I'm just waiting for someone with money to bring the situation to its obvious parodic conclusion and be carried up to the top on a gilded litter dressed like Xerces.

Thanks to Google's project Calico, I would like to be the first to wish Dan a speedy recovery.

Let's be frank, you're evil.

But it isn't really about progress or innovation or creation, it is about the dismantling of the economy, while extracting as much profit as possible until the sad end. With every job, so goes a piece of the GDP, and now, in dramatic comparison to the 1950s and 1960s, the bulk of the tax base of America derives from payroll taxes, which the super-rich certainly don't pay, i.e., Amerika is so very effed!

. . . only really works in the labor market we are told, since it is completely inoperative everywhere else!!!!!

And taken a bit further, with a bit more modern historical research, NAFTA was about the same thing: new regs allowing for foreign ownership of Mexican banks (within one year of the passage of NAFTA, or signing by Mexico, 90% of their banks became foreign owned), when then favor Big Agra, which speedily moves in to take over the agriculture industry, while payouts go to Mexican politicians favoring the privatizing of those farmlands occupied by Mexican subsistance farmers, who are then forced off their lands, and thus journey north to America, to continue the downward trend on wages at the lower levels, etc., etc., etc.

Not really, me thinks, since those klepto-psycho-greedheads only dwell on money and their greed.

Given that all those so-called think tanks were founded and financed by the super rich, and whenever they claim one is "liberal" --- like the Brookings Institution (where one finds the Hamilton Project, founded by Robert Rubin, to privatize EVERYTHING), nothing could be further from the truth!

Then when you consider that former psychos from various bloody dictatorial regimes are employed at these so-called think tanks, since the Wall Street-owned American gov't invested in criminal elements to overthrow their various democracies (Iran, Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Chile, etc., etc., etc.), and then when the psycho-crooks there fall out of power, they have favored immigration to the USA, whereby they immediately are senior fellows at these stink tanks, and that almost daily our news is provided to us by various newsy whorescum interviewing swine from these stink tanks defining what the so-called news is --- Amerika is soooo over.

While I probably don't agree with this fellow's political beliefs, I do confirm that he is on the right track, i.e., One World Bank, which owns One World Corporation and One World Financial Exchange, said One World Bank controlling the One World Currency, of course:

http://personalliberty.com/eco...

You're not asked to justify abortion, you're asked to keep your fucking nose out of other peoples' business. And how many abortions in the US are late term abortions? Yes, I'm not a fucking retard and saw the clever little rhetorical trick you played there.

Genetically there are something like five or six human races; several in sub-Saharan African, and one just about everywhere else.

If the poster were to die of some horrible illness, I'd make a special trip to wherever he is buried to piss on the grave.

I'm not posting this AC, and will take the karma hit off need be.

So with that, let me say that I hope you die of some horrible cancer that makes you smell like rancid cat shit, so awful that your own mother hopes you die, but you don't, and just linger on, more foul and corrupted with each passing day, becoming as vile and repugnant on the outside as you are on the inside.

Yeah, but "living in a large aluminum ball in his parents' basement" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Yep. It's wierd because the symptoms can correspond with many different causes. For example, the climate change thing makes sense because bees can be tricked into thinking it's spring and start foraging or even swarming in the middle of winter when they really should stay in the winter cluster. The occasional warm day is good for them to be able to get out and void themselves, but longer periods of significantly fluctuating weather can be bad.

But it also matches other problems. Diseased or dying hives often lead to "desperate" swarming where bees start abandoning the hive to try to establish a new, safe place. Most of these swarms, however, will die. The behavior could be seen as a general "exteme stress" behavior. It could also be seen as a neurological disorder from pesticide exposure.

In short, it could match almost any possible cause. And probably is a result of many of them.

I dunno, they might be a bit boring.

I think it's important to ask questions because there's been literally "dozens" of different things "definitively linked" with CCD. The public likes to seize on neonicotinoids, but they're probably one of the least supported of these many different "definitively linked" reasons. Whole countries have gone so far as to outright ban neonicotinoids, with no effect on CCD. France, for example, banned them. The next year they largely switched to blaming the condition on Asian Hornets when the decline rates didn't decrease.

The problem is that when you ban a certain pesticide, people start using others. And going from neonicotinoids to organophosphates is a massive step backwards in terms of general safety, not just to pollinators, but especially to more complex animals as well. But the biggest problem with the neonicotinoid theory is that neonicotinoids are only used in a small fraction of the areas where CCD exists. Bees can only fly several kilometers from the hive, they're not going cross-country and picking up every pesticide in every farmer's arsenal. It even exists among people who are in places where no pesticides at all are used.

It's easy for the general public to latch onto a particular cause. But once you learn more about beekeeping you realize how incredibly much out there is that can utterly f* up a hive. And which have in history regularly collapsed bee populations, far worse than the collapses we have today. Trachael mites once nearly obliterated beekeeping in Europe, saved mainly by the development of the Buckfast bee. Check out this very inexhaustive list of bee pests and diseases. There's even some really counterintuitive effects in that small levels of some pesticides can actually increase hive survival rates, in that they're deadlier to bee pests like mites than to the bees themselves.

The public also tends to totally understand colony collapse disorder in the first place. Normal winter colony death levels are about 15% in most locations (though where I am it's higher). CCD raised the US average to about 30% at its peak. This is painful and expensive to beekeepers, but it has literally no impact on the ability to sustain bee populations. A new beehive can be started with just a queen and a handful of workers. Hives can be made to produce queens en masse through proper management. Hence people can mail order starter hives, and there's never going to be a threat to the ability to produce these starter hives - a single hive can make many dozens per year. Even normal hives not managed for breeding starter hives will naturally produce several swarms every year; beekeepers try to discourage and/or catch these swarms.

In all likelihood, neonicotinoids are one among many different stressors to bees in the modern era that causes CCD. Modern bees are much more "stressed" than bees in the past. We've created an environment where new bee pests and diseases have spread far and wide to bees that never would have encountered them in the wild. We raise them on corn syrup and sugar water in the winter (good for reducing dysintery and increasing honey yields, but robbing them of certain vitamins and minerals). We transport them on flatbed trucks hundreds or thousands of kilometers (these are animals that get confused if you move their hive a couple meters; their ability to navigate by sight is poor, they're best navigating by the sun and dead reckoning). And countless varieties of poisons, even unintentional ones, affect them every day of their lives. There's so many factors now that weaken hives that any "new" factor to an area can push them over the edge.

I'd really like to read the paper but unfortunately it's down. But for example, do the neonicotinoids add a UV signature to the liquid not present in the sugar water? That would have little to no influence in the case of flowers in nature (where they're not looking at the nectar, and there's all sorts of other chemicals in the nectar). What other chemicals are in the neonicotinoid solution (they're rarely pure, they usually have all sorts of other chemicals to increase their effect)? What's their cleaning and handling procedure for preparing and filling the sample containers? I want to know how they controlled these experiments against factors that humans can't detect but bees absolutely can.

Just the very act of hooking electrodes up to bee neurons I'd have concerns about. Is there any induced electric field involved, or even rubbing against the bee hairs? Bees transfer information to one another via dances, such as the waggle dance. Bees build up an electrostatic charge on their body, and a waggling bee imposes an electrostatic force on the antennae and hairs of all adjacent bees, causing them to feel dance over a short distance. Their stereoscopic sense of the dance lets them know the direction, and that combined with the time allows them to work out a direction to a food source relative to the (moving) direction of the sun. It functions like transferring a memory from one be to another. There's also "negation" behaviors, by other bees who don't like the information giving out; they have a different frequency buzz to say "don't go there", and sometimes different bees may even fight with each other over what's good and what's bad information.

Also note that the linked articles refer to a second study published simultaneously which showed no effect on honeybees next to rapeseed fields sprayed with neonicotinoids versus an altogether unsprayed field. Which is pretty remarkable, because you expect almost *any* pesticide next to your hive to have a profoundly negative effect on it.