Archive for December, 2015

Alan Beat’s New Book
Dec 29th
Some of you may remember that Alan Beat started the Smallholders online newsletter back a few years ago during the disgraceful burning of thousands of cattle and sheep here in the UK. The newsletter was extremely informative and also served as a communications vehicle especially for those smallholders who had their land invaded by government personnel who often burned healthy cattle and sheep tested perfectly free of foot and mouth just in case!! I think it is fair to say that Alan’s research and experience qualified him as, at least, one of the best informed farmers in the UK on the subject.
The following information contains the details of Alan’s new blog on Mother Earth News.
Here is the main reason why vaccination was prohibited:
“Currently, the World Organisation for Animal Health recognizes countries to be in one of three disease states with regard to FMD: FMD present with or without vaccination, FMD-free with vaccination, and FMD-free without vaccination.[24] Countries designated FMD-free without vaccination have the greatest access to export markets, so many developed nations, including Canada, the United States, and the UK, work hard to maintain their current status. Some countries such as Brazil and Argentina which have large beef exporting industries, practise vaccination in some areas but have other vaccination-free zones.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-and-mouth_disease
These were frightening and extremely sad days for many farmers and smallholders in the UK who were victims of the decision not to vaccinate.
“Alan Beat trained as a mechanical engineer, working 20 years in the profession before making a deliberate change of lifestyle by moving to a 16-acre smallholding (homestead) with his family in 1987. He restored an historic water mill to working order, and now grinds locally grown organic wheat for demonstration and to feed his family. Alan has written a regular monthly feature in Country Smallholding magazine for the past 25 years and has contributed to a number of other UK publications on a freelance basis.”
http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/homesteading-in-the-united-kingdom-zbcz1512.aspx
Smallholding: A practical guide to self-sufficient living Paperback – 16 Jun 2015
Alan is an established author with six, 5 star Amazon reviews of his first book on the subject: A Start in Smallholding.
The Universe is Not About Us!
Dec 10th
“If the view of the universe revealed to us by modern science is even approximately accurate—and, like Lovecraft, I have no doubt of this—then the entire history of our species, from its emergence sometime in the Pleistocene to its extinction at some as yet undetermined point in the future, is a brief incident on the wet film that covers the surface of a small planet circling an undistinguished star over to one side of an ordinary galaxy. Is it important, that brief incident? To us, surely—but only to us. In Lovecraft’s words, we are ‘faced by the black, unfathomable gulph of the Outside, with its forever-unexplorable orbs & its virtually certain sprinkling of utterly unknowable life-forms.’ Notice the adjectives here: unfathomable, unexplorable, unknowable. What he’s saying here, and throughout his fiction as well, is plain: the message of deep time and deep space is that the cosmos is not there for our benefit.”
John Michael Greer
One could say: The universe is not about us!
From: WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 09, 2015
The Flutter of Space Bat Wings
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/
Living in Concept
Dec 6th
Albert Camus on Happiness, Unhappiness, and Our Self-Imposed Prisons
“Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.”
“For what gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. One can no longer cheat — hide behind the hours spent at the office or at the plant (those hours we protest so loudly, which protect us so well from the pain of being alone). I have always wanted to write novels in which my heroes would say: ‘What would I do without the office?’ or again: ‘My wife has died, but fortunately I have all these orders to fill for tomorrow.’ Travel robs us of such refuge.”
I relate strongly to these insights. As I grow older, I realise how attached I am becoming to my routines; they become habits that I cling to and begin to cherish. They tend to cement me to the familiar where I wallow in a trough of certainty and complacency. Why is this a problem? Seeing only the familiar often results in not seeing or hearing at all what’s actually there. We live in concept, we see what we know is there and hear what we know is being spoken or brought forth. As this article says, we build walls and encase ourselves in a “self-Imposed prison.”