Saturday, October 31, 2009

Witty name about my trip to Wisconsin


At the request of my rebel friend, I must admit that I have been remiss in my blog writing and now need to update ya'll.

Last weekend, I traveled up to the north land of Wisconsin to attend a hop growing convention. There is a group there trying to bring hop growing back to the Midwest. Currently 95 % of the hops grown in this country for beer making are grown in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. With 77% of the total hops grown in the Yakima valley, WA. But, currently about .0001% of this country's hops are grown in Wisconsin. Why so little you ask? Well, in the late 1800s, most of the hops in this country were grown in Wisconsin and New York. In fact Saulk county, where modern day Wisconsin Dells is, used to be corner to corner hops. Every year, 30,000 workers from Rockford, Chicago, and even into Indiana would flock to Wisconsin for the hop harvest earning 1-2 dollars a day, a month's wages in some places. But, around 1890, much like the potato famine in Ireland, the single variety was wiped out by a mold strain. So, the hops moved to the northwest, with their arid climates and consistent products.

I've been tossing around the idea of farming hops in Illinois on a smaller farm scale and in conjunction with other niche crops. This conference gave me a good idea of exactly what would go in to this endeavor. Approximately 15,000 dollars to start... per acre. So, it isn't exactly a cheap hobby... nor is it a short term investment. But it was a fruitful weekend in that I learned a lot about soil and hop variety. Plus the brew master of Capital brewery in Madison WI, Kirby Nelson, had us to the brewery for a private tour and lecture on hop quality's effect on beer quality. He also let us taste several beers off the tank. The tanks themselves are actually old dairy tanks, which was pretty neat. His signature beer now is an ice bock which is like a double bock but 25% of the water gets frozen off, producing a beer with a very high Alcohol by volume (ABV). And it was quite tasty, complex, almost syrupy.

On a side note, did you know that people from Wisconsin hate people from Illinois. I think it has to do with the Chicago folks who buy up all the lakefront property in Wisconsin so the locals can't buy property on their own lakes. Or, maybe it has something to do with the ultra-liberalized, snobby jerks from Chicago and the northern suburbs who mostly act as our ambassadors to the cheese land. Either way, I always catch a lot of flack from Wisconsinites who are ... less than charitable to Illinoisans. They even ave a term for us, "FIBS"... the I stands for Illinois. To combat this, I usually tell people I'm from Kentucky ... which is true in a manner of speaking.

The ironic thing is that few people in Illinois even know about this hatred. Kind of like a rivalry that only one side cares (or knows) about. I'm not saying it's unwarranted hatred. Most of the people in downstate Illinois hate Chicagoans as well, for many of the same reasons. But, to have such a widespread hatred that 90 percent of Illinoisans don't even know about... it's a little funny...

Cheers

Thursday, October 15, 2009

From Wall St. Journal

What happened here, and is happening elsewhere in American life, is that Mr. Limbaugh's outspoken political conservatism is being deemed sufficient reason to ostracize him from polite society. By contrast, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who fires off his own brand of high-velocity, left-wing political commentary but lacks Mr. Limbaugh's sense of humor, appears weekly as co-host of NBC's "Football Night in America." We haven't heard anyone on the right say Mr. Olbermann's nightly ad-hominem rants should disqualify him from hanging around the NFL. Al Franken made it all the way to the U.S. Senate on a river of political vitriol.

click here to read in full

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Images from the Farm: Harvest 2009






For those of you not fortunate enough to be on a farm, here are some images of the beauty of the Fall.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

BBC changing their tune....?

Interesting article from the BBC questioning the 'global warming' juggernaut.

The funnies thing to me is that, even though various climate prediction models were proven hilariously wrong, those who create the models are using more models to predict the cooling trend of the past 11 years to reverse immediately following their previous models being incorrect....

Maybe we should stop trusting climate models all together, as they are so frequently proven useless (especially when it comes to enacting policy and law).

Cheers.

Friday, October 9, 2009

Uncle Walt, again.

If you don't read Walter Williams' regular column, I highly suggest it. Here's an important, VERY IMPORTANT excerpt from his article two days ago:

"The most authoritative tally of history's most murderous regimes is in a book by University of Hawaii's Professor Rudolph J. Rummel, "Death by Government." Statistics are provided at his website: (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html). The Nazis murdered 20 million of their own people and those in nations they captured. Between 1917 and 1987, Stalin and his successors murdered, or were otherwise responsible for the deaths of, 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, Mao Tsetung and his successors were responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese.


Today's leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from Nazism. However, there's little or no distinction between Nazism and socialism. Even the word Nazi is short for National Socialist German Workers Party. The origins of the unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism did not begin in the '20s, '30s and '40s. Those horrors were simply the end result of long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for "social justice." It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans, like many of today's Americans, who would have cringed at the thought of genocide, who built the Trojan horse for Hitler to take over. "

-Walter Williams

Steyn and me

This from an interview of Mark Steyn yesterday performed by Hugh Hewitt.

Hugh Hewitt: The second paragraph reads, and this is very scary, Mr. Obama appears to have been swayed in recent days by arguments from some advisers, led by Vice President Joe Biden, that the Taliban do not pose a direct threat to the U.S., and that there should be a greater focus on tackling al Qaeda inside of Pakistan.

Mark Steyn....Well you know, in Afghanistan, it was illegal, it was under the Taliban, illegal by law, by law, for a woman to feel sunlight on her face, illegal by law. And leftist feminists, the left wing feminist organizations in the Western world had absolutely nothing to say about that. And George W. Bush liberated those Afghan women. He got them out of their burkas. He allowed them to feel sunlight on their face. A year after the Afghan invasion, there were a higher proportion of women elected to the Afghan parliament than to the Canadian parliament. And the idea that you can simply allow this disgusting party of the Taliban effectively to return large parts of Afghanistan to a prison state, is, speaks very poorly for us. But in a sense, you know, in hard national interest terms, if you want to get out, the thing to do would be to figure out a way to get out without making it look like a defeat. The minute you re-burkaize parts of Afghanistan, what you’re telling the world is that you have been defeated, that the patrons of Osama bin Laden are now back in charge. You couldn’t stick it. You couldn’t stick it. You’re as, as the historian Niall Ferguson says, this is the superpower with ADHD. It hasn’t got the staying power, can’t concentrate long enough.


HTNL thoughts: I think this shows an increasing trend of comparing President Bush's success in Iraq, and B.O.'s looming disaster in Afghanistan. After the residue of resentment surrounding President Bush subsides, everyone outside of our communist universities and the media will realize Iraq as a resounding success. (And the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan as an achievement truly worthy of peace prize).

Cheers.

quote of the day: Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.

-Winston Churchill

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Sorry B.O.

I'm not sad that Chicago lost the Olympics. In fact, it fills me with glee and giddiness that the IOC, possibly the most corrupt institution outside of Cook County, IL, snubbed B.O, Mrs. B.O, Oprah and our old friend Michael Jordan. Apparently, though 'widely popular' abroad, B.O.'s popularity could not get Chicago out of the first round of city selection.

This decision did not come as a total surprise to me. What was the dominant story of the summer domestically other than B.O.'s attempt to make America into Canada Jr.? It was the violence of Chicago; multiple murders every week, gang violence and the like. Even leading up to the Olympic decision, the violence in Chicago was on a national and international stage as two other young men were horribly and tragically beaten this very week.

Then, we have the widespread opposition of Chicagoonians themselves. Various polls, one even by the Chicago Tribune had near half of Chicago residents being opposed to having the games. And why shouldn't they be? The financial strains would be staggering. Atlanta is still paying off their Olympic bill from '96 and Montreal hadn't stopped taxing their citizens for their Olympics until 2007. Throwing billions of dollars into the most politically corrupt state in the country and the most politically corrupt city in the Western world would certainly result in disaster.

Finally we have the message of B.O. regarding America's world identity. From his travels to the Mideast, to his drippy, sappy domestic speeches (of which there have been hundreds since his Inauguration) to his recent escapade of shame at the U.N; the message of B.O. is that America is not special, America is not exceptional, and that Americans should be ashamed of their country's history (especially the last 8 years of it). This shows a major disparity of his rhetoric and reality. If America is not exceptional, why should we have the Olympics here? Seems hard to hold both positions simultaneously.

A major implication of Chicago's international humiliation (1st round elimination, even behind Tokyo who made a ridiculous pitch of having a "green Olympics") is the consequence for our fearless leader B.O. The anointed one has received widespread doubt and disapproval of his speedy attempt to "remake America" (translation: make American a Euro-Socialist nation). The failure of B.O. to bring an Olympics to his home town now draws international doubt from...

Canada -- "With an incredible rapidity, America's status as the world's pre-eminent superpower is now passing away. This is a function both of the nearly systematic abandonment of U.S. interests and allies overseas, with metastasizing debt and bureaucracy on the home front.And while I think the U.S. has the structural fortitude to survive the Obama presidency, it will be a much-diminished country that emerges from the 'new physics' of hope and change."

and England as well --"There has been a growing narrative taking hold about Barack Obama’s presidency in recent weeks: that he is loved by many, but feared by none; that he is full of lofty vision, but is actually achieving nothing with his grandiloquence."

But, ultimately, this is a good thing for Chicago. Having B.O. embarrassed on the international stage is just a bonus. But, I'm afraid, B.O's embarrassment will be a much more common theme in the months and years to come, as nations realize we are being led by a man who has accomplished nothing and has no experience at all.

Cheers.