The Goat Pen

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I have a soft spot for the American farmer. I'm not big on the subsidies but I do believe that water and food production are national security measures and steps should be taken to protect our interests

In that light, I'd support a one time grant to all American farmers to get them back on their feet in this disastrous year for them - from flooding to the chinese tariffs

crashcourse wrote:well somebody knew enough to take him off of suicide watch, disable the camera move his roommate out of the cell and ensure the guards didn't round every 30 minutes

Point of order: I know they took him off suicide watch, removed his cellie, and didn’t do their 30 minute checks. That is suspicious, but CAN be ascribed to staff laziness and incompetence.

But I hadn’t heard there is a gap in the camera footage between the time he entered his cell and the time they pulled him out of the cell dead. Where is that being reported? If that is true, then I really am in the conspiracy camp. There would be way too many coincidences to believe otherwise.

"I have a soft spot for the American farmer. I'm not big on the subsidies but I do believe that water and food production are national security measures and steps should be taken to protect our interests"

I hear it every day from the farmers around here and obviously, they being my customers, I don't say anything, but they got their grant, a $1.65 per bushel subsidy for their soybeans last year and will likely get it again this year. Yes, if someone had sold their beans at the very lowest point, they would've ended up netting about $9.65 for their beans, which was about 60 cents below the highest price before the tariffs were announced. But most of them sold somewhere around the $9 mark, meaning they netted $10.65 (with the subsidy), which is equivalent to $10.65, i.e., about 40 cents higher than when the tariffs were announced. Now then, it's certainly possible that if Trump hadn't put on the tariffs, beans would've gone higher than that due to market conditions, but there's no way to know or predict that sort of thing. They could've just as easily gone down due to dozens of other factors (just like every year). Of course the tariffs have hurt more than just soybeans, but soybeans are (well, were) one of their largest ag sector purchases (might be the largest, not sure), but the tariffs have caused pain for most other crops too.

The problem (or something) about feeling sorry for the poor farmer is that by far the largest "farmers" are corporations (just like in every other sector of business). The small farmer is like the small businessman compared to large corporations. It's true that around here (and really throughout the Southeast) most of the farmers really are "small farmers", even the big ones (except in animal production, which is also farming in a sense). But the massive bulk of farming is in the midwest (and California) and most of those are corporate farms. There aren't many (any) Farmer Brown's hoeing 20 acres in Iowa or Kansas, etc., so really the "people" getting the bulk of the government subsidies are, as usual, very rich corporations. But I don't see how Trump or any president or national politician would try to give the subsidy only to "farmers" of a certain size and leave out the corporate farms, who are their real constituents...

Professor Tiger wrote:

crashcourse wrote:
But I hadn’t heard there is a gap in the camera footage between the time he entered his cell and the time they pulled him out of the cell dead. Where is that being reported? If that is true, then I really am in the conspiracy camp. There would be way too many coincidences to believe otherwise.

There was never a camera pointed directly at him.

Interestingly, the hottest sector in farming now is small scale production of specialty and organic items, or even just growing, say, arugula or heirloom tomatoes for the "eat local" types. The problem with that is most of the eat local markets are urban areas so there isn't much market for that type of thing is Iowa. But I've seen plenty of stories about folks making a pretty good living on like 2 acres of land or even less, which is practically nothing. There are tons of youtube videos on urban farming, eCat, you should check them out. That would dovetail nicely with your other ongoing projects and also get you back to your Peducah roots. Me and Stu's friend Logan (yes, him again) has gotten into this in a small way, he's got like 10 rows in his backyard, maybe like 1/10 of an acre (maybe less than that), he's got more produce than he can possibly eat, I get stuff from him all the time (Stu does too, even though he's not really welcome or appreciative), it's really more than 10 people could eat and he is constantly rotating crops...

this is what prompted me

We haven’t seen anything like this since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Leading up to this year, farm incomes had been trending lower for most of the past decade, and meanwhile farm debt levels have been absolutely exploding. So U.S. farmers were desperate for a really good year, but instead 2019 has been a total disaster. As I have been carefully documenting, due to endless rain and catastrophic flooding millions of acres of prime farmland didn’t get planted at all this year, and the yields on tens of millions of other acres are expected to be way, way below normal. As a result, we are facing the worst farming crisis in modern American history, and this comes at a time when U.S. farms are drowning in more debt than ever before. In fact, the latest numbers that we have show that the average U.S. farm is 1.3 million dollars in debt…

https://www.farmprogress.com/management ... 13-million

As long as Iowa has the first caucus/primary in presidential elections, there will be farm subsidies, and they will be especially beneficial to the big farms.

The government used to pay me a very modest sum to grow 150 acres of pine trees under the Conservation Reserve Program. They tightened up on the rules, and didn’t renew my contract. Dang it.

"As I have been carefully documenting, due to endless rain and catastrophic flooding millions of acres of prime farmland didn’t get planted at all this year, and the yields on tens of millions of other acres are expected to be way, way below normal."

Crop report came out yesterday, corn acres were up, estimated yields were up, corn futures down 45 cents in the past 2 days (over 10%). With soybeans it hardly matters, with China out of the picture (the largest single purchaser of US soybeans by far) there's a glut that won't go away anytime soon...

eCat wrote:This won't be the last

A 61-year-old man is dead after he was shot by an officer trying to enforce Maryland’s new ‘red flag’ law in Ferndale Monday morning.

Anne Arundel County Police confirmed the police-involved shooting happened in the 100 block of Linwood Avenue around 5:17 a.m.

According to police, two officers serving a new Extreme Risk Protective Order (Red Flag Law), a Maryland protective order to remove guns from a household, shot and killed the man listed on that order.

“Under the law, family, police, mental health professionals can all ask for the protective orders to remove weapons,” said Sgt. Jacklyn David, with Anne Arundel County Police.

That man was identified as Gary J. Willis of same address.

Officials said Willis answered the door while holding a handgun.

Willis then placed the gun next to the door.

When officers began to serve him the order, Willis became irate and grabbed his gun.

One of the officers tried to take the gun from Willis, but instead Willis fired the gun.

The second officer fired a gun, striking Willis. He died at the scene."

Just found out that this happened on November 5th, 2018. Must not have been a big deal at the time.

oh it was because Maryland was one of the first states to implement a red flag law

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=10&hilit=red+flag&s ... 40#p168943

I posted this a year ago toov

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=10&hilit=red+flag&s ... 00#p169311

Not following

Hurry up and watch this before Big Tech pulls it down for making fun of Fredo:

https://t.co/A8W4KGDH7E https://twitter.com/CarpeDonktum/status ... 63394304?s

Today after the latest round of protests that has Hong Kong on lock-down and world markets flashing danger, the news from the WH press briefing is that the US supports the pro-democracy demonstrations and we are engaged with our allies to seek measures to tamp down global economic fears. The President emerged from his morning national security briefing and made an impassioned request to Xi to slow any troop build-up and seek talks with Hong Kong dissidents - and echoed the pro-liberty theme of the press briefing and the WH releases.

Bull- fucking - shit.

None of that happened. There are no daily press briefings anymore. This president doesn't get morning national security briefings. No WH staffer is beating the drum for pro-democracy interests in HK, and neither does the Number Two Leader of the Free World. "It's a tough situation" is our official position, as we've officially abdicated our "shining beacon of freedom/city on the hill" place in the world. There are no deliberations with our allies or NATO. We're sitting this one out, and Xi and Putin couldn't be happier. "America First" is partly at work here, but it's also a cover for an administration that is totally clueless wrt managing foreign affairs.

Psst...tick...The guards are sleeping.

Tick, it’s all because Trump is a racist Nazi KKK white supremacist who hates people of color, including the yellow ones:

You posted the same thing over on PNN, BTW. But that’s okay.

Interesting....texags.com and tigerdroppings.com are listed in Google's news blacklist.

About time...

The 1994 assault weapons and high-capacity magazines bans worked. And if I am elected president, we’re going to pass them again — and this time, we’ll make them even stronger,” Joe Biden promised this week.

The only thing stopping the assault-weapon ban from getting through the Republican-controlled Senate, Biden wrote in a New York Times op-ed on Monday, is “weak-willed leaders who care more about their campaign coffers than children in coffins.”

Accusing anyone of caring more about getting campaign contributions than stopping the murder of children is incredibly vicious. It’s the type of ad hominem attack you would not expect from a candidate who portrays himself as a bipartisan dealmaker who can restore civility and unite a divided country.

It’s also an incredibly hypocritical attack coming from Biden. Do you know how many votes Democrats held on gun control during the first two years of the Obama-Biden administration, when there were huge Democratic congressional majorities? Zero. If “weak-willed leaders who care more about their campaign coffers than children in coffins” are the only thing stopping the assault-weapon ban, isn’t that a searing indictment of President Obama, Vice President Biden, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Majority Leader Harry Reid?

Unlike most elected Republicans, who believe that an assault-weapon ban would be unconstitutional and ineffective at stopping mass shootings, those Democratic leaders all believe the assault-weapon ban is constitutional and actually works. So why didn’t Pelosi and Reid hold any votes when Democrats had a once-in-a-generation supermajority in Congress?

Reid, for his part, is blaming the Senate’s 60-vote requirement to end debate for the failure to pass gun control. “People ask why the federal government hasn’t lifted a finger to stop the growing epidemic of gun violence, despite Americans’ demands for action and overwhelming support for common-sense reforms like universal background checks and bans on high-capacity magazines,” Reid wrote in a separate New York Times op-ed on Tuesday calling for the abolition of the 60-vote requirement. “They ask how we can stand by as the country suffers tragedy after tragedy and averages more than one mass shooting every single day. The answer once again: the filibuster.”

But it’s misleading for Reid to blame the filibuster alone for the failure to pass a ban on “high-capacity magazines.” Democrats held 59 or 60 seats from 2009 to 2011 — when Reid was majority leader — and there were a handful of Republicans in the Senate who in 2004 had voted to extend the 1994 assault-weapon ban, which prohibited the sale of a number of semiautomatic rifles, based largely on their cosmetic features, as well as magazines that hold more than ten rounds of ammunition. Yet Reid never brought an assault-weapon bill to the floor, much less engage in the kind of arm-twisting he used to pass Obamacare.

It wasn’t until 2013, when Republicans controlled the House, that Reid allowed a vote on an assault-weapon ban after the Sandy Hook massacre. At the time, Democrats controlled the upper chamber 55–45, but the ban received just 40 votes. Sixteen Democrats joined 44 Republicans to vote it down. Democratic senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, who voted against the ban, told me at the time: “I didn’t think that bill was carefully drawn.” Just one Republican who is no longer in the Senate (Mark Kirk of Illinois) voted for the ban.

The Senate also voted on a standalone measure co-sponsored by Bennet that would ban magazines that hold more than ten rounds of ammunition, but that too failed to get the support of a majority (only 46 senators backed it). Again, the filibuster was not to blame.

The reason why neither the assault-weapon ban nor a narrower ban on “high-capacity magazines” passed the Democratic Senate is simple: From 2004 to 2012, Democrats intentionally retreated on gun control because they believed this was necessary win elections. And a critical number of Democrats voted with Republicans to oppose most gun-control bills.

A charitable interpretation of this history is that pro-gun Democrats genuinely believed in the position they took on the issue and that Democratic leaders’ recruitment of pro-gun Democrats was simply a prudential judgment. But if Democrats like Joe Biden want to attack motives and blame “weak-willed leaders who care more about their campaign coffers than children in coffins” for the failure of gun control, they ought to look in the mirror first and do a little soul-searching.