Puzzle #53 and the mourning doves

I just love the birds in winter.


Amy got a few good shots of the mourning doves eating. This feeder was in the tree, but somehow the lid came half off, so dh just put it on the little bench on the deck.

On the Road to Spring quilt-along

Starting this week I'm participating in i have to say's quilt-along. It's a six week process. If you click on the quilt-along picture it'll take you to week one's instructions as well as the rest of the schedule.




Here are my fabrics for the quilt-along.



They were all gathered from my stash. I did buy white Kona cotton to be my solid for this project and I'll probably have to get something for the back yet. I'm going to try to find something from my stash for the binding. I don't think it'll be a problem. ;-)

Guess what I found!

Today I went quilt shop hopping. Seemed like a fun thing to do after finishing the quilting on the current quilt. I started at the shop farthest away and worked my way home. At the very first shop I went to some of the fabric looked familiar, so I decided to ask the clerk about it.

Back in October my local quilt shop closed abruptly. I got the email the day after they closed. I wondered what she did with all that fabric, where did it go?

The clerk's answer was, "Yes." My question: "Did you buy F.O.'s fabric?" Turns out that the owner of Quilt Garden went to F.O. to take a look at the fixtures. While she was there L.M. asked her if she wanted to buy everything (including all the fabric). Wow! She wasn't prepared for that question, so she went to lunch and did the math. Turns out she did buy it, all 575 bolts of fabric and the fixtures! She then asked L.M. when she was closing and L.M. said, "Right now." The owner of Quilt Garden picked up the goods on Monday, L.M. and her husband left to winter in FL on Friday. Can you imagine?

No wonder the fabric looked familiar. BTW I only bought a quarter of a yard of three fabrics for binding the current quilt. :)

1st of three posts for the day :)

Quilting made easier

By putting Amy's adjustable sewing table lower than our kitchen table my sewing machine sits flush with the kitchen table. :)



That means the quilt just glides nicely across the table with no dragging or getting stuck.



I'm absolutely amazed at how much easier the quilting went this time as opposed to last time.

Now be sure to scroll down the next two posts for the day. :)

Puzzles #51& 52

We're off school this week, so the second one I finished today, the first one I finished this past weekend.

God's Rhapsody in Gray

God's Rhapsody in Gray

by Bojidar Marinov, Jan 20, 2010

These last weeks the British government was taught a lesson in common sense once again. In response to the rising costs of propane (natural gas in Britain), coal, and electricity, British pensioners resorted to buying books from charity stores to use as cheap fuel in the harsh winter. Fuel prices have remained stable around the world for the last two years but not in Britain. There, the prices went up by 20 to 40 percent for the same period, all due to the obsession of the British government to fight global warming through its excessive Climate Change Levy—a tax that is increased every year at a rate almost double the inflation rate. The government’s obsession with the myth of global warming made prices of coal too high for the poor and elderly in Britain, and now, as a result, instead of carbon from coal, Britain will emit carbon from burned books. Same carbon but processed and refined and enriched with ink and glue.

“Boo for the British government’s lack of common sense,” you would say. Well, we knew from Cyril Parkinson that the British government has long ago severed any connections between its decision-making process and plain common sense. There isn’t much hope that something will change for good, and therefore the news is disturbing and disappointing. But I have a better, fresher, and more optimistic perspective on this situation.

The pensioners’ actions are another example of what economists would call a “gray economy.” Gray economy—by the definitions of the economists—are those economic activities that 1) are not registered in the official government statistics, or 2) thwart government regulations, restrictions, and controls by finding alternative legal ways to supply the controlled or regulated goods or services. Unlike black markets, the gray economy is perfectly legal, and it feeds on the inability of the socialist governments to be what they claim they can be: omniscient and omnipresent. That’s exactly what happened in the above story: The government wants to control the emissions of carbon through taxing it, and the pensioners found a way to emit uncontrolled, unregulated—and therefore cheap—carbon.

But there is more to it. The economic analysis fails to record the moral war going on. Yes, every socialist government is in a state of perpetual war against its own citizens, and we need to understand the gray economy as an aspect of that war. The British government has its commitment to a religion—the religion of global warming alarmism; this religion identifies as enemies all human beings who burn carbon—i.e., all of us—and the British pensioners are among its enemies. The government predictably attacks what supports the life and well-being of the enemies, their fuel supplies, by raising taxes. The pensioners, even though they lack the power to oppose the state, have not lost their will to survive, and they fight back. The fight seems hopeless for them, and yet they do not just lie in their cold rooms to freeze to death. The same spirit that was, for instance, in the Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, is in those pensioners: Fight one more day, find a way to survive one more day against the Nazis, against an oppressive government that has committed all its resources to destroy your life in the name of its evil ideology.
The American Vision on Facebook

This will of the little people, of the individual citizen, to survive against all odds is the greatest problem of the welfare state. Socialism is an ideology that calls for the confiscation of the individual’s life, liberty and property by the state; but whatever resources socialist governments commit to their propaganda, they can never talk the individual people out of loving their life, liberty, and property. Whatever laws and forces they commit to achieving the goal, they will always meet resistance that is stronger, smarter, and more resourceful than the best the government can muster. The little people don’t need an ideology to resist; it is in their blood to hold fast to what is rightfully theirs. Even in the most totalitarian regimes, government commissars and ideologists were not able to destroy the personal will to live and survive and resist immoral governments.

And the gray economy is by far the most formidable social expression of that will to resist. No socialist government has ever been able to destroy it. In Communist Eastern Europe before 1989 all private enterprise was outlawed. And yet, people kept having their little workshops and little plots of land in their backyards where they would produce useful little things or food and sell them to others. Authors would self-publish their books—samizdat—and distribute them outside of the official government channels. Many examples of such passive resistance can be cited, even in the Gulags, as related by Solzhenitsyn. So prevalent was it that in the early 1980s Andropov capitulated and allowed peasants to produce food on their own land and sell it and craftsmen to open their own shops and produce items and services for the market. In the nations of the European Union today billions of Euro circulate in activities that are not reported to the government statisticians. Even in the most prosperous and organized nation member of the EU, Finland, economists are complaining of the large share of the gray economy, and openly state that it is a “significant threat to the welfare state.”

The Revolutionary War that created the United States of America started over government control on private trade, and many of the heroes in the war were champions of the gray economy that defied controls and regulations. Two decades ago even the Chinese Communist government capitulated before the gray and allowed private property and enterprise, only to legalize and tax what has been going on in secret even during the worst times of Mao’s cultural revolution.

And eventually the envirofascist government of Great Britain will be forced to capitulate before the will of the people to survive, unless it decides to impose Fossil Fuel Tax on books. Pensioners might then turn to burn furniture, trash, or cow manure to keep warm.

The gray economy is indestructible, and this is not only because of the essential nature of man. God Himself is the Protector of the gray economy. He has established boundaries, a wall of separation between the civil government and the private economic transactions of the individuals, and the Biblical law mandates census only in time of war. King David himself, when he ordered Joab to number the people, incurred God’s wrath upon himself and upon the nation. God not only refused to support “official statistics” for government purposes, He in fact was angry at the very idea. Samuel in 1 Samuel 8 described an ungodly government in terms of government control over the economy and the labor force as well as control over “thousands and fifties.” In the book of Judges, the Angel of the Lord called Gideon to lead His army while Gideon was involved in “gray economy” activities of threshing wheat in the winepress, to hide it from the government tax-collectors of the Midianites. The Hebrew midwives deliberately lied to the Egyptian Ministry of Planned Parenthood; and the KGB of Jericho got a false report from Rahab. God blessed the midwives and Rahab for their courage to participate in the gray economy. Joseph decided to take his wife and her son and emigrate from Israel—a legal move per se, but it thwarted the environmentalist plans of Herod’s government of cleaning the world of undesirables.

America will not be an exception. With a government that is consistently moving towards more socialism, we will see more resources produced and exchanged in the gray economy. Government statisticians and economists already express concern over this phenomenon; one wonders why they are surprised. In fact, they should expect Americans to be even more willing to engage in it; first, because of the proud tradition on which America was founded, resistance to wicked governments, and second, because Americans more than any other nation in the world have the will to resist and survive. Because of the greater opportunities and traditions here, the gray economy will be much more diverse and resourceful—private money, informal banking and leasing, community services, barter bargains for goods and services, church related activities of mutual aid, healthcare, and charity services; legal, financial, and other counseling; and of course, that new nemesis for all government control freaks: Internet-based services and trade. Compared to what America and Americans can produce in the field of economic activity under the radar of the official statistics, Europe’s gray economy will look like an amateurish play.

People often ask me, in the face of so much evidence for America’s free fall into socialism and tyranny, why I am so optimistic about the future of this nation. I answer: I saw Communism fall. It was big, ugly, it had all the resources, it had all the guns and it had all the food, and it could kill and spare at will, and . . . it fell. It didn’t fall before mighty military conquerors; it fell before the gray little people whose will to survive it couldn’t break. It capitulated before their ingenuity to find ways to produce and trade under all the government restrictions and controls.

That’s why the news from England are exciting and optimistic. Where people haven’t lost their will to live, where the gray economy still survives and functions in all its multiple diversity, there tyrants are still fighting an uphill battle. May God bless us to understand this and act on it.

Raw Milk and the Sour State
Control of the Milk Supply is a Primary Step toward Government Control of the Larger Food Supply
By William E. Pike • January/February 2009 • Volume: 59 • Issue: 1

Raw Milk and the Sour State

Take a moment, if you will, to think about the milk you buy from the grocery store. Whether it is an expensive organic brand or simply carries a mega-chain store name, that milk has undergone pasteurization and homogenization. In pasteurization it has been quickly heated to temperatures up to 250 degrees Fahrenheit for a few seconds to kill bacteria. In homogenization the milk has passed through a tiny valve at pressures exceeding 20,000 pounds per square inch, breaking up fat globules so that cream does not rise to the top. In addition to these volatile treatments, your milk may come from cows fed specially designed hormones to help the animals produce at a rate far beyond that which nature intended.

There is a growing subset of consumers who would prefer not to buy their milk this way. They want it unpasteurized, unhomogenized—in a word, “raw.” They would prefer to drink their milk as humans have consumed it for centuries, which is also how every single signer of the U.S. Constitution drank it.

To procure such a basic product, however, these consumers—with some exceptions—are forced to break the law. The basic retail sale of raw milk for human consumption is legal in only eight states—Arizona, California, Connecticut, Maine, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, New Mexico, and Washington. Its sale for human consumption across state lines is illegal nationwide. In some other states raw milk can be sold at the farm site only, sold through “cow share” programs, or legally marketed as “pet food.” Seventeen states completely forbid the sale of raw milk in any way.

How did this happen? We all learned in childhood about Louis Pasteur’s development of pasteurization in the mid-1800s. For mass-produced milk in an age before refrigeration, pasteurization was indeed a godsend. Early in the twentieth century, as people died at alarming rates due to contaminated milk from filthy urban dairy centers, pasteurization caught on as a hot market trend. In a time when milk collection and storage on large-scale farms was unsanitary and unrefrigerated (and when additives as diverse as marigold petals and animal brains were placed in milk to add body), pasteurization helped save lives. Thus people were willing to pay for it. But then one city after another began to mandate the process through legislation. In 1948 Michigan became the first state to ban the sale of unpasteurized milk, and other states soon followed suit. In 1986 a federal judge ordered that interstate shipments of raw milk be banned, further limiting supply for consumers.

Now, despite advances in dairy-production techniques, it doesn’t matter how clean the equipment or how healthy the cow; raw milk is either illegal or highly suspect, and state and federal bureaucracies see it as a threat to the population. Regulation overstepped the free market and did an end run around common sense.

Raw-milk advocates argue that milk in its pure state is quite beneficial to health. According to the Weston A. Price Foundation, a leading natural-foods organization, raw milk reduces the incidence of asthma, eczema, and hay fever in children. Unpasteurized milk also aids the body’s natural digestive system. Pasteurization, the Foundation insists, kills helpful bacteria and breaks down delicate proteins in milk, leading to the dairy intolerance seen in so many individuals in this modern age. Advocates also state that unpasteurized milk strengthens the immune system and provides optimal growth and development for young people.

The opinion of government officials, backed up by the bulk of the medical community, is that every bit of that is hogwash. A joint press release from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, dated March 1, 2007, reminds consumers “of the dangers of drinking milk that has not been pasteurized.” Among the litany of diseases said to be carried by raw milk are “listeriosis, salmonellosis, campylobacteriosis, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria and brucellosis.” It is enough to make one wonder how Amish communities manage to survive.

The FDA/CDC claims that “There is no meaningful nutritional difference between pasteurized and raw milk.” The Price Foundation retorts that no research is cited by the FDA/CDC to substantiate such claims. The press release also states that “From 1998 to May 2005 CDC identified 45 outbreaks of foodborne illnesses,” accounting for “1,007 illnesses, 107 hospitalizations, and two deaths.” Aside from the fact that these are minuscule numbers for a population of nearly 300 million being tracked over seven years, there seems to be little evidence to back up the figures. Thomas Bartlett, in an article on raw milk (“The Raw Deal,” October 1, 2006), went looking for such cases of illness. In addition to finding no anecdotal evidence whatsoever, he also asked John Sheehan, then-director of the FDA’s dairy and egg safety division, for evidence linking raw milk to deadly disease outbreaks.

Sheehan admitted that he didn’t know of any such cases in the United States in the past 20 years. Nevertheless, the official line on raw milk is so ingrained as to be farcical. In interviewing a Maryland state health official about raw milk sales, Bartlett was told selling raw milk was as bad as selling marijuana, and the official compared such producers to heroin dealers.

Indeed, the question is far more important than, “Is raw milk beneficial?” or even, “Is raw milk safe?” It is this: What right does the state have to outlaw the sale of unpasteurized milk in the first place?

Imagine the case of Mark Nolt of New Line, Pennsylvania. Nolt was arrested—arrested—last May in a sting operation in which undercover officials purchased raw milk from his farm. Nolt, a Mennonite farmer with ten children, was fined $4,040, had his equipment and products seized, and was threatened with jail if he tried to sell raw milk again. His case is not unique. Nolt’s spokesman at his trial, Jonas Stoltzfus, eloquently summed up the situation: “This issue has very little to do with raw milk and health, and everything to do with freedom.”

Controlling the Milk Supply

But why milk? Indeed, as the 2008 pepper scare has proven, harmful bacteria can find their way to many other food sources. However, milk is different from most other food products. It is a staple among staples. To control the milk supply is to control the food supply.

Pasteurization is not a cheap process, and therefore the legal demand for pasteurization favors large producers. A small, independent dairy farm may very well not be able to afford pasteurization equipment (not at government standards, at least), and thus micro-dairies can rarely operate legally on their own. With the dairy industry more centralized, it becomes easier to track and regulate—and control.

Control of the milk supply has been a primary step in the state’s efforts to control the larger food supply. Agriculture continues to fall further and further under the eye of government regulation, as do businesses as diverse as potato-chip manufacturers and fast-food restaurants. The USDA, FDA, and myriad other state and federal agencies make no bones about their goal of controlling every morsel Americans consume—all for our own good, of course.

And where better to start than with milk? Think of the psychological benefits for the state emanating from such regulation. If a product as central and wholesome as milk can only be safe through government control, reliance on the paternalistic state grows. Has it worked? Ask a random acquaintance if he would consider drinking unpasteurized milk. You may very well get a look of horror in return. Why do people feel that way? Simply because they have been indoctrinated to feel that way. Why not be just as accepting of government regulation over their mayonnaise or their chicken or their lettuce? How about their water supply or the cars they drive or how warm they keep their homes in the wintertime? Though not necessarily a conscious progression, control by the state, when left unchecked, simply grows and expands naturally.

As ingrained in our social conscience as pasteurization has become, it is hard for many to step back and realize just how preposterous milk laws happen to be. One must ask if the many citizen-farmers who valiantly fought for liberty two centuries ago could have ever envisioned a “free” state in which one citizen would be legally barred from selling milk from his cow to another citizen. Even King George III would have laughed at that idea.