And Following On Yesterday's Post....

Quote from one of B-Daddy's links:

The use of native prairie grasses is meant to avoid some of the other risks associated with biofuels such as reduced diversity of local animal life and displacing food crops with fuel crops. "This is an energy crop that can be grown on marginal land," Vogel argues, such as the more than 35 million acres (14.2 million hectares) of marginal land that farmers are currently paid not to plant under the terms of USDA's Conservation Reserve Program.

His post is a very nice explanation, with a numbered list, of why ethanol is a bad idea.

Oh, by the way? The leftover stuff from the fermentation? If I read this right, it might be usable as cattle feed. (Plus foraging after harvest.)

Wait, The Gov't Was WRONG?!

Dietary, this time.

A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (May 4), reports that among 3,681 study subjects followed for as long as 23 years, the cardiovascular death rate was more than 50 percent higher among those on who consumed less salt.

(Quote from Junk Science, emphasis mine.)

Pardon while I use the fainting room on finding out that government told everyone to do something that was good for a small group, and it was not only useless it was actually bad....

I knew that blanket medical advice was bad from when I was a kid-- my dad was told to reduce his sodium intake purely off of the doctor hearing what he ate.  So mom flatly stopped adding salt to her cooking, but kept the salt shaker on the table.  (A compromise that they figured would   Dad got heat stroke. (Thank God, it was actually with my mom and NOT miles from shelter or large amounts of water; a water jug doesn't cool you as well as buckets of cold water.)  They went back, and the doctor wanted to have dad start taking sodium tablets... mom went back to cooking normally.  Haven't had a problem since then.

Food Prices Up?

Let's make it worse so that we look good!

Short version: the National Wildlife Foundation is suing on the claim that the EPA isn't doing enough to control what Other People do to their own land.  (hell is other people...)

A large part of their claim is that grasslands are "huge carbon sinks" (apparently, other plants aren't) and are vital to biodiversity.

From the various protected public grasslands I've seen, a major chunk of that "diversity" consists of weeds.  (This is a technical claim; "weed" doesn't just mean "unwanted plant" in this case.)  State and Federal lands are often huge areas of class A, and good luck getting any action on it.

Here's an idea, how about tell the feds to go do something physically improbable to themselves instead of telling the nation what we put in our tanks, and where it is to come from?

While we're at it, make dang sure the NWF and other organizations don't make one red cent off of their lawsuits.  You want to be activists?  Get someone besides the tax payer to foot the tab.  (Wonder how much that would take off of the budget?  You don't just save the money they're getting, you save the money you would've spent defending yourself while you were paying them to sue you.)

He's Dead

Good.

Don't let your attention waiver.  Just because one goblin is gone, doesn't mean there's no need to lock the door.