It's mighty cold here where we're visiting in upstate NY. Though the snow is melting a little today, it's clearly just going to settle a bit with a foot or two on the ground where it hasn't been plowed away or in direct sun. It reminds me of when I was a very small person living in northern California near Mt. Shasta. My family had a house in a tiny town with a one-screen movie theater that'd get releases several months after all the other theaters had finished with them, one grocery store, and not much else. Every winter it would snow like crazy, for months.

We'd get completely snowed in sometimes, 2 and 3 foot icicles would form slowly on the roof, and we'd mostly eat whatever my Mom had canned during the summer or that my Dad had shot during hunting season and put in the big freezer. There was a lot of agriculture in the area, and the families we knew through our church would keep track of when farms and orchards were done with their harvest and opened their gates to gleaners. The woodstove was kept going all winter.

My Mom, btw, makes the best blackberry jam ever. OMFG. And don't get me started on the clove pear preserves.

When Dad got sick, and after he died but before we moved to Los Angeles for good, other church members would come and chop wood for us in the winter. Neither my Mom nor my older sister were strong enough to do it all themselves and you couldn't be without a well-stocked wood pile in that weather.

These days, they've got a video store in town and residents don't need to chop nearly so much wood. It only snows for a week or two anymore there, if that. It's anecdotal, sure, but the Sierra Nevada snowpack that waters California has been much reduced in recent years, including this one. Either not as much snow has fallen as water administrators had come to expect as normal, or early, warm spring weather has melted it off much earlier than the usual summer months when the state needs it. This year's drought cost state farmers $260 million, and 80,000 acres of farmland went uncultivated.

Anyway, the following is what I'm reading today. Share your top reads and/or memories of the season down below, if you'd be so kind.

- Yes, Rick Warren is an insulting choice.

- The coal companies are poisoning our sushi, and covering the countryside with toxic slurry with their latest spill bigger than the Exxon-Valdez disaster.  

- Ask Iran to free these two AIDS doctors.

- LED holiday light sales are booming, as more people realize that the energy cost savings pay for the higher up front cost of the bulbs.

- Dear California courts, please don't divorce these families.

- The South: their elites hate us for our freedoms, and good wages. Agreed that it's time for a Third Reconstruction.

- More good stuff to read than you can shake a stick at.

There's more...

... But the main reason agrarian life was often deperately impoverished was because farmers were being systematically robbed. American agrarian culture came largely ... from Europe, where our peasant ancestors saw close to half of their production directly expropriated by a protection racket run by feudal warlords. ... American agrarianism developed, by contrast, in a capitalist market economy - under which the crop is frequently worth less than what it costs to produce. This means (if I'm doing my math right) that 100 percent of farmers' production is being expropriated, along with some of their other wealth besides - usually income from another job, or the investment in land with which they started. Such agriculture is indeed an economic miracle, but not for farmers. ... - Brian Donahue, The Essential Agrarian Reader

- I can't argue with disapproval of Obama's cabinet picks for their impacts on food and the environment. Anyway, I only said Vilsack wasn't a completely terrible choice, hardly a ringing endorsement.

- Underwater permafrost is thawing, releasing methane. As a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, the release of this carbon store poses a significant danger of irreversible global climate disruption.

- Taser International says that their product is perfectly safe. Anyone who says otherwise, including county medical examiners, is a damn, dirty liar.

- FBI triaging agents to invesigate financial crimes. (via HuffPo)

- The failed state of Somalia has become a haven for pirates, like the ones who've been holing up in the remote village of Hobyo, where Islamist militants are using their opposition to piracy to win the sympathy of locals.

- Yay, the recording industry won't be suing their customers anymore. They'll just shut off their internet access. Which is better because it isn't a matter of public record.

- Best explanation for our economic crisis yet: the tweakers are crashing.

- Held hostage by an insane Republican minority, California may have to lay off 200,000 state employees.

- Rick Warren, one of the Davos people. Naturally he's also been welcome at the Clinton Global Initiative. The people who run the world need their celebrity cover.

- The Pope says humanity needs to be saved from gays and transsexuals. Huh. And here I was more worried about the hurricanes, the droughts, the pollution, the corporate criminals and the terrible, terrible bears.

- Immigration used to be called Manifest Destiny when it was Europeans doing it.

- Imagine a United States where most people thought it was wrong to cheer on the incipient poverty and starvation of poor people in other countries, even if we didn't like their government. Go ahead, try to imagine it.

There's more...

We're coming to the end of a hundred years or more of devices at were invented in order to save time. What has become of time? Nobody has enough time anymore. ... We are a time-impoverished society. We have lots of material things, but we have no time left. Human time has disappeared, and we're in animal time. Or vegetable time, if you like. Or mineral time. The time of computers. The time of things. Of mechanical devices. ... It's the New Poverty. - Jacob Needleman, professor of philosophy and comparative religions at San Francisco State University, 1999. As quoted in "The Farm as Natural Habitat," edited by Dana L. Jackson and Laura L. Jackson.

- Newsflash: Michelle Obama's hair insufficiently motherly.

- Latinos increasing targeted for hate crimes and beating deaths following on the wave of deliberately stoked anti-immigrant hatred. And we all know what "immigrant" means when Lou Dobbs says it, don't we? He does not refer to college-educated Canadians in country on a work visa.

- Rolling Stone says it's gay people's fault they don't have equal rights. Damn straight, as it were. Because everybody knows that it's the duty of anyone who's oppressed in their corner of the world to beg other people to stop treating them like sh*t.

- In honor of this rescued diary on the consensus regarding the failure of the War on Some Drugs, here are a couple video tutorials on busting crooked cops and concealing your stash.

- If we don't avert climate change, a head IPCC scientist says, the affected communities won't be able to adapt to shifting weather patterns. Going carbon neutral or better, carbon negative, in the industrialized world would save not only our economies, but probably millions of lives.

- There is already a global food crisis, and no joke.

- Canada may have its issues, but wanting a depression economy isn't one of them. They've got a plan on offer to keep the Canadian units of the Big Three afloat until something reasonable can be done next year.

As the Sisters of Mercy might say, "it's a small world and it smells funny I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money take back what I paid for another motherf*er in a motorcade." What's on your mind tonight?

There's more...