... and use lighter tar on the streets white instead of the pitch black crap
The department of transportation started coating the freeways in the Phoenix metropolitan area with Rubberized Asphalt a few years back. At first I was like, "brilliant, dudes, brilliant", as the rubberized freeways are much blacker than they were before, and I assumed that this would increase the urban heat island effect.
Then I read about a group who actually had some numbers. They had an infrared satellite picture of the Valley of the Sun pre- and post-rubberization. In the before photo, you could clearly see where the freeways ran, as they were glowing bright orange. But in the after photo, the freeways were all black. The rubberized asphalt does not conduct heat very well, and while it does get hotter during the day (140+ deg. F, iirc), it cools down much quicker at night.
Rubberized asphalt is only good for freeways, where there won't be any pedestrians...
I don't think your 'aliens are here to eat us' thing works very well - It seems rather confrontational to me, like you're only giving half the story.
What if these aliens are to us what we are to cows. That they are here to eat us. What if they consume the energy from negative emotions such as fear and pain.
Robert Monroe uses a cow analogy too, but he said it's more like the milk cow at the end of the day - its udder hurts, and it knows to go to the barn where the farmer will relieve the discomfort. Thought it was in Far Journeys, but after a bit of a search I think it must be in Ultimate Journey. Both are excellent books, if you're not familiar...
Also, I'm not particularly well read in the alien thing, but I understand that there are different groups. Some feed off the negativity; others are helping to advance the human condition.
She sent me to an ENT, who found the root cause (allergies). Now, I keep the dust mites down in the house, take a nose spray daily, take Zyrtec and/or Sudafed when heavy allergy season hits, and have been ear-infection-free for a few years.
I'm glad that you've found something to keep the ear infections away (they suck!), but it seems to me that, since you're still taking a daily nasal spray and allergy drugs during part of the year, you haven't yet hit the core of the issue.
Allergies can be successfully resolved. Perhaps there's something in your diet - many children's ear infections can be traced back to a milk (pasteurized/homogenized) allergy. Hypnosis is one way of getting to the core of the allergy - for example, suppressed trauma from parents fighting on a picnic could've triggered an allergic response to grass; Donna Eden tells how she's dealt with allergic responses in her book. I don't recall offhand if Harold Reilly's The Edgar Cayce Handbook For Health Through Drugless Therapy mentions allergies specifically, but it's a gold-mine of natural solutions to many health problems.
So if they don't enter our bodies and result in healthier (and more productive) animals,
Agribusiness managers don't give hormones to their herds to help them become healthier. They do it for profit, pure and simple. Antibiotics don't make a feedlot cow healthy - they keep the sick ones alive.
Simply put, organic is not a viable long-term approach.
Neither is the system we have, where midwestern topsoil is depleted by monocropping corn & soybeans, which compose a substantial part of feedlot feed. Not to mention the excessive amount of natural gas that gets used to create synthetic fertilizers. It would be much more sustainable to feed the cattle directly on midwestern grassland...
The only group that benefits from the status quo are the argibusiness and chemical companies - Monsanto/et al. The consumer gets tasteless food; the farmer doesn't get any extra profit from their farm. Organic and all-natural farmers (the ones who know what they're doing) may get less output from their fields, but they more than make up the difference in reduced outlays for fertilizer/pesticides/etc and increased market price.
The meat production industry often gets an undeserved reputation, and there appears to be very little actual information out to combat those opinions.
The modern incantation of the industry deserves every slander it gets. I happened to find a copy of The Meat You Eat at the library two years back - I don't remember many of the specifics, just that it confirmed my selection of the most natural meats I can find. It was quite neutral in tone, except when it came to Veal.
I became friends with a grassfed beef farmer myself when I was in college. Went out to his farm one day at the end of my stay, and helped him move his cows around. Frank's meat was excellent (the best I've ever had), and his eggs had an exquisite flavor to them that I've never found the equal of. The chickens followed his cows through the pastures, and they'd go stomping through the cow manure chasing bugs and the like. Mmm... He wasn't certified, but his operation was certainly philosophically pure.
As for your bit about "scientifically unfounded fears" - science does advance, you know. Eventually certain ideologies will be substantiated, and all the rest will chuckle at what they used to believe.
The only reason agribusiness needs these new antibiotics is because they abuse their animals. Cows that are warehoused in feedlots and fed diets unfit for a cow and the stressful lifestyle.
Animal Stress: A high-grain diet can cause physical problems for ruminants-cud-chewing animals such as cattle, dairy cows, goats, bison, and sheep. Ruminants are designed to eat fibrous grasses, plants, and shrubs-not starchy, low-fiber grain. When they are switched from pasture to grain, they can become afflicted with a number of disorders, including a common but painful condition called "subacute acidosis." Cattle with subacute acidosis kick at their bellies, go off their feed, and eat dirt. To prevent more serious and sometimes fatal reactions, the animals are given chemical additives along with a constant, low-level dose of antibiotics. Some of these antibiotics are the same ones used in human medicine. When medications are overused in the feedlots, bacteria become resistant to them. When people become infected with these new, disease-resistant bacteria, there are fewer medi- cations available to treat them.
I read something written by natural dairy farmers about their experience helping conventional farmers convert their operations to more sustainable methodology. The converteres were like, "since you can't use antibiotics, what do you do when your cows get sick?" They said that their cows simply don't get sick, because they're properly cared for.
I haven't needed antibiotics since I fired the Medical-Industrial Complex 7 years ago. I got fed up with their inability to do anything for my chronic ear infections besides antibiotic drops and pills. There is a time and a place for everything, but these drugs certainly don't belong in the regular veterinary repertoire.
Basically, at college homework is so much better. I hear that there are high schools like this, I guess for gifted kids; too bad I didn't go to one.
You went to a high school for the proletariat. All men may be created equal (genius is common in our species), but the system can be rigged to produce winners and losers. Rich people send their kids to boarding schools, where they're molded into leaders. See the first video here.
I've read that some old oil wells, which had supposedly been 'tapped out' and capped over decades ago, have re-filled in the intervening years.
Recall that oil wells are pressurized, and are only economical to tap as long as that pressure stays high. Exploration for oil involves poking a hole where the oil is and measuring how much spurts out. If it's enough, they'll put up a permanent rig & piping.
Recall Kuwait in 1991, when some of the oil wells were bombed & set aflame... Took the special firefighters quite a while to put them all out.
Our understanding of the earth beneath our feet is as yet incomplete. I think the evidence indicates that oil originates from very deep in the earth. It's certainly problematic that we've removed so many billion barrels of oil from so many different places. The oil that recharges these fields comes from deeper in the crust - who knows what the usual (lubricative?) task of this oil is?
While it's somewhat topical: saw an interesting reference to Gull Island, Alaska. Apparently, back in the 70's, they drilled any number of test wells all across Alaska's North Slope, and there's billions of barrels worth up there. Due to the politics of the situation (Exxon makes a lot more money at $20/barrel than $10/barrel), the test wells were all capped over and "forgotten". (search for 'gull island', perhaps + 'oil')
Oil is everywhere on our humble planet - I think it possible that the present article's 'water reservoir' is some form of crude oil. The present "oil crisis" is a fraud to squeeze 'teh masses' (we the people) for every last drop. The U.S. has a ton of oil reserves - Alaska's North Slope, off the coast of California, off the coast of Florida. But in the last 40+ years, we've moved the messy business of extraction of said oil to poor countries, perhaps to save 'our' oil for the future, while we use 'their' oil up first. ?
All truly revolutionary ideas start as 'crackpot' theories. After years & decades of lonesome, dedicated research, some of these theories become widely accepted.... Wouldn't have replied, but I have a '93 Escort Wagon too. Be sure to change your timing belt at the regularly scheduled intervals for more reliable transportation. Manual or Automatic?:)
The discovery fits neatly... with the idea that the planet's moving crustal plates are lubricated with water."
I'm a fan of the Abiogenic theory of oil. This theory holds that crude oil does NOT come from 'dinosaurs' and swamps, but from some other source in the Earth system. IANACG (crackpot geologist), but I think crude oil is just a part of the earth's carbon cycle. Carbon gets sequestered in the ocean (coral/etc), said carbon gets submerged into the mantle, and millions/billions of years later gets transformed into oil, through one mechanism or another. See the 'proposed mechanism' section of above-linked page for details.
Could this story's 'water' patch also be a patch of oil? Oil would lubricate the crust much better than water, I think.
In light of this overview, hydrocarbon economies are bad not because of Carbon Dioxide, but because we're draining our planet of its lubrication. This is probably a Bad Thing - I expect some major seismic activity in the next 50-1000 years.
Once the Wellston plant closes, GE will move the plant's equipment to a facility in Monterrey, Mexico.
Every American that GE employs shoulders the burden of helping to finance the Imperial War Machine. $120 million jets and billion dollar aircraft carriers don't pay for themselves, you know... Mexican workers simply don't have the income/social security/medicare tax burden that American workers carry.
I wonder how much longer this economic bleeding will go on, before America falls down... six months? a year? There are consequences for running perpetual budget & trade deficits too, you know.
A good bit of any extra heat that is trapped in the atmosphere will go into the oceans.
If the heat came from the atmosphere, wouldn't it be detected in surface temperatures? This story seems to indicated the reverse: A good bit of any extra heat that is trapped in the ocean will leak into the atmosphere.
Heat from hydrothermal vents and other underwater volcanic phenomena heats the ocean water. The Juan de Fuca Ridge is in the pacific ocean along the Washington coastline, so I think it likely that this process is what the scientists' sub has detected.
There's also the Gods and Spacemen series. Gods and Spacemen in the Ancient West, Gods and Spacemen in the Ancient East, Gods and Spacemen in the Ancient Past, Gods and Spacemen in Greece and Rome, Gods and Spacemen in Ancient Israel, Gods & Spacemen Throughout History, and maybe some others. Ingo Swann says he tracked W. Raymond Drake down in the 60's or 70's, and that this author had learned 9+ languages so that he could read the primary texts.
They'll keep the people entertained by focusing on social issues... while the actual running of government is left to Party lead... sorry, political families like the Kennedys, Bushs and Clintons
Good points, but I don't think that it's fair to group the Kennedy clan with the Bushitters and Clintons. JFK started to stand up to the men behind the curtain (the Mob, rogue elements of the CIA, etc), and look how far he got. They entertained 'us' with their phoney "Warren Commission" to create a fantasy story about how the wacko lone-gunman did it, in the depository, with an inaccurate rifle.
Robert Kennedy was campaigning on the same platform. But 'they' remembered how they'd been double-crossed by his brother, so they didn't even let him get elected. Another lone gunman story took care of that problem too. Ted Kennedy probably just took note of what happened to his brothers, screwed up somewhat, and has decided to mostly lie low. (not familiar with his senate record/legacy, so I could be mistaken here.)
Billy Clinton's evil because he had a role in Iran-Contra - something to do with drugs being smuggled through Arkansas while he was governor. Apparently one branch of the justice department was looking in to it, but all their records were stored in the Oklahoma City Federal Building, and we all know what happened to that one - another crazy wacko with a bomb. Ignore those initial reports of multiple explosions, and undetonated charges on the building's support structures...
"would Americans recognize a totalitarian government before they were neck deep in one?"
It's important to realize that the people behind the forming totalitarian government have been pursuing this strategy for generations. We 'the masses' have no comparable inter-generational organization, and when presented with the possibility, most people's thinking skills just shut down: "Conspiracy? Hah, that canna be, NBC would've told me, hey lookie, Survivor's on Channel 3!"
But they never counted on the Internet, and now they're trying to put the horses back in the barn. It's easy to buy a mass media, but impossible to corral the free expression of ideas on an unfiltered communication medium. They'll try, and may succeed temporarily, but we're more innovative than 'they' are, and good people will always find a way to sound the alarm of nefarious men trying to rig the game of life.
Our medical system is based on the principle that if for have something wrong with you, you see a doctor, and the doctor prescribes the right drug for it if one exists.
This is the fundamental reason why our medical system fails it. While drugs have their place, they usually aren't the best response to an illness. But, in Fascist America (de facto integration between corporations and the government), all the health options that are NOT drugs or surgery get labeled 'alternative', and you generally have to discover those options on your own.
The basic requirements for health haven't changed at all for thousands of years. The father of western holistic medicine called them assimilation (the taking in nutrients) and elimination (clearing out waste products). See Dr. Reilly's Handbook for Health through Drugless Therapy for a manual (of a sort) on nutrition, exercise, massage, and other unconventional approaches to health that ought to be mainstream.
Results are what we should be concerned about, and by this margin the focus on finding the right drug falls down. A pharmaceutical company's ideal product is a 0drug that manages a sick person's symptom well, but doesn't address the underlying cause, so one has to keep going back to the drugstore for perpetual refills. There's not much money in "curing" disease - all the money's in managing the symptoms.
Reilly's handbook is all about the "cures" that he had much success with in his busy mid-20th-century practice. Not every patient got a cure, of course, but many found therapies that allowed them to be pain-free well after they'd been written off by their regular doctors.
Porn to me, replicates what happens in real life...in my own private imaginary world.
There, fixed that for you.
I finally 'got it' a month ago, quit the porn and faping cold, and two days later met 'Ms. Right' via teh craigslist. Had to wait two weeks for her to get back to town (lots of emails shortened the usual courtship rituals), and I must say that the real thing is much better than any porn I've ever 'consumed'.
For me, there's no going back - I never really liked porn (other than for how it helped me get off), and that many of the girls obviously weren't happy about what they were doing didn't help.
But you can do whatever you want - freewill and all that.:)
Bullying is an essential part of the compulsory school experience. However would the government subjugate millions of creative little minds into obedient automatons, without getting the kids' help in doing it to themselves? In the one-roomed schoolhouse, older students keep the younger students in line and model appropriate behavior. Learning is the student's responsibility, and the teacher is there to provide a little guidance. In the age-segregated factory school, learning is the teacher's responsibility. It is impossible for a single teacher to be able to engage 25-30+ different learning styles - perhaps a good teacher could reach 5 of his/her students. The other 20 kids in the class become bored out of their little minds, and a certain percentage of those kids turn to not-so-nice pursuits to entertain themselves.
Indeed, the intense fear of [a slave] insurrection seems to match the intensity of the collective denial about its cause. This is reminiscent of the countless school shooting plots "uncovered" over the past few years. While the culture continues to blame everything but schools for schoolyard massacres, paranoia increases, zero tolerance policies are applied oftentimes irrationally, and many kids' lives are being [ruined?] due to rumor, fear, or childish boasting of the sort that was once ignored.
Much like today's mainstream rush to blame Hollywood, the NRA, or other fuzzy outsiders for causing rage massacres that occur in offices and schoolyards, Americans, particularly Southerners right up to the late 1850's, blamed any slave unrest or rebellion on "outside agitators," whether on Northern abolitionist extremists or alien Jacobins. And they sincerely believed it. They couldn't even imagine that domestic conditions, that the very institution of slavery, caused slaves to rebel. It didn't make sense to them and those who suggested such a thing simply 'didn't understand.' To suggest that slavery as an institution and the South's culture caused black insurrection and violence was dangerous lunacy, an abolitionists was shunned and marginalized as today's Earth Liberation Front activists. (pg 46)
Substitute "children" for "slaves" and "compulsory school" for "slavery", and this paragraph perfectly describes why the bullying problem perpetuates itself: "we're" currently incapable of recognizing how the institution itself creates the problem. Gatto describes the government school as "psychopathic"...
Later chapters are on the Columbine and other schoolyard shooters, but I haven't gotten there yet.
(p.s. If you see this, thanks for the book recommendation, Slashdotter, whoever you were...:)
Simple, we can't afford to buy truely healthy food, in the quantities necessary for a healthy diet,... so we live on ramen, rice, hamburger, whatever we can get from food banks, pasta, and so on. Basically, whatever's cheap, and when it's cheap, it's generally unhealthy.
There's a sidebar in my favorite cookbook, Nourishing Traditions, about a rat study in Brazil. The group of rats that was fed only corn and beans were a little skinny. The group of rats that was given a very small amount of animal protein (equivalent to a one sardine a day, for a human) were quite healthy.
There's a caveat about corn - pellagra (caused vitamin deficiency) is caused by eating too much, unless it's soaked in lime water - so I'd recommend a diet of beans, brown rice, and a wee little bit of animal protein. The beans should be soaked in water (With a wee little bit of an acid - lemon juice/vinegar/whey) overnight, to make them more digestible. Salt and dry herbs, to flavor things up a bit, are cheap too.
You can get fresh vegetables by sprouting. Mung beans/wheatgrass/radish seeds/sunflower seeds/etc.
The raw ingredients for food are quite cheap, Value-added processing makes eating expensive. It's much cheaper, and much healthier too, to do all the processing for one's self, than to pay someone else to do it. I like using paper plates to look for rocks in my dry wheat & beans...
As for the physical activity, the best kind is the kind you do. A short walk around the block is better than nothing doing nothing at all.
I think we forget just how bad life used to be for most people.
I think you're generalizing the European slum experience across all of humanity, and I Don't think that's accurate or fair. Weston A. Price traveled the world at the start of the modern age, and found that people who lived a traditional lifestyle had marvelous health, and people who ate "modern" foods were sickly and had lots of cavities. I don't care to speculate as to why George Washington lost his teeth.
In their native state the natives of the Torres Strait Islands have exceedingly little disease. Dr. J. R. Nimmo, the government physician in charge of the supervision of this group, told me in his thirteen years with them he had not seen a single case of malignancy, and had seen only one that he had suspected might be malignancy among the entire four thousand native population. He stated that during this same period he had operated on several dozen malignancies for the white population, which numbers about three hundred. He reported that among the primitive stock other affections requiring surgical interference were rare. The environment of the Torres Strait Islanders provided a very liberal supply of sea foods and fertile islands on which an adequate quantity of tropical plants are readily grown. Toro, bananas, papaya, and plums are all grown abundantly. The sea foods include large and small fish in great abundance, dugong and a great variety of shellfish. These foods have developed for them remarkable physiques with practically complete immunity to dental caries. Wherever they have adopted the white man's foods, however, the suffer the typical expressions of degeneration, such as loss of immunity to dental caries; and in the succeeding generations there is a marked change in facial and dental arch form with marked lowering of resistance to disease.
I also refer you to my reply to the other post on tooth decay. My grandfather's teeth are currently rotting out, and if you stick to the conventional route I expect this'll happen to you too. Dr. Judd (link in that post) mentions that 42% of americans over 65 have NO natural teeth (#16).
All I'm offering is some better information - the choice to keep your teeth is up to you.:)
Teeth last a lifetime if they're properly cared for. Modern toothpastes are not the proper way to take care of the teeth - Dr. Judd says to brush with bar soap, so that the enamel can be properly remineralized. I follow the bar soap with a mixture of baking soda and salt. Acids dissolve tooth enamel; well-nourished humans have saliva that is slightly alkaline, so that the enamel is continuously re-formed. Dr. Judd doesn't have anything nice to say about fluoride either.
Weston A. Price, DDS, was a dentist in the early 20th century. He was alarmed at the increase in the number of cavities he saw in his patients, so one day he closed up shop and started traveling the world.
If I may be so bold as to summarize his findings in a couple sentances, Dr. Price found near-perfect teeth wherever a group of people were eating their traditional diets, whatever that diet might have been composed of. Modern food (refined flour, refined sugar, canned food, etc) was strongly correlated with tooth decay, poor bone structure (narrow faces, compressed dental arches, etc), and general poor health.
In the summer of 1933, [we made] contact with large bands of Indians who had come out of the Pelly mountain country to exchange their furs at the last outpost of the Hudson Bay Company...they have remained as nomadic wandering tribes following the moose and caribou herds in the necessary search to obtain foods.
The rigorous winters reach seventy degrees below zero. This precludes the possibility of maintaining dairy animals or growing seed cereals or fruits. The diet of these indians is almost entirely limited to the wild animals of the chase. This made a study of them exceedingly important. The wisdom of these people regarding Nature's laws and their skill in adapting themselves to the rigorous climate and very limited variety of foods, and these often very hard to obtain, have developed a skill in the art of living comfortably with rugged Nature that has been approached by few other tribes in the world. The sense of honor among these tribes is so strong that practically all cabins, temporarily unoccupied due to the absence of the Indians on their hunting trip, were entirely unprotected by locks; and the valuables belonging to the Indians were left in plain sight...
The condition of the teeth, and the shape of the dental arches and the facial form, were superb. Indeed, in several groups examined not a single tooth was found that had ever been attacked by tooth decay.... Careful inquiry regarding the presence of arthritis was made in the more isolated groups. We neithersaw nor heard of a case in the isolated groups. However, at the point of contact with the foods of modern civilization many cases were found including ten bed-ridden cripples in a series of about twenty Indian homes. Some other affections made their appearance here, particularly tuberculosis which was taking a very severe toll fo the children who ahd been born at this center.... The suffering from tooth decay was tragic. There were no dentists, no doctors available within hundreds of miles to relieve suffering.
The physiques of the Indians of the far north who are still living in their isolated locations and in accordance with their accumulated wisdom were superb. There were practically no irregular teeth including no impacted thrid molars, as evidenced by the fac tthat all individuals old enough to have the molars erupted had them standing in position and functioning normally for mastication.... Where the indians were using the white man's food tooth decay was very severe.... In the new generation, after meeting the white civilization and using his foods, many developed crooked teeth, so called, with deformed dental arches.
Weston Price, DDS/Nutrition and Physical Degeneration/
-from Nourishing Traditions, pg 320-321
Every recipe page in this 'cookbook' has quotes such as this. (Each of the sections in the book is set up as in the sample chapters on the previously linked website.)
Sterile food is a 20th century historical curiosity, and look at how chronic disease has taken off. Antibiotics may have diminished the danger of a bacterial infections, but new health syndromes have risen with a vengeance (cancer, heart disease, IBS, tooth decay, etc).
Lots of traditional foods were fermented. Nourishing Traditions (best cookbook evar!) has a couple chapters on using lacto-bacteria to predigest and preserve foods - cultured dairy products, fermented fruits & vegetables (chutney, Sauerkraut, pickled vegetables, etc), lacto-fermented beverages (made some "grape cooler" last fall - Mmmm.... ), etc.
It may seem strange to us that, in earlier times, people knew how to preserve vegetables for long periods without the use of freezers or canning machines. This was done through the process of lacto-fermentation. Lactic acid is a natural preservative that inhibits putrefying bacteria. Starches and sugars in vegetables and fruits are converted into lactic acid by the many species of lactic-acid-producing bacteria. These lactobacilli are ubiquitous, present on the surface of all living things and especially numerous on leaves and roots of plants growing in or near the ground. Man needs only to learn the techniques for controlling and encouraging their proliferation to put them to his own use, just as he has learned to put certain yeasts to use in converting the sugars in grape juice to alcohol in wine.
The ancient Greeks understood that important chemical changes took place during this type of fermentation. Their name for this change was "alchemy." Like the fermentation of dairy products, preservation of vegetables and fruits by the process of lacto-fermentation has numerous advantages beyond those of simple preservation. The proliferation of lactobacilli in fermented vegetables enhances their digestibility and increases vitamin levels.These beneficial organisms produce numerous helpful enzymes as well as antibiotic and anticarcinogenic substances. Their main by-product, lactic acid, not only keeps vegetables and fruits in a state of perfect preservation but also promotes the growth of healthy flora throughout the intestine. Other alchemical by-products include hydrogen peroxide and small amounts of benzoic acid.
-Nourishing Traditions, pg. 89
One insight that I think is particularly useful is how the book says that grains/nuts/beans/legumes should be soaked in water (depending on what's being soaked, with salt/whey/lemon juice) to de-activate enzyme-inhibitors. This makes said grains/nuts/beans/legumes easier to digest, which might be important for you Irritable Bowel Syndrome sufferers... If I'm making pancakes, I take my freshly ground whole wheat flour and mix in the raw milk and a little probiotics the night before. Leave it out on the counter overnight, and by morning all those nasty enzyme inhibitors have broken down.
Sample chapters at the page linked above. Check it out. More info if desired...
fire your employer, disappear from the IRS's tracking systems. Cash and barter are your friends.
srsly. I've never filed a return myself, and haven't had one filed on my behalf since I used up all the college money my dad had saved. Had a regular job after teh college, and eventually filed a W2 with teh employer that told him to withold nothing, as I made less than $7k/year.
Be a small fish in a big pond, and it won't be worth their while to bother you.
Yearly tax returns don't bother me, because the government always ends up owing me money.
That's a funny way to look at it. How much did they take from you total, and what percentage do they "owe" you back?
It just has to be something that counteracts the fear that some Americans live with.
The simple fact of the matter is that there is nothing to be afraid of, and Americans are only afraid because of the corporate media propaganda machine.
Throughout all this, there is a perspective on terrorism that has been very substantially ignored. It can be summarized, somewhat crudely, as follows:
Assessed in broad but reasonable context, terrorism generally does not do much damage.
The costs of terrorism very often are the result of hasty, ill-considered, and overwrought reactions.
A sensible policy approach to the problem might be to stress that any damage terrorists are able to accomplish likely can be absorbed, however grimly. While judicious protective and policing measures are sensible,extensive fear and anxiety over what may at base prove to be a rather limited problem are mis-placed, unjustified, and counterproductive
I don't know that I've yet seen an apology from a newspaper's editors for being taken by last summer's "liquid bomb plot". They can't, of course, because they're selected by the paper's corporate owners to advance the "consolidation of power" agenda. If the media barons were to suddenly say "sorry, there never really was anything to fear, and 9/11 might have actually been a 'false flag' operation..." Well - however would George Bush justify setting up permanent bases in Iraq, and his plans to attack Iran and Syria?
Re:If the Republicans own the elections...
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If when you said "Kerry was selected from the crop of democratic contenders" you meant "chosen by the few people who bothered to vote in the primaries," then yeah, that's pretty accurate.
I am specifically referring to the media elite's skewering of Howard Dean with constant replays of his 'yell'. That would be the one whose context was eliminated by a noise-canceling microphone.
The video would give a different impression if it had the roaring crowd in the background. But Fox/NBC/ABC/CBS replayed the noise-canceled yell ad-infinitum (700 times?), and that was pretty much the end of Dean's candidacy.
I'm sure there are other examples of the media being used to shape that election - this is just one that immediately comes to mind.
Re:If the Republicans own the elections...
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... what happened in November? Did they forget to press the "cheat" button... ?
The most interesting theory I've heard went something like this: The imperialists decided early in the election cycle that their party needed 4% to win, so they set plans to fudge the vote by that amount. Developments late in the election cycle (Mark Foley's thing for congressional pages, etc) boosted the democratic margin to 7%. If the 2006 election hadn't been rigged, the democrats would have taken even more seats than they did.
The Democrats lost in 2004 because they had a crappy candidate, and let the republicans control the debate. Get over it already.
The "men behind the curtain" pick the candidates. Kerry was probably 'selected' from the crop of democratic contenders because it was thought that he'd be the only one of the bunch with enough available material ('Vietnam Veterans Against Kerry', etc) to make a bush "victory" seem plausible.
Present understanding of physics pretty much rules out FTL communications, but there could always be some exotic aspect of our universe we haven't discovered yet that would allow it and we'll finally be able to log in to the giant IRC server of the universe.
I read something recently that pointed out that our universe is only "regular" around the edges of normal human experience, and turns "exotic" at the extremes. That is, the regular rules go away at sub-atomic scales (quantum mechanics), speeds approaching the speed of light (relativity), etc.
We're trained, in the government schools, with a sort of 'ideological blinders', where classic materialism is installed as the universe's presumptive operating philosophy. Materialism keeps getting revised to deal with contradictions between theory and reality - atoms were originally viewed as billiard balls, and were the smallest possible unit of existence. A better operating philosophy would only require 'filling in the blanks', and new data would be entirely consistent with the old theory.
Our knowledge of how the universe's fundamental principles is vastly incomplete. We've little idea how gravity and electro-magnetism interact, for example. If we did, there wouldn't be a Pioneer Anomaly. The Pioneer spacecraft are not where they should be, based on the current understandings of the universe's physical principles. Perhaps dark matter and dark energy are throwing the probes off their predicted courses.
One of the twentieth century's most distinguished scientists and Nobel laureates, physicist Max Planck, observed that; 'A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Slashdot Mirror
... and use lighter tar on the streets white instead of the pitch black crap
The department of transportation started coating the freeways in the Phoenix metropolitan area with Rubberized Asphalt a few years back. At first I was like, "brilliant, dudes, brilliant", as the rubberized freeways are much blacker than they were before, and I assumed that this would increase the urban heat island effect.
Then I read about a group who actually had some numbers. They had an infrared satellite picture of the Valley of the Sun pre- and post-rubberization. In the before photo, you could clearly see where the freeways ran, as they were glowing bright orange. But in the after photo, the freeways were all black. The rubberized asphalt does not conduct heat very well, and while it does get hotter during the day (140+ deg. F, iirc), it cools down much quicker at night.
Rubberized asphalt is only good for freeways, where there won't be any pedestrians...
I don't think your 'aliens are here to eat us' thing works very well - It seems rather confrontational to me, like you're only giving half the story.
What if these aliens are to us what we are to cows. That they are here to eat us. What if they consume the energy from negative emotions such as fear and pain.
Robert Monroe uses a cow analogy too, but he said it's more like the milk cow at the end of the day - its udder hurts, and it knows to go to the barn where the farmer will relieve the discomfort. Thought it was in Far Journeys, but after a bit of a search I think it must be in Ultimate Journey. Both are excellent books, if you're not familiar...
Also, I'm not particularly well read in the alien thing, but I understand that there are different groups. Some feed off the negativity; others are helping to advance the human condition.
She sent me to an ENT, who found the root cause (allergies). Now, I keep the dust mites down in the house, take a nose spray daily, take Zyrtec and/or Sudafed when heavy allergy season hits, and have been ear-infection-free for a few years.
:)
I'm glad that you've found something to keep the ear infections away (they suck!), but it seems to me that, since you're still taking a daily nasal spray and allergy drugs during part of the year, you haven't yet hit the core of the issue.
Allergies can be successfully resolved. Perhaps there's something in your diet - many children's ear infections can be traced back to a milk (pasteurized/homogenized) allergy. Hypnosis is one way of getting to the core of the allergy - for example, suppressed trauma from parents fighting on a picnic could've triggered an allergic response to grass; Donna Eden tells how she's dealt with allergic responses in her book. I don't recall offhand if Harold Reilly's The Edgar Cayce Handbook For Health Through Drugless Therapy mentions allergies specifically, but it's a gold-mine of natural solutions to many health problems.
Another of favorite modalities is Cranial Osteopathy/CranioSacral Therapy.
If you like being on the drugs that's fine, but there are other options too.
So if they don't enter our bodies and result in healthier (and more productive) animals,
Agribusiness managers don't give hormones to their herds to help them become healthier. They do it for profit, pure and simple. Antibiotics don't make a feedlot cow healthy - they keep the sick ones alive.
Simply put, organic is not a viable long-term approach.
Neither is the system we have, where midwestern topsoil is depleted by monocropping corn & soybeans, which compose a substantial part of feedlot feed. Not to mention the excessive amount of natural gas that gets used to create synthetic fertilizers. It would be much more sustainable to feed the cattle directly on midwestern grassland...
The only group that benefits from the status quo are the argibusiness and chemical companies - Monsanto/et al. The consumer gets tasteless food; the farmer doesn't get any extra profit from their farm. Organic and all-natural farmers (the ones who know what they're doing) may get less output from their fields, but they more than make up the difference in reduced outlays for fertilizer/pesticides/etc and increased market price.
The meat production industry often gets an undeserved reputation, and there appears to be very little actual information out to combat those opinions.
The modern incantation of the industry deserves every slander it gets. I happened to find a copy of The Meat You Eat at the library two years back - I don't remember many of the specifics, just that it confirmed my selection of the most natural meats I can find. It was quite neutral in tone, except when it came to Veal.
I became friends with a grassfed beef farmer myself when I was in college. Went out to his farm one day at the end of my stay, and helped him move his cows around. Frank's meat was excellent (the best I've ever had), and his eggs had an exquisite flavor to them that I've never found the equal of. The chickens followed his cows through the pastures, and they'd go stomping through the cow manure chasing bugs and the like. Mmm... He wasn't certified, but his operation was certainly philosophically pure.
As for your bit about "scientifically unfounded fears" - science does advance, you know. Eventually certain ideologies will be substantiated, and all the rest will chuckle at what they used to believe.
I read something written by natural dairy farmers about their experience helping conventional farmers convert their operations to more sustainable methodology. The converteres were like, "since you can't use antibiotics, what do you do when your cows get sick?" They said that their cows simply don't get sick, because they're properly cared for.
I haven't needed antibiotics since I fired the Medical-Industrial Complex 7 years ago. I got fed up with their inability to do anything for my chronic ear infections besides antibiotic drops and pills. There is a time and a place for everything, but these drugs certainly don't belong in the regular veterinary repertoire.
Basically, at college homework is so much better. I hear that there are high schools like this, I guess for gifted kids; too bad I didn't go to one.
You went to a high school for the proletariat. All men may be created equal (genius is common in our species), but the system can be rigged to produce winners and losers. Rich people send their kids to boarding schools, where they're molded into leaders. See the first video here.
I've read that some old oil wells, which had supposedly been 'tapped out' and capped over decades ago, have re-filled in the intervening years.
Recall that oil wells are pressurized, and are only economical to tap as long as that pressure stays high. Exploration for oil involves poking a hole where the oil is and measuring how much spurts out. If it's enough, they'll put up a permanent rig & piping.
Recall Kuwait in 1991, when some of the oil wells were bombed & set aflame... Took the special firefighters quite a while to put them all out.
Our understanding of the earth beneath our feet is as yet incomplete. I think the evidence indicates that oil originates from very deep in the earth. It's certainly problematic that we've removed so many billion barrels of oil from so many different places. The oil that recharges these fields comes from deeper in the crust - who knows what the usual (lubricative?) task of this oil is?
While it's somewhat topical: saw an interesting reference to Gull Island, Alaska. Apparently, back in the 70's, they drilled any number of test wells all across Alaska's North Slope, and there's billions of barrels worth up there. Due to the politics of the situation (Exxon makes a lot more money at $20/barrel than $10/barrel), the test wells were all capped over and "forgotten". (search for 'gull island', perhaps + 'oil')
Oil is everywhere on our humble planet - I think it possible that the present article's 'water reservoir' is some form of crude oil. The present "oil crisis" is a fraud to squeeze 'teh masses' (we the people) for every last drop. The U.S. has a ton of oil reserves - Alaska's North Slope, off the coast of California, off the coast of Florida. But in the last 40+ years, we've moved the messy business of extraction of said oil to poor countries, perhaps to save 'our' oil for the future, while we use 'their' oil up first. ?
All truly revolutionary ideas start as 'crackpot' theories. After years & decades of lonesome, dedicated research, some of these theories become widely accepted. ... Wouldn't have replied, but I have a '93 Escort Wagon too. Be sure to change your timing belt at the regularly scheduled intervals for more reliable transportation. Manual or Automatic? :)
The discovery fits neatly ... with the idea that the planet's moving crustal plates are lubricated with water."
I'm a fan of the Abiogenic theory of oil. This theory holds that crude oil does NOT come from 'dinosaurs' and swamps, but from some other source in the Earth system. IANACG (crackpot geologist), but I think crude oil is just a part of the earth's carbon cycle. Carbon gets sequestered in the ocean (coral/etc), said carbon gets submerged into the mantle, and millions/billions of years later gets transformed into oil, through one mechanism or another. See the 'proposed mechanism' section of above-linked page for details.
Could this story's 'water' patch also be a patch of oil? Oil would lubricate the crust much better than water, I think.
In light of this overview, hydrocarbon economies are bad not because of Carbon Dioxide, but because we're draining our planet of its lubrication. This is probably a Bad Thing - I expect some major seismic activity in the next 50-1000 years.
I wonder how much longer this economic bleeding will go on, before America falls down... six months? a year? There are consequences for running perpetual budget & trade deficits too, you know.
A good bit of any extra heat that is trapped in the atmosphere will go into the oceans.
If the heat came from the atmosphere, wouldn't it be detected in surface temperatures? This story seems to indicated the reverse: A good bit of any extra heat that is trapped in the ocean will leak into the atmosphere.
Heat from hydrothermal vents and other underwater volcanic phenomena heats the ocean water. The Juan de Fuca Ridge is in the pacific ocean along the Washington coastline, so I think it likely that this process is what the scientists' sub has detected.
There's also the Gods and Spacemen series. Gods and Spacemen in the Ancient West, Gods and Spacemen in the Ancient East, Gods and Spacemen in the Ancient Past, Gods and Spacemen in Greece and Rome, Gods and Spacemen in Ancient Israel, Gods & Spacemen Throughout History, and maybe some others. Ingo Swann says he tracked W. Raymond Drake down in the 60's or 70's, and that this author had learned 9+ languages so that he could read the primary texts.
They'll keep the people entertained by focusing on social issues ... while the actual running of government is left to Party lead... sorry, political families like the Kennedys, Bushs and Clintons
Good points, but I don't think that it's fair to group the Kennedy clan with the Bushitters and Clintons. JFK started to stand up to the men behind the curtain (the Mob, rogue elements of the CIA, etc), and look how far he got. They entertained 'us' with their phoney "Warren Commission" to create a fantasy story about how the wacko lone-gunman did it, in the depository, with an inaccurate rifle.
Robert Kennedy was campaigning on the same platform. But 'they' remembered how they'd been double-crossed by his brother, so they didn't even let him get elected. Another lone gunman story took care of that problem too. Ted Kennedy probably just took note of what happened to his brothers, screwed up somewhat, and has decided to mostly lie low. (not familiar with his senate record/legacy, so I could be mistaken here.)
Billy Clinton's evil because he had a role in Iran-Contra - something to do with drugs being smuggled through Arkansas while he was governor. Apparently one branch of the justice department was looking in to it, but all their records were stored in the Oklahoma City Federal Building, and we all know what happened to that one - another crazy wacko with a bomb. Ignore those initial reports of multiple explosions, and undetonated charges on the building's support structures...
"would Americans recognize a totalitarian government before they were neck deep in one?"
It's important to realize that the people behind the forming totalitarian government have been pursuing this strategy for generations. We 'the masses' have no comparable inter-generational organization, and when presented with the possibility, most people's thinking skills just shut down: "Conspiracy? Hah, that canna be, NBC would've told me, hey lookie, Survivor's on Channel 3!"
But they never counted on the Internet, and now they're trying to put the horses back in the barn. It's easy to buy a mass media, but impossible to corral the free expression of ideas on an unfiltered communication medium. They'll try, and may succeed temporarily, but we're more innovative than 'they' are, and good people will always find a way to sound the alarm of nefarious men trying to rig the game of life.
Our medical system is based on the principle that if for have something wrong with you, you see a doctor, and the doctor prescribes the right drug for it if one exists.
This is the fundamental reason why our medical system fails it. While drugs have their place, they usually aren't the best response to an illness. But, in Fascist America (de facto integration between corporations and the government), all the health options that are NOT drugs or surgery get labeled 'alternative', and you generally have to discover those options on your own.
The basic requirements for health haven't changed at all for thousands of years. The father of western holistic medicine called them assimilation (the taking in nutrients) and elimination (clearing out waste products). See Dr. Reilly's Handbook for Health through Drugless Therapy for a manual (of a sort) on nutrition, exercise, massage, and other unconventional approaches to health that ought to be mainstream.
Results are what we should be concerned about, and by this margin the focus on finding the right drug falls down. A pharmaceutical company's ideal product is a 0drug that manages a sick person's symptom well, but doesn't address the underlying cause, so one has to keep going back to the drugstore for perpetual refills. There's not much money in "curing" disease - all the money's in managing the symptoms.
Reilly's handbook is all about the "cures" that he had much success with in his busy mid-20th-century practice. Not every patient got a cure, of course, but many found therapies that allowed them to be pain-free well after they'd been written off by their regular doctors.
Porn to me, replicates what happens in real life...in my own private imaginary world.
:)
There, fixed that for you.
I finally 'got it' a month ago, quit the porn and faping cold, and two days later met 'Ms. Right' via teh craigslist. Had to wait two weeks for her to get back to town (lots of emails shortened the usual courtship rituals), and I must say that the real thing is much better than any porn I've ever 'consumed'.
For me, there's no going back - I never really liked porn (other than for how it helped me get off), and that many of the girls obviously weren't happy about what they were doing didn't help.
But you can do whatever you want - freewill and all that.
I think I mentioned the Columbine shootings a few months back, and someone replied recommending Going Postal - Rage, Murder and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond. I read this last night:
Substitute "children" for "slaves" and "compulsory school" for "slavery", and this paragraph perfectly describes why the bullying problem perpetuates itself: "we're" currently incapable of recognizing how the institution itself creates the problem. Gatto describes the government school as "psychopathic"...
Later chapters are on the Columbine and other schoolyard shooters, but I haven't gotten there yet.
(p.s. If you see this, thanks for the book recommendation, Slashdotter, whoever you were...
Simple, we can't afford to buy truely healthy food, in the quantities necessary for a healthy diet, ... so we live on ramen, rice, hamburger, whatever we can get from food banks, pasta, and so on. Basically, whatever's cheap, and when it's cheap, it's generally unhealthy.
There's a sidebar in my favorite cookbook, Nourishing Traditions, about a rat study in Brazil. The group of rats that was fed only corn and beans were a little skinny. The group of rats that was given a very small amount of animal protein (equivalent to a one sardine a day, for a human) were quite healthy.
There's a caveat about corn - pellagra (caused vitamin deficiency) is caused by eating too much, unless it's soaked in lime water - so I'd recommend a diet of beans, brown rice, and a wee little bit of animal protein. The beans should be soaked in water (With a wee little bit of an acid - lemon juice/vinegar/whey) overnight, to make them more digestible. Salt and dry herbs, to flavor things up a bit, are cheap too.
You can get fresh vegetables by sprouting. Mung beans/wheatgrass/radish seeds/sunflower seeds/etc.
The raw ingredients for food are quite cheap, Value-added processing makes eating expensive. It's much cheaper, and much healthier too, to do all the processing for one's self, than to pay someone else to do it. I like using paper plates to look for rocks in my dry wheat & beans...
As for the physical activity, the best kind is the kind you do. A short walk around the block is better than nothing doing nothing at all.
I think you're generalizing the European slum experience across all of humanity, and I Don't think that's accurate or fair. Weston A. Price traveled the world at the start of the modern age, and found that people who lived a traditional lifestyle had marvelous health, and people who ate "modern" foods were sickly and had lots of cavities. I don't care to speculate as to why George Washington lost his teeth.
I also refer you to my reply to the other post on tooth decay. My grandfather's teeth are currently rotting out, and if you stick to the conventional route I expect this'll happen to you too. Dr. Judd (link in that post) mentions that 42% of americans over 65 have NO natural teeth (#16).
All I'm offering is some better information - the choice to keep your teeth is up to you.
Weston A. Price, DDS, was a dentist in the early 20th century. He was alarmed at the increase in the number of cavities he saw in his patients, so one day he closed up shop and started traveling the world.
If I may be so bold as to summarize his findings in a couple sentances, Dr. Price found near-perfect teeth wherever a group of people were eating their traditional diets, whatever that diet might have been composed of. Modern food (refined flour, refined sugar, canned food, etc) was strongly correlated with tooth decay, poor bone structure (narrow faces, compressed dental arches, etc), and general poor health.
Every recipe page in this 'cookbook' has quotes such as this. (Each of the sections in the book is set up as in the sample chapters on the previously linked website.)
Lots of traditional foods were fermented. Nourishing Traditions (best cookbook evar!) has a couple chapters on using lacto-bacteria to predigest and preserve foods - cultured dairy products, fermented fruits & vegetables (chutney, Sauerkraut, pickled vegetables, etc), lacto-fermented beverages (made some "grape cooler" last fall - Mmmm.... ), etc.
One insight that I think is particularly useful is how the book says that grains/nuts/beans/legumes should be soaked in water (depending on what's being soaked, with salt/whey/lemon juice) to de-activate enzyme-inhibitors. This makes said grains/nuts/beans/legumes easier to digest, which might be important for you Irritable Bowel Syndrome sufferers... If I'm making pancakes, I take my freshly ground whole wheat flour and mix in the raw milk and a little probiotics the night before. Leave it out on the counter overnight, and by morning all those nasty enzyme inhibitors have broken down.
Sample chapters at the page linked above. Check it out. More info if desired...
fire your employer, disappear from the IRS's tracking systems. Cash and barter are your friends.
srsly. I've never filed a return myself, and haven't had one filed on my behalf since I used up all the college money my dad had saved. Had a regular job after teh college, and eventually filed a W2 with teh employer that told him to withold nothing, as I made less than $7k/year.
Be a small fish in a big pond, and it won't be worth their while to bother you.
Yearly tax returns don't bother me, because the government always ends up owing me money.
That's a funny way to look at it. How much did they take from you total, and what percentage do they "owe" you back?
The simple fact of the matter is that there is nothing to be afraid of, and Americans are only afraid because of the corporate media propaganda machine.
A False Sense of Insecurity? [pdf] [google cache]:
I don't know that I've yet seen an apology from a newspaper's editors for being taken by last summer's "liquid bomb plot". They can't, of course, because they're selected by the paper's corporate owners to advance the "consolidation of power" agenda. If the media barons were to suddenly say "sorry, there never really was anything to fear, and 9/11 might have actually been a 'false flag' operation..." Well - however would George Bush justify setting up permanent bases in Iraq, and his plans to attack Iran and Syria?
If when you said "Kerry was selected from the crop of democratic contenders" you meant "chosen by the few people who bothered to vote in the primaries," then yeah, that's pretty accurate.
I am specifically referring to the media elite's skewering of Howard Dean with constant replays of his 'yell'. That would be the one whose context was eliminated by a noise-canceling microphone.
Context-free Howard Dean Yell.
The video would give a different impression if it had the roaring crowd in the background. But Fox/NBC/ABC/CBS replayed the noise-canceled yell ad-infinitum (700 times?), and that was pretty much the end of Dean's candidacy.
Howard Dean and the Microphone of Doom
I'm sure there are other examples of the media being used to shape that election - this is just one that immediately comes to mind.
... what happened in November? Did they forget to press the "cheat" button... ?
The most interesting theory I've heard went something like this: The imperialists decided early in the election cycle that their party needed 4% to win, so they set plans to fudge the vote by that amount. Developments late in the election cycle (Mark Foley's thing for congressional pages, etc) boosted the democratic margin to 7%. If the 2006 election hadn't been rigged, the democrats would have taken even more seats than they did.
The Democrats lost in 2004 because they had a crappy candidate, and let the republicans control the debate. Get over it already.
The "men behind the curtain" pick the candidates. Kerry was probably 'selected' from the crop of democratic contenders because it was thought that he'd be the only one of the bunch with enough available material ('Vietnam Veterans Against Kerry', etc) to make a bush "victory" seem plausible.
I read something recently that pointed out that our universe is only "regular" around the edges of normal human experience, and turns "exotic" at the extremes. That is, the regular rules go away at sub-atomic scales (quantum mechanics), speeds approaching the speed of light (relativity), etc.
We're trained, in the government schools, with a sort of 'ideological blinders', where classic materialism is installed as the universe's presumptive operating philosophy. Materialism keeps getting revised to deal with contradictions between theory and reality - atoms were originally viewed as billiard balls, and were the smallest possible unit of existence. A better operating philosophy would only require 'filling in the blanks', and new data would be entirely consistent with the old theory.
Our knowledge of how the universe's fundamental principles is vastly incomplete. We've little idea how gravity and electro-magnetism interact, for example. If we did, there wouldn't be a Pioneer Anomaly. The Pioneer spacecraft are not where they should be, based on the current understandings of the universe's physical principles. Perhaps dark matter and dark energy are throwing the probes off their predicted courses.