Fertilizer is not made from oil. It is made from natural gas. And fertilizer production consumes only 1.5% of U.S. natural gas production (world-wide it is 5%). Only 2% of world energy consumption goes into fertilizer. So the energy savings here aren't making more than a small dent in energy usage, and synthetic fertilizer can use any energy source at all via the Haber Process to fix nitrogen from the air (if talk about energy and fertilizer it is nitrogen we are talking about). So as long as humankind has some modest source of energy synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is an unlimited resource. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilizer#High_energy_consumption

Potassium and phosphorous fertilizers really are a limited resource, that must be mined to produce. But organic farming permits the use of these fertilizers and so does not help with resource depletion here much, if at all.

Now overuse of nitrogen fertilizer is a real problem since it runs off if irrigation is poorly managed and pollutes the environment (the annual dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is due to farming nitrogen run-off). So restricting nitrogen fertilizer use and managing run-off is important, but it does not require organic farming to do so.

The principal problem for modern farming is loss of organic material from soil. Organic practices can help here, but they are not required. Simply allowing fields to grow cover crops in rotation, but following regular commercial practices otherwise can address this.

Ford is an unusual case though - he was never elected to the office in the first place so he was running for election not re-election.

So you are saying that your theories are so profound they transcend evidence, and are true because of their evident trueness to yourself?

Giving something a Greek name doesn't give substance.

Sounds like the post-modernism of the right. We don't need no stinkin' evidence!

Are property rights uniformly enforced in the absence of government?

Who pays for the enforcement of property rights in this theoretical construct of an governmentless world?

Can you point to any concrete examples of a society based on this existing at any time or place? (To show that this isn't like Marxism - a philosophical pipe dream divorced from reality and impossible to actually create).

I call B.S. on this. Please provide a citation for this claim. DDT was NEVER banned for malaria control in any area where malaria was a serious endemic. It is explicitly permitted today (as it always has been) for the purposes of malaria vector control in affected regions. About 4000 tonnes are produced and used annually for this purpose. The Wikipedia page is a convenient place to start informing yourself about the facts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT .

Oh man - Exhibit A here. The aptly self-identified (by not logging in) Coward treats science as simply a process of advocacy for political (or other ideological ) positions. All money being spent on climate research is "pro-warmist" (since that is what actual science shows). That is so-o-o-o unfair to people who want to believe things contrary to the evidence.

On the other hand metabolizing 2000 kilocalories of food a day produces about half a pound of water as a by-product. This is more than the 3% lost.

TFA:

Already, Cooper's team of three has come up with about 100 recipes, all vegetarian because the astronauts will not have dairy or meat products available. It isn't possible to preserve those products long enough to take to Mars - and bringing a cow on the mission is not an option, Cooper jokes.

Can anyone suggest to me why powdered milk, and freeze-dried or liquid nitrogen frozen meat would not last for the three year voyage? One vendor freeeze-dired meat entrees claims they last 7 years: http://www.mtnhse.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=M&Category_Code=MHDL

Is there some constraint that they are not telling us about?

I'd say the filibuster-proof supermajority lasted only 5 weeks in effect. From the time Franken was sworn in until the death of Sen. Kennedy was 7 weeks, but the Senate was only in session for five of those weeks. Oh - and that "supermajority" exists ONLY if you count two Independents as being Democrats, which they weren't.

Despite what certain progressive rock bands would have you believe, there is no "dark side of the moon".

In my experience, with one Lexmark printer if you did not print for a couple of weeks the cartridge clogged and could not be unclogged. Sure, there was a cleaning cycle, it just did not work. A cartridge that does not print cleanly is useless, so unless I remembered to print regularly and did not go on vacation, after a liitle bit of use the cartridges had to be thrown out. A theoretical 2 cents a page becomes 20 cents a page, or even $2 a page if you did not print much before the clog set in (this happened to me in fact shortly after I bought it and before I discovered its clogging problem).

It was an all-in-one so I used it just as a scanner for awhile, until its drive mechanism broke and it started slamming the scanner across the platen instead of, well, scanning. What a piece of junk. Naturally I have no experience with a second LexMark.

The hole named "Jeanne" here is more than 178 meters deep, no way a drill can come close to that. And many of the holes detected on Mars are not lava tubes but sink holes, i.e. created by some process of erosion. This is often involves water, and "follow the water" is exactly what Mars exploration wants to do. We are much more likely to find interesting water-related geology and chemistry hundreds of meters down a water-erosion tunnel than a few meters down under the surface.

This comment posits the existence of intrinsically "accident prone" individuals that will be eliminated, thus lowering the death rate by a significant factor. Most popular notions of "accident proneness" is simply blaming the people at the high end of random accident bell curve. Real accident proneness is rare enough that its mere existence has been controversial for decades, and is difficult to detect statistically. But it seems there actually are people who are substantially more prone to accidents than the general population: researchers at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands in a 2007 meta-analysis of 79 studies covering 150,000 people found one out of every 29 people has a 50 percent or higher chance of having an accident than others, but they are too few to drive the overall accident rates (they are hard to detect statistically in fact), and they all only die once. Eliminating them all has a trivial effect on the overall accident rate.

Accident rates are not markedly different from early adulthood until advanced age (over 70), bouncing around between 35 and 57 per 100,000 for 50 years with no trend. There is thus little real evidence to suppose that accident rates will drop due to some natural attrition process.

But accident rates are malleable as I said - so yes, the average lifespan limit can be extended beyond this 2,000 year estimate, but how much enters into a lot of speculation. Training people to avoid accidents is probably one of the most effective (i.e. altering behavior), and building in safeguards to prevent avoidable ones is another.

Yet.

According to the CDC for 2009 there were 118,021 accidental deaths and 36,909 suicides for a population of 307 million. As a first approximation this gives a death rate from non-disease causes of one per 1,982 Americans. This suggests a non-disease lifespan of about 2,000 years with a 25% chance of suicide being your ultimate end. Suicide rates are quite variable though (and suggests that women will outlive men due to lower suicide rates alone). Accident rates can be lowered of course with properly enforced safety standards (that means "laws" and "government").