Pity about That Legacy, Paul Ryan

Bummer of Birthmark, Paul

House Speaker Paul Ryan is leaving, and on the way out, he wanted a legacy.

Seeing as how the soon to be former Congressman, AKA the zombie eyed granny starver, IS the zombie eyed granny starver, he sees his legacy as finding some new and inventive way to inflict cruelty on the helpless.

So, in contravention of more than 50 years of bipartisan consensus, Paul Ryan decided to gut food stamps (SNAP) in the latest farm bill, and so he had to pass the bill without Democratic votes, and the right wing nut-jobs of the Freedom Caucus refused to back the bill, because they wanted to vote on persecuting brown people first:

A sweeping farm bill failed in the House on Friday in a blow to GOP leaders who were unable to placate conservative lawmakers demanding commitments on immigration.

The House leadership put the bill on the floor gambling it would pass despite unanimous Democratic opposition. They negotiated with members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus up to the last minutes.

But their gamble failed. The vote was 213 to 198, with 30 Republicans joining 183 Democrats in defeating the bill.

The outcome exposed what is becoming an all-out war within the House GOP over immigration, a divisive fight the Republicans did not want to have heading into midterm elections in November that will decide control of Congress.

The bill’s collapse also highlight the splits within the GOP conference that have bedeviled House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and will be certain to dog the top lieutenants in line to replace him, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.).

With moderate Republicans maneuvering to force a vote on legislation offering citizenship to some younger immigrants who arrived in the country as children, conservatives revolted. The farm bill became a bargaining chip as they lobbied leadership for a vote on a hard-line immigration bill.

………


The Washington Post
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In blow to GOP, House fails to pass massive farm bill in face of conservative Republican showdown
by Erica Werner and Mike DeBonis May 18 Email the author

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) on Wednesday expresses support for the House Agriculture Committee’s work on the farm bill. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

A sweeping farm bill failed in the House on Friday in a blow to GOP leaders who were unable to placate conservative lawmakers demanding commitments on immigration.

The House leadership put the bill on the floor gambling it would pass despite unanimous Democratic opposition. They negotiated with members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus up to the last minutes.

But their gamble failed. The vote was 213 to 198, with 30 Republicans joining 183 Democrats in defeating the bill.

The outcome exposed what is becoming an all-out war within the House GOP over immigration, a divisive fight the Republicans did not want to have heading into midterm elections in November that will decide control of Congress.

The bill’s collapse also highlight the splits within the GOP conference that have bedeviled House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and will be certain to dog the top lieutenants in line to replace him, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.).

With moderate Republicans maneuvering to force a vote on legislation offering citizenship to some younger immigrants who arrived in the country as children, conservatives revolted. The farm bill became a bargaining chip as they lobbied leadership for a vote on a hard-line immigration bill.

Leaders tried to come up with a compromise, but 11th-hour negotiations, offers and counteroffers failed. McCarthy and Scalise will face a share of the blame for the failure, and their fortunes in the race to replace Ryan next year could suffer accordingly.

The farm bill itself became practically a sideshow, despite its importance to agriculture and the significant changes it would institute to food stamp programs.

………

The farm bill itself broke open partisan House divisions as Democrats abandoned negotiations with Republicans over the food stamp changes, which would require adults to spend 20 hours per week working or participating in a state-run training program as a condition to receive benefits. Democrats argue that a million or more people would end up losing benefits, because most states do not have the capacity to set up the training programs required.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) described the legislation as “cruel” and argued that with the proposed changes to food stamps, “Republicans are taking food out of the mouths of families struggling to make ends meet.”

This outcome was eminently predictable, and it could not happen to a more deserving guy.

I Don't Often Express Admiration for the Indian Justice System, But………

The recent ruling by the Indian Supreme Court saying that seeds cannot be patented is good for the Indian people, and not just because it is bad for Monsanto:

In an another legal blow to Monsanto, India's Supreme Court on Monday refused to stay the Delhi High Court's ruling that the seed giant cannot claim patents for Bollgard and Bollgard II, its genetically modified cotton seeds, in the country.

Monsanto's chief technology officer Robert Fraley, who just announced that he and other top executives are stepping down from the company after Bayer AG's multi-billion dollar takeover closes, lamented the news.

………

Monsanto first introduced its GM-technology in India in 1995. Today, more than 90 percent of the country's cotton crop is genetically modified. These crops have been inserted with a pest-resistant toxin called Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt.

Citing India's Patents Act of 1970, the Delhi High Court ruled last month that plant varieties and seeds cannot be patented, thereby rejecting Monsanto's attempt to block its Indian licensee, Nuziveedu Seeds Ltd., from selling the seeds.

Because of the ruling, Monsanto's claims against Nuziveedu for unpaid royalties have been waived, as its patents are now invalid under Indian law. Royalties will now be decided by the government.

Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva, who is known for her fierce activism against corporate patents on seeds, called the top court's move a "major victory" that opens the door "to make Monsanto pay for trapping farmers in debt by extracting illegal royalties on BT cotton."

Of the various extensions of IP, none is more concerning, and more unethical, than the expansion of patents to abrogate the rights for farmers to replant their own seeds.

Ban Agricultural Use of Antibiotics

In a frighteningly short time, an antibiotic resistant gene, MCR-1, has spread around the world.
Investigations have revealed that it originated in the antibiotics inundated world of agriculture:

The mcr-1 gene, which helps bacteria resist colistin – one of the few remaining antibiotic drugs of last resort that still work – has now reached hospitals all across the world.

And thanks to new research, we now have more evidence of where it came from – pig farms in China.

While experts had previously thought the gene developed on Chinese pig farms, due to their extensive use of colistin on the animals, the latest study offers more evidence to back this idea up.

It pinpoints the start of the spread to sometime in 2005.

………

The speed at which mcr-1 spread globally is indeed shocking," says lead researcher Francois Balloux, from University College London (UCL) in the UK.

By sequencing the genomes of 110 bacterial strains and comparing them to existing genomic data, the team identified a large dataset of 457 mcr-1 positive genome sequences, taken from humans and farm animals spread across five continents.

That enabled them to show exactly where mcr-1 had emerged from, and how it spread globally – attaching itself to various bacterial pathogens by "hitchhiking" on different mobile genetic elements.

The supporters of antibiotic use on livestock have always said that no one ever showed that antibiotic resistance has originated from their use on live stock.

Not any more.

This needs to be banned world wide.

More Cowbell!!!!

A vegan nut-job^* activist in Switzerland has been denied citizenship in for a campaign against cowbells:

A longtime resident of Switzerland has been refused a passport because of her outspoken campaign against cowbells. Vegan animal rights activist Nancy Holten, who was born in the Netherlands but has lived in Switzerland since she was eight years old, has been labelled a "big mouth" by the resident committee in her village that has rejected her citizenship application twice.

Holten's argument? Wearing heavy metal bells around their necks is causing Switzerland's roaming cows physical pain and distress. Switzerland's argument? Cows look damn good in bells, especially when they're roaming around in the picturesque alps. Also, tourists are charmed by them.

In Switzerland, citizenship applications are partially assessed by a committee of residents who live in the same district as the applicant. It would appear that Holten is unpopular among some in her village of Gipf-Oberfrick, with a local representative of the Swiss People's Party Tanja Suter telling the Swiss media that she "annoys us and doesn't respect our traditions."

Cow bells aren't the only cause on Holten's mind. The self-described freelance journalist, author, model and drama student has staged multiple campaigns against other beloved national pastimes like hunting and piglet racing. According to Swiss news site The Local, the sounds of church bells irritate her too. Does this woman even eat Lindt balls?

You know, cow bells would not be my choice for a hill to die on, but whatever.

^*The nut job has nothing to do with being a vegan, and everything to do with freaking out over f%$#ing cowbells.

When a Press Release Becomes a Breathless Headline

There are a whole bunch of headlines screaming that anthropogenic climate change could eliminate chocolate from the world in just 40 years.

I get it:  Climate change has the prospect of causing major disruption in all sorts of agriculture, and coastal cities, and social unrest.

It's real, and the potential harm is high.

That being said, this story is all about someone trying to make their product the next big thing.

Just read this:

Beyond the glittery glass-and-sandstone walls of the University of California’s new biosciences building, rows of tiny green cacao seedlings in refrigerated greenhouses await judgment day.

Under the watchful eye of Myeong-Je Cho, the director of plant genomics at an institute that's working with food and candy company Mars, the plants will be transformed. If all goes well, these tiny seedlings will soon be capable of surviving — and thriving — in the dryer, warmer climate that is sending chills through the spines of farmers across the globe.

It's all thanks to a new technology called CRISPR, which allows for tiny, precise tweaks to DNA that were never possible before. These tweaks are already being used to make crops cheaper and more reliable. But their most important use may be in the developing world, where many of the plants that people rely on to avoid starvation are threatened by the impacts of climate change, including more pests and a lack of water.

What is the first thing that you think?

If it's panic over the potential of a world without chocolate, then you are the victim of what is called a "Hack Journalism".

Some steps:

• Check Snopes.
• Figure out whose pocket is lined.

In this case, Snopes has it pegged as a fraud, and it's clear who is making money from this:  Monsanto and its ilk.

Chocolate is not going away.

It might move a few miles further south, or a few hundred feet higher, but this is a press release for transgenic IP protected agricultural products.

Oh Snap!

In response to reports that the EU scientific report on the safety of its glyphosate (RoundUp) weedkiller, where large blocks of text were copied and pasted from Monsanto application for re-approval, the European parliament held hearings to investigate whether or not the agricultural giant exerted undue influence on the process.

Monsanto refused to attend the meeting, so banned Monsanto and its lobbyists from the European parliament:

Monsanto lobbyists have been banned from entering the European parliament after the multinational refused to attend a parliamentary hearing into allegations of regulatory interference.

It is the first time MEPs have used new rules to withdraw parliamentary access for firms that ignore a summons to attend parliamentary inquiries or hearings.

Monsanto officials will now be unable to meet MEPs, attend committee meetings or use digital resources on parliament premises in Brussels or Strasbourg.

While a formal process still needs to be worked through, a spokesman for the parliament’s president Antonio Tajani said that the leaders of all major parliamentary blocks had backed the ban in a vote this morning.

“One has to assume it is effective immediately,” he said.

I'm a pessimist, so I expect that, after aggressive American lobbying, the EU will re-approve the chemical, but I'd really love to see them get slapped down.

OK, This Explains a the Furor………

As a part of the Brexit, the UK is renegotiating export deals with the US.

One of the sticking point is chlorine washed chicken.

In the EU and the UK, cleanliness is required at every step of the process, while in the US, the carcasses are washed with a solution of water and chlorine because the chickens are raised in in extreme conditions, and the chlorine washing is required to make ensure that the chickens are safe to eat:

The disturbing prospect of chlorine-washed chickens from the US going on sale in British shops in a post-Brexit trade deal last week sparked an explosive row at the heart of Government.

But beyond the politics lies the story of why American poultry needs such drastic chemical treatment – and of the horrendous conditions at the farms where they are bred and reared.

Now whistleblower farmers have revealed the full horror of the suffering to The Mail on Sunday, including how:

• Tens of thousands of super-sized 'Frankenstein' birds are crammed in vast warehouses.
• The chickens, which weigh up to 9lb, often buckle under their weight and must live without natural sunlight.
• Chickens frequently die before they reach maturity and many are left covered in their own faeces, turning warehouses into vile breeding grounds for disease.

Unlike in the UK and Europe, there are no minimum space requirements for breeding chickens in the US. America also does not have any rules governing lighting levels in the sheds and, crucially, its farms have no maximum allowed level of ammonia, which indicates how much urine and faecal matter is present. This means there is no limit on how much can fester inside the sheds.

There is no legal requirement to wash US chickens in chlorine or other disinfectants, but 97 per cent of its birds are cleaned in this way after slaughter.

………

Another reason poultry in the US is chlorinated is that farmers are not required to vaccinate against diseases such as Salmonella. Britain and the EU have widespread vaccination programmes.

………

Leah Garces, of the Global Animal Partnership, an animal welfare group, added: 'The fact we have to wash our food in chlorine to make it safe indicates that we are not doing farming right in the first place. It indicates how unhealthy we are raising our birds.'

While UK chicken farmers are not wholly free from criticism from animal welfare campaigners, there are strict regulations that must be followed. In the UK and Europe, poultry farmers must not keep more than 17 chickens per square metre in their sheds. There are also rules governing available natural light, temperature and the maximum levels of ammonia.

………

Shraddha Kaul, of the British Poultry Council, said: 'We strongly reject any move to import chlorine-washed chickens as part of a makeweight in trade negotiations with the US.

'Chlorine is used as a catch-all. It is an approach which means it doesn't matter how badly you treat your chicken, you can just clean it away at the end of the process.'

This reflects a very big difference in philosophy, the Europeans bake in sanitation throughout the process, while in the US, you hose the chickens down with disinfectant when they hit the slaughter house.

Of course, lousy chicken and a race to the bottom is the par for the course in free trade deals, so limeys need to eat their mutant steroid and antibiotic fetid chicken, and they need to like it.

There Has to Be a Line beyond Which the Democratic Party Tells a Public Figure to Go Pound Sand

In North Carolina, Governor Roy Cooper, ostensibly a Democrat, just signed a bill purposed designed to cripple the farmworkers union in the state.

The bill was promulgated by a Republican state senator who had been successfully sued by the union for wage theft:

Earlier today, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, signed the state’s Farm Act, which prohibits farmworkers’ unions from collecting union dues directly from workers’ paychecks.

Labor activists say that the provision in the bill, SB 615, was aimed at the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, which represents 10,000 farmworkers in North Carolina. Earlier this year, FLOC was able to force a major settlement from North Carolina State [Senator] Brent Jackson.

“This attack on farm workers’ rights is most likely in retaliation for a series of lawsuits brought by farm workers and their union (Farm Labor Organizing Committee) over wage theft and mistreatment on several farms in Eastern NC — including one owned by Sen. Brent Jackson, who sponsored this bill and chaired the Senate conference committee” said North Carolina AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer MaryBe McMillian. “It is a clear conflict of interest and blatant abuse of power for legislators who are also growers to push policies that allow them to gain more and more profit on the backs of their workers.”

Organized labor had hoped that Democratic Governor Roy Cooper would veto the bill,meeting with him twice to lobby against it. Yesterday, however, they received word that the Governor intended to sign it.

Normally, I'd be supportive of someone like Governor Cooper, but he could have vetoed it, even though there was a veto proof supermajority, or he could have allowed it to become law without his signature, signifying his disapproval.

He did neither, and I will neither forgive nor forget.

We are F%$#ed

Up in the arctic, there is a vault holding the seeds of thousands of species of crops.

Its purpose is to protect the biodiversity of agriculture in an increasingly commercial and monoculture system.

An unexpected thaw in permafrost just flooded portions of the complex:

It was designed as an impregnable deep-freeze to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply forever. But the Global Seed Vault, buried in a mountain deep inside the Arctic circle, has been breached after global warming produced extraordinary temperatures over the winter, sending meltwater gushing into the entrance tunnel.

The vault is on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen and contains almost a million packets of seeds, each a variety of an important food crop. When it was opened in 2008, the deep permafrost through which the vault was sunk was expected to provide “failsafe” protection against “the challenge of natural or man-made disasters”.

But soaring temperatures in the Arctic at the end of the world’s hottest ever recorded year led to melting and heavy rain, when light snow should have been falling. “It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that,” said Hege Njaa Aschim, from the Norwegian government, which owns the vault.

“A lot of water went into the start of the tunnel and then it froze to ice, so it was like a glacier when you went in,” she told the Guardian. Fortunately, the meltwater did not reach the vault itself, the ice has been hacked out, and the precious seeds remain safe for now at the required storage temperature of -18C.

But the breach has questioned the ability of the vault to survive as a lifeline for humanity if catastrophe strikes. “It was supposed to [operate] without the help of humans, but now we are watching the seed vault 24 hours a day,” Aschim said. “We must see what we can do to minimise all the risks and make sure the seed bank can take care of itself.”

………

“The Arctic and especially Svalbard warms up faster than the rest of the world. The climate is changing dramatically and we are all amazed at how quickly it is going,” Isaksen told Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet. 

Anthropogenic climate change is real, and we are only beginning to see the consequences.

Finally

A federal court has ruled that the air quality rules for raising livestock are too lenient:

……… Most livestock farming in industrialized countries takes place on large enclosed farms, known in the United States as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), that house hundreds or thousands of animals. Many environmental and public health groups say CAFOs are major air and water polluters and should be regulated more stringently. Farmers and trade organizations typically respond that CAFOS already are adequately regulated and do not threaten nearby communities or the environment.

On April 11, 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down a rule, issued by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2008, that exempted livestock farms from reporting hazardous air emissions from animal waste. Unless EPA appeals to the Supreme Court, these farms will have to report releases of substances such as ammonia and hydrogen sulfide starting later this year.

Agriculture, particularly Big Ag, has been skating for way too long on environmental regulations.

Our IP System in One Profoundly Dysfunctional Nutshell

It turns out that American farmers are being forced to use software from Ukrainian hackers to repair their own tractors:

To avoid the draconian locks that John Deere puts on the tractors they buy, farmers throughout America's heartland have started hacking their equipment with firmware that's cracked in Eastern Europe and traded on invite-only, paid online forums.

Tractor hacking is growing increasingly popular because John Deere and other manufacturers have made it impossible to perform "unauthorized" repair on farm equipment, which farmers see as an attack on their sovereignty and quite possibly an existential threat to their livelihood if their tractor breaks at an inopportune time.

"When crunch time comes and we break down, chances are we don't have time to wait for a dealership employee to show up and fix it," Danny Kluthe, a hog farmer in Nebraska, told his state legislature earlier this month. "Most all the new equipment [requires] a download [to fix]."

The nightmare scenario, and a fear I heard expressed over and over again in talking with farmers, is that John Deere could remotely shut down a tractor and there wouldn't be anything a farmer could do about it.

A license agreement John Deere required farmers to sign in October forbids nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment, and prevents farmers from suing for "crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software." The agreement applies to anyone who turns the key or otherwise uses a John Deere tractor with embedded software. It means that only John Deere dealerships and "authorized" repair shops can work on newer tractors.

"If a farmer bought the tractor, he should be able to do whatever he wants with it," Kevin Kenney, a farmer and right-to-repair advocate in Nebraska, told me. "You want to replace a transmission and you take it to an independent mechanic—he can put in the new transmission but the tractor can't drive out of the shop. Deere charges $230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize the part."

"What you've got is technicians running around here with cracked Ukrainian John Deere software that they bought off the black market," he added.

The affection we have in our society for rent seeking through things like the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), and it serves no one but parasites.

In fact, it creates a society based on this parasitism, which crowds out productive activities, and leads to inequality,

We have created a society of Martin Shkrelis, and this is not a good way to be.

Muck Fonsanto

The New York Times has looked into the potential benefits of transgenic crops, and found no evidence that these benefits exist:

The controversy over genetically modified crops has long focused on largely unsubstantiated fears that they are unsafe to eat.

But an extensive examination by The New York Times indicates that the debate has missed a more basic problem — genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields or led to an overall reduction in the use of chemical pesticides.

The promise of genetic modification was twofold: By making crops immune to the effects of weedkillers and inherently resistant to many pests, they would grow so robustly that they would become indispensable to feeding the world’s growing population, while also requiring fewer applications of sprayed pesticides.

Twenty years ago, Europe largely rejected genetic modification at the same time the United States and Canada were embracing it. Comparing results on the two continents, using independent data as well as academic and industry research, shows how the technology has fallen short of the promise.

An analysis by The Times using United Nations data showed that the United States and Canada have gained no discernible advantage in yields — food per acre — when measured against Western Europe, a region with comparably modernized agricultural producers like France and Germany. Also, a recent National Academy of Sciences report found that “there was little evidence” that the introduction of genetically modified crops in the United States had led to yield gains beyond those seen in conventional crops. Continue reading the main story

At the same time, herbicide use has increased in the United States, even as major crops like corn, soybeans and cotton have been converted to modified varieties. And the United States has fallen behind Europe’s biggest producer, France, in reducing the overall use of pesticides, which includes both herbicides and insecticides.

Here's a suggestion, how about invalidating patents on plant species and granting farmers the unconditional right to replant their seeds. 

This was the state of affairs for about 15,000 years of human history, and we did just fine.

Our Foreign Policy is Going Swimmingly

Despite US sanctions, Russia is now top wheat exporter, proving sanctions won’t work - MarketWatch:

Wheat, the world-feeding crop whose shortage was Pharaoh’s nightmare, is now at such a global surplus that last month its price was less than two-thirds its level in 2008.

………

Wheat prices have plummeted not for a circumstantial reason, like weather-driven bumper crops, nor for a cyclical reason like a major buyer’s recession. Though some such factors have been at play in this market, they were marginal compared with the structural fact that Russia, once an agricultural laggard, has joined the industry’s leaders — big time.

The first meaning of this far-reaching development is not about Russia’s place in the world, but about the commodity markets’ beauty.

………

Blessed with endless expanses of exceptionally fertile land known as “black earth,” Russia is doing to the grain markets what shale did to oil.

Russia’s annual wheat output, which 20 years ago was just under 35 million metric tons, is expected to cross the 70 million metric ton barrier this year. Nearly half that volume will be exported, making Russian media celebrate Russia’s emergence as the world’s largest wheat exporter.

This is the same Russia that, back when it was under Soviet management, depended on Western grain imports because it failed to use its rich soil to feed its people, a glaring embarrassment that mocked Moscow’s imperial ambitions and inspired its younger leaders’ economic heresy.

………

Now, the markets attest that Russia’s agrarian reform has been a smashing success, so much so that U.S. government charts show that Russia has just surpassed Uncle Sam in wheat production.

………

Russia’s new agricultural prowess has just made its farm exports surpass its arms sales for the first time ever. Earning $20 billion abroad last year, 15% more than the previous year, agriculture’s evolving centrality in the Russian economy is evidently part of a governmental design.

Modern Agriculture, like pretty much everything else, runs on credit, and theoretically, the international credit markets have been inaccessible to Russia, but they are now the largest exporter of wheat in the world.

Our sanctions were supposed to prevent this, but they don't because we've worn out the proverbial batteries.

About F%$#ing Time

After more than 75 years. California Farm Workers have finally got the right to overtime pay:

California just approved the strongest overtime pay legislation in the nation for farmworkers, long exempt from overtime standards mandated for most other occupations.

The legislation, known as AB 1066, was signed into law this week by Gov. Jerry Brown and will eventually result in time-and-a-half pay for farmworkers who work more than eight hours a day or 40 hours a week.

“This bill corrects 78 years of discrimination, not just in the state but in the country,” says Juan Garcia, an internal coordinator with the United Farm Workers (UFW). “Most of the people that I’ve talked to here in Sonoma that have worked 30, sometimes 40 years—they’ve been waiting for something like this.”

Nationwide, almost all farmworkers are exempt from overtime thresholds thanks to agricultural worker exemptions in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The law excluded farmworkers in order to appease Dixiecrat leaders who objected to minimum wage and overtime federal standards for the mostly black farmworkers of the time.

………

Under AB 1066, the state will reduce the overtime threshold by half an hour every year, starting in 2019, until it reaches the 8 hours a day or 40 hours a week standard in 2022. AB 1066 affects the roughly 800,000 farmworkers in California, one-third of all agricultural laborers in the country according to 2014 estimates by Philip Martin, professor of agricultural economics at the University of California, Davis. These workers earn, on average, between $16,500 and $19,000 a year, according to Martin and other researchers at UC Davis. When employed by farm labor contractors, instead of growers directly, farmworkers, on average, earn even less—an estimated $12,719 per year. The California Research Bureau reports that approximately 30 percent of California households with farm laborer incomes are below the poverty line.

The horrible conditions that farm workers labor under are a searing indictment of the US agricultural industry.

California's Drought Could Last for Centuries

A new study indicates that anthropogenic climate change driven shifts to the pacific ocean may make the current drought the new normal:

Clues from prehistoric droughts and arid periods in California show that today's increasing greenhouse gas levels could lock the state into drought for centuries, according to a study led by UCLA professor Glen MacDonald.

The study, published today in the Nature.com journal Scientific Reports, looked at how natural climatic forces contributed to centuries-long and even millennia-long periods of dryness in California during the past 10,000 years. These phenomena—sun spots, a slightly different earth orbit, a decrease in volcanic activity—intermittently warmed the region through a process called radiative forcing, and recently have been joined by a new force: greenhouse gases.

As long as warming forces like greenhouse gases are present, the resulting radiative forcing can extend drought-like conditions more or less indefinitely, said MacDonald, a distinguished professor of geography and of ecology and evolutionary biology.

"Radiative forcing in the past appears to have had catastrophic effects in extending droughts," said MacDonald, an international authority on drought and climate change. "When you have arid periods that persist for 60 years, as we did in the 12th century, or for millennia, as we did from 6,000 to 1,000 B.C., that's not really a 'drought.' That aridity is the new normal."

Researchers tracked California's historic and prehistoric climate and water conditions by taking a sediment core in the Sierra Nevada mountains. They pulled a 2-inch-wide, 10-foot-deep cylinder of sediment from the bottom of Kirman Lake and analyzed it in third-of-an­-inch sections, creating the most detailed and continuous paleoenvironmental record of California.

The team correlated their findings with other studies of California climate history, and for the first time, united all the studies and cross-referenced them with histories of the Pacific Ocean's temperature taken from marine sediment cores and other sources.

What they found was not only that periods of increased radiative forcing could produce drought-like conditions that extended indefinitely, but that these conditions were closely tied to prolonged changes in Pacific Ocean surface temperatures.

While the urban areas of California may find a way to deal with this, but the agriculture sector of the state is completely f%$#ed.

Headline of the Day

Mass Lesbian Farm Infiltration Is Obama’s Best Scheme Yet

—Jonathan Chait

It's Jonathan Chait writing about Rush Limbaugh, so it's not really worth clicking through, but it is a great hed.

The Term Here is Eating Our Seed Corn

It appears that Colony Collapse Disorder, which has been decimating bees across the nation, is not just an issue with a specific type of insecticide, but a more general consequence of chemical intensive farming:

As we’ve written before, the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America’s apis mellifera population that one bad winter could leave fields fallow. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be much more difficult than previously thought.

Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch’s brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.

 When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.

Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees as they’re designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples.

“There’s growing evidence that fungicides may be affecting the bees on their own and I think what it highlights is a need to reassess how we label these agricultural chemicals,” Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the study’s lead author, told Quartz.

This is going to get ugly, and I expect to see a collapse of some bee pollinated crops, most likely almonds, before we actually start applying some common sense regulation to the industry.

I'll Take Self Entitled Clueless Assholes for $500, Alex

Bill Gates has a solution for world hunger that is almost as brilliant as Windows Vista^®.

He's going to be sending chickens to the poor people of the world.

Brilliant.

And he has chosen Bolivia as one of the first recipients of his largess.

One problem: Bolivia is a major exporter of chicken, and they told him to go cluck himself:

The Bolivian government has rejected a donation of hens offered by the US billionaire Bill Gates………

“How can he think we are living 500 years ago, in the middle of the jungle not knowing how to produce?” the Bolivian development minister, César Cocarico, told journalists. “Respectfully, he should stop talking about Bolivia.”

………

Bolivia produces 197m chickens annually and has the capacity to export 36m, the local poultry producing association said.

This is the charitable equivalent of the blue screen of death, which is amazingly apropos.

Lawmakers in West Virginia Pass a Bill Legalizing Raw Milk, and Toast their Success With Raw Milk………

Then they proceed to make the state house resemble the sets in The Wild Bunch if the film had been directed by John Waters instead of Sam Peckinpah:^*

In West Virginia, farmers and fans of raw milk celebrated this week as the governor signed a bill that, among other things, legalizes the sale of raw milk to consumers. Some delegates celebrated by drinking cups of raw milk from a local farm, or at least tasting it. Some of them are now sick with a mysterious gastrointestinal illness. Is it a coincidence or deep irony?

………

Cadle himself was out with a stomach bug on Monday, but he and others point out that a similar illness had been circulating around the state capitol building for weeks. “It ain’t because of the raw milk,” he told the Charleston Gazette-Mail. “With that many people around and that close quarters and in that air and environment, I just call it a big germ.” The illness includes diarrhea, vomiting, and a fever, and sounds like our old fast-spreading pal norovirus.

………

Health officials are investigating the milk incident.

This is just too perfect.

^*Not my bon mot. I adopted this from Paul T. Riddell essay, The Attack of the Mad Sh%$ter.

About F%$#ing Time

This guy is in custody now too

It looks like the the FBI is finally going after people who threatened federal officers at the Bundy ranch:

FBI agents have been busy today. Another one (possibly two) of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s sons was arrested, this time in Utah. According to what David ‘Davey’ Bundy’s wife told The Salt Lake Tribune today, her husband was arrested just after 7:00 a.m. Thursday at the site of the house the Millard County contractor is building for his family just south of Delta.

Marylynn Bundy said she was told of her husband’s arrest by a worker who was blocked from getting to the house by law enforcement.

“I think they are just trying to get all the Bundy men locked up, so they can raid their homes,” Marylynn Bundy said.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nevada confirmed to the paper that a charging document had been filed against Bundy, but said that it was sealed and the feds did not confirm his arrest.

The feds are busy making arrests today. After his role in the armed standoff in Nevada almost two years ago at the Bundy ranch, tea party activist Jerry DeLemus was arrested on nine federal charges today. He’s also the husband of Rep. Susan DeLemus, a crazy-time New Hampshire Republican lawmaker and co-chair of the state’s “Veterans for Trump” coalition.

………

UPDATE: The Idaho Statesman just reported that, “Eric James Parker, 32, and Steve Arthur Stewart, 36, both of Hailey, O. Scott Drexler, 44, of Challis, and Todd Engel, 48, of Boundary County were taken into custody, U.S. Attorney for Idaho Wendy Olson said.”

“This investigation began the day after the assault against federal law enforcement officers and continues to this day,” U.S. Attorney for Nevada Daniel Bogden said in a release. “We will continue to work to identify the assaulters and their role in the assault and the aftermath, in order to ensure that justice is served.”

The wheels of justice do grind slowly, but it appears that they grind sure.