Check out Ward-Perkins’ Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2006)
(ISBN-13:978-0-19-280728-1)

Just from watching the book reviews trickle by, I have gleaned that the new consensus is that the die-off wasn’t the same everywhere, and wasn’t as bad overall as previously believed (i.e., 5c-6c pop. losses ~ those of the mid-14c-15c). There was, nevertheless, sufficient dislocation that certain agricultural technologies known to the “barbarians” weren’t “rediscovered” until the late 11c, at the earliest.
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All Pirenne managed to show is that he sucked at numismatics. But his Clash of Civilizations storyline has a certain appeal to it, and anyways facts are such silly things.
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How in the wide world of fuck does an idiot like Frum get to waste our time on NPR or anything else? Whose dick you you have to suck to get a platform in this second rate country of ours these days?

Or is there a connection here?
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Bear in mind that I have little experience with corn, but…

These little plots you’re talking about are probably not test plots, but simply marginal land put into corn — presumably dryland corn — because the price is so freakin high right now. As someone else said in the thread, the signs are advertisements. But I could be wrong, maybe the need for seed is high enough to warrant test plotting on that kind of land (by which I mostly mean, in that geographical location), or maybe they are experimenting with a more cool weather-tolerant variety.

I have some friends who grow corn, but aside sweet corn in the garden, neither I nor my family have ever messed with the stuff.

Also, thank you Anne Laurie. In my car that night, all I could think of was the zebra mussel infestation in Lake Michigan. The water is the cleanest it’s been in a while, but those little suckers bring a whole host of other problems including habitat and species destruction and, (if you’re more concerned about the infrastructure,) blocked intake pipes, clogged machinery, etc. It’s an invasive alien species, not a boon and certainly not the result of human ingenuity. More like a careless accident.

Does he even realize that the US is the falling Roman Empire in this scenario?

It’s almost like these guys only show an interest in science and history when their corporate taskmasters have a vested interest.

Making those years literal Dark Ages. Combined w/ the decline of the Western Roman Empire as documented above, & the early Islamo-fascists, well, so much for Frum’s horseshit.

…the quality and amount of durable artifacts rapidly declines after the fifth century in the West. In the past, scholars attributed their absence to a sudden massive decline in population. Now, they think the people were still there, but living in a wretched state.

Chris – do you have a source for that?

It’s not that I’m disputing it – I don’t know enough about the collapse of the Western Empire to dispute anything – it’s just that I always assumed that there was a massive population drop in Western Europe from the mid-5th century. If they now think otherwise, I’m curious to see what they believe happened.

The trade of Marseilles did not suddenly cease but, from the middle of the seventh century, waned gradually as the Moslems advanced in the Mediterranean. Syria, conquered by them in 633-638, no longer kept it thriving through her ships and her merchandise. Shortly afterwards, Egypt passed in her turn under the yoke of Islam (638-640) and papyrus no longer came to Gaul. A characteristic consequence is that, after 677, the royal chancellery stopped using papyrus…

Finally, I understand the rationale behind the Global War on Muslamomania – preserving America’s all-important access to papyrus.

It really sucked for the Romans when Vandals took over Africa and blackmailed them over their food supply.

The North African provinces pumped cheap grain into Rome for generations. But it’s like Gaiseric said after his barbarians overran Carthage: ‘The pump don’t work ’cause the Vandals took the handle.’
WAAAahahaHAhahaaa. Pfft. Snort. Sorry… a little 5th century humor.

I am with you on that, but I could not remember whom HTML Mencken paired the Frump up with as his doppelganger. And the crazy brow furrow thing is spot on.

Those markers just indicate the kind of seed planted. Sometimes they’re test plots, sometimes it’s just advertising.

At least, that’s how it is around here.

“For decades, scientists assumed that nothing could live in the Berkeley Pit, a hole 1,780 feet deep and a mile and a half wide that was one of the world’s largest copper mines until 1982, when the Atlantic Richfield Company suspended work there. The pit filled with water that turned as acidic as vinegar, laced with high concentrations of arsenic, aluminum, cadmium and zinc.

Today it is one of the harshest environments in the country. When residents speak of the pit, they often recall the day in 1995 when hundreds of geese landed on the water and promptly died.”

The article (Science Section of NYT, October 2007) goes on discussing amazing microbes that survive in the lake — so it is not true that nothing can.

About Rome not getting grain from outside Italy after the fall of Western Roman Emprire: one would have to check why Rome was getting grain before that. Aparently, between 2nd century BC and 2 century AD Rome was a thriving manufacturing center trading goods for food with distant land. However, the growth of city population was larger than the growth of export, and the population was sustained by food purchases with money collected from the empire as taxes. Another trend was that as Roman civilization spread to provinces, local production was no worse than Italian, decreasing the demand.

Thus when Rome was no longer benefiting from the revenue collected from numerous provinces, Romans of the city no longer had money to pay for food imports from far-flunged places, or even from nearby. By that time, the city was no quite “post-industrial” and had not much to sell.

The story about patchment and papyrus makes no sense. Parchment was invented in Pergamon, now in Turkey. I cannot imagine that at any time it was less expensive than papyrus. I would think that it was always more durable, especially in moist climate, so it would be preferable if you had few books that you wanted to keep “forever”. With the decline of literacy, there was small demand for “disposable” writing materials, and for temporary notes, slate was cheaper than papyrus.