This post is dedicated to chthonictonic as he expressed some concern about me. Don't worry! My last post was just a smidgen of my time - I really am kicking the media habit. This is what I've done instead, with the help of Steve Solomon in his book, Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, as well as ideas from many people online.



This is a shot looking west at the northeast corner of the bed. Strawberries and hinges!

Please, if you like, take a look at the PDF of my original cold frame plans!

( More Pics below The Fold, View Image To Quadruple Resolution On All )

( Moar? )

( Moar? )

For background, please see my post on the heat pump. More ( below the fold. )

I have geeked. Behold my new babies:



They are my hopeful tomato and pepper seedlings. The tomatoes get a red dot and the peppers a green one.

All images in this post can be expanded by right-clicking and selecting "view image".

( More pics below the fold! )

( Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change by Pat Murphy is all about doom. )


In the strongest terms I urge you: bike to your local library and check out the book, and better yet, get to know your librarian while you're there!

Yay! Autumn's over! We made it. From here on out, though cold, every day will deliver more light than the last, until summer. Hooray! Celebrate with friends and family.

Steadfast and resolutely,

Tim

This guy holds it together whereas if I were saying things he says, I couldn't.

Direct link for the cross-site-scripting-averse:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnHyy8gkNEE

These are more complete musings on topics I was discussing with my friend Sam after seeing Bill Maher's movie, Religulous. Incidentally, I thought it was an OK movie. It could have been funnier and was very negative overall, and I felt unfairly portrayed both Islam as a violent religion and Islamic violence as more common and/or pronounced than Christian or Jewish violence. It had some very good points, though, mainly the tenets of agnosticism I agree with.

( Click here for the armchair philosophy it inspired )

discrimination (n.)
[...]
3. Treatment or consideration based on class or category rather than individual merit; partiality or prejudice

All Californians currently have the intrinsic right defended by its constitution to legally marry one other person of their choosing.

Prop 8's explicit goal is to amend the constitution of the state to consider (me undeserving of the aforementioned currently state-constitutionally-defended right) based on my category (of being homosexual) rather than my individual merit (to fulfill the responsibilities that accompany the right, principal among which is to love my spouse actively). It *is* partial: (adj.)

[...]
2 : inclined to favor one party more than the other : biased
[...]

and it *is* prejudiced: (prejudice) (adj.)

1: injury or damage resulting from some judgment or action of another in disregard of one's rights ; especially : detriment to one's legal rights or claims
[...]

Again, Prop 8's *explicit and sole intent is to disregard my intrinsic legal right based on category*.

Jeff, you are discriminating against me, by direct dictionary definition. You are expressing prejudice against me, again by direct dictionary definition. What kind of brother is prejudiced and discriminates against his own brother? It is wrong. It is *not* Christian. Jesus was an *ally* of the disaffected of his time. Please see your way clear on this. Please everyone in our family help Jeff see his way clear on this. Please everyone we know in common help Jeff see his way clear on this. Please stand up for me.

Vote No on Prop 8 in California. Please forward, for me. To grandpa Bud and to Mark and Karen and Alex and Nate, to Aunt Barbara, to all the Stanleys - Courtney and Quinn and Megan, Doug and Colleen, Gail and Dave, to Warren and Kathryn's aunt I haven't seen in too long! to Shawn and Ahron and Todd and Sheila and Larry and Lisa and Allegra and to Rick's dad Jim and mom Rusty and Darryl and Debbie and Susan and Keith and Del and Luanne anyone at all who knows me, who knows that I'm a fine human being and deserving of my rights equal to Jeff's. Please CC me so I know you support my rights, because I need that support right NOW. Please forward this, for me, especially to California voters. And donate. http://www.noonprop8.com/ And vote.

-Tim

p.s. Church and Parent-Education-Involvement rights are fully protected in California, which I also support!

Yay! I tried the recipe for baked ziti with three cheeses and OMMUGUH! It was a success! From the time I opened the fridge to get the cheeses out to the time the pot was washed and drying, it was only 30 minutes, and that included eating! What I learned that I wasn't expecting was that cooking pasta in a pressure cooker conserves a great deal of water too, since you put in only enough to be absorbed by the pasta. Thank you Mark (emtel) and Nico (chthonictonic)! You rock!

So I finally undertook the investigation of this here new fangled Pressure Cooker that emtel and chthonictonic got for me. I scanned the tables for ingredients I had and took the same time to cook at pressure. I wound up with beet-potato-white bean soup. It was awful. To others: I recommend trying a recipe rather than mixing things willy-nilly based on their similar cooking times.

But! It was great for my digestion and it made a lot easily and quickly.

I plan to try out one of the recipes in Pressure Perfect this week! One-pot baked ziti with three cheeses!

Please watch if you are still undecided, or if you're a McCain supporter!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/27265490#27265490

Hello folks!

Even if you don't have time to read this email, please watch the thirty-second video here and at least read my conclusion at the bottom:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHeTVAE4ZkY

( The Textual Support for My Plea )

CONCLUSION

Please don't single out a specific social minority to revoke their rights in a state constitutional amendment. Please don't institutionalize a second-class citizenship for homosexuals. Please vote No on Prop 8.

Please also urge those you know whose minds are not made up to vote No as well. This latter step is extremely important. The funding for the Yes side far outstrips the funding for the No side, and this will be a close call. Please do what you can to defeat this proposition by talking about it with the undecided Californians in your life.

For more information, please visit http://www.noonprop8.com/ . A copy of this plea is available on my blog (here).

With utmost sincerity,

Tim Heilman

Mid-March 2006	Oct 13 2008

Some great quotes from Naomi Klein regarding the bailout as an example of the shock doctrine.

"The offloading of that private debt onto the public payroll is really just the first stage, because the crisis that Wall Street wants to get rid of isn't being solved - the location is being moved, it's dumped on taxpayers, dumped on Washington. The really scary part comes when the crisis is used as the excuse for why the next administration can't afford health care, why it has to privatize social security, why you need to cut corporate taxes to make America more competitive. ... The real disaster has yet to hit."

from http://bravenewfilms.org/blog/54244-are-we-witnessing-the-shock-doctrine-in-effect

and here's a real zinger:

"The Bush administration doesn't really believe in the free market. They have invented no-risk capitalism. ... They spend seven years just transferring public money into private hands, [then] their final act is taking [over a trillion dollars of] private debt and transferring it into public hands."

from her recent interview on The Colbert Report, here:

http://bravenewfilms.org/blog/55758-colbert-report-naomi-klein-warns-of-wall-street-shock-doctrine

(For those wishing to understand what she's talking about with "transferring public money into private hands," check out her book, The Shock Doctrine. Here's one of exhaustively many examples: no-bid cost-plus contracts awarded to Halliburton and other contracting companies to "rebuild" Iraq - many billions of dollars for projects that were fully funded and paid for yet never came anywhere close to completion.)

I thought it was a fantastic book, and Naomi Klein is a hero of the free press. The bailout just passed is a textbook example of the shock doctrine in practice, with the suburban cash-out mentioned in the prior post being the new form of extraction of wealth and power for the few.