Celebration :: David Mallett

The Trash of Billionaires

“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied... but written off as trash.” - John Berger

23 Bushes In, 25 More to Go

Four potted bushes in, four pots of rocks out.

I'm digging holes three times bigger than the pots, and filling in with soil from the hole, cleaned of all rocks, and mixed with old composted mulch.  

After digging the hole, and before planting and backfilling, I am slamming the adze blade of a pick into the side and prying it up to split and loosen the clay-like soil all around so that the roots can find a way outwards as well as down.

Pit Bulls Are a Type Older Than Jesus

This Sicilian mosaic is over 1,700 years old, and shows the same dog, of the same size, used for the same purpose that it is today.

A Nugget in the Pan Is a Good Prospect

IOWA HAS SWUNG 22 POINTS since June, and Harris is now in the lead.

Amazing.  

Iowa is as rock-ribbed Republican as any state in the nation.

Have you ever *been* to Iowa?

It’s farmer conservative. Deep red. 

Every job in the state is connected to farms, pigs, cattle and crops.

You cannot get elected to home room monitor in that state unless you are pro-farmer and pro-agricultural livestock production.

This is a state with 3 million people, 4 million cattle, and 19 million hogs.

You want to talk chickens? Fine. Iowa leads the nation in egg production with 52.4 million chickens producing 13.9 billion eggs a year.

You want to talk turkey? Fine. Iowa, produced 274 million pounds of turkey last year.

All told, over 6.6 billion pounds of red meat were produced in Iowa last year, as well as 4.28 billion pounds of milk.

If Harris is ahead in Iowa (and she no doubt is, as the Des Moines Register poll is famously good), then the campaign signals from Texas and Florida may mean what the pipe smokers suggest, which is that Texas and Florida are in play.

Iowa!

The mind reels.

American Girl

Love this!

An Existential Election

Every Text Message These Days

“We’ll be blunt. We’re worried about the quarterly fundraising reports that just came out.

“We can catch up in these final hours, but we need to have a massive fundraising surge before Election Day to do so. 

“Can you rush a contribution to me right now?”

Gone, But Not Forgotten

Roman marble gravestone for a dog named Aminnaracus. From Rome, 1st-2nd century AD. Located in National Museum Wales.

Seven In, and Forty-One To Go

One Week to the Election

It’s one week to the election, and I am *guaranteed* to be wrong, but here’s how I think it’s going.

▪️I’m expecting an early evening i.e. I’Il be in bed and drifting off to sleep by 10 PM. 

▪️I think there are three things happening that could drive the election.

1. The first is that a significant number of Trump supporters now know he’s a bad guy, and that he’s both physically feeble and mentally demented. They see and hear him as he is now, and they remember January 6th. Those 34 felony convictions are real, as is the sexual assault finding, and the huge financial liabilities Trump now faces. Trump is set to be sentenced on those 34 felony convictions in three weeks. What’s that mean? I suspect 5 percent of Trump’s old supporters will simply not turn out to vote.
2. The second issue is what I will call “cut and fill” on the Republican side.  A Republican not voting is *half* as good as Republican switching sides, because he’s not only *not* voting for the Republicans, he’s voting *for* the Democrats.  I think perhaps 5 percent of Republicans will switch sides. That would be enormous. Under this scenario, Trump would hold 90 percent of his 2020 voters and lose 15 percent of “his” vote to Harris.
3. The third factor is Democrats are pretty energized. Non-voters are the biggest political party in the US, but the GOTV efforts by the Dems is pretty impressive, while the Republican operation appears to be in chaos or non-existent. The NRA is broke, the veterans are being insulted, and the economy is roaring under Biden-Harris. I suspect Trump will lose white women voters for the first time. He won white women in 2016 and in 2020 — and by a larger margin in 2020 than in 2016. At the same time, black women are incredibly energized, and are taking leadership positions to turn out the vote. Big stuff is happening!

The real issue is the Senate. Hogan will lose Maryland, and I think Cruz will lose in Texas. Tester will hold Montana. The Dems will lose WV.  I think Osborn might win Nebraska. Casey will hold PA.  Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin are nail-biters, but women and the unions may help hold all three. Gallego will win AZ. In the end, when the dust settles, we *may* hold the Senate, but it’s too damn close to bet.

I think the Dems will take the House (barely), but I haven’t been nose counting.  The Democratic money train is flowing, and the GOTV push at the top will help lift all boats.  The race I’m most interested in is the Alaska seat, as it’s a ranked choice race, which is unusual.

My Enthusiasm Exceeds My Capacity

I picked up 48 potted bushes acquired by online auction, sight unseen, from a Virginia nursery going out of business due to a road expansion.

I thought these shrubs were in 10” pots, but a lot were in 14” pots.  I barely got them all into the two SUVs. 

26 of these shrubs will grow up to at least 7 feet by 6 feet.

I placed 34 of the shrubs this morning, and by “place,” I mean I just moved them to a location for consideration.  

Digging the holes is going to be a voyage of the damned due to the massive amount of rock on the knoll.

This mushroom was with 5-6 others of similar size right where I intend to drop a hole for an American Cranberrybush 'Redwing’ Viburnum.

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Temp Job

Titanic’s boiler rooms. There were six boiler rooms that held 29 boilers manned by 179 men who moved 600 tonnes of coal a day.

Sic Semper Tyrannis

The Immortals Live Among Us

See >> https://tinyurl.com/55sku9ny

Trump Backer Meets Trump Banker

Flip The Script

Walking Cures a Lot

"Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right." -- Søren Kierkegaard

New Camera Trap Manual

Cris Wemmer, who is a biologist, wildlife conservation consultant, and retired Smithsonian scientist who ran the rare animal Smithsonian Conservation and Research Center in Luray, Virginia, has just put out a new manual on camera trapping with game or trail cameras. Available on Kindle or in print. 

Chris knows this topic backwards and forwards, as anyone who has visited his excellent blog, Camera Trap Codger, can attest.

Time for me to break out my game cameras!

The Best Hitler Is a Dead Hitler

UNLIKE TRUMP, I don’t like Nazi generals that lose.

I LIKE AMERICAN generals that win by killing Nazis.

These are the generals of Antifa, 1945:

Standing (from left to right) Ralph Stearley, Hoyt Vandenberg, Walter Bedell Smith, Otto P. Weyland, and Richard Nugent. Seated (from left to right) William Simpson, George Patton, Carl Spaatz, Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, Courtney Hodges, and Leonard Gerow.

American bad asses.  Certified Nazi killers.

Two that I know of were famously devoted to their terriers, as was the American President they fought under.

Bottom line:  VOTE.

Coffee Is America’s Favorite Bean Soup

Legend has it that the coffee plant was first discovered in Ethiopia by a goat herder who found his charges a little too animated after eating beans from a local bush. 

The coffee plant (and the drink) eventually made its way to Yemen and the Arab world via the Sudanese slaves that were forced to paddle boats across the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula.

With alcohol banned, coffee quickly became the "drug of choice" in the Arab world. While an alcohol-besotted Europe struggled in a drunken haze through the Dark Ages, the Arab world became caffeinated and invigorated. Soon after they started the first coffee houses in the world, Arabs began creating grand libraries, universities, new mathematical equations, and amazingly complex architectural designs. Such is the power of coffee.

Coffee houses hit Europe around 1600, and there they had the same effect they had in the Arab world -- a spectacular growth in intellectual clarity and output. From the enlightened coffee houses of London grew the first newspaper divisions (business, style, overseas news, etc.), the first organized scientific associations, and Lloyds of London -- the first international insurance cartel.

Coffee consumption took off like a rocket in Great Britain, and in 1796, when the British took over Sri Lanka (Ceylon) from the Dutch, the new settlers began clearing land for coffee plantations.

By the 1860s, Sri Lanka was the largest coffee producer in the world.

In 1869, however, a lethal fungus known as coffee rust had shown up on the island causing premature defoliation of the coffee plants, and dramatically reducing berry yield.

By 1879, the rust fungus had spread across the island and into Indian plantations as well, with the result being a collapse of coffee production across the region.

Unable to grow coffee in the face of a devastating rust fungus epidemic, Ceylonese and Indian plantation owners began to rip out their coffee plants in order to grow tea.

Within a few decades, tea consumption in the U.K. had surpassed coffee consumption, and it has remained so to this day.

While tea is the national drink of Great Britain, coffee remains the national drink of the United States, where we consume vast quantities of it. In fact, though coffee is the second most internationally traded commodity in the world (after oil), the U.S. consumes one-quarter of the world's coffee beans.

Coffee came to the New World via the French, who introduced it into the Caribbean in the mid 1700s, and the Spanish, who brought coffee plants to Latin America a few decades later.

By the mid 1800s, coffee plantations had been planted in Central and South America, and these coffee plantations were greatly expanded after coffee rust decimated production in Sri Lanka and India.

Coffee plantations in Central and South America were diverse operations that grew, rather naturally, out of the multi-storied small-patch gardening operations that had been successfully employed by the native Indians for several thousand years before Columbus.

These small patch gardens were created by removing large trees with little agricultural value, but leaving those that might yield a nut harvest, good wood, seasonal fruits, or which had the lucky property of fixing nitrogen in the soil.

Under these large forest trees were planted shorter citrus and cacao trees, and between these were planted bananas. Underneath and between the bananas were planted coffee bushes and vegetable crops for local food consumption.

Multi-storied "shade coffee" plantations were miracles of production. When coffee prices fell (as they often did), other crops provided sustenance and cash, ensuring that the locals could always eat and pay for things made elsewhere.

Because multiple types of plants were found on shade-grown coffee plots, multiple types of insects and birds were present. The result was not only less overall insect predation on any one crop, but less erosion and slower evaporation as both rain and sunlight filtered through multiple vegetative layers.

Shade-grown coffee plantations were particularly rich in bird life -- especially neo-tropical migrant song birds such as redstarts, Tenessee warblers, Baltimore Orioles, yellow-throated and solitary vireos, wood thrushes, catbirds, ruby-throated hummingbirds, Nashville Warblers, and oven-birds.

All told, more than 150 bird species are known to winter or live year-round in shade coffee plantations, making them the most bird-intensive agricultural areas in the world.

Shade coffee production thrived.  

But something wicked this way drifted. The coffee rust fungus that had been seen in Sri Lanka 100 years earlier, was discovered in Brazil and Nicaragua. This discovery caused a panic, not only in the coffee industry, but also among the economic and political elite that run such major banking and development policy shops as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The fear was that coffee rust would soon sweep through Central and South America. If that happened, not only would the coffee crop be destroyed, but so too would the economic base of entire countries and many millions of people. If that happened, not only would we not have coffee in New York, Paris and Vienna, but billions of dollars of foreign loans would go unpaid.

Something had to be done.

What was done was massive, mechanical, and swift. 

Under orders from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the large cartels that control much of the world's coffee market, coffee plantations in Central and South America were systematically ripped from the ground and replanted.

The idea here was a simple one: by growing coffee in direct sun, rather than in the shade, coffee plants could be made safe from the coffee rust fungus. The prescription for salvation was destruction, and entire mountain sides were plowed clear of their multistory canopies and the detritus burned. In their place was planted dense hedgerows of a dwarf variety of coffee that could withstand direct tropical sunlight.

With the loss of a diversified shade forest cover, bird populations that had once thrived in the rich overstory of coffee plantations plummeted.  At the same time, with the absence of trees to provide vegetative nutrients to the soil and hold back erosion, the fertilizer needs of coffee plantations skyrocketed. Mono-cropped sun coffee plantations proved far more susceptible to insect infestations than shade plantations, so insecticide inputs also increased. The open sunny soil between coffee plants proved susceptible to weed infestations, so herbicide use also increased. Finally, though the new coffee plants produced a great number of beans, the plants themselves were not as hardy as the old shade-grown varieties, and an additional expense had to be factored into the equation -- the cost of periodically replanting large numbers of exhausted plants.

Ironically, all of the devastation and destruction was not needed. It turns out that due to the peculiarities of Latin America's climate and the timing of rain, humidity and mountain temperature, coffee leaf rust has not been able to proliferate in either Central or South America.

Adding insult to injury, it turns out that the new dwarf varieties of sun-grown coffee are not less susceptible to coffee leaf rust than the older varieties. When a fungus outbreak does occur, as it sometimes does, it is generally localized and easily treatable with a copper-based fungicide.

Sadly, however, the damage to the once-vibrant shade coffee plantations cannot be rapidly undone. Forests that took decades to grow were razed to the ground in hours, and will now take decades to grow back, if they ever do.

Have things turned around at all?  Sadly, they have not.  Between 1996 and 2014, the proportion of land used to cultivate shade-grown coffee, relative to the total land area used for coffee cultivation, has fallen by nearly 20 percent.

The Tree of Life is Self-pruning

Lizard Brains Armed With Chainsaws

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.” — E. O. Wilson

No Taxes, No Service

Churches, synagogues, mosques, and ashrams are unique in that while they are afforded Constitutional protection, tax exemptions for religions specifically violates the separation of church and state enshrined in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. 

Americans are — quite literally — subsidizing religion, and favoring religious activities over non-religious ones. The argument that the activities of churches are incidental to religion is complete nonsense, as most churches do little or no community service beyond religious indoctrination and collecting money.   

All churches, mosques, temples, ashrams, etc. should be treated the same as every other business. As a business, they can deduct their charitable expenses from their taxes, same as every other business.

Until then, no fire truck should ever go to a church, synagogue, mosque or ashram. 

No police car. 

No public water or sewer. 

The road in front should never be paved. 

No taxes, no service.

For the record, Jesus approved of taxation, saying “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s”. 

Taxes are at the core of Jesus’ mission to provide health care, education, and help for the poor.

A true Christian would champion church taxation —and church tax deductions for charitable works — as a duty to help support the community.  

Some Sort of Mushroom Coming Up

These might be some sort of puffballs.  We’ll see…

Season Collision in Vermont

Thanks to Lucas M. for this terrific picture by Ryan Resatka.  Check him out!

Wee Wolves in the Watershed

Deer Season

Deer season in Maryland means I need to throw a bright orange hat in the truck.

Wee Man Inspects the Pumpkin Crop

Willow and Darwin in the Watershed

Your Opinion Versus Your Experience

Every time someone comments on modern e-collars, and I ask what make and model of e-collar that person owns (and please post a picture), that commentator disappears.

Every. Time.

Imagine writing about tree work, and someone sails into the comments demonizing chainsaws (so dangerous, so loud!) and asking why we need them when Americans once used only axes and handsaws.  

Would it be unreasonable to ask whether that person owned a chainsaw, ever used a chainsaw, and could they post a picture of their make and model?  Could they post a picture of the 80-foot oak tree they felled and sectioned for firewood using only an ax?

Imagine writing about cooking, and someone sails into the comments demonizing microwaves (radiation!) and asking why we need them when our grandparents cooked without them. Would it be unreasonable to ask whether they had ever used a microwave, and could they post a picture of the make and model of microwave, and something that they heated up (and for how long)?

Imagine writing about travel, and someone sails into the comments demonizing cars and airplanes (too fast, too polluting, too dangerous!) and asking why we need them when the whole world once traveled only by horse and train. Would it be unreasonable to ask whether they had ever been in a car or airplane, and could they post a picture of the make and model and tell us where they started from, and where they were going?

To be clear, I am not asking anyone to use any tool to do anything.

That said, if my tree guy shows up with five people only wielding axes, I might enquire if he owns a chainsaw.  If he says he is opposed to them, I might enquire whether he intended to charge me by the hour.

Similarly, if a dog trainer shows up to train a dog and owns no leashes, but quotes Bob Dylan (“dogs run free, so why can’t we?”), I might have a few questions.  

A dog trainer that does not own a full set of tools is like a house painter without a sprayer, or a boat builder without a chisel and mallet. 

Even if the painter rarely uses a sprayer, and the boatbuilder goes months without touching mallet and chisel, the failure to even own the basic tools tells me quite a lot.

The Last Rose of the Season?