Yes, it’s a thing and it sounds a lot like modern slavery.
Social Impact Investing. Doesn’t that sound super? Now the corporations and governments, through their other super sounding ‘Public-Private Partnerships’ (the latest fancy phrase for fascism) will be openly programming your children, no more beating around the bush about it.
This is about surveillance, its proliferation and its management. It’s also exactly why I quit teaching. It became painfully obvious within the university systems involved with educational technology that this was the direction they were heading years ago.
They tried to sell it to us all wrapped in glowing marketing slogans, appealing to teachers’ better instincts to help their students. Most teachers, like 99% of them, bought it, no questions asked. Surveillance does not help people, it life-squashes them. It is not a long-term motivational strategy either, it does not help with coaching, all it does is invade folks’ minds and lives.
Of course, they are going to say everything you want to hear—they know we need a heavy coating of sugar to take our medicine. It’s all about helping the poor, raising all boats, no child left behind, build back better bullshit.
But “Pay for Success Financing” is not about helping people, it’s about making money off poverty. Like the old saying goes:
“If shit had value, the poor wouldn’t have asses.”
Please folks, stop buying their propaganda! They’ve got our number, because they’ve got our data. They know how to outfox the Left, the Right, the churchies and the anarchists, and everyone in between. And they want the children. They want to own the next generations forevermore and from cradle to grave.
They are expert snake oil salesmen and they would swindle their own grandmothers, so imagine what they’d be willing to do to yours!
Alison McDowell calls it out—the soft global coup—and breaks it down so well in this video, I cannot recommend it enough.
I’ve got sweet potatoes on the brain since I’m just fixing to plant them. I’ll continue planting them for another month or so as they are such heat lovers they’ll thrive all summer long, with supplemental water, and they have numerous benefits.
The biggest benefit, besides doing well in the heat, is that they are vigorous enough to out-compete the many grasses that try (and too often succeed) to take over the summer garden. Additional benefits are that the leaves are edible and delicious, few pests bother them too much, and all the critters love the surplus. Plus, they are so easy to grow you can start them right in your kitchen and have dozens of plants from just one potato.
There are several methods for growing the ‘slips’ which you then plant in the garden. It seems the most popular way is to suspend your potato in a jar of water then snap each new vine off when there’s about 4 or 5 leaf sets, then plant it.
I prefer another method because when those vines get taller they don’t do so well with the wind when you first put them in the ground and they dry out faster. I lay them first flat in a tray and cover them most of the way with loose soil. Once they get 2 or 3 leaf sets I snap those off and put them in water for a week or so to grow roots. The short vine with many roots transplants much better in our climate than the long vine with no roots.*
These are from last year’s harvest, under lights in the corner, but a sunny window would work as well, especially with a heat mat.
Not exactly attractive, but very tasty! Some of our favorite ways to enjoy them are as a crust for quiche, in a roasted veggie medley tossed with plenty of olive oil or pork fat, and mashed with turnips and butter.
I prefer to tone down their sweetness rather than accentuate it, but lots of folks prefer the opposite, like the popular Thanksgiving dish topped with marshmallows or baked in a pie. They also do very well as a thickener for soups and sauces. To further tone down the sweetness you can avoid the curing process and move them straight indoors to overwinter.
For more growing tips and cooking ideas, here’s a good site:
* Another tip for Southern gardeners is to grow your own slips rather than order them. I wanted to try some different varieties I saw in the catalogues and tried for several years to get a good crop and they failed every time. The vines went crazy, but no tubers grew at all. I tried to discover why this was, but never could find an answer. My only guess is that coming from a more northern climate disrupted their growth somehow? Not only that, but they are obscenely expensive considering how easy they are to grow! I was not at all pleased to waste so much time, space and money for those failures. But, lesson learned and now I waste no money on them at all!
A trigger warning accompanies this week’s batch! If a few of them seem sociopathic to you, I totally agree.
I don’t laugh because I think it’s right, but because it’s true, too often, sadly so. (And just adding such a disclaimer automatically makes it less funny, but still, no less true!)
Saved the best for last! How cool is that?! As awesome as walking on water??
Hope there was a little something for everyone! Wishing y’all a lovely weekend!
And, it seems to me, the only way to really know that, is to have known how very low you can go, when you’re really not, hot.
Mamas and babies are all doing great and our semi-feral cat, Skittles, has just had TicTacs, though we can only hear them so far, somewhere, under the floorboards of the old tractor barn where she’s taken up semi-permanent residence .
And . … We just got our first swarm! I’m extra excited because it’s off our ‘Ninja’ hive, our strongest colony. And a bit of an odd story about that. I ‘sensed’ it, before I saw it. I know, sounds crazy! I did suspect they’d swarm this season, because they didn’t last year, as far as I know.
All settled in already, after just a couple of hours!
I call them the Ninja hive because they are right by the house, always very active, regularly fighting off robbers and just generally busy, but never aggressive toward us. We can even mow right around them with no problem.
Because I like their temperament so much I have taken splits from them in the past hoping to spread their lineage far and wide. Funny thing is, they were the brand new hive that got flipped over during the tornado several years ago and they were so weak I thought they wouldn’t even make it through the summer.
This afternoon I had a sense, all of the sudden, that they’d swarmed, and I looked out the window, and there was their swarm!
Bad photo I know, but just to show the location, right above the power lines in the nearby pine tree.
Didn’t bother to edit this after all, I’ll learn someday soon though, really!
Mama Chop went for an excursion and I figured she’d go right to her daughter’s place, which she did. Virginia was nursing at that moment and one piglet had strayed through the fence into the orchard and couldn’t figure her way back in and was NOT AT ALL happy to be missing her breakfast! (Actually, it could very well be a ’he’ and probably more likely since the boys are typically first to venture off).
We traded a couple piglets once again with a farming friend for our next breeding ram. We named him ‘Terdeau’, HeHe, can you guess why?!
I’ve been noticing for years, as so many others have as well, that the online world is being transformed into something quite unrecognizable.
I noticed this incremental shift long before the “Fact Checking” era began, but not long after I got removed from the blogging platform I’d been blogging at for years, before I started this blog.
It was mere annoyance at first, at the little things. Why can’t I find recipes anymore by independent bloggers? I thought DuckDuckGo was supposed to be a more neutral search engine. Why is it all becoming so commercialized and institutionalized? So many ads, so much repetition, so few unique voices. If I didn’t know the exact name of the specific bloggers’ recipes I wanted to find the only links that come up in my searches are for the ‘big name’ mainstream mega-platforms, like Betty Crocker, Saveur, Food Network, listed over and over again. The original content creators that made the web what it is are being systematically squeezed out.
And it’s not just about controversial content, as Truthstream Media is pointing out in this new video. Mel aptly describes it as the latest Potemkin Village.
This morning I got this message (below) in my inbox. Now, it’s been some years since I’ve blogged for GRIT, and that stint didn’t last long even back then, because the stupid rules were already starting in at that point, and changing constantly, and I found it too annoying to try to keep up with them, considering it was supposed to be a labor of love (ie, no one’s getting paid for all the free content we provide).
Now it seems they don’t even want free content anymore from mere bloggers.
Dear GRIT blogger:
During the past 10 years, you have offered your know-how generously, supplying millions of readers with the actionable advice that has enabled so many households and farms to turn country living dreams into reality. The work you do — and the wisdom you transfer to the digital page — underpin more resilient, connected communities. Also during the past decade, the Internet evolved immensely.
When we started the GRIT blogging program, we were on a mission to supply a rapidly growing online readership with timely — even daily — information, free of the page and time constraints faced by the print edition of the magazine. We also were largely free of rules; blogging was in its “Wild West” period. As online writing evolved, search engines placed increasingly complex, and ever-changing, “web rules” around what content is featured in search results. Meanwhile, blogging as a format and cultural phenomenon underwent its own transitions. These factors have led us to make a tough decision.
No more bloggers at GRIT.
Looks to me like the WorldWideWeb is being Walmarted. I believe in business parlance that’s called Vertical Integration.
I can’t believe it’s Friday already! This week felt like it went by faster than a rooster makes whoopee! 😆 Sorry, guess I’ve got roosters on the mind as a friend just gave us four. Luckily, Hubby built the new coop closer to the neighbor’s bedroom window than our own. 😏
We have some happy snaps, one minute of piglets’ bliss and a couple garden successes to share today.
Mamas and piglets are venturing out already and enjoyed their first spa day. Unfortunately, Mama Chop did still squish two of her wee ones despite Hubby’s extra efforts, so both Mamas are now with seven. Virginia has proven to be the better mother, but we prefer Mama Chop’s personality. But, it’s not about us. Sadly this will probably be Mama Chop’s last hurrah.
Mama Chop with her Lucky 7Our semi-feral cat, Skittles, is becoming more domesticated now that there are only two dogs who chase her off. That is, if you call hissing and snarling for her supper domesticated! 😳
Moving on to the garden I’m pleased to report good news. The alliums are looking amazing, the best ever at this time of year., I expect that is due to our very mild winter and an extra helping of sheep poop. I love this time of year when chopped green onion can top every savory dish. Also, unlimited lettuces, for a limited time only. Once the heat sets in there are only a few varieties that survive, arugula and oak leaf primarily, and even those still have a tendency to get too hot or bitter and bolt quickly.
Here we’ve got garlic, elephant and a few varieties of hard neck, plus white, red and yellow storage onions, shallots, and a pearl onion perennial that I highly recommend for hot climates (Bianca di Maggio). I’ve tried every type of popular perennial onion and this is the first time I’ve gotten them to last, relatively carefree, for two full years. Normally they do not last the summer. That could also be because these I grew from seed instead of getting sets.
Seed saving and propagation are big on my garden plans lately, not only because of the high costs we’re seeing. Some seeds naturalize very quickly to their environment and I’m regularly impressed at all the volunteers that have found their way into the garden over the years—including tomatoes, wild carrot, datura, tomatillos, jumping jacks, Malabar spinach and collards/kale. In some cases I’m planting these purchased seeds and they don’t do that great the first year, but the volunteers that come back thrive with no care and even competing with some of our very pernicious grasses. Nature is so amazing!
Tis the season for pokeweed, a new and reliable favorite—that poor maligned and misunderstood plant I wrote about last year. We ate the greens all summer, the berries all fall and winter . … and we’re still alive . … go figure! So much mis-and dis-information out there on this delicious, nutritious and versatile, once upon a time Southern staple, that ‘science’ has tried to steal from us.
Two more such successes are strawberries and chayote squash. These are definite testaments to the old adage: “If you don’t succeed, try, and try, again!”
Why, oh why do you let weeds grow in your garden!? Oh let me count the ways . … the bees, the seeds, and, seriously how much time do you think I have?! Actually though, there’s a very good short answer for that—when you allow the deeply-rooted ’weeds’ to work among your short-rooted annual crops you have a magnificent force of nature at your fingertipes—those long tap-roots bring nutrients up from the depths in order to feed your fancy annual crops their otherwise lacking essential minerals.
The chayote squash, pictured left, I’ve tried to get established a minimum of five times. Even this time, the one I expected to live has died and the one I expected to die has come back with impressive gusto. This is why the plants I really want to work I place in different spots of the garden, just to see, as extra insurance, even though this is often inconvenient and seemingly counter-intuitive.
Same thing with the strawberries. Texas gardeners don’t have an easy time with strawberries or blueberries, they both prefer cooler climates. Most gardeners here who are serious about strawberries either buy new plugs each fall for the spring crop or dig up their crop and store them in the fridge all summer until the fall planting. This is too much work and/or expense for us here, yet I’d love to have at least a small, but reliable, crop of strawberries. This time did the trick so far, but only time will tell. At least I’ve got them not only surviving the summer, but also spreading. I used a couple of folk tricks I heard over the decades. One is from Finland—put them with the asparagus, I was told. But alone that did not do the trick. So, I tried them where the asparagus had been, but also where the Indian strawberries had been growing wild. Success! So far . …
You’d think with it being April Fool’s Day I’d have funnier memes to share. Maybe I’m too exhausted to laugh? But at least there’s a smile in there somewhere!
“Patients no longer complain of inferiority feelings or sexual frustration as they did in the age of Adler and Freud. Today they come to see us psychiatrists because of feelings of futility” – Viktor Frankl
“Daft sensational types have no problem thinking of nature as one big theme-park, there expressly to satisfy their every tawdry infantile desire. Their interest in nature’s welfare is insincere and supeficial. Most people’s attitude toward nature (umwelt) is gnostic in complexion. Nature is not to be loved and understood, it’s to be escaped. While we are here on the planet, we might as well have fun at nature’s expense. We’re on our way somewhere better, where happiness is guaranteed. Nature denies us a lot, and makes us suffer. God grants all my wishes and bestows eternal pleasure. Millions of people have this outlook. It’s the main reason they do what they do, and accounts for a great deal of the irrational nonsense going on in the world. Delicate senses are taxed and sullied by the incessant irrational demand for “more.” In the end one prostitutes themselves to the senses and pays dearly for doing so. One becomes decadent, discontented and compulsively outer-directed.”
“Like spoiled brats we just can’t accept that the ride comes to an end. This is why we aren’t satisfied with one or two versions of any product. There must be hundreds of brands and dozens of flavors and alternatives. We’re never satisfied, but rarely ask why? We never inquire into what sensations are, or that maybe it’s a good thing we’re not in a world of constant sensual edification. What kind of beings would we become if it were otherwise? Are we to take it that we, as humans, simply wish to have pleasure and avoid pain? Or is it more accurate to say that without opposites there can be neither pleasure nor pain?”
Kensho Homestead 