SC Rep Spratt (D) to actually meet with constituents on ObamaCare.

SC Rep John Spratt (D) to actually meet with constituents on ObamaCare in Sumter today and Rock Hill tomorrow. I am so glad they provided all of the advance notice so constituents could make arrangements to be there.

The York native plans to discuss the health care plans, then take questions. Attendees will be asked to write any questions on a slip of paper at the door and put them in a box that matches their position, whether they're for, against or undecided. A moderator will draw names.

from the Observer

Calling all kooks

The knee-slappingly funny thing is these same critics – who possess no practical skills beyond the ability to craft a cutting sentence or verbally spear beauty queens – are positive they represent the common viewpoint of most Americans.

Snark from elsewhere - but she thinks like I do. Only difference is that she is doing. Read.

Government as an embezzler

from the quoteable Mike Folkerth

We find ourselves in the unsavory circumstances of the embezzler who had always promised themselves that they would pay the money back, only to get in deeper and deeper to such time that repayment became impossible.

Fuffled? Fufflery?

Club Orlov continues a pattern of excellence by posting this explanation of the word that perfectly describes...well...the whole damn thing. It's like the The Number 42.

A fuffle is an artful fake, an artifact specifically made to fool, beguile, seduce, or intimidate people into paying for it. Ideally, the initial transaction serves as the basis of a permanent arrangement, with the victim roped into an installment plan, which keeps the payments flowing even after the fuffle itself has crumbled into a pile of dust. An even better fuffle is one that grows over time. Since a fuffle is, in essence, a fake, its useful properties, should it have any, are largely irrelevant, and so its abstract (which is to say, financial) properties come forth as being the essential ones. The most important such property is, quite obviously, size, and indeed fuffles tend to get bigger and bigger over time. This is a telltale feature of fuffles that makes them easier to identify: if something gets bigger and bigger over time while delivering the same or lesser value, then it is quite likely to be a fuffle. Also, fuffles breed: as a fuffle gets larger and larger, it produces offspring of other fuffles, which also grow. Examples come from many realms.

That's it. Fuffle is the word. 

Kitchen Gardening

via PrudentHome.com

Clearly, this data is just for one family (of five), one yard (.3 acre), one garden (roughly 1600 square feet), and one climate (Maine, zone 5b/6), but it gives you some sense of what’s possible. If you consider that there are about 90 million households in the US that have some sort of yard, factor in the thousands of new community and school gardens we could be planting, this really could add up. Our savings allowed us to do different things including investing in some weatherization work for our house last fall that is making us a greener household in another way. Some might ask what this would mean for farmers to have more people growing their own food. The local farmers I know welcome it because they correctly believe that the more people discover what fresh, real food tastes like, the more they'll want to taste. In our case, part of our savings helped us to buy better quality, sustainably-raised meat from a local CSA farmer.

Read the rest at kitchengardeners.org

Off to get the soil sample...

The infinitely readable ClubOrlov recently posted this...

and here's a great table - 

Amounts of Vegetables To Be Grown & Preserved For a Family of 4 Persons  

- from the grannymillerblog.

Surviving The Great Depression

via SurvivalBlog. Of course.

"That's what people had to do then. Most people had a garden. People plowed their garden with horses, there was somebody who came around with a plow and a horse and plowed gardens for people. People on southside had chickens, pigs and cows and people were always bringing eggs to the store and trade. I just don't know what people would do today, of course everybody on southside had to get rid of their chickens and hogs when it was incorporated into the city later," he said.

~98% of everyone I know is incapable of understanding how to live like this, let alone actually living like this. Better to start late than to start when it's too late.

And yes, today I discovered italics for the very first time.

How They See It

I am not going to spend all morning picking this apart, but this article from Newsweek has an interesting take on the financial mess.

It's all the rich people's fault.