CAFOs: A Collective Colonic Cornucopia

Swine flu is overwhelming the news lately, but there is one aspect of the problem that seems to have fallen through the cracks.

Swine flu (H1N1, as the Center for Disease Control has designated it) is not a food-borne illness; you do not get it from eating pork products. It is spread by contact between people, the same as any other sort of flu. The name ‘swine flu’ is applied because it was originally an animal illness that has started infecting humans too.

Yes, it’s a new and fairly nasty disease, but if you behave reasonably and take the precautions that you would if you knew any other flu was going around your school or office, you will be fine. Essentially, do all the stuff your mom told you to do when you were five years old—blow your nose, don’t pick; wash your hands; load up on Vitamin C and drink a lot of water; stay home if you’re sick; and go to a doctor if you really feel horrible.

The Mexican government blames the outbreak on a hog farm in La Gloria, Veracruz, Mexico, with the first human cases of swine flu identified in the vicinity of the farm in early February. The current hypothesis is that fecal particles transported by wind or insects were somehow ingested by humans, allowing the disease to make the jump to humans.

The farm in question is owned and operated by Smithfield Foods, Inc., of Virginia, one of the world’s largest food supply companies, with an annual revenue of $11 billion and an annual production of approximately 5.9 billion pounds of pork and 1.4 billion pounds of beef.

Agribusiness is big money—the 10 million hogs raised annually in North Carolina are the state’s largest cash crop, surpassing Big Tobacco with $2 billion in annual revenues. 92% of these animals are raised on factory farms with more than 2,000 animals per facility. In 1983, North Carolina had about 23,000 hog farms, most of which had fewer than 200 hogs. By 1997, however, those ratios had changed. There were now fewer than 5,000 hog farms, but the average was now 2,000 or more animals per farm, and 480 farms had more than 5,000 animals each. Most of the small farmers were simply run out of business by large conglomerates like Smithfield Foods.

Agriculture is, in the United States, a uniquely privileged industry, one that was originally exempt from many state and federal environmental protection regulations such as the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Safe Drinking Water Act, as well as wetlands and natural resource protection requirements. Some popular pesticides (such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, commonly known as DDT) were, however, specifically banned for their damaging effects on wildlife. The reasoning for this, when these regulations were created during the 1970s, reflected government and the public’s sympathetic attitude towards farmers, and a recognition of the shoestring profit margins on which most farmers lived. The Clean Water Act did, however, identify those factory farms that existed then (mostly poultry farms) as ‘point sources’ of pollutants which could affect water quality.

That was more than thirty years ago, however, and the exemptions made somewhat more sense in the 1970s than it does today, given the consolidation and industrialization that has occurred in the agriculture sector over the last three decades, and the exponentially larger number of factory farms operating today. The autonomous family farm in the United States is no longer a meaningful part of the American food supply or economy, a victim of the unforgiving need for economies of scale in agriculture, and the inability of private owners to absorb the loss of a harvest as easily as a multibillion dollar corporation. Most family farms these days are contract farms, to whom a firm like Purdue or Tyson will subcontract the work of raising and feeding animals. Most of our food is produced, processed, and provided by a surprisingly small number of immense agribusiness combines, such as Smithfield Foods, ConAgra, Tyson Foods, and a few others. Monsanto and a few other firms also hold a firm sway over the fertilizers, seeds, pesticides, and other products used to support agriculture, particularly pesticide-resistant strains of ‘Roundup Ready’ plants, which allow a farmer to blast a field with weed killer without fear of killing the wheat along with the weeds.

Farms like the Smithfield facility in La Gloria frequently cram tens or hundreds of thousands of animals into a feeding complex. The layman’s term for such industrialized operations is a ‘factory farm,’ but many regulatory agencies, trade publications, environmental groups, and others generally refer to such operations as CAFOs, which, depending on who you ask, stands variously for Confined Animal Feeding Operation, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, or Combined Animal Feeding Operation.

The current US EPA regulations for CAFOs, the 2008 CAFO Final Rule, define a facility as a “Large CAFO” (and thus subject to regulation under the Clean Water Act):

if it stables or confines as many as or more than the numbers of animals specified in any of the following categories:

• 700 mature dairy cows, whether milked or dry;
• 1,000 veal calves;
• 1,000 cattle other than mature dairy cows or veal calves. Cattle includes but is not limited to heifers, steers, bulls and cow/calf pairs;
• 2,500 swine each weighing 55 pounds or more;
• 10,000 swine each weighing less than 55 pounds;
• 500 horses;
• 10,000 sheep or lambs;
• 55,000 turkeys;
• 30,000 laying hens or broilers, if the AFO uses a liquid manure handling system;
• 125,000 chickens (other than laying hens), if the AFO uses other than a liquid manure handling system;
• 82,000 laying hens, if the AFO uses other than a liquid manure handling system;
• 30,000 ducks (if the AFO uses other than a liquid manure handling system); or
• 5,000 ducks (if the AFO uses a liquid manure handling system).

These are minimum thresholds, you understand—some facilities have ten times the number of animals needed to qualify as a Large CAFO. There is also a category called the Medium CAFO, which can cover smaller facilities with more direct potential for impact on the environment.

A CAFO can be summarized as an enormous number of animals crammed into a few buildings, unable to move more than a few feet in any direction, and essentially living in their own feces. Lots of animals mean big barns and enormous amounts of poop. Two years ago, I worked on a commercial poultry farm that had housed 25,000 turkeys, which is small by CAFO standards—some poultry farms in the Midwest, in the MidAtlantic, or elsewhere can house ten times as many birds. I can personally attest that the floors in these buildings were covered to the depth of a foot with excrement, wood chips, and the skeletal remains of dead turkeys, and that even months after the business had ceased operating, the stench was eye-watering.

Pigs in a CAFO facility.

Animals understandably do not thrive under these brutal conditions without substantial assistance from mankind, so it should be no surprise that factory-farmed animals are typically pumped full of hormones, antibiotics, and other substances from the day they are born until they are slaughtered. Diets are carefully adjusted to produce the most lean meat per animal for the least cost, which in some cases has a deleterious effect on the meat that is the end result—this is why pork is so much more lean now than it was ten years ago. Likewise, most factory-farmed cows are fed a steady diet of corn, which is cheap but fibrous, not easily digestible, and not very nutritious when compared to the grass that a cow is biologically structured to eat, which is why cows have to be stuffed full of nutritional supplements and pharmaceuticals.

Meat is not murder. Meat is manufacturing.

By contrast, the rule of thumb for non-industrial cattle raising, as suggested by the Ohio State University Agricultural Extension Program, is five acres of land per cow. A CAFO can raise hundreds or thousands of cows on the same land area, because it doesn’t depend on land area and grazing—it just locks the cows in stalls and shovels in the corn. Thirty years ago, treatment like this earned the raising of veal calves lasting opprobrium as an inhumane way to raise an animal, but it is for all intents and purposes how most cows are raised in the US today.

A typical CAFO, showing barns, lagoons, and support buildings. Photo courtesy of US EPA.

The large oblongs next to each group of barns are the manure lagoons. Guess why the fields in the above photos are that dark brown color.....

One of the most odious aspects of the livestock industry is the poop the animals produce, and which they by definition produce in almost unimaginably vast quantities. Nationwide, farm animals produce an estimate 1.6 billion tons of excrement per year. Some sixth-grade math will tell you that the farm animals produce in one day what the human population of the United States produces in three years.

Now imagine a factory farm in rural Iowa or Michigan holding ten thousand cows. A cow typically excretes twenty to twenty-five pounds of poop per day, or approximately ten times as much as an adult human. Ten thousand cows, then, produce 200,000 to 250,000 pounds of poop per day, equivalent to the excrement produced by the human population of the city of Manchester, NH. One dairy alone, the Vreba-Hoff II facility in Michigan, has a storage capacity of 22 million gallons of poop.

Vreba-Hoff Dairy II, south of Hudson, Michigan, partially flooded in 2003.

Unlike the collective daily bowel movements of the Queen City of New Hampshire, however, the poop produced by these ten thousand cows does not go into a sewer and does not go to a treatment plant. It goes, if we are lucky, into a storage lagoon the size of a football field, and there it sits. And sits. And sits. All through the hot summer, swarmed by flies, reeking to high heaven. Eventually, it may be composted, dried and sold as a fertilizer (such as the ever-reliable Bovung) or most likely, diluted into a slurry and sprayed onto fields. Poop, as any backyard gardener knows, can be a very valuable and useful commodity for growing plants, serving as a fertilizer and soil restorative. Given the sheer quantities of poop produced at a CAFO, however, the unfortunate facility manager is now often faced with the prospect of having more poop than he can use, forcing him to apply more than the appropriate amount of poop per acre (18.7 tons of wet-weight hog poop per acre being an industry rule of thumb, and worth about $50 at current prices), applying poop to frozen ground during the winter, or onto wet ground, just in order to free up lagoon space. These are not recommended practices, since the poop just runs off the ground surface without improving the soil and winds up in the nearest stream, pond, or other drainage nexus.

Any individual CAFO has the potential to become a collective colonic cornucopia, a fecal Frodi’s Mill which produces more excrement than even the best-intentioned crew can handle, leaving the CAFO’s staff running around like sorcerer’s apprentices trying to get rid of it all.

That practice spraying onto the fields, and the potential for the poop to affect streams and other waterways, was the subject of a 2003 rule issued under the Bush Administration by the Environmental Protection Agency, which required CAFOs to obtain National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits under the Clean Water Act. A NPDES permit, which can cover anything from an industrial wastewater treatment system to a construction project’s runoff controls, allows a party to discharge a certain quantity of material into a waterway, within strict limits and requiring chemical treatment and other safeguards to minimize the environmental impact of the discharge. The 2003 rule was itself the result of a 1992 consent order issued by a court in response to a suit by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which essentially told the EPA it had to do its job whether it wanted to or not. The 2003 rule, however, essentially rendered the NPDES requirements essentially toothless, since it gave CAFO operators a free hand in deciding on their own what ‘compliance’ meant, in addition to specifically exempting them from several important and longstanding federal regulations:

• The rule allowed factory farms to write the part of their permits that limit spraying poop on fields without state or federal review or approval, and without notifying the public. The preparation of permits is usually done either by government officials, or the permits are subject to government approval.

• The rule did not require CAFOs to use technological controls to reduce bacteria and other pathogens in the manure, even relatively simple and inexpensive technologies like methane digesters and odor controls.

• The rule exempted factory farms from meeting water quality standards.

These exemptions meant that any NPDES requirements essentially existed only on paper, without any real effect on the CAFO’s adverse effect on human health and the environment.

The Waterkeeper Alliance, the Sierra Club, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, and filed a suit against the EPA in 2005, alleging that the 2003 rule had violated not only the 1992 consent order, but the Clean Water Act itself, thus putting the EPA in the awkward position of having violated a law which it is charged with enforcing. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, threw out the 2003 rule, and ordered the EPA to start afresh, with specific requirements for pollution controls and public notification of permits.

Innumerable local initiatives have been launched over the last ten years to draw public attention to CAFOs and their environmental impacts, including Environmentally Concerned Citizens of South Michigan, who maintain the website www.nocafos.org.

This is not 1900 or 1950, when after milking the cows a boy growing up on the farm could wander down to the creek for some idyllic fishing. Not only are there probably no fish in the creek now, let alone any fish safe to eat, but the smell of the water alone would probably make a prospective fisherman nauseous.

In 1895, over a century ago, the New York State Department of Health considered a four-square-mile area of waterway adequate to absorb the 11,350 pounds of raw sewage produced daily by a neighborhood of five thousand people. Granted, that was nineteenth-century engineering and displayed a degree of conservatism and caution that fell out of favor over the succeeding eight decades, but it does put the sheer quantities into perspective.

The vast amounts of animal poop introduced into the nation’s rivers, ponds, wetlands, lakes, and so on easily overwhelms most of the natural ecological processes, converting streams into vast open sewers worthy of Calcutta, India. Several of the Great Lakes, a large part of the Florida Everglades, and the Chesapeake Bay are virtually biologically dead, due to the combined uncontrolled runoff from tens of thousands of acres of agricultural land.

Assume a hog farm CAFO in North Carolina, with two thousand hogs. A hog will produce about two tons of poop in one year. Two thousand animals times two tons of poop per animal per year equals four thousand tons of poop—enough to cover a football field to a depth of eighteen feet, or to fertilize 213 acres of farmland. Much of that poop could, however, wind up flowing into nearby waterways, or even seeping into the ground and contaminating aquifers.

A worst-case situation—a CAFO on the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, with feeding barns, poop lagoon, and visible flooding that would carry enormous amounts of contamination into the adjacent river.

Rainwater, floodwater, or irrigation runoff, which account for most of the material carried into waterways, can transport dissolved solids (such as fecal particles) as well as ammonia, phosphorus, hydrogen sulfide (the asphyxiating and potentially corrosive ‘fart gas’), organic acids, bacteria, viruses, parasites, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, pharmaceuticals, and various other undesirable materials, all of which winds up in the stream, lake, etc. The result is not so much a stream as a noxious brown soup unable to support life.

Many of these substances, such as bacteria (notably fecal coliform), phosphorus, and ammonia are also found in human-derived sewage, in which case they must be treated in a wastewater plant or septic system (which is a wastewater treatment plant in miniature) to protect human health and the environment. The exponentially larger quantity of animal poop, however, is not require to be so treated, and in most cases does not even receive the more cursory runoff controls generally required of construction projects.

Ammonia, which accounts for the eye-watering reek of mammal urine and bird excrement, presents a particular problem. Ammonia is by itself a weak base, with a typical pH of 4.5, and if enough of it reaches a water body it can alter the pH of the water to the point where it’s no longer suitable for native plant and animal life. Ammonia is, however, a nitrogen compound (NH3) and when it breaks down it releases nitrogen into the environment. Nitrogen is great as a nutrient for plants, but sometimes it is too great. When introduced into water bodies in vast quantities such as agriculture produces, it provides a surprise banquet for algae, microscopic plants that live in water, resulting in ‘algae blooms,’ in which the water becomes so clogged with algae that nothing else can live there. Fish, frogs, newts…. Everything but the algae has to leave or die.

Human health is also potentially at risk, since poop or the chemical constituents thereof can leach into groundwater, rendering the water unsafe to drink due to contamination with fecal coliform, nitrate, nitrite, and other compounds. Tyson Chicken settled in 2004 a $7.4 million lawsuit brought by the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which found that Tyson’s operations had contaminated the city’s potable water supply (drawn from municipal groundwater wells) with alarming levels of phosphorus. Tyson Chicken has been found guilty of twenty separate violations of the Clean Water Act for its Sedalia, Missouri plant, although this was a processing facility and not a CAFO, as well as facing suits and racketeering allegations about the deliberate recruiting of illegal immigrants as factory labor. Smithfield Foods was the subject of the third-largest civil penalty ever levied under the Clean Water Act in 1997, a paltry $12.7 million – 0.035% of the company’s 1997 earnings. Other potential pathways for CAFOs to affect public health are through air quality degradation through fecal particle and gaseous emissions, and damage to other crops, fish, or other livestock in the vicinity of the CAFO that people could consume.

The bottom line is that although poop is an animal product, in the context of modern industrialized agribusiness it is an industrial waste and should be regulated as such. The natural environment could absorb the waste generated by ten thousand cows if they were spread over fifty thousand acres, but ten thousand cows concentrated in five acres is a contaminant source that overwhelms natural processes and damages the environment. This is not the liberal establishment picking on Ma and Pa Kettle. This is a matter of industrialized big business, the equivalent of the public’s realization thirty years ago that hazardous wastes posed a clear and present danger to human health and the environment. The nation owes it to itself to address the problem before we have another disaster on the scale of Love Canal.

As a footnote to the above, there remains one major issue which must be addressed, which is the safety of our food supply. Within the last two years, we have seen panics over peanut products, dog food, beef, Malt-O-Meal cereals, Nestle candy bars, and Gerber cereals. Given the relatively small number of hands our food supply passes through these days, a failure in one plant or factory farm can have enormous ramifications. If a Tyson Chicken plant has a bad day, all of the 100,000 birds processed that day could potentially be contaminated, a problem that may not be caught for months or weeks afterwards.

pure-strain (comedy) gold

Just when you thought you had heard every ridiculous, far-fetched, completely out-to-lunch idea there is.......... Republicans happen.

You see, dear readers and obedient minions, the Republican Party seems to be having a crisis of some sort, having realized that the last eight years were a complete disaster. Case in point, Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), who said "The Republican brand is in the trash can. I've often observed that if we were a dog food, they would take us off the shelf." Iraq- 'nuff said. Afghanistan-- people are remembering what that was all about, and wondering where Bin Laden is, closing on seven years after the 9/11 attacks. Eight years of Republican economics and banking deregulation not only brought us the housing market crash and the repeated plummets of the stock markets, but a rapidly increasing number of bank failures and the need for the federal government to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored banking entitites that have their thumbs in the pies of most of the housing mortgages in the country.

The end result is that Barack Obama is beating seven kinds of hell out of John "Bush's Third Term" McCain, who is so screwed up that his own essays get rejected by the New York Times (which solicted them) because he regurgitates endless mush and refuses to speak to the issue they wanted him to discuss (specifically, what 'victory' is).

So someone in the Republican Party's apparatus decided it was a bright idea to put out a call for conservative bloggers and laypeople on the Intersystemoftubesweb to submit ideas on stuff the party should include in the national platform. The basic idea seems to have been something like the 1994 Contract with America that Newt used, abused, and refused to win a Republican majority in Congress, except starting from the ground up rather than the top down (i.e. asking people what they thought was important, rather than telling them what they should think is important). The party leadership apparently thought the result would the the same old self-affirming menage-a-trois of God, guns, and gays that made Republicanland such a wonderful place to live, as long as you are a white, straight conservative evangelical Christian, e.g. Charlton Heston.

Bzzzzt. Wrong.

Ron Paul's supporters deluged the website with libertarian-leaning suggestions and sharp criticisms of the party's recent leadership for embracing needless wars, pork-barrel spending on a scale never before seen, and the systematic defilement of virtually every branch and office of government, from the Justice Department to the Air Force Academy.

Were irony not passé, I would call this ironic, but as we all know, hubris is the new irony. Permit me to indulge in a Biblical reference, which is somewhat apropos under the circumstances. Tom Delay and the other priests of Baal who preached of a 'permanent Republican majority' have had their day, Ahab's throne is tottering, the years of drought are here, Israel has taken to its collective tents, and now Elijah has marched back out of the wilderness … and he is not happy at all.

If there is to be any future to the Republican party, the leadership had better listen to the 'Paulites' and listen well, because the party as it is simply cannot go on. Bigotry and bile will only get you so far—eventually you have to show people that you can actually do something to make their lot better, and the last eight years of George W. Bush and the three most recent Republican-controlled Congresses show just how little good they can do when left in charge of a government that they pretend to despise as a hindrance to Truth, Justice, the American Way, and other useful fictions, and which they simultaneously depend on to support their system of political cronyism. "God, guns, and gays" does not keep banks from collapsing or maintain levees in New Orleans.

OK, I let the political hoof-stomping go a little longer than I had intended, I admit, but now on to what actually prompted me to write this post.

One of the linchpins of Ron Paul's agenda is to put the United States' currency back on the gold standard, or in other words require that all paper money or coinage be backed by an actual quantity of gold stored in Fort Knox or some such place, and thus has some notional intrinsic worth. Keep in mind that the use of the gold standard had for all intents and purposes collapsed by 1971, in large part because it was not flexible enough to accommodate the inflation and economic growth (or decline) going on at the time. Staying on the gold standard would have ruined the world's economies. Do I like the idea that governments can basically print as much or as little money as they want, and deliberately manipulate financial instruments as tools of political agendas or social engineering (e.g. China's artificial government-mandated exchange rate with the dollar, which keeps Chinese goods cheap)? No. Absolutely not. Do I think we could go back on the gold standard after almost four decades off it, in which finance has mutated and mutated again? Once again, no. Absolutely not. Even if it could be achieved without wrecking the global economy, it would be extremely difficult. In any case, remember Gresham's Law—bad money drives out good, because people hoard the good money for a rainy day (taking it out of circulation) and spend the bad money.

There are those, however, who embrace the idea of the gold standard as a touchstone of value, a thing by which all other things can be measured. If you assume that the intrinsic value of gold is fixed and that there is a finite and invariable amount of gold in the world, this would make sense. The actual value of gold is the buying power, however, and that changes in response to the demand for the commodities you'd use the gold to buy. For example, during a bad famine the price of grain would skyrocket, and the price of gold would correspondingly weaken, since the same amount of gold would buy less grain. Likewise, economies were turned thoroughly upside-down in sixteenth-century Europe by the arrival of vast new quantities of gold from the New World; the price of gold, and most other commodities, and labor, all dropped through the floor. The price of gold also fluctuates—during the 1960s, the Bretton Woods Accords required governments to try to keep the price of gold fixed at US $35 per ounce. The price today is US $967 per ounce, which is much higher than even fifty years of inflation could account for. Two weeks ago it was a bargain at $957 an ounce.

Neither is the amount of gold in the world fixed-- the world's gold supply more than doubled during the 20^th Century, in large part due to industrial exploitation of existing gold mines in places like China and South Africa, and new discoveries in Siberia.

There are also those, including some conservative Muslims, who take literally the scriptural or traditional requirements to use religiously-sanctioned coinage, such as gold dinars, for religious transactions such as charitable donations, bride-prices, etc. For that matter, in 2006 Malaysia began minting dinars to the historic Islamic standard established by the 7^th-century Caliph Umar (an amount of gold equivalent to 72 grains of barley, or 4.25 grams of 22-karat gold; this is suspiciously similar to the Roman coinage known as the denarius) in an attempt to establish an international reference coinage for the Islamic world.

One of the more amusing proposals I found while browsing Wired's articles on the Republican Web Plea was this one, by one Bob in Clemons, NC:

"We need to abolish the Federal Reserve and go back to the gold standard. Not just any gold though, I heard about this stuff, pure-strain gold that has been around since God created the universe. That's what we should base our currency around since it is so close to God."

Hm. Is 'God, gold, gays and guns' too long of a mission statement?

Anyways, the idea of 'pure-strain gold' tickled my curiosity bone and off I went, using all my mad ph4T g00gl3 H4xx0R s|<1llz. There really isn't much out there on it, and even less of that is of actual substance. An alarming amount of what comes up stems from somethingawful.com, which is what it says on the tin. Heck, for all I know this could be some sort of internet meme that somebody passed off on the Republicans as a joke.

The idea seems to be this—that when some unmoved mover (thank you, St. Thomas Aquinas) that may or may not be a god created the universe, a certain amount of the matter created in the Big Bang (or whatever scriptural account you choose to believe) was in fact, Element No. 79 on the periodic table, one of the transition metals. Yep, gold. Large quantities of hydrogen also appeared, enough to apparently make it the most common element in the universe, but it is less clear where the second most common element, stupidity, came from.

Gold was always valuable because it had a somewhat otherworldly cachet—rare, shiny (this metric of value also applies to Gucci, Prada, Ferrari, and those cheap Christmas ornament toys parrots like to play with) invulnerable to most acids, not very reactive, extremely malleable, didn't corrode or discolor, very dense, and so on. Industrialized society eventually added electrical conductivity to that list. Supposedly this 'pure-strain gold' is therefore the purest and most unalterable form of gold there is, since gold is supposedly nonreactive, cannot be diluted and exists in a finite quantity, is a physical souvenir of the creation of the universe by the hand (or noodly appendage) of God Themselves. That would be Bob's ultimate benchmark of value—ancient magical gold from the dawn of time.

I'll leave it to the astrophysicists to determine whether or not 'pure strain gold' is even theoretically feasible; I don't know what elements they expect were first spawned in the furnaces of creation, much less can I fathom how a lump of Ur-gold could survive billions of years of time without being affected. Perhaps this is one of those ideas best left to people who know for an absolute fact that the world was created on the 21^st of October in 4004 BC (it was a Sunday).

For my part, however, one cannot work in the field I do and not pick up the odd bits of chemistry, especially important concepts like reactivity (the vital practical application of which is How Not To Make Things Go Boom). Gold is not very reactive by any standard, especially when compared with elements like sodium, which go bang when you drop them in water. It does, however, react with elements in the halogen family, (e.g. hydrofluoric acid * to form chloroauric acid, a process used in recovering gold from electronic parts) and bonds quite happily with chlorine to form various types of auric chloride, or with cyanide compounds (sometimes used in gold plating work). Gold readily forms alloys with many metals, including silver, copper, and so on. On top of that, there are (I admit, I googled it) fifteen radioisotopes of gold which are constantly shifting in their atomic makeup, since that's what radioisotopes do.

*Alchemists historically made much of this stuff, referring to it as aqua regia, or royal water, because it could dissolve metals such as gold and platinum, that were immune to the attacks of other acids.

You know what? If this makes me a goddam lib'rul left-wing east coast elitist, then I like it and so be it…since at least I know stuff and can think for myself. I'll pass on the lattes, though.