A planet that is warming at extraordinary speed may require extraordinary new food crops.
And a planet that is not nonetheless has considerably warmer regions that might like new and imprived food sources. Those who need to eat win either way.
The latest great agricultural hope is beans that can thrive in temperatures that cripple most conventional beans. They're now growing in test plots of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, or CIAT, in Colombia.
Many of these "heat-beater" beans resulted from a unique marriage, 20 years ago, of tradition and technology. The matchmaker was a Colombian scientist named Alvaro Mejia-Jimenez. But for almost two decades, his innovation sat on the shelf, unused.
Some of the biggest dry bean producers in the world include Brazil, Burma and India.
Posted by: lord garth ||
04/09/2015 1:05 Comments ||
Top||
#3
And when the ice age comes, they'll finally realize they've been working on the wrong problem. Of course, I'm sure they'd grow well in any land positioned behind Al Gore. Burning methane from his ass can probably heat the bean crop, provide 200 MW of power and still leave enough energy to set his pants on fire.
#4
He wanted to transfer these genetic traits into the common bean
Doesn't that make it, like, a Genetically Modified Organism? I wonder if the lefties understand? They hate GMOs.
Posted by: Bobby ||
04/09/2015 7:50 Comments ||
Top||
#5
Technically speaking, all our food crops are GMO, since we breed and crossbreed them. Blanket condemnation of GMO foods is a hallmark of the modern day Luddite, ironically delivered over the Internet
#7
Lord Garth, perhaps humidity is a factor they forgot to mention?
I'd love to see what would happen if it suddnely became known that Starbucks was using GMO beans to make their coffee. Riots? Or just suicidal depression?
[Daily Caller] Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Haslam shot down a request from state troopers to work security at the National Rifle Association's annual convention this weekend in Nashville.
Eight Tennessee Highway Patrol officers requested permission to work the event in their off-hours, but Haslam's administration denied that offer, citing the security gig would cost the state too much money. The troopers wanted to use their patrol cars during their time there, which the governor's office claimed was an expense the THP could not "recoup," according to the Associated Press. A public relations missed opportunity. But of course if the imagery of Law Enforcement and the NRA is somehow politically disturbing, his actions are completely justified.
While state troopers are barred from providing security, the NRA is expected to pay over $200,000 to off-duty Nashville police officers to do the job, The Tennessean reports. Nashville's Democrat Mayor Karl Dean and his administration appeared to have no objection to city cops working there.
This isn't the only gun-related issue Haslam has addressed this week. On Monday, the Tennessee governor said he had "major concerns" about a guns-in-parks bill that was eventually passed by the state legislature. However, Haslam signed the bill into law on Tuesday.
#4
Remember the 'off duty' cops in uniform working with DoT roadblocks to get 'voluntary' information? A lot of backtracking when it gave the appearance of law enforcement rather than the excuses that were offered justifying the events when it all came to light.
Using the company vehicle to moonlight another job sounds out of bounds.
Then what if the vehicle driven by somebody officially off the clock is involved in an accident?
Local boys have it, and I get why they would ask, like getting the assignment to stand near football coach during a big game. Yeah, I'm working, but look at the view.
#7
...citing the security gig would cost the state too much money
That's not how police details work, at least not in MA. In this case the NRA would get a bill for the trooper's time, usually overtime, so it would not cost TN anything.
#10
A club (of which I am a member) puts on an Motorcycle Enduro every Spring in Idaho, Boise County. The County permit REQUIRES that we hire 2 officers and their official vehicles. We pay for both. It's not cheap but helps us, helps them.
We use the Officers for oversight of our traffic control and the County has them on hand during a busy Spring weekend and so can use them in case of any other emergencies if required.
I don't either, but his brother Jimmuh (owner of the biggest joke in American professional sports, the Cleveland Browns) is, candidly, an oleaginous scumbag.
#15
Usually, there is a mechanism in place for the vendor (the NRA) to pay the agency for the work hours for both troopers and cars. The state police are probably self-insured and the insurance bill is included in the amount charged. The rationale is that the troopers may need the cars for traffic control at the event, the state gains some benefit for the travel to-and-from, plus the troopers have to respond to emergencies even if working off-duty. The denial of permission was probably about the politics of the NRA, not the actual work conditions, since troopers work off-duty to supplement their income all the time.
Using their oil weapon against Iran and those upstart frackers.
[AnNahar] Saudi oil production reached 10.3 million barrels per day in March, Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi has said, a figure that is the highest on record.
"Average daily output hit 10.3 million bpd in March," Naimi, cited by the official Saudi Press Agency, said Tuesday night.
That was up 450,000 bpd on February and comes at a time of increasing competition for market share and as oil prices continued to drop.
The highest previous record was registered in 1980, at 10.285 million bpd, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Naimi expected the kingdom's production to continue at around 10 million bpd and also expected crude prices to improve.
He also said Soddy Arabia ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face... , OPEC kingpin and the world's top crude exporter, was prepared to help improve oil prices but needed cooperation from major OPEC and non-OPEC producers.
AFP: Turkish prosecutors on Wednesday called for two prominent journalists who featured Charlie Hebdo's cover with the image of the Prophet Mohammed in their columns to be jailed for four and a half years. again, brave secular Muslims in Turkey are being persecuted in the rising tide of Islamism.
Istanbul's chief public prosecutor has charged Ceyda Karan and Hikmet Cetinkaya with "inciting public hatred" and "insulting religious values" by illustrating their columns with the cartoon, the Hurriyet daily reported. I think it's clear that Turkey won't be joining the EU anytime soon...
The cartoon was a smaller version of the controversial front cover depicting the Prophet Mohammed that French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo printed in its first edition after the attack on its offices by Islamist gunmen in January that killed 12 people.
Filed Non-WoT until further information. I don't know if this is meaningful, if only to create a scary (as opposed to hazardous) dirty bomb. Thoughts?
[AnNahar] Vietnamese authorities are searching for a lead box containing hazardous radioactive material which has gone missing from a steel factory, an official said Wednesday.
The box of cobalt-60, which has a wide range of uses including for radiotherapy and in industry, has disappeared from the Vietnamese-owned Pomina steel mill in the south of the country.
"(We) do not know how and when the container went missing," Do Vu Khoa, an official with the Department of Science and Technology in the southern province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau, told Agence La Belle France Presse.
"We are searching for the radiation box," he added.
The silver-white container weighs 45 kilograms (100 pounds) and is some 1.5 feet long (45 centimetres) and six inches wide, the department said in a statement.
"It contains Co-60 which was used for liquid measurement. It poses a potential danger to the environment and people's health," the statement said.
State-run Tuoi Tre newspaper said the cobalt-60 was among five radioactive sources which Pomina imported in 2010 to measure liquid steel levels at its plant.
The equipment was last confirmed to be at the facility late last year, the company said, according to the report.
The search zone includes several waste dumps in Ba Ria-Vung Tau and surrounding areas including Ho Chi Minh City.
"It's our top priority to look for the container," Mai Thanh Quang, director of the science department, was quoted as saying.
The biggest risk is that a scrap collector could find the box and cut open the protective lead casing, potentially exposing himself and others to radiation, he said.
Cobalt-60 is a radioactive isotope of the metallic element cobalt and the gamma rays it emits destroy tumours.
Apart from radiotherapy, it can be used to irradiate food and sterilise health care products.
But direct contact or mere proximity can cause cancer without proper safeguards.
[Wash Times] Iran has placed an "explosive emphasis" in putting military surveillance and attack drones into the sky, including "suicide" aircraft that increase risks for Israel and for U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf, according to a new U.S. Army analysis.
The Iranian army is spearheading the drive for a fleet of explosive-mounted killer drones. It tested them in December against ship targets near the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint for maritime traffic in and out of the Gulf.
The implication is clear: The hard-line Shiite-dominated regime has long threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world's oil is transported daily. The live-fire test/exercise shows that kamikaze drones are in the Iranian war plan.
Iran also is sharing new drone technologies with allies Hamas on Israel's south and Hezbollah on its north, the Army study says. Both are U.S.-designated terrorist groups that pledge the destruction of Israel.
The assessment is contained in a new publication from the Army's Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The document, which contains assessments by several in-house national security analysts, is devoted to the topic of the growing use of military drones worldwide.
#8
Difference between a missile or a drone, but the line can blur.
A missile is either unguided or takes minimal direction from an operator. Like a laser designator or GPS location to target.
A drone can take input from an operator and change course/target/mission at anytime from the launch. Most drones are recoverable so they can be reused, but some carry a warhead and the operator will use it as a munitions delivery vehicle to engage and destroy targets on the fly. Our current cruise missiles can receive guidance and completely change course/target or go into loiter on the command of the operator, so they could be considered a drone of sorts.
[The Weekly Standard] While everyone else was concentrating on Indiana and Iran last week, a much smaller piece of news broke that was of little interest to the wider world. It was so microscopic that I would have missed it entirely, if not for Sonny Bunch's indispensible blog, Everything's A Problem.
But fortunately, Sonny noticed the sudden death of Anthony Stokes that was, in addition to being a minor tragedy, also a telling story about where we are as a culture.
You probably don't remember Anthony Stokes, but back in 2013, he was briefly famous. Stokes as a 15-year-old Georgia kid with a bad heart condition: Born with an enlarged heart, doctors gave him roughly six months to live if he didn't get a transplant. The problem for Stokes--besides his terrible medical condition--was that the medical authorities wouldn't put him on the transplant list because they deemed him to be a high-risk for non-compliance. You see, Stokes had not just a history of bad grades, but a criminal record, too. "We follow very specific criteria in determining eligibility for a transplant of any kind," a flack from Children's Healthcare of Atlanta said at the time. "They said they don't have any evidence that he would take his medicine or that he would go to his follow-ups," said Stokes' mother.
But this is America, so you can already guess how this story went. Stokes' family went to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They cried racism. Then social media and "#BlackTwitter" (their term, not mine) kicked in. And the doctors at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta freaked out because there are few things as unsettling as being called racist by hordes of people on the internet. So the doctors reversed course and put Stokes on the transplant list. And, by the grace of God, Stokes got a heart. (Which means that someone else, by necessity, did not.)
And then the left--from the Huffington Post to Think Progress to Gawker to Ebony--did a victory lap. To their mind, they had won another victory in the culture war, exposing racism, shaming the power structure, and making the world a more perfect place.
Last Tuesday, a little less than two years after Stokes was gifted a heart, he--allegedy--broke into an 81-year-old woman's home and, upon being discovered, fired gunshot at her. He--allegedly--fled the scene of the break-in in a car that police later determined had been stolen. Police pursued Stokes in a high-speed chase. After a few miles Stokes--allegedly!--hit a pedestrian, whereupon he crashed the stolen car and died. (We don't have to cover ourselves on this last bit; he is indisputably dead.)
There's a great parable wrapped up in this story. And yet in the public consciousness, the death of Anthony Stokes barely registers. He's not even a footnote. But he should be. Because he got a heart that could have gone to someone else if not for the online mob and charges of racism.
As the case of Anthony Stokes should make clear, a great deal of the culture war is taking place under the radar these days. For the last year, for instance, the videogame world has been embroiled in a fight known colloquially as #GamerGate. I don't have the patience (and you don't have the time) to fully explain the story, but if you want to get a flavor for it, you can read this and this. The micro-version is: The elite videogame press is dominated by a small clique of writers and game-makers with radical leftist politics. These folks have made a long practice of foisting their views on an audience--videogame players--which is not interested in radical leftist politics.
#GamerGate is basically an apolitical revolt against leftism in a context where politics shouldn't exist, but does--because leftism necessitates that politics be ubiquitous.
Over the weekend we saw another revolt of the masses against leftist elites in a sphere where you wouldn't expect: science-fiction writing.
#1
Some just will not give up on the idea that the founding American ideal is "leave me alone and I'll do likewise, unless conditions conspire to make collaboration temporarily more attractive." Question is, are there still enough of us thinking that way to make a lasting difference?
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/09/2015 9:39 Comments ||
Top||
#2
Not any more. A decade plus of massive importation of uneducated entitlement drones who come from Caudillo states is changing our nation permanently. They aren't assimilating and have learned to organize to ask for more money very quickly. The importation of children to overcome the sanity of those of is left has done the trick.
[Daily Caller] An 18 month trial period allowing female Marines to attend the Marine Corps' Infantry Officer Course will end without a single female graduate, reported the Marine Corps Times.
The opportunity for female volunteers is part of a larger effort to determine the feasibility of allowing female officers to take part in ground combat operations. If anyone had successfully completed the course, they would not have earned the occupational designator or entered the infantry, since the program was only an experiment. Army program of gender appeasement continues.
#1
That's OK. I understand that before leaving office, Oby is going to promote Marie Harf to General and then make her Commandant.
(Now tell me you think that's too ridiculous to ever happen.)
Posted by: ed in texas ||
04/09/2015 7:59 Comments ||
Top||
#2
...well, given that the Trunks in Congress roll over so often, I wouldn't put it out of the realm of possibility, but the position requires the approval of Congress. Senior military positions are confirmed just like Secretarial and Supreme Court positions. It also might just be the event to trigger the next Franco/Pinochet era which weren't good times for the Left.
#4
My promotion to LTC was delayed almost 18 months back I'm 93. Now it's down to MAJ and planning might eventually go to platoon level? (Sarcasm I hope)
#5
In other news, every single Gunnery Sergeant admitted into the Marine Wet Nurse program failed to complete the course. Said one:
"No #$%^! The little !&^%$#& wouldn't suck hard enough. Just like the Colonel's wife, har har."
Posted by: Matt ||
04/09/2015 13:12 Comments ||
Top||
#6
Another way to put this:
Marine Corps refuses to change standards to accomidate females in Gender Integration Program.
I remember during the 90s (I think I remember but my memory is spotty) when the economy was booming and the military was having trouble filling the ranks so they lowered the requirements. Except the Marine Corps. And for some reason they had less trouble with numbers because the reputation they had developed over the years was beyond price.
#8
#1 That's OK. I understand that before leaving office, Oby is going to promote Marie Harf to General and then make her Commandant.
(Now tell me you think that's too ridiculous to ever happen.)
Only the part about Obama voluntarily leaving office.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
AFP: Turkish prosecutors on Wednesday called for two prominent journalists who featured Charlie Hebdo's cover with the image of the Prophet Mohammed in their columns to be jailed for four and a half years.
[The Weekly Standard] While everyone else was concentrating on Indiana and Iran last week, a much smaller piece of news broke that was of little interest to the wider world. It was so microscopic that I would have missed it entirely, if not for Sonny Bunch's indispensible blog, Everything's A Problem.
