Adventures in Agriculture, Part IV

I told you it was coming, didn’t I?

Well, here it is. I’ve been getting serious about my (extremely) small-scale agriculture on my small plot of land (it’s a pretty standard quarter-acre lot), and I’ve got some interesting things to write about.

As I mentioned in one of the prior parts, organic agriculture is all about feeding the soil, not about feeding plants. If you have healthy soil, you’ll have healthy plants and good crops; if you don’t have healthy soil, either your plants won’t grow, or you’ll be forced to load your soil with chemicals, which will only kill it further. So I’m concentrating on feeding my soil, making it healthy and productive of good plants. To do that, though, I need to learn what its present condition is. And to do that, I needed some handy-dandy soil health calculation detector thing. So I broke out my chemistry set (by which I mean I bought a soil-testing kit at a gardening store) and started to work.

My four test tubes, showing various soil properties.

To the right, you’ll see one result of said handy-dandy soil health test kit. (The tubes are reusable; the packet came with supplies for ten tests.) Essentially, you get a little bit of soil, mix it in with water and some nifty chemicals, conveniently packaged as small solid tabs, and judge the chemical contents of your soil by the color of the resulting fluid. In this example (which applies to my apple plot), we’ll start from right to left. The blue tube contains the test for phosphorus; phosphorus is vital for healthy root growth. This shade of blue indicates that I have a healthy amount of phosphorus in this particular patch. If I didn’t, bone meal would be the best organic fertilizer to mix into the soil to improve its phosphorus content. The next tube is green; that’s the test for the pH of the soil (that is, whether it’s acidic, basic (alkalinic), or neither). This shade of green indicates that my soil is almost exactly 7, the pH of water, neither acidic nor basic. That’s not really good; most plants want soil that’s a little acidic. Apples, for example, like a pH around 6 or 6.5. However, it’ll do for now. To make soil more acidic, raise the bed and improve drainage; to make it less, apply lime.

The third tube is yellow-capped, containing a gray liquid. This contains the test for potassium, which helps produce fuller blossoms and, of course, fruits. This shade of gray indicates that I’m a bit low on potassium. Rock potash or hardwood ashes are the answer for that. Finally, the red-capped tube contains the test for nitrogen, the all-important element which encourages healthy growth, particularly of leaves and stems. You can barely tell that the liquid is pink, and it’s supposed to be fully red, so I’m quite low on nitrogen in this patch. The solution is to apply a good dressing of dried blood (often sold as “blood meal”), which is very fast-acting, so don’t apply it too long before planting.

What’s all this chemistry stuff, anyway? Well, the good gardener is, to a limited degree, a good chemist. An off-the-cuff, inexact, eyeballing type of chemist, but a chemist nevertheless. A healthy soil is all about a healthy chemistry, and it’s important to know which plants require which elements more, and how to tell (based on the plants) when the soil has a shortage or a surplus of certain elements. Let’s begin, shall we?

Plants depend most significant on the Big Three, the three major elements. These are carbon (C), hydrogen (H), and oxygen (O). Hydrogen and oxygen generally come in their mixed-together form (we often call this “water”, H₂O), and carbon is so omnipresent that a shortage is pretty well unheard of. But without these three elements, a plant just isn’t a plant. Literally; it can’t exist. These elements are so vital that Hamilton simply presumes them, and doesn’t give them a name, calling what I call the minor elements “major” in consequence; however, I compulsively categorize, and so major elements is what I’ll call them. Make sure your plants get their water!

Next come the six minor elements, which are vital and generally cause the problems that you’re going to have with keeping a healthy soil. The first is nitrogen (N), responsible for good green growth. Dried blood is the best source of this if you get a shortage. Decomposition (rotting) of organic matter requires lots of it; fortunately, our atmosphere is 70%+ nitrogen, so there’s plenty to go around. However, not all of it’s incorporated in the soil, and that’s where most plants need to get it. (Not all plants, though; we’ll get to that in a minute.) That’s why it’s important that, when you work organic matter (compost and manure) into your soil, you make sure that it’s well-rotted first; otherwise, the bacteria which rot it will take the nitrogen they need out of the soil and use it themselves, depriving your plants of it. This is counterproductive, to say that least. If your compost isn’t quite rotten yet, make sure you compensate for that with extra nitrogen, probably from dried blood.

Now, there are some plants that don’t get their nitrogen from the ground; they get it from the air instead. The most useful of these are beans; I say they’re the most useful because they’re a very healthy, protein-rich foodstuff as well as being very good for the soil. They’re good for the soil because they not only don’t take nitrogen out of the soil, they put it into the soil. That is, they take their nitrogen from the air and work it into their own selves, including their roots. Some of this gets into the soil from there. When this happens, we say that the plant is fixing nitrogen, or is a nitrogen-fixer. Other edible examples are mints and clover; an inedible (in fact, poisonous) example is vetch. This makes such crops ideal for nitrogen-poor soil. (I’m growing lots of beans in my own nitrogen-poor plots.) Mints and clover are edible, but are also useful as green manure; you grow them for the purpose of plowing them back into the soil. This is good with them even when unrotted, because they take nitrogen from the air and add it to the soil. When you harvest your beans, cut them off at ground level and toss the above-ground bits into your compose bin; leave the roots in the ground, where they will enrich the soil with nitrogen.

Of course, you don’t want too much nitrogen, or your plants will grow too fast. This results in weak, soft growth, vulnerable to pests and disease. A deficiency of nitrogen will result in stunted plants, and leaves, particularly older ones, will yellow all through. Dried blood is the cure-all; it’s like a quick shot of nitrogen for the soil.

The second minor element is phosphorus (P), which is vital for good root growth. The better the roots, the stronger the plant. Plants grown in phosphorus-deficient soil will be slightly stunted, but also weak because they have weak roots. The leaves will also start to take on a bluish tone, particularly the older ones. The best source of phosphorus is bone meal (just what it sounds like: ground-up bones).

The third minor element is potassium (K), also called potash. An excellent source of potash is, obviously, rock potash; it’s also contained in hardwood ashes. Potassium helps produce larger and well-formed blossoms and fruits. If you don’t have enough, you’ll know, because your blossoms and fruits will be small. Too much potassium, though, and your plants will have trouble taking up magnesium, which causes its own problems.

The fourth minor element is magnesium (Mg). Magnesium is an element of chlorophyll, which is what helps plants survive with nothing but water, soil, and sun; a deficiency will result in yellowing in the leaves, starting between the veins. The best way to add this to the soil is to not let it get short in the first place; always provide your soil with lots of organic matter (compost or manure). If you’ve already planted, try seaweed if you’ve got any; seaweed meal or liquid seaweed (the liquid that results from soaking seaweed in water for an extended period), or liquid manure (made the same way, but with manure).

The fifth minor element is calcium (Ca), which does all sorts of chemical things in plants that are too complex for me to really grok at this time. Bottom line, you need it. Hamilton assures me that a deficiency in an organic garden is quite rare; this is because organic gardeners provide lots of organic matter to the soil. However, if you do have one, mix into the soil things like eggshells, oyster shells, and hardwood ashes. Ground limestone, or lime itself, would also be good, though don’t let it burn the plants.

The last minor element is sulfur (S). Sulfer is a vital ingredient in proteins and helps produce chlorophyll. The answer: you guessed it! Apply lots of organic matter to the soil. That’s really the bedrock of all organic agriculture: provide as much organic matter to the soil as you can. What you take out in the form of fruits and vegetables, you must return in the form of compost or manure. You can’t get something for nothing, pay off debt with debt. It’s that simple.

Finally, after the minor elements come the trace elements. These are necessary elements, but only in very small quantities. Iron (Fe) is needed for the formation of chlorophyll. Zinc (Zn) and copper (Cu) are required to activate certain necessary plant enzymes. (No, don’t ask me what an enzyme is; something biological chemical of some sort. Check Wikipedia.) Manganese (Mn) helps form proteins and chlorophyll. Boron (B) is necessary for growth. And finally, molybdenum (Mo) is needed to produce certain proteins. I’m not going to explain them all; this post is already ridiculously long as far as blog posts should go. All I can say is, go buy Hamilton! Seriously! It’s worth every cent!

Apple patch at a distance.

So, I’ve produced my apple patch. You can see it there on the right, in all its still-lots-of-dirt-on-the-grass-part glory. (Yes, I clean it up afterward.) I gave it a little bit of bone meal to provide phosphorus for healthy root growth and plenty of dried blood to improve the soil’s nitrogen content. That should also acidify the soil a little bit, which the apples will like. The apples arrived today; they are three-foot barerooted trees, one Granny Smith and one Braeburn (two varieties that blossom at about the same time and will happily pollinate each other). I’m going to a professional conference tomorrow, but in the morning, before I leave, I shall plant those trees. I’m very excited about it. I intend to keep them manageable in size by judicious pruning, training them as festoons; this is a slightly complicated process that I’ll explain at the end of the summer, when I start it. I’ll take a few pictures at each step along the way, as always, and let you all know how it goes.

Praise be to Christ the King!

The Best Terminal Emulator: Xterm

Xterm? Really? That ugly little emulator with the funny, tiny font?

Yes, xterm. Really. Sure, it doesn’t do fancy-schmancy transparency like rxvt; it doesn’t natively support multiple tabs like konsole. But it’s the best terminal emulator for X. Period.

See, xterm is a beautiful thing; it does exactly one thing, and it does it well. Really well. It minimizes its own necessary screen real estate (provided you don’t use a gigantic font, of course), it doesn’t eat up your resources with eye-candy nonsense; and it allows you to employ whatever fonts and symbols you want without taking over the whole issue itself. It’s light as a feather, starting in an instant and using up barely enough memory to be noticed. Yes, it even supports Unicode! And while a fork of rxvt does that (rxvt-unicode, which is invoked as urxvt), I found that program to crash frequently when used with the Perl tabs plugin, so xterm remains my favorite.

Oh, I know that I said a while back that konsole was the tab-enabled Unicode-supporting editor of choice. I was wrong. Konsole is a nice editor, and the tabs feature is great; but it’s comparatively heavy, and it requires a bulky library (Qt) to work. Xterm requires no fat libraries, and it supports Unicode natively, as it should. It supports tabs, though not natively, but that’s okay, too; it shouldn’t support tabs natively. That a job for another program, not for xterm. What other program? GNU screen.

See, tabs are a sine qua non for me with terminal emulators. I often run many terminal windows at a time, and having all of these all over my desktop, even with virtual desktops, is clunky and annoying. So for a while I thought I was stuck with konsole, since I was having trouble with rxvt’s tab function. (It crashed. Repeatedly. While opening predictable man pages. And extensive Googling turned up no solutions.) But I didn’t realize that a good terminal emulator didn’t have to support tabs, because that job is done by another program. A good Unix program does one thing and does it well; I was expecting a good Unix program to do two things, and that was unjust. God be praised, however; I discovered GNU screen.

GNU screen is a great tool which has functions far beyond what I use it for. However, it has the ability to split a terminal window (or a real console, if that’s your pleasure) into multiple instances, each of which can be addressed individually and perform different functions. One can name and manipulate each instance as one wishes. Switching between them is easy; escape yourself from your program with CTRL-A, then hit “N” for the next screen or “P” for the previous one. To create a new screen, hit CTRL-C. It’s great.

You can even have these screens named, and listed on the bottom of your screen precisely as if they were literal tabs in a single program. This requires some interesting wizardry in your .screenrc program, but it’s fun for all the girls and boys anyway. Here, for example, is my .screenrc:

# +AMDG
vbell off
startup_message off
hardstatus alwayslastline
termcapinfo xterm|xterms|xs|rxvt ti@:te@
caption always
caption string "%{= kB}%-Lw%{=s kB}%50>%n%f* %t %{-}%+Lw%<"
# open programs with escape plus the binding; also names tab
bind m screen -t 'Mutt' 7 mutt
bind s screen -t 'Snownews' 7 snownews
# avoid screen conflicting with vi bindings; basically,
# whenever it sees "escape", screen waits for more
# characters, and only passes the escape to the program
# after a short pause; this sets the pause to zero
maptimeout 0
defc1 off

Those “caption” lines make the magic happen; the screen man page will tell you much, much more. But here’s the result: my current xterm window, stripped of window decorations like title bar and borders:

Current xterm window, using GNU screen, without window decorations.

See those tabs? The asterisk indicates which screen is active. (Yes, that red prompt reminds me that I’m root on that terminal. My normal user prompt is blue.)

Sure, but isn’t it annoying to have to start xterm, then run screen to get your tabs? No; like most terminal emulators, xterm allows you to run another program in it upon opening the terminal. For example, I have fvwm open an xterm for me upon startup, which is running GNU screen, with the following command line (unnecessary bits, like geometry requirements, removed):

xterm -e screen

And that’s it. Really not a problem, is it?

So all hail the mighty xterm: small, sleek, streamlined, doing one job and doing it well. And all hail GNU screen, which helps xterm to be all it can be.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Ubuntu is Linux: Really?

Yes, I have a big hefty agricultural post coming up (or: no, I haven’t given up on agriculture, and am going at it stronger than ever), but lately the technical stuff has been easier for me to write about. So, here it is. Ubuntu and Linux: what gives?

Let me begin by saying that Ubuntu is a perfectly fine operating system. It beats Windows hands down, for example, for security, for ease of use, and most importantly for freedom. That goes for all its miscellaneous flavors, too: Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and whatever else. Indeed, I run Kubuntu on my laptop, though it’s been severely debianized, because I want my computer to be Unix, not a Windows lookalike.

That said, I happened upon a post over at Penguin Pete’s entitled Ubuntu is Not Linux: Pass it On!, and found myself nodding the entire time. Ubuntu is not Linux.

Let me be clear. In a certain sense, Ubuntu clearly is Linux. Namely, it runs on a Linux kernel. It’s even legitimately referred to as GNU/Linux, because it includes many of the GNU tools by default. To say that Ubuntu is not Linux in this technical sense is pure silliness.

However, while GNU/Linux in the technical sense is simply the Linux kernel with the GNU tools running on top of it, what is Linux in its essential sense? Essentially, Linux is a free replacement for Unix. When I heard about Linux, I was interested in a free version of Windows, like a lot of people were, but as I learned I became aware that the Unix paradigm is endlessly superior to Windows and I decided that that’s what I wanted. This was long before Ubuntu was even a twinkle in Shuttleworth’s eye, you understand, so I got a good dose of Unix shortly after finishing my installation, but you get my point. Linux is designed to be a Unix-like operating system licensed under the GPL.

What is Ubuntu? “Linux for human beings,” according to Ubuntu itself. Ubuntu defines itself by differentiating itself from the rest of Linux in a pretty drastic way. It’s not like, say, Gentoo, which is Linux for the compulsive do-it-yourselfer. It’s not like Slackware, which is Linux for the minimalist, or Debian, which is Linux for the insanely conservative. (Unless you run Sid. But that’s another story. Myself, I run Debian stable.) Ubuntu, on the other hand, is Linux “for human beings.” Because the rest of Linux is Linux for something other than human beings, apparently. It brings to mind a twisted version of Aristotle’s statement on the necessity of the state: he who uses Linux which is not Ubuntu must be either a beast or a god. A man, he most certainly is not.

But see, I‘m a human being. I’m pretty confident when I say this. I’m not a kernel hacker; while I enjoy programming in C, my skills can be described only as laughably amateurish; while I qualify as a Perlmonger, I program Perl about like I program C; writing anything but the simplest shell scripts is a real chore for me; I don’t know awk or sed; I do use and love vi, and I’m proud to call myself a “power-user” of it; and when it comes to network configuration I’m all over Google trying to figure out what ought to be very simply things. But I am a human being. And I don’t run Ubuntu. I run Debian GNU/Linux 5.0, and I’m proud of it.

What’s more, all of these folks are human beings. Kernel hackers, Perlmongers, awkers and sedders, and even emacs men (though I’m a bit skeptical about this one) are human beings. And these folks use Linux, though many of them do not use Ubuntu. So what exactly does this statement mean? Why does Ubuntu consider the statement “Linux for human beings” meaningful, when in its literal sense it’s obviously untrue?

Because Ubuntu is doing its level best to make sure that we all know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Ubuntu just isn’t the same as the rest of Linux. It doesn’t work like the rest of Linux. You don’t need to even touch a command line. Heck, we’ll do our best to make sure that you never even see one! No editing text files to configure your software; we’ll let you do it from a GUI! Security measures, like requiring a login for root access? Never! You’ll have full access to the entire system just by typing sudo and your user password! Forget all that Unix stuff about superusers, text configuration, redundant security measures, and “command lines”! This isn’t that kind of Linux! This is Linux for human beings!

And that’s fine. Not everybody wants a free version of Unix. Some people want a free version of Windows, and more power to them. I recommend Ubuntu whenever someone tells me they want to move to Linux so that they can get away from Windows. But we might as well face it: Ubuntu is something different, something all its own. It says so itself. And that’s a perfectly fine thing for it to be.

The only problem comes when people refuse to make the distinction. Often, Windows-refugee Ubuntu users confuse Ubuntu and Linux, and in fact think that the two are synonymous. Such users decide that Linux should work they way they want it to. Although Ubuntu does a fantastic job making everything just as brainless as Windows does, Windows users who have switched to Ubuntu still frequently complain about it. “Linux doesn’t handle this in exactly the same way that Windows does; it’s going to need to fix that if it ever wants to make it to prime time.” No one ever seems very clear on just what “making it to prime time” is supposed to mean, but they are all very certain that it’s something that Linux needs to do.

No, Linux does not need to handle things the way Windows does. People might as well face it: Linux is NOT Windows. They are two different systems which do things in different ways. Linux doesn’t handle things the Windows way; it handles things the Unix way, and the Unix way is better.

Our Windows-refugee Ubuntu user thinks that “Linux” doesn’t work the way he wants it to. That’s correct; it doesn’t. It works the way it’s supposed to, not the way that Windows is supposed to. And that’s really all the answer he’s ever going to get. He thinks that’s not fair; he switched to Ubuntu to escape Microsoftian dictatorship, not to learn some new and sometimes arcane operating system called “Unix.” And he’s right. But Linux doesn’t offer him a Windows lookalike; it offers him Linux. Ubuntu, on the other hand, may well be exactly what he needs.

So what solution is there? Remember that Penguin Pete’s entitled Ubuntu is not Linux. Ubuntu is a fork, a project which is based on Linux, which has a lot in common with Linux, but which has entirely different aims from Linux. Ubuntu aims to be a replacement for Windows and Mac OSX; God bless it for that. It’s doing a great job, too. But that makes it something other than Linux. Let’s not get them confused.

We currently divide the world into three main camps: Unix, Windows, and Apple. The Unix world is divided into many camps, but only two which make much difference these days, Linux and BSD. Apple is monolithic, and is BSD-based, but its interface is so non-Unix that we really ought to consider it a different thing. And then there’s Windows. We need to have a fourth camp: Ubuntu. It’s not Windows, because it uses a Linux kernel; but it’s not Linux, because it specifically sets out to be fundamentally different from all other Linux distributions. Four main camps: Unix, Windows, Apple, and Ubuntu. That’s the way the OS world really looks.

That way, when Windows refugees start complaining that “Linux” doesn’t work the way they expect it to, they can get a good answer. “Yes, sir; we at Ubuntu are doing our best to make that more intuitive for our users.” That’s much better than, “Yes, sir, but…this is Linux. Things just don’t work that way here.” Ubuntu can really fly away at what it wants to be, and Linux can remain as it is, growing and flourishing as Linux, as exactly what it wants to be.

Now someone tell me, what’s the problem with that?

Distributists and the Draft

Lately Rahm Emmanuel made some waves by repeating the oft-proposed suggestion of reinstating an active draft. I’ve often thought about this topic, and for a long time I was in favor of the draft. Two to four years of service required of every able-bodied man for the defense of his country. Who could object to such a benign proposal? Who could possibly oppose serving one’s country?

You see, as I think I’ve mentioned before, I come from a long, long line of military folk. Longer than history records, most likely. The earliest military man in my family that I’m familiar with (my grandfather has it back to Hastings) is Edward “Redsleeves” Goodman, who fought with Henry VII at Bosworth Field, and received a beautiful coat of arms for his valor and service. My people have fought in every single declared American war, and few others besides. One of my ancestors was killed at the battle at Hayes Station in our American revolution (after the battle, actually, cruelly and quite illegally executed by a British officer, by the sword). Another fought in the war of 1812; another fought in that cruel war in which Texas was stolen from the Mexicans. My great-great grandfather, Samuel Goodman, served in the Texas cavalry during the American civil war. My great-grandfather, Charles Goodman, served as a medic in World War I, bravely saving many lives, even to the point of swallowing some of the dreaded mustard gas, which caused him health problems for the rest of his days. My father’s father served bravely through the Korean and Vietnam conflicts (he did twenty-one years and was in his last year of service in Vietnam; I’m not that young), even being slightly wounded while attempted to assist another wounded soldier. (He did not request a purple heart, as he felt this was not really a battle wound.) My mother’s father had a scholarship to go to college in 1940; instead, knowing that war was coming, he joined what was then the U.S. Army Air Corps and flew countless missions over Europe. Three times he was shot down; twice he was shot down over water; one of those times he was the only member of his crew to be pulled from the Channel alive. The third time was over France; he managed to find the French underground, which successfully smuggled him back to England, where he hopped directly back into a plane and started flying missions again. My own brother has served in Iraq with the Marines.

So my people are intimately acquainted with the duties and responsibilities of military service in defense of their country. Few families could be more so. And we know that it is hell.

William Tecumseh Sherman, of course, who has the negative distinction of being one of the more brutal generals of our history, uttered those famous words:

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.

Coming from a man like Sherman, this means a lot. War is terrible, a horrible curse on a country. War takes the bravest, the youngest, the strongest, and throws them into a literal meat-grinder. It leaves homes empty, fields untended, shops unkept, wives without husbands, and children fatherless. Even those who return are scarred forever. War is the destroyer of worlds.

And here I refer only to a just war, and one in which the laws of civilized warfare are obeyed. Such wars are rarely fought in our sad times. In these enlightened days, wars kill not only brave men, who put their frail bodies between their homes and the war’s desolation; it kills our women and children, destroys our fields and our factories, and wreaks havoc on everything throughout the land. Even the just war, about whose permissibility there can be no legitimate question, is a monumental tragedy, a scourge upon any land; the unjust war is unspeakably terrible, a horror which defies mortal description. War is, truly and without ambiguity, the destroyer of worlds.

Mars always rode into battle on a chariot pulled by Timor (Phobos) and Metus (Deimos). Few images could be more terrifying, more suitable for the inhuman bloodbath that is even the most just of wars: terrible, bloody War, riding to the slaughter pulled by Fear and Dread. The people that forgets this, that trivializes the horror that is war, will brutalize their country and ultimately lose their humanity. That’s what happened to Europe in the early twentieth century; that’s what’s happened in America before; God help us, it may yet happen here again.

The draft is a means of keeping a large standing army for purposes of warfare. We’ve used it many times in America; both North and South had a draft in our civil war, and we had a draft in World War I. Starting in 1940, however, we had the first-ever peacetime draft, which lasted through peace and war until 1975, and then from 1980 to the present day, though no one has actually been forcibly inducted into the military since 1975. Our Supreme Court has declared it constitutional. But is the draft moral, in peace and in war? What is a distributist to think of this idea?

War in general is even more harmful for the distributist society than for a capitalist one. In a distributist society, most citizens are owners of their own productive property, and themselves care for their own property. Fields and shops require constant care and maintenance; leaving them for any extended period is an extremely important decision that will not be made lightly. The farmer will not leave his fields for anything other than the direst causes; the well-being of his property, and thus of his family which depends upon it, is at stake.

For example, among the most distributist societies in modern history, the Vendée in France, began its revolt against the French Revolution precisely because Paris had passed a universal conscription program. The Vendéens couldn’t send their young men to the army; they needed their young men at home, in the fields and the shops. Spreading the revolution was not worth leaving their property; but to defend their right to remain at their property until they determined the cause was dire enough, they would (and did) fight to the death.

Universal conscription requires that every young man (and, by most proposals in our degraded times, young women as well) to leave their homes and their property for two to four years to serve in the military. This will probably, given our current quagmires and all the proposed future ones, involve serving in war. The distributist should not support this.

First, as discussed above, war is terrible. Universal conscription serves only one purpose: keeping a large army ready to make it easier to fight wars. The easier it is to fight them, the more often they will be fought. While Switzerland, wealthy and cuddled by the forbidding Alps, has remained peaceful, history shows that nations with universal conscription are nations with frequent and larger wars. Wars in Europe, for example, only became universally destructive after universal conscription made them so. Given how destructive war is by nature, and how even more destructive it is to a civilized society, any policy which makes wars easier to fight ought to be opposed.

Second, the distributist wants families to be economically self-sufficient and spiritually strong; universal conscription makes that impossible. Economic self-sufficiency depends upon the head of the household being available to care for the family’s productive property, and often it depends on the assistance of the head of household’s older children, particularly his sons. Conscription will take away the head of household when he is young and most needed to establish his property; it will then take his sons when he is older and most needs them to help prepare that property to be passed down to their care. Then again, conscription takes the head of household when he is young, and his wife most needs his support, and his children, if he yet has any, are young and need their father as an example of just and loving rule; it then takes his sons when they are just coming into manhood, just starting families of their own, when they most need to be close to their father, who can show them the way. Universal conscription thus strikes at the very heart of the distributist agenda: it renders the self-sufficient and spiritually strong family exponentially more difficult to achieve. The distributist should not support it for this reason.

Should the distributist oppose all conscription? Certainly not. It is every man’s honor and duty to defend his homeland when it is under threat, and conscription is an easy and effective way to ensure that, when needed, citizens can be brought together for that defense. If I believed that America were under an imminent threat, I’d race you to the recruitment office, and I have a wife and children I could easily use as an excuse to stay home if I wanted. Despite all of war’s horror, there is honor and good in killing and dying in defense of hearth and home; distributism is most emphatically not pacifism. But it is not every man’s duty to abandon his home, his family, and his property when his service is not needed for a just war.

But in today’s modern wars, citizens simply aren’t prepared to fight without training, and without peacetime conscription how can that training be provided? Imminent threats seldom leave time for extensive military training, after all. There are many ways, however, to prepare citizens for that sad necessity, the most reasonable being the weekend method. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, for example, the heyday of the Anglo-Welsh longbow, English law required all able-bodied Englishmen and Welshmen to practice with the longbow for two hours every Sunday after Mass, to ensure a citizenry prepared for war should they be required. Such longbowmen proved to be the most effective military units in Europe.

Longbows are, of course, weapons of the past, but the principle holds true. Young men, upon reaching a certain age, are trained in the weapons and equipment of warfare near their own homes. Such methods provide a citizenry trained in the weapons of war, ready to fight should their fighting be needed, but does not tear young men away from their family and friends during some of their most formative years. It better respects the principle of subsidiarity, providing more localized training for more localized units, familiar with the tactics and weapons which are appropriate for those particular areas. And finally, it trains soldiers to fight knowing that they are fighting only for what is nearest and dearest to them: their homes, their families, and their property. A distributist solution, indeed.

As distributists, I suggest we all oppose efforts at universal conscription, and instead support a “national guard” on this model. Going hand-in-hand with our opposition to all wars which do not unambiguously meet the requirements of Catholic just war theory, distributists can offer something true and practical to our society on this point as on so many others.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Technology and Agriculture

Seriously, what gives? Here I am blogging about the geekiest of all geekery, Linux and such (and I’ve got a really geeky one coming up soon, too), and yet interspersed with all of this I’ve got articles about agriculture, my own experiments with agriculture, and how important it is to get back to real production. Again, what gives?

(Do people even say “what gives” anymore? I have a vague impression that this expression has been replaced with such monstrosities as “what’s up with that” and “wtf”. But I’ll stick with my late-eighties and early-nineties slang, thank you very much. It’s just too awesome to abandon in favor of bogus contemporary speech.)

To answer this, I’m going to have to be specific about what I mean by “technology.” By “technology” in this article I mean mostly computers. That’s it. This is, of course, much more restrictive than the ordinary definition of technology, which would cover everything from stone axes to intercontinental ballistic missiles. Stone axes are surely much lower technology than missiles, but they’re technology all the same. But for the purposes of this article, I’m using “technology” to mean what we’ve come to refer to as “high tech” things, primarily computers.

I like technology, a lot. I intensely enjoy working with it, forming it to my will, making it do what I want and to do it much more quickly than I could do it otherwise. For example, I have a pretty extensive library for a gentleman my age (approaching eight hundred volumes), and rather than keeping a normal paper log of what books I have, I’ve designed a relational database using postgresql (a more standards-compliant free software relational database system than MySQL, which is the most popular choice in the field). It has three tables—one for books, one for authors, and one for publishers—each of which contains a primary key column, which assigns to each field a unique identifying integer (like “2″ or “57″). I then enter in the “book” table, for example, the title, language, type, and so on, along with the identifying number for the publisher and the author, as contained in the other two tables. This setup is extremely scalable—so I can keep using it no matter how many books I get—and allows extremely fast data retrieval, along with data retrieval in unlimited interesting ways. For example, if I remember a French-language murder mystery I’m interested in reading again, but can remember neither author nor title, I can just request postgresql to print all books which are in French, drawing the author from the authors table and linking it in with the results. Try doing that with a card catalog.

I do countless things with technology like this. I format books and articles for a variety of things with LaTeX, which produces better results than anything else out there. (Yes, much better than any word processor, including Microsoft Word.) I use email extensively to communicate with friends, relations, and fellow Catholics and distributists around the country. I run a blog (imagine that!). It’s fun, it’s useful, and I truly enjoy it.

However, I’m under no illusions about technology; it’s not the savior of the world. People speak as though technological advancement will bring mankind to an age when we have no shortages, no poor, no problems. Technology will fix it all for us. Hurray for the microchip! Let’s get one put in our hands so we can become one with the machines that will save us!

But technology won’t save us; indeed, a retreat from technology is precisely what we need. The tools of the future are not the keyboard and the mouse, but the hoe and the shovel. As useful as technology is, we are and will always remain men, with normal human bodies and normal human needs. Fundamentally, as men, we don’t require faster processors and independent video chipsets. We need food. Beef, pork, corn, wheat, carrots, beans. We need clothing. Wool, cotton, linen. We need shelter. Wood, stones, bricks. As cool as wireless Internet is, it’s far removed from fundamental human needs, so it can’t possibly serve as the basis for a human economy.

What, after all, is an economy for? The economy deals with the distribution of scarce resources; that is, of resources that are limited in scope. There is no economy for air, for example, because there’s plenty of air for everybody to take as much as they want without making any trouble for anyone else. But there is an economy in most other resources, like food, clothing, and shelter. A just economy is one which makes a just distribution of such material goods. One which does not is, of course, an unjust economy, to a greater or lesser extent.

As such, the economy certainly deals with the just distribution of memory cards, because these are scarce goods just as tomatoes and cucumbers are. However, an economy deals with the distribution of all scarce goods, including those which are most fundamental to human survival and flourishing. Primarily, of course, those are food, clothing, and shelter. Given that these goods are the scarce resources of primary concern to human beings, they are also the primary concern of human economies. The way that an economy produces and distributes these goods is thus the fundamental issue of any economic system.

Of course, our modern system is so far removed from the production of these essential goods that most Americans scarcely remember that they exist. Farmers and herdsmen, who produce the most necessary goods on the planet, without whom the vast bulk of humanity would starve within a month, are laughed at and derided as ignorant bumpkins unworthy of respect. No, we say, lawyers and accountants are much more important and necessary for our well-being. Textiles are mostly produced by foreigners in foreign lands, the production of these vital goods being deemed too lowly for lofty American hands. Construction of shelter we’ve relegated to illegal immigrants paid borderline slave wages, while all our respect and honor goes to the real estate brokers and mortgage agents who profit from the fruits of their hard labor. Americans are just too good to produce these necessities of life; we’re now occupied in more important tasks, like the creation of financial documents that no one can understand to be sold repeatedly at a profit.

Is technology useful? Of course it is. Do we need lawyers and real estate brokers in society? Of course we do. But we must never forget what the primary purpose, the fundamental end, of our economy and of any economy is and must be: the production of the necessities of life. Food, clothing, and shelter, and the materials which go to producing them. As always, we return to the fields, the forests, the factories, and the mines. These are where the real work of the economy occur; the rest is just enabling them to be successful.

So I see no contradiction in liking technology and simultaneously pursuing agriculture; the former is not possible without the latter. I’ll use technology as is necessary and interesting; but I won’t forget what really puts the butter on my bread—and the bread under my butter, for that matter. Agriculture, the production of food, is the fundamental pursuit of mankind and of his economies. The rest is just interesting build-up on it.

How does these considerations effect what a just economy looks like? I’ll be discussing that, but it will have to wait for a later post. At over twelve hundred words, this article is already taxing the limits of the blog medium as it is.

Praise be to Christ the King!

GoodClock

Here I’m just going to discuss my basic clock and date program for fvwm, an excellent (and my new favorite) window manager. In case you missed my post about it, it’s insanely configurable. This comes with great benefit, but also some cost. In this case, the cost was that, having been presented with an option of what clock to use, and knowing that I could have any type or format I wanted, I insisted on having that and nothing else. Since no one had yet written one that I liked, this forced me to write my own.

It’s not complicated; here’s the entirety of the code, in fvwmscript:


# +AMDG This document was begun on 3 March 2009, the feast
# of St. David of Wales, and it is humbly dedicated to him
# and to the Immaculate Heart of Mary for their prayers, and
# to the Sacred Heart of Jesus for His mercy.
WindowTitle {FvwmApplet-GoodClock}
WindowSize 100 40
Colorset 7

Init
Begin
Set $time = (GetOutput {exec date "+%H:%M"} 1 -1)
Set $date = (GetOutput {exec date "+%d %b %Y"} 1 -1)
ChangeTitle 1 $time
ChangeTitle 2 $date
End

PeriodicTasks
Begin
If (RemainderOfDiv (GetTime) 60)==0 Then
Begin
Set $time = (GetOutput {exec date "+%H:%M"} 1 -1)
ChangeTitle 1 $time
End
If (RemainderOfDiv (GetTime) 3600)==0 Then
Begin
Set $date = (GetOutput {exec date "+%d %b %Y"} 1 -1)
ChangeTitle 2 $date
End
End

Widget 1
Property
Position 0 3
Size 100 15
Type ItemDraw
Flags NoReliefString
Font "xft:Serif:size=10:antialias=True"
Title {}
End

Widget 2
Property
Position 0 15
Size 100 15
Type ItemDraw
Flags NoReliefString
Font "xft:Serif:size=8:antialias=True"
Title {}
End


I find it’s best to include it on my desktop swallowed into my general toolbar; the line I use to include it is as follows:

*Toolbar: (2x1, Frame 0, Swallow GoodClock 'FvwmScript /path/to/GoodClock')

(I do indent my code, honest; WordPress didn’t reflect that.) And that’s it. As I said, not complicated, but pretty cool.

GoodClock on my fvwm desktop

This is what it looks like on my desktop, with my “Colorset 7″ in place (green text on a transparent background; my background happens to be black, so this image of the clock has a black background); obviously, you can set whatever colors you want with the colorset. And since it just uses the system’s date command, it accurately reflects daylight savings time and other temporal oddities.

Anyway, I hope this is helpful to someone.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Adventures in Agriculture: The Index

Greetings to all. I’ve decided to collect the reports of Farmer-Scout Me into one place, so people who are interested can easily isolate them. You can look for it in the “Frequently Updated Posts” section in the sidebar.

• Part I: In which I tell people in a general sense what I hope to do in these adventures.
• Part II: In which everything I hope to do changes due to a massive increase in knowledge, which is itself due to a remarkable book, Geoff Hamilton’s Organic Gardening.
• Part III: In which I begin to actually do some interesting stuff, including building a compost bin.
• Part IV: In which I describe briefly the chemical composition of my apple patch, and then wax eloquent at some length on basic organic gardening chemistry. Important and fascinating.
• Part V: In which I describe the progress of my garden, from ornamentals to fruits and vegetables, and teach a lesson about protecting seedlings from pests.
• Part VI: In which I give yet another update of my garden, explaining briefly what I have learned so far.

I hope these adventures have been as interesting to you as they have to me (though I find this unlikely). Have some yourself; you’ll be glad you did.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Frequently Edited Posts Section

This brief post is just to inform you that I have added a new section to the sidebar: Frequently Edited Posts. That’s where I’ll put links to posts that will be edited relatively frequently.

Right now there’s only one, and it hasn’t been recently edited. But I added the section because I plan on editing it soon. I will also shortly add a post designed to keep all the Adventures in Agriculture posts united in a single spot, to ease anyone interested in those pursuits of mine. In any case, I hope this feature proves useful to my readers.

Praise be to Christ the King!

My New Window Manager

Greetings out there. I decided to share something that will require some explanation, for those of you still trapped in Windows land. I got a new window manager.

Windows users are probably scratching their heads right now (or running to Wikipedia, which actually gives a pretty good answer), thinking, “What’s a window manager?” Well, have no fear; it’s a simple concept. A window manager controls the appearance and placement of windows on a graphical desktop.

Windows, you see, is monolithic. Microsoft wants you to believe that Microsoft is the only source for all your computing needs, so it bundles as many functions into one nasty package as it can. Windows really performs the functions of three programs when it runs on your computer: the windowing system, the window manager, and the desktop environment. (Lots more than that, really; but for present purposes, that’s all.)

The windowing system is the program which puts up your graphical interface and provides protocols for displaying windows and other graphics. In the free world, the almost universal windowing system is the X windowing system, originally from MIT labs and commonly called, these days, simply x.org. It’s released under the MIT free software license. If you’re running a free system, it may be instructive to kill your desktop manager (probably gdm or kdm; make sure that you’ve saved everything you want before you do this, because it will close out of your graphical interface entirely) and get to a console. (That’s the black screen with the words on it, where they expect you to type.) Log in there and, once you get to the shell (old DOS people will probably call this “the command prompt”), type “startx”. Presuming that your distribution has X properly configured to start without a fancy desktop environment like Gnome or KDE attached to it, you should get a proper result. See what comes up? That gray screen with the little “x” for a mouse cursor that you move around? That’s X, pure and simple. The most basic of all graphical environments.

Now, Linux offers a whole lot more than that, of course. It also has window managers. Windows managers provide the decoration on the windows (scroll bars, borders, title bars, buttons, and so on), as well as governing how focus is passed from window to window and things of that nature. In the Microsoft universe, Windows does this job as well as the windowing system’s, but in the free world you have, as always, lots of options. One window manager comes bundled with X, because it’s so excruciatingly spartan that it takes practically no space; that’s called twm. Try it if you want; it’s a little fun, for a little while, to live what life was like in the early days of graphical computing. Legend has it that the author sat down and wrote the entire window manager in one session in vi so he’d have something nice (by mid-1980s standards) to look at all day. But now it’s not so nice, suitable only for rare disaster recover purposes (so rare that I’ve never had to use it except out of curiosity).

We’ve got window managers for the tinkering inclined, who still like modularity and text-based controls. Chief among these is fvwm, which we’ll come back to later. And we’ve got window managers for the grpahical inclined, both those who like to tinker (KDE) and those who want everything set in iron for them (Gnome). And many more options besides.

Then, finally, we’ve got desktop environments. These provide the applications and tools and widgets and eye-candy and all that junk that litters the modern desktop. In Windows-world, there’s only one of these. You guessed it! It’s Windows. But in the free world, there are many, as usual. KDE and Gnome are the best known (yes, these are also window managers). Xfce is another. And the list goes on and on. For a good overview of Linux graphical interfaces, I’d recommend Penguin Pete’s X Window Manager and Desktop Guide, which reviews all the major choices and a few minor ones in an entertaining and easy-to-access way.

So why this little article? Because I’ve found my new window manager. I’ve been a KDE man since 2000, only briefly stinting with Gnome by accident in 2007 (installed Ubuntu, which I no longer use, thinking I’d get the usual choice, and was sadly disappointed). But great as KDE is, it’s huge. It’s bloated, and therefore slow (though it’s still lightning compared to Windows). All of its programs are heavily graphical, and there are way too many of them. Finally, all the configuration is graphical, which is great until your graphics don’t work anymore. But what could I do? Gnome and KDE were the Two Ways, and Gnome was practically optionless.

Enter fvwm. Originally, this supposedly stood for “Frank’s virtual window manager,” but it’s become popular enough that nobody can really remember what it actually stood for in the beginning, so it’s now just “F? virtual window manager.” And it’s great. It’s got a file, .fvwm2rc, which contains its configuration. In text. Fully editable. And fully configurable.

And when I say “fully,” I mean fully. Everything is configurable. For example, I’ve always hated having the “close” button on a window right next to the minimize and maximize buttons. (I practically never use maximize anyway, but you get my point.) You want to minimize a window, you’re working quickly, and you hit the close instead. Your work is gone. However, fvwm has the solution; I get to control which buttons go where and do what. So I put the close button on the right side, in its normal spot, and the minimize button on the left side, far, far away. There’s no chance of me hitting the wrong one now, no matter how quickly I’m working.

Oh, and buttons? Three is for chumps. (I’ve got three, actually. But being limited to three is for chumps.) Fvwm allows you to place up to ten buttons on the window, or none, if you prefer, and each can look like and do whatever you tell it to.

I also hate moving my hand back and forth from keyboard to mouse. If I’m working on my keyboard, I want to stay on my keyboard; if I”m working with my mouse, I want one hand to stay on the mouse. Moving back and forth is slow and error-prone, as I’ve got to look away from what I’m doing to make sure I’ve got my fingers on the right keys before I can start typing again. Fvwm to the rescue; it’s got .fvwm2rc. I can bind keys to do these things, and they’ll operate on the active window (the one which has focus). So I bound F2 to minimize, F3 to maximize, and F12 (way on the other side, to avoid accidental strikes) for close. So now, when I want to get rid of a window and stay on the keyboard to keep working, I can without any difficulty.

Oh, and the first things I do when I log in is open up a konsole session (KDE does some things right; when you want a terminal emulator with both multiple tabs and Unicode support, konsole is the only way to fly), move it to the lower right corner, and then open up Iceweasel and move it to the upper left corner. Fvwm does all that for me, too, so I’ve got my default starting workspace all ready for me when I log on.

(As a side note, it’s annoying when programs don’t conform to standards. One standard tag that X programs are supposed to accept is “geometry,” which governs the size of the window and where it will appear. E.g., I can run “konsole -geometry 445×336+0-0″, which will open konsole exactly 445 pixels by 336 pixels at the lower left corner of the screen. Some programs, like Firefox (of which Iceweasel is a version), don’t accept that, so you’re forced to kluge a solution together in the .fvwm2rc. It’s not hard (you have fvwm wait for a Firefox window to open; when it does, it moves it to where you want it), but it would save several lines of configuration and a lot of headache if they just accepted standard X flags.)

Styles for windows can be altered universally or depending on the window. Want your title bars on the bottom? Or on the side? Fvwm can do it. Want no title bar at all? Fine. Thick borders? Thin borders? Start menu? No start menu? Task bar? None? Task bar that’s only the size of the icons of currently running programs? Digital clock? Analog clock? Both? Neither? Want different focus rules for different windows? The same focus for all windows? Fvwm’s got you covered.

And best of all? No trash cans. When I delete something, I’m not treated like a small child who’s asked for a box of matches. The file is deleted, and it’s dead. (Okay, this is Unix; it’s just unlinked, its blocks aren’t zeroed out, but you get the picture.)

Don’t be fooled by the fact that it’s so configurable, and that by text files; fvwm is capable of some amazing eye candy, if you want it to be. (One of my favorite example is Tavis Ormandy’s desktop, and the fvwm website has plenty more.) But it’s also capable of next to none, the way I prefer it. It’s the way you want it, nothing more and nothing less. That is the Unix Way.

So I’d encourage you all to try out fvwm, if you get the time and the interest. It takes a while to set it up the way you want (unless you use a pre-set theme, of which there are many; fvwm-crystal is a popular one ), but once it is, you’ll be much happier and more effective using your computer, because things will be set up exactly the way it’s easiest for you to work. And that, too, is truly the Unix Way.

Praise be to Christ the King!