15
Sep

Weekly Open Thread

Posted by: Curt @ 7:18 pm in Open Thread  | 89 views

istock_000007923367small

  • Share/Bookmark
Print This Post Print This Post
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 7:18 pm and is filed under Open Thread. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Trackbacks

  1. Tweets that mention Flopping Aces » Blog Archive » Weekly Open Thread -- Topsy.com

11 comments so far

teqjack
 1Reply to this comment  

“Norman Borlaug saved a billion lives from starvation. But decades on, his farming methods threaten the health of the planet.”

Lots of strande stuff here –
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6833080.ece

“The land must be ploughed and cultivated each year, and for long periods is left bare, a condition that seldom arises in nature. Stripped of vegetation cover, the soil’s organic matter starts to burn up or oxidise, releasing carbon into the atmosphere and adding to the greenhouse gas burden.”

This is new, since the 1950s, of course. Never happened before, nor was any method of replacing that organic matter – say, by spreading animal [or human] waste around. Nope.

“For all the high hopes of the 1960s, it is hard to see Borlaug’s system as more than a partial success. Its weakness is its reliance on a handful of annual crops that cannot be grown without massive inputs of fossil fuel. The sustainable methods called for in the World Bank report will almost certainly make greater use of perennial crops — principally grassland — to feed livestock.”

What? I thought raising animals for food was EXTREMELY wasteful? And there are not many perennials that humans can eat, at least not among the grasses.

There’s more.

September 15th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Old Trooper
 2Reply to this comment  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JGGKmtMPkE

This should get you through the week. Pass it around and enjoy!

September 16th, 2009 at 5:05 am
FedUp
 3Reply to this comment  

Beautiful!!! Just another example of God’s creation!

September 16th, 2009 at 6:14 am
Aqua
 4Reply to this comment  

So…this is my congressman. Yep, before the redistricting, my congressman was Johnny Isakson and then Lynn Westmoreland. Somehow, I ended up with Cynthia McKinney and now Hank. Hank ran unopposed last election. No primary opponent, no general election opponent.

I’ve had it. I’m tired of being called a racist. I’m part Native American and married to a lady that is originally from Mexico. My brother is married to a lady originally from Vietnam. The color of a person’s skin matters as much to me as how Skittles are made. Yet, every time I turn around, anyone that disagrees with this president is labeled a racist.

September 16th, 2009 at 9:44 am
Blast
 5Reply to this comment  

Pres Obama said Kanye West is a jack ass. I agree with Obama.

September 16th, 2009 at 10:35 am
Aqua
 6Reply to this comment  

@ Blast
So do I. Why didn’t he want that to get out? He didn’t mind saying the cops acted stupidly when they busted his buddy, but he doesn’t want to go on record callin Kanye a jackass? The difference between the president and me? If Toby Keith had gotten on stage and taken the mic from Beyonce and said Taylor’s video was the best of the year, I would have called Toby a jackass too.
Speaking of Beyonce, Kanye’s an ass, and Beyonce is all class. I don’t think she got enough recognition for being the class act she is that night. I still don’t know why she’s with Jay-Z though. I actually like some of his music and there is no denying he’s a very gifted producer, but he’s just fugly.

September 16th, 2009 at 10:46 am
Blast
 7Reply to this comment  

Aqua, Why didn’t he want that to get out?

It diverts attention from real issues would be my guess.

September 16th, 2009 at 10:53 am
Patvann
 8Reply to this comment  

@Aqua

Don’t you see?

Obama and these Progs NEED to have the fires of racism (and other isms) kept stoked to give themselves legitimacy with the Racers. The HipHop caucus, the Black Congressional Caucus, and the other race-bating haters would all be out of business, if racism goes into it’s natural death. They MUST have a steady supply of “victims” in order to remain viable, so it is with Blacks, recently Mexicans, (but no Asians) women, and Homosexuals.

Kanye is a “useful idiot” for this Party, therefore no Prog Politician will say anything against him.
Obama’s puppet-masters went into damage-control to make sure his (accurate) remark gets minimized. Had he been a real leader, he would have no problem stating it loud and clear, and it would have actually helped heal the race-rift in a small way. Notice Kanye is getting 10X the exposure now, and the White girl is nowhere in the major-media. Obama was simply trying to not do what he did during the Gates affair, but went off script.

Notice that his calling the cops at Cambridge “stupid” (even the Black ones) wasn’t denounced by Progs as: “Diverting attention away from real issues”. In fact it was only after the outcry that his Masters went into Damage-control mode, and attempted to turn it into Obama being the Great Moderator, even though it was HE who made it bigger than it needed to be….Because his FIRST instinct was to support his fellow-traveler, professor Gates.

Notice that he (rightfully) denounced the man who killed the abortion doctor, but has said nothing about the killing of the abortion protester.

Beyonce is twice the man Obama is.

September 16th, 2009 at 11:39 am
Ditto
 9Reply to this comment  

@teqjack

“The land must be ploughed and cultivated each year, and for long periods is left bare, a condition that seldom arises in nature. Stripped of vegetation cover, the soil’s organic matter starts to burn up or oxidise, releasing carbon into the atmosphere and adding to the greenhouse gas burden.”

This is not quite correct. There are crops that strip a lot of nutrients out of the land and can eventually make it barren or poor producing. That’s why it is essential to rotate crops. Here is a handy guide on this: http://www.yankeegardener.com/resource/croprotate.html Farmers may still on occasion may have to allow a field to lay fallow so that it can recover. Better yet is to plant grass and use it for grazing pasture for that year.

This is new, since the 1950s, of course. Never happened before, nor was any method of replacing that organic matter – say, by spreading animal [or human] waste around. Nope.

Not true. The Romans used crop rotation before the Dark Ages and Muslim farmers came up with revolutionary crop rotation methods that sometimes allowed two or three different crops to be harvested in a single year. Some plants improve the harvest of the crop planted after it. If you plant correctly fertilizer needs can be minimized.

“For all the high hopes of the 1960s, it is hard to see Borlaug’s system as more than a partial success. Its weakness is its reliance on a handful of annual crops that cannot be grown without massive inputs of fossil fuel. The sustainable methods called for in the World Bank report will almost certainly make greater use of perennial crops — principally grassland — to feed livestock.”

The link given at the top of your post and the preceding entry are Green-Movement propaganda. The writer’s analysis is antithesis to what successful farming professionals and agribusiness knows to be the facts of raising crops.

What? I thought raising animals for food was EXTREMELY wasteful? And there are not many perennials that humans can eat, at least not among the grasses.

Raising animals for food is not that wasteful if it is done properly. on the other hand growing crops to create ethanol is just plain dumb and wasteful.

September 23rd, 2009 at 3:20 am
Missy
 10Reply to this comment  

Surprise, surprise, no he can’t. Obama’s ME Summit….a dud. Those foreigners can be so darn understanding, they can see he’s in weeds over his head too:

Here is a sample of fairly typical comments:

“We’re in a corner. Obama is running out of steam. He was expected to set the direction in the first six months. But now it’s the politics of no choice, of deadlock,” said Zakaria al Qaq, foreign affairs director at Al-Quds University.

Al Qaq and other commentators say Netanyahu seems content with the status quo, and in no hurry to open talks on a final settlement leading to the creation of a Palestinian state.

In Netanyahu’s view, the threat of an atom bomb in the hands of the Islamic Republic of Iran is the top priority. In his own words: “The Iranian issue overshadows everything.”

Obama, Palestinian analysts note, has his hands tied by issues of greater immediacy for American voters — healthcare policy and war in Afghanistan — and cannot afford to open a new front with the right by taking on Israel in a test of wills.

“He is captive of the healthcare issue and he cannot move freely, so the Palestinians are captive also,” al Qaq said.

“Abbas wants to allow Obama 3 or 4 months more to see what happens on healthcare. But what we are getting is meetings, not negotiations, and the people are not fooled.”

Pessimism is not limited to the Palestinians.

Aaron David Miller, Mideast counsel to six U.S. secretaries of state, writes in Politico that “to all but the terminally obtuse,” the chances of a deal right now are about zero.

Even if Obama could deliver a freeze on Israeli settlement building in the West Bank that Abbas has again demanded and Netanyahu has again refused, Miller says, the fact remains that the Palestinian national movement is divided and Israel “still doesn’t know what price it’s prepared to pay” for peace.

Obama may soon have to decide “whether to get out of the serious peacemaking business … or get more deeply involved and consider an unprecedented American effort to bridge the gaps.”

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/news/international/All_round_pessimism_after_dud_Middle_East_summit.html?siteSect=143&sid=11264394&cKey=1253807554000&ty=ti

Editorial from Las Vegas Journal Review. Appears that Harry Reid can’t either inspite of all the vote fraud perpetrated by ACORN in his home state he squelches an investigation into ACORN.

Remember all the investigations after the dems took over congress? Well, Reid doesn’t think they can be distracted from addressing more important matters. He might want to get Holder on it, the CIA has already been investigated.

ACORN — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — is stinking up Washington.

And this is far more significant than if a suspiciously large number of operatives for a purely “private” outfit had been found systematically bending and breaking the law, because ACORN receives and spends taxpayer money — lots of it — and had carried the imprimatur of official partnerships with the IRS, the Census Bureau … the kind of “cred” that in the political world comes only from “who you know.”

Yes, ACORN has friends in high places — friends who are still stonewalling attempts to trace where all that tax money went … perhaps because they know who still has cookie crumbs all over their hands.

>snip<

Here in Clark County, Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said last year he saw “rampant fraud in the 2,000 to 3,000 registrations ACORN turns in every week,” with some 48 percent of those forms being “clearly fraudulent.”

The Las Vegas headquarters of ACORN, “a Democrat-allied organization,” was raided after being “accused of submitting multiple voter registrations with duplicate and false names,” the Washington Times reported last fall. The outfit claimed it had registered to vote in Nevada, among others, the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys.

The raid “set off a skirmish over efforts to expand the electorate on behalf of Sen. Barack Obama,” the Times reported.

Mr. Lomax noted ACORN had hired 59 inmates from a work-release program at a nearby prison and that some inmates who had been convicted of identity theft had been made supervisors. “That led some local wags to joke that at least ACORN was hiring specialists to do their work,” reported John Fund at The Politico, last November.

>snip<

Mr. Reid replied additional investigations might distract lawmakers from addressing more important matters, including health care and economic recovery.

http://www.lvrj.com/opinion/reid-blocks-acorn-probe-61438132.html

September 25th, 2009 at 6:23 am

Leave a reply

Name (*)
Mail (will not be published) (*)
URI
Comment

If your comments get caught in spam a lot please log into your registered account before trying to comment again. You can email me if your comment is caught in spam

 

Identity Verification: If you wish to verify your commenter identity, so no one can steal it, click the below button: