Everything old is new again! New Depression, meet New Dustbowl! You're going to really go well together.

"“You can see how the sand is just drifting,” said Mr. Brown, 65, digging his toe into the dust piled up at his feet. “This normally would be grass.”
The worst drought in nearly 100 years is racking three-quarters of Texas. Much of the state has not had a significant rainfall since August. Winter wheat crops have failed. Ponds have dried up. Ranchers are spending heavily on hay and feed pellets to get their cattle through the winter. Some wonder if they will have to slaughter their herds come summer. Farmers say the soil is too dry for seeds to germinate and are considering not planting.
“The last time we had a drought this bad was in January 1918,” said John Nielsen-Gammon, the state climatologist. " LINK

A really, really, really bad idea.

Sometimes the government still surprises me with their apparent reckless desire to destroy everything. This is one of those times. Fresh from admitting that there were accidents at Plum Island, they want to build a new center for animal disease research. Next to land where there are herds of cattle and a wildlife preserve. Yay!

And don't forget the possibility that Plum Island might be where Lyme disease spread out from. Tinfoil hatty or not, it is true that tick borne diseases were being studied there for use in wartime, and that Plum Island is only 6 miles across Long Island Sound from Lyme- deer swim to Block Island, and that's 12 miles offshore.

"...former Plum Island lab director Jerry Callis talking about tick research on Plum Island:
"Plum Island experimented with ticks, but never outside of containment. We had a tick colony where you take them and feed them on the virus and breed ticks to see how many generations it would last, on and on, until its diluted. Recently they reinstated the tick colony."

"In the book, The Belarus Secret, author John Luftis, the Justice Department employee who exposed Kurt Waldheim as a Nazi, states that Nazi germ warfare scientists had experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread rare diseases. Loftus also states that he had received information that the United States had tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range off the coast of Connecticut during the early part of the 1950s." LINK to wikipedia on Erich Traub

"Mr. Carroll argues that outbreaks of the Dutch duck plague virus that devastated duck farms on eastern Long Island in the 1960's, Lyme disease in 1975, West Nile virus in 1999 and the mysterious 1999 disease that killed most of the lobsters in Long Island Sound all occurred too suspiciously close to Plum Island to dismiss the possibility of a laboratory link. " LINK to NYT

"The only U.S. facility allowed to research the highly contagious foot-and-mouth disease experienced several accidents with the feared virus, the Bush administration acknowledged Friday.
...The Homeland Security Department told a House committee there were other accidents inside the government's laboratory.
The accidents are significant because the administration is likely to move foot-and-mouth research from the remote island to one of five sites on the U.S. mainland near livestock herds."
LINK to article about accidents at Plum Island


"The Bush administration is likely to move its research on one of the most contagious animal diseases from an isolated island laboratory to the U.S. mainland near herds of livestock, raising concerns about a catastrophic outbreak.
...One such government report, produced last year and already turned over to lawmakers by the Homeland Security Department, combined commercial satellite images and federal farm data to show the proximity to livestock herds of locations that have been considered for the new lab. "Would an accidental laboratory release at these locations have the potential to affect nearby livestock?" asked the nine-page document. It did not directly answer the question.
A simulated outbreak of the disease — part of an earlier U.S. government exercise called "Crimson Sky" — ended with fictional riots in the streets after the simulation's National Guardsmen were ordered to kill tens of millions of farm animals, so many that troops ran out of bullets. In the exercise, the government said it would have been forced to dig a ditch in Kansas 25 miles long to bury carcasses. In the simulation, protests broke out in some cities amid food shortages.

...An epidemic in 2001 devastated Britain's livestock industry, as the government slaughtered 6 million sheep, cows and pigs. Last year, in a less serious outbreak, Britain's health and safety agency concluded the virus probably escaped from a site shared by a government research center and a vaccine maker. Other outbreaks have occurred in Taiwan in 1997 and China last year and in 2006.

If even a single cow signals an outbreak in the U.S., emergency plans permit the government to shut down all exports and movement of livestock. Herds would be quarantined, and a controlled slaughter could be started to stop the disease from spreading." LINK to article about creating new facility

Got milk? Cloned supersized cows do!

Crikey.
"Dundee Paradise is evidence that clone farming - designed to deliver supersize cows producing an astonishing 70 pints of milk a day - has arrived in Britain."
LINK

Cloning, Biodiversity, and why we should be paying attention.

The FDA has, as all alert readers of the Guide to the Doom should know, announced that there is "no public health risk from eating cloned foods." However, the beautiful and brilliant Kristin forwarded an excellent article that took the issue a little further. Cloned animals are very expensive- about $20,000 per cow, as opposed to (Ok, brief tangent here- it is very hard to find livestock prices online) between $675 and $1500 for a non-cloned heifer. Why are farmers willing to pay so much more for a cloned animal? "Cloned animals are derived from the healthiest animals in the herd and therefore are more disease-resistant and offer leaner meat than conventionally produced animals, Dr. Sundlof said."

However, not everyone agrees with this sunny statement. "That assertion is disputed by the Consumers Union, a nonprofit consumer-safety organization that says the cloning process produces a sick animal that often dies soon after being reproduced. Furthermore, the organization contends that cloning weakens animals' disease resistance because the cloned animals need more antibiotics to survive. "

This is especially interesting in light of the arguments against genetically modified (GM) crops. These battles, sometimes actually physical, have taken place mostly in the UK and within the EU, with activists, scientists, politicians, big businesses and farmers in serious disagreement about what to do about GM crops. It's a hell of a messy issue, but here are the two main points.

Pro-GM crops: The "Green Revolution" is the parent of the current GM debate, and many NGOs point to early successes such as the "pro-vitamin A enriched Golden rice which has the potential to prevent much childhood death from infectious disease, and insect protected Bt rice which can reduce exposure of farmers to synthetic insecticides." "Many proponents of current genetic engineering techniques believe it will lower pesticide usage and has brought higher yields and profitability to many farmers, including those in developing nations ".

Anti-GM crops: The argument here is that the use of GM crops threatens biodiversity. Not only is relying only one main variety of plant for food known to be dangerous should that food become diseased, as in the Irish potato famine, but the ecological impact of GM crops is largely unknown. "Genes will inevitably escape from genetically modified crops, contaminating organic farms, creating superweeds, and driving wild plants to extinction, an official EU study concludes. "Several preliminary laboratory based studies suggest an adverse impact on biodiversity. Monarch butterfly larvae fed only on leaves covered in pollen from Bt corn grew more slowly and suffered higher death rates. Similar results were reported for pink bollworm fed on cotton producing the Bt toxin. Aphids fed on GM potatoes producing a different toxin were also reported to have a harmful effect on ladybirds feeding on the aphids."

The issue is also clouded by politics ( an actual headline- "America's masterplan is to force GM food on the world") and by worldwide growing distrust of the few super-corporations who control the bulk of the world's wealth, such as Monsanto, the best known biotech company.

The question I have, I guess, is given that it is known that "monoculture can lead to large scale crop failure as this single genetic variant or cultivar becomes susceptible to a disease", will a monoculture of cloned livestock lead to similar vulnerabilities?

Delicious! B-O-L-O-D-N-A!

Cloned meats, fantastic. That steak was extra-tender? Let's all have the same exact piece!
No, I really am at a total loss as to the ethical hows and howevers for cloned meats. Are we just killing the same, sweet, brown-eyed cow over and over? And did that tasty beast have especially bad karma?

I guess I'm holding out for lab-grown meat- cells on trays, never attached to anything called Bessie.

/and no, I'm not vegetarian. I'm a nasty carnivore, but I do feel guilty! Does that count for anything?