May 25, 2015

Ack! I just cut into a field mouse nest while shoveling up an abandoned raised bed that had gotten

overshadowed as the cherry trees grew. I don't think I killed any of the pups outright, but I might have injured them, since they were all still hairless and with closed eyes, no bigger than the last joint or so of my little finger. I went ahead and put a large flat rock over the hole I'd cut in the top of the hollowed area they were in and carefully covered it with dirt, so that they're hidden from predators (like my beagles), but I hope the adults come back and clean out some of the fallen dirt and make sure they're ok.

More of the potatoes are leafing out now, and the birds are starting to feast on the cherries. Got more tomatoes and peppers in and growing over in Dad's yard, and the raspberries in his yard are coming along quicker than those in mine (mine are more in shade from the apples and cherries), but none anywhere near ripe yet. Gotten 5 strawberries out of the beds so far, so probably will be picking pints at a time within a week or two.

May 20, 2015

The disrespect Republicans (and Democrats who buy into their rhetoric) show to workers disgusts me.

I've got Morning Joe providing background noise behind me. I wasn't paying attention, but as I finished reading another OP, my brain suddenly tuned in on the words, and there were a pair of smarmy types talking to Mika. Something about an ambulance driver who, I'm guessing, wasn't being paid much, and they pulled out that crap about 'the solution for that is education and training, to get a better job.'

I'm sorry but that is pure elitism and classism. The old 'If only you had the education I have, you'd be earning hundreds of thousands just like me!' Which is crapola. First off, no capitalist economy can provide every single person with the 'top wages'. Even if 100% of your populace were trained as neurosurgeons, there simply wouldn't be a need for 315 million neurosurgeons.

Jobs exist not because some 'job creator' is feeling benevolent, but because those jobs are NEEDED. Businesses don't hire people they don't actually need. That janitorial staff is every bit as necessary as the day trader or the doctor, or else they wouldn't have a job. Get rid of housekeeping, and your rates of people dying in hospitals would skyrocket.

Don't tell me the 'solution' for crappy, substandard wages is 'get an education so you can get a better job'. The solution is LIVING WAGES for EVERY JOB. Every job is important in one way or another, or it simply wouldn't exist.

If the job exists, it's worth paying a living wage.

May 14, 2015

Blue Buffalo foods not necessarily what the ingredient list claims. Testing reveals byproducts.

First, the link to the independent testing report.

Apparently there's been a lawsuit ongoing between Purina and Blue Buffalo for quite a while now, and things are coming to a head.

Blue Buffalo, with over a billion in sales last year, has been the fastest growing company in the pet food market, in large part based upon high prices justified (supposedly) by premium ingredients that avoid things like 'chicken byproduct' (ground up beaks, feet, intestines, feathers, etc) and filler grains (corn, wheat) more prevalent in other dog and cat foods. Somebody smelled a rat, though, and Purina got Windsor Labs to do analyses to find out just what's going into a bunch of the Blue Buffalo branded products.

The results were not pleasant. Some products contained up to 22% poultry byproduct, despite claims that no such byproduct was in the product. Small amounts of corn or rice also showed up in products labeled as having 'no grain' as well. Of the products tested, only the 'Adult Basics - Turkey & Potato' for dogs actually tested without any poultry byproduct or grains. Of course, once you got farther down in the report, it turned out that the ingredients actually found in it included 48% chicken, 22% chicken meal - not turkey. For people trying to avoid foreign grown or processed poultry (No turkeys in China) this means that even though you managed to avoid 'byproduct' and 'grain', you still have no idea where the chicken in the product came from, when you were supposedly paying for turkey.

The Poisoned Pets blog post goes into more detail about the lawsuit and how the chairman of the company is a former ad man.

Some folks might have seen me mention in comments how my male beagle died this January from kidney failure. He also had damage to his liver and pancreas. While I have no specific reason to believe his death was related to a diet of Blue Buffalo, before we switched to BB, he had been overweight, but as soon as we switched to it, he started losing weight, which at first we thought was a 'good thing'. But he never stopped losing weight, and was down to 20 lbs by the time he died, around 2/3 or what a healthy beagle probably weighs. So after reading these articles, I just have a nagging feeling that his diet might have played a role in his early death.

We've adopted another beagle, and after reading how analyses are showing that we're not getting what we've been paying for from Blue Buffalo, I can say for certain that we won't be buying it again in future.

May 12, 2015

Watching the Tony Robinson Jr shooting press conference.

Shooting by police of a 19 yr old unarmed black man.

The DA type giving the press conference seems to be trotting out a lot of personal extraneous crap that has nothing to do with whether or not a police officer broke the law in shooting an unarmed man. He's still dragging things out but I'm guessing he's going to let the cop off. And... I think he just did. No charges against the officer if I understand him correctly. Black lives don't matter enough in Wisconsin.


Edited to add: Ok, so the cop shot Robinson because he hit his head, was afraid that Robinson would 'take his gun and shoot him' if he went unconscious. So Robinson was not shot for what Robinson had done or for having a weapon, but because the police was afraid that he couldn't maintain control over his own weapon, even though, if I understand it right, Robinson had not actually made any attempt to take the gun.