Why are there syllables in my bread?
The other day I made the mistake of looking at the the ingredients label on the bag containing a loaf of sliced bread I brought home from the Giant store on Linglestown Road.
Can you believe the chemicals and additives and preservatives that are in that loaf of bread, according to the label? These are seriously long, serious-sounding, polysyllabic words that I have trouble pronouncing, no matter how long I have to spell them out slowly.
Words this long do not belong in the human body.
It made me wonder, Why are all these syllables in my bread?
Shouldn’t bread just be something like flour, water, salt, sugar, eggs, baking powder, maybe some fresh yeast, plus fire? For the past five thousand years, bread has been successfully made with slight variations on this theme of basic ingredients.
One of my kids has a health issue, and for most of her life it was treated with scary chemicals.
One by one, the chemicals stopped working. We were left with few options.
Then a researcher in Israel began a study, where kids with this health issue would go on a basic diet: No processed food, no canned food, no frozen food except what you freeze yourself. Everything fresh. No soda, no powdered drink mixes. Etc.
Guess what? She went into remission. It was attributable solely to the lack of processed food and the attendant polysyllabic chemicals she was otherwise ingesting when she ate “food.”
Today our friend Roberta came over, delivering Girl Scout cookies that only our boy can eat (well, I could easily eat them, but my body needs no extra calories or fat). We caught up in the kitchen over fresh coffee. Turns out she has changed her diet, and is feeling a lot better than before, plus she is lean and feeling energized.
What is her diet? No processed food.
Seeing that bread label got me thinking. Seeing my beloved child get better from a serious health issue got me thinking. Talking with our family friend of nearly twenty years got me thinking. Here is what I am thinking:
Syllables and food do not go together, unless it’s Italian. Certainly not in English.
Chemicals and food should not go together.
Chemicals are not food.
Chemicals and body health probably do not go together, except as a treatment for a serious health issue.
I just ate a pile of fresh carrot sticks. They were not nearly as satisfying to me, as they don’t taste great, as something processed. But it’s the beginning of something good. And it reminds me to start preparing seeds for the summer garden.
And one more thing: Giant also sells freshly baked bread. This bread lacks the preservatives of the bagged bread. It’s my new go-to bread, and as I do most of the food shopping for our family, it is what we are going to have going forward.
Maple syrup thoughts
Yes, I enjoy metaphors, and no, this is no metaphor.
Each spring I and my willing victim family members undertake a ritual that might just be the most labor-intensive goal you will ever take here in modern America.
We make maple syrup.
We tap the maple trees in mid January, using traditional buckets, and now also using the plastic spiles and tubing. Then we gather the sap into a big tank in the back of a pickup truck. When we reach about 15-20 gallons of sap, we boil it. It takes a long time, a lot of energy, a lot of propane.
Here are some season-end thoughts, as the last batch evaporates outside in a shed right now:
- Sap production can be erratic, and there is no explanation. Mostly driven by nighttime temperatures, some trees can be just pumping out sap like gangbusters for two to four weeks, and then kind of go dead, or nearly dead. Our late-season taps are the biggest producers right now, while the early taps have mostly dried up. I don’t know why this is, but it is frustrating. We did not get a lot of sap this year, and though I felt uncertain about beginning to tap so early, I am glad we did, because we would not have gathered enough had we not started back in mid January this year. Rumors are Pennsylvania’s maple producers are having a bad sap season, too.
- Cans and plastic tubing each have advantages and disadvantages. Cans get bugs galore, and the lids can get beat up by high winds. The plastic tubing drips down into a container, which can attract curious deer, raccoons, etc, and they can mess with the stuff. Next year we will continue to do both types. One thing, though, we do need bigger containers for the tubing and plastic spiles; they can easily produce a gallon of sap overnight. I hate to see sap spill out on the ground. Almost a Biblical thing…
- From what I read, a lot of syrup producers will not use cloudy sap. Well, we use everything we get, cloudy, clear, bugs swimming about, and we eventually filter out the bugs, wood bits, etc. Regardless of how cloudy it is, when it evaporates down to syrup, it tastes amazing.
- Finally, less is more. Used to be we’d wait until we got 30-35 gallons of sap in the tank to start boiling it, enough to make over half a gallon of syrup. Problem with that is it’s a lot of sap to boil, the way we boil it. We use two large outdoor propane burners under the stainless steel evaporator pan. If we used firewood, it might get hotter or evaporate faster. But then I’d have to cut more firewood, and because we already burn between two and four cords of wood a season in our wood stove, I don’t want to cut and split any more than we really need. So, now when we hit 15 to 20 gallons of sap, we start boiling. It takes about ten to twelve hours, so start as early as possible. This is a manageable amount of time for us.
OK, those are the thoughts for now. Surely as we go forward more will come and go. Here are some photos from the other day, above and below. The sap is boiled and evaporated in a big stainless steel pan, then the condensed syrup is moved inside to the stove top, where we carefully finish it off and pour it into old whisky bottles.
A mighty wind
Astute followers of weather may have noticed the past few years have been marked by strong winds, each and every year. Usually around seasonal changes. Really strong winds. Howling.
Silly people will jump to the conclusion that this is yet more evidence of “global warming,” or “climate change,” because God knows, everything that happens is “evidence” for these theories, no matter what.
But the truth is actually much more interesting and compelling. The cause of these winds is Planet Earth’s changing polarity.
Our planet’s magnetic polarity switches every 100,000 years, or so, give or take.
This means that what is now the North Pole becomes the South Pole, and vice versa.
The magnetic field surrounding our planet is responsible for our existence here, because it provides a shield against cosmic rays and radiation, including from our own sun. Mars was once a watery oasis, a lot like Earth, but when its magnetic shield weakened, solar radiation stripped the planet’s surface of water and everything else needed for life. Including its atmosphere.
Because Earth’s magnetic shield is so strong, we survive. However, our magnetic shield is weakest when the polarity shifts. It’s like trying to walk when you’ve bent over with your pants around your ankles…you can kind of shuffle forward, but you won’t be winning any running or walking competitions.
As a result of our weakened magnetic shield, it is kind of like Star Wars ship-to-ship fighting scenes, where some of the laser bolts get through and kind of rock the ship. It is alarming, but not really damaging.
Oh, people can be damaged by the unusually strong sun’s rays, if they are out without clothes. But we already know that is foolish behavior.
But more than anything is the effect on our climate, and the resulting winds. Though it is not totally understood, the increased heat and solar radiation on our planet’s surface definitely causes temperatures to rise, and it can cause what feels like rough weather, though it is probably relatively calm compared to other planets.
There is nothing we can do about this polarity shift, and the resulting mighty winds, other than batten down the hatches and try to adapt.
More than anything, watching this happen reminds us of how tenuous life on Planet Earth is, and what a narrow window it was that opened to permit us to move forward technologically and materially. We have perhaps foolishly built high rise buildings and overhead power lines during a relatively narrow window of relative calm, but it is what it is. We cannot go back over all our infrastructure and rebuild it, though we are seeing the benefits of buying up private property along floodways to prevent further material destruction.
With these strong winds, we are just going to have to get used to them, and hope the polarity shift doesn’t poop out halfway through. Because then we’d all become Martians.
Conservation vs Environmentalism
After decades of environmentalism, many Americans are burnt out on the movement’s constant sky-is-falling hype and never-ending Defcon 5 emergency messaging. Environmentalists’ craving for full control of our every motion and breath understandably scares the daylights out of normal Americans.
Though environmentalism is sold as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition by its proponents, the truth is that it represents an unnecessarily confrontational and expensive approach to environmental and public health, with misplaced priorities and unmeasurable outcomes.
Simply put, Environmentalism is the over-reliance upon government coercive force, command-and-control, one-size-fits-all sledgehammer policies to problems that might require a screwdriver, if needing anything at all.
The premise behind environmentalism is that mere daily acts of human existence are pitted against a static natural environment that must be defended at all costs, in the face of change being this planet’s biggest constant. Un-anointed humans are vermin in environmentalism.
Oh, sure, pollution and environmental destruction from human activity do exist: Over-fishing of the shared oceans is resulting in catastrophic population reductions of the most valuable fish (tuna, sharks, some salmon). Low-density residential development and warehousing goes up on our flattest, best, most fertile farmlands while national food security is an ever growing concern. Where will we grow our own clean food, if not on our best farmland closest to our largest population centers? Preventing water pollution is a constant effort. And certain chemicals were not vetted properly, with the burden of proof placed on the hapless citizenry before they were discovered to pose unacceptable health risks.
Republican President Richard Nixon said it best: “What a strange creature is man, that he fouls his own nest.” This is just being honest, though the very people most radicalized about environmental issues are also and equally fouling our collective nest with their own reliance on cars, iPhones, and hip clothing. They aren’t special. In fact the most “special” among them have their own personal jets and huge cars and boats with daily carbon footprints the size of small towns. Hypocrisy has a way of passively degrading and delegitimizing people, and that has happened with environmentalism’s biggest messengers, like Al Gore, Leon DiCaprio, et al.
Each of the real environmental health issues we face can and will be tackled with all of our best Yankee ingenuity. Not every day needs to be the summer of 1968, and not every environmental issue is Love Canal or will result in Planet Earth’s extinction if we don’t implement drastic policies right now. At its worst, environmentalism is virtue signaling and fake moral outrage.
A more measured, more adult approach is needed.
America is hopefully about to see a blossoming of conservation. Aldo Leopold called it a “conservation ethic,” where a sense of stewardship results in concrete steps to protect natural resources for future generations of Americans.
Yet, conservation is mostly boring as hell. It lacks the screaming and yelling, the gnashing of teeth, the drama of environmentalism. It lacks the big demands for dramatic lifestyle changes and income redistribution that falsely substitute for self-examination, introspection, personal change.
By relying on market forces and free choices by people inside those markets, conservation empowers the very people environmentalists despise. Conservation involves a lot of actual heavy lifting among and by people who care: Raising private money and judiciously spending public taxpayer money on carefully ranked projects that are of both great symbolic and tangible meaning to the citizens.
It involves natural resource management and planning, which environmentalists decry while using more than their fair share of those same resources.
While land conservation is the best example of conservation, there are plenty of successful, subtle, fish and wildlife management models and even agricultural management models (with pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, fertilizer inputs). Back in 2002, I co-founded the Conestoga River Nutrient Management Project in Lancaster County, to use market forces to address waterway sedimentation finding its way to the Chesapeake Bay.
These are definitely not sexy policies. Conservation does not involve the glitzy rock star concerts, Hollywood celebrity interventions, and spectacular claims of imminent world-end that environmentalism has going for it.
Conservation is for adults, and now the adults are in charge. Hopefully the adults can teach the children to eat their vegetables, so to speak.
New York Times Invents Time Machine
The New York Times was once the flagship news source in the whole world. It was the standard by which all other news sources and newspapers were judged.
What happens when a trusted news source becomes an active partisan in politics is inevitable: The credibility banked over decades is spent in a fury of attacks, which then blow away like dust after the contest is ended.
Partisans of all sorts inevitably find themselves clawing for survival, as it is the nature of choosing artificial sides in a world of holism. Sliding over the cliff, partisans act like a drowning victim on the way down. They’ll do anything to keep from going under, no matter how futile or self-defeating. It’s like using the wood from your home’s walls to run the fireplace.
So back in January of this year, the NYT ran headlines about how Trump was wiretapped. Why not? The NYT was one of the partisan proponents alleging an official investigation into Trump, and wiretaps are part of those kinds of investigations. The NYT was doing its best to damage Trump’s credibility, his standing, his ability to act as president. The NYT was trying to delegitimize Trump, and reporting that he had been wiretapped had all the trappings of a bad guy being surveilled by official law enforcement good guys.
Fast forward a couple months, and now “wiretap” has a whole new meaning: Today it means that the Obama administration illegally wiretapped and conducted illegal domestic spying against political candidate Trump. We now know there was no investigation of Trump, ever. But we also know there was eavesdropping aka wiretapping of Trump. The leaked transcripts of his calls prove it.
In this context, “wiretap” sounds awful, even damning when an Obama ally like the NYT reports it, and if you are in the business of bashing Trump and protecting Obama, which the NYT is, then you certainly don’t want to support evidence of the greatest political scandal since Watergate.
So the clever NYT invented a time machine. They went back in time to their January 2017 headlines that screamed “WIRETAP” and digitally altered them, on their website. No kidding. I do not lie. Check it out.
They “fixed” the NYT headlines, which might have a double meaning that applies here quite well. The NYT “fixed” its own headlines from months ago, so that going forward it would appear that the NYT had never said that Trump was wiretapped by Obama. Because now that sounds like an admission that Obama was conducting his illegal domestic spying on a US citizen and politician. The NYT retroactively changed its own history to support the narrative it currently promotes.
Being partisan, and not a news organization, the NYT will do whatever it can to support its allies (Obama) and damage its enemies (Trump, America, traditional values, Christianity, etc.), so the record has been forged to preserve a current version of events that are most favorable to Obama.
Now the forged January 2017 NYT headlines say that Trump’s name came up in “data intercepts” conducted by the NSA while spying on Russian officials stationed here in America.
Data intercepts. Doesn’t that sound a lot more acceptable, more palatable? A lot less invasive? A lot more normal than the actual spying via wiretaps we witnessed going on against Trump by the US government under Obama’s stewardship?
Like a drowning man, the NYT is going down the tubes. Its credibility is shot, gone, spent wildly like a drunken sailor during the recent political contest which saw Trump elected over the NYT’s favored Clinton. Trying to alter what it wrote months ago is simply fakery, forgery, really, and the NYT has been caught red-handed doing what it would never allow anyone else to do: Go back in time and re-invent reality to fit today’s immediate purposes.
If this isn’t fake news and alternative facts, then what is? But this is surely news.
Ryan’s NobamaCare Plan
RINO Paul Ryan, Speaker of the US House, is unveiling a complicated “reform” of ObamaCare as I write these words.
To say his plan is complicated is a gross understatement. The fact that it requires so many charts and graphs tells us everything we need to know: No.
The main problem with Ryan’s NobamaCare plan is that it becomes part and parcel of an already clunky and complicated federal tax code.
We don’t need no more stinkin’ federal tax code stuff, unless it is a total overhaul. Like elimination and replacement.
Ryan’s plan just makes it all worse, both the health care part and the federal tax part.
Only elimination will suffice.
One of the issues with political careerists like Ryan is that they are unwilling to think or act outside the box. They accept certain premises handed down by previous elected officials, instead of questioning why and how they did what they did.
I mean, look at federal and state pension problems alone. What on earth motivated previous elected officials to create these monstrosities? It sure wasn’t a careful and judicious use of limited taxpayer funds! Why, you could be led to believe that those former politicians had used taxpayer money to create largess and thus buy votes, so they could stay in office….
Career politicians like Ryan are terrified of making a mistake, because they are terrified of losing their cozy job and benefits. He refuses to make a principled stand when it can count. So he\they stick to what is politically safe, ie palatable to the special interests that control him\them and then those interests that control the opposition party.
The concerns of us citizens factor in way last, if at all in their calculations.
So, ObamaCare must go, as it is the Unaffordable Care Act, and no, you could not keep your health plan, and no, you could not keep your doctor. It was a disaster. You cannot fix a disaster. You get rid of a disaster.
And while we are at it, can we get rid of RINO Ryan, too? America needs a principles-focused person, man or woman, in that congressional seat. Ryan ain’t gettin it done. In fact, as we see this morning, Ryan is making it a lot worse than it already is.
If I couldn’t keep my doctor, then why do I have to keep Ryan?
Say bye to both problems.
Obama the Domestic Spy Part 3
You know what all this “Russia hacked the election for Trump” noise was all about?
It was a distraction to draw attention away from the fact that Obama had an aggressive and totally illegal domestic spying program against his political opponents.
Including and especially Donald Trump, who threatened everything Obama had done to America over eight years.
The illegally gathered and illegally “leaked” Flynn transcript, the leaked transcripts of Trump talking with the leaders of Mexico and Australia. These are wiretapping results from people controlling the levers of government power. They are the remnants of Obama’s administration, dug down deep in the DC bureaucratic morass, dishing out their best efforts to undermine and damage Trump by whatever means they can.
Before the leaks they were simply wiretapping Trump, when he was a candidate and after he was elected, in his home, his business, his car.
Oh sure, the Obama folks have tried to cover their tracks by saying this was all a legitimate “investigation” of Trump.
But there never was an investigation of Trump. Unlike with Hillary Clinton’s dealings with Russia, there is zero evidence of any wrongdoing by Trump.
Trump didn’t do anything wrong or illegal. His only “crime” is that he opposed the Obama machine, which illegally weaponized the federal government against its political opponents, using the IRS , the NSA, EPA, Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, etc.
Obama took this risk because the information was highly valuable for the campaign, and he bet that Clinton would win. Obama expected this whole thing would be swept under the rug and no one would ever really know after Clinton was elected.
But now that Trump is president, and the facts are coming out, Obama’s malicious persona is becoming public knowledge. He is not a nice man. He is not an honest man. Obama makes president Richard Nixon look like a puppy, a kitten, a baby monkey, whatever image of a cute, cuddly, non-threatening adorable little pet you can imagine.
That is the contrast. That is the truth. And the truth is becoming more widely known. Russia didn’t hack anything, and they didn’t make Clinton run a terrible campaign nor did Russia force people to vote a certain way. Russia is a false flag by a group of people who we now see deserve to be treated like the deposed tyrants of Europe, at the hands of a mob.
What ever will we now do with this illegal squatter in our midst, this criminal alien with his anti-democracy machinations against the American People?
Is there no one who will rid us of this meddlesome priest?
Where are all the rogue judges when they are really needed to administer true justice?
Obama Wire-Tapped Trump Part 2
If past president Barack Hussein Obama did not wiretap Donald Trump (Obama did not deny doing it but rather clumsily dodged the question), then what have the “Russia investigation” and secret-but- disclosed transcripts of President Trump phone calls been about? Where did they come from?
The fake Russia connection claim and fake investigation demand are a result of Obama illegally wiretapping Candidate Trump, and getting caught by President Trump.
No evidence of Trump benefiting from Russia, but tons of official big bucks relationship between Putin and Clinton, like the sale of huge quantities of Uranium to Russia and the insane Iran-Russia-empowerment deal. Those never merited investigation before, apparently. And the same political party still wants no one looking into those Clinton influence peddling deals on the taxpayer dime.
Trump wasn’t wiretapped, you say?
Well we know he was “investigated.” What do investigations involve? Wiretapping? You bet!
And what are these supposedly secure and secret phone call transcripts between Trump and other international leaders being released to the press from government sources?
Where did these transcripts come from? Probably from people left over from the Obama administration using their official positions for partisan gain. The same as they did while illegally wiretapping Candidate Trump and calling it an “investigation.”
The partisan yelling and screaming about Trump and Russia is just a noisy diversion from the increasing recognition that Obamagate is worse by far than Watergate, that Mister Wonderful Obama was in fact an illegal Spy.
The continuing demands for an endless investigation into Trump and Russia is just a smokescreen, an obfuscation designed to make Trump look bad and draw away attention from the truly bad fact that our former president Obama was in fact, much worse than Nixon. Obama makes Nixon look like an incompetent rookie.
May be the first time that an ex president goes to jail. But hey, Obama knew the risks and he decided to illegally spy on his party’s nemesis anyhow. Now the time has come to pay the price.
Poison Candy: Spymaster Obama now officially worse than Nixon
Obama craved power and control, no one disputes that.
In fact his supporters admired him for it, even the American media when he spied on them. They cheered when he had the US National Park Service police actually block Americans from visiting open-air national parks like the Lincoln Memorial in downtown DC.
Obama weaponized the entire government apparatus against his political foes. From the Obama IRS subverting conservative non-profit groups, to the National Security Agency surveilling reporters, American civilians, and political conservatives, as documented by Edward Snowden (who fled from Obama to Russia).
Now it turns out the Obama Department of Justice was spying on the Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, before the election and afterwards. In his home. In his business.
The reasoning is murky, but the purposes are like all the other crimes Obama committed against Americans: Control. Obama wanted to know what candidate Trump was doing, what he was planning, what he was going to say.
Knowing this information would help the Democrat candidate, who was endorsed by Obama, and who would preserve Obama’s legacy and cover his many criminal tracks.
Because the Democrat candidate was expected to win, the Obama administration probably believed this was a low-risk crime, because their Democrat successor would not hold them accountable.
But irony of ironies, the Democrat did not win, and the Republican victim of illegal government spying did win. So history looks different now than was expected just a few months ago.
What little we know at this point is that Obama is already far worse than Richard Nixon ever could have been, could have even dreamed of. Obama is a much bigger criminal than Nixon ever dreamed of being.
And how will our nation hold Obama accountable? He has left the White House, but he has stayed inside the country. He walks freely among the good citizens of this nation. He is as arrogant and stupid as he was before. At some point he will be held accountable in a court of law, as will his criminal associates Valerie Jarrett, Eric Holder, Huma Abedin, and Loretta Lynch, among others.
Revenge will be sweet, “sweeter than honey,” says our Bible.