It's fall here; I've got acres of oak trees - white, red and some black - a few hickory trees, although sadly no shag bark variety (I'm told their hickory nuts are the best tasting) and just came across a very robust huckleberry bush. The colors are beautiful although not as spectacular as last year's but perhaps that's due to a very hot and dry August?
We're a week away from Samhain ('sow-wen'), the Celtic New Year (and Irish for "November") and now just 9 days from the Nov 2nd elections. I rely on the "Real Clear Politics" site for a more accurate and objective picture of how things are going.
Daylight Saving Time (DST) ends in 2 weeks, on Sunday, Nov 7th.
I've been looking into different types of flours out of curiosity about alternative foods. Turns out white oak acorns are easiest to process due to minimal tannin, red oaks are more involved because they do have a high tannin content. Those are the 2 varieties I have the most of here on the homestead, along with tulip poplars. If nothing else, I've finally learned how to identify those 3 types of trees.
Sitting here quietly on a Sunday morning, looking out onto the woods below the house is really soothing. Gives me a chance and atmosphere in which to reflect, assimilate what I've read and heard and plan accordingly.
I don't think things are good, world wide or in this nation. I don't see how such fundamentally opposite world views can reconcile; Jeffersonian conservatives vs all flavors of collectivists, from Maoists (such as Bill Ayers) to neo-Marxists and Fabians, to neo-cons (aka Mercantilists). Actually the Fabians are the most prolific, an unholy alliance of neo-Marxists (Marx' planks and theory but no violence if possible) + Darwin's survival of the fittest with a heaping helping of what Mussolini described as "corporatism" but is more familiarly known as 'fascism'. And then there's everything in between.
Add to that mix the different schools of economic theory: Keynes vs Marx vs Von Mises. Von who? Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian school of economics. This is Ron Paul, Lew Rockwell, et al. It is the theory that the free market is the best arbiter of price and value, that a free market - a truly free market - will actually protect people better than endless government regulation and that money should be "honest" and "hard"; that is, backed by gold and silver, which also serves to limit how big government can grow. Right now, most of the major governments in the world use 'fiat' money (worth what a government says)
