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The Birds & The Bees: Suicide By Pesticide
Submitted by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com,
As you are aware, honey bees have been suffering from something called Colony Collapse Disorder. In practice, what this means is that the bees simply vanish from their hives, leaving behind their most precious worldly possessions: honey and larvae.
What causes these mysterious vanishing acts has been something of a mystery. But because the phenomenon began really ramping up in 2006, we can focus in on some suspects.
While it’s always possible that the bees are suffering ‘death from a thousand cuts’ -- where it’s no one specific thing but rather a wide range of minor insults, ranging from loss of forage to herbicides to fungicides to pesticides -- there’s actually quite strong evidence pointing to a specific class of pesticides called neonicotinoids.
This class of pesticides is massively and indiscriminately toxic. More specific to our investigation here, it was only introduced into widespread use shortly before the massive bee die-offs began.
Biocide = Suicide
Actually, it’s not really proper to call neonicotinoids ‘pesticides’ because they don't solely target pests. They should more accurately be called ‘biocides’ because they kill all insects equally and indiscriminately.
How toxic are they?
The neonics are so toxic that it's sufficient to simply lightly coat a seed with it before planting. When the seed grows to maturity, the plant will still have enough absorbed toxin circulating within its system to kill any insect that munches on it or sucks on its sap.
Think about that for a minute. Coat a kernel of corn with a neonic, sow it, and the mature plant will still be lethal to a corn borer when the corn ears develop several months later.
But not just to insects:
"A single corn kernel coated with a neonicotinoid can kill a song bird." As a long time environmental lawyer and campaigner, I should not have been stunned by that fact but I was. Shaking my head in dismay, I read on, "Even a tiny grain of wheat or canola treated with the ...neonicotinoid... can fatally poison a bird."
(Source)
Ugh. Boy, that depresses me -- thinking of the mentality in play that allows one to conceive of and then use such powerful poisons simply because one wants to engage in lazy farming. Hard farming requires knowing how to rotate crops, use beneficial natural relationships, and work intimately with the land on which you farm so as to minimize pest losses while maximizing the abundance of both your crops and the local ecosystem.
Sadly, the indiscriminate neonic killers are being used very widely. The mentality at play might as well be kill them all and let god sort them out. And therefore we are literally taking out whole swaths of life; both observed as in the case of the honey bee, and unobserved in the case of the many, many organisms not commercially or recreationally important enough to us to notice and track.
Killing off organisms in an ecosystem using indiscriminate biocides is quite literally a slow form of suicide for us humans. As within, so without. You cannot poison and kill of the world around you without poisoning and killing yourself.
Simply put: We are killing ourselves. And the data is literally horrifying.
The Birds and the Bees
If the thesis that neonics are harmful to both pests and other life forms alike is correct, then we should be able to detect those effects both with direct studies and indirect measurements.
Here’s where the horrifying part comes in. All of the data agrees: neonics are stone cold killers.
Insecticides Linked To Farmland Bird Population Declines
July 10, 2014
A new study in the journal Nature has found that use of neonicotinoids is linked to a decline in the populations of farmland birds across Europe.
For the study, scientists from Radboud University in the Netherlands and the Dutch Centre for Field Ornithology and Birdlife Netherlands (SOVON) analyzed long-term data for both farmland bird populations and chemical amounts in surface water. They discovered that in locations where water held high amounts of imidacloprid, a standard neonicotinoid, bird populations were known to decrease by an average of 3.5 percent on a yearly basis.
“In ten years it’s a 35 percent reduction in the local population, it’s really huge,” study author Hans de Kroon from Radboud University told Matt McGrath of BBC News. “It means the alarm bells are on straight away.”
The study team said the insecticide is probably coating seeds that the birds like to eat – as well as leaching into both water and soil around the sprayed areas. They added that neonicotinoids can persist in the environment for up to three years.
(Source)
Here we have a study that shows huge and dramatic negative impacts on bird life. A massive culling of more than a third of the bird populations in ten years is a really disturbing figure. In places where the water held high concentrations of neonics, bird populations were hit hardest.
The other interesting finding in the above the study was that the neonics were found in the water supply. They are not supposed to end up there, but they do, as we now know:
Bee-Killing Pesticides Found in Midwest Rivers
Aug 4, 2014
PESTICIDES LINKED TO declining bee and bird populations have been found in streams across the upper Midwest, raising yet more concerns about these chemicals’ environmental effects.
Researchers from the United States Geological Survey tested waters at nine sites in Iowa and Nebraska. They found neonicotinoids in each, frequently at levels that may harm insects and the life that depends on them.
“This wasn’t a toxicity study, but there’s research out there indicating that these concentrations could be of concern,” said USGS chemist Michelle Hladik, lead author of the paper describing the survey in the journal Environmental Pollution.
(Source)
Given just how toxic the neonics are, I have to wonder what the effect of them are on all the insect life that has water in its life stage: the mayflies, stoneflies and caddis flies. If these insects are killed, then you will find big declines in the bird populations that depend on those same insects for their food supply.
And/or if the insects are carrying sub-lethal levels of the neonic biocides in them, then the birds may be bio-concentrating the toxin to detrimental if not lethal levels in their own bodies.
I have to ask: What sort of a so-called ‘civilized’ nation, in this day and age, allows toxic levels of pesticides (or biocides as the case may be) to build up at hazardous levels in surface water in the first place?
What’s so important about selling a few bucks more to enable giant chemical firms and certain farmers to practice lazy farming that we’re willing to sacrifice the complete loss of critical elements of key ecosystems?
We may not tend to appreciate insects, but they are utterly and fabulously essential to everything we hold dear. You cannot just kill them all without upsetting the myriad finely-tuned systems of which both they and we are components.
While we have a lot of data on honey bees because they are commercially kept and tracked, the wild bees are not really tracked all that carefully. But we know enough to conclude that they, too, are suffering:
Neonicotinoid pesticides dramatically harm wild bees, study finds
APR 22, 2015
A common type of pesticide is dramatically harming wild bees, according to a new in-the-field study that outside experts say may help shift the way the U.S. government looks at a controversial class of chemicals.
But in the study published by the journal Nature on Wednesday, honeybees — which get trucked from place to place to pollinate major crops like almonds— didn't show the significant ill effects that wild cousins like bumblebees did. This is a finding some experts found surprising. A second study published in the same journal showed that in lab tests bees are not repelled by the pesticides and in fact may even prefer pesticide coated crops, making the problem worse.
Scientists in Sweden were able to conduct a study that was in the wild, but still had the in-the-lab qualities of having control groups that researchers covet. They used 16 patches of landscape, eight where canola seeds were coated with the pesticide and eight where they weren't, and compared the two areas.
When the first results came in, "I was quite, 'Oh my God,'" said study lead author Maj Rundlof of Lund University. She said the reduction in bee health was "much more dramatic than I ever expected."
In areas treated with the pesticide, there were half as many wild bees per square meter than there were in areas not treated, Rundlof said. In the pesticide patches, bumblebee colonies had "almost no weight gain" compared to the normal colonies that gained about a pound, she said.
(Source)
The bumblebees are essential to the overall state of the ecosystems of the world because they pollinate things that honeybees don’t. There is some overlap, but the bumblebees are able to reach deeper into certain flowers and have different platn preferences than honeybees, so they are not replaceable. They are unique contributors. If they go away, so will the many plants that depend on them for their life cycle.
And it gets worse:
Beyond Honeybees: Now Wild Bees and Butterflies May Be in Trouble
MAY 6, 2014
Among other pollinators, iconic monarch butterfly declines are well documented: Their numbers are now at a small fraction of historical levels. And entomologist Art Shapiro of the University of California, Davis spent most of the last four decades counting butterflies across central California, and found declines in every region.
These declines don’t just involve butterflies that require very specific habitats or food sources, and might be expected to be fragile, but so-called generalist species thought to be highly adaptable. Many other entomologists have told Black the same thing.
“Species that used to be in all our yards are dropping out, but nobody’s monitoring them,” Black said.
(Source)
It’s the butterflies, too. Certainly in my own personal experience, I’ve noticed a lot fewer butterflies in my backyard over the past several years. We plant flowers specifically for bees and butterflies, so I'm something of a casual tracker of their types and numbers.
Even more recently, we have solid data showing a dose-response where the heaviest neonic use correlates with the heaviest honeybee die-offs:
Bee Die-Offs Are Worst Where Pesticide Use Is Heaviest
May 14, 2015
The nation’s honeybee crisis has deepened, with colony die-offs rising sharply over last year’s levels, the latest survey from the US Department of Agriculture-funded Bee Informed Partnership shows. A decade or so ago, a mysterious winter-season phenomenon known as colony-collapse disorder emerged, in which bee populations would abandon their hives en masse. These heavy winter-season losses have tapered off somewhat, but now researchers are finding substantial summer-season losses, too.
And here’s a map a map depicting where losses are heaviest:
(Source)
The article goes on to cite much of the direct as well as circumstantial evidence we have that these biocides are the culprits for much of the damage cited above. Take a look at both where the usage of the neonics is heaviest and when they began to be used in earnest (charts below) and then recall that the bee, butterfly, and bird declines all began around 2006 and have gotten measurably and drastically worse in the last few years.
Hmmmm….seems to me that in any court of law, and in the mind of any reasonable person, there’s enough evidence here to say that there’s a very big problem and the neonics are the likely culprits.
One bird that I’ve always loved in the Sparrow Hawk, or American Kestrel as it is now more properly called. The smallest of the hawks it is brightly colored and was a very prominent bird of my childhood. They used to be everywhere.
Now they are quite scarce in my area. And because nobody makes any money off of them, only a few ‘birders’ seem to notice or care.
But these mainly insect-eating birds are in serious decline:
American Kestrel Population Drops Dramatically, And Without Fanfare
Jul 29, 2014
On a national level, the American kestrel (Falco sparverius) population has been plummeting. Records from the North American Breeding Bird Survey, a massive annual data collection effort for more than 400 bird species overseen by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the Canadian Wildlife Service, show the kestrels have declined by an estimated one and a half percent each year between 1966 and 2010. The long-term loss is almost 50 percent of the population. That’s a big drop for a bird considered abundant in North America.
A handful of things could be causing the lower kestrel numbers, bird biologists say, including increased predation by Cooper’s hawks, continued exposure to pesticides, and competition at nesting sites by European starlings.
(Source)
Every biologist struggles to explain the massive losses in their chosen area of study due to ‘natural causes.’ But the easier and more obvious choice is ‘humans are doing something, and it’s killing off this thing I am studying.’
So when we put all of the above together, it's obvious that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring has taught the US EPA and businesses nothing at all.
You would think that in the wake of the DDT disaster that we’d be more careful. But that’s just not the case. The exact same mistakes are being made here again. And it is beyond a tragedy because this time it’s being done with our full awareness.
Obviously, the sorts of environmental impact and toxicity studies that were supposed to be done were either forgone, or done fraudulently.
The Response
After a lot of hue and cry, and years and years of solid studies and accumulating evidence, the EPA finally took a stand and issued new firm rules for the neonics.
However, don't just scan the headlines because you’ll end up with the wrong impression.
Read more carefully:
EPA Restricts Use of Pesticides Suspected of Killing Bees
Apr 2, 2015
The EPA has issued a moratorium on use of a type of pesticide theorized to be responsible for plummeting bee populations. Neonicotinoids are a class of common pesticides that recent research has pointed to as being harmful to birds, bees and other animals.
The EPA previously approved their use, but outcry over the damage being done has caused the agency to reverse course while more studies are done. On Thursday, the EPA sent letters to people and companies that have applied for outdoor use of the pesticide, saying that new use permits won’t be issued.
New uses of neonicotinoids will no long be approved “until the data on pollinator health have been received and appropriate risk assessments completed,” the EPA letter reads. Existing permits to use them, however, will not be rescinded — something wildlife and environmental advocacy groups are unhappy with.
(Source)
The headline implies that the EPA is now limiting the amount of neonic being used but that's not the case at all. As a result of their 'ruling' even more could be used in the near future, or maybe less, but the ruling itself does nothing to restrict how neonics are currently being used because it only applies to 'new' uses.
Are you kidding me? This represents the ‘middle ground’ the EPA sought?
Every single current use of neonics will continue. By the way, one “use” is using neonics to treat corn. Or wheat, or any other already approved “use.” Those use maps above will continue unabated while the EPA 'studies' the issue, a process that could take a decade or more.
The ruling means that farmers newly considering using these biocides will not be blocked in any way shape or form as long as they are going to use them in a way that's already approved.
So, the exceptional and mounting damage will continue.
This is pathetic, and it is an outrage. It represents everything that is wrong with America today.
There is both economic damage being done to beekeepers and everybody who depends on their services, and there is massive environmental and ecosystem damage being done. The EPA has ruled that a few hundred million dollars of sales for major chemical companies outweigh every other right in this story, including the basic right of all life to simply live.
[Note for subscribers, this is a new set of paragraphs inserted to keep up with recent developments]
More recently, the Obama administration has unveiled the results of a task force meant to study the plight of the pollinators and make recommendations on how to support them.
How the White House plans to help the humble bee maintain its buzz
May 9, 2015
On Tuesday, the Obama administration will announce the first National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators, a bureaucratic title for a plan to save the bee, other small winged animals and their breeding grounds.
The strategy, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, will seek to manage the way forests burned by wildfire are replanted, the way offices are landscaped and the way roadside habitats where bees feed are preserved.
“What are we doing on bees?” Obama asked Holdren as they prepared to wrap up an Oval Office meeting in the summer of 2013. “Are we doing enough?”
That discussion led to the launch of the White House Pollinator Health Task Force, whose recommendations are being unveiled Tuesday.
CropLife America chief executive Jay Vroom, whose group represents pesticide manufacturers and participated in the task force, said that while his members might disagree with the EPA at times, they’ve “continued to be science-based and balanced” at the agency.
Not at all surprisingly, given the fact that we have 8 years of increasing and highly obvious evidence of neonicotinoid inflicted damage, the Obama task force came out with recommendations to study pesticides for a few more years and then devote a couple of nickels and a lot of lip service to increasing ‘habitat.’
I know that the task force came up with diddly squat because the main pesticide promoting trade association representing the manufacturers of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals, the ill-named CropLife America, loved the resulting recommendations.
That’s all I need to know that this task force was a joke, came up with nothing useful, and ended up protecting narrow economic interests as opposed to protecting broad life supportive aims.
The very idea that it’s habitat that’s at fault here, rather than the chemicals is just another insult to everyone of reasonable intelligence.
The American Way
I find it increasingly difficult to believe in the things the country in which I live stands for.
In Germany, where the various interests are more carefully balanced, and where people and beekeepers actually have some say, things are very different.
From 2008:
Germany bans chemicals linked to honeybee devastation
Germany has banned a family of pesticides that are blamed for the deaths of millions of honeybees. The German Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety (BVL) has suspended the registration for eight pesticide seed treatment products used in rapeseed oil and sweetcorn.
The move follows reports from German beekeepers in the Baden-Württemberg region that two thirds of their bees died earlier this month following the application of a pesticide called clothianidin.
"It's a real bee emergency," said Manfred Hederer, president of the German Professional Beekeepers' Association. "50-60% of the bees have died on average and some beekeepers have lost all their hives."
Tests on dead bees showed that 99% of those examined had a build-up of clothianidin. The chemical, produced by Bayer CropScience, a subsidiary of the German chemical giant Bayer, is sold in Europe under the trade name Poncho.
(Source)
Several things are fascinating here. First, the neonic clothianidin is actually manufactured by a German company, and it’s the same company that sells the stuff in the US. You’d think that, if anything, the German government would work harder to protect the economic interests of its own companies more than the US EPA. But you’d be wrong.
Second, this was way back in 2008. German beekeepers had one very bad incident with the chemical, the appropriate tests were run, the risk was deemed unacceptable and the pesticide was yanked from the market.
That’s how these things are supposed to work.
Yet in the US, it is now seven years after that and the EPA has only gotten around to nixing new uses for the compounds that are now widely used and destroying insects and birds across a huge swath of the country.
Even if it would cost somebody a whole lot of money, and maybe even make farming a touch less lazy and require more effort, I would personally favor banning every and any pesticide and herbicide and fungicide until all of the appropriate long-term toxicological studies had been carried out. They are not that difficult to run, they just cost money and take time.
No ‘grandfathered’ uses. No exceptions. Prove the stuff is safe or else it cannot be sold or used.
But that’s because I would choose life over money. And that’s apparently where I part ways with my country, at least as far as the US government is concerned.
Unintended consequences
The prediction here is easy enough to make. The law of unintended consequences is going to rear up and bite us. Again.
One cannot simply wipe out entire swaths of insect and bird populations without causing eventual and massive difficulties.
One day we’ll wake up and wonder why some pest has gotten totally and uncontrollably out of hand. And if we chase it down, we’ll discover some beautifully complex natural cycle that involved a host species, a predator, a plant and animal and a few other creatures that used to dance to a song that had been written and perfected over a hundred million years of evolution.
Break the dance, and you break the web of life.
Mark my words, ‘insects’ is going to become a very hot topic over the next few years. And my sincere hope is that we do not destroy too much and that we figure this out before it’s too late.
For now, all I can say is: Shame on you, EPA. Deep, and lasting shame on all of you.
Conclusion
All of this leads me here: We desperately need a new narrative.
The old one not only allows but encourages the neonic story, and a hundred others just like it, to take root and flourish.
We cannot begin to fight each battle -- neonics and fracking waste water disposal and leaking Gulf of Mexico wells and money in politics – and hope for anything more than a slight delay of the arrival of our miserable end.
Instead we have to have a new narrative where it is emotionally impossible for an EPA staffer to approve neonics because they would be too horrified to do so. I could not use them, but that's because I have an internal narrative that values all life.
While I certainly think people should fight these battles, those skirmishes are for naught if another crew (that’s us) is not paving the way for that new narrative at the same time.
If we were to have a new Declaration of Independence, it might start with these words (from our group effort):
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal and that all life is sacred. That all people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights and Responsibilities. That among these Rights are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, and among these Responsibilities are to live in Harmony with Nature, to be Stewards for the Natural World, and to leave a World Worth Inheriting to our Posterity."
I am sickened by the damage being done by the neonics and I am dismayed by the pathetic and weak response by the so-called regulators at the EPA.
In a healthy culture these people would be packed off to new jobs, and they would be shunned by thoughtful people until they had atoned for their ridiculous actions.
But that is not yet the world in which we live.
A more subtle point to be made here is that each of us needs to prepare for the fact that the people in authority, even when confronted with compelling and obvious data, will choose to put profits over life and favor doing nothing over something.
In short, stories like this one cement my view that we face a future that will be shaped more by disaster than design, and that we each need to prepare for that as best we can.
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I have been keeping bees for a long time, like everything else today, the corporate model for beekeeping is wrong. Looking at the maps and data, answer this question, why are so many dying in Maine?
some neonicotinoid pesticides fuckery in Quebec and/or Eastern Ontario, no doubt.
http://www.snopes.com/food/tainted/gmobeedeaths.asp
They are fucking up my zombie apocalypse refuge, too.
here's a very useful link for nectar flows in real time.
http://www.hivetool.net/
I have often thought about setting up an HPLC system to detect neonicotinoid (bad) and nicotinoid (good) compounds. We already have a small analytical lab for soil analysis.
I can't stand these tree huggers moaning about how some bird or bug is gonna be wiped out if we use this or that chemical. It's ridiculous. Can't they see there are some very needy billionaires out there who want their Monsanto stock to go up some more? Get your priorities straight, people, who really needs this so-called *food* or *water* anyway?
Yeah and these scientists with their liberally biased science.
Chris-
Could Cell Phones Be Killing The Honey Bee?
Sorry - post wouldn't edit
Was trying to say that I live about one hour east of you, Chris M. and I haven't seen a single bat this year
Monsanto Insecticides Collapsing Bee Colonies Nationwide
Remember: Monsanto is Death
Obama - We need a bee tax to fix this.
If you like your bees, you can keep them.
Let's file this whole pesticide/bee connection under F for Fucking Obvious.
Also, centralization contributes greatly to the honeybees' demise. Too many acres with the same crop using the same pesticides... Lack of variety is a lack of nutrition. This weakens bees. Take a weakened bee hive, dose it with "chemo", add to it the enemies of bees, and you have mass murder.
I used to enjoy watching the bats at dusk when I was a child. Now they're all gone. My children will never see them. They ate their entire weight in insects every night, so I'm sure the concentrations of insecticide has something to do with it.
must have flown this way. My neighbor has over 300 living in one of his abandoned tobacco kilns. Had a bonfire one night, and started counting the buggers flying out from behind the tin.
The upside to this genocide is that the remaining insects will evovle towards intelligence.
Funnily enough i just got this email from SumOfUs. I put in $33 and challange all ZHers to match it.
Peter,
A newspaper just rejected our ad demanding that Bayer stop selling bee-killing pesticides. They're terrified of offending Bayer and losing the corporation's business.
We can't be censored, and we won't let Bayer intimidate critics into silence.
So, we're getting ready to go bigger. Instead of a regional paper, we're set to run our ad in one of Germany's highest circulation national newspapers, so everyone knows. With Bayer's big annual shareholder meeting happening in just two days, now is the time our message needs to cut through.
But it's not going to be cheap, and we need another 3,000 people to chip in now to get it to happen. Can we count on you to call out Bayer and beat this censorship? If you're one of the 6,000 people who have already generously donated, please consider matching your previous donation to help us reach our target.
Yes, I'll chip in $1 to get ads up in big-circulation national newspapers and save the bees from Bayer's pesticides.
Thanks for all you do,
Paul, Jon and the team at SumOfUs
And Al Gore is worried about global warming. LOL!! I haven't seen a feral honeybee in a long time. Used to catch them at recess during lunch break in elementary school. The whole playground was full of dandelions......and bees.
I think it's pretty funny how many of the same ZH readers who think the science behind climate change is a fraud, find this science perfectly valid.
There is nothing funny about all the stupidity.
But al gore has a plane...
His own jet plane..!
"I think it's pretty funny how many of the same ZH readers who think the science behind climate change is a fraud, find this science perfectly valid."
Uh, the "climate" is changing. It is not a static entity. If you don't like the weather, just wait a few hours - it'll change.
What is a fraud is to pretend that that forcing Americans to stop driving cars will stop the climate from changing. That is complete and total bullshit.
You should take your schtick and peddle it to the Chinese. I'm sure they'd give you an honest hearing. lol.
Uhh, this one time at science camp....
I met these climate scientists who PROVED THAT THE CLIMATE WAS ALWAYS CHANGING...!!!
And I really liked all the facts they provided.
And then they proved that it was changing more rapidly due to human activity...
And I said.: fuk ur faks...!
If you believed a 'proof' that scientists can accurately measure the impact of human emissions on climate - something that changes on a century-based timeline, not a few months - when we've only had internal combustion engines in quantity for 60 years, then there is a specific, scientific term that describes you:
credulous.
This documentary blames cell towers/our sudden wireless gadgetification of the world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYP4TJXm4cg
could also be air flow patterns, prevailing winds.
SNOPES? REALLY?
WHAT KIND OF IGNORANT FUCKTARD BELIEVE ANYTHING FROM A GEORGE SOROS FUNDED HOMOSEXUAL KWEER SMEAR SITE?
I just checked snopes to see if your rumor re snopes and soros is true but snopes says it isn't: http://www.snopes.com/info/aboutus.asp
:-P
Bee-fore and Afterwards, there gone and it all perishes...
This could be your answer Laws of Physics. If you recall they were spraying defoliants in Maine back in the early 80's to kill off hardwoods. You couldn't hear any birds in the areas they sprayed. I also recall that at the same time PCB's were in the process of being banned, logging companies were spraying oil on the dirt roads to keep the dust down.
http://umaine.edu/agriculture/files/2014/11/Use-Patterns-for-Neonicotino...
be healthy eat your honey.
Emergeing market? apiarists
The European Honey Bee is an invasive specie in North America. http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/02-0626
so was the white man...
sorry, what was your point again?
...my point is that the entire ecosystem of north america has been restructured ...and fucked.
This probably isn't real just like climate change
My climate here at the house changed from yesterday to today. Yesterday no rain, Today nothing but rain.
Why?
Because you ran your lawnmower. Duh...
>> north america has been restructured ...and fucked.
It's only got to hold together for another 20/25 years, AFAIC. There are decided benifits to being an old fuck.
Hey greatbeard you missed some good generation wars instigated here by Bill Bonner.
Here's world renegade Vladimir Putin on this bee killing....
Russia Warns Obama: Monsanto
http://entomologicalphilosopher.com/2013/05/28/russia-warns-obama-monsan...
Oh...this thing is copy protected...have to click it to read.
Remember when "Killer bees" were a thing? Fucking fear mongering rent seeking statist cunts.
Seeing as though the earth came into existence without life, all species are invasive.
"In the beginning, Man created God in His own image"
Then something went awry...
Some people took that one a bit to literally, and look where it got us...
have a couple shots of scotch [whiskey if you're a fucking gentleman], and watch this to the end. It's relevant, but you'll want to have had the shots...:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=video&cd=1&ved=0CB...
but did anyone *actually* listen to the joke?
Modern society is all about maximizing short term yield, whether it is food crops or stealing money, and to hell with the consequences!
Monkey want banana!
Yep. Maximising short term yield, creating dependency to products and consumables. Far too many corporations' products are planned and analysed from the inception stage to self destruct and/or force consumers to be dependent on the "razor and blades" business model.
I can feel a volcanic rant brewing up inside me when I look at the state of the human and animal food chain. The thing is, when it comes to greed and instant gratification, the utter fucking stupidity of the upright ape is beyond batshit crazy.
"A single corn kernel coated with a neonicotinoid can kill a song bird." As a long time environmental lawyer and campaigner, I should not have been stunned by that fact but I was. Shaking my head in dismay, I read on, "Even a tiny grain of wheat or canola treated with the ...neonicotinoid... can fatally poison a bird."
...
Think of how much humans ingest then and it's long term effects. Not only humans but animals they eat and how it effects them since corn is a major source for animal feed.
Before everyone panics, these compounds do not hang around. They are chemical and metabolically processed very quickly (just not by all organisms, obviously.
Still, they do suck. At least from my perspective. The point is, as soon as they are applied they do start breaking down, fairly quickly too.
The word you are looking for is devolution... (for humans anyway).
No that is what cellphones are for. Devolution through nutrition and GMOs just makes it easier to keep them assimilated in the Borg collective.
Too vague of a rebuke. 3 days is plenty long enough to kill.
Time to break down depends on the chemical, and more often than not the consequences compound long before the breakdown.
It's Nicotine, the active alkoloid of tobacco...hence neoNICOTINoid
Tobacco was introduced to Europe in 1559, and by the late 17th century, it was used not only for smoking but also as an insecticide. After World War II, over 2,500 tons of nicotine insecticide were used worldwide, but by the 1980s the use of nicotine insecticide had declined below 200 tons. This was due to the availability of other insecticides that are cheaper and less harmful to mammals.[7]
Explains everything. Propaganda matrix is all about controlling emotions aka drug addiction. Keep them emotionally unstable and addicted without the lung cancer problems from cigarettes through pesticides instead. People become addicted to specific foods then. Explains the rise in obesity rates in the US and everywhere this stuff is used.
Control the pesticides and in turn with help where the food goes in the chain control the populace and make money knowing how and what addicts have a predisposition to eat.
Here is something to consider. So you have people addicted to food. Now you salt the food. Salted food causes salivation and craving also. Salt is also associated with semen. You can Pavlov dog train people using subtle sexual references visually then program other ideas to associate when trigger once salivation and sex are mentally linked via Pavlov dog training on people. Pay attention to tee vee for the sexual undertones in the visuals or words. Like granola nut bar commercials for example, salty peanuts, etc.
Or articles on here by an author named Kunt sler bitching....
Neural net linguistic AI's tend to be a bit too literal like Indian genies (snake charmers) and 1 million bucks.
...
http://entomologicalphilosopher.com/2013/05/28/russia-warns-obama-monsan...
...
Two of the most feared neonicotinoids being banned are Actara and Cruiser made by the Swiss global bio-tech seed and pesticide giant Syngenta AG which employs over 26,000 people in over 90 countries and ranks third in total global sales in the commercial agricultural seeds market.
Important to note, this report says, is that Syngenta, along with bio-tech giants Monsanto, Bayer, Dow and DuPont, now control nearly 100% of the global market for genetically modified pesticides, plants and seeds.
...
And more importantly
The new report concludes that neonicotinoid contamination levels in both surface- and ground water in the United States and around the world are already beyond the threshold found to kill many aquatic invertebrates.”
Same old , same old.
Elitism manifesting as cronyism.
That's the 'merkin way
Nobody does it better, nobody does it quite like you , . . .
Essentially, without bees there is no food. However, unlike the "global warming" scam where the money is in pretending to stop a pretend "thereat," the money related to the demise of the bees and humanity's food supply is in keeping the real threat humming along unabated. And people still question my Noah's Ark like quest for a guillotine.
Liberty is a demand. Tyranny is submission..
Government, being nothing more than a criminal syndicate of theft and violence, always accomplishes the opposite of the stated goal. Always.
There are lots of pollentators. Let's be clear, without bees, there is no MEAD!!!!
And that is some serious shit.
So why is this not a scam and global warming is?
Have you ever been bit by a dead bee?
You know, I really like watching that TV show "How it's made".
If you have ever seen a bottling line with the bottles whizzing in at 100 miles and hour and then entering the giant circle to be filled, you might appreciate what an excellent design that would make for a guillotine. Probably "service" 20,000 people an hour that way.
Sounds about right to me.
God I love technology.
too bad neonics don't cause global warming.
Get ahold of a book called "One Straw Revolution".
Then start researching permaculture. Then start living.
There are some interesting ideas in One Straw Revolution , but much of it is specific to the semi-tropical zone.
Permaculture has more widespread application, but the principles are the same.
Either way , city life has a limited future.
Sepp Holzer Rocks
I do have issues with Mollison and Lawton, but think the basic theory is sound. The fact that Lawton didn't have a clue that you couldn't throw a corn fed cow onto a free range pasture without killing it was proof he didn't know real life from theory.
The sheer fact that you can't feed an animal natural food after it has been raised on corn without killing it should send shock waves throgh society.
Monarch butterfly population is down 95% from 1996.
Up to a billion monarchs formerly colored our skies each summer, yet only about 33 million remain — a decline of more than 90 percent since the mid-1990s, according to the Endangered Species Coalition.
http://www.agweb.com/article/farmers-activists-clash-over-monarch-butter...
"The honey comb walls become so thin .... the baby bees are crushed under their own weight !" .... Rachel Carson from her grave
Another claim to fame for Monsanto et al.
humans have proven themselves incapable of governing themselves with stability, peace and prosperity, incapable of rising above primitive savage cult worship, eg islam, incapable of limiting their reckless profligate excessive breeding, and incapable of just preserving the very earth that they depend upon for survival =
much better for Mother Earth and all remaining living creatures if humans quickly extinct themselves
Replace stupid bees with drones .... much more efficient and thorough .... no more crap shoot with the people's food supply !
Luddite woo-woo bullshit, sourced from lefty eco-freaks. Boo.
+1 Lol. Excellent!
Monsanto = Saint Mountain DuPont = the bridge, the bridge Let's put a human face on these chemical companies who feed the hungry !
Was DDT really the disaster the author claims? I wasn't around back then. I've heard conflicting reports on whether or not it was a bad thing.
In my opinion DDT was bad. I was born in 1960 and never saw a bald eagle until 1999. Now I see many raptors that were rare.
My dad loved using DDT on the farm...he died of bone cancer at 59.
Was it DDT?...Today, like you say there are "many conflicting reports" I just go by what I saw.
Banning DDT led to the death of more than 50 million. But hey, YOU got to see a bird.
FFS...
No the author and Rachel Carson are full of shit. And without that shit the Global Warming scam wouldn't have been able to profit the way it has.
But honey bees are different (much larger #s, and there is no increase human casualties to factor in, which is conveniently ignored by the anti-DDT crowd) and there is a much larger body of research and evidence indicating that neonicotinoids contribute to CCD.
However, Europe is not the happy land solution the author makes it out to be-
DDT was a great tool. The author pines for the good old days of malaria, and dengue fever.
I had a roomate in College, he was in AG SCI.
his professor showed the class a DDT can with directions.
spray the walls in the barn until there are runs down the walls (for horse flys)
personally I tihnk the problem with DDT was how MUCH was used, probably much more then necessary to get the job done.
and to kill skeeters in Africa it would have saved millions of lives.
i rather doubt this author knows much about farming. as a retired farmer i can tell you in all honesty that farming, with or without pesticides, is NOT easy.
Nothing about life is easy, just don't kill the planet in the process is all anyone is asking.
7 junks on a comment like this...ZH is ground zero for science illiterates.
Fat fuckers want cheap food, and they don't care how it's made.
The people of the country need a country. They no longer have a country but are a bankster occupied nation. People that live within US borders have to eradicate the banksters. You make the first move. They're paying me not to fight.
I like open source software and the idea of replacing the banking system, but you have to somehow take the military away from the NWO and return it to being under control of Americans.
The best time to do all this is when Russia and or China attack the western globalists: to make certain they are hit by all sides and pounded into extinction. But for now the Q99X2 are sitting fat and happy while writing college essays on diversity.
But Russia and China in that case will want a say after the demolition, not a pure thought, nothing personal.
My opinion is the same faction works from all sides anyway.
.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. - See more at: http://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment2.html#sthash.WCSdFrTH.dpuf A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. - See more at: http://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment2.html#sthash.WCSdFrTH.dpuf A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. - See more at: http://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment2.html#sthash.WCSdFrTH.dpuf A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. - See more at: http://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment2.html#sthash.WCSdFrTH.dpuf A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. - See more at: http://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment2.html#sthash.WCSdFrTH.dpuf"I like the keep and bear arms part. Not a fan of the Militia part. I don't like conscription. The Constitution sucks.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_Acts_of_1792
Conscription and a return to State militias would prevent many of the abuses of the MIC, both foreign and domestic.
The is an argument as to the increased efficacy of a professional (all volunteer) military, but I'm not sure how many of the proponets of that theory have actually spent enough time among the current and recent volunteers to properly gauge their "professionalism" and skill.
5 ways the billionaires club runs the EPA.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/07/30/5-ways-billionaires-c...
The Monarch butterfly and bumblebee die off is heart wrenching. I used to see a lot of those growing up and hardly see any now. It bums me out.
I'm starting to see bees again in my area. won't help me much though the winter froze my Black berry and Red Raspberry plants off at the ground. :(
Given the amount of pesticides in these crops, will humans die off before the bees?
This is a major problem but it is America's problem. Other countries will do the right thing to take care of their people and their food supply. America will take care of their people with Jade Helm and their Military power!!! and then buy their food from Russia and China
This is a BS. Decades ago before DDT and other useful pesticides were banned there plenty of birds and bees. NOW they tell us WE are killing them all off with pesticides AFTER they banned what worked.
What are we to believe? I know, they can fix it all with a TAX!
Do not whisper against the eco doomers. What the fuck happened to this site?
Clearly, I need to get some nipple cream so I can get in touch with my eco self and join the groupthink.
Mankind desperately needs to wipe out mankind. Nature will recover.
Because so many bees eat corn stalks.
WTF does that inane comment have to do with the topic under discussion?
Oh! Nothing.?
Sorry.
Pardon me.
Correlating bee deaths with neonictonide poisoning is bull shit. Western Canada uses neonictonide poisons, but has not experienced the collapse in bee colonies that eastern Canada has. However, Western Canadian bee keepers do not use poisons for mites - which is placed in, and around the hives.
Global warming...dem bees be hot!!!
Dem hunny's are fine!?
down vote.
subtle thought is not your forte.
http://phys.org/news/2013-04-high-fructose-corn-syrup-tied-worldwide.html
up vote.
This article fails to mention the greed of bee keepers who starve their hives.
Nothing thrives on high fructose corn syrup.
Bees R us
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What do we do?
I've known about this for years. Everyone has.
Of course it's the fucking insecticide!
Do we get the guns?
What will one or two or 500 hundred people do? Who do we shoot? Will it matter?
Write the politicians? Those assholes have know about this for years. The problem is they're in the bag for the chemical companies.
What. The. Fuck. Do. We. Do?
Me? I'm gonna hope that the politicians, when this starts to slide, are the ones that will be hunted like rats, so that they hide in the sewers in fear.
Then we'll get the guns.
•?•
V-V
1. Neonics have been around about a decade before the North American bee issue manifests itself
2. There has been no conclusive link to neonics and bee colony collapse
3. Australia uses neonics -- guess what -- no bee colony collapse - how can that be????? Sort of like smoking cigarettes 'CAUSES' lung cancer, except in Asians, French,etc
4. Grow up. Wanna solve problems. Learn to be analytical. Your knee jerk whining is silly
That's cause the Frenchies don't inhale. Just wanna look cool.
ALL stories like the one above track back to the FUNDING OF POLITICS. The existing monetary system, as frauds by privately controlled banks, which are enforced by governments, is the most extreme example of that problem of the history of the FUNDING OF POLITICS. However, every other issue follows the same basic pattern of crazy corruption, where the profits from frauds are able to be reinvested in more frauds.
There is an overwhelming amount of JUNK SCIENCE, involved in vicious feedback loops, where those who profit from the established systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, are then able to continue to dominate the FUNDING OF POLITICS. Every time that one attempts to come up with any better resolutions to the problems created by crazy corrupt governments serving the short-term special interests, one runs into the PRACTICAL IMPOSSIBILITY OF OVERCOMING THE ALREADY ESTABLISHED PATTERNS OF THE FUNDING OF POLITICS.
I have spent the last few decades working on that problem, because it is theoretically the most important one, where the maximum leverage exists. However, the only thing that has happened after working on that problem was that the more that I learned, the worse it got! There is a long list of problems similar to the problems observed with bees. They all follow the same patterns, whereby governments are almost inconceivably crazy and corrupt, and that is automatically getting worse, faster ...
Every attempt to propose possible solutions to any of the problems (manifested on the long list of similar problems) always run into the same obstacles regarding the FUNDING OF POLITICS. After the crazy corruption of the public "money" supply was achieved, then everything else automatically became runaway vicious spirals of more and more crazy corruption, through the subsequent FUNDING OF POLITICS driving the enforcement of frauds, along with the matching evil deliberate ignorance.
Pretty well every problem would require solutions that were in the public interest, that would limit the short-term profits of some vested special interests. NONE of those kinds of solutions have a hope in hell of actually being implemented due to the ways that the FUNDING OF POLITICS has been operating. After one appreciates the magnitude of the social insanities represented by the existing monetary and taxation systems being extremely unbalanced in favour of tiny minorities of the population, against everyone else, one then can put all other issues, such as those related to bees, into an overall perspective.
Tragically, there are NO practical political solutions, because there are no ways to prevent the FUNDING OF POLITICS from continuing to be extremely unbalanced, and automatically getting worse, faster. The basic monetary system has become like a metastasizing cancer, that is killing the society that is it growing within. That original crazy corruption was due to the ways that the FUNDING OF POLITICS could achieve the creation of criminally insane, and fundamentally fraudulent, financial accounting systems. Those systems then applied everywhere else that monetary system was used, so that every possible crazy corruption and deliberately ignorance flourished, in order to advance the short-term interests of a few, despite that having longer term consequences that were terrible for everyone, eventually including even those who benefited in the short-term.
However, any attempt to fix any of those problems always immediately runs into the obstacles of the established patterns of the FUNDING OF POLITICS, where the maximum leverage continues to exist, and prevails to drive society as a whole to act in ways which are runaway criminal insanities. Anyone who spends as much time as I have learning about those issues will eventually be forced to face the fact that the FUNDING OF POLITICS has become so extremely unbalanced that less than 1% of the people fund pretty close to 100% of the political activities, while 99% of the people fund practically nothing.
However, any attempt to persuade the 99% of the population who act like incompetent political idiots to change tends to only PROVE, yet again, that they are incompetent political idiots. The 1% that FUND POLITICS got what they wanted, which is why the laws and regulations become runaway criminal insanities, where JUNK SCIENCE triumphs, and evil deliberate ignorance prevails towards every concern that would interfere with the profits made by that 1%, despite that, in the longer term, 100% of the people are going to suffer from the consequences of that crazy corruption.
With respect to every other issue, similar to the problems with respect to the bees, the same issues are the central core to everything else, which are the FUNDING OF POLITICS. Since that FUNDING has already created a monetary system based on governments enforcing frauds by privately controlled banks, of course, the corporations that grew up around those banks issuing the public "money" supply followed the same patterns, of being able to capture control over the legislative and regulatory agencies, so that almost all of those laws and regulations are manifestations of crazy corruption, shot through and through with attitudes of evil deliberate ignorance towards the bigger picture and longer term consequences with respect to everything that is done.
As far as I can tell, the social successes that the banksters have achieved in making and maintaining governments based on runaway crazy corruption have driven society to become terminally sick and insane. Multiply the problems with bees by billions of times, as every other similar issue compounds with that, to add together and multiply themselves, and one has the overall picture of civilization so dominated by crazy corruption that it is criminally insane and madly self-destructive. HOWEVER, as soon as one tries to do anything whatsoever about that, one runs directly into the problem of the FUNDING OF POLITICS, and thereby rediscovers and reconfirms that it is politically impossible to fix any other problems that all are derived from the central issue that everything is based upon fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting systems.
Of course, I WISH that I was able to come to some other conclusions, and to propose some realistic solutions to the problems that the human species is rushing towards committing collective suicide. However, the ONLY thing that I actually continue to do is PROVE that is not possible to either prevent, nor prepare for ... Instead, I merely point out the same bla, bla, blah, which will continue to be deliberately ignored by almost everyone who are all stuck inside of the established systems, where the "money" is runaway criminal insanity, driving every other kind of runaway criminal insanity to spin more wildly out of control. E.g., I posted one of my typical comments under this article above, despite that there seems no practical point to bother to do so, other than for me to amuse myself with my sense of intellectual integrity and rigour that I feel when I try to describe the facts in the best possible ways, with models of the real world that are as accurate and penetrating as I can make them be.
Who doesn't know math here -- the article author or the study author?
For sure it's the idiot reporter.
The sun has stopped revolving, I'm linking a huffpo piece as a counter to the idiocy to this ZH post.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jon-entine/neonics-not-key-driver-of_b_692...
A USDA study....enough said. Just like its cousin the FDA the USDA has dubious relations with biotech and big AG business.
Some GMO have insecticides build into them. These so-called Bt toxins cause insects' intestine to burst open causing them to die. These toxins are there from the moment the seed is produced until the full grown produce ends up as animal fodder or on your plate.
Yes, they contain the same "toxin" as tomatoes
BT only effects lepidoptera. Not all insects. Educate yourself.
Oh my!! In 100 years how are they gonna tell little Johnny about sexual intercourse when he doesn't know what the hell "birds and bees" are...
Where have all the frogs gone? I've been reading for twenty years now of the loss of frog populations world-wide.
Help save the bees!
https://action.sumofus.org/a/bayer_cologne/2/2/?akid=10882.1627870.Udtm_...
I blame those who view a dandelion in their yard as a threat to their manhood.