An Irishman speaks up for America


Michael D. Higgins, president of Ireland

Last year, when Michael D. Higgins was elected president of Ireland, I wrote a post about how delightful it is that there are countries in the world capable of electing poets for president. Higgins promised to govern Ireland from principles other than wealth.

Higgins used to live in the United States. He knows this country, and he follows our politics. Here is a link to a stunning radio interview (“A tea partier decided to pick a fight with a foreign president; it didn’t go so well”) in which Higgins gives T-total hell to some Tea Partiers. It is not to be missed.

This pairs nicely with yesterday’s post about Julian Assange. Russians — Russians! — can try to get the truth to the American people, while the American media are nothing but a pig circus. In this interview, Higgins, an Irishmen, stands up for the principles of social justice in a way that never happens in the United States, because our media are corrupt and the Democratic party is feckless and cowardly.

If people in this country who care about social justice dared to speak with passion, then perverted projects like the Tea Party would soon fade away. When did it become impossible for justice-loving people to talk like this in the United States? When did our churches start to glorify war, exploitation, and greed? Why are we such cowards in standing up to people like the Tea Partiers, or the people on hate radio?

Cultural continuity

When I was a young’un in the 1950s, growing up in the farmland of the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina, one of my uncles operated a country store. Every day, local menfolk, especially farmers, would congregate there. If it was winter, they’d sit around the stove. If it was summer, they’d sit around the fan. Of an evening, they might move outside onto the benches under the store’s front awning.

It was called “loafing,” and by some people it was frowned upon. I call it important cultural glue. Today, there are far fewer places where neighbors can congregate than there were in the 1950s.

But this tradition persists in Stokes County today, and no doubt in rural areas all over America as well. Most of the country stores are gone now. Today the loafers hang out at fast-food places at the nearest town or highway stop. In this area, Hardee’s rules, but I’ve also seen congregations of elderly people hanging out at McDonald’s. In Madison-Mayodan, one of the Hardee’s actually has live music and square-dancing once a week (for old people). Or at least they did a couple of years ago.

Even in the 1950s, though, loafing was nothing new. Its roots, I’m sure, are in the old countries.

Most of the people in this area are descended from people who migrated here in the 18th and 19th centuries. Most of them came from the British Isles. Even today, rural pubs are common in the British Isles and Ireland. A couple of times I have visited a Welsh family I’d befriended. Of an evening the menfolk would go down to the pub for a couple of hours in the evening, while the womenfolk cooked dinner.

In this country, Puritan, anti-alcohol values were strongly enforced, so country stores took the place of pubs. The same Puritan culture that demonizes alcohol used the pejorative term “loafing” for it. Now fast-food restaurants have taken the place of country stores. At least it’s cultural continuity, but it looks like thirsty work to me.

Julian Assange

“Facebook is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented.” — Julian Assange

Regular readers of this blog know that one of my constant refrains is that Americans are now the most propagandized people in the world. Whenever I say this, I also say that I’m not just throwing a rhetorical grenade. I am being completely serious. My constant concern is that, because of the failure of our media, we know very little about what is actually going on in the world. Instead, we get a constant blare of distraction, drivel, and misinformation. They tell us what they want us to know, and anything else is difficult or impossible to get. Assange expresses my precise concern: that without accurate information, we cannot understand the true state of the world or plan for our own future.

Julian Assange and Wikileaks are probably the most powerful forces in the world today, damaged though they are, that are operating to break through the lies and secrecy and get real information to people. Because of that, Assange is criminalized and hounded.

I’m posting links to a 40-minute interview with Assange last year, by Russia Today. This interview is by no means out of date, and it provides important background on the drama now playing out in London, with Assange holed up at the Ecuadorean embassy.

The ironies are incredible:

— That in our times, only a Russian organization is independent enough of U.S. and Western interests to bring us this interview. Please note that I do not allege that the Russian media tell the truth about Russia; far from it. But they can tell the truth about the United States, because they are not in our orbit or under our thumb. Nor do they need to propagandize, because the unadorned, unspun truth is so powerful on its own.

— Note how civil and intelligent this interview is — quite unlike anything on American television. No one shouts, no one interrupts. The interviewer asks excellent questions in an intelligent sequence, then listens silently, giving Assange plenty of time to respond.

— Note that no one is spinning — neither the interviewer for Russia Today, nor Assange.

I defy anyone to disprove any of the hundreds of facts that Assange covers in this interview. He is no idealogue. He is simply a truth teller. I have often said that the best journalists, the real journalists, are people who find it pretty much impossible to lie because of an honor for the truth that is almost religious. There are very few journalists like that anymore. Most journalists today are simply too weak to resist the forces that have degraded and corrupted the media. They are all equally cowed, they all sing the same song, and they all think they’re doing a great job. For those who don’t know me, I should mention that I spent my entire career in the newspaper business, that I know more than my share of (and am ashamed of) the journalists you see on television today, and that I have for decades been an amateur scholar of propaganda.

The first part of the interview deals largely with important events in the Arab world last year. The last half of the interview will be of more interest to Americans, including Assange’s statements about the threat to privacy from Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. It’s worth taking the 40 minutes to listen to the entire interview, just to get a feel for the inferiority of the American media and how it deceives us, and to size up Julian Assange as a person.

Here are links to the two-part interview: Part1 — Part 2.

Brother Evangeline

From early on, we had our suspicions about Sister Evangeline. She had large feet, and she grew unusually fast. Still, she was gentle enough, though she didn’t like to be petted like the other hens. And she did not have the flashy comb that roosters (or so I thought) are supposed to have.

The first convincing sign came about three weeks ago, when there was a strange noise from inside the fence that scared the cat and me both. It sounded vaguely like a fox barking. But when I dashed to the door and looked, I saw an adolescent rooster practicing his crowing.

The second convincing sign started about two weeks ago. Watching chickens do it is not a pretty sight. It looks like rape to me, and now it happens first thing every morning, as soon as I let the chickens out, and again at random times during the day. He pinches the hens on the back, or on the back of the neck, to hold them still while he does his ugly little thing. The hens squawk. But so far no one seems to have been hurt.

I’ve been opposed to having a rooster, for several reasons. For one, they don’t lay eggs. For two, they make a lot of noise. For three, they can be mean. I have very clear memories of a rooster who used to flog me when I was a child and was sent to the barn to feed the chickens. I came home from school one day, and he was in the oven.

However, Brother Evangeline doesn’t spend a lot of time crowing. And, so far, he has never been aggressive with me. He continues to spat with Patience, the oldest and largest hen, but she hasn’t backed down yet and given up her place at the top of the pecking order, and they have not hurt each other.

So I guess the abbey’s nunnery is stuck with a rooster.

Persimmons, volunteering

I have carefully protected the four native persimmon trees that volunteered around the edges of the yard. They’re about eight feet tall now. This year, two of them are bearing. There are lots of wild persimmons along the edges of local woods, but they’re usually so surrounded by undergrowth and tangle that it’s hard to retrieve the fruit. I can mow around these four trees. They’ll be easy to get at.

Something else to fight the raccoons for.

Automobile safety


NASA Multimedia Gallery, released for public use

When I was a child in the 1950s, cars were incredibly unsafe. No one had ever seen a safe car, and people were only just beginning to imagine safe cars. It was very common in those days to hear of fatal wrecks, and all too often those wrecks involved someone you knew. It was during the 1950s that some people began to imagine safer cars. For example, take a look at this article from Popular Science from 1955.

The steady improvement of automobile safety over the decades is a great example of a cooperative effort by government and corporations. Some corporations at first resisted building safer cars. They didn’t think there was a market for it. They were wrong, of course, and eventually automobile manufacturers started to engineer for greater safety. In 1968, government regulators started requiring shoulder belts and collapsible steering columns. In 1969, head restraints were required. Whiplash injuries were very common before head restraints.

The integration of computers into automobile control systems opened up new possibilites. Anti-lock brake systems are a good example. Though much of the anti-lock brake system is hydraulic, it relies on a digital controller. The most amazing system yet, though, is the electronic stability control system. This system monitors the wheel speed, the direction in which the steering wheel is pointed (to understand the driver’s intentions), and a “yaw” sensor, which determines the direction the car is actually headed. If the car is sliding sideways, for example, the yaw sensor would allow the control computer to know it. By comparing the actual trajectory of the car with what the driver says he wants (as revealed by the steering wheel), then the system can use the brakes (each wheel independently) and the throttle to make the car go where the driver wants it to go.

Last night, driving home from Winston-Salem, I experienced one of these systems for the first time. It felt like a miracle. I was traveling at about 45 miles per hour on a dark country road. Suddenly a deer jumped out in front me from some heavy vegetation on the right side of the road. I hit the brakes, hard. Without anti-lock brakes, I’d have heard squalling tires, and, depending on the conditions, I might or might not have been able to steer the car. Instead, I heard a rapid “clicking” sound from all the brakes, and I felt a pulsing in the brake pedal. There were no squealing tires. The car just … stopped, and it continued in a straight line until it stopped. I figure that I missed the deer by about 10 feet. Without anti-lock brakes, I’m sure I would have hit it.

That quick stop did not engage the electronic stability system. If I’d had to swerve to miss the deer, the stability system might have been activated. The worst case scenario is when some sort of obstacle in front of you requires that you brake, steer sharply in one direction, then sharply back in the other direction. It causes a kind of inertial whiplash, and this is exactly what causes an SUV to flip and roll over. If you’ve ever been in this situation, the feeling is sickening. I had it happen once, 10 or so years ago on a freeway in California. I strongly felt my Jeep Wrangler wanting to roll over. It didn’t happen, either because I deftly used the steering to reduce the inertial force that was sending me up onto two wheels (try steering then!), or I wasn’t going quite fast enough to roll.

I consider myself a good driver. My reaction to the deer last night was so fast that I wasn’t even conscious of why I’d hit the brakes until the deer was almost across the road. I’ve never had an accident in more than 45 years of driving. But in a close call, one wants all the help one can get.

My 2001 Jeep Wrangler has air bags, but 2001 was a little early for digital systems, at least in the Jeep Wrangler. I have greatly desired a car with the new digital systems, and that was part of my decision to get a Smart car. The Smart car is the least expensive car you can get that has those systems … not to mention eight air bags.

It took only six weeks of driving the new car for the anti-lock brakes to pay off. With luck, I’ll never get into a situation in which I need electronic stability control. But it’s good to know it’s there.

Let’s hear it for those automotive safety engineers.

Peaches and cream

For years, fats have been so demonized that I avoided cream. Now I confess that I keep cream in the refrigerator all the time. Cream makes a great base for a quick sauce for fish or vegetables. And of course there’s peaches and cream.

I buy organic cream from Whole Foods. Most of what is sold as cream these days is full of adulterants.

Unfortunately, I didn’t grow those peaches. I had a great peach crop coming along, but a raccoon got into the trees and stole every last one of them. No doubt it was the same raccoon that also stole all the corn and made a wreck of the garden in doing so.

I can’t bring myself to shoot a raccoon — at least not yet. I need to make a winter project of making the garden and orchard fence raccoon-proof. There are spots where they can get under the fence. With those spots fixed, and some work around the gates, a raccoon-proof fence should be possible. I might even throw in a low run of electrical wire to discourage meddling.

A sacred summer ritual

For many years, I’ve wanted to get myself into a situation in which I could can tomatoes. If your situation permits the growing and canning of tomatoes, you’re all set. It’s a yardstick against which you can measure your lifestyle.

But it took so long! Even after I bought the land, it was seven more years. The steps, roughly, are:

  • 1. Buy your land
  • 2. Build your house
  • 3. Build a garden fence (maybe some areas could do without a fence)
  • 4. Rehabilitate and prepare your garden soil, organically
  • 5. Deal with the irrigation problem
  • 6. Grow enough tomatoes to produce at least one peck of surplus tomatoes that ripen together

    • If you fumble a step, you lose a year. For example, last year I did not have irrigation. Hot, dry weather torched the garden. This year, the irrigation system made a huge difference. And in the early years of the Acorn Abbey project, my hands were too full to get around to things like preparing the garden soil or building the garden fence.

    Why do we work so hard for tomatoes? I think it’s not just because they’re so good eat. I think it’s because tomatoes are sacred.