Billy wrote:
....
The better for what? question about my organic meal can of
course be
answered in a much less selfish way: Is it better for the
environment?
Better for the farmers who grew it? Better for the public
health? For
the taxpayer? The answer to all three questions is an (almost)
unqualified yes. To grow the plants and animals that made up my
meal,
no pesti- cides found their way into any farmworker's
bloodstream, no
nitrogen runoff or growth hormones seeped into the watershed,
no
soils were poisoned, no antibiotics were squandered, no subsidy
checks were written. If the high price of my all-organic meal
is
weighed against the comparatively low price it exacted from the
larger world, as it should be, it begins to look, at least in
karmic
terms, like a real bargain.

i'd be sure that at least one of those farmer's
children were on birth control.

i love science, but we have a long ways to go
before we have the complete picture of this
understood.

i wouldn't be surprised to find out at how
much of what we consider good gardening
now will be proved false in the next 50 years.

i remain a wide-eyed optimist with cynically
rose colored glasses.


songbird

In article ,
"songbird" wrote:

Billy wrote:
...
The better for what? question about my organic meal can of
course be
answered in a much less selfish way: Is it better for the
environment?
Better for the farmers who grew it? Better for the public
health? For
the taxpayer? The answer to all three questions is an (almost)
unqualified yes. To grow the plants and animals that made up my
meal,
no pesti- cides found their way into any farmworker's
bloodstream, no
nitrogen runoff or growth hormones seeped into the watershed,
no
soils were poisoned, no antibiotics were squandered, no subsidy
checks were written. If the high price of my all-organic meal
is
weighed against the comparatively low price it exacted from the
larger world, as it should be, it begins to look, at least in
karmic
terms, like a real bargain.

i'd be sure that at least one of those farmer's
children were on birth control.

i love science, but we have a long ways to go
before we have the complete picture of this
understood.

i wouldn't be surprised to find out at how
much of what we consider good gardening
now will be proved false in the next 50 years.

i remain a wide-eyed optimist with cynically
rose colored glasses.


songbird

True, we understood mega-nutrients: protein, carbohydrates, and fats,
but that wasn't enough.
Now we understand micronutrients: vitamins, but that isn't enough.
Will bioflavonoids be it, or will that not be enough as well?
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg
http://radwisdom.com/essays/this-is-your-brain/

Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
...
The better for what? question about my organic meal can of
course be
answered in a much less selfish way: Is it better for the
environment?
Better for the farmers who grew it? Better for the public
health? For
the taxpayer? The answer to all three questions is an
(almost)
unqualified yes. To grow the plants and animals that made up
my
meal,
no pesti- cides found their way into any farmworker's
bloodstream, no
nitrogen runoff or growth hormones seeped into the watershed,
no
soils were poisoned, no antibiotics were squandered, no
subsidy
checks were written. If the high price of my all-organic meal
is
weighed against the comparatively low price it exacted from
the
larger world, as it should be, it begins to look, at least in
karmic
terms, like a real bargain.

i'd be sure that at least one of those farmer's
children were on birth control.

i love science, but we have a long ways to go
before we have the complete picture of this
understood.

i wouldn't be surprised to find out at how
much of what we consider good gardening
now will be proved false in the next 50 years.

i remain a wide-eyed optimist with cynically
rose colored glasses.

True, we understood mega-nutrients: protein, carbohydrates, and
fats,
but that wasn't enough.
Now we understand micronutrients: vitamins, but that isn't
enough.
Will bioflavonoids be it, or will that not be enough as well?

actually, what i am wondering more and more
about is while i'm sure that some of the things
that plants make are ok for us, many other
substances are either going to be somewhat
toxic or neutral and the end result is that the liver
is the primary sorting ground. so any nutritional
studies which do not analyze long term liver
function/toxicity are basically crap.

all these chemicals that plants make to defend
themselves from predators (including herbivores/
omnivores i.e. us) at some level will be doing
some damage and perhaps organic gardening
which increases certain chemicals may be increasing
the burden on the liver. we really are not very far
along in this sort of "entire system" analysis when it
comes to all the chemicals the body can ingest
and the waste products and how they are transported
and etc... some things are stored in fats and thus in
the fatty cells in the body. some things come out of
the fats given certain diets and such, etc. all of this
is not really completely understood either.

take it all in combination and we are many years
from "knowledge" in the sense of completeness, but
at least we are on the way if we don't manage to do
ourselves in first. it's a race IMO. considering what
we knew a hundred years ago we've made a lot of
progress, but much of what we know now is still
likely to be flat out wrong. i trust science to figure
it out eventually, i do not trust "organic religion" any
more than i trusted "atkins diet religion" when that
became a craze.


songbird

In article ,
"songbird" wrote:

Billy wrote:
songbird wrote:
Billy wrote:
...
The better for what? question about my organic meal can of
course be
answered in a much less selfish way: Is it better for the
environment?
Better for the farmers who grew it? Better for the public
health? For
the taxpayer? The answer to all three questions is an
(almost)
unqualified yes. To grow the plants and animals that made up
my
meal,
no pesti- cides found their way into any farmworker's
bloodstream, no
nitrogen runoff or growth hormones seeped into the watershed,
no
soils were poisoned, no antibiotics were squandered, no
subsidy
checks were written. If the high price of my all-organic meal
is
weighed against the comparatively low price it exacted from
the
larger world, as it should be, it begins to look, at least in
karmic
terms, like a real bargain.

i'd be sure that at least one of those farmer's
children were on birth control.

i love science, but we have a long ways to go
before we have the complete picture of this
understood.

i wouldn't be surprised to find out at how
much of what we consider good gardening
now will be proved false in the next 50 years.

i remain a wide-eyed optimist with cynically
rose colored glasses.

True, we understood mega-nutrients: protein, carbohydrates, and
fats,
but that wasn't enough.
Now we understand micronutrients: vitamins, but that isn't
enough.
Will bioflavonoids be it, or will that not be enough as well?

actually, what i am wondering more and more
about is while i'm sure that some of the things
that plants make are ok for us, many other
substances are either going to be somewhat
toxic or neutral and the end result is that the liver
is the primary sorting ground. so any nutritional
studies which do not analyze long term liver
function/toxicity are basically crap.

all these chemicals that plants make to defend
themselves from predators (including herbivores/
omnivores i.e. us) at some level will be doing
some damage and perhaps organic gardening
which increases certain chemicals may be increasing
the burden on the liver. we really are not very far
along in this sort of "entire system" analysis when it
comes to all the chemicals the body can ingest
and the waste products and how they are transported
and etc... some things are stored in fats and thus in
the fatty cells in the body. some things come out of
the fats given certain diets and such, etc. all of this
is not really completely understood either.

take it all in combination and we are many years
from "knowledge" in the sense of completeness, but
at least we are on the way if we don't manage to do
ourselves in first. it's a race IMO. considering what
we knew a hundred years ago we've made a lot of
progress, but much of what we know now is still
likely to be flat out wrong. i trust science to figure
it out eventually, i do not trust "organic religion" any
more than i trusted "atkins diet religion" when that
became a craze.


songbird

Quite a little rant. As far as organic foods are concerned, that is what
humanity has been eating since the Garden of Eden to 1945. If that is
insufficient, then it is a wonder that we are still here. Our liver is
indeed here to protect us from our mistakes, has our entire history been
a mistake?

Organic religion? Shirley, you jest. We are only talking about
traditional food, grown in traditional ways. Does that aspire to the
level of a cult?

Contemporary, commercial agriculture kills top soil, kills soil ecology,
pollutes ground water, and creates ocean dead zones around the mouthes
of rivers. Contemporary, commercial agriculture requires more than a
calorie of fossil fuel for each calorie of food. Organic (traditional)
agriculture produces 2+ calories for each calorie of input.
Contemporary, commercial agriculture fills your body with chemicals that
your liver never saw before, much less has developed any way of dealing
with.

With corporations now funding large segments of our underfunded higher
education, don't be surprised if scientists can't get funding for
nutritional studies that are very expensive to run. Even now, industry
is fighting doing toxicological studies of chemicals that that were
grand fathered into our food delivery system.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chemical-controls
April 2010, Scientific American
p. 30
Chemical Controls
Congress needs to give federal agencies greater authority to test and
regulate chemicals

People seem to thrive on traditional food. It is only when they take up
western food that they get sick. One of the reasons that wheat was
separated from its germ is because with only the starch and none of its
nutrition, white flour attracts fewer pests. Stay away from processed
foods (empty calories of sugar, white flour, and white rice), and you'll
be healthier. The Inuit didn't have diabetes, until they started eating
from trading posts. Colonial doctors reported little i the way of
diabetes, cancer, or high blood pressure, until the introduction of the
"Western" diet. Sugar consumption (IIRC) has gone from 15 lbs/year in
1840 to approximately 170 lbs/year at present in "western" cultures.
But, hey, it's your organism, who am I to tell you not to abuse it?

Especially, when the University of California
http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16717
and
Stanford University
http://academicearth.org/lectures/battle-of-the-diets
can say it much more eloquently and with more authority than I can.

Don't get me wrong, even traditional organic agriculture isn't perfect.
Far from it,
http://www.environnement.ens.fr/pers.../mistake_jared
_diamond.pdf

And as you work on your grapevine, or worrying about uncontrolled
immigration, remember that by 2050, there will be 9 billion people on
this planet with us, and 12 billion by 2067. And we have already
exceeded the Earth's carrying capacity for us.

We can't even figure out what to do with a half-century's total
production of over a 1 billion tons of plastic that is floating around
in the oceans. It includes hundreds of different plastics, with untold
permutations involving added plasticizers, opacifiers, colors, fillers,
strengtheners, and light stabilizers. The longevity of each can vary
enormously. Thus far, none has disappeared.

What did this mean for the ocean, the ecosystem, the future? Would its
chemical constituents or additives ‹ for instance, colorants such as
metallic copper ‹ concentrate as they ascended the food chain, and alter
evolution?

The use of aggressively toxic polychlorinated biphenyls‹PCBs‹to make
plastics more pliable had been banned since 1970; among other hazards,
PCBs were known to promote hor-
monal havoc such as hermaphroditic fish and polar bears. Like
time-release capsules, pre-1970 plastic flotsam will gradually leak PCBs
into the ocean for centuries. But, as Takada also discovered,
free-floating toxins from all kinds of sources‹copy paper, automobile
grease, coolant fluids, old fluorescent tubes, and infamous discharges
by General Electric and Monsanto plants directly into streams and
rivers‹readily stick to the surfaces of free-floating plastic.

One study directly correlated ingested plastics with PCBs in the fat
tissue of puffins. The astonishing part was the amount. Takada aad his
colleagues found that plastic pellets that the birds ate concentrate
poisons to levels as high as 1 million times their normal occurrence in
seawater.

The World Without Us (Paperback)
by Alan Weisman
POLYMERS ARE FOREVER / 151
http://www.amazon.com/World-Without-...2427905/ref=sr
_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274206221&sr=1-1

And we want to build more nuclear reactors ;O)
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg
http://radwisdom.com/essays/this-is-your-brain/

Billy wrote:
....
Quite a little rant. As far as organic foods are concerned,
that is
what
humanity has been eating since the Garden of Eden to 1945. If
that is
insufficient, then it is a wonder that we are still here. Our
liver is
indeed here to protect us from our mistakes, has our entire
history
been
a mistake?

Organic religion? Shirley, you jest. We are only talking about
traditional food, grown in traditional ways. Does that aspire
to the
level of a cult?

some people talk about it with that gleem in
their eyes which removes all doubt that this
is _The True and Only Way_ to grow things.

alas, science will continue to show that
there will be even better ways of doing
things, given time, evolution is not optimized.



Contemporary, commercial agriculture kills top soil, kills soil
ecology,

have you read anything about no-till practices?

i'm not a contemporary farm practices apologist,
i just don't see how we get out of the current fix
without food riots and mass starvation and many
other turmoils.


pollutes ground water, and creates ocean dead zones around the
mouthes
of rivers.

i think organic farms can also pollute ground water
and certainly do contribute to nutrients in the rivers
thus the dead zones. i think there is a major problem
there but i think it is also contributed to heavily by
many other practices which are not agricultural
(lawns being one of them, massive parking lots/paving,
ditching, drainage not filtered through wetlands,
waste processing plants, etc). i don't think it correct to
put that sort of thing wholly on the plates of the
non-organic farmers.


Contemporary, commercial agriculture requires more than a
calorie of fossil fuel for each calorie of food. Organic
(traditional)
agriculture produces 2+ calories for each calorie of input.

where are you getting this calorie amount from?
from what i know, organic farming is more
labor intensive, so will require more people
to grow the things consumed. which is good
for employment, but does not help reduce
the pressure on the entire planet's ecosystem.

i do agree that the petrochemical system
currently in place is going to peter out
eventually, it has to, there isn't an infinite
supply of oil. there isn't an infinite supply
of anything on this planet, we really need
to be investing in figuring out how to survive
in smaller systems and what is needed
to thrive there.


Contemporary, commercial agriculture fills your body with
chemicals
that
your liver never saw before, much less has developed any way of
dealing
with.

somewhat true, and these are greatly troubling
to me also. Dioxins being a local trouble (read
about the dioxin contamination of the
Tittabawassee River and the Saginaw River
sometime).

i'm also greatly troubled by the general
neglect of understanding of what happens
to things after we are done with them.
including things like BC meds, all those
plastics (which you speak about below
and i agree with that they are trouble) which
act as long term sources of pollutants,
landfills, etc.


With corporations now funding large segments of our underfunded
higher
education, don't be surprised if scientists can't get funding
for
nutritional studies that are very expensive to run. Even now,
industry
is fighting doing toxicological studies of chemicals that that
were
grand fathered into our food delivery system.

i know, that is horrible and for
certain should require safety studies,
even if done for one item per company
per season it's not that terrible a
thing to ask. and actually if you have
many companies using the compound
in question they could all contribute
to the study based upon how much
they use. seems fair and the cost
gets passed on to consumers anyways
in one form or another eventually...
there's no real way to avoid the
price of ignorance even if most
people do not really want the
slightly higher prices that knowledge
would cost it's a basic science
question that eventually will have to
be addressed, it doesn't matter
what the currency is used to
pay for it, the ultimate currency is
human time and wasted or damaged
lives/ecosystems/other organisms, etc.

i read about current practices
in meat processing and testing and
decide to not eat much ground meat
as a result. there's no way i want
meat that has been treated with
ammonia to kill the microbes put
back into the mix (i thought that
was what pigs were for ). and
actually i try to eat less meat as i
consider it fairly "expensive" when
it comes to the environment. as
an omnivore it's a part of the total
feedbag and i like a good burger
or steak once in a while, but i know
some people who eat that way
every day... um, not for me...


http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chemical-controls
April 2010, Scientific American
p. 30
Chemical Controls
Congress needs to give federal agencies greater authority to
test and
regulate chemicals

People seem to thrive on traditional food. It is only when they
take
up
western food that they get sick.

again, not entirely true, before modern
methods came along people died from
malnutrition and food borne diseases or
just didn't make it to old age where such
things as heart disease and diabetes tend
to show up more and more.

when i want to amuse myself i think
that i really wasn't meant to live past
40 and should have been food for a
saber tooth tiger.


One of the reasons that wheat was
separated from its germ is because with only the starch and
none of
its
nutrition, white flour attracts fewer pests. Stay away from
processed
foods (empty calories of sugar, white flour, and white rice),
and
you'll
be healthier. The Inuit didn't have diabetes, until they
started
eating
from trading posts. Colonial doctors reported little i the way
of
diabetes, cancer, or high blood pressure,

heh, a lot of people just died earlier than they
do now, and much that people used to die of
isn't accurately known or reported. there are
still troubles in knowing even now. this is a
continuing issue of privacy vs. community
health and what science needs to know to
advance understanding. not easy things to
resolve.


until the introduction of
the "Western" diet. Sugar consumption (IIRC) has gone from 15
lbs/year in 1840 to approximately 170 lbs/year at present in
"western" cultures.
But, hey, it's your organism, who am I to tell you not to abuse
it?

i'm offline at the moment so i cannot follow links... however,
some of what you write above is simply not true. modern
food science and as a result changes in agricultural
practices has reduced toxicity of certain things and i'm
glad for that (being that peanut butter is something i like
to eat on a regular basis i'm glad to know it's produced
to reduce the toxins that can otherwise accumulate). also
that is true for many grain crops that used to have much
higher fungal troubles and the resulting toxins... not that
this is all right, but i think it has helped in some ways.

i agree that the overprocessing and such is not good,
and i eat myself to avoid some of the things you mention
but not completely as certain tastes, textures and
end products (in baking and candy making) just aren't
right when done with whole grain flours or unrefined
sugars.

moderation being the key there (omnivore means
eat a variety of things, physiology says eat more
plant than animal things, climate and physical exercise
means certain amounts of calories are needed and
sometimes you have to have dense sources of nutrients
just to survive, but most people these days do not
need as much as they are getting which is obvious).


Especially, when the University of California
http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16717
and
Stanford University
http://academicearth.org/lectures/battle-of-the-diets
can say it much more eloquently and with more authority than I
can.

Don't get me wrong, even traditional organic agriculture isn't
perfect.
Far from it,
http://www.environnement.ens.fr/pers.../mistake_jared
_diamond.pdf

And as you work on your grapevine, or worrying about
uncontrolled
immigration, remember that by 2050, there will be 9 billion
people on
this planet with us, and 12 billion by 2067. And we have
already
exceeded the Earth's carrying capacity for us.

oh believe me i'm already knowing of
that. it's only the petrochemicals which
are feeding a lot of people now, when
they start becoming scarce the food riots
are going to be "interesting". my personal
choice to not have children and to drive
as little as possible a very fuel efficient
car is what i could do to make a difference.
i try to make other differences in not
using a lot of fertilizers, in trying to
soak up or filter runoff before it hits the
ditches. i'm a big fan of river restorations
and letting the rivers flood again where
they used to go, restoring wetlands,
stopping the spraying of nerve poisons
for insect controls, etc.

i like organic farming, i like working
with the world around me instead of
having to fight it, but at the moment i'm
also having to live in a world with values
almost 180 degrees from my own so
somethings i must bend around as i
can.


We can't even figure out what to do with a half-century's total
production of over a 1 billion tons of plastic that is floating
around
in the oceans. It includes hundreds of different plastics, with
untold
permutations involving added plasticizers, opacifiers, colors,
fillers,
strengtheners, and light stabilizers. The longevity of each can
vary
enormously. Thus far, none has disappeared.

some of it has been incorporated in reefs.
(one of my interests has been coral reef
oceanography/biology/nutrient cycling).


What did this mean for the ocean, the ecosystem, the future?
Would its
chemical constituents or additives for instance, colorants
such as
metallic copper concentrate as they ascended the food chain,
and
alter
evolution?

raw copper is really tough on marine
critters. most of it gets bound in one
way or another before it gets to the
oceans.


The use of aggressively toxic polychlorinated biphenyls
plastics
more pliable had been banned since 1970; among other hazards,
PCBs
were known to promote hor-
monal havoc such as hermaphroditic fish and polar bears. Like
time-release capsules, pre-1970 plastic flotsam will gradually
leak
PCBs
into the ocean for centuries. But, as Takada also discovered,
free-floating toxins from all kinds of sources grease,
coolant
fluids, old fluorescent tubes, and infamous discharges
by General Electric and Monsanto plants directly into streams
and
rivers
One study directly correlated ingested plastics with PCBs in
the fat
tissue of puffins. The astonishing part was the amount. Takada
aad his
colleagues found that plastic pellets that the birds ate
concentrate
poisons to levels as high as 1 million times their normal
occurrence
in
seawater.

yep, it's going to take it's toll one
way or another. i'm glad we
recycle plastics here. until we
did i was not buying certain
products because i objected
to the packaging.

mercury loading is troublesome
too from coal burning (among other
things). ok, this we must skip for
now. my toxic metal knowledge is
limited to lead, murkery, copper
and some of the radioactives.


The World Without Us (Paperback)
by Alan Weisman
POLYMERS ARE FOREVER / 151
http://www.amazon.com/World-Without-...2427905/ref=sr
_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274206221&sr=1-1

And we want to build more nuclear reactors ;O)

designed right and run right i'll take
them over coal/oil any time, but my
preference is more towards solar and
wind and conservation measures.
the big trouble with the wastes is a
farce, they could be disposed in a
way which the earth would normally
cycle them (reprocess, what's left
could be encased in heavy glass,
steel, lead, etc. then dropped into a
continental subduction zone which
would take it back into the mantle).

in the end we gotta get a move on
learning how to live in space and
that has a certain time frame that it
has to happen by or we're just another
fossil in the record...

a few good blasts from a bunch
of volcanoes and we're seriously
in trouble worldwide within two
years... in my other moments
of wondering what kind of
people i live among it amazes
me how many really just don't
care about the long term future
of the planet and the means
by which we can get moving towards
other planets... optimally i would
like to have that happen when we
know what it takes to live in a
relatively closed system without
damaging ourselves in the process...
but if push comes to shove i know
what bit of the cosmic ark i'd
want to be on.

it is going to take a large
and organised system of
production to get that to happen
which means corporations or
government agencies and all
the foibles of human nature
that come along with such
groupings. at least science
has ways of understanding and
helping all around. i think
organic means of production will
be a part of that too, but there
will also be industrial processes
too. we're just too far past the
carrying capacity (as you say and
i agree with) to go back short of
cataclysm or a real serious long
range effort to gradually reduce
populations... i don't see that
happening. people want to have
babies, they want children to
take care of them when they
grow older, they want workers
to pay taxes so they can fund their
pet projects (safety studies,
nutritional studies, health studies,
space science and exploration ) hee

oh, i feel bad that i didn't
speak about ocean acidification.
as that is a basic change that
will have long range effects and
we're basically ignoring it by
pumping all the carbon dioxide
into the air... organic gardening
is not going to fix that because
organic gardening aims to recycle
nutrients not sequester carbon
dioxide. somehow that has to
be addressed and fairly immediately
and unfortunately it's not. people
are still driving SUVs even after
the oil platform spill and all the
havoc that is going to cause... *sigh*

if only i were king... i think that is
why your .sig is always amusing to me.

consider this:

humans are an ecological system's
response to limited and finite resources...
we are the great innoculators, the
means of dispersal and of course
destruction if we screw up. oops.

ok, good night, it's been fun...


songbird

You have some interesting things to say and you have clearly thought about
them but you do yourself a disservice in your presentation.

Your postings are often made up of very long one-sentence paragraphs all in
lower case. You may think that messy old usenet doesn't require your finger
to ever hit the full stop or the shift key but we will read more and skip
less if you employ them. May I also suggest that you adjust the line length
of your newsreader as it wraps lines rather short, which is hardly good for
your text but it mangles the quotes because they are then chopped twice.

David

David Hare-Scott wrote:
You have some interesting things to say and you have clearly thought
about them but you do yourself a disservice in your presentation.

your attention is appreciated,
your responses read if i'm still
alive to press the key or click the
mouse, but i'm unlikely to change
my writing style to your satisfaction.

considering much is wandering
OT of r.g.e. i'm quite happy to
drop much of it.


Your postings are often made up of very long one-sentence paragraphs
all in lower case.

grammar takes a backseat
and howls to the music of
wurlds colliding.

her knickers about her
sneeze her shoes in a
bundle and (to be true
to this group) a rhubarb
pie on the dash.

....

more seriously, words and ideas
first, am i clear enough that you
understand what i'm aiming at?
or if i am confusing, you can ask
questions and we can have a
conversation (instead of throwing
links back and forth as seems to
be what is happening to usenet
these days).

paragraphs are for formal
writing, this isn't that kind of
writing. i'm here to have fun
and talk, not write papers for
publication. some of my aim
is to be entertaining and playful
while also being challenging.


You may think that messy old usenet doesn't
require your finger to ever hit the full stop or the shift key but we
will read more and skip less if you employ them.

i like being little. i am keeping my
ego on a leash, don't encourage me
to get all formalic like the big ants in
the amazon do. they scare the shit
outta me, always marching, always
eating, and oy veh the smell!


May I also suggest
that you adjust the line length of your newsreader as it wraps lines
rather short, which is hardly good for your text but it mangles the
quotes because they are then chopped twice.

oh, ok, i didn't notice i'd chopped at 65 instead of 72,
i've now adjusted it upwards. i'm still testing out my
linux side setup for slrn so as soon as i get that working
the way i like it i will be switching newsreaders... at
this rate it will be a few months yet. i'm in the middle
of too many projects and gardening season is on.

peace and good evening to all,


songbird

In article ,
"songbird" wrote:

Billy wrote:
...
Quite a little rant. As far as organic foods are concerned,
that is
what
humanity has been eating since the Garden of Eden to 1945. If
that is
insufficient, then it is a wonder that we are still here. Our
liver is
indeed here to protect us from our mistakes, has our entire
history
been
a mistake?

Organic religion? Shirley, you jest. We are only talking about
traditional food, grown in traditional ways. Does that aspire
to the
level of a cult?

some people talk about it with that gleem in
their eyes which removes all doubt that this
is _The True and Only Way_ to grow things.

alas, science will continue to show that
there will be even better ways of doing
things, given time, evolution is not optimized.



Contemporary, commercial agriculture kills top soil, kills soil
ecology,

have you read anything about no-till practices?

i'm not a contemporary farm practices apologist,
i just don't see how we get out of the current fix
without food riots and mass starvation and many
other turmoils.


pollutes ground water, and creates ocean dead zones around the
mouthes
of rivers.

i think organic farms can also pollute ground water
and certainly do contribute to nutrients in the rivers
thus the dead zones. i think there is a major problem
there but i think it is also contributed to heavily by
many other practices which are not agricultural
(lawns being one of them, massive parking lots/paving,
ditching, drainage not filtered through wetlands,
waste processing plants, etc). i don't think it correct to
put that sort of thing wholly on the plates of the
non-organic farmers.


Contemporary, commercial agriculture requires more than a
calorie of fossil fuel for each calorie of food. Organic
(traditional)
agriculture produces 2+ calories for each calorie of input.

where are you getting this calorie amount from?
from what i know, organic farming is more
labor intensive, so will require more people
to grow the things consumed. which is good
for employment, but does not help reduce
the pressure on the entire planet's ecosystem.

i do agree that the petrochemical system
currently in place is going to peter out
eventually, it has to, there isn't an infinite
supply of oil. there isn't an infinite supply
of anything on this planet, we really need
to be investing in figuring out how to survive
in smaller systems and what is needed
to thrive there.


Contemporary, commercial agriculture fills your body with
chemicals
that
your liver never saw before, much less has developed any way of
dealing
with.

somewhat true, and these are greatly troubling
to me also. Dioxins being a local trouble (read
about the dioxin contamination of the
Tittabawassee River and the Saginaw River
sometime).

i'm also greatly troubled by the general
neglect of understanding of what happens
to things after we are done with them.
including things like BC meds, all those
plastics (which you speak about below
and i agree with that they are trouble) which
act as long term sources of pollutants,
landfills, etc.


With corporations now funding large segments of our underfunded
higher
education, don't be surprised if scientists can't get funding
for
nutritional studies that are very expensive to run. Even now,
industry
is fighting doing toxicological studies of chemicals that that
were
grand fathered into our food delivery system.

i know, that is horrible and for
certain should require safety studies,
even if done for one item per company
per season it's not that terrible a
thing to ask. and actually if you have
many companies using the compound
in question they could all contribute
to the study based upon how much
they use. seems fair and the cost
gets passed on to consumers anyways
in one form or another eventually...
there's no real way to avoid the
price of ignorance even if most
people do not really want the
slightly higher prices that knowledge
would cost it's a basic science
question that eventually will have to
be addressed, it doesn't matter
what the currency is used to
pay for it, the ultimate currency is
human time and wasted or damaged
lives/ecosystems/other organisms, etc.

i read about current practices
in meat processing and testing and
decide to not eat much ground meat
as a result. there's no way i want
meat that has been treated with
ammonia to kill the microbes put
back into the mix (i thought that
was what pigs were for ). and
actually i try to eat less meat as i
consider it fairly "expensive" when
it comes to the environment. as
an omnivore it's a part of the total
feedbag and i like a good burger
or steak once in a while, but i know
some people who eat that way
every day... um, not for me...


http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=chemical-controls
April 2010, Scientific American
p. 30
Chemical Controls
Congress needs to give federal agencies greater authority to
test and
regulate chemicals

People seem to thrive on traditional food. It is only when they
take
up
western food that they get sick.

again, not entirely true, before modern
methods came along people died from
malnutrition and food borne diseases or
just didn't make it to old age where such
things as heart disease and diabetes tend
to show up more and more.

when i want to amuse myself i think
that i really wasn't meant to live past
40 and should have been food for a
saber tooth tiger.


One of the reasons that wheat was
separated from its germ is because with only the starch and
none of
its
nutrition, white flour attracts fewer pests. Stay away from
processed
foods (empty calories of sugar, white flour, and white rice),
and
you'll
be healthier. The Inuit didn't have diabetes, until they
started
eating
from trading posts. Colonial doctors reported little i the way
of
diabetes, cancer, or high blood pressure,

heh, a lot of people just died earlier than they
do now, and much that people used to die of
isn't accurately known or reported. there are
still troubles in knowing even now. this is a
continuing issue of privacy vs. community
health and what science needs to know to
advance understanding. not easy things to
resolve.


until the introduction of
the "Western" diet. Sugar consumption (IIRC) has gone from 15
lbs/year in 1840 to approximately 170 lbs/year at present in
"western" cultures.
But, hey, it's your organism, who am I to tell you not to abuse
it?

i'm offline at the moment so i cannot follow links... however,
some of what you write above is simply not true. modern
food science and as a result changes in agricultural
practices has reduced toxicity of certain things and i'm
glad for that (being that peanut butter is something i like
to eat on a regular basis i'm glad to know it's produced
to reduce the toxins that can otherwise accumulate). also
that is true for many grain crops that used to have much
higher fungal troubles and the resulting toxins... not that
this is all right, but i think it has helped in some ways.

i agree that the overprocessing and such is not good,
and i eat myself to avoid some of the things you mention
but not completely as certain tastes, textures and
end products (in baking and candy making) just aren't
right when done with whole grain flours or unrefined
sugars.

moderation being the key there (omnivore means
eat a variety of things, physiology says eat more
plant than animal things, climate and physical exercise
means certain amounts of calories are needed and
sometimes you have to have dense sources of nutrients
just to survive, but most people these days do not
need as much as they are getting which is obvious).


Especially, when the University of California
http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16717
and
Stanford University
http://academicearth.org/lectures/battle-of-the-diets
can say it much more eloquently and with more authority than I
can.

Don't get me wrong, even traditional organic agriculture isn't
perfect.
Far from it,
http://www.environnement.ens.fr/pers.../mistake_jared
_diamond.pdf

And as you work on your grapevine, or worrying about
uncontrolled
immigration, remember that by 2050, there will be 9 billion
people on
this planet with us, and 12 billion by 2067. And we have
already
exceeded the Earth's carrying capacity for us.

oh believe me i'm already knowing of
that. it's only the petrochemicals which
are feeding a lot of people now, when
they start becoming scarce the food riots
are going to be "interesting". my personal
choice to not have children and to drive
as little as possible a very fuel efficient
car is what i could do to make a difference.
i try to make other differences in not
using a lot of fertilizers, in trying to
soak up or filter runoff before it hits the
ditches. i'm a big fan of river restorations
and letting the rivers flood again where
they used to go, restoring wetlands,
stopping the spraying of nerve poisons
for insect controls, etc.

i like organic farming, i like working
with the world around me instead of
having to fight it, but at the moment i'm
also having to live in a world with values
almost 180 degrees from my own so
somethings i must bend around as i
can.


We can't even figure out what to do with a half-century's total
production of over a 1 billion tons of plastic that is floating
around
in the oceans. It includes hundreds of different plastics, with
untold
permutations involving added plasticizers, opacifiers, colors,
fillers,
strengtheners, and light stabilizers. The longevity of each can
vary
enormously. Thus far, none has disappeared.

some of it has been incorporated in reefs.
(one of my interests has been coral reef
oceanography/biology/nutrient cycling).


What did this mean for the ocean, the ecosystem, the future?
Would its
chemical constituents or additives for instance, colorants
such as
metallic copper concentrate as they ascended the food chain,
and
alter
evolution?

raw copper is really tough on marine
critters. most of it gets bound in one
way or another before it gets to the
oceans.


The use of aggressively toxic polychlorinated biphenyls
plastics
more pliable had been banned since 1970; among other hazards,
PCBs
were known to promote hor-
monal havoc such as hermaphroditic fish and polar bears. Like
time-release capsules, pre-1970 plastic flotsam will gradually
leak
PCBs
into the ocean for centuries. But, as Takada also discovered,
free-floating toxins from all kinds of sources grease,
coolant
fluids, old fluorescent tubes, and infamous discharges
by General Electric and Monsanto plants directly into streams
and
rivers
One study directly correlated ingested plastics with PCBs in
the fat
tissue of puffins. The astonishing part was the amount. Takada
aad his
colleagues found that plastic pellets that the birds ate
concentrate
poisons to levels as high as 1 million times their normal
occurrence
in
seawater.

yep, it's going to take it's toll one
way or another. i'm glad we
recycle plastics here. until we
did i was not buying certain
products because i objected
to the packaging.

mercury loading is troublesome
too from coal burning (among other
things). ok, this we must skip for
now. my toxic metal knowledge is
limited to lead, murkery, copper
and some of the radioactives.


The World Without Us (Paperback)
by Alan Weisman
POLYMERS ARE FOREVER / 151
http://www.amazon.com/World-Without-...2427905/ref=sr
_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274206221&sr=1-1

And we want to build more nuclear reactors ;O)

designed right and run right i'll take
them over coal/oil any time, but my
preference is more towards solar and
wind and conservation measures.
the big trouble with the wastes is a
farce, they could be disposed in a
way which the earth would normally
cycle them (reprocess, what's left
could be encased in heavy glass,
steel, lead, etc. then dropped into a
continental subduction zone which
would take it back into the mantle).

in the end we gotta get a move on
learning how to live in space and
that has a certain time frame that it
has to happen by or we're just another
fossil in the record...

a few good blasts from a bunch
of volcanoes and we're seriously
in trouble worldwide within two
years... in my other moments
of wondering what kind of
people i live among it amazes
me how many really just don't
care about the long term future
of the planet and the means
by which we can get moving towards
other planets... optimally i would
like to have that happen when we
know what it takes to live in a
relatively closed system without
damaging ourselves in the process...
but if push comes to shove i know
what bit of the cosmic ark i'd
want to be on.

it is going to take a large
and organised system of
production to get that to happen
which means corporations or
government agencies and all
the foibles of human nature
that come along with such
groupings. at least science
has ways of understanding and
helping all around. i think
organic means of production will
be a part of that too, but there
will also be industrial processes
too. we're just too far past the
carrying capacity (as you say and
i agree with) to go back short of
cataclysm or a real serious long
range effort to gradually reduce
populations... i don't see that
happening. people want to have
babies, they want children to
take care of them when they
grow older, they want workers
to pay taxes so they can fund their
pet projects (safety studies,
nutritional studies, health studies,
space science and exploration ) hee

oh, i feel bad that i didn't
speak about ocean acidification.
as that is a basic change that
will have long range effects and
we're basically ignoring it by
pumping all the carbon dioxide
into the air... organic gardening
is not going to fix that because
organic gardening aims to recycle
nutrients not sequester carbon
dioxide. somehow that has to
be addressed and fairly immediately
and unfortunately it's not. people
are still driving SUVs even after
the oil platform spill and all the
havoc that is going to cause... *sigh*

if only i were king... i think that is
why your .sig is always amusing to me.

consider this:

humans are an ecological system's
response to limited and finite resources...
we are the great innoculators, the
means of dispersal and of course
destruction if we screw up. oops.

ok, good night, it's been fun...


songbird

All brain farts, and not one citation. Good luck with that.
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg
http://radwisdom.com/essays/this-is-your-brain/

Billy wrote:
....
All brain farts, and not one citation. Good luck with that.

you quote the whole thing for a one
line reply?

oh, ok, Billy, i see your comprehension
is down, read again where i said i composted
my reply off-line.

i have a very slow connection, i do
not watch tv or load audio via internet
unless it's the rare thing i want to wait
hours to accomplish, usually i cannot
tie up the phone line for that length of
time.

i'm mostly here to converse and
read about gardening, i'll try to have
fun in the process. most of what
you write in reply i am aware of and
actually agree with in some parts, if
you'd read it you'd see. yet there
are large gaps even in that time will
show. poking at them is just the
way i am.

now can you tell me what happened
to the art of general shooting the shit?
it sure isn't about quoting links back
and forth.

good day,


songbird

On Jun 26, 10:50*pm, "songbird" wrote:

* all these chemicals that plants make to defend
themselves from predators (including herbivores/
omnivores i.e. us) at some level will be doing
some damage and perhaps organic gardening
which increases certain chemicals may be increasing

Interesting point, obviously the plants have no idea what chemicals
they produce contributes to human wellness nor do they care

and one has to reconcile the fact that we are living longer then ever
on mainly a corn syrup diet

In article
,
fsadfa wrote:

On Jun 26, 10:50*pm, "songbird" wrote:

* all these chemicals that plants make to defend
themselves from predators (including herbivores/
omnivores i.e. us) at some level will be doing
some damage and perhaps organic gardening
which increases certain chemicals may be increasing
Consider your source. The chemicals that organic farming increases (more
accurately: that factory farming depresses) are flavonoids
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavonoids
Plant toxins are usually alkaloids that taste bitter, and are normally
avoided because they are repugnant.

Interesting point, obviously the plants have no idea what chemicals
they produce contributes to human wellness nor do they care
Tomato leaves are poisonous, as are rhubarb, however most poisonous
plants aren't found in the vegetable garden (surprise, surprise), they
are found among the ornamentals that are not likely to be eaten.

and one has to reconcile the fact that we are living longer then ever
on mainly a corn syrup diet

Make that in spite of corn syrup. Obese, type 2, diabetic children
aren't going to increase the life expectancy average.
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/2...al_crime_scene

On Jun 30, 11:30*am, Billy wrote:

Tomato leaves are poisonous, as are rhubarb, however most poisonous
plants aren't found in the vegetable garden (surprise, surprise), they
are found among the ornamentals that are not likely to be eaten.

you can't make the assumption that because a plant is not poisonous,
it is 100% good for you

and one has to reconcile the fact that we are living longer then ever
on mainly a corn syrup diet

Make that in spite of corn syrup. Obese, type 2, diabetic children
aren't going to increase the life expectancy average.
--

facts are facts, facts can be stubborn things

I suspect having cheap calories to eat overrides everything else, IMO

In article b3ee3ed1-0e4d-41cb-a392-7e7aab3978e8
@i9g2000prn.googlegroups.com, says...

On Jun 30, 11:30*am, Billy wrote:

Tomato leaves are poisonous, as are rhubarb, however most poisonous
plants aren't found in the vegetable garden (surprise, surprise), they
are found among the ornamentals that are not likely to be eaten.

you can't make the assumption that because a plant is not poisonous,
it is 100% good for you

Life isn't 100% good for us but look at how hard we hang onto it.

There are a lot of assumptions you can't make about plants.


and one has to reconcile the fact that we are living longer then ever
on mainly a corn syrup diet

Make that in spite of corn syrup. Obese, type 2, diabetic children
aren't going to increase the life expectancy average.
--

facts are facts, facts can be stubborn things

I suspect having cheap calories to eat overrides everything else, IMO

It's not cheap calories so much as it is the type of calories and the
combinations they come in.

If by "everything else", you mean reasonable eating habits and common
sense, I agree.

I suggest that having sugars, starches, fats and salt in certain
combinations acts on the brain in much the way that drugs do.

I don't have time to supply cites but the truth is out there.

Try sugar salt fat acts brain drug study

In article
,
fsadfa wrote:

On Jun 30, 11:30*am, Billy wrote:

Tomato leaves are poisonous, as are rhubarb, however most poisonous
plants aren't found in the vegetable garden (surprise, surprise), they
are found among the ornamentals that are not likely to be eaten.

you can't make the assumption that because a plant is not poisonous,
it is 100% good for you

And you can't make the assumption that organic farming is making a
traditional food more toxic.

and one has to reconcile the fact that we are living longer then ever
on mainly a corn syrup diet

Make that in spite of corn syrup. Obese, type 2, diabetic children
aren't going to increase the life expectancy average.
--

facts are facts, facts can be stubborn things

I suspect having cheap calories to eat overrides everything else, IMO

Not if the cheap calories that are causing life shortening illnesses;
metabolic syndrome includes obesity, hypertension, diabetes, high
cholesterol. One of the reasons that grain was processed was because
pests avoided it in favor of whole grains.
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/2...al_crime_scene

In article
,
fsadfa wrote:

On Jun 30, 11:30*am, Billy wrote:

Tomato leaves are poisonous, as are rhubarb, however most poisonous
plants aren't found in the vegetable garden (surprise, surprise), they
are found among the ornamentals that are not likely to be eaten.

you can't make the assumption that because a plant is not poisonous,
it is 100% good for you

and one has to reconcile the fact that we are living longer then ever
on mainly a corn syrup diet

Make that in spite of corn syrup. Obese, type 2, diabetic children
aren't going to increase the life expectancy average.
--

facts are facts, facts can be stubborn things

I suspect having cheap calories to eat overrides everything else, IMO

"SAVE THE LEAF LITTER"
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/2...al_crime_scene