It is February 12th, 2022 in Willamette Valley, Oregon. A few years ago, I would have been worried about my hives of honey bees: do they have enough food storage left, is the temporary winter structure shielding the hive sufficiently from the freezing wind, did I successfully treat them for…

Chicken Stories part 4 The seventh and last member of our first brood is a Silkie Frizzle. That means she is a cross between a Silkie and a Frizzle. Silkies have soft fluffy feathers. Their ancestry dates back to ancient China. The first mention in Western text is probably by…

Chicken stories part 3 Martha is an Andelucian, the kind that is mostly white with speckles of black on her back and wings. Her sister, Marilyn has slightly less black speckles and is a little smaller. Another way to tell them apart is from their behavior. Among the seven chicks…

Chicken stories part 2 Timmy was the first chick that we named when we brought home seven of these two-day old cuties. She is a Fayoumis. Fayoumis can trace their ancestry back to ancient Egypt, in fact, to the famous Tutankhamen. King Tut had procured some Sri Lankan jungle fowls…

Chicken Stories Part 1 I am not a religious person. But I just had a deep religious experience eating a chicken. No it is not about how good it tastes. Willow is a Welsummer chicken. We got him together with six other baby chicks in May shortly after we moved…

If you think you deserve equality more than others, then you are merely enforcing inequality. This is a leftist anti-woke perspective. For a clear statement of what leftist anti-woke is, see this article. I just read something by Steffi Lau that made my experience of racism in the US clicked: …

It’s time to get over “I’m right and you are wrong” For too long, we imagine that politics is about compromises. The left and the right want opposite things. So politics and good governance is about splitting the difference and meeting each other in the middle. …

And is there a way out of this vicious circle? Right now we are caught between two competing models of capitalism. Surveillance late capitalism reigns in the US where giant corporations and their operatives have captured the state. They use the US Treasury as their private piggy bank and the…

So you are ready to take the plunge. Here are the first steps. If you are wondering what is a homestead commons, here is the article that explains it. Finding the right piece of land for your homestead takes time. It took us almost a year. And that is counting…