Breaking Amish

I missed this bit of reality TV exploitation, but luckily Grantland covers for me:

Speaking of Jeremiah, how's his language now that he's out of Amish country?
First words, upon leaving Penn Station:

"No more bishop looking after me. Fuck that. Holy shit, finally fucking free."

Well, OK then. How about you, Abe?
On the ladies of New York City:

"There's a lot of skanks."

Noted. Anything else?

"Her ass cheek was there and her dress stopped right there."

"I thought about throwing a quarter out and letting her pick it up."

All. Gentlemen. Everything.

Gosh darn, it sounds entertaining, but I'm just not going to tune in.

Aflatoxin Threatens Corn Crop

Scientific American:

Continuing heat and drought are withering corn crops across the Midwest, creating prime conditions for a fungus that produces a toxic carcinogen causing health problems in livestock, according to Purdue University researchers.
The fungus, Aspergillus ear rot, infects corn ears through silks or wounds. Fields most at risk, researchers said, were planted in late March or early April.
"Aspergillus ear rot is out there, but it varies greatly from field to field," said Kiersten Wise, a Purdue University Extension plant pathologist. "There is no field without some potential for the disease."
The U.S. Department of Agriculture regulates how much aflatoxin is allowed in livestock feed and corn for human consumption. Corn destined for humans and dairy cattle has the tightest limit, at 20 parts per billion. Corn destined intended to finish beef cattle can contain the fungus at concentrations up to 300 parts per billion.

It's a good thing beef cattle can take much higher limits on the stuff, because I'll probably be storing some corn in a gravity bed wagon this winter.  Hopefully nobody dies.

Hybrid Seeds and GMO Seeds

Marketplace:

Janisse Ray spends a lot of her time with seeds, thinking about them, writing about them and (of course) planting them in the ground. Her new book is called "The Seed Underground."
Ray explains that it's only in the last hundred years that farmers have shifted from caretakers to "renters" of genetic material in the form of high-tech seeds.
"With the advent of patenting laws and the ability to patent life, basically, a patent supercedes the rights of a farmer to save his own seeds," says Ray. Seeds have always had value, but the legal right to plant is a new phenomenon -- thanks to "G.M." or genetically-modified seeds.
"The Seed Underground" also takes readers to farms and neighborhood gardens around the country where people are cataloging and cultivating the seeds their families have planted for generations.  Ray says this underground movement (made up of those she has dubbed "quiet revolutionaries") is one way to preserve varieties of fruits and vegetables for the future.
Ray herself is "not opposed to technology," but she believes science should be used for "the good of all humanity" over the long haul.
"I'm opposed to science or technology being used for short-term profits," she sums up. "I can say that hybrid seeds have brought us a lot of good, and perhaps [genetically-modified seeds] could."

Wait a second:

The 1970s marked the first time when scientists patented methods on their biotechnological inventions with recombinant DNA. It wasn’t until 1980 that patents for whole-scale living organisms were permitted. In Diamond v. Chakrabarty, the U.S. Supreme Court established the patentability of living matter, provided it was truly "man-made." The subject for this particular case was a genetically engineered bacterium that was specifically modified to help clean up and degrade oil spills.
Since that 1980 court case, there has been much patenting of genetically modified organisms. This includes bacteria (as just mentioned), viruses, seeds, plants, and even non-human animals. For example, a genetically modified mouse, dubbed the Oncomouse, that is useful for studying cancer, was patented by Harvard University.

So what happened a little less than 100 years ago?  How about the development of hybrid seed:

 In agriculture and gardening, hybrid seed is seed produced by cross-pollinated plants. In hybrid seed production, the crosses are specific and controlled. The advantage of growing hybrid seed compared to inbred lines comes from heterosis. To produce hybrid seed, elite inbred varieties with well documented and consistent phenotypes (such as yield) are crossed and the resulting hybrid seed is collected. Another factor that is important in hybrid seed production is the combining ability of the parent plants. Although two elite inbred parent plant varieties may produce the highest yields of their crop, it does not necessarily mean that crossing these inbreds will result in the highest yielding hybrid. Combining ability is the term used to describe the level of heterosis that the parents will generate in the resultant seed. Higher combining ability between the parents results in increased performance in the resulting hybrid seed. Hybrids are bred to improve the characteristics of the resulting plants, such as better yield, greater uniformity, improved color, disease resistance, and so forth. Today, hybrid seed production is predominant in agriculture and home gardening, and is one of the main contributing factors to the dramatic rise in agricultural output during the last half of the 20th century. In the US, the commercial market was launched in the 1920s, with the first hybrid maize. All of the hybrid seeds planted by the farmer will be the same hybrid, which causes the first generation of seed from the hybrids planted to be inbred. This is why hybrid seed is generally not saved from subsequent generations and is purchased for each planting. Hybrid seeds are much dearer than normal seeds, due to the technology, time and effort put in to produce them. (emphasis mine)

 Hmm, the 1920s. Let's take a look at a chart:

So farmers could have continued to use open-pollinated varieties of corn they used from the beginning of time until really the mid '30s or so, or they could start buying better yielding hybrid seeds which would yield much more grain, even though they wouldn't be able to reuse the seed. 

It is true that farmers can't reuse the patented GMO soybeans (yet), but they knew that was part of the deal going in.  But considering how much benefit they have seen from the hybrid seeds, I'm not surprised they took that deal.  Saving seed is beneficial, but improved genetics is more beneficial.  Patents weren't the things that killed open variety corn.

George Brett On His Brawls

At Grantland:

George Brett makes me laugh. My favorite George Brett freakout here.

NASA Photo of the Day

September 11:

Milky Way Over the Bungle Bungles
Image Credit & Copyright: Mike Salway Explanation: Which part of this picture do you find more interesting -- the land or the sky? Advocates for the land might cite the beauty of the ancient domes of the Bungle Bungle Range in Western Australia. These picturesque domes appear as huge layered beehives and are made of sandstones and conglomerates deposited over 350 million years ago. Advocates for the sky might laud the beauty of the Milky Way's central band shown arching from horizon to horizon. The photogenic Milky Way band formed over 10 billion years ago and now includes many well-known nebulae and bright stars. Fortunately, you don't have to decide and can enjoy both together in this beautiful 8-frame panorama taken from the dark skies of Purnululu National Park about two months ago.

Is Kansas Crazy?

The Kansas State Objection Board is weighing whether to remove the current U.S. President from the fall election ballot:

A GOP-controlled board in Kansas is trying to decide whether to remove President Obama from the state ballot over objections about his birth certificate.
The State Objections Board -- consisting of three of the state's top Republican elected officials -- ruled Thursday it did not yet have enough information and postponed a decision until Monday.
"I don't think it's a frivolous objection," Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach told the Topeka Capital-Journal. "I do think the factual record could be supplemented."

Kris Kobach is a clown.  That is why he is a rising star in the Republican party.  How do such morons get put in place to run entire states?

The Salton Sea Mess

Wired looks at the history of the accidental American lake:

This week, Los Angeles got a whiff of the future.
A heinous rotten-egg smell settled into the metropolis, a stench more familiar to residents lining the Salton Sea, some 150 miles to the east. It was this 376-square-mile body of water, created by accident in the middle of the desert over a century ago, that belched up the fetid cloud. And such episodes will continue to plague Southern California as the collapse of the Salton Sea ecosystem accelerates over the coming years.
Considered to be among the world’s most vital avian habitats and — until recently — one of its most productive fisheries, the Salton Sea is in a state of wild flux, the scene of fish and bird die-offs of unfathomable proportions. It was the resulting sea-bottom biomass that a storm churned earlier this week, releasing gases that drifted into Los Angeles.
This is just the latest episode in the Salton Sea’s long, painful history of sickness and health and booms and busts — a stinky side effect of a great American experiment to civilize the western deserts. By economic measurements, this experiment has been an astounding success. By environmental measurements, it’s shaping up to be pure disaster.
These days, in the 115-degree heat of summer the Sea stinks so bad that the reek sticks in your throat like Elmer’s Glue. Chemical-laced dust kicked up from its rapidly receding shoreline contributes to an asthma rate for local children three times higher than the state average. It’s been variously called a natural wonder, a national embarrassment, paradise, and the ecological equivalent of the Chernobyl disaster.

The whole story is interesting, and a warning about man's struggle with nature.  More on the Salton Sea here.

A Wall Street Truthteller?

The NYT on Sandy Lewis:

Mr. Lewis wants to flip over Wall Street’s paving stones and search for worms. He relies on his singular strength: he discerns patterns where most see random data. He forecast the financial meltdown of 2008 that vaporized Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. In 2006, he warned a Bear Stearns executive: “Bear is toast. Get out now!”

Lehman Brothers, he notes, certified it was in good health in June 2008 and issued stock, attracting investment, including from the New Jersey Teachers’ Pension and Annuity Fund. Secretly, Lehman was on an intravenous drip, poisoned by bad debt.

“My respect for their brains is too great to think Lehman’s top guys didn’t know they were conveying the cynical impression of health,” Mr. Lewis said.

He is no less suspicious of Goldman Sachs, which has alumni sprinkled across the upper reaches of government. In a tough spot, Goldman obtained extraordinary permission to make an overnight metamorphosis from investment bank to traditional bank holding company.

“Can I prove this was a wired deal? Absolutely not,” Mr. Lewis said. “Am I certain of it? Only 100 percent.”

As for the whirling, three-million-shares-per-second casino of Wall Street? He sees it as rigged. “I would not risk stocks under any circumstances,” he said, “because we don’t know when this thing is going to blow.”

The guy is definitely fascinating.  The story about how he got prosecuted by Rudy Giuliani is amazing.  I would agree with him that there's still another shoe to drop in the economy.

UW-Whitewater Loses

D3Football:

Mary Hardin-Baylor and Linfield each won Top 10 battles on Saturday, but it was a surprising loss that steals the headlines.
Buffalo State drove the length of the field and Casey Kacz found Ryan Carney in the front corner of the end zone for a 10-yard touchdown with 3.2 seconds left as the Bengals snapped No. 1 UW-Whitewater's 46-game winning streak, defeating the Warhawks 7-6.
Kacz drove the offense 75 yards for a touchdown after the Bengals got the ball back with 1:35 left. The key play was a hook-and-double-lateral that converted a fourth down and long.
"That's a play we practice every week," said coach Jerry Boyes, "because it's our last play-type of a play. The kids executed it to perfection."
Whitewater was limited to a pair of Eric Kindler field goals, the last with 1:35 left to give the Warhawks a 6-0 lead. Each team missed two field goals.

That is a pretty big upset. A 46 game winning streak is pretty damn impressive, though. I guess that means Mount Union will return to a familiar place, the number 1 ranking.

Well Said

Rick Santorum at the Value Voters Summit:

Former presidential candidate Rick Santorum attacked the media and "smart people" for not being on the side of conservatives in a speech to the Values Voter Summit on Saturday.
"We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country," Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, told the audience at the Omni Shoreham hotel. "We will never have the elite, smart people on our side."
The media "doesn't like the other side," Santorum said. "And not necessarily, I would argue, because they agree with them, but because they can influence the country.
"If just a few people make decisions about what this world looks like, what this country looks like, then you have people sitting in offices at major media outlets and Hollywood who think they can deal with a small group of people, to get them to jump through the hoops they want you to," Santorum said.

Yeah, Rick, smart people aren't going to be on your side.  Seriously, when did being intelligent become a bad thing?  I could understand somebody saying that somebody in book smart, but lacks common sense, but Republicans have completely undermined any possibly claim they have to utilizing common sense.  When your solution to the global economic meltdown is cutting taxes and getting rid of regulations, you've veered far away from common sense.  I understand that Republican voters enjoy being told that they are better people than the rest of the country, but why do they like being told they aren't smart?