All in the Family featured the curmudgeonly Archie Bunker. Archie was television’s most famous grouch, blunt, blustering, straightforward and untouched by the PC crowd. He was the archetype of the conservative male. Michael desprately tried to reeducate him, but he persisted in his breviloquence.



Looking back at the last 40 years, we realize: ARCHIE WAS RIGHT!

2/25/2014

Al Gore

I realize beating up on Al Gore is a lot like beating up on the little kid getting off the short bus, but I can't help it.

Gore: Dust Bowl coming unless we act
“Think about that,” he said. “The Dust Bowl is coming back, quickly, unless we act.”
Gore conceded the possible fatigue some may have with his warnings, as well as the possible sense of powerlessness as to what any one individual can do to affect what appear to be vast, unchangeable trends.
“Do we really have to do this and — if the answer is yes — can we do it?” Gore said, repeating two questions he routinely hears.
“The answer to both of those questions — spoiler alert — is ‘yes.’ ” 
Al Gore is wrong again, still.  Saying he is wrong isn't really accurate.  Being wrong would entail an honest mistake.  Al Gore is engaged in fraud.  When you build an entire "industry" on the concept of carbon trading and you stand to make a tidy profit off of getting companies to pay you to buy carbon credits, you have an incentive to lie to get others to go along with you.

What Al hasn't said, because he doesn't care, is that there is a real parallel to the 1930's going on today.  The economy is as bad as the great depression.  This is being caused by the very people Al wants to put in charge of fixing the world, bigger government.  The fact that big government is the force destroying America (and almost every place else) is of no concern to Al. 

Is there a threat to the United States food supply?  Yes I believe there is.  That threat isn't related to global warming.  That threat goes back over 40 years to a series of food supply related policies under the Nixon administration and has been followed by every administration since, and magnified under the Obama administration.

So what did Nixon do?  Tricky Dick was faced with a potential problem as reelection time neared.  That problem was the price of sugar.  It was going up.  Back in the 60's America still had housewives (google it, they were great creatures, almost extinct now), housewives cared very much about the price of things they used to feed their families.  The price of sugar was going up, a lot.  The housewives of America were concerned.  There is a second piece of the puzzle.  That piece has to do with corn prices and production.  Production was up, prices were down, farmers were unhappy.  A solution presented its self in the form of advise from Earl Butz.  Fast track High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) into the market place.  This accomplished a reduction in the price of cane sugar and made the agricultural lobby happy. 

When it came to food prices at election time Nixon wanted to "take the issue off the table".  It must have seemed like a big win for the R team.  The outcome for America has been a net loss.   It is considered politically correct to kick Dick Nixon around and blame him for America's woes.  I think that's why we are hearing about the government link with HFCS.  HFCS turns out to be one of the leading culprits in America's obesity crisis.  That's not half the problem.  The government tinkering in artificial foods has lead to other questionable practices in the AG industry.

I don't have the space in one post, or the inclination, to go into the whole Franken-food issue.  The larger point is that every administration since Nixon has engaged in the same type of policy decision making.  Every single one of them has voted/signed/promoted the idea that the government tinkering on a case by case basis can do things better than the market.  In the case of genetically modified food, they believe they can do a better job than God.  In case you didn't know Obummer signed into law (a law voted on and passed by Republicans and Democrats alike)  a special provision for the AG industry, that even if/when GMO foods are proven harmful, they cannot be sued or face other court action, ever.   How's that for a bipartisan win?

We can't fix AG issues by blaming CO2 emissions.  Just like we can't fix the budget deficit by taxing health care.  Of course you can't fix companies laying off workers by making them promise that they aren't laying off workers because they can't afford to pay for the health care. 

To paraphrase Ron Reagan:
A recession is when your neighbor losses his job.  A depression is when you lose yours.  A recovery is when Obama, the congress and 80% of Federal employees lose theirs.

If you really want to "fix", as in make something better, in American public policy, the answer is get the government out of it.  You don't fix big government problems by making another branch of the government bigger, or by passing more laws.

11 comments:

  1. WaterBoy11:41 AM

    There are two definite points, at least, on which Al Gore is wrong:

    1. Dust bowl. The drought was a really big deal, the primary culprit. However, farming practices also played a large part in it. For one thing, many farmers cleared the majority of trees from their land to maximize their acreage. This had the effect of removing natural windbreaks, exacerbating the wind's effects on soil erosion. Another thing was the type of tilling employed, turning over the topsoil, which loosens it and makes it more susceptible to erosion.

    As noted in this article, the Federal government devised a program to plant millions of trees to construct a "shelterbelt", cutting down on the amount of soil erosion caused by wind. And farmers adopted other planting techniques to minimize erosion caused by top-tilling.

    The kernel of truth in his presentation is that drought is endangering the lives of those trees, but this isn't even the first time that's been true. The risk now is that their age is exacerbating the damage being done to them, which didn't factor in as high during previous droughts.

    2. Manitou Springs floods. The primary cause of this was the Waldo Canyon fire, which turned acres of forested hills into dust and ash. There was no foliage to soak up the heavy rainfall, nor to stop the mudslides which did form. Nor was it unheard of before...so Gore was simply wrong that those there had never seen anything like it.

    Hyperbole goes a long way in covering up the truth.

    ReplyDelete
  2. A more recent event that is causing problems in food supply is the early snow storm and cattle herd losses in the Dakotas and the rest of the west. According to estimates I've seen the US cattle herd is down to its lowest since the 50's. Which is why chuck roast is selling for $4.69/lb at our Wal-Mart.

    ReplyDelete
  3. WaterBoy12:55 PM

    Time to eat more chicken, fish, and pork, I guess....

    How's your venison supply, this year?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous1:11 PM

    "A recovery is when Obama, the congress and 80% of Federal employees lose theirs."

    HEY!!! That's just crazy talk.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Giraffe3:50 PM

    Time to eat more chicken, fish, and pork, I guess....

    Yep. I hear there is some virus in the hogs.

    I think everybody cut back their livestock in response to high corn prices. Further cuts to cattle due to the drought down south. Then the blizzard killed thousands here in SD. I hope pork and chicken come down but since beef is so high and will stay that way for a few years there will be extra demand for pork and chicken.

    Good time to have a bunch of cattle. Or really any meat animal.

    Went hunting coyotes last month in sw So Dak. Dead cows lying everywhere.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Susan6:15 PM

    My husband was talking to a young farmer in our church during a potluck meal a couple of years ago, and the young farmer was mentioning that a large percentage of corn is now imported into this Country? Furthermore, this Country is lucky to have a 2 week supply on hand at any given time.
    Most of our corn goes into the gas tank.
    We must be the only Country on earth stupid enough to put our food into the gas tank. It only ruins the engine and makes it run poorly.

    Get the Government out of public policy is correct.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Giraffe8:19 AM

    Susan, that sounds like baloney.

    1. We have too much corn. That is why the price is down. We export corn.

    2. No way we could only have a two week supply. We carry over millions bushels of unused corn from one year to the next. There is no corn harvested from December probably till August (I don't know when they harvest in the south but it is earlier than here)

    3. Ethanol doesn't hurt your engine. At worst, it dissolves some plastic or rubber parts that weren't made for it. If your car is less than 400 years old, it is probably fine. You do get worse gas mileage. I don't burn ethanol because it costs more. Some claim they get better mileage. I burn a tank of 10% once in awhile to clean stuff up.

    4. Corn is not used for food except as corn syrup. It is used as feed for animals. Corn used for ethanol is still used after processing as feed. The value of the feed is higher than before, but there is less of it. Ethanol plants have two products, feed and fuel. Sometimes they make more on the feed. Farmers love this stuff, called Dried Distillers Grain, because cows love it. They can mix it with cheap feed like corn stalks and the cows will eat it.

    5. In my opinion, ethanol is a good industry. It doesn't make sense to produce corn just to make ethanol because you need to sell the feed to make it viable. This is what we are doing to a certain extent, but the market is still adjusting. It does make sense to process some of the corn we are already growing.

    ReplyDelete
  8. black9:44 AM

    Giraffe: Thanks for the explanation.

    ReplyDelete
  9. 3. Ethanol doesn't hurt your engine.

    That depends. If your engine uses/d alloys the higher combustion tempts cause premature engine ware and failure. Metallurgically not all engines can take the heat and heads can and do warp.

    I'm looking to drop another $1,500 to $2,000 on top of the $6,000 I spent on replacing my truck engine 18,000 miles ago.

    ReplyDelete
  10. My '98 Honda has had a lot of problems directly tied to ethanol.

    And I can't believe Giraffe thinks that corn is only for corn syrup and feed. He really needs to walk down the aisle of a grocery store once in a while.

    As to what an actual farmer told my husband, well, we live in the middle of agriculture that has a worldwide reach now. So I tend to believe him when he says stuff like this.

    As to ruination of an engine, ethanol pulls more moisture into the engine than is good for it. And because your mileage is worse, you wind up spending more of your paycheck every month for your fuel needs. That gets bad when gas hits $4 a gallon or more. When I bought my Honda, gas was $1.69 a gallon.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Giraffe8:50 PM

    We import a small amount of corn. Less than 1/4 of 1 percent of what we grow. We export 15% of what we grow.

    The corn crop this year was almost 14 billion bushels. That is more than six pounds of corn for every person in the US per day. As you can see, we don't eat much corn. At least not until it is processed by a hog, chicken, or cow.


    Americans typically think of themselves as wheat eaters because they eat 114 lbs of wheat flour per person per year vs. only 11 pounds of corn flour.

    We eat 1500 lbs of "corn" per person per year. After it is converted to meat.

    http://fatknowledge.blogspot.com/2007/04/average-american-consumes-1500-pounds.html

    ReplyDelete