Virtually every lake and river in the United States is cleaner than it was a generation ago. Ditto the air in any major city.

This, of course, has everything to do with the wonderful processes of the global market, and nothing to do with the Clean Air Act, or the Clean Water Act.

Glaven!

Ah, li’l Davey Frump.

He’s basically Krauthammer, with no “disarming” human interest angle.

So, thees means, Frum ees 180° opposite of what joo rrreally should do.

Again.

(Por supuesto, eet ees no my furry leetle culo on the line.)

(bathe, bathe)

Half-bright scam artists like Frum badly need the whole “globalization” idea as a confidence prop. If there isn’t a handy territory to light out for, Frum fears (with good reason) that he’ll end up like the Dauphin of Arkansas in Huckleberry Finn, tarred & feathered by the Redstate rubes once they figure out just how egregiously he’s cheated them.

Yet some worry it cannot continue — that we’ll pollute ourselves to death or run out of resources. These worries ignore both evidence and history. Human ingenuity creates resources as fast as we consume them.

Yeah, I’ve been creating gold, diamonds & platinum in my basement for yrs.
And I’ve got a new food “resource” my ingenuity is creating. I’m going to call it Soylent Green.

What is this, the fucking Laffer Curve in reverse? The more we use, the more we create?

Of course rich people will demand a cleaner environment, & be able to pay for it. Just because it’s a dome over their gated community, & we poor folks can breathe just as well as we can afford to, that shouldn’t worry anyone.

HTML, is the harvest in? Explaining your burst in S,N! activity?

And I buy as much imported food as I can, because Chinese Health & Safety standards are so much better than ours.

M. Bouffant, the question is not whether the harvest is in, the question is whether or not HTML has received and cashed his agricultural subsidy check(s).

Still waiting for the post from HTML about how that check (or checks) affects subsistence farmers in other nations, but in the meantime, I’m assuming his attitude is “pro-USian farm tariffs, hooray!”

Grampaw! Haven’t seen you in a while!

Simba, been busy. Rash of kids on the lawn, unspeakable difficulties in the bowels.

Love the way you kids jump right into the substance of the debate. Keep it up!

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for grampaw to admit that when he says “subsistence farmers” he means “formerly subsisting farmers who used to own and farm their land, but are now evicted and exist as hired hands for corporate farms in the third world.” Then he can tell us what kind of Gary Ruppertesque deal he’s got with Bunge or Cargill for his ‘net repetitions of the kind of spin they’re masters of. *Then* he can go to Brazil (say), spew his Free Trade bullshit about how all the toilers should be happy about their condition because their grandchildren might one day own a pair of Nikes, and see how long it takes him to be flattened by a grain cart.

Hey, M Bouffant: I just got finished helping plant wheat. I’m done and will probably try to get a factory job (only possible as a temp with no benefits, “generous” considering grampaw’s beloved corps’ usual tendency of shutting down and heading for China) at the first of the year so that I can afford to take a few classes in the summer (or try to go to the DNC in Denver). And interestingly enough, despite the *huge* government subsidies I get, my income is about at poverty level, and my vehicle was so shitty that I couldn’t make the long commute to school this past academic year, even if I could have afforded classes (which I could not). So, yeah, that’s why I’m back here posting more often and at weird hours.

..And just to state the obvious, why grampaw’s trolling yet again is because he believes in the absolute righteousness of everything David Frum’s saying. But then grampaw will also tell you that he’s not a wingnut. He’s funny that way.

Virtually every lake and river in the United States is cleaner than it was a generation ago. Ditto the air in any major city.

What planet is this guy living on? Oh–that would be the American Enterprise Institute. That might explain why he hasn’t heard that not only are rivers and lakes more polluted now than in the 70’s, but due to dredging and development, non-native species of plants and animals have often decimated the populations of native species. And we may run short of potable water as soon as 2020 if people in AZ, NV and CA don’t get over the idea that it’s their god-given right to have a green lawn year ’round.

As for the air, we merely seem to have replaced the particulate-laden smoke from burning coal, with lighter hydrocarbons, plus a heaping helping of nitrates, sulfer dioxide and vinyl chloride. People who have worked with the latter chemical for years, often lose the tips of their fingers and toes. This does not bode well for manicurists and the beauty sectors of our global economy.

Human ingenuity creates resources as fast as we consume them.

Who needs ANWR? With a few dietary modifications, a family of four could be sh*tting enough oil to power a couple of Hummers, 2 Jet-Skis, and a bass boat!

The fact is, you liberals did not respond to the susbtsance of his arguement, and like all good liberal flying monkeys merely call names, instead of understanding the correctness that things are bettre than in the 1970s for the environment and they will be better yet if the market is allowed to create new resources and allocate them to the deserving who have worked hard for it. Most greenshirts just want a handout of clean rivers and lakes but do not want to pay for it.

greenshirts

I like this.

Gary, nonsense. I’m convinced. From now on I’m only buying things that come pre-packaged in plastic containers that no one will recycle anymore. And no more fighting local land developers. I’m Frumulated now. Waste is great.

Ack, my shirt just turned green!

Oooops, forgot.

SKINK08!!

Where’s the line-up for the handout of clean rivers and lakes?

Great picture of Frum there. I can almost hear the droning “duhhhhhhh” sound.

Durn fool dunderheads like this Frum fella shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a radio microphone. Danged idjit! Why, I remember public radio back in the day when no one had to listen to barking blowhards like this and and his kinda nonsense jibberjabber. Then some bureaucratic dickwad decided public radio wasl too “liberal.” Now it’s all Heritage Foundation-this and American Enterprise Institute-that, and that waddly l’il pantload son of that Lucienne Goldstein or what have you and now look at the mess we’re in.

Hey you kids! Quit jumpin’ in those leaf piles on my lawn!
(ribber-shibber cotton’-pickin’)

Frum is right, Frum is right, Frum is right.
I want all my consumer items made by slave labor in countries that are totalitarian. I want poisonous food grown by foreigners. I want lots of packaging. I want all land in my area developed into worker barracks. I want all but the elite to have Walmart quality jobs.Soylent Green, Soylent Green, Soylent Green….

Is Frum getting his info from “King of the Hill” episodes?

I’m just glad that Frum’s your problem now.

We sure don’t need him up here in Hoserville.

Here’s hoping that when his father-in-law retires (he’s founding editor of the Toronto Sun), he dosn’t pass the throne to l’il Davey.

David Frum: You’ve just heard from people who think the key to human survival is to cut ourselves off from the world economy and buy and sell only in local markets. This approach has been tried before — in Europe, after the fall of the Roman Empire. We call this period the Dark Ages.

Papyrus disappeared from Europe in the Dark Ages not because some eco-hippies perversely decided to support local manufacture at the expense of importation and thus eliminate superfluous transportation wastage, but because – let me quote Henri Pirenne, Ancient Cities:

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…

God, I loathe those hacks at AEI. Piss on your leg, look you in the eye, and tell you “it’s raining!”

Frum’s ignorance of Medieval History (‘Dark Ages’ is a term used by florid novelists and 1940’s scriptwriters) seems to be as comprehensive as his ignorance of economics.

Large scale Mediterranean trade with western Europe collapsed because of the fall of Rome and the subsequent changes in the balance of power between the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire (The Byzantines). The trade in luxury goods to western Europe continued through the succeeding centuries of alternation of control of the Mediterranean between Byzantium and the Muslims. Does Frum actually believe that a shortage of lapis lazuli among the farmers of Gaul led to the decline of civilization in the fifth century?

The fall of the Western Roman empire enabled the rise of various smaller units of government in western Europe. These were largely self-sufficient and agrarian – as they had always been. Their needs for goods obtained through Mediterranean trade were exactly the same as they had been for centuries – which is to say little to none.

To attribute the Medieval Age to the collapse of trade is the uninformed and self-serving equivalent of attributing a death by hanging to rope burns.

It was the sarascenofascists!

Shorter Frum:

Of course I can afford to buy delicious local produce because my multinational corporate overlords have made me rich, rich, RICH!!! HAH Hahahahahahahahahaaaa…. but you little people really shouldn’t throw your money away to small family farms or I might be out of a job someday. Look, I can dance too!

Hey, Mencken, are you in Boston? I may be able to get you something that beats the hell out of a temp job if you are.

Another irony is that there was a period of devastating famine and depopulation in Italy, but it was because they were cut off from North Africa, not Gaul.

Virtually all of the Italian countryside had been converted into vast senatorial estates that produced luxury goods using slave labor, while the landless poor had become dependent on free grain that was imported from overseas. That was obviously completely unsustainable and resulted in widespread starvation.

Now of course, to make sure that such a thing never happens again we should buy our food from as far away as possible, so that the wealthy can afford more luxury goods. I’m pretty sure our military won’t overextend itself.

Silly peasants just don’t understand history.

David Frum is no realist. If he was he’d know the first global economy accidentally set up by the British didn’t stop economic woes like inflation, or war.

David Frum better be careful — the conservative base is actually, sometimes somewhat consciously too — wanting(*) to returnto the Middle Ages. If he keeps this up, crunchy conservatives will be casting their political lot with dirty f#%$ing hippies in droves. Welcome to the new political alignment folks: religious nuts and moonbats united in a common love of local produce, Pink Floyd music and voting for liberal politicians!

*many conservatives today are the sort of Miniver Cheevy types who see a Society for Creative Anachronism event and take it too seriously (and the wrong way besides) and say “wow! the middle ages really were so much fun (although I bet the people then weren’t dirty hippies) — why don’t I support policies that’ll return us to that joyful era?”

Actually Mr. Frum. I think I try hardest to avoid making any money for the people who keep you employed.

Obviously, I’m not doing enough.

“Human ingenuity creates resources as fast as we consume them.

Believe it or not, the proven oil reserves of the United States today are virtually identical to what they were in 1973.”

Its no wonder he was a speechwriter for George W. Bush. Frum found a perfect conduit for the idiocy and myopia that he’s so adept at disseminating.

Firstly, human ingenuity doesn’t “create” resources at all, but rather exploits them. Our ingenuity is limited by the constraints of ecology, geology and physics. It is not some magical resource-making engine that Frum likes to believe. But, this really isn’t surprising from someone who buys into wholesale “American exceptionalism,” and thinks every September 11th should be a national day of mourning slash jingoism. Blinded sentimentalism and ignorant emotionalism is David Frum’s stock in trade. He is (along with Thomas Friedman) the type of writer who coins the popular idiocies that pervade our culture: “War is good for the economy,” and “America is not a democracy, its a republic,” to name just two.

On to oil. Frum’s so high on his bogus “dark ages” allusion, that he apparently doesn’t notice the obvious contradiction of his own consecutive statements. If humans are “creating” resources as fast as they’re consuming them, why have US oil reserves remained static for nearly 35 years? Answer: because domestic oil extraction peaked in the early 1970s and has been in slow, irreversible decline since that time, while domestic demand continued to rise, and is subsequently increasingly satiated by imported foreign oil. Extracting the latter half of the supply curve involves more time and energy hence money, and it only becomes more costly as time goes on. But in David Frum’s pop-economics, a barrel of oil is just a barrel of oil, and look, we’ve got a lot of it still! No worries.

As for “ignoring evidence and history” when worrying about resource depletion and pollution, Frum must be wholly unaware of the numerous human populations and societies that have succumbed to those very problems. An example: Easter Islanders. The couldn’t invent their way out of completely deforesting the Island and its ability to sustain them. They destroyed it through unchecked exploitation, ultimately to their own detriment.

But hey, what can you expect from a Canadian who wishes he were American?

Hey, Mencken, are you in Boston? I may be able to get you something that beats the hell out of a temp job if you are.

I’m in Boston. What sort of thing have you got?

You got an email address I could write you at?

Believe it or not, the proven oil reserves of the United States today are virtually identical to what they were in 1973.

Sadly, NO!

According to the Energy Information Administration, the official US Government source on engergy statistics, proven reserves in 1973 were 35,300 million barrels, while reserves in 2005, the most recent available year, were 21,757 million.

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/rcrr01nus_1a.htm

David, your paycheck is being cut 38%. It’s virtually identical.

Ed – you could always use yon cool link atop the page, which reads “Contact us”, and then choose “Gavin” from the menu.
Truth be told, I just noticed it myself.

I looked all over the page and missed the big honking thing that said “contact”.

HTML – you just reminded me of all the corn test fields out in Western MA, where the rows have Cargill signs at the ends IDing different varieties by number.
I’m not sure (I kinda doubt) that Cargill actually owns the land, but at the very least it’s leased from the developers that bought the farms and built what houses they could without a major zoning fight.

I mean, they’re all over the place; 5 acres here, 10 there, occasionally a big area at 20+. Hadley, Hatfield, Sunderland, Whately

Believe it or not, the proven oil reserves of the United States today are virtually identical to what they were in 1973.

Huh. Frum must not be very good at math. Last I checked 35.3 billion was a much larger number than 21.8 billion. Warning, that’s a PDF file. But you can get that info from a dozen sources.

There is quite a bit of complex data regarding the oil situation, but suffice it to say that Frum is FUCKING STUPID. He may be wanting to include oil shale as “proven” reserves even though nobody else counts them that way. If he were going to do that he would have reported that, as “reserves” the US has more shale oil than anyone else in the world. It’s just really messy expensive and energy-inefficient which is why our economy isn’t based on it.

I’ve had a wonderful 30 minutes or so reading into the issue so that I could in fact demonstrating that I can spend part of my lunch hour becoming smarter than a think-tank hack, and demonstrating conclusively that those guys are apparently amateur jackoffs with zero intellectual credibility.

Mr. Frum, here is your gift cup. You can pick it up by clicking BUY on the linked page.

When will NPR (“Marketplace,” etc.) learn that hacks like Frum from AEI are experts only in propaganda? Kai Ryssdal likes to evoke a kind of jovial lightness during his program. He should’ve concluded this segment with, “Enough with the jokes, let’s do the numbers.”

Zactly, BDH. Do you know how the AEI folks reacted when they realized that fact checking is dead? They roasted a small boy and had an orgy. I’ll bet the conservatives never told you that.

Amazing column. Frum has it exactly wrong.

The fall of Rome hit the West hard precisely because the locals had long since deferred to globalization and had become a cog in the imperial system. People relied on trade to get most of their goods, and when the political instability ended the safe exchange of raw and manufactured materials, there were no local industries to pick up the slack. That’s the reason why 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.

I always get a kick out of these propaganda pieces, but I can never tell if the author is cunning or just ignorant.

Ryssdal’s program (Marketplace) has from its inception been primarly underwritten by GE. The theme song for Marketplace includes melody from the ‘GE – we bring good things to life’ jingle.

I like Marketplace, but they are really not to be trusted on some subjects. BJ Leiderman lived up to his name on that one.

The fall of Rome hit the West hard precisely because the locals had long since deferred to globalization and had become a cog in the imperial system.

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

I love about the comments section here at SN!
Every time I am moved enough to comment someone else has already voiced my exact sentiment.
Word, Patrick.

People relied on trade to get most of their goods, and when the political instability ended the safe exchange of raw and manufactured materials, there were no local industries to pick up the slack.

Regional agriculture, anyone?
No, seriously. I’m no huge fan of turnips, taters and kale, but at least around here(central MA) you can still pick them well into the snow season.
Assuming that there is any decent farmland left to grow them upon …

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/opinion/20brooks.html?ref=opinion

Check out this bit of musical knowledge from that other David. Ignorance seems to be a natural resource that never runs dry.

Ed Marshall said,

They should put an animated Canadian goose (preferably migratory) over the linkie. Maybe Gavin M(acCleod) could get ‘er done?

Brooks’ ignorance is as willful as Frum’s. Not a word in that article about the empire of commercial radio stations that destroyed airwave rock’n’roll, and nary a hint of the Internet music scene that has brought more musicians to the attention of listeners and fellow musicians. If he did any research past cribbing from The New Yorker and TIME he would know about this. Hell, if he were a sentient being strolling through life with his head anywhere except up his ass, he’d know about this.

And how will any of us know, until another 20-20 yrs have passed, if any current bands will have the long run of the Rolling Stones, Springsteen, U2? Does the NYT editor ever read the crap Brooks makes up?

Papyrus disappeared from Europe in the Dark Ages not because some eco-hippies perversely decided to support local manufacture at the expense of importation and thus eliminate superfluous transportation wastage,

DID TOO! DID TOO! DID TOO!
(Ha! I win!)

Geez! What are you going to claim next, that most of the existing papyrus (and the information written on it) was burned by a bunch fundamentalist Christians?

Crazy hippies.

Yet some worry it cannot continue — that we’ll pollute ourselves to death or run out of resources. These worries ignore both evidence and history. Human ingenuity creates resources as fast as we consume them.

A complete and utter lie that is demonstrably false. Watch “The Most Important Video You’ll Ever See” to learn just how well and truly fucked we are.

Believe it or not, the proven oil reserves of the United States today are virtually identical to what they were in 1973.

I think that here he is referring to a statement to the effect that “We have as much oil in the US as we’ve ever had”. Which may in fact be true but it won’t do anyone much good. If Pedestrian is right that we have 21,757 million (whatever that means) barrels left at present rates of consumption I doubt it would last long. World consumption rates are 83 mb per day. At that rate our reserves would last only about 8 or 9 months.

Assume you have some bacteria in a bottle and that the population doubles every minute. At noon the bottle is completely full. What time is it when the bacteria have “as much food available to them as they have ever had”?

One minute to twelve.

thanks to the wealth produced by ever-expanding technology and world trade, I can afford it. After two or three more decades of growth through trade, so (I hope) will millions more, in this country and throughout the world.

Fucking self centered asshole. However, there will not be too many more decades of unrestrained growth. That which cannot continue will stop. No amount of wealth will buy you food that isn’t there or fill your tank with gas when it’s gone. Frankly, sometimes I think they know all this perfectly well but they just think their money will be able to help them ride out the mother of all fold catastrophes headed our way.

Goddammit, David Brooks! My headache was just beginning to go away and then I read that. He managed to combine all of my least favorite lines about rock music into one shit sandwich topped off with a slice of “swipe at Obama” 5-grain and a slice of ‘faux-populist’ wonder bread.

I’m calling him on this one. He’s gone beyond the pale this time. Only concern I have is that if my letter to the Times had all of his mistakes, it would be too long to print.

I’m not sure (I kinda doubt) that Cargill actually owns the land

They almost certainly don’t. In America, their modus operandi is different. Here they buy crops, sell seed, and, of course, offer credit services.

Is there any way you can caption the provided picture with this:

Ted! Annette! I’m glad you could come, how you doin’, give me your coats. Everybody, this is Ted and Annette Fleming! Ted has a small carpet cleaning business in receivership; Annette’s drawing a salary from a deferred bonus from two years ago! They got fifteen thousand left on the house at eight percent. So they’re okay! So, does anybody wanna play Parcheesi?

Okay, who brought the dog?

That might explain why he hasn’t heard that not only are rivers and lakes more polluted now than in the 70’s, but due to dredging and development, non-native species of plants and animals have often decimated the populations of native species.

Frum is the human equivalent of the zebra mussel or the water hyacinth — an invasive xenospecimen that starves out less aggressive lifeforms, leading eventually to the total collapse of the ecosystem. Although this comparison is probably unfair to the mussels and weeds, who don’t consciously *choose* to be life-sucking destroyers of all that is good and pure.

Assume you have some bacteria in a bottle and that the population doubles every minute. At noon the bottle is completely full. What time is it when the bacteria have “as much food available to them as they have ever had”? One minute to twelve.

Thank you, Noen — wise words. Of course Frum and his paymasters are convinced that *they* will always have another bottle to emigrate to when conditions get too ‘populist’ around here. They’re wrong, but then “wrong” is their default setting.

cur: I see the resemblance! But Rick Moranis is way cuter than frumpy Frum.

A little example of a lake cleaner than a generation ago:

“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.

I just had a terrible thought that if Frum is saying “the lakes and rivers are cleaner now than they were a generation ago” it’s because the EPA has changed the definition of “clean” or something. I hope that’s not it; maybe it’s because of all the manufacturing that we’re no longer doing in the US.

“I’m not sure (I kinda doubt) that Cargill actually owns the land”

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.

Acidic as vinegar, that’s nothing. The lake/mine at Iron Mountain CA has some parts with a pH of -3.5, about 100,000 times as acidic as vinegar.

Geez, did Frum pay ANY attention to the piece before his, the piece to which he was purportedly responding? Maybe he could try to address the ACTUAL point of the previous article, and come up with a valid argument that it’s better if communities are unable to meet their own needs?

MzNicky,

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.

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.

cur:
And Mark Steyn looks like Walter Peck. OmG — what if all the characters in “Ghostbusters” look like some wingnut ululator or other? Whoa.

D’oh! Screwed up the Walter Pecklink. Must scroll.

Chris wrote:

…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.

[…] here for full […]

As far as the “Dark Ages” go, if one can trust those cable channels (Discovery, Nat Geo, History, one of ’em for sure, maybe PBS) there was a huge volcanic explosion (possibly Krakatoa, or in that area) around the beginning of the fifth or sixth century (can’t remember a damn thing any more) resulting in a sort of nuclear winter, at least one year there was essentially no spring or summer, & this wreaked havoc on crops, & of course the human poulation (& all the other ones as well).

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.

Local food tastes better. Frum is now a taste dictator!!. Typical conservative, so totalitarian always telling people what to do in “his” market. A Canadian reject with short man syndrome, but his wife thinks he has a big tree. She’s doesn’t know better.

It’s funny how Gary Ruppert and his chums don’t jump in on the subject of Henri Pirenne. After all, at this point he’s as “wrong” as Marx, Darwin, or Freud–i.e. other academics took his ideas and ran with them, found holes, developed nuance. There should be plenty of points open for contrarian nitpicking.

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

Thank you, Sadly, No! I was listening the night that they broadcast this piece of assholery and was hoping that one of the blogs I love would take it on. Very glad to see it!

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?

you just reminded me of all the corn test fields out in Western MA, where the rows have Cargill signs at the ends IDing different varieties by number.

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.

Another ignorant fucking conservative. The kind of “locovore” micro-economies fostered, for instance, by Alfred the Great were far more resilient in the face of invasion, climate change, and economic dislocation than were the far-flung distribution networks favored, for instance, by that idiot thug “Charlemagne.”

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?
.

It’s funny how Gary Ruppert and his chums don’t jump in on the subject of Henri Pirenne.

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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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.

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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Snorghagen,

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