Wordless Wednesday
Thunder rumbles and lite rain pitter patters. My last couple of hours in bed weren't very restful. The thunderstorms the prognosticators promised in their foretelling yesterday moved over my house. At least, this time, the rainfall amount wasn't oppressive. Other than the patter of the falling rain, I'm hearing a…
It's already after noon. I'm still drinking coffee so this still qualifies as my afternoon coffee muse. As I write this the first rumbles of thunder are rolling around the house. The thunderstorms the prognosticators were foretelling of are making their presence known. I've been perusing the interwebs this morning.…
It's been mostly cloudy this morning. Already, at midmorning, the temperature is 85. I've spent the morning doing chores, so even though today's photos are from the front porch. I didn't spend my morning muse time out in the heat and humidity. I stopped at the local HEB yesterday afternoon.…
Well, they did it... Now I start dealing with my Republican Senators. As far I'm concerned my Repugnant Representative will have one very pissed of old hippy doing everything I can to see that he has to go back to fixing air conditioners.
The sun, for starters. Also lightning, choking on a chicken bone, drowning in the bathtub, and people who text and drive. But probably not terrorism. Source: What to Be Afraid Of Timothy Egan has I point that has never left my mind since the first World Trade Center bombing... It's…
Yesterday my wife came home with a passel of worries about Obamacare. She wanted me to go online and find out if what she had been told was true. It seems one of her coworkers had heard something on the radio that had her worried. There was talk about the IRS, an…
Mark Bittman makes the point in his column at the New York Times today, that the biggest killer of Americans isn't guns but industrial agriculture. A point I have made repeatedly with my family over the years. ...the root of that dangerous diet is our system of hyper-industrial agriculture,…
Now that we have baked our cookies and trimmed our trees,now that we have wrapped our gifts and planned our dinners,now that we have hung stockings, sent greetings and set tables,assembled toys, trimmed wicks, written Santa and hung wreaths,the time has come to abandon it all,if only for a moment.Hallelujah…
You tell me... November 2012 was the globe's 5th warmest November on record, said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) on Monday. NASA rated November 2012 the 2nd warmest November on record. Global temperature records begin in 1880. November 2012 global land temperatures were the 6th…
Every news story about the coming "fiscal cliff" talks about what the "real" problem is. The consensus being, that American companies aren't making decisions on employment or investment because they don't know what is going to happen... They are putting off decisions until they see what Congress will do. The truth isn't quite that straight forward...I caught…
Now that the Supreme Court has declared the ACA to be constitutional I find most people still don't know what is in the law... I don't really know. My wife doesn't understand it. I know most of the folks I talk to don't. From the comments and email I get,…
I always knew that red state Texas was stingy. Governor Perry has spent most of his decade in office turning down federal money to help the poor. But this paragraph really spelled out the extent of Texas stinginess. The biggest losers are Medicaid and the poor. Very quietly, the Affordable Care Act…
Yes it does... Mitt Romney may have joked yesterday that the White House was “not sleeping real well” last night. But a lot of people tonight and in the future will sleep a lot better for this result. Young people, people with pre-existing conditions and mainly people who through the…
My wife and I were having a conversation about the weather/climate of our youth. What brought the conversation up was the fact that I was mowing grass in our yard on January 11 as the temperature approach 70°. I commented on the fact that when I was a teenager in…
https://www.youtube.com/embed/fX7Q-0QuID4 It also reinforced the fact that most of this years storms were pushed off out into the Atlantic. Watching Irene work her way up the east coast all the way to Canada had me remembering the pictures of the flooding in New England. I suppose only time will tell if this…
I know it's a mixed metaphor, but the GOP has really become a sad, sad representation of the old saying... You can lead a mule to water but you can't make him drink. “I am committed to not raising the debt ceiling,” Bachmann said at a National Press Club luncheon,…
(Rep. Eric A. “Rick”)Crawford, the freshman from Arkansas, was among 63 legislators who sent a letter to Obama on Thursday that imagined Aug. 3 arriving without a deal. In the letter, the legislators urged Obama to promise he would pay interest on existing debt, military salaries, and Medicare and Social…
Going through my email this morning turned up the latest from farm policy. White House has laid out a graphic there that speaks loads about the disconnect between reality and what should be our Subsidy in this country... I was really inspired by the diversity and nutritiousness of the crops…
Anyone with a garden in Houston knows just how stingy the skies have been this spring. According to the Houston/Galveston National Weather Service office, the period from mid-February to April 17 has been the driest in Houston climate records dating back to 1850. The .91 inch total beat out 1925's…
"The idea that all this can be reduced to money — that doctors are just people selling services to consumers of health care — is, well, sickening. And the prevalence of this kind of language is a sign that something has gone very wrong not just with this discussion, but…
... columnist and former GOP presidential aide Pete Wehner notes, "now that he finds himself intellectually outmatched by Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, and in a precarious situation when it comes to his re-election, Obama is dropping his past civility sermons down the memory hole. - Mean streak:…
For a few years I have refrained in many instances from commenting on the political debate in this country. But the budget discussion this year is beginning to get my need to comment going again. Here is the straw that broke this uncommon, for me, silence... Here are two numbers to keep in…
Refund Status Results There is a delay in processing your tax return. For more information, please continue. If you have questions or need additional information, please have the following on hand when you call: A copy of this page. A copy of your tax return. The Social Security Number, Filing…
Reading Mark Bittman's blog this morning I saw this lead-in to a link I had to follow: Here’s the thing. A lot of stuff isn’t directly about food, but TB – that’s tuberculosis – is becoming, has become, antibiotic-resistant. And a lot of antibiotic resistance may be because there are…
General Electric, the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010. The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States. Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2…
RALEIGH, N.C. – For the past three years, American consumers have been on a shopping diet. They cut nonessentials from their shopping lists. They’ve made do. They’ve thought twice before buying. And yet, they’ve continued to open their wallets for natural and organic products. via Recession-racked shoppers still spend on…
This hour, with Bill McKibben, we seek perspective, both factual and moral, on human responsibility in a changing natural world. McKibben wrote The End of Nature, the first book on climate change for a general readership, in 1989. "Only in the disappearance of nature as we have known it," he…
Crooks and Liars has a list working of what we can expect in the first year while we wait for the full bill to kick in... Here are ten benefits which come online within six months of the President's signature on the health care bill: 1. Adult children may remain…
Wind power generation in Texas is growing so quickly that it is testing the limits of the state’s electrical grid. The state set a record on March 5 when wind turbines generated 6,272 megawatts of energy, or about 19 percent of the electricity on the state’s main power grid. That…
Now comes a fitting bookend to a winter seemingly without end. While we have missed any snow accumulations here this winter, we did have a full afternoon of flurries back in earl December...And now, this is what greets me in my feedreader this morning over coffee... Houston already had its…
I tossed and turned in bed last night in a perfect storm of tax related muses...nightmares...planning. I had a meeting with a CPA yesterday. I had arranged the meeting to try to get a handle on my tax plan for next year. This is the year I finally bury my…
Talk about getting your head in a spin...Today I went through my daily routine of reading email as I listen to yesterdays "news" via podcasts downloaded to iTunes. I do this every morning, without fail...Coffee, email, podcasts. All of a sudden, it hit me...The incongruousness of what I was doing.…
All of the folks that are claiming that the Earth is and has been in a cooling cycle are being disingenuous...Using weather trends to infer climate trends breaks down when you watch the averages over any period of time. I can already hear the cries from the climate skeptics...But, here…
I found out about these Blue Zones a month or so ago. Went on the expedition with them to a Greek Island (virtually), read the info on their website, was intrigued by...And impressed with the simplicity of the idea. So when this TED Talk popped up on my Facebook Feed…
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s investment bank, survivors of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, are set to pay record bonuses this year. The firms -- the three biggest banks to exit the Troubled Asset Relief Program -- will hand out $29.7…
Another reason to change our methods... A ground beef recall for more than 545,699 pounds of meat has been expanded to states from North Carolina to Maine on fears of E. coli contamination. Fairbanks Farms of Ashville, N.Y., expanded the recall on Monday for ground beef produced between Sept. 14…
To a rancher like me, who raises cattle, goats and turkeys the traditional way (on grass), the studies show only that the prevailing methods of producing meat — that is, crowding animals together in factory farms, storing their waste in giant lagoons and cutting down forests to grow crops to feed them — cause substantial greenhouse gases. It could be, in fact, that a conscientious meat eater may have a more environmentally friendly diet than your average vegetarian.
It's understandable the drugmakers would want a roll-call accounting of who their friends and enemies are, considering the size of the investment they are making on Capitol Hill: in the first six months of this year alone, drug and biotech companies and their trade associations spent more than $110 million…
The world’s largest reserve for migrating Monarch butterflies, located in the Mexican highlands, is suffering from an infestation of bark beetles similar to outbreaks that have killed millions of acres of evergreens in the U.S. and Canada...So far, the infestation has affected only a small portion of the 33,000-acre core…
The globe recorded its second warmest September since record keeping began in 1880, according to NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. The combined global land and ocean temperature anomaly was 0.62°C (1.12°F), falling only 0.04°C (0.07°F) short of tying the record set in 2005. NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies also…
Record heat is forecast for today in the Houston area, but by late this afternoon or early evening a blast of cooler Canadian air is expected to drop temperatures through the weekend. Temperatures are predicted to creep back into the 80s early next week, but another cold front is predicted…
It's that time of year again...15 October 2009 is the third Blog Action Day. This year the subject of conversation for the day is "Climate Change". Close to 7,000 bloggers are participating this year. What Is Blog Action Day? Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world's…
Eating a hamburger should not be a death-defying experience. Too often it is. via Editorial - Toxic Hamburgers - NYTimes.com. This is where Food Policy and Health Policy come together. And the American people get taken for a ride by the corporate penny pinching policies and the lack of enforcement…
"We as a party have spent the last six months, the greatest minds in our party, dwelling on the question, the unbelievably consuming question of how to get Olympia Snowe to vote on health care reform. I want to remind us all that Olympia Snowe was not elected President last…
Churchill's argument was this"I have heard it said that the government had no mandate such a doctrine is wholly inadmissible. The responsibility for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate!" And there is the essence of what this is. What, on the eternal list of priorities, precedes health?…
DALLAS — Recent storms in Texas brought some long-awaited relief to the nation's most drought-stricken state, but the brutal dry spell is far from over as it drags into its third year. About 16 percent of the state — all in the southern and central parts of Texas — is…
The insurance industry, of course, loves the Baucus plan. Need we say more? via Paul Krugman - Baucus and the Threshold - NYTimes.com.
I grew up with a strong support for the power of technology...But the abuses perpetrated in the name of technological advancement of agriculture in the past few decades have left a foul taste in my mouth. It appears I share that distaste wit Verlyn Klinkenborg... There is no disputing the…
Something I keep pushing in the healthcare reform debate...Agriculture is key to real reform. Recently a team of designers from M.I.T. and Columbia was asked by the foundation of the insurer UnitedHealthcare to develop an innovative systems approach to tackling childhood obesity in America. Their conclusion surprised the designers as…
I keep reading how this reform is dead. We have Texas Republicans in Congress claiming if the Dems pass a plan they will be back in power and repeal it. Yet, the only alternative they seem to have to offer is Health Savings Plans...Call me stupid, but exactly where do…
Nicholas Kristof, writing in his column, had what I think is probably the best definition I have ever seen of the state of our agriculture... I think I figured out the central problem with modern industrial agriculture. It’s not just that it produces unhealthy food, mishandles waste and overuses antibiotics…
...the public — struggling with the worst economic downturn since the 1930s — is looking on with great anxiety and confusion. If the drug companies and the insurance industry are smiling, it can only mean that the public interest is being left behind. Bob Herbert said it today, I've been…
I have been incredibly blessed to be able to combine this love of calloused hands with dramatic and verbal skills. And that is why I promote direct marketing. Too often parents whose children express an interest in farming squelch it because they envision dirt, dust, poverty, and hermit living. But…
There are times my hometown newspaper makes me proud...This is one of them. In an editorial yesterday they laid out the argument for health care reform and touched many of the reasons that what is being argued in Congress is just BS. These three paragraphs tell the story... but you…
Can someone explain the connection between Credit Card Reform and the right to bear arms in national parks? Now don't get me wrong, I was raised to be a hunter, I bought my first guns at 18, my grandfather was a life long hunter who bought and passed down a…
Think of the 47 million Americans who lack insurance. They are less likely to receive flu vaccines (which might or might not help), less likely to receive prompt care when they get sick, and less able financially to stay home from work — and thus they are more likely both…
I saw Patry's post about the medicinal use of red wine in the treatment of influenza... Patry Francis Red wine may prevent swine flu, which is the absolute only reason I drink it. http://www.anotherwineblog.com/archives/4253 I checked my stock and decided I needed to make a "medicine" run...Off to Spec's we…
Leave to a youngish mind in a middleaged, out of shape body to discover the hard way (always the hard way) that he cannot still do everything he once did. Yesterday I decided, at long last, to finish the distruction of our dog pen that Ike had started. Bearing in…
Just recently, the small-business boogeyman came up in the debate over the estate tax -- specifically, whether it is unfair to impose a tax on estates in excess of $7 million per couple (the level this year) or whether the first $10 million of every estate should be exempt from…
The cornbread I put aside for the next day...did not make it that long.
I woke this morning to a still, clear, cold sunrise. There was a layer of frost on the freshly cut grass out back. The scratchy throat, runny eyes and stuffy nose had managed to transform into a full blown cold. Herbal teas and sweatsuit time... And yes the wildflowers have…
I know we are all holding out great hopes for biofuels, but these nagging pieces keep showing up in the papers... The False Hope of Biofuels: "Biofuels such as ethanol made from corn, sugar cane, switchgrass and other crops are being touted as a 'green' solution for a large part…
Here's another article on the sustainable foods culture. The tie is to the book by Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma. Looks like another trip to the booksellers for me. Everthing I keep reading about "Omnivore" makes me want to check out the book. Common Ground: The Shortest Food Chain: "In the…
It looks like if there is a common thread running through recent posts it is the idea of buying local. My concern was originally in the way of food. I feel a bit leery of the commercialization of the organic movement. Call me a “Luddite” but when the big Agri-Business…
'Organic' Loses Its Freshness: Until recently, organic practices were sneered at by those in academia, in government and in chemical agribusiness -- now called 'conventional agriculture.' Thanks to a fast-growing demand for organic food, the sneers are now reserved for those who practice organics on a small scale. Long accustomed…
Latest measles case brings total to 14 - The Boston Globe: "June 21, 2006 The Massachusetts Department of Public Health confirmed another case of measles yesterday, bringing the total to 14 since early May. The patient, a woman in her early 20s, has recovered from the disease and is back…
Daily Kos: Science Friday: Tis The Season: "Science Friday: Tis The Season by DarkSyde Fri Jun 02, 2006 at 03:41:48 AM PDT In the aftermath of the devastating 2005 hurricane season, the following soundbite was repeated incessantly, packaged in various ways, on every network news station by head meteorologists with…