Koster the Imposter Brought Home the Bacon

CAFO is a word that you'll hear a lot more as the AG race heats up. CAFO is an acronym for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, more commonly known as a factory farm. They replace the image of farms we all grew up with with super-sized concentrations of pigs, jammed together in hideous conditions. I'm no PETA member, but even I don't like the idea of eating something that has spent its entire life jammed in a stinky stall like the most crowded and flatulent elevator you have ever imagined.

Setting aside any porcine pity or tenderness for tenderloins, though, CAFOs are huge canker sores on the environment. They pollute ground water with unimaginable quantities of pig feces and urine. Their smell can make your eyes water, or worse - airborne micro-particles of pig feces can pollute entire zones of beautiful Missouri countrysides.

Economical disaster mirrors the impact on quality of life. Corporate farms don't drive the pick-up to the local feed mill for supplies - they import vast quantities of whatever they need on shiny 18 wheelers without contributing positively to the local economy. CAFOs drive family farmers out of business, and towns disappear when there are no people to shop on Main Street.

Not surprisingly, local communities have sought to protect their towns and the Missouri landscape from these destructive behemoths. Much like the zoning laws that protected Koster when he was living in Hallbrook or in wealthy St. Louis suburbs, local controls are ways for the people of Missouri's towns to preserve their way of life and the towns they have grown up in.

Also not surprisingly, corporate interests have the money to buy legislative protection. Also not surprisingly, Chris Koster was for sale when he was a Republican Senator. He became so enthusiastic about CAFO and the wealthy donors that control them that he actually sponsored SB 364, mockingly entitled the Missouri Farm and Food Preservation Act.

What would SB 364 have done? It would have loosened environmental controls on these factory farms. Not tightened the controls to prevent the spread of disease and environmental damage, but actually loosen those controls, to enhance profits. It also would have prevented counties from controlling their own jurisdictions, ripping local control away from the locals and insisting that only state or federal regulations could be applied to CAFOs.

This is not some act of ancient history I dug out of the vaults - this happened this year, during the 2007 legislative session, while Koster was supposedly becoming a Democrat! Mere months ago, Koster was siding with corporate hog farms against small town Missourians in a classic Republican power play. Now he wants us to trust him?

Personally, I think that stinks like . . . a hog farm.

By the way, both Democrats in the race, Jeff Harris and Margaret Donnelly, opposed the CAFO bill.

Some Look at Global Warming and Ask "Why?" I Look at Global Warming and Ask "Why Not?"

The Bush Regime continues to astound. Remember when NASA was a leader in science and technology - remember when it was THE dream job for high school kids who did well in physics?

Not surprisingly, the Bush Regime has dumbed things down a few notches.

Last week, NPR interviewed NASA administrator Michael Griffin - the man in charge of NASA. Here's what he has to say about the fact of global warming:

I'm aware that global warming exists. I understand that the bulk of scientific evidence accumulated supports the claim that we've had about a one degree centigrade rise in temperature over the last century to within an accuracy of 20 percent. I'm also aware of recent findings that appear to have nailed down — pretty well nailed down the conclusion that much of that is manmade.

So far, so good. Even a Bush appointee must face reality once in a while.

But what makes Griffin special is what he does with reality. To coin a phrase, while most of us look at anthropogenic global warming and ask "Why?", Bush appointee Michael Griffin looks at anthropogenic global warming and asks "Why not?".

When asked whether he has any doubt that this is a problem we need to wrestle with, Griffin envisions a world where Arkansas is on the Gulf Coast and Siberia grows pineapples:

And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take.

Bravo, Mr. Griffin! Indeed, who are we to judge such things? If our activities cause Florida to flood, who are we to say that's a bad thing? If our activities cause Africa's drought and famine to spread, maybe that will all work out for the better.

In climate change, there will be winners and there will be losers. Conventional wisdom suggests that it is unwise to unleash forces we are able to neither control nor understand. Conventional wisdom says that starvation, flooding, and dislocation of millions of people will be a bad thing, but, really, isn't labelling them "bad" just an arrogant value judgment?

Blessed with Griffin's insight, I look back on other instances where man has sought to ameliorate man's impact on the world, and, released from my arrogance, I see things in a new light. Why did that arrogant bitch Rachel Carson assume we would want a world without DDT killing off our birds and fishes? Who was the arrogant ass who interfered with our pollution of Lake Erie, so that now we can't light it on fire anymore? Indeed, who are those arrogant anti-nuke wusses who prevent us from unleashing a nuclear winter on this warming planet?

It's time for the arrogant creeps who seek to minimize man's impact on the globe to step aside and let us play with the environment as much as we like. Why must we assume that catastrophic change will necessarily be a catastrophe?

Get Your Hummingbird Feeders Out!

I haven't seen any hummingbirds around yet, but according to this handy-dandy map, ruby throated hummingbirds have been in the area for a month already.

Last year, I didn't see any at my feeder until late June, but they were regular visitors after that . . .

Stupid Blogger Tricks - Attacking the Celebrities

The god of Irony gets a special chuckle when a blogger attacks a celebrity's qualifications for voicing an opinion.

I'm probably violating a union rule by pointing this out, but the fact that you have a blog doesn't make you any more qualified to voice an opinion on global warming than Leonardo DiCaprio.

And, if you're going to start throwing stones from the glass porch on your glass house, it might be helpful to pick a target that doesn't have 99% of the scientists on his side.

Polar Ice and Polarization

A couple months ago, I saw An Inconvenient Truth, and thought it was excellent. It was a fact-based presentation on global warming, and it led to some frightening conclusions. Like much of the science surrounding global warming, you can quibble with a few details, but the evidence is overwhelming that something big is going on, and fossil fuels are at the heart of it.

Yesterday, NASA released data that shows a chunk of Antarctica the size of California melted in January of 2005. That's NASA, not some blogger with a vivid imagination.

Despite it all, the rightwing bloggers are almost unanimous in dismissing global warming as a fraud. Their hostility to the concept and to the science behind it is impressive in its baseless vehemence. Any contrary "evidence", even when it consists of a snowy afternoon, is trumpeted, and any outlying "scientist" who staggers out of a revival tent and rejects the scientific method becomes a leading voice. I swear I once heard Rush Limbaugh mocking global warming concerns because of a news story that the largest iceberg ever had been found floating off Antarctica - he completely mistook the import of that fact.

How did a scientific concern become a political schism? Is it because one of the leading voices of that concern happens to be a Democrat whose "loss" to W remains doubtful? It is because Bush happens to be in the White House now that concensus has formed, and action is required (if so, would it make any difference if I agreed that Clinton should have gotten on board with this, too)? Is it because contemporary rightwingers have lost their environmental way? Is it just a healthy cynicism toward scientific theory, to be expected from a group which is still struggling with the concept of evolution?

It doesn't have to be this way. It's not like global warming is a Republican phenomenon, to be blamed on the Bush Regime - it's been building even during the Golden Days of the Clinton Presidency of Peace and Prosperity. It's not like solutions to global warming are going to hurt the big business interests that control the Republicans - many of the more clever large businesses are already paying attention to how energy consumption hurts their bottom lines, and others are lining up to profit from the necessary changes. This could be as big a boon for business as the Iraqi quagmire has been for Halliburton.

In this case, the left is pretty obviously on the correct side of the science. We're listening to real scientists, not pundits. We're looking at evidence, and it's mounting.

It's time for the rightwingers drop the anti-scientific knee-jerk cynicism and join us. Come on in, the water's (disturbingly) warm.