Re: The Bigger, Badder, Even More Serious Thread [3]

[azriel]

The reason,Mrs Figg is, there are so many more poor or low paid people about. Its easier to clamp down on poor sods as its a guaranteed income= there will ALWAYS be the poor ! If youre rich,affluant, well-to-do, within the means of a comfortable life, you can find ways of either hiding your wealth or removing your wealth. The poor dont have that luxury. All our business is laid bare, the only way to get by is to find a job "cash in hand", off the books, NO tax paid !!. Cameron must be rubbing his hands with glee at all the dumb fuck ideas that are dreamed up ! If it means screwing even ONE pence,not matter HOW ridiculous the demand is, Cameron will go for it ! Who's to stop him ? He only meets up with the Queen once a week I believe ? I could be wrong ! might be less, & what has SHE done to curb the lunacy ? The rate this country's going,we'll be on ration books as they did in the war & just after. Dont have a bedroom tax on the rich, they must & should pay a higher council tax, make THEM downgrade & you;ll have them barking about "human rights" etc, & Cameron wouldnt get the council tax from them. As for getting people to downsize,well, on the news here, A woman down sized,left the home she loved & had for years. Couldnt afford the extra payment, (she WAS in social housing) Swapped with a COUPLE,no kids, to a lesser bedroom property & says WHY? downsizing did nothing, it didnt free up a property for a FAMILY that needed the extra bedroom at all ! The council bang on about being under occupied or over occupied, but do nothing to help. they couldnt give a fuck really as long as the rent & council tax is paid. & Cameron doesnt want people to claim to much benefit to cover rent/C.tax, he wants you to earn it, & be skint & have NO life, as long as your money is guarateed for the "hurray henry;s" to have THEIR comfortable life style & life time pension. The class divide is bigger & more obvious now than ever, My friends & I wonder how long the British "stiff upper lip" will continue ? Will we have a revolution ? The French go mad if theres not enough butter on their croissant, & take to the streets !

[Mrs Figg]

it sounds bad. But at least there are still benefits in England. Here there is NOTHING, yep Nothing. If you are unemployed its tough shit. you will starve and lose your home and end up on the streets with kids. The only thing that saves people is the family, kids stay at home with parents way into their 30s and sometimes 40s, its the only way to survive. There is also the Church who help out a lot with soup kitchens and suchlike. But unless you are below the poverty line you literally get no help from the state at all. Only people like gypsies and really rock bottom cases get state homes. Luckily Italians have large families and all the burden is put on them when times get tough. Everyday 200 firms go bust, and its dramatic. Its getting as bad as Greece and Spain. Really being in the Euro zone is not very hopeful at the moment.

[azriel]

You are right Mrs Figg ! Europe is in a very bad way indeed ! We all thought those medievil days were over but obviously theyre not. Money is PRIME it seems, above anything or anyone. Centuries later & people are STILL putting wealth,possessions,greed & all,well before the care & welfare of people ! So much for "love one another" & "humanity" ? help your fellow man out....if he can pay ! or to hell with you ! Have we as humans progressed very far intellectually or emotionally ? I think a lot of people are trying,but just keep getting beaten down.

[Pettytyrant101]

Talking of money- this is a wealth map of the UK- and also doubles as a spending map- where most of the government money goes.

[azriel]

looks like my figure !

[Pettytyrant101]

Im imaging you must mean whilst doing a hand stand.
Although in that case Im amazed you can walk without falling over forwards!

[azriel]

you mean Ive a big BRAIN ?

[Pettytyrant101]

Um, yes. If it keeps me out of trouble, yes.

[azriel]

[Mrs Figg]

[Pettytyrant101]

[azriel]

I wish !

[chris63]

[Pettytyrant101]

Bees. Handy things. We kind of need them to pollinate an awful lot of what we eat.
So this is a bit worrying-

'A mysterious malady that has been killing honeybees en masse for several years appears to have expanded drastically in the last year, commercial beekeepers say, wiping out 40 percent or even 50 percent of the hives needed to pollinate many of the nation’s (US) fruits and vegetables.
A conclusive explanation so far has escaped scientists studying the ailment, colony collapse disorder, since it first surfaced around 2005. But beekeepers and some researchers say there is growing evidence that a powerful new class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, incorporated into the plants themselves, could be an important factor.
The pesticide industry disputes that.- New York Times

I had a quick look into these neonicotinoids. As the name implies it is derived from nicotine.
According to wiki-

Neonicotinoids are a class of neuro-active insecticides chemically related to nicotine. The development of this class of insecticides began with work in the 1980s by Shell and the 1990s by Bayer.The neonicotinoids were developed in large part because they show reduced toxicity compared to previously used organophosphate and carbamate insecticides. Most neonicotinoids show much lower toxicity in mammals than insects, but some breakdown products are toxic.Neonicotinoids are the first new class of insecticides introduced in the last 50 years, and the neonicotinoid imidacloprid is currently the most widely used insecticide in the world.

A bit more digging about turned up a study conducted at the Univerity of Dundee in Scotland-

'Commonly used pesticides are damaging honey bee brains, studies suggest.
Scientists have found that two types of chemicals called neonicotinoids and coumaphos are interfering with the insect's ability to learn and remember.
Experiments revealed that exposure was also lowering brain activity, especially when the two pesticides were used in combination.
The research is detailed in two papers in Nature Communications and the Journal of Experimental Biology.
But a company that makes the substances said laboratory-based studies did not always apply to bees in the wild.
To investigate, scientists looked at two common pesticides: neonicotinoids, which are used to control pests on oil seed rape and other crops, and a group of organophosphate chemicals called coumaphos, which are used to kill the Varroa mite, a parasite that attacks the honey bee.
Neonicotinoids are used more commonly in Europe, while coumaphos are more often employed in the United States.
Work carried out by the University of Dundee, in Scotland, revealed that if the pesticides were applied directly to the brains of the pollinators, they caused a loss of brain activity.
Dr Christopher Connolly said: "We found neonicotinoids cause an immediate hyper-activation - so an epileptic type activity - this was proceeded by neuronal inactivation, where the brain goes quiet and cannot communicate any more. The same effects occur when we used organophosphates.
"And if we used them together, the effect was additive, so they added to the toxicity: the effect was greater when both were present."- BBC Science

There was also a report carried out by the European Food Safety Authority who said-

'that they posed a high acute risk to pollinators.
But 14 out of the 27 EU nations - including the UK and Germany - opposed the ban, and the proposal has now been delayed.'- BBC

I think this is an err on the side of caution thing myself.
The disasterous food shortages and dramatic rising in prices that would result from a total collapse of bee populations globally is not worth contemplating. Surely better to take these pesticides off the market until they can be absolutely certain their is no link? As there seems to be at least the strong possibility the two things are connected.

[Pettytyrant101]

More bedroom tax news as English councils take a look at the effect they excpect it to have-

'A report by the National Housing Federation, which represents 1,200 housing associations, said the policy was targeting those parts of the country least affected by the problem of under-occupation.
It said that in the north of England there was no need for people to move as families with a spare room outnumbered overcrowded households by three to one. It added that there were insufficient smaller properties for all 660,000 households affected by the bedroom tax to move into.
If disabled people in adapted properties moved into smaller homes this could also cost the taxpayer millions more in costly home adaptations, the federation claimed.
David Orr, its chief executive, said: “The bedroom tax is an ill-conceived policy which will hurt the most vulnerable people in our society. It will cause financial hardship for hundreds of thousands of families and cause huge upheaval around the country.”- The Independent

And as if this was not proof enough on top of an almost identical set of findings by Scottish housing associations and councils, one council in Ealing in London is suggesting-

'that families hit by the bedroom tax could foster a child to avoid losing benefit.'

When the solution to a piece of legislation has to be as mad as that its a bad bit of legislation!

[azriel]

That last statement was disgusting in the least ! "foster a child" ! what a thing to say ! Using children to hang onto or claim extra benefit, I thought "Dickens" was a fanciful story ? Ok, lets say you help house kids, by the very people social services didnt want kids to go to in the 1st place ?? & in a few yrs time, will these kids find out just WHY they were fostered ? Oh goody, a new generation of mind screwed adults with grudges.

[David H]

Bees. Handy things. We kind of need them to pollinate an awful lot of what we eat.
So this is a bit worrying-

.........



There was also a report carried out by the European Food Safety Authority who said-

'that they posed a high acute risk to pollinators.
But 14 out of the 27 EU nations - including the UK and Germany - opposed the ban, and the proposal has now been delayed.'- BBCen

I think this is an err on the side of caution thing myself.
The disasterous food shortages and dramatic rising in prices that would result from a total collapse of bee populations globally is not worth contemplating. Surely better to take these pesticides off the market until they can be absolutely certain their is no link? As there seems to be at least the strong possibility the two things are connected.

It's a serious issue. We choose not to use neonicotinoids on our farm for this reason. But here's the problem:

In the 19th and early 20th century many commercial farms used lead arsenate (yes, that's arsenic and lead) and some tobacco extracts that caused a lot of poisonings, some of the type that killed in hours, some that would collect in your body and drive you to insanity and slow wasting death. Around WWII came the organo-chlorates (OC'S) including DDT which were amazingly safe to humans. Agriculture's food output quadrupled over night. The only trouble was that these compounds collected in the environment and slowly poisoned wild animals, especially birds.

When DDT and the OC's were banned, they were replaced by organo-phospates (OP's) which broke down in a matter of days rather than years so they didn't accumulate in the environment. They also weren't as effective at controlling insects, so farmers used many times more of them, which was eventually found to be getting into the water and poisoning fish. They also were extremely lethal to bees, so farmers had to have bees removed during spraying. The OP's have nearly all been banned now.

The next class are the bio-rationals of which the neonicotinoids were the first to be released. They are very safe to humans, fish and non-target insects by mimicking natural defense mechanisms of certain plants. They don't kill bees, they just give the a "buzz" (..sorry..) not unlike buckie. Everybody thought they were the new miracle in safe farming until the reports on bee colony collapse came in. The bee keeper we work with still feels that climate change and environmental habitat loss is a bigger issue but nobody wants to address that one.

There are new pest controls that are being developed and tested, but until they're proven safe what do you suggest we do? If we ban what is working to control pest plagues now, do we go back to the older more poisonous pesticides? Do we gamble on the new ones without testing? Do we let the pests run uncontrolled for a few years and risk something like the Irish Potato famine on a global scale? There's not a quick fix or easy answer. Organically grown products just can't produce enough to feed the world's current urban population.

On our farm we are constantly working to find the balance, but even though we don't use the neonicotinoids, I'd be scared of a ban until something safer and more reliable was available.

By the way, I've been gone a while. Has anything exciting happened while I was out?

[chris63]

We weeded your veggie patch

[Pettytyrant101]

No doubting the difficulty of the issues but it seems to me that if there is a dispute btween one body of scientists and those who make it, over whether it has any part in the problem at all then taking it out of circulation for a few years, at least in the worse hit areas in the US for colony collapse, and seeing what happens should at least indicate if it the pesticide is doing it or something else.


'we weeded your veggie patch'- Chris

And I may have kinda of fallen drunken asleep in your manure pit. But don't worry I wouldnt be doing it again, it gave me bad dreams involving Mrs figg!

[David H]

I do a lot of hand weeding too, but with 53 acres it's not easy. The insect problems are different though.

About 15 years ago as the new "environmentally safe" pesticides were coming becoming common we decided to eliminate the older organo-phosphates entirely. It seemed like a good idea and we thought we had pretty good control of the blackheaded firworm population until the second hatch when things got out of control. By the 3rd hatch we'd lost it and to make a long story short, we lost over 60% of that year's crop and almost half the fruit buds that make the next year's crop. That little experiment cost us over one year's income.

Now consider how much,far too much, of the world's food supply comes from a few giant agribusinesses, producing wheat, corn, soy on areas the size of countries. Imagine if just one of the countries did an experiment like we did and lost just one year's production. Food prices could easily double and millions of poorer people would starve unless they could grow their own food (which wouldn't be a bad idea for everybody to try. What percentage of your own diet could you reasonably grow your self? It's not good to be so dependent on these corporate giants.)

I think I've made the analogy between pesticides and antibiotics before when talking with Orwell. It's been proven to be unhealthy to pump antibiotics into people and animals continuously, but to ban them outright is to condemn a lot of sick people and animals to death.

The same with farms. By careful management insect populations can be kept in check, but on a year when all the weather and environmental conditions are right, an insect plague can explode out of nowhere and leave you not only with nothing, but with no real hope of replanting because there is now such a ravenous bug population just waiting for you to try again.

The best answer is to use pesticides as little as possible and watch conditions daily. Then when you see a small outbreak, you've got to sterilize it as quickly as possible.

[Pettytyrant101]

I was looking at the problem from a more trouble shooting angle.
They dont seem to know if it is the pesticides causing the problem.
In a computer system if you dont know if something is the problem or not you unplug it and see what difference that makes. If it sovles the trouble then youve isolated the problem.
If not then its probably something else.

Only way to do that in the real world would be to stop using the suspected chemicals and monitor the results.

But I appreciate there are all sorts of factors make that a risky thing to do.

[halfwise]

By the way, I've been gone a while. Has anything exciting happened while I was out?

Got a collage of collected pictures of forumshire folks over in the photoshop thread.

As for the bees, wouldn't a little Buckie help? It is a tonic ale, after all.

[Mrs Figg]

I never spray my garden with anything. I try to encourage ladybirds and earwigs because they eat the parasites and rose munchers. surely there must be a way of using good bugs to kill the bad on a large scale? maybe its time to accept that not all plants are going to survive during a harvest and be prepared to eat funny shaped fruit not these perfect looking things you see in supermarkets today. tomatos are perfect in shape and colour but are tasteless, the organic stuff is wobbly and knobbly but you get a tomato taste explosion. I also grow loads of flowers in all seasons to attract bees, and my garden is absolutely buzzing, I get rid of aphids by brushing them off with a small paintbrush, it takes hours but its worth it.

[David H]

I'm with you 100 percent, Mrs Figg. We do use beneficial insects, as well as beneficial nematodes (little vampire bugs that that eat the evil insects from the inside out ) and best of all are the cliff swallows who we encourage to nest on our buildings. They eat millions of moths that lay the eggs that hatch into the ravenous larvae that eat our precious plants. On a perfect year we can use almost no artificial pesticides.

But when you're farming large acreage you have to be ever vigilant against weak spots where the pests can infect the plants easily. In a garden it's relatively easy to deal with these infestations, like a child with a cold.

But when you have tens or hundreds of acres to take care of, the infection can spread through all your fields like small pox through a classroom full of elementary school children in the days before vaccination.

When you see the first symptoms on the first child you need to act fast or you could have an epidemic. That's the side of farming that many people don't appreciate any more.

[Mrs Figg]

do you use lunar calendars Dave? all the old folk go by the phases of the moon here when they plant things.

I found an explaination in English on a gardening website, its really interesting.
Guide to planting by the moon

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Moon planting calendar for fruit, vegetables and flowers


In ancient times when man had not quite got round to inventing the wristwatch, the most reliable source of telling the time was the sun, moon, and stars. There seems to be several opinions of who came up with the moon planting calendar first. Was it the Egyptians or the Babylonians? It is more than likely that each and every farmer had a planting calendar based on the moon phases, and there would be different variations depending on the geographical location. As their calendars where passed on through the generations they evolved to cover the different crops they tried to grow, and the more productive farming techniques used.

It was noticed that different plants grow better when they are planted during different phases of the moon. Each of these phases imparts an influence on the way vegetation grows on the planet through the rising and falling of the moisture in the ground and in the plants.

To provide more accurate records it was noted that certain crops faired better when planted whilst the moon was in a specific constellation. As the moon can take only 2-3 days to pass through a constellation, the planting calendar was a 'cutting edge' technology.

Planting was not the most important time for the farmer, harvest time also had to be recorded. If you harvest at the correct time your crops will last much longer. It is down to how the plant stores the water in the fruit/crop at different times of the Luna cycle.

Moon planting rediscovered ( well its not really rediscovered as Italians have always used this method)


We in our modern and advanced civilization are rediscovering the benefits of planting by the Luna cycle and various sources are being used to generate Moon Planting systems for us to use. Some of these systems would appear to contradict each other in places, but it is important to remember they are guides for you to use and modify, they are not an exact science.

Three Moon planting methods

There are three methods for planting by the moon. The Synodic, or waxing and waning cycle, the Sidereal, and the Biodynamic cycle.

Synodic (waxing and waning) cycle

This is a simple form of Moon planting which divides the Luna cycle into four phases or quarters. This cycle takes 29.6 days to complete. It then groups plants into categories, Root Crops, Foliage, Crops with seeds on the outside, and crops with seeds on the inside. Then it assigns plants to the phases of the moon which best suits there growing characteristics.

Biodynamic cycle

Secondly, there is the more detailed method using the 12 Zodiac signs as a method of position the moon, for more accurate planting. This method was developed by Rudolf Steiner in 1924, and the Zodiac signs used where the actual positioning of the signs in the sky, when the moon passed through them. In addition to the position of the moon, Venus ans Saturn also played a large part in the Biodynamic farming calendar. Form more information see the Wikipedia Article on Biodynamics.

Sidereal cycle

Lastly the Sidereal cycle is very similar to the Biodynamic cycle except only the moons orbit around the earth is used to define the best times to sow and harvest. The orbit is divided up into 12 equal 30 degree sections to represent the position of the moon in the sky, but it may not be the same as the current moon position. The sidereal cycle takes 27.3 days to complete.