grouchyfarmer

The Magic Bullet Syndrome

Magic bullets. You’ve seen them. We all have. The pill that claims it will melt away pounds while letting you gorge on Big Macs and never exercise. The miracle wrist bands you can get for just $19.95 that will make your joint pain vanish. The miracle nutrition supplement that will let you throw away your glasses, or keep you from getting dementia or cure the ailment of your choice. The miracle food that will prevent cancer. The list is endless.

Every generation has their own unique set, it seems. When I was in college one was laetrile, a quack remedy made from apricot pits that was alleged to cure cancer. It didn’t, of course. Previous generations suffered through a variety of radium cures that claimed to help everything from impotence to ‘female problems’ to gray hair. Or electric cures, or ultraviolet light cures. I could go on listing them all day.

The magic bullet syndrome has infected almost every aspect of society. Medical, nutritional, political. They have the ‘magic bullet’, that if only you’ll elect them or buy them, will be a fast and cheap cure for whatever problem you have.

They don’t work, of course, these magic bullets. They never have. They never will. The frustrating thing is that even though we know they don’t work, that they can’t work, huge numbers of people keep buying into the belief that there is something, somewhere, that will solve whatever problem they need solved, without any work on their part, without them having to make any kind of significant sacrifice or effort, and which won’t cost them much.

And magic bullets almost always make things worse, not better. This belief in a magic bullet masks the real problems and the real solutions to the problems. Often until the situation has become so bad that we can’t hide it, can’t try to ignore it, and finally are forced to do something. And by that time, things have gotten so bad, so out of control, that it’s going to cost ten times more to fix it than it would have if we’d just tackled the problem the right way in the beginning. Or in the case of some of the health scams, you end up dead.

They’re seductive, though, these magic bullets. There is no doubt about that. I can certainly understand the temptation to believe in them despite the fact that I know that, ultimately, they will always make the problem worse than it was before.

But it’s oh so tempting… The magic bullet, well, that means you don’t have to accept responsibility for the problem. You don’t have to change. You don’t have to give anything up. It isn’t going to cost you anything, financially or personally.

As the election insanity approaches its climax, we have packs of politicians swarming around the country, each promoting their own particular magic bullets, they themselves. They are the magic bullet that will solve all of the country’s problems. They can fix the economy. They can create new jobs. They can improve the schools. They can bring peace. They can stop terrorism. They can fix anything and everything.

The root of the magic bullet syndrome seems to be intimately linked to our refusal to take responsibility. No one wants to admit that the problems we are facing are our own fault, and the politicians are taking full advantage of that. They’ve latched on to the magic bullet syndrome’s close relative, scapegoatism.

Scapegoatism is simply a different form of the magic bullet syndrome. Instead of a magic bullet fixing something, scapegoatism is the attempt to blame all problems on an individual or small group. It’s been around as long as magic bullets have been, and it has it’s roots in the same basic human fault that makes magic bullets so attractive, our unwillingness to admit that we are responsible for our own problems.

And like magic bullets, it’s so easy to do, so tempting to blame someone else, isn’t it? It’s not our fault, it’s, oh, immigrants or one’s political opponent, or the government. The list of scapegoats is as long as the list of magic bullets, really. Unions, teachers, students, young people, old people, immigrants, governments, politicians, religions, communists, democrats, republicans, liberals, conservatives, rich people, poor people, middle class people… They’ve all been used as scapegoats.

When are we ever going to get over the magic bullet syndrome? When are we ever going to be able to admit that our problems are largely our own fault? When are we going to be able to admit that there is no magic bullet, that the scapegoat is really us?

The Great Mayonnaise War

It looks like The Great Mayonnaise War is finally over as the USDA issues rulings on the antics the egg board was engaged in that started the war.

If you don’t remember the Mayonnaise War, I don’t blame you. As such things go, it made barely a blip on the media’s radar. But for some it was a very big deal indeed.

The war began when a company called Hampton Creek released a vegan mayonnaise that they called Just Mayo. Unlike ‘real’ mayonnaise, Just Mayo was made without the use of eggs.

Just Mayo was the kind of product that would probably not have made much of dent in the marketplace, to be honest. It might have gotten exposure in places like Whole Foods and other speciality retailers, but it’s unlikely that it would have been all that popular in most mass market grocery store chains. Vegan foods intended to replace more traditional non-vegan options generally don’t do all that well in the mass market.

The egg producers, and especially the American Egg Board, the egg industry’s marketing organization, didn’t see it that way, though. They looked at Just Mayo and went full Chicken Little, running around in circles like a chicken with it’s head cut off, clucking that the sky was falling, and that they had to do something, right now, to shut this down, before they were left with (Oh, no, he’s not really going to say it, is he? Yeah, he is) egg on their faces.

Now, have I gotten all of the chicken references out of the way in this little item? Lord, I hope so. I hate it when I start doing that. Are there no depths to which I will not stoop in order to grab for a cheap laugh? Uh, well, no, not really. Ahem, let’s get on with this.

The egg board went a bit loony, to be honest. It launched attacks against Just Mayo, claiming it wasn’t ‘real’ mayonnaise because it didn’t have eggs, filing complaints with the FDA, USDA and any other agency that had blank complaint forms laying around in the lobby.

But the board’s efforts to derail Hampton Creek and it’s vegan mayonnaise weren’t limited to just legal objections.

An alleged industry consultant, someone named Zolezzi, got in touch with the board and during a strategy session in 2013 claimed he could make a phone call and get Whole Foods to pull the product line from it’s shelves. An offer that was, for a time at least, taken seriously. In a note written to the president of the board, the head of United Egg Producers offered to get in touch with Zolezzi and actually try to do it.

Internal memos and emails showed one instance where it was suggested egg board members pool their money and hire a hit man to take out the founder of Hampton Creek.

This was, they say, a joke.

And it was also a ‘joke’ when another member offered to have his old buddies in Brooklyn to pay a visit to the founder of Hampton Creek with the apparent intent to, I’m sure, have a nice, pleasant chat with him and not at all do him bodily injury.

Investigators from the USDA said that the actions and comments of the egg board were “inappropriate discussions about an action which, if acted upon, would have significantly exceeded the provisions of the Egg Research and Consumer Information Act” that was responsible for setting up the board and defining its duties.

(Good heavens, really? How can an egg board operate if can’t take out a hit on the competition? What’s the world coming to?)

The board did take some action, including trying to rig internet advertising services so searches for Hampton Creek’s products would bring up the board’s own ads. It discussed spending money for “research and coordination with key influential bloggers in food and health/nutrition space, drafting key messaging and coordinating posts”, according to the reports I’ve read. In other words, trying to hire or otherwise influence food bloggers to present a message that was pro-egg and anti Just Mayo.

I should point out that Hampton Creek allegedly wasn’t behaving in exactly an ethical fashion either. An investigative reporter for Bloomberg news filed a report that claimed Hampton was running a covert operation to buy up large amounts of its own products in order to inflate sales figures and make it more attractive to investors.

According the the Bloomberg report (click the link to jump to the story) executives at the company launched a large scale undercover operation to buy back its own products in order to make it seem the company was selling far more than it really was. Five former workers came forward to talk about it, hundreds of receipts, expense reports, cash advance records and emails were discovered by Bloomberg describing how the scheme worked. In addition, Bloomberg claims that the company had contractors calling store managers asking about Just Mayo, requesting they stock it.

Bloomberg’s report also shows contractors and employees bought large quantities of product from Safeway, Kroger, Costco, Walmart, Target and Whole foods around the country. Employees were assigned specific stores, instructed in techniques for making the buys so they wouldn’t be seen buying mass quantities of the product.

The CEO claims the purpose of the purchases was to check quality of product, not to inflate sales. But internal memos and emails from company executives don’t back that up. Emails from from a Hampton Creek vice president actually outlined how contractors should use self checkout lanes or make several transactions at different lanes to avoid appearing to be buying large amounts of product and to avoid wearing Hampton Creek logoed clothing. One email specifically said “this is an undercover project.” according to Bloomberg.

The company was being investigated by the SEC and the Justice Department, but I haven’t heard of any results from those investigations as yet.

But let’s get back to the marketing board, which is what I started out talking about.

The whole thing was just silly, and it points out just how out of control these product marketing boards have become, and how cutthroat product marketing can be.

The whole kerfuffle ended up with the egg board getting a slap on the wrist from the government, and a promise that the board would ‘retrain’ its employees on just what it could and could not legally do.

Junk Science Reporting Drives Me Crazy

It’s been a while since I had a good rant, so I’m going to indulge. Please feel free to skip this one if you like. I occasionally go off on a rant when I run into an especially irritating bit of so-called “journalism”, and this is one of those instances.

When I was going through my various news sources this morning while having my coffee, I ran across a news item at Motherboard, part of Vice.com, about Proxima Centauri and it’s newly discovered planet, b. You can click here to jump over and read it yourself. The headline reads: “Our Closest Earthlike Planet Appears to be Covered in Water”

As I read it I frowned a lot. I might go so far as to say I was seriously irked. Unless someone, somewhere, had come up with something entirely new and unexpected, what they were implying in this little piece was irresponsible and so lacking in any kind of facts that it was pure fiction. And yes, they use weasel words like ‘could’, ‘possibly’, ‘may’. Technically the article doesn’t come right out and lie, but it is seriously misleading, perhaps deliberately so in order to generate clickbait headlines.

Let me give you some background for you non-astronomers out there. Proxima Centauri is the star closest to us. It is a very tiny and very dim red dwarf star about 4.2 light years away from Earth. While that is close in astronomical terms, in human terms it is very, very far away indeed. Light moves at 186,000 miles per second. Light takes 4.2 years to go from Earth to Proxima. I will leave it to you to figure out exactly how far that is. My calculator doesn’t have enough zeroes.

They recently discovered Proxima has a planet. They immediately gave it the amazingly creative name Proxima b. What we know about this new planet is, well, not much, really. We know it’s about 1.3 times the mass of the Earth. We know it’s between 0.9 and 1.44 times the diameter of the Earth. We know it orbits Proxima at a distance that is one tenth the distance of Mercury to our sun. We know how fast it goes around it’s star. We know it is tidally locked to it’s star. That means the same face of the planet is always facing the star. One side of the planet is in perpetual light, the other side is in perpetual dark.

Or I thought that’s all we knew until I saw this article. This article implies that B is covered with planet spanning oceans teaming with life. There’s liquid water everywhere, and because there’s water, there must be life! Oh my!

Now just a minute here. Really? I follow astronomy news fairly closely. If these discoveries had been made, why weren’t they all over the actual astronomical press? Something smells a wee bit odd here.

And here’s another thing that set off alarm bells. The quotes are all generic, never attributed to a specific person, but they instead use terms like “researchers said”, and “the research team said”, and “scientists concluded”. That kind of thing starts to set off alarm bells with me. It’s been my experience that legitimate news stories almost always give actual names, and if not the name of the person being quoted, at least the name of the press agent or the name of the spokesperson.

Then I started running into other rather odd things.

The Motherboard article posts a link to what supposedly was the original press release from the Marseille Astrophysics Laboratory which appeared in Agence Presse France, the French press agency. But when I click in the link, the APF’s website tells me there is no such story. So I started running searches on the APF’s news website, plugging in terms like Proxima, Proxima Centauri, Proxima B, the research group’s name, the university’s name, and found nothing. Not a single story anywhere on the APF’s website concerning Proxima’s planet, these researchers… Nothing. Unless I missed something, or wasn’t using the search engine properly, the story Motherboard quotes over at APF doesn’t exist according to APF. In fact, there is nothing anywhere on APF about Proxima at all that I could find after running extensive searches of its entire news site.

I freely admit that I might have been using their site wrong, was using their search engine wrong. So I did some more hunting for other related stories from other sources and found a lot of sciencey related popular websites with this same story. But all shared the same troubling traits. No actual names, vague references to universities and research organizations, quotes, again not from real people, but from “scientists” and “researchers.” Even more troubling, many of the stories in these websites were virtually identical, and I mean word for word identical in some cases, indicating that a lot of these places were engaging in good old fashioned cut and paste plagiarism.

I was getting increasingly obsessed with finding out what the hell was going on. Finally, I went to CNRS, the French science research organization, which supposedly was the source of all of this, and once I’d tracked down the actual original sources, I discovered what I had started to suspect already.

What the CNRS actually said about Proxima b bore little or no resemblance to what the media sources were claiming. What the CNRS actually said, if my horrible French and Google Translate haven’t failed me, is that we really know nothing about Proxima B except the few facts I already told told you about. But that if you make a whole lot of assumptions that are probably wrong, and if those assumptions are correct, which they probably aren’t, and if the planet has an atmosphere, which we don’t know, and if the planet has a magnetic field, which we also don’t know, Proxima B might be capable of having liquid water, maybe even large amounts of it, and if it has water, which we don’t know, it might have a chance to develop some sort of life. Maybe. But we don’t really know.

This is considerably different from the Motherboard headline that says “Our Closest Earthlike Planet Appears to be Covered in Water”. In fact, I have yet to find any legitimate scientist of science organization that has said any such thing.

There is, in fact, no evidence that it has any water at all. There is no evidence it has an atmosphere. The only things we know about the planet at all are it’s approximate mass, it’s approximate size, it’s distance from its star, and it’s orbital period.

If you look at the actual facts, what we do know about Proxima Centauri and its planet, the preliminary data indicates exactly the opposite. Everything we know about it so far tends to contradict everything the Motherboard article claims is possible.

B is very, very close to it’s star. And while Proxima Centauri is a very small, very dim star, it is still a star. Even worse it is a flare star. That means it regularly blasts surrounding space with high intensity radiation and stellar mass ejections. This means that solar radiation and stellar mass ejections would have eroded away any atmosphere and water that the planet might have had billions of years ago.

Some people are trying to get around this fact by claiming B has a magnetic field strong enough to protect it from it’s star, a field similar to the one that protects Earth.

But not only is there no evidence at all to indicate it has a magnetic field, simple physics tells us it pretty much can’t have a magnetic field. A planet’s magnetic field is generated by the rotation of its molten iron core. But Proxima B doesn’t rotate. It’s tidally locked to it’s star. If it doesn’t rotate, it can’t have a magnetic field. Period.

Junk science reporting drives me crazy.

Merger Fever

screen-shot-2016-10-07-at-6-57-39-am

If you follow ag news you must be aware of the high profile mergers and buyouts going on in agribusiness. After months of trying to sell itself or merge with another agribusiness company, Monsanto seems as if it is going to be snapped up by pharmaceutical giant, Bayer, so the German company can increase it’s ag presence. Bayer is already a major maker of pesticides and snapping up Monsanto would give it a significant presence in the GM seed market as well.

It is not a done deal by any means. It still has to be passed by antitrust regulators both here and in the EU. There seems to be considerable resistance to the merger in Germany and in the EU as a whole, and a lot of politicians over there have been making disapproving noises.

This isn’t the only big ag merger going on, either. Dupont and Dow Chemical are in the process of merging, with the details still a bit up in the air. Swiss company Syngenta, which Monsanto had attempted to cut a deal with earlier, is being snapped up by the China National Chemical corporation, which is owned by the Chinese government. All four of these companies are major players in the agricultural chemical industry. (ChemChina seems to be on a buying spree. Last year it bought Pirelli, the Italian tire maker)

Mergers, acquisitions, buyouts, etc. aren’t anything new, especially in the ag industry. It’s been going on for ages. And generally the results, at least for the farmers, aren’t pretty. Over the years we’ve seen virtually every small, independent co-op, feed processor, seed maker, machinery dealer and independent mechanic be bought up, forced out of business or merged into ever larger semi-monopolistic businesses. And while competition has dwindled, farmers have fewer choices of where to go to buy seed, fertilizer, feed, chemicals and equipment, prices have, of course, skyrocketed.

The problem with all of these mergers is that they don’t seem to benefit anyone except a handful of investors, lawyers and, of course, the upper management of the companies themselves. They certainly don’t benefit the consumers, that is the farmers and you, the people who buy the milk, cheese, eggs, meat, vegetables and fruit that the farmers produce.

We used to plant 30 to 40 different types of soybeans in the US. Today, 90% of all the soybeans planted in the US are a single variety, produced by Monsanto. The fact that Monsanto has a literal monopoly on soybean seed isn’t the only problem with the situation. It’s the fact that we could be facing a very serious biological crisis. If a new disease pops up that this one variety of bean is susceptible to, the entire US soybean crop could be jeopardized because of this lack of genetic diversity. These monopolies have resulted in such a lack of genetic diversity in our agricultural systems that many of them now lack the genetic diversity to be sustained if a disease strikes them.

What these companies try to do, want to do, is lock farmers into a specific “system” of agriculture. You buy a specific type of seed to plant. That plant comes along with a specific program of herbicide and pesticide control systems, also sold by the company. Farmers do it because it’s easy. Sort of one stop shopping. They get everything they need from one vendor. And generally these systems are profitable.

At least at first. What generally happens is the company starts to get greedy. After releasing the system at a relatively decent price, the company starts ratcheting the price up once farmers get hooked into it. Prices go up until farmers realize the system isn’t all that profitable any longer. But by that time, well, they have such a heavy investment in the system they can’t really get out of it any more. Besides, where else are they going to go because the company has driven all of it’s competition out of business.

Farmers who want an alternative have enormous trouble even trying to find one. These semi-monopolies claim there is still a lot of competition out there. And it’s true that there are some competitors. But not many, and even fewer who could provide large scale farmers with the quantity of seed they need at a price they can afford to pay.

An Odd Autumn

It’s been a rather odd autumn here in north eastern Wisconsin. Usually this time of year it’s starting to get chilly, even downright cold. It hasn’t, though. Daytime temperatures have been in the low to mid seventies, at night it has only rarely fallen below 57 – 65 degrees. And it’s also been unusually wet. They’re claiming this has been the fourth wettest season on record.

It’s had an interesting effect on the plants around here. Our roses are in full blossom once again. We have new dill plants sprouting up all over the place. It looks more like May or early June than October.

Our eggplant has gotten its second wind, so to speak, and is loaded with blossoms and new fruit. Same with our poblano and jalapeno pepper plants. We have new green onions sprouting. The oregano I cut back has regrown. Some of our hostas are blooming for the second time this season. The morning glory seed we planted back in May that never sprouted sprang up out of nowhere two or three weeks ago and is now in full flower. The roses are a riot of color, with blossoms coming so heavy the branches can hardly support them.

Rain has been our constant companion for weeks and weeks now. If you don’t live in Wisconsin you may not have heard about the flooding we’ve had; two people killed, houses washed away, roads closed, something like $20 million in damages so far. Farmers should be getting ready to start harvesting corn, should be harvesting soybeans. They can’t get into the fields without the combines sinking into the ground up to the axles, and there seems to be no end in sight.

I’m sure most of us don’t mind the warm fall, but the rain…

Starving Amidst Plenty

screen-shot-2016-10-06-at-7-23-03-am

Not a day goes by when you don’t see a news item about more food aid being needed somewhere as enormous numbers of people go hungry or are even starving because of natural disasters, political disasters, poverty. If you follow the agricultural media as I do you will see articles about the mega ag companies like Monsanto talking about how they need to get ever bigger, absorb even more small companies, because they need to develop new seeds, new herbicides, to satisfy an ever expanding and increasingly hungry world population. Articles about food deserts in the inner cities in the US and other otherwise prosperous countries. Articles about how we need to cultivate more land, increase the yield of crops because people are starving all over the world.

But then along comes items like this story from AP at AgWeb: Why Is There So Much Food?

The US alone is producing 24 billion gallons of milk a year. We’re producing enough milk every year to fill a good sized lake or two. So much milk that it’s driven the farmgate price down so far farmers are going bankrupt. The US alone has 1.24 billion pounds of cheese in storage and 322 million pounds of butter. USDA has been buying up stored cheese and giving it away to try to keep prices from collapsing.

If milk were the only commodity we have massive surpluses of, it wouldn’t be so bad. But it isn’t. The US has 377 million pounds of strawberries and 313 million pounds of blueberries in storage. In total we have around 1.5 billion pounds of fruit in storage. We have 1.3 billion pounds of turkey and chicken in storage.

If you look at grains, the situation is similar. The 2016 corn harvest is just getting started here in the US, and it looks like it’s going to be a near record breaking crop. And we still have millions of bushels of corn in storage from last year’s near record breaking crop. The price of corn has plummeted to $3.30 or so a bushel, and will probably drop considerably as the new crop floods storage facilities. The story with soybeans is similar. Same with wheat. Eggs, which suffered massive price increases that saw the local stores selling eggs at $1.75 a dozen, have fallen to $0.49 cents in our local grocery store.

Right now we are looking at the lowest prices for ag commodities that we’ve seen in many years. Retail consumer prices are flat or falling. One source I read the other day claimed retail food prices have dropped by 8% in the last six months. The UN claims food prices are at the lowest level they’ve been at (adjusted for inflation) in a very long time indeed. We have a glut of food on the market, so much we don’t have enough storage space for it.

And we still have people going hungry, even starving. Even in the most affluent countries in the world we have large parts of the population who are hungry, who don’t know where their next meal is coming from.

It isn’t agriculture that’s at fault here. It isn’t farming. It’s politics. Petty nationalistic disputes, power struggles in congresses and parliaments. It’s prejudice and discrimination. It’s greed and selfishness.

The Ridiculous Rudy the Roomba Story

I have a Roomba. Yeah, I know, they’re silly, don’t do a very good job, and you have to pretty much childproof your entire house as if you had a two year old when you have one of these things because it will try to eat electrical cords, cell phone chargers, throw rugs, get stuck under furniture and generally try to destroy itself if you allow it to. It also is horrible at cleaning up cat barf. It is also brain dead because it can’t find it’s own charging dock and just sits there complaining when it’s battery runs low.

Still, I got the dopey thing, so I use it. When I remember I have it, anyway.

So, the other day I’d tracked grass in all over the kitchen, and I go ‘ooo, Rudolph can do this for me!’.

I call him Rudolph. The Roomba, I mean. Rudolph the Roomba. Hey, don’t look at me, his parents named him, not me.

So I fire up Rudy and send him on his merry way, and about 10 minutes later he stops dead and starts yelling about something. I come running in expecting to find him wedged under the refrigerator, or maybe he tried to suck up one of the cats and they beat him up or something.

But no, his little side brush thingie fell off. It’s that little arm like brush that sticks out the side to get along edges and into corners and stuff. Screw fell out and he tried eating his own brush, the idiot. Just what I need, a robot that is fond of self-canabalism, right?

Okay, so I pry the brush out of his gizzard, and then… Okay, where’s the screw? It’s a teeny, tiny, almost microscopic little screw, judging from the size of the hole, and it’s nowhere to be found. I looked around on the floor, even dumped out Rudy’s little dirt catcher thing. Not there. I figure he must have already digested it. Or one of the cats ate it.

No problem, I’ll get another one. Off to the trusty Internet to go look for Roomba parts. This isn’t an uncommon problem. Someone must sell these screws, right?

Uh, well, no. Seems not. You can get replacement brushes, which seems a bit silly because the brush part never wears out. Usually they get wrecked because it falls off and the Roomba eats it. I don’t need a brush. And most of the brushes for sale seem to be conspicuously missing the screw. Brushes you can get all over. They’re cheap. They don’t come with screws, as hoards of complaining product reviewers proclaim in their one star reviews because they didn’t need the damn brush, they just needed the damned screw. And even the brushes that are advertised as coming with the screw, don’t.

I scoured around and finally found out place that offered the brush and the screw. They specifically mentioned, twice, that they included it. So I ordered it. Whopping $6.95 or something like that. It arrives two days later. It comes in an unpadded envelope labeled “replacement battery”. Folded in half. Ripped, shoved into another envelope, also ripped, with a mailing label in Sri Lanka or somewhere. That, in turn, is shoved into a third envelope, which actually has my name on it.

And, of course, it doesn’t have the screw.

Okay…

I dig some more and try to find the actual size of the screw to see if I can buy some locally. After almost half an hour of Google searches I finally find a forum somewhere, where someone actually found this precious secret known only to the Zen Roomba Masters of Lower Passaic New Jersey. This is one tiny, tiny screw. No one around here has it. I finally resort to the internet again. I find someone else who had the same problem got his hot little hands on a whole box of the damned screws, and out of the kindness of his heart, is sharing them with his fellow Roomba owners. For $5.

So, I know people. Really, I do. I don’t just sit here complaining about my cats all day long. I do have a life, people. Sort of.

So I start making some calls. I have a friend who works for a military contractor. Seriously. They make battleships or submarines or bomb proof attack trucks or giant robots or something. He’s always really vague about what they actually make there,

So I tell him I’m looking for this tiny, tiny screw, tell him the size. Hell, I can get you those, he tells me. I’ll get you a box of ‘em. I’m like, well, I’m not going to have the NSA or the CIA or the FBI or the ARRP or one of them alphabet agencies showing up on my door or something. He says don’t be an ass, we get ‘em from Home Depot. Six bucks for a box of ‘em.

A meeting is set up in a dark parking lot. Money exchanges hands… Well, okay, it was a Starbucks and he was on his lunch break, so maybe that part isn’t really accurate.

So, the damned screw fits! Wow! Rudy is back on the job again!

But now I’m sitting here looking at a box with 4,999 teeny, teeny screws…

The age of Conspiracies

I wrote about “The Age of Stupid” a few weeks ago, but “Age of Conspiracy” could be just as appropriate to describe what we’re going through these days. And it’s been going on for a long, long time.

You could say that I grew up in an age of conspiracy theories. I was born about halfway through the “red scare” that started in the late 1940s and ran into the late 1950s. Politicians like McCarthy latched onto it immediately as a way of expanding their power and influence, claiming there were evil communists lurking in every corner, infiltrating our schools and even taking over our popular media. It resulted in very public witch hunts. It ruined the lives of a lot of people because of the tactics of people like McCarthy, who engaged in unsubstantiated accusations, public attacks and fear mongering. I suspect that McCarthy didn’t give a fig about communists, nor about the homosexuals he’d tried to go after in the so-called Lavender Scare (1) earlier. I suspect he was trying to do anything he could to revive a rather mediocre political career and saw this as a possible path to power.

McCarthy and his red scare was perhaps the beginning of the modern era of conspiracy theories. After his disgrace and his death in 1957, other people, other organizations, took up “the cause”, whatever that cause might be. Whether that cause was the government poisoning us by putting fluoride(2) in the water, the United Nations taking over the US, Catholics (3)… The list goes on and on.

Any time there is some kind of crisis going on it seems that someone will come up with some kind of conspiracy theory to try to explain it.

The development of the internet has resulted in such an explosion of conspiracy theories that it’s impossible to keep up with what’s going on out there. There’s Jade Helm, which somehow linked empty Walmart stores with FEMA, the UN, Obama (of course) and I don’t know what all else and morphing it all into some kind of invasion attempt. Airliners pumping tons of chemicals into the atmosphere via ‘chemtrails’. Weird, mysterious groups of people who secretly control the world. Fake moon landings. FEMA stockpiling “disposable coffins” to deal with the bodies when Obama purges the country of A) gun owners/NRA members, B) Christians, C) heterosexuals, D) all of the above. FEMA setting up “death camps” in secret locations all around the country so it has enough bodies to put in the ‘disposable coffins’. Fluoride (again and still). Canada pre-staging its entire military force along the border to invade the US. The NRA board of directors being taken over by the Islamic Brotherhood. Hillary has brain cancer. Hillary has tuberculosis. The list goes on and on and on.

How do these things get started in the first place? And even more importantly, why do some people actually believe them?

How they get started isn’t difficult to discover in many cases. Someone, somewhere, finds something, some little fact, some photo, some tiny, tiny bit of reality, and goes off the deep end with it, totally transforming into something it isn’t. Over time other people get their hands on it, add to it, expand it, modify it, and you end up with… Well, let’s look at the FEMA coffin thing.

What seems to have happened in that case is that someone stumbled on a field covered with not coffins, but with burial vaults that are used to put over coffins to prevent coffins from collapsing when you drive thousand pound lawnmowers over cemeteries. In a lot of areas these things are required by law. You can’t just shove a coffin in the ground, you have to put a vault over the top of it. Because burial vaults are tough and weather proof the company didn’t see much point in building expensive warehouses to store them, they just stack them up outside in a vacant field. Eventually this field of burial vaults morphed into the FEMA coffin nonsense.

Same with the FEMA death camps. They have actual photos that prove there are actual camps complete with tacky old trailer houses where they’re going to shove all us gun loving god fearing americans while they line us up to kill us off. Probably with fluoride? That story also started with a very tiny grain of truth. There are areas where large numbers of these trailers are parked. They aren’t “camps”, they’re storage areas. Where do you think FEMA gets the trailers they use to house people after a major disaster? Just call up some manufacturer and say they need, on, 5,000 trailers and deliver them tomorrow? Of course not. They already have them stockpiled. Someone stumbled across one of the storage sites, and the story evolved into the whole death camp nonsense.

I know how these things get started, but what’s always puzzled me is why so many people, many of whom seem reasonably intelligent, believe this stuff.

I think part of the reason is we often refuse to accept the fact that a lot of things are our own fault. We have made decisions in our lives that have resulted in certain undesirable consequences, and because we like those decisions, because they make our lives more comfortable or make money for us, we desperately try to rationalize away the undesirable consequences.

Like climate change. It is a flat out fact that pumping hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere as we have been doing for decades is going to have an adverse effect on the climate of the planet. But a lot of people won’t accept that because it means that it would be their fault and, even worse, trying to fix the problem might have an adverse effect on them personally. So they latch onto some tenuous and irrational explanation for what’s going on, rather than accept the facts.

The list goes on and on, with people latching onto conspiracy theories for whatever reason.

There are always going to be people who, for whatever reason, appear to genuinely believe this stuff. There’s nothing we can do about that.

The real problem is when politicians and the media deliberately embrace this kind of thing for no other reason than for financial gain or to try to expand their support.

—- Footnotes

(1) Most people don’t remember the so-called “lavender scare” that McCarthy and a few others attempted first, a witch hunt McCarthy and others conducted against suspected homosexuals. McCarthy seemed almost desperate to try to find some issue, any issue, that would bring him some kind of influence and power after his mediocre and largely unnoticed career in the Senate.

(2) Still is in some areas. The fluoridated water scare is something that goes through cycles it seems. It eventually fades away, but sooner or later some news service comes across something on a slow day, runs it, and it heats up again, only to fade out of the public eye until the next slow news day.

(3) Yes, Catholics. They’re plotting to take over the US and turn it into the Pope’s private estate, you know, or something like that. You wouldn’t believe the nonsense we used to hear when Kennedy was running for president.

Is The ‘Golden Age’ of GM Tarnishing Already

This entry was sparked by an article I read over at NPR’s website about the failure of GM corn, and the seed companies desperate search for something to replace it. You can read it yourself by clicking here. As the article points out, one of the original commercially available genetically modified plants, BT corn, is failing. But a lot of my readers aren’t farmers and don’t know what BT corn is or know about the problem it was developed to cure, so let me tell you about that first.

The problem is this guy here:

This is the european corn root worm, otherwise known as the corn borer, and its rather nondescript parent moth. The european corn root worm is not native to North America. It first appeared in the US around 1917, and quickly spread throughout the US and up into Canada. The moth itself is harmless. It’s offspring, however, loves to eat the roots of corn plants, tunneling through them, weakening them, reducing yields, and even killing the plant. Over the years it became a serious problem, infesting much of the corn belt. There were pesticides that could kill it, but they are expensive, and a lot of the most effective pesticides are toxic and many have been outright banned because of their toxicity over the years.

BT corn was one of the first genetically engineered plants to be approved for commercial use. It incorporated genes from bacillus thuringiensis, a naturally occurring bacteria that lives in the soil. The modification causes the corn plant to produce a protein called Bt delta endotoxin, which kills the larvae of the corn borer. The BT toxin itself is not new. It’s been available for use as a pesticide since the 1960s, and it has a pretty good safety record. It is generally recognized as safe for humans, other mammals, fish, birds, and most insects.

BT corn worked very well indeed. So well that it quickly dominated the market and a large number of different varieties of BT corn are now available. But there’s a problem. It’s not working very well any longer.

In just twelve years the corn borer began to develop a tolerance for the BT toxin, and it began to spread. We are rapidly approaching the point where BT corn will no longer be effective against the pest and we’ll be right back where we started.

The same thing is happening with the other big GM cash cow, engineered plants like soybeans that are immune to glyphosate, the active ingredient in RoundUp from Monsanto. As was the case with BT corn, it wasn’t long before the so-called ‘super weeds’ began to emerge which were immune to glyphosate. And they are spreading throughout the country.

In both cases, these products were supposed to be quick and easy fixes for problems that have no quick and easy solution. And in both cases these ‘solutions’ were doomed to fail from the beginning. And everyone knew that they were not going to be long term solutions. Even as they were developing these products, the researchers involved were warning that sooner or later the pests they were intended to fight would eventually develop resistance and we’d be back where we started again. They recommended various techniques to help to reduce the spread of resistance. Those techniques were ignored because most companies these days operate on the basis of generating as much profit as possible right now and the hell with the future.

And that seems to be the problem with a lot of the GM products I’ve seen. They’re little more than quick fixes. Very little thought seems to go into determining if the products are going to be viable, useful, over the long term. The focus is profit, as much profit as possible, and profit right now. And hopefully the CEOs can cash out their stock options and bank their bonuses before the whole thing falls apart and leaves the company, and the farmers, worse off than before.

I’m not anti-GMO. Genetically modifying organisms has the potential to be incredibly beneficial. But as long as this current business climate where the only thing that matters is profit, right now, and the hell with the future, remains in effect, it is never going to fulfill that potential.

Disconnection from Reality in Agriculture

I often find myself irritated by what appears to be a serious problem with how some ag news outlets and their various pundits report on the dairy industry. Ever since milk prices plummeted a couple of years ago, I’ve been reading an endless string of opinion pieces by the so called experts, the pundits, even actual news reports, that indicate that milk production is dropping, or is going to drop, the number of milking cows is going to shrink, and there is going to be a significant improvement in farmgate(1) prices.

Even as I was reading some of those items I was scratching my head because the actual data I was seeing was telling me exactly the opposite of what the pundits at the ag web sites were claiming. While there was some shrinking numbers in some parts of the world, like New Zealand, what I was seeing in the rest of the world was a significant increase in production almost world wide.

The experts were claiming that production in the US was shrinking as well. They were claiming that production was flat or even shrinking as farmers culled herds and halted expansion plans.

The problem was that at the same time I was seeing new permits for mega farms being applied for, news stories about expansion plans, and other indications that exactly the opposite was happening.

The new USDA report that came out yesterday supported what I’d been seeing in the news, and indicated that the pundits don’t read the news reports in their own magazines or websites.

August milk production was up almost 2% in the US. Texas’ production was up 11%. The report said that 16,000 milking cows were added in July alone, and 45,o00 were added over the past year. And just ten minutes ago I was reading about yet another application here in Wisconsin for a dairy CAFO(2) to expand to 5,000 head.

The problem with a lot of these experts seems to be that they look at a specifically local condition and extrapolate from that and apply it world wide, while ignoring what’s really going on.

Some of the claims that production in the US was in decline was due to California. Production there has been declining significantly for the last ten years for a variety of factors. But they’ve been ignoring the fact that almost everywhere else in the US production has been going up. Wisconsin, North Dakota, Arizona, Minnesota… almost every state with any kind of significant dairy farm presence has been increasing production, often dramatically, as with Texas.

It’s been the same thing with the EU. They focus on a single country that’s seen a decline in production, and from that claim production is going down through the entire EU. When it isn’t.

It’s been a similar story when it comes to demand for milk products. They seem to focus on a small part of the world that is experiencing an increase in demand for milk products, and apply that world wide.

Even worse, they’ve gotten in the habit of looking at Global Dairy, a milk marketing system in New Zealand, as an indicator of world wide demand. But they tend to ignore the fact that GD is not an independent market. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Fonterra, the New Zealand milk processing giant, and that it has a history of deliberately manipulating supplies flowing through the market in order to manipulate prices. Neither the amount of product flowing through GD, nor the prices of the products sold, is an accurate picture of supply and demand.

Farmgate price is not the commodity futures price, but the actual price that the farmer gets for her/his product. There is often a significant difference between the commodities prices and the farmgate price. For example, a couple of months ago when the corn price on the Chicago market was running about 3.49, the actual price farmers in this area were getting for their corn was 2.78.
CAFO is the term used by government for a mega farm. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. It applies not just to dairy farms but to any animal operation that has more than a certain number of cattle, pigs, etc. Generally around 500 – 700 animals.