Newsletter #242 2024 Jan 19 Friday
Another winter week, cold, snow, chores and a lot of office work...and a first attempt at embedding audio in the post
Primal Woods and Homestead Rebel Farm
This is the third Newsletter to be published on Substack; all Newsletters in the foreseeable future will be published on Substack, so if you want to continue to be notified of Newsletters please sign up for a free subscription.
We got off to a cold start to the week; it’s not bitter cold by Dakota standards, but the record low for Jan 15 here is “only” -18°F, so -4°F is pretty cold. I like snow, I don’t have a lot of use for bitter cold, it makes everything a lot more difficult. I particularly like that “MUCH WARMER than yesterday” notation, ha! The good news is that at the end of the 10-day forecast we are expected to be back to 40°F. Meanwhile the chickens are cooped up, and the oxen are being fed and watered in the barn.
I’ve got three books that I’m reading right now, two of them I have to take in relatively small doses; Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, and Missing Microbes: How the Overuse of Antibiotics is Fueling Our Modern Plagues.
All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.
That goes for the mind, as well as the body, I would argue.
Limits to Growth was first published in 1972. The authors argue that given the application of current technologies, as in industrial agribusiness for example, we have already exceeded the sustainable long-term carrying capacity of the planet. Some of the data is a bit “soft” or incomplete, as are some assumptions made, but aside from that I think they are probably correct in their conclusion. They are banking on solar and wind to solve one aspect of the problem, which in their minds represent sustainable energy production. To that I’ll say this; the only thing sustainable about wind power is the wind itself, and the only thing sustainable about solar power is the sun. As you might know we have embraced solar for our homestead, but certainly not because it is “sustainable” in any sense of the word. In my opinion, anyone who thinks either of the wind or solar technologies is sustainable, at grid scale, needs to do a bit more research.
Missing Microbes is about the negative impact of our profligate use and misuse of antibiotics. It is not about antibiotic resistance per se; it is about how wiping out microbes, especially our gut microbes, has long-term and very deleterious effects on our health. Antibiotics are “broad spectrum,” which is to say that they do not discriminate between good and bad, they kill everything. Kinda like pesticides and herbicides in industrial farming; just sayin’.
As is often if not always the case, we take up a new technology having in mind only the first order, immediate and positive effects; we pay no attention to the second and third order, later and negative effects. Until it’s too late.
The antidote to an overdose of the first two, is Fathered by God: Learning What Your Dad Could Never Teach You. Eldredge writes that there are five stages, or phases, overlapping, in a boy’s journey to manhood; beloved son, cowboy, warrior, king, and sage. Perhaps a simplification but it works for me. We are all “unfinished” as men, in some sense, and some more than others. As a father I left a lot unfinished. The question Eldredge strives to answer is how to get closer to the finish line. I’ve probably read 8 or 10 books on the subject at this point, including Eldredge’s earlier book, Wild at Heart. If you are interested, the book that got me started on this subject was No More Mr. Nice Guy by Dr. Robert A. Glover; I highly recommend it for all you fellow “nice guys.” If my memory serves there is a quiz of sorts in the first chapter; if you are not a “nice guy” move along, if you’re like I was there is work to do. A lot of it. I now refer to myself as a “recovering nice guy.”
News From This Week
This is an interesting chart from Statista, for 2022, published July 2023; I’d bet my a$$ the situation has not improved.

No matter how I look at this chart, Small business should be at the top. And clearly, it takes confidence of both Republicans and Democrats to achieve 60+% levels of trust as Small business and The military have garnered (I’m looking at the light and dark blue sections of the bars combined). But look at the bottom five of this “confidence levels” chart; Newspapers, Television news, Big business, The criminal justice system, and Congress. It takes bipartisan distrust in the establishment to drive the blue (high confidence) sections of the bars down into the teens, and to drive the red+green (low confidence) sections up to near 50%, and in the case of Television news and Congress to at or more than 50%. (As for the military, I have great trust in the “rank and file” soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines; I have no trust in the political machine that has them fighting endless wars, supposedly on our behalf, but that’s just me.) So what?
So if you are wondering why Trump won a true landslide victory in the Iowa caucus, you need look no further than the confidence levels chart above. Trump is charged by the feds (Jack Smith) with felonies, and by prosecutors in several states, and Trump’s support is growing. (I’d argue that these prosecutors are in effect making a martyr of Trump.) Not to mention the moves in 30 states to have Trump re-moved from the ballot. Distrust of “the establishment,” including the criminal justice system, is the why of the landslide.
Note: Glenn Greenwald did a good job with this on his January 16th show, Trump’s Iowa Victory Marks Total Establishment Collapse.
Some of my thoughts on Trump and his competition, and the state of the union. (I’m trying this feature of Substack for the first time, so my apologies in advance for any lack of production value.) No retakes, this is a simple record of my “stream of consciousness” on Wednesday morning.
Further to some things I mentioned in my “stream of consciousness:”
The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, book by Paul Kennedy
Reelection rate in the House was 94.5% in 2022; see Open Secrets for the rates since 1964.
Posts on federal spending:
Whom Shall Ye Serve (1st in a 3-part series), and
Correction: Letitia James is the New York State Attorney General
It seems like Acton’s quote is as fitting for this week’s content as it was for last week’s, so I’m leaving it in place.
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.
One more item regarding federal government malfeasance, from my friend, and a great friend of Primal Woods, David W.
The Electric-Vehicle Cheating Scandal: A government rule makes them look nearly seven times as efficient as they are.
When carmakers test gasoline-powered vehicles for compliance with the Transportation Department’s fuel-efficiency rules, they must use real values measured in a laboratory. By contrast, under an Energy Department rule, carmakers can arbitrarily multiply the efficiency of electric cars by 6.67.
And of course, we are paying for it.
Chores
We didn’t get the forecasted 30 inches of snow; maybe half that. We did however get the cold! The oxen have been in the barn since a week ago today. I’ve had to haul water to them in 5 gallon buckets at the rate of about 40 gallons per day, but aside from that it’s been an acceptable situation; they are much more comfortable in the barn, and so long as I keep them well fed they provide a measure of heat in the space.
The chickens are laying fewer eggs in the single-digit temperatures to be sure, but they all seem happy and healthy in the coop. If the weather-guessers have the temperature forecast down pat, all of the animals should be outside again as of Monday.
As you might have expected, the outdoor wood boiler is burnin’ through a lot of wood; but it’s all good. One big advantage to going day-by-day with the firewood supply is that I’m forced out of the house and into some physical exertion on a near-daily basis. That’s not always convenient, nor do I always even want to do it, but it eliminates the need for a gym membership! Speaking of the lifestyle, here is a video, Grandfather, that I enjoyed when it came out 4 years ago, but enjoy even more, and get more out of, now that we’ve been farming for a few years. It takes place in Latvia, and is short on the spoken word, and long on great content. About 50 minutes.
Farmhouse Airbnb
We did not make any progress on the basement studio this week, but the Farmhouse is ready for your visit!
Pure Maple Syrup
Step by step we are moving towards readiness for the season in mid-February. A lot of our homeschoolers have “aged-out” of the workforce, so organizing help is at the top of my to-do list.
Omnivory
Apparently I just made that word up, but it has to do with subscribing to the notion, the fact actually, that humans are omnivores; we are designed to eat both plants and animals. There as never been an indigenous vegan culture of humans, nor I will point out, has there ever been a purely carnivorous culture of humans. In various places we humans have approached both of those extremes, not by choice, but simply as a result of the environment local to us. It makes perfect sense that humans living nearer the poles literally evolved to eat more animal foods (the Inuit are a prime example), and conversely those living nearer the equator evolved to eat a greater portion of plant foods. But, all indigenous humans have been omnivorous. All.
The foregoing is simply preamble. To the vegans in the audience, who are probably in very short supply, I don’t subscribe to the belief that veganism will save the planet, or even that it will save or improve animal life. Because it just ain’t so. Here is a truth, or near-truth; if you can buy it in a grocery store, the process by which it got there is not friendly to either animal life in general, nor is it friendly to non-food plant life. This is something that as humans we have to accept; to eat you have to kill. Plants and animals. Even if you are a vegan. Just because you cannot anthropomorphize all animals, like Bambi, or Babe the pig, does not mean they are not members of the animal kingdom. Maybe you’re putting E85 “flex fuel” in your vehicle because you think it’s more environmentally friendly; nothing could be further from the truth, and it is now 45% of the U.S. corn crop. And if you are eating an annual, like corn or soy beans, or using their byproducts (like ethanol or corn syrup or fake meats), some of which are very hard to avoid, you are partaking in the killing large numbers of animals in the process. Unfortunately that is the nature of industrial agribusiness.
And I just can’t go on without pointing out large scale animal abuse; vegan cat food (cats are not just pure carnivores, but hyper-carnivores, which means they eat other carnivores), and vegetarian fed laying hens (chickens are omnivores). Our cultural lunacy in seeking virtue knows no bounds.
That rant was inspired by an article that Geri sent me regarding veganism. On a related note below is a chart I find really informative, and surprising.
Finally, closing with a bit of great news, check out what the New Hampshire legislature is doing!
New Hampshire: We won't send our soldiers to unauthorized wars
Enough for now, and I suspect you might be thinking, “way more than enough!”
All the best, and may God bless you and yours,
John & Geri
John, I enjoy reading of your trek to self sufficiency. I’ve noticed a significant shift in your attitude on many issues since you moved way up north. If you get too cold, come down for a few days and enjoy the river house. I know we will have many sea stories to swap. It would be a peaceful break to your pace.
Respectfully,
Brandon