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June 25th, 2008
10:03 am - On Asses: Part 2
In evaluating the character of the horse, I would like to compare it to its smaller sibling, the ass, and its half-breed, the mule.
Horses are notoriously moody and skittish creatures, easily upset, and easily frightened by anything unfamiliar. Herodotus wrote that the Persian armies had to keep camel-riders and horsemen at opposite ends of the column, as horses were terrified of camels.
Asses and mules, on the other hand, are more likely to think than panic, and are more likely to attack than flee when confronted by danger. Asses and mules have been known to attack and kill wolves and mountain lions. It is also probably on account of their calm, collected nature that it is difficult to coerce asses and mules by means of fear. To this day they are used as guard-animals for sheep, goats, and other livestock.
A horse will eat itself sick, will work itself to death, and will stand in the sun until it falls dead. Asses and mules are often considered stubborn, but their stubbornness is in most cases simply the instinct for self-preservation that horses lack. It is probably for this reason above any other that donkeys and mules live longer than horses. If a donkey is exhausted, it will simply stop working. It will similarly stop working if it doesn't have enough water, food, or if it is too hot.
Horses require specialized diets, and even where pasture is available, they often require high-quality feed to be imported. Asses and mules require less specialized food and less of it, are more vigorous and less prone to disease, have sturdier feet, and are less prone to injury.
The horse, in short, is an expensive, moody, dim-witted, and rather helpless creature compared to its smaller relatives, who are both in character and practicality superior.
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June 20th, 2008
11:56 am - On Asses: Part 1
Or, "Why I Hate Horses"...
It's no secret that I hate horses. I'll be the first to admit that 50% of this hatred is simply transferred from horse owners, whose multi-million dollar estates on "protected" land have all but destroyed any serious effort at farm preservation in the Northeast. For those not familiar with the scam:
Protected land means you can't build anything on most of it. You have a house, and maybe you're allowed to have some barns, but most of the land has to remain clear. The value of the land is slashed because you can't build new homes on it. This was done so that farmers could afford to stay on the land.
But what happened, particularly after 9/11, was that a lot of wealthy people decided that they didn't mind paying a lot of money for land they couldn't build on. It was nice to look at. It felt good to own it. And they quickly discovered that all this useless land could be put to use for that favorite past-time of the rich since the days of the Romans: playing with horses.
And so it was that the "horse farm" became a phenomenon in New Jersey, New York, Mass., etc.
The very idea of a "horse farm" is a little confusing. What do you "farm" there? You're not eating the horses. I mean, I wish you could. The horses don't do any work. The farm doesn't produce anything. In fact, it takes a lot to feed a horse, and most of these places have to import most or all of their feed from goddamn Canada. How on Earth is it a "farm"? I mean, there's a pretty basic difference between owning a pet and raising livestock.
But such distinctions did not enter into the minds of lawmakers, who basically engineered farm protection programs to provide tax breaks to the wealthy. As usual.
Here's the real problem:
This "estate" market for protected farm land drastically inflates its price, to the extent that the idea of farmers being able to afford it becomes an absurdity, thus defeating its original (stated) purpose. The farm protection programs are basically being used by the wealthy to take tax breaks to steal land from farmers. It makes no sense.
And the symbol of this absurdity, its mascot, is the horse.
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June 12th, 2008
06:16 pm - Some pictures
Today: ( some pictures. )
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June 10th, 2008
09:21 am - Opposite World
There's a kind of dumb article posted yesterday by one of the Freakonomics authors about eating local. His basic argument is that eating locally, as understood as growing all your own food yourself, is (a) not going to be as efficient as buying it and (b) won't necessarily be better for the environment.
The first mistake Dubner makes is to confuse eating local with growing all of your own food, which is almost impossible, and would be extremely resource-intensive if it were possible. But most people who are interested in this sort of thing understand "eating local" to mean relying (as much as possible) on farmstands, community-supported farms, and suppliers within a certain radius of where one lives. This is a far cry from the extreme of personally growing all of your own food.
The second and more important mistake here is a little more complicated. Large farms are more "efficient", in the sense that they can produce more of a single crop per acre. But according to the Institute for Food and Development Policy, smaller farms are more efficient in terms of the actual amount and variety of food they produce. And it's these small farms that most people have in mind when they try to eat locally. Dubner also points out that the carbon footprint of our food is mostly in the production process. But he curiously doesn't explore how these two things -- efficiency and carbon emissions -- are related. I don't know if this is because he doesn't know what he's talking about or because he's more interested in making a good-looking argument, but in any case, massive monoculture production requires more fertilizer, pesticides, machinery, and processing than a small farm producing a variety of fresh produce. And all of those inputs use and burn fossil fuels. The "efficiency" is not magical.
What's interesting about Dubner's article is that he manages to imply that the opposite of the truth is, in fact, true. It's a good example of how examining something while selectively omitting certain "externalities" can make almost anything look efficient and economical.
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June 3rd, 2008
08:59 am - Google, Goolsbee, horseshit
I generally find Ralph Nader to be an annoying, opportunistic, and generally irrelevant character. But I have to admit that I sympathized with his recent article at Counterpunch, wherein he applies his butterknife-sharp wit to the phenomenon of Google.( Read more... )
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May 30th, 2008
12:10 pm - Reflections
Fidel Castro, now soft in his old age, writes about Obama:
"I am not questioning Obama’s great intelligence, his debating skills or his work ethic. He is a talented orator and is ahead of his rivals in the electoral race. I feel sympathy for his wife and little girls, who accompany him and give him encouragement every Tuesday. It is indeed a touching human spectacle. Nevertheless, I am obliged to raise a number of delicate questions. I do not expect answers; I wish only to raise them for the record..."
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May 23rd, 2008
10:07 pm
I've been growing more fond of roses. I think this began last year, when I spent some time at the rose garden at the Vanderbilt estate not far from here. Until then, I don't think I had realized the full variety of scents these plants were capable of producing. It's somewhat embarrassing to think that a person could reach my age without realizing this, especially when he professes such an interest and delight in olfaction, but there you have it.
This one, which I found yesterday in the corner of a nearby garden, was unbelievably exquisite. As its color suggests, it had a very strong citrus scent -- but not sour and biting, more like sweetened lemonade. But along with the citrus it also had that floral warmth that, while not peculiar to the roses, is often best represented by them.
I do not know the name of the variety, but I am more than determined to take a cutting of it.
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May 16th, 2008
03:19 pm
Jeffrey Kaplan recently wrote an interesting article for this month's issue of Orion about how modern consumer capitalism avoided the use of machinery and modern technology to reduce the amount of time we "have" to work, among other things. It's a good read, in spite of the frustration that comes with being reminded that the work, stress, debt, and inequality most people suffer under is, practically speaking, entirely unnecessary and is engineered only to provide a minority with more and a majority with much, much less.
All the same, it's interesting to imagine an American society that was essentially more frugal and self-sufficient than the one that exists today, where people are dumbfounded by anything that isn't prepackaged and disposable.
William Cobbet, in his very entertaining and educational The Cottage Economy, remarked at how in the course of only 40 years, the English working people had given up making their own beer and tending their own land, when this had been a fundamental part of country life for centuries.
Even very educated people have few qualms about imagining the economic and social conditions under which they live to be eternal and as natural law, even when history amply demonstrates how rapidly society can change, and how things once thought of as common-sensically intrinsic to human society -- "human nature" -- can vanish overnight.
Too few consider in whose interest it is to consistently underestimate the mutability of human society.
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April 27th, 2008
11:27 am - Swollen Ovaries
( Read more... )
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April 9th, 2008
10:46 pm
Along the side of a road, near a creek, two girls pointing excitedly.
In the middle of the river, a boat with five men drawing up a large net. Perhaps they were trying to catch shad, for which a festival is held this time of year.
Phoebes are here in force.
Shoveling manure, manure, manure. Planting peas.
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March 30th, 2008
09:04 pm
Farm party. Clearing out an overgrown fence with machetes and chainsaws, enjoying the sun. Young people building improvised structures out of salvaged wood.
Home-made wine from wild grapes and unpasteurized honey. Not honey as a sweetener, but as a substitute for sugar in the fermenting process. Picture a deep red with the "zing" you get in mead.
A house packed with friends excitedly discussing the future. Food everywhere.
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March 16th, 2008
04:03 pm
This scene awaited me upon returning from work:
If anything it simply underscored how unready and insensitive I am for what is beautiful. The "working day" piles up such a load of petty anxieties and such an abundance of trivial shit that I literally do not know how to be open to such a sight when I'm confronted by it. I fumble for my camera, knowing full well that the picture I take will not remind me of anything at all sublime, but only of how I, just like everyone else, am now able to infinitely defer moments of significance to technology, to this anonymous network of viewers, etc., instead of ever receiving it myself.
The technological society of the first-world has long past the point where it becomes much easier to "share" its experiences than to actually have them and process them in a rich and reflective way; please, give me instead that "technology", that can remind us after a day of tedium that we're still alive.
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February 24th, 2008
11:06 pm - More random shit.
( etc )
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February 21st, 2008
05:51 pm - Random Crap
People have a wonderfully myopic view of the world they live in. I was recently reading a book about private property rights. In it there was a very illuminating passage attributed to John Edward Cribbet indicating that, historically speaking, the "purity" of private property rights peaked somewhere in the early 20th century, and that a plethora of new instruments have since disaggregated individual property rights more and more in ways that favor public or community rights.
This isn't to say that society itself has become more community-oriented or more interested in protecting public rights. I think it has quite visibly moved in the opposite direction, with fewer and fewer people enjoying increasingly broader rights and privileges. The point is that it's a mistake to think that private property is a rigid institution or that its existence has a binary value -- an attitude that I've been encountering with perplexing frequency.
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February 3rd, 2008
11:52 pm - The Clouds of Home
A river of clouds blowing through a valley. The strip of gray at the bottom is the Hudson.
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January 27th, 2008
08:43 pm - Conference
The insiders are saying that soil carbon isn't going to be a part of the federal cap and trade system that's going to be adopted by the next administration. People have been warning the nascent "carbon farmer" networks about this for a while, but in certain parts of the sustainability world, being exuberant counts for a lot more than being politically savvy.
There's no good reason for this, really, except that foresters showed up at Kyoto and farmers didn't.
Oh well. Maybe in 2012.
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January 22nd, 2008
10:06 am
Seed-ordering season. Delicata squash, Ronde de Nice zuccini and heirloom cheese pumpkins. I wish to plant many potatoes.
Ice on the Hudson. Big mats hug the shores, with long thin strips in the center of the river. These little floes are always a beige color from the birds that rest there in packs.
Oatmeal pie breakfast.
Splitting elm is a horror.
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December 29th, 2007
02:43 pm
Dolphins headed north along the coast every afternoon. The sea has been having an unusually sweet smell -- like nutmeg and coconut.
The forests here feature very tall sweetbays, loblolly pines, and some rather odd species of miniature, narrow-leaved oaks. The pine and sweetbay leaves make walking here a remarkably fragrant experience.
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December 17th, 2007
05:15 pm - The pain in my side
I've had a pain in my side. It occurs every few weeks and when it does, the pain is intense and debilitating. But nothing obvious is wrong with me, and no one seems to know the cause.
When the pain comes, I lie down and think about my guts. I think of the entrails of slaughtered animals I've seen and all the gray-pink coils that are compressed inside me. I doubt the cause of the pain is anything life-threatening, although I really have no idea. When the experience of having/being a body suddenly means something very different than it used to, cavalier guesses as to the cause and one's life expectancy are pretty vacuous.
When I think about my guts, I think about how they could probably fit inside of a pail. In any case, I often imagine the slippery blobs of whatever-they-are inside a pail, or a suitcase, or some enclosed space other than my abdominal cavity, and it's when I think about them this way that it seems very strange that these weird objects are responsible for that very different thing that I think of as my life.
I don't feel betrayed by my body, but I do consider it a sort of stranger. Its recent developments are incongruous with the rest of my life, which has been full of joy, and it does vex me.
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November 19th, 2007
03:12 pm - Squash
Too much squash. Squash pies. Squash soup. Squash & pear ravioli with mushroom sauce.
Black walnut bread fried in pork fat with sauteed onions and bacon. Coffee.
Odd conglomerations of people. Bourbon and woodsmoke. Roasted chestnuts.
Music.
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