CANADA & USA FIGHT AGAINST DEMOCRACY

WAR Is A Racket

No one wins 

In the game of war 

It's played like a game 

Lives tossed in to the furnace 

 

Of profits 

The companies know well 

The share holders jump with glee-full sounds 

At the sounds
of bombs dropping 

 

The companies win 

As stocks sky rocket 

As rockets burst through the sky 

As rockets burst into the child lining up for a little morsel of food 

 

The profiteers sit back 

With full stomachs 

Belly aches from so much excess 

Sore backs from sedentary lives, minds, and hearts 

 

They don't go to war 

No - the poor are sent off 

No jobs 

No choice [you know: cut social programs, keep wages low, move factories for cheaper labour]

 

The media, which the rich own 

Which owns us 

Our minds and 

Therefore our souls 

 

Convinces us 

That we are good 

And those over "there" - wherever "there" is 

Are bad 

 

It might be Gaza, Iraq, Iran, Russia, China, Mars 

But we are all-ways right-eous 

We all-ways know best 

And, of course, we want to help/save those poor bastards [so we are so easily convinced] 

 

For we don't believe in sin 

We are beyond sin 

We are pure 

And, of course, we bring "demo-crazy" 

 

With "the rule of law" 

As our guide 

We will save you all 

You will thank us one day 

 

Our minds are bleached 

Our hearts are filled with gadgets 

And denied pain 

If only we could see the mad-ness

 

Of murdering 

If only we had com-passion [feel with] 

Instead of moral superior-ity

Judging instead of be-ing with the suffer-ing

 

The mom who holds her dead baby 

A baby who starved because we dropped bombs and not food 

Did she profit?

She screams in agony 

 

She weeps 

Oh Gaza, dear Gaza [or fill in with other]

Why do they hates us? 

Forgive me my child I could not feed you 

 

My breasts dried up

I  have not eaten for months

I have not had a drink of water

My mind and body and heart and soul are traumatized

 

They have taken away our food, water, land and re-placed with bombs

They must have no eyes 

No ears 

No heart 

 

Or is it they have no soul? 

As they go on in their busy petty self-indulgent circles

Creating Soil: Cover Crops And Wormies Will Help You!

 

Cover crops provide a home for extremely beneficial "insects" and more!

We all want "better" soil or at least to maintain the wonder-full soil we have - if we do. As crops are taken out of the soil, they remove soil, nutrients and water from the soil. So we need to continually [key word] add these and more to the soil.

Field radish [daikon]grown to loosen subsoil

At a recent workshop on cover crops - at the Guelph Organic Conference - OMAFRA presented the benefits of using cover crops [cc] for a number of purposes: 

• to protect the soil from 'the elements'
• to build the soil through the addition of nutrients and organic matter
• to smother/kill weeds through the dense growth of the cc - and the allelopathic actions of them
• to loosen/break up the soil via deep rooted cc's, 
• fight erosion
• maintain moisture
• radiation protection
• prevent leaching and volatilization of nutrients
• scavenge nutrients [especially N, P]
• carbon sequestation/fight the climate emergency 
• provide home for predatory insects
• provide pollination for bees, butterflies, others
  
• fight pests/diseases

Fall rye planted in rows of Rau Ram

 

The grower needs to determine which 'actions' are the most needed. Some farmers, like local organic grain producer Ray Halma cover all bases by planting mixes - consisting of 14 different plant seeds.

A few examples for growing in the Northeast include, but not limited to:

N source: red clover, hairy vetch, berseem, sweet clover, alfalfa, peas

Soil builder: rye grass, sweet clover, sorghum-sudan grass, rye

Erosion fighter: rye, rye grass, white clover, oats

Subsoil loosener: sorghum-sudan grass, field radish [daikon], sweet clover, alfalfa

Weed fighter: sorghum-sudan grass, rye, ryegrass, buckwheat

Pest fighter: rye, sorghum-sudan grass. One audience member suggested that wire worm can be killed using black sesame. 

More areas to consider include: the impact on the soil: we can look at subsoil impact, freeing up P & K and loosening the top soil. Looking at the soil ecology we should consider both the present condition of the following along with what we want to accomplish in the area of nematodes, disease, allelopathic effect and choking of weeds. Other important considerations include the attraction of beneficials, how well the cc's bear traffic and the length of the growing window.

The cost of seed also needs to be considered. It also should be noted that grasses produce much more organic matter than legumes do. And while grasses take up/scavenge N left over from previous crops, N is less likely to be released for a crop grown immediately after the cover crop is grown. 

Mixing grasses with legume cc's in your cropping systems helps alleviate the N-immobilization effect. This can lead to more dry organic matter and erosion control due the different growth habits of the species.

For more information, see the classic Canadian Organic Growers "Organic Field Crop Handbook". The Organic Science Cluster work is also a valuable resource. 

For a totally different and, in some ways, complementary approach, Carolyn Merchant notes in The Death Of Nature that Renaissance behaviour treated nature as a "person-writ-large". And American-Indian tribes, like the Columbia Basin Tribes opposed the Europeans attitudes in the mid-1800s [prevalent today]. Smohalla [p.28] is quoted as saying:

You ask me to plow the ground! Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's breast? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest.

You ask me to dig for stone! Shall I dig under her skin for her bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again.

You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it, and be rich like white men! But how dare I cut off my mother's hair?