Of late all the news about wikileaks focuses on Julian Assange, diverting attention from the real stories. The Guardian is publishing a day to day summary of leaks as they are made public. I find some of the leaks quite interesting.
Read it here.
Hat tip Chickadee.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Monday, December 13, 2010
We all gotta go
Monday morning, December 13, 2010
It’s freezing and still outside my door this morning. All the summer grasses are now dormant, the grass above ground scorched, bleached and kindle dry. We’ve had almost no rain for three months. Yesterday I felt something in the wind that reminded me of droughts past. We’re not yet there, but it feels like that’s where we’re headed.
We’ve begun feeding hay to the cows. Standing grass serves as filler for the cows’ bellies, but has little in the way of food value. The accepted practice in these parts is to force them to eat this grass and then to supplement them with protein, usually in the form of molasses based liquids or blocks. I don’t like the idea of buying feed, so I put out hay instead, hay that has been fertilized with manure from our chicken growing operation and therefore is quite high in protein.
On another ranch we’ve turned the cattle in an oat field, once again fertilized with manure. Despite the dry weather, this field has maintained a bit of moisture as it lies alongside the San Marcos River. In wet years, the river covers much of the ground and tends to drown out crops. In dry years that same land out-produces anything we have. These cows should thrive with the green grass the oats provide. I should have planted oats here at the Belmont farm as well, but didn’t.
So far, every time I declare pecan harvest over I find more native trees with nuts. More nuts means more work for a few men that would otherwise sit at home unemployed. The native trees are so tall and big, some with trunks up to six feet in diameter, that it’s difficult to shake the pecans loose even with a tractor mounted device made for that express purpose. Most of the pecans fall when the wind blows; feral hogs, deer, wild turkeys, squirrels, raccoons, possums, crows, armadillos and a perhaps a few more creatures that don’t come to mind at the moment clean them up in short order. I figure we do well to harvest about 20% of what the trees produce. But the wildlife needs to eat also.
Most of the plants in my winter garden have been scorched by freezes but continue to grow. Small cabbage heads have begun to form; broccoli should soon follow. Winter onions and shallots are ready to eat and spring onions are well established and growing. Turnips are producing greens, but the bulbs have not yet filled out. Beets, spinach and Swiss chard are growing but not yet big enough to eat either. I have a poor stand of carrots, but should have some come spring. I’ll probably try to replant the gaps. I tried growing English peas over the winter. The plants have survived, but the freezes seem to have sucked most of the life out of them. I doubt they’ll produce anything, unless they make it to spring. Nothing would have survived without irrigation this year. Not a single plant.
Outside of where I’ve planted and watered, the ground has been cleared and plowed but there’s little moisture in the soil. I should have applied chicken litter as soon as the summer harvest was over so I could get it worked into the ground but, once again, I didn’t. I suppose I could add some now, but the ground is so dry tilling it would raise clouds of dust. The truth is that the garden doesn’t get as much attention as perhaps it should.
Our new batch of yard chickens have figured out the routine of coming and going from the roost. It’s nice to see chickens get to be chickens. For whatever reason, there’s one chicken that runs around and can’t find her way back to the coop. I catch her and put her in every night when I go out to shut in the rest of the chickens. The first couple of nights she ran from me and squawked a bit when I caught her. Now she knows the routine, stops and allows me to pick her up. Who’d have thought that individual chickens have personalities? Leah sells eggs at a pottery studio she attends. Apparently demand has now exceeded supply as there’s a waiting list to get them. Real free range eggs are quite a bit better than anything you can buy from a store.
The goats continue to be a nuisance. Every time I open a door, including the door to my pickup, they jam in looking for a stray morsel of food. All but two are females, and therefore will be spared a date with the dinner table, but there’s one young male in the bunch. I sometimes feel sorry for the little guy, knowing what is likely to be his fate.
But in the end, we all gotta go. Sooner or later, we all gotta go.
I suppose it’s more important how we live than how long we live. And I also suppose it's better that when don't know when that final day will arrive.
It’s freezing and still outside my door this morning. All the summer grasses are now dormant, the grass above ground scorched, bleached and kindle dry. We’ve had almost no rain for three months. Yesterday I felt something in the wind that reminded me of droughts past. We’re not yet there, but it feels like that’s where we’re headed.
We’ve begun feeding hay to the cows. Standing grass serves as filler for the cows’ bellies, but has little in the way of food value. The accepted practice in these parts is to force them to eat this grass and then to supplement them with protein, usually in the form of molasses based liquids or blocks. I don’t like the idea of buying feed, so I put out hay instead, hay that has been fertilized with manure from our chicken growing operation and therefore is quite high in protein.
On another ranch we’ve turned the cattle in an oat field, once again fertilized with manure. Despite the dry weather, this field has maintained a bit of moisture as it lies alongside the San Marcos River. In wet years, the river covers much of the ground and tends to drown out crops. In dry years that same land out-produces anything we have. These cows should thrive with the green grass the oats provide. I should have planted oats here at the Belmont farm as well, but didn’t.
So far, every time I declare pecan harvest over I find more native trees with nuts. More nuts means more work for a few men that would otherwise sit at home unemployed. The native trees are so tall and big, some with trunks up to six feet in diameter, that it’s difficult to shake the pecans loose even with a tractor mounted device made for that express purpose. Most of the pecans fall when the wind blows; feral hogs, deer, wild turkeys, squirrels, raccoons, possums, crows, armadillos and a perhaps a few more creatures that don’t come to mind at the moment clean them up in short order. I figure we do well to harvest about 20% of what the trees produce. But the wildlife needs to eat also.
Most of the plants in my winter garden have been scorched by freezes but continue to grow. Small cabbage heads have begun to form; broccoli should soon follow. Winter onions and shallots are ready to eat and spring onions are well established and growing. Turnips are producing greens, but the bulbs have not yet filled out. Beets, spinach and Swiss chard are growing but not yet big enough to eat either. I have a poor stand of carrots, but should have some come spring. I’ll probably try to replant the gaps. I tried growing English peas over the winter. The plants have survived, but the freezes seem to have sucked most of the life out of them. I doubt they’ll produce anything, unless they make it to spring. Nothing would have survived without irrigation this year. Not a single plant.
Outside of where I’ve planted and watered, the ground has been cleared and plowed but there’s little moisture in the soil. I should have applied chicken litter as soon as the summer harvest was over so I could get it worked into the ground but, once again, I didn’t. I suppose I could add some now, but the ground is so dry tilling it would raise clouds of dust. The truth is that the garden doesn’t get as much attention as perhaps it should.
Our new batch of yard chickens have figured out the routine of coming and going from the roost. It’s nice to see chickens get to be chickens. For whatever reason, there’s one chicken that runs around and can’t find her way back to the coop. I catch her and put her in every night when I go out to shut in the rest of the chickens. The first couple of nights she ran from me and squawked a bit when I caught her. Now she knows the routine, stops and allows me to pick her up. Who’d have thought that individual chickens have personalities? Leah sells eggs at a pottery studio she attends. Apparently demand has now exceeded supply as there’s a waiting list to get them. Real free range eggs are quite a bit better than anything you can buy from a store.
The goats continue to be a nuisance. Every time I open a door, including the door to my pickup, they jam in looking for a stray morsel of food. All but two are females, and therefore will be spared a date with the dinner table, but there’s one young male in the bunch. I sometimes feel sorry for the little guy, knowing what is likely to be his fate.
But in the end, we all gotta go. Sooner or later, we all gotta go.
I suppose it’s more important how we live than how long we live. And I also suppose it's better that when don't know when that final day will arrive.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
More on the fed--crime of the century
The Wall Street Pentagon Papers: Biggest Scam In World History Exposed: Are The Federal Reserve’s Crimes Too Big To Comprehend?
by David Degraw at Public Record. Hat tip to Raja.
by David Degraw at Public Record. Hat tip to Raja.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
So cocksuckers...
Here's some of the people you're protecting when you go after Assange and other truth tellers. Yeah, you Hillary. Barack. Mike Huckabee. And the rest (you know who you are).
A bunch of goddamned ass-raping pedophiles, for one.
WikiLeaks: Texas Company Helped Pimp Little Boys To Stoned Afghan Cops.
Protecting our freedoms, you say?
A bunch of goddamned ass-raping pedophiles, for one.
WikiLeaks: Texas Company Helped Pimp Little Boys To Stoned Afghan Cops.
Protecting our freedoms, you say?
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
The shameful attacks on Julian Assange
The Atlantic
Excerpt:
Julian Assange and Pfc Bradley Manning have done a huge public service by making hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents available on Wikileaks -- and, predictably, no one is grateful. Manning, a former army intelligence analyst in Iraq, faces up to 52 years in prison. He is currently being held in solitary confinement at a military base in Quantico, Virginia, where he is not allowed to see his parents or other outside visitors.
Assange, the organizing brain of Wikileaks, enjoys a higher degree of freedom living as a hunted man in England under the close surveillance of domestic and foreign intelligence agencies -- but probably not for long. Not since President Richard Nixon directed his minions to go after Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan - "a vicious antiwar type," an enraged Nixon called him on the Watergate tapes -- has a working journalist and his source been subjected to the kind of official intimidation and threats that have been directed at Assange and Manning by high-ranking members of the Obama Administration.
read the rest at the link
PS.
And another:
Truth in Chains by Chris Floyd
Excerpt:
Julian Assange and Pfc Bradley Manning have done a huge public service by making hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents available on Wikileaks -- and, predictably, no one is grateful. Manning, a former army intelligence analyst in Iraq, faces up to 52 years in prison. He is currently being held in solitary confinement at a military base in Quantico, Virginia, where he is not allowed to see his parents or other outside visitors.
Assange, the organizing brain of Wikileaks, enjoys a higher degree of freedom living as a hunted man in England under the close surveillance of domestic and foreign intelligence agencies -- but probably not for long. Not since President Richard Nixon directed his minions to go after Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan - "a vicious antiwar type," an enraged Nixon called him on the Watergate tapes -- has a working journalist and his source been subjected to the kind of official intimidation and threats that have been directed at Assange and Manning by high-ranking members of the Obama Administration.
read the rest at the link
PS.
And another:
Truth in Chains by Chris Floyd
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Currency debasement
Sunday morning, December 5, 2010. The Sabbath came. I wrote nothing because I had nothing to say. Or perhaps I was too tired or lazy to force the issue.
Every week I expect to finish harvesting pecans; every week I find more we’ve missed. What we’re doing is more gleaning than full on harvesting, but to date we’ve managed to pick enough pecans to pay the laborers involved, not to make money, but to pay laborers. Pecans have not only maintained a higher price than in years past; the price has gone up as the season progressed. I sold small native pecans for $1.45 a pound in quantity, a previously unheard of number, to a broker that will sell them for more to someone else.
Corn, wheat, cotton, oil and other commodities have also gone up in price. I still sit on my corn, waiting for the local glut to be erased, and it should be soon, considering all the poultry and livestock feeding businesses in these parts consume more corn than we grow. About ten to one I’m guessing.
Fuel costs are going up; diesel has once again broached $3/gallon and gas is right there as well, but there seems to be a lag in the price of food compared to the cost of basic staples necessary to produce food. Expect higher prices, soon. Anything containing cotton fiber, and that’d include jeans, t-shirts, socks and underwear should, by necessity, go up in value soon as well.
Precious metals are becoming more expensive, almost by the day. Actual physical silver is getting hard to come by, both locally and over the Internet, or so I am told. I suspect physical gold is a bit easier to find as the price of gold at $1,400/ounce is already cost prohibitive for the average working class (or unemployed) American strapped with ass-loads of debt.
Some respected economists continue to say that deflation will rule the day. To be sure, the fed’s efforts seem designed to fight deflation. But last week, news began to appear about one of the fed’s backdoor lending programs (notice I said one, as if this isn’t the only one). Seems the fed lent $9,000,000,000,000 (nine trillion dollars, or if you prefer enough money to make 9 million totally broke Americans millionaires), through the overnight window at just above zero percent interest rates over the last couple of years.
Many say this does nothing but increase public debt and I’m sure it does. These also say bad debts remain hidden on balance sheets, and I am sure some do. But I am also sure that some bad debts are being cured, as representatives of the fed/big bank duo purchase delinquent loans with what amounts to money created with the wave of a wand, in essence repossessing valuable assets around the land with an unlimited supply of paper and digital notes.
These same deflationists say this trend can’t continue, that the rest of the world will not allow the fed to continue creating more dollars out of thin air.
My question: Who is going to stop them, and how?
Every week I expect to finish harvesting pecans; every week I find more we’ve missed. What we’re doing is more gleaning than full on harvesting, but to date we’ve managed to pick enough pecans to pay the laborers involved, not to make money, but to pay laborers. Pecans have not only maintained a higher price than in years past; the price has gone up as the season progressed. I sold small native pecans for $1.45 a pound in quantity, a previously unheard of number, to a broker that will sell them for more to someone else.
Corn, wheat, cotton, oil and other commodities have also gone up in price. I still sit on my corn, waiting for the local glut to be erased, and it should be soon, considering all the poultry and livestock feeding businesses in these parts consume more corn than we grow. About ten to one I’m guessing.
Fuel costs are going up; diesel has once again broached $3/gallon and gas is right there as well, but there seems to be a lag in the price of food compared to the cost of basic staples necessary to produce food. Expect higher prices, soon. Anything containing cotton fiber, and that’d include jeans, t-shirts, socks and underwear should, by necessity, go up in value soon as well.
Precious metals are becoming more expensive, almost by the day. Actual physical silver is getting hard to come by, both locally and over the Internet, or so I am told. I suspect physical gold is a bit easier to find as the price of gold at $1,400/ounce is already cost prohibitive for the average working class (or unemployed) American strapped with ass-loads of debt.
Some respected economists continue to say that deflation will rule the day. To be sure, the fed’s efforts seem designed to fight deflation. But last week, news began to appear about one of the fed’s backdoor lending programs (notice I said one, as if this isn’t the only one). Seems the fed lent $9,000,000,000,000 (nine trillion dollars, or if you prefer enough money to make 9 million totally broke Americans millionaires), through the overnight window at just above zero percent interest rates over the last couple of years.
Many say this does nothing but increase public debt and I’m sure it does. These also say bad debts remain hidden on balance sheets, and I am sure some do. But I am also sure that some bad debts are being cured, as representatives of the fed/big bank duo purchase delinquent loans with what amounts to money created with the wave of a wand, in essence repossessing valuable assets around the land with an unlimited supply of paper and digital notes.
These same deflationists say this trend can’t continue, that the rest of the world will not allow the fed to continue creating more dollars out of thin air.
My question: Who is going to stop them, and how?
Friday, December 3, 2010
Yeah, Ryan Bingham
I gave Ryan a rash of shit, anticipating that fame and success would have or had ruined the man. Apparently, Ryan hasn't forgotten his roots. First, an apology. Second, a blessing, for what it's worth.
Ryan Bingham helps homeless kids with show.
May you be blessed.
Ryan Bingham helps homeless kids with show.
May you be blessed.
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