Courtesy of Pascal Fervor, commenting at Liberty's Torch, we find this object lesson in reality. Click the image for a larger view.
Next time a climate alarmist tries to pull "The seas are rising!" on you, show them that picture, and ask them to explain it. They won't, of course - because they can't, unless they admit that sea levels on the whole are not rising.
Thank you, ancient Romans!
Peter
I was interested to read that an ancient course of the Ganges River in India, some 2,500 years old, has been discovered.
Earthquakes, caused by the shifting of Earth’s tectonic plates, have the potential to transform the face of the world. Now, for the first time, scientists have evidence that earthquakes can reroute rivers: It happened to the Ganges River 2,500 years ago.
. . .
In a July 2016 study, Dr. Michael Steckler ... had previously reconstructed the tectonic plate movements — gigantic slowly moving pieces of Earth’s crust and uppermost mantle — that account for earthquakes experienced in the Ganges Delta.
His models showed that the likely source of earthquakes in the region is more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) away from the sand volcanoes that Chamberlain and her colleagues found. Based on the large size of the sand volcanoes, the quake must have been at least a 7 or an 8 magnitude — approaching the size of the Great 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
. . .
About 50 miles (85 kilometers) away from the sand volcanoes, the scientists also found a large river channel that filled with mud at roughly the same time. This finding indicates that 2,500 years ago, the course of the river dramatically changed. The proximity of these events in both time and space suggests that a massive earthquake 2,500 years ago is the cause of this rerouting of the Ganges.
There's more at the link.
The now-demonstrated fact that a major earthquake can change the course of even a huge river like the Ganges, moving it 50 to 100 miles away from its previous course, made me think hard. I don't know that we've ever seen the like in North America; most of our rivers have changed course through a combination of erosion and silting (as far as I know, anyway). However, what might happen if something like the New Madrid Fault let go in a big way?
Earthquakes that occur in the New Madrid Seismic Zone potentially threaten parts of seven American states: Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and to a lesser extent Mississippi and Indiana.
The 150-mile (240 km)-long seismic zone, which extends into five states, stretches southward from Cairo, Illinois; through Hayti, Caruthersville, and New Madrid in Missouri; through Blytheville into Marked Tree in Arkansas. It also covers a part of West Tennessee near Reelfoot Lake, extending southeast into Dyersburg. It is southwest of the Wabash Valley Seismic Zone.
Again, more at the link.
What's more, the New Madrid Fault runs slap bang underneath the Mississippi River. If it really let go, it could easily produce an earthquake with a magnitude of 7 to 8 - it already has in the not too distant past. If it were big enough, and lasted for long enough, what might that do to the biggest river on our continent? If a waterway that big were to be displaced by 50 to 100 miles east or west, how much of our economy, our cities and our population would it take with it? And what would happen to anything in the way?
It's a fascinating subject for speculation. I wonder if it might make an interesting novel - perhaps set in older times, around the Civil War or Wild West period, as alternate history? There were powerful earthquakes along the Fault in 1811-12. What if they were repeated, say, 60 or 70 years later, at even greater intensity?
Hmmm . . .
Peter
A few articles caught my eye in recent days. They illustrate eloquently how unprepared Americans as a whole are for a true disaster-level emergency.
First, Brandon Smith looks at mass starvation.
Because we have lived in relative security and economic affluence for so long the idea of ever having to go without food seems “laughable” to many people. When the notion of economic collapse is brought up they jeer and call it “conspiracy theory.”
Compared to the Great Depression, the US population today is completely removed from agriculture and has no idea what living off the land means. These are not things that can be learned in a few months from books and YouTube videos; they require years of experience to master.
. . .
The greater problem in terms of famine is not that individual Americans are not aware of the threat; many of them are. The problem is that our infrastructure and logistical systems are designed to fail and there’s not much the average citizen can do about it.
. . .
Growing food, hunting food and foraging food are all supplemental measures, especially in the first years of any crisis event. Without a primary emergency supply most people will not make it. Food storage has been a mainstay of civilization for thousands of years for a reason – It works. When larger secure communities are established then agriculture can return and self sustaining production makes food storage less important. Until then, what you have in your basement or your garage is the only thing that’s going to keep you alive.
There's more at the link.
Next, Michael Totten analyzes the very real risk of a catastrophic earthquake in the Pacific Northwest - one that may be many times worse than anything any of us have ever experienced.
Roughly 100 miles off the West Coast, running from Mendocino, California, to Canada’s Vancouver Island, lurks the Cascadia Subduction Zone, where the Juan de Fuca Plate is sliding beneath the North American Plate, creating the conditions for a megathrust quake 30 times stronger than the worst-case scenario along the notorious San Andreas, and 1,000 times stronger than the earthquake that killed 100,000 Haitians in 2010.
. . .
Scientists scrambled for core samples of the ocean floor just off the American coast and found turbidites—layers of tsunami debris—that date back millennia and, most recently, again, to 1700, revealing a cycle that repeats itself every 300 to 600 years. The Cascadia Subduction Zone is not quiet, after all: it triggers catastrophic megathrust quakes, on schedule. “A fault that ruptures with this big of an earthquake every few hundred years is ragingly active,” says Yumei Wang, a geotechnical engineer at the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI).
A 9.0 megathrust quake is too powerful even to be measured on the now-dated Richter scale.
. . .
“No community on the planet is adequately prepared for a major subduction zone earthquake,” observes Dan Douthit, spokesman for the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management (PBEM). The Northwest, however, and especially Oregon, is nerve-rackingly further behind than it should be. Nothing built here before 1995—which includes the vast majority of all structures, including skyscrapers, bridges, and hospitals, as well as houses—was engineered to withstand it.
Again, more at the link.
However, the really scary part comes when one puts the warnings from the two articles above into joint perspective: in other words, how they interact with and affect each other. A massive natural disaster like a Pacific Northwest earthquake might - probably will - cut almost all transport links from the West Coast to states further inland, and vice versa. Emergency relief won't be able to reach disaster zones, and refugees won't be able to move away from them. We won't be able to get at the vast agricultural and processing resources of our Western states, which together supply more than half of our fruit and vegetables; and we won't be able to help those that produce them, meaning they'll probably be unable to produce more for a significant length of time - years rather than months.
What's more, the sudden need to reallocate transport resources - trains, 18-wheelers, etc. - to disaster relief, plus the loss of transport resources in the disaster zone, will result in a sudden and unavoidable collapse of distribution networks throughout the rest of the country. We may have plenty of food for everyone: but if it can't be moved from field to processing facilities to distributors to consumers, how are we going to get our hands on it?
Too many of us are prone to say, "Well, that's just fear-mongering. There's no guarantee anything like that will happen." Unfortunately, there is such a guarantee. Read the article about the Pacific Northwest earthquake potential, and look at what scientists and professionals are saying about its inevitability. It's scary.
Remember "nine meals from anarchy"? That well-known saying appears to have been first used by Alfred Henry Lewis in 1896. In 1932 a New Jersey newspaper noted:
How nicely civilization has become balanced is shown by the easily perceived fact that we are never more than nine meals away from anarchy. Throw an impenetrable wall around this metropolitan zone of ten million persons, prevent the people from receiving a supply of food and water for three days, and our vaunted civilization goes on the scrap heap.
In a more recent article titled with that well-known saying, Jeff Thomas pointed out:
Importantly, it’s the very unpredictability of food delivery that increases fear, creating panic and violence. And, again, none of the above is speculation; it’s a historical pattern – a reaction based upon human nature ... At that point, it would be very likely that the central government would step in and issue controls to the food industry that served political needs rather than business needs, greatly exacerbating the problem.
There's also the question of the duration of an emergency. If it's [a major nation-wide catastrophe], then the effects will be felt for not just years, but decades. There's no way we can stockpile enough supplies to cater for something like that. Those who can farm, growing their own food, will have an edge: but everyone else who survives will be doing their best to raid farms for food, so keeping it is likely to be a very serious problem. Certainly, if we are not already growing at least some of our own food, we're very unlikely to be able to grow enough from scratch to survive. We lack the knowledge, tools, seeds, and experience to do so. Tempting advertisements to buy a certain brand of seed, or a particular tool, or land on which to establish an "emergency farm", are likely to benefit only those selling them. Realistically, most of us can afford to plan, and stockpile supplies, for an emergency lasting from a few weeks to a year. Anything beyond that . . . well, it's unlikely we'll live through it. That's just the way it is.
Nothing in the articles linked above leads me to think differently. Perhaps all of us should re-evaluate our own emergency preparations with that in mind.
Peter
There's been an enormous, emotional reaction to South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem's revelation that she shot an errant dog after it had killed a flock of chickens and then appeared to turn on her. If you've missed the story, you can read about it here.
My first point is, if the incident is as she described it, she did exactly the right thing. One of her dogs had inflicted death and destruction on another person's animals. There's no "miracle cure" for that; once an animal starts down that path, it'll continue unless and until it's stopped the hard way. I've seen it many times before, and twice have assisted a friend to shoot packs of dogs that had "graduated" to chasing cattle, biting at their legs and throats, trying to bring one down to kill and eat it.
My second point is that far too many people today have lost sight of the basic facts of life. They're living in a cocoon, an emotional fuzzy ball of fluff that's insulated them from reality. As "Ragin Dave" put it at Liberty's Torch:
The people freaking out about this are people who have never once been outside of their protective bubble. Sometimes real life demands hard choices. When I read the story, I just shrugged and went “Yeah. So?” I think it would do this country a world a good if many of those pampered bubble dwellers had to actually see where their food comes from, and perhaps harvest that food themselves. The first time I helped harvest and butcher an animal I became much more appreciative of the food on my plate, and the people who work to put it there. I think that lesson needs to be taught to an entire generation these days.
True dat. Life is full of hard choices. Killing an errant, dangerous animal is just one of them - and by no means the most difficult.
Choices are often hard in the abstract, but a heck of a lot easier in the concrete. It's easy to say, "Oh, I could never shoot someone!" when asked what one would do if a criminal attacked one's spouse or child. When it actually happens - when one's spouse or child is subject to a brutal, relentless attack that can only result in her death or serious injury - it's a whole lot easier to justify shooting, and even killing, the attacker. That also tends to change one's whole outlook on life. Shooting an errant, dangerous animal is part and parcel of the same response.
I remember a young lady I knew back in South Africa. She was one of the anti-violence, peace-and-rainbows-and-unicorn-farts people, nice enough as a person, but without much of a clue about the darker side of the world. When I invited her to join a class I was presenting on defensive firearm use, she recoiled in horror, as if I were some sort of monster. (I was more than a little surprised that her husband, a shooter and hunter and outdoor type, had married her; but he obviously saw beneath the surface to the real person, who hadn't yet revealed herself.)
That changed in the small hours of the morning she found an intruder climbing in through the window of her two-year-old daughter's bedroom. According to her (somewhat bemused) husband, she stormed into the room (pushing him aside in the process), pepper-sprayed the intruder in the eyes, waited until he'd put his hands up to his face, kicked him hard in the unmentionables, and proceeded to beat him unmercifully about the head with her daughter's favorite wooden stool (so hard that she broke it). According to him, when the cops arrived, they stood around scratching their heads and saying things like "Ma'am, why did you call us? You were doing just fine on your own!" Kipling warned us about the female of the species . . . and I suspect he was right, particularly when the female in question is the mother of a young child.
I heard about the incident at five o'clock that morning, when she called, woke me out of a sound sleep, and demanded to join my next shooting class, at once if not sooner. She learned well, and persuaded her husband (who, already a shooter, needed little persuasion) to buy her a Colt Commander lightweight .45 pistol, which she proceeded to carry everywhere with almost religious fervor. She'd learned the hard way that life happens, whether we like it or not - and she was determined to make sure it worked out in her (and her child's) favor next time. The rest of her (former) circle of friends were horrified at her transformation, needless to say, and promptly turned their backs on her; but her husband (and yours truly) were all in favor. It did their marriage no end of good, too.
So, I fail to see why all the fuss about Governor Noem's actions with respect to her dog. She did what was necessary, when it was necessary. I have no idea whether or not she's a good governor, as I live a long way from her state and have never had the need to do any research about her: but the story makes me more likely than not to consider her favorably, as a politician who's walked the walk as well as talked the talk. Readers who know more about her can tell the rest of us in Comments if that's a reasonable assessment.
Peter
I wrote about the need for reserve supplies of water just last week. It's emerged that my country of origin, South Africa, appears set to become a laboratory for emergency water supplies - what works, what doesn't, and how to cope when the taps aren't working.
(That photograph also illustrates what I said earlier about using five-gallon buckets as water containers.)
Two articles summarize what's happening in two of South Africa's largest cities. I won't post excerpts from them here, but I recommend you follow the links below and read them for yourself.
In case you were wondering whether something like that could happen here, it already has in at least two cities over the past decade: Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi. There may well be others of which I'm not aware. If readers can provide more examples, please do so in Comments.
Anyway, if you're still hesitant about the need to provide at least some reserve water supplies for your family, I hope these reports will convince you. It's not a theoretical risk: it's very real. As our elderly, creaking infrastructure breaks down more often, we're going to see it more often, too.
Peter
First published in 2006, Michael Pollan's book "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals" exposed the hugely artificial, compromised nature of our First World food chain. It's been a source of enlightenment and controversy ever since.
The blurb reads:
What should we have for dinner? Ten years ago, Michael Pollan confronted us with this seemingly simple question and, with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, his brilliant and eye-opening exploration of our food choices, demonstrated that how we answer it today may determine not only our health but our survival as a species. In the years since, Pollan’s revolutionary examination has changed the way Americans think about food. Bringing wide attention to the little-known but vitally important dimensions of food and agriculture in America, Pollan launched a national conversation about what we eat and the profound consequences that even the simplest everyday food choices have on both ourselves and the natural world. Ten years later, The Omnivore’s Dilemma continues to transform the way Americans think about the politics, perils, and pleasures of eating.
I'm still in the process of reading the book. I'm finding it fascinating, and learning a lot as I proceed. I thought I'd start you off with the strange tale of how the humble corn plant has come to dominate so much of our food production and consumption.
Air-conditioned, odorless, illuminated by buzzing fluorescent tubes, the American supermarket doesn’t present itself as having very much to do with Nature. And yet what is this place if not a landscape (man-made, it’s true) teeming with plants and animals?
I’m not just talking about the produce section or the meat counter, either—the supermarket’s flora and fauna. Ecologically speaking, these are this landscape’s most legible zones, the places where it doesn’t take a field guide to identify the resident species. Over there’s your eggplant, onion, potato, and leek; here your apple, banana, and orange. Spritzed with morning dew every few minutes, Produce is the only corner of the supermarket where we’re apt to think “Ah, yes, the bounty of Nature!” Which probably explains why such a garden of fruits and vegetables (sometimes flowers, too) is what usually greets the shopper coming through the automatic doors.
Keep rolling, back to the mirrored rear wall behind which the butchers toil, and you encounter a set of species only slightly harder to identify—there’s chicken and turkey, lamb and cow and pig. Though in Meat the creaturely character of the species on display does seem to be fading, as the cows and pigs increasingly come subdivided into boneless and bloodless geometrical cuts. In recent years some of this supermarket euphemism has seeped into Produce, where you’ll now find formerly soil-encrusted potatoes cubed pristine white, and “baby” carrots machine-lathed into neatly tapered torpedoes. But in general here in flora and fauna you don’t need to be a naturalist, much less a food scientist, to know what species you’re tossing into your cart.
Venture farther, though, and you come to regions of the supermarket where the very notion of species seems increasingly obscure: the canyons of breakfast cereals and condiments; the freezer cases stacked with “home meal replacements” and bagged platonic peas; the broad expanses of soft drinks and towering cliffs of snacks; the unclassifiable Pop-Tarts and Lunchables; the frankly synthetic coffee whiteners and the Linnaeus-defying Twinkie. Plants? Animals?! Though it might not always seem that way, even the deathless Twinkie is constructed out of…well, precisely what I don’t know offhand, but ultimately some sort of formerly living creature, i.e., a species. We haven’t yet begun to synthesize our foods from petroleum, at least not directly.
If you do manage to regard the supermarket through the eyes of a naturalist, your first impression is apt to be of its astounding biodiversity. Look how many different plants and animals (and fungi) are represented on this single acre of land! What forest or prairie could hope to match it? There must be a hundred different species in the produce section alone, a handful more in the meat counter. And this diversity appears only to be increasing: When I was a kid, you never saw radicchio in the produce section, or a half dozen different kinds of mushrooms, or kiwis and passion fruit and durians and mangoes. Indeed, in the last few years a whole catalog of exotic species from the tropics has colonized, and considerably enlivened, the produce department. Over in fauna, on a good day you’re apt to find—beyond beef—ostrich and quail and even bison, while in Fish you can catch not just salmon and shrimp but catfish and tilapia, too. Naturalists regard biodiversity as a measure of a landscape’s health, and the modern supermarket’s devotion to variety and choice would seem to reflect, perhaps even promote, precisely that sort of ecological vigor.
Except for the salt and a handful of synthetic food additives, every edible item in the supermarket is a link in a food chain that begins with a particular plant growing in a specific patch of soil (or, more seldom, stretch of sea) somewhere on earth. Sometimes, as in the produce section, that chain is fairly short and easy to follow: As the netted bag says, this potato was grown in Idaho, that onion came from a farm in Texas. Move over to Meat, though, and the chain grows longer and less comprehensible: The label doesn’t mention that that rib-eye steak came from a steer born in South Dakota and fattened in a Kansas feedlot on grain grown in Iowa. Once you get into the processed foods you have to be a fairly determined ecological detective to follow the intricate and increasingly obscure lines of connection linking the Twinkie, or the nondairy creamer, to a plant growing in the earth someplace, but it can be done.
So what exactly would an ecological detective set loose in an American supermarket discover, were he to trace the items in his shopping cart all the way back to the soil? The notion began to occupy me a few years ago, after I realized that the straightforward question “What should I eat?” could no longer be answered without first addressing two other even more straightforward questions: “What am I eating? And where in the world did it come from?” Not very long ago an eater didn’t need a journalist to answer these questions. The fact that today one so often does suggests a pretty good start on a working definition of industrial food: Any food whose provenance is so complex or obscure that it requires expert help to ascertain.
When I started trying to follow the industrial food chain—the one that now feeds most of us most of the time and typically culminates either in a supermarket or fast-food meal—I expected that my investigations would lead me to a wide variety of places. And though my journeys did take me to a great many states, and covered a great many miles, at the very end of these food chains (which is to say, at the very beginning), I invariably found myself in almost exactly the same place: a farm field in the American Corn Belt. The great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket turns out to rest on a remarkably narrow biological foundation comprised of a tiny group of plants that is dominated by a single species: Zea mays, the giant tropical grass most Americans know as corn.
Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.
Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget’s other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the thing together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive golden coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget “fresh” can all be derived from corn.
To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)—after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for your beverage instead and you’d still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it’s in the Twinkie, too.) There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well—everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in Produce on a day when there’s ostensibly no corn for sale you’ll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce’s perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself—the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built—is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.
And us?
. . .
Americans eat much more wheat than corn—114 pounds of wheat flour per person per year, compared to 11 pounds of corn flour. The Europeans who colonized America regarded themselves as wheat people, in contrast to the native corn people they encountered; wheat in the West has always been considered the most refined, or civilized, grain. If asked to choose, most of us would probably still consider ourselves wheat people (except perhaps the proud corn-fed Midwesterners, and they don’t know the half of it), though by now the whole idea of identifying with a plant at all strikes us as a little old-fashioned. Beef people sounds more like it, though nowadays chicken people, which sounds not nearly so good, is probably closer to the truth of the matter. But carbon 13 doesn’t lie, and researchers who have compared the isotopes in the flesh or hair of North Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn. “When you look at the isotope ratios,” Todd Dawson, a Berkeley biologist who’s done this sort of research, told me, “we North Americans look like corn chips with legs.” Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar.
So that’s us: processed corn, walking.
. . .
Early in the twentieth century American corn breeders figured out how to bring corn reproduction under firm control and to protect the seed from copiers. The breeders discovered that when they crossed two corn plants that had come from inbred lines—from ancestors that had themselves been exclusively self-pollinated for several generations—the hybrid offspring displayed some highly unusual characteristics. First, all the seeds in that first generation (F-1, in the plant breeder’s vocabulary) produced genetically identical plants—a trait that, among other things, facilitates mechanization. Second, those plants exhibited heterosis, or hybrid vigor—better yields than either of their parents. But most important of all, they found that the seeds produced by these seeds did not “come true”—the plants in the second (F-2) generation bore little resemblance to the plants in the first. Specifically, their yields plummeted by as much as a third, making their seeds virtually worthless.
Hybrid corn now offered its breeders what no other plant at that time could: the biological equivalent of a patent. Farmers now had to buy new seeds every spring; instead of depending upon their plants to reproduce themselves, they now depended on a corporation. The corporation, assured for the first time of a return on its investment in breeding, showered corn with attention—R&D, promotion, advertising—and the plant responded, multiplying its fruitfulness year after year. With the advent of the F-1 hybrid, a technology with the power to remake nature in the image of capitalism, Zea mays entered the industrial age and, in time, it brought the whole American food chain with it.
. . .
Naylor has no idea how many bushels of corn per acre his grandfather could produce, but the average back in 1920 was about twenty bushels per acre—roughly the same yields historically realized by Native Americans. Corn then was planted in widely spaced bunches in a checkerboard pattern so farmers could easily cultivate between the stands in either direction. Hybrid seed came on the market in the late 1930s, when his father was farming. “You heard stories,” George shouted over the din of the tractor. “How they talked him into raising an acre or two of the new hybrid, and by god when the old corn fell over, the hybrid stood straight up. Doubled Dad’s yields, till he was getting seventy to eighty an acre in the fifties.” George has doubled that yet again, some years getting as much as two hundred bushels of corn per acre. The only other domesticated species ever to have multiplied its productivity by such a factor is the Holstein cow.
“High yield” is a fairly abstract concept, and I wondered what it meant at the level of the plant: more cobs per stalk? more kernels per cob? Neither of the above, Naylor explained. The higher yield of modern hybrids stems mainly from the fact that they can be planted so close together, thirty thousand to the acre instead of eight thousand in his father’s day. Planting the old open-pollinated (nonhybrid) varieties so densely would result in stalks grown spindly as they jostled each other for sunlight; eventually the plants would topple in the wind. Hybrids have been bred for thicker stalks and stronger root systems, the better to stand upright in a crowd and withstand mechanical harvesting. Basically, modern hybrids can tolerate the corn equivalent of city life, growing amid the multitudes without succumbing to urban stress.
You would think that competition among individuals would threaten the tranquility of such a crowded metropolis, yet the modern field of corn forms a most orderly mob. This is because every plant in it, being an F-1 hybrid, is genetically identical to every other. Since no individual plant has inherited any competitive edge over any other, precious resources like sunlight, water, and soil nutrients are shared equitably. There are no alpha corn plants to hog the light or fertilizer. The true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants.
Iowa begins to look a little different when you think of its sprawling fields as cities of corn, the land, in its own way, settled as densely as Manhattan for the very same purpose: to maximize real estate values. There may be little pavement out here, but this is no middle landscape. Though by any reasonable definition Iowa is a rural state, it is more thoroughly developed than many cities: A mere 2 percent of the state’s land remains what it used to be (tall-grass prairie), every square foot of the rest having been completely remade by man. The only thing missing from this man-made landscape is…man.
. . .
There are many reasons for the depopulation of the American Farm Belt, but the triumph of corn deserves a large share of the blame—or the credit, depending on your point of view.
When George Naylor’s grandfather was farming, the typical Iowa farm was home to whole families of different plant and animal species, corn being only the fourth most common. Horses were the first, because every farm needed working animals (there were only 225 tractors in all of America in 1920), followed by cattle, chickens, and then corn. After corn came hogs, apples, hay, oats, potatoes, and cherries; many Iowa farms also grew wheat, plums, grapes, and pears. This diversity allowed the farm not only to substantially feed itself—and by that I don’t mean feed only the farmers, but also the soil and the livestock—but to withstand a collapse in the market for any one of those crops. It also produced a completely different landscape than the Iowa of today.
“You had fences everywhere,” George recalled, “and of course pastures. Everyone had livestock, so large parts of the farm would be green most of the year. The ground never used to be this bare this long.” For much of the year, from the October harvest to the emergence of the corn in mid-May, Greene County is black now, a great tarmac only slightly more hospitable to wildlife than asphalt. Even in May the only green you see are the moats of lawn surrounding the houses, the narrow strips of grass dividing one farm from another, and the roadside ditches. The fences were pulled up when the animals left, beginning in the fifties and sixties, or when they moved indoors, as Iowa’s hogs have more recently done; hogs now spend their lives in aluminum sheds perched atop manure pits. Greene County in the spring has become a monotonous landscape, vast plowed fields relieved only by a dwindling number of farmsteads, increasingly lonesome islands of white wood and green grass marooned in a sea of black. Without the fences and hedgerows to slow it down, Naylor says, the winds blow more fiercely in Iowa today than they once did.
Corn isn’t solely responsible for remaking this landscape: It was the tractor, after all, that put the horses out of work, and with the horses went the fields of oats and some of the pasture. But corn was the crop that put cash in the farmer’s pocket, so as corn yields began to soar at midcentury, the temptation was to give the miracle crop more and more land. Of course, every other farmer in America was thinking the same way (having been encouraged to do so by government policies), with the inevitable result that the price of corn declined. One might think falling corn prices would lead farmers to plant less of it, but the economics and psychology of agriculture are such that exactly the opposite happened.
Beginning in the fifties and sixties, the flood tide of cheap corn made it profitable to fatten cattle on feedlots instead of on grass, and to raise chickens in giant factories rather than in farmyards. Iowa livestock farmers couldn’t compete with the factory-farmed animals their own cheap corn had helped spawn, so the chickens and cattle disappeared from the farm, and with them the pastures and hay fields and fences. In their place the farmers planted more of the one crop they could grow more of than anything else: corn. And whenever the price of corn slipped they planted a little more of it, to cover expenses and stay even. By the 1980s the diversified family farm was history in Iowa, and corn was king.
(Planting corn on the same ground year after year brought down the predictable plagues of insects and disease, so beginning in the 1970s Iowa farmers started alternating corn with soybeans, a legume. Recently, though, bean prices having fallen and bean diseases having risen, some farmers are going back to a risky rotation of “corn on corn.”)
With the help of its human and botanical allies (i.e., farm policy and soybeans), corn had pushed the animals and their feed crops off the land, and steadily expanded into their paddocks and pastures and fields. Now it proceeded to push out the people. For the radically simplified farm of corn and soybeans doesn’t require nearly as much human labor as the old diversified farm, especially when the farmer can call on sixteen-row planters and chemical weed killers. One man can handle a lot more acreage by himself when it’s planted in monoculture, and without animals to care for he can take the weekend off, and even think about spending the winter in Florida.
. . .
The great turning point in the modern history of corn, which in turn marks a key turning point in the industrialization of our food, can be dated with some precision to the day in 1947 when the huge munitions plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, switched over to making chemical fertilizer. After the war the government had found itself with a tremendous surplus of ammonium nitrate, the principal ingredient in the making of explosives. Ammonium nitrate also happens to be an excellent source of nitrogen for plants. Serious thought was given to spraying America’s forests with the surplus chemical, to help out the timber industry. But agronomists in the Department of Agriculture had a better idea: Spread the ammonium nitrate on farmland as fertilizer. The chemical fertilizer industry (along with that of pesticides, which are based on poison gases developed for the war) is the product of the government’s effort to convert its war machine to peacetime purposes. As the Indian farmer activist Vandana Shiva says in her speeches, “We’re still eating the leftovers of World War II.”
Hybrid corn turned out to be the greatest beneficiary of this conversion. Hybrid corn is the greediest of plants, consuming more fertilizer than any other crop. For though the new hybrids had the genes to survive in teeming cities of corn, the richest acre of Iowa soil could never have fed thirty thousand hungry corn plants without promptly bankrupting its fertility. To keep their land from getting “corn sick” farmers in Naylor’s father’s day would carefully rotate their crops with legumes (which add nitrogen to the soil), never growing corn more than twice in the same field every five years; they would also recycle nutrients by spreading their cornfields with manure from their livestock. Before synthetic fertilizers the amount of nitrogen in the soil strictly limited the amount of corn an acre of land could support. Though hybrids were introduced in the thirties, it wasn’t until they made the acquaintance of chemical fertilizers in the 1950s that corn yields exploded.
. . .
On the day in the 1950s that George Naylor’s father spread his first load of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, the ecology of his farm underwent a quiet revolution. What had been a local, sun-driven cycle of fertility, in which the legumes fed the corn which fed the livestock which in turn (with their manure) fed the corn, was now broken. Now he could plant corn every year and on as much of his acreage as he chose, since he had no need for the legumes or the animal manure. He could buy fertility in a bag, fertility that had originally been produced a billion years ago halfway around the world.
Liberated from the old biological constraints, the farm could now be managed on industrial principles, as a factory transforming inputs of raw material—chemical fertilizer—into outputs of corn. Since the farm no longer needs to generate and conserve its own fertility by maintaining a diversity of species, synthetic fertilizer opens the way to monoculture, allowing the farmer to bring the factory’s economies of scale and mechanical efficiency to nature. If, as has sometimes been said, the discovery of agriculture represented the first fall of man from the state of nature, then the discovery of synthetic fertility is surely a second precipitous fall. Fixing nitrogen allowed the food chain to turn from the logic of biology and embrace the logic of industry. Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.
Corn adapted brilliantly to the new industrial regime, consuming prodigious quantities of fossil fuel energy and turning out ever more prodigious quantities of food energy. More than half of all the synthetic nitrogen made today is applied to corn, whose hybrid strains can make better use of it than any other plant. Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn it into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food. This shift explains the color of the land: The reason Greene County is no longer green for half the year is because the farmer who can buy synthetic fertility no longer needs cover crops to capture a whole year’s worth of sunlight; he has plugged himself into a new source of energy. When you add together the natural gas in the fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn, you find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it—or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.) Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer the Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy for every calorie of energy invested. From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it’s too bad we can’t simply drink the petroleum directly.
Ecologically this is a fabulously expensive way to produce food—but “ecologically” is no longer the operative standard. As long as fossil fuel energy is so cheap and available, it makes good economic sense to produce corn this way. The old way of growing corn—using fertility drawn from the sun—may have been the biological equivalent of a free lunch, but the service was much slower and the portions were much skimpier. In the factory time is money, and yield is everything.
There's a whole lot more in the book to explore and think about. It's certainly opened my eyes to the fundamentally unnatural way in which we feed ourselves today - unnatural in the sense that if our food production were suddenly to be left to nature alone, without scientific and technological assistance, most of us would starve to death within a matter of weeks.
It also exposes the dangerous fallacy that if society goes to hell in a handbasket, preppers and survivalists will be able to grow their own food on secluded farms to keep themselves alive. That sort of mixed-production family farm no longer exists in most cases, and where it does, it usually has to be subsidized by some sort of outside income. It's simply no longer economical to grow or raise everything one needs out of one's own resources. It can be done, but it takes so much effort to do so without the aid of technology (which won't be available in a long-drawn-out crisis or emergency) that it's effectively impossible for all except experienced farmers - of whom we have very few these days. Those who succeed in doing so will almost certainly not be growing or raising everything they need, anyway, and will have to trade for things they can't produce themselves - but who will be producing those things in such a situation?
Food for thought indeed.
Peter
Gabriel M. posts on YouTube:
I was parked in McDonald's parking lot in LOS ANGELES (Ladera Heights) drinking my coffee and this giant hawk came from nowhere and landed on my windshield. It's saw my baby kitten from who knows how far away, tried to atrack it through glass and wouldn't leave even as i drove away through the strip mall. Someone at the home depot nearby saw it on my hood as I was driving it around the strip mall said it was a pigeon hawk but i confirmed its actually a Red Tailed Hawk.
That sure is one frustrated hawk!
Lucky for the kitten that windscreen could stand up to the impact . . .
Peter
The Bird Photographer Of The Year competition has announced its 2023 winners. There are some incredible photographs among them. Here, for example, is the overall winner, showing a female falcon driving a brown pelican away from her nest. (Click any image to be taken to a full-size version of the photograph on the Web.)
Here's a mother owl with her almost-grown chick.
And here's a Gibson's albatross flying over the ocean.
There are dozens more at the link. Click over there to see them all.
Peter
The BBC reports:
The latest research suggests that our skin is not just a mirror for our lifestyles – reflecting the effects of years of smoking, drinking, sun and stress – and hinting at our inner health. No, in this new upside-down-world, the body's largest organ is an active participant in our physical wellbeing. This is a strange new reality where wrinkles, dry skin and sunspots cause ageing, instead of the other way around.
In 1958 ... [a] major project was quietly conceived. The Baltimore Longitudinal Study was to be a scientific investigation of ageing with a daring and rather unorthodox premise ... The research followed thousands of adult men (and later, women) for decades, to see how their health developed – and how this was affected by their genes and the environment.
Just two decades in, scientists had already made some intriguing breakthroughs, from the discovery that less emotionally stable men were more likely to be diagnosed with heart disease to the revelation that our problem-solving abilities decline only slightly with age.
But one of the most striking findings confirmed what people had long suspected: how youthful you look is an impressively accurate expression of your inner health. By 1982, those men who had been assessed as looking particularly old for their age at the beginning of the study, 20 years earlier, were more likely to be dead. This is backed up by more recent research, which found that, of patients who were judged to look at least 10 years older than they should, 99% had health problems.
It turns out skin health can be used to predict a number of seemingly unconnected factors, from your bone density to your risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases or dying from cardiovascular disease. However, as the evidence has begun to add up, the story has taken a surprise twist.
. . .
As the largest organ in the body, the skin can have a profound impact. The chemicals released by diseased and dysfunctional skin soon enter the bloodstream, where they wash around, damaging other tissues. Amid the ensuing systemic inflammation, chemicals from the skin can reach and harm organs that seem entirely unrelated, including your heart and brain.
The result is accelerated ageing, and a higher risk of developing the majority of – or possibly even all – related disorders. So far, aged or diseased skin has been linked to the onset of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and cognitive impairment, as well as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.
. . .
... there is direct evidence that [using sunscreen and moisturizing the skin] does reduce inflammation – and that it may help to prevent dementia ... adding moisture back is not particularly complicated, whatever cosmetics adverts seem to suggest. And in the field of ageing, this simple intervention is showing remarkable results.
There's more at the link.
I'm intrigued by this research because, like many others, I was exposed to particularly harsh conditions for my skin during my military service. When you're deployed, nobody's going to provide sunscreen or moisturizer for your skin - at least, no military organization of which I've ever heard has done so. You provide your own, or get sunburned and wizened like a dried-up prune. (Yes, there are other similes. No, I'm not going to mention them in a family-friendly blog like this!)
When I look at my catalog of health problems in later life (it's a depressing list), and read this article, I find that many of the illnesses and conditions it identifies are among my issues. I wonder if there's a correlation between years of one's skin being baked and fried and rained on and frozen in the field, and health in later life? It sounds as if there may be. Might veterans be able to use this evidence to get more medical assistance for such issues as they get older? How would one prove the connection?
Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say . . .
Peter
I'd never heard of watering the foundations of your home, but apparently in Texas (at least, this part of Texas) it's a known thing.
It’s a simple upkeep that many may be unaware of. Ensuring your home’s foundation is well-taken care of is a task often overlooked but quite crucial.
“If you continue to let it go, you can be going from a $5 to $8,000 repair to a $50,000 repair,” AAA Guardian Foundation Repair Owner Jared Golden said.
And, no home can stand without a strong foundation.
It’s as simple as watering near the foundation for 25 to 30 minutes at a time, Golden said. In stage one drought restrictions, your foundation is exempt ... “We recommend putting a soaker hose down somewhere between 12 and 18 inches from the house and then water probably three to four times a week.”
With the record heat and dry land, Golden said that if you start to see dirt pull away from your house and cracks inside or outside doors starting to not close well, you might have a problem ... “Everything that’s sitting on that soil that dried out is going to fall with it. And so that’s what happened. And that’s why I would tell you to continue to water around your house.”
There's more at the link.
I haven't noticed any major cracks around our house foundation, but I did see them at the concrete slab of our new shed in the back yard. I guess I'd better get watering . . . and brace myself for higher water bills. Oh, well!
Peter
British photographer Andy Maher captured this outstanding image of a kestrel diving straight at his lens. Click it for a larger view.
The BBC reports:
Andy Maher, from Hayle, told BBC Radio Cornwall he was out taking photos of birds in flight when he saw the kestrel hovering above him.
He said the bird then dived towards him and swooped away at the last second.
Mr Maher took a burst of photographs of the action and when he looked at them later he was "quite blown away by what I'd taken" ... "You can get a bird in flight which isn't always difficult... but to get an action shot, it can be very rare, particularly a shot like that where a bird is coming right at you. It's just a once in a lifetime image."
There's more at the link.
I found Mr. Maher's Web site, and was impressed by his excellent bird photographs. Check it out for yourself. He's apparently self-taught, and I'd say he's mastered his craft very well.
Peter
Dr. Bill England shared this tale with an e-mail list of which I'm also a member. He gave me permission to publish it here, for which my grateful thanks.
There are innumerable folk remedies for removing ticks. Some work better than others. To whit:
Almost every Friday/Saturday night in the ER we would hear a roaring pickup engine, the squeal of locked-up brakes and tires, and within seconds have a drunk guy dash in through the ambulance entrance yelling, "We got Buck in the truck, and he's hurt bad!" This is a Buck story.
For the twenty years I practiced in Idaho, I would have several people come in every summer with ticks attached to their bodies, naturally wanting the ticks removed. It's actually pretty easy to do (if you do it correctly) and I've shared my technique with the List. But Idaho is high desert with low humidity, so we have few ticks and many people have never had to remove one.
But Missouri is another story and ticks are abundant. As I told patients, I've pulled off more ticks from one of my dogs in one day in May in Missouri, then my total experience practicing in Idaho. So Missourians are familiar with ticks and can come to blows arguing the finer points of tick removal.
My ER was in Jefferson City, the state capital and on the south bank of the Missouri River. The Missouri is heavily channelized and levied, and huge barges come down the river day and night, so it is no place to recreate. But the tributary rivers like the Moreau, Gasconade, and Osage are both lovely and very popular. There is even a nice state park at the confluence of the Osage and the Missouri, and people enjoy camping, fishing or jugging for catfish, and drinking mass quantities of ethanol.
Buck and his pals were camping at that park one fine Saturday evening in June, pretending to fish and succeeding in getting really hammered. About midnight Buck staggered down to the edge of the Osage to recycle the beer he had been swilling. But in the light of the campfire and nearly full moon, he was quite dismayed to see a fat black tick embedded in Mr. Happy.
He weaved back to the campfire, shook his Johnson, and stated the nature of his medical emergency. His equally drunk colleagues inspected the tick and dick with concern. The brain trust provided a variety of opinions and proposed interventions.
The first consultant exclaimed, "A tick--a tick he cannot abide alcohol. You take this here Everclear and douse that damn tick and the M--F-- will back right out." He anointed the area with Everclear and the group watched expectantly. But the tick never moved.
The second drunken expert opined "A tick can't take fire. You take the cherry of this here Camel and put it on his ass and he is gone!" He took his cigarette and touched the glowing tip to the poor little arachnid.
Of course, enough Everclear remained to provide abundant fuel. Buck watched in horror as his favorite body part erupted in flames. He ran screaming into the waters of the Osage, hoping to extinguish the weiner roast.
With much pleading and yet more booze, his pals finally coaxed him out of the river and carried him to the Ford F-150. They proceeded at an excessive rate of speed to my ER, slid into the ambulance bay, and ran in screaming "We got Buck in the truck, and he's hurt bad!"
The team wheeled a trauma stretcher out to the pickup, slid Buck onto it, and brought him into the trauma bay. I found a roaring drunk young white male with NO pubic hair and the front of his Fruit of the Looms burned beyond recognition. He had first and second degree burns of his genitalia, thighs, and lower abdomen. And he had a tick on the end of his very red penis.
After getting Buck calmed down and reassuring him that his woody had not been burned to ash, we cleaned, debrided, and dressed his burns, updated his tetanus booster, and I gently removed the tick. Still alive, kicking, but pretty happy from all that Everclear!
Buck was decidedly less happy, but did make a full recovery.
I think I've met Buck, and his friends, too. They're legion, and they're all over the place . . .
Peter
I'm still laughing after reading this report.
In cities around the world, anti-bird spikes are used to protect statues and balconies from unwanted birds - but now, it appears the birds are getting their own back.
Dutch researchers have found that some birds use the spikes as weapons around their nests - using them to keep pests away in the same way that humans do.
It shows amazing adaptability, biologist Auke-Florian Hiemstra says.
"They are incredible fortresses - like a bunker for birds," he told the BBC.
. . .
Mr Hiemstra's research started in the courtyard of a hospital in Antwerp, Belgium, where an enormous magpie nest was found containing some 1,500 spikes.
"For the first few minutes, I just stared at it - this strange, beautiful, weird nest," Mr Hiemstra explained.
He says the spikes were pointing outwards, creating a perfect armour around the nest.
A trip to the hospital roof confirmed it - about 50m (164 ft) of anti-bird spike strips had been ripped off the building - all that remained was the trail of glue.
. . .
Mr Hiemstra says ... there are several aspects to the nest architecture that suggest the birds are using the spikes as protection.
One is their placement - the spikes are on the roof of the nests, he says, "so they aren't just making a roof - it's a roof with thorny material for protection".
Birds often use thorny branches to protect their nests, but humans aren't fans of these kinds of bushes and trees, so birds living in built up areas go for the next best thing, Mr Hiemstra says.
It shows a remarkable adaptability to their environment, he adds, and also a determination to protect their nests, as the glue used to attach the spikes to buildings is strong and the spikes not easy to remove.
There's more at the link, including photographs of the nests.
I know magpies are intelligent critters, but I wouldn't have thought they were smart enough to turn our anti-bird measures against us by protecting their nests with them. It must have been a lot of hard work for the birds to defeat the glue holding down the spikes, and free them. Clearly, they figured out in advance that it would be worth the effort.
Peter
A tip o' the hat to reader Deborah H. for sending me the links to the excerpts below.
It seems that the World Health Organization is in bed with the climate change scaremongers, and they're all trying to leverage health care as yet another front in their assault on people's rights and freedoms. The Gateway Pundit quotes Michele Bachmann, who's at the World Health Assembly in Switzerland.
WHO Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who lied to the world about the COVID19 pandemic origins and mortality rate, is demaning the WHO hold “sovereignty” over all member nations due to the global warming climate crisis.
. . .
Today was the Sustainable Roundtable at the World Health Assembly on Climate Change. And so, believe it or not, the centerpiece of today was forcing all these delegates to listen to none other than John Kerry from the United States. He was introduced by his daughter, Dr. Vanessa Kerry, who, by the way, is the head of the Global Seed Foundation, and she is a recipient of millions of dollars from the Clinton Health Initiative. So there’s this incestrous relationship of organizations and money. But the big thing today is this the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Ghebreyesus, said that the climate crisis is a health crisis. He said the climate crisis is their priority. Climate is the number one mission of health care. So one of the doctors in charge of the environment and climate at the World Health Organization said very clearly that we were focused on infectious diseases, but now we’re going to be moving away from infectious diseases, and we’re going to focus now on climate change.
So all of these climate change people who saw they were going to establish global government through climate change, now they see after the pandemic, and that works so well for the World Health Organization to try to control people’s lives.
Now they see that the platform, if you will, for global government is coming through health care. So the climate change people are jumping square in. They were given the centerpiece stool today, if you will. They were all cheered by the head, Tedros Ghebreyesus, saying the same thing that John Kerry was saying. And John Kerry said, well, I never thought about health care before. I never thought health care had anything to do with climate change until my daughter Vanessa, his 46 year old daughter, taught him to turn on the light bulb and realize that really the centerpiece of health care is climate change and that climate change causes the health care problems in the world.
There's more at the link.
It's all a gigantic lie from start to finish, of course. Whenever you see anyone, or any group, or any official body, demanding control over people's and nation's lives in order to deal with some threat or other, you can be sure they're not trying to increase our safety. No, they're trying to increase their control over us. What's more, whenever the "threat to safety" they're pontificating about has passed, you may be sure they won't surrender the control over us they've gained by exploiting it. Freedoms once lost are almost never restored unless those wanting them are willing to dig in and fight for it.
The problem is, there are many in the USA who are blinded by corporate and political propaganda. They're so indoctrinated into believing that "the government is here to help us" and "the science is settled" and "we can trust our leaders" that they no longer even question such demands. Instead, they demand that the rest of us, those with our eyes open, must abandon our rights and freedoms and knuckle under to those trying to dominate us and destroy our society.
There are things that once unloosed can no longer be restrained. A federal police force is one of those. A concession of liberty to the prospect of safety is another. These things were warned of, but discounted when convenience was threatened.
Should we have a police force that can cross state lines to arrest bandits who found peace and safety in states where they’d committed no crimes? Yes, do it, why not? Should we have a police force that can protect people of one political party from answering for crimes and vigorously investigate the slightest abnormality of those in another political party? No, of course not. But they’re the same thing, the same question asked in different ways. A government that can give you all the answers can make all the rules.
Should we institute a seat belt law to protect people from their own bad decisions? Yes, do it, why not? Should we empower the health organizations to lockdown people in their homes to protect them from spreading a dangerous virus, even if they don’t have it? No, of course not. But they’re the same question asked in different ways. A government that can protect you from yourself can demand anything.
The roots of everything horrible come from minor concessions of liberty for safety’s sake. Those who see the roots when they appear and rave on about the principles that are being violated are discounted and ridiculed as being reactionary and paranoid. Yet, a decade or two later all of the histrionics are justified, but by then, who cares?
The pandemic was a test that Americans failed and now, a few short years later, the WHO is taking that test as a green light to proceed with a world government where local police forces and medical systems will be used to trap and enslave you to achieve climate change goals. Climate Change, they say, is the root of all health issues in the world and so all 194 nations who are signatories to the WHO treaty being negotiated in Geneva, Switzerland, home of the WEF and other nefarious global actors, will forfeit their national sovereignty in order to allow the WHO to make and enforce health-related restrictions on the world’s populations.
. . .
Now you can say: “To hell with that,” but it won’t change anything unless you change, unless you are committed to keep it from happening and now would be a good time to start making that clear. Build up your resolve, set your mind that at the fall test run, you bring everything to the table. It’s time to stop being good little boys and girls.
Again, more at the link.
Whenever anyone says to you that you "must" obey because "it's the law", remember that the law is merely another tool in the toolbox of those who seek to ride roughshod over our rights, our freedoms, and our constitution. Congress could pass a law tomorrow dictating that the sky is red, rather than blue, and providing for draconian punishments for anyone who insists that it's really blue: but that law would not change the facts, not affect the truth in any way. Just because something is a law doesn't mean that it's right, or worthy, or factual, or justifiable. As nations and peoples have learned over many, many centuries, "might makes right" as far as dictators are concerned; and laws they can enforce using police and (if necessary) military powers, whether or not they're ethically or morally justifiable, are just one more example of that.
That's why the WHO wants new powers that they can enforce over member nations, even if that means disregarding the legal, constitutional rights of their citizens. That's why climate change activist groups and leaders are jumping on the same bandwagon and arguing for the same thing. They all see it as yet another tool in their toolbox to seize and retain power over us, regardless of whether or not we agree with them.
And if we allow them to get away with it, we'll have handed over our future to those who care only about their own - not ours.
Peter
Courtesy of Watts Up With That, here's a little fact of which I wasn't aware.
From the beginning of natural gas pipelines, compressors were powered by natural gas. That made sense because the pipelines were full of natural gas, so pipelines powered themselves. But gradually, compressors were electrified so slowly that, to follow the parable, they, like the frog, didn’t notice what was about to happen.
. . .
The anti-fossil fuel movement started pressuring North Texas cities and towns to require electric compressors on natural gas pipelines based on arguments that the air pollution from natural gas-powered compressors was causing increased asthma and other health problems. In 2012, the Denton City Council invited me to participate in their project to rewrite city ordinances that regulate natural gas drilling and pipelines.
I distinctly recall a public meeting in which I said that electrifying natural gas pipeline compressors was a terrible idea that could affect the availability of natural gas when it was needed most, such as during bad weather events. Unfortunately, I lost that debate, and the City of Denton changed its city ordinances to require electric natural gas compressors within its city limits. Similar ordinances quickly spread to other municipalities within the state of Texas and eventually to other natural gas-producing states that pipelines pass through.
As shown in the map above, the use of electric compressors on gas pipelines has now become so pervasive that the entire interstate natural gas pipeline network is effectively compromised. An interruption in the generation of electricity can cause some natural gas pipelines to shut down, which interrupts other parts of the natural gas pipeline grid and potentially shuts down multiple pipelines.
An early indicator of the problems caused by the electrification of natural gas pipelines was Winter Storm Uri which hit Texas and much of the nation in February 2021. This was detailed in my article “The Texas power grid was minutes from collapsing in 2021 and declaring an emergency in 2022.”
Here’s what happened. The entire state of Texas was hit by Winter Storm Uri, which resulted in all 254 counties in the state experiencing below-freezing temperatures, with much of the state temperatures in the teens and below zero in some areas for almost an entire week. Freezing temperatures affected all forms of electrical generation, starting with frozen wind turbines, freeze-offs at natural gas wells, and even problems with coal-fired generators and nuclear power generation plants.
As the temperatures dropped and people turned up their heat, the demand for electricity exceeded the supply, and rolling blackouts were ordered to maintain the integrity of the electrical grid. The grid operator, ERCOT, ordered rolling blackouts to balance supply and demand. Unfortunately, some local electricity companies did not have good information on the location of natural gas wells and compressor stations, so some blackouts shut down natural gas wells and pipeline compressors. In turn, this reduced the natural gas supply to gas-fired power generators. This caused a death spiral in electricity generation to the point where the Texas grid was within 4 minutes and 37 seconds of completely collapsing.
There's more at the link. I highly recommend that you read the whole thing.
Was this an innocent mistake, where concern about pollution gave rise to a "solution" that inadvertently increased risks to natural gas supply? Or was it a deliberate "stealth" move by anti-energy crusaders that was intended to cause disruptions to our energy supply at a critical time?
I know they say that "correlation is not causation", and I know I should "never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity". Nevertheless, the ongoing campaign against fossil fuels - including natural gas, most recently resulting in the banning of gas stoves in new construction in New York State - suggests that there may be some fire to back up the smoke, if you know what I mean.
Next question: Now that this vulnerability is known, how many municipalities are reversing their previous regulations and allowing gas pipeline companies to use natural-gas-powered compressors on their pipelines within municipal areas? If they aren't, I suggest it would lent additional weight to the "deliberate" argument.
Peter
Armstrong Economics reminds us that the much-ballyhooed "climate emergency" is no such thing. It's a cynical ploy designed to grab more and more power over us in the name of a non-existent crisis.
The Global Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL) is an independent foundation founded in 2019 by emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and science journalist Marcel Crok. “The climate view of CLINTEL can be easily summarized as: There is no climate emergency.” Over 1540 experts respected in their independent fields have joined CLINTEL to spread the message that there is no scientific data to indicate that climate change is [anything other than] political propaganda.
“Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. In particular, scientists should emphasize that their modeling output is not the result of magic: computer models are human-made. What comes out is fully dependent on what theoreticians and programmers have put in: hypotheses, assumptions, relationships, parameterizations, stability constraints, etc. Unfortunately, in mainstream climate science most of this input is undeclared.
“To believe the outcome of a climate model is to believe what the model makers have put in. This is precisely the problem of today’s climate discussion to which climate models are central. Climate science has degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs, not on sound self-critical science. We should free ourselves from the naïve belief in immature climate models. In future, climate research must give significantly more emphasis to empirical science.”. . .
We MUST question why governments across the world are fighting tooth and nail to eliminate fossil fuels and our way of life as we know it. Why are we following the World Economic Forum’s 2030 agenda to save a planet that does not need saving? Why are we allowing our elected officials to spend endless funds on an imaginary cause? Everything has a cycle, including the weather. So while the climate may be changing, there is absolutely nothing humans can do to alter the course of nature, and those stating otherwise are lying.
There's more at the link.
So, when you hear politicians and pressure groups demanding that we sacrifice this, or that, or the other, in the name of "climate change" . . . remember that they're all lying through their teeth.
Peter
From author Kit Sun Cheah on Gab this morning:
It is 420 day during a partial solar eclipse, so I am absolutely confident that today will be totally peaceful and absolutely nothing weird will happen at all, especially in Florida.
Yeah, riiiiiight!!!
Peter
A few weeks ago I wrote about the declining availability of water in the western and southwestern states. Now it looks as if Wall Street is getting involved, and trying to prevent locals from realizing what's going on until they've created a fait accompli.
Situated in the Sonoran Desert near the Arizona-California border is the tiny rural town of Cibola -- home to roughly 300 people, depending on the season.
Life here depends almost entirely on the Colorado River, which nourishes thirsty crops like cotton and alfalfa, sustains a nearby wildlife refuge and allows visitors to enjoy boating and other recreation.
It's a place few Americans are likely to have heard of, which made it all the more surprising when investment firm Greenstone Management Partners bought nearly 500 acres of land here. On its website, Greenstone says its "goal is to advance water transactions that benefit both the public good and private enterprise."
But critics accuse Greenstone -- a subsidiary of the East Coast financial services conglomerate MassMutual -- of trying to profit off Cibola's most precious and limited resource: water. And it comes at a time when Arizona's allocation of Colorado River water is being slashed amid a decades-long megadrought.
"These companies aren't buying up plots of land because they want to farm here and be a part of the community, they're buying up land here for the water rights," said Holly Irwin, a Cibola resident and La Paz County district supervisor.
Those water rights could soon benefit Queen Creek, Arizona, a growing Phoenix suburb about 200 miles away. Last September, the town approved the transfer of a $27 million purchase of Colorado River water from Greenstone's properties in Cibola, though the deal is now mired in a lawsuit filed by La Paz, Mohave and Yuma counties against the federal Bureau of Reclamation for signing off on the water transfer.
. . .
"Greenstone is going to make millions at the expense of what it's going to do to our communities in the future and the precedence it's going to set," said Irwin. "We are in the midst of an extreme drought, our communities need this water. At some point, the state has a responsibility to protect the people that are here and to protect our water and not cater to those that are buying property for the water rights to make millions off of it to benefit metropolitan areas."
. . .
In neighboring Mohave County, Supervisor Travis Lingenfelter describes what he sees as a battle for the future of Colorado River communities, adding that a number of East Coast investment firms have been trying to get in on the action.
"These companies are actually pretty savvy in that they come out West, purchase and pick up cheap rural agricultural land, they sit on it for a little while and then they're trying to sell the water," Lingenfelter said. "I don't think that they should be allowed to profiteer off of Arizona's finite resources ... If they're coming after a portion of our only water supply on the river for many of our communities, we have to fight it."
It's not just Arizona. East Coast firms have bought up thousands of acres of irrigated land across the Southwest, local officials told CNN. Water Asset Management, a New York-based investment firm, has become one of the biggest players in the field, with purchases in Arizona, California, Colorado and Nevada as well as pending deals in New Mexico and Texas.
. . .
"Water Asset Management has engaged in a number of different purchase methods to keep their transactions unknown to many of the local jurisdictions," Mueller said. "It's a very unpopular move to come from New York and invest in irrigated agriculture with the intent to dry it up and watch it blow away."
There's more at the link.
The companies involved will, of course, argue that what they're doing is entirely legal. Trouble is, just because something is legal doesn't mean that it's morally right. As the famous dictum reminds us:
The companies will, again, doubtless argue that morals are an abstract, a value rather than a commodity that can be quantified in gallons, or dollars and cents. They deal in the latter, and leave the former to religion and philosophy - knowing that there's so much dissent and disagreement in both disciplines that they'll almost certainly never have to answer for the rights and/or wrongs of what they've done.
That's what the makers of Thalidomide relied on when trying to weasel out of the catastrophic damage their drug had caused. It's what Pfizer, Moderna and others will almost certainly rely upon when confronted with the equally grave (if not worse) damage caused by their mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. "We were following the science and the law. That's all anyone can ask of us!" That's their attitude. Sadly, they never think of another well-known maxim: "It's not just about what you can do, but also whether or not you should do it."
I suspect that increasingly, agricultural and riparian communities across the country are going to be confronted by this commercial conundrum. Their "liquid asset", water, is today liquid in more ways than one. Water's merely the latest commodity to be "financialized". However, without it, communities and farms die - and that's a whole new ball game.
Peter
