Disconcerting: Tom Vilsack at USDA

December 18th, 2008
USDA.jpg

As President-Elect Barack Obama has been very busy selecting key cabinet people and meeting with House and Senate leadership to ensure everyone’s ready on January 20th to begin implementing the Changes he promised, some of us out here on the active lifestyle progressive fringe are not happy with a few of the important choices.

By appointing Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to head the USDA (Department of Agriculture), committed homesteaders, small landholders and organic farmers like me now have to be concerned that efforts by our own government to make us extinct may NOT change when the leadership in DC changes hands.

In the diary Tom “I Heart Monsanto” Vilsack, This One’s For You, kossack OrangeClouds115 lists everything that’s wrong with GMOs and Monsanto Corporation’s tireless efforts to own and control every aspect of agricultural production in the world. Note I said “world,” because it’s not just Big Corn Country like Iowa and Nebraska and Indiana that Monsanto seeks to own with its grotesque genetically-altered cultivars. It’s everyone’s ability to obtain seed and farm the land, from the US to Canada and South America, Africa, Europe and Asia as well as Australia. They want it all, they don’t need it all, and right here in Homesteading-USA we are the front and foremost line against this obscenity.

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Filed under Activities, Farm Policy, Food Production, Food Safety, Homestead, Independence | Comment (1)

Yet Another New Energy Source

December 10th, 2008

Putting the vortex to good use!

FishSchool

As the world economy continues its wide swings mired in uncertainty as well as hope that the necessary changes in the way we energize our world will finally get a real chance for development, scientists at the University of Michigan, funded by the US Department of Energy, have developed a new technology inspired by the way fish swim that can harness the power of slow-moving water.

Most hydropower technologies rely on the action of waves, tides or faster currents caused by dams, and need the water to move as fast as five or six knots in order to operate efficiently. This new system can generate electricity in water that flows less than one knot (about 1 mile per hour), and does not require placing obstructions in or on top of the water as other methods do. Rather, this new system uses cylinders positioned horizontal to the water flow and attached to springs beneath the surface of the waterway. As the water moves past the cylinders, it creates vortices which push and pull them up and down on the springs. It is the mechanical energy in the vibrations that is converted into electricity.

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Filed under Alternatives, Energy, Environment, Water | Comment (1)