Guerilla Gardening

random acts of beauty
h/t
Althouse

Unplugged Christians living off the grid

"We are not living off the grid as much as we are creating a new grid, a more wholesome grid," he said.

"We are following a different path that we think is healthier, promotes better families, and better communities."

He doesn't believe a church needs four walls and a roof. Rather, a church is people who believe in taking care of each other -- living under the biblical principles of faith, hope and charity.

[...]

"Personal secession are things like homeschooling, house churches, home gardening, home-based economics, just regaining privacy and a sense of community rather than worrying about what's going on in Washington, D.C... What's the latest thing from the Supreme Court?

"You know, who cares? I don't care about what they're saying in D.C. because they don't represent me hardly more than Pyongyang."

full article at CNN

Feast Day of St. Joan of Arc

From the preface of Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc:

To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man’s character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours. Judged by the standards of one century, the noblest characters of an earlier one lose much of their lustre; judged by the standards of today, there is probably no illustrious man of four or five centuries ago whose character could meet the test at all points. But the character of Joan of Arc is unique. It can be measured by the standards of all times without misgiving or apprehension as to the result. Judged by any of them, judged by all of them, it is still flawless, it is still ideally perfect; it still occupies the loftiest place possible to human attainment, a loftier one than has been reached by any other mere mortal.

[...]

She was perhaps the only entirely unselfish person whose name has a place in profane history. No vestige or suggestion of self-seeking can be found in any word or deed of hers. When she had rescued her King from his vagabondage, and set his crown upon his head, she was offered rewards and honours, but she refused them all, and would take nothing. All she would take for herself - if the King would grant it - was leave to go back to her village home, and tend her sheep again, and feel her mother’s arms about her, and be her housemaid and helper. The selfishness of this unspoiled general of victorious armies, companion of princes, and idol of an applauding and grateful nation, reached but that far and no farther.



Thanks to Elena Maria Vidal for the heads up

So long Billy

FTC Proposes Federalizing Newspapers, and Killing off Blogs

By "journalism", the FTC means "newspapers" and by "encourage innovations" the FTC means stifle competition. Among the FTC's suggestions:

• Tightly limit what search engines and news aggregators (like Drudge Report) are allowed to report;

• Potentially define certain kinds of news reports as "proprietary facts" rather than events in the public domain;

• Rather than protect consumers against price-fixing (one of its missions), the FTC rallies around antitrust exemptions for newspapers that could help them monopolize news distribution;

• Redistributing wealth from individual taxpayers to old media, which would serve to bolster the coffers of newspapers while simultaneously reducing journalistic independence and truly creating a "state-run media".

Doug Ross has more
h/t
Scribal Terror

Added: from Coyote Blog

Here are just some quick highlights:

* Substantial narrowing of fair use, with particular focus on how search engines and other online sites (e.g. blogs) use and/or have to pay for access to news sites

* Expansion of news copyrights on breaking news – ie certain papers will own the copyrights to certain news events if they are the first mover on it

* Increased government funding of news organizations along multiple vectors, from subsidies to guaranteed loans to income tax checkoffs to lower postal rates to Americorps programs for for journalists.

* Simultaneously reduce private funding of journalism through taxes, including a tax on advertisers

* Shift the organizational model of journalism from profit corporations (which rely on satisfying individuals to get their revenue) to non-profit organizations dependent on the government for funding

* New taxes on and licensing of the Internet. New taxes on broadcast spectrum to subsidize print media (shifting money from media that are more hostile to the administration to print media and non-profits that are more sympathetic to the administration).

Here is the intro that was missing from the report: “The New York Times and Newsweek can’t figure out a profitable business model in the Internet age. We propose the government step in with all means at its disposal to limit competition to these print media companies and create new government subsidies for their business. Once their companies’ profitability is absolutely dependent on these government mandates and subsidies, the Federal government will have a powerful source of leverage to protect itself from criticism in these outlets. Once we have this situation in place, we will have a strong inventive to quash more independent outlets and maximize the market share of media companies beholden to the government. In a large sense, our recommendations build off the success of the tobacco settlement experiment, where a few large companies agreed to pay the government large percentages of their future profits, and then the government worked diligently to quash new tobacco competitors to maximize the market share of those companies paying it settlement money.”

Homegrown revolution - radical change taking root

The Dervaes family's website
h/t
Colin McEnroe

Happy birthday T-Bone Walker!

It's also Sonny Burgess' birthday. This is the first record he did for Sun.

huh?

Thanks for sharing Christopher!

Maryland keeps orphans' Social Security benefits

Maryland is just one of many states that apply for -- and keep -- Social Security benefits that legally belong to children in foster care.

This is happening to tens of thousands of foster kids nationwide, says Dr. Daniel Hatcher, associate professor of law at the University of Baltimore. Child welfare agencies regularly file for Social Security benefits that should go to orphaned or disabled foster kids, then pocket the money in their budgets, leaving their young charges with no financial resources when they leave the system at age 18.

Since Social Security benefits legally belong to the minor child, whoever receives the money has a fiduciary responsibility to spend it in the child's best interest. This is a broad standard, but padding bureaucratic budgets doesn't even come close.

[...]

Not only do foster children get no benefit from their own benefits, they often have no idea that child welfare agencies are keeping their money. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld this despicable practice in Washington State Department of Social and Health Services v. Guardianship Estate of Keffeler, Hatcher says.

But, he notes, the Court did not address the breach of fiduciary duty or the violation of foster children's property and equal protection rights without due process.

So in 2008, he filed a lawsuit on behalf of then-21-year-old Alex Myers of Dundalk, Maryland, who was 11 when his mother died in 1999. While in foster care, Myers was moved to at least 20 homes, none permanent.

In 2001 when his father died, he became eligible for Social Security survivor benefits. Unbeknownst to him, the Baltimore County Department of Social Services applied for -- and kept --$16,000 that should have gone to him. He only found out when he aged out of foster care at age 18, penniless and on his own.

The motion to dismiss submitted by Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler's office sums up the state's attitude. Assistant attorney general Julia Bernhardt argued in court that Myers' complaint should be thrown out because of his "failure to file ... within the applicable period."

In other words, the State of Maryland thinks that a teenaged orphan should have figured it out all by himself that the adults in charge of taking care of him were secretly stealing his Social Security checks, and then found a lawyer to assert his rights in court before the statute of limitations ran out. He didn't, so too bad for him.

Bernhardt did not return a call from The Examiner asking whether she thought it was right or appropriate for bureaucrats to divert Social Security benefits away from orphans to government.

Washington Examiner

h/t
Tim Fowler

Federal Redesign of Hot Dogs?

At the instigation of the American Academy of Pediatrics, federal bureaucrats at the FDA, the Department of Agriculture, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission are studying whether to require the nation’s hot-dog makers to redesign hot dogs to reduce the likelihood of choking.

Cato has the skinny

Allen West answers a Marine's question

h/t
Nickie Goomba

The FDA vs Raw Milk and the Constitution

In a dismissal notice issued to the Iowa District Court where the suit was filed, the FDA officially made public its views on health and food freedom. These views will shock you, but they reveal the true evil intent of the FDA and why it is truly a rogue federal agency.

The FDA essentially believes that nobody has the right to choose what to eat or drink. You are only “allowed” to eat or drink what the FDA gives you permission to. There is no inherent right or God-given right to consume any foods from nature without the FDA’s consent.

This is no exaggeration. It’s exactly what the FDA said in its own words.

You have no natural right to food

The FTCLDF highlighted a few of the key phrases from the FDA’s response document in a recent email to its supporters. They include the following two statements from the FDA:

“There is no ‘deeply rooted’ historical tradition of unfettered access to foods of all kinds.” [p. 26]

“Plaintiffs’ assertion of a ‘fundamental right to their own bodily and physical health, which includes what foods they do and do not choose to consume for themselves and their families’ is similarly unavailing because plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to obtain any food they wish.” [p.26]

There’s a lot more in the document, which primarily addresses the raw milk issue, but these statements alone clearly reveal how the FDA views the concept of health freedom. Essentially, the FDA does not believe in health freedom at all. It believes that it is the only entity granted the authority to decide for you what you are able to eat and drink.

more at the Tenth Amendment Center

Video from the Boston Common Drink-In

more at Chelsea Green

Boston Milk Party

A Boston Milk Party is being staged on Monday, after a failed attempt by ag officials to ban farm buying clubs. Activists are convinced the battle is not over.

The Organic Consumers Association ... plans to stage a colorful, Raw Milk “Drink In” outside Monday’s hearing. A cow will be brought downtown to Boston Common, and a group of concerned citizens will stage fresh milk Boston Tea Party. California dairyman, Mark McAfee, and Wisconsin filmmaker, Max Kane, are making the cross country trek to be there and remind Massachusetts that they are the cradle of liberty and that this is a national issue.

The revolution will not be pasteurized!

This type of bs has to stop

>> SWAT team breaks into home, fires seven rounds at family’s pit bull and corgi (?!) as a seven-year-old looks on.

They found a “small amount” of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor charge. The parents were then charged with child endangerment.

So smoking pot = “child endangerment.” Storming a home with guns, then firing bullets into the family pets as a child looks on = necessary police procedures to ensure everyone’s safety.

Just so we’re clear.

from The Agitator

I'm not going to post the video here. Whited Sepulchre says it's heartbreaking, I'll take his word for it.

Congressman Waxman sneaks anti-vitamin amendment into Wall Street reform bill

Of all the sneaky tactics practiced in Washington D.C., this recent action by Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) is one of the most insidious: While no one was looking, he injected amendment language into the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009 (H.R. 4173) that would expand the powers of the FTC (not the FDA, but the FTC) to terrorize nutritional supplement companies by greatly expanding the power of the FTC to make its own laws that target dietary supplement companies.
Natural News
h/t
DMA