I guess Communism isn't dead after all

Down in Alabama, the members of the state legislature have managed to pass legislation designed to hold off the evils of a dastardly Commie plot. As reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Since September, the [John Birch Society] has sponsored a national lecture tour on the supposed dangers of Agenda 21. Using slideshows replete with images of Karl Marx and Alger Hiss, the accused communist spy who helped draft the U.N. Charter, JBS scare-mongers have fanned out across the country to warn locals of the evils of the U.N.’s sustainability initiative. Agenda 21, they claim, calls for “a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced.” According to the JBS, the ultimate purpose of this decades-old plan is nothing less than a new world order in which rural regions will be depopulated and foreign bureaucrats will mandate family size here in the United States, imposing forced abortions as they do in communist China.

Apparently, these threats were enough to spook the Republican National Committee, which in January passed a resolution opposing Agenda 21, decrying the nonbinding measure as “a comprehensive plan of extreme environmentalism, social engineering, and global political control.” Counties in various states have adopted similar resolutions, as has the Tennessee House of Representatives. According to The New American, activists in New Hampshire are lobbying to pass anti-Agenda 21 legislation. Arizona’s state Senate this spring passed a bill similar to Alabama’s, but it died before the session ended.

Community sustainability efforts are coordinated through something known as ICLEI – the International Council on Local Environmental Initiatives. Under its auspices, more than 1,000 cities and municipalities around the world, including hundreds in the U.S., have received grants (or bribes, if you agree with the JBS version of the story) that will help implement local sustainability proposals.

News of the Alabama passage heartened anti-ICLEI activists across the nation. The headline on one Virginia blog, for example, reads:  “VICTORY! ICLEI BAN PASSED ALABAMA LEGISLATURE! YEAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Read it and weep, globalists!”

The Alabama cities of Birmingham and Huntsville are both ICLEI members (though depending on how this law is interpreted, they may not be for long). As their residents gear up for another long, hot Deep South summer, they – and the rest of us Alabamians – can breathe a sigh of relief, safe in the knowledge that the communist menace of environmental protection has been beaten back from our doors.

I've been reading about the hysteria over Agenda 21 for awhile now. Paranoia about black helicopters and blue helmets has led to the defeat of land use planning for smart growth in Colorado, for example, and, as the SPLC notes, the conspiracy theorists are popping up elsewhere around the country. If it wasn't having serious consequences, it would be laughable. You know, "Omigod. The oppressive and evil one world government is going to force us to breathe clean air!!" Only the tinfoil hat types on the extreme right could manage to come up with a conspiracy theory that takes a suggestion to stop wasting resources and trashing the planet and turns it into a plot for global domination.

I'm also real intrigued by the way the tinfoil hat types are doing their best to turn sustainability ("Sustainable: a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged") into a dirty word. The stupid, it burns. 

Promotion from within

I see we've managed to kill still another Al Qaeda leader, someone who was supposedly the Number 2 guy in the organization. So how many of the top leadership have we offed to date? If promotion is strictly from within, it's got to be getting to where the "number 2" guy is also the poor sap who gets to empty the wastebaskets and scrub the floors. Pretty soon they're going to run out of members to promote. I have this image of the lower echelon Al Qaeda members, what you might term the support staff (the gophers, file clerks, whatever, the dudes who claim to be for jihad but don't really want to strap on a C-4 vest) reacting to the news there's an opening at the top with a fair amount of nervousness while talking up their colleagues' qualifications and doing a pretty good Chip 'n' Dale impression:

Ahmed: "Promote Mustafa -- he deserves it more than I do."

Mustafa: "No, no. I am not worthy. Please, Ahmed is best qualified."

Ahmed: "No, I insist, Mustafa should get the job."

And so it goes. . .

Grassroots politics

I've been spending a fair amount of time in Wisconsin lately, albeit all in the northern part of the state, and I've noticed an intriguing phenomenon in the lead up to this week's recall election of the governor: the hand-made yard signs for the Democratic candidate, Tom Barrett, far outnumbered the commercially printed signs for the Republican governor, Scott Walker.  I have no idea what this might signify in terms of which guy is actually going to win the election, but it does tell me two things: the people who dislike Scott Walker are a lot more passionate in their distaste for him than his supporters are about backing him (which could be a good thing for Barrett; his supporters might be more likely to vote than Walker's) and that the national Democratic Party is led by idiots.

Why do I say that? Because the national party, the inside-the-Beltway professionals running the Democratic National Committee, has been ignoring Wisconsin. Instead of seeing the vibrant grassroots movement as a way to re-energize voters in general, the DNC's been looking the other way. While Republican backers, like the infamous Koch brothers, pour money into Wisconsin to try to keep Walker in office, the DNC can't be bothered. A recall of Walker would scare the bejesus out of every other Republican politician in the country, but Debbie Wasserman-Schultz  (current DNC chair) is too dense to see that. If the DNC isn't willing to fight now for Wisconsin's Democrats, why on earth should anyone in Wisconsin bother to support the national ticket (i.e., Obama) in the fall?

Playing in the dirt

I haven't felt much like blogging lately -- the unseasonably warm weather in May has kept me busy indulging in fantasies about the amazing garden we'll have this year. It's a fantasy, I know, because right about the time everything has popped out of the ground and is looking good, we'll get one of the U.P.'s infamous Flag Day frosts or 4th of July snowstorms, but for now I'm enjoying thinking that this will be the year we get more than one ear of sweet corn. Either that, or the battery will go dead on the fence charger, we won't realize it immediately, and deer will mow everything down to ground level.

Gardening here has always been a challenge. The growing season is short (theoretically Memorial Day to Labor Day, or a little over 90 days) and our soil is marginal. It's glacial till: sand, gravel, and lots and lots of rocks. Little rocks, big rocks, in-between size rocks. We pulled this one out a few years ago:

We've been building up the soil now for multiple summers through the usual methods -- compost, manure, and planting clover that gets tilled under. It's finally reaching the point where the dirt looks like topsoil instead of a child's sand box, and the permanent plantings (rhubarb, asparagus) are starting to yield more than a lonely stalk or two.

On the positive side, it's always had really good drainage.

Kromers

Back when the Younger Daughter was in about 4th grade, she really, really wanted a Kromer. For some reason, the hats were the headgear of choice for her contemporaries. I don't think she ever got one. Apparently Ironwood, Michigan, is now the Kromer Capital of the World. This was news to me. I thought it always had been because the western U.P. is the only place I've ever seen anyone wearing a classic Stormy  Kromer. I was wrong -- they used to be manufactured in Milwaukee. Live and learn.

What liberal media?

I should know by now that it's a bad idea to watch "Hardball" on MSNBC. Nine times out of ten, by the time the program ends, I'm muttering, "Sweet Jesus, I hate Chris Matthews" and vowing to never listen to Tweety pontificate ever again.

Nonetheless, when the S.O. decided to test the Internet connection yesterday by streaming "Hardball," I got suckered into watching. Topic of the day? Cory Booker's supposed major political gaffe. What was Booker's gaffe, you ask? He committed the ultimate political sin during a discussion on a Sunday morning talk show. He was honest. He said that the current hyperbolic posturing by both the Republicans and the Democrats was disgusting and that it was turning voters off.

So what did Chris Matthews and his invited pundits obsess about? The fact Booker was obliquely critical of the Obama campaign's characterizations of Bain Capital. Apparently, saying that both parties are guilty of indulging in nasty politicking is synonymous with throwing Obama under the bus. They went on and on and on about Booker sabotaging the Obama campaign, that he'd just handed the Romney campaign the ammunition it needed to win the election, et cetera ad nauseum. Not one word about the context of Booker's comments or the fact that Booker had also criticized the Romney campaign, just a lot of blathering about one of the rising stars of the Democratic Party backstabbing the President.

You know, if there really was a liberal media, the discussion would have emphasized Booker's pointing out that the Republicans are gearing up to run a racially-charged campaign by once again trotting out Obama's association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Instead, they decided to obsess about the one half of the comment that's most damaging to Obama. That is, we're being treated to the talking heads hammering home the point there's dissension among Democrats because one Democrat had the temerity to suggest that private equity firms are not Totally Evil. How they managed to get from Booker trying to say that the tone of the campaign needs to change on both sides to Booker being a sellout to Wall Street and a defender of Romney and vulture capitalism is beyond me, but they did it.

The stupid, it burns.

Conversations with the S.O.

Farewell, Kelvinator

Today, if all goes well, we're bidding a fond farewell to the Kelvinator in the camp. I'm not sure just what vintage that refrigerator is, but it's got to be about the same age as the  model pictured in the ad, which is from 1940. I have a hard time picturing any appliance made today lasting for over 70 years, but our Kelvinator is still muddling along, sort of.

Unfortunately, although it may work, it works inconsistently. There's a real fine line between "not cold enough" and "everything freezing solid." It  has a freezer just barely big enough to hold two ice cube trays, and, despite its ability to freeze lettuce on the bottom shelf, it can't manage to prevent a pint of ice cream that's actually in the freezer from turning to soup. It also takes up more than its fair share of floor space in a camp that's not especially big. Considering that the amount of usable space inside the thing isn't much bigger than a dorm fridge, it's massive (it easily takes up as much space as a modern 15-cubic foot fridge, but has barely 6 cubic feet of interior space) and, the one reason someone is willing to haul it away, it  sucks up a lot of electricity when it's being used.

We noticed an ad in the REA magazine informing members that turning in old, energy-sucking appliances, like our ancient refrigerator, would garner us a small credit. Given how difficult it is to get rid of an old refrigerator (landfills and scrap metal yards won't take them unless you can prove the Freon's been removed), we would have been happy just to have them haul the beast away -- the credit is a bonus.

The S.O. and I were wondering, though, just what happens to the refrigerators once they're collected from people's homes. Where do old refrigerators go to die? Our assumption is that their fate must be similar to that of cars traded in during that "cash for clunkers" program a few years ago -- the crusher, the shredder, and a slow boat to China -- but who knows?*

[*rhetorical question. I know perfectly well that if I were sufficiently curious I could Google it and learn more than I ever wanted to know about appliance recycling.] 

Yes!

I can't remember when I got my first library card, but I can recall many a happy walk home from Ishpeming's Carnegie Library. One of the best days ever was the day the librarians let me check out books from the adult section on my own  for the first time. As a kid, I could pick whatever I wanted from the children's section, but anything on the adult shelves required my mother's okay. That day, like most, my mother wasn't with me. She was home coping with my younger siblings, and I was doing her a favor by vanishing for the afternoon. I still remember the book: The Lone Ranger and the Mystery Ranch. Not exactly great literature, but what did I know? I was 8 years old and liked the tv show. 

Carnegie Public Library, Ishpeming, Michigan