Started out reading Denninger this morning which led to this, penned by Matt Taibbi.
Bank of America sucks.
As do the bastards that enable them.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Monday, March 12, 2012
Daylight savings scam
Monday morning, March 12, 2012, second work day of the week.
Every year about this time, I announce I am not going to make the switch to daylight savings time. For all intents and purposes this is my new year’s resolution, and like that of most, my commitment waivers at some point, when my schedule is forced to comport to the rest of the world by which I am surrounded, good little unquestioning industrial slaves they tend to be.
So today I sit at 7AM, my time, and for that matter the time of the chickens and cows accustomed to my arrival, typing on this computer. In a couple of minutes people will begin to arrive and I will ignore them, silently cussing our collective stupidity, until eventually the will of the masses bends my own. As I age, I tend to bend less easily.
I planted seed last week, pinto beans (for dried beans) sweet corn, blue lake green beans, yellow and zucchini squash, green and white striped Cushaw gourds, cantaloupes, watermelons, cucumbers for pickles and a row of okra. It’s a little early for some of this, but we’ve had regular rains and unusually mild weather so I figured I’d better get while the getting is good. I also set out 144 tomato plants and 78 pepper plants of differing varieties. It drizzled for a couple of days after and then warmed up. I can almost feel the seeds springing to life underground.
The transplants took and potatoes are off to the races, most about 6” tall already with a few stragglers just beginning to appear. Shallots and onions are well on their way to maturity. Broccoli is done for, we’ve been feeding leftover plants to hogs and goats. Most of the cabbage is harvested and a two crocks of kraut near ready in the room next door. The few heads that remain in the garden are massive, upwards of ten pounds apiece. Beets also are ready, cilantro starting to bolt.
We harvested about a third of our spinach patch and filled five large tow sacks. I helped Leah sort and can spinach Saturday and Sunday. Figured if we paid ourselves $10 an hour, we had about $4 per pint invested in labor, not including the cost of lids or any cost in growing and harvesting the produce.
I will not sell you a jar of my spinach. If I did, the cost is $20 a pint. Unless you are a lawyer or a Wall Street banker. Your cost is $200 a pint and you should consider that a bargain, considering what I get for your time.
Martin also planted 5 acres of non-hybrid white field corn right before the rains. Lamentably, he convinced me that we needed to spray glyphosate (generic Roundup) on a field where we intend to plant grain sorghum as the weeds got a jump on us and would interfere with planting and cultivating down the line. I have not yet been able to entirely wean myself from the industrial model of farming. As Dmiti Orlov stated recently (paraphrased): What works in the new paradigm won’t work in this. What works in the current paradigm won’t perform in the next.
I find myself straddling a dying way of life and that of a future not quite manifest, but much closer than most suspect, or at least that’s my take.
OK. It’s 7:30 Central Standard (Don Henry Ford Jr.) time. I need to go to work. People are wondering where the hell I am. The cows think something’s wrong with the people.
Someone is waiting at the door and my fucking phone is ringing.
Every year about this time, I announce I am not going to make the switch to daylight savings time. For all intents and purposes this is my new year’s resolution, and like that of most, my commitment waivers at some point, when my schedule is forced to comport to the rest of the world by which I am surrounded, good little unquestioning industrial slaves they tend to be.
So today I sit at 7AM, my time, and for that matter the time of the chickens and cows accustomed to my arrival, typing on this computer. In a couple of minutes people will begin to arrive and I will ignore them, silently cussing our collective stupidity, until eventually the will of the masses bends my own. As I age, I tend to bend less easily.
I planted seed last week, pinto beans (for dried beans) sweet corn, blue lake green beans, yellow and zucchini squash, green and white striped Cushaw gourds, cantaloupes, watermelons, cucumbers for pickles and a row of okra. It’s a little early for some of this, but we’ve had regular rains and unusually mild weather so I figured I’d better get while the getting is good. I also set out 144 tomato plants and 78 pepper plants of differing varieties. It drizzled for a couple of days after and then warmed up. I can almost feel the seeds springing to life underground.
The transplants took and potatoes are off to the races, most about 6” tall already with a few stragglers just beginning to appear. Shallots and onions are well on their way to maturity. Broccoli is done for, we’ve been feeding leftover plants to hogs and goats. Most of the cabbage is harvested and a two crocks of kraut near ready in the room next door. The few heads that remain in the garden are massive, upwards of ten pounds apiece. Beets also are ready, cilantro starting to bolt.
We harvested about a third of our spinach patch and filled five large tow sacks. I helped Leah sort and can spinach Saturday and Sunday. Figured if we paid ourselves $10 an hour, we had about $4 per pint invested in labor, not including the cost of lids or any cost in growing and harvesting the produce.
I will not sell you a jar of my spinach. If I did, the cost is $20 a pint. Unless you are a lawyer or a Wall Street banker. Your cost is $200 a pint and you should consider that a bargain, considering what I get for your time.
Martin also planted 5 acres of non-hybrid white field corn right before the rains. Lamentably, he convinced me that we needed to spray glyphosate (generic Roundup) on a field where we intend to plant grain sorghum as the weeds got a jump on us and would interfere with planting and cultivating down the line. I have not yet been able to entirely wean myself from the industrial model of farming. As Dmiti Orlov stated recently (paraphrased): What works in the new paradigm won’t work in this. What works in the current paradigm won’t perform in the next.
I find myself straddling a dying way of life and that of a future not quite manifest, but much closer than most suspect, or at least that’s my take.
OK. It’s 7:30 Central Standard (Don Henry Ford Jr.) time. I need to go to work. People are wondering where the hell I am. The cows think something’s wrong with the people.
Someone is waiting at the door and my fucking phone is ringing.
Monday, March 5, 2012
Hell in the Henhouse (blood in the yard)
Post Script to this land is your land: Went to bed Friday night thinking things were well.
Saturday morning had me singing Hell in the Henhouse (soon to be released song written by Matt King and Ray Wylie Hubbard).
It started when a worker friend arrived and left his grandson out in the yard. The boy knocks on the door. Next thing I know, Leah is screaming at Polly, a Queensland blue heeler. Polly has bitten a goat in the hock region and the goat can't get up. My guess is that the boy tried to shoo the goat and she helped the only way she knows how, by attacking the goat. I felt obliged to beat Polly nonetheless. The goat regained her feet and tended to her baby, albeit with a limp and a few bloody bite marks on a hind leg.
After enjoying coffee with Leah, I leave the house, milk pail and can full of warm water in hand, ready to milk cows.
A otherwise healthy looking but dead goat awaits near the feed room, the second unexplainable death in a week. I drag the poor thing off and cut it in pieces for the dogs.
Then someone comes up the drive saying one of our cows has a calf that got under the fence; black headed buzzards are about to kill the thing. Luckily, I arrive in time to thrwart their breakfast plans.
The cell phone rings.
Hay customers arrive.
The cell rings again.
Another truck pulls up to tell me buzzards are trying to kill one of my calves.
The irrigation machine I left running last night has not moved, but instead sprayed thousands of gallons of water in one spot, flooding that area while the rest of the circuit it should have traveled remains dry.
By the time I get around to the cows, the water in the pail is cold and the cows are looking at me like, Where the hell you been?
Sometimes more is not better.
Saturday morning had me singing Hell in the Henhouse (soon to be released song written by Matt King and Ray Wylie Hubbard).
It started when a worker friend arrived and left his grandson out in the yard. The boy knocks on the door. Next thing I know, Leah is screaming at Polly, a Queensland blue heeler. Polly has bitten a goat in the hock region and the goat can't get up. My guess is that the boy tried to shoo the goat and she helped the only way she knows how, by attacking the goat. I felt obliged to beat Polly nonetheless. The goat regained her feet and tended to her baby, albeit with a limp and a few bloody bite marks on a hind leg.
After enjoying coffee with Leah, I leave the house, milk pail and can full of warm water in hand, ready to milk cows.
A otherwise healthy looking but dead goat awaits near the feed room, the second unexplainable death in a week. I drag the poor thing off and cut it in pieces for the dogs.
Then someone comes up the drive saying one of our cows has a calf that got under the fence; black headed buzzards are about to kill the thing. Luckily, I arrive in time to thrwart their breakfast plans.
The cell phone rings.
Hay customers arrive.
The cell rings again.
Another truck pulls up to tell me buzzards are trying to kill one of my calves.
The irrigation machine I left running last night has not moved, but instead sprayed thousands of gallons of water in one spot, flooding that area while the rest of the circuit it should have traveled remains dry.
By the time I get around to the cows, the water in the pail is cold and the cows are looking at me like, Where the hell you been?
Sometimes more is not better.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Black markets
As a kid, we routinely shopped black markets of Quito, Ecuador to get things not available through "legitimate" channels.
Looks like the same has become necessary here in the good ole USA, courtesy of our jailers.
Americans Will Need “Black Markets” To Survive
Looks like the same has become necessary here in the good ole USA, courtesy of our jailers.
Americans Will Need “Black Markets” To Survive
Friday, March 2, 2012
This land is your land....
Sabbath eve, March 2, 2012.
Spring is in the air. I start days wearing a long-sleeved shirt but soon peel down to a t-shirt and sweat, nonetheless. We’ve had no winter. Decent rains in January and the early part of February have faded of late. Computers continue to give us chances of moisture. Quintin, a farmer friend of mine, says he saw dust devils in January—a bad omen. He says he doesn’t feel good about the year.
I take his dust devils over a computer forecast for rain.
Corn requires more water than grain sorghum, so grain sorghum it will be, good Lord willing. I also hope to plant cowpeas for hay under irrigation, a practice long abandoned in this area. Cowpeas, being legumes, fix nitrogen into the soil. I over-farmed my irrigated field, trying to grow forage for cows through the horrible drought. I do have the advantage of copious amounts of chicken shit for fertilizer, but even so, I think we need to rotate our crops and give the soil a break now and again. Cowpeas serve as green fertilizer when plowed back into the soil.
We had an explosion of clover this year, nature’s way of healing pastures after drought killed off most of the grass. With the clover came problems—producers in the country, myself included, lost cattle to bloat. The alternative would have been losing them to starvation, so I am not complaining. Clover is also a legume.
Unfortunately, the herbicide most people use on hay patches kills clover along with the targeted weeds. I think spraying may prove a costly mistake, especially if we fail to get more rain. I’d rather have bales with a few weeds than have nothing to bale.
Cattle numbers are low; consequently cattle prices are high. A good calf will bring almost double the price it did last year.
We have a decent winter garden, cabbage in the field, sauerkraut in the crock, spinach getting huge. Onions are doing well, potatoes just breaking out of the ground. There’s beats, turnips galore, and some really good cilantro. The broccoli is pretty much done for, but pigs in the pen think the whole damn plant pretty good stuff.
We’re aerating the soil in pecan bottoms and applying chicken litter. Preparing to irrigate, if need be.
I’m milking three cows and Leah makes cheese, only now in a big vat once a week instead of daily. The leftover whey that doesn’t make it into Ricotta gets soaked into corn the pigs eat.
For rest, Leah throws pottery.
I’ve paid almost no attention to our mares over the last couple of years, especially after Racing Rhinocerous died. When I least expected it, a friend told me that Gaff, a multiple graded stakes winner could be bought. I offered what I thought a cheap price. To my surprise, the owner accepted. Looks like I am back in the Thoroughbred breeding business.
Gaff is by far the best horse I’ve owned. He won $560,000 and blistered tracks around the land doing so. He’s a sprinter, my preferred type, a son of Maria’s Mon.
I’ve heard it said a man with a yearling will never commit suicide. Something about hope, I suppose.
We pasture bred our mares last year to a cheap stallion no one will like except for Leah and me (Sheck My Goyo). Gina’s Patience delivered our first foal in three years this morning. More are on the way. Abraham tells me he’s a champion.
Manuel is back from Mexico, with him the blessing his presence brings. I didn’t give hiring Manuel a second thought, despite having quite a few people already on the payroll. He’s cutting pecan wood from limbs that fell in the bottom and helping with the chores. A hand like Manuel always pays his way.
I know times are tough and there are lots of reasons to be afraid, but I am determined not to let fear dictate the way I live, no matter how dark it may seem.
This world is ours, despite pretenders to the throne.
Make of it what you will.
Spring is in the air. I start days wearing a long-sleeved shirt but soon peel down to a t-shirt and sweat, nonetheless. We’ve had no winter. Decent rains in January and the early part of February have faded of late. Computers continue to give us chances of moisture. Quintin, a farmer friend of mine, says he saw dust devils in January—a bad omen. He says he doesn’t feel good about the year.
I take his dust devils over a computer forecast for rain.
Corn requires more water than grain sorghum, so grain sorghum it will be, good Lord willing. I also hope to plant cowpeas for hay under irrigation, a practice long abandoned in this area. Cowpeas, being legumes, fix nitrogen into the soil. I over-farmed my irrigated field, trying to grow forage for cows through the horrible drought. I do have the advantage of copious amounts of chicken shit for fertilizer, but even so, I think we need to rotate our crops and give the soil a break now and again. Cowpeas serve as green fertilizer when plowed back into the soil.
We had an explosion of clover this year, nature’s way of healing pastures after drought killed off most of the grass. With the clover came problems—producers in the country, myself included, lost cattle to bloat. The alternative would have been losing them to starvation, so I am not complaining. Clover is also a legume.
Unfortunately, the herbicide most people use on hay patches kills clover along with the targeted weeds. I think spraying may prove a costly mistake, especially if we fail to get more rain. I’d rather have bales with a few weeds than have nothing to bale.
Cattle numbers are low; consequently cattle prices are high. A good calf will bring almost double the price it did last year.
We have a decent winter garden, cabbage in the field, sauerkraut in the crock, spinach getting huge. Onions are doing well, potatoes just breaking out of the ground. There’s beats, turnips galore, and some really good cilantro. The broccoli is pretty much done for, but pigs in the pen think the whole damn plant pretty good stuff.
We’re aerating the soil in pecan bottoms and applying chicken litter. Preparing to irrigate, if need be.
I’m milking three cows and Leah makes cheese, only now in a big vat once a week instead of daily. The leftover whey that doesn’t make it into Ricotta gets soaked into corn the pigs eat.
For rest, Leah throws pottery.
I’ve paid almost no attention to our mares over the last couple of years, especially after Racing Rhinocerous died. When I least expected it, a friend told me that Gaff, a multiple graded stakes winner could be bought. I offered what I thought a cheap price. To my surprise, the owner accepted. Looks like I am back in the Thoroughbred breeding business.
Gaff is by far the best horse I’ve owned. He won $560,000 and blistered tracks around the land doing so. He’s a sprinter, my preferred type, a son of Maria’s Mon.
I’ve heard it said a man with a yearling will never commit suicide. Something about hope, I suppose.
We pasture bred our mares last year to a cheap stallion no one will like except for Leah and me (Sheck My Goyo). Gina’s Patience delivered our first foal in three years this morning. More are on the way. Abraham tells me he’s a champion.
Manuel is back from Mexico, with him the blessing his presence brings. I didn’t give hiring Manuel a second thought, despite having quite a few people already on the payroll. He’s cutting pecan wood from limbs that fell in the bottom and helping with the chores. A hand like Manuel always pays his way.
I know times are tough and there are lots of reasons to be afraid, but I am determined not to let fear dictate the way I live, no matter how dark it may seem.
This world is ours, despite pretenders to the throne.
Make of it what you will.
Monday, February 20, 2012
The choices we make
Sometimes James Howard Kunstler says it better than I:
The Choices We Make
By James Howard Kunstler
on February 20, 2012 9:41 AM
The misalignment of politics and reality threatens to scuttle both major parties, but it's especially gratifying to see the Republicans sail off the edge of their own flat earth on the winds of religious idiocy. For forty years it has not been enough for them to just be a conservative party. They had to enlist the worst elements of ignorance and reaction, and they found an endless supply of it in the boom regions of the Sunbelt with its brotherhood of TV evangelist con-artists and a population fretful with suburban angst.
Now, in the last hours of the cheap oil economy, the forty year miracle of the Sunbelt boom dwindles and a fear of approaching darkness grips the people there like a rumor of Satan. The long boom that took them from an agricultural backwater of barefoot peasantry to a miracle world of Sonic Drive-ins, perpetual air-conditioning, WalMarts, and creation museums is turning back in the other direction and they fear losing all that comfort, convenience, and spectacle. Since they don't understand where it came from, they conclude that it was all a God-given endowment conferred upon them for their exceptional specialness as Americans, and so only the forces of evil could conspire to take it all away.
Hence, the rise of a sanctimonious, hyper-patriotic putz such as Rick Santorum and his take-back-the-night appeal to those who sense the gathering twilight. And the awful ordeal of convictionless pander and former front-runner Mitt Romney drowning in his own bullshit as he struggles to extrude one whopper after another just to keep up with the others in this race to the bottom of the political mud-flow.
There is an obvious dither backstage now among those who cynically thought they could manipulate and control these dark impulses of the frightened masses as the candidates all pile into a train wreck of super-PAC obloquy. Won't some level-headed adult like the governors of New Jersey and Indiana step up and volunteer? Is this finally its Whig Moment - the point where the Republican Party has offended history so gravely that it goes up in a vapor of its own absurdity? I hope so. The conservative impulse is hardly all bad. We need it in civilization. But it can't be vested in the sheer and constant repudiation of reality.
The opposing Democrats have their own problem with reality, which is that they don't tell the truth about so many things despite knowing better, and, under Obama, they act contrary to their stated intentions often enough, and in matters of extreme importance, that they deserve to go down in flames, too. Just as there is a place for conservatism in civilized life, there is also a place for the progressive impulse, let's call it - for making bold advance in step with the mandates of reality and an interest in justice for all those along on the journey.
The Democrats under Obama don't want to go to that place. They want to really go to the same place as the fretful Sunbelt fundamentalists, but by a different route - and that place is yesterday, by means of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable. Mr. Obama is pretending that an economic "recovery" is underway when he knows damn well that the banking system is just blowing smoke up the shredded ass of what's left of that economy. He pretends to an interest in the rule of law in money matters but he's done everything possible to prevent the Department of Justice, the SEC, and a dozen other regulatory authorities from functioning the way they were designed. He has never suggested resurrecting the Glass-Steagall act, which kept banking close to being honest for forty years. He never issued a peep of objection about the Citizens United case where the Supreme Court tossed the election process into a crocodile pit of corporate turpitude (he could have proposed a constitutional amendment redefining corporate "personhood."). He declared he'd never permit a super-PAC to be created in his name, and now he's got one. Mr. Obama represents a lot of things to a lot of people. He is mainly Progressivism's bowling trophy, its symbol of its own triumphant wonderfulness in overcoming the age old phantoms of race prejudice. Alas, that's not enough. Where exactly is the boundary between telling "folks" what they want to hear and just flat-out lying?
Neither party can articulate the current reality, which is that we have to reorganize civilization pretty drastically. I've reviewed that agenda many times in this space and it largely amounts to rebuilding local economies at a smaller and finer scale. That is just not on the table for all current leadership, or even in the room. If neither party can frame an agenda consistent with that reality, then we'll have to get there without them, probably after a very rough period when the pretending still lingers in the air like a bad odor and no reality-based consensus is able to form, no agreement about what we should do. That's the period when a lot of things fall apart and people get hurt. These are the choices we're making right now.
The Choices We Make
By James Howard Kunstler
on February 20, 2012 9:41 AM
The misalignment of politics and reality threatens to scuttle both major parties, but it's especially gratifying to see the Republicans sail off the edge of their own flat earth on the winds of religious idiocy. For forty years it has not been enough for them to just be a conservative party. They had to enlist the worst elements of ignorance and reaction, and they found an endless supply of it in the boom regions of the Sunbelt with its brotherhood of TV evangelist con-artists and a population fretful with suburban angst.
Now, in the last hours of the cheap oil economy, the forty year miracle of the Sunbelt boom dwindles and a fear of approaching darkness grips the people there like a rumor of Satan. The long boom that took them from an agricultural backwater of barefoot peasantry to a miracle world of Sonic Drive-ins, perpetual air-conditioning, WalMarts, and creation museums is turning back in the other direction and they fear losing all that comfort, convenience, and spectacle. Since they don't understand where it came from, they conclude that it was all a God-given endowment conferred upon them for their exceptional specialness as Americans, and so only the forces of evil could conspire to take it all away.
Hence, the rise of a sanctimonious, hyper-patriotic putz such as Rick Santorum and his take-back-the-night appeal to those who sense the gathering twilight. And the awful ordeal of convictionless pander and former front-runner Mitt Romney drowning in his own bullshit as he struggles to extrude one whopper after another just to keep up with the others in this race to the bottom of the political mud-flow.
There is an obvious dither backstage now among those who cynically thought they could manipulate and control these dark impulses of the frightened masses as the candidates all pile into a train wreck of super-PAC obloquy. Won't some level-headed adult like the governors of New Jersey and Indiana step up and volunteer? Is this finally its Whig Moment - the point where the Republican Party has offended history so gravely that it goes up in a vapor of its own absurdity? I hope so. The conservative impulse is hardly all bad. We need it in civilization. But it can't be vested in the sheer and constant repudiation of reality.
The opposing Democrats have their own problem with reality, which is that they don't tell the truth about so many things despite knowing better, and, under Obama, they act contrary to their stated intentions often enough, and in matters of extreme importance, that they deserve to go down in flames, too. Just as there is a place for conservatism in civilized life, there is also a place for the progressive impulse, let's call it - for making bold advance in step with the mandates of reality and an interest in justice for all those along on the journey.
The Democrats under Obama don't want to go to that place. They want to really go to the same place as the fretful Sunbelt fundamentalists, but by a different route - and that place is yesterday, by means of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable. Mr. Obama is pretending that an economic "recovery" is underway when he knows damn well that the banking system is just blowing smoke up the shredded ass of what's left of that economy. He pretends to an interest in the rule of law in money matters but he's done everything possible to prevent the Department of Justice, the SEC, and a dozen other regulatory authorities from functioning the way they were designed. He has never suggested resurrecting the Glass-Steagall act, which kept banking close to being honest for forty years. He never issued a peep of objection about the Citizens United case where the Supreme Court tossed the election process into a crocodile pit of corporate turpitude (he could have proposed a constitutional amendment redefining corporate "personhood."). He declared he'd never permit a super-PAC to be created in his name, and now he's got one. Mr. Obama represents a lot of things to a lot of people. He is mainly Progressivism's bowling trophy, its symbol of its own triumphant wonderfulness in overcoming the age old phantoms of race prejudice. Alas, that's not enough. Where exactly is the boundary between telling "folks" what they want to hear and just flat-out lying?
Neither party can articulate the current reality, which is that we have to reorganize civilization pretty drastically. I've reviewed that agenda many times in this space and it largely amounts to rebuilding local economies at a smaller and finer scale. That is just not on the table for all current leadership, or even in the room. If neither party can frame an agenda consistent with that reality, then we'll have to get there without them, probably after a very rough period when the pretending still lingers in the air like a bad odor and no reality-based consensus is able to form, no agreement about what we should do. That's the period when a lot of things fall apart and people get hurt. These are the choices we're making right now.
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