Mato's Blog

Here is another batch of links to articles, who may be informative and helpful for the readers.The selection is as always largely arbitrary, incomplete, and inconsistent. The attached comments may be viewed as controversial, exaggerating, offensive, sarcastic, inappropriate. Continue reading at your own peril.

Feline news:
http://www.sciencealert.com/in-1975-a-cat-co-authored-a-physics-paper
http://www.npr.org/2016/09/12/493277364/who-says-you-cant-train-a-cat-a-book-of-tips-for-feline-human-harmony
http://wqad.com/2016/09/16/feline-friday-kitties-down-the-tubes/

Environmental news:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/09/oceans-warming-global-environment-climate/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-myth-of-the-sustainable-city/
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/999002.shtml
newsletters.environmentalhealthnews.org/t/220125/132378/169003/0/ G5 technology will be even more intrusive because it needs a transmitter on nearly every rooftop.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/cell-towers-and-cellphones-microwave-radiation-electromagnetic-pollution-impacts-on-human-health/5540490 Sounds a bit like conspiracy theory or sensationalism. Yet, I personally don’t use a cell phone or other wireless devices and have disconnected all antennas in the computers and on the modem-router. I’m glad that the next cell phone tower is far away and feel deeply reassured and consoled when neighbors tell me, that cell phone reception and reliability here is poor.
There are already billions of guinea pigs participating in this global experiment and my refusal to join will do no harm.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-36924361 Two remarkable statements in the article: Mark Buckingham of Monsanto said: “Glyphosate has a lower toxicity than most other pesticides. In terms of acute toxicity glyphosate is less toxic than vinegar, table salt, paracetamol and caffeine.” Congressman Eduardo Amadeo said: “Thanks to herbicides like glyphosate, agricultural productivity in the world has tripled. Without them the world would suffer hunger.”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/media-silence-and-the-agrochemicals-industry-the-slow-poisoning-of-health-and-the-environment/5540625
http://qz.com/107970/scientists-discover-whats-killing-the-bees-and-its-worse-than-you-thought/
http://www.wakingtimes.com/2016/07/23/not-just-bees-insects-decline-heading-extinction/
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37089385
http://journal-neo.org/2016/08/13/bayer-ag-makes-bee-contraceptives/ For anybody with a little bit of common sense it is clear since years that industrial agriculture is killing bees, butterflies, amphibians, and many other living creatures with a hellish brew of toxic chemicals, but the authorities who allow this mass murder just order scientific studies to deflect criticism about their inaction.
There are farmers who use intelligent methods like crop rotation, cover crops, beneficial plants and animals to keep pests and weeds in check, but the majority is ignorant, aloof, negligent, plain evil, and continues spraying tons of poison onto their fields and surroundings.
It is not only about our fellow animals. Residential and occupational exposures to the poisons increase the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, leukemia, various other cancers, liver and kidney damage, allergies, neurological diseases, birth defects. And yet, the concerned decision makers allow the mass killings to continue because they are bribed by the chemical industry.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/08/08/were-trashing-the-oceans-and-making-ourselves-sick-in-the-process/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/08/09/researchers-find-unsafe-levels-of-industrial-chemicals-in-drinking-water-of-6-million-americans/
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/08/15/african-wildlife-darkness-falls-robert-ross-ivory-poaching/ Hatred of life.
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)30993-9
http://www.vice.com/read/cambodian-journalists-are-dying-trying-to-save-the-countrys-forests-v23n6
https://psmag.com/bracing-ourselves-for-the-climate-tipping-point-d507b826ecf6#.o3wdr69ju
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14693062.2016.1179616
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/08/22/as-congos-globe-threatening-yellow-fever-pandemic-explodes-they-ask-where-is-the-vaccine/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/an-epic-middle-east-heat-wave-could-be-global-warmings-hellish-curtain-raiser/2016/08/09/c8c717d4-5992-11e6-8b48-0cb344221131_story.html
http://www.npr.org/2016/08/23/491103706/persistent-drought-kills-millions-of-trees-in-california-forests
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/30/more-than-half-of-south-asias-groundwater-too-contaminated-to-use-study
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/08/africa-elephants-rapidly-declining-study-160831175517306.html A tragedy.
http://www.defenddemocracy.press/ecologists-please-delink-bipolar-climate-change-racket/
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-indonesia-haze-idUSKCN11B0JF
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/childhood-cancer-cases-in-uk-have-risen-by-40-since-1998-1.2778942
http://www.ecowatch.com/david-suzuki-trophy-hunting-1999211166.html Time to take action against the most destructive invasive species.

Economic news:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/08/dirk-bezemer-and-michael-hudson-finance-is-not-the-economy.html Another gem by Michael Hudson. The rare case of economic theory which makes sense.
http://www.defenddemocracy.press/the-retreat-of-neoliberalism/
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/ubs-whistleblower-exposes-political-prostitution-all-way-president-obama-1577834
http://www.defenddemocracy.press/samir-amin-how-to-defeat-the-collective-imperialism-of-the-triad/

Media news:
http://petras.lahaine.org/?p=2098
http://medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2016/825-propagandising-for-war-the-bbc-today-programme-on-syria.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-conspiracy-theory-narrative-are-you-a-mind-controlled-cia-stooge/5543367 Heavy! Is he allowed to write such things because totalitarian government control over the media makes sure that only a tiny and insignificant minority will read this?

Imperial news:
http://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2016/09/14/report-lead-paint-makers-helped-gov-walker/90349256/
http://stopimperialism.org/hillary-clinton-big-neoliberal-lie/ Though there is a good chance, that the HRC (Hillary Rodham Clinton) problem will solve itself, we will still be left with the DT (Donald Trump) problem. Trump appears to be not as dangerous as Clinton, but he is a climate change denier, opposes regulations and strict overviews, wants tax relief for corporations and the super rich.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-prisons-corrections-corporation-inmates-investigation-bauer
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/08/16/americas-journalistic-hypocrites/ They are not only hypocrites and liars, they are also ignorant.The New York Times needed three corrections to get a story about Aleppo right. Aleppo was incorrectly named the capital of Islamic State (that is Raqqa), a stronghold of Islamic State, and then the capital of Syria (that is Damascus). This is the leading US-newspaper! What expertise can one expect from regular readers of this paper?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pregnancy-related-deaths-are-inexcusably-high-in-the-us_us_57b601d8e4b0b51733a20d56
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/08/the-average-american-family-had-the-same-amount-of-wealth-in-2013-as-it-did-in-1989
Imperial conquest news:
http://petras.lahaine.org/?p=2095 About Turkey — an alternative view.
http://www.defenddemocracy.press/milosevic-destruction-yugoslavia-unpleasant-truths-no-one-wants-know/
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/a-clinton-win-means-an-expanded-war-in-syria/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/17/bolivia-anti-imperialist-military-school-evo-morales-us
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/aug/22/iraq-children-health-cost-war-induced-air-pollution-study-toxic-waste-birth-defects
http://johnpilger.com/articles/provoking-nuclear-war-by-media
http://www.globalresearch.ca/unworthy-victims-houthis-in-yemen-hutus-in-burundi/5542515 Classic foreign policy of the evil empire: Destabilization, assassinations, genocide.
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/08/24/the-bogus-humanitarian-war-on-serbia/ Recommended reading!
http://www.workers.org/2016/09/09/racist-israel-takes-more-palestinian-land/#.V9QWPygg-Cc
https://www.brown.edu/web/documents/nosearch/2016CostsofWar.pdf
http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/ It is all very logical: Wars are necessary to conquer and exploit other nations. Exploiting other nations is necessary to pay for the wars. One could argue of course why not just for a change try it without wars and exploitation? But who would then pay the shareholder dividends and CEO bonuses of Lockheed Martin, Boing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, United Technologies, L-3 Communications, Huntington Ingalls, Honeywell, Textron, Booz Allen Hamilton, and their like?
Uncategorized news:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/08/chinese-tourist-who-lost-wallet-in-germany-ends-up-in-refugee-shelter Imagine the comments, if this would have happened in China or Russia.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/08/05/are-performance-monitoring-wearables-an-affront-to-workers-rights/ Far beyond Orwell.
http://theduran.com/10-ways-russia-surprises-me/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/rockefeller-ford-foundations-behind-world-social-forum-wsf-the-corporate-funding-of-social-activism/5540552
http://www.chiangraitimes.com/could-invincible-defense-technology-work-for-thailand.html
http://voxeu.org/article/newspapers-times-low-advertising-revenues-towards-decline-quality-information-media-outlet-level Newspapers are doomed, which is good, because it means less propaganda. Yet, Google and Facebook easily fill the void, which is bad, because they are not only propaganda channels but also tools of mass surveillance.

News from cat land

The pumpkin harvest was less than the last years, because there was not enough land left for the pumpkin plants to conquer with their far reaching branches and huge leaves. The pumpkin plants unsuccessfully tried to invade a neighbors property and he stopped them by bending the branches or breaking them off. I can’t blame him, on his ground he is allowed to do that.

Tomatoes were okay, despite lack of sun. I canned only 30 glasses, not as much as last year, because I was not able to consume all canned tomatoes and still have a few glasses from last year in the cellar.

Finally there were peaches to harvest, even a lot of. The four peach trees which I bought were grafted of course, nurseries don’t offer trees from planted seeds. But I have also six trees which I grew by just  putting the pit from a peach fruit into a flower pot and eventually transplanting the young tree to a sunny place somewhere in the garden. That was three years ago and two of the trees now bore fruits.

Everybody told me that fruits from the self grown trees will be inferior or simply uneatable, yet the fruits are as delicious as normal peaches, they are only smaller. In addition to that, the six “wild” peach trees seem to be more resistant to peach leaf curl. They had a few infected leaves but after I tore them off the symptoms disappeared. The four grafted trees in contrast since years have been heavily infected by peach leaf curl and last year they produced only a handful of fruits.

In early February I sprayed these four trees with a copper based fungicide. I really hated to do this because normally I avoid agrochemicals but at the time of the spraying it was bitter cold and so no insects and no other garden animals were around. The spraying worked well though the trees at first developed quite a few curled red leaves. When I saw that I was desperate, thinking that the spraying was ineffective, but when I removed these leaves no other infected leaves appeared. Next year I will treat the four trees once more, hoping that the six self grown trees will still be greatly immune and that it will be the last time that I have to take such a drastic measure.

In autumn last year I put about hundred pits from mirabelle plums into flower pots and also directly into the garden soil and many have developed into little trees, the biggest of which are already one meter high. The fruits were from a natural tree, not hybrid or grafted, that means in four or five years I will have lot of mirabelle plums.

Grapes are not as plentiful as last year, there was not enough sun, the birds are doing lot of damage, and the oldest grapevine plant needs pruning. 

There were lot of berries this year, especially blackberries. While last year lemon balm reached the status of an omnipresent weed, this year it was mint. Sage, camomile, marigold, and dill are ok, I still struggle to establish thyme and fennel in colonies that propagate themselves. Self propagation works with chard, which pops up in unexpected and sometimes inappropriate places all around the garden. I don’t like chard that much, but I should eat lot of it to treat iron deficiency caused by my vegetarian diet.

The cats are fine with the exception of Gandhi Jr. who had an inflammation on his snout. His lower lip became severely swollen and looked strange and disturbing. I first hoped the ailment would heal by itself but when the swelling started to affect his eating and his behavior suggested that he was suffering I brought him to the veterinarian who cured the infection by a single shot of antibiotics. Apparently (and fortunately) no “superbugs” were involved.

The regular forest walks are mostly attended by the three young cats Linda, Lucia, and Gandhi Jr. The middle aged ladies Princess Min Ki and aunt Rosy (Gandhi’s grand aunt) are joining often but mostly keep apart from the young ones. There is clearly a generational divide. Wendy only seldom participates and Miss Marple always stays in the garden. Miss Marple is a quirky old lady now, yet, despite her 19 years, she is still astonishing fit.

After a three week period of dry and sunny weather torrential rains have started again — so there will be flooding again. This is the new normal and it was predicted by climate experts since a long time. Nobody can complain, it’s of our own making.

With the rain came the cold and today I heated the wood stove for the first time since April. The two backside chamotte tiles were cracked and when I failed to get a local stove installer / fitter interested (not enough money to be made by repairing stoves) I ordered them in a nearby hardware store and exchanged them by myself. No problem and the stove is like new again.

As usual the cats have gathered around the stove. I love these moments when we are all together in the living room.

Nobody is repairing and mending things here anymore. This summer my garden grinder broke after two and a half years (only half a year after warranty expired), and nobody fixed it. I had to buy a new one for 500 Euros. This one has an extended warranty of three years but I don’t hold my breath that it will last any longer. Throw-away society.