One of the repeated lessons of history is that when Potemkin politics become standard operating procedure in a nation, no matter how powerful and stable that nation might look, it can come apart with astonishing speed once somebody provides the good hard shove just discussed. The sudden implosion of the Kingdom of France in 1789… Quote […]
“This is how we got twenty years of total failure in Afghanistan. Ours is a profoundly caste-ridden society, in which members of the privileged classes fondly pretend that they alone know what’s really going on in the world and can ignore any contradictory data that might filter up from below. Meanwhile the people who have to live with the consequences of the resulting policies face a torrent of abuse if they mention that the facts on the ground are not behaving according to plan. Nor was this effect limited to one overseas war. Keep in mind that the same elites who were responsible for those twenty years of total failure in Afghanistan are also responsible for the current state of affairs here at home, and a great deal suddenly makes sense.“
Sanity still reigns on the wee homestead and I thought maybe a few of y’all might need a decent dose of it during these crazy dog days of summer amidst continued global chicanery.
The garden looks more like a jungle, but there is a method to the madness. Mostly it’s called ‘too hot to bother’. Still, it looks better than it ever has this time of year (which is saying very little) so I’m proud of a few things worth sharing.
The pigs are eating well off the luffa, which does so well here it actually out-competes the grasses. I wish we liked to eat it too, but I do use the sponges. It’s widely consumed in some cultures, so I might keep trying recipes to see if anything can improve its very bland taste. Plus, the bees love it, so it’s definitely a keeper.
We’re pretty limited on the veggie harvest this time of year, which means eating okra almost daily. I’m really not a big fan and it’s not even a fun one to harvest. It’s prickly and the fire ants scout every inch of it waiting to fall into your gloves or onto your thighs as you cut the spears. Its only redeeming qualities, if you ask me, are that it thrives in the heat and the flowers are pretty.
Luffa and Okra, 2 heat lovers
It’s our first harvest of scuppernong grapes and I’ll soon be making some wine and jelly. I’m kind of sick of canning, after all the pickles and having tried several new canning recipes this year, but I must find the grit somewhere and get back to it. For my latest experiments we’ll soon be tasting pickled watermelon rind, melon butter, and some exotically flavored cucumbers. That’s in addition to all our usual staples of pickles and salsas and sauces.
Green scuppernongs, yum!
I’ve also made poke wine! It tastes pretty weird, but is supposed to be an excellent medicinal, so I thought it would be good to have on hand this winter. Despite popular hype, poke berries are not poisonous. Well, not exactly anyway. The seeds inside the berry are poisonous if chewed. You must extract the juice or swallow the berries whole.
Poke berries and poke wineButtercup decorated with Poke berry splotches 🙂
Our pear harvest was quite small this year, but those will be processed soon too, into cider and preserves. My favorite, figs, have been doing better after a couple years of total failure. Too bad we eat them too fast to preserve them!
I’ve settled into a nice routine with milking our goat Summer and am extremely pleased with the cheeses I’ve been making. It took some getting used to, fitting it all into a workable new plan, after making mostly large-batch cheeses for several years. I’m using only traditional methods now too, so no more expensive cheese cultures to purchase.
Making melon butter and goat cheeses. Pictured here: left: crottin; right: mozzarella Middle: my favorite preserving book
Organizing seeds and preparing the fall plantings are also in high gear. It’s a real challenge in 90+ degree temps to be considering the cool season crops. I’ve got some started indoors under lights and my direct sow method amounts to throwing a variety of seeds in the ground every week, waterIng liberally, and keeping fingers crossed. Usually, eventually, some seedlings get brave and make an appearance and if we’re lucky, will produce something before the first frost.
Handy Hubby’s still rockin’ the new utility room and it’s already looking fabulous! It’s been a 100% DIY project for him and he never fails to impress. Once done I’ll give him a proper staging and big kudos post.
‘Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state has become lawless or corrupt. And a citizen who barters with such a state shares in its corruption and lawlessness.’ — Mahatma Gandhi In our post […] The post Shutdowns and Covid Tyranny: Rubber Meets the Road for Resistance first appeared on Winter Watch.
She’s the kind of wise woman I’d love to know. Not because I think we are political allies, or ideological twins—we are not. She sometimes writes about Native American issues and social justice, two movements I might’ve supported as a young woman, but which I truly believe now have been co-opted by dark forces for corrupt gains.
She’s a strong believer in community; I covet individualism. I can tell from her posts she’s a kind person who wishes to engender a spirit of generosity and love in the world; I grow increasingly curmudgeon-like with age, and I like it that way, perhaps too much.
But what we have in common, I sense, is so deep that none of that would matter. In another time and place I suspect we would become great friends.
Short of putting words in her mouth, I’d say she believes mankind needs to soften up, whereas I believe we need to toughen up.
We are probably both right. Ever heard of the Gentle Giant? Those who are truly tough very rarely show it. They don’t have to. They don’t need to carry a big stick and they can afford to speak softly.
It’s the power-addicted peons who most often need to strut their stuff. Their Napoleon complex ensures they never truly feel power unless others are cowering and groveling before them—masked, impotent, willing dupes in their own demise, and therefore unable to remind the petty tyrants of their own impotence.
When adults—as in parents, teachers, preachers, politicians—teach children “Christian values” like ‘don’t hit, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t cheat’ and then model the exact opposite of that by supporting wars of aggression for their own material interests or petty revenge, forcing others to bow to tyranny in order to safeguard their own comfort levels, coercing others to do their dirty work, exploiting and abusing their power—they are creating the adolescent malcontents who then are forced into a double-bind—in effect forcing them to either support the charade as fellow hypocrites, or rebel against it in a myriad of destructive ways.
This is called “Adultism” because real adults protect children, not make slaves of them. They walk their talk. They don’t sit around like a Miss Muffet on her Tuffet while barking orders at others.
I’m reminded here of my all-time favorite play. Tartuffe by Moliere: “Tartuffe, ou L’Imposteur was also performed at Versailles, in 1664, and created the greatest scandal of Molière’s artistic career. Its depiction of the hypocrisy of the dominant classes was taken as an outrage and violently contested. It also aroused the wrath of the Jansenists and the play was banned.”
From Act 1, Scene II (in a marvelous translation by Richard Wilbur) is it not poignant in its Universal and timeless appeal?!
“In the late troubles, he played an able part And served his king with wise and loyal heart, But he’s quite lost his sense since he fell Beneath Tartuffe’s infatuating spell. He calls him brother, and loves him as his life, Preferring him to mother, child, or wife. In him and him alone will he confide; He’s made him his confessor and his guide; He pets and pampers him with love more tender Than any pretty mistress could engender, Gives him the place of honor when they dine, Delights to see him gorging like a swine, Stuffs him with dainties till his guts distend, And when he belches, cries, “God bless you, friend!” In short, he’s mad; he worships him; he dotes; His deeds he marvels at, his words he quotes, Thinking each act a miracle, each word Oracular as those that Moses heard. Tartuffe, much pleased to find so easy a victim, Has in a hundred ways beguiled and tricked him, Milked him of money, and with his permission Established here a sort of Inquisition. Even Laurent, his lackey, dares to give Us arrogant advice on how to live; He sermonizes us in thundering tones And confiscates our ribbons and colognes. Last week he tore a kerchief into pieces Because he found it pressed in A Life of Jesus: He said it was a sin to juxtapose Unholy vanities and holy prose.”
As synchronicity would have it, as I was writing this I took a break to listen to another wise Carol, who I listen to almost daily At ‘Never Lose Truth’ channel.
I don’t know her either, but I truly cherish her work. She just happened to post a fairly scathing rebuke of Christian hypocrites that fits right in line with this post. Some call her ‘bitter’, Hubby calls her ‘Crazy Carol’ and asks I turn her off when he’s in the room. But in her I hear my own frustrations, my own futile battles, my own refusal to break, and I find such mirroring very inspiring and very necessary to my peace of mind.
We are each doing what we feel must be done in the only way we know how.
Thank you, two Carols, for your very different approaches to the very same problems, and for giving me a much welcomed sense of soul-sisterhood.
This is a summary, of sorts, to Jasun Horsley’s thought-provoking work: Prisoner of Infinity: UFOs, Social Engineering and the Psychology of Fragmentation adapted, in my mind, to the song: I’ve Seen All Good People by YES.
All good people . . .
“One connection I made (in my own mind at least) early on was to the transhumanist movement, something I’d been researching while looking into autism (a project that got steamrollered by this one). I had looked briefly into Ray Kurzweil and ‘The Singularity,” and planned to cite it in passing in the larger context of SRI and spiritual engineering.”
So satisfied . . .
For all the Eastern spiritual jargon favored by these individuals and institutes, the aims they put forth (in common with those of trans humanism and the Singularity) are really indistinguishable from the aims of Western occultism (and groups like Scientology): namely, the development of superpowers. In the West, we tend to confuse psychism with spiritual attainment. Yet from and Eastern point of view, they are seen as at odds with one another—hence the many warnings about ‘siddhis’.”
I’m on my way . . .
“To give an example: One way in which experiences get swept up by a sense of being on a world-saving mission is by trying to get the government (and other people) to see what the aliens are doing. Scratch the surface of this phantastic narrative and underneath we may find something more mundane and tragic: the frustration and torment of a child, unable to get his parents (or other adults, if the abuse or neglect is by the parents) to see what’s happening to him. The experiencer’s experience then becomes part of a larger, unconscious reenactment, meant to bring about whatever resolution failed to occur when it was most needed.”
Move on to any black square, use me anytime you want . . .
“Implicit in this scenario is the understanding that, to become more than human entails becoming less than human. Ironically, the same subhuman indifference to other people’s pain—the complete absence of empathy or compassion or conscience—must be extended to the controllers who are performing these horrendous conditioning exercises. Possibly it is even one of their goals, based on an understanding that, the more abhorrent the acts they commit, the more desensitized they will become, the more ‘invulnerable’ and ‘powerful’ they will experience themselves to be.”
For the Queen to use . . .
“Returning to the more solid ground of Industrial Light & Magic Reaganomics; if,as the evidence suggests, none of this is coincidental but is by careful design, then the entire Star Wars phenomenon—which continues to fire people’s most irrational, romantic responses to this day—is very different from what millions of impassioned devotees have hitherto dreamed of, even in their wildest fantasies. Such innocence may not only be a luxury: It may also be a commodity. The soul-deep mythic yearning of entire generations, tapped into by the use of images and carefully designed narratives, transmuted into a power source to be harnessed and directed into specific goals of progress, all in service of The Empire.”
Don’t surround yourself with yourself . . .
“One reason for the appeal of secret societies lies in what might be called the lure of the arcane. It is a basic human impulse to enjoy secrets, to be included in a special group that has privileged information about any subject that matter to the individual, whether government, finance, sports, the arts, or religion. In the mid-nineteenth venture Thomas De Quincey wrote: “To be hidden amidst crowds is sublime—to come down hidden amongst crowds from distant generations is double sublime.” De Quince was writing with a degree of cynicism about those who feel they are connected by ‘the grander link of awful truths which, merely to shelter themselves from the hostility of an age unprepared for their reception, must retire, perhaps for generations, behind thick curtains of secrecy.’ Yet his cynicism correctly identified a widespread phenomenon. A venture later C.G. Jung observed that ‘there is no better means of intensifying the treasured feeling of individuality than the possession of a secret which the individual is pledged to guard. The very beginnings of societal structures reveal the craving for secret organizations..’ This impulse accounts for the self-protective tendency among the young, but also among their seniors, to join teams, clubs, gangs, political parties, professional associations, and other circles.”
The Lure of the Arcane: The Literature of Cult and Conspiracy; Ziolkowski, Theodore. (Only the final quote.). I found both books to be interesting, but only Horsley’s would I recommend as being particularly relevant to current events.
The column you are about to read is propaganda. Yes, that’s right … propaganda. It isn’t political satire or commentary, or objective news or information, or unbiased, verified scientific fact. It is propaganda, pure and simple. That isn’t a confession, a disclaimer, or a warning. I am not ashamed of writing propaganda. Most everything you […]
Why is the world I see through media so vastly different from the one outside my door?
Once upon a time, stories and reality were most often reflections of one another. When stories were meant to stray terribly far from reality we labeled them as such—fantasies, science fiction, myths, legends, tall tales, etc.
These days I often comment that it feels as if we are in an episode of The Twilight Zone.
We don’t get out much, but that’s nothing new for us. Last week we went to town to run a few errands, which we do a couple times a month. On the weekend we went to a church fundraiser, which was a pleasant occasion with burgers, homemade ice cream and live music.
Folks were very friendly. I saw only a couple of them wearing masks. No one I noticed was doing anything remarkably weird, like ‘social distancing’ or not shaking hands or screeching incessantly about ‘safety’.
The most remarkable thing that’s happened lately is a few weeks ago I was having lunch out with some ladies and overheard a table of preachers next to us discussing ‘conspiracy theory’. I was astonished until I realized it was in reference to the debate as to whether Jesus was an actual living man.
Sometimes we turn on the TV to watch the evening propaganda, but more often we hear it online. Here’s where the stories get really weird. They try to sell some of this as news, which like stories, used to mirror one’s reality. Not anymore.
Now the news has become like science fiction, which they try to pass off as reality!
A ‘pandemic’ used to mean lots of folks ill and dying. They say it’s happening, for over a year, yet I still see no evidence of this. They keep carrying on about ‘Science’ and ‘listening to the scientists and experts’ but they only parade around a handful of them in front of the camera, as if those are the only experts in the world.
Since when did real scientists like to spend all their time in front of cameras?
And they keep going on and on about political division, and violence, and race wars, but again, where is the evidence?
I hear from others that on social media, like Fakebook, there is loads of ‘violence’ against ‘antivaxxers’. First of all, words aren’t violent. Words are just words. Even after a few hours of downing some hard core Dutch courage, words rarely lead to actual violence.
Second of all, why is anyone hanging out in places they consider to be violent if they don’t like violence? It used to be folks who liked witnessing violence went to special venues for that unusual brand of pleasure—like a boxing match or cock fighting, or whatever.
That’s not my cup of tea, but every once in a while I’ll pop onto one of a select few forums (not Fakebook) to berate a few nitwits about the current shit-show they’re calling reality, which in my mind should be named: Tyranny in the Twilight Zone.
Then I get back to the real world, right outside our door, where normal is still normal and this so-called New Normal is not actually evident anywhere.
My favorite conspiracy theorist, James Corbett, calls this the ‘Biosecurity State’. Now it looks like we’re about to face her evil twin sister, Hysterical Climate Rage.
Oh goodie, a new sci-fi hits the airwaves called ‘reality’!
“Yes, the good old anthropogenic climate change fairy tale is set to make a comeback with a vengeance in the 2020s. As I warned last September, The Pandemic is a Test Run for the systems of control that will scare the public into complying with all sorts of draconian limitations on their activities in the name of saving the earth from climate change.” JC
“Scamdemic was so last year, here’s what’s coming next.”
The Sweltering Season has officially begun, later than usual for these parts, lucky for us.
Long weeks of crazy heat and zero rain makes for four lazy dogs and one crabby wife.
So Handy Hubby comes to the rescue once again!
I wanted to share this one because it’s a cool off-grid hack, even though we aren’t off-grid. The ability to pump water from your natural spring, creek or man-made pond or other source has advantages for any landowner. There is the savings on your water bill of course, and the peace of mind in having an alternate water supply, but beyond that the untreated water is better for the plants, animals and environment.
While it does take some significant time and expense initially, to set it up, move it around and then conveniently store it away when not in use is just what we need around here.
We soak the yard and garden with it, and then soak in it ourselves in our 200 gallon stock tank. A real redneck sort of system, but so refreshing!
I asked for a detailed explanation on Hubby’s handiwork to include here for anyone interested and he mumbled, “Just glue it and screw it.”
Yes a man of few words, but great actions, just like I like ‘em. 🤣
On further pressuring him he said if there was anyone reading this that must know the details, just say so in a comment below and he’ll let me figure out a way to persuade him to oblige.
Nature is not perfect, nor perfectible. But whether in chaos or order there can always be found magnificent beauty that heals, energizes and inspires.
I don’t like to see folks high on false Hopium when they face troubled times. I don’t like political slogans or wistful mantras about Hate or Love.
I wish all mankind could feel what I feel, see what I see, touch what I touch, so that the wholesome Hopium of pure life filled them each day with all the sense of wonder and potential, or challenge and purpose, they try forever in vain to find in others’ words and buying things.
And they would know to micromanage Life is antithetical to our raison d’etre, not to mention a hard lesson in futility.
Co-creating beauty and abundance, participating directly in our daily sustenance, living reciprocally between the heavens and the soil is a marvelous feast of the mind, heart and soul.
Nature does not long to be worshipped, or revered, or admired from afar, or just replicated in images. It is us, it is ours to be truly seen and felt, up close and very personal, not as masters or servants, but as partners, in divinity.
To work with nature, really work WITH it and IN it, is to spend your days suspended in magic.
Try one minute of bee zen. Can you hear their successful model of a happy colony? Contrary to popular lore, the worker bees control the queen, not the other way around. Can you sense their contentedness in maintaining their colony as instinctually as every Superorganism does?
Just like the human body, if left to its own devices, it knows just what to do.
