Giant ragweed (Ambrosia trifida) is one of the main contributors to the hay fever that causes distress to millions of gardeners this time of year. While giant ragweed is quite capable of spreading through gardens and fields on its own, it’s also getting help from one of a gardener’s best friends: the earthworm.
Weed ecologists at Ohio State University have found that earthworms are moving seeds of giant ragweed around in the soil, effectively spreading this weed wherever they go. More than two-thirds of all giant ragweed seedlings studied emerged from earthworm burrows. Researchers began investigating this phenomenon because giant ragweed produces few seeds, yet it's readily spreading in gardens and agricultural fields.
While earthworms also collect seed from other plants, such as sunflowers, giant ragweed is a preferred plant. Earthworms forage for seeds and bring them into their burrows, often located only a few inches below the soil surface -- a perfect place for weed seeds to germinate.
For more information on earthworms as weed farmers, go to: Weed Science Society of America.
I found the article here:
http://www.garden.org/regional/report/national/2896Dear Friends:
The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.
We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market's attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.
Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I'd only be repeating what I've been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.
Still, at least a few observations are necessary.
The president assures us that his administration "is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets." Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?
We are told that "low interest rates" led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.
Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or "wildcat capitalism" (as if we actually have a pure free market!).
Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: "Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk."
Doesn't that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn't that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn't the federal government shown that the "many" who "believed they were guaranteed by the federal government" were in fact correct?
Then come the scare tactics. If we don't give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary "the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet." Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.
It's the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.
The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.
F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks' manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:
Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.
To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end... It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.
The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.
The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?
Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a "rescue plan"? I guess "bailout" wasn't sitting too well with the American people.
The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you're supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.
I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.
H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.
In liberty,
criminals who have created the financial fiasco we are currently
faced with. I don't know if his math is right...but I sure like the
idea!
OK.....here's a plan I could live with...
I'm against the $85,000,000,000.00 bailout of AIG.
Instead, I'm in favor of giving $85,000,000,000 to America in a
"We Deserve It Dividend".
We think great ideas come from anywhere.
Wall Street Bail Out
It is very sad that we are in this position at this time (that is to say how close to being a third world country which I talked about in my last address). It is my opinion that we do not give one dime to bail out the GREEDY and CROOKED companies. Where were our leaders while this was happening? Our President and both Presidential candidates keep telling America that the backbone of our country and economy is the everyday worker and small business owner. As a small business owner I am tired of them breaking my back. While the speculators drove up the price of oil we paid and are still paying the price at the pumps while those same speculators made BILLIONS with no risk involved. Ask any small business owner if Wall Street and/or the Government will bail them out if they make bad decisions in business. These people on Wall Street make VERY VERY good money (which they still have in the bank or in their possession unlike the stockholder that they wiped out). Wall Street, AIG, Fanny Mae, Freddie Mac etc employees are all still working, their fortunes and futures were not wiped out. If the President, Congress and both Presidential candidates pass this 700 BILLION bail out they are telling me Washington business as usual (PORK SPENDING JUST SUPER SIZED and under the term BAILOUT). I believe if no bailout is given the everyday worker and small business will not perish as they lead you to believe. After all we survive every other hurdle Government and big business throw our way. It is time they learn how to survive the way we do, by sucking it up and getting through with no guarantees like the rest of the real world survives. I would rather endure a few bumps in the road than have the Government sell the future of my children and grand children. If the big companies pay and suffer for their mistakes, we (as well as them) will evolve a better and stronger country for it.
Thank You,
Bill Balsamico
Casa D'ice
N. Versailles Pa. 15137
www.casadice.com
