Month: February 2010

Count the time in quarter tones

I was googling around for St. Vincent performance videos last night and came across this one, and it’s gotten under my skin.

At first I wondered why she’d bother with a cover of this morose little tune, written by Jackson Browne, apparently at the tender age of sixteen, and first performed, oddly but endearingly, by Nico.

Scrolling down the YouTube listings, I shuddered in fear at the thought the song had been covered by Bon Jovi and the egregious Rascal Flatts, but THANK GOD, those are different songs.

“Please don’t confront me with my failures. I have not forgotten them.” That’s a little hard on yourself at sixteen, Mr. Browne, but typical of adolescent self-laceration at its best. Maybe it could only have been written by a sixteen-year-old. Not far from the Replacements’ “Sixteen Blue,” and—surprise!— Paul Westerberg has also covered this song.

Anyway, Annie Clark’s version blows them all away.

I don’t know for sure if she’s really feeling it, or just selling it really well (that is her secret, as it should be), but when her voice starts cracking and her eyes welling up, she’s exposing some pretty raw nerves. And then that steely thousand-yard stare.  She’s got a magnetism that is at once alluring and kind of scary.

Ms. Clark’s  appeal was always apparent. She had the gorgeous voice, the sophisticated compositions, the bona fide guitar chops— but there was always something a little off-putting about her.  My initial resistance had to do with what I saw as her formalist, ironic affect, more music conservatory than rock ‘n’ roll. But her charms have continued to grow on me, as I think I’m beginning to see the wicked wit in her sensibility. Now I’ve swung ever so gradually into the zealot camp, to the point where I’m wondering when Karl Lagerfeld will claim her as his latest muse…..

Mr. Wikipedia has the whole history of “These Days,” which is fairly fascinating, actually.

Gates: Europe’s peacefulness threatens world peace

antiwar poster
Poster seen on the streets of Harlem, February 2010

Juan Cole takes Defense Secretary Gates to task for criticizing Europe’s “general anti-war sentiment.”

An AFP story earlier this week quoted Gates as saying:

The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st.

Cole rightly sees this as being a little rich coming from a country in the process of beggaring itself on war expenditures.

[A]s far as I can tell, Europe is the world’s largest economy and got there without any recent substantial wars except those the US dragged it into. Moreover, the fastest-growing economy for the past nearly 30 years has been China, which spends a fraction on their military of what the US spends on its, and, aside from a skirmish with Vietnam in the early 1980s, has been at peace. Apparently massive war expenditures are unrelated to economic growth or prosperity.

In contrast, the US has been at war for 19 of the last 47 years (not counting US-backed insurgencies such as 1980s Afghanistan, on which we spent billions) but has not grown faster than the other two economically. Moreover, the increasingly unwieldy US national debt, deriving from the US government spending more than it took in in recent decades, would not exist if the US military budget had been the same as that of the European Union since 1980. The US overspent on its military because Washington mistakenly thought the Soviet economy was twice as big as it actually was, and vastly over-estimated Soviet military capabilities. The bloated military budgets continue now, apparently because of a couple thousand al-Qaeda operatives hiding out in caves in the Hadhramawt and Waziristan.

I would go further, and say Europe is spending way more than it should on soldiers and guns and bombers and rockets. The U.S. military budget is officially over $700 billion, but in reality it’s closer to a trillion and a half dollars. The Europe Union spends $289 billion on  its toys. In contrast, China’s 2009 military budget was $122 billion.  Economic growth comparison?

US economic growth 2009: 0.2%
European Union economic growth 2009: -4%
China economic growth 2009: 8.7 %

Hmm. I wonder if one thing has to do with another here.

And I  also wonder what the endgame will look like. In my darker moments, I worry that the day is not far off when the U.S. will no longer be able to print or borrow money (the same thing, in our case). At that point, what will stop our government from using its military might against its creditors?

GMO vaporware in Africa

african corn farmer

In the conventional wisdom, Billl Gates has gone from geek, to megalomaniac software mogul bent on world domination, to a man so rich he can SAVE THE WORLD WITH HIS MONEY!

I cannot argue with his decision to dedicate his life to making things better through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but sometimes trying to make things better makes things worse. And that’s if your intentions are pure to start with. Mix in a partner who might have other motives, and well, you see where this is going….

This Grist article by Tom Laskawy discusses a recent venture by the Gates Foundation that sounds great on its face. The goal: to feed Africa. The method: GMO seed technology from DuPont’s biotechnology arm, Pioneer Hi-Bred.

Laskawy quotes a DesMoines Register news item, which mentions that DuPont rival Monsanto is involved in a simliar venture:

Pioneer Hi-Bred is joining with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help scientists in Africa develop genetically engineered corn varieties that would allow poor farmers increase their yields with less fertilizer.

The aim of the project is to increase corn yields by 50 percent over the average now reached by African varieties, said Paul Schickler, president of Pioneer, a Johnston-based unit of DuPont.

… Pioneer’s arch-rival Monsanto Co. is two years into a similar project with the Gates foundation to develop drought-tolerant corn that is to be made available to small-scale farmers in eastern and southern Africa.

Both Pioneer and Monsanto have agreed to make the seeds available royalty-free to small-scale farmers.

Lawkawy is skeptical.  And the not-so-fine print shows he has reason to be:

As for Pioneer, they will first use advanced conventional breeding techniques to improve yields, and then add their genetically engineered genes later. The conventional version should be ready by 2014. The transgenic version? Eventually.

From his years as CEO of Microsoft, Bill Gates knows well the name for this kind of product: vaporware. It’s hard not to think that Monsanto, Dupont and their ilk are turning into the Bernie Madoff of agriculture. Convince gullible foundations along with the federal government to send billions in research dollars their way based on a promise of magically awesome results. Sometime down the road, of course.

And of course the irony here is that a non-GMO solution exists, the development of seed varieties by local, African researchers such as the Nigeria National Variety Release Committee, who “developed the [improved] varieties through conventional plant breeding by tapping naturally-available traits.”

Wouldn’t it be simpler, and cheaper, wonders Laskawy, to just spend some foundation money (most likely a fraction of what goes to DuPont) on getting locally adapted seeds into local farmers’ hands?

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Note: You can find a good summary of objections to Gates’ faith in GMO technology here.

Obama’s energy budget — nukes get the goldmine, conservation gets the shaft

Maybe you know this. Maybe you don’t. (I didn’t, until fairly recently.) But the money for  building and maintaining nuclear weapons is NOT in the Pentagon’s budget. It’s in the budget of the Department of Energy. (Why?)

Just something to keep in mind as we all try to digest what the President means by “the largest investment in clean energy in history.”

The Institute for Policy Studies points out a few inconvenient truths (boldface is mine).

Despite Obama’s rhetoric about reshaping America’s energy future, he’s asking for a budget that would have the Energy Department continue to spend 10 times more on nuclear weapons than energy conservation. More than 65 percent of our energy budget covers military nuclear activities and the cleanup of weapons sites. Its single largest expenditure maintains some 9,200 intact nuclear warheads. Even though the department hasn’t built a new nuclear weapon for 20 years, its weapons complex is spending at rates comparable to that during the height of the nuclear arms race in the 1950s. Even with economic stimulus funding, the department’s actual energy functions comprise only 15 percent of its total budget and continue to take a backseat to propping up the nations’ large and antiquated nuclear weapons infrastructure. In fact, the Energy Department’s proposed budget for the 2011 fiscal year, minus stimulus money, looks a whole lot like it did in the Bush administration, and as it has during several presidents’ tenures.

And at Grist, David Roberts notes the expanded budget for building new nuclear reactors includes some potentially ginormous hidden costs:

To the naked eye it looks like nuclear energy wins out here:

The Budget substantially expands support for construction of new nuclear power plants by increasing the Department of Energy loan guarantees authority for such projects by $36 billion, to a total of $54.5 billion, and provides credit subsidy funding of $500 million to support $3 to $5 billion of loan guarantees for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects.

But it’s worth unpacking this. As OMB chief Peter Orszag emphasized in a briefing call this morning, the nuclear loan guarantees are meant to be fully repaid, while the renewable energy and energy efficiency money contains $500 million in credit subsidy. So there’s more direct spending on clean energy.

That’s with one big caveat, of course: that the nuclear industry doesn’t default on loans, sticking taxpayers with the liability. That could never happen, right? Ha ha. See Sue Sturgis and Dan Weiss on that subject. Or see the Congressional Research Service (PDF), which says the “federal government would bear most of the risk, facing potentially large losses if borrowers defaulted on reactor projects that could not be salvaged.” Or the Congressional Budget Office, which “considers the risk of default on such a loan guarantee to be very high—well above 50 percent.”

more on “cows the climate solution?”

cow image

I feel terrible that Seth Itzkan’s articulate response to a post of mine has languished in the WordPress spam queue for 6 weeks now.

The post in question, Cows the climate solution?, discussed Adam Sacks’ bold claim that well managed cattle grazing could solve all of our climate problems by the middle of the century! Seth’s very persuasive comment makes me think, Well, just maybe….

Thanks for your post which I found because I monitor Google Alerts for “Holistic Management”.  Actually, Adam Sacks is a colleague / friend of mine, and we’ve discussed these topics at length.  It’s nice to see that the word is getting out.

You are correct that Adam and George’s comments are not mutually exclusive because they are discussing different things.  As Adam states in his follow up, the issue isn’t about “cows” (although that’s the catch – I guess it worked!), the issue is about restoring grassland ecosystems – which are by far the largest stores of terrestrial carbon on the earth. Grasslands co-evolved with grazing mammals that moved in concentrated herds.  This herding action was caused by predation (wolves, lions and such).  The devastation of the world’s grasslands and is due largely to the removal of large mammals – not over grazing.  Too little grazing is as bad as too much.  Either way the grass dies.  This is the discovery of Alan Savory and the findings of the process of “Holistic Management”.  Please see http://www.holisticmanagement.org.  The more large animals are removed from their natural grassland ecosystems, the faster the grassland dies. Imagine that?  They actually need each other.

The problem today is that we have no sense of what a natural grassland ecosystem is.  When Louis and Clarke traveled across the Midwest they were walking over thousands of square miles of the riches soils on the planet, in many place over 10 feet deep with grasses just as high. Those soils, of course, are organic matter, which is, largely carbon, sequestered by plants that were kept alive by the “pulsed” animal impact. There were billions of tons carbon stored in those soils, most of which has run off into the oceans as topsoil loss.  The rest has been oxidized and become CO2 through burning and tilling.  At the time, there were 100 million buffalo, 100 million elk, and billions of prairie dogs, all eating, aerating, and recycling nutrients.  Gee, how did the grasslands survive with all that chomping? Heaven forbid. To restore those soils requires animal impact of the nature they evolved in – herd action, intense and short spurts or “pulses”.  The idyllic grazing that we see of a
few cows lounging around in short grass and mud is a modern, unnatural and unsustainable solution.  That’s *not* what we’re talking.

Environmentalist are correct in citing the damage that cattle do in their artificially maintained and poorly managed environments.  Of course.  No one is arguing for more of that. What Savory, and Adam are talking about is a new method of managing cows in a fashion that simulates the natural herd behavior that the grassland evolved this.  This takes the form of tightly packed groups of cows called “paddacks” that are moved frequently.  The process is known as Holistic Management.  The results are unequivocal.  Tens of millions of degraded soils have been restored this way, and small scales herders are viable now because of it.  It cost far less than traditional herding and greater “stocking levels” can be sustaining while improving the ecosystem.  In fact, as Savory says, this is the only method that will restore grassland soil.  No other method will work.  Grassland soils will not return without the animal impact that they evolved in.  It won’t happen.  The grassland will turn to
desert and their carbon sequestering potential will be lost.  The good news is that this process can be reversed.

Again, it isn’t about “cows”.  It’s about grazing mammals.  Cows can be managed in a way that mimics behavior that is beneficial to the soil.  We don’t give a flying hoot if it’s cows or bison, or elk, or giraffes, or elephants.  The action is similar.  Each is a grazing mammal that evolved in a grassland / savanna ecosystem.  When the animals are removed, the grassland ecosystem dies. We need millions more grazing animals moving about as natural herds, or in managed paddacks that replicate the herd behavior.  Seeing as so many people depend on cows, they may as well be managed in a fashion that is environmentally restorative – doing this sequesters, carbon, replenishes water tables, and creates viable enterprise for small rangers and herders.

Regarding methane.  Here is another case where the anti-cow environmentalists are missing the point. Miracle of miracle, the methane levels were less in the atmosphere when there were 100s of millions more grazing mammals on the earth than there are now – all of them eating grass and flatulating. How was that possible?  Because the animals were part of an ecosystem that was sequestering far more methane than they could ever produce.  It doesn’t matter how much gas the cows emit.  What matter is whether the soil ecosystem is being restored.  If it is, then methane is being sequestered at factors that are orders of magnitude greater than what the cow emits.  Cows are not an island.  We have a fragmented view of the problem.  Yes, grass fed cows in a feedlot may fart more than grain fed cows in a feedlot.  But, what’s the point of the comparison?  Both are unsustainable and deadly.

The more germane question is if the cows are part of a system that is environmentally restorative.  If they are being managed properly, they will be restoring the soil which will be sequestering methane, as well as CO2.  Cows (and all grazing mammals), are just a part of the system.  Recent studies have shown that a healthy grassland ecosystem will sequester 1000 times the methane produced by a cow on a space of soil adequate for that’s cows sustenance – repeat, 1000 times.  This is possible because of the methane eating microbes that are in the soil far outnumber the methane producing microbes in the cows stomach.  Methane digestion is an aerobic process. In a healthy soil (i.e. aerated), the methane eating microbes will dominate.  Where the soils are many feet deep, you are talking about thousands of cubic meters of methane eating soils compared to a few square feet of a cows stomach that is an anaerobic environment – thus produces methane.  In healthy soils, the methane eating
potential will always exceed the methane producing potential of the animals on it.  Again, it’s not about the cows.  It’s about the ecosystem. An aerated ecosystem will sequester methane.  Get the cows on the land, moving in a fashion that natures expects them to, and the methane problem will work itself out.

Restoring grassland soils is one of our most powerful tools in the fight against climate change.  Animal impact is essential to this process.  We need a deeper understanding of this process and it’s potential.  Thank you again for further considering it on your blog.

Chicken litter. It’s what’s for dinner!

cow face
Nope, not eatin' THAT!

In a typically enlightening and frightening Grist article, Tom Philpott notices a few nasty ingredients that are now going into your “conventional” hamburgers.  Poultry litter, for one, thing, or in plain English, “feces mixed with bedding, feathers, and uneaten feed.”

A Missouri Extension publication blithely describes this gross practice as “provid[ing] opportunities for both the poultry producer and the beef cattle producer.” The Consumers Union sees it a little differently:

It can contain disease-causing bacteria, antibiotics, toxic heavy metals, restricted feed ingredients including meat and bone meal from dead cattle, and even foreign objects such as dead rodents, rocks, nails and glass. Few of these hazards are eliminated by any processing that might occur before use as feed. The resulting health threats include the spread of mad cow disease and related human neurological diseases, the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria, and the potential for exposure to toxic metals, drug residues, and disease-causing bacteria.

Philpott also points out that crude (i.e. unpurified) glycerin, a biodiesel byproduct which goes into cosmetics (in purified form)  is now finding its way into feedlot food, as well as distillers grains, even though, as Philpott notes, “regulators acknowledge that the [latter] practice seems to encourage the growth of the deadly-to-humans pathogen E coli 0157. Distillers grains are also loaded with antibiotic residues and various industrial chemicals.”

And finally, because you might have missed it, the massive Huntington Meat Packing recall of beef tainted with  e. coli 0157 was not a mere 866,000 pounds of ground beef (enough for 3.56 million Quarter Pounders).  It was five times that amount!

As per the USDA

Huntington Meat Packing Inc., a Montebello, Calif., establishment, is expanding its recall of January 18 to include approximately 4.9 million additional pounds of beef and veal products that were not produced in accordance with the company’s food safety plan.

The USDA release also notes that the Huntington “recall was expanded based on evidence collected in an ongoing criminal investigation being conducted by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) with assistance from FSIS.”

Are you lovin’ it yet?

Truckin’

My mother’s favorite male celebrities were Liberace and Claude Akins.

I know! That’s quite a pair (comparable: Ernest Borgnine and Paul Lynde;  Charles Bronson and Charles Nelson Reilly). But she was a banquet waitress and a true small-d democrat. She cherished equally the autographs of both men, superstars from a kinder, gentler era.

Been having trucking songs running through my head lately. Found this clip from Movin’ On, which starred Akins and had a great song by Merle Haggard

Staying with truckin’ songs, and trying to match the weirdness of my mother’s pairing (God rest her),  another classic, albeit one from a distinct tradition, that of the scary, exhilarating roller coaster ride that is a Fall song:

“it will take 2 million angry moms to change school food”

free for all“It will take 2 million angry moms to change school food,” says Susan Coombs, former Texas Agriculture Secretary, who is quoted in Janet Poppendieck’s Free for All: Fixing School Food in America.

I’ve only just read a review of the book, and want this dad’s name added to the list of angry moms.

This happens to be a week I am also digesting  a full-hour interview with Michael Pollan on Democracy Now, as well as my third viewing of Food Inc., which is the best single document to introduce the unaware into the batshit crazy place that is America’s food system.

It’s a convoluted contraption, with a few big winners and lots and lots of losers.

Those profiting (mightily) from our national food dysfunction include executives and shareholders of the various Big Ag corporations–Monsanto, ConAgra, ADM, Cargill,  Smithfield, Tyson, Perdue– and the large farms that receive the bulk of subsidy payments for growing massive surpluses of corn and soybeans.

The losers are just about everyone else. The victims who suffer the most include small farmers; the abused cattle, pigs, and chickens who are treated like mechanical cogs, not living beings; the horribly stressed and underpaid factory farm workers who are treated only marginally better than the animals;  and … and … our children, who, via the school lunch program, are the last stop for the last bits of that surplus production that no one else wants.  Pollan calls it “a dispose-all system for surplus agricultural commodities.”

Here is a summary of the problem, and Poppendieck’s proposed radical solution, via Mark Winne on Civil Eats:

Why, for instance, have we developed three different ways to pay the lunch lady–one for the poor students, one for the nearly poor, and one for those who supposedly are being driven in BMWs to school? The logical answer might be because that’s fair; the rich kids should pay more and the government should subsidize the cost of feeding lower income children, as it does currently to the tune of $11 billion annually. But as Poppendieck peels back the layers of the onion, we find the issue has always been less about compassion for needy children and more about accommodating political and commercial interests. Harry Truman (school lunch is good for national security), Ronald Reagan (ketchup is a vegetable), nutritionists and nutritionism (its nutrients that count, not the quality and taste of food), and various agricultural lobbies wanting to unload their farm surpluses are just a sampling of what has driven the school food agenda. Somewhere low on the totem pole you’ll find concern for the health and well-being of boys and girls.

Poppendieck’s jargon-free narrative takes us step-by-step through the deals, concessions, and compromises that have bureaucratized the school food process while simultaneously dumbing down the food. Why is so much processed food used to prepare school meals? Because it’s cheaper and “cooking from scratch” kitchens have been removed from the schools. Why does it have to be cheaper when we’re talking about feeding our children? Because the federal government (or anyone else for that matter) will not provide enough funding to enable schools to buy fresh, whole ingredients. (And by the way, taxpayers are spending billions of dollars to subsidize corn and soybeans, the prime ingredients in processed food.) Why do we have so many junk food items sold “a la carte” in our schools? Well, in addition to using a French culinary phrase to disguise what is otherwise crappy food, schools must sell these items to those with discretionary cash–supposedly the ones in the BMWs–to compensate for the low reimbursements they receive for meals that meet mandated USDA standards. And on it goes.

Poppendieck has a solution that is as elegant as it will be hard to achieve–universal free meals for all students K through 12. She acknowledges the cost, an additional $12 billion per year (our present wars, please note, are costing about the same amount each month) that would not only feed all students for free, but also improve the quality of the food.

If the arguments for universal school meals–efficiency, equity, no one excluded–sound eerily familiar, then you’ve probably been paying attention to the arguments for universal health care. If nothing else, it’s certainly ironic to consider the consequences of removing each system’s respective middlemen: processed food purveyors for school food, and private health insurers for health care. Might we all be healthier as a result?

This food and kids thing is a big battle in our house. I work hard to have good food around: we raise our own meat and veggies (in season), but we’re always battling peer pressure, fast food and (this one really kills me) all the free toys the kids get when they eat fast food.

In spite of all my efforts, my kids ingest more than their fair share of sugary cereal, pizza, and chicken nuggets– both at school and (sadly) at home. I have to weigh the risk of alienating them from good food altogether (if I push too hard) against the ill effects of the crap they prefer. It ain’t easy. I like to hope that the exposure to real food will at some future point mutate into a desire to eat it, but I can’t be sure.

I’m not exactly optimistic that Congress and the White House will find the $12 billion to give free, nutritious school lunches for all of our kids. That’s putting it mildly. It’s not going to happen with the current crew. But we have to start demanding it.

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