Food, Inc.

One of my fave armies we've done: the Imperial Guard Strike Force. It's veterans made from space marine scouts.

While you were sleeping, a lame duck congress, like a disgruntled employee who's been fired but still has access to company computers, passed the so-called Food Safety Bill in a most sneaky way. They slipped it into a military appropriations bill HR 3082. It gives the FDA sweeping powers over your food and clamps down on any farm making over $500K a year. Did I say "make"? I meant "gross" which at the profit margin, if any, of a typical family farm is almost no margin at all.

I hope you like eating genetically modified food. The Feds now control the food supply.

Like a mean little piranha, I'm going to do something about it. I'm going to take a bite out of big agriculture and stop going out to fast food and Snickers bars. I've had it with corn syrup. I'm also going to change my food-buying habits. According to my calculations I eat at least $4000 of food a year. I'm going to redirect that money as local and organic as possible. As usual, Federal intervention will have unintended consequences. My prediction: this will see the rise of micro-farming.

Let's start with Monday morning. I was up bright an early for an hour or two then went back to sleep. Sound lazy? Bright and early means 1:30am. I am now using an agenda book to plan out my days, like on my mission, and Monday was an absolute insanity. Nevertheless, I cleared the list and got it all in order. It's clear now that I need to have a more rigid schedule at the studio with people arriving at certain times, and not play it as loosely as I have in the past.

I read this brilliant article by genius author Terry Pratchett entitled Why Gandalf Never Married. Pratchett missed my teenage reading years I'm sorry to say, I think I would have enjoyed him very much.

Recently, I've been thinking about a core philosophy of mine: to grasp the enjoyment of life while still alive. This comes from two sources. The first is a conversation I had with my Dad in late 2003. We were up in the mountains above my beloved Ashland, on the balcony of a massive log home overlooking the ancient pines. He was dying of cancer just a few months to live, so in a way this was like his death bed (I called it his "death recliner" as that was where he was sitting while I took notes as if by dictation). He pointed to his new truck and said he waited his whole life to buy that truck, and to retire and now that it happened he was going to die. He urged me to not wait around to live life, but to seize it. A sort of carpe diem speech. Well, not really a speech as he was a get-to-the-point kind of guy and said it all in two sentences.

The second source is my study of monetary policy. When the government is inflating the money supply so much that it outpaces the return from investment then it's time to consume. Eat that money before its value slides. Put another way, if inflation is at 10% and your best return for saving/investing your money is 5% then you're better off just eating it up. Grab it and stuff it in your mouth before the Feds steal it from you. Make no mistake: it is theft. By stealth or force. Solution: allow competing hard currencies; commodity money. I would love to pay my workers in cash. Nowadays that is called "under the table". I propose banishing the table itself. If there are no taxes (ie the Central Govt is funded entirely by alternative revenues such as tariffs) then there is no IRS, no record-keeping, no accountants to pay at $75 an hour. All those resources are freed into the real economy. I dream of that day. It's what I want as a citizen-voter.

But I digress. I now have a growing force of Ork boyz, about fifty at this time. They are being painted up for the first event at Valhalla in late January. One of the scenarios we're working on involves a horde of Ork boyz. I've got about three bins chock full of all the stuff that needs to be painted up. I'm trying to get Cameroon and Josephus clear of their regular painting duties and get them on terrain again.

It's time to buy your ticket! The January event is about a third full at this time.

A Batrep with IG vs DE is being planned for tomorrow. I also have plans to get a better camera (still a ways off).

________________________________
[Reader comment on this post]

BTW, I just read the new blog post; it was awesome. I find your writing style very enjoyable. Rather than a long drawn out dialogue on a single track subject with the good points sprinkled in here and there, it's a series of quick, dense, and satisfying 'shorts' addressing a wide range of topics throughout the post. Very fitting to my reading style and how my brain processes information.

When I was young they tried to tell me I had ADD.... :\ It's the most fake B.S. "condition" I've ever learned of, of which I'm fairly sure was invented for doctors to use to get that sweet methylphenidate prescription. I digress, however, I think a lot of kids have the capacity to absorb a lot of dense information and not only understand it, but retain it. Just not enough of them for the gov. to consider changing our outdated public school teaching format. Previously being a teacher (of younger children I believe?), i'm curious what your thoughts on that are?

Back to your blog though, as much as I too disapprove of the Federal Dumb A**'s new bill, as a closet optimist I can only hope that it becomes the catalyst that finally gets people doing the things you've talked about:

"stop going out to fast food and Snickers bars. I've had it with corn syrup. I'm also going to change my food-buying habits. According to my calculations I eat at least $4000 of food a year. I'm going to redirect that money as local and organic as possible."

My wife and I for years now have tried to find small, organic, 'homestead' based CSA's for our source of food (the kind that gross < weeks =" $1976/">

I also am hope full that more people will start micro farming as well. As a test this spring i took a 4' x 4' patch of normal lawn and cut out the grass (sort of like what a sod cutter would do). I planted 6 bell pepper plants, a tomato plant, an eggplant, and a crook neck squash. My test was to see how little I could prep the spot and how little attention I could give the plants, but still get a yield (to disprove the common statement "I don't have the time or energy to make a garden"). I mixed in only a little paydirt and set a timer for the water... I've made at least 4-5 gallons of pasta sauce, have had squash or eggplant with dinner more times than I care to remember, and am STILL getting peppers.

I still don't like the bill... but perhaps something good (inadvertently) will come of it. I could go on but you're a busy man. My point is that the blog is great (both the content and the format).

Thank you,
David S.
_______________________________________
More comments

I hope that this is not inappropriate of me to email you here, but I was not able to post on the blogspot..

Yes the Nazis would be proud of the Food Safety Bill, also known as bill S-510 before they trojan horsed it in to HR-3082. I hope everyone starts cultivating their own micro farms. "Permaculture" farms may be the way to go. Also, try to get heirloom seeds..

Shawn I think that's spot-on what you said about getting rid of "the table", so to speak, and paying your employees directly in cash. I support you 100% (although that's easy for me to say because I don't own a business). It's so refreshing to hear a business owner such as yourself speak out on these topics. It's often difficult to bring these subjects up without immediately being labeled as a "conspiracy theorist".

There is nothing theoretical about how criminal the Fed is. Here is s clip of Alan Greenspan admitting that the Federal Reserve is NOT part of the U.S. government and that there is no government agency that can over-rule their actions..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QkmLnNEvdU&feature=related

Cheers,

- J.J.