… so much for the dream of bucolic farm life. The air there will kill you faster than the smog here, according to Discovery News. (Be sure to click and look at their little “worst offenders” slideshow):

Feb. 29, 2008 — Like flatulence that never dissipates, gaseous ammonia and other odorous gases resulting from animal manure can attach to dust particles, leaving behind matter that is both unpleasant and unhealthy for humans, according to new research that evaluated the levels of dust stink.

The study, which will be published in next month’s Biosystems Engineering journal, is among the first to quantify dust gas emissions. Dust from structures housing cattle, laying hens and pigs was studied, with the dust particles produced mainly from feed, manure, bedding, soil and the animals’ dry skin.

Co-author Jongmin Lee explained that an attraction-producing force, known in physics as the Van der Waals force, causes gas molecules to bond with those of the dust. The resulting bond is weaker than most chemical bonds, but it’s enough keep the gas stuck to the dust.

“The reverse of adsorption, desorption, is the transfer of gas from dust particles to the surrounding air, and the principles are the same as for adsorption,” Lee, a researcher in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, explained to Discovery News.

He added that heat can permit the gases to volatize and separate from the dust.

Lee and colleague Yuanhui Zhang therefore created a closed cylinder device that both introduced heat and then allowed for the measurement of the released gas from dust that was scraped off of barns, pipelines and exhaust fans from animal structures located in Illinois. They focused on ammonia, one of the smelliest gases produced by animals.

Based on their findings, laying hens and pigs produced far more ammonia dust than cattle did. The researchers attribute this to the way in which the animals were housed.

Someone must have really hated Mr. Van der Waals to name that “force” after him.

According to Doughy Pantload logic, that is.

Roy actually read Liberal Fascism and had this comment:

We get a hint at the problem early on, when Goldberg defines fascism. “Scholars have had so much difficulty explaining what fascism is because various fascisms have been so different from each other,” he says. But he is unwilling to take as a guide such apparently definitive statements as Mussolini’s (”the resolute negation of the doctrine underlying so-called scientific and Marxian socialism”) — even while calling Il Duce “The Father of Fascism” — prefering instead to emphasize Mussolini’s youthful enthusiasms for Marx and socialism, which Goldberg accepts as proof that Marxism, socialism, and fascism are all the same thing — that is, liberalism.

As a perhaps semi-conscious defense of this selective reading, Goldberg notes that “as a pragmatist, [Mussolini] was constantly willing to throw off dogma, theory, and alliances whenever convenient” — yet he doesn’t seem to grasp that this statement cuts both ways; if Mussolini was just conning people when he denounced the Left, why couldn’t he have been conning them when he embraced it?

Catch that? According to Pantload, since Mussolini was a socialist when in his youth, he was also a socialist when he came to power as a fascist and renounced everything socialist.

Ultra-conservative batshit-crazy David Horowitz was a notoriously a member of the radical left in his younger days, so it’s clear that he, like Mussolini, remains a committed communist rather than the batshit-crazy paranoid conservative he manifests so obviously, or rather that Horowitz’s Conservative group and the Young Spartacists are the same thing.

In the way that socialists and liberals are also fascists.

Even the Doughy Pantload hits the mark, once in a while. From today’s Freudian projection column ink spoor in the Los Angeles Times:

What Americans really want when they look into a politician’s eyes is to see their own images reflected back, like in Narcissus’ pool. The presidency in particular has become the highest ground in the culture war. Americans want a candidate who validates them personally. “I’m voting for him because he’s a hunter like me.” “I’m backing voting for her because she’s a woman too.” “I’m for that guy because he’s angry like me.”

If you think about this, it makes sense — at least with respect to the Pantload himself. When Jonah voted for George Bush, he no doubt said, “I’m for the incompetent, intellectually moribund son of a privileged family, who was handed every job he ever had (and for which he was wholly unfit) through a lethal combination of nepotism, family name, and his parents’ connections — because he’s just like me!”

Jonah Goldberg, narcissist.

Incompetent would-be historian Jonah Goldberg in the dunce’s corner the other day discussing Danish cartoons with the other juveniles, gets off on a tangent about Denmark’s rescue of its resident Jewry during the Second World War:

But, since the issue of Denmark and the Jews comes up in my email a lot too, it’s probably worth noting that a lot of mythology has accreted around the story of Danish “resistance” to the Holocaust. First of all, the King of Denmark never wore the Star of David, declaring “we’re all Jews.”

Second, and more important, the Danes were brave in defying the Nazi assaults on their sovereignty and the seizure of the Jews was seen as an affront to Danish sovereignty. I don’t mean to say that the Danes would have been fine with the confiscation of Danish Jewry if such an affront could be avoided. The stories of individual Danes doing everything they could save the Jews are morally powerful and important to remember. And the Danish government’s defense and rescue of its Jews was itself a moral highwater mark for much of northern Europe. But it’s important to keep in mind that the issue was always Denmark’s Jews.

And, of course, the Doughy Pantload is wrong, as only the Doughy Pantload can be. First, it is true that the King of Denmark did not wear a star of David — rather the Nazis were told that the King would be the first to wear it, and that the government would resign en masse if anti-Jewish measures were instituted. The King didn’t wear a star — because no one wore a star.

Second, for Pantload’s contention that Denmark’s rescue efforts was about Danish sovereignty and Denmark’s Jews, Hannah Arendt noted in Eichmann in Jerusalem, the Danish’s government’s response to German anti-Jewish measures was:

so decisive in this whole matter that the Germans did not even succeed introducing the vitally important distinction between native Danes of Jewish origin. . . and the fourteen hundred German Jewish refugees who had found asylum in the country prior to the war and who now had been declared stateless by the German government. This must have surprised the Germans no end, since it appeared “illogical” for a government to protect people to whom it had categorically denied naturalization.

It was not a matter of national pride which led Denmark to insist that it retain its stateless Jews, Arendt concludes, but rather “the fact that the Danish government had decided to protect them.”

Indeed, it was the very refusal of the Danes to accept the Germans distinction between native and foreign Jews which distinguished Denmark from other countries which, like France, opposed German anti-semitic measures against their own Jewish populations, largely keeping them from harm, while permitting refugee Jews to be “resettled” by the Germans. Some 1400 of the 8000 or so Jews in Denmark were non-Danish, a substantial percentage, and it was the very fact that the Danes’ action was taken without regard to nationality which distinguishes their conduct and makes it such a powerful moral tale.

So, typically, Goldberg’s remark that it was about Denmark’s Jews gets it exactly wrong. BTW, has the Times fired him yet?