sastyk | February 2, 2012Now let's be clear - we all knew Mitt Romney did not give a flying fuck about the poor. Other than the occasional service provider, he's never met any poor people, first of all. Moreover, it is a fact that no presidential candidate, Democratic or Republican for the last 30 years has cared about the very poor. Add in the fact that Mitt demonstrably cares only about his hair, campaign donors (not a lot of them among the very poor) and getting elected, and this isn't exactly news.
GOP front-runner Mitt Romney said this morning that he's not concerned about the plight of the country's very…
sastyk | February 1, 2012Counting Out Rhyme
Silver bark of beech, and sallow
Bark of yellow birch and yellow
Twig of willow.
Stripe of green in moosewood maple,
Colour seen in leaf of apple,
Bark of popple.
Wood of popple pale as moonbeam,
Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam,
Wood of hornbeam.
Silver bark of beech, and hollow
Stem of elder, tall and yellow
Twig of willow. - Edna St. Vincent Millay
I should be in the woods at this time of year. Instead, because of the unusually warm winter and heavy rains that have left the ground saturated and soggy, rather than frozen and covered with snow, and because I managed to…
sastyk | January 31, 2012My fellow geeky Jewish goat-farmer Reb Deb sent me this, and I couldn't resist posting it:
sastyk | January 30, 2012Kari Hamerschlag has a post up about the upcoming Farm Bill and its potential to move money away from large scale industrial agriculture and towards smaller producers. For most small farmers producing for local markets, the idea is heady - after all, the economics agriculture are tenuous for many of us - we get all of the burdens of regulation without any of the economies of scale that accompany large scale agriculture. Most small producers are driven, then, to serve communities that can pay, rather than necessarily their poorer rural neighbors (although all of us do some of that too). We…
sastyk | January 30, 2012Christian Parenti has a really good article in TomDispatch about the reasons why Climate Change may change people'st thinking about the role of government:
Global warming and the freaky, increasingly extreme weather that will accompany it is going to change all that. After all, there is only one institution that actually has the capacity to deal with multibillion-dollar natural disasters on an increasingly routine basis. Private security firms won't help your flooded or tornado-struck town. Private insurance companies are systematically withdrawing coverage from vulnerable coastal areas.…
sastyk | January 27, 2012What I think is most important about the Nature article (unfortunately behind a paywall - Energy Bulletin has a summary here) is that part of its underlying presence is that it is possible to make major changes in the use of fossil fuels on the peak oil issue in ways it is not possible to make those changes due to the politically charged nature of climate change.
The authors, James Murray and David King, confirm what geologists involved with peak oil have known for a long time - that reserve estimates are unreliable at best, and that the science behind oil peaks is both clear and…
sastyk | January 23, 2012
I try really hard to ignore the presidential election, I do, but this was too funny not to post! Yes, a hoax, but hey, shoulda been.
Sharon
sastyk | January 23, 2012This is a revised version of a post that appeared three years ago, towards the start of the recession. It seems just as relevant, maybe more relevant, now.
A while back there was a study that suggested that it is more expensive to be poor in the US in some ways, than it is to be rich. And to anyone who has actually been poor, this probably made perfect sense. Among the ways that being poor cost you money:
1. Your infrastructure is limited, so you are limited to what fits in your infrastructure - for example, you don't have a car, so you can only shop at the convenience stores or those on…
sastyk | January 19, 2012Well, as the republican donnybrooks narrow down, the enemy becomes evident - the American poor. Newt Gingrich particularly dislikes poor folk, especially poor children, because after all, if they were good people they wouldn't be poor, they'd be working 50 hours a week in some nice sweatshop!
Celeste Monforton at The Pump Handle has a nice post on the realities of the food stamp recipients Newt claims are lazy buggers.
"And we think unconditional efforts by the best food stamp president in American history to maximize dependency is terrible for the future of this country."
It is absolutely…
sastyk | January 18, 2012No, not the kind used in track and field (although if you really want to jump over them I won't stop you), I mean the sort used to keep livestock in without breaking the budget on fencing. They look cool, and now is the perfect time of year to prune out branches and hurdle making materials. We use low ones to keep chickens out of spots we don't want, and have a few that we use for moving livestock to create chutes - but I'm working on more. As long as it is time to prune trees and cut wood anyway, you might as well make some fence as well!
Two tutorials, first a written one here from the…
sastyk | January 17, 2012I've always read cookbooks the way one reads novels, not only for recipes but for plots, stories and bits of detail, and one of the details I always look for are acknowledgements of particular tastes in my cookbook authors. The reason I look for this is that cookbooks are usually a uniquely authoritative genre - one that purports to tell you THIS IS GOOD. And yet, of course, one's tastes are particular - most cookbooks that don't originate in restaurants are fundamentally about a particular person's sense of what tastes good and is appealing. Some acknowledge this, most don't, but it is…
sastyk | January 12, 2012Given that January is the season for regretting excesses and making new starts, I thought I'd offer Sharon's patented formula for losing 10lbs fast - absolutely guaranteed to take off the weight like lightning.;
Day 1: Spend most of the day getting ready for a weekend event - running errands, shopping at local markets, prepping to prepare lunch for 20+ people. Run into friends and acquaintances and chat about the upcoming event.
3pm Day 1: Get a call from your caseworker announcing that she has four children, 4, 3, 2 and 1 in need of an emergency placement - can you take them RIGHT NOW?…
sastyk | January 5, 2012
If you have followed energy issues from anywhere other than a cave on a mountain peak, you've probably heard technoutopians utter some variation on the following sentence two or three hundred times "We walked on the moon - of course we can do whatever it takes to shift from fossil fuels to some other source of energy." The moon shot is perceived as the ultimate example of "put in a quarter and get out the technological outcome you want" in our history. If we could set out to put a man on the moon and do it in less than decade, can't we do anything we want to, with just enough ingenuity?…
sastyk | January 5, 2012If you aren't familiar with the Export Land Model for oil, you should be - I've posted about Jeffrey Brown's incredibly important work many times in the past, but it is still common for even people who otherwise grasp the basic points of peak oil to not thoroughly understand that internal consumption dramatically affects potential decline rates.
In the simplest terms, oil exporting nations are also nations with oil money coming in and that creates economic growth and modernization that encourages domestic oil consumption. The more oil consumed internally, the less that gets exported. When…
sastyk | January 4, 2012In college I lived in a house where I was the only female resident among a largish group of guys. Along with assorted boyfriends, girlfriends and hangers on, our house became a hang-out for a lot of people, and we regularly sat down with 15-20 people for dinner. Our food budgets, however, were not of the sort that made this easy - but we managed mostly by feeding everyone soup, more or less all the time. The household was vegetarian and kosher, and we were young and experimental, and almost nothing seemed weird. As one of the chief cooks in the household, I made soup out of nearly…
sastyk | January 3, 2012On January 1, it was 48 degrees on my farm. My sons were at the playground, dressed in sweatshirts and jeans, rather than winter coats and mittens. Their ice skates had yet to be used this year. Their sleds haven't even come out of the garage. Walking out in the warm weather among the goats, I noticed my cowslips and primroses are up and there are buds on the pussy willows.
On the farm, we measure the severity of the winter by the final full barn cleaning before spring - the last one before heavy snow and ice make it impossible to get a wheelbarrow in and out of the barn. In a cold…
sastyk | December 30, 2011First of all, I owe y'all an apology for the radio silence. Somehow this month I've felt a deep need for some quiet, rest and offlineness. It was quite an autumn here - it started with the destruction of Irene and Lee (and dealing with those disasters are still a major part of life in our community although they've faded from public focus), included the usual autumn and holiday rush, our usual sequence of family events and birthday parties (three kids have birthday in six weeks, right after the high holidays wind up), ASPO, my book, two foster placements and the loss of M., and the wind up…
sastyk | December 15, 2011Meg emails to ask me "How much work is small-scale farming, anyway?" I want to farm and I'm planning on trying it out over the summer as an intern, but what I'm worried about is not being able to keep up with everyone else. I'm healthy and reasonably energetic, but everyone makes it sound so hard! Should I even try?"
Well first of all, I think Meg is doing exactly the right thing in trying it out. The best way to understand whether you are suited to small-scale agriculture is to get some experience, idealy on several different small farms that do the kinds of things you want to do.…
sastyk | December 8, 2011Megan Quinn Bachman has a fabulous piece on the problem of net energy ignorance. Megan followed a group of ASPO attendees who visited congressional offices to talk about peak oil, and found pretty much what you'd expect - but what you'd expect has serious consequences:
During our congressional briefings, it felt like we were the ones slamming our heads against the wall. We were told that:
-Ethanol could free America from its dependence upon foreign oil (while at the conference chemical engineer and energy analyst Robert Rapier noted that turning all arable land in the world into biofuels…