better bugs with gm seeds and pesticides.

While the responses to questions 2, 4, 5 and 11 are consistent with the explanation that no explosives were used, they aren't strong enough to imply that there were no explosives.

That's because NIST was charged with simply determining the cause of the collapse. They determined a few things. Airliners filled with jet fuel were crashed into the towers hours before they collapsed. The collapse of the towers appears to start with the collapse of the floors that were crashed into by the airliners. Expert study of the damage caused to the building, including simulations and past direct experiment determined that the airliner crash and resulting fires were sufficient to cause the collapse. NIST then concluded that the cause of the collapse was the airliners that crashed into the towers that day.

They didn't specifically study the possibility of pre-planted explosives causing the collapse. There were thorough analysis of the dust from the collapse though, and they looked for trace elements of almost anything and everything. The came up with traces of asbestos and even pesticides, but no high explosives.

They didn't specifically test for pre-planted terrorist agents with arc welders cutting the buildings support beams either, but why should they?

They didn't specifically study the possibility of trained monkeys with hacksaws being pre-positioned at the pillars causing the collapse either, but why should they?

@Tymbrwulf

Yes, but as you say, genetic mutation takes years to study...possibly generations. The profit margins are greatly increased as you say by speeding GMO's to market. This is a problem, obviously. And when you look at epigentics (and I urge everyone to consider it), a genetic mutation problem can snowball by generation.

When we talk about genetic mutation, we are talking about death, not simple side-effects. This requires long-term study. We don't really have a choice.

Most "farms"today are corporate subsidiaries. And from reports, smaller organic farms are being hit hard by those who don't bow to government/fda/corporate pressure to use their GMO seeds and pesticides. Raids on these farms and small organic grocery outlets are reported to be increasing in rate and severity. And the FDA just had their enforcement powers increased. We're talking about enforcement teams in full armor with submachine guns taking down a grocery store because they dared to sell raw milk. The "organic" movement is seen as a real threat to corporate profit margins.

I'm not a scientist, (my sister is the biochemist), but I almost died twice as a child because of exposure to "harmless" pesticides. Perhaps this affects my objectivity, or perhaps I am rightfully concerned and skeptical, given my personal history and the safety history of Monsanto and similar multinationals. But I am aware of ever increasing cancer rates, and declining fertility rates, and the common world-wide problem of corporate greed defeating notions of safety and common sense.

I was waiting for the city official to say 'It couldn't possibly be the massive plastic factory.. pan camera.. that is pumping out thousands of tuns of toxic gas into the sky and giving every other person in this town a baseball size tumor in their necks. Couldn't possibly be that!"

Ah well..


IMHO if it were fireworks this would happen every year.. and everywhere. I'm pretty sure every bird in the country knows innately to hide on July 4th and December 31st. I'm sure it'll be some chemical or pesticide or factory dumping toxic shit into the river, etc.

>> ^mgittle:

>> ^heathen:
I'd guess pesticides, sprayed from a crop duster. The plane may have flown over where the birds were roosting. Then later the pesticides could have washed into the river, killing the fish mentioned in Deathcow's linked article.

Except as was pointed out, pollutants would have affected multiple fish species instead of only one. Also, I'd guess that it would be quite unlikely for pesticides sprayed in the air to travel 125 miles without dispersing to really low concentrations unless the initial concentration/quantity was ridiculously high. Plus, even if some chemical in the air reached the ground in a concentrated amount, it's also highly unlikely that, specific crazy topography aside, the local watershed could move the chemical 125 miles in the time span in question.
Until more info, I'd stick with the "unrelated" hypothesis.


Yeah, I was suggesting the fish were poisoned in the river near the spraying site and then swam to Ozark before dying, not that the pesticides were carried on the wind for 125 miles.

I also agree the watershed couldn't move the pollutants that far, especially since Google tells me the Arkasas river flows in the wrong direction.

Pollutants are certainly likely to affect multiple fish species, however they don't have to affect them all the same way, or with the same severity. For example, maybe fish larger than the drum didn't receive a large enough dose to kill them, or smaller fish were able to survive as they required less oxygen in the water.

As you say, it may just be an unrelated co-incidence. However, with that many animals dying in such a short time frame, I'd personally hope it was a one-off mistake than something that could occur twice in such a small area, within a day of each other.

>> ^heathen:

I'd guess pesticides, sprayed from a crop duster. The plane may have flown over where the birds were roosting. Then later the pesticides could have washed into the river, killing the fish mentioned in Deathcow's linked article.


Except as was pointed out, pollutants would have affected multiple fish species instead of only one. Also, I'd guess that it would be quite unlikely for pesticides sprayed in the air to travel 125 miles without dispersing to really low concentrations unless the initial concentration/quantity was ridiculously high. Plus, even if some chemical in the air reached the ground in a concentrated amount, it's also highly unlikely that, specific crazy topography aside, the local watershed could move the chemical 125 miles in the time span in question.

Until more info, I'd stick with the "unrelated" hypothesis.

I'd guess pesticides, sprayed from a crop duster. The plane may have flown over where the birds were roosting. Then later the pesticides could have washed into the river, killing the fish mentioned in Deathcow's linked article.

Fisheries policy, like the agricultural policy, is all about individual countries trying to protect the jobs of their people. Too many short term politicians pandering to their electorate result in too many short term decisions against the long term sustainability of our fisheries, which we're really going to need come 2050 when the world population hits 9 billion.

Fishermen are still behaving like hunters roaming further and further afield when they can't find fish locally, instead of acting like responsible farmers who have to protect their land if they want it to continue producing food. Except that irresponsible farmers are over-using fertilizers and herb/pesticides which are washing off into the ocean, some of which act like fish hormones decreasing their ability to reproduce, and others create oxygen depleted algal blooms in which fish can't live.

Sometimes I wish I had an orbital ion cannon and a C&C interface to the world. Then we'd see who makes stupid decisions on my watch...

No mention that the latest generation is the first to have a shorter lifespan than its predecessor.

Plastics, pesticides, pollution.... We are going backwards.

I really like the idea of developing a community website (not unlike Videosift) as a tool to promote the funding of some areas of research. A well designed website providing brief but informative notes on research areas, projects, initial results, etc., given wide promotion, would be interesting, as an experiment (with no up or down voting on who actually gets money, just on the perceived value of the ideas).


One rough hypothesis is that this will lead to cuts in funding to research projects that lack, in the eyes of the lay person, obvious scientific/social importance simply because many of these research areas/projects may be too abstract for a lay person to grasp from the info provided. Thus we will be effectively culling programs in a very poorly informed way, possibly leading to an age of research more focused on immediate social/commercial results. So with something like bird mating behavior vs. pesticide environmental toxicity... people will choose pesticide toxicity without even weighing the possibility that the bird research may be relevant to agricultural, safe air travel, disease, etc..


I say we should test this hypothesis, and then debate about whether and in what situations it worked, and whether some form of this idea could be a good or bad way to help delegate our finite resources.


p.s. I'm writing this on an excellent online community's comment page, a situation which may be influencing my optimism for the IDEA of this online experiment. If you visit the actual webpage for this project its garbage... 'dig through NSF's website and paste in research titles that sound wasteful', which will likely lead to anything fruitfly or C.elegans related being dumped on the guy's assistants to dig through... thats a waste of time, but a more powerful, well designed site could be awesome.

It is a lot like radioactive fallout, or the fallout from air dispersed biochemical weapons. The wind blows, then the chemical will disperse, some of that will land in strange places. Much like crop dusting, the wind can still blow that stuff over to a neighboring farm. In fact there's a term for crop dusting damage to other farms; Drift Damage. The consensus that I got from reading articles is that solid particles will drift farther than liquid; dust drifts more than liquid.

I'm supposing that has something to do with the density of water and dust. These are things you should think about before you go outside and use that weed killer on your lawn. I guess a good experiment would be to take a bucket full of sand and a wind source and let the sand fall with the wind blowing it. Then do the same for something of a liquid type. I think that the results would be clear.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf60023a614

Notable court case.
http://www.lawyersweekly.com/reprints/grg.htm

A search for Herbicide dift laws. Illinois has a law specifically for dealing with civil cases of herbicidal drift.
http://www.google.com/search?q=herbicide+drift+laws&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Below, herbicide drift damage.
http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/pubs/plantsci/weeds/wc751w.htm

Pesticide drift.
http://www.midrivers.net/~fergusco/weed/Pesticide%20Drift.htm

It all depends on your location. The municipal tap water in Nebraska tests positive, at levels way above WHO recommendations, for various pesticides and fertilizers.

It looks like the Westboro Baptist Church has procreated. I think it's time to dig out the pesticide.

It's actually pointless to introduce the solar energy input into the equation at all Crake. The sun has shone and will shine for far longer than human beings will ever manage to survive on this planet. When I and many others look at agricultural reform we look at those aspects of the food production chain that humans can control and can change. The 'facilitation' you talk about is the entire crux of the modern day agricultural dilemma. There are an infinite number of ways that facilitation could happen, and the concern and debate is whether or not the road industry has chosen for us is the one that will bare the most fruit. Clearly it has not. The reasons, myriad, I don't want to write a thesis on the sift.

And I agree, when you start looking at government crop subsidies the energy calculation does lose its relevance. Why? Because you have jumped a 100 steps up a chain that was problematic at its root. The agricultural subsidy issue is a whole other Pandora's box.

Again, it's not the Haber process itself that is unsustainable, it is the entire industrial agricultural framework. The Haber process's dependence on natural gas is problematic, and even with future technological developments aside, it's a reductionist solution that undermines the multitude of complimentary farming techniques that could naturally introduce nitrogen into the soil. It's the kind of simplified agricultural solution that corporate agribusiness monopolies love, and it's this mutual reinforcement that causes concern. Again, the Haber process is a small piece of huge puzzle, we digress.

And with regards to future developments, let me illustrate why future developments are almost irrelevant to many of the problems at hand. In India for example there is a 500 year old tradition of aquaculture, for shrimp specifically. Most of the farms are small, local and sustainably run using various aquaculture farming methods (if you are interested you could read up on the Bheri system of aquaculture, just one of the many traditional systems).

This 'third world' farming technique as some might call it is just as profitable and has yields just as large as the more intensive commercial and industrial aquaculture methods. It has stood the test of time and it also forms the back bone of India's shrimp export economy, the largest in the world.

Industrial shrimp farming has had dismal success around the world. Taiwan, China, Mexico, Ecuador, all these countries have had huge issues keeping commercial shrimp farming sustainable. Wherever commercial shrimp farming has been tried, it has failed to a large degree, usually due to major disease outbreaks. That's why the call it the 'rape and run' industry.

Isn't it strange that the more industrial shrimp farms are introduced in India (due to government subsidies and incentives), the more 'environmental issues' they have to deal with that just didn't exist with the 'traditional third world systems' . . . mangrove destruction, drinking water pollution (from antibiotics and pesticides add to the shrimp ponds to minimize disease) , salinization of groundwater, etc.

Now you might argue with me that the solution to this problem potentially lies with future developments . . . a better antibiotic maybe, perhaps genetically engineering shrimp to be more resistant to disease and pollution, etc, or maybe the solution lies in adopting farming techniques that have been slowly perfected for the last 500 years and are proven to work, where the only interventions that could be made were natural ones and success was determined by how well you could maintain a balanced relationship with your local ecosystem. It is these farming systems and the mindset that they embody that I would like to see the world adopt, improve upon and gravitate towards.

Pinning your hopes for improvement on future developments and technology is totally misguided, especially when the core of the modern industrial agricultural foundation is so rotten. I have nothing against technology, but I'm not going to let the problems, born of brutish and unsophisticated industrial thinking, be overlooked by a corporate apologist futurist mindset. I'm not implying that's how you feel about the issue, but that the stance that many people have. There is an utter lack of holistic thinking in the industrial agricultural world (and everywhere else pretty much) and the direction it is leading us in is potentially frightening.

Sure, ask at a farmers market? people who think because it the food is sold under dinky stands that it wasn't covered in pesticides.

In a controlled environment like this where pests, nutriants, air pollution, and even bacterias can be completely controlled from seed to delivery without antibotics - the food is likely to be far healthier. Potentially even organic certified as long as the process is carefully controlled.

Unfortunately it's when greed steps in and the ethics of producing healthy food gets completely abandoned. And since this takes money and investment it's almost guaranteed they would move to GM food's, articitial growth cycles and hormones, lower the nutriants but increase the speed and out put of the factory line etc...