Kampalla Walla returns to thank the two people who voted for her in the primaries
/
Hello? Hello? Anyone out there? it’s me!
Geeze, what other myths of the Greens aren't true?
/
Buying organic foods not worth the cost
Small excerpts from a far lengthier excerpt at the link, which is well worth reading. And if nothing else, it’s comforting to know that Harvard still has at least one non-woke professor on staff.
Consumers tend to favor organic food because they believe the advocates who claim it is safer and more nutritious to eat, but there is little or no scientific evidence to support these claims. Others buy organic food because they assume it comes from farms that are smaller, more traditional, and more diverse, but this is not a safe assumption either. Most organic food on the market today comes from highly specialized, industrial-scale farms, not so different from those that produce conventional food.
It doesn’t usually pay to challenge popular beliefs, even with scientific evidence, but some have felt compelled to do so in the case of organic agriculture. Louise O. Fresco, trained as an agronomist, is the president of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, the world’s leading agricultural university. In her 2016 book “Hamburgers in Paradise,” she drew a harsh conclusion: “Organic farming as a whole is a mish-mash of valuable goals and ideals that have either been insufficiently tested or are completely misguided.”
…
Consumers pay considerably more for organic. In 2018, the Food Marketing Institute reported that the average retail price (by volume) for organic produce was 54 percent higher than for conventional produce. One USDA study showed that organic salad mix cost 60 percent more than conventional; organic milk 72 percent more; and organic eggs 82 percent more. Organic corn and soybeans sell for twice as much as conventional. These are high premiums, but not high enough to move most farmers toward organic, because the farming costs required by organic methods can be higher still.
There is nothing novel about producing foods without the use of synthetic chemicals. Before science first made these chemicals available to farmers early in the 20th century, all crops were de facto organic. When synthetic nitrogen first became available for fertilizer, farmers who began using it saved on labor and enjoyed higher crop yields. The timing was fortunate, since the earth’s population was just then in the process of increasing from two billion up to nearly eight billion today. Vaclav Smil, from the University of Manitoba, has estimated that without nitrogen fertilizer, 40 percent of the increase in food production needed to feed these much larger numbers would never have taken place. For at least a third of humanity in the world’s most populous countries, the use of nitrogen fertilizer in the 20th century made the difference between an adequate diet and malnutrition. In 1940, the average corn yield in the United States had been 30 bushels an acre, but by 1960 it had increased to 55 bushels, and by 1980 to 91 bushels and now it’s nearly twice that.
…
When the new National Organic Program came into full effect in 2002, commercial production and sales began to increase rapidly. Food stores specializing in organic products, such as Whole Foods and Wild Oats, expanded operations by building new outlets and buying up or consolidating existing organic and natural food stores. Like all supermarkets, these retailers sought out suppliers who could deliver a steady volume of high-quality products on time, at a consistent grade, and uniformly packaged. Small, diverse organic farms could not meet these requirements, so it was the highly specialized, industrial-scale operations that expanded to take over. Earthbound Farm in California, for instance, started out with 2.5 acres of organic raspberries in 1984, but now it manages 50,000 acres and has taken over more than half of the national market for organic packaged salad greens.
Our courageous Fourth Estate recovers from the just-ended reign of terror and regains its fierce independence
/
Everyone into the tank!
WaPo praises Biden’s ‘low key” response to the southern ice storm.
That "low-key” response was to say absolutely nothing about it at all for a week. Readers with memories that can stretch back further than this past January 20th will recall the press’s non-stop, 24-hour-a-day excoriation of two recent Republican presidents’ responses to, respectively, Hurricanes Katrina and Maria.
It’s been reported that (at least) 60% of the American public distrusts the media. Let’s blame Trump.
No one tell Dorothy Hamill
/
Ice skating is racist? Why not? Everything is racist
The prognosis for fixing American figure skating is bleak: In order to be competitive with the Russians, who have dominated the sport by building elite state-sponsored academies to churn out Olympic contenders, the US would have to dramatically alter the way it approaches both figure skating and youth sports in general, so that children beyond the most privileged could have a real shot.
…
Figure skating has more or less always been this way. “The skating that turned into figure skating over a couple of centuries really does have roots among elite white European men,” explains Mary Louise Adams, a professor of kinesiology at Queen’s University and author of Artistic Impressions: Figure Skating, Masculinity, and the Limits of Sport. Evolving in the UK as a popular amusement for the aristocracy in the late 18th century, skating clubs typically excluded women, Jews, people of color, and low-income people. “The aesthetics of the sport itself developed in line with that,” Adams says.
Twitchy’s Brett T sums it up nicely:
The thing about academia is you can always find a professor to say exactly what you need her to say, regardless of how stupid it is.
And it's back to the good old days
/
Cornell offers a colored-folks-only rock climbing class to those of its oppressed, non-white students able to cough up $1,900 to play on a fake rock wall this semester. No mention whether whites confused about their gender could enroll, but surely ….
But no “white-adjacent races formerly known as Asians”
I assume that by now, you've all seen this, but just in case ....
/
We should achieve herd immunity by April
It’s a WSJ opinion piece written by a Johns Hopkins medical professor who, this layman, seems to know his stuff.
Amid the dire Covid warnings, one crucial fact has been largely ignored: Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks. If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we’d call it a miracle pill. Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?
In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.
Now add people getting vaccinated. As of this week, 15% of Americans have received the vaccine, and the figure is rising fast. Former Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb estimates 250 million doses will have been delivered to some 150 million people by the end of March.
There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection. As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected. At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.
Antibody studies almost certainly underestimate natural immunity. Antibody testing doesn’t capture antigen-specific T-cells, which develop “memory” once they are activated by the virus. Survivors of the 1918 Spanish flu were found in 2008—90 years later—to have memory cells still able to produce neutralizing antibodies.
Researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute found that the percentage of people mounting a T-cell response after mild or asymptomatic Covid-19 infection consistently exceeded the percentage with detectable antibodies. T-cell immunity was even present in people who were exposed to infected family members but never developed symptoms. . . .
Some medical experts privately agreed with my prediction that there may be very little Covid-19 by April but suggested that I not to talk publicly about herd immunity because people might become complacent and fail to take precautions or might decline the vaccine. But scientists shouldn’t try to manipulate the public by hiding the truth. [emphasis added] As we encourage everyone to get a vaccine, we also need to reopen schools and society to limit the damage of closures and prolonged isolation. Contingency planning for an open economy by April can deliver hope to those in despair and to those who have made large personal sacrifices.
Then again, maybe it's time to drop the humor and man the barricades
/
Pelosi declares that her fences and storm troopers will remain in Washington “until September, or longer”
Reagan’s repeal of “the Fairness Doctrine” let Rush, and then talk-radio, grow. Which, says the Left, caused Orange Man. They’re coming, in every way.
Washington Magazine, 2017:
This Friday marks the 30th anniversary of one of the most destructive decisions in the modern American media history, a shamefully successful effort to divide our public airwaves along partisan lines, a choice that made a few people rich while impoverishing our democracy.
On August 4, 1987, the Reagan-era Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal the Fairness Doctrine, the sound policy that preserved a diversity of viewpoints in American broadcast media. The New York Times reported at the time:
The Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously today to abolish its fairness doctrine on the ground that it unconstitutionally restricts the free-speech rights of broadcast journalists.
“We seek to extend to the electronic press the same First Amendment guarantees that the print media have enjoyed since our country’s inception,” said the new chairman of the F.C.C., Dennis R. Patrick.
He and the three other commissioners said the 38-year-old fairness doctrine was stifling the democratic debate it was supposed to promote…The doctrine, which evolved through court rulings and commission policy statements over the years, requires broadcasters to give contrasting viewpoints on issues of public importance. In addition to news reports, it can apply to advocacy advertising, as it did in the case that led to today’s ruling.
The justification for applying the doctrine to broadcasting was that in contrast to the potentially infinite number of newspapers and magazines, there were a limited number of frequencies and channels and thus a limited number of broadcast outlets…
In a comment typical of several advocacy groups, Ralph Nader called today’s decision a major setback…
“The fairness doctrine is not only constitutionally permissible, it is constitutionally required,” Mr. Nader said. Its repeal, he added, means that broadcasters “can ignore crucial issues or present only one side” of debates, and that news judgment will increasingly reflect a business orientation. Mr. Nader said such issues as women’s rights, the health effects of smoking, and the safety of nuclear power plants would have come to far less public prominence had the fairness doctrine not been in effect.
Nader’s words were prophetic, as just under a year later, on August 1, 1988, Rush Limbaugh’s Sacramento, California-based radio program was syndicated nationwide…and talk-radio stations across the country soon began to run right-wing agitprop from dawn to dusk, flooding the public airwaves with shameless demonization of Democrats and progressives–and helping to create the media/political culture that allowed a candidate as vulgar as Donald Trump to seize control of the White House last November.
And so on. They let dissenters escape, back then; they won’t make that mistake this time.
Well, damn
/
Mount Rushmore
I’ve been too depressed about what’s coming at us these days to post. but news that Rush Limbaugh has died is just too sad to avoid comment. He saved AM radio, created a conservative medium, and effected change in so many ways. I pretty much stopped listening to all talk-radio decades ago, but just knowing that Rush was out there was comforting.
It’s been a horrible year, and I fear it’s only going to get worse.
Attention must be paid
/
It’s Gideon’s birthday! Perhaps because he’s the youngest of us five, Gid’s always been obsessively protective of this date; indeed, he’s long demanded that presents intended for his older, wiser brother Anthony on August 9th be delivered to him instead, a tradition that carries on to this day (one day, Ants, you’ll get that firetruck). So if you’re in the neighborhood, there’s a collection box outside Hooligans & Lawyers expressly dedicated to our favorite sibling, and Caldwell Bankrupt’s own Joe Barbieri will be alongside, dressed in his usual Santa outfit and ringing a bell. Give generously.