Gave Reverend Malthus a good birching, he did.

Good morning, pups. Prof. Krugman is off today, and the Pasty Little Putz and Mr. Cohen are both addressing health care. The PLP, in “The Ghosts of 1994,” says there are parallels between the current health care push and the attempt 16 years ago, but it’s hard to see today’s Republican Party capitalizing on angry centrism the way Newt Gingrich did. Mr. Cohen, in “Get Real on Health Care,” says the main difference on health care between France and the United States is not ideological but a question of efficiency. Unfortunately, stereotypes cloud the discussion.

Here they are.

The coffee and tea are ready, and the biscuits are out of the oven. I wound up doing a bit more work in the garden yesterday than was really wise, so my back is remonstrating with me this morning. I think some ibuprofen with my second cup of tea may make it shut up… Have a great day.

Tap, tap, tap… Is this thing on?

Good morning, Marion. It’s on. Hope your back stops singing ”Ave Maria”.

Thanks. The hot shower and ibuprofen seem to be doing the trick. The weeds had really gotten out of control, and I’m about to embark on having my treasure of a yard man raise the raised beds up another level or two, so I had to let him see where they were!

geneticist who helped develop resistant high-yield wheat that revolutionized farming in the third-world,

And now Monsanto (et al) has taken that technology to a new level and is flooding the world with propaganda informing us of how wonderful their wheat, corn etc is in that it is resistant to everything. Of course the fact that it is infertile and is helping to, literally, kill off the small farmer world wide is, I guess, just an “unexpected consequence”.

Frankly I am none too sure of the efficacy of fucking with the genetics of food no matter what the initial plan may have been.

“who could have anticipated….” Seems to operate just about everywhere.

Off to be a small cog in the great healthcare machine.

Rwanda has a neighbor to neighbor health care delivery system that works much better than ours, and naturally, for every citizen there is health care provided by a functioning gov’t.
see http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/537/index.html

Sadly true, and tho disease resistance is nice in crops, that same resistance is making such disease spreads as H1N1 highly hazardous.

HOme gardeners – who form a large online community and have been helpful in my efforts – have learned to avoid commercial seeds, there are Heritage lines, and I can buy from a local farm store that only sells seeds from locals.

Good Morning. Great post, Attaturk, but it only reinforces my thinking that the days of good news are over. Our government sucks.

Gotta find a way to straighten out the Supremes about the First Amendment and corporations. The fuel for the summer crazies was health care dollars. Would’ve been something if they went and killed someone.

We save a lot of seeds from year to year. Beans, tommies, spuds all the various squashes, radishes and, when we get our act together, lettuce. The seeds and soil have become “harmonized” and we have weeded out the crops that are not well producing.

It is almost time to put the gardens to bed this year and when we do we will put a hefty layer of organic cow shit, dig it in and cover them with black plastic as a defense against early weeds. Not long now until the first snow fall!

The coathanger court is looking for a way to insure corporate rule since the masses keep voting for libruls, it seems.

and nomolos, sounds lovely. I save my lettuce seeds too.

March of the Valkyries, perhaps? Take care, Marion!

One of Minnesota’s better products, Norman Borlaug.

Thanks so much for posting this, Attaturk. I’ve been dismayed by the un-coverage about this truly important man. Important as in gives a rip about humanity vs. most pols whose importance is self-inflated.

And why in the world was this posted at 1:30 a.m. at FDL, of all places?????

The Green Revolution put many of India’s farmers into debt with bigAgra, promoted monoculture, poisoned the farm land and ruined the structure of the soil so that crops can no longer grow. How many Indian farmers have killed themselves because of debt? How many have been affected by the strong-arm tactics of Monsanto, etc?
Perhaps his intentions were noble but he was an agent of bigAgra and his misguided vision will inevitably lead to our demise as well. These corporate farms and the corporate controlled food supply will poison us all.

IMHO, disease-resistance is a different story than injecting poisons in the seeds to 1) stop them from reproducing; 2) kill the pests that persist who then develop resistant strains.

The work Borlaug was doing has been a respected part of biology/agronomy since people started cross breeding plants.

I don’t know about India specifically and you may be right that cross-breeding has caused problems for them, but Monsanto’s work has a much different outcome than that of a farmer/biologist who is working with plants to increase production. Monsanto’s aim is to keep farmers from saving seeds (since they won’t breed), to increase their prices annually, and make farmers dependent on Monsanto.

I totally agree. A more nuanced response can be found here: http://www.lavidalocavore.org/…..aug-age-95

Perhaps. But respected by whom and in what way? And changing the genetic makeup of the plant, whether for disease resistance or non-reproduction, will enable companies to patent the seeds. Whatever the case, I probably shouldn’t vilify a man who saw himself as doing good– just a scientist doing it for science and humanity. But bigagra behind it was evil. And Monsanto knew exactly what is was doing. Perhaps an obit isn’t the place to say– hey, this guy tried but his whole life’s work was a big failure and will ultimately lead to mass starvation. The truth about the green revolution in third world countries is upsetting.

you’re right. i was just replying to Primrose when you sent this. I was wrong. An obit is not the place to really criticize.

National Geographic did an article on the Green Revolution a while back. Per NG, the reliance on hybrid seeds, pesticides and herbicides have been economically harmful to third world farmers and environmentally harmful.

So there is a very real dark side.

The question then becomes, how does the world feed itself? One place to look for an answer may be Cuba, I’ve read articles that describe contemporary Cuban agriculture as sustainable and organic. After a rough start in the Special Period after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has managed to feed the Cuban people. At one point the World Wildlife Fund listed Cuba as the world’s only sustainable economy.

Get the chemical companies out of farming and government farming programs. Repair the soil. Let the farmers do as they did for millennia. Give a hand, yes, but don’t force the chemical companies method of growing onto them. Disease just comes from unhealthy soil.

No one could have predicted that greedy, unprincipled people would use corporatism and political power to corrupt and ruin what should have been an entirely selfless and communal process.