Oklahoma legislators want castor beans to be outlawed
Fast cut to the link and the first thing seen is the standard chubbish white guys in suits. Minor empirical proof the US began rewarding the useless and nasty decades ago.
The piece reads (it’s almost too intelligence insulting to believe):
Castor beans do not immediately leap to mind when one considers the state’s most serious problems.
And yet bills outlawing the production and transportation of castor beans were among the first filed in anticipation of next year’s legislative session.
Castor beans, being 50 percent or more oil, are the among the most promising biofuel crops.
They are also the source of one of nature’s deadliest poisons …
But state Sen. Mike Schulz, R-Altus, and Rep. Dale DeWitt, R-Braman, did not have terrorism or espionage in mind when they filed their castor bean bills this fall. They were concerned about a more direct threat – inadvertent contamination of the food supply.
“Prohibiting castor beans may not be something we want for the long-range,” DeWitt said. “But until we have more research into ways of lowering the ricin levels, we have to be very careful with it.”
Although castor plants are fairly common as ornamentals, their commercial production is virtually unknown in Oklahoma. With growing interest in them for biofuels, however, wheat growers and other crop producers became concerned about a burst of speculative cultivation spreading castor and ricin residue into fields, planting and harvesting equipment, storage bins and trucks and railroad cars used for transporting grain.
This is intellectual failure on so many levels it is difficult to know where to begin in explaining the stupidity of it.
At some time in the nation’s past — a few decades back — castor was a crop in the US. I have written about this before. None of it sticks. Journalists, politicians, and American alleged terror experts pay no attention to historical precedent or fact. If there are agricultural history and science books in libraries or old newspaper articles and stories to be consulted, they are all discounted and discarded for the apparent reason that people are now too lazy and crippled to be bothered to read them.
As an agricultural resource castor posed no real problem. It does not in those places around the world where it still is a crop. And castor mills in the United States were not poison dumps. People were not felled by wandering castor seeds in their morning cereal.
It is no longer a surprise to find that people around the world find Americans to be dangerously incompetent. Ignorance and the reward of it are now commonly seen at malevolent levels in this country.
Over the course of a decade, from 1959 until 1970, Plainview was considered the hub of domestic castor bean production with the local office of Baker Castor Oil ultimately contracting for 70,000 acres of production annually.
However, the crop’s success ultimately worked against it with practically no significant domestic production recorded after 1972. Since that time, the United States has been forced to turn to producers in India and Brazil to supply the majority of its needs.
Plainview Mayor John C. Anderson has a unique perspective on the local castor industry, having served as general manager of Baker Castor Oil’s local operations from August 1959 until December 1970.
“During most of that time Baker was the dominant player in the United States with about 75 percent of the castor oil production,??? Anderson recalled last week, “and the Plainview facilities accounted for virtually all of that.???
The oil derived from castor beans is used in a vast array of products, ranging from paints, varnishes and lacquers to lipstick, hair tonic and shampoo. Since it does not become stiff with cold nor unduly thin with heat, castor oil is an important component in plastics, soaps, waxes, hydraulic fluids and ink. It also is used to make special lubricants for jet engines and racing cars, and during World War I, World War II and the Korean War it was stockpiled by the federal government as a strategic material.
Bayonne, N.J.-based Baker Castor Oil Company already was a major importer and processor when it embarked on a plant breeding program in the late 1950s centered in Plainview in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“Baker needed a dependable domestic supply of castor beans since the government was building up its strategic reserve,??? Anderson explained. “Baker at the time was having to primarily rely on what was being harvested by hand in Brazil and India from plants growing wild.???
Not only were there concerns about production and price volatility, the imported oil had a tendency to turn rancid during transport, Anderson said. A domestic source would reduce transportation costs while substantially improving quality. And, Plainview was a logical choice since the harvested crop could be shipped to crushing facilities on both East and West Coasts.
Amazing. Harvested castor seeds were crushed daily. And nobody died!
Obviously, in Oklahoma you can be … I don’t even wanna get into it.
But think back to 2000. Many Democrats and journalists alike, feeling grouchy, were dismissive of Al Gore and magnified his shortcomings. We forgot the context, prided ourselves on our disdainful superiority — and won eight years of George W. Bush.
This time, let’s do a better job of retaining perspective. If we turn Obama out of office a year from now, let’s make sure it is because the Republican nominee is preferable, not just out of grumpiness toward the incumbent during a difficult time.
“I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground … Please also join me on Facebook and Google+, watch my YouTube videos,made for me by various footmen and follow me on Twitter along with the other 1,194,973,” reads his usual tagline.
Living proof the wrong people are getting pepper spray.
An interesting news piece at Science magazine briefly examines the state of science employment in the US.
If you read the idiot musings of the mainstream press, where stories about science are always written by people without any science background (or worse, weird liberal arts journo-degrees like science & journalism or history of science custom made for a variety of sissies and intellectual weaklings), you have read, many times, that we suffer a science shortage. Or will. Soon. (Sadly, the link is to my old alma mater where they apparently patronize the desire to be ‘into’ science without actually having to do anything that would dangerously expose you to the real thing. Kind of like the George Plimpton Paper Lion approach to pro football — only more pathetic and personally insulting.)
Scientists are like vitamins — that’s the gist of what you read from the good boys. We are always in danger of suffering a deficiency and can’t get enough of them. Except for the Republican Party. The GOP has had enough of scientists. Reality doesn’t adhere to either view.
The author of the brief at Science examines some of the conclusions from two studies — one arguing that there’s, indeed, a shortage of science workers, the other arguing there’s a glut.
The conclusion reached by the writer is that both have some truth to the them but the one arguing that there’s a glut is more true.
And I agree. When DD left Lehigh University there was a surplus of Ph.D scientists in the US. And the people I knew faced it.
The report from FAIR argues that scientists are forced out of STEM fields because there aren’t enough jobs. “There is no evidence that there is, or will exist in the foreseeable future, a shortage of qualified native-born scientists and engineers in the United States,” the authors write. “The glut of science and engineering [S&E] degree holders in the United States has caused many S&E graduates to seek work in other fields.”
[Keep in mind STEM is acronym jargon for “science and engineering majors.” It didn’t exist when I earned a Ph.D. at a science and engineering school. It was invented by education officials and
other nuisances opposed to clear language that can’t be used as a professional advancement.]
While the United States seems to be producing enough STEM workers to fill traditional STEM jobs, the Georgetown authors write, the migration of people with STEM-related competencies into non-STEM occupations leads to STEM-worker shortages. “Even when the numbers indicate that we are producing enough STEM graduates for STEM occupations, we do face STEM scarcity in some occupations because STEM-capable workers divert from STEM into non-STEM occupations.”
“The perceptions about a lack of skilled workers are pervasive,” Cappelli writes. “But the problem is an illusion.” Employers perceive a worker shortage, he writes, because they “want prospective workers to be able to fill a role right away, without any training or ramp-up time.” Employers “need to drop the idea of finding perfect candidates and look for people who could do the job with a bit of training and practice,” he writes. “Unfortunately, American companies don’t seem to do training anymore.”
A second reason for the perception of a shortage, Cappelli says, boils “down to the fact that employers can’t get candidates to accept jobs at the wages offered. That’s an affordability problem, not a skills shortage. We can buy all we want at the prevailing prices.”
If companies would stop seeking exact skill matches and seek the help they need among the many workers currently available — including, I would argue, the nation’s 100,000 or so science postdocs — they would “vastly expand the supply of talent” available, “making it both cheaper and easier to fill jobs.” This is a case where “company self-interest and societal interest just happen to collide.”
From personal experience, I agree.
Postdoctoral positions paid very poorly in the mid-Eighties. I’m assuming they still do, in spades. The work was hard and, unless you were fortunate, generally sucked. Everyone (and I do mean everyone from technicians to grad students to post docs) eventually left the lab I was in at the Penn State School of Medicine in Hershey because the work was so unrewarding and dead-end.
You could hang around in them until something opened up or you were deemed experienced or connected enough for a position in the private sector. Or you could try for great publishing and grant proposal acquisition and a stab at a university position, much harder to land.
Both tracks revealed gluts of highly trained people, most of whom wouldn’t get the jobs they applied for.
This was made worse by the bottom line practice, adopted nationwide at universities, of using Ph.D’s as cheap no-hope-of-tenure-track labor for the teaching of undergraduate and low-level graduate courses, all in order to free the older tenured professorial class from pedagogy while in the pursuit of more illustrious full-time research.
And in terms of corporate America, it has always been a case of unchangeable but unrealistic desires on the part of the employer: the requirements in personnel departments for “exact skills” matches and people who require no “on-ramp” time.
Yeah, as it turns out, corporate America does hate you. Always has.
Extra points to the story for rubbishing the idea that perhaps many scientists leave the field, not finding jobs because they are socially distasteful. We’re talking about the notion among many run of the mill idiots that science attracts a disproportionate number of physically crippled smelly mentally ill four-eyes types incapable of being near someone without farting, stuttering and acting like Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor.
“[Anyone] who has spent time around aspiring scientists will find the suggestion that they’re unemployable ludicrous; socially inept scientists do exist, but most are earnest, personable, and very smart,” writes Jim Austin for Science.
Joined the singer/songwriter contest sponsored by Guitar Center today thinking it might not be run by machines.
Suckered!
It’s here and works off something called Whooznxt.
Whooznxt and its “people” or, more accurately, robots simply connect to all the social networks and counts up how many followers you have. It doesn’t even seem to matter that you have any original music, just the most number of growth in followers when the contest ends on November 30.
So if you join like, say, today, and you’re Nick Kristof — my favorite good boy — or anyone in this category of net “counting” popularity, as long as you could put a tune on YouTube or somewhere, you go right to the top of the list for consideration. (Incidentally, to bag on Kristof some more. If he could pry fifty cents a week out of even a quarter of his Internet legion of followers he’d actually be able to be the philanthropic idea man he poses as on Sundays without jetting to the world’s misery places on the Times dime.)
Of course, it was stupid of me to even think that a mass call for entrants would be culled by anything but software counting.
On YouTube, only teenagers subscribe to video accounts. “Friends” don’t count. Friends are meaningless on YouTube. They’re a sham to get a back link to the “friend” on your Channel page. The people who “friend” you never want to be the only metric that YouTube and Google counts, which is subscribers.
So what you find after a couple months is that people who are trying to game the system regularly send you “friend” requests.
Twitter is much the same. Outside of celebrity, Twitter is gamed by people who send out mass follow requests, gambling on the idea that quite a few people will reciprocate with a follow request of their own.
Then they quickly unfollow all the people they’ve gamed. In case you were wondering why that “girl” from somewhere in Russia with a profile about looking for romance just attached to you.
Anyway, I have eight fans. I am lousy at gaming the systems.
My YouTube channel. Listen to a song. You don’t even have to be my “friend.”
But if you can rustle up 10,000 subscribers, then that’d get you a year’s supply of No-Prizes from DD blog. Whooznxt’d notice me and I might get $10,000 to write some songs.
[Stars and Stripes reporterd] “nearly $88 million worth of food stamps were used at commissaries nationwide in 2011, up from $31 million in 2008.”
The Defense Department doesn’t track commissary sales, so it’s unclear which military personnel seek benefits.
Analysts believe, however, that recent vets are the demographic most likely to need help: 860,000 sought unemployment benefits in October.
Statisticians consider some 25 percent of these men and women to be “young veterans.”
Food stamp usage in the military is generally not banner news. You have to look around for it.
In October I posted a summary of food stamp use. It included an item from a southern newspaper citing the use within the military.
Again, it points out that while the US spends lavishly on its defense budget, the soldiers do not do so well. The defense establishment believes in defense contractors and armaments, not people.
You can also view food stamp subsidies as a way in which you can pay soldiers less in a kind of rip off, one in which they’re actually entitled to more but forced to apply for more of the taxpayer’s money through the means test SNAP program applicants go through.
From 2008 to 2009 military families were using food stamps at twice the rate as civilians, 25 percent to 13 percent. About $31 million of food stamps were used in nationwide commissaries.
From July 2009 to March 2011 in Oklahoma, where there are four military bases — Fort Sill, Tinker AFB, Vance AFB, Altus AFB — $1.8 million in food stamps was spent.
You can bet nobody at General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics Land Systems ever needs to present their monthly budget and bank account statistics at the local welfare center.
It’s a good demonstration of a systemic immorality and just another hidden national disgrace. It’s the stealing of the riskiest patriotic labor so we can suck out a few dollars more for the gadgets of killing.
Now that Newt Gingrich is enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame atop the heap of horrid GOP presidential hopefuls I can use it as an excuse to show him back when he was basically the famous person for a group of relative nobodies (but persistent nobodies) in the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy.
Gingrich has been called a a whore/”rental politician” (most recently by George Will) for anyone who’ll pay him to show up or provide “strategic consulting.” And one of the lobbies that loved him most was the pulsers/bomb Iran group — famous for using EMP doom to push ballistic missile defense.
Here are three videos of Newt on Youtube, doing his EMP doom tap dance. Two of them are for the lobbying group, EMPAct America.
The third is for Fox News where he advocated for starting a war with North Korea back in 2009.
The long version.
If he was President…
So far Newt hasn’t dropped “permanent continental shutdown” and the end of US civilization in the debates.
Why not?
Update, from the evening debate: Gingrich worked electromagnetic pulse doom into it for a minute. And everyone ignored him. No love for EMPAct America.
Sampling from the wires:
He said the biggest undiagnosed danger to national security was an EMP pulse.
It makes more sense than Rick Santorum’s claim that the unspotted danger was Hezbollah in South America.
— BBC North America
Gingrich rattles through a doomsday list: electromagnetic pulses, weapons of mass destruction in an American city and cyber attacks.
— The Daily Telegraph
New Gingrich says he worries about nuclear/WMD attack; electro-magnetic pulse attack, and cyber attack.
Yesterday the Maddow Show devoted a short segment to non-lethal weapons and the OWS protests.
It started with a showing of graphics and citations on the more exotic and menacing versions developed for the US military in the last few years. First up was the microwaving pain ray, aka The Sheriff, written about many times on this blog.
MADDOW: From the files of accurately nicknamed weapons, this is the so-called giant pain ray. It`s technically called the active denial system, but really the nickname pain ray is so much more descriptive. This giant satellite looking thing, it shoots electromagnetic radiation at a target, also known as a human. It’s intended to cause a lot of pain. The top layer of skin is supposed to absorb the radioactive rays and get very hot.
In tests people could endure the pain ray for about three seconds.
Nobody lasted more than five seconds. So it hurts a whole heck of a lot, but in theory at least it does not kill you …
[Maddow goes on to say that non-lethal weaponry is rationalized as “an alternative to deadly force.”]
But it turns out it`s not the way nonlethal weaponry gets used.
Often, instead of substituting for lethal force, nonlethal weapons just
increase the number of occasions, the types of occasions on which force is used at all. Seattle police, for example, probably would have never used guns and live ammunition to shoot this 84-year-old woman who was the defining image [as someone who had been pepper sprayed] of Occupy protests last week.
Another small homeland security industry now of importance is the one devoted to “non-lethal” weaponry in the United States. Small and large businesses, as well as the big arms developers, got involved in peddling various new arms to the government and police forces, all using the argument that technological advances would allow for non-bloody crowd control.
The most public example was The Sheriff, a high-powered microwave gun mounted on a Hummer and developed by Raytheon. The Sheriff took over a decade of taxpayer investment and an incredible public relations effort to push it (one that failed spectacularly) as a revolutionary weapon which could be used to disperse crowds.
Publicly, it was a disaster. The Sheriff was taken to Afghanistan a year or so ago and quietly brought back without firing one microwave shot in anger. It was, and still is, simply viewed as a device for torturing people who can’t fight back.
At which point in time Raytheon began peddling a much smaller mounted version of it for use in the California prison system.
The essential point to be made is a simple one. All the arguments for the development and use of “non-lethal” weapons rely upon the success in getting people to believe there is some magic point of force application in which people are not irrevocably injured or killed.
In real life, this point is imaginary. It does not exist. And there is no scientific method that can be used to find or elucidate it. As any perusal of the literature on use of tasers, rubber bullets and tear gas quickly reveals.
However, the argument remains seductive particularly when governments or law enforcement need rationalizations for using force short of bullets on the unarmed.
What the “non-lethal” weapon does is set the bar downward for the use of force. When one equips a military or law enforcement agency with weapons which the average soldier or policeman believes will not hurt people because they have been told there is a science to them making them safe, the problem becomes obvious.
The point to be underlined is that weaponry sold as stuff that doesn’t kill you only lowers the threshold for its use in the militarized police forces of this country. Restraints are removed.
And you wind up with what we have: Appalling incidents like the one in which the campus police officer blithely empties a canister of pepper spray into students — then goes for more.
On MSNBC Maddow has covered the pain ray before.
One of her producers, Laura Conaway, was also one of my editors at the Village Voice years ago.
In December 2002 I authored a column, “Weapon of the Week,” for the Voice. Conaway was my editor and one of the first pieces we did was on the pain ray.
At the time it was advertised for coming use in the imminent invasion of Iraq.
What is the microwaver’s target? It must be unarmed civilians, because as described, the VMAD wouldn’t seem to offer much against terrorists or regular soldiers ready to fire back with conventional weapons. What is certain is that the Pentagon’s microwave projects lack oversight and common sense.
However, pepper spray, as everyone knows now, is more than bad enough. We’ll probably never get to the pain ray because the old-fashioned stuff — capsaicin, tear gas rounds and rubber bullets — have been more than sufficient at horrification.
Use of non-lethals on unarmed crowds in the United States has led, and will only lead, to more civil unrest. And that’s because the rationalization for their use is totally rotten. Their practical use is in handing out severe punishments for stepping out of line. Everyone knows it, too.
“Boosting [your] schools teaches … skills to represent businesses or organizations after graduation … failure is not an option … Stay optimistic!”
Perhaps no truth to the rumor Homeland Security has a special department employing people writing stories like the above for syndication into Internet news feeds.
Freedom of speech exercised against what in my younger days was called “the Establishment??? is tolerated as long as it stays in the backwaters (sort of like this blog). Once persons start actually to notice it, the tear gas, or, these days, the pepper spray and tasers come out.
The let’s-make-it-really-hurt spray seen ’round the world. Let’s hear it for law and order and no places cluttered up by untidy tents. And where’s the Prez for comment?
Morning scan of the blog posts for the past couple of days. Dismaying stuff, a snapshot of what the USA shows the rest of the world.
Burly police in riot gear hosing down students (smaller than them) with pepper spray. Because they had some tents on campus.
More police with a weird useless weapon developed during the war on terror, for use on an unarmed crowd.
Pictures of the worst of the 1 percent: Infamous bankers, Dick Cheney and loathed corporate leaders who have used their money and power to make everyone else miserable.
The biggest conventional bomb in the world for use on a country smaller than us. Just in case they go for that bomb to deter us from bombing them.
Repetitive fifteen year-old paranoia over American property and multi-national business being sneak-attacked in cyberspace.
Hosing unarmed students with pepper spray, as the police did at UC Davis, is a new low.
The video speaks for itself. Use of burning chemical spray to the eyes is totally unjustified. And it tells us that many parts of this country are crippled by moral bankruptcy and bereft of basic human decency. Such actions justify further civil unrest.
Torturing civilians in the US cannot end well for the torturers. In the short term, someone should begin buying police-style helmets with face guards for OWS protests.
UC Davis and the police erred badly. And the video shows this.
Despite the exhibition of brutality and callousness students gained the upper hand, herded there attackers into a defensive position, where brandishing riot control guns, the police were made to look even worse.
“You can go!” shouts the crowd. The police were forced to retreat.
“Join our strike!” the crowd yells as the video ends.
