BPro

USA

[BPro @BPro02]

@greg16676935420 Oh no

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In 1958 the Chinese state worked out that sparrows were eating the grain, and organised six hundred million people to kill every one of them.

It did not take bullets. Villages, schools and factory units turned out with pots, pans, drums and gongs and made continuous noise so that no bird could land anywhere. Nests were pulled down, eggs smashed, chicks killed. The sparrows flew until their hearts gave out and dropped into the streets, where children collected them and the totals were reported upward as achievements. The toll ran into the hundreds of millions.

The arithmetic was sound as far as it went. A sparrow eats grain. Fewer sparrows, more grain, more people fed. Nobody in the room was wrong about what the bird took.

They were wrong about what it did.

Sparrows eat insects, in enormous quantity, and most of all in the breeding season when the chicks need protein. Take them out of a farmed landscape and the locusts and grain borers they had been holding down are handed the whole country. Which is what happened. Crop losses to insects rose sharply, and by 1960 the ornithologist Tso-hsin Cheng had made the case well enough that Mao ordered sparrows struck from the list and replaced with bed bugs.

Far too late, and never the whole cause. The famine of 1959 to 1961 was principally a policy famine, driven by collectivisation, grain requisition and the diversion of farm labour to backyard steel furnaces, and the dead are counted in tens of millions.

But the sparrow campaign is the purest thing in the episode, because it is the reasoning stripped to bone. A committee looked at a living system, isolated the one animal it could measure as a cost, and calculated the gain from removing it without ever asking what that animal was holding up.

Now look at what is being proposed for grassland.

The ruminant is measured the same way, on one ledger line, the methane it emits and the land it stands on. What is left off the ledger is everything it does. The grazing that keeps grassland grassland instead of scrub. The dung that feeds the beetles that feed the birds. The hoof that breaks the surface so seed can take. The mouth that removes the standing dead matter which otherwise cures into wildfire fuel. The manure that returns phosphorus and nitrogen to the soil so nobody has to mine it and ship it in.

Grasslands and grazing animals co-evolved over tens of millions of years. Remove the animal and you do not get the same field minus some methane. You get a different system, and it will not be the one on the spreadsheet.

The men who ordered the sparrows killed were not stupid, and they were not cruel. They had a number, and the number was correct, and they were praised for acting on it decisively. It took two years for the second half of the equation to arrive, and by then nobody could put the birds back.

We are eighteen months into the herd reduction schemes.

The grass has not sent its invoice yet.

[BPro @BPro02]

@billglahn Smells like burning wood in our area, bonfire-ish almost

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

Master and Commander (2003) ends by promising more adventures, and it’s still hard to believe they never came. Crowe & Bettany were perfect, and Patrick O’Brian left behind more than 20 novels that could’ve sustained one of cinema’s great franchises.

[BPro @BPro02]

@RealSkipBayless Lame post from a lame ass dude

[BPro @BPro02]

@WhyWeDrinkHere We can

[BPro @BPro02]

@divotdudesgolf 16/ 165, 180, 275

[BPro @BPro02]

@JoshuaBarzon D for sure

[BPro @BPro02]

@Arkasiraee @KimCJorgensen @bscholl We know

[BPro @BPro02]

@JR_HIRSHey @Fully_Equipped @CallawayGolf We the people!

[zerohedge @zerohedge]

Soon every hyperscaler will be forced to do the same.

[BPro @BPro02]

@AlZeidenfeld Yeah not watching that

[BPro @BPro02]

@Veezyinc @HurlsDa @Tekeee WF

[BPro @BPro02]

@HankMardukas3M @SeifertESPN Was thinking the same, grow his hair out and he's a young VanG in training

[BPro @BPro02]

@RevivedThoughts Pretty fair points Troy

[Dr. Maalouf ‏ @realMaalouf]

The Pope cites Lebanon as an example of peaceful “coexistence” between Christians and Muslims.

Fun fact: Lebanon was literally created to be a homeland for persecuted Christians in the Middle East. And it was for a few decades.

The moment Muslim invaders thought they had the numbers, they started a civil war that lasted 15 years because they didn’t want to live with the same Christians who made them part of the country.

Thousands of Christians were massacred, Muslims became the majority, Hezbollah took over, and the country hasn’t known peace ever since.

Lebanon is the first and ultimate example that coexistence between Christians and Muslims is quite literally impossible.

It’s mind-blowing that anyone would use it as an example of coexistence, let alone the Pope.

[BPro @BPro02]

@HilldurG @unchaindmlody @allie__voss Meh I think you're telling on yourself

[BPro @BPro02]

@TomCottonAR Never forget

[BPro @BPro02]

Lewis Del Mar - TV
Give it a rip

[BPro @BPro02]

@Travis1 This is the all time what if team. Can't pick just one. All of these guys could have been it. Man TMac Penny and Rose, couldn't even pick one