Year: 2011

Putting chickens up at night

I was dreading it, but when it came to pass, remembered that I quite enjoyed crating the chickens for slaughter by moonlight.

It has to be done at night, unless you enjoy chasing birds through bushes, and they always seem to be able to hide in the young locust shoots. Spiny, sharp, skin-tearing locusts shoots.

At night, their flight instincts are at war with the need to roost and sleep.

I had to move slow, and was worried that my rechargeable torch was on the low end of the charging scale. But after a while moonlight is just fine.

I’d pick them off one by one. The boys into the crates. (The cockerel’s life is a jolly one, until this day.) The girls into the coop,  where they will, eventually, become accepted by the older hens.

I got ’em all up but one hen, who will be fine til the morning.

In previous years, it was fifty at a time, white cornish crosses, one indistinguishable from the other, and they never came out of the portable pen. This year, it’s just about a dozen cockerels, and they’ve had the run of the yard. They are all colors. The dominant line is buff orpington,  so a lot of orange birds,  but many reds as well, some speckly things (silver-laced wyandottes, perhaps) and a couple with whiskers, whom the kids have dubbed Chipmunk Fur #1 and #2.

They all have names. It’s kind of a sad thing. They put up the most awful fuss when I grab them, but when I squeeze them to my side they calm  down so quickly.  “We’re going in the crate? Well, OK. Time for some shut-eye.” They trust the farmer.

In the bucolic bubble

We incubated baby chicks in two batches this spring, and now they are feisty grown birds. The males are feeling their testosterone.

A mature rooster goes about his breeding duties with clinical efficiency. It’s hop on, bite a piece of neck for stability, thrust, and hop off. No fuss. The hen gives a little indignant shake and clucks away.

With these callow cockrels, it’s considerably more chaotic and comical. (Alliteration!) They chase and grab at the hens but never get a good grip, and end up tugging on pieces of skin or a couple of feathers, the hens screeching a cross between “I’m being murdered” and  “not in a million years, pal.” Most times, they escape.

I can’t lie. I find this entertaining. We have friends who also keep chickens who coined the phrase watching Chicken TV. It’s a pretty good show.

****

After a wet spring, the rain stopped abruptly (in May!) and we edged into drought territory. Nothing like Texas (these images are heartbreaking),  but plenty bad. The garden was a disaster, my cistern was dry for more than a month, the pasture became dominated by weird weeds, which the cows wouldn’t touch, and Johnsongrass, which they would eat at least. Some of my neighbors were already feeding hay before the first of September. The irrational thought that it will never rain again seemed entirely sensible to me for all of July and August.

But  suddenly two weeks ago, the clouds parted and we’ve had plentiful and steady rains.  My herd will be happily grazing well into November.  I like to think this is because of my pasture management, but am not ready to take credit yet….

We’ve had eight calves (the latest born just ten days ago) and all are doing well. The mommas too. Seven of the eight were male, which is pretty weird, and a little disappointing, since my prime directive is to grow the herd, but having seven steers to market next  winter will be good for the cash flow.

The fall has been much greener than the summer. My hives are bustling, and the recent rains have salvaged something like a fall honey flow for the bees. This weekend I’m hoping to get work started on installing a wood stove to reduce and (I hope) eliminate the outrageous propane bills we’ve been paying for seven years. The cows are getting good and fat, and the garden is teeming with volunteer greens, arugula especially.

Tonight the state of Georgia will execute a man for a crime few believe he committed. At the United Nations today the president announced that “the tide of war is receding,” even as new bases to launch Predator drones are being built in the Horn of Africa, where a quarter of a million people will likely starve to death,  in no small part due to my country’s intervention. (Everyone should read that article, by the way).

The wider world we’re bringing three kids into is getting uglier, greedier and more dangerous. For the moment we are living in a little bucolic bubble where they bounce on a trampoline for hours at a time, amidst tame chickens foraging in the grass, and calm cows staring at them through the fence.

Winter is coming, and I know I can’t protect my children from the outside world forever. It’s autumn. Things wither and die, and new life comes along.

Some days I’m not so sure about the second part, but for now I’m determined to enjoy this little autumn interlude. I think I’m happy.

“No kin to you undertaker”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocKFSLsZnUo&feature=player_embedded

I imagine the producers of these debates get together with the hosts afterwards and give notes, as they do in the theater. And I strongly hope they suggested to Brian Williams that, following Governor Perry’s ode to Texas justice, a follow-up question might have been nice….

It’s hard to imagine Mr. Williams and/or the producers were not familiar with The Texas Tribune’s database of all the executions in Texas under Perry’s leadership, including capsule summaries about some of the most controversial.

The summaries should be read in full, but I will excerpt just the first one to give a taste of what “ultimate justice” means in Texas.

Mental Incapacity

Kelsey Patterson was sentenced to death for the September 1992 shooting deaths of Louis Oates and Dorothy Harris in Palestine.

Testimony showed that without provocation, Patterson walked up to Oates, 63, the owner of Oates Oil Co., and shot him. He shot Harris, 41, when she came out to see what was going on. Patterson then went to a friend’s home nearby, stripped down to his socks and waited in the street for police to arrive.

Dr. James Grigson, a psychiatrist and popular prosecution expert witness who earned the label “Dr. Death” because he rarely found defendants too mentally unfit to face the death penalty, told jurors Patterson was sane at the time of the murders. At trial, Patterson testified at length about devices the military had planted in his head.

From prison, he sent incoherent letters to the courts, including a 2004 letter to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, in which he wrote that he wanted to “conduct my legal work needed to stop the execution murder assaults injury execution date murder machines grave graveyard murder …”

Shortly before his execution on May 18, 2004, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended that Perry grant clemency, which Perry rejected. He worried that if he commuted the sentence, Patterson might be released on parole. Patterson’s last statement was a final testimony to his mental condition: “Statement to what? State what? I am not guilty of the charge of capital murder. Steal me and my family’s money. My truth will always be my truth. There is no kin and no friend; no fear what you do to me. No kin to you undertaker.”

Ta-Nehesi Coates has a good response, and an extremely re-tweetable one at that, reminding us of the bi-partisan nature of death penalty boosterism:

Apparently people were shocked by the applause here. The only thing that shocked me was that they didn’t form a rumba line. [!!!!!] It’s a Republican debate. And it’s America. Perry’s right–most people support the death penalty. It’s the job of those of us who oppose the death penalty to change that.

It’s worth remembering that no Democratic nominee for the presidency in some twenty years, has been against the death penalty.

This is still the country where we took kids to see men lynched, and then posed for photos. We are a lot of things. This is one of them.

Also, Ricky Ray Rector ring a bell?

And maybe this is a good place to remind people that the current president has, like his predecessor, granted unto himself the right to kill anyone on the planet, even American citizens, without even the faintest whiff of due process.

And typically these executions in distant lands do not involve lethal injections. They are more along the lines of missile attacks on the targeted person, as well as anyone who is unlucky enough to be in the general vicinity.

Fifty innocent victims for every successful hit. Makes Perry look pretty benevolent in comparison….

So let’s not get all “OMG what if this guy becomes president!” Please. In some respects, this guy already is.

“We’re the dark matter”

Reading the news this week, there are at least three (not unrelated) subjects that call to mind that great line from Adventureland: “Hey, do you have an ice-pick I can jam into my ears? I can’t listen to this song again.”

  • The lack of response, from government and serious media alike, to the Wikileaks revelations about the 2006 atrocity in Ishaqi, in which U.S. soldiers executed 11 civilians, including women and toddlers, by tying their hands behind their backs, and shooting them in the head. And then called in an air strike to destroy the evidence.
  • And, to arbitrarily limit the list to three things, the USA’s Qaddafi problem, as laid out in this typically very good piece from Amy Davidson of the New Yorker, who seems to be one of the few voices in the mainstream press paying attention:

Its dealings in Libya are not the C.I.A.’s only problem; nor is the C.I.A. the only problem. The Washington Post has two new pieces in its “Top Secret America” series that one should read. The first, by Julie Tate and Greg Miller, is on the C.I.A.’s shift away from learning things and toward killing people considered dangerous (and who makes that call?), with analysts becoming “targeters.” The other, by Dana Priest and William Arkin, is about the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, which has held some thousand prisoners “in jails that it alone controls in Iraq and Afghanistan.” (“We’re the dark matter. We’re the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen,” a SEAL told the Post.) The “C.I.A.” binder in Tripoli included “a list of 89 questions for the Libyans to ask a suspect,” the Times said. We should have at least that many—many more—for our own government.

Maybe minor, maybe not, but Davidson cites the “dark matter” quote,  not what followed. The attribution itself is kind of revealing, no? It was not “a SEAL told the Post.” No, that creepy, grandiose claim came from “a strapping Navy SEAL, speaking on the condition of anonymity.” Yes, strapping. Really?

To be sure, Priest and Arkin are not the only reporters in the land to have become aroused by contact with these hunky dudes.

The humble brag about being “dark matter,” the  ever-expanding practice of extrajudicial assassination–something  even Reagan condemned– on an unimaginable (and apparently unknowable) scale. The CIA quietly and without discussion transforming its mission from intelligence to becoming “one hell of a killing machine.” Working in close coordination with the very dictators we’re demonizing for the rubes at home…. That’s bad, I guess, but…. Hey, did you check out the six-packs on these dudes!

Work is dead. Happy Labor Day!

 

Charles Hugh Smith, who blogs at oftwominds.com, has some apt if discouraging Labor Day reading in a piece titled Labor’s Dwindling Share of the Economy and the Crisis of Advanced Capitalism.

I will cheat and lead with his conclusion:

Add all this up and you have to conclude the final crisis of finance-based advanced Capitalism is finally at hand. All the “fixes” that extended its run over the past 70 years have run their course. Life will go on, of course, after the Status Quo devolves, and in my view, ridding the globe of financial predation and parasitism will be a positive step forward.

 

To make this case he steps through the four mechanisms that have served to stave off, temporarily, the contradictions of capitalism that came to the fore in the thirties. If this sounds like Marxism, it’s because it is.

Not sure how to keep true to this argument by excerpting and summarizing, so I will just be lazy and shovel a large, uninterrupted chunk into your lap, dear reader:

This redistributive “socialist” flavor of advanced Capitalism has bought time–the crisis of the 1930s was staved off for 70 years–but now redistribution as a saving strategy has reached its limits.

The other political-economic strategy that has been used to stave off the crisis is consumer credit: as labor’s share of the economy shrank, the middle class workforce was given massive quantities of credit, based on their earnings and on the equity of the family home.

The credit model of boosting consumption has also run its course, though the Keynesian cargo cult is still busily painting radio dials on rocks and hectoring the Economic Gods to unleash their magic “animal spirits.”

The third strategy to stave off advanced Capitalism’s crisis was to greatly expand the workforce to compensate for labor’s dwindling share of the economy. Simply put, Mom, Aunty and Sis entered the workforce en masse in the 1970s, and their earning power boosted household income enough to maintain consumption.

That gambit has run out of steam as the labor force is now shrinking for structural reasons. Though the system is eager to put Grandpa to work as a Wal-Mart greeter and Grandma to work as a retail clerk, the total number of jobs is declining, and so older workers are simply displacing younger workers. The gambit of expanding the workforce to keep finance-based Capitalism going has entered the final end-game. Moving the pawns of tax rates and fiscal stimulus around may be distracting, but neither will fix advanced finance-based Capitalism’s basic ills.

The fourth and final strategy was to exploit speculation’s ability to create phantom wealth. By unleashing the dogs of speculation via a vast expansion of credit, leverage and proxies for actual capital, i.e. derivatives, advanced finance-based Capitalism enabled the expansion of serial speculative bubbles, each of whcih created the illusion of systemically rising wealth, and each of which led to a rise in consumption as the “winners” in the speculative game spent some of their gains.

This strategy has also run its course, as the public at last grasps that bubbles must burst and the aftermath damages everyone, not just those who gambled and lost.

Two other essential conditions have also peaked: cheap energy and globalization, which opened vast new markets for both cheap labor and new consumption. As inflation explodes in China and its speculative credit-based bubbles burst, and as oil exporters increasingly consume their resources domestically, those drivers are now reversing.

Advanced Capitalism is broken for reasons conventional economics cannot dare recognize, because it would spell the end of its intellectual dominance and the end of the entire post-war political-economic paradigm that feeds it.

So, some happy thoughts to ponder, not just for us, who might squeak through, but certainly for our children and theirs.

I’m not entirely sure what he means by “advanced finance-based global Capitalism will unravel as a result of the internal dynamics described above, and be replaced with an economic and political Localism.” Apparently, you’ll have to invest in Smith’s book to really understand…..

“What the ancients were most afraid of: a population of debtors skating at the edge of disaster”

http://youtu.be/iZr2inQYV7M

“What is debt?”, an interview with David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, is well worth reading from beginning to end. But for those who, like me, get a serious case of eyes-glazing-over when confronted with lengthy pieces about economics, I hereby offer a couple of key excerpts.

Philip Pilkington: Let’s move on to some of the real world problems facing the world today. We know that in many Western countries over the past few years households have been running up enormous debts, from credit card debts to mortgages (the latter of which were one of the root causes of the recent financial crisis). Some economists are saying that economic growth since the Clinton era was essentially run on an unsustainable inflating of household debt. From an historical perspective what do you make of this phenomenon?

David Graeber: From an historical perspective, it’s pretty ominous. One could go further than the Clinton era, actually – a case could be made that we are seeing now is the same crisis we were facing in the 70s; it’s just that we managed to fend it off for 30 or 35 years through all these elaborate credit arrangements (and of course, the super-exploitation of the global South, through the ‘Third World Debt Crisis’.)

As I said Eurasian history, taken in its broadest contours, shifts back and forth between periods dominated by virtual credit money and those dominated by actual coin and bullion. The credit systems of the ancient Near East give way to the great slave-holding empires of the Classical world in Europe, India, and China, which used coinage to pay their troops. In the Middle Ages the empires go and so does the coinage – the gold and silver is mostly locked up in temples and monasteries – and the world reverts to credit. Then after 1492 or so you have the return world empires again; and gold and silver currency together with slavery, for that matter.

What’s been happening since Nixon went off the gold standard in 1971 has just been another turn of the wheel – though of course it never happens the same way twice. However, in one sense, I think we’ve been going about things backwards. In the past, periods dominated by virtual credit money have also been periods where there have been social protections for debtors. Once you recognize that money is just a social construct, a credit, an IOU, then first of all what is to stop people from generating it endlessly? And how do you prevent the poor from falling into debt traps and becoming effectively enslaved to the rich? That’s why you had Mesopotamian clean slates, Biblical Jubilees, Medieval laws against usury in both Christianity and Islam and so on and so forth.

Since antiquity the worst-case scenario that everyone felt would lead to total social breakdown was a major debt crisis; ordinary people would become so indebted to the top one or two percent of the population that they would start selling family members into slavery, or eventually, even themselves.

Well, what happened this time around? Instead of creating some sort of overarching institution to protect debtors, they create these grandiose, world-scale institutions like the IMF or S&P to protect creditors. They essentially declare (in defiance of all traditional economic logic) that no debtor should ever be allowed to default. Needless to say the result is catastrophic. We are experiencing something that to me, at least, looks exactly like what the ancients were most afraid of: a population of debtors skating at the edge of disaster.

And, I might add, if Aristotle were around today, I very much doubt he would think that the distinction between renting yourself or members of your family out to work and selling yourself or members of your family to work was more than a legal nicety. He’d probably conclude that most Americans were, for all intents and purposes, slaves.

It is only slightly good news that Graeber finds the current unrest rippling through Europe to be a positive.

DG: Well, I think this is a prime example of why existing arrangements are clearly untenable. Obviously the ‘whole debt’ cannot be paid. But even when some French banks offered voluntary write-downs for Greece, the others insisted they would treat it as if it were a default anyway. The UK takes the even weirder position that this is true even of debts the government owes to banks that have been nationalized – that is, technically, that they owe to themselves! If that means that disabled pensioners are no longer able to use public transit or youth centers have to be closed down, well that’s simply the ‘reality of the situation,’ as they put it.

These ‘realities’ are being increasingly revealed to simply be ones of power. Clearly any pretence that markets maintain themselves, that debts always have to be honored, went by the boards in 2008. That’s one of the reasons I think you see the beginnings of a reaction in a remarkably similar form to what we saw during the heyday of the ‘Third World debt crisis’ – what got called, rather weirdly, the ‘anti-globalization movement’. This movement called for genuine democracy and actually tried to practice forms of direct, horizontal democracy. In the face of this there was the insidious alliance between financial elites and global bureaucrats (whether the IMF, World Bank, WTO, now EU, or what-have-you).

When thousands of people begin assembling in squares in Greece and Spain calling for real democracy what they are effectively saying is: “Look, in 2008 you let the cat out of the bag. If money really is just a social construct now, a promise, a set of IOUs and even trillions of debts can be made to vanish if sufficiently powerful players demand it then, if democracy is to mean anything, it means that everyone gets to weigh in on the process of how these promises are made and renegotiated.” I find this extraordinarily hopeful.

Graeber’s conclusion. Things look good, 500 years down the line…..

For the long-term future, I’m pretty optimistic. We might have been doing things backwards for the last 40 years, but in terms of 500-year cycles, well, 40 years is nothing. Eventually there will have to be recognition that in a phase of virtual money, safeguards have to be put in place – and not just ones to protect creditors. How many disasters it will take to get there? I can’t say.

Read the whole thing, really, and do it with the Replacements’ IOU playing through your earbuds at full blast.

Let me see if I have this straight …

Eight Israelis, six soldiers, and two civilians, were attacked and killed in a bus near the Sinai border.  It’s not clear who carried out the attacks. Hamas denies responsibility.

Nevertheless, Israel has been hitting Gaza hard with air strikes (American  F-16s, naturally) for the past two days, with the results you see below (I caution you about the image at the bottom).

How is this not collective punishment?

Richard Silverstein offers the story behind the picture:

Today, an Israeli drone performed heroically for the fatherland by incinerating a car (or in other reports a motorcycle) carrying a Palestinian doctor and his family to hospital seeking treatment for a sick child.  The doctor, his brother, and the doctor’s little boy were killed in the attack.  Ynet announced: Oops, we missed.  The drone was aiming for a terrorist cell traveling nearby.  WAFA says the doctor’s brother was an Al Quds commander, which would mean that the IDF is willing to kill sick 2 year old children in order to get alleged terrorists as well.

In a galaxy far far away

“Reading the news and it’s all bad,” mused Joni in a different context.

Perhaps paralyzed by the cornucopia of awful things to comment upon, I’ve been fixated on some old news the past couple days.

From the Guardian: Dag Hammarskjöld: evidence suggests UN chief’s plane was shot down.

Chalk another one up for the conspiracy theorists. In fifty years will conclusive proof finally emerge that Paul Wellstone was offed? That seems to be how it works.

Pretty much completely ignorant of the context and controversy surrounding Hammarskjöld’s crash, I’ve gone to Wikipedia U to get modestly up to speed. So, the Dagster. Congo. Belgium. Lumumba. Mobutu.

Operation Morthor is a name right out of Tolkein. And, to borrow another fantastic reference from pop culture, the Kantangan secessionist rebels, who sound ever so Star Wars.

So there must be an Evil Empire. But there it breaks down a bit. Was it the Belgians? Plenty evil, but facing the twilight of their long, brutal  colonial reign in 1961. Or was it the rising empire, just coming into its Don Draper heyday, whose tension with its other imperial rival gave birth, passively, and actively, to the tragedy of the Congo.

In some respects, Hammarskjöld’s death was just a footnote in the history of the Congo and the entire continent. A white man dies, and gets all the ink. Tempting to think that. But just this small glimpse of the force of Hammarskjöld’s personality leads me to think about what was lost when his plane went down.

To today’s eyes, such idealism in the UN’s secretary general seems to come from another world entirely–from, yes, a galaxy far far away. (See what I did there?!)

Hammarskjöld thought that this was a problem the UN should, and could, solve. He was convinced that this was his job. He thought he could fly in and sort it all out by himself, being fully aware of the Belgian, British and Yankee feathers he was ruffling in the process (and the Russians were no fans either, for different reasons). In 1961 the secretary general took the UN charter seriously. He actually took the side of the developing nations against the might of the Security Council. This stands in stark contrast to the current state of affairs, when the UN’s function is to lend grudging  legitimacy to whatever questionable military operation the US has in mind.

From that Guardian article:

Hammarskjöld was flying to Ndola for peace talks with the Katanga leadership at a meeting that the British helped arrange. The fiercely independent Swedish diplomat had, by then, enraged almost all the major powers on the security council with his support for decolonisation, but support from developing countries meant his re-election as secretary general would have been virtually guaranteed at the general assembly vote due the following year.

Can you imagine? How far have we come from this time, entirely in the wrong direction?

It’s complicated…

Noam Chomsky and Ron Paul agree on at least one thing: War is a racket.

Juan Cole uses last night’s GOP debate to compare and contrast Paul’s libertarian antiwar position and the left, Chomskyite variation.

As Right anarchists, [Libertarian Republicans] want the least government possible, and see government as a distraction for businesses, who succumb to the temptation to use the government to distort the eufunctional* free market. In essence, government is a scam whereby some companies are seduced by the possibility of manacling the invisible hand that ought to be magically rewarding enterprise and innovation. A significant stream within libertarianism theorizes war as the ultimate in this racket, whereby some companies use government to throw enormous sums to themselves by waging wars abroad and invoking patriotic themes. This analysis is remarkably similar to that of Left anarchists such as Noam Chomsky.

The difference is that for anarcho-syndicalists like Chomsky, the good guys of history are the workers and ordinary folk, whereas for Libertarians, it is entrepreneurs. Both theories depend on a naive reading of social interest. Right anarchists seem not to be able to perceive that without government, corporations would reduce us all to living in company towns on bad wages and would constantly be purveying to us bad banking, tainted food, dangerous drugs, etc.

…. Likewise, the anarcho-syndicalist tradition makes workers unions more saintly and disinterested than they typically actually are, though since they are looking out for the interests of the majority (workers), they typically have more equitable positions than the narrower business elites idolized by Libertarians.

___________

* great word!

This is OK, if simplistic. I might add that Cole is a stubborn defender of America’s and NATO’s latest adventure in Libya, “unabashedly cheering the liberation movement on.” As such, not really the guy to be flinging the word naive about. He even wrote an open letter, scolding the timid left for not getting behind our nation’s noble effort. To date, that mission has amounted to “18,774 sorties including 7,127 strike sorties.” That is a hell of a lot of metal to be slinging in a humanitarian kinetic action, but these are Hellfire rockets of love and concern, of course.

Back to Paul, in her summation of the GOP debate, the always thoughtful Amy Davidson gets a tad wistful when musing on the man’s appeal:

It was a little sad, watching the Republican Presidential debate last night, to remind oneself that at a certain point, next winter or summer or sooner, Ron Paul will no longer be taking part in these exercises. He is not likely to get his party’s nomination; and yet how useful was Paul’s presence in the debate last night? When he was asked a question, one knew, if nothing else, that one’s attention would be held by the answer, whether it’s about allowing churches to harbor undocumented immigrants or, as he seemed to be suggesting, effectively renouncing much of our national debt. His appeal to a certain segment of Republicans (and not just Republicans) is often ascribed to his consistency; just what he is consistent about is a harder question to answer, and anyway doesn’t get at his odd charisma.

These two pieces together start to get at what is so maddening about Paul. On issue after issue, he is coherent, rational, and appealing, especially to someone comme moi, with a vaguely leftish lean, and a strong disgust at the mainstream corporatist politics practiced by both parties.

On a host of issues, Paul’s positions and mine line up pretty well, and probably line up with the attitudes of a great number of uncommitted voters. He is the only high-profile politician seeing straight on war, militarism, civil liberties, and privacy issues.

But then there are the scary positions, anchored by the Libertarian Achilles Heel, the completely untethered-from-reality belief in the magic of Markets. Social Security and Medicare and the EPA are clunky and inefficient, but they are necessary protections against the predations of the marketplace. And they are not the drivers of the deficit. So, Ron: I like you, I really do, and I’m not saying you’re crazy, but you’ve said some crazy things.

BUT and this is where it gets complicated….Is Ron Paul SCARY?  Somebody thinks so:

But Ari has his own reasons. The question is: should ordinary folks  be scared of someone who thinks so opposite to the consensus, at least the consensus of Washington and mainstream media? I think not.

There is always much noise at this point in the election cycle about the frightening prospect of candidate A or B actually making his (or her) way into the White House.

Yes, we’re talking about that nutjob from Minnesota who shall remain nameless. Uh, er, the Lady Nutjob. I forget there are two sometimes…. Ryan Lizza has pretty much sealed the deal for anyone who had any doubts.

Nope, I don’t want to see her in the White House, nor do I find that much of a realistic concern. But there is another faction at least trying to make us very afraid of people with strange ideas taking the reins of power.

The We Must Re-elect Obama to Keep X Out of the White House hysteria brings up a large question for me: Why? Do we have a sane and/or benign presence in the White House?

The short answer is … no. And the short reason is … War.  And while one could, and I would, have some dissenting words on the necessities of any of the United States’ wars, it’s not controversial at all to observe that the wars of the past few decades have been beyond pointless. Or that alarmingly, the warfare state has expanded greatly in the Obama era. (I had a fairly low opinion of the man when he took office, but this is one absolutely shocking development. Who  saw that coming?)

The United States is currently admitting to be warring on, or in, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and our putative ally Pakistan. Why? I mean, really, why? When pressed, officials will mumble something about humanitarianism  or the threat of Islamic terror groups, and other times they will talk with a straight face about the remaining 22 targets in Afghanistan (140,000 US and NATO soldiers, makes 7000 soldiers per threat?!) And one might well ponder this underappreciated weirdness, as fleshed out by Nick Turse:

Last year, Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post reported that U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in 75 countries, up from 60 at the end of the Bush presidency. By the end of this year, U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told me, that number will likely reach 120. “We do a lot of traveling — a lot more than Afghanistan or Iraq,” he said recently. This global presence — in about 60% of the world’s nations and far larger than previously acknowledged — provides striking new evidence of a rising clandestine Pentagon power elite waging a secret war in all corners of the world.

The six wars, expensive wars, in terms of both lives destroyed and treasure wasted. The nuclear arsenal. The undeclared/unexamined military footprint  in nigh on 100 countries. This is the status quo. (And oh crap I did not even mention the callous disregard for rule of law, Obama’s assertion of his personal right to have anyone in the world ordered killed, the widening gulf between rich and poor, white and black, the overstuffed prisons, the ongoing criminalization of poverty. I’ve been away for so long….)

But let’s stay focused on the deranged, paranoiac military fortress that America has become. Try as I might, I cannot get my brain to accept that the civilian and uniformed planners of such madness think they’re doing the right thing for the world. I prefer to think it’s more about competition among the multitude of military branches and secret agencies, known and unknown.

I like to think there’s cynicism behind this, because the scarier thought is that very powerful people believe this shit–that a perpetual war footing against a sad excuse for a civilization-threatening enemy is a necessary and just thing to do. I’m hoping it’s more Milo Minderbinder than Jack Ripper, but who knows?

The recent frantic concern over the debt and the deficit is a fraudulent thing. Politicians nominally work for voters, and no demographic cohort puts this issue very high up on the list of things that need to be fixed. The drive to rewrite the social contract came from somewhere else. And the social programs that will be gutted to assuage this selective fit of fiscal probity will make America poorer, meaner, and less safe for everyone. Anyone seeking a serious bettering of the money mess need only focus on a distinctive five-sided building on the Potomac. But don’t hold your breath. Only fringe pols and marginalized media outlets ever mention the subject.

To say there’s not a whole lot of promise in the field of realistic presidential aspirants is a massive understatement.  Some are truly scary (that word again!) Perry scares me. Bachmann scares me. And Ron Paul scares me, but  less than anyone else, and a lot less than the Players in DC. Obama, Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi, who with their Super Committee now look to disempower all but a dozen representatives when “fixing” the deficit. The rest might as well go home. The insider culture in Washington is already being run by crooks who may or may not also be bonkers.

Not saying who I’ll be voting for come election time, if anyone (Mr. Carlin is always whispering in my ear), but painting outsiders as “crazy” isn’t very convincing. We’re already at crazy.

Bittersweet milestone on the farm

I’ve had steers killed and butchered on the farm before, but today marked the first time for a calf I had observed being born.

Here is the calf in question, just new to the world, with his momma in July 2009.

It’s a bittersweet milestone. This is what I had set out to do, and three years later I am still at it with the cows. They are gentle, and tame, and I have gotten more than a few compliments from neighbors on the temperament and condition of my herd.

They are so tame, in fact, that when Dicky the butcher drove up, the entire herd ran towards him and lined up at the fence, curious about the stranger’s truck. I had only to point out the animal in question, which made me feel a little weird. Dicky said, “I’ll just drop him right here, then,” and so he did, from four feet away.

“That better be the one,” he chuckled, as the steer went to its knees, then rolled over.

Today, the herd behaved fairly strangely compared to previous visits from Dicky.  Last year, I had one done in a pen, away from the others.

It was going to be two at once, but the second one literally jumped out of the pen.  As it happened, steer #2 still needed a little filling out. When steer #2’s time came, he was dropped  in the pasture, and the other cows just went about their business after the initial ruckus caused by the rifle report.

This time they were curious to the point of nearly interfering with the skinning and gutting.

I honestly have no idea what kind of bond remains between mother and calf nearly two years old,  but I thought I sensed a special unease or melancholy on the part of the momma. That might just be me. Suddenly (perhaps guiltily?), I found myself motivated to do a lot of field work, mostly involving enlarging marginal grazing areas. The herd followed me everywhere. They were almost … clingy.  And they didn’t seem to associate me with what had just happened, or maybe they didn’t understand it.

I don’t entirely understand it either. It all  makes sense on paper. Take grass, rain, sunlight. Add cattle. A sustainable system. The pastures get taken care of by the cows, and you get thousands of pounds of protein as a happy side result. But it’s still heartbreaking for me when the day comes, and Dicky drives up with his .22 magnum and his winch.

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