Remember, Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires... 🔥🌲🔥🤔😬

 

The current forest fires in New Mexico were started by the U.S. Forest Serivce!

True

AoSHQ: Morning Report 06.03.22

If the cattle industry doesn't like the videos, maybe they should adjust their practices...

Hey, I am biased.  I would prefer you all ate pork, fish and poultry.  But people eat beef.  

The industry worst enemy is not PETA and the Humane Society, but producers doing things like in the video above.  This legislation proposed is about punishing the messenger.  I am no fan of over regulation, sunlight is the best disinfectant.  While I disagree with a lot of PETA's agenda, I disagree with practices shown above.

And I am no fan of the USDA.  USDA is more geared to protecting large producers at the expense of family farms.  The vast number of cattle ranchers would never engaged in the practices you see above.  But factories are faceless and can be brutal places.

USDA:  Cutting inspectors, but promoting food stamps in Mexico!  

Are we going over the milk cliff?

One of the things that might happen if the fiscal cliff negotiations fail is milk prices jumping up in price and perhaps even doubling.  That is because the arcane 1949 law that over regulated milk prices would kick in.

We need to reduce federal involvement in agriculture and ranching...

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: "I do think if we went over the milk cliff it would actually be a good idea. [If] people actually saw the milk price double, it would be less abstract than watching a debt clock. They would finally understand that we have the insane laws, that acquire barnacles over the decades. And the farm laws are the worst. They are all kind of pressure, special interest favors, pay offs which make no economic sense. I'd like to wipe them out and start all over again, and it would be good if the law expired. People would actually be awakened to how insane our system is and how much we really need tax reform. It wouldn't be an abstraction, it would be real."

 We need to allow market forces determine prices, not complex layers of government bureaucracy.  

Verenice Gutierrez is a racist and an embarrassment for Portland, Oregon. George Washington Carver was a scholar and hero who promoted the peanut and peanut butter for the betterment of all people.

Verenice Gutierrez is worthy of mockery and ridicule.  That Ms. Gutierrez is teaching our children is an example of why home schooling and private schools are so popular now a days.  Ms. Gutierrez is the 21st century version of a witch hunter, searching for raaaaacism.  Ms. Gutierrez is trying to dowse evidence of it from the dust from the air.

Update: Instapundit posted it again today!

Vererice Gutierrez:  Do not let this ignorant women teach your children!  

Take the peanut butter sandwich, a seemingly innocent example a teacher used in a lesson last school year.
“What about Somali or Hispanic students, who might not eat sandwiches?” says Gutierrez, principal at Harvey Scott K-8 School, a diverse school of 500 students in Northeast Portland’s Cully neighborhood.

Excuse me?  I get Ms. Gutierrez' completely in artfully made point that a student from some other immigrant culture may have cultural challenges to learning when coming to the United States--but I also reject it.  That is not racism.  That is called assimilation.  And culture after culture (including millions of Hispanics and dare I guess even some Somalis) have navigated and benefited from that challenge.  It is important (for their own economic wellbeing) that immigrants assimilate.  But cultural assimilation can go both ways:  many born in Portland and the rest of the United States readily adopt the culture and culinary traditions of immigrants.  I would suggest that interplay of immigrant cultural assimilation as it has been practiced in the United States is generally a positive thing.  E pluribus unum:  Ms. Gutierrez should look that phrase up.  

But what about that so called racist lunch known as the peanut butter sandwich?

George Washington Carver, self made botanist, scientist, humanitarian, and promoter of the peanut!

George Washington Carver was born into slavery in Missouri, but (despite real racism and personal health issues as a child) managed through hard work and self education to become a famed botanist and scientist.   Carver, as a professor at Tuskegee, promoted crop rotation.  Soils in the south had become depleted from years of mono-culture cotton growing.  Legumes, such as peanuts, fix nitrogen through their roots and help restore the fertility of depleted soils.  Farmers and share croppers, black and white, were resistant to growing soybeans, pecans, and peanuts because of lack of markets for those crops.  So Carver worked on finding economic uses for these crops to promote their growing.  

Peanuts are native to the Americas. Carver did not invent peanut butter, but he promoted it (along with many other products).  Peanut butter is a health food, with anti oxidants and vitamins.  Combined with bread it is a complete protein. The Aztecs and Incas used to enjoy peanut butter (why is Ms. Gutierrez denying Hispanic kids their culinary cultural heritage)!  We do not know if the Aztecs put chocolate and peanuts together, but we can guess they probably did enjoy that synergistic combination. That white racist lunch that Ms. Gutierrez casually denounced was actually a Native American treat, promoted by a self taught African American former slave to benefit the economic condition of poor black and white farmers and improve the environment.

So to combat racism, to remember George Washington Carver, and to mock Ms. Gutierrez' lunacy, enjoy a delicious and healthy peanut butter sandwich.  And if you are in Portland, you should consider adding some local Marionberry or native salmonberry jam to go along with it.   

Save the family farm from evil Democrat government...

The Tea Party is fighting for freedom and liberty!  

Smitty at The Other McCain raises how zoning is used to attack family farming and enterprise.  This is hardly an isolated or regional issue.   This is just a battle in a much larger war taking place all across America.   The Obama Administration in particular has gone out of its way to hurt and actively destroy American family farming.  The Obamas want to hurt rural and suburban Americans for the benefit of their urban base.  It makes no sense, but that is what they want.

Trust me, I would rather be a cow on a family farm than under some corporate agribusiness beholden to the Democrat Party.

Update:  Another Smitty post of Bishop E.W. Jackson...

Friday the 13th...

And the collapse of the Midwest tart cherry harvest. I weep for all the pies that will never be made.

Why the hold up on this agricultural breakthrough that could save lives? Being green is never having to say you are sorry.

The golden rice has beta carotene and will improve people's health,
but environmentalists are blocking it...

Instapundit has the story on how the Greeners do not want golden rice...even though it would save lives and improve people's health in Asia.

Of course, this is how radical environmentalists roll.   Heck, even birds and bats have to sacrifice to be green.

h/t:  Small Dead Animals

Why do Barack Obama and the Democrats hate American family farmers?

A happy successful American farm family...You are looking at an endangered species

The Obama Administration is adopting rules through the Department of Labor that would ban children working on family farms... 

U.S. Senators John Thune (R-S.D.) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) today introduced common sense legislation, the Preserving America’s Family Farm Act, to prevent the Department of Labor (DOL) from enacting its controversial proposed restrictions on youth working on family farms.

Obama Administration U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis,
actively trying to destroy American family farms for partisan political purpose
Hilda Solis also calls Tea Party members "Teabaggers"

Last year, DOL Secretary Hilda Solis proposed rules that would restrict family farm operations by prohibiting youth under the age of 18 from being near certain age animals without adult supervision, participating in common livestock practices such as vaccinating and hoof trimming, and handling most animals more than six months old, which would severely limit participation in 4-H and FFA activities and restrict their youth farm safety classes; operating farm machinery over 20 PTO horsepower; completing tasks at elevations over six feet high; and working at stockyards and grain and feed facilities. The language of the proposed rule is so specific it would even ban youth from operating a battery powered screwdriver or a pressurized garden hose...

As Gateway Pundit notes: Yes it is that bad.  This is also no accident.  

Democrats like their farmers poor
and dependent on government 

Rural communities are not good for Democrats (well not conservative Kulak farmers anyway).  So Democrats and the Obama Administration are adopting policies and rules on labor, taxation, and other regulation intended to destroy these small family farms and the voter base in these communities.  These small family farms will be sold to large agribusinesses.  The agribusiness migrant labor (who cares if they are naturalized or not) can then be used to vote the way they are needed to vote.

Rural farm families are good for the environment in a way corporate agribusiness can never be, which is reflected in the misleading review of The Omnivore's Dilemma by the New York Times:

Pollan finds his hero in Joel Salatin, an "alternative" farmer in Virginia who will sell his goods only to local customers. A cantankerous self-described "Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic," Farmer Joel has ingeniously marshalled the rhythms and symbioses of nature to produce a bounty of food from his hundred acres. For example, his cattle graze a plot of grass for a day or two and are then succeeded by several hundred laying hens, which not only nibble on the clipped grass but pick grubs and larvae from the cowpats, thereby spreading the manure and eliminating parasites. The chickens' bug-laden, high-protein diet results in fantastically flavorful eggs, while their excrement enriches the pasture with nitrogen, allowing it to recover in a matter of weeks for the cows to revisit.

Salatin seems to have found the secrets of sustainable agriculture. The shocker is that he doesn't want to be part of any national solution. He's an off-the-grid crank who hates the government, home-schooled his kids and declares to Pollan: "Why do we have to have a New York City? What good is it?" But Pollan, a nice-guy writer whose awe of Salatin is palpable, lets the farmer off lightly, saying that his provocative words "made me appreciate what a deep gulf of culture and experience separates me from Joel — and yet at the same time, what a sturdy bridge caring about food can sometimes provide."

If I have any caveats about "The Omnivore's Dilemma," it's Pollan's tendency to be too nice...

I read The Omnivore's Dilemma and found Joel Salatin to be a hero in it.  For good reason--because what he is doing is heroic.  That New York Times writer David Kamp read the same material and went out of its way to degenerate Mr. Salatin reveals the New York Times and Mr. Kamp's bias and hostility.  Mr. Salatin took a worn out Virginia farm and managed to convert it by organic farming practices and intensive hands on management into a productive profitable operation that not only benefited his family but the environment and the surrounding community.  These are the same principals that lefty hero Aldo Leopold promoted in A Sand County Almanac (which Mr. Salatin has on his book shelf). What is upsetting the New York Times is Mr. Salatin (through Mr. Pollan's book) explains how regulations by the Department of Agriculture are hindering family farms and farmers.  Leftists especially do not like that message in a book like The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is popular with the Whole Food/NPR crowd that is part of the Democratic Party base.  Mr. Pollan (to his credit) notes some of that lefty hostility and bias in the book (Pollan invites some friends to visit the farm and they are shocked the Salatin's have a Christian fish symbol on their home).  

Do the Democrats and Leftist care that they are destroying small farmers and hurting the environment?  Of course not, they only care about power.