I bought Bruce Springsteen's Wrecking Ball a while back, but just got around to listening to it yesterday.

The man is back.

Saturday, May 12, 2012

I sit. Home. Alone. Leah has gone to see the redwoods in the company of her two sisters, her 87 year old mother and my brother-in-law, God save his soul.

I say alone, but in reality I am surrounded by creatures, among them a pack of dogs, a fair number of horses, goats, chickens of all stripes and sizes, cats, hogs and a even a couple of obnoxious geese. We’ve had rain of late, which, I suppose is a good thing, however, having been conceived and raised in desert regions of West Texas and New Mexico, wet, nice and green makes me feel out of my element.

With Leah’s absence, I inherited her chores atop my own. I now seem to have so many chores there’s no time left for work.

From zerohedge, a report signaling a reversal in the flow of migrants from Mexico to the US.

Granted, much of this is exodus is involuntary, a result of stepped up border surveillance, deportations and harassment by local authorities in some communities.

Nevertheless, those using the wetback invasion as the excuse for all our ills here in the US may soon have to find another scapegoat.

Sabbath eve, April 20, 2012

A front just blew through, dry, again. We had decent rain over the winter but since April 1st, nothing. The forecast calls for dry weather the remainder of the month. I’m not surprised that the drought resumes; I was surprised by the respite we had over the winter.

Fortunately, we planted oats and rye in the fall which provided winter grazing and have been cutting and baling hay from those same fields over the last two weeks. The hay is low quality, relative to the coastal Bermuda normally grown in these parts, but any hay beats none. None is what we had last year outside that produced from a few small patches of irrigated ground.

Once again, Chris Martenson hits the nail on the head.

Betty Gillis took pictures while cowboys gathered and worked the cattle on our "Nelson place", bordering the San Marcos River near Gonzales.

Then she went and fucked things up by posting a few head shots of some old snaggle-toothed fart that dragged along for the ride.

I routinely see and hear people protesting the cost of gasoline and or diesel, and in the next breath, protesting methods used to extract the oil from which these are made due to environmental concerns.

Do they not know that the only oil left is increasingly difficult to find and inherently dangerous to produce?

So, which is it going to be?

Meanwhile, another off-shore well has blown out and is spewing fuel--methane this time--into the atmosphere (hat tip to Collapsenet).

I tire of hearing lying pricks like Obama and Santorum trying to scare us with Iran the boogeyman. It ain't about Iran building a bomb. It's that Iran wants to sidestep the petrodollar.

Which at some point will lead to bombs.

It isn't only Iran. Previous administrations that have tried to do abandon the petrodollar: Hussein in Iraq and Khadafi in Libya.

Here's a rundown of current attempts to sidestep the dollar.

Started out reading Denninger this morning which led to this, penned by Matt Taibbi.

Bank of America sucks.

As do the bastards that enable them.

Monday morning, March 12, 2012, second work day of the week.

Every year about this time, I announce I am not going to make the switch to daylight savings time. For all intents and purposes this is my new year’s resolution, and like that of most, my commitment waivers at some point, when my schedule is forced to comport to the rest of the world by which I am surrounded, good little unquestioning industrial slaves they tend to be.

So today I sit at 7AM, my time, and for that matter the time of the chickens and cows accustomed to my arrival, typing on this computer. In a couple of minutes people will begin to arrive and I will ignore them, silently cussing our collective stupidity, until eventually the will of the masses bends my own. As I age, I tend to be a little less easily.

Sabbath eve, March 2, 2012.

Spring is in the air. I start days wearing a long-sleeved shirt but soon peel down to a t-shirt and sweat, nonetheless. We’ve had no winter. Decent rains in January and the early part of February have faded of late. Computers continue to give us chances of moisture. Quintin, a farmer friend of mine, says he saw dust devils in January—a bad omen. He says he doesn’t feel good about the year.

I take his dust devils over a computer forecast for rain.

Corn requires more water than grain sorghum, so grain sorghum it will be, good Lord willing. I also hope to plant cowpeas for hay under irrigation, a practice long abandoned in this area. Cowpeas, being legumes, fix nitrogen into the soil. I over-farmed my irrigated field, trying to grow forage for cows through the horrible drought. I do have the advantage of copious amounts of chicken shit for fertilizer, but even so, I think we need to rotate our crops and give the soil a break now and again. Cowpeas serve as green fertilizer when plowed back into the soil.

(Chickenhawks shit their pants):

Sometimes James Howard Kunstler says it better than I:

The Choices We Make

By James Howard Kunstler
on February 20, 2012 9:41 AM

The misalignment of politics and reality threatens to scuttle both major parties, but it's especially gratifying to see the Republicans sail off the edge of their own flat earth on the winds of religious idiocy. For forty years it has not been enough for them to just be a conservative party. They had to enlist the worst elements of ignorance and reaction, and they found an endless supply of it in the boom regions of the Sunbelt with its brotherhood of TV evangelist con-artists and a population fretful with suburban angst.

I can't sign off on the title, There is no Tomorrow, but this short film provides an accurate assessment of our current condition and the challenges humans face in the future.

I recently hijacked a thread started by Scott R with an article suggesting that real economic activity is better measured by energy consumption than phony economic figures.

Yesterday, Charles Hugh Smith released a followup article.

It's Not Just Gasoline Consumption That's Tanking, It's All Energy.

An excerpt:

A number of readers kindly forwarded additional data sources to me as followup on last week's entry describing sharply lower deliveries of gasoline. (Why Is Gasoline Consumption Tanking? February 10, 2012)

For those unaware, Dmitri Orlov was born in the Soviet Union, immigrated as a young teen to the United States, and then traveled between Russia and his new home, watching and documenting the collapse of the Soviet state.

Orlov then wrote a book and maintains a web-site drawing comparisons between the Soviet collapse and the ongoing collapse of the United States.

I'll lose some of you with this.

I'm OK with that.

Recently, I was fined by the IRS for paying employee withholding funds with a personal check. Not for refusing to pay, or shorting what I owed, but because I paid with a check.

By law, the IRS requires electronic transfer of funds to make those payments.

I tell people that we're moving toward a cashless society, eventually requiring the implantation of a chip in our bodies. Not only will this chip be required to buy or sell, but also to track our movements.

People roll their eyes, etc.

Well, here's what happened when a man recently tried to pay his mortgage at Bank of America with cash:

Bill Conroy continues digging into the coverup surrounding the house of death in Juarez, Mexico.

In the process he reveals a new name for our friends from Blackwater, scratch that, Xe, scratch that, Academi. Among the directors of the company you will find no less than that gem of a man, John Ashcroft, still, it seems, dedicated to keeping us safe.

Don't you feel better already?

We got between 1-1/4" and 3" of rain on our ranches, day before yesterday. Apparently, rainfall totals were much heavier upstream.

Today, the rivers on which we live will flood.

Time to save the cows.

Came across this on a Guy Clark tribute album:

Wow.

PS. The Guy Clark Tribute Album on which the song is found is by far the best I heard from 2011.

Paul Craig Roberts tells us why Ron Paul may be our last chance.

And then, why it won't happen.

Those thinking a mighty American carrier group would have a cake walk should Iran decide to close the straight of Hormuz, should read this.

Seems Iran's bluster might be backed by a real threat.

December 29, 2011.

Another year almost gone. I try to remember the good things, but can’t.

Some speak of destruction by fire; I saw that this year, only the fire was sun, no rain, relentless dry scorching weather, day after day, week upon week, months….

Damn near the whole year.

I am told half a billion trees died in Texas alone.

It started raining about a month ago. Slow, steady, light but soaking rain. With the rain came cold. The moisture will pay dividends down the line, but now, cold and wet suck life from animals forced to endure without hay to fill their guts.

Aquifers, lakes and livestock ponds remain precariously low despite the recent showers. I have no clue what the new year will bring.

I watched and listened to most of this last night. It's long, over two hours, a free-for-all conversation, interspersed with humor and a wide gammit of important subjects.

I thoroughly enjoyed listening in and I think I learned a thing or two.

However, I must issue a warning: you'll have to wade through a bit of shit to get to the gems. But they are there.

(There's a mp3 at the link.)

I remember thinking when America elected George W. Bush the first time, Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.

When bush got re-elected after people had four years to see the kind of fellow he was, that prayer no longer applied.

First the Republican party failed and then the nation at large failed.

Now Democrats continue throwing rocks at any and all challengers from across the aisle and they have, well who the fuck do they have running against Barack Obama in the primary…

No excuses. You know who this son-of-a-bitch is, and you’re going to nominate him again.