If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.
If he raises a good crop at the cost of belittling himself and diminishing the ground, they he has gained nothing. He will have to begin all over again the next spring, worse off than before.
From Prayers And Sayings Of The Mad Farmer, p. 59
Found in my electronic chapbook.
From Farming: A Hand Book by Wendell Berry.
First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Joseph Stalin once taught that: It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything. Clearly the military dictators of Myanmar have Studied Uncle Joe’s playbook.
From the Democratic Voice of Burma:
Members of the junta proxy Union and Solidarity Development Association are being trained in lieu of their role in monitoring ballot boxes during Burma’s elections this year.
Workshops are being conducted in Rangoon and Mandalay division and Sagaing, Shan, Mon and Arakan states, by the Election Commission, according to a retired government official in Sagaing division who is close to the USDA.
The government-appointed Electoral Commission has been charged as the supreme authority during polls, rumoured for October this year.
I love the big about It is enough that the people know there was an election. Are elections a difference that makes no difference?
But it wasn’t. Moreover, it was the secessionist who took the ass-kicking, at the hands of a bunch of effete Northerners and cowardly runaway slaves. It was as if the AV club and the weed-heads got together and beat down the football team — in front of the cheerleaders. Or it’s Tyson after Douglass. Indeed since the Confederates galloped out of Richmond, some portion of this country has always been Tyson dazed on the mat, groping for the mouth-piece.
And Ta-Nehisi nails the inevitable result: teabaggers.
Reeling from each successive volley, the Southern racist–and really any white racist–is left with a question: If the Southern white man is proven inferior physically, mentally, and even morally, than what is he?
It is from this question that you get protests of “losing everything,” or “illegals taking over everything,” or “jihad in the White House.” It’s about identity, and the Confederate South not as geography but as an idea. I’d argue that–from the Confederate battle flag, to all-white country clubs, to the Muslim\terrorist Obama– the search for identity continues to this day. The Civil War commenced an assault on an notion that was, by the War’s onset, some 200 years in the making. My sense is that the unholy idea may require some 200 years of unmaking.
Why are they called apartments when they are all stuck together?
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.
[Franz Kafka] lived every day of his life with a persistent sense of doom-which in New Orleans in hurricane season is called watching the news. So, I think he would have had no trouble feeling his way into this hovering malevolent undersea black cloud of oil and dispersant waiting to strike. Meanwhile BP offers, for our entertainment and distraction, a dog-and-pony sideshow straight out of Kafka”s “A Hunger Artist.” Like the starving man in that famous story, the long-suffering people of Louisiana waste away while the media gawk for a moment, spouting theories and implications and then moving on to another form of entertainment.
If the crop of any one year was all, a man would have to cut his throat ever time it hailed.
From Prayers And Sayings Of The Mad Farmer, p. 58
Found in my electronic chapbook.
From Farming: A Hand Book by Wendell Berry.
So why have we wasted all the time and energy with a supposed “reformed” Cuyahoga County Government when Joe Roman and the Greater Cleveland Partnership can decide for us.
Why bother with any democracy? Who needs it.
The Plain Dealer – it its usual uncritical manner – reported last week that Joe Roman, according to the paper, “said community leaders discussed extending the sales tax increase more than a year ago as a possible way to fill gaps in medical mart funding.”
They want more bucks for downtown, of course. Another couple of hundred million dollars.
Why do we need a County chief executive? Why do we need a County Commission of 11 elected officials?
We have Joe Roman – the $451,241 a year GCP boss – to tell us what we need. How we should tax and what for.
“Roman,” said the Plain Dealer, “said the business community supports a transformation of the malls, Public Square and other areas in the central business district. He also recommends addressing the improvements before construction of the medical mart begins in October.”
Let the rest of the city rot. Continue Reading »
From Time:
But we don’t have the luxury of philosophizing about food. With the exhaustion of the soil, the impact of global warming and the inevitably rising price of oil – which will affect everything from fertilizer to supermarket electricity bills – our industrial style of food production will end sooner or later.
As the developing world grows richer, hundreds of millions of people will want to shift to the same calorie-heavy, protein-rich diet that has made Americans so unhealthy – demand for meat and poultry worldwide is set to rise 25% by 2015 – but the earth can no longer deliver. Unless Americans radically rethink the way they grow and consume food, they face a future of eroded farmland, hollowed-out countryside, scarier germs, higher health costs – and bland taste.
Sustainable food has an élitist reputation, but each of us depends on the soil, animals and plants – and as every farmer knows, if you don’t take care of your land, it can’t take care of you.
The real solution is always in the follow through.
Why don’t sheep shrink when it rains?
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.
By the excellence of his work the workman is a neighbor. By selling only what he would not despise to own the salesman is a neighbor. By selling what is good his character survives his market.
From Prayers And Sayings Of The Mad Farmer, p. 58
Found in my electronic chapbook.
From Farming: A Hand Book by Wendell Berry.
Powered by Wordpress | Design by Ash Haque
XHTML Strict | RSS Entries