Planting pumpkins

I’ve written here previously about the nearby farm where I’m buying most of my summer vegetables this year. They sell the vegetables for $1.50 a pound (mix and match) from the shade of an old barn right beside the fields. You can see in the upper right of the photo that the corn will be ready soon. The crew (they are from Mexico, and they are very good) are planting fall crops — three varieties of pumpkins including what I call pie pumpkins, and sweet potatoes.

I first observed this planting protocol from commercial strawberry fields. The plastic, of course, keeps down the weeds and preserves moisture. A drip irrigation pipe runs under the plastic in each row. The water for these fields is pumped from a pond just below the fields, but rainfall has been good here this summer. The soil look pretty terrible, doesn’t it? But it is typical of the soils in the North Carolina piedmont and foothills — very red. The high white fence is to keep the deer out.

The mountain in the background is part of the Saura mountain chain. It’s the location of Hanging Rock State Park here in Stokes County, maximum elevation about 2,500 feet.

Young lives, ruined by Hitler


Generation War, a German production, 2013

We Americans have seen many movies about World War II, but we probably haven’t seen a movie about how the war looked from a German perspective. Generation War is hard to watch, as the misery and disillusion of the Germans escalate year after awful year. The stories of the five young people in Generation War make it clear that the lies behind the war were as cruel as the war itself, adding existential agony to the physical agony.

The series is in three parts, each about an hour and a half long. The cast is charismatic. It’s a beautiful period piece, shot in Germany, Lithuania, and Latvia.

Generation War can be streamed on Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

The epistemology of derp

Paul Krugman’s column today is about crypto currency, “Crypto Is Crashing. Where Were the Regulators?” But my subject here isn’t crypto currency. Rather, it’s the many, many ways in which people allow themselves to be deceived, and the many, many ways in which people try to deceive us.

As for how people allowed themselves to be deceived about crypto currency, Krugman writes (the italics are mine): “The way I see it, crypto evolved into a sort of postmodern pyramid scheme. The industry lured investors in with a combination of technobabble and libertarian derp.”

That started me thinking about derp. It’s a beautiful word that almost defines itself. Krugman uses the word fairly often, probably because economic derp is so common. But there are many kinds of derp. Our lives are a minefield of derp. If our defenses against derp are weak, then we’re going to get things wrong. When we get things wrong, we are vulnerable to misjudgments that can lead to all sorts of trouble. Did you receive a phishing email and fall for the derp? Oops. There went your bank account. Did you drink bleach during the Covid lockdown? Oops. There went your esophagus, your stomach lining, and half of your intestines.

Epistemology — the philosophy of how we know things, how we discover new things, how we disprove things, and how we correct our errors — is very complex and very well developed. More than once in my life I’ve been accused of wanting to be right, as though that is an insult. Perhaps it’s thought to be an insult because wanting to be right is assumed to be about policing the errors of others. But that’s not it at all. It’s about applying good sense and skepticism to what we allow into our heads. It’s about making good decisions. It’s about not being prey in a world of derp. And yes, whether you want to call it policing or not, it’s also about saying that’s derp when confronted with derp.

I often read books that go over my head and that are more than I can understand. Usually, though, that’s worth the effort, because something can be gleaned. There are three subjects in particular about which I would like to know a great deal more but which are subjects that go over my head: physics, mathematics, and philosophy. The over-my-head book that was most recently on the nightstand is Of Two Minds: The Nature of Inquiry (James Blachowicz, State University of New York Press, 1998). I bought this book a while back because I’d come across references to the book which suggested that Blachowicz delivered a whipping or two to Karl Popper, whom many mongers of the smarter sort of derp take to be the last word in epistemology. I have learned the hard way that when someone is hectoring us with derp and makes a reference to Karl Popper, our derp detectors should light up.

Before, say, the days of cable television in the 1980s, it was fairly expensive to dispense derp. Historically people certainly found ways to do it. Pamphleteering, for example, which was often anonymous, is an important part of American and British history. But few people could afford the printing costs. But we now live in an era in which dispensing derp is nearly cost-free. It was cable television, for example, which brought us television preachers. The derp quickly created a lot of rich preachers. A decade later (1996), cable television brought us Fox News. When derp comes via email, we call it spam. And then came Facebook and all the other low-cost distributors of derp, derp, and more derp.

I think it’s unfortunately true these days that many people — if not most people — just don’t have the ability to defend themselves from derp. Some derp has become so sophisticated that having a Ph.D. is insufficient protection, at least where there are underlying susceptibilities. Some intelligence is required to detect derp, the more intelligence the better. Some education is required, the more the better. But character flaws also make people susceptible to derp — authoritarianism, narcissism, meanness and prejudice of every type, and (it’s a biggy) a craving for religion. Millions of people live in the trifecta of derp: They’re not very smart, they have weak educations, and they’re moral morons. Such people live in an alternate universe of purest derp, with just enough contact with a rational world to get in out of the rain.

I’ve hastily come up with a list of some categories of derp. If you’d like to add to the list, please leave a comment.

• Libertarian derp, with a hat tip to Krugman. There are well-funded think tanks that develop libertarian derp — for example, the Cato Institute. Billionaires and techno-utopians such as Elon Musk use the media to dispense libertarian derp.

• Right-wing derp. We’re utterly inundated with right-wing derp these days. It may be as close as your dinner table. Unless you’re off the grid or something, there is no escaping it.

• Centrist derp. The mainstream media are full of centrist derp. For publications such as The Atlantic, it’s a business model. Here I owe another hat tip to Paul Krugman, who I believe came up with the term “radical centrist.”

• Leftist derp. This is not nearly — not anywhere near — as common as centrist derp would have us believe. But it does exist. Think Glenn Greenwald or Jill Stein, the kind of leftists who are aligned with Russia.

• Religious derp. My personal epistemological view is that all religion is derp. But there are of course many religions and many degrees of religious derpiness.

• Marketing derp.

• Sucker derp. Think spam, phishing scams, pyramid schemes, and anyone who uses any form of derp to raise money.

• Doomer derp. You’d better buy your guns and ammo now to protect your family from the civil war that is going to start any minute. Trans athletes are going to groom our children and bring down the wrath of God on our once-great nation!

• Sentimental derp. Someday you, too, will find true love.

• Techno-utopian derp: Social media will bring us all together! Technology will save the planet! Artificial intelligence will save us from our ignorance! The meta world will be better than the real thing!

• Economic derp. Cutting taxes makes everyone better off and increases government revenue!

• Hero derp. I can’t stand the sight of Elon Musk, but he has millions of fan boys, most of whom, I’m pretty sure, also consume libertarian and techno-utopian derp.

• Distraction derp: Flood the zone with shit! Antifa did it! But her emails!

• Elitist derp: The New Yorker.

Part of the problem is that so many people love their derp. Without derp, their lives would be empty. And yet derp is the very thing that makes their lives so pathetic.

Cigar boxes

Tobacco and “vaping” stores seem to be all over the place these days, but I had never been inside one until today. My mission was to see if the shop would be useful as a drop point for Amazon packages. It’s the nearest Amazon drop point, and I’d like to keep those big Amazon trucks off of the little unpaved road that I live on.

As I looked at their stock, of which there was a lot, it occurred to me that they might have cigar boxes. When I asked, I was shown to a special little room that they call the thermidor room. All their cigars were on shelves in that room. On the floor was a wide stack of empty cigar boxes, all of which were for sale for $5 each. I bought a nice one. Now I wish I had bought more than one.

If the “6×52” on the box means that the box held 52 cigars, then at $7.99 per cigar the cost of the cigars in the box would come to $415.48. I’ve never used tobacco. What a waste of money!

An 18th Century cooking show

Delicious has a remarkable 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It was released in France in 2021 as Délicieux and is now available for streaming at Amazon Prime Video.

It’s set in 1789, just before the Revolution got violent. A duke’s chief cook, humiliated by the duke’s obnoxious dinner guests, leaves the duke’s household and returns to his family home, accompanied by his teen-age son. The place is a shambles. But as the cook recovers from his depression, he begins to cook again. Encouraged by his son and a mysterious visitor, he turns the place into an inn and stagecoach stop. Whether it’s historically accurate or not, the story is a parable about how fine cuisine — and dining out — became available to everyone, not just to a pampered and bored aristocracy.

Not only is Delicious visually beautiful, it’s a highly entertaining comedy.

Squash and walnut fritters


Squash and walnut fritters with pesto

Especially if you have a garden, you’re always looking for ways not to get tired of summer squash. I made squash fritters a few days ago and noted that they were just a bit too mushy. They needed something to give them some extra substance and a better bite. Walnuts worked. The fritters were greatly improved.

Grind the walnuts in a food processor. Grate the squash and some onion. As a binder, I’ve been using potato starch. An egg would work, but using egg as a binder would require an ingredient to offset the liquid. Potato starch works well. Add just enough to get the fritters to hold together before frying. After the potato starch sets in the frying pan, they’ll be fine.

The walnuts somehow made the fritters a bit reminiscent of crab cakes. How you season them would make a big difference. It occurs to me that a little crab, or small shrimp, would work well in squash and walnut fritters, and a little bit of crab would go a long way.

Stories about bad people


From “The Pale Horse” (BBC / Amazon Prime Video). Boring.

Regular readers here know that there are certain kinds of stories that just don’t interest me. The largest category would be stories set in the here and now. But there’s another category as well: stories about bad people.

“The Pale Horse,” from BBC One (2020), now streamable from Amazon Prime Video, is that kind of story. The production is good, and the cast is excellent. It’s a nice period piece. But there is not a single character who is fit to like, with the exception of Clemency Ardingly, who has only a bit part. Even the detective is a bad guy — a bully. The men are jerks. The women are snarky and shallow. The witches glare and always look threatening.

People who are dysfunctional make similarly poor stories. The first example that comes to mind is “Trainspotting.” It was a popular film, but I stopped watching after about five minutes because the characters were so dysfunctional. Dysfunction is not interesting.

A story needs at least one character who is someone we can like. And then as long as there is at least one such character, bring on the villains.

A haul from the farm stand


The vegetable gardens are to the left behind the tractor.

Here in the middle of nowhere where some people consider Dollar General a grocery store, the best thing that has happened in years is the new farm stand. Two years ago, they started with strawberries. This year they expanded to include summer vegetables. Strawberries and vegetables are picked in the morning. The farm stand, which is right beside the fields, opens at 10. They sell all their produce into the local market. People flock in to buy it. By sometime in the afternoon, everything for that day is sold out. The fields are irrigated from a rain-fed farm pond. Vegetables are all $1.50 a pound. The tomato crop should start coming in next week. The produce is not organic, but they promise no pesticides.

The economic model makes so much sense that I don’t understand why it took so long. We have plenty of land here and lots of ponds for irrigation. We have the odd farmer’s market or two, but those are poorly attended, the prices are too high, and with some items such as tomatoes I’m skeptical that the sellers actually grow what they sell. In the past, though most have gone out of business, we used to have produce stands that sold trucked-in commercial produce. The quality was poor, and nothing was ever fresh, partly because it was never refrigerated. A farm stand eliminates all sorts of expenses and impediments to quality. There are no transportation costs and refrigeration costs. When you sell out every day, there is no waste. Everything is fresh. Not only do you meet the farmers, you see the fields. I hope this is a trend that is growing, nationwide.

The farming work here is done by a crew from Mexico, on visas for seasonal farm workers. The farm provides the workers with housing. From the quality of the strawberries, which were perfectly cultivated and perfectly picked back during May, I knew that the summer vegetables would be good, too, because the farm workers know what they are doing, and they work the fields every day. For example, a common mistake in gardening is to pick vegetables such as cucumbers and squash after they’ve gotten a little too big. Late picking increases the weight of the crop, of course. But the vegetables aren’t as good because they start to turn dry and seedy. These vegetables are picked on just the right day for maximum quality in the kitchen.

The blueberries come from a nearby farm. While peaches are in season in South Carolina, they’ve been sending a truck to South Carolina once or twice a week to bring a load of peaches. The peaches, they say, sell out almost immediately. The best peaches in the United States (sorry, California) come from South Carolina and Georgia.

The fall crop will include pumpkins. They assured me that, in addition to those horrid bright-orange pumpkins that people use these days for Halloween, they’ll also have “pie pumpkins.” That’s a huge deal for pumpkin lovers like me. I haven’t had much luck growing them, and besides they need a huge amount of space. For years, it has been difficult to find pie pumpkins in the fall — a terrible cultural failure if there ever was one. Even most country folk these days make pumpkin pies from canned pumpkin. Never in my life have I done that, and I never will.

I still have my garden, but this year I’ve reduced its size, given how much easier it has become to get fresh-picked summer vegetables at a reasonable cost. I’m growing tomatoes, basil, and cucumbers.

If you’re in this area, Manuel Farms in on Stewart Road northwest of Walnut Cove, North Carolina.


My haul, after I got home

First Fiona Hill, now Cassidy Hutchinson

I have written here in the past about Fiona Hill, the Russia expert who worked in the White House and who gave such brilliant testimony during Trump’s second impeachment. Fiona Hill went on to write a beautiful book, There Is Nothing for You Here. Yesterday, during the sixth of the January 6 committee’s televised hearings on the Trump coup attempt, Cassidy Hutchinson gave similarly extraordinary testimony.

Hutchinson is only 25, and as I took note of her perfect poise, her perfect diction, and her unwilting and respectful character when caught in the klieg lights between two hostile centers of political power and between tyranny and justice, I thought about what a privileged background she must have had to find herself as a witness to so much power at such an early age. But I was wrong about the privilege. Rather than a creature of Harvard, as I would have guessed, Hutchinson actually attended a modest public university, Christopher Newport University in Virginia. She is a first-generation college student. Obviously, like Fiona Hill, Cassidy Hutchinson is extremely gifted, and it wasn’t privilege that got her to where she is. We probably will see much more of her in the future, if (a big if) the Republican Party can throw out the Trumpists and choose leaders with integrity. The hearings have shown us that at least a few such Republicans remain.

We still haven’t seen whether the Republican Party has figured out that its only hope is to cut Trump loose and let Trump fall back into hell. Republicans may try to brazen it out until the November election, hoping that they can regain enough power in Congress to throw the country back into Trumpian chaos, and back on the path to theocracy and fascism. And honestly, if the American people choose theocracy and fascism in a fair election, then Americans will have brought on themselves the horror of the years that will surely follow. We must never forget that Trumpist Republicans are a minority, that the party as currently constituted can gain power only by lying and cheating (do we need more proof than what January 6 provided?), and that iron-boot rule by a corrupt minority could never be stable in a country like America. There would be chaos until the majority regained control — Americans who want to live in a democracy under the rule of law, Americans who are better educated, who can distingush truth from lies, who produce most of the country’s wealth, and most important people of character who can see the difference between honorable human beings and lying con men with the maturity of an eight-year-old.

The media coverage of the hearings has been quite good. I haven’t had much to say about it because there’s little I can add. But I do try to connect the dots and look ahead at the probabilities of what might happen next. I’ve been saying for a very long time that Trump will go to prison. I should have said that it will take a while to put him there, but at least now just about everyone can see that Trump is going to prison. Do the leaders of the Republican Party see that now? If they do, how might they change course? And does Trump himself now see that he’s going to prison? Does he have lawyers who are not lunatics like Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman? If he does, then Trump has to know what’s going to happen. He could easily lose his freedom once the first indictments are filed, even before he goes on trial. If I were Trump, I’d gas up the family jet and move to Russia. Since Trump kills everything he touches, Trump’s assistance would be invaluable in helping Putin crash and burn, bringing regime change to Russia.

Yesterday’s hearing added something very important above and beyond the testimony about Trump’s legal liability. That was details that help expose Trump’s infantile character to those who have previously refused to see it — smashed dishes, lunch and ketchup thrown against a White House wall, the enraged attempt to throttle a Secret Service agent, the eagerness for violence in demanding that the rioters be allowed to keep their weapons, the apparent approval of allowing a mob to hang his own vice president. That such a man ever got inside the White House is a stain and a shame that this country will have to bear for as long as there is an America. I take some comfort in knowing that, though we’re still living through the chaos, at least history will have the full story of what happened, thanks to the January 6 committee.

Pity the poor witches


A Facebook meme

The day before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, there were stories in the media about an effort in the Scottish Parliament to pardon the thousands of witches who were burned at the stake in Scotland between between 1563 and 1736.

Earlier this year, Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland, had given a speech in which she said the victims were “accused and killed because they were poor, different, vulnerable or in many cases just because they were women.”

There are some interesting — and I think revealing — elements in the history of witch executions in Scotland. For one, there is evidence that Scotland executed five times as many witches per capita as other parts of Europe. For two, most of the witch-burnings occurred in the Lowlands of Scotland, not in the Highlands. Why might that be?

King James VI of Scotland (1566-1625) considered himself an expert on witchcraft. He wrote a book, Daemonologie. According to Wikipedia, “James personally supervised the torture of women accused of being witches.” Thus it was largely James VI who stirred up the witchcraft hysteria in Scotland. (James VI of Scotland later became James I of England. It is for this monster of a man for whom the King James translation of the Bible is named. They never tell the whole story in church.)

It was in the Lowlands of Scotland (Edinburgh and to the south of Edinburgh) where English-speaking Anglo-Saxons were concentrated, along with — of course — the influence of the church. But the Scottish Highlands remained largely pagan and Gaelic, and thus “witches” were respected — and needed — in the Highlands as wisewomen, herbalists, and healers.

This is yet another example of the moral differences between pagans and the people of the church. Because of the church’s claim to a patent on the moral high ground — one of the greatest frauds of Western civilization — the abiding superior wisdom of the pagans sometimes takes centuries to be acknowledged, which is why the Scottish Parliament is taking up the issue of witchcraft in the year 2022.

Even worse, though, than the church’s lack of moral wisdom — still with us today no less than in 1566 — is its eagerness for persecution and domination, even to the point of genocide. In the past I have written often about early Christianity’s genocides against the pagans of Europe. Canada today, and to a lesser degree the United States, is dealing with the church-state collusion and cruelty toward Native American children in the boarding schools that attempted to strip the children of their native culture — cultural genocide. Many children died in those schools. The Christian religion, like Islam, is a proselytizing religion that believes it has a mandate from God for domination of the world and of everyone in it. There is much we still don’t know about what Christian missionaries have done to powerless poor people all over the world.

There is a straight line, centuries long, from James VI of Scotland to the morally defective church people of today, especially those who are able to acquire and wield the power of the state in the service of their religion. Their purpose, still, is punishment and domination — for example, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett of the U.S. Supreme Court. Anyone who has seen the hatred and depravity flashing in the eyes of Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, or the almost soulless emptiness and stuntedness in the eyes of Amy Coney Barrett, can see that a concern for the unborn is not what motivates them. It is their lust for domination that motivates them. Or, to use Nicola Sturgeon’s words, their hatred for the poor, the different, and the vulnerable.

Much has changed over the centuries as the arc of justice moves on. To say that we don’t burn witches anymore is one of the ways we shed light on the idea of the arc of justice. But the minds of morally defective church people have not changed. They are authoritarians, and they continue to crave the legal right to be the cause of domination and punishment in whatever form they can get it. Donald Trump — their King Donald — emboldened them, empowered them, and let them loose. They are on our backs again. As always, women, children, and anyone who is different will pay most heavily. It remains to be seen how long it will take to throw them off our backs, especially given that the U.S. Constitution is so easily weaponized to block human progress.

My claim here is radical, but I believe it to be true. My claim is that authoritarians are not merely benignly different, with different views about what is good and what is wrong. My claim is that they are morally defective, and that they do vast harm and cause great misery in whatever century they live. They fight against the arc of justice because, in a just world, their lust for domination and persecution is thwarted.


“Visit to the Witch,” Edward Frederick Brewtnall, 1882