In Arizona there is a push on to refer to the ballot five different referendums, related to the recent legislature approval of tax cuts and election changes. Here are the five bills:
Referendums to keep the following bills from becoming laws:
SB1485 –> Changes the Permanent Early Voting List (PEVL) to Active Early Voting List (AEVL). Purges AEVL periodically. Notices would be sent to people based on their frequency of voting by mail. People who receive notices would be required to respond to stay on the list.
SB1819 –> Promotes a list of ten ballot fraud countermeasures, including bar and QR codes which would violate the ballot secrecy guarantee of the Arizona Constitution
HB2569 –> Puts elections officials at risk of becoming underfunded because they are banned from receiving private grants to help them run elections or register voters.
SB1827 –> Caps the taxpayer’s total tax rate at 4.5%.
SB1828 –> Cuts the number of tax brackets from five to two.
SB1783 –> Allows wealthy individuals to file their state taxes as small businesses so they can avoid the extra tax stipulated in Prop 208.
There are three ways to get into faming, each with their own issues, pitfalls, and nuances.
There are three distinct ways to get into farming and those paths are all not worn at all. After a few rainy and hot weeks of watching the Top Gear guy farm his land that he previously subbed out and now wants to argue with his wife about Cartel Avocados, and multiple documentaries that are openly streaming on many a platforms, I have to confess I am confused. Not as someone with a plan, but I am confused as to what the populace wants out of this new movement of knowledge. I grow things, my grandparent grew things, my parents, well we had pots on the back porch growing things in the city. Growing things is nothing new. My grandfather told me “we are too poor to farm”, and now at almost two score I proved him right. But we persist because we must for our kids.
But the future will not care.
We have a problem. We have California dying a slow death of drought. We have Chile and Argentina experiencing all kinds of disruptions due to the Pacific Ocean throwing tempter tantrums because of the plastic and carbon that we have made her take under her dress. She isn’t pleased.
We have a problem. A recent documentary titled “Farmland” https://www.amazon.com/Farmland-Brad-Bellah/dp/B00P7P8RS0 exemplifies something we already knew, farmers are getting older, succumbing to illness and their children are needing to step in to sustain. Again, I need to digress.
Three ways to get into farming, for better or worse
1. We inherited the farm from our parents, grandparents, etc.
A good example of this is Laura Farms. I have been following her and her family since they first popped up on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCA1y-4TJdVEcSMWN9OZfGSA about a year ago. Her father and grandfather own and operate a pastoral farm in Nebraska that she and her fiancé are taking over. She chronicles the experiences in the YouTube channel that she has created and I love it. But we cant forget that they are a mono or specialty grower that has land that was paid for probably a few generations or so ago has expense that solely comes from equipment and sow/chem activity. This is one thing that we have to look at, Pastoral Farms being handed down from generation to generation and the current generation wants nothing to do with it. The BLS expects a 6% decline https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/farmers-ranchers-and-other-agricultural-managers.htm over the next few years. Not surprising. The average farmer is well over 60 and it isn’t getting any better.
2. Education.“I went to school for this because I have a passion.”
This is actually less likely. A friend of mine I grew up with decided to go to A&M to major in ag and managed a very serious outfit for a number of years before defecting to work in construction because “I’ve got kids to feed” This is all too often an issue. The USDA will award loans to grads with degrees in agriculture, but that largely saddles, in theory, a debt loaded early twenty something with another tens of thousands of debt to make a farm work with just them as the sole laborer. This is largely again anecdotal. If you have no collateral, the USDA will give you nothing. If you have collateral and don’t have the background they will give you nothing. Its not easy which is why outfits like Capital Farm Credit, etc exist. According to Joel Salatin in his book “You Can Farm” https://www.amazon.com/You-Can-Farm-Entrepreneurs-Enterprise/dp/0963810928, you don’t need the USDA, I mean, USDuh. His parents left him 550 acres of Shenandoah Valley land paid for that he has largely profited from and now hails as the “know it all of farming know it alls” even though his claim to fame is cattle and chicken that he started from land that cost him nothing. Those who read his books and others like it should eat the salt shaker.
Go to a market and see what we bring, from weird tomatoes to purple beans and a few other things that used to be prevalent 100 years ago.
Faming through the next twenty years now involves you. We need you. We need you to buy a CSA, go to the farmers market, and start looking at labels of where your produce comes from. This is the way we limit excess carbon emissions in agriculture and also start to pay our farmers a proper wage. We are here. Are you here?
… Under the agreement governing the program, participating companies are restricted from marketing paid products to those using Free File services.
… An Intuit spokesperson told CNET that the company is “committed to continuing to offer free tax preparation while accelerating innovation to address all of consumers’ financial problems. Intuit’s TurboTax Free Edition is the industry’s most used free tax preparation offer and will continue to be available to more than 50 million people who file simple tax returns.” …
so-called foreign agents in close proximity to presidents
and presidential candidates. No doubt they bring fresh perspectives
and desperately needed financial support to the electoral process.
Especially needed when Trump re-runs in 2024.)
Once upon a time, it would have been huge news if the chairman of the former president’s inaugural committee was indicted on charges of acting as an agent of a foreign power.
Donald Trump’s presidency, however, has left us with scandal inflation. At this point many of the leading figures from his 2016 campaign have been either indicted or convicted, even if they were later pardoned. The C.F.O. of Trump’s company was charged with tax fraud less than a month ago.
So when the billionaire real estate investor Tom Barrack, one of Trump’s biggest fund-raisers, was arrested on Tuesday and charged with acting as an unregistered agent of the United Arab Emirates along with other felonies, it might have seemed like a dog-bites-man story. Barrack was once described by longtime Trump strategist Roger Stone — a felon, naturally — as the ex-president’s best friend. If you knew nothing else about Barrack but that, you might have guessed he’d end up in handcuffs.
Nevertheless, Barrack’s arrest is important. Trump’s dealings with the Emirates and Saudi Arabia deserve to be investigated as thoroughly as his administration’s relationship with Russia. So far, that hasn’t happened. When Robert Mueller, the former special counsel, testified before Congress, Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said to him, “We did not bother to ask whether financial inducements from any Gulf nations were influencing U.S. policy, since it is outside the four corners of your report, and so we must find out.” But we have not found out. …
Tom Barrack, the founder and former CEO of Colony Capital and longtime advisor to Donald Trump, was released on Friday on a whopping $250 million bond, three days after being arrested on charges that he acted as an unregistered foreign agent and lied about it to investigators.
Barrack, 74, was freed from a county jail facility in San Bernardino, according to jail records. He was arrested Tuesday in Los Angeles on charges he that he illegally sought to influence policy for the United Arab Emirates with disclosing himself as a registered foreign agent.
“I want to thank the fine men and women of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s office, the United States Marshals Service and the Central District of California Court, Pretrial, and Probation teams,” Barrack said in a statement on Friday evening. “They have difficult jobs and carry them out with great professionalism. I also want to recognize the grace and humanity of the gentlemen with whom I have shared a community over these last three days. …”
Possible way to take the “scare” out or Covid vaccine: pill form. It’s may not be the needle that leads to vaccine phobia — though that may contribute — it may be the sight of the syringe and the imagining of all the “scaries” that may be floating within.
A Covid vaccine in a pill may never have led to the level of irrational vaccine reluctance we observe today.
Or just call them stupid and walk or run away from them.
” Stop Insulting Trump Voters and Their Concerns. Instead, Shut Up and Take It.
Instead, try listening to Trump voters and their concerns as though you were plucked from the cabbage patch this very morning, fresh as the dew, with no memory of what happened when we spent several years listening to Trump voters and their concerns. While you’re listening, you can show your commitment to democracy in America by murmuring things like, “I see,” or nodding your head in an understanding manner. Do not do that thing where you pretend like you’re coughing and bark, “Bullshit!” into your fist when the Trump voter you are listening to says that of course they didn’t approve of everything Donald Trump did. Do not accuse them of enabling a nihilistic death cult that is steering the entire planet into a lake of fire. Do not throw pies or fruit or bricks. Do not say, “What’s that? It seems like you’re trying to talk, but all I can hear is a thick, clotty bubbling sound, because you’re up to your eyebrows in the blood of your fellow citizens.” Shaming will never work!”
The question looms over the delicate negotiations on President Biden’s massive infrastructure package, which enters a crucial phase in the Senate this week, as well as pretty much any other item on the Democratic agenda.
The West Virginia senator has been at the center of the effort to draft a bipartisan,$1.2 trillion infrastructure bill to rebuild the nation’s crumbling roads and bridges that Biden has vowed will be accompanied by a much larger, $3.5 trillion bill addressing Democratic priorities such as climate change and health care. Manchin has refused to say whether he’ll get behind that second bill, which almost certainly will need all 50 Senate Democrats to pass.
It also puts him in a great negotiating position with his fellow Democrats who are desperate for a legislative win.
“He’s an indispensable partner in getting to the final product,” said Senator Ed Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who is pushing for aggressive measures in the package to tackle climate change. “Senator Manchin has done a good job of representing West Virginia, and it’s the job of everyone else to respond to his concerns and get both of these bills over the finish line.”
A veteran Democrat in a state that Biden lost overwhelmingly to then-President Trump, Manchin has frustrated many in his party who are eager to enact bold legislation using only their narrow majority if necessary. But Manchin has stood firm, along with moderateArizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, in opposing calls to scrap the filibuster, a Senate rule that requires almost all legislation to get 60 votes to proceed in the 100-member chamber. …
“I’ve always tried to work in a bipartisan way and I’ve voted in a bipartisan way in the last 10 years of the Senate,” Manchin said last month in defending the approach. “So I’m doing what I have always done. Let’s unite this country. We don’t need to be divided any further.”
Manchin’s stance, which is shared by Sinema, is largely responsible for Democrats pursuing their current delicate, two-track strategy on infrastructure, in which they are moving the bipartisan and more sweeping infrastructure bills in tandem in order to keep their left and middle flanks united.
The fate of the bipartisan bill faces a key test this week. After Republicans blocked an initial vote on it last week, work to finish the legislation continued over the weekend with senators sounding optimistic a deal would be reached soon. In the meantime, Senate Democrats are starting to decide what exactly will be included in their$3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. …
(Personally, as a centrist myself, I don’t think this strategy is going to work for the Dem party as a whole or for the Biden presidency, because the GOP has an easy time thwarting it.)
In Arizona there is a push on to refer to the ballot five different referendums, related to the recent legislature approval of tax cuts and election changes. Here are the five bills:
Referendums to keep the following bills from becoming laws:
SB1485 –> Changes the Permanent Early Voting List (PEVL) to Active Early Voting List (AEVL). Purges AEVL periodically. Notices would be sent to people based on their frequency of voting by mail. People who receive notices would be required to respond to stay on the list.
SB1819 –> Promotes a list of ten ballot fraud countermeasures, including bar and QR codes which would violate the ballot secrecy guarantee of the Arizona Constitution
HB2569 –> Puts elections officials at risk of becoming underfunded because they are banned from receiving private grants to help them run elections or register voters.
SB1827 –> Caps the taxpayer’s total tax rate at 4.5%.
SB1828 –> Cuts the number of tax brackets from five to two.
SB1783 –> Allows wealthy individuals to file their state taxes as small businesses so they can avoid the extra tax stipulated in Prop 208.
Jim:
When you have multiple links, you end up in spam. I approved your comment. The lateness of your post was due to the number of links and nothing else.
BREAKING AND ENTERING: How to get into farming.
There are three ways to get into faming, each with their own issues, pitfalls, and nuances.
There are three distinct ways to get into farming and those paths are all not worn at all. After a few rainy and hot weeks of watching the Top Gear guy farm his land that he previously subbed out and now wants to argue with his wife about Cartel Avocados, and multiple documentaries that are openly streaming on many a platforms, I have to confess I am confused. Not as someone with a plan, but I am confused as to what the populace wants out of this new movement of knowledge. I grow things, my grandparent grew things, my parents, well we had pots on the back porch growing things in the city. Growing things is nothing new. My grandfather told me “we are too poor to farm”, and now at almost two score I proved him right. But we persist because we must for our kids.
But the future will not care.
We have a problem. We have California dying a slow death of drought. We have Chile and Argentina experiencing all kinds of disruptions due to the Pacific Ocean throwing tempter tantrums because of the plastic and carbon that we have made her take under her dress. She isn’t pleased.
There is a slice of the population in the US that see this and also food is about to be a big freaking problem. This was exacerbated by the pandemic and the sale of Sanderson Farms(https://www.wsj.com/articles/sanderson-farms-explores-sale-11624305575#:~:text=A%20deal%20with%20Continental%20would,of%20the%20country's%20chicken%20meat.) only highlights the oligopoly that is our food supply. I digress.
We have a problem. A recent documentary titled “Farmland” https://www.amazon.com/Farmland-Brad-Bellah/dp/B00P7P8RS0 exemplifies something we already knew, farmers are getting older, succumbing to illness and their children are needing to step in to sustain. Again, I need to digress.
Three ways to get into farming, for better or worse
1. We inherited the farm from our parents, grandparents, etc.
A good example of this is Laura Farms. I have been following her and her family since they first popped up on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCA1y-4TJdVEcSMWN9OZfGSA about a year ago. Her father and grandfather own and operate a pastoral farm in Nebraska that she and her fiancé are taking over. She chronicles the experiences in the YouTube channel that she has created and I love it. But we cant forget that they are a mono or specialty grower that has land that was paid for probably a few generations or so ago has expense that solely comes from equipment and sow/chem activity. This is one thing that we have to look at, Pastoral Farms being handed down from generation to generation and the current generation wants nothing to do with it. The BLS expects a 6% decline https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/farmers-ranchers-and-other-agricultural-managers.htm over the next few years. Not surprising. The average farmer is well over 60 and it isn’t getting any better.
2. Education.“I went to school for this because I have a passion.”
This is actually less likely. A friend of mine I grew up with decided to go to A&M to major in ag and managed a very serious outfit for a number of years before defecting to work in construction because “I’ve got kids to feed” This is all too often an issue. The USDA will award loans to grads with degrees in agriculture, but that largely saddles, in theory, a debt loaded early twenty something with another tens of thousands of debt to make a farm work with just them as the sole laborer. This is largely again anecdotal. If you have no collateral, the USDA will give you nothing. If you have collateral and don’t have the background they will give you nothing. Its not easy which is why outfits like Capital Farm Credit, etc exist. According to Joel Salatin in his book “You Can Farm” https://www.amazon.com/You-Can-Farm-Entrepreneurs-Enterprise/dp/0963810928, you don’t need the USDA, I mean, USDuh. His parents left him 550 acres of Shenandoah Valley land paid for that he has largely profited from and now hails as the “know it all of farming know it alls” even though his claim to fame is cattle and chicken that he started from land that cost him nothing. Those who read his books and others like it should eat the salt shaker.
3. Brute Force.
This has been the current model as with the Farmland documentary and also the Farmshare Austin and a few other groups, https://www.amazon.com/Farmland-Brad-Bellah/dp/B00P7P8RS0 where millennials are now buying land and farming it. There are a lot of women who are asking the question of “how can we feed ourselves and our loved ones?” As the pandemic has raged on, very smart women have decided to change the narrative. We now have multiple farms popping up all over the country that have one goal in mind: bring you the best seasonal produce that your area can allow. My wife’s farm included. This is how most new farms are created. One party works and the other farms. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/farming-and-farm-income/?topicId=bf4f3449-e2f2-4745-98c0-b538672bbbf1#:~:text=Most%20farmers%20receive%20off%2Dfarm,households%20(%2468%2C703)%20in%202019. Nonetheless, farms in your community are the path to sustainability. Farmers markets allow you to experience all manner of great, new things. https://www.prevention.com/food-nutrition/a20459065/tasty-ideas-for-unusual-farmers-market-finds/
Go to a market and see what we bring, from weird tomatoes to purple beans and a few other things that used to be prevalent 100 years ago.
Faming through the next twenty years now involves you. We need you. We need you to buy a CSA, go to the farmers market, and start looking at labels of where your produce comes from. This is the way we limit excess carbon emissions in agriculture and also start to pay our farmers a proper wage. We are here. Are you here?
(I have been a TurboTax users for many years, but
never with the ‘Free’ version, said to be very popular.)
https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/taxes/turbotax-drops-irs-free-file-program-after-two-decades-what-that-means-for-you/
(We really need to get over ‘undue concern’ about
so-called foreign agents in close proximity to presidents
and presidential candidates. No doubt they bring fresh perspectives
and desperately needed financial support to the electoral process.
Especially needed when Trump re-runs in 2024.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/opinion/trump-tom-barrack-corruption.html?smid=tw-share
Record-setting bail?
Tom Barrack Freed From Jail After Whopping $250 Million Bond Deal With Prosecutors
Tom Barrack, the founder and former CEO of Colony Capital and longtime advisor to Donald Trump, was released on Friday on a whopping $250 million bond, three days after being arrested on charges that he acted as an unregistered foreign agent and lied about it to investigators.
Barrack, 74, was freed from a county jail facility in San Bernardino, according to jail records. He was arrested Tuesday in Los Angeles on charges he that he illegally sought to influence policy for the United Arab Emirates with disclosing himself as a registered foreign agent.
“I want to thank the fine men and women of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s office, the United States Marshals Service and the Central District of California Court, Pretrial, and Probation teams,” Barrack said in a statement on Friday evening. “They have difficult jobs and carry them out with great professionalism. I also want to recognize the grace and humanity of the gentlemen with whom I have shared a community over these last three days. …”
Possible way to take the “scare” out or Covid vaccine: pill form. It’s may not be the needle that leads to vaccine phobia — though that may contribute — it may be the sight of the syringe and the imagining of all the “scaries” that may be floating within.
A Covid vaccine in a pill may never have led to the level of irrational vaccine reluctance we observe today.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-covid-vaccine-in-pill-form-to-start-clinical-trial-in-tel-aviv/
This may be all it takes to “save the world.”
Or just call them stupid and walk or run away from them.
” Stop Insulting Trump Voters and Their Concerns. Instead, Shut Up and Take It.
Instead, try listening to Trump voters and their concerns as though you were plucked from the cabbage patch this very morning, fresh as the dew, with no memory of what happened when we spent several years listening to Trump voters and their concerns. While you’re listening, you can show your commitment to democracy in America by murmuring things like, “I see,” or nodding your head in an understanding manner. Do not do that thing where you pretend like you’re coughing and bark, “Bullshit!” into your fist when the Trump voter you are listening to says that of course they didn’t approve of everything Donald Trump did. Do not accuse them of enabling a nihilistic death cult that is steering the entire planet into a lake of fire. Do not throw pies or fruit or bricks. Do not say, “What’s that? It seems like you’re trying to talk, but all I can hear is a thick, clotty bubbling sound, because you’re up to your eyebrows in the blood of your fellow citizens.” Shaming will never work!”
https://slate.com/culture/2021/07/stop-insulting-trump-voters-washington-post-wise-brilliant-great-advice.html
Manchin in the Middle
(Personally, as a centrist myself, I don’t think this strategy is going to work for the Dem party as a whole or for the Biden presidency, because the GOP has an easy time thwarting it.)