I’m getting very tired of hearing people mindless repeat that the future is “plant based foods” Or “The future is meat free” or whatever the unholy idiocy they keep spouting.
The idiots who are spilling milk in the UK grocery stores — thereby of course, raising the demand for milk, because people still have to feed their kids! — the idiots who sit in front of shelves blocking access to milk — yeah, I note that it only happens in places where people are too civilized to get three strong guys to come, lift them and toss them out of the store with enough force to make it hurt — and the idiots who assemble at DAVOS to plan how to stop animal husbandry are all of a piece: idiots.
They’re the kind of lack brain who might own farms, but has no clue how agriculture, let alone raising animals actually works. The kind of mental midget who accepts numbers — population numbers, in this case — from the UN and never asks how those are gathered, or how the interests of the people gathering them run. I mean, do they wish to report high population or low population? Because you know there is a reason to go through the effort of reporting something.
Also, and by the way, there is no way that South Elbonia, who consists of a few farmers, two large cities in a state of war, and the rest more or less nomadic pastoralists, and whose GDP consists of painted clogs and three buckets of rice (that can be tracked. I mean, obviously the people have more, but they sure as heck aren’t volunteering to pay taxes on it) and whose officials get rich only one contributions from the IMF (“Loans” no one ever expects to be paid back) is able to count their population. Even if they wanted to. And FYI no they don’t want to. They want to report an explosive population increase, because that’s the way they get more money (per capita) to feed all those non-existent people, but really to make the president for life and his cronies very rich.
Look at these numbers from the UN and you see the problem of population predictions very clearly: Take this UN-number-based nonsense.
You don’t have to be my younger son, who can’t look at numbers that don’t add up without feeling pain and starting to growl out all the ways in which they don’t add up. You can poke around and see all the supposed “births” are in countries that are net recipients of aid.
More importantly you can poke around and realize we have — even with their numbers — a massive dearth of women in child bearing ages worldwide. So they expect the population to continue increasing…. because they expect non-existent women to give birth.
Beyond all that if we are anywhere near six billion — let alone eight — I’ll eat my hat without salt and pepper. The big floppy straw hat I use while gardening. Why? Well, because it’s not just the fact that developing countries make up numbers out of the clear blue sky. “There are three farms within walking distance of here, and each of the farmers has 10 children. That’s three farms in two miles. How many square miles does the country have? Obviously we multiply that by three farms every two miles, and number of families with ten kids.” (And I’m being generous. It’s not nearly that scientific. It’s more “How many people did we report last year? How may do we need to get more millions to steal? Okay. Let’s add that many.” It’s also the fact that countries immigrants come from continue counting them as living there, and often collecting payments for them as unemployed. Ask me how I know that. Come on, ask me. And take in account this was standard operation procedure in Portugal, which was always almost first world. Imagine what goes on in Mexico, in Costa Rica, in Brazil or in the depths of Africa.
I repeat if we’re anywhere near six billion and you can prove it to me, I’ll eat my hat. Twice. Without salt or pepper.
And note that however many we are, the only famines happen due to explosive government stupidity. Every time, in the last hundred and fifty years or so, that any place in the world was starving, it was because government corruptocrats had come up with something special. They were either intentionally starving a sub-population, or they’d become enamored of some “brilliant” intellectual notion, like Marxism, and thereby redistributed land or the like, and sent their farmers to the desert, killing everyone with hunger.
The “green” delusion is a new way to accomplish this, but a very effective one, to look at Sri Lanka.
And it all starts with twin lies.
The first is overpopulation, stretching exponentially, until the universe is entirely composed of humans, not choking in vacuum because there’s no space for vacuum. There’s only humans.
The second is that any hunger in the world is due to our not producing enough food to feed the EXPLODING human population. — Which of course, makes perfect sense, since we don’t know how to grow wheat in vacuum — and therefore we need to optimize our ability to feed everyone, not by creating the most calorie-dense food possible, but by feeding everyone the bare minimum to stay alive and make more humans. Or something.
It is in fact Malthus’ old stupidity, almost instantly disproven, that human population would grow and grow and grow regardless of incentives. Like a total berk, having seen population in his time explode (largely due to reduced child mortality) he never considered that human beings, like every living thing on Earth, respond to stimulus, and decided women would continue to spend all their lives pregnant, when they would raise every one of the 14 or 15 kids, instead of — with luck — one or two to look after them in their old age. Because idiot. And fastening on one aspect of something, without realizing that there were more variables. He also didn’t take in account that humans figure out ways to produce more food when such is needed. No. He assumed two factors were all that mattered and would remain the same world without end. If he were alive today he’d be a climate “scientist” proving that we’re already all burned in our shell and have been for twenty five years, and ignoring everything to the contrary, including the fact we’re obviously not all dead. But then again, he probably would also be running the British models that said that Covid would have a close mortality to the Black Plague, with numbers pulled entirely from their posterior.
Anyway, all it boils down to is lies about people: that people are mindlessly reproducing automatons, and lies about food.
Not just that food is scarce, but also a bizarre idea that could only take hold in minds that have never been near anywhere that food is produced. As I said, I don’t fully understand how Bill Gates can own farms and not understand this. But I suspect he has gotten reports, and looked at them, and not correlated them with anything else.
I suspect they read Diet For A Small Planet and BELIEVED it credulously, with closed eyes and open mouths. (And the idea that created that execrable book had been in the air amid the hippies, I suspect because most of them hated the idea of killing moo cows and bah lambs and were looking for an excuse not to. I have some vegetarian cookbooks printed in that era. They’re great for lent and side dishes. But the idiots bought the idea that plant based food was good for us, or something.)
The whole thesis of Diet For A Small Planet was that we’d need to go to all plant-based food, because we couldn’t afford to raise cows on acres that could produce rice and wheat. Because we’d need every handful of wheat to feed our EXPLODING population. I mean Paul Ehrlich, a man who has never been right, ever, and yet gets paid money for his prognostications, did say we’d all starve by the eighties. Or was it the seventies?
Anyway, I remember reading Diet For A Small Planet standing up at a Walden books (I was waiting for my job at a mall store to start, so–) and snorting loudly enough for everyone to turn to me. Because it was painfully obvious that no one who wrote that book had any clue how food grew. They vaguely thought that food grew “Out there” where it was rural and backwards and stuff, but nothing more than that.
To explain: Animal husbandry takes place in a completely different area than grain production. In the US, but also in Europe, the land that cattle pastures in is land that is almost universally not good enough to grow … well, much of anything on. In fact, having cattle pasture somewhere is a good way — over time — to improve the land for agriculture. There might be a reason our ancestors were pastoralists before they were agriculturists.
However, the idiots deciding that bugs are better protein don’t know that. They think (And granted it happens somewhat, in factory-farms, but even then what the cattle eats is not what is sold for humans to eat) that cows eat the same wheat that could go to feed ‘the starving.’ And they think that cattle takes up amounts of land that could better be used to grow wheat or rice.
There is a name for these people. “Simple.” And that’s the polite word, and we used to put them in homes where they couldn’t hurt themselves, not in places of power where they could hurt everyone.
All their contortions, their railing against cow farts, and screaming about nitrogen, and their insistence you eat the bugs (which take up less space than cows per cubic foot, see) is all based on this idiocy.
The population is EXPLODING. If it hasn’t exploded on your block, it must be because you’re keeping all your neighbors in separate containers so they can’t reproduce wildly, or something. And the food production of the world is maxed out, and people are already staaaaaaarving.
This is bolstered by things like the fact they’re importing people from the rest of the world as fast as they can, and they all live in cities so they think “The cities are growing exponentially. We’ve got EXPLODING population.” (This is bs. The US has almost only grown by importing people for the last 40 years — yes, including me — and those people are coming from countries that are not overpopulated, and in fact often have a dearth of young people and are turning into vast old age homes. And keep in mind that even in Europe, they’re importing from the third world as fast as they can. AND they’re still vast old age homes with borders. Also, even with those massive imports, our cities are now dying. And our countryside was always mostly depopulated. It would help if these idiots drove coast to coast instead of flying.)
So, they want to use every possible space to grow food. And bugs are better than cows, because (though they eat way more) we can stack them to grow them.
Lies kill. The lie that population is too high or that people are starving from lack of food, not excess government is creating other lies, including the idea we need to grow low-nutrition food everywhere, and forego the dense food that can eat brush and turn it into high calories to feed multitudes. Including the idea that bugs, one of the most voratious forms of life is better for those high-density calories than cows. Including the idea that if you make the West poor everyone else will be rich.
Malthus’ lies and Marx’s lies had offspring, and it is hideous to behold, as though it had come from the pit of hell.
Lies kill. And we need to fight them, every day of our life every way we can.
The more centralized government, the more a single lie can take hold of it — being only a handful of similarly-indoctrinated brains — and kill millions.
It’s time to stop centralized governments, centralized news, and centralized information. It’s time to stop the indoctrination factories that colleges have turned in two.
It’s time to stand on our own two feet, and with that human inventiveness that bedevils the mentally-slow one-factor or two-factor only prognosticators, make mockery of their predictions and confound all their directives.
Steak is delicious and cows can turn spiny oak brush into it. Chicken is a great way to turn bugs into food. Milk has allowed humans to prosper for the last 10000 years.
We will survive the idiocy — we’re already in the process of fighting back — as we survived the EXPLODING humans and lack of food before: by working around it.
If I weren’t allergic to chickens, we’d already have a coop. I’m not going to suggest you do what Portuguese do and use extra parking spaces for goat pens (though it might come to that) but if you can grow anything, even a balcony garden might help (Go for beans or other dense food.) And if you have a plot of land… well, in America even upscale suburbs have chickens now, and even the saner HOAs are turning a blind eye.
Grow your own as much as you can, and support your local farmers.
And laugh in the face of those who want you to starve or eat bugs. And ask them where the women to bear that massive population increase they predict are coming from.
Because barring aliens coming to earth to have babies with us, we’re in for a population crash. Which brings food production and distribution of a whole different kind, because non-existent people also don’t farm, or drive trucks.
So, prepare. This one is going to hurt like a mother.
But in the end we win, they lose. And humans will grow and multiply again. And eventually we will get to the stars and away from the centralized idiocy that would kill us all. Probably by our grand kids time.
Sursum Corda. Be not afraid.
According To Hoyt 
Just trash being the trash they are. They DO need thrown out on their heads to try to knock some sense into their thick skulls. BTW, where are the police on this???
Too busy getting paid by the people who think the rest of us should all be eating bugs.
I do hope nobody tries blocking me from buying groceries for my family, because I won’t be blocked…and I don’t anticipate the police thanking me for doing their job.
Ditto.
it ain’t really the police being paid by but the Prosecutors and their bosses being paid over and above to get their power, that is doing the damage.
Yeah, some knobs block the milk here and even if I am not buying milk products, I’m dragging them away by the hair, ears, or nose.
I believe I’d drag them by something a bit lower. Be sure to use gloves.
With a good solid grip, of course?
Naturally. Wouldn’t want them to get away…:-)
They often don’t have anything lower.
🙂 Point…
I still think the bug thing is mostly a humiliation ritual. “Look we made the peasants eat bugs! Another steak?”
I think that just about nails it.
All food is plant based. As my son says, veggies is what my food eats.
Or, as somebody else has said, “Yes, this hamburger is plant-based. It came from a meat processing plant.”
And the input to the meat processing plant was a plant processing plant. 🙂
Nothing beats a big chunk of processed grass grilled to perfection and smothered in mushrooms.
Don’t forget, chocolate is a vegetable. So is beer! 😀
“Ranchers raise grass. Cattle are how the monetize the grass.”
Solar powered, too.
Along with all forms of energy except nuclear fission — that’s star powered.
There is meme (which I don’t have to hoof atm) that is an image of several Venus Fly Traps and the text is ‘Dear Vegans, even plants think you are wrong.’
And what do plants absolutely require for healthy growth?
A sufficient concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
And what component of the atmosphere are the Greenies desperately trying to eradicate?
Well duh!
If you reduce the level of atmospheric carbon enough, you really could “kill” the planet, as far as its ability to sustain plant and animal life as we know it. We’re not capable of doing that, but the trend on a geologic timescale has actually been heading in that direction.
Many organisms have evolved to sequester carbon, locking vast amounts of this lifegiving molecule away in the earth, until in the Holocene era (our own era of geologic time), the percentage of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere reached the lowest it has ever been since the advent of plant life 500 million years ago. The planet is a carbon-poor desert in comparison to its former green abundance.
And yet, here in the Holocene, there has arisen the only species Earth has ever seen that is capable of liberating carbon in mass quantities that might…maybe…reverse the great geological sequestration. If you take the long view, humans aren’t ruining the planet — we’re restoring balance.
Too many people
OR
Demographic collapse
Can’t be both.
It’s demographic collapse
Look at the school enrollment numbers in the US. Even allowing for relocations, homeschooling, and private/parochial schools (enrollment tracked there), a lot of kids vanished. Especially in the big cities. How many were phantoms, padding on the books to get money from the DoEd, DoAg (school lunches) and other agencies and charities? Combine that with the demographics we can all see with our eyes, and surprise, there are fewer kids and a lower population. And that’s in the US, which is semi-demi honest about population stats.
Cough Apportionment cough.
All the shortfalls are big blue.
I haven’t double-checked the stats, but I don’t remember seeing a big drop in school enrollment during la grande salidad or however it’s spelled, but I sure as heck did notice the sudden dramatic drop of Spanish speaking families, or even just workers.
Now there’s an uptick, but still nowhere like how it was…and the enrollment numbers are dropping? Part of that here is the shift from city schools, but…
La Grand Salida. And yes.
Many years ago I was working customer service for a company that did benefits administration.
A man called in, furious that his children’s vet bills were not being paid. Yes, you read that right. Vet bills.
He had three children listed, all with his last name, birth dates and ssn’s.
I advised him not to push it. Better paying a few vet bills than to deal with tax fraud, insurance fraud, and social security fraud.
I can’t help wondering how many of those missing kids aren’t actually kids at all. How many “parents” needed a tax write-off or something similar?
When they started requiring SSN to claim dependents, something like 10% of the children vanished.
It’s definitely demographic collapse, Potentially the biggest one since the Black Death, not the world wars, the Black Death. It’s that bad.
That’s done using the official UN numbers. They’re mostly lies, but as long as the lies are consistent, it doesn’t actually matter so much that they’re lies.
It’s the big thing that Zeihan focuses on as the trigger. There’s a lot of stuff that he believes will follow (including, he’s convinced, the US Navy pulling back to merely enforcing the Monroe Doctrine; and wont’ that be a treat…) that will likely lead to subsequent nastiness throughout the world. But the demographic collapse is what he points to as the trigger event.
And simultaneously overpopulation, to listen to some people . . .
Both is correct.
The goal is around 500 million manageable serf population. Thus “demographic collapse” neatly aligns with “too many”.
Yes, they really do intend to reduce humanity by 5-ish billion. They intend to exceed Mao by about two orders of magnitude.
Thanos only wanted half of us dead.
Compared to Soros’ desires Thanos was a piker. Hell Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot etc back in time all piled together were pikers. That’s like a 90% reduction they want.
they don’t get what they want.
“We win, they lose”
But the question becomes “How much damage can they do on the way out?”
Not an academic question for me: I live by the Ohio River.
A lot. That’s already baked in
At this point, they’re comic supervillains without the cool costumes and charisma.
Does art imitate life or vice versa?
Yes.
They’ve already done a lot. Seen video of San Francisco lately? Same thing in Toronto now. Same glidepath as Chicago and Detroit.
Drug addicts used as a weapon against the public by the government. Because Whitey deserves to suffer, or something.
Is it simply a continual effort to provoke some act the PTB can frame as, “right-wing sedition,” so they can declare martial law? I’m beginning g to wonder.
I’m beginning to wonder too, because the current Federal government here in Canada was apparently installed by Communist China. I’m not kidding, they actually did it according to Canadian Lamestream Media outlet the Globe & Mail.
So now that Chinese election rigging has been -admitted- by the Shiny Pony, out of his own mouth, we can look at current events in Canada under a new light.
It’s enemy action.
The only thing that makes a lick of sense, when you look at what they’re doing, is if you accept that the people controlling the government are trying to actively weaken the country, impoverish the citizens, and devalue everything in preparation for a hostile take over.
Now, I can’t prove that’s what is going on. But if you look at the amount of money China spends in Canada and the USA buying the cooperation of universities, you have to wonder what they bought with that money. And the answer is Critical Race Theory, which leads in a straight line to thousands of drug users crapping on the sidewalk because the cops aren’t allowed to arrest them and there’s no mental hospitals for them. Kapow.
You could maybe sell something like that if it happened in Salt Lake City (though its reputation is far more conservative than it actually is these days).
In San Francisco? Who would believe it?
If Salt Lake were as conservative as the left thinks it is, they wouldn’t be earthquake proofing the temple there.
Sorry, as a Salt Laker, and yes, the city proper has become extremely liberal and permissive, and is doubling down on it.
What does seismic enforcement under the historic Salt Lake Temple have to do with a lack of conservatism? I mean they are trying to ensure it survives the long overdue big earthquake.
denver. My beloved Denver.
Your beloved Denver no longer exists except in your memories. Same with my beloved Oregon.
Let’s give Sarah some bendryl(R).
Bring on the coup!
}:-)
Dude. I wrote this uncaffinated
Get Sarah some Benadryl(R).
Bring on the coup!
}:-)
WPDE!
I read that as
Double U Pee Dee Eeeeeee!
( like a radio station callsign)
Keith Olberman (I know, but he won’t go away) was out last week announcing it’s time for blue states to “crush,” and “dominate,” the “death states,” by denying them food. No, really. He seems to think blue cities have replicators and that’s where food comes from.
I see this nonsense on my Twitter feed, from city folk who think of COURSE long-haul truckers and rail workers will be 100% good with “starving out the ignorant red state yokels on command.”
And in other news, Biden decided to spend part of Presidents’ Day in Ukraine, promising to send more military aid.
(Head placed slowly on desk, plus sigh.).
Olberman strikes me as one of the maroons who think that food is created in The Back (capitalization deliberate) of The Supermarket. Can’t tell you how many of my customers (4 years in a supermarket) were convinced that The Back was a TARDIS-like zone full of pre-made food and/or all of the ingredients needed to easily make them. And likewise, that the steaks in the meat counter and salmon fillets in seafood were grown in vats in The Back like on the scifi TV show they watched last week.
People. Are. Idiots. But it’s not their fault, since schools have, for the past few decades, been teaching exactly two things: Jack and Sh*t, and Jack left town.
Sufficiently advanced idiots are aware that food comes from trucks.
You’re right, they don’t know Jack Schitt. 😛
Food doesn’t grow on trees, you know.
“It’s really amazing how cheap corn syrup is, having to tap all them stalks…”
They all are. Remember Mike Bloomberg’s idiotic statement about how growing crops was easy during his brief run for the Democratic Party nomination. He showed he has zero understanding of how crops are grown or farms actually work as he demanded the power to dictate what food can be produced and consumed. He was super condescending about it to. In other words, a typical Democrat.
“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
I often get the impression that Clarkson’s Farm was created specifically to refute things like Bloomberg’s idiotic statement.
Just need a few more train “accidents” and food processing plant mishaps. Sure, the former doesn’t exactly square with going green, but take the long view: in a few generations the toxins will work themselves out, and think of the damage done to the human infestation in the meantime! In treating the cancer of humanity, sometimes Gaia must endure some chemo damage.
And in the meantime, there’s vertical farming, cloned “meat” and Soylent green.
Dear God these people are supervillains.
Supervillains are intelligent, if warped. These idiots forego the “intelligent” part.
Half agree, half disagree. No one’s going to say Soros and Gates and the like are lacking brainpower. The rank and file have their deficiencies, but what they lack there, they make up for in obedience and fanaticism, and they were certainly organized enough to get their puppet installed in the city of whitewashed tombs that is DC, and to build sufficient organizational ‘flood controls’ to stymie any red wave.
To paraphrase one of Dave Cullen’s vids: Don’t confuse the incompetence of the BMV with incompetence of getting and keeping power. They prioritize one, not the other.
OK. But intelligence implies an ability to analyze the past and project the future based on that past, something these idiot do not exhibit.
(Red stater laughs)
“Your terms are acceptable. Ready?”
“We have all the money!”
“And how much protein does your money contain?”
Yup. I’ve never seen a quarter casserole
I have. It’s when the potluck queue is about half way done.
It’s tough to chew, but at least it isn’t stringy.
Needs a bit more emphasis.
Cattle can eat wheat, but that is /not/ what they are fed on, by and large.
The folks who ‘monoculture is the eviluz’ and ‘animals are a waste’ are hypocrites or ignorant or insane.
We have terrain that with local weather is optimal for wheat, rice, or corn by such and such technique.
Then we have all the other terrain. Which is still arable, but you will not get as high a yield of the things that generalist eaters like humans get much nutrition from. So, grow other stuff, and feed that to animals.
You have a very diversified mixture of crops, both human edible, and human inedible, and this is a hedge against risks of one or more failing during a year or period of years.
no-meat-ism is vandalism, and sabotage of a fundamental pillar of human society.
‘keep animals as well as competing humans from screwing with our crop’ is very fundamental principle for both peaceful human societies, and for human civilizations.
Norman Borlaug very nearly created a post-scarcity situation where food is concerned. Despite appealing to post-scarcity all of the time, the communists actually hate it, because scarcity is a form of leverage that can be used as a way to hurt people. Inventing the current ‘climate change’ scheme was the communist answer to Norman Borlaug.
These people are vermin.
They are also children of God, who tells us to preach to them, to turn them from evil, and towards Christ.
People can eat corn. Specifically, we can eat the corn kernels, which yield 4 to 6 ounces of food per corn plant.
Well, okay, we could eat the leaves, stalk and corncob, but we can’t digest them. All the food value for humans in in those 4 to 6 ounces of corn kernels.
Cows can digest the entire corn plant, all 5 or 6 pounds of it, and convert that into milk and meat. Cows can digest hay and other plant materials that are useless to humans, and grow in places corn, wheat and oats won’t grow. They also produce large quantities of organic fertilizer.
So do the no-meat-ists. 😛
———————————
Deja Moo — that funny feeling you get sometimes, that you’ve heard the same bullshit before.
I remember my father telling me about pea silage. They put the pea vines and roots into a silo, to let it rot for a little bit. Once it is sufficiently broken down, it gets fed to the cows, who love it.
He said the milk that came from these cows would be extremely heavy on the cream.
Thus, something indigestible to humans, from which they had already harvested the peas, was then able to make more food, rather than just being plowed under or mulched.
This is all part of a complicated, long standing system of food production, and is far more complicated and involved than any politician can appreciate.
Can vouch. Pea silage is one of the more disgusting things you’re ever likely to encounter, but the cows fricking love it. (Just make sure to cut it with feed that’s dry. Sopping black muck is too rich to be processed by itself.)
Now, in a traditional crop rotation scheme, you’ll be growing fodder (Like alfalfa or clover) on any given piece of land every third year to replenish the soil. Be a shame to waste it.
I thought the modern crop rotation cycle had 4 parts, not 3?
You can also turn cattle and some other animals out on harvested (as in chopped off) corn fields to clean them up, which can also work as finishing before slaughter.
I say we make them eat salads from the wheat and corn stalks typically fed to the dairy cows and beef cattle etc, and they don’t get the corns we use for bread, succotash, oils, etc.
Do not get me started on growing corn (maize) out here for ethanol. For feed, human and livestock? Maybe. But wasting all that irrigation water on something to reduce gas mileage . . . [long string of rude words in three languages]. This is winter-wheat country, sorghum, teff, and other dry-land crops. Not corn.
This! Corn can be grown in Flyover County (just above the Cali border, east of the Cascades), but usually in
smalltiny plots. The biggest field of corn I’ve seen here might be a quarter acre, and I’m reasonably sure that those end up as tortillas. (Proximity to the farm HQ building is a strong clue…) And it’s dependent on the micro climate. (Recalls the knee-high corn I got one year. Missed the mid-90s warm spell.)Barley can be grown in spots, and it’s a valid cash crop, but much of the farmland is used for pasture and/or hay. (Some of the smaller operations will have cattle in the hay fields.)
Potatoes are also a big crop down in the reclaimed areas of Flyover Basin, where the Lower Klamath Lake was turned into farmable soil about 100 years ago.
The first time I ever visited the Midwest states was a big eye opener to me– the sight of actual corn fields, and corn, corn, corn, soy, corn etc. for miles was strange to me, coming from the high basin country.
Yes, a fair amount of potatoes can be grown, though the drought has murderous on the quantity & quality of local spuds. One operation rotates a lot, potatoes, strawberries, and probably barley. Some kind of grain, if memory serves, used for fodder. OTOH, they’ve been concentrating on strawberry plants, shipped south (Watsonville, CA and the Santa Theresa Valley near San Jose) to grow the fruit. That operation’s area tends to run fairly warm, with Flyover County being microclimate central. Sometimes nanoclimate; a quarter mile and 50 feet of elevation has made a huge difference with plants from the same batch.
And hops in the Willamette valley . . .
I’m more-or-less ignorant of crop potential Westside. (Fruit in the Rogue area and coastal, beyond that, I know nuthin’.) OTOH, it’s low elevation, not necessarily all that different from other places I know, if you squint. 🙂
I never saw hops in the Willamette valley when I lived in Albany (early 60s). Saw a lot of it in Idaho passing through.
Hops were there when I was living in (actually, more like based out of) McMinnville, late ’80’s – late ’90s.
I didn’t get to that area.
I don’t even like growing ethanol corn where you don’t need to irrigate…. If they really thought that we needed to feed the world, wouldn’t it make more sense to USE THAT TO GROW FOOD?!?
And yes, even the low quality land could be used for silage– as can the soy bean rotation. Good protein for animal feed.
In fairness corn grown to produce ethanol gets turned into mash, fermented, the alcohol extracted, then what remains is something called DDG, or Distiller Dried Grain. Cows and hogs love the stuff. Not to mention that the rest of the corn plant becomes silage.
Biggest problem with the whole ethanol scam is that it is based on the false premise that petroleum was running out, something that was proven false in the Trump administration and reinstalled by executive order Biden’s first few days in office.
The byproducts are used, yes– although I’m pretty sure the stalks can’t be made into silage, that’s being picky about it not fermenting so it’s not sileage, not it not being fed to the cattle.
At least here, the corn gets dry before they harvest it for ethanol.
Since the leftovers from fermentation are noted as being good feed additives, I’d guess that the corn stalk bails get mixed with it. Which is kind of like sileage, but it wouldn’t give the stalks time to break down and make that protein as accessible.
Biggest problem with the whole ethanol scam is that it is based on the false premise that petroleum was running out, something that was proven false in the Trump administration and reinstalled by executive order Biden’s first few days in office.
I wasn’t looking at THE biggest problem with ethanol for fuel– spoiled for choices, there!– I was looking at it in an ‘answer the fool according to his folly’ direction.
Seriously, OK, fine; the world is starving, or about to. Why are you burning a third of the American corn crop, then!?!?
This requires music videos!
(to be followed by a more educational version)
“…hypocrites or ignorant or insane.”
Embrace the power of “and”.
And I suspect Christ might give us a “pass” on that. Trying to turn them in His direction would be akin to paddling the Queen Mary with a pitchfork; lots of effort for zero effect.
I’ve thought about getting chickens, but the problem is that having had to care for chickens as a lad, I now hate them. Not their eggs and meat, which are delicious…I hate THEM. Filthy, disease-ridden, beady-eyed little psychopaths, every one of them. They deserve to die. Not sure I could make myself care for them or about them, even if it meant a steady stream of low-cost eggs.
Ditto.
Every time I eat a chicken salad sandwich, I consider it a delayed comeuppance for the chickens I had to care for in my youth.
After all, revenge is a dish best eaten cold . . .
😄
My sentiments exactly.
My mother always felt the same – she hated chickens, since my grandmother kept them during the depression and WWII, and Mom had to help take care of them. Even when she and Dad had extensive vegetable gardens, and a small orchard – no chickens.
OTO, my daughter and I have kept them, and will have more in the spring.
I grew up on a farm, and we had chickens for eggs and meat. When I was little, my daddy made me a toy helicopter – it was a dried corn cob, with three chicken feathers shoved into a hole in one end. You threw it up in the air, and it autorotated down. GREAT fun. Of course, the feathers would wear out and need replacing. When I would open the coop door, the squawking was terrific, because…those chickens HATED to see me coming…
We’ve thought about it, and I fenced off a run for a coop, but Kat the dog has strong feelings about feathered intruders on her land. If she can see it, she thinks it’s hers. She’ll grow up, eventually. So for the next few years, it’s a dog run.
OTOH, our neighbors grow some plants we can’t, and one has several chickens. We have a better tomato crop because greenhouse, so there’s room for barter.
What do you expect from tiny dinosaurs?
You describe my youth. I hated going out to “get the eggs” so much. Hated, as in feared, dreaded, despised, actively resisted…etc.
I would have to be seriously starving to even consider a coop. I don’t even eat chickens or their eggs.
I hate deer too because they eat my lettuces. But they are delicious. So I fence them out and let hunters around me turn them into jerky and burgers. Then I trade for herbs and veggies.
Love pork and beef though. Don’t have the acreage for them so I have to buy. Worth it though.
Chickens can die in a fire though. Don’t care.
We already have five new chicks right now. Mom said with the price of eggs being what it is, we should get them early.
Dimple solution. Raise meat birds.
You reminded me of something I wrote on a similar topic related to fiction:
“Now consider the accidents, diseases, and other events which will inevitably occur during a given person’s lifetime. In the United States, thousands of people die of everything from car accidents to lightning strikes to the flu annually. Add to this the number of people who are murdered, electrocuted, killed by wild animals, drowned, die in natural disasters, or are otherwise removed from this life, and that idyllic model of Mom, Dad, Junior, and little Jane starts to look less like an assurance and more like a naïve child’s drawing.” (Post available here: https://carolinefurlong.wordpress.com/2020/06/12/children-in-fiction-part-1-what-happens-when-there-arent-enough/)
Static population? That’s a laugh. Point me to any population anywhere that IS NOT subject to any number of unfortunate accidents, et al, that could lower it. Replacement numbers don’t mean one boy to replace dad and one girl to replace mom. They mean enough kids to replace mom, dad, the next door neighbor who never married, the man killed at the docks with only one child at home with his wife, the young soldier patrolling the camp, et cetera and so forth. I can’t stand being lied to in any language and math is a LANGUAGE. Abuse of it has brought us here, and it’s high time we stopped treating it like an unpleasant noise and started pumping in oxygen to save the canary in the coal mine.
Truth! Almost 3 million people die of something every year in the U.S. Between 8,000 and 30,000 die of colds and flu, depending on what strains are going around that year. Currently, more than 100,000 a year are dying of fentanyl overdoses; more than the total COVID19 deaths, even with evil governors sending contagious patients to nursing homes.
The main characters in one of my stories announce their plans to sell weight reduction nanomachines. Some ignorant Luddite starts wailing about how “That cant’ be safe! REEEEEE!!” and this is their answer:
“Are some people going to die soon after using this product? Of course — but not because the product had anything to do with it. It’s just random chance.”
“If you pick 40,000 people at random and do absolutely nothing, one of them will die today. One of them will die tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. Statictically, out of 40,000 random people, 380 will die in the next year. That’s more than one a day. It’s normal. It’s inevitable.”
“Now consider that the people using this product will not be chosen at random. The majority of our customers are going to be severely overweight, with all the health problems that entails, and thus more likely to drop dead of natural causes than the average person.”
“Within a week after using this product, their odds of dying will start to decrease, until they’re equal to everybody else’s chances. We’ll save lives, if we’re not stopped by ignorant narrow-minded idiots.”
Chicken coup? Have you been watching ‘Chicken Run’? 😀
“Mrs. Tweedy! The chickens are revolting!”
“Finally something we agree on.”
>coup
“Chickens in Choppers.”
Are you sure you don’t mean ‘Chickens On Choppers’ — the Hell’s Poultry motorcycle gang? 😀
That’s pretty clucked up. Your jokes are fowl, dude.
Hey, anything to get a cackle! 😀
So quit yer squawkin’.
I don’t like your tone, so watch how you speak to me buck-buck-bucko. 😛
Kung Fu Chickens
For whatever reason the phrase EXPLODING humans just makes me thing of the way all the lemmings in the the of the same name would start screaming and explode when you did a hard quit of a level.
On the davos crew, I don’t remember if I said this here or somewhere else, but seeing the air flute entertainment things they were all watching rapturously, I’ve realized they’re not stupid, just largely just high performing sycophants.
Every system has them, but when they’ve taken over the levers of power, they tend to act like incompetents, because their path to power has been through something completely orthogonal to the skills required to do the job they’ve been promoted to.
I would not call them idiots — I call them evil.
As the saying goes, “never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained as ignorance”. Emphasis on “adequately”. When people repeatedly propose policies that are obviously extremely dangerous in spite of all correction and explanation, “ignorance” ceased to be an adequate explanation. Instead, you should conclude that they want us — most of us — dead. And therefore you should be adequately armed, to prevent them from achieving their goal.
Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from evil.
Any sufficiently advanced evil is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Marxism, in two sentences.
That’s great, I’m saving that.
I put it this way: “The three pillars of communism are lying, stealing, and murdering”.
Under capitalism, man exploits man.
Under communism, it’s the other way around.
Speaking of cutting through lies, the Reader wants to know if Fluffy can pop popcorn. We are going to need it. https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-tucker-carlson-given-41000-hours-of-january-6-surveillance-footage-by-kevin-mccarthy
/Mr.Burnson
steeples fingers “Eeeexcellent!”
/Mr.Burnsoff
It’s about time.
Fluffy not only pops popcorn, he eats 90% of it. Plan accordingly including butter and salt
Bugs “….they eat way more) we can stack them to grow them.” Hum. Chicken batteries are now inhumane, wonder how long before we worry about the horror of bug batteries.
Free Range Bugs, for sale; uncaged cockroaches, corn field crickets, non-tenement termites, approved by the ASPCB (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty Bugs)!
:pushes glasses up nose:
They sold ‘cage free’ as that, yes– it works rather like leaving sows “free” to interact with their offspring.
That is, results in a lot of rather horrific animal deaths, raises the animal’s stress-levels (as detected biologically), still looks horrible, but it requires a redesign of the barns involved so it forces out most of the small producers. (helped by requiring enough leeway to be able to absorb the losses from the newly “humane” systems)
Get rid of small producers, and you focus your production in fewer, larger areas.
Guess what happens when those big farms get infected with avian influenza?
A former pastor of mine told me he was raised on a farm that raised many hundred of chickens. He said the last thing he would ever buy was free range chickens or eggs. “I know how they terrorize each other if left out of cages. It’s horrific. I will never be a part of that”.
My dad said the same sort of thing about pigs. “You cannot trust them in the same pen with their offspring, they are cannibals.”
Even well trained, gentle sows who won’t eat their babies… roll over on them.
On that last bit, I think we might be about to find out. Insty had a link up that bird flu might have been found here in California.
It’s been happening in Iowa for the last… year? Two?
I know I have a link here somewhere….
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/data-map-commercial.html
Ooof, commercial duck dealer, almost thirty thousand.
Sigh. I wish it were just a joke.
I bought my seeds for this year’s garden during one of Burpee’s periodic sales. They’ve been sitting in my office (which is one of the coldest places in the house during the winter) ever since. This weekend I’m planning on starting the tomato and pepper plants so they’ll be germinating while we’re gone to our first show of the new year. When we get back, I need to get the beds dug back out and determine what soil amendments they need before I can start planting peas — this year’s snow peas and sugar snap peas for eating, and last year’s for ground cover and green manure on the other beds, until it’s time to start planting the warm-weather crops.
Now we see whether I can balance gardening along with shows, writing, and promo (I figured out how to keep newsletters coming out even when we were super-busy last year, but the garden, not so much).
That’s awesome! I have had incredibly bad luck with our backyard garden. I’m incredibly envious of people with a naturally green thumb. Even though my luck has been terrible, every year I try gardening again. It helps that our local library gives away A LOT of free seeds in the spring and summer. If you have a local library nearby, you might want to check them out for seeds.
I cannot recommend the late Jerry Pournelle’s collection “A Step Farther Out” highly enough. Expecially the section on “survival with style.”
Almost anything Pournelle wrote is well worth reading. The rest is just worth reading.
I have no problem with non-evangelizing vegetarian adults (all five of them). You want to do that to yourself, because you think it’s healthier or you lived through some hard times and lost the taste for meat, or even because you have religious reasons, fair enough. (Or because you’re called Beren son of Barahir and the birds and beasts are your only allies against the forces of evil). But please don’t do that to the growing children in your care, or the obligate carnivores you keep as pets. And don’t try to force the rest of us into your lifestyle.
Frigging vegan dog diets, oh my ghu do not get me started…. 😡
Even worse are the vegan cat diets.
Those people are the reason I order the club sandwich. Roast beef, turkey AND bacon!
Yes, I am an evil old geezer.
With extra bacon.
Does that make me eviler?
Moar bacon is more better. ~:D
And apparently your countrymen have risen to the challenge:
https://notthebee.com/article/canadian-farmers-created-a-giant-super-pig-that-can-survive-brutal-winters-and-now-its-set-to-invade-the-united-states
Invaders will be hunted down and shot. All the better if they’re also delicious eating.
I bet those are some well-mannered swine. ~:D
Isn’t that basically what a Mammoth is? A pig big enough to last through the winter.
The Reader is going to need a bigger gun.
They have managed to synthesize all the nutrients so “vegan cat diet” is not actually animal abuse.
I still think it’s pretty stupid, but there are vegan cat foods– with the amino acids, fatty acids, taurine, arachidonic acid, vitamins, all the stuff.
THERE ARE NOT ALL NATURAL, NON-SYNTHETIC VEGAN CAT FOODS.
They are scienced out the ears, and pretty dang wasteful, for a silly reason.
But they do now exist.
Yay. Modern science has managed to, at great labor and expense, make an acceptable substitute for a dead mouse.
The Reader doesn’t believe they have yet reproduced the shriek the cat’s servants produce when finding the remains of said mouse in the middle of the kitchen floor.
Just because you feed your cat veggies does not mean it will lose it’s hunter killer instincts.
Enhances the cat’s killer instincts.
It makes ’em mean and dangerous.
We will know that the food scientists are actually paying attention to actual cats when they start making cat food “mouse-flavored”
:snickers:
Our cats are retarded.
They’ll clean up stuff the baby drops…starting with THE CORN.
Portugal has rabbit flavor. We keep meaning to bring it to our cats and forgetting.
Have seen both dog and cat food with rabbit flavor. Not that either will touch the appropriate version. Cats even go as far as to stand over the dog’s food (regardless of type or flavor) and “bury it”. She just (has to) stands/lays there and watches.
And how many people will volunteer to find out what dead mouse tastes like so they can make sure to get the flavor right?
Can’t speak to mouse, but I do know that rat tastes a bit like raccoon.
Even worse, I’ve heard that vegan diets are fatal for human infants.
Guaranteed vegetarian chicken eggs.
I’ll admit to going vegetarian for a few years in the early ’90s, but none of the fellow planteaters I knew could stand the vegans. They deserve the same circle of Hell as do the PETA brigade (strong overlap, I think).
Loved going back to real food…
I believe I am a charter member of PETA -People Eating Tasty Animals . . .
We have the T-shirt. We’ll, we have both t-shirts. The People Eating Tasty Animals one and the one saying, “There’s a Place for All God’s Creatures….right next to the potatoes and gravy.”
Schwabians: “You vill eat ze bugs.”
Americans: “No, the bugs will be eating you.”
Cricket meal now a legal food additive in the EU, but burning (renewable and ecologically friendly!) wood for heat is double-plus ungood because… reasons.
Saw that today, the German government is coming for Uncle Hans’ vood schtove. Ach du liber.
Schwabians: “You vill eat ze bugs.”
Americans:
Eat bugs? Not hardly.
(Whistles Yankee Doodle)
…
The Brits wrote Yankee Doodle to mock us uppity colonists. Washington used it as military music. When Cornwallis’ men marched out of their fortification at Yorktown, to surrender, Washington had his band play Yankee Doodle for them.
Ouch.
‘Murica!
That is all.
These are the same people who want us to stop using all fossil fuels (including fertilizer), and want to eliminate CO2. How do they plan to grow all these plants without those things?
They do not.
How do you think they achieve a world population of 500 million? Famine is their preferred method.
They don’t really care about plants. Ask yourself, if there was an evil intelligence behind this who wanted to destroy all human life, what would it do differently?
I do think some of them are idiots.
I ran into this person who was telling people that dairy cows suffered constant pain while being milked, that they were raped into having calves, and that cows hated living in barns and cow sheds.
So I (and some other commenters) pointed out that dairy cows had to live happy and comfortable lives in order to keep giving lots of milk, that cows like heat and A/C, that cows like to be around other cows, and that cows full of milk suffer pain if they’re not milked.
(And apparently many barns have stereos full of cow-appreciated music.)
(I forget what we said about the rape charges. Sheesh.)
I can vouch for beef cattle that you try to make a heifer’s first pregnancy as nice as possible, because they can and will beat the ever loving snot out of a bull that approaches them if they had a bad enough experience. Rape is an emotionally charged word, but the closes thing that almost-fits… it’s something so stupid that it’d be its own punishment on the herd owner.
(my folks massively improved the pregnancy rate by getting decent heifer bulls when they took over the ranch I grew up on; later on they would also AI the best of the bunch to get new blood into the herd and, again, make for an easier experience all-around)
One reason to keep Texas Longhorn bulls around is that longhorns have narrow shoulder, so the first calf doesn’t stress the mother as much as some broader breeds do.
Try saying, “Tell me you have never been on a dairy farm without telling me you’ve never been on a dairy farm. ”
My grandfather’s dairy farm was cow heaven. Music pumped in, the finest foods, the warmest stalls, the cushiest corrals the finest stud bulls brought in from neighboring farms to entice the ladies.
If you did NOT treat the ladies right there was no way you were going to get milk.
Any farmer worth their weight in cheese knows this.
A vegan knows NOTHING about actual animals on the farm or in nature.
I occasionally watch a Youtube channel called “The Hoof GP.” He’s a professional cow hoof trimmer in the Scottish lowlands. Now I know nothing about cows except tasty, but this guy can somehow make carving out around an abscess in a cow’s hoof interesting. Dude can take a hook knife, a disc grinder, some hot glue, and a plastic hoof block and do near-miracles with it on a cow’s foot.
Anyway, he constantly mentions how well the farmers treat their wee coos in Scotland. Pasture them outside in good weather, keep them inside in the bad. Comfortable pens, good feed, and not least, paying for the services of a guy like him to come in every month or two and trim the hooves of a couple hundred cows to keep them from going lame. Lame cows don’t give milk. You can look at it two ways…there’s the compassionate angle of wanting your animals to be happy and healthy, and the sheer business angle of “these cows are my assets, I need periodic maintenance to keep them in working order.” Either way, it pays off (both in karma and in profit) to treat your livestock the best that you possibly can.
Pragmatism rocks!
Reminds me…
IIRC, an upcoming episode of Clarkson’s Farm will focus on cattle. It’ll also include the threat that badgers pose to a head of cattle, and that the government makes it nearly impossible to do anything about the badgers even though they’re not endangered.
I do love that channel. The man truly cares for the well being of his patients, sparing no efforts to keep them happy and as pain free as he possibly can.
Especially loved his visit to that farm raising buffalo for milk with the higher fat content to make premium mozzarella cheese.
I wonder what kind of music cows like. What do they find mooooooving?
😀
[blink]
“cow-appreciated music?”
…Do I DARE even ask? Is it something like this:
They want to get back to a simpler, more humane time, when all their food came from the grocery store shelf (and with someone else cooking it.) It was all ruined for them when they found out where chicken nuggets really come from.
I blame McDonalds (and those happy meal toys) – they never learned what survival actually requires.
I do like the header picture today.
In Scotland, many folks would take it as a tribute to Thor Heyerdahl’s 1957 book “A Koo, A Koo!”
It’s bloody cold where those koos live. Not a lot of crops in their vicinity and what’s there seems to me better devoted to whisky.
interesting, though not surprising, as the German word for cow is Kuh (pronounced ‘Koo’).
And note that however many we are, the only famines happen due to explosive government stupidity. Every time, in the last hundred and fifty years or so, that any place in the world was starving, it was because government corruptocrats had come up with something special. They were either intentionally starving a sub-population, or they’d become enamored of some “brilliant” intellectual notion, like Marxism, and thereby redistributed land or the like, and sent their farmers to the desert, killing everyone with hunger.
And/or they disarm the folks who are producing anything, which means they get slaughtered for what they made.
c4c
US needs a budget
trimsevere cut. I propose immediate cut to ALL foreign aid. 100% across the board. Anything that gets sent overseas should be by accountable charity efforts. No exceptions. This includes military bases. If the country, wants the US military to stay, they country pays. Even if it is just a token. Payment to stay by them. Not by US.Some military bases are there for our benefit, not the host country’s. (Though the host country naturally derive economic benefit from them too, of course: soldiers gotta eat, and so on). If China were to invade Taiwan, the strategic importance of having bases in Japan or the Philippines would far outweigh the money spent on them.
Now, there may be some military bases that amount to foreign aid, but I wouldn’t lump them all in that category. I would expect that most would not be in that category, but not being any kind of expert on the subject, I’d be wholly unsurprised to be wrong on that. (And would gladly accept correction from someone who knows more).
I do understand. Was going to add there were a few that mutual aid did apply. Japan, Philippines. What amounts to US territories, if not formal states anyway. What benefits Israel. A few others that honestly, probably should be there, but they should be paying the US to be there. VS US paying them.
I would propose the elimination of Congressional and Judicial pay, as a start. None of them produce anything, other than corruption and lawlessness.
Protein is brain food, vital to develop the brain in children, and vital to maintain it in adults.
Stupid people are easily led.
Ban high-protein food!
Hmmm. Sounds almost conspiratorial.
“Protein-starving the peasantry so it will remain docile and biddable is a tyrant’s maneuver thousands of years old.”
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5030 In the context of the Obama administration applying this maneuver to school lunch programs.
Things that bother me are the realization that only women can decide to have children (except for a vanishingly small number of pregnancies from rape). Women in the first world have been propagandized for the past three generations that it is bad to have children, so they have not. This means that the groups that are capable of creating and maintaining a modern civilization that is capable of feeding the modern and potential greater world populations are slowly dying off and are being replaced by groups that are completely incapable of feeding the world population. This will lead to a massive die off of the human population.
Women in the first world have been propagandized for the past three generations that it is bad to have children, so they have not.
Both sexes have been told that having a baby is a shameful thing which will functionally end their lives, and a unique failing on the part of the woman, since it is entirely under her control. (Similarly, failure to produce the desired child on demand is a failure of the woman, and one which has severely wounded several women on this blog.) Never mind the absolute dirt ignorance of basic biology or what is literally written on the side of the birth control here, that’s the message pushed.
Worse, their mates have been told that it’s “responsible” to have sex without offspring, and generally if the woman wants a child– that is up to her, she needs to shoulder all extra work. While, of course, still being productive in contributing to the household.
It takes a very emotionally secure, strong man to overcome that kind of cultural permission to indulge in baser appetites.
This extends to jobs as well– where single fathers may be given leeway to be around their kid, but if they have a spouse, or a large number of children? Much less leeway.
If you are two freaks who insist on having children after you have had the acceptable one boy and one girl– or three of either, really– you can and will be publicly shamed, informed that you are awkward to be around, and generally treated as a second-class citizen.
Barring a few areas with healthier subcultures– Iowa, and some of the Mormon heavy areas of Idaho, are two places that I have heard of good things or seen them lived out.
It’s been known for at least three decades that areas with a large number of observant Mormon families tend to have non-Mormons with higher per-family birth rates as well.
You want the West to live and thrive?
Support the people who are having kids. Defend them. At the very least, don’t hamstring us!
Child care is swing shift, with random mandatory double overtime. Nevertheless, $SPOUSE$ was raised “traditionally,” and insisted that she was going to do it all.
Lasted not quite through the first one (and she was the easy one). Single parents that still manage to raise fantastic kids – I accord them the same awe as I would a bona-fide superhero. (Not the Marvel kind. Those wimps would fall apart at the first diaper change, much less the first night of teething.)
It’s definitely not effectively done as an after thought.
Culturally…a lot of it is pure perspective shifting.
What is the purpose of being a couple? Is it the family they have formed?
Pop culture… it’s to indulge the adults. If one of them wants the hobby of “a baby,” well, that’s on her. She better not go over-board. Maybe dad will babysit once a week.
(Pardon if that’s your nuke button, I know it is for a lot of dads.)
This is not a healthy cultural place to be, and the care that each sex has for the other has been weaponized to attack their weak points.
growls
:snickers:
Pretty much.
My dear husband has been known to point out that he is capable of supervising the children without loss of life or limb on either part, and I am to go away, now.
Of course, he’s also the guy who actually says “dude, they’re your kids, too” when a co-worker is complaining that he has to “babysit” the kids for a couple of hours when his wife did the grocery shopping.
My husband, dear soul, took the youngest to a birthday party last Saturday because the eldest was camping with his troop, and I was camping with the daughter’s troop.
I got a text a few minutes in: “Oh my god this is HELL.”
Did I mention he’s a strong introvert and is easily overstimulated, and this was in a party place with loud music, vibrant colors, and dozens upon dozens of the under-10 crowd? 😀
Anyway. He loves his kids even unto the horrors of an indoor birthday party.
I have described myself, from time to time during the first 15 years of my daughter’s life as “a single father with a rather indifferent to somewhat hostile roommate with sometimes ‘benefits’.”
People thought I was joking.
I wasn’t, or if I was, it was very dark humor.
And that’s as much as I’m going to say on that subject.
:sympathy:
“This is not a healthy cultural place to be, and the care that each sex has for the other has been weaponized to attack their weak points.”
This part here is a huge chunk of what’s wrong with our society.
Meanwhile, it now takes 14+ months of work at the median wage to earn enough money to support a middle-class lifestyle.
So you’ll suffer economically if you have children, and probably also end up having them raised by government-controlled proxies while you AND your spouse work for wages. Unless you’re in the upper 10% income bracket, that’s all there is to it.
If the goal is to destroy any incentive to have children and cripple parents’ ability to raise their own children, that could be a good way to achieve it.
I wouldn’t be so quick to lecture Foxfier on it. She’s not in the top 10% and she manages. So did I. Depends on what you consider “middle class.”
AGREE on taxes, but still.
There’s several definition issues in there– as Sarah mentions, I spend a lot of time on on this. ^.^
Definition issue from weakest to strongest-
median (reported) wage is going to include a bunch of super-part-time jobs, and the 16 year olds that can work a max of four hours on a school day, and retired people, and folks like my mother in law who gets a part time job after Thanksgiving to buy Christmas gifts.
Median income (sometimes listed as ‘annual wage’) is only slightly better, although it avoids someone who has four very low paid part-time jobs (say, contracted yard labor) from dragging the median down.
Median weekly earnings from BLS, the one where they have full-time wage and salary workers, is probably second from the strongest, and it’s relatively easy to get the data, avoids part-time workers; on the other hand, it avoids part-time workers, and some households run off of a bunch of part time jobs, especially after Obamacare raised the cost of a full time employee.
Then there’s median household income which would be the strongest, though it’s also going to miss non-reportable-income and there are some issues with definition of household, but you do avoid DINKs raising the average. (Double Income, No Kids– power couples, basically.)
Then there’s the question of what IS a middle-class lifestyle, and where are folks supposed to be having it?
We had a family in the Seattle blob– in the cheaper areas– and have bounced across the country in both directions, currently in rural Iowa; our costs are incredibly different from my brother’s in the north east.
What people do spend and what people need to spend, and what are their markers of middle class, are going to change a lot of the calculation. Childcare? Vacations? What kind of transportation? Home ownership? Electronics?
Add in regulations on vehicles to the list of “make it hard to have kids,” too.
The only way that works is if you artificially inflate “middle class” to something well above (by 14/12 at least) above “middle”.
Eeeh, it can be done with some other number games, because the US is so big and diverse in costs– one of our friends in the Seattle area lives in a relatively inexpensive area, in a rather low quality “efficiency” apartment, with great rent for her area.
It costs more than the monthly payments (including tax and insurance) on a four bedroom house sitting on two acres out here.
And that’s before utilities.
All of her costs have been going up, while they’ve frozen pay…. I can easily see it being impossible to have even a lower middle class lifestyle in the Seattle area, unless you are bringing in well over median income for the area. It’s been a “thing” where folks who do the lower income jobs have to commute in from waaaaaay out of the area (or are illegals living in a manner I wouldn’t be allowed to do) and for the last at least five years, it’s been getting harder to get them to show up.
I’m thinking of those “costs to raise a child” surveys, as a sort of example of how many ways there are to mess things around.
My sister has eight kids. I lived with her family for five years, from the birth of her third to the pregnancy of her fifth. I am happy that I had the chance to support her.
Believe me, even just having someone that doesn’t reflexively act like you’re an idiot is a huge help– and you did so much more than that!
When people find out you are pregnant with your 3rd, 4th or 5th kid, the stupid comments start flying. That’s one reason I hang around with a lot of Catholics – nobody looks at my “medium-sized” family and makes rude comments.
Sister had a perfect comeback for the “haven’t you figured out how that happens?” – 3 pregnancies, and 2 miscarriages, total 4 girls raised. “Nope. I’ve been told by doctors I can’t conceive (and yes there was an actual diagnosis why). IVF failed. Doctor keeps saying its a miracle!!! One does not argue with miracles.” … Note, first child was adopted. The oldest biological is using IVF to produce children.
:hugs:
I got super lucky– a nice, older Catholic couple warned me about that kind of ‘humor’, so when my uncle was an ass about “you know, they figured out what causes that” I told him we were quite good at it and implied that he was not.
The BSOD was epic.
LOL!
> “When people find out you are pregnant with your 3rd, 4th or 5th kid, the stupid comments start flying.”
Tell them you’re breeding your own personal army for world conquest. Ask what their plan is for when your forces come for them.
I felt terrible at mass with only two. Honestly, we were trying as hard as we could.
We had three. They did a very good job of convincing the congregation that we had at least six, though.
True. Mine also.
Which is the evil flip-side of “it’s all under the woman’s control.”
I know it’s a human failing, but oy!
I call Vegans, Baby eaters, I also ask them why they eat babies? They look at me aghast and demand to know what I am talking about. It is really quite simple, grains, beans, even the lovely tomato and jalapeno are those plants babies. So how can you be morally superior to me if you feast solely on babies? Want a little bunny with those Legume babies you fiend? You can not live without killing something alive. I find no distinction between animal or vegetable, life is life. The only distinctions are ones you made up to soothe your own diseased mind.
Let’s not even go into how I call cattle and swine nonviable tissue masses, you should see their heads explode after that one.
There was a great series of posts by someone with a decent grasp of agriculture and climate, and she pointed out in very simple terms that a culture’s diet is based on two things: the availability of water, and the availability of land.
If you have plenty of water, but very little land, the diet is going to tend towards vegetarian. You can grow plenty of crops in a small area if you have the water to nourish them.
The opposite is very little water, but plenty of land. That’s when the carnivores come to play, because it’s efficient to have your sheep or goats graze on browse that wouldn’t sustain a vegetarian.
So when you have people talking about how a vegetarian diet uses less water, the real question is “Where?” You’re not feeding the cattle on high-water foods if you’re smart; you’re letting them graze on the natural prairie grasses. When you live in southeast Asian countries, you have plenty of water (sometimes far too much) and your staple diet is grain. When you live in the Mideast, your staple diet is sheep, because there’s little water to be found.
Thus why Florida has -way- more cows than Texas.
Mass of grass per acre is the key. Florida measures rain in feet.
Yeah. Lots of rain PLUS lots of space makes for lots of cattle. Lots of space with little rain makes for large ranches, widely spaced, with reasonable herds.
Our leadership, outside of a certain level, is a monoculture or wants to be part of one.
Namely, the monoculture that pretends that New York (and LA and London) are perfect places to live, they can make it in a five-bedroom (rent controlled and sub-leased from an aunt) apartment with the friends that they will have forever, and that at the end of the day they’ll get the Hot, Awesome Liberal Boyfriend that is kind, sensitive, strong, has a cock bigger than their forearm with an articulated head, and a Kung-Fu orgasm grip. That they’ll have the 2.5 kids that are basically talking corgis and they’ are always right when they demand to see the manager at Whole Foods when they spend $10 for free-trade, organic quniola that only differs from the $3.50 stuff at the regular supermarket because of packaging.
(You’d be scared at how big corporate HR hires on this basis. They only reason they don’t have absolutely perfect background filling for their episode of Friends is that someone in their organization realizes that they can get and need one or two desperate aspie nerds that they can work to death by being a Girl Boss (and, yes, I do mean that literally) to get everything they need done while they are trying to get their Mrs. Certificate with a C-suite executive.)
It’s the Matriarchy, Grrl Power in its most terrible form and far too often, the Patriarchy that happens after matriarchies tends to be horrible. Usually on the day when enough boys realize that they are stronger than girls and that they can impose their own control on the world.
I’ve been looking into quail as a quieter option than chickens, there are even modular quail cages that one YouTuber suggested could be kept in a garage in the ‘city’ so the neighbors don’t know you have them…
Maybe that works; our wild California quail are not all that quiet, but no rooster crowing.
They’re fun to hear, and to watch, especially as a dozen or so chicks are learning to fly.
Let’s not forget that the FDR policy to deal with low farm good prices was not to improve the economy so that demand would increase but to literally compel farmers to destroy crops to reduce supply.
Nothing has changed. The left pursues the creation of artificial shortages across the board; food, energy, pretty much everything, because the created shortages are a pretext to grab more power over others. The goal is government controlled distribution of everything, with the distribution prioritized by ones compliance and support for the mandated ideological diktats of the moment and ones identity group. They want to bring the same “intersectional analysis” to the whole of society; those at the wrong end of their neo-Marxist analysis get to go without food and fuel, inside or outside of the gulag/concentration camp.
Recall that Bernie Sanders praised Soviet breadlines as being superior to the USA because “it was fair” in his warped view. Their idea of equity is modeled on Soviet breadlines, except that to be able to even stand in line one must be of the correct identity group and profess the correct talking points.
The whole WEF globalist crowd is simply engaged in an effort to serve the same old communism with different condiments.
Marxists lie.
Water is wet.
Thank you Sarah, for the best explanation of the whole throbbing pile of Marxist scat we’ve been hearing since ZPG was published.
I have noticed many people (even the black americans I live among) are not having as many children as they did in the 1930-1940s. My mother’s father had 12 brothers and sisters (half his mother’s, half her second marriage)… mostly so they could farm in the mountains of West Virginia. The next generation had half that. When I was little we had family reunions of 200 some people. By the time we quit having reunions in 1980 something we were down to 80 and most were elderly then. So no overpopulation there. I like meat….though I have cut down in the amount I eat. I have tried and Hated “fake veggy meat”. Though Susan loves it. She also has more health problems than I do. So, yes, I mostly agree.
Lee
Reblogged this on The Elegant Ungulate and commented:
Go Read.
c4c
c4c
“Cat Park”? (from last November; but I just saw it today)
https://report.foundationforfreedomonline.com/11-17-22.html
Around here it’s winter wheat until it comes in, then a cover crop and cows, with cows being added to fallow years.
There’s a permaculture group I follow that keeps posting ‘new’ better ways to farm that I’ve been going ‘they’ve been doing that here for at least 40 years.’
I highly recommend:
https://www.amazon.com/Against-Grain-James-C-Scott-audiobook/dp/B079VWTTP2/ref=sr_1_5?crid=2FLUL8TO2MXCD&keywords=james+scott+seeing+like+a+state&qid=1677059730&sprefix=james+scott%2Caps%2C144&sr=8-5