Month: June 2011

Know your farmer? Not if she can help it…

There is no creature in the U.S. Congress more vile, more black-hearted, more ignorant, and more determined to horse-whip us all back to the Dark Ages than Virginia Foxx. I am ashamed to say that she represents my district, the 5th District of North Carolina.

She’s always up to no good, in service of corporate greed and pandering to the fears and prejudices of the ignorati. Her most recent deed was to introduce an amendment that would shut down a U.S. Department of Agriculture web site known as the “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative. Though the web site has no real budget to take away, its purpose is to lend a little support to small farmers and local markets. Foxx thinks that’s a bad idea, you see, because she doesn’t want any competition for corporatized, industrialized agriculture. There’s nothing that free-marketers hate more than any attempt by groups of citizens to band together to supply their own needs. Consider, as an example, the right-wing North Carolina legislature’s recent approval of a new statute that would prevent rural communities from setting up their own broadband systems. When groups of citizens dare to “compete with the private sector,” these libertarian types elected with corporate money just pass a law against it.

Tom Philpott blogs about this at Mother Jones.

Foxx is from up near Wilkes County, which is one of the largest producers of factory chickens in the United States. It’s this proximity to factory chicken farms, apparently, which qualified Foxx to sit on the agriculture committee, including a poultry subcommittee.

Here’s a link to the web site Foxx wants to shut down. Foxx does not approve of its mission: Support local farmers, strengthen rural communities, promote healthy eating, protect natural resources.


Where corporate chicken comes from

Rain!

Several times in the last month I’ve watched on radar as storms in the area figured out all sorts of clever ways to miss me. They’d be headed straight at me, then fork into two so that one could miss me to the north, the other to the south. Or a storm would be headed my way, then suddenly peter out a couple of miles away. One storm was so strong and so close that it knocked out my electricity, though I didn’t get a drop of rain.

But last night I was in the nexus of two good-size storms which hit pretty hard, leaving 1.3 inches of rain. This will save an awful lot of growing things. Even some young trees, native species, had started to wilt in the dry heat. There’s a 60 percent chance of rain today and tonight. With luck, maybe more rain will fall.

A meteorologist's roundup of wretched weather


My ever-empty rain gauge

The high temperature here today was 94 degrees. The normal for this date is 86. In the last month, I’ve had half an inch of rain. Lots of things are turning brown. Even the squash are wilting. High temperatures alone wouldn’t be so frightening, if there was rain. It’s the combination of hot and dry that is life-threatening. Crops will grow in hot and wet. Crops won’t grow in hot and dry.

Under these circumstances it’s a depressing time to read this roundup of extreme weather by Jeff Masters at Weather Underground. These are not climate predictions that right-wingers can say are lies. It’s just real, measurable weather, compared with the weather we used to have. Last year, remember, tied with 2005 for the hottest year on record.

From Masters’ post:

“The pace of incredible extreme weather events in the U.S. over the past few months have kept me so busy that I’ve been unable to write-up a retrospective look at the weather events of 2010. But I’ve finally managed to finish, so fasten your seat belts for a tour through the top twenty most remarkable weather events of 2010. At the end, I’ll reflect on what the wild weather events of 2010 and 2011 imply for our future.”

Mobs?


Greece, this week (Der Spiegel)

Yesterday, while browsing for books at Amazon, I came across the title of Ann Coulter’s newest book: Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America.

I have long been a student of propaganda, but reading an Ann Coulter book is farther than I’ll go. Besides, ideologues like Coulter are easy to model because their ideologies are always so black and white, so cut and dried, and so predictable. Look at what the title alone tells us. The authoritarian right-wing mind demonizes what it fears, literally. And it always, always sees a threat.

But insofar as I understand the point Coulter is trying to make from reading a few reviews, she’s actually right — if you’re on the side of authority, the status quo, and ruling elites who won’t allow justice without a fight. As Voltaire said, “The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant supply of the poor.” Voltaire died in 1778 and so did not witness the French revolution, but he understood what the revolution was about. Coulter sees in the French revolution the roots of today’s “liberal mob.” What kind of knots of revisionism she ties herself in to make the American revolution sacred and the French revolution evil must be a thrilling and instructive piece of propaganda production, but I’m still not going to read the book.

In any case, Coulter reveals the deepest fears of the authoritarians who have now nearly completed their takeover of the American democracy. Having bought and captured the institutions of the American democracy, now all they have to fear is the mob.

I’m afraid they’re right.


Selma, Alabama, 1965


Berlin, 1989


Tianenmen Square, 1989


Poland, 1980


White Night, San Francisco, 1979


India, 1931


Kent State, 1970


Kent State

Some thoughts on E-readers


iPad 1, Kindle DX, and, above, my now obsolete Sony Reader

Long have I craved an iPad and an Amazon Kindle. But there were things that the abbey, both house and grounds, needed much more. Luckily a friend in California took pity on me and gave me his iPad 1 and Kindle DX, for the cost of shipping, because he now has an iPad 2 and a newer Kindle. So finally I’ve been able to try these things out and contemplate their possibilities.

While it’s interesting to have a debate about whether printed books are dead, that’s really nothing more than an interesting debating question. What’s important is simply this: All serious readers are going to own electronic readers. Millions of them already do.

The other important point is that the economics of publishing has been radically changed, because the cost of publishing has been greatly reduced. Would I care if Doubleday went out of business? I wouldn’t care at all. I wouldn’t miss them a bit. Good riddance. In spite of the whining of the publishing industry, they no longer add much value. Their distribution channels are no longer important because of Amazon and because so many bookstores are closing. And I don’t buy the argument that they nurtured new authors. To the contrary. They made it impossible for many good authors to break into the market. Those new authors can now afford to publish.

To readers, it means that more books than ever will be published. It will be more difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, but the Internet makes that sifting process easier with mechanisms such as on-line reviews and ratings, or forums for people with particular interests.

The cost of publishing is so low, in fact (and we should have anticipated this) that spam books for the Kindle have now appeared, clogging Amazon’s book lists and making it a headache to shop for books.

The iPad

It’s hard not to love it, but many things are annoying, especially to a computer nerd like me. When you make some things super simple, it’s guaranteed that you will make other things super hard. The iOS operating system, for example, is a multi-tasking operating system. But you can have only one thing running at a time, and that one thing gets the entire screen. But then, what happens when you put away an application? Is it still running in the background and keeping your processor, and your Internet connection, busy? If it is, how do you make the application quit? The answers to those questions are not simple, and getting control over what’s actually running on your iPad is not simple. Nor is it easy to find answers to these questions.

It’s easy to see why the nerd community has made such a big deal out of “jail breaking” these devices. It would be very difficult to use the iPad as a general-purpose computer, thus protecting the market for laptops. Apple wants to keep iPad users contained within their little eco-system.

Apps

I’ve heard all the buzz about apps. It was very clever of Apple to develop the concept of apps, because it has created a huge market with all sorts of niche applications. But 99 percent of apps, as far as I can tell, are junk.

One of the best apps I’ve tried, actually, is the Kindle app for iPad. If you buy a book for Kindle, you can download the book to your iPad at no extra cost. Amazon even tracks what page you’re on in both devices using Amazon’s free wireless pipe. So if yesterday you were reading a book on the Kindle, and today you want to read it on the iPad, you pick up where you left off on the Kindle yesterday.

The Kindle

As almost all the reviewers have said, the Kindle is a better book reader. You can’t have color on the Kindle, or fancy graphics, or video, but you do get very sharp text. I also love the fact that, with every Kindle, you get a wireless connection that Amazon pays for. Not only does this wireless connection let you shop for and download your books, Amazon also lets you use the connection to browse the web (in a somewhat limited browser). You can use the Kindle as a portable email device, free. It’s hard to beat that.

The Kindle is an amazing marriage of tech-savviness and market-savviness.

But if you have to choose between the iPad and the Kindle and can have only one, I’d go for the iPad, then get the Kindle app for the iPad.

eBay’s app for iPad is excellent, by the way, as is the Netflix app — all the movies you can eat on your iPad.

The main problem with reading a book on the iPad is the constant temptation to check your email or browse the web.

Retired? Who’s retired?

Having retired from the publishing business, maybe it was inevitable that I’d get back into it. A few months ago I took on an editing and publishing project as a little sideline — editing and doing the book layout (both print and electronic) for four psychologists who are self-publishing a corporate training manual. The extra income will help me get some projects done here at the abbey. I’ve got ink in my blood, and I’m eager to explore the possibilities of electronic publishing.

What’s involved in electronic publishing? The key application is Adobe InDesign, which is used for print publishing. It’s also the application with the best support for electronic publishing. It can create the ePub documents required for the iPad as well as the document types needed to publish on the Kindle.

What does an abbey-dwelling monk need these days to make, and illuminate, books? An iMac and Adobe InDesign, plus an iPad and a Kindle for testing the finished books. Though since the 1980s I’ve never been without a Macintosh, I’ve wanted the other things for quite some time, and finally I’ve checked them off my list.

June = day lilies


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If I had to pick a favorite flower, it would be the lily. Unless scent is the criterion, in which case I would pick gardenia or lilac. I have several varieties of day lilies, but I need more. The last photo is the common wild lily. It’s what I planted on my steepest bank, because of its hardiness. The others are hybrids.


[Link to high-res]


[Link to high-res]


[Link to high-res]

Never turn your back on a cucumber vine


Three days’ worth, two cucumber vines

Three days ago I picked all the cucumbers. I left no cucumbers over two inches long. I was in no hurry to go back, thinking that the weather was so dry that not much could be happening. But this morning there were oodles of cucumbers, and some of them were even too big to be ideal.

The ability of certain plants to grow and produce in hot, dry weather continues to blow my mind. It’s almost as though the cucurbits — cucumbers, squash, pumpkin, melons — tap into the high humidity, though I know that they don’t actually do that. The key — as was clear in my organic gardening books and as I am now seeing with my own eyes — is to have fertile soil, to plant things well apart, and to keep the weeds down. This is simply old-fashioned gardening the way our grandparents did it. I have had only .3 inch of rain in the last three weeks, which I’ve supplemented with a quick watering with the hose on particularly hot days when the temperature went to 95. These were not deep waterings, but just enough to cool things down, reduce stress, and buy time for rain.

Though the tomatoes seem to crave more moisture than the cucurbits, they are holding their own. Based on what I’ve learned this year, I’ll amend my planting next spring. The brussels sprouts took up a lot of space but never produced, so no more brussels sprouts. The cauliflower was finicky. No more cauliflower. The cabbage and broccoli, at least, earned its space. Next spring I’ll reduce the amount of space allocated to the cabbage family and save the garden space for more cucurbits.