Makin’ mealworms

We have a big container here in the house for raising mealworms, but it starts getting decrepit after a few months. It’s more frass than food, the adult beetles start taking over, and while it’s still productive for now, the writing is on the wall — a few more months and I’ll be dumping it into the compost bin. If I were smart, I’d start a fresh mealworm colony now, before the old one fades away.

I am smart, S-M-R-T, so that’s what I did this morning. Here’s what a mealworm paradise looks like:

I poured in a mix of oats and cornmeal, with some barley for variety, and chopped up some old carrots for gnawing on. Then I transferred a bunch of larvae from the old colony, and also a few adults to start laying eggs. The cardboard and toilet paper rolls are for shelter, and they also lay eggs on those. Now I wait for the population to explode, and then I can start harvesting the worms for the more important spider colony.

Biology is so easy. Provide the right environment, and your subjects proliferate with little effort on your part.

Life in the duck factory

I live in Morris, Minnesota, which is on the western edge of the state. This part of the state is called the Prairie Pothole region, which isn’t particularly glamorous — “potholes” are not generally regarded as a positive feature — but it’s nicer than it sounds. We’re part of a larger geological feature.

This is a part of the world that was scoured by glaciers, but not deeply. The countryside is full of these shallow dimples that still fit the description of a lake, but they are kind of crappy lakes. Not deep, more marsh than clear open water, not the kind of lake that you imagine building a cabin next to and putting in a dock and cruising around in your bass boat. Don’t get me wrong, tourists, there are also plenty of deep fishing lakes around here, but we also have this thick scattering of dimples. And these dimples are important!

Today, more than 300 bird species depend on the Prairie Potholes, including the endangered Piping Plover, iconic White Pelican, and elegant Marbled Godwit. But the region is best known for sustaining waterfowl: half of North America’s breeding migratory waterfowl are hatched and reared in this region, earning it the nickname “America’s Duck Factory.”

So yeah, I live in a duck factory. Big chunks of the land around us are set aside as “waterfowl production areas” and “wildlife management areas,” which has the advantage that they are left undisturbed and unplowed and are also great “spider production areas” although they are never displayed as such.

But the potholes are under threat. We have regulations to prevent local farms from building what are called “drain tiles” too close to the potholes — these are perforated pipes that facilitate drainage of the land, and which have the potential to suck a shallow lake dry.

One of the biggest threats to these wetlands comes from drain tiles — perforated pipes buried underground to move water within agricultural soils. These systems help farmers manage moisture levels, but when placed too close to Prairie Potholes, they can siphon water away and shorten or eliminate the annual life of these vitally important wetlands.

Existing rules establish minimum safe distances between wetlands and drain tiles to prevent farmland drainage from harming these fragile habitats. This combination of science, site-specific considerations, and good-faith agreements has successfully kept the wetlands wet while allowing landowners to use the rest of their properties as they see fit.

Unfortunately, some people would prefer to have more land for growing corn than “wasting” that acreage on migratory birds and want to squeeze out the potholes by placing more drain tiles next to them.

Now, a new request for information from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service signals a departure from 60 years of successful, bipartisan policy by reducing the allowable distance between drain tiles and Prairie Potholes. This proposed change could dry up vitally important wetlands, threatening one of North America’s most important breeding grounds for ducks and other bird species.

You probably don’t live in our duck factory, but if you like ducks and geese and other native birds, you can sign a petition to protect our environment. It’s a good thing to do.

Good news from Michigan

Abdul El-Sayed has won the Michigan primary!

Abdul El-Sayed has won the Democratic nomination in the US Senate seat in Michigan, beating Haley Stevens in a bitter competition that became a referendum on the changing face of the Democratic party.

El-Sayed won the race by a single point, fewer than 15,000 votes, according to the Associated Press. He will now face Republican nominee Mike Rogers – who ran unopposed – for a key battleground seat that is vital for Democrats to retain in order to achieve their lofty goal of reclaiming the majority in the upper chamber of Congress.

It was close, but I’m glad that Stevens is out (she was a weird shrill Zionist), and seeing a progressive candidate emerge in the Democratic party suggests that maybe the party will eventually shift.

Also, the late Ed Brayton, co-founder of Freethoughtblogs and Michigander, would no doubt be pleased by this outcome.

Texas hates education

You spend years, decades even, in deep study of a complex topic, and you keep abreast of the current literature. You regularly attend meetings with fellow experts to compare information. You take this knowledge seriously and try to pass it on to the next generation of scholars.

Then some yahoo in shitkickers who teaches Sunday School and got voted into office tells you you’re wrong and puts a gag on your teaching.

That’s how I feel about the threats to higher education right now. Texas A&M led the way, with administrators clamping down and telling professors they had to reflect their bigoted ignorant views on race, gender and sexuality.

The professors are fighting back, though. They’re suing the regents.

The lawsuit asks the judge to rescind instructions requiring professors to remove particular readings or subjects and declare the policy unconstitutional. They allege the restrictions violate the professors’ First Amendment rights and are so vague that faculty cannot determine what they may teach without risking discipline.

Good for them. These are the heroes we need.

The American Association of University Professors brought the lawsuit alongside four professors: Texas A&M professors Leonard Bright, Vanita Reddy and Landon Sadler and Tarleton State University professor Aaron George. They are represented by the ACLU of Texas, the national ACLU and the Houston law firm Yetter Coleman. They sued the system’s regents in a federal court in Houston.

After they clean up the Board of Regents, it’s time for the citizens of Texas to step up and fire Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

The sky is falling!

There are 6400 Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit right now, and Musk wants to launch more than 10,000 more; there are a half million more proposed by competing companies, like Amazon. Each one weighs about 800kg. Regularly, here’s what happens:

This adds up.

Due to the large number of short-lived satellites, at its peak deployment, Starlink’s mega-constellation will require 29 tons of satellites to enter the upper atmosphere every day. That’s nearly equivalent to a car entering our skies every hour.

A ton an hour is trivial on the scale of an entire planet, but the danger is that it could come crashing down on a plane flying through the debris.

I’m also thinking…that’s a ton of high-end electronics launched at great expense being vaporized every hour. It’s an extravagant, dangerous waste.

Farm politics? Not something I ever thought I’d get into

I live in a rural farm community, although I’m not really part of it. I don’t want to farm, I couldn’t do the work, but I respect it. Last night, we attended a meeting about farming anyway, because there are plans afoot that could dramatically affect everyone‘s way of life, and it has to do with water and massive amounts of cow manure. Riverview Dairy, already the largest dairy operation in the state (and busily expanding into the Dakotas), wants to massively increase the number of cows they raise, and they want to create the single largest dairy farm in the whole damn state, right here in little ol’ Stevens County, population 10,000.

Riverview’s proposed expansion would add 15,400 animal units, require 250 million gallons of liquid manure storage, and consume 319 million gallons of water every single year. The scale of this project — if it goes forward, it will be the largest concentrated animal feeding operation in the state — is exactly why Stevens County must not rubber-stamp this permit. We need to pack the room and show local officials that we do not want this mega-operation in Minnesota.

So pack the room we did last night. Unfortunately, Riverview also packed the room with their employees and advocates, and the Stevens County Planning Commission didn’t know how to do their job. This was a session where residents were invited to express their opinion, which meant we had a long line of people coming up to microphones to say what they think, and at the end, the commissioners were visibly befuddled and had no plan for what they would do, and were sitting up at the front of the room asking each other what to do next. It was kind of a fiasco.

The issue at hand was that Riverview wants to do a huge expansion of their business, and somehow managed to convince the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to not require an environmental impact statement. The side I was on was primarily arguing for caution, that we need to address potential impacts, while the other side was mainly a horde of dairy workers urging Riverview to go full steam ahead right now. The community fell into two camps with some interesting conflicts.

One side would just say jobs, jobs, jobs, and growth, growth, growth. Riverview Dairy is a great company that contributes so much to the community, and this expansion will help so many businesses. One unexpected twist on a traditional Republican position is that a lot of the speakers on this side had Hispanic accents, and told stories of how they migrated to the USA to take advantage of what Riverview offered, and had become American citizens. Fascinating stories: we don’t often hear about the benefits of immigration on the news. I only heard one person say that they wanted jobs for real American citizens, not Mexicans, and I don’t want that person on my side. One argument I heard was that having this mega-dairy will help grow church congregations, which I didn’t consider a positive effect.

The other side was concerned that draining several hundred million gallons of water per year from our aquifers could lead to long term consequences. Spraying a few hundred million gallons of cow poop into large fields could pollute an already polluted region, and wreak havoc on our rivers. There were concerns about the ongoing consolidation of small farms into this one mega-farm. The question on my mind was “who benefits?” and why do we need to produce so much milk; one person did ask what the need for all this output was. The debate wasn’t on whether Riverview was a good company that would benefit the community, but why we’re foregoing investigating deeply into what the long-term consequences were.

In the end, a small group of old white men, the planning commission, will retreat into a meeting room and make the decision, and I predict that they will decide that Riverview doesn’t need any more studies of their environmental impact. The county has a total population of 10,000, and this one dairy operation will be pumping out waste equivalent to the output of a city of 750,00 people, but we’ll just let them do their thing and then find out the consequences. Short-sightedness will win again.

left handed one finger typing

well, this sucks.
i woke up at 3am to sharp pains in my right elbow. i thought i’d sprained it in my sleep. i got in a more comfortable position, went back to sleep until 6.
woke up to whole right arm swollen and tingling, fingers fat and clumsy. first thought: blood clot? walked to the emergency room to get checked out. it’s nerve injury.
i’m home again. right arm extremely painful and useless. i have a bottle of tramadol. guess what? i can’t open it with one hand. guess i’ll wait until my wife gets home at 3.
don’t expect much typing from me for a few days.