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"Rammstein has reached its goal. The band's best-selling new album "
Liebe ist für alle da" ("Love is There for Everyone") has been taken off German shelves after offending government censors — a first for the bad boys of German rock." -
The author quotes 'The Vegetarian Myth' pointing out what Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms does on pasture:
"On ten acres of land, Salatin’s grass-based husbandry produces:
3000 eggs
1000 broilers
80 stewing hens
2000 pounds of beef
2500 pounds of pork
100 turkeys
50 rabbits"We're heading towards a beef farm, but as we get into direct sales it may be a wise move to diversify into other meats.
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Great to read someone fanatical about soil and litter quality. The farms I see are really weak with this. The best soil gets used for cereals and the ploughing kills the surface litter. The pastures never properly recover because the entire 10ha paddocks are always being grazed by sparse cattle.
21
Nov
09
links for 2009-11-20
18
Nov
09
links for 2009-11-17
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I love Roosh's blog. He's a pickup artist but here he muses on what a real man is.
He describes two qualities:
1. ability to get laid at will.
2. Personal strength.I think having these qualities makes you a fine animal. To be a man you need at least one quality more: the ability to act for a higher goal than yourself. Family, country, equality, freedom, ancestors, the list goes on.
'Strong' and 'well laid' is just dandy, but it isn't enough.
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I hate the assumption here – that the money saved by cutting funding in one sport should be spent on another. Why not cut the funding by that amount? Why are we funding all these things in the first place?
The 'national character' should come from the actions of the people and not from a government decision.
17
Nov
09
links for 2009-11-16
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I love everyone's love for tractors. I have it too.
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The Beginning Farmer posts a vid he found of Joel Salatin. I've read Joel Salatin and he talks about his single biggest point in this video – that farms need to be businesses.
14
Nov
09
links for 2009-11-13
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David Kilcullen on Afghanistan: "As an analogy, you have a building on fire, and it's got a bunch of firemen inside. There are not enough firemen to put it out. You have to send in more or you have to leave. It is not appropriate to stand outside pontificating about not taking lightly the responsibility of sending firemen into harm's way. Either put in enough firemen to put the fire out or get out of the house. That is my analogy of where we are. Either of those approaches could potentially work."
From The Strategist. http://kotare.typepad.com/thestrategist/2009/11/david-kilcullen-afghanistan-half-measures.html
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Well that explains Top Gear's attraction. Public Schoolboy bonding humor.
13
Nov
09
links for 2009-11-12
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"Not much serious research has been done therefore (what agribusiness company would fund it?) into the fact that these two plants are the most palatable (my sheep tell me that over and over again) and in humid parts of the U.S., offer a protein-rich diet through April, May and June, and in the fall when rains come again, until about Thanksgiving."
Not the best structured sentence, but its content is very interesting to me. I've been seeing how medical and health research is biased towards studies that get funding, i.e. studies that could show the benefits of drugs. I didn't realize that the same bias would apply to research done on agriculture. In hindsight it is obvious the same problem would exist.
I'm spending a lot of time reading up old books on farming, from the time before big ag. It seems we have forgotten a lot of things.
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There's something in this, but it is a little restrictive. At all levels of Microsoft we used to see there were some people good at the start of a project, and some good at the end. I was a shipper, good at the end. But as my career progressed I became more of a seer and a person who could figure out the right thing to do and delegate a lot of the shipping. Now I think I can do either, but there might be a fair bit of resistance while switching between modes. Amazon, on the other hand, had less of a problem with this. Maybe projects were small enough that there wasn't such a blocker to go between seeing and doing. The decisions were less costly to screw up.
The whole idea of two modes is worth examining and this is an interesting way to look at it.
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Swine Flu deaths are ahead of leprosy deaths. Just. [From The Strategist: http://kotare.typepad.com/thestrategist/.]
12
Nov
09
links for 2009-11-11
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When there's a global market, to whom are you loyal? John Robb of Global Guerrillas calls out something I've been thinking about. He's clear and concise, unlike my thoughts.
Living in a small rural European community there is a lot more loyalty to neighbors and community than living in a US city. But the post forces me to ask what are the other groups that hold loyalty? Perhaps the Chasse (hunt), the French farmers union, the rugby club, the committee des fetes and even the expat group you find yourself in.
10
Nov
09
links for 2009-11-09
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Parenting and coaching are important, basketball phenomenon edition. [via Blazer's Edge.]
09
Nov
09
links for 2009-11-08
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Wear a name tag at all times.
I think I'd rather have a personalized t-shirt that says, "Bonjour! Je m'appelle Brent."
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About time this happened. As someone familiar with Amazon.com's Personalization, I'm amazed it has taken years for Google to ship something in this space.
07
Nov
09
links for 2009-11-06
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Bill Bryson goes to CERN and looks at the Compact Muon Solenoid, "surely the largest thing ever to be built with the word “compact” in its title."
06
Nov
09
links for 2009-11-05
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Congratulations, folks. They shipped the Beta of their Compressed Earth Block Press.
I've been following these guys for a while. They are putting themselves in a position where they have to solve ecology problems that the rest of us will face at some point.
