Holland Family Farms to debut new soap line at June 15 Holly Springs Farmers' Market

    The Holland family of Marshall County has been farming near Hudsonville since 1899. Jesse Holland was editor of The Daily Mississippian some years back (say 1994?), and now covers the Supreme Court for the Associated Press. They are going to be on the Marshall County courthouse Square Saturday, June 15, from 7 a.m. to noon as part of the county farmer’s market.
    They have a line of goat’s milk soap. I have not tried it but they are getting some raves on their Facebook page. Click here for their webpage.

“We have been told that the annual Holly Springs Farmers’ Market will begin this Saturday, June 15th on the historic Holly Springs Courthouse Square, from 7 am until noon.
“We will be at the market with some of our produce such as onions, collard greens, swiss chard and fresh herbs. Check back here tomorrow on our Facebook Fan Page for a complete list of our produce we’ll have for Saturday!
“A new addition to our stand this year will be our 1899 Goat’s Milk Soap. We will have our 12 varieties on hand for purchase. Our goat milk soap is great to use for that dry, itchy summer skin! We’ve had great comments about the soap, so we hope y’all will try it! ‘Your skin will thank you!’ ”

    Another post lists herbs and produce available: “Collard Greens, Mustard Greens, Swiss Chard, Green Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Squash, Potatoes, Onions, Garlic, Mint, Rosemary, Parsley, Basil, Chives and Lavender. As the growing season progresses, we will have more produce available!”

Jesse Holland

    The AP reporter Jesse Holland now lives in Washington. He is the author of Black Men Built the Capitol: Discovering African-American History In and Around Washington, D.C.
    If I get up there tomorrow maybe I'll be able to take a couple of photos and write a short feature.

Legal education program to highlight what we learn about law from the movies

J. Howard Sunderman

    Retired Ohio appeals court judge Judge J. Howard Sunderman, now a professor at the University of Cincinnati Law school, is the presenter for a Kentucky Bar Association CLE. His program is called CLE at the Movies.
    So what have the movie taught us about law and police investigations?

1. During all police investigations, it will be necessary to visit a strip club at least once.
2. The ventilation system of any building is the perfect hiding place. No one will ever think of looking for you in there, and you can travel to any other part of the building you want without difficulty.
3. Should you wish to pass yourself off as a German officer, it will not be necessary to speak the language. A German accent will do.
4. A man will show no pain while taking the most ferocious beating, but will wince when a woman tries to clean his wounds.
5. Kitchens don't have light switches. When entering a kitchen at night, you should open the fridge door and use that light instead.
6. If staying in a haunted house, women should investigate any strange noises in their most revealing underwear.
7. Cars that crash will invariably burst into flames.
8. Stripping to the waist can make a man invulnerable to bullets.
9. Any person waking from a nightmare will sit bolt upright and pant.
10. All bombs are fitted with electronic timing devices with large red readouts so you know exactly when they're going to go off.
11. When confronted by an evil international terrorist, sarcasm and wisecracks are your best weapons.
12. Laptop computers are powerful enough to override the communication systems of an invading alien civilization.
13. Most people keep a scrapbook of newspaper clippings – especially if any of their family or friends has died in a strange boating accident.
14. All computer disks will work in all computers, regardless of software.
15. Police departments give their officers personality tests to make sure they are assigned a partner who is their total opposite.
16. When they are alone, foreigners prefer to speak English to each other.
17. If you are a hero, you never face charges for manslaughter or criminal damage despite laying entire cities to waste by your actions.
18. You can always find a chainsaw when you need one.
19. Any lock can be picked by a credit card or a paper clip in seconds – unless it's the door to a burning building with a child trapped inside.
20. When driving a car, it is normal to look not at the road but rather at the person sitting beside you or in the back seat for the entire journey.
21. Taxi drivers don't require exact or even approximate payment – the first bill you pull from your pocket is always correct.
22. Honest and hard-working policemen are traditionally gunned down three days before retirement.
23. A single match will be sufficient to light up a room the size of Yankee Stadium.
24. The Chief of Police will always suspend his star detective – or give him forty-eight hours to finish the job.
24. Television and radio news bulletins usually contain a story that affects the plot at that precise moment.
25. You're likely to survive any battle in any war unless you make the mistake of showing someone a picture of your sweetheart from back home.
26. If you need to reload your gun, you will always have more ammunition even if you weren't carrying any before.
27. It doesn't matter if you are heavily outnumbered in a martial arts fight – your enemies will wait patiently to attack you one by one by dancing around in a threatening manner until you have knocked out each of their predecessors.

    The Kentucky Bar does a good job with lawyer education. Their bar convention is a working convention reasonably priced, versus the Mississippi Bar Convention, which is designed as a week-long vacation for the whole family. The Kentucky Bar Convention CLE is top-notch.
    In addition to having a good education program at the annual convention, the Kentucky Bar offers at no charge an annual two-day Kentucky Law Update. In other words, free CLE.

Curtis Wilkie

    The Kentucky Bar Association convention is June 19-21 in Louisville, Ky.
    Oh, and Ole Miss journalism professor Curtis Wilkie will be there, with a one-hour CLE on his book, The Fall of the House of Zeus, on Dickie Scruggs and the Mississippi judicial bribery scandal.

Pope's call to eliminate food waste won't feed a single poor person

    Pope Francis has just declared the wasting of food equivalent to "stealing from the poor." It's a statement that reflects a poor understanding of economics.
    I remember as a child being told to eat everything on my plate and not to throw away a sandwich. "Think of all the starving children in India," we were told. Today I think children are told that it's the Africans who are starving.
    Finally we got wiser and would tell the sermonizer to "just put it in a box and mail it to them."
    Certainly there is plenty of food wasted in the United States each year. A recent study said 40 percent of American food production is "wasted," whether in the fields, on the way to and from market, in processing, or thrown away uneaten or spoiled. The study says that if we reduced food waste by 15 percent we could feed 25 million more people each year. Apparently unanswered in the study is exactly how this food is to be delivered to these people.
    Food is money. When we waste food we waste money. So we shouldn't waste food. But time is money, too. When we waste time we waste money. So sometimes we make choices and throw away food money to get time money; or manufacturers waste 10 cents worth of food to save a dollar in labor and processing costs.
    The fact is that food is cheap in relation to the cost of reducing food waste. Restaurants could cut their serving sizes and offer free seconds, which would probably help all of our waistelines. But somebody would have to cook those seconds. Somebody would have to serve those seconds. And somebody would have to clean the extra plate. It's far more efficient -- and cheaper -- to just put enough food for a hearty appetite in the first place, even it it increases food waste.
    I keep a bell pepper on hand for cooking, particularly when they are in season and low in price. Sometimes I don't need a pepper and it goes bad and into the garbage. I could just wait until I was sure I needed the pepper, hop in my car, drive to the store and get a nice, fresh, bell pepper. But what is the cost in doing this, in terms of not only time, but gas? Isn't it better and cheaper to just accept that a few bell peppers a year will have to be discarded?
    If everyone in the world stopped wasting food tomorrow the price of food might drop, thus benefiting the poor. But guess what happens next? Farmers cut back on production on their more marginal land, since the crop price would have dropped lower than the cost of production, and prices go back up again.
    I try to buy pasta on sale at 50 cents per pound. I frequently cook about four ounces more than I really need, so roughly 12.5 cents worth of pasta goes in  the garbage can. It's cheaper to cook four extra ounces than it is to measure the exact amount, marry partially used boxes, etc. And I know there will be plenty to go around. But if the pope wants the 12.5 cents of pasta that we throw out on a regular basis I'll put it in a Ziploc bag and refrigerate it until he has a chance to come pick it up. Of course, the Ziploc bag costs about six cents, so he'll need to reimburse me for that.
    Eliminating food waste will not put one ounce of extra food on the plates of the poor. If eliminating food waste would feed the starving, then when Black Oak Arkansas disbanded every poor person in the world should have gotten a guitar. They didn't.

You decide -- is this baby trying to read the newspaper or not?

    I have some old videos that I downloaded to my computer years ago. I've used Windows Movie Maker to turn a lot of my raw video into various Youtube-like shorts, but I've got a one hour-long video that is essentially six months or so out of our lives that's just been sitting there. I decided to see what was on it today.
    I won't bore you with a long home movie, but I did produce a 90-second short featuring my son Ash, who was then perhaps 10 months old, trying hard to read the newspaper. I read most of my news on the Internet these days, but back then I was an avid newspaper reader. It seems clear to me that my son is trying to figure out what all the fuss is about.
    The video was shot at my wife's maternal grandmother's house. I decided to pull away and get a little film on everyone in the room, including Jinny's grandmother. It likely is the only video that there is of Lucille Burkhalter, who died a couple of years ago after a prolonged illness.
    So I guess there are two morals to this story. First, get a little film on your loved ones as time goes by. Some day you will cherish it. Second, based on Ash's action's with the newspaper, be aware that the children are watching -- even when they are 10 months old!

The beauty of federalism: Blue States free to raise taxes while Red States make cuts

    The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story about how Blue states are raising taxes and spending pretty dramatically while Red States are holding the line.
    My personal opinion is that these Blue States are making a mistake. There has been a slow seepage of high-income people and businesses from Blue States due to high taxes. Raising them even more is likely to drive off more.
    But, on the other side of the coin, many people are glad to pay more in taxes when accompanied by better government services. Unfortunately, many of the Blue States, such as California, have a history of squandering tax money.
    What's the right choice? I have an opinion but I don't know for sure. But the beauty of federalism is that different states can do different things and hopefully learn from each other's mistakes. If higher taxes and spending -- presumably accompanied by better infrastructure and education -- end up attracting new businesses we'll know that the Blue State strategy is best. If the Blue States continue to hemorrhage jobs and taxpayers we'll know they have made a mistake. If Red States continue to slowly attract business and taxpayers we'll know they've done it right.
    I think it worthy of note that many Blue State residents simply would never more to a Red State no matter how high their taxes were. Most people from Southern California or Massachusetts simply are not going to be happy living in Mississippi or Alabama. They might like Naples, Fla., though. People aren't going to pack up and move overnight. This is a decade-by-decade process.
    What we have is federalism at its finest. Different states adopting dramatically different policies. Not only does it give American citizens more choices, but as a state we can look around at what works and doesn't work elsewhere and act accordingly.

Read the latest news about unfettered immigration and you can smell treason in the air

    As the United States Congress attempts to essentially do away with any limitations on immigration whatsoever with a bill that will legalize virtually anyone and make all non-citizens eligible for welfare and free health care, it might be a good time to look at the latest immigration news from around the world.
    In Great Britain, a soldier was beheaded in broad daylight by at least two Muslim extremists. Why? Because the British government was stupid enough to allow people who did not love Britain or who did not fit in with the British to immigrate to that county. We'll soon find out whether the killers were on welfare, but my guess is that they were.
    Of, and just for fun news, an English town has decided to stop displaying the English flag, on the grounds that Muslims might be offended, since England participated in the Crusades.
    Sweden has now endured its third night of rioting in immigrant neighborhoods, relating to the death of a knife-wielding man in Husby, a suburb from which native Swedes have been run off. The riots are made worse by the irresponsible decision of the police not to use machine guns to quell the disorder. The problem? Once again, like Britain, Sweden allowed massive numbers of immigrants who didn't fit in, weren't very employable, and didn't have a true love and allegiance to Sweden to enter the country. They are reaping what they have sown.
    Right here in the good, ol' United States, a Chechen immigrant with ties to the Boston Marathon bombers was shot and killed by law enforcement officers after he attacked them during an interview. Ibragim Todashev was no stranger to violence; he recently put an American citizen in the hospital as a result of a dispute over a parking space.
    Now here's an interesting question for you. How many Chechan immigrants have you even heard of in this country? For me the answer is three. All three have turned out to be murderous Islamic extremists or thugs. But the liberals tell us we must pretend there is no difference in people from different countries, that every potential immigrant must be assumed to be an altar boy. Just because 100 percent of the Chechans we've heard of have turned out to be ultra-violent thugs is no reason to subject other Chechans to increased scrutiny. Oh, no!
    Make no mistake, I support legal immigration. I think that as a society we need as many really smart immigrants who speak English and who love our country as we can get. But these immigrants must be able to support themselves, and be admitted on the basis of how much they will contribute to our society, not based on how cheaply they will pick a pint of strawberries to enrich some dirtbag berry farmer. We mustn't allow prospective failures to enter the country, as all they will do is blame their failure on American society and start killing people. Or maybe well be lucky and they won't kill; they'll just steal, or maybe just suck all the money out of our welfare system.
    There is a bipartisan group of U.S. senators known as the Gang of Eight essentially trying to eliminate America's borders and provide welfare benefits to the world. These men are nothing less than traitors to the American people. There will be another election in 18 months, and I seriously doubt the Gang of Eight can pack the voter rolls with enough illegal voters in that time to save themselves and their allies.
    So I'm looking forward to seeing a few of these guys turned out of office in 2014, provided one of their immigrant allies doesn't murder, behead, or blow me up before then.

If you're sitting on unused Marriott Rewards certificates, book your stay by May 16

    I've said for some time that the Marriott Rewards program is one of the best for casual travelers who want to score free lower-end hotel rooms with a minimum number of stays.
    The Marriott Megabonus, offered three times a year, offers most members a free-night certificate for each two paid nights. In the past these certificates have been limited to Category 1-4 hotels. So in New Orleans we could get a free room at the Springhill Suites in the Warehouse District, but not at the full Marriott on Canal Street. This suited us just fine.
    Earlier this year Marriott announced a pretty massive "devaluation," whereby many of its Cat 4 hotels were moving to Cat 5. This leaves us without an acceptable hotel option in New Orleans, Little Rock, and elsewhere. The silver lining is that the changes don't take effect until May 16 -- that's tomorrow!
    So if you're sitting on some of these certificates -- Jinny has five of them -- now would be a good time to book a possible trip. I'm studying the Ole Miss "Away" calendar and trying to think of a good time to visit New Orleans this fall. If you don't book now, your options may be limited.
    The "Loyalty Lobby" blog has a good explanation of these changes, along with advice to book rooms one night at a time so one can make changes.
    On the good news front, this summer's Megabonus offer for most is for certificates that are good for Cat 1-5 hotels. So we can still earn the certificates and they still have real value, allowing Marriott to retain its status as the top loyalty program for casual travelers, in my view.