deep sea chive
By Amelia Urryon 1 Jul 2015commentsShare
What thrives at 79 degrees and 20 feet below sea level, and tastes like a strawberry?
Actually, it is a strawberry — a salty sea strawberry. OK, fine, it’s just a regular strawberry possessing no marine qualities that we know of, aside from being grown in a submersible greenhouse off the coast of Italy. This berry-infested Atlantis can be found alongside four other biospheres containing basil, lettuce, and beans. And while 20 feet isn’t quite 20,000 leagues, the improbable place is called Nemo’s Garden.
More from the Washington Post:
The balloon-like biospheres take advantage of the sea’s natural properties to grow plants. The underwater temperatures are constant, and the shape of the greenhouses allows for water to constantly evaporate and replenish the plants. What’s more, the high amounts of carbon dioxide act like steroids for the plants, making them grow at very rapid rates. …
Sergio Gamberini, president of Ocean Reef Group, came up with the “crazy” idea of growing plants under the sea while on a summer vacation in Italy. He immediately made a few calls and started experimenting, sinking the transparent biospheres under the ocean and filling them with air.
And, uh, why exactly?
“I try to do something that’s a little different and to show the beauty of the ocean,” Gamberini said. “I hope to do something for the young people and to inspire new dreams.”
Aside from that — and some pesto Gamberini made for a big dinner party — the submarine vegetables haven’t had much in the way of larger purpose. Or at least not yet! Gamberini and co. hope that the five greenhouses might serve as models for a more sustainable food system — one that can produce crops with minimal impact:
In fact, the biospheres are attracting wildlife. Octopuses seem to like taking shelter under the structures, and endangered seahorses have gathered beneath the biospheres to develop nurseries. Crabs have also been known to crawl up the anchors and into the greenhouses.
Just stay away from my salty strawberries, crabs, and we’ve got ourselves a deal.
A beautiful, whimsical deal. See?
Nemo’s GardenNemo’s GardenNemo’s GardenNemo’s GardenSource:
The world’s most beautiful greenhouses are underwater, and growing strawberries
, Washington Post.
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So now we have beautiful underwater greenhouses. Why? Why not!
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Mother Jones
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Megyn Kelly: Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the Iraq invasion?
Jeb Bush: I would have.
Really? As Byron York points out, even George W. Bush himself has some qualms about the war knowing what we know now—namely that the intel about Saddam’s WMD was all 100 percent fiction derived from phony sources and wishful thinking. So how is ol’ Jeb going to clean up this steaming pile of gaffe-osity? Like this, according to former Bush aide Ana Navarro:
I emailed him this morning and I said to him, ‘Hey, I’m a little confused by this answer so I’m genuinely wondering did you mishear the question?'” Navarro said. “And he said, ‘Yes, I misheard the question.'”
….On Tuesday morning, Navarro she wasn’t sure whether he would clarify the answer.
Hoo boy. That’s his story? Good luck with that.
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Mother Jones
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I’ve long been conflicted about China’s prospects for the future. On the one hand, their growth rate has been impressive over the past few decades, and their long-term growth seems to be reasonably well assured too. But there are clouds on the horizon. Demographics are one: China is getting older, and by 2030 nearly a quarter of the country will be elderly. There’s also a problem that’s inherent to growth: As China gets richer and more middle class, their labor costs will rise, eliminating one of their key attractions to Western manufacturers.
But what about the short term? That’s starting to look problematic too. China’s stock markets have been on a massive, bubblicious tear recently, none more so than the exchanges that specialize in tech companies. Matt O’Brien speculates about the underlying cause of this mania:
Why are China’s stock markets partying like it’s 1999? Well, part of it is that China’s housing bubble might be bursting—new home prices fell 5.1 percent in January—and the only other place people can put their money is in stocks. Another part is that China’s state-owned media companies have been saying for months that stocks look cheap, and people are listening. Especially people who haven’t graduated from high school. Indeed, 67 percent of China’s new stock investors don’t have a high school diploma. And now that China has cut interest rates so much—and looks like it will keep doing so—they can borrow money to buy as many stocks as they want. And that’s a lot. So-called margin accounts, which let people do this, more than doubled in 2014, and, even though brokerages have tightened their terms a bit, they’re still growing.
So whether you want to call this a boom, a bull market, or a mania doesn’t really matter. A bubble by any other name will pop just as much.
The best-case scenario is probably that China’s central bank manages to engineer a fairly normal cyclical recession, which will be mild and short-lived. The worst-case scenario is that borrowing is fueling more of this boom than we think, and China will shortly experience a bursting property and stock bubble that will look an awful lot like the one we went through in 2008.
Still, I will say one thing in China’s favor: a lot of analysts have been predicting a crash for a long time, and somehow China’s economy just keeps rolling along. On the other hand, to paraphrase Keynes, bubbles can last a helluva lot longer than you’d think. But eventually they all burst anyway.
So color me nervous about China. At the same time, keep in mind that all I know is what I read in the papers. I might be totally off base with my concerns.
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Mother Jones
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It feels like it’s been weeks since I last created a chart for this blog. I suppose this is because it has been weeks. Today that changes.
Over on the right is the chart that’s controlled my life for the past couple of weeks. That’s not to say there weren’t plenty of others. My potassium level seemed to be of particular concern, for example, but that would make an especially boring chart since it just bounced around between 3.3 and 3.9 the entire time. (They added a bag of IV potassium to my usual daily hydration whenever it fell below 3.6.) Now that I’m home and my IV line is gone, I’m eating more bananas than usual, just to be on the safe side, but that’s about it.
But that was nothing. What really mattered was my white blood count. You can see it on the right. For some reason, the two days of actual chemotherapy are called Day -2 and Day -1, and the day of the stem cell transplant is Day 0. On that day, as you can see, my count was around 6500, which is quite normal. Then, as the Melphalan steamrolled everything in its path, it plummeted to ~0 on days 7 and 8. Bye bye, immune system. Finally, on Day 9, as the transplanted stem cells started to morph into various blood products, my count skyrocketed. By the time I was discharged on Day 14, it was back to normal levels.
Fascinating, no? Especially when it’s in chart form!
Lessee. Any other news? My fatigue is still pretty heavy, and will stay that way for 2-3 weeks. I didn’t realize it would last so long, partly because my doctor waited literally until my discharge date to tell me. But it’s for real. It took me two tries to create this post: one session to create the chart, after which I crashed, and a second session to write the text. Not exactly speed demon blogging. What else? I have a nasty metallic taste in my mouth all this time. It sucks. And I think my hair is finally getting ready to fall out completely. This morning my pillow was covered with tiny little pieces of hair, and it’s pretty obvious where they came from. On the bright side, my appetite is improving. I’m not yet at the stage where I really want to eat, but I’m mostly willing to eat, which is good enough for now. This may be partly due to the fact that I’m wearing one of those seasickness patches behind my ear to fight nausea. It seems to be working.
Oh, and I can now take a nice, normal shower without first having to spend ten minutes trying to bundle up my catheter so it doesn’t get wet. Woohoo!
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Mother Jones
While Kevin Drum is focused on getting better, we’ve invited some of the remarkable writers and thinkers who have traded links and ideas with him from Blogosphere 1.0 to this day to contribute posts and keep the conversation going. Today we’re honored to present a post from Ryan Cooper, national correspondent for the Week.
The next several years will see a rolling 150th anniversary of Reconstruction, my favorite period in American history. From about 1865 to 1877, American society as a whole tried reasonably hard to do right by the freed slaves, before getting tired of the effort and abandoning them to the depredations of racist terrorism. For the next nine decades, black Americans had few if any political rights under the boot heel of Jim Crow.
It’s both a shining example of what can happen when a society really tries to right a past wrong, and tragic, infuriating failure of will. But most of all it’s very interesting. Things were changing, social orders were being overthrown, historical ground was being broken. At a time when few nations had any suffrage at all, roughly 4 million freed slaves got the vote in a single stroke, perhaps the single starkest act of democratic radicalism in world history.
So it’s weirdly fascinating to read conservative historiography of the 19th century, such as this piece by Robert Tracinski at the Federalist, as an example of how Darryl Worley-style historiography irons all the best parts out of American history.
He’s interested in trying to prove that a “non-coercive” economy is possible, by which he means that taxes and spending could be dramatically lower than they are today. Thus he charts government spending as a percentage of GDP, finds that it was pretty low for most of the 19th century, and claims victory:
What the left wants is not just to make America’s economic history disappear. It needs to make America’s political system disappear: to make truly small, truly limited government seem like a utopian fantasy that can safely be dismissed. Please bear in mind that this latest example came up in the context of a discussion about the justification for government force. So what they want to describe as an unrealistic fantasy is a society not dominated by coercion.
One might think that when writing a paean to a noncoercive century, it might be a good idea to address the fact that for 60 percent of that century, it was government policy that human beings could be owned and sold like beasts, or that half or more of the national economy was based on that institution. But no, the word “slavery” does not appear in the piece. Neither does “Civil War” or “Reconstruction,” which as a literal war against and military occupation of the South would seem fairly coercive.
So speaking of the 19th century as one notably free of coercion is not just utterly risible, it’s also a cockeyed way to look at what was good or bad about it. The economy of the antebellum South was founded on the labor of owned human beings, extracted through torture. Slave masters set steadily increasing quotas for cotton picking, for instance, and would flog slaves according to the number of “missing” pounds. As Edward Baptist writes, they thus increased the productivity of slave cotton-picking by nearly 400 percent from 1860 to 1865.
It was akin to the Gulag system of Soviet Russia, except that it had all the power of the red-hot Industrial Revolution, including cutting-edge financial technology, behind it. That combination of slavery plus explosive economic growth and innovation made the antebellum South one of the most profoundly evil places that has ever existed — one that was an absolutely critical part of early industrial growth in both Britain and the North.
But on the other hand, the war that ended slavery, despite involving coercion in the form of organized mass killing, was therefore good! And so was Reconstruction, even though that involved extremely harsh measures against the likes of the KKK. Whether coercion is good or bad depends on just who is being coerced and why.
And that, in turn, puts the lie to conservative complaints that liberals always “blame America first.” On the contrary, grappling with the pitch-black periods of history makes the positive notes shine all the brighter. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, the “epoch of slavery is…the quintessential romance of American history.” It’s just a romance difficult to detect in the GDP statistics.
Link:
Why Would an Economic Analysis Want to Ignore American Slavery?
Mother Jones
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Kevin Drum doesn’t write much about guns, which is why I’m going to keep on it a bit here and honor him by rolling out the red carpet for a bunch of grating 2A trolls to stampede into the comments thread.
How exactly is that going to honor Kevin, you ask? By underscoring what his legions of intelligent readers already know: These dudes could learn a thing or three from Kevin Drum. He’s open-minded and deeply curious. He asks shrewd questions and tests his own assumptions. He respects data. And he’s a damn fine writer—clear, to the point, and not always entirely correct but who the hell cares because he’s right there chatting with you as if happy hour has come early today and the drinks are already on the table. (Godspeed, Kevin—we miss you, we’re stoked that you’re on the road back to full-time badass blogger, and we’ll see you again soon.)
So, to the subject at hand: Late last week, I spoke with Michael Krasny on KQED’s Forum about our deep investigation into the economic toll from gun violence, which dings America for no less than $229 billion a year. (Yes, that’s capital ‘B’ billion, further explained visually here and methodologically here.) The project has made waves not just for that staggering sum, but because we spent months digging up the elusive data behind it, from the personal to the societal. Yet, as listeners called into the show with questions, I was quickly reminded of just how ridiculously dumb and polarizing the gun debate really is—thanks to both sides—even in the face of groundbreaking information.
After a former US Marine came on the air and criticized the National Rifle Association for lying, the next caller, another gun owner, promptly denounced him for speaking against the Second Amendment and being “full of it.” (Which in this arena is basically the equivalent of a puppy’s kiss.) That was followed by a woman who wanted to know what could be done to prevent gun manufacturers from manufacturing guns, whether “we could stop it at the source.”
And that, in a nutshell, is pretty much the state of America’s gun debate. Here’s more of it—but also some vivid stories and data from those who know gun violence firsthand:
Having reported on this subject intensively for the last three years, I’m still not totally sure whether guns kill people or people kill people, but I’m almost certain that you can be riddled to death with inanities. (See, for the umpteenth time: “Knives, baseball bats, and hands and feet kill people too!!”)
But while there are offenders at both ends of the spectrum, one side is fundamentally responsible for the enduring standoff. The NRA’s power tends to be regarded as legendary in politics and in the media, though it’s probably overstated, especially nowadays. Still, the gun lobby has pulled off a messaging feat decades in the making—its leaders perpetually blasting away with the idea that any discussion of guns in America can be nothing other than a brutal dichotomy. You’re either a defender of constitutional liberty, their premise goes, or you’re an anti-freedom “gun grabber.” Barack Obama’s mass seizure of law-abiding citizens’ firearms may have yet to materialize six-plus years in, but the NRA is taking no chances, already preparing as it is for Hillary Clinton’s own nefarious plans.
More than just inciting the imagination of the NRA’s political base, this construct evidently has become the default setting for the national debate. Some of the blame also falls on the gun-control movement, which expends considerable energy pontificating about how the NRA is evil. Of course, this bleak if cartoonish disconnect hardly reflects most Americans’ attitudes about firearms, gun owners included.
But it has caused some very real, very serious collateral damage, according to numerous public health experts I’ve spoken with. The American medical community is nearly unanimous that gun violence is a serious public health threat, and yet, as we detailed in the aforementioned investigation, there remains precious little research on the problem, let alone funding to do more. As Mark Rosenberg, the former director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control put it during another recent radio conversation, the entrenched gun debate itself carries a steep price:
This is really destructive to our ability to make progress. It’s posed as an “either or,” and this was done by strategists working for the NRA over a long period of time. They wanted people to think that either you protect the rights of all gun owners to keep their guns, or you do research on gun violence, and that the two are diametrically opposed. And they had a zero-tolerance philosophy that said, “You can’t even discuss research on gun violence because that leads down the slippery slope of all of us losing our guns.” And that’s led us into the morass where we are today.
One of Rosenberg’s fiercest old adversaries, former Republican Rep. Jay Dickey of Arkansas—who in his own words “served as the NRA’s point person in Congress”—now agrees with Rosenberg. After the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado (which cost that community at least $100 million), the two published a joint Op-Ed in the Washington Post: “We were on opposite sides of the heated battle 16 years ago,” they wrote, “but we are in strong agreement now that scientific research should be conducted into preventing firearm injuries and that ways to prevent firearm deaths can be found without encroaching on the rights of legitimate gun owners. The same evidence-based approach that is saving millions of lives from motor-vehicle crashes, as well as from smoking, cancer and HIV/AIDS, can help reduce the toll of deaths and injuries from gun violence.”
Read their whole July 2012 piece, look at the findings from our new data investigation, and you’ll also begin to see—another 100,000 deaths, 250,000 injuries, and one unthinkable elementary school massacre later—just how much we still don’t know.
Link –
Our Country’s Cartoonish Gun Debate Isn’t Just Idiotic—It’s Really Damaging
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