I ate the strawberries.

They were delicious.

Replace petroleum, but don’t burn your food

My friend Taylor says we should switch to methanol as an intermediate step to the hydrogen economy, he points out that our cars could easily be made to run on methanol with little modification and the distribution system would be little different from ethanol, but we wouldn’t be burning our food.

Monkeyfister has a great post, and everyone should read it. He writes:

We told you– You can have food, or you can have ethanol… you cannot have both.

BUT– you can grow Hemp and Cannabis on marginal soil, where nothing but weeds will grow. Not only will it provide industrial and edible oils, it will provide paper, clothing, organic fertilizer, medicinal pain killer/appetite stimulator, and/or much, much more. Hemp and Cannabis will help to not only resurrect exhausted soils, but also provide desperately needed Tax Revenue. Re-Legalization will also destroy the Black Market for Cannabis.

Ethanol is great for Local, Rural economies with surplus bio-mass to spare. It can’t be scaled-up to National use without starving millions of people. It is good that we’re waking up to that. Perhaps that multi-year mandated Law, and the HUGE Government contracts it generated, could be justified by Re-Legalization of Hemp and Cannabis. I see nothing but win, win, win, win there. Gov’t revenue wins, Farmers win, those suffering with cancer or other illnesses win, the soil wins, the economy wins, trees win, the People win… What’s not to love about that?

The man has a point, there. And I think cannabis hemp makes an excellent renewable feedstock for methanol production, as well.

And now for something completely different

Try it, you’ll like it.

Yes, that is a tasty beverage

Recipe edited July 21, 2007. This originally called for twice as much cassia, but I found it to be excessive. Black pepper is a very good addition with turmeric.

1 tsp turmeric powder

1/4 tsp cassia powder

twist of black pepper

1 tsp raw honey

8 oz cool water

Stir and enjoy.

Playing with food

Hat-tip Phydeaux Speaks.

Recommended listening:

• Sufjan Stevens

And now for something completely different:

• The Richard Bruce Cheney fansite.

Permaculture: The Garden of Eden

[Zoom]

Will it work?

Do plants grow?

Hat-tip Monkeyfister.

Is milk good or bad? Yes. Definitely, or not.

Hat-tip Chester.

Aspartame: Brought to you by Donald Rumsfeld

Stay away from artificial sweeteners.

An addictive synthetic neurotoxic stimulant ought to be regulated as a drug, not a food additive.

Sweet Misery: A Poisoned World.

Etz Chaim

[odeo=http://odeo.com/audio/12377753/view]

Heal the nation.

On blogonomics

Melissa McEwan, my friend who runs Shakesville (formerly Shakespeare’s Sister), has an excellent post about how we as a blogging community might sustain ourselves. Obviously we can do this out of our pockets and free time for only so long, but we do not want to become compromised by anyone for the sake of a coin. Advertisers will limit what you can or cannot say. Mimus Pauly wrote a long but very good post about this the day before yesterday. For him this must be always a part-time endeavor, his advice — don’t quit your day job (he hasn’t).

But good writers should have a way to write full-time. Good bloggers should be able to make this a profession, and afford to feed themselves and their families without selling out. The alternative is that you will have no good bloggers that do it for a long time, and eventually our whole ecosystem will be corporate shills like we have on the mainstream media today.

We need patronage, we need to do some things to make a network of bloggers that can rate one another in terms of worthiness, and help new bloggers get connected with a source of funding. We need a structure that is more than each of us having a donation box, as patrons may not know about more than a few of the larger blogs, and some of us blog semi-pseudonymously for good reasons.

Cannablog is a blog about cannabis, and I am a medical marijuana patient in California. This is information I have made public and I feel no great concern about my safety in saying so. California law protects patients. The federal government may have other ideas, and that is something that needs badly to change. Though I feel safe now, I am not safe forever, if it does not. But in other states, medical patients who are living and not dying because they take cannabis are constantly at risk of arrest and imprisonment by local and state officials now. If they want to be bloggers and honestly talk about how cannabis helps them, they cannot use their names. This needs to change.

I want to ensure that they can be funded somehow, to be given help so that they can afford to live, so they can feed their families. They are capable of being great writers and bloggers, and if you think otherwise, if you think this blog is substandard in any way, then I would ask you to please leave a comment and tell me what you’d like to see me do better.

This is, for me, a labor of love. I do it because I must do it. I do it because it is more important to try to stop war than anything else I can do, and this is how I can help to achieve that objective. But I must eat. All must eat.

High society

Take. Eat. This is my body.

Related post:

• Habeas corpus

See also some reaction.

A song of seeds, the food of love

“She’s trying to stop me from helping you!” Click the video to watch it elsewhere, it won’t embed.

All life is intelligent

Consider a simple plant, which knows at a deep cellular level how to find and transform water, air, sunlight and a few minerals into complex forms of great beauty and practical utility. You may not know how to communicate with all life, but all life communicates in its own way. Herbs put forth scents and spices, which give us pleasure and medicine at once, and we think it an evolutionary accident only if we presuppose no intelligence prior to our emergence as humans.

Related post:

• Here.

Dignity

Hat-tip Tanya.

Related post:

• Meanwhile, across the pond

Judge the tree by the fruit thereof

You do not have to eat poison, and you can be sure that if you consume enough of some things you will die.

Some things are so benign you can eat them without limitation and become healthier.

Recognize the difference.

And now, a word from one of our many non-sponsors

Tanya has more.

Cannabis treats attention deficit disorder, according to physicians

Keith Olbermann has the story,

Hat-tip Tanya.

Spice for the recipe

Happy bloggiversary, Watertiger

Two years old today, she says.

Instead of war

Blogging isn’t a bad life

Lee Rosenberg (thehim) is looking for a way to blog while keeping his bills paid. Our situation is similar, but in our case the insurance and everything are in place and we have just enough to pay our bills and tread water now. It would be nice if we could plan to have a family but we cannot even imagine it financially now. I cannot complain; we are not starving unless we try to live beyond our means. Once in a blue moon we might even go out to see a movie. (I highly recommend Pan’s Labyrinth.)

Oh, also I blog semi-anonymously. It’s not hard for people to figure out who I am if they care enough, but I have no desire for personal publicity outside those who know me by introduction. I’d love to have a larger readership but I don’t want to write for hire. I wouldn’t mind it if I could find a way to support myself on donations but it would have to be done in a way that would be kept away from me, lest I be corrupted by seeing what I can say that brings in more dollars.

I want to speak from my heart and tell you what seems right to me, so that if I make a mistake it was one not made with a gain in mind. I could choose to become wealthy, it would be easy enough if I had the will to subjugate myself to that end, to put aside my childish blogging. I could be a capitalist like the Goldman family, and I love them very much.

But to do this I would have to turn my back on injustice, to stop looking in the dark corners where people are being tortured in our names. To let the problems of the world be someone else’s problem, I cannot do this. To the extent I can integrate what I do with helping people, I will do it. While the current crisis is ongoing, the most helpful thing I can do is communicate a way that I see through the danger. I could be non-essential, maybe my own thoughts are not as good as someone else’s, but I don’t know that. For the want of a nail, the horse, the battle and finally the war were lost.

Seeds

Via skippy.

Wherein I show off my novice drawing skills

^{(pencil on newsprint)}

“Keep the egg from fully cracking”

That’s a direct quote from the man who is sending 21,500 American men and women on a fool’s errand of putting Humpty-Dumpty together again, at risk of their lives.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yeah, you know, that’s an interesting question. I don’t quite view it as the broken egg; I view it as the cracked egg —

MR. LEHRER: Cracked egg?

PRESIDENT BUSH: — that — where we still have a chance to move beyond the broken egg. And I thought long and hard about the decision, Jim. Obviously it’s a big decision for this theater in the war on terror, and you know, if I didn’t believe we could keep the egg from fully cracking, I wouldn’t ask 21,000 kids — additional kids to go into Iraq to reinforce those troops that are there.

Watch the interview here.

Hat-tip Shakes.

More about foie gras

I was taken out to dinner one evening and there were protesters outside the restaurant informing us that foie gras was on the menu. They were rather more strident about it, of course, but I stopped to talk with one of them, and asked whether they might not be protesting the war or something. I used to be a conservative, after all, so my line of questioning might have been a bit impertinent, but I was a guest being taken to this place and did not want especially to make a scene about something that concerned me a good deal less than other current events.

Anyhow, the person said it wasn’t a matter of protesting one or the other, and I of course agreed. Nonetheless, we did have dinner at that restaurant.

I did not order the foie gras, but they were too expensive anyhow.

Black market goose liver doesn’t sound like a very good idea

Chicago bans foie gras.

This is ridiculous. People can have a debate on the morality of eating meat, too, and I for one prefer that all animals be humanely treated and organically fed if farm raised.

But prohibition does not work.

Please note again how this differs from the TFA ban in New York. People really do want to eat foie gras. I don’t care whether you agree with them or think they are despicable people, they are going to eat foie gras, and the more of a fuss you make about it, the more foie gras they are going to eat just to piss you off.

Also, it is delicious.

Via.

Imagine

Hope writes,

Some plants, if not all, contain some amazing healing properties for human beings and animals. There are discoveries to be made…horizons to reach.

Imagine if a chemical company, like Dow or Monsanto, could “engineer” a plant that could actually treat and cure some illness, ease pain and inflammation, and make a person feel better. Talk about money growing on trees…or bushes or grasses! Would that not be the discovery of the age? A plant that prevents, eases, and cures some of the misery of human kind! That is so exciting!

Mankind has already been given this plant and others. This amazing plant has already been discovered, although somewhat barely. Yet….and this is the big question….Why won’t the authorities and the powers that be let you have it?

Why?

Why this great insult and injustice to humanity? Why is it kept from us, the people, and even scientists are hard pressed to even consider studying it?

Why exactly is this prohibition being done and on such a large and dramatic scale?

Schrödinger’s Beer

Two tablespoons organic hemp protein (Living Harvest),

Two cups hot freshly distilled water.

Tea only Not for me

I have tasted the hops and I would not use it in bread.

As a tea it is embittering.

How to make a starter

My tinctures of vert, azure, or. Knit together to form a unity.

No more bread nor wine from these

It is done, and a New Year.

Let’s hope it’s a good one.

Here

Let me show you a miracle.

Six days of creation

Related post:

• Five cups of wine

Fine herbs for bread making

As any decent person knows, hops had nothing whatsoever to do with sinful chemistry; they just kept bad company. They did not prevent, sustain, catalyze, or effect in any way the process of alcohol formation from various sugars, cellulose, starch, taters, beans, seaweed, or from whatever else human folk have attempted its secretion. Except that when hops are included in a bread recipe, the dough is, for some reason, the more ecstatic. Hop cones ground to a fine grayish powder, rendered then to a tea, this in turn stirred into bread yeast, caused the carbon dioxide that spewed forth from asexual torment to come off in the most exquisite bubbles. Not belching, gargantuan bubbles that lift the crust of the bread so horribly that the result is bread with gopher holes. Hops do for white bread what only an extra half hour of intensive hand-to-hand combat with the bread board could equally bestow. A fine-stranded gluten that gives farm bread an unblemished texture, almost silken smooth was the flesh of this oven varmint. Hops in my grandmother’s bread recipe brought about the same result as three rounds on the wrestling mat.

Excerpted from The Hop Pole, by Justin Isherwood. The whole story is well worth reading.

I haven’t yet tried adding hops to my starter.

A poem that shows

The rose is a rose
and was always a rose;
But the theory now goes
That the apple’s a rose,
And the pear is, and so’s
The plum, I suppose.
The dear only knows
What will next prove a rose.
You, of course, are a rose,
but were always a rose.

– Robert Frost, “The Rose Family”.

No more war between the roses, I say.

Taken from Wikipedia’s entry on Rosaceae, the order of which is called Rosales, of which it is said within,

In the APG classification, well-known members of Rosales include: roses; strawberries, blackberries and raspberries; apples and pears; plums, peaches and apricots; almonds; rowan and hawthorn; elms; figs; nettles; and hops and cannabis.

So there you have it, and enjoy them all.

From someone who goes, but comes in repose.

It’s log, it’s log, it’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood.

Everyone loves a log.

For Christmas.

Hat-tip Buck Batard.

White meat

Just discard the peel

Five cups of wine

I could keep going, really. Just drink the juice down half way and refill it as many times as you want, since the little yeasts (eukaryotes) will keep on multiplying if you don’t finish the whole thing, and fruit juice is food to them.

Related posts:

• More cooking and eating today
• Water into wine
• What’s next?

More cooking and eating today

The pancakes were made with starter, bananas and hemp protein, oil and honey, and added salt.

The wine is very fine and a portion was blended with some organic strawberry lemonade. Christmas punch indeed.

Bananas are a kind of herb. Who knew?

Water into wine

The starter which is used to make bread, may separate while refrigerated. The top layer is a liquid, in my case a mixture of water and oil with some suspended herbs, because I always feed my starter with flour, water, oil, honey, salt and fine herbs.

This is mead, a kind of beer.

Fresh bread and smoked salmon

Is NutraSweet safe?

Don’t miss Part III, below…

“Henny Penny”

Let every herb grow

Let all be cultivated for their virtues, and treated with the respect and caution a new food deserves. For what is good to eat does not make you sick, and what gives you pleasure without doing harm is good for your spirit.

Test me, and then test yourself. Are my beliefs different from your own?

Cannabis is prohibited?

Oh, but this is good:

• Nine percent of 8th graders sniffed glue, spray paints, cleaning fluids or other inhalants, down slightly.

Um. Here’s the thing, parents. Your kids are going to alter their consciousness, and don’t you pretend to me that you don’t alter yours. Everyone does it. Choose your poison, or learn what is good for you.

Sniffing paint is using dope, and it’s not good for you or your kids. Nine percent of 8th graders is way too many kids that are being permanently injured by these dangerous things.

Cannabis is not dope.

Better you should eat or drink or vaporize or smoke cannabis than drink alcohol, smoke tobacco or take prescription mood altering substances. God knows what is good for you, and you will find no better medicine than what God made for you.

Hat-tip.

Sourdough latkes

In honor of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, here is the recipe.

Starter, mashed potatoes, honey, oil, salt and fine herbs.

Just mix ’em up and fry ’em in a pan. This is something I’ve done when it was time to feed the starter but I didn’t want to make bread that day. It’s good stuff.

Bon appétit.

Hat-tip to Jan in San Fran.

Related post:

• Starter biscuits

A lovely beverage

If you have a vaporizer, you do not burn your flowers. When you have finished enjoying their aromas, you can place the roasted pieces into a tea ball and steep them in hot water for a few minutes.

Really, it’s delightful.

(Don’t try this with tobacco, kids. It’s only cannabis that is so benign.)

Bring the troops home

America is an empire, an expansionist empire, and this is not a new development. From its inception, the territory it has claimed and controlled has expanded, the native people it has subjugated, and so Iraq fits into a larger pattern which was briefly interrupted as a reaction to Vietnam. Now I am not passing judgment on this behavior in calling attention to it, but I am saying that it is an important context to understanding current events.

The empire extended beyond its ability to control the margins of its authority, and the empire will not continue to hold territories it cannot control.

We are faced with a time of great change in society, and in our economy, which has been on a war-footing for a long number of years. The war is going to come to an end one way or another. Either by trying to hold the outlying regions and so weakening the center, or by letting them go in peace. We are striving for peace.

There may be no similarity between America of 2006 and America of 2012. This frightens people who have been brought up with certain expectations and have no idea where they will fit in a new society.

I think it is a conversation we need to be having with one another, about what we hope for and expect to happen. My hope is to reduce suffering and increase happiness for everyone.

We cannot continue to subjugate people, we cannot defend ourselves against the people we destroy, because the victims have families, and the families are not going to wait for us to destroy them. The more war you make the more war you have.

It’s all over but the counting

Cannabis is the top cash crop in America according to a new study.

The study shows that 10,000 tonnes of marijuana worth $35.8bn (£18.4bn) is grown each year; the street value would be even higher. This dwarfs the $23bn-worth of corn grown, $17.6bn-worth of soybeans and $12.2bn-worth of hay. Marijuana is the biggest cash crop in 12 states, with the value of pot grown outstripping peanuts in Georgia and tobacco in North and South Carolina. In California, the biggest producer, it is worth $13.8bn.

Hat-tip.