The future of rain


Projected change in summer rainfall by 2080-2099. See link below to full chart.

Is it surprising that servants of the oil industry continue to deny climate change, even though they aren’t really fooling anybody? A poll last year found that 83 percent of Americans believe the world is warming, including 72 percent of Republicans.

But ask the farmers. They know. Just recently I overheard a group of elderly Stokes County farmers talking about what they used to be able to grow that they can’t grow any longer. In Canada, some polls have found that only 2 percent of the population deny climate change.

But the propaganda is getting results. Some polls have found a slight rise in climate-change denial in recent years. But the most important thing the propaganda accomplishes is shutting down any hope of our having a national conversation about climate change, and doing anything about it. And of course that is their goal.

Meanwhile, as Washington fiddles while the heartland burns, we must each think about our own water security. One of the reasons I gave up on the idea of retiring in California is that the future of water in California looks terrible, particularly to the south of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Here is a link to a chart showing expected changes in rainfall, by season, for the entire country.

Lucky for me, northwest North Carolina appears to be in a bit of a sweet spot. It’s not far enough south to be at high risk of dryer winters and springs. In the summer, it appears that it’s beneficial to be east of the spine of the Appalachian chain. Fall on the east coast is little changed from today’s normal. The models I checked before deciding to buy land in northwest North Carolina showed a slight increase in expected future rainfall, from about 44 inches per year to 46 inches per year.

However, as I have mentioned many times in the past, the summers of 2009, 2010, and 2011 were terrible. In retrospect, I believe — or at least hope — that this was because of an unusual persistence of La Niña. This summer, La Niña is gone. What a difference it makes.

Last September 1, I started keeping very careful rainfall records using a gauge on the back deck. As of midnight last night, I’ve now collected exactly one year’s worth of data. The total comes to 54.5 inches. This is a stunning amount of rain. It probably is never going to get any better than this.

Here are the totals by month:

September 2011: 6.03
October 2011: 3.35
November 2011: 5.35
December 2011: 3.20
January 2012: 2.10
February 2012: 2.15
March 2012: 3.95
April 2012: 2.50
May 2012: 6.65
June 2012: 5.15
July 2012: 6.01
August 2012: 8.10

I have never seen such lushness here. The abbey is surrounded by green. All the young trees have grown like crazy this year. I have a certain amount of survivor’s guilt, because America’s agricultural heartland has been scorched this summer. That may be the new normal. Maybe for winter wheat it won’t be so bad. But the future of corn is not looking good.

Speaking of corn, a few months ago, 25 pounds of chicken feed (which is only partly corn) cost $6.50 a bag at my local mill. It has risen steadily all summer. Yesterday I paid $8. Though the corn in my chicken feed is local corn, commodity prices are global.

Your future: 54.5 miles per gallon

Yesterday, the Obama administration made it official. The new target for gasoline mileage for 2025 is 54.5 miles per gallon. Though the usual stark-raving-mad lunatics in Congress are deeply offended by something so sensible and call the new rules “burdensome” (among other things), the auto industry stopped fighting and cooperated. They’re on board. Why?

Partly, no doubt, it’s because anyone who has two clues to rub together (that would exclude most of the U.S. Congress) knows that the era of cheap gasoline is ending. People probably will be delighted, come 2025, to be able to buy cars that get that kind of mileage.

Does that mean that everyone will be driving tiny cars? Not necessarily. Automobile engineers have lots of tricks up their sleeves that they haven’t used yet, including better fuel injection systems, better turbochargers, and more efficient transmissions. They also have more than 10 years to develop new technologies. They’ll find ways to make vehicles lighter, including greater use of aluminum and technologies borrowed from aircraft design that make components light but strong. You can be sure that engineers also will continue to build safer cars, because automakers already compete on safety. The automobile industry is a truly competitive industry, so automakers will compete to design cars that are safer, more fuel-frugal, and not tiny. Yes, the cars will cost more. But the savings in gasoline will more than offset the increased cost.

The reason the Obama administration gives for the new rules is very sensible: to reduce dependence on foreign oil, and to cut vehicle emissions in half. But they (and the automobile industry as well) know more than they tell us, and I believe they know that gasoline will be much more expensive in 2025. Car manufacturers are nowhere near stupid enough to be caught with nothing but gas-guzzlers to sell if people can’t afford the gas for them. Only right-wing shills for the oil and fracking industry are that stupid.

Would the oil companies like to catch us with a fleet of gas-guzzlers in an era of $8 gas? You bet they would. By agreeing to the new standards, automakers are protecting their industry and their future profits, at the expense (heehee) of the oil companies. Because I love cars and hate oil companies, I say that’s a darned good lick. Anyone who sees it otherwise is getting money from the Koch brothers or someone similar.

By the way, on a recent fill-up, the Smart car hit 53.6 miles per gallon — not quite enough to meet the 2025 standard, but I’m not complaining. The weather has been cooler, and I’ve used the air conditioner less. That has increased the mileage. I’m also finding that the brand of gasoline makes a difference. I’ll have more on that after I’ve collected more data.

Rowdy chickens


Can you espy the chicken in this photo?

The new generation of chickens seem to be rowdier and more inquisitive than the previous generation. Sister Josephine, who I thought was rather mousy when she was young, has taken to escaping, daily, from inside the fence. I still have not caught her in the act to see how she does it, but I suspect she’s flying up onto the horizontal members of the fence structure, then hopping up onto the wire, then flying down to the other side.

She strolls some in the yard, but mostly she peeks in the windows, and waits by the door for me to come out with treats. And she seems to enjoy being caught and lectured. I blame this on Ken. He raised them to be willful and rebellious.

La bonne cuisine

If you buy something at the mall, it’s only half a thrill — the thrill of acquisition. If you buy something at a second-hand shop, it’s the full thrill — the thrill of acquisition plus the thrill of the hunt. Because you never know what you’re going to find at a second-hand shop. This week, for $5, I found a classic French cookbook.

I have very few cookbooks anymore. Specialized cookbooks (for example, Beard on Bread), sat on the shelf and were never consulted. There’s only one kind of cookbook that I find truly useful — a complete, encyclopedic cookbook. That’s why the 1943 wartime edition of The Joy of Cooking is my favorite cookbook, used regularly. I may page through it looking for inspiration. Or maybe I have too many eggs on my hands, and I’m trying to think of something new to do with them. Or maybe I want something chocolate, but I’m not sure what.

Though for years I subscribed to Gourmet magazine, I’ve never really been a student of French cooking. I have, however, been a student of the French language, and I read French fluently, though I never claim to speak it. So I was thrilled to come across this copy of Le Livre de la Bonne Cuisine. It’s a classic in France, in many ways analogous to America’s The Joy of Cooking. It’s encyclopedic — 770 recipes, 668 pages, 1,200 photographs. Like The Joy of Cooking, it was largely aimed at diligent new housekeepers who wanted to upgrade their cooking. This is the 1989 edition. It assumes that you don’t know a great deal, so it covers lots of basics, things such as how to clean a chicken, how to slice uncommon vegetables, pastry techniques, what to do with a lobster, or how to filet a fish.

I don’t do a lot of cooking in the summer — just enough to survive. But as soon as the air is cool, so that the heat of the kitchen is comforting rather than oppressive, I cook. This fall and winter, I plan to work on my French cooking skills.

I need to get a kitchen scale, though, and metric measuring vessels. Though French recipes use tablespoons and teaspoons as a measure, liquid ingredients are given in metric measures, and many ingredients, including butter, sugar, and flour, must be weighed. Williams-Sonoma, here I come, for a little mall shopping.

An Amish well bucket


It looks like a rocket, but it’s a well bucket.

If a big storm or other crisis kept the power off for a long time, how would you get water? Everyone should have some containers of water tucked away for relatively short outages, but storage is not a good solution if for some reason the tap stopped working for days as opposed to hours. Those of us with wells are lucky. We have our own water. But we have to get it out of the well.

Some people with water wells solve the problem with electric generators. That will work. They’re expensive, though, and in a seriously long crisis in which the electric grid went down and stayed down, one might also run out of fuel to power a generator.

A cheaper form of insurance is a well bucket. Until a few decades ago, wells were fairly wide, and well buckets were six or eight inches, or more, in diameter. These days, though, modern wells are much smaller in diameter. Lehman’s sells a well bucket that is only 3.5 inches in diameter. It’s 52 inches long and holds 2 gallons of water. They are usually on back-order. They’re made by an Amish gentleman who has a hard time keeping up with the demand.

They’re made from galvanized stove pipe. The design is simple. The only tricky part of making a well bucket is the valve at the bottom. The valve must open and allow water to enter the bucket when the bucket hits the water, but the valve must close when the bucket is lifted. The valve in this bucket appears to be a piece of rubber which is fastened to a shaft that runs the full length of the bucket. The long shaft is a nice touch, because it should keep the valve moving smoothly. Some people also make narrow well buckets out of PVC pipe. Again, the foot valve is the challenge.

I’m stashing a bucket as cheap insurance, along with some rope, a pulley, and other hardware needed to mount a windlass over my well.


The top of the bucket


The bottom of the bucket

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.