Making Farming a Reality in Rose Bud, Arkansas

I met Steve Grappe ten years ago in St. Louis when I was attending a Lightroom course he was teaching. Back then, Steve was an excellent photographer who eventually became my photography mentor. He taught many other people too. He was the center of vibrant photography community. I quickly learned that Steve was an indefatigable man with an expansive skillset and nonstop creativity. A few years ago Steve left St. Louis to reconnect with Kelly, his prom date from many years earlier when they attended high school together in Arkansas. They were married in May 2018. He took a day gig as a car mechanic and she continued her job as a telecom executive. They settled down and lived happily ever after. The End.

Actually, that's not quite the end of the story. A few months later, they bought a dilapidated old farm in Rose Bud, Arkansas. It was actually much worse than dilapidated. I think Steve said he bought it for a bag of acorns. They worked around the clock to fix up the place and this took an enormous amount of sweat equity. Steve and Kelly were helped considerably in this project by Kelly's teenage daughter, Grace.

Steve and Kelly were still most definitely not farmers, but at about this same time they decided they needed to learn how to run a farm, so they attended one of the best farm schools available: Youtube. They also asked lots of questions and listened to others in the business. They jumped right in and brought in some livestock, including chickens, pigs, turkeys, rabbits and pigs. They named their special place "Forevermost Farms," a name based upon a syrupy romantic encounter that I don't have time for right now. All of that was such long time ago . . . To recap, Steve and Kelly got married all the way back in May of 2018. They then bought a run-down farm, turned it into a really cool place where some of the animals wear clothes and sometimes sing in little animal quartets. Steve and Kelly went to YouTube University in order to learn how to humanely and organically raise these eccentric critters. Their work has become their passion and I now realize that they were just getting started.

Fast forword: In the past couple weeks, Steve and Kelly said goodbye to their latest batch of 3,000 chickens that they raised over the past few months. They also recently said goodbye to 300 turkeys, 60 pigs and, if I'm remembering correctly, a partridge in a pear tree. Most recently, they announced that one of their dogs is pregnant, which will provide them with more dogs to help them raise their livestock. Things are always happening at Forevermost.

The above numbers boggle my mind, but I've visited Steve and Kelly and I've seen their beautiful place. I've seen many of their animals and I know that many of those animals have both personalities and names. Steve has also become an expert in the mating habits of their animals. He carefully (some would say voyeuristically) observes the animals to see who is doing what to whom. Beware. If you ask Steve a question about animal sex, he will speak to you much more directly than your parents ever did when they gave you the "sex talk."

As Forevermost Farms has become a reality, I've seen a special glow in the eyes of Steve and Kelly. They have accomplished something I would have thought impossible until I saw it with my own eyes, especially in that short time frame, and it was all done on a limited budget. But guess what? My two wonderful upbeat hard-working friends have now most definitely become farmers.

If you'd like to know more about the story of Forevermost Farms, you are invited to follow Steve and Kelly on Facebook or at the Forevermost Farms Website. Please do visit their website so that you can take in some of this celebration that has become their lives.

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Would you Invite a Poisonous Snake to Run Loose at Thanksgiving Gathering?

I will not be attending any indoor holiday gatherings this year. I'll refrain for the same reason that I don't bring poisonous snakes to family gatherings. Imagine that it's one year ago, before COVID was a thing. Assume that your extended family invited you to a big holiday celebration. You mention to your family that you will be bringing your pet poisonous snake and letting it run loose in the house during the celebration. Your family is aghast. You reassure them: My snake is shy. It will probably slither under a couch and stay there the entire time. In fact, there is only a 1% chance that the snake would bite one or more people. There's only a 1% chance that people bitten by the snake would die and only another 5% of people who are bitten would have long-lasting residual physical complications.

What would your family say? How is this risk any different than the risk of COVID other than the dangerous being visible rather than invisible?

I've seen the stats. 38% of Americans plan to attend Thanksgiving gatherings with 10 or more people. I understand that we are intensely social animals and that the social isolation triggering depression and probably killing people. I know that there are still some lingering questions about exactly how contagious and how dangerous COVID is in various environments. That said, I won't be attending any indoor gatherings this holiday season. Instead, I'll be attending two short scaled-down family outdoor gatherings at a distance (it's supposed to be about 50 degrees where I live). I'm not willing to send anyone I love to the hospital in order to eat turkey in a warm room. Not when there are alternatives to visiting indoors, including Zoom. Not when the hospitals are almost filled and health care workers are stretched hard to handle this onslaught.

Have a safe holiday season!

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What is a Cult? Descriptions from Cult Education Institute

There's a lot of accusations that Americans on both the political right and left are now members of "Cults." What exactly is a cult? After doing a bit of research, I found these helpful descriptions / definitions / traits of Cult Leaders and their followers from the Cult Education Institute. The following material is from the CEI webpage titled "Warning Signs":

Ten warning signs of a potentially unsafe group/leader.

  1. Absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability.
  2. No tolerance for questions or critical inquiry.
  3. No meaningful financial disclosure regarding budget, expenses such as an independently audited financial statement.
  4. Unreasonable fear about the outside world, such as impending catastrophe, evil conspiracies and persecutions.
  5. There is no legitimate reason to leave, former followers are always wrong in leaving, negative or even evil.
  6. Former members often relate the same stories of abuse and reflect a similar pattern of grievances.
  7. There are records, books, news articles, or television programs that document the abuses of the group/leader.
  8. Followers feel they can never be "good enough".
  9. The group/leader is always right.
  10. The group/leader is the exclusive means of knowing "truth" or receiving validation, no other process of discovery is really acceptable or credible.

Ten warning signs regarding people involved in/with a potentially unsafe group/leader.

  1. Extreme obsessiveness regarding the group/leader resulting in the exclusion of almost every practical consideration.
  2. Individual identity, the group, the leader and/or God as distinct and separate categories of existence become increasingly blurred. Instead, in the follower's mind these identities become substantially and increasingly fused--as that person's involvement with the group/leader continues and deepens.
  3. Whenever the group/leader is criticized or questioned it is characterized as "persecution".
  4. Uncharacteristically stilted and seemingly programmed conversation and mannerisms, cloning of the group/leader in personal behavior.
  5. Dependency upon the group/leader for problem solving, solutions, and definitions without meaningful reflective thought. A seeming inability to think independently or analyze situations without group/leader involvement.
  6. Hyperactivity centered on the group/leader agenda, which seems to supercede any personal goals or individual interests.
  7. A dramatic loss of spontaneity and sense of humor.
  8. Increasing isolation from family and old friends unless they demonstrate an interest in the group/leader.
  9. Anything the group/leader does can be justified no matter how harsh or harmful.
  10. Former followers are at best-considered negative or worse evil and under bad influences. They can not be trusted and personal contact is avoided.

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The History of the Green Bean Casserole Using Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup. And what about Jello Pretzel Salad?

Green Bean Casserole is standard fare at my extended family gatherings. I've wondered how it originated, and I now know:

The Campbell’s Soup Company had its own kitchen, in Camden, New Jersey, dedicated to pumping out recipe pamphlets. A home economist named Dorcas Reilly worked at the Campbell’s kitchen, and in 1955 she successfully devised and tested the infamous green bean casserole recipe. . . . Campbell’s now estimates 40% of the Cream of Mushroom soup sold in the US goes into making green bean casserole.

A friend of mine recently offered me a "healthier alternative" to the standard recipe for green bean casserole.

Next investigation based upon a tradition in my family: Jello Pretzel Salad. Here's what I found, from an article titled: "Why strawberry pretzel salad is the queen of all Jell-O salads":

In 2018, surrounded by full plates of lettuce, it is hard for us to image that congealed sugar and flavoring could ever be considered as a salad. However, these dishes continue to be a mainstay of holiday meals, barbecues, showers and potlucks alike. We have the Jell-O corporation to personally thank for decades of congealed and molded fruits and sometimes vegetables.

BON APPÉTIT!

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Social Media is the New Version of Brain-Destroying Lead

In this Interview with Joe Rogan, Tristan Harris of the Center for Humane Technology drew a haunting analogy.  The discussion begins at 1:24.

Throughout the 1900's, lead was increasingly used in paint, gasoline and other products.  It was hailed as a miracle substance.

What are the Health Effects of Lead? Lead can affect almost every organ and system in your body. In children six years old and younger even low levels of lead in the blood of children is poisonous. It can result in behavior and learning problems, lower IQ and hyperactivity, slowed growth and many other problems. Beginning in 1965, it took the heroic efforts by geochemist Clair Cameron Patterson (and see here) to convince the U.S. Government (over systematic misinformation from companies who profited from the sale of products using lead) that lead in the environment was dangerous to humans.

Tristan Harris argues that social media is the new lead.  Instead of brain damage, however, social media causes people to distrust each other, making it impossible for people from the opposing tribes to work with each other or compromise with each other. Social Media is thus causing a massive breakdown of our political system. The following exchange begins at 85:21):

TH: Let's replace lead with problem solving capacity . . .  Imagine that we have a societal IQ or a societal problem-solving capacity the US has a societal IQ, Russia has a societal IQ, Germany has a societal IQ:  How good is a country at solving its problems? Now imagine, what does social media do to our societal IQ?

JR: It distorts our ideas. It gives us a bunch of false narratives. It fills us with misinformation.

TH: It makes it impossible to agree with each other, and in a democracy if you don't agree with each other and you can't even do compromise . . .  People recognize that politics was invented to avoid warfare. So we have compromise and understanding so that we don't physically become violent with each other.  We have compromise and conversation.  If social media makes compromise, conversation and shared understanding and shared truth impossible, it doesn't drop our societal IQ by four points. It drops it to zero, because you can't solve any problem, whether it's human trafficking or poverty or climate issues or racial injustice. Whatever it is that you care about, it depends on us having some shared view about what we agree on.

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