How bailing out the rich created the Depression

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From IAN WELSH
Crooks and Liars

The other day, Krugman wrote that we’re in the beginning of a new Long Depression.

Forgive me, but he’s wrong: this isn’t the beginning, it’s been going on for about two years now.

During a Depression there are periods where GDP grows. There are periods where jobs grow. It’s just that the periods of job growth don’t last.

There were opportunities to end the Depression before it really dug in its heels. The last one was at the beginning of Obama’s term. Kicking out of the Depression required two things.

The first was an adequate stimulus. This didn’t just mean a large enough stimulus, though the one offered was not large enough, it meant one properly constructed. Tax cuts for ordinary Americans are not stimulative, because folks like banks who have pricing power (you must have a credit card, loans, etc…) will simply take that money away by raising rates and fees. And it doesn’t mean short term shovel-projects, it means making commitments which will last for years so that businesses, when making plans know that hiring is worth it because those employees will be needed for more than a year or so.

Likewise the US has some serious problems with the structure of the American economy. The cornerstone of the stimulus had to be reducing US dependence on oil because as long as the US economy is so dependent on oil, full fledged growth is simply not possible. The days of $20/barrel oil aren’t coming back, and every time the price of oil gets too high, it puts great pressure on the US economy (and every other modern nation.)

more here
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Leo Tolstoy: The Law of Love and the Law of Violence

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From DAVE SMITH
to be of use
Ukiah

[The Last Station, the wonderful film about Leo Tolstoy's relationships with his wife and followers, and his last days, is now available on Netflix.]

At the end of his wistful last book, The Law of Love and the Law of Violence, Leo Tolstoy wrote:

Put the good of your life in the progressive liberation of your mind, freedom from all the illusions of the flesh, and in the perfecting of your love for your fellow man — which is in essence the same thing. As soon as you begin to live like this, you will feel a joyous sensation full of liberty and happiness. You will be surprised to find that the same external conditions which caused you such anxiety, and which were far from what you wanted, will not prevent your experiencing the greatest possible happiness.

And if you are unhappy — I know that you are — reflect upon what is proposed to you here, which is not the product of my imagination merely, but of the thoughts and feelings of the best minds and hearts. It provides the only way to deliver you from your unhappiness and give you the greatest good you can get in this life.

That is what I have wanted to say to you, my brothers. Before I died.
~~

10 Easy Steps for Becoming a Radical Homemaker

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From SHANNON HAYES
YES! Magazine

When Shannon Hayes made a list of easy steps for becoming a radical homemaker, she didn’t realize just how revolutionary they were.

When I first released Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, I was advised to make a list of “easy steps for becoming a radical homemaker” as part of my publicity outreach materials. My shoulders slumped at the very thought: Three years of research about the social, economic, and ecological significance of homemaking, and I had to reduce it to 10 easy tips? I didn’t see a to-do list as a viable route to a dramatic shift in thinking, beliefs, and behaviors. But since the objective of such a list was smoother discussion and communication of Radical Homemaking ideas with the public, I did it.

I came up with the simplest things I could imagine—like committing to hanging laundry out to dry, dedicating a portion of the lawn to a vegetable garden, making an effort to get to know neighbors to enable greater cooperation and reduce resource consumption. I would perfunctorily refer back to them when radio dialogues flagged, when interviews seemed to be getting off track, or to distract myself when an occasional wave of personal sarcasm (I do have them on occasion) threatened to jeopardize an otherwise polite discourse about the book. After about 40 media interviews, I was pretty good at rattling them off, and I began to see their power and significance beyond helping me to be polite.

Take hanging out the laundry as an example. At the outset, it is deceptively simple: It saves money and resources, and it’s easy. As I spoke about line-drying laundry more, however, the suggestion took on more meaning. Of course everyone would like to hang out the laundry. But many people don’t do it. They’re too busy.

Jim Houle: War going badly? Let’s just fire the General!

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From JIM HOULE
Obama-Watch.com
Redwood Valley

The abrupt dismissal of General Stanley McChrystal by President Obama confirms that the war in Afghanistan is going very badly indeed. The general would not have been fired for a few unguarded remarks to a 2nd tier magazine had the war been succeeding according to plan. It may well be that his only offense was to express in too blunt and undiplomatic a fashion the sentiments of broad sections of the US officer corps. Nevertheless, the COIN (counterinsurgency) strategy, that McChrystal himself designed and that his boss General Patraeus sold to Washington, is rapidly falling apart:

•The death toll for US and NATO troops rose to 85 so far in June, making this the worst month since the US invaded Afghanistan way back in October 2001.

•The US quartermasters who maintain the supply chain for war materiel hire various war lords to funnel these supplies from Pakistan ports and from Central Asian airports into our Afghani bases. A good portion of these transportation costs have now been exposed as flowing directly into the coffers of Taliban insurgents so as to convince them not to attack the trucks. Thus, the Pentagon is indirectly financing the insurgency to the tune of approximately $2 million a week.

•The failure of the US intervention in the southern town of Marjah this spring is now admitted (McChrystal calls it “a bleeding ulcer”). The Marjah campaign was intended to demonstrate how COIN would win local support (McChrystal jokingly called it ‘government in a box’). The major advance into Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second largest city, has had to be postponed at least until next fall.

•Amongst the Afghan people, President Hamid Karzai is widely reviled as a corrupt American puppet while his brother continues to operate a major opium entrepot. Opium remains the country’s major cash crop (right next to US handouts and bribes).

Thom Hartmann: There are now Bankster Sharks in the Water…

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From THOM HARTMANN

In his New York Times column, economist Paul Krugman is ringing the warning bell and saying we are in the early stages of a “third depression.” “This third depression,” he writes, “will be primarily a failure of policy” as the world’s leading governments focus “about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.”

It’s truly bizarre to watch country after country across Europe fail to learn the lessons of the past and hang tight to the economic policies of Herbert Hoover and Milton Friedman when both have been tried – and failed – repeatedly in countries all over the world over the past 80 years. The only reasonable rationale for why these national leaders are willing to destroy their social safety nets, throw their working people into serfdom, and drain the resources of their tattered middle classes to reduce their national debts is that – unlike other times in the past – there are now sharks in the water.

Those sharks are the banksters, liberated in 1998 and 2000 by Phil and Wendy Gramm and Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, and Robert Rubin. Now that the banksters have been deregulated and can run trillion dollar gambling casinos, one of their easiest targets are the countries that have a lot of debt – just like the corporate raiders and so-called “private equity” companies look for companies with lots of debt to take down, disassemble, fire all the workers, and ship the jobs to China. Because these bankster sharks are now fully empowered in the waters of international finance, the traditional tool used

Book Review: Nothing’s too small to make a difference

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From TRANSITION U.S.

[...] But perhaps the most heartwarming thing I found in this remarkable little book is a short sentence in an essay by co-editor Wanda Urbanska as she writes about the Simple Living television series she hosted.

A mantra which threaded overtly and subliminally throughout the show’s 39 episodes … “Nothing’s too small to make a difference.” Picking up a trash-bound paperclip, repurposing your mother’s 1960s skirt into kitchen curtains, installing a water-saving, dual-flush commode; each of these action steps qualified.

“Nothing’s too small to make a difference.” In the short days since I’ve read that phrase, it has given me enormous peace of mind.

In the Transition movement I often immerse myself in the huge problems, the sweeping issues. How do we transform an entire society? How do we Transition a city the size of Los Angeles? How do we bring along the poor and the extremely poor, not just the upper-middle-class white faces? What events or programs will best get the attention of those upper-middle-class faces, entrenched as they are with teeth gritted in the final throes of the Industrial Growth Complex rat race?

So often I forget to value what I do have. “Nothing’s too small to make a difference” has given me enormous relief this week. An hour spent weeding the community garden. A meal which includes vegetables from my own backyard. Watching my kids sit in the cage with our new chickens. There is great joy in these little moments.

The journey to the post-petroleum future is going to be made up of a bazillion of these “too small” events. It is the cumulative energy that creates the Transition movement. Yet there is joy in the details. No, it doesn’t make U.S. dollar sense to raise city chickens, but it makes enormous difference to my kids and to my own heart. No, it doesn’t change the world if my dinner includes only a few homegrown ingredients. But it’s a start. And at this point on the timeline, we need to remember to value each of those little “too small” steps. We need to make space in our lives to appreciate and honor the “starts.”

Less is More and the Simplicity movement remind us that the inner goal is “knowing who you are, being clear about your values, understanding what brings true well-being.” In this context, each of the erstwhile “too small” steps has value. Each brings us that much closer to the mark …

of living the way we dream of living;
of living a life of deeper integrity;

Todd Walton: Solar School

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From TODD WALTON
Anderson Valley

Mendocino has a spanking new elementary/junior high school on Little Lake Road about a mile inland from the village, and I am happy to report that her shiny blue metal rooftops are being covered with photovoltaic cells to produce electricity. I was recently at the school shooting hoops on one of the three new outdoor basketball courts, fresh nets affixed to glossy orange rims, and as I huffed and puffed in humbling pursuit of my largely uncooperative basketball, valiant technicians were hard at work affixing the solar cells.

It was a sunny day, and in the absence of students or anyone else making use of the new school, I thrilled to imagine the school’s electric meters whirling in reverse as great currents of electricity flowed from the rooftops into the greater power grid. Such imagining made me happy in the face of the murderous gusher continuing to gush in the Gulf of Mexico. I am aware that solar power is not the ultimate answer to the woes of the world. I have read myriad articles by smart people explaining how electric cars are every bit as bad for the earth as gasoline powered cars. I have read even more articles by these same and other smart people explaining how renewable energy will never replace oil and that we are destined, rather soon, for a new Dark Age of lawlessness and mass starvation. But whenever I stopped to catch my breath from chasing my runaway basketball and saw those fellows affixing solar panels to the shiny blue roof, I felt twinges of hope.

When I was a young man I decided to try to make my living as a musician and a writer. I worked as a landscaper, a gardener, a janitor, a ditch digger, a farmhand, a day care worker, and at several other low-paying jobs. With whatever energy I had left at the end of each day, I practiced music and writing. And for ten years, every person I knew, including my best friends and many smart people, told me with absolute certainty, “You will never succeed as a writer or as a musician. Give it up.” And when I did succeed, these same absolutely certain people said, “I always knew you’d make it.”

Indeed, I have subsequently observed again and again that smart people are often very good at talking themselves and other people out of doing things by stating with absolute certainty that the thing in question cannot be achieved, and they know the thing cannot be achieved because they have the data to prove it. “Oh, so you put in a gray water system to water your garden and conserve water. Big deal. That won’t help. Corporations waste millions of gallons of water every minute. Your little gray water system won’t make a bit of difference.

Michael Laybourn: The Real Facts About Social Security

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From MICHAEL LAYBOURN
Hopland

This letter from FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794 hit the internet a couple of years ago and I answered it. Maybe we need to do it again…

The letter starts:
Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, introduced the Social Security (FICA) Program.  He  promised:
1.) That participation in the Program would be completely voluntary,
2.) That the participants would only have to pay 1% of the first $1,400 of their annual incomes into the program,
3.) That the money the participants elected to put into the Program would be deductible from their income for tax purposes each year,
4.) That the money the participants put into the independent “Trust Fund” rather than into the general operating fund, and therefore, would only be used to fund the Social Security Retirement Program, and no other government program, and,
5.) That the annuity payments to the retirees would never be taxed as income.

ML A: Wrong. Originally, President Roosevelt called for “social insurance.” He envisioned a plan through which workers would contribute and provide for their own future economic security. He specifically disdained the idea of reliance upon welfare. The original SSA embraced the idea of Social Security being an insurance program under which a group of individuals were insured against identifiable risks: disability and old age. Workers paid for their own insurance.

The original 1935 statute paid retirement benefits only to the primary worker. Many types of people were excluded, mainly farm workers, the self-employed, and anyone employed by an employer of fewer than ten people. These limitations, intended to exclude those from whom it would be difficult to monitor compliance, covered approximately half of the civilian labor force in the United States.

This had to change of course: In 1939, the 1937 Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) tax was amended in three important ways:
1. The widowed, nonworking spouse of a someone  entitled to an old-age benefit also became entitled to an old-age benefit.
2. Survivors (widows and orphans) became eligible for a benefit. This feature was very popular among the millions of elderly Americans hard hit

Bruce Patterson: The Anyhow Saloon

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From BRUCE PATTERSON
4mules.com
Anderson Valley

Old Henry never thought he’d ever get snake bit enough to have to endure forty-two days hunkered down inside his backwoods cabin under a near-on relentless barrage of rain, hail, sleet and snow. There was wet snow dropping from the sky like bullets; snow falling in downward spirals like mortally wounded bi-planes; snow howling sideways and, now and again, fat snowflakes gently floating through the redwoods to silent landings all shoulder-to-shoulder and butt-to-belly. Then the next morning them poor snowflakes would get themselves bushwhacked by a good old-fashioned, shutter-banging, tree-slapping, gully-washing rainstorm.

No Siree. If old Henry had’ve wanted to winter up in Alaska, he’d’ve moved to Alaska by golly. He hadn’t set down stakes in the redwoods just to have to sit and stare out his foggy window at them shivering half to death.

The other day a Great Blue Heron landed in Henry’s yard and got his big webbed feet stuck in the mud. Henry watched out his window as the poor fellah furiously flapped his wings trying to unstick himself, and then strained to lift up one foot and then the other. Having no luck either way, the heron finally got to just standing there perfectly still as if, reconciled to maybe having to stay put till spring, he decided he may as well get some hunting in.

Not willing to leave the poor fellah to his fate, and after deciding he couldn’t very well lasso him and yank him loose without hurting him, much less dig him out by hand without getting his eyes plucked out for his trouble, Henry chose to go outside to try’n scare the fellah free, herons being bashful of people and all. So Henry showed himself and, seeing this towering, ungainly biped waddling his way with its skinny wings flapping and him honking like a goose, the heron shriveled his webbed feet, gave his wings one powerful downward whoosh, jerked up his knees into his chest, got airborne and raced away on the wind like he’d wasted enough time already.

Now there was a break in the noon clouds, a spot of blue, and Henry got to scratching the bottoms of his itchy feet. If the trail was too slippery to saddle up his clumsy young gelding, Henry could damn sure walk down the mountain his own self. In need of human company, a stiff drink and a jug of moonshine to go, Henry gathered himself up

Lucy Neely: The European Grapevine Moth in Mendocino County

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From LUCY NEELY
Ukiah

The story of the European Grapevine Moth (EGVM) in Mendocino County demonstrates the risks inherent in globalized agriculture and in monocropping Mendocino County in grapes. Conversely, it shows the advantages of a local, diversified food system’s greater resistance to pests, disease, and market fluctuation. It provides a challenging exercise in reconciling the reality of grapes with the idealism of a local food system.

When I first heard about the EGVM in April, my gut reaction was, “That’s what we get for monocropping the county,” and I didn’t think much more about it. But I became interested in the EGVM when I heard that work at the County Department of Agriculture had been consumed by the moth, while I heard nothing of grapes being consumed by the moth.

To understand this phenomenon, I talked to Tony Linegar, Agriculture Commissioner of Mendocino County.

“I’ve been eating, breathing, sleeping the EGVM,” Tony declares. “We’re all working extra hours.” So this moth must be bad! Really harming the crops? Well, not exactly. 1,400 traps were set in Mendocino County to survey the moth’s presence. The traps yielded 35 moths, all of them in the Ukiah Valley. By comparison, Napa County’s traps turned up 100,000 moths.

Why does this moth merit so much attention if it isn’t destroying crops? “If you don’t treat for it, it could take your whole crop,” Linegar says. And since grapes are the biggest (legal) economy in Mendocino County, if that whole crop was taken, we could be belly up. So the Department of Agriculture has taken the necessary steps to control the moth and save Mendocino’s economy. These steps include spraying grapes with pesticides, mating disruption, and quarantine. All this is “extra work and extra costs” for everyone.

EGVM has the potential to wreak havoc on grape crops in Mendocino County, but it’s easy to kill with the proper attention. For now, the moth is a big hassle and a little ominous, and it doesn’t look like the hassle or the threat are going away, since nearby Napa will be infected for the foreseeable future.

So what lessons can be gleaned from the EGVM in Mendocino County? First, there’s monocropping. When I asked Tony if the monocropping of Mendocino County in grapes makes him nervous, referring to the vulnerability it creates to pests and disease, he paused and replied “a little bit,”

A BBQ Master Delivers: Tips for Preparing Chicken

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From the Award-Winning DVD, BBQ Secrets: The Master Guide to Extraordinary Barbecue Cookin’, world champion cook Mike Davis demonstrates some tips for preparing chicken for the cooker. For many of us, the notion that cooking barbecue requires much experience and know-how to do a good job—it doesn’t!

But, for those who want to cook barbecue that is consistently extraordinary, there is an art, a science, and an incredible body of knowledge to acquire in order to become a true master. Mike “Sarge” Davis, head cook of the Whole Hog Café, in Little Rock, Arkansas is one of those true masters of barbecue.
~~

Ukiah Transition: The Hard Realities of Community Building

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From PEAK OIL BLUES

[...] If you want to trade and learn from the self-reliant, resilient community of people around you then I suggest that you:

1. Be open and listen with humility. Do not come with your own ideas of how things should be. If you don’t like it here, go back where you came from.

2. Avoid condescending someone’s way of life either indirectly, subtly or directly. Live and Let Live. If it is necessary to dress down like the locals or drive a crappier car, so be it. Today’s symbols of success will not insure tomorrow’s success. That greasy redneck next door neighbor may be your lifeline in the future – think about that.

3. Bring some useful skills or resources to earn your seat at the table. I’m sorry I don’t need the services of a retired pilates instructor, an interior decorator or a golf event organizer. A pilates instructor needs to learn how to build a fence. An interior decorator needs to learn how to refinish hardwood floors. A golf event organizer needs to learn how to get stuff that busy people don’t have time to find.

4. Avoid calling attention to people who don’t want it or threatening their way of life in ANY way. More often than not self reliant people are that way because they just want to live without any attention. Bear in mind…. The last holdouts of the oil rich paradigm will be the government. I’m not advocating lawlessness here. I am saying that the laws which restrain people from being self-reliant are threats. The government will continue to legislate and enforce regulations that are impossible to follow in post-peak oil world. They will do their jobs with gusto because jobs in the private sector are becoming ever increasingly scarce. And the most dangerous aspect of all, these folks will do their job for your own good.

5. Be willing to work hard and get dirty. Nothing makes a better impression on these people than being willing to work and sweat. Even if you don’t know which end of the shovel to use, there is still plenty of little tasks that can be made lighter. And, I guarantee you that EVERYONE you meet will show you how to use a shovel!

My martial arts instructor reminds us frequently that our character is our first line of defense and greatest source of strength. Courtesy, humility, integrity, perseverance, self-control and indomitable spirit – these character traits are embodied in all of these suggestions.

To conclude, here are the hard realities of community building:

The Bullshit Lies of Alan Simpson about Social Security

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From FIREDOGLAKE

[...] Let me elucidate some of the ways that Simpson is wrong about Social Security:

SIMPSON: It’ll go broke in the year 2037.

FACT: The Social Security program faces a modest long-term financing shortfall of tax revenue and interest on Trust Fund assets. The Social Security Trustees estimated in 2009 that the Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program will continue to add tax revenue to their Trust Funds up to 2016. The Trust Funds will continue to grow because of interest earned through 2023, at which time total assets will be $4.3 trillion. Subsequently, Social Security will gradually draw down all reserves before the end of 2037, if Congress takes no action whatsoever, it will have sufficient resources to pay about three-quarters of scheduled benefits. Hardly “going broke.”

SIMPSON: All of them have to do with stabilizing the system, which we are told is insolvent, it’s paying out more then it’s taking in.

FACT: Social Security is currently running a surplus. In 2009, an estimated 94 percent of Social Security tax revenues were spent to meet current expenditures (benefits and administrative costs). The surplus tax revenues, along with interest credited to the Trust Fund, contribute to a growing Trust Fund balance.

SIMPSON: It’s 2.5 trillion bucks in IOUs which have been used to build the interstate highway system and all of the things people have enjoyed since it has been setup.

FACT: The interstate highway system was built in the 1950’s when Social Security’s income and outgo were equal. The build up of the trust fund began after 1983 when Congress consciously chose that route as part of the 1983 amendments.

SIMPSON: When I was your age there were 16 people paying into the system and 1 taking out and today there are 3 people paying into the system and 1 taking out.

FACT: This is the same misleading information that Bush used to sell his privatization plan. The 16 to 1 ratio is a figure plucked from 1950, the year that social security expanded to cover millions of farm and other workers. All pension programs that require a period of employment for eligibility show similar ratios at the start or when expanded because all newly covered workers are paying in, but none of them have yet qualified for benefits. By 1955, the ratio was 8 to 1 and by 1973 the ratio was where it is today…

More here.
~~

Doc Searls: The Bottom Line Isn’t Everything

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From DOC SEARLS
Linux Journal

Is there something new that [computer] open source development methods and values can bring to the economy? How about something old?

I think the answer may come from the developing world, where pre-industrial methods and values persist and offer some helpful models and lessons for a networked world that’s less post-industrial than industrial in a new and less impersonal way.

This began to become apparent to me a few years ago I had a Socratic exchange with a Nigerian pastor named Sayo, whom I was lucky to find sitting next to me on a long airplane trip. We were both on speaking junkets. He was coming from an event related to his latest work: translating the Bible to Yoruba, one of the eight languages he spoke. I was on my way to give a talk about The Cluetrain Manifesto, a book I co-authored.

My main contribution to Cluetrain was a chapter called “Markets are conversations. Sayo asked me what we meant by that. After hearing my answer, he acknowledged that our observations were astute, but also incomplete. Something more was going on in markets than just transactions and conversations, he said. What was it?

I said I didn’t know. Here is the dialogue that followed, as close to verbatim as I can recall it…

“Pretend this is a garment”, Sayo said, picking up one of those blue airplane pillows. “Let’s say you see it for sale in a public market in my country, and you are interested in buying it. What is your first question to the seller?”

“What does it cost?” I said.

“Yes”, he answered. “You would ask that. Let’s say he says, ‘Fifty dollars’. What happens next?”

“If I want the garment, I bargain with him until we reach an agreeable price.”

“Good. Now let’s say you know something about textiles. And the two of you get into a long conversation where both of you learn much from each other. You learn about the origin of the garment, the yarn used, the dyes, the name of the artist, and so on. He learns about how fabric is made in your country, how distribution works, and so on. In the course of this you get to know each other. What happens to the price?”

Book Review: ‘Medium Raw,’ Anthony Bourdain

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From SF GATE

[...] His new book, “Medium Raw,” is subtitled “A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook,” and much of it reads more like a poison-pen letter than a love note. Sandra Lee is the “hellspawn of Betty Crocker and Charles Manson.” The movie “No Reservations” makes him want to “vomit blood.” Rocco DiSpirito’s TV series is a “reality-show-driven abomination.” Even the saintly Alice Waters is dissed for her “crude and obvious blend of self-aggrandizement and genuine good intentions.”

Elsewhere, Gael Greene, Alain Ducasse, Wolfgang Puck and many more come in for varying degrees of evisceration. This, of course, is all great fun, even if some of it’s the shooting-fish-in-a-barrel variety. But just in case you’re wondering whether Bourdain can take it as well as he can dish it out, he turns his verbal knife skills on himself. “A loud, egotistical, one-note -hole who’s been cruising on the reputation of one obnoxious, over-testosteroned book for way too long,” “the angry, cynical, snarky guy who says mean things on ‘Top Chef,’ ” “the very picture of the jaded, overprivileged ‘foodie.’ ” Well, he makes some good points….

But for my money the standout chapter in the book is “My Aim Is True,” which describes the work and life of Justo Thomas, who cuts and portions at least 700 pounds of fish every day at Le Bernardin, the New York seafood restaurant. The man is a brilliant craftsman and a force of nature, and when he goes on vacation, three people have to be employed to do his work.

Bourdain observes and describes Thomas in wonderfully fine detail. We “see” the way he employs different methods for different fish, how he uses his knives, the way he removes skin and bones, how he’s able to cut absolutely identically sized pieces. Then we learn about his background in the Dominican Republic, and the role he still plays in his family there. And finally, in a masterful flourish, Bourdain takes Thomas to eat at Le Bernardin.

It’s generally unthinkable for kitchen staff to eat in their own restaurant, but for Thomas, people make exceptions. By the end of the piece I felt I knew Thomas better than I know most of my own friends. You have to hand it to Bourdain; this is really good writing, not just really good food writing.

Bourdain says he spent 28 years as a professional cook and chef. By my reckoning he’s spent 15 years as a professional writer. Will it surprise you that he doesn’t think much of writers? He says, “hanging out with more than one of them at a time is about as much fun as being thrown in a cage full of hungry but toothless civet cats.” Just once in a while, even Mr. B. overcooks his similes.

Full review here.
~~

Guess what? Frozen Yogurt is not a Health Food.

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From NATURAL NEWS

[...] Here’s what’s in it:

Pure Crystalline Fructose, Dextrose, Maltodextrin, Non-fat Milk, Yogurt Powder, Micro-encapsulated Probiotic (Lactobacillus Sporogenes)

Did you catch all that? The first three ingredients are all sugars, followed by processed cow’s milk. Maltodextrin, in particular, has a glycemic index so high that it’s practically poison to diabetics. It’s often derived from genetically-modified corn, by the way.

As you can see from the ingredients list, frozen yogurt is basically just ice cream with some yogurt powder thrown in. It’s ice cream with probiotics.

That doesn’t make it healthy food. It’s still junk food, but with probiotic powder…

… [P]eople almost never examine what they eat. They chew and swallow blindly, giving less thought to what they put inside their bodies than the clothes they wear outside their bodies.

Actually, they choose their foods from the perspective of entertainment. What taste and texture will be entertaining right now? What will give my taste buds pleasure in this instant, regardless of the lifelong effects of this substance on my body?

What sugars, fats or chemical taste enhancers can I place on my tongue in this instant that will provide some level of sensory experience to my brain and remind me that I’m still alive?

That’s the real essence of it, you see. People are sleepwalking through our world half dead, and what they really seek is just stimulation to remind them that they aren’t dead yet. Almost any stimulation will do: The loud blaring of speakers at a rock concert, the sexual foreplay with a new partner, the rush of an abused prescription drug, the thrill of a horror movie, the sensory engrossment of a violent video game, the stimulant kick of a Coca-Cola… it hardly matters as long as something is being felt through the numbness of emotional trauma that typifies human experience in our modern world.

The numbed-up, dumbed-down metrosexual seeker of experience is actually a biological stimulation machine with a tiny unit of consciousness tacked on top that’s seeking a heavy hit of just about anything to remind himself that he still exists. “I feel, therefore I am,” to bastardize Descartes’ famous utterance.

America: Speak Back and Derail the Drive to Cut Social Security and Medicare

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From FIREDOGLAKE

Next weekend will feature another milestone in the drive to cut Social Security and Medicare. The organization America Speaks will be hosting a series of 20 meetings in cities across the country. They will ask the people at these meetings, a cross section of the nation, to come up with proposals for dealing with the country’s projected long-term budget deficit.

The way the problem is outlined for these meetings virtually guarantees that most of the participants will opt for big cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The results of this song and dance exercise will then be presented to President Obama’s fiscal responsibility commission on June 30th, which will use it as further ammunition for plans by its co-chairs to gut these programs.

The rigged deck approach should come as no surprise. America Speaks is largely funded by Peter G. Peterson, the investment banker billionaire who has been on a decades long crusade to gut these programs. In recent years Peterson has redoubled his efforts, committing more than a billion dollars to a wide variety of groups in addition to America Speaks. To advance his agenda Peterson has even set up a fake news service, the “Fiscal Times.” To fill the staff, Peterson’s son hired a number of reputable reporters who were displaced by the collapse of the newspaper industry.

The “Federal Budget 101,” the guidebook for the discussion, follows a predictably shoddy path. The book discusses the budget in almost complete isolation from any larger discussion of the economy. There is virtually no discussion of the ways in which the budget fosters growth, for example by funding education, research and infrastructure; nor the way in which the pattern of growth affects the budget.

For example, the booklet never discusses the extent to which the economic mismanagement that allowed the unchecked growth of an $8 trillion housing bubble contributed to the debt that is its central concern. The downturn caused by the resulting economic collapse will eventually add more than $3 trillion to the country’s debt according to the Congressional Budget Office’s projections.

The booklet also neglects to point out the extent to which the long-term budget disaster story is driven by our broken health care system. If per person health care costs in the United States were the same as in any other wealthy country, we would be looking at enormous budget surpluses in the long-term, not deficits…

More here.
~~

Manifesto: I am not a brand

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From MAUREEN JOHNSON

[Enough with the brand bullshit already. -DS]

[...] Just to be clear on this thing I am not, maybe I should define my understanding of personal branding. A personal brand is a little package you make of yourself so you can put yourself on the shelf in the marketplace and people will know what to expect or look for when they come to buy you. For example, Coke is a brand. When you see Coke, you expect a dark brown effervescent sweet drink that is always going to taste like . . . Coke. McDonalds is going to sell you inexpensive, fast food. The Ritz or the Four Seasons is going to sell you a luxury experience. BP will now be known as the brand that destroys the costal ecosystem of the southeastern United States.

And yes, authors sometimes have these “brands.” Nicholas Sparks is going to sell you a Roman . . . love story, excuse me . . . where someone dies of cancer/similar disease at the end. V.C. Andrews will sell you something awesomely insane and creepy. Dan Brown will sell you a series of puzzles, facts, and clues leading to the unveiling of a huge secret. Tom Clancy will sell you something with a submarine or some kind of large weapon in it. You get the idea. I don’t know if any of the above actively works on his or her “brand” . . . (well, V.C. Andrews won’t, since she died in 1986 having written only eight books -— her official ghostwriter has written over sixty more in her name since that time, which is pretty impressive work).

I am not saying that it is a bad or dishonest thing to try to sell your work. It is not. What I am saying is that I am tired of the rush to commodify everything, to turn everything into products, including people. I don’t want a brand, because a brand limits me. A brand says I will churn out the same thing over and over. Which I won’t, because I am weird…

I think the divide is pretty basic. I think there are people out there who see the Internet as a way of employing the same old techniques of SHILL, SHILL, SHILL. A hundred years ago, they would have rolled up to you in a wagon, shouting about their tonic. Fifty years ago, they would have rolled their vacuum cleaners up to your door.

The other side, the side I am on, is the one that sees an organic Internet full of people. Sure, when I have a book come out, I will often say, “Please, could you buy a copy? I need to buy food and Post-it notes and hamsters.” But in reality, I wouldn’t suggest it if I didn’t think you would like it. I have a lot of fun writing my books, and hey, if you can buy one, great! I think it’s just as great if you take it out of the library. I write because I actually like doing it, and through some miracle of science, I get paid, so wayhay!…

MY POINT IS . . . it’s early days yet on the Internet, and lines are being drawn. We can, if we group together, fight off the weenuses and hosebags who want to turn the Internet into a giant commercial. Hence, the manifesto. It goes something like this:

Adbusters: Ignored and Forgotten

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From ADBUSTERS

Professional ethics in the War on Terror

Though their actions invoke less dramatic imagery than the interrogators and prison guards who tortured and humiliated Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, equally guilty are the legions of professionals who facilitated the abuse.

Although the principal maxim of medical ethics is “First do no harm,” psychologists and doctors working for the military and CIA actively assisted in the torture of human beings. Psychologists helped fine-tune techniques such as sleep deprivation, stress positions and waterboarding, and doctors often monitored harsh interrogations, intervening when necessary to keep struggling prisoners alive and alert so the questioning could continue.

How could medical professionals demonstrate such little empathy in the presence of human suffering?

“People are capable of incredible cruelty. It’s increased in circumstances where there aren’t clear rules and boundaries,” says psychoanalyst Dr. Stephen Soldz. “We dehumanized the enemy after 9/11. We did it as a culture and the military did it spectacularly well. Like many others, military doctors felt a duty to serve their country.”

In 2007 Dr. Soldz urged the American Psychological Association to ban psychologists from participating in the interrogation of terror suspects.

“Professional ethics are always weak,” he says. “We have wonderful statements by professional associations about what the ethics are, but many people don’t internalize them.”

Justice Department memos revealed that doctors with the CIA’s Office of Medical Services declared that depriving prisoners of sleep for upwards of 180 hours was not classified as torture, nor was hosing down detainees with freezing cold water for up to two-thirds of the time it takes hypothermia to set in.

“They signed up to be part of the CIA’s covert operations, so presumably their commitment to medical ethics was long gone,” Dr. Soldz explains…

More here.
~

See also Glenn Greenwald: “the Obama administration is knowingly imprisoning a completely innocent human being who has been kept in a cage in an island prison, thousands of miles from his home, for the last 8 years, since he’s 18 years old, despite having done absolutely nothing wrong.” here
~~

Michael Laybourn: PG&E & Prop 16, Not Quite The Last Word…

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From MICHAEL LAYBOURN
Hopland

On election night I went to bed furious. PG&E and their arrogant, reckless campaign to change the California Constitution was ahead in votes. That 50 million dollars worth of lies must have done it, I thought, and locked in a no competition monopoly.

But when I woke up and checked the voting, the vote had reversed with NO on 16 ahead. Talk about a personal mental turnaround. But it was close, too close. 1,869,805 voted for it for a 47.7% yes vote and 52.3% voted against it, most of them, it turned out, PG&E customers.

At stake was, I believe, California’s renewable energy future. The collapse of PG&E’s attempt to buy a monopoly in California gives Californians time to consider local power. Supervisors and City councils can now take some time to educate local residents about the value of community-controlled energy. Citizens can write letters comparing the ways to purchase energy.

Looking back, it was unlimited political spending up against a small group who had no way of raising that kind of money and up against cities that manage or want to manage their own utilities, but can’t, by law, spend money on the necessary advertising to fight PG&E’s attempt to change our constitution.

The bully says we can spend them into oblivion. This doesn’t happen with community controlled energy. But it is a description of PG&E in California. PG&E wanted to stop municipal purchasing before its customers acquired a taste for lower electric rates, because most of these utilities have lower rates.

“Peter Darbee, PG&E CEO, who earned $10.6 million dollars last year, told company shareholders that the goal of Proposition 16 is to defeat local power choice “once and for all,” instead of having to continually fend off the specter of customer defection.

“Darbee speculated that California voters would be receptive to Proposition 16 if the initiative’s campaign exploited the current anti-government anger over the economy and state budget deficit.” – Dan Aiello, California Progress Report. California media was inundated with radio, TV ads and flyers telling Californians to save themselves from government. And almost 2 million people believed those slick Yes on Prop 16 fliers & TV ads telling us the initiative was a voter safeguard against local governments wanting to spend unlimited amounts to get into the energy business.

Herman Daly: Without choice there can be no responsibility

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From HERMAN DALY

Presuppositions of Policy

As you graduate I want to remind you of something you already know. Since you have not only chosen to study public policy, but have persevered to graduate with a Master’s degree, you must already have rejected the perennial and pernicious philosophical doctrines of determinism and nihilism. That is what I want to remind you of.

Determinists believe that there is only one possible future, rigidly determined either by atoms in motion, selfish genes, dialectical materialism, toilet training, or the puppet strings of a predestining deity. If there is only one possible future state of the world then there are no options, nothing to choose from, and therefore no need for policy — or schools of public policy or Master’s degrees in public policy. You should head straight to the unemployment office! You are necessarily non-determinists who must believe that there are at least a few possible alternative future states of the world, and that purposive policy can be causative in choosing among them.

Of course there are also many merely conceivable or imaginary futures that really can be ruled out as impossible – such as, for example, growing the economy forever on a finite planet that is subject to the laws of thermodynamics and ecological interdependence. Our commitment to the fantasy of unlimited growth as the foundation of all national policy should top the list of things to be reconsidered. But that is a story for another time. My point for today is that after eliminating all impossible futures we are still left with more than one possible future.

To choose from the remaining menu of possible futures we need a criterion of value by which to distinguish better from worse states of the world. Nihilists, or extreme relativists, deny the existence of any such criterion. For them it is all a matter of subjective individual preferences, suitably weighted by ability to pay, as modified by gender, race, and class interests. The nihilists say that there is no such thing as the common good or objective value, and that therefore we cannot distinguish better from worse future states. So even though real alternatives may exist, policy still would make no sense without an objective criterion of value, and some vision of the common good.

Without choice there can be no responsibility, so the determinists and nihilists are often undeservedly comfortable in their irresponsible irrelevance. “Never knowing where they are going, they can never go astray.” As future policy makers I am sure that you will have to confront some complacent determinists and nihilists, perhaps disguised as political pollsters, apocalyptic televangelists, cost-benefit analysts, bio-ethicists, evolutionary neuropsychologists, or growth economists. One way or another they will insist that there is no alternative, and even if there were, it would not matter.

Rosalind Peterson: Caltrans Widening of U.S. 101 in Richardson Park Threatens California Redwoods

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From ROSALIND PETERSON
Redwood Valley

Article here.

The idea is to straighten the road out and widen the shoulders in an effort to accommodate the largest big rig trucks, which currently do not use the roadway. Many business leaders and politicians in Eureka have expressed support for the project on grounds that it would help commerce.

We can all take action against this proposal and call the following elected officials:

Congressman Mike Thompson (1-866) 220-0044 (Toll Free Washington Office) The Redwood Trees are in his district.

Senators Barbara Boxer & Dianne Feinstein (1-866) 220-0044 (Toll Free Washington, D.C. Office)

And we can contact the office of the Governor of California:
(916) 445-2841 And let him know that his legacy should not be the destruction of the Redwood in
Richardson State Park, etc.

We also need to contact our elected State Representatives in Sacramento-Local Offices don’t always deliver Messages to Sacramento Offices:

California Assemblyman Wes Chesbro (916) 391-2001

Senator Pat Wiggins (916) 445-3373

Also CALTRANS deserves some telephone calls as well from those that oppose this action:
(707) 445-6600 Eureka Office
District CALTRANS Director: (707) 445-6445

Our Mendocino County Supervisors should also speak out as Richardson State Park is a Tourist Attraction and we should support keeping this area as a tourist attraction not a fast road track for speeding and polluting trucks. Many enjoy the highway and don’t drive at 65 MPH preferring to enjoy the beauty of this area. Please contact your local Supervisor and ask for a resolution to protect Richardson State Park Redwood Trees.<!–

HWY 101 Widening Jeopardizes Richardson State Park Redwood Trees

A coalition of environmental groups and individuals filed a lawsuit this week in San Francisco challenging a plan by the California Department of Transportation to widen a highway through an ancient redwood grove.

Why Are You So In Love With Green Smoothies?

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From GREENSMOOTHIEGIRL.com

If you do just ONE thing to improve your family’s health, make it green smoothies! Believe it or not, kids WILL drink it, and you will be surprised that you enjoy them and even learn to crave them. Don’t let the name put you off—I make them look more purple than green, with a magic ingredient called frozen mixed berries!

You can read Victoria Boutenko’s book, Green For Life, for comprehensive overview of why this is so important. I had three people in a one-week period recommend the book to me, and I’ve learned from past experience to sit up and listen when things happen to me in threes! (Actually, I’m getting smarter and now follow through when I hear something TWICE.) Her research of people drinking green smoothies yielded 100 percent positive reviews, with the top three health benefits being better digestion/elimination, more energy, and weight loss!

I’ve written a book review as a summary and motivation for you to start making them. And included in my recipes is my a master template for green smoothies that you can adapt to various greens and fruit for variety. It’s easy, it takes 10 minutes of my day, and it’s the highest and best use of my kitchen time!

Who eats a big plate of plain, raw, kale, collards, spinach and celery? Mustard greens, arugula, turnip greens, dandelion greens, beet greens, and chard don’t end up in too many salads. Just the time to chew it would be half an hour (oh, and the chopping)! They’re a regular feature in my green smoothies every day. My kids drink a pint every day, and you can make it ahead and stick it in the frig. And, in a smoothie, you don’t have to drizzle them with fattening, chemical-laden salad dressings to get them down.

You won’t believe how much green food it has in it: chlorophyll and a powerhouse of enzymes, vitamins, and minerals. Unlike a juicer (which makes such a mess and throws away much of the plant), green smoothie is packed with insoluble plant fiber capable of carrying many times its own weight in toxins out of the body. Drinking a quart a day addresses what I believe is the #1 deficit in the American diet: lack of leafy greens. (And I am NOT talking about iceberg lettuce, an essentially nutrition-free food.) A close second deficit is lack of overall plant fiber in the diet, but eating green smoothies addresses that, too.

More here.
~
See also Just try ‘em – Organic Green Smoothies
~~

Some First Steps

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From THE OIL DRUM

[...] So how do we start down this necessary path? First, let’s start with a few things we cannot do — some doors that are now closed to us due to our decades of profligate resource destruction.

Firstly, anything requiring significant amounts of energy is out of the question. The era of cheap, abundant fossil energy is behind us — forever. Despite repeated warnings from our best scientists, we failed to make the transition to renewables in time. Now it’s too late. Every year from now on will afford us less and less energy — possibly significantly less in the coming years.

Secondly, anything requiring significant amounts of money in the form of credit is out of the question. In a future of a continually-declining resource base, there is simply no such thing as economic growth, and thus no credit. Basically, we play with what material resources we have at this point — which is a lot less than we used to.

But enough with the negatives — let’s start with some concrete positive steps that we can accomplish. I can think of three that deserve our immediate attention:

1. I see no more crucial place to start than with food and our country’s food-security. We will change both the way we grow food and the food we eat. We will create more small local farms, more small farmers, more ecologically-sane fertilization methods, more seed saving and exchanging, more farmers markets and CSAs. We will grow food on our city’s rooftops, windowsills, and front stoops. We will grow food in our suburban lawns, parking lots, and golf courses. We will become self-sufficient in food-production with a smarter kind of agriculture that does not waste soil, pollute water, and poison our children. This, my fellow Americans, is true “homeland security.”

2. Next up is transportation. We will need to move ourselves and our products around largely without the aid of fossil fuels, as these will become only more expensive and unavailable in the years ahead. Is transportation with minimal fossil fuels even possible? Of course it is! We did it for centuries before the Industrial Age, and we need only to reclaim those technologies. Bicycles with trailers, hand-carts, and electric scooters will be made available as much as possible. Mules, oxen, and draft horses will be bred as rapidly as possible for distribution to our farms, towns, and cities. These will not allow us the mobility of former years, but that is the price we pay for thoughtlessly squandering our fossil fuels.

3. If we are to be a less-mobile, more-localized people, we will need to start producing most of the necessities of everyday life in the places where we live.

R.I.P.

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The Soul Desires Expression at Work

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From JOHN O’DONOHUE
Anam Cara (Soul Friend) 1998

For many people, the workplace is unsatisfactory and permits neither growth nor creativity. More often than not, it is an anonymous place where function and image have control since work demands such labor and effort, it has always made the worker vulnerable. Even in the ancient Celtic tradition, negativity could be harnessed to make nature work against the worker…

In the modern workplace, a negative atmosphere can be very destructive. When we speak of an individual, we speak of his presence. Presence is the way a person’s individuality comes toward you. Presence is the soul texture of the person. When we speak of this presence in relation to a group of people, we refer to it as atmosphere or ethos. The ethos of a workplace is a very subtle group presence. It is difficult to describe or analyze an ethos; yet you immediately sense its power and effect. Where the ethos is positive, wonderful things can happen. It is a joy to come to work because the atmosphere comes out to meet you and it is caring, kind, and creative. If the ethos of the workplace is negative and destructive, then when people wake up in the morning, their first thought of going to work literally makes them ill. It is lonely that so many people have to spend so much of their short time in the world in a negative and destructive work ethos. The workplace can be quite hostile; it is often an environment of power. You are working for people who have power over you. They have the power to sack you, criticize and bully you, or compromise your dignity. This is not a welcoming atmosphere. People have power over us because we give our power away to them…

Frequently people in power are not as strong as they might wish to appear. Many people who desperately hunger for power are weak. They seek power positions to compensate for their own fragility and vulnerability. A weak person in power can never be generous with power because they see questions or alternative possibilities as threatening their own supremacy and dominance. If you are going to be creatively confrontational with such a person, you need to approach that person very gently in a nondirect manner. This is the only way that the word of your truth can reach such a frightened, powerful person.

The workplace as a place of power can also be a place of control. Control is destructive because it reduces your own independence and autonomy. You are placed back in an infantile role where you are dealing with an authority figure. Because of our untransfigured relationship to our parents, we sometimes turn authority figures into giants. There is a crucial distinction here between power and authority. When you are awake to the integrity of your inner power, then you are your own authority. The word authority signifies your authorship of your ideas and actions. The world functions through power structures.

Mark Scaramella: Queen Kendall — Round 4

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From MARK SCARAMELLA
The Jaundiced Eye – TheAVA.com

[Shameful... -DS]

The Mendocino County Grand Jury gets extra credit for persistence, if not effectiveness.

For the fourth year in a row, the Grand Jury has concluded that Fourth District Supervisor Kendall Smith is a thief, and this time they seem to be saying that she should be removed from office.

I hesitate to bore readers with yet another recitation of the particulars of Ms. Smith’s petty criminality because it’s been hashed out in all its excruciating glory in several previous Grand Jury reports and in several stories the Anderson Valley Advertiser.

Basically, the Grand Jury determined that Ms. Smith claimed travel reimbursement to and from Fort Bragg when she hadn’t traveled, but stayed at friend’s house in Ukiah. There was more, but the Grand Jury, in an overabundance of caution, gave Ms. Smith the benefit of the doubt and only asked her to pay back the most completely documented and clear amount. (There were other amounts that were less obvious due to the County Auditor’s and the Supervisors’ self-serving “interpretations” of the travel reimbursement policy that the Supes themselves wrote for themselves.)

So even after trimming back the amount to the bare minimum that Smith clearly owed, Smith first said she’d repay it, then reneged on that promised and refused. One of her more outrageous reimbursement claims was for “pet care” of her pet while she was at “work” in Ukiah.

The Supes get $68,000 per year plus perks which bring it up to the range of $90-$110k depending on the Supervisor District. One of those perks is a monthly travel stipend which reimburses the Supervisors for commuting to work. The amount of the stipend is tied to the distance the individual Supervisors travel to Ukiah. (One is forced to wonder what will happen when Dan Hamburg or Wendy Roberts is elected Supervisor in January. Hamburg lives very near Ukiah, much closer than Colfax; Roberts lives on the Coast, much farther than Colfax. Will the reimbursement “policy” be revised based on who is Supervisor? Don’t ask.)

When the Grand Jury first looked at the Supervisors’ travel reimbursements back in 2007, they concluded that “some Supervisors have a casual and loosely defined understanding of what is considered to be ‘official County business,’ resulting in substantive travel policy abuse.”

Those Supervisors were John Pinches, David Colfax and Kendall Smith. To his credit, Supervisor Pinches didn’t quibble over what the Grand Jury said were overpayments to him and he quickly paid it back.

But Supervisors Colfax and Smith, instead of paying back the rather small amount given their generous public salaries, angrily denounced the Grand Jury.

More here.
~~

Farming’s future (right here in Ukiah)

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From THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

New breed of agri-curious entrepreneurs emphasizes ‘growing food responsibly’

As Mendocino County residents dash off to work during the morning rush hour, Paula Manolo and her boyfriend, Adam Gaska, are hard at work at an entirely different kind of office: A 4-acre plot on land near Ukiah.

The biodynamic farm, situated on Heart Arrow Ranch (which is owned by Golden Vineyards), is among the fields the couple leases and tends as part of their business, Mendocino Organics.

By September, the duo will be farming a total of 50 acres as their primary occupation.

Manolo, 28, and Gaska, 31, are not alone. At a time when farm revenues are declining along with the national economy, a number of young and “agri-curious” Sonoma and Mendocino county residents are turning to farming as a viable profession.

This influx of fresh blood comes just in time. The average age of Sonoma County farmers has risen steadily for the past 30 years, peaking at 56 in 2009. The new generation also has introduced a new way of thinking to the profession. Most have turned to farming to help improve the way food is grown and to make communities more self-sustaining.

“For us farming is about much more than production and consumption,” says Manolo. “It’s about growing food responsibly, using the Earth sustainably and giving back whenever possible. It truly is a way of life.”

Many members of this new breed refer to themselves as “Greenhorns,” an eco-conscious play on a compound word that has come to mean “novice.”

The group has spawned quite an organic community. A number of participants met up this spring at a lively mixer at the Baker Creek Seed Bank in Petaluma, while others frequently “meet” on online forums and message boards to share best practices and chat about challenges associated with the farming life.

There’s even a documentary film about this nationwide phenomenon titled, simply, “Greenhorns.”

Among all of the local Greenhorns, Manolo and Gaska are perhaps the most adventuresome. They are growing sweet corn, beans, winter squash and melons, and they raise sheep and chickens for meat, and cows for milk.

Their average day begins around 5:30 or 6 a.m., when the pair gets up to water plants in their greenhouse, feed animals and move chickens to a new part of the pasture. Later, they might tend to some of their 100sheep, or look after the nine cows that hang together on leased land in the Potter Valley. They also might head out to inspect some of the irrigated pasture land they run.

More here.
~~

More “Whacking The Old Folks” – Social Security On The Line

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From OPENLEFT

[...] This is really important. They increased the Social Security tax on working people, gave the money out as tax cuts for the wealthy, created deficits on purpose to defund government, created a huge debt mess, and now the next stage of this plan is to gut social programs.

This is what the Deficit Commission is about. Tax cuts for the rich and military spending caused the borrowing and raising taxes on the rich can stop it.  But the plan was to force a perception of a debt emergency to stampede people into accepting a dismantling of government that works for We, the People, and provides for us, empowers us and protects us.    This is the confrontation of  plutocracy vs democracy.  We can’t let them get away with it.

What can you do?  Visit Social Security Works, get on their mailing list or follow them on Twitter.

Get mad.

And get informed.
~

From FIREDOGLAKE (video)

Each time the Catfood Commission holds its secret meetings, Alex Lawson of Social Security Works has been outside with his camera, shooting video of the closed front door as FDL runs a live stream on our front page. The Washington Post wrote it up recently.  As committee members go in and out of the room Alex asks them questions when he can and yesterday he had an exchange with Alan Simpson that was…well, extraordinary.

Simpson is apparently a graduate of the Bobby Etheridge school of charm. Alex Lawson was incredibly respectful and polite as the crankly Simpson berated, interrupted and cussed him. Simpson has been a long-time supporter of rolling back the New Deal, and when asked about cuts he would recommend to the President and Congress on CNBC, Simpson said  “We are going to stick to the big three,” meaning Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  His sentiments haven’t changed.

CJR’s Trudy Lieberman recently ran down Simpson’s history of delicate statements on the subject of Social Security.   He is equally decorous on camera with Alex, who clearly knows a great deal more about the subject than he does.  Simpson starts from the premise that the Treasury will default on the bonds issued to the Social Security trust fund, because all the best people apparently know that it’s better to default on America’s senior citizens and plunge them into poverty than it is to default on, say, the Chinese.

Despite Simpson’s assertions, raising the retirement age to 70 IS a benefit cut.  It would put an estimated 1.5 million  senior citizens into poverty.

5 Free and Open-Source Software Alternatives for Small Businesses

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From MASHABLE

[...] Many business owners and managers don’t realize is that they can get all the software they need to run a business — quite literally all of it in most cases — 100% free of charge. That includes operating systems, word processing programs, accounting software, email servers, graphic design programs and more.

If you put in some time to do some research, you might find perfectly free software alternatives that work just as well as Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop (Adobe Photoshop), QuickBooks, and other better-known programs.

Best of all, since FOSS is free to download and try, there’s no risk in testing it out. Take a look at some of these programs and see if a few of them would fit your business needs…

GIMP is a free Photoshop substitute that will satisfy all but the most demanding professional graphic designers. If you need to make simple web graphics, retouch a few product photos, or create flyers or other marketing materials, this program should work nicely for you. It’s robust, and if you’ve used Photoshop or Photoshop-like clone programs, the interface and commands will be familiar to you. The images you create can be saved in an array of common formats, including PSD Photoshop files, in case you need to send your files to a Photoshop user.

All in all, GIMP might be the single greatest money-saver on this list. It’s completely free, whereas a single Photoshop license — which you’ll need to pay for again each time Adobe releases a new version of the software — can cost hundreds of dollars per user…

For years, there’s been the commonly held idea that Linux OSes are command-line intensive, difficult to use, easy to crash and generally for nerds only. Much of this “fear, uncertainty and doubt” has come from corporate entities that benefit most from these drastic misperceptions. While you might want to reach out for a little help when installing your Linux OS for the first time, you’ll be shocked at how simple and user-friendly a Linux distro (that’s short for “distribution,” the Linux term for version) can be. The interfaces are elegant and intuitive, much more so than even Windows or Mac for many users…

1. OpenOffice …open-source alternative to Microsoft Office.

2. GNUCash …alternative for Microsoft Money and Quicken

3. GIMP …alternative for Photoshop

4. Zimbra …alternative for Microsoft Exchange email

5. Linux …alternative for Windows and MacOS

More details here.
~~

Getting Shit Done

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From ANDREW SULLIVAN
Daily Dish

What are the odds that Obama’s huge success yesterday in getting BP to pledge a cool $20 billion to recompense the “small people” in the Gulf will get the same attention as his allegedly dismal speech on Tuesday night? If you take Memeorandum as an indicator, it really is no contest. The speech is still being dissected by language experts, but the $20 billion that is the front page news in the NYT today? Barely anywhere on the blogs.

This is just a glimpse into the distortion inherent in our current political and media culture. It’s way easier to comment on a speech – his hands were moving too much! – than to note the truly substantive victory, apparently personally nailed down by Obama, in the White House yesterday. If leftwing populism in America were anything like as potent as right-wing populism – Matt Bai has a superb analysis of this in the NYT today – there would be cheering in the streets. But there’s nada, but more leftist utopianism and outrage on MSNBC. And since there’s no end to this spill without relief wells, this is about as much as Obama can do, short of monitoring clean-up efforts, or rather ongoing management of the ecological nightmare of an unstopped and unstoppable wound in the ocean floor.

I sure understand why people feel powerless and angry about the vast forces that control our lives and over which we seem to have only fitful control – big government and big business. But it seems to me vital to keep our heads and remain focused on what substantively can be done to address real problems, and judge Obama on those terms. When you do, you realize that the left’s “disgruntleist” faction needs to take a chill pill.

Take Iran. Everyone – part from still-delusional neocons – accepts that this is a hugely difficult issue. To read the neocon right, you’d think all our problems would be solved by the president declaring the regime “evil” and launching military strikes all over the country. Sound familiar? In the real world, most of us understand that the military option is madness, that the machinery of repression is strong enough for the  coup regime to survive – but only just. Since Obama was elected, the legitimacy of the Tehran regime has been shredded – and I’d argue that removing America from the equation helped Iran’s opposition, rather than stymying it. Most of us knew, moreover, that Russia and China would oppose any and all sanctions.

But in fact, after a painstaking process in which Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have been successfully cornered in world opinion as the transgressors, sanctions, with Russia’s and China’s support, have passed the UN Security Council. More focused sanctions are in force against the financial interests of the Revolutionary Guards, and will soon come from the US Congress and European capitals. The price of Ahmadi’s paranoia will be high, which may explain his recent fulminations.

Todd Walton: The Presence of Absence

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From TODD WALTON
Anderson Valley

(This essay originally appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser June 2010)

Thursday in the village of Mendocino is the day the AVA (Anderson Valley Advertiser) arrives in our post office boxes and at the liquor store (should we need extra copies.) Now and then the AVA is delayed for a day and arrives on Friday. But this week, the AVA did not come at all. I inquired of my heroes at the post office, but they had not seen hide nor hair of the goodly rag. And though I knew the liquor store is supplied via the mails, too, I nevertheless went thither in the vain hope that a batch had been brought by pony express or valiant pickup from the inland empire to our coastal enclave.

The liquor store in our hamlet is a living foreign movie. No matter how many times I go in there, I have the feeling something important is missing. There is an empty feeling about the place, as if the proprietors are just moving in or just moving out. The lighting is strange and forlorn and bathes everything in a pale yellow light. My friendly greetings invariably fall into a bottomless chasm of ennui, and in thirty tries I have never once elicited a smile from the fellow at the cash register. Perhaps he is hardened by years of dealing with drunks. I don’t know. I don’t buy anything there except the AVA, and maybe this bugs him. In any case, they didn’t have any AVAs and I was apparently not the first person to inquire.

Certainly one of the great appeals of the AVA to me is that I often have something published therein. Discovering that I am once again in the goodly rag never fails to impart a momentary thrill, a sense of well-being, a revivifying and inspiring validation that I did not waste however many hours I spent writing whatever I wrote. I never know in advance if my pieces will run. The editors are not in the habit of telling me, possibly because they don’t know themselves until the very last minute before they put the paper to bed, and perhaps not even then.

No, the only way to find out if I’m in the AVA is to look through her pages. Now and then I will land an essay on the front page (mazel tov!) but more often than not my pieces are tucked away in the cozy confines of the middle. In truth, I don’t care where they land, just so they do. Land.

Those weeks when I do not appear (assuming I’ve submitted something before the deadline) I invariably experience a brief emotional downturn. I want to make it clear (to myself if no one else) that this downturn has much less to do with my absence from the pages of the AVA than it does with the absence of my books from the bookstores of America, the lack of reviews of my books in The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, and the towering indifference of the great big world to the creations of little old me.

Fannie and Freddie and What Not

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From THE AUTOMATIC EARTH

[...] As longtime readers will know, my forecast for a real estate prices is for a decline of 90% on average, albeit with considerable local variation. For those who think this is not possible, you might want to look at what you can buy a house for right now in Detroit. It is considerably less than the price of a second-hand car, and in a market where the price of second-hand cars is depressed. In places where there is no work for miles around, and no access to mortgages in dying neighborhoods, the pool of buyers will be limited to those who can afford to buy a property in cash and would choose to spend what will be extremely scarce cash on that particular purchase. The price support that will convey will be minimal, to say the least.

As unemployment takes a moonshot in the coming years, purchasing power will be far more limited than most can imagine. The liquidity crunch we are moving into will cause the same kind of economic seizure as we saw in the depression, when a lack of money alone made it exceptionally difficult to connect buyers and sellers, or producers and potential consumers. Money is the lubricant in the engine of the economy in the same way that oil is the lubricant in the engine of your car. Running an engine with too little lubricant will cause it to grind to a halt.

The ‘assistance’ currently being provided in the form of down payments is only going to make the situation worse in the long run. Bailouts are never for the little guy. Offering inducements to further indebtedness is merely a trap. It will do nothing but increase the pool of future debt slaves. This is not a benefit for the people it is ostensibly aimed at. Instead it is a cynical move intended to keep our game of extend-and-pretend going a little longer. Rising unemployment will cruelly expose the fragility of buying power and the ability to service debt in the relatively near future. Defaults are likely to be shockingly high, and with them losses to Fannie and Freddie.

As John Stuart Mill observed, “Panics do not destroy capital, they merely reveal the extent to which it has already been destroyed by betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works.” The construction of much of suburbia has been a giant exercise in the creation of negative added value. It is this decades-long commitment of resources to living arrangements with fatal structural dependencies that has been destructive of value, and there is a limit to how long we can stave off the day when that will be generally recognized. That is all we are doing in supporting Fannie and Freddie.

Now that it appears the credit markets have turned again, the real economy will inevitably follow. The long rally facilitated a suspension of disbelief that was kind to policy makers while it lasted. The resumption of the downtrend will conversely strip away their credibility, making everything they do fail conspicuously and ignominiously.
~~

Call the Politburo, we’re in trouble

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From TOM ENGELHARDT
TomDispatch.com

Entering the Soviet Era in America

Mark it on your calendar.  It seems we’ve finally entered the Soviet era in America.

You remember the Soviet Union, now almost 20 years in its grave.  But who gives it a second thought today?  Even in its glory years that “evil empire” was sometimes referred to as “the second superpower.”  In 1991, after seven decades, it suddenly disintegrated and disappeared, leaving the United States — the “sole superpower,” even the “hyperpower,” on planet Earth — surprised but triumphant.

The USSR had been heading for the exits for quite a while, not that official Washington had a clue.  At the moment it happened, Soviet “experts” like Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (then director of the CIA) still expected the Cold War to go on and on.  In Washington, eyes were trained on the might of the Soviet military, which the Soviet leadership had never stopped feeding, even as its sclerotic bureaucracy was rotting, its economy (which had ceased to grow in the late 1970s) was tanking, budget deficits were soaring, indebtedness to other countries was growing, and social welfare payments were eating into what funds remained.  Not even a vigorous, reformist leader like Mikhail Gorbachev could staunch the rot, especially when, in the late 1980s, the price of Russian oil fell drastically.

Looking back, the most distinctive feature of the last years of the Soviet Union may have been the way it continued to pour money into its military — and its military adventure in Afghanistan — when it was already going bankrupt and the society it had built was beginning to collapse around it.  In the end, its aging leaders made a devastating miscalculation.  They mistook military power for power on this planet.  Armed to the teeth and possessing a nuclear force capable of destroying the Earth many times over, the Soviets nonetheless remained the vastly poorer, weaker, and (except when it came to the arms race) far less technologically innovative of the two superpowers.

In December 1979, perhaps taking the bait of the Carter administration whose national security advisor was eager to see the Soviets bloodied by a “Vietnam” of their own, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan to support a weak communist government in Kabul.  When resistance in the countryside, led by Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas and backed by the other superpower, only grew, the Soviets sent in more troops, launched major offensives, called in air power, and fought on brutally and futilely for a decade until, in 1989, long after they had been whipped, they withdrew in defeat.

Gorbachev had dubbed Afghanistan “the bleeding wound,” and when the wounded Red Army finally limped home, it was to a country that would soon cease to exist.  For the Soviet Union, Afghanistan had literally proven “the graveyard of empires.”  If, at the end, its military remained standing, the empire didn’t…  More here.
~~

Worst Case Scenario on Gulf Spill?

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From SHARON ASTYK
Causabon’s Book

Reader Stephen B. pointed me to this comment at The Oil Drum by someone who argues that there’s more going on under the Gulf that we think. For those who think it is strange that I be highlighting a comment in a thread, I should note that TOD attracts many, many petroleum geologists and other professionals, and while sometimes the comments are the same “pulled it out of my ass” as on every other website, often, the technical knowledge on offer is pretty astounding. This one passes my smell test, which is usually pretty good – that doesn’t mean I claim commenter Doug R is right – it means I think his information is interesting enough to be worth exposing to a wider audience for clarification or correction.

The whole thing is worth a read, including the many cites and sources (again, why I take it at least a little seriously), but here’s one of several major points made, building on a Wall Street Journal article (link at source):

There are some inconsistencies with this article.
There are no “Disks” or “Subsea safety structure” 1,000 feet below the sea floor, all that is there is well bore. There is nothing that can allow the mud or oil to “escape” into the rock formation outside the well bore except the well, because it is the only thing there.

All the actions and few tid bits of information all lead to one inescapable conclusion. The well pipes below the sea floor are broken and leaking. Now you have some real data of how BP’s actions are evidence of that, as well as some murky statement from “BP officials” confirming the same.

I took some time to go into a bit of detail concerning the failure of Top Kill because this was a significant event. To those of us outside the real inside loop, yet still fairly knowledgeable, it was a major confirmation of what many feared. That the system below the sea floor has serious failures of varying magnitude in the complicated chain, and it is breaking down and it will continue to.

What does this mean?

It means they will never cap the gusher after the wellhead. They cannot…the more they try and restrict the oil gushing out the bop?…the more it will transfer to the leaks below. Just like a leaky garden hose with a nozzle on it. When you open up the nozzle?…it doesn’t leak so bad, you close the nozzle?…it leaks real bad, same dynamics… More here.
~~

Seth Godin: Goodbye to the office

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From SETH GODIN

Factories used to be arranged in a straight line. That’s because there was one steam engine, and it turned a shaft. All the machines were set up along the shaft, with a belt giving each of them power. The office needed to be right next to this building, so management could monitor what was going on.

150 years later, why go to work in an office/plant/factory?

1. That’s where the machines are.

2. That’s where the items I need to work on are.

3. The boss needs to keep tabs on my productivity.

4. There are important meetings to go to.

5. It’s a source of energy.

6. The people I collaborate with all day are there.

7. I need someplace to go.

But…

1. If you have a laptop, you probably have the machine already, in your house.

2. If you do work with a keyboard and a mouse, the items you need to work on are on your laptop, not in the office.

3. The boss can easily keep tabs on productivity digitally.

4. How many meetings are important? If you didn’t go, what would happen?

5. You can get energy from people other than those in the same company.

6. Of the 100 people in your office, how many do you collaborate with daily?

7. So go someplace. But it doesn’t have to be to your office.

If we were starting this whole office thing today, it’s inconceivable we’d pay the rent/time/commuting cost to get what we get. I think in ten years the TV show ‘the Office’ will be seen as a quaint antique.

When you need to have a meeting, have a meeting. When you need to collaborate, collaborate. The rest of the time, do the work, wherever you like.

The gain in speed, productivity and happiness is massive. What’s missing is #7… someplace to go. Once someone figures that part out, the office is dead.
~~

Another bullshit sandwich? (Updated – Rachel Maddow for President!)

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From RICHARD HEINBERG
Post Carbon Institute

[Where's the beef? -DS]

Last night’s presidential speech on the Gulf oil spill had been pre-billed by the Washington Post as Barack Obama’s “Jimmy Carter moment.” But reading any of Carter’s speeches (a good one to start with is that of April 18, 1977) side by side with last night’s bromide is an invitation to nostalgia and bitter disappointment.

President Obama offered up one promising paragraph:

“For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. For decades, we have talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. Time and again, the path forward has been blocked—not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.”

It sounds for all the world as though the President is about to unleash a grand program on the scale of the New Deal—an energy Moon Shot, a rousing call-to-arms reminiscent of December 8, 1941. But this is what follows:

“So I am happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party—as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels. Some have suggested raising efficiency standards in our buildings like we did in our cars and trucks. Some believe we should set standards to ensure that more of our electricity comes from wind and solar power. Others wonder why the energy industry only spends a fraction of what the high-tech industry does on research and development—and want to rapidly boost our investments in such research and development. All of these approaches have merit, and deserve a fair hearing in the months ahead. But the one approach I will not accept is inaction. The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is too big and too difficult to meet. You see, the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II. The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon. And yet, time and again, we have refused to settle for the paltry limits of conventional wisdom.

Trying To Understand The Tea Party

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From ANDREW SULLIVAN
The Daily Dish

[T]hey’re the usual reactionary crowd that goes nuts whenever there’s a Democrat in the White House and they’re looking for something to be outraged about. And right-wing media and the Republican Party have decided (correctly, I think) that banging on about the deficit is a handy way to gin up opposition to pretty much everything Democrats want to do.

The previous tea party incarnations worked the same way, but their leaders chose topics suited to their time and circumstances. In the 30s it was opposition to the New Deal. For the Birchers it was communism. For the Clinton-haters it was the culture wars. Those were the most obvious and convenient stalking horses of their day for broad-spectrum outrage at Democrats, while today’s is the deficits/socialism message. There’s really nothing mysterious here. It’s just ordinary partisan politics.

So please please please: trying to figure out what’s behind the tea parties is fine. But psychoanalysis isn’t the right tool. History and politics are.

~

From clinical interviews and thematic apperception tests, Adorno and his co-workers found that their pseudo-conservative subjects, although given to a form of political expression that combines a curious mixture of largely conservative with occasional radical notions, succeed in concealing from themselves impulsive tendencies that, if released into action, would be very far from conservative.

The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, “shows conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness” in his conscious thinking and “violence, anarchic impulses and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere. The pseudo-conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them from largely fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”

John Yoo anyone? Dick Cheney? I can think of few examples of this more telling than the suspension of habeas corpus, the enactment of preventative war as policy and the institutionalization of torture as the celebration of American traditional values. So Hofstadter helps me understand how a movement based on inalienable individual freedom had nothing to say about the most authoritarian period in the American executive branch in their lifetimes. But the maintenance of shrill ideology against reality is still the most prevalent feature. Hofstadter noted some classic examples from a previous era that seem plucked from Fox News today:

Victor Frankl: Our Search for Meaning

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From DAVE SMITH
To Be Of Use

Internationally renowned psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who endured years of unspeakable horror in Nazi death camps, wrote this in his groundbreaking book Man’s Search for Meaning:

I published a study devoted to a specific type of depression I had diagnosed in cases of young patients suffering from what I called “unemployment neurosis.” And I could show that this neurosis really originated in a twofold erroneous identification: being jobless was equated with being useless, and being useless was equated with having a meaningless life.

Consequently, whenever I succeeded in persuading the patients to volunteer in youth organizations, adult education, public libraries, and the like — in other words, as soon as they could fill their abundant free time with some sort of unpaid but meaningful activity — their depression disappeared although their economic situation had not changed and their hunger was the same.

Frankl developed “logotherapy.” Logos is a Greek word that denotes “meaning,” and his therapy was based on the “striving to find a meaning in one’s life,” which he felt was “the primary motivational force in man.” What matters is “not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment. … Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it… The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself … self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.”
~

More from Man’s Search For Meaning (1959)

Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning. There are some authors that contend that “meanings and values” are nothing but defense mechanisms, reaction formations, and sublimations.” But as for myself I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my “defense mechanisms,” nor would I be willing to die merely for the sake of my “reaction formations.” Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values!

Books and the Hungry Soul

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From RANDALL SMITH
Front Porch Republic

One of the great benefits of being someone who studies the Middle Ages is that I not only have the privilege of reading great books — Dante, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas — I also have the special privilege of seeing beautiful books.  I was reminded of this the other day as I was walking through the reading room of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame and saw a student poring over a color facsimile of a beautiful Fourteenth Century illuminated manuscript.  It was visually stunning.  And I thought to myself: “Wow, those people really knew how to make books!” In the age of Kindle, we need to be careful of not losing our appreciation for books.

It’s interesting how the advent of technology does not always bring with it unmitigated progress in all areas.  Flying across the Atlantic with my legs tucked up against my chest in one of Continental Airlines’ economy seats is not necessarily better than sailing across the Atlantic on an ocean liner.  And flying almost anywhere in the States is not necessarily better than taking a train, especially if you like to read, talk to people, stretch your legs regularly, and breathe real air.  Granted, if all you want to do is “get there,” then the plane is probably your best bet.  But “faster” isn’t the same thing as “better” or “more civilized,” any more than “fast-food” necessarily means “more nourishing.”

Several weeks ago I heard someone on National Public Radio arguing in defense of books saythat they remain a good “information delivery system.”  As much as I appreciate any defense of books, I had to cringe a bit when I heard books being described as a kind of “information delivery system.”  For lovers of books, calling them a kind of “information delivery system” is akin to describing eating as a kind of “fuel delivery system.” It’s possible to do, of course, and not entirely untrue, but one feels that a crucial element of the experience has gone missing.

Several years ago Dr. Leon Kass, former head of the President’s Council on Bioethics during the George W. Bush administration, wrote a wonderful book entitled The Hungry Soul in which he argued that “eating” among human beings was not merely about “feeding.”  It could be (and in fact generally should be) a much more civilized and civilizing activity.  When “eating” is done in a social context with one’s family or friends, such meals, with their conversation and good cheer, are not only about feeding one’s body, but also about feeding one’s soul.  Thus the title of his book: The Hungry Soul.

So too, I would argue, with books, the point isn’t merely to fill one’s brain with information, any more than eating is merely about filling one’s belly with food… More here.
~~

Janie Sheppard: Laura Fogg’s Quilts at the Corner Gallery, Ukiah (video)

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From JANIE SHEPPARD
Mendocino County

Laura Fogg’s art has top billing at the Corner Gallery in Ukiah.  On Friday, June 4^th, Laura’s show opened, with her newest quilts, tile mosaics, and some older drawings that together show her development as one of Mendocino County’s outstanding artists.

The Corner Gallery is located at 201 S State Street in Ukiah.  Check out the website: artcenterukiah.org. Hours are 11-6, Tues thru Saturday.  It is a co-op gallery with over 20 artist members. Laura’s work will be in the front windows for the month of June.

Fogg’s website, where you can see her other work, is fogwomancreations.com.

Plan a visit soon.
~~

Belief systems at a turning point

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From GAIL TVERBERG
The Oil Drum via Energy Bulletin

It seems to me with the BP Horizon Blowout, we may be hitting a turning point in belief systems, in more than one way:

• Can businesses really be expected to regulate themselves, with minimal oversight?

• Can technology solve all our problems?

• If there are technological solutions, can they be expected immediately?

• Can we really depend on the oil supply that everyone has told us is here?

1. Can businesses really be expected to regulate themselves, with minimal oversight?

Once upon a time, back in the pre-Reagan era, capitalism and profits didn’t seem to have quite the emphasis they have today in the the way the country functioned.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” and people took him seriously. Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1963 to 1969 period was responsible for designing the “Great Society” legislation that included laws that upheld civil rights, Public Broadcasting, Medicare, Medicaid, environmental protection, aid to education, and his “War on Poverty.”

But by 1980, the country had been through a lot of hard times, with the decline in US oil supply starting in 1970, Nixon canceling the convertibility of dollar to gold in 1971, real wages starting to decline in 1973, and the oil price shock of 1973-1974.

Ronald Reagan was elected as US president in 1980. He was known policies that much more oriented toward laisse faire capitalism, including trickle down economics, reduced taxes, getting tough on labor unions, and deregulation of businesses.

The BP Deepwater Horizon blowout and what appears to be questionable internal decisions, makes one wonder about whether this deregulation really makes sense. There were hints that deregulation might be a problem before–with Enron’s manipulation of energy markets and creative accounting, discovered in 2001, followed by all of the bank bailouts in 2008 and 2009.

Now, when one hears all the detailed allegations made in the BP incident, one wonders whether our faith in deregulation might be misplaced…

More here.
~~

Chicken coops, once uncouth, are springing up in Santa Cruz backyards

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From SANTA CRUZ SENTINEL

Four babies arrived at the Branciforte Avenue home of Holly and Jeff Akiyoshi early last summer. The new parents held their breath. They wanted girls.

The Akiyoshis got their wish within a few months — not a rooster in the bunch.

The loud-mouthed males are banned in the urban areas of Santa Cruz County, but hens don’t require so much as a permit. Whether it’s the economy, a desire for sustainable living or the appeal of farm-fresh eggs, a growing number of county residents appear to be catching on to the idea of backyard coops. And they’re in places where chickens haven’t traditionally been kept, at least not for the past half-century.

“I’m planning on getting two hens each year, so we don’t have any dry years,” said Holly Akiyoshi, whose flock now numbers 11 and is laying half-a-dozen eggs a day in the heart of the Eastside.

Scotts Valley Feed sold 3,000 chickens in 2009, up from 150 to 300 just four years earlier. Spring started in February this year at the store — chicks usually don’t go on the shelves until April — and already 1,500 have found homes.

“We got 300 and sold them out in 45 minutes,” said co-owner Christine Richie. “The hatcheries were caught off guard.”

Jen Dumford, manager of DIG Gardens in Santa Cruz, reports an increased interest in heritage breeds — the cold-hardy Speckled Sussex, the Rhode Island Red — from customers who want to add more variety to the color of their hens’ plummage and resulting eggs.

But unlike growing parsley, keeping chickens isn’t necessarily cheaper than buying eggs from the store. There’s the expense of creating a sturdy coop — a necessity. Chickens are natural foragers who can live off bugs and greens in the wild, but urban chickens need to be given feed. A 50-pound bag of organic scratch runs about $30 and lasts a month or two, depending on the size of the flock, and the birds can sometimes require supplements like ground oyster shells to ensure hard eggs.

So with organic eggs at the market starting at roughly $2.99 a dozen, why bother with a coop? Because for many, chickens are less of a farm animal, more of an all-in-one family pet — one that helps with the compost, offers a feeling of self-sufficiency and requires minimal care beyond the owners’ watchful eye.

More here.
~~

Todd Walton: Words, Words, Words

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From TODD WALTON
Anderson Valley

(This essay originally appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser June 2010)

We are awash in words. Our thoughts are words. We talk with words, we read words, we listen to words. We depend on words to define our reality. And when we hear the same pronouncement often enough, most of us come to believe the pronouncement is fact even if the only proof is repetition.

Shortly after the World Trade Center came tumbling down, a comprehensive national poll revealed that less than one per cent of the American population believed Sadaam Hussein had anything to do with that event. Then the administration of George Bush, speaking through their corporate media, embarked on an all-day-every-day-all-channel campaign of repetition stating briefly and with no corroborating evidence that Sadaam was joined at the hip with Osama Bin Laden and possessed weapons of mass destruction. Six months and ten million repetitions later, a new poll revealed that seventy-nine per cent of the American people believed Sadaam was directly involved in bringing down the twin towers. Repetition of an unfounded lie became general belief.

For a month now this same corporate media has been calling the gusher in the Gulf of Mexico a leak. I think they have intentionally chosen the word leak so we will associate this unprecedented disaster with a dripping faucet. What do you think of when you hear the word leak? Certainly not millions and millions of gallons of oil gushing into the ocean for days and weeks and months on end. Yet even after movies began to appear on television and on the Internet showing the oil gushing from a massive broken pipe, commentators continued to use the word leak. As of this writing, that catastrophic gusher is still being called a leak, with only a few of the more daring journalists using the word spill, which is also inaccurate and inadequate.

Do our overlords think we’re stupid? You bet they do. You may recall some years ago when there used to be occasional news of the war that has never ended in Iraq, commentators and journalists referred to Iraqis killed by American forces as insurgents; a brilliant choice of words for the purposes of propaganda,

Whacking the Old Folks

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From WILLIAM GREIDER
The Nation

In setting up his National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, Barack Obama is again playing coy in public, but his intentions are widely understood among Washington insiders. The president intends to offer Social Security as a sacrificial lamb to entice conservative deficit hawks into a grand bipartisan compromise in which Democrats agree to cut Social Security benefits for future retirees while Republicans accede to significant tax increases to reduce government red ink.

Obama’s commission is the vehicle created to achieve this deal. He ducks questions about his preferences, saying only that “everything has to be on the table.” But White House lieutenants are privately talking up a bargain along those lines. They are telling anxious liberals to trust the president to make only moderate cuts. Better to have Democrats cut Social Security, Obama advisers say, than leave the task to bloodthirsty Republicans.

The president has stacked the deck to encourage this strategy. The eighteen-member commission is top-heavy with fiscal conservatives and hostile right-wingers who yearn to dismantle the retirement program. The Republican co-chair, former Senator Alan Simpson, is especially nasty; he likes to get laughs by ridiculing wheezy old folks. Democratic co-chair Erskine Bowles and staff director Bruce Reed secretly negotiated a partial privatization of Social Security with Newt Gingrich back when they served in the Clinton White House, but the deal blew up with Clinton’s sex scandal. Monica Lewinsky saved the system.

Any recommendations require fourteen votes, and Obama has at least five loyalists who will protect him—Senators Dick Durbin and Max Baucus, Representatives Jan Schakowsky and Xavier Becerra, and former SEIU president Andy Stern. On the other hand, if Obama really wants to make a deal, these commissioners will very likely support him.

The people, once again, are kept in the dark. The Obama commission will not report its recommendations until after this fall’s elections—too late for voters to express objections. Both parties assume they can evade blame by holding hands and jumping together.

What’s extraordinary about this assault on Social Security is that a Democratic president is leading it. Obama is arm in arm with GOP conservatives like Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson, who for decades has demonized Social Security as a grave threat to the Republic and has spread some $12 million among economists, think tanks, foundations and assorted front groups to sell his case. If Obama pulls the deal off, this will be his version of “Nixon goes to China”—a leader proving his manhood by going against his party’s convictions. Even if he fails, the president will get some protective cover on the deficit issue.

Hooray For Our Team

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From KURT VONNEGUT
A Man Without a Country (2005)

Our daily news sources, newspapers and TV, are now so craven, so unvigilant on behalf of the American people, so uninformative, that only in books do we learn what’s really going on.
~

People are so afraid. Take the man, with no address, who wrote me:

If you knew that a man posed a danger to you—maybe he had a gun in his pocket, and you felt that he would not hesitate one moment to use it on you—what would you do? We know Iraq poses a threat to us, to the rest of the world. Why do we sit here and pretend we are protected? That is exactly what happened with al-Queda and 9/11. With Iraq, though, the threat is on a much larger scale. Should we sit back, be little children that sit in fear and just wait?

I wrote back:

Please, for the sake of us all, get a shotgun, preferably a 12-guage double-barrel, and right there in your own neighborhood blow off the heads of people, cops excepted, who may be armed.
~

“Socialism” is no more an evil word than “Christianity.” Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.

Adolf Hitler, incidentally, was a two-fer. He named his party the National Socialists, the Nazis. Hitler’s swastika wasn’t a pagan symbol, as so many people believe. It was a working person’s Christian cross, made of axes, of tools.

About Stalin’s shuttered churches, and those in China today: Such suppression of religion was supposedly justified by Karl Marx’s statement that “religion is the opium of the people.” Marx said that back in 1844, when opium and opium derivatives were the only effective painkillers anyone could take. Marx himself had taken them. He was grateful for the temporary relief they had given him. He was simply noticing, and surely not condemning, the fact that religion could also be comforting to those in economic or social distress. It was a casual truism, not a dictum.

When Marx wrote those words, by the way, we hadn’t even freed our slaves yet. Who do you imagine was more pleasing in the eyes of a merciful God back then, Karl Marx or the United States of America?

Lucy Neely: Paradise and the Parking Lot

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From LUCY NEELY
The Gardens Project
Ukiah

This is a tale of transformation and renewal – an empty parking lot to community garden story…

Not so very long ago, in the magical valley of Ukiah, just North of the Myers Dentistry building and just West of the Ford dealership, there sat a quarter acre parking lot that had been unused and neglected for decades. The land beneath the asphalt yearned for a purpose.

Lynda Myers, owner of the lot and the building next to it, listened to the lot’s yearning and felt motivated to call Miles Gordon, Project Coordinator of The Gardens Project, in July 2009. She said, “Miles, I want to turn this parking lot into a community garden.” Miles replied, “That sounds like it has potential. We’ll look into it.”

In August, three AmeriCorps volunteers arrived to The Gardens Project in Ukiah and started looking earnestly into the possibility of turning that empty lot into a garden. In November, they canvassed apartment buildings in the neighborhood, assessing whether there was interest in a community garden. There was interest, and that weekend twelve excited gardeners-to-be stood in the middle of that empty lot, dreaming a transformation.

The soil under the asphalt was tested for contaminants of folly past. It was clean. Throughout the winter and into early Spring of this year, The Gardens Project worked with Kim Jordan and others in the planning department of the City of Ukiah to define the language and conditions of the permitting process for a community garden on private land in Ukiah, since this had never been done before. We hammered it out and obtained the first permit for such a garden. It was time to take out the asphalt, which fortunately was quite thin and crumbly. A front loader scraped off the asphalt and top few inches of soil in a few hours.

The California Conservation Corps of Ukiah donated their entire Corps to The Gardens Project on April 22, Earth Day, and twenty of those Corps members went to work on the Washington Ave. garden, trenching and laying irrigation, pick-axing the hard packed ground and sifting out thousands of rocks.

The neighborhood noticed the transformation that was happening. When the garden opened its gates to the public in late April, all forty one plots were claimed by eager gardeners within two weeks – people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to the space or resources to have a garden.

Ukiah Farmers Market Saturday 6/12/10

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Anacortes, Washington

From SCOTT CRATTY

Friends of the Farmers Market,

Greetings!  The market has been slow the last couple of weeks, but I know that you will not be able to resist all of the cool stuff going on this Saturday.

For starters, we will have an interactive chef demonstration showing how to prepare your own great salad dressings from scratch, using what is available at the market (even at this lean point in the season).  To participate meet up with Jini Reynolds at 10am under the pavilion and join her as she shops the farmers’ market for fresh ingredients.   She will then show you how to make a range of fresh-made dressings.  Then you get to taste them.

The market will also share space with two important benefits.  The Peregrine Audubon Society’s annual rummage sale will be in the park at Alex Thomas Plaza.  It is your opportunity to find something interesting and support a good cause.  We will also host a raffle supporting for the upcoming Death to Meth concert and educational event (see today’s UDJ for more about this event).

For the kids, our series of 10:30am story time features kicks-off this week with a reading by librarian Eliza Wingate with assistance from Joplin the therapy dog.  Look for it near the Jumperz play house.

In the street the oysters are likely to be back, Covelo Organics should be with us for the 1st time this season, Richard Jeske will be at the market for the 1st time with goji berry plants, table grape plants selected specially for inland Mendocino Co, tree collard plants, and shiso plants. You will also have the opportunity to visit with Stephen Decater of Live Power Community Farm under the pavilion.  Plus, Diamond Edge Knife Sharpening will be on hand to tackle your most difficult sharpening challenges.

All of that plus our usual array of excellent local farms and ranches.

Finally, follow the link below to our revamped Ukiah Saturday Farmers’ Market TV commercial.  It should start to play on Comcast as early as next week.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0G0P2C_PrM

As usual, the market is 8:30 to noon at the corners of School and Clay St in historic downtown Ukiah.
~~

10,000 Peasants March Against Monsanto in Haiti

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From LA VIA CAMPESINA

Hinche, Haiti– An estimated 10,000 peasants gathered for a massive march in Central Haiti on June 4, 2010, to protest what has been described as “the next earthquake for Haiti” – a donation of 475 tons of hybrid corn seeds and vegetable seeds by the US-based agribusiness giant Monsanto, in partnership with USAID. While this move comes at a time of dire need in Haiti, many feel it will undermine rather than bolster the country’s food security.

According to Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, leader of the Peasant Movement of Papaye (MPP) and spokesperson for the National Peasant Movement of the Congress of Papaye (MPNKP), the entry of Monsanto seeds into Haiti is “a very strong attack on small agriculture, on farmers, on biodiversity, on Creole seeds… and on what is left our environment in Haiti.”

While Monsanto is known for being among the world’s largest purveyors of genetically modified seeds, the corporation’s spokespeople have emphasized that this particular donation is of conventional hybrid seeds as opposed to GMO seeds. Yet for many of Haiti’s peasants, this distinction is of little comfort.

“The foundation for Haiti’s food sovereignty is the ability of peasants to save seeds from one growing season to the next. The hybrid crops that Monsanto is introducing do not produce seeds that can be saved for the next season, therefore peasants who use them would be forced to somehow buy more seeds each season,” explains Bazelais Jean-Baptiste, an agronomist from the MPP who is currently directing the “Seeds for Haiti” project in New York City.

“The foundation for Haiti’s food sovereignty is the ability of peasants to save seeds from one growing season to the next. The hybrid crops that Monsanto is introducing do not produce seeds that can be saved for the next season, therefore peasants who use them would be forced to somehow buy more seeds each season,” explains Bazelais Jean-Baptiste, an agronomist from the MPP who is currently directing the “Seeds for Haiti” project in New York City.

“Furthermore, these seeds require expensive inputs of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides that Haiti’s farmers simply cannot afford. This creates a devastating level of dependency and is a complete departure from the reality of Haiti’s peasants. Haitian peasants already have locally adapted seeds that have been developed over generations. What we need is support for peasants to access the traditional seeds that are already available.”

More here

The Stupid Never Ends

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From JED ALLEN
Daily Kos

Via Mike Allen, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has some advice for President Obama on the BP spill:

“What he needed was sort of a bullhorn moment where he went to the Gulf and said we’re going to get this right. I’m going to get on it.’ … [H]e’s making up lost ground.”

Ah, yes. President Obama just needs to handle the BP spill like George W. Bush handled 9/11. Can you imagine how great it would be? President Obama would put on some waders and step into oil-ravaged Louisiana wetland. And then he’d grab a bullhorn and tell the assembled fishermen that he could hear them, and the whole world could hear them, and that we’re going to get the people who spilled all this oil into the Gulf of Mexico. And then we’d go and attack Venezuela or something. Just like Bush. It’d be so fucking great.

Look, Lindsey: we don’t need a damn bullhorn. We need a government that stands up for American citizens and tries to do the right thing. And as long as you are refusing to help pass energy reform legislation, why don’t you shut your sanctimonious mouth. What we need right now are some patriots who are willing to set aside politics to do the right thing for this country. Not more armchair quarterbacking Republican hacks.
~

See also Reagan’s Legacy of Deregulation Goes Haywire in the Gulf

The oil spill in the Gulf is the product of decades of conservatives pounding for deregulation, Cheney-era manipulation of federal regulatory agencies, and corporate insatiability.
~~

Book Review: Wendell Berry’s New Collection Of Essays,What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth

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From CIVIL EATS

In much the same way that Michael Pollan has told us in recent years not to trust our nutrition to the nutritionists, essayist, sage, and father of modern agrarian thought, Wendell Berry, instructs us that we should never have trusted our economy to economists. At least not to the ones who have been (mis)handling it for the last hundred years or so.

In his collection of new and renewed essays, What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth, Berry lays out clearly and concisely the hows and whys of our modern system’s failures, but far from being all doom and gloom, he points the way to a properly prioritized economy. It may at times feel a bit Utopian, but it is perfectly plausible, sustainable, logical and, in the end, necessary.

Right from the start (in fact in the second sentence) he explains that “In ordering the economy of a household or a community or a nation, I would put nature first, the economies of land use second, the manufacturing economy third, and the consumer economy fourth.”

In this list of priorities it is easy to see – and no accident – that the economy that has failed us so miserably at least twice in the last century is ordered in precisely the reverse. It has relegated its citizens to the status of mere consumers, duping them into confusing wants for needs, and “the gullibility of the public thus becomes an economic resource.” It’s a meager stumble then from Plutocracy to Idiocracy.

Berry is a farmer who sees the world from a literal ground level. In one of the essays, “Faustian Economics,” he contends, “The real names of global warming are ‘waste’ and ‘greed.’” He has no tolerance for the conspicuous consumer, accusing him of not only “Prodigal extravagance” but also of having “an assumed godly limitlessness.” These are accusations that would not sting so much if they weren’t true.

The irony bears noting, by the way, that in our energy deal with the devil – only the most recent downside of which is the horrendous catastrophe now killing the Gulf of Mexico – the dirty, pollution-prone fuels come from the depths, while the sustainable, clean fuels come from the heavens… More here
~~

Top 15 Policies For Achieving A Steady State Economy

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Herman Daly

CENTER FOR ADVANCEMENT OF THE STEADY STATE ECONOMY (CASSE)

In a democratic society, the people have a say about the policies enacted. We can all look for opportunities to support policies that will lead to a sustainable economy rather than a growth economy. Ecological economics suggests three foundations to a long-term, healthy economy: (1) sustainable scale, (2) fair distribution, and (3) efficient allocation. CASSE’s top 15 policies for building these three foundations are provided below. In addition, we also provide summaries of policy recommendations from other leading researchers: Tim Jackson, Herman Daly, Gus Speth, David Korten.

1. First and foremost, adopt the right macro-economic policy goal – a steady state economy that features sustainable scale, fair distribution of wealth, and efficient allocation of resources. A prerequisite to adopting this macro-economic policy goal is a cultural shift from the pursuit of lifestyles driven by endless economic expansion and unsustainable consumerism to lifestyles driven by the search for long-term prosperity and sustainable consumption that fulfills people’s needs.
2. Maintain an exemplary network of conservation areas, sufficient in size and diversity to ensure the long-term provision of vital ecosystem services.
3. Stabilize population, and aim for a long-term population size that enables a high standard of living for everyone without undermining ecological systems and the life-support services they provide.
4. Gradually reset existing fiscal, monetary, and trade policy levers from growth toward a steady state. For example, manage the money supply and redevelop the tax code with the new macro-economic policy goal as a guide.
5. Limit the range of inequality in income and wealth, including both a minimum and maximum allowable income. Implement tax reforms to tax “bads” (e.g., pollution and depletion of natural resources) rather than goods (e.g., income from wages).
6. Develop a commons sector to accompany the public and private sectors. Within this commons sector, assign property rights for commonly held resources (e.g., the atmosphere, mineral resources, and forests), and establish public trusts to manage those resources for maximum long-term public benefit.
7. Employ cap-auction-trade systems in the commons sector for allocating basic resources. Set caps based on biophysical limits.

Why Sociopaths Win & Why, No, You Don’t Want to Be One of Them

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PEAK OIL BLUES

[...] But here’s what I really want to say, as a psychologist, to all of you: Sociopaths lack something 95% of us have: They lack a conscience. They lack the capacity to feel empathy, to feel guilt, to feel bad about doing bad. When you lack Vitamin E(mpathy), you hate people who have it. You walk around with an expensive suit and you have a black card to pay for an expensive dinner, and you buy and sell people and marry the hottest mates around, but it’s all for nothing. You can’t attach to other people, even though you know it is something you should want to do. You can only treat people as pawns in a chess game, because you can’t relate to people as anything other than suckers or fools to manipulate…

And when sociopaths rule every aspect of our lives, when the largest organizations are modeled after sociopathic humans, it takes the rest of us a long time to figure out that we’ve been suckered in. We’ve been tarnished and harmed by it. The reason is that, having empathy, we bend over backward trying to believe there has to be some logic to completely merciless, cut-throat destructive action. Having empathy, we can’t believe anyone would do that “for no reason” or only “to make a buck.” We keep thinking that anyone who has gotten to that level of power and authority has to know better than we do, what they are doing. And when we finally get it, when we finally realize that, no, there is no “deeper purpose” other than profit, there is no “master plan” other than getting richer at any cost, most of us feel deeply, deeply impacted. Depressed, or angry, or speechless, or outraged.

When this happens, we stop shouting at them “Don’t you CARE!” because we understand that they don’t.  They can’t.   As long as we are shouting “Don’t you care!” the sociopaths secretly laugh at us.  When we finally “get it,” realize just how disordered it all is, and stop putting ourselves in the same pool of “humans” as those with sociopathy, our actions can be much more effective.

Before we understand the sociopathy of the system, we keep believing that if we protest, and shout loud enough, the system will respond. But once we understand that this is a sociopathic system, devoid of Vitamin E, we have to start looking at how we, ourselves, have been suckered into acting like sociopaths too. We’ve been seduced into believing that our own internal greed, our own desire for “something for nothing” is the best part of us, the normal, adult part.

When we really get it, deep down, the vast majority of us are going to do some soul-searching, because we have a soul to search. And we’ll be tempted to believe that the “anxious” or “depressed” part, the part were we’ve “got this broken feeling, like their father or their dog just died,” is the part we have to kill off with drugs manufactured just for this purpose by the sociopathic Big Pharm.  And the sociopaths score again. Those pills that are supposed to make you “larger” and feel “less,” are worse than the “ones that mother gives you that don’t do anything at all”: they might make things worse.  If they kill you or cripple you, the sociopaths pay the lawsuits.  No big woop.  But they make a lot of cash in the meanwhile.

When you’ve, been well lubricated by this system but still have a healthy dose of Vitamin E, you start having problems if you don’t start causing trouble or withdrawing your participation. In fact, when we start to believe that only the “babies” and the “suckers” are the ones who don’t lie constantly (even in their sleep), when only fools “don’t ’sell their own grandmothers for a buck,” and we start trying to join them instead of beat them or withdraw from them, that’s when we become mentally ill. And our mental illness might be the first clue to those of  us who have bought in, that something, something deep down has got to change fundamentally about how we relate to other people, to ourselves, and to the planet.
~
Full article here
~~

Why To Buy Organic Eggs From The Farm, Not From The Store

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From MERCOLA.COM

Eggs are one of the most beneficial foods you can eat, and it’s a shame they’ve been vilified for so long in the United States. In the U. S., roughly 280 million birds give us about 75 billion eggs per year, which is about 10 percent of the world supply.

But not all eggs are created equal.

Eggs from truly organic, free-range chickens are FAR less likely to contain dangerous bacteria such as salmonella, and their nutrient content is also much higher than commercially raised eggs.

The dramatically superior nutrient levels are most likely the result of the differences in diet between free ranging, pastured hens and commercially farmed hens.

If you are eating organically, then you have learned how important the diet and care of an animal is to the quality of its meat, and in this case, their eggs. But have you ever thought about what happens to these eggs AFTER they are collected?

You would think that organic eggs would be your best choice when picking them up at the grocery store. However, most states have laws that make them illegal unless all the eggs that are sold commercially are processed in a way that could damage them.

Some states require that all eggs receive a chlorine bath and mineral oil coating before they are nestled into their cartons.

There are vast differences in how eggs are processed and handled, even under the “certified organic” label.

As it turns out, what happens outside the shell is as important as what happens inside the shell, and that is the focus of this report.

Your Egg’s Journey from Hen to Market
Ideally, eggs should be processed the day after they are laid. The USDA requires processing within 30 days of lay. High quality eggs are processed within seven days of lay.

Egg processing involves the following six steps:

1. Egg collecting
2. Cooling
3. Cleaning/Disinfecting
4. Candling (a measure for assessing the interior quality of the eggs whereby eggs are held up in front of a high-intensity light and visually examined; among other problems, cracks can be identified that necessitate disposal of the egg)

The Top Ten Provably Untrue Things Tea Partiers Believe

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From JOHN AMATO and DAVID NEIWERT
Crooks and Liars

Stephen Levingston at the Washington Post asked us to write up a piece illustrating one of the book’s chief theses — namely, that the American Right, embodied nowadays in the Tea Party movement, now widely embraces a belief in things that are provably untrue.

The piece ran in the Post this week: “10 fictitious Tea Party beliefs”:

We’ll admit up-front that the title of our forthcoming book,“Over the Cliff: How Obama’s Election Drove the American Right Insane,” indulges in some rhetorical imprecision: conservatives in the United States are of course not really insane in any clinical or legal sense, and we are not suggesting they undergo sanity hearings to determine if their rights should be suspended. We mean “insane” in the common-sense meaning of the word — having taken leave of their senses.

What other word, after all, can properly describe the behavior of people who adamantly insist on believing things that are provably untrue? Einstein facetiously defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. Defiantly clinging to exploded fantasies and thoroughly debunked false “facts,” even when evidence of their falsity is planted directly in front of them, is a kind of insanity too.

The numbers of things that the American Right — embodied in its wildly popular new “grassroots” Tea Party movement – believes but that are provably untrue is actually a pretty long list. But we’ve put together the Top 10, listed by importance in their increasingly Planet Bizarro-like worldview:

1. The birth-certificate conspiracy. Reality: Not even official birth certificates from Hawaii, newspaper clippings from 1961, and the testimony of state officials will convince the true-blue Tea Partiers. Which is why WorldNetDaily’s Joseph Farah lectured the National Tea Party Convention for an hour about the “truth” of the birth-certificate story.

2. Death panels. Reality: PolitiFact named Sarah Palin’s Facebook invention its “Lie of the Year,” and the belief was thoroughly exposed as a falsehood by every news network (even Fox). Yet Palin still insists that the panels exist somewhere in the health-care reform bill that was signed into law, its actual language notwithstanding.

Congratulations, Dan Hamburg!

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Garlic-Roasted Lamb Shanks with South American Jalapeño-Parsley Salsa (Organic Recipe)

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From THE WELL-FILLED TORTILLA

Garlic-Roasted Lamb Shanks

[Recipe dedicated to Owens Family Farm, Hopland. -DS]

We usually think of stewing a lamb shank, as in osso buco. But you can also treat the shank like a mini leg of lamb. It roasts to perfection and produces the same kind of full-flavored morsels that dark meat lovers insist on. As with any roast, plenty of garlic is never out of order.

Serves 4 to 6
Takes 2½ hours

4 local pasture-fed lamb shanks (9 to 10 pounds)
24 garlic cloves, cut into slivers
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
2 large organic red peppers
2 cups cooked organic chick-peas
1½ tablespoons fresh lime juice
1½ tablespoons olive oil
¼ teaspoon salt
18 organic corn or 12 flour tortillas, warmed or crisped just before serving

Toppings
South American Jalapeño-Parsley Salsa (see below)
2 cups organic sour cream

1. Heat the oven to 475ºF.

2. With your fingers, push the garlic slivers into the natural openings in the lamb shanks and sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper. Arrange the lamb shanks and bell peppers in a single layer in 1 or 2 roasting pans. Roast for 10 minutes. Reduce the oven heat to 350ºF and roast until the peppers are soft and the skins are wrinkled, about 1 hour more. Remove the peppers and continue roasting the shanks until the meat is well browned and pulling away from the bones, about 50 minutes more. Remove and let cool enough to handle.

More at OrganicToBe.org
~~

Soil and Health Library – Tasmania

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Certified Organic Everlasting Starflower Seeds by Dave Smith

[Steve Soloman founded Territorial Seeds in Cottage Grove, Oregon many years ago, then sold it and moved to Tasmania. Here is what he has been doing since... -DS]

This website provides free e-books, mainly about holistic agriculture, holistic health and self-sufficient homestead living. There are secondary collections about social criticism and transformational psychology. No fees are collected for this service.

Upon special request the Soil and Health Library provides custom-made digital copies of a far wider range of books in the same subject areas for its patrons, delivered on CD-ROM by post. There is a small fee for this service.

The library’s subject seemingly-diverse topic areas actually connect agricultural methods to the consequent health or illness of animals and humans, shows how to prevent and heal disease and increase longevity, suggests how to live a more fulfilling life and reveals social forces working against that possibility.

The Free Digitalized Library:

There are four major subject areas:

Radical Agriculture. The nutritional qualites of food and consequently the health of the animals and humans eating that food are determined by soil fertility. This section’s interest is far wider than organic gardening and farming; other health-determined approaches to food-raising are also included. Go to the Agriculture Library

The Restoration and Maintenance of Health. Nutritional medicine heals disease, builds and maintains health with diet—and sometimes heals with fasting or other forms of dietary restriction. There are many approaches represented in this collection. There is also a collection concerning longevity and nutritional anthropology. Go to the Health Library

Achieving Personal Sovereignty. Physical, mental, and spiritual health are linked to one’s lifestyle. This collection focuses on liberating activities, especially homesteading and the skills it takes to do that—small-scale entrepreneuring, financial independence, frugality, and voluntary simplicity. There is also a collection of social criticism, especially from a back-to-the-land point of view. Go to the Personal Sovereignty Library

The fierce urgency of energy

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From METEOR BLADES
Daily Kos

I’m careful about the word crisis. Like hero it gets overused. And when politicians deploy the word, watch out because you don’t know if it means one of their earmarks got nicked or they’re actually worried about something real. I don’t, however, have any trouble when crisis is applied to our energy situation. What we’re doing with energy – what we’ve been relentlessly, myopically doing after being warned and warned about the consequences – is exacerbating a climate change already well under way by refusing to acknowledge that this is a crisis. Not a Priority #6, we-should-maybe-get-around-to-that- tomorrow-or-day-after-tomorrow kind of crisis. A right-now crisis. We have to stop dinking around.

We should treat our energy crisis like World War II.

I’m not fond of the label “Greatest Generation” that Tom Brokaw implanted irrevocably into our brains. It’s the sort of phraseology that contributes to generational warfare, and we already have enough divisions. But who can disrespect the sacrifices so many people of that era made? After surviving the Depression, they rationed sugar and gasoline and rubber, built tanks instead of Buicks, and went off to fight against the armies of nations who, for one of the few times in our history, had made war impossible to avoid.

When I say tanks, I mean massive numbers of tanks. Huge numbers of airplanes and ships and jeeps and locomotives and guns. Munitions and uniforms and bullets and bombs and bandages and all manner of everything needed to defeat determined enemies and simultaneously keep the home front fed and hopeful. Factories running three shifts even when that required hiring women, which it did, in vast quantities. Victory gardens. Gold star moms. Everything for the war effort.

In today’s dollars, $4.5 trillion borrowed and spent.

That’s the kind of focus and commitment we need now. For energy, the presidential model should not be, as many progressives have urged on other issues, the New Deal FDR of 1933-36. Rather, it should be the wartime FDR of 1940-45. That war generated the largest public mobilization of human resources in our history.

Together We Can! Mendocino

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From TogetherWeCan

Together We Can! Mendocino supports local non-profits and community organizations by incorporating a social aspect to the volunteer experience. We create a fun and friendly atmosphere around volunteering for “one time” only events, which typically last 2-3 hours. After the volunteer event, we invite our volunteers to gather at a local cafe’, park or restaurant, where they can get to know one another in a relaxed social setting.

The “one time” event format allows you to limit your commitment to a one day event, rather than having to commit to a regular weekly or monthly schedule. It makes it easy for you to try out a variety of volunteer activities, help different community organizations and meet new people involved in different community projects.

Try it!
You might find yourself:

• Planting trees or trail building.
• Reading to children at the library.
• Serving meals to the homeless.
• Creating a new neighborhood garden.
• Walking or running for a cause.

Which leads to:

• Meeting new and interesting people.
• Feeling personal satisfaction about improving the quality of life in your community.

  ~~

A vote for Wendy Roberts is a vote for the Right Wing, Privatizing, and Dumb Growth

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Excerpts from an article in The Press Democrat

[...] Mendocino business consultant Wendy Roberts’ financial supporters include the North Coast Citizens for a Better Economy, a construction industry lobbying group [from outside Mendocino County -DS], and John Mayfield, a Ukiah land developer who belongs to the conservative Mendocino Employers Council…

Roberts is liberal by Mayfield’s standards, but he said she is more conservative fiscally and on property rights than her opponents. She also favors privatizing some county services and allowing some development on the coast…

More at the PD here
~
See also: Hey Wingnutters! Are Community and Compassion Evil?
~~

The Meat Ax (Mendo Slaughterhouse)

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From MARK SCARAMELLA
TheAVA.com

On Tuesday, May 18, the Board of Supervisors spent an afternoon discussing the possibility of a slaughterhouse somewhere along Highway 101. 101 is something of a slaughterhouse itself, especially near Hopland to the south and between Willits and Laytonville to the north. The interstate suddenly goes from four lanes to two. Motorists slow to react are often killed.

The slaughterhouse under discussion, however, would render four-footed animals into steaks and chops.

Several sons of the soil, fresh off their back 40s, appeared before the Supervisors to talk up a tax-subsidized facility.

The slaughterhouse idea has been floating around for several years now, never getting very far because, of course, nobody’s willing to put up millions of dollars for, ahem, a pig in a poke.

Ranchers, miscellaneous Friends of Ranchers, and some local food advocates spoke for the idea; none of them offered to front the money. They seemed to think the Supervisors would somehow fund it, or fund the planning of it.

A rancher named John Ford, unlike his fellow ranchers, seemed much more reality-based. Ford rattled off some likely numbers and told the Board, “I can’t see where this is economically viable.”

Several enviros and a vegetarian told the Board that there were various problems with the idea — the smell, the waste, the humane treatment, the idea itself…

One Ukiah resident was for it as long as it wasn’t in his neighborhood…

Counting herself among the Friends of Ranchers, Fifth District Supervisor Candidate Wendy Roberts said she’d spoken to “Sea Ranchers and large cattle ranchers

Peter Bradford, Larry Mailliard, Larry Stornetta… They tell me it would make a tremendous benefit to them. No more hauling of animals out of county.” Roberts then added the facility should not be in the Ukiah area. “Our support is conditional on that,” said Roberts.

“Our support”?…

more here
~~

As the Oil Spreads

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From DON SANDERSON
Hopland

As the oil spreads through the Gulf of Mexico, Obama tells us that we must focus on clean energy and get off the fossil fuel diet. Such is apparently a result of political pressure – as the spill was beginning, he was advocating drilling along all our coasts. We seem to be wandering around in a carnival of fools, attempting to find our way to something solid and failing time and time again. As I hope to enlighten you, clean energy technologies as Obama and probably most of the rest of us are thinking about are just other such hawkers’ distractions. Understand, I’ve been fed so much bullshit while working in the industrial and academic worlds that almost all the stuff “they” are pushing must be held up to a bright light and turned every which way before I will consider it. Warning: I shall use our pet “clean” energy technology solar power, specifically solar cells, as a metaphor for the hidden difficulties with “clean” energy technologies in general. I realize an earlier reference I made to this caused some consternation, so I’ll be more explicit this time.

The prototypical final solar cell manufacturing process is an assembly line that uses quite a lot of electricity. Still, it is possible to imagine this all originates from solar cells that have been produced earlier, so the entire line is solar powered – but, probably not. If so, however, the last step in the manufacturing process of the solar cells would indeed be energetically free of fossil fuel expense. Thus, the energy they would eventually generate would seemingly be clean. Aw, but the assembly line doesn’t stand alone. Behind the scene is a warehouse in which raw materials, packaging, and components manufactured elsewhere are received and inventoried. As the cells exit the assembly line, they are forwarded to another warehouse where they are temporarily stored and prepared for shipment. But, wait, these warehouses require energy to operate as well, which must be added to each cell’s energy production budget.

Those items received at the first warehouse likely have been produced elsewhere, perhaps even mined and refined. The crates sent from the second travel via various transport pathways perhaps to a series of other somewhat automated warehouses until they are finally delivered to retailers and sold.

Well worth the wheat: Gene Logsdon’s ‘Small-Scale Grain Raising’

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From JENNIFER M. aka BAKLAVA QUEEN
The Ethicurean

As the price of flour and other grain-based foods has risen, creative-minded people have begun to consider growing their own wheat, corn, rye, and other grains. Groovy Green noted last year that one bakery — the Hungry Ghost Bread company in Northhampton, Massachusetts — even offered grain seeds to their customers through their Little Red Hen venture, encouraging them to grow the grains to sell back to the bakery for local loaves.

It’s an idea whose time is ripe once again. More than 30 years ago, farmer Gene Logsdon followed his publisher’s suggestion to write a book that would help aspiring grain-growing homesteaders of the 1960s and 1970s choose the right grain for their land and their garden or farming situation. The book went out of print many years ago, but the recession, the specter of peak oil, and the desire to take back some control over the food supply have all combined to prompt some folks to grow grains locally, sparking a renewed interest in the work and sending the price of used copies of “Small-Scale Grain Raising” well over $1,000.

It’s with some relief, then, that readers and homesteading hopefuls will welcome this revised second edition (Chelsea Green, spring 2009; pre-order from Amazon.com), in which Logsdon has updated the information based on new research and his personal experience. Logsdon returned with his equally knowledgeable wife, Carol, to farm a portion of his family’s land in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, in the 1970s. He began a prolific literary career by working at “Farm Journal” in the 1960s before writing on practical homesteading and how-to topics, moving to philosophical essays, and in recent years producing two novels and a “fable” on reclaiming strip-mined land. He currently writes at Organic To Be, combining reprinted essays and passages from his books with up-to-date musings, and at Farming Magazine.

Lucy Neely: The Mendocino Grain Project

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From LUCY NEELY
The Gardens Project
A Program of NCO Community Action
www.gardensproject.org

The best and most radical idea in the county right now is The Mendocino Grain Project, which consists of three Anderson Valley farmers – Doug Mosel, John Gramke, and Sophia Bates – who are reintroducing grain production to Mendocino County through a grain-share CSA. Their reintroduction of grain represents an essential step towards a local food economy in Mendocino County, but one that has historically been overlooked.

Last Friday, I visited with Mosel, Gramke, Bates, and the grains to learn about their project. It was a beautiful spring morning following those tiresome rains, and the clarity of the blue, cloud-dappled sky could just barely rival that of The Grain Project. The three farmers share a creative, forward thinking, and good-humored ethos. Mosel is a hay-man whose passion is grain. Gramke got into grains by way of biodiesel and canola. Both are Nebraska-born farm-boys living the second halves of their lives in Mendocino County. Bates is a Philo native with thirty in sight, a braid to her waist, horses instead of a tractor, and a feather in her hat.

As Mosel remembers it, the idea of reintroducing grain production to the county came to the fore during the Steps Towards a Local Food Economy gatherings that took place from 2005 to 2007, primarily in Anderson Valley. During these gatherings, grain production was identified as “a gap in local food production.” So, Doug figured, “Let’s try it.” After all, until post World War II, Mendocino County was self-sufficient in food production, grains included. So what happened? “The commodity market happened,” answers Gramke. “Grapes happened,” Bates adds.

Janie Sheppard: What’s Happening at Lake Mendocino (with Video)?

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From JANIE SHEPPARD
Mendocino County

On Memorial Day, Bill, the dogs, and I set out to take pictures of the beautiful wildflowers along the Lake Mendocino eastside trails.  Indeed, our cameras captured a profusion of white, blue and yellow wildflowers.  As we hiked we could not, however, ignore the signs of impending trouble.

First, we noticed that the trails were being damaged by truck traffic.  Signs at the locked trailhead gate prohibit all motorized vehicles.  So, what’s going on?  Apparently, Corps of Engineers personnel are not heeding their own rules as they drive pickup trucks through the mud.  It’s high time that the Corps fix this damage.  As you can see from the pictures, the damage is substantial in some places.  If not repaired, the beautiful trails will become eroded and impassable.

Second, we noticed that horseback riders are using the trails when they shouldn’t.  Horses’ hooves leave big holes in the trails, just about the right size for ankle twisting.  The horseback riders too need to repair the trail sections damaged by their horses.

BP Oil: Coming Soon to a Beach Near You

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From KATE SHEPPARD
Mother Jones
Thanks to Janie Sheppard

[This is Bush/Cheney's second Katrina... -DS]

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) just released this horrifying animation of how ocean currents may carry all the oil in the Gulf of Mexico. According to their computer modeling of currents and the oil, the spill “might soon extend along thousands of miles of the Atlantic coast and open ocean as early as this summer.”

“I’ve had a lot of people ask me, ‘Will the oil reach Florida?’” says NCAR scientist Synte Peacock in a statement accompanying the animation, which he worked on. “Actually, our best knowledge says the scope of this environmental disaster is likely to reach far beyond Florida, with impacts that have yet to be understood.”

The models show oil hitting Florida’s Atlantic coast within a few weeks, then moving north as far as about Cape Hatteras, N.C., before heading east.
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Songbirds and Organic Wheat

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From THE ORGANIC CENTER

A paper by a U.K. research team entitled “Birds select conventional over organic wheat when given free choice” appeared in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture. The team reports that birds prefer conventional wheat over organic wheat when given a choice, and attribute the preference expressed by bird feeding behavior to the approximately 10% higher protein content in the conventional wheat.

Because of higher levels of nitrogen fertilizer use on conventional farms, conventional food often includes higher levels of protein than organic food. But because protein is a nutrient present at ample to excessive levels in the typical western diet, this advantage for conventional food does not lead to any significant health benefits in countries like the U.K. and U.S.

The authors go on to make several questionable statements based on their experimental findings. For example, they conclude that –

“Our results suggest that the current dogma that organic food is preferred to conventional food may not always be true, which is of considerable importance for consumer perceptions of organically grown food.”

People do not seek out conventional or organic wheat to increase their average daily protein intakes, nor do preferences expressed by birds in an experiment like this one have anything to do with the reasons some consumers choose to purchase organic wheat and support organic wheat farmers.

The study has attracted considerable press attention and strong criticism for overstating its findings. In a May 19, 2010 story in the Los Angeles Times, one of the authors of the study acknowledged that – “Just because the birds preferred conventional food doesn’t mean it’s better for them.” The study makes no mention of the impacts of pesticide use on bird populations.

Source: Ailsa McKenzie, and Mark Whittingham, “Birds select conventional over organic wheat when given free choice,” Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, in press, 2010.
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50 Useful Reference Tools for Exploring Alternative Medicine

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From CAROLYN FRIEDMAN

[Outstanding resource! -DS]

Alternative medicine encompasses an exceptionally broad spectrum of practices. Everything from ancient or indigenous remedies to today’s herbal supplements qualifies as a treatment option beyond the mainstream solutions. Fearful of the frequently harsh side effects of conventional medicine, many turn to acupuncture or homeopathy to ease their pain instead. The following resources – by no means a comprehensive listing – provide a valuable introduction to multiple perspectives and findings. Many of them also help individuals and families curious about alternative medicine make the right choices and avoid crooks out to prey on their inexperience. Please keep in mind that some of these remedies involve negative side effects of their own, so be sure to consult with a reliable, verified professional before jumping into a regimen…

15. Society for Acupuncture Research

Sign up for the Society of Acupuncture Research’s e-mail newsletter for all the latest findings and applications of Chinese medicine. A wide variety of professionals, students, and educators weigh in on relevant subjects.

16. National Indian Health Board

Anyone interested in traditional Native American remedies will appreciate the information on the politics and practices that shape one facet of today’s medical world…

29. Hpathy.com

Considered one of the best online resources for homeopathic treatments, Hpathy.com provides a wealth of information in the form of articles, videos, ebooks, and audio lectures…

More here
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Infinite Regret

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David Foster Wallace

From MICHAEL O’DONNELL
Washington Monthly

An account of five days on the road with David Foster Wallace offers a coda to the writer’s sadly truncated career.

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky

One struggles to find a concise, representative anecdote about the late David Foster Wallace for an audience of politically minded readers. Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008 at age forty-six, was the most promising and accomplished writer of his generation. An athlete of prolixity, he published a celebrated novel of 1,100 pages called Infinite Jest, several meaty volumes of short stories, a monograph or two, and a pair of essay collections filled with footnotes that had their own footnotes. He tended to avoid prescriptions or answers, instead plumbing the complexity of topics like grammar, tennis, state fairs, and television. He was not especially political.

But he did write a brilliant essay about John McCain for Rolling Stone in 2000. Clever editors at the magazine booked Wallace a press pass on the Straight Talk Express between the New Hampshire and South Carolina Republican primaries; they titled the resulting article “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys, and the Shrub.” (George W. Bush was the Shrub.) In reclaiming the piece for his 2006 collection, Consider the Lobster — and returning to it long passages that a “mensch” at the magazine had removed “with sympathy and good humor” during a “radically ablative editorial process” — Wallace renamed it “Up, Simba.” One of the network video cameramen traveling in the bus’s press corps had liked to say that phrase “in a fake-deep bwana voice” as he hoisted his $40,000 rig. The goofy new title was essential Wallace: it at once exploited the funniest anecdote in the piece; broadcast his discomfort with authority and prestige by allying him with the scruffy techies; and made a serious intellectual point:

Civilization

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From IRREVERENT FILMS

Tired of primitive living? Why not try Civilization* ?

*some restrictions apply
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Probing the link between slaughterhouses and violent crime

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From SARAH BARMAK
TheStar.com
Thanks to Dave Pollard

To author Upton Sinclair, the hellish world of factory slaughterhouses was as dangerous to human beings as it was to pigs. He filled his 1906 novel The Jungle with meat-packing images that seem ripped from a slasher movie:

“… and as for the other men, who worked in tank-rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting — sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!”

Sinclair’s abattoir labourers get so desensitized to violence that rates of murder, rape and brawls among them rise. The book cemented the link between slaughterhouses and crime for decades to come — long before pig farmer and serial killer Robert Pickton haunted headlines.

More than a hundred years later, a University of Windsor researcher may have proven the literary classic right. Criminology professor Amy Fitzgerald says statistics show the link between slaughterhouses and brutal crime is empirical fact.

In a recent study, Fitzgerald crunched numbers from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report database, census data, and arrest and offence reports from 581 U.S. counties from 1994 to 2002.