Roundup Ready Human Beings

All physical systems seek equilibrium as their normal and desired state. The tides roll in and the ebb with the gravitational pull of the sun and the moon. The desert sun bakes the soil taking it into double-digit temperatures. When the sun sets, temperatures can fall to near freezing under clear black starry skies. This daily cycle keeps the life going between the daily extremes. Nature sometimes erupts shaking the landscape out of its equilibrium. Man also acts to push the environment out of the balance that it seeks return to.

In every case of out of balance conditions, the earth and its natural forces act to re-establish the equilibrium. A child can build a sand castle out of wet sand on the beach only to have it dry out and be blown back into the dune from where it came. The approaching tide may take it first, but it is gone nonetheless. Every mound of sand piled contrary to the desire of the beach to be flattened will be reduced. Men build sandstone castles high above the tides. They too will be returned to sea-level at some point in the future.

The same forces toward equilibrium also apply in agriculture. The balance occurs naturally and may evolve over time that spans many decades or even centuries. Eutrophication is the biological process whereby too much nutrient load in ponds causes them to grow algae blooms and eventually fill in the depression that becomes a meadow and eventually a forest. Plants in a field will reach an equilibrium in their growth patterns as each species strives to hold it place. Occasionally an invasive species enters the ecosystem and disrupts the equilibrium. Soon though a new equilibrium will become established. Normally, the earth doesn't really care which plant is dominant. All of the plants produce oxygen and remove carbon dioxide from the air. All of them pull nutrients from the ground and produce topsoil in which plant life can thrive. It is Man who chooses that one plant is beautiful and another is a nuisance. It is we who sow seeds of desirable food plants and try to keep other plants at bay.

Scientists use chemistry and selective breeding to try to make a food crop more hearty and survive the stresses of nature so that we get a higher yield per acre to feed our burgeoning population. We find a combination of plant characteristics and horticultural modifications that works for a while and propagate it to the exclusion of the diversity that made the environment productive in the first place. When we cultivate large tracts of land in one uniform seed configuration, all the other competitors for that space are likewise motivated to change themselves to gain their place. Then when a failure happens, it happens in huge catastrophic scenarios. While agricultural 'experts' create uniform domino rows of crops, in another field of expertise, financial investment experts always warn us to diversify our portfolios so as to weather individual downturns in one investment or another.

Monsanto spent tens of millions of dollars developing genetically modified organisms (GMO) to speed up the development of 'better' crops that would grow bigger, faster, better. They would be resistant to blights and insects. In particular they created crop species that were resistant to the specific herbicide which Monsanto itself developed to combat weeds in the cash crop fields. They refer to these strains of seeds as "Roundup Ready". This way they can spray all the Roundup herbicide they want on the crops to kill the weeds and not the crops. But nature loves equilibrium. Planting cash crops and killing off the weeds puts everything out of balance.

In fields of cotton in northern Georgia there is a particularly troublesome weed that chokes out the cotton plants. Roundup Ready cotton seeds were used and Roundup was used to control the weeds. But within a very few years pigweed species spent no money to become resistant to Roundup too. Now farmers are back to where they were before and they have no poisons to stop the weeds. " it has also created a situation in which 'superweeds,' resistant to the specific herbicide being applied, are causing significant damage to crops and requiring even more herbicides to be applied. For example, in 2010, middle Georgia cotton farmers had to deal with a devastating issue related to 'RoundUp Ready' cotton. After a resistant strain of pigweed took over cotton fields, 1 million acres of cotton needed to be weeded by hand at the cost of nearly $11 million." Growers went from spending $25 per acre to control weeds in cotton a few years ago to spending $60 to $100 per acre now.

Today we still have wheat and corn strains that are GMO food crops that are Roundup Resistant and are planted in fields where the weeds have not yet adapted and taken over. This failure is only a matter of time. Nature will restore the equilibrium that humans have set out of balance. Meanwhile the human organism it very slow to adapt and must accept the possible negative consequences that might be tagging along with the genetic modifications. Maybe we will someday become Roundup Ready ourselves like the pigweed. I wonder what we will look like then.

The Significance of 11-11-11

Plenty of folks read into the digits some significance, including that it was a ones in a lifetime event. for me, it was 40% more significant when I got up late and finally went into the kitchen to see the stove clock read 11:11 and I was completely blown away. Not.

The 11s notwithstanding it was also a Friday, and we know who to thank for THAT. The Gregorian Monks, for it was they who set the start date for Our Calender and decided that the fifth day of the 5-day workweek would forever be a Friday.

It all seems so silly to me because there is only one day and that day is tomorrow. Never comes the day...

I'll have to look into this bit of information is as much as I do not know the answer yet. The Hebrew, Chinese, Muslim, Hindu and Gregorian calendars all point to a different year number that we label 2011, but do they all agree when it is Monday? I know that the Mayan calendar says this is Thursday, or as they spelt it Itxanolipanalwattimogan (with the accent on 'nolip') I cannot help but think that they were just being shortsighted to only chisel a calendar that was 600 years long.

Maybe it was as I have said and the Emperor hired a consultant to etch the calendar. When the consultant asked for partial payment for the 600 years worth he had already etched, The Emperor had died and the son who took his place was a fiscal conservative. With a refusal of payment due to widespread debt load for prior obligations, the consultant decided to stop his work right where it was. That was a bad move for the consultant because he was sacrificed to the Asteroid god, Utupiky, and there was no one left to continue the calendar. As far as the young Emperor was concerned, he saw no reason to have to pay for additional dates because he and everyone he knew would be dead long before the 600 years were up. And besides, as a hansom young Emperor, he NEVER had to pay for dates.

So now when those 600 years are almost up, Dec 21, 2012 on our calendar (aka 12-21-12), we think that the end of the world is at hand when all it is is the result of a reduction in public sector employment.

It's No Wonder that the Economy Sucks

Economic prosperity is heavily dependent on one primary factor. That factor is confidence.

We don't have it – the economy sucks. When we had the Great Depression there was more than enough misery to go around. People were hungry, they were cold and they waited for a miracle to bring about a recovery that could once again sustain themselves and their families. Not merely one measure was employed to bring about the change of direction that eventually led back to a level of existence where people could live without wondering from where their next meal was coming. A lot of spending bills were passed by Congress. A lot of programs that did something tangible were implemented and people worked. Most of all they were lifted by a sense of confidence that there was indeed hope for the future and people strived to get there. The government channeled money to workers, who worked then spent that money up the chain to the wealthy at the top. Some of the money was taxed and send down to workers once again. Hope was strengthened and money moved. The economy recovered.

In the 2008-2011 stagnant economy there is little hope for the future. There is no consensus for what to do to get everything moving again. It is like a bunch of college Freshmen trying to push a car out of the soft sand with some leaning on the front bumper and other pushing on the rear. Still others are standing on the sidelines calling one group or the other a bunch of idiots for trying to push in the wrong direction. Meanwhile the middleclassman behind the wheel is spinning the wheels and shifting the gears from forward to reverse and back in an attempt to rock the car out of the rut. Nobody is instilling confidence that the car will ever get out of the sand.

Here in the latter part of 2011 we have the two houses of Congress at odds with each other and with the Executive Branch of government. We have staff economists who support one agenda and others who support the opposite. We have banks who received billions in taxpayer funded bailouts who paid bonuses to executives rather than make loans to people who wanted to buy a house, expand a business or fund an education. Those banks had so little faith in using that money for the business they were in they decided to give it to themselves.

Nobody wants to make any big purchases when they are being told that tomorrow the EU might implode. Business is off when China might not be able to ship product to America because Americans have decided that food and heat are more important than Plasma TV, yet another pocket phone, or toys that might have lead paint, melamine or mercury in them.

Every time the news media tells us another round of mortgage foreclosures in about to happen, the housing recovery gets pushed back another fiscal quarter or two. When there are millions of vacant foreclosed houses on the market, most buyers will not buy a newly constructed one. When state and local governments are laying off public sector employees and the Republican media calls them leeches on the taxpayer, few of them will be able to engage in economic activity above subsistence level.

All the activity that was the hallmark of the American economy has been strafed and left as scorched earth. Republicans and their uber-conservative Tea Party arm have undermined the hope that Americans have for economic prosperity. With out hope there will be a further decline in economic activity.

For the GOP and its supporters this is a good thing. Our economic prosperity was funded by taxation and the incurring of debt, both of which can only be paid off by the very wealthy who still have money. Meanwhile the middleclass taxpayers continue to pay the current operations costs of society.

Government jobs require government funding and that means taxes. If public sector employment is decimated, then so is the need for taxes. Less need for taxes means no more to be paid by people who still have money. When one is counting their money, they cannot see the people who were supported by the funding that used to be available.

Whether the fragmenting of hope of economic prosperity is an agenda item or merely the collateral damage of fragmented policy and conflicted opinions, the outcome is stagnation. The people who have retained their wealth are also victims of the loss of hope in the system the have come to rely upon. They sit on trillions of dollars of wealth waiting for the dove to return with the olive twig that signifies that there is solid dry land out there to land on. Until then they float without a captain and rudderless at the whim of the currents.

BWI Airport Rail Station Electric Car Parking/Charging

Even as I write this posting, workers are converting a half dozen first level parking spots at the BWI Airport Rail Station to charging stations for yet non-existent electric cars. They certainly will come soon. When they first arrive I will see them and make additional comment here (with pictures.) This is a good element in the plan to make our continued society a bit more sustainable. We all know (though many won't admit it) that what brought us through the last century will not sustains us through the next (refer to National Debt, heating with coal, residential sprawl, driving everywhere burning oil.)

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