I collect pigs. Fortunately, only one of them was a live pig and I quickly returned that little sucker. I have pig salt and pepper shakers, pig towels, pig pins, pig bottles, pig carvings, pig soap, pig hats, well...you get the idea. It's amazing what different things get made in the shape of pigs. They are interesting animals.

My Hogs

Sometimes, standing in the small wood that shields my house from the north, I whisper the word 'Pigs!' Within a second, bursting from the laurels, alert and obedient as no dog could be, comes a pair of Gloucester Old Spot gilts to nuzzle my hand. Or sometimes, if I am late with their afternoon bucket of scraps, they break out of their enclosure and hurtle across to bang their rumps against the kitchen door. As I contemplate these animals, my mind's eye fills with placid agricultural visions. More and extensive areas of the woods are cleared of brambles and brush. My cow begins to produce milk and the pigs take the surplus, like a Denmark in miniature; or they are turned out when the corn is cut to glean the spilled grain; or when the orchard is up, they manure the trees and eat the insect-tainted fruit. In this beautiful and frictionless economy (in the old Xenophontic or Aristotelian sense of household rather than state management, which is, properly, political economy), the pig is the heart and soul, the wild card, the blockbuster, the Maxim gun. Indeed, to me a wood without pigs is like a ballroom without women.
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thanks to Ethel the Blog

Bush Dictatorship

They let Al Martin out of his cage again.

The Grand Tyranny

The new Bush dictatorship is in full swing. Bush just signed a bill wherein the United States no longer has to provide a civilian trial for anyone who should stand accused of committing a terrorist act against the United States. Instead the government will now try said individuals in a "special closed military court." In this trial, the defendants will not even be allowed to present any exculpatory evidence that the adjudicating military body should deem "contrary to the security of the State or the domestic tranquility of the people."

I love the way Bill O'Reilly announced it on Fox News. Our new Leader of Pro-Government Media, Bill O'Reilly, in conjunction with this announcement, said that the American armed forces should be praised for their defeat of the Taliban in Kabul and that this action now sends a message to the world that the US military "can kill any individuals, groups, organizations or parties hostile to the security of the United States."
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thanks to Ethel the Blog

Afghanistan - America's tar baby

Robert Fisk: Forget the cliches, there is no easy way for the West to sort this out

Afghanistan – as the armies of the West are about to realise – is not a country. You can't "occupy" or even "control" Afghanistan because it is neither a state nor a nation.

Nor can we dominate Afghanistan with the clichés now being honed by our journalists. We may want a "broad-based" government, but do the Afghans? We may regard cities as "strategic" – especially if reporters are about to enter them – but the Afghans have a different perspective on their land.

As for the famous loya jirga, a phrase which now slips proudly off the lips of cognoscenti, it just means "big meeting". Even more disturbingly, it is a uniquely Pashtun phrase and thus represents the tribal rules of only 38 per cent of Afghan society.

The real problem is that Afghanistan contains only tiny minorities of the ethnic groups which constitute its population. Thus, the 7 million Pashtuns in the country are outnumbered by the 12 million Pashtuns in Pakistan, the 3.5 million Tajiks in Afghanistan are outnumbered by the 6 million Tajiks in Tajikistan. The 1.3 million Uzbeks are just a fraction of the 23 million Uzbeks in Uzbekistan. There are 600,000 Turkmens in Afghanistan – but 3.52 million in Turkmenistan. So why should the Afghan Pashtuns and Tajiks and Uzbeks and Turkmens regard Afghanistan as their country? Their "country" is the bit of land in Afghanistan upon which they live.
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thanks to also not found in nature

Hollywood on Parade

I've always liked Robert Mitchum. Now there is a biography of him - Robert Mitchum : Baby I Don't Care. My younger readers probably have no idea of who Robert Mitchum is but they might be more intrerested if they knew he was busted for marijuana in the 1950s.

Gadfly does a review of the book. Ethel the Blog mentioned this with the following anecdote from the book which is to good to not repeat.

Again, for my younger readers, "Young" is Loretta Young, a major star starting to fade about the time this movie was made.

A devout Catholic, Young frowned on unseemly behavior of all kinds and particularly disapproved the use of bad language in the workplace. It was generally understood that there was to be no swearing by anyone within miles of Loretta’s delicate ears, a tall order considering that in the movie business even the child actors cursed like sailors. To enforce this edict, Loretta instituted her infamous "curse box," requiring an immediate donation (to be forwarded to one of her Catholic charities) by anyone on the set uttering a forbidden epithet. This provoked one of the most durable of Mitchum anecdotes. In the pithiest version of the story, an assistant explained to Bob how the curse box worked, with its sliding scale of penalties.

"It’s fifty cents for ‘hell,’ a dollar for a ‘damn,’ a dollar-fifty for ‘shit’—"

"What I want to know is," said Mitchum, in a voice that could be heard throughout Oregon, "what does Miss Young charge for a ‘fuck’?"
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