WaPo Columnist Catherine Rampell accuses Trump of pushing Americans to become subsistence farmers: I can think of worse things to be

Egg prices are up all over the U.S. primarily due to bird flu, which forced chicken farmers to liquidate their poultry. However, prices will come down soon because if there is anything Americans know how to do, it's mass-producing chickens.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration feels compelled to address this short-term crisis because the President promised to lower food prices. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins off-handly suggested that people should raise their own chickens.

Catherine Rampell, a Washington Post op-ed columnist, jumped on this casual remark, accusing Trump of urging Americans to go back to subsistence farming. I have a few bones to pick with her arguments.

First, the Trump administration is not pushing Americans to become subsistence farmers, and it was disingenuous for Rampell to say that it did.

Second, Ag Secretary Rollins's suggestion that people raise chickens for home consumption is not a bad idea. Rampell pointed out that some cities ban townspeople from raising livestock on residential property, but that's not universally true. People are raising chickens in their backyards all over America.

A young relative of mine raised chickens at his suburban home in upstate New York for several years. His family obtained all the eggs they needed from just six chickens. I ate some of those eggs, which tasted delicious--much better than store-bought eggs.

Rampell's essay throws cold water on the notion that Americans should grow their own food. "The fact that we humans don't have to spend all our time growing our own sustenance, and can instead specialize in other fields where we're more productive is a tremendous victory for our species," she writes. Indeed, Rampell argues, "Our post-agrarian society has allowed Americans to lead richer, healthier, longer, more leisure-filled lives."

I disagree. Over my life, I've known a few people who grew most of their food from backyard gardens.  I think their lives were just as rich as those of urban dwellers who bought all their groceries from Whole Foods. And home gardeners, I feel sure, are as healthy as people who don't cultivate anything besides a marijuana plant.

Let's not go hating on the notion that people should be encouraged to grow some of their food. During World War II, roughly half of American households tended victory gardens, which provided 40 percent of the nation's wartime vegetable supply. During the 900-day siege of Leningrad, people grew gardens in parks and public places to fight off famine.

My father was a wheat farmer and cattleman, and I spent many weary hours driving a tractor on hot summer days. I experienced enough farm life to know I didn't want to be a farmer. I wound up being a college professor.

Nevertheless, if I were given a choice between tending my garden on a sweltering summer afternoon and attending a university faculty meeting, my decision would be easy. I would much rather weed my vegetable patch than sit through a tedious academic discussion in an air-conditioned university conference room. There are worse ways to spend a day than tending a garden.

The U.S is bumbling toward a serious confrontation with Russia over Ukraine

 2024 dawns with America embroiled in a war in Eastern Europe. The United States is fighting a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, and the Russians are winning.

The United States bears a large share of responsibility for this catastrophe. Our government destabilized Ukraine in 2014 when it goaded the Ukrainians into overthrowing a popularly elected pro-Russian president. Within weeks, Russia responded by annexing Crimea. Six years later, Russia invaded Ukraine and now occupies the largely Russian-speaking Donbas region in the eastern region of that wretched country.

The Ukraine war has been a humanitarian disaster. At least a half million people have been killed or maimed in Ukraine, and the country's population has been cut in half as refugees flee to other European countries to escape the fighting. 

Without question, Ukraine is losing its war with Russia. Ukraine's vaunted spring counteroffensive achieved almost nothing. The Ukrainians will never oust Russia from Crimea or the Donbas, and everyone knows it.

Anyone who thinks Russia will tire of the war and simply give up doesn't know Russian history. Hitler besieged Leningrad during World War II for 900 days and never captured the city, even though one million Russians starved to death before the Russians broke the siege.

Americans are mistaken if they think the Ukraine misadventure will not affect them. Our politicians crow that the Ukraine war is a windfall for the United States because the Ukrainians are killing Russians with American weapons while the United States sits safely on the sidelines.  The Ukraine war will weaken Russia, the pundits say, but they are wrong.

Russia's army is larger today than it was before the Ukraine war began, and it is the United States, not Russia, that is tiring of the war. Congress is balking at the prospect of limitless funding for the Ukraine project, and our European allies are beginning to wish they had never followed our cognitively challenged President into the briar patch that is Ukraine.

Americans will pay a price for for our feckless and arrogant foreign policy. President Putin will have his revenge against us. He is tirelessly working toward the day when the US dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency. We can expect some act of retribution on a scale that will shock us.

There will be a reckoning for our government's behavior, likely before the November 2024 election.

Always Leave a Rat a Way Out: An Old Guy's Misgivings About the War in Ukraine

 When I was a young man practicing law in Alaska, my senior partner gave me some advice I never forgot. Several times during my legal career, I had an opportunity to completely devastate a nefarious party that had pressed a frivolous claim against one of my clients.

"I've got you now," I told myself as I made plans not only to defeat my opponent but to humiliate and destroy him. In these cases, my senior partner always cautioned prudence and restraint. "Richard," he would say, "always leave a rat a way out."

And he was right. I learned that a party pressed to the wall almost always lashes out viciously and behaves recklessly to the detriment of everyone--good guys and bad guys alike.

So far, President Putin's war against Ukraine has not gone well for the Russians. To almost everyone's surprise, Ukraine has beaten back the Russian invasion, inflicting heavy casualties. The Ukrainians have destroyed countless Russian tanks, airplanes, and even the flagship of Russia's Black Sea fleet.  The Ukrainians have been so exhilarated by their battlefield successes that President Zelensky promises to evict the Russians from Crimea, where they have been since 2014 (and centuries before that).

What fun! In America, the elite media crows with delight. How delicious to rub Mr. Putin's face in the mud.  

We should remember, however, what George Orwell said about war. "One of the most horrible features of war," he observed, "is that all the war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, come invariable from people who are not fighting."

With a few rare exceptions, the reporters who work at the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNBC are not being shot at. If the Ukraine war escalates, their children won't be drafted. Their paychecks, restaurants, and expense accounts won't be affected. The beaches of Martha's Vinyard and the Hamptons will be pristine and peaceful no matter what happens to the Russians and the Ukrainians.

We should remember, however, that Russia is a nuclear power. We may sneer at Putin's threats to unleash tactical nuclear weapons. We may comfort ourselves that Russia is merely a regional power, unlike the mighty United States, which is supposedly the most powerful military power in the world.

Nevertheless, we should always leave a rat a way out. 

Our diplomats and political leaders may consider Ukraine an American playground that can be manipulated like a child's toy. Perhaps they have not read about Stalin's Holodomor or the savagery of the Russians and the Germans in the blood lands of Ukraine and Belarus during the Second World War.

Of course, I'm some old guy living in Flyover Country. What do I know compared to the policymakers and political strategists who got their degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown?

However, I've done a little reading, and I recall that Hitler woefully underestimated the Russians when he launched Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941. The Germans pushed the Russian army back to the outskirts of Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Moscow, but in the end, Russian soldiers showed up in the streets of Berlin in May 1945. I'll bet the Germans wished they had let Russia alone.

And Napolean, one of the world's greatest military strategists, lost his entire army when he foolishly invaded Russia in 1812. By the time that adventure ended, little Nappie had lost ninety percent of his army, with the survivors reduced to cannibalism.

So let the United States strip our nation's arsenals to give high-tech weapons to the Ukrainians.  Let's see how it works out. As for me, I don't want my grandchildren fighting in Europe in a war that got out of control because the western powers didn't leave a rat a way out. 

Let's you and him fight!