Month: October 2011

Family heirloom bean seeds

My older sister and I have often lamented that the heirloom seeds that were used for so many years on my mother’s family farm have been lost. But my sister recently discovered that a cousin has been growing green beans from family seed for many years. That cousin sent me some of those seeds. They’ll definitely be used in my garden next year.

My mother grew up on a good-size family farm in the Yadkin Valley, a place that had been in the family at least since the days of my mother’s grandfather, which is as far back as living memories go (my mother will soon be 88). Most of the farmland has been split up and sold off, but a few acres remain in the family.

This farm — which I well remember from my childhood — was highly self-sufficient. It even had its own blacksmith shop. Most of the food was grown and preserved for the winter on the farm. Preserved foods were canned, dried, and fermented. Fermented foods included pickles and sauerkraut. The farm produced its own milk, butter, and ham. There were draft animals for farming (I can remember the mules), though of course tractors came into use later on. The farm could make its own corn meal, but wheat flour was one of the few staples that had to be bought, along with pinto beans. Flour and beans were bought in 50-pound sacks. The farm even made wine and moonshine. I believe the winemaking and distilling had shut down by the time I was a child, though there was a kitchen closet with the scent of wine that I was never permitted to open when I was a child.

My mother’s father took pride in providing for a generous and well-stocked kitchen. And my grandmother’s cooking is still the family standard that I and my siblings and cousins aim for.

Robin Hood


Some of the cast of Robin of Sherwood, the 1980s TV series

The story of Robin Hood is one of the oldest stories in English literature. The references start in the 13th century and never stop, all the way up to our own times.

When “Robin of Sherwood” became a cult television item during the 1980s, I never saw any of them. But they are available on DVD, and Netflix’s system for recommending things recommended it to me, since I have gotten so many BBC series through Netflix.

In a way, Robin Hood is always timely, because the rich are always looking for ways to steal from the poor, and always pervert justice to get away with it. But now, as the Occupy Wall Street era begins (I hope it will be an era), Robin Hood is particularly timely.

Michael Praed as Robin Hood, episode 1:

You were sleeping. You slept too long. We all have… Villages destroyed so that princes can hunt unhindered, the people bled white to pay for foreign wars. No voice. No justice. No England! Well, it’s time to fight back.

Fresh from Liberty Plaza

I believe that today is Day 5 for Ken at Occupy Wall Street. He sent this photo today from Zuccotti Park (which the occupiers call Liberty Plaza). I don’t think Ken has his laptop with him at Liberty Plaza, so not being wired has delayed his ability to post on his blog and process his photos. But I’m hoping he’ll have a proper blog post soon on Occupy Wall Street.

Update: Ken put up a post today on Friday’s march on Harlem.

Anatomy of a boondoggle bailout


The Shearon Harris nuclear plant near Raleigh, North Carolina. It was partly financed with taxpayer debt.

When taxpayer money becomes entangled with private, for-profit ventures, there is one thing you can always be sure of: Profits will be privatized, and costs will be socialized. This $3.7 billion boondoggle is a provincial North Carolina tale, but there are lessons in it for everyone, no matter where you live.

First of all, put on your thinking cap and read this lazy-ass dispatch from an Associated Press Raleigh reporter that appeared in today’s lazy-ass Raleigh News and Observer:

NC lawmakers look at steep power bills, city debt

Keep in mind that I spent my career in the newspaper business, with time in the provinces as well as the big city. This story has all the features of lazy-ass reporting by lazy-ass third-string reporters in lazy-ass backwaters of the MSM such as the Associated Press Raleigh bureau.

You’ve got your obligatory lazy-ass anecdotal “lead” with an emotional hook which is supposed to bring the story home to the reader: This poor woman has a $450 power bill!

You get to the gist of story in paragraph 5: Certain North Carolina towns owe billions in debt, and it seems to have something to do with electricity. What’s going on here?

Then you get the propagandized explanation from sources with undisclosed conflicts of interest. The question of how it came to pass that a bunch of North Carolina towns still owe $3.7 billion in debt for something having to do with electricity is largely left unanswered, except to make the propaganda point that it all had to do with government regulation (what else?) and unforeseeable events such as lower coal prices:

“Things went awry. The Three Mile Island nuclear disaster in Pennsylvania led to new nuclear plant requirements and cost overruns. CP&L’s Shearon Harris plant in Wake County – the eastern agency took a 16 percent share in the plant – ended up costing $3.9 billion, or twice the original estimate. Declining fossil fuel prices and declining inflation exacerbated the risks of the strategy, leading to more borrowing. The debt peaked at $6.5 billion.”

What really happened?

Back in the 1970s, North Carolina power companies wanted to build new generators, including the Shearon Harris nuclear plant. But interest rates were high back then. The country had just been through an energy shortage. There had been lines at gas pumps. Well-off people had installed tanks at home to hoard gasoline. Power company executives had a brilliant idea. The cheapest way to borrow money was with municipal debt. How might private power companies use municipal debt to build power plants? Politicians were happy to cooperate, and 51 towns in North Carolina fell for the plan. The towns would issue 30-year bonds for which the towns’ taxpayers were responsible, and in exchange the towns would be able to count on getting lots of cheap electricity, because they’d be part-owners of the power plants.

This was around 30 years ago, so those old bonds should be paid off by now. But during the 1980s and later, when interest rates were lower, the bonds were refinanced at lower interest rates. The old bonds were retired, and new 30-year bonds were issued. The new bonds won’t be paid off until 2026. The towns did not use all the new bond money to pay off the old bonds. Instead, the towns spent the money on all sorts of other things, including — you guessed it — lower tax rates. Does it sound familiar? Spend borrowed money and let the good times roll!

The Associated Press piece says that debt peaked at $6.5 billion. I assume that figure is accurate. But the Shearon Harris plant’s total cost was $3.9 billion. I know that these cities made other “investments” in power plants, but so far I’ve been unable to figure out where $6.5 billion went. Perhaps some of the $6.5 billion was interest accrued on the original borrowings. I don’t know.

And now, of course, the $3.7 billion in remaining debt greatly exceeds the value of the towns’ investments in power plants. Paying off the bonds is pushing up electric rates in the towns, and the high electric rates have become a drag on economic growth, because businesses move to places with lower rates. The good times are not rolling anymore — unless a bailout can be arranged.

Now North Carolina’s Republican legislature is pondering what to do about this. The proposals all come down to the same thing — making everyone in North Carolina pay for the bonds. It could be done directly, by just shifting responsibility for the bonds to North Carolina taxpayers. Or it could be done indirectly, by making the power companies responsible for the bonds and letting the power companies pay off the bonds with rate increases. If I bet on the outcome, I’d bet on a plan that gives the power companies full ownership of the plants while making all the state’s taxpayers pay for the bonds.

And here’s the lazy-ass reporter’s last paragraph, a quote from the mayor of New Bern:

“We’re not asking for a bailout here,” Bettis said. “We’re asking for a level playing field.”

So this is not only a case study in a public-private boondoggle, it’s also a case study in how lazy-ass newspapers and their lazy-ass reporters help to deceive the many for the benefit of the few.

This boondoggle and this bailout will be like every other boondoggle and bailout after you cut through the propaganda and disguised agendas: The good times roll, for a while, for the few; this leads to a “crisis”; and the many get stuck with the bill.

Guess where Ken is?


Photo from the Gothamist. Can you espy Ken? Solution below…

Ken called from New York yesterday, from Occupy Wall Street. I could barely hear him for the noise in the background, but he wanted to let me know where he was, because he understands how much I’d like to be there myself. He flew to New York from Alaska a few days ago. He was getting ready to go with the group that was to march on Harlem to draw attention to racial profiling. Cornel West was arrested later in the day, but as far as I know, Ken was not among those who were arrested.

I knew that if I searched for photos from the Harlem march long enough this morning, I’d eventually find one with Ken in it. And sure enough I did.

I hardly need to add my commentary to the national hubbub around Occupy Wall Street. I’m glad for that hubbub. It was a long time coming. The New York Times has a predictably lukewarm piece today about how Tea Party sympathizers and Occupy Wall Street sympathizers are angered by comparisons between the two movements, because the two movements see completely different causes for the world’s problems. To Tea Partiers, government is the problem. To OWS’ers, out-of-control banks and corporate capture of government are the problem.

A gazillion words have been written trying to describe the line that separates this polarized country. In my opinion, almost everyone is overlooking the clearest dividing line, which also is the largest part of the cause of the polarization. It’s this: There are those upon whom the corporate and right-wing propaganda works, and there are those who see through it. And that, as I see it, is the real reason that Fox News and other propaganda empires are working overtime to demonize Occupy Wall Street. The Occupy Wall Street movement threatens the fragile system of lies and anti-government, pro-greed, pro-rich propaganda that the right wing has so carefully built over the last 30 years. They thought they could buy the government and make the government serve wealth and corporate power rather than the people, and they thought they could get away with it if they saturated the country with anti-government propaganda. They were wrong.

Update: Ken put up a short post on his blog on Occupy Wall Street.

Resisting Internet snooping


My cellular antenna, pointed at a Verizon tower for Internet service. Apple found my WIFI and its exact location, even though it’s in the boonies, in the darkness of my attic.

The dark side of the Internet is that it is a big machine increasingly optimized for the invasion of privacy. For example, my WIFI router lives in the dark up in my attic, connected to an “air card” and special antenna that connect me to Verizon for Internet access. My WIFI router is in the woods in a sparsely populated rural area, half a mile from a paved road and a good many miles from a Verizon tower. And yet I discovered yesterday, while experimenting with “location services” on my iPad, that Apple knows the exact location of my WIFI router. How can that be, since my iPad 1 does not have GPS, 3G, or any other means of determining its location?

I had to think for a while and do some research before I figured it out. A friend was here recently with an iPhone equipped with GPS. He was unable to get an AT&T cell phone signal from here, but he did connect to my WIFI router. His cell phone, I now realize, knew its exact location from GPS. It also, of course, knew the unique machine address, or “MAC address,” of my WIFI router. Because “location services” was enabled on his iPhone, the iPhone transmitted my WIFI router’s unique identifier and its exact location to Apple’s databases. Google does something similar. Apple’s and Google’s databases know the exact locations of millions of WIFI routers — public and private — all over the world. If you enable “location services” on an iPhone or iPad, you consent to this. Apple has fully “disclosed” it. Google built its database partly by having vehicles drive through the major streets and roadways, sniffing out WIFI signals, capturing the WIFI systems’ unique identifiers, and transmitting the location back to Google’s database.

So Apple has pinned me. I can’t undo it. My only recourse would be to sell my current router so that someone else is pinned with its location and buy a new, virgin WIFI router. Then I’d have to lock down my router, never use “location services,” and forbid my friends and visitors from connecting to my WIFI system. How likely am I to do that? The first thing visitors want to know these days is whether you’ve got WIFI. Guests expect it, along with clean towels and a mud-free driveway.

Still, I try to do everything that is reasonable and practical to prevent my (totally legal and benign) Internet activity from being logged in corporate databases. This kind of data, from all of us who use the Internet, is now routinely logged, cross-referenced with our names and addresses, and sold — more often to other corporations but also to government and investigative agencies.

Your Internet service provider, this very minute, is almost certainly logging all your web browsing. Your ISP knows everything you do on the Internet. This data is almost certainly kept for a long time, maybe forever.

Is there anything you can do about that?

For a good while, I’ve been looking for a trustworthy “virtual private network,” or VPN, provider that will encrypt all my Internet traffic (making it invisible to my ISP, Verizon), while keeping my IP address private. There are many organizations on the Internet that provide this kind of service, but most of them seem to be part of a shady gray market that mostly serves people who are up to no good.

I think I’ve found a VPN provider that is a respectable business, reasonably priced, with service that is good enough not to slow me down when I’m browsing. In fact, there is evidence that this VPN service actually speeds up my browsing, because Verizon is now intercepting its customers web traffic and sending it through “optimization” servers that attempt to reduce the bandwidth that Verizon customers use. Verizon intercepts only traffic on HTTP port 80, so encrypted VPN on other ports bypasses Verizon’s optimization servers. Verizon has disclosed this.

The software system I’m using is OpenVPN, and the company that provides the service is Private Tunnel. I’ve been using this service for a week now. They provide OpenVPN software for both Mac and Windows. On my Mac, the app is robust and transparent. It uses a tiny amount of CPU. I’m very pleased with it so far. I had a couple of questions for Private Tunnel’s tech support, and they got back to me immediately via email. Though this is not spelled out in Private Tunnel’s terms of service document (it ought to be), I am assured by their tech support department that, though they log incoming connections to their servers and keep those logs for a month or two, they do not log your browsing destinations. And because all your traffic is encrypted by the VPN software, your ISP gleans no data about your activity on the Internet, other than the fact that you have an encrypted connection to a Private Tunnel server.

Do you need something like this? You do only if you don’t want corporate America to collect and resell data about your Internet activity. Also, if you use a laptop or notebook at a public WIFI hot spot, this encryption prevents snoopers at that hot spot from intercepting and stealing passwords, etc., from any unencrypted data that you transmit through that hot spot.

New plantings


The red maple

I’m very lucky to have a garden shop a few miles away owned by the county’s former agricultural extension agent. I bought some bargain trees from him that were planted yesterday. The trees (though I didn’t know it when I picked them out) were all trade-show trees from Monrovia nurseries that Michael had bought after a trade show two or three years ago. The trees have been in their pots all that time, waiting for the day when the garden shop would open. The trade-show look had worn off, but the trees were beautiful specimens in good condition, pot bound, and eager to be planted. I got them at a bargain price.

Yesterday Michael and his helper planted a number of new things at the abbey: a red maple as a shade tree, a weeping willow, a conical ligustrum, two kiwis, two figs, and two raspberries.

Ah, toast

One of my motivations for wanting to evolve the abbey bread into French loaves was to make it possible to slice it for toast. If one makes bread every day, then it makes sense to have one warm and fresh for supper and one left over for breakfast.

The Dualit toaster, by the way, is a beautiful toaster, but its working parts are unremittingly aggravating. The “lifter,” instead of coming straight up, comes up at an angle, pressing the toast against the side of the slot and trapping the toast inside the toaster. It completely dumbfounds me how a toaster maker could put so much thought and expense into the exterior design while making the working parts almost useless. It makes me want to put a curse on English engineers. I bought the toaster some years ago at Williams Sonoma. I don’t recommend it, unless they’ve re-engineered the lifter.

This morning the stuck toast started to burn, setting off the smoke alarms and scaring the cat half to death. The toast was nice, though. The burnt edges even add to the provincial flavor. Maybe that’s what those old English designers had in mind?

Fall cookin'

I have a visitor from California, so the abbey kitchen is running at high speed, as it did while Ken was here. This is a green pepper stuffed with rice, cheese, and vegetarian fake sausage; mustard greens; a roasted tomato; turnips seasoned with toasted sesame oil and Greek yogurt; and abbey bread. All the produce came from my garden, except for the tomato, which came a friend’s garden near Asheville.