Open Thread

Header: Little Garden Report.

My hickory cane corn plants have survived the first light frost. I have harvested the first three ears to reach hard dry mature seed-replantable maturity. Even if they don’t all make it, at least three have so far. One looks very nice. Another looks pretty nice with the strange and unexpected feature of having two tiny little baby embryo corn ears coming off the vase of the one same shank which is bearing the main ear. I will plant seeds from that one separately just in case this a manifestation of actual genetic potential. Three ears of corn from one leaf-axil would be a pretty neat feature.

I also had planted a few beans of a kind called Cherokee Trail Of Tears. It is a vining pole bean. The two really successful vines have several sub-vines apiece and rambled around over the semi-tall goldenrod plants. Between the two vines I got 120 dry mature pods ( plus some green-bean-stage pods that I picked to eat). At an average of 5 beans per pod, that is 600 small black beans from two plants.

I have straightened the leaning-over end-cap retainer board at the end of a long bed. I dug up a couple of successfully growing Seven Top turnip plants and reset them right next to that board. If it rains tonight as predicted, they may survive in place. The space they have vacated is assigned to plant garlic, if I actually plant any.

I planted 8 small potatoes. I got back one small potato and 27 medium to large-medium potatoes, which is pretty okay for a first time amateur. If they last in storage till next late-spring, I will plant them out to see what happens.

Spitballing here:

Thinking about investing a chunk of change into Dollar General (DG) stock. It’s gone down so, perhaps, a bargain. Buy low; sell high and all that. Running about 3% return and a $.59 dividend. Not terrible even if it stays relatively flat. In 22 it was at $240 but now $77. Looks like plenty of room for growth if economy gets tight. If things boom and it drops to 2% I sell. At 3%/.59 profits will cover brokerage fees in a few moths so no harm; no foul.

Anyone have any thoughts?

For your friends who see moral equivalency in Israel/Palestine:
Howard Zinn- The Poisons of Nationalism
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/4/article/593908/pdf
Israeli Myths & Propaganda. Ilan Pappe
https://youtu.be/sIWvcBzbqVc?si=8I2TxW_rdRGMjpLW

Did I miss something here? Was the world put out that we are all supposed to pretend that industrial civilization is going to continue until we are all driving around in EVs powered by a grid that only uses hydro, solar, and wind power? A world that is bipolar. Though China will be a first among equals. But for some reason no one sent me an email or a letter that this is the line that I should support in order to delay the coming collapse of industrial civilization and the human extinction that will result from that collapse.
I ask because October 2024 was just as warm as October 2023 which does not mean that no warming has occured in the last year because now there is no El Nino effect. The temperature should have been colder overall.
I ask because we all here claim that science is a crucial method for knowing what is going to happen. At least when the scientists are honest and not lying to our faces.
Well engineers have done the calculations and the calculations show that the the earth is absorbing mush more solar radiation than it is releasing back in to outerspace.
There is no reason to be surprised by this finding. The earth’s level of sea ice in both hemispheres is at record low levels. We were warned decades ago that there were many feedback loops that would act as force multipliers for climate change.
Therefore it seems to me that to talk about a future in which China overtakes the Unites States while both of them will be plunging in to pit of molten lava seems to me to be a case of, whats it called, ummm dementia, no that is not quite it, as people with dementia can not remember anything. Old age ummm no it is not old age either. In old age people forget words that they should know.
Ah, I had to google this. Intentionally failing to use information suspected of being relevant and significant is committing the fallacy of suppressed evidence. Well I must say if there was ever a case for surpressing information that is both relevent and significant this would be it. But it would be interesting to know if people are doing this deliberatly or if they think that they are not doing it at all.

No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/no-place-self-pity-no-room-fear/

In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.

Toni Morrison, March 23, 2015

Christmas, the day after, in 2004, following the presidential re-election of George W. Bush.

I am staring out of the window in an extremely dark mood, feeling helpless. Then a friend, a fellow artist, calls to wish me happy holidays. He asks, “How are you?” And instead of “Oh, fine—and you?”, I blurt out the truth: “Not well. Not only am I depressed, I can’t seem to work, to write; it’s as though I am paralyzed, unable to write anything more in the novel I’ve begun. I’ve never felt this way before, but the election….” I am about to explain with further detail when he interrupts, shouting: “No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work—not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!”

I felt foolish the rest of the morning, especially when I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds; who did their work while hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed.

The list—which covers centuries, not just the last one—is long. A short sample will include Paul Robeson, Primo Levi, Ai Weiwei, Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, Dashiell Hammett, Wole Soyinka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lillian Hellman, Salman Rushdie, Herta Müller, Walter Benjamin. An exhaustive list would run into the hundreds.

Dictators and tyrants routinely begin their reigns and sustain their power with the deliberate and calculated destruction of art: the censorship and book-burning of unpoliced prose, the harassment and detention of painters, journalists, poets, playwrights, novelists, essayists. This is the first step of a despot whose instinctive acts of malevolence are not simply mindless or evil; they are also perceptive. Such despots know very well that their strategy of repression will allow the real tools of oppressive power to flourish. Their plan is simple:

1. Select a useful enemy—an “Other”—to convert rage into conflict, even war.

2. Limit or erase the imagination that art provides, as well as the critical thinking of scholars and journalists.

3. Distract with toys, dreams of loot, and themes of superior religion or defiant national pride that enshrine past hurts and humiliations.

The Nation could never have existed or flourished in 1940s Spain, or 2014 Syria, or apartheid South Africa, or 1930s Germany. And the reason is clear. It was born in the United States in 1865, the year of Lincoln’s assassination, when political division was stark and lethal—during, as my friend said, times of dread. But no prince or king or dictator could interfere successfully or forever in a country that seriously prized freedom of the press. This is not to say there weren’t elements that tried censure, but they could not, over the long haul, win. The Nation, with its history of disruptive, probing, intelligent essays sharing wide space equally with art criticism, reviews, poetry and drama, is as crucial now as it has been for 150 years.

In this contemporary world of violent protests, internecine war, cries for food and peace, in which whole desert cities are thrown up to shelter the dispossessed, abandoned, terrified populations running for their lives and the breath of their children, what are we (the so-called civilized) to do?

The solutions gravitate toward military intervention and/or internment—killing or jailing. Any gesture other than those two in this debased political climate is understood to be a sign of weakness. One wonders why the label “weak” has become the ultimate and unforgivable sin. Is it because we have become a nation so frightened of others, itself and its citizens that it does not recognize true weakness: the cowardice in the insistence on guns everywhere, war anywhere? How adult, how manly is it to shoot abortion doctors, schoolchildren, pedestrians, fleeing black teenagers? How strong, how powerful is the feeling of having a murderous weapon in the pocket, on the hip, in the glove compartment of your car? How leaderly is it to threaten war in foreign affairs simply out of habit, manufactured fear or national ego? And how pitiful? Pitiful because we must know, at some level of consciousness, that the source of and reason for our instilled aggression is not only fear. It is also money: the profit motive of the weapons industry, the financial support of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about.

Forcing a nation to use force is easy when the citizenry is rife with discontent, experiencing feelings of a powerlessness that can be easily soothed by violence. And when the political discourse is shredded by an unreason and hatred so deep that vulgar abuse seems normal, disaffection rules. Our debates, for the most part, are examples unworthy of a playground: name-calling, verbal slaps, gossip, giggles, all while the swings and slides of governance remain empty.

For most of the last five centuries, Africa has been understood to be poor, desperately poor, in spite of the fact that it is outrageously rich in oil, gold, diamonds, precious metals, etc. But since those riches do not, in large part, belong to the people who have lived there all their lives, it has remained in the mind of the West worthy of disdain, sorrow and, of course, pillage. We sometimes forget that colonialism was and is war, a war to control and own another country’s resources—meaning money. We may also delude ourselves into thinking that our efforts to “civilize” or “pacify” other countries are not about money. Slavery was always about money: free labor producing money for owners and industries. The contemporary “working poor” and “jobless poor” are like the dormant riches of “darkest colonial Africa”—available for wage theft and property theft, and owned by metastasizing corporations stifling dissident voices.

None of this bodes well for the future. Still, I remember the shout of my friend that day after Christmas: No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.

Toni Morrison – Recipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize, member of The Nation‘s editorial advisory board and author of Love, Beloved, Paradise, Jazz and The Bluest Eye, among other books.

@different clue, as you probably recall Ian ran a weekly survival thread a few years back, and the comments ran into the hundreds, if not ultimately the thousands.
I didn’t contribute, although I have much to say about gardening and food preservation, not to mention food as medicine, food for pleasure, food for life.
In my younger years I tried to spread the word through cooking classes, essays, articles and down on the ground events.
Maybe I reached a Renton housewife or two, or maybe helped some cancer patients to heal through food.
For damn sure I’ve fed more people than I know and made a lot of people happy, even though it all turns to shit in the end.
We’ve got to keep on trying to feed the world good food, nourishing food, same and healthy food.
Speaking literally and metaphorically.
Do good whatever you do.

As far as I know the first warnings that human over population could outstrip the food supply did not come until the 19th century. That was far to late to be of any value.
But what if the warnings would have come in the first century AD. I think that the warnings still would have been to late because every the people of every nation or tribe on earth would have expected everyone else to do something about the problem while they remain free riders. No one would do anything until the consequences became a parent and then it wouid be to late to do anything about the problem. Just like it was with fossil fuels. And even if fossil fuels did not produce greenhouse gases we still would be on the road to a rapid extinction. Because the fossil fuels will run out and then if humans happen to still be around the forests will disappear before people do.

This story is only for entertainment purposes. My post about no one warning about the dangers of over population until the 19th century reminded me of something that happened to me in the summer of 1983.
On this summer evening I was introduced to the wife of a friend and coworker. At some point during the evening the conversation turned to Nostradamus who I had never heard of before. Needless to say I was really shocked that someone born around 1960 could possibly believe in such drivel. So I said well rather than tell me about all of the things that have happened in the past that Nostradamus predicted tell me a pridiction that he makes that will happen in the future. She said that Nostramdamus predicted that the World Trade Center Buildings would collapse before the year 2000 was over. Well I said that is pretty damned convienient. That is so far off that we will probably not even know each other by then and who is going to remember that we had this conversation in about 20 years. I also added that I thought the prediction was absurd as New York was not known for earth quakes and even the strongest hurricane that New York could be subject to would not knock them down. And well if they collapse due a nuclear war no one is going to be left around to care anyways.
But once the WTC did collapse i did remember the conversation. I then started doing research about Nostradamus on my computer. I could not find anything about Nostradamus predicting the fall of the WTC at any time, let alone around the year 2000.
By then I had not had any contact with the couple for many years. But I did manage to find contact information for him. It was not hard in those days. So much information was public and for free. I called him up and asked him if he recalled the conversation that I and his wife had. He told me that he could not remember the conversation. I think that he also told me then that they had divorced. But, that might not have happend yet.
So I thought to myself that there is a 50% chance that the conversation that I remembered never happened or a 50% chance that he was not present when the talk of the WTC towers falling happened.
Maybe this story is boring and stupid. Maybe it is inconcievable that the conversation could have actually happened. But I wonder if there is more to the story than meets the raven’s eye.

I really liked the way that I ended the story. It is like at the beginning of every Fargo story when they say that it is a true story. It makes it seem as if the story, though it may be exagurated is based upon true events.