Dr. David Nabarro from the WHO spoke calmly on teev last night. He said corpses are NOT the major health risk in disasters. the major risk is faecal contamination of drinking water from LIVE people.
I have always been puzzled by disaster reports which say "We are struggling to bury the bodies, lest disease break out" - dead people dont catch cholera...
It is a waste of resources to have refridgerated trucks keeping bodies 'fresh' better to photo, snip a small piece of DNA/flesh and bury or burn or simply leave the bodies, and tend the wounded. Rushing plane loads of 'bodybags' is a waste of transport. Bodies can be buried without 'bodybags'.
Refridgerated trucks and fuel have much better uses then chilling corpses.
The only justification for priority in corpse handling is for morale. Bodies look and smell bad, but they are NOT the major health risk.
What would be useful: pallets of aid slung under parafoils, with gps locators actuating fins/flaps to land the pallet accurately the gps kit to be recycled.
Also Steam generators powered by external combustion (pritchardpower) theres a lot of scrap wood now in many places, which could be burnt to make electricity.
"..the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon- " Rumsfeld - admitting that the US agency that shot down flight 93, also toppled the towers.
Fallujah follies:
On December 24, approximately 900 former residents of the battered city were allowed to return to their homes only to find that (according to BBC) "about 60% to 70% of the homes and buildings are completely crushed and damaged, and not ready to inhabit. Of the 30% still left standing, there's not single one that has not been exposed to some damage."
The siege, which began on November 8, was intended to rid the city of an estimated 5,000 insurgents who were using it as a base of operation. The results have been devastating. Over 250,000 people have been expelled from their homes and the city has been laid to waste. The US military targeted the three main water treatment plants, the electrical grid and the sewage treatment plant; leaving Fallujans without any of the basic services
buzzflash.."Four of my aunts and uncles are doctors in the main Hospitals in both Baghdad and Mosul. From contact with them, I can only imagine what it does to a doctor's heart to try to heal, knowingly in vain, a people who now may have become the first victims of irreparable, long-term geno-contamination in human history: Already at the Conference on Nuclear Arms in Hamburg, Oct. 2003, Dr. Katsuma Yagasaki, Prof. of Science at the University of Ryukyus, Okinawa, reported the US had dropped the equivalent of 250,000 times the radioactive nuclear waste dropped on Nagasaki in Iraq. Different from Nagasaki, however, the contamination in Iraq is widespread, dispersed over entire regions of the country, ...From scant reports and video that leak past the mainstream embargo on images from Iraq, we can only assume that Fallujah has been leveled like Dresden ..he entire city could very well be a permanently uninhabitable radioactive zone, yet we hear about the noble efforts of the US to move the 250-300,000 inhabitants back in to live in the now poisoned homes, water, earth, and air. .. The giant-sized presidential campaign posters of interim prime minister and US-backed former Saddam Hussein strongman Ayad Allawi, shown going up around Baghdad on today's cover of the New York Times, don't fool the citizens of a politically evolved society. The average Iraqi citizen is much more aware of the workings of power in politics and media than their Fox-News addicted American counterparts."
..The world must be prepared for this possibility: that the United States would be become a militaristic fundamentalist police state. We already have the biggest prison population and percentage in the world, the old primary accusation against the Soviets.
"Fallujah is now a free city" - Rumsfeld _________________________ __ Is this bad timing or what? _________________________ People,people. Recall that all in Nature is wave-like If the sea goes out a long way, do NOT walk out to pick up the fish. Rather, RUN for high ground.
Central Government indifference to disaster in Sri Lanka and Indonesia will help to bring about Independance for Aceh and Tamil Eelam
"But the Indonesian government has yet to decide whether to allow international aid agencies to operate in Aceh".
Eventually Jakarta must accept international aid, then UN peacekeepers, All the atrocities will be exposed. _________________________ _
Tue Dec 28, 3:08 PM ET Indonesia's Health Ministry said 27,178 people were confirmed killed on Sumatra..this figure did not include data from districts on Sumatra's hard-hit western coast, including the town of Meulaboh.. ..Earlier, the country's national disaster director, Purnomo Sidik, said 10,000 people were killed in Meulaboh alone. There was no immediate explanation why the Health Ministry statement did not count the figure given by Sidik or figures from other parts of the west coast.
_________________________ ____ Tsunami Warning: Cell phone towers, and at least one cell phone in each village, would be the cheapest warning system. a cell phone in each village would have many other benefits. In tourist areas, the towers & phones are already present. A widespread SMS tsunami warning SMS wouldnt be very hard. The problem is, in Indian ocean, such events are rare (hundreds of years?) so people would et tired of drills. _________________________ ____ from digitalglobe Swirling sea, tongues lashing inland. big animation
_________________________ ____ general satellite images: worldchanging - an interesting outfit, they mention globalsecurity and keyhole (keyhole needs new graphicd card, mine doesnt work)
Aceh deaths, GAM, Ansar al-Sunna, Miss Waldron's red colobus
Aceh deaths, GAM, Ansar al-Sunna, Miss Waldron's red colobus
Preventable deaths in Aceh
No news 28-12-4 12:28PM from the West coast of Aceh No-one can stop a Tsunami but remember the masses of dead which could be prevented, for which Jakarta is responsible: Saturday 25 December 2004.. Indonesian troops have killed 18 separatists in a single day in the latest clashes in Aceh province, the military said. The fighters were killed in four separate clashes on Friday, Aceh military spokesman Ari Mulya Asnawi said on Saturday. ..one of the highest number of casualties suffered by the Free Aceh Movement in a single day since the government launched a major offensive..May 2003. ..12,000 people - many of them civilians - have been killed since the Free Aceh Movement began its revolt in 1976.. May 2003.The military says 2300 ..killed since then. Sometimes a disaster can lead to change, when people lose faith in the current regime (Chernobyl, China 1976). Here's hoping that Jakarta loses its grip on Aceh
Fallujah follies:
24 December 2004.. Clashes have erupted between US marines and Falluja's fighters ..three US marines had been killed in the Al-Anbar province ..F-18 fighter-bombers struck at targets in the city's southern neighborhoods. Tank and artillery fire were also heard. .. "Some families entered the city in their cars after being searched, heading towards the al-Andalus neighbourhood west of the city, at the eastern side of the Euphrates.. "The instructions stipulated that no car can move inside the city. No child or elderly can cross the street ..charred and half-eaten corpses festooned the streets. Many Fallujans returned to find corpses in their homes .."I entered my neigbour's house and found him, after identifying him from an identity card. His corpse had lain on the ground, nothing left of him but some bones. .."The scene was very shocking and I could not stay as the smell in the houses and the street was intolerable," he said explaining why he left Falluja. ..we were shocked when we found no water, no electricity and no simple services." (in more legal centuries, these were war crimes) _________________________ One stop site for Army of Ansar al-Sunna videos dont register, - why register for ANY site when you can get your login for most sites from href="www.bugmenot.com"bugmenot
Monkeys, monkeys
New Monkey found: 17-12-4 ..in the Himalayas.. a new species of monkey, a stocky, short-tailed, brown-haired creature they have named the Macaca munzala, or Arunachal macaque. ..people in the area are quite familiar with them. They call them mun zala or deep forest monkeys
Miss Waldron's red colobus refound: Miss Waldron's red colobus McGraw is in the unusual position of proving himself wrong about waldroni, and he couldn't be happier about it. In an upcoming article in the International Journal of Primatology, he says he has proof that a handful of Miss Waldron's red colobus may somehow still survive. It's even possible some could be hiding among the twisted branches of the Ehy Forest.
The End Of Warfare Against the most heavily armed opponent in the history of War, Fallujah has still not let itself be "taken" to date. The mightiest military machine in history has met its match. A turning point in military affairs? The end of warfare, as practiced by the Americans - the application of overwhelming force to obtain a victory? ... It is indeed the greatest military victory in history. The self proclaimed mightiest empire that ever was, in fact, turns out to have had the shortest reign ever. This Empire met its match in the land between the two rivers.
lewrockwell "..Fallujah and indeed the rest of Iraq post April 2003, heralds "supersymmetrical" warfare and the end of conventional warfare."
A toast to the defeat of the evil empire - A prayer for the poor fallen souls.
Sat Dec 18 ..fighting that broke out Friday in Fallujah, which left six marines dead, was not an example [of] failure...
22-12-4 10:50AM Mosul More than 20 have been killed and more than 60 people have been wounded," ..the blast was a single explosion, and that its shrapnel had created uniform perforations.. as if ball bearings..perfectly round," ____________________ ..the agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent - that is, a cyanide-based gas - which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time. _____________________ 19Dec IraqTheModel CIA PsyOperative Ali bails: "I still love America... . But it's the act of some Americans that made me feel I'm on the wrong side here. I will expose these people in public very soon and I won't lack the mean to do this" ________________ andrewsullivan ________________________ OK so I'm not over the war. Gratitude to the Resistance, for halting Empire in its tracks
dry dreams, Abd Allah al-Janabi, Hugo Chavez, Juan Cole, Shrooms, Rimbaud, Bouguereau
dry dreams, Abd Allah al-Janabi, Hugo Chavez, Juan Cole, Shrooms, Rimbaud, Bouguereau Who will look after you when you die?" a Chinese girl asks me, in a dream. We both understand, she means - while I am dying. Funny thing, I have never once had an erotic dream. Always dream women are puzzled, wondering why I dont conform to some unstated rules. My dreams are trials, not bacchanals. I laugh loudly to hide a tear. I wake, to find tears welling, early trains click 16 times on rail joint. I pad to the kitchen, pop a Bupropion, swig a chardonay. push the screen aside, step out to start the gas water heater munch a sprig of parsley, tick off some mental list another day.Raucous birds and tough orb web strands tear at my indifference.
Fallujah follies:
If bombing & fighting continues after 41 days this means the USA cant capture a town. _________________________ 19 December 2004.. ..Iraqi journalist Fadhil al-Badrani, US warplanes targeted Falluja's eastern and southern districts. He said fierce clashes had broken out in the city centre between US forces who have been in the city since 8 November and Iraqi fighters .. ________________________ Shaikh Abd Allah al-Janabi..5 December: "Your brothers on the Falluja Council of the Mujahidin and those from other factions stand committed before God and before you to continue the Jihad against the occupiers and their agents until they leave Iraq." They "would continue whatever the sacrifices," al-Janabi said. "We defy Bush, to reveal to his people, his failures in Falluja, which has become the symbol and the voice of all oppression in the world and a solid platform of the resistance in Iraq." ____________________ The Fallujah police-state strategy represents a sign of weakness, not strength. The new Fallujah imagined by American planners is a desperate, ad hoc response to the failure of the battle to "break the back of the guerrillas". _________________________ ______ ______________ TomPaineVenezuelan President Hugo Chavez's recent discussions with Russia about the possible purchase of warplanes and his visit to Iran have also spurred a flurry of columns, particularly in the Journal and National Review , reminding readers how close President Hugo Chavez is to Fidel Castro and how determined he is to curb U.S. influence in the Americas. _________________________ _ For 15 years, some of us have warned that if we fail to adopt a traditionalist foreign policy, the world will, to our humiliation, impose such a policy upon us. Bush is at a crossroads. Conservatives, rather than wringing our hands, must re-engage the debate. All is not lost. All is never lost. - Patrick J. Buchanan __________________ wordsfromiraqthe guys asked if I wanted to "hang" a round. Of course I do. The awesome part about my job is that I get to see and do a little of everything. They showed me how to lift the round, where to place it and what to do when I dropped it into the tube, and there I went, hanging a mortar over a city in Iraq. They were like, "I think you’re the first girl we’ve ever let do this." Hmmm… there I go, defying Army norms again. The rest of the day went about the same... _____________________ juancoleIraqTheModel (ItM). Juan Cole also reckons that "IraqTheModel" is a fake blog, a PsyOp. ________________________ This never reported in Aus: iraqidoctorWednesday, October 27, 2004 ..there were two big explosions near me, the first was targeting the Australian forces near our home & by chance I passed the place of bombed car 5 min before the explosion, & this explosion killed 5 Iraqis & 2 Australian soldiers Shrooms on Sale. the Metropolitan police, which has so far taken no action in London, where magic mushrooms are sold openly in street markets. When I visited a stall in Portobello Road, business was fairly brisk, with family groups clustered round the stall choosing from among the mushroom varieties - Mexican, Colombian, Hawaiian, Thai. Christmas is a busy time, apparently, with grow-kits rivalling iPods as the must-have present last year. Graham Robb's Rimbaud biography. not enough about the poetry, perhaps, but sufficient about the life in Africa to demolish the myth of Rimbaud as anti-establishment. Amazing how thoroughly nasty and bourgeois AR was. He stayed in Africa because he was trying to save up for a good wife. He said if he returned poor he would only get a widow. He hoped to get a college girl if he returned rich enough. While in Africa he was beaten almost to death after cutting an infibulated girl with a knife and seriously wounding her. He was not killed because Muslims dont kill madmen. He trafficked in guns and traveled with slave caravans. He is recoded as attempting to buy two boy slaves. The most astounding thing about AR is his, and his families, treatment of his older brother. Alfred "married a pregnant pauper" and for this terrible crime against bourgeois values he was cut off from the family as if he didnt exist. Alfred became a bus driver, had three children, but Arthur determined he would get none of his money, and the family never contacted him. So its better to be a sodomite, gun runner, slave dealer, rapist and pederast than to marry low. That said, I would definitely read the poems, or watch Terence Stamp or DiCaprio in the movies
..even better, admire some of the vulgar glabrous painiings from the period:
"Morality is a weakness of the brain"
avian flu, Xmas, Mark Latham, plutonium-239, Fly through the Universe
avian flu, Xmas, Mark Latham, plutonium-239, Fly through the Universe
Somehow feeling inauthentic becomes an authentic stance, Cut off, reading emails from N. cut off in another continent. Weedy drunk nights, up at 4am to swig some OJ over dessicate throat, Garlic & lecithin to curtail coming hangover. Dirty flat, moss on the yard bricks. Basil, Endive, Oregano in Tomatoes. Crushed cinnamon coffee Fatuous Xtian celebrations in an evil time. In Cité Soleil the poorest pursued by so named United Nations. On the Lidcome train, he peers doggedly into another dire book. _________________________ _________________________ __ ..Konrad von Soest 1403
_________________________ _________________________ __ A young man died in Thailand of avian flu. "The case was an 18-year-old male who'd been exposed to sick chickens." The Thai Department of Disease Control said the young man had had "very close contact to... fighting cocks by carrying and helping to clear up the mucous secretion from the throat of the cock during the fighting game by using his mouth". That is, the young man had cleared the cock's airways by sucking his rooster's beak and swallowing the spit and mucus. "That was a risk factor for avian flu we hadn't really considered before," Dr Tim Uyeki told me dryly. OR: dont swallow when sucking cock... _________________________ _________________________ __ The first flight test in nearly two years of a planned U.S. missile-defense shield has been scrapped two days in a row this week because of bad weather..The first attempt.. was scrubbed by clouds _________________________ _________________________ __ _________________________ _________________________ __ iraqblogcount _________________________ _________________________ __ Mark Latham blogs _________________________ _________________________ __ more Mars Dunes _________________________ _________________________ __ tracks .. made by alpha rays from a particle of pllutonium-239 in the lung tissue of an ape. ..can penetrate more than 10,000 cells within their range. This set of alpha tracks occurred over a 48-hour period. The plutonium particle that emitted them has a half-life of 24,000 years. "At Work in the Fields of the Bomb" all pictures now online _________________________ _________________________ __ Fly through the Universe ..c/o Swinbourne University
TheAtlantic magazine archives are no longer free and articles from January, 1964 - September, 1992, are not available So, when you see any good article free from any magazine, take a copy, dont just take a link Here from 1966 is White Collar Pill Party:
White-Collar Pill Party
A good eye, a sharp ear, and quiet personal research characterize Bruce Jackson's examination of American manners and morals. This report on a spreading social habit is a long step ahead of journalism's routine portrayal of what has come to be called the drug scene by Bruce Jackson ..... There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol. There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality. But they used to take morphia and cocaine ... Two thousand pharmacologists and bio-chemists were subsidized in A.F. 178. ... Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug ... Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant ... All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.... Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932
rugs, like chewing gum, TV, oversize cars, and crime, are part of the American way of life. No one receives an exemption.
This was made particularly clear to me recently by my four-year-old son, Michael, who came into the kitchen one evening and asked me to go out and buy a certain brand of vitamin pills for him. Since he is quite healthy and not observably hypochondriac, I asked why he wanted them. "So I can be as strong as Jimmy down the block."
"There isn't any Jimmy down the block," I said, whereupon he patiently explained that the clown on the 5 P.M. TV program he watches every day had told him the pills would make him stronger than Jimmy, and his tone gave me to understand that the existence of a corporeal Jimmy was irrelevant: the truehearted clown, the child's friend, had advised the pills, and any four-year-old knows a clown wouldn't steer you wrong.
For adults the process is modified slightly. An afternoon TV commercial urges women to purchase a new drug for their "everyday headache" (without warning them that anyone who has a headache every day should certainly be consulting a GP or a psychiatrist); a Former Personality with suggestive regularity tells you to keep your bloodstream pure by consuming buffered aspirin for the headache you are supposed to have, and another recommends regular doses of iron for your "tired blood." (It won't be long before another screen has-been mounts the TV commercial podium with a pill that doesn't do anything at all; it just keeps your corpuscles company on the days you ate liver and forgot to have a headache.)
One result of all the drug propaganda and the appalling faith in the efficacy of drugs is that a lot of people take a lot more pills than they have any reason to. They think in terms of pills. And so do their physicians: you fix a fat man by giving him a diet pill, you fix a chronic insomniac by giving him a sleeping pill. But these conditions are frequently merely symptoms of far more complicated disorders. The convenient prescription blank solves the problem of finding out what the trouble really is it makes the symptom seem to go away.
Think for a moment: how many people do you know who cannot stop stuffing themselves without an amphetamine and who cannot go to sleep without a barbiturate (over nine billion of those produced last year) or make it through a workday without a sequence of tranquilizers? And what about those six million alcoholics, who daily ingest quantities of what is, by sheer force of numbers, the most addicting drug in America?
The publicity goes to the junkies, lately to the college kids, but these account for only a small portion of the American drug problem. Far more worrisome are the millions of people who have become dependent on commercial drugs. The junkie knows he is hooked; the housewife on amphetamine and the businessman on meprobamate hardly ever realize what has gone wrong.
Sometimes the pill-takers meet other pill-takers, and an odd thing happens: instead of using the drug to cope with the world, they begin to use their time to take drugs. Taking drugs becomes something to do. When this stage is reached, the drug-taking pattern broadens: the user takes a wider variety of drugs with increasing frequency. For want of a better term, one might call it the white collar drug scene.
I first learned about it during a party in Chicago last winter, and the best way to introduce you will be to tell you something about that evening, the people I met, what I think was happening.
here were about a dozen people in the room, and over the noise from the record player scraps of conversation came through:
"Now the Desbutal, if you take it with this stuff, has a peculiar effect, contraindication, at least it did for me. You let me know if you ... "
"I don't have one legitimate prescription, Harry, not one! Can you imagine that?" "I'll get you some tomorrow, dear."
" ... and this pharmacist on Fifth will sell you all the leapers [amphetamines] you can carry—just like that. Right off the street. I don't think he'd know a prescription if it bit him." "As long as he can read the labels, what the hell."
"You know, a funny thing happened to me. I got this green and yellow capsule, and I looked it up in the Book, and it wasn't anything I'd been using, and I thought, great! It's not something I've built a tolerance to. And I took it. A couple of them. And you know what happened? Nothing! That's what happened, not a goddamned thing."
The Book—the Physicians' Desk Reference, which lists the composition and effects of almost all commercial pharmaceuticals produced in this country—passes back and forth, and two or three people at a time look up the contents and possible values of a drug one of them has just discovered or heard about or acquired or taken. The Book is the pillhead's Yellow Pages: you look up the effect you want ("Sympathomimetics" or "Cerebral Stimulants," for example), and it tells you the magic columns. The pillheads swap stories of kicks and sound like professional chemists discussing recent developments; others listen, then examine the PDR to see if the drug discussed really could do that.
Eddie, the host, a painter who has received some recognition, had been awake three or four days, he was not exactly sure. He consumes between 150 and 200 milligrams of amphetamine a day, needs a large part of that to stay awake, even when he has slipped a night's sleep in somewhere. The dose would cause most people some difficulty; the familiar diet pill, a capsule of Dexamyl or Eskatrol, which makes the new user edgy and overenergetic and slightly insomniac the first few days, contains only 10 or 15 milligrams of amphetamine. But amphetamine is one of the few central nervous system stimulants to which one can develop a tolerance, and over the months and years Ed and his friends have built up massive tolerances and dependencies. "Leapers aren't so hard to give up," he told me. "I mean, I sleep almost constantly when I'm off, but you get over that. But everything is so damned boring without the pills."
I asked him if he knew many amphetamine users who have given up the pills.
"For good?"
I nodded.
"I haven't known anybody that's given it up for good." He reached out and took a few pills from the candy dish in the middle of the coffee table, then washed them down with some Coke.
The last couple to arrive—a journalist and his wife—settled into positions. The wife was next to me on the oversize sofa, and she skimmed through the "Product Identification Section" of the PDR, dozens of pages of pretty color photos of tablets and capsules. "Hey!" she said to no one in particular. Then, to her husband, "Look at the pretty hexagonal. George, get the Source to get some of them for me." George, across the table, near the fire, nodded.
I had been advised to watch him as he turned on. As the pills took effect something happened to the muscles of his face, and the whole assembly seemed to go rubbery. His features settled lower and more loosely on the bones of his head. He began to talk with considerably more verve.
A distractingly pretty girl with dark brown eyes sat at the edge of our group and ignored both the joint making its rounds and the record player belching away just behind her. Between the thumb and middle finger of her left hand she held a pill that was blue on one side and yellow on the other; steadily, with the double-edged razor blade she held in her right hand, she sawed on the seam between the two halves of the pill. Every once in a while she rotated it a few degrees with her index finger. Her skin was smooth, and the light from the fireplace played tricks with it, all of them charming. The right hand sawed on.
I got the Book from the coffee table and looked for the pill in the pages of color pictures, but before I found it, Ed leaned over and said, "They're Desbutal Gradumets. Abbott Labs."
I turned to the "Professional Products Information" section and learned that Desbutal is a combination of Desoxyn (methamphetamine hydrochloride, also marketed as Methedrine) and Nembutal, that the pill the girl sawed contained 15 milligrams of the Desoxyn, that the combination of drugs served "to both stimulate and calm the patient so that feelings of depression are overcome and a sense of well-being and increased energy is produced. Inner tension and anxiety are relieved so that a sense of serenity and ease of mind prevails." Gradumets, the Book explained, "are indicated in the management of obesity, the management of depressed states, certain behavioral syndromes, and a number of typical geriatric conditions," as well as "helpful in managing psychosomatic complaints and neuroses," Parkinson's disease, and a hangover.
The girl, obviously, was not interested in all of the pill's splendid therapeutic promises; were she, she would not have been so diligently sawing along that seam. She was after the methamphetamine, which like other amphetamines "depresses appetite, elevates the mood, increases the urge to work, imparts a sense of increased efficiency, and counteracts sleepiness and the feeling of fatigue in most persons."
After what seemed a long while the pill split into two round sections. A few scraps of the yellow Nembutal adhered to the Desoxyn side, and she carefully scraped them away. "Wilkinson's the best blade for this sort of thing," she said. I asked if she didn't cut herself on occasion, and she showed me a few nicks in her left thumb. "But a single edge isn't thin enough to do it neatly."
She put the blue disk in one small container, the yellow in another, then from a third took a fresh Desbutal and began sawing. I asked why she kept the Nembutal, since it was the Desoxyn she was after.
"Sometimes I might want to sleep, you know. I might have to sleep because something is coming up the next day. It's not easy for us to sleep, and sometimes we just don't for a couple or three days. But if we have to, we can just take a few of these." She smiled at me tolerantly, then returned to her blade and tablet.
When I saw Ed in New York several weeks later, I asked about her. "Some are like that," he said; "they like to carve on their pills. She'll sit and carve for thirty or forty minutes."
"Is that sort of ritual an important part of it all?"
"I think it is. She seems to have gotten hung up on it. I told her that she shouldn't take that Nembutal, that I have been cutting the Nembutal off my pills. It only takes about thirty seconds. And she can spend a good half hour at it if she has a mind to. I told her once about the effect of taking a Spansule; you know, one of those big things with sustained release [like Dexamyl, a mixture of dextroamphetamine sulfate and amobarbital designed to be effective over a twelve-hour period]. What you do is open the capsule and put it in a little bowl and grind up the little pellets until it's powder, then stuff all the powder back in the pill and take it, and it all goes off at once. I'll be damned if I haven't seen her grinding away like she was making matzo meal. That's a sign of a fairly confirmed head when they reach that ritual stage."
..
White-Collar Pill Party - Page 2
ext to the candy dish filled with Dexedrine, Dexamyl, Eskatrol, Desbutal, and a few other products I hadn't yet learned to identify, near the five-pound box of Dexedrine tablets someone had brought, were two bottles. One was filled with Dexedrine Elixir, the other with Dexamyl Elixir. Someone took a long swallow from the latter, and I thought him to be an extremely heavy user, but when the man left the room, a lawyer told me he'd bet the man was new at it. "He has to be. A mouthful is like two pills, and if he was a real head, he'd have a far greater tolerance to the Dexedrine than the amobarbital, and the stuff would make him sleepy. Anyhow, I don't like to mess with barbiturates much anymore. Dorothy Kilgallen died from that." He took a drink from the Dexedrine bottle and said, "And this tastes better. Very tasty stuff, like cherry syrup. Make a nice cherry Coke with it. The Dexamyl Elixir is bitter."
Someone emptied the tobacco from a Salem and filled the tube with grass; he tamped it down with a Tinkertoy stick, crimped the tip, then lighted it and inhaled noisily. He immediately passed the joint to the person on his left. Since one must hold the smoke in one's lungs for several seconds to get the full effect, it is more economical for several people to turn on at once. The grass was very good and seemed to produce a quiet but substantial high. One doesn't notice it coming on, but there is a realization that for a while now the room has been a decidedly pleasant one, and some noises are particularly interesting for their own sake.
I leaned back and closed my eyes for a moment. It was almost 5 A.M., and in three hours I had to catch a plane at O'Hare. "You're not going to sleep are you?" The tone implied that this group considered few human frailties truly gauche, but going to sleep was surely one of them. I shook my head no and looked to see who had spoken. It was Ed's wife; she looked concerned. "Do you want a pill?" I shook my head no again. Then, just then, I realized that Ed—who knew I was not a pill-user—had not once in the evening offered me one of the many samples that had been passed around, nor had anyone else. Just the grass, but not the pills. His wife suggested a pill not so that I might get high, but merely so that I could stay awake without difficulty.
"I'm not tired," I said, "just relaxing." I assured her I wouldn't doze off. She was still concerned, however, and got me a cup of coffee from the kitchen and offered some Murine from her purse.
The front door opened, and there was a vicious blast of winter off Lake Michigan. Ed kicked the door closed behind him and dumped an armful of logs by the fireplace, then went back into the kitchen. A moment later he returned and passed around a small dish of capsules. And this time it was handed to me. They looked familiar. "One a Days," he said. I had learned enough from the Book to see the need for them: the amphetamine user often does not eat for long periods of time (some days his only nourishment is the sugar in the bottles of soda which he drinks to wash down the pills and counter their side effect of dehydration of the mouth), and he not only tends to lose weight but also risks vitamin deficiencies. After a while, the heavy user learns to force-feed himself or go off-pills every once in a while in order to eat without difficulty and to keep his tolerance level down.
Later, getting settled in the plane, I thought, What a wild party that was. I'd never been to anything quite like it, and I began making notes about what had gone on. Not long before we came into Logan, it suddenly struck me that there had been nothing wild about the party at all, nothing. There had been women there, some of them unaccompanied and some with husbands or dates, but there had been none of the playing around and sexual hustling that several years of academic and business world parties had led me to consider a correlative of almost any evening gathering of more than ten men and women: no meaningful looks, no wisecracks, no "accidental" rubbing. No one had spoken loudly, no one had become giggly or silly, no one had lost control or seemed anywhere near it. Viewed with some perspective, the evening seemed nothing more than comfortable.
here are various ways to acquire the pills, but the most common is also the most legal: prescriptions. Even though there is now a federal law requiring physicians and pharmacists to maintain careful records regarding prescriptions for drugs like Dexamyl, many physicians are careless about prescribing them, and few seem to realize that the kind of personality that needs them is often the kind of personality that can easily acquire an overwhelming dependency on them. Often a patient will be issued a refillable prescription; if the patient is a heavy user, all he needs to do is visit several physicians and get refillable prescriptions from each. If he is worried that a cross-check of druggists' lists might turn up his name, he can easily give some of his doctors false names.
There are dealers, generically called the Source, who specialize in selling these drugs; some give them away. They do not seem to be underworld types but professional people in various capacities who, for one reason or another, have access to large quantities of them. If one is completely without connections, the drugs can made be at home. One young man I know made mescaline, amphetamine, methamphetamine, LSD and DET and DMT (diethyl- and dimethyl- tryptamine, hallucinogens of shorter duration and greater punch than LSD) in his kitchen. In small lots, dextroamphetamine sulfate costs him about 50 cents a gram; a pound costs him about $30 (the same amounts of Dexedrine at your friendly corner druggist's would cost, respectively, about $10 and $4200).
In some areas, primarily those fairly distant from major centers of drug distribution, the new law has begun to have some significant effect. In one medium-sized city, for example, the price of black-market Dexamyl and Eskatrol Spansules has risen from 15 cents to 50 cents a capsule, when one can connect for them at all.
In the major cities one can still connect, but it is becoming more difficult. The new law will inhibit, but there may be complications. It would be unfortunate if the price should be driven up so high that it would become profitable for criminal organizations to involve themselves with the traffic, as was the case with opiates in the 1940s and 1950s and alcohol in the 1920s.
There was talk in Manhattan last winter, just before the new law took effect, that some LSD factories were closing down, and I know that some Sources stopped supplying. For a short time the price of LSD went up; then things stabilized, competition increased, a new packaging method developed popularity (instead of the familiar sugar cubes, one now takes one's dose on a tiny slip of paper; like a spitball, only you don't spit it out), and now the price for a dose of LSD is about 20 percent less than it was a year ago.
Since most of the pillheads I'm talking about are middle-class and either professional or semi-professional, they will still be able to obtain their drugs. Their drugs of choice have a legitimate use, and it is unlikely that the government's attempt to prevent diversion will be more than partially successful. If our narcotics agents have been unable to keep off the open market drugs which have no legitimate use at all—heroin and marijuana—it hardly seems likely that they will be able to control chemicals legitimately in the possession of millions of citizens. I asked one amphetamine head in the Southwest how local supplies had been affected by the new law. "I heard about that law," he said, "but I haven't seen anybody getting panicked." Another user tells me prices have risen slightly, but not enough yet to present difficulties.
There are marked differences between these drug-users and the ones who make the newspapers. They're well educated (largely college graduates), are older (25 to 40), and middle-class (with a range of occupations: writers, artists, lawyers, TV executives, journalists, political aides, housewives). They're not like the high school kids who are after a kick in any form (some of them rather illusory, as one psychosomatic gem reported to me by a New Jersey teen-ager: "What some of the kids do is take a cigarette and saturate it with perfume or hairspray. When this is completely soaked in and dry, they cup the cigarettes and inhale every drag. Somehow this gives them a good high"), or college students experimenting with drugs as part of a romantic program of self-location. The kids take drugs "because it's cool" and to get high, but when you talk to them you find that most ascribe the same general high to a wide range of drugs having quite diverse effects; they're promiscuous and insensitive. There is considerable evidence to suggest that almost none of the college drug-users take anything illegal after graduation, for most of them lose their connections and their curiosity.
It is not likely that many of the thousands of solitary amphetamine abusers would join these groups. They take drugs to avoid deviance—so they can be fashionably slim, or bright and alert and functional, or so they can muster the quoi que with which to face the tedium of housework or some other dull job—and the last thing they want is membership in a group defined solely by one clear form of rulebreaking behavior. Several of the group members were first turned on by physicians, but a larger number were turned on by friends. Most were after a particular therapeutic effect, but after a while interest developed in the drug for its own sake and the effect became a cause, and after that the pattern of drug-taking overcame the pattern of taking a specific drug.
Some of the socialized amphetamine-users specialize. One takes Dexedrine and Dexamyl almost exclusively; he takes other combinations only when he is trying to reduce his tolerance to Dexamyl. Though he is partly addicted to the barbiturates, they do not seem to trouble him very much, and on the few occasions when he has had to go off drugs (as when he was in California for a few months and found getting legal prescriptions too difficult and for some reason didn't connect with a local Source), he has had no physiological trouble giving them up. He did, of course, suffer from the overwhelming depression and enervation that characterize amphetamine withdrawal. Most heads will use other drugs along with amphetamine—especially marijuana—in order to appreciate the heightened alertness they've acquired; some alternate with hallucinogens.
To the heroin addict, the square is anyone who does not use heroin. For the dedicated pillhead there is a slightly narrower definition: the square is someone who has an alcohol dependency; those who use nothing at all aren't even classified. The boozers do bad things, they get drunk and lose control and hurt themselves and other people. They contaminate their tubes, and whenever they get really far out, they don't even remember it the next day. The pillhead's disdain is sometimes rather excessive. One girl, for example, was living with a fellow who, like her, was taking over 500 milligrams of amphetamine a day. They were getting on well. One night the two were at a party, and instead of chewing pills, her man had a few beers; the girl was furious, betrayed, outraged. Another time, at a large party that sprawled through a sprawling apartment, a girl had been on scotch and grass and she went to sleep. There were three men in the room, none of them interested in her sexually, yet they jeered and wisecracked as she nodded off. It was 4 or 5 A.M. of a Sunday, not too unreasonable a time to be drowsy. When they saw she was really asleep—breaking the double taboo by having drunk too much scotch and been put to sleep by it—they muttered a goddamn and went into another room; she was too depressing to have around.
There is an important difference in the drug-use patterns of the pillhead and opiate dependent: the latter is interested only in getting his drug and avoiding withdrawal; the former is also interested in perceiving his drugs' effects. I remember one occasion attended by someone who had obtained a fairly large mixed bag. In such a situation a junkie would have shot himself insensible; this fellow gave most of his away to his friends. With each gift he said something about a particular aspect of the drug which he found interesting. The heroin-user is far less social. His stuff is too hard to get, too expensive, his withdrawal too agonizing. But the pillhead is an experimenter. Often he seems to be interested as much in observing himself experiencing reactions as he is in having the reactions.
A large part of the attractiveness may be the ritual associated with this kind of group drug abuse: the PDR (a holy book), the Source (the medicine man whose preparations promise a polychromatic world of sensory and mystical experiences), the sharing of proscribed materials in a closed community, the sawing and grinding, the being privy to the Pythian secrets of colors and milligrams and trade names and contraindications and optimum dosages. And, of course, using drugs is something of a fad.
But there are costs. Kicks are rarely free in this world, and drugs are no exception. One risks dysfunction; one can go out of one's head; one may get into trouble with the police. Though the users are from a socioeconomic class that can most likely beat a first offense at almost anything, there is the problem that legal involvement of any kind, whether successfully prosecuted or not, can cause considerable embarrassment; an arrest for taking drugs may be negligible to a slum dweller in New York, but it is quite something else for a lawyer or reporter. And there is always the most tempting danger of all: getting habituated to drugs to such a degree that the drugs are no longer something extra in life but are instead a major goal.
One user wrote me, "Lately I find myself wishing not that I might kick the lunatic habit—but simply that our drug firms would soon develop something NEW which might refresh the memory of the flash and glow of that first voom-voom pill." I had asked him why take them at all, and he wrote, "I don't know. Really. Why smoke, drink, drive recklessly, sunbathe, fornicate, shoot tigers, climb mountains, gamble, lie, steal, cheat, kill, make war and blame it all largely on our parents. Possibly to make oneself more acceptable to oneself."
Many of the pillheads are taking drugs not only to escape but also to have an experience that is entirely one's own. There is no one else to be propitiated, there are no explanations or excuses needed for what happens inside one's own head when one is turned on; words won't do, and that is as much a benefit as a disadvantage, because if you cannot describe, then neither can you discuss or question or submit to evaluation. The benefit and the risk are entirely one's own. Indiana University sociologist John Gagnon pointed out at a drug symposium held at Antioch College last year, "I'd like to argue that possibly in our attempt to protect people, we have underrepresented the real payoff for drug-taking as an experiencc, as a risk people want to run."
You select your own risks—that's what living is all about. For some of these drug-users, the risks currently being marketed do not have very much sales appeal: going South for the summer with SNCC is out because they feel that they are too old and that ofays aren't much wanted anyhow; going to Vietnam for Lyndon is absurd. So they go inside. A scarier place, but no one else can muddle around with it.
There is nothing wrong with using chemicals to help cope with life. That is one of the things science is supposed to do, help us cope, and the business of living can be rough at times. And we have the requisite faith: I am sure that far more Americans believe in the efficacy of a pill than believe in God. The problem arises when one's concern shifts so that life becomes an exercise in coping with the chemicals.
I think there has been an unfortunate imbalance in the negative publicity. For years the press has printed marvelous tales about all the robberies and rapes performed by evil beings whose brain tissue had been jellied by heroin. But it has rarely printed stories that point out that opiates make even the randiest impotent, or that alcohol, which has five hundred times as many addicts, is an important factor in sex offenses and murders.
Lately, attention has been focused on drug abuse and experimentation among college students. Yet all the college students and all the junkies account for only a small portion of American drug abuse. The adults, the respectable grown-ups, the nice people who cannot or will not make it without depending on a variety of drugs, present a far more serious problem. For them the drug experience threatens to disrupt or even destroy life patterns and human relationships that required many years to establish.
And the problem is not a minor one. Worse, it seems to be accelerating. As Ed advised one night, "You better research the hell out of it because I'm convinced that the next ruling generation is going to be all pillheads. I'm convinced of it. If they haven't dysfunctioned completely to the point where they can't stand for office. It's getting to be unbelievable. I've never seen such a transformation in just four or five years. ... "
bonobos go,SkySails fly,rapidPrototypeArt, Ikuza, Moorea bonobos.. may be down to 20% of previous levels. ..Salonga National Park ..saw no live animals.. Armed militias use national parks as areas to hide out.. Peter Stephenson..WWF's African Great Apes programme....traces of people and hunting. ..Salonga is the only area where bonobos are .. protected in the only country in which they live..we think there were between 10,000 and 50,000..
..using the SkySails ship owners can either increase speed of the ship or reduce the ship’s operating costs. ..cargo vessels can increase their speed minimum of 10%- 15%. Alternatively by using the SkySails propulsion fuel savings of up to 50% .. ..rapid prototyping... I was somewhat surprised that you didn't mention the sculptural opportunities.
Busy nights in Cambodia: Chay Hour 2 hotel.. Eighty-four were rescued by officers of the Anti-Human Trafficking and Juvenile Protection Department last Tuesday, in the largest human-trafficking bust in Cambodia this year. They were placed in the care of the group Agir pour les Femmes en Situation Precaire .. One 17-year-old told the shelter's staff she had sold her virginity the night before. Many other stories went untold. Before staff could interview most of the women, armed thugs broke down the shelter's doors and abducted all but one of the 91 women and children in the group's care.
Pritchard steam generators, Sadad al-Husseini, new peakoil peak, What goes on now
Pritchard steam generators, Sadad al-Husseini, new peakoil peak, What goes on now
What goes on now:
We go to work in the 100kW car through 15kph traffic Work in finance, marketing, other "white collar" is mostly manipulating files - databases or producing reports and promotions - media or handling storage and warehousing and delivery schedules.
Now finance is a lot of Insurance,Pension Funds, Loans, Banking might all be much less in a cohesive society, where after a loss or aging, members were supported as a matter of course. Even at current levels of financial activity, the database and reports can be done anywhere, Costa Rica, Mumbai.
Towns developed where transport systems changed. Goods taken off the ship, and about to be put on carts, needed to be stored Hence Warehouses, then nearby finance houses, hence cities.
Now container transhipping is done in huge terminals with only a few people in sight driving giant cranes.
Warehousing is now "just in time", theres a lot less of it, and its now a branch of databases. If today the trucks stop rolling, "justintime" means metropolitan cities run out of food in three days. Food riots are three days away.
Most of the WhiteCollarWork is make-work, to keep the rich citizens of Empires capitals contented.
Women believe they must park their infants with child-minder-corporations for $100 a day so they can work in an office for $180 a day, doing filing & reports, to be satisfied.
In the Main World, the poor world, a lot of people just sit around in townships near the capitals, no "job" scrounging a dollar when they can.
Still a big bunch are out on the fields, although their ankles may be burning from the concentrated urea, and their healthy rape-oil may be replaced with soy-oil. They have remaining some knowledge we are going to need.
When cheap oil runs out:
A lot more agricultural labourers. A lot of us weeding, grinding with pedal power, gathering stalks for steam generators, watching ducks and geese. Not much 100kW car travel, not much 800kph jet travel. Lots of info - satellite cell phones all around, they dont need oil every day (methanol fuel cells) so its peasant life , down on the commune, with movies on demand and instant global news. My guess is a lot of time and effort will go into identifying the latest farm pests, and searching the web for the latest bio-control wasps, companion plants, fungus controls. I expect a whole new science of the rhizosphere. The fungus that feed 80% of plants. We will spend our days scanning DNA sequences of our dirt, comparing with other places dirt, and swapping dirt samples to inoculate our paddocks. A lot of dirty time, manure spreading. Electric fences should make herding easier, with beepers on each cow to keep her in the right paddock. A smelly life, with none of those industrial NewJersy deodorants Air conditioning will depend on PV cells, it may be prevalent, or it may be a luxury. The Main, tropical, world now sits and sleeps in front of electric fans, when they can pay the bill.
After thousands of years attempting to escape the monotony and gossip of the village, most will be back there. We will have wall sized TV screens and a thousand channels to amuse us. But we will depend on the neighbours to watch the ducks or milk the cows if we ever want to leave the village for a day. That will be on a big slow truck - steam or gas turbine, 30kph max. It may take us to a railway which might be running at 200kph. As fast as we will ever go, since FanJets will be replaced with Hydrogen-Dirigibles doing about 150kph. We are going to have a lot less stuff. Big stuff we will have to share. How gross. Sharing fridges and washing machines. Get used to it. Laundromats everybody? Get friendly with your horse and buffalo. They need looking after, but they do reproduce if treated well. Sheep are useful because they bring nitrogen down from the hillsides. Need shepherds but.
Just like the Communes, but with a lot of information, a lot of small gadgets sensors, phones. A lot of medical diagnostic gadgets, constantly monitoring health of everyone. Airship to the hospital for emergencies. A lot of science, smart materials. Maybe we wil finally have synthetic fibres that feel better than plant & animal fibres. Probably not. Windows will let in just the right frequencies, smart pumps will move heat and air around.
Some will be freed from farming. Its not clear how many, but surely a lot less than the 97% who dont farm now.
Cities will still exist, but cars will be more like golf buggies. Most of the filing, data manipulating report generating, will be done on the farm between weeding and feeding. But there will be some folks in town doing show-biz and such.
Speculating on property values near the old cities, which were near the old wooden-ship wharves, will be sen as a grotesque past delusional way to save for senescence.
The young will be in residential colleges, learning mostly agricultural science, some energy capture and efficiency physics.
Ocean liners will be big, since jets use too much kero. Freighters with sails will take longer to cross the seas, but total information will mean they are our warehouses.
The crash.
getting there from here is going to be Grozny, Felujah over and over. Most whiteCollar types will say "everything will be alright" until the tanks actually appear in their street and roll over their suddenly useless cars.
Expect meanness, then widespread religions of submission. Countries that teach creationism and weaken their bio-sciences will suffer. peasant farming is not stupidity, it takes a heap of knowledge, and seeds. Nature's Operating Instructions Ed Kenny Ausubel & J.P. Harpignies a biochemist named Randall von Wedel brewed a special bacterial smoothie in a blender and used it to clean up old gas station sites and truck terminals. And some day soon, the brilliant Wes Jackson, who has been out in the Midwest "thinking like a prairie," will succeed in perennializing our food crops and restoring the natural fertility of the nation's soil. ASPOrevised forcast: Peak Oil & Gas Liquids now 2007
Saudi Insider Says Oil Supplies 'Over-Estmated' by U.S. A recently retired Saudi oil executive has told Channel 4 News in London that he thinks the U.S. government's forecast for future oil supplies is a "dangerous over-estimate." Sadad al-Husseini, former vice-president of the national oil company Aramco, said, "in total the outlook is much too high for production and it’s unrealistic for the world to be expecting such high numbers from all of the producers, including Saudi Arabia." The news report cites a U.S. government forecast that by 2025 global oil demand will grow by 50 percent to 120 million barrels a day. Saudi Arabia, with current daily production of 9 million barrels, will by then supply 22 million barrels a day. "They’re not only overestimating the Middle East," al-Husseini said, "but they overestimate non-Opec, they overestimate Russia, they overestimate the whole global resource base. I think this is a rather dangerous situation for the US government policy to be based on."
How long has this been going on?: The value of new discoveries by the world's 10 largest oil companies .. .... expenditure of $8 billion on exploration last year.. produced discoveries valued at less than half that amount. ODACOil Depletion Analysis Centre (ODAC) Biomass Biomass is widely available, but low energy density. So it cannot be effectively trucked to a central generator, because of transport costs. But: if Pritchard steam generators are trucked to farms, the transport cost is once only, for the generator. The biomass thereafter is only moved a short distance from field to generator. In addition the electricity is not transmitted far. All over the world farmers burn the stalks in the field. Burning in local Pritchard steam generators seems like a great idea. The world needs a hundred million of these, starting now. The Brain's Own Marijuana The receptor CB1 seems to be present in all vertebrate species, suggesting that systems employing the brain's own marijuana have been in existence for about 500 million years. During that time, endocannabinoids have been adapted to serve numerous, often subtle, functions. We have learned that they do not affect the development of fear, but the forgetting of fear; they do not alter the ability to eat, but the desirability of the food,
The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly - Balzac
The New England Journal of MedicineNEJM "This can no longer be described as a small or contained conflict. But a far larger proportion of soldiers are surviving their injuries," author Atul Gawande, a Harvard professor and surgeon at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, said in the article. ....10 percent of U.S. soldiers injured in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan have died, Gawande said. That compared to about 25 percent for American soldiers injured while fighting in Korea, Vietnam and even during the Gulf War . ..official figures showing over 10,700 U.S. troops killed or wounded .. That is more than..first five years of the Vietnam War.. Some troops are surviving the loss of three limbs -- which previously would have been "uniformly fatal," Gawande said. .. The cost, however, can be high. The airman lost one leg above the knee, the other in a hip disarticulation, his right hand, and part of his face. How he and others like him will be able to live and function remains an open question. Gruesome Pictures: http://content.nejm.org/conte...
Jingo bells Jingo all the way... the Washington Post says "U.S. finds Syria loyal to Iraqi insurgents" What was actually found was a GPS receiver with some "Syria" waypoints. so "Syria" as a regime is not involved, just "Syria" as a location - can't expect Post people to get that distinction. But remember: Syria bought 1000 Kornets from the old CCCP. Those babies can pierce the side of an M1 tank at 3km. So those 100 M1s that the USA just pulled out of Korea wont be much good in the coming invasion of Syria.
Found this nice color on gonzofreakpower a Kiwi kind of Gay National party site
Mudyanse Tennekoon, David Goodstein, The End of Suburbia, Augustus, Mathaf Sqare, Ali Bakhtiari, Fr
Mudyanse Tennekoon, David Goodstein, The End of Suburbia, Augustus, Mathaf Sqare, Ali Bakhtiari, Fred Pearce goviya. Edward Goldsmith interviews Mudyanse Tennekoon
Goldsmith: It seems that practically all the traditional foodstuffs also had medicinal uses, did you have any effective traditional cures for malaria?
Tennekoon: A very effective one. We use Banja or Ganja-marijuana as it is usually known. This was one of our most important medicines; it used to be called "the leaf that can win the entire world" so great were its medicinal uses. We used to reduce it to powder and boil it like tea and add jaggery (sugar from the Kittul palm) to it. It was only effective against malaria but also against worms. We often took it with other foods for it reduced the time it took for them to be absorbed by the blood. Honey has the same effect.
Gunasekara: Robert Knox the Englishman who was shipwrecked in Sri Lanka in the 16th century and spent seventeen years here as a prisoner of the king referred to Banja as the cure for malaria in his Account of Ceylon. The plant was called "the ruler of the three worlds".
Goldsmith: Do you still use Banja for medicinal purposes?
Tennekoon: No, today it is banned by the government.
_____________________ there's more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than in a gallon of of liquid hydrogen. _____________________ ..no future generation will forget 2005 - the year the world began eating into the second half of its oil reserves. . Or, as Professor David Goodstein of the California Institute of Technology argues, the beginning of the end of the civilisation as we know it. . "Everybody has come to imagine that the flow of oil is like the rivers that flow from the mountains to the sea," _________________________ __ globalpublicmedia postcarbon The End of Suburbia Interviews All this to say that the world is about to change radically. Most of us (90%+) on the continent of North America are set to become much poorer monetarily and more importantly in terms of energy than we have been at any time since the great depression ... The implosion of Russia's economy and the resulting population 'die-off', 11 million and counting and a life expectancy dropping to that of Guatemala... _________________________ _ countercurrents ..When Attorney General John Ashcroft testified..he stated, "those who oppose us are providing aid and comfort to the enemy." These are carefully chosen words. "Aid and comfort to the enemy" are the words used in the Constitution to define Treason, ..And by the internal logic of a global Oil Empire, this is entirely reasonable. The needs of the people of any one country must be subordinated to the larger agenda of Empire itself. This is what the Romans learned in 27 B.C. when Augustus proclaimed himself Emperor. It was the end of the Roman Republic and the disappearance of representative government on earth for almost 1,700 years, until the English Civil Wars in the 1600s. That is the reality we are confronting today - offering up our democracy in propitiation to an Empire for Oil. It will be a fateful, irreversible decision. _________________ 23/11/2004 feeding Cars, Not People The adoption of biofuels would be a humanitarian and environmental disaster By George Monbiot.. Guardian 22nd November 2004 Road transport in the U K = 37.6 E6 Tons of petrol/yr The most productive oil crop ..is rape. .. yield 3 - 3.5 ton/ha. One ton of rapeseed = 415 kilos of biodiesel So every hectare of arable land could provide 1.45 tonnes of transport fuel. To run our cars and buses and lorries on biodiesel, in other words, would require 25.9m hectares. There are 5.7m in the United Kingdom..four and half times our arable area ____________________-
thirdworldtraveler monbiot -________________________ countercurrents. The intent of the US commanders and Iraqi leaders is to make Fallujah a 'model city" . I wonder if they’ll try this in Baghdad. The goal of crushing the resistance and creating stability by destroying Fallujah has gone so well that resistance fighters here roamed freely about Haifa street today hunting for Iraqis collaborating with US forces. . They executed a man they suspected as being a collaborator in Tahrir Square, and then they moved on to Mathaf Sqare, just 3 blocks from the 'Green Zone' _________________________ _____- Back in April one man, Iranian oil and energy analyst and expert Ali Bakhtiari.. He stood up and made a prediction that could have seen him ridiculed. "By the end of the year we will see oil at $50 a barrel," he told an audience at the annual gathering of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) in Berlin. . "I think the peak will arrive around 2006, 2007. But, this is only 15 months away. That is all. At that point, no one can say what is going to happen. Except the price is going to go up. And no one will be able to stop it." Fred Pearce Let-Weeds-Do-Work
redhead, Wangari Maathai, The Final Empire, Which War Is This Anyway? DNA testing and retina scans,
redhead, Wangari Maathai, The Final Empire, Which War Is This Anyway? DNA testing and retina scans, fallujahinpictures lewrockwell Which War Is This Anyway? by Tom Engelhardt thousands of troops by the occupying power make a second, carefully planned "brutal advance" into a large city to root out Islamic "rebels." The first attack on the city failed, though it all but destroyed neighborhoods in a "ferocious bombardment." The soldiers advance behind "relentless air and artillery strikes." This second attempt to take the city, the capital of a "rebellious province," defended by a determined "rebel force" of perhaps 5003,000, succeeds, though the fighting never quite ends. The result? A "razed" city, "where virtually every building has been bombed, burned, shelled beyond recognition or simply obliterated by war"; a place where occupying "soldiers fire at anything that moves" lewrockwell Icarus (Armed with Vipers) Over Iraq by Tom Engelhardt ..the man who commanded the U.S. Army Air Forces, both the thousand-plane armadas and the Enola Gay, General Henry "Hap" Arnold (according Robin Neillands in The Bomber War, The Allied Air Offensive Against Nazi Germany), "had been taught to fly by none other than Orville Wright, Media tycoons: Falluja . at risk of becoming police state ..Falluja..residents may find that the measures make the battle-scarred city look more like a police state than the democracy they have been promised. ..troops would funnel residents..to..processing centres ..to compile a database ..through DNA testing and retina scans. ..badges displaying their home addresses which must be worn at all times. Buses would ferry them into the city, where cars, the deadliest tool of suicide bombers, would be banned. One controversial idea would require all Falluja men to work for pay, in military-style battalions...they would be assigned jobs in construction, waterworks, or rubble-clearing platoons. ..Colonel Bellon said previous attempts to win trust from Iraqis ..had telegraphed weakness by asking, 'What are your needs? What are your emotional needs?' All this Oprah stuff," .. ..US commanders and Iraqi leaders have declared their intention to make Falluja a "model city"..they believe they will have to use coercive measures allowed under martial law .. The Woman Who Didn’t Listen. The genius of Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai By Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé guerrillanews. rainbowbody. The Final Empire: the Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future by Wm. H. Kötke
Industrial Agriculture Pundits and propagandists of the Chamber of Commerce and the "boomers" of the industrial system are fond of claiming the great productivity of industrial agriculture by pointing out how few farmers there are in ratio to the population. In reality, the most efficient systems are the most "primitive." Industrial agriculture is by far the most energy inefficient system of food production. ... Hundreds of industrial workers participate with each industrial farmer. There are the oil field workers, oil refinery workers, the truck drivers, the plastics plant workers, the workers who create the packaging of farm produce, the packagers, distributors, wholesalers, delivery people and retail clerks. An enormous amount of machinery is required for this process. All machinery is produced by factories somewhere, by people who must be counted in the food production network. .... Tsembaga people of the highlands in New Guinea raise sweet potatoes at an expenditure of approximately one kilocalorie of energy for each 16 kilocalories of food produced. Studies of the industrial system indicate that approximately 20 kilocalories of energy are required to produce one kilocalorie of food. since 1981 the retail price for 2 grams of cocaine went from $544.59 to $106.54 in 2003. Retail heroin prices mirrored the decline in cocaine prices, falling from $1,974.49 to $361.95
Helmet laws, Chinese sub, slums, coffee farms, pave Americe,
Helmet laws, Chinese sub, slums, coffee farms, pave Americe, Bike to Bondi,yelled at by young cops for no helmet. fancy a job where youre paid to be angry all the time... Helmet laws cost lives Western Australia..helmets have been the law for 13 years.. While a greater number of cyclists wore helmets, by far the most dramatic result was a catastrophic decline in ridership: in excess of 30%. ..Perth-based journalist Chris Gillham calls it "one of Australia's worst-ever public health disasters." _________________________ ___ 3Dec 2004 China has launched the first (094 nuclear) submarine ..designed to fire intercontinental ballistic missiles ... The launch was much earlier than US intelligence expected, JL2 missile 8000km range
_________________________ ___ 1994 Robert D. Kaplan Slums are litmus tests for innate cultural strengths and weaknesses. Those peoples whose cultures can harbor extensive slum life without decomposing will be, relatively speaking, the future's winners... _________________________ ___ Institute of Science in society Small farms are far more productive than large farms. In most developing countries, smaller farms produce more per unit area by 200 to 1 000 % - than larger ones. In the US, the smallest farms - 27 acres or less - have more than ten times greater the dollar output per acre than larger farms. .. small-scale coffee producers in Chiapas..Conventional coffee producers ..landholdings averaging 7 hectares, and devote most of their land to coffee production. As their system uses shade trees, they conserve some biodiversity but their dependence on external markets for cash, food and inputs is very high, making such farmers very vulnerable to the vagaries of an economic system beyond their control. In contrast, small organic producers with an average farm size of 4 hectares have the highest coffee yields, and they devote about 30-50% of their land to maize and beans for food security, pasture for animals and part for forest reserve.. _________________________ ___ liberty forum In order for school consolidation to occur, the Progressives signed on to ‘pave America.’ Good roads would be needed to ship children up to two hours from their country homes to government re-education camps. The great homogenization of America was underway, the Progressives were building a New Man, part Soviet New Man, part Fascist New Man. _________________________ ___ Hill stuck at airport. Australia's Defence Minister could not make it to the centre of the Iraqi capital last Friday. So dangerous has the main highway to and from the airport become,..Senator Hill did not visit the Australian embassy or the Green Zone that comprises the headquarters of the US-led coalition forces in Iraq. ..."This is the first time I've been unable to do that. It's very dangerous .. _________________________ ___ liberty forum. Opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko in the Ukrainian presidential elections is firmly backed by the Washington Consensus. He is not only supported by the IMF and the international financial community, he also has the endorsement of The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) , the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace , Freedom House and George Soros' Open Society Institute , which played a behind the scenes role last year in helping "topple Georgia's president Eduard Shevardnadze by putting financial muscle and organizational metal behind his opponents." (New Statesman, 29 November 2004). _________________________ ___ Smirkingchimp. {guess where) On one of my trips to drop off a detainee at the jail, the Senior Interrogator told us not to bring them in any more. 'Just shoot them' he said
Green China, Colon in the shit, kiwis in Iraq, Powell in Haitithe AFP picture in SMH 3Dec is nowhere to be found "We have to get all weapons out of the hands of those excepthe government
71 US killed in Falluja 02 December 2004
.. up to $216,000 a year in Iraq .. NZ Defence chief Air Marshal Bruce Ferguson said..almost a quarter of army staff with less than six years experience had left to become contractors in the Middle East.
(too green to be true?) Chinais taking some giant steps forward in building an ecologically sane future: embracing windpower, building the largest tidal energy project in the world, implementing new automobile fuel efficiency standards more stringent than those of the US, promoting a massive solar energy program and becoming one of the largest manufacturers of solar cells, even embracing the idea of a green olympics.
Kelburn Thorndon BBC YourPhoto The BBC YourPhoto published one of mine in "this weeks top 10" They cropped out the sleeping dog, which I thought was the best part. Glenverbie Terrace House, Thorndon, Wellington. Weatherboard houses in a deep green roaring 40's city
From 1902 to 1978 you could sit on the outside of the Kelburn Cable Car, and kick the tunnel walls. On a cold morning in 1969 I would descend the 72 steps from my hilltop house, which I shared with 5 women. The sun rising over the crisp harbour, down the steep cable incline, to my job in the NZ Treasury, on the Government Computer - they had one, a 360/40
"Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?" Georg Christoph Lichtenberg .............. "If you can smell garlic, everything is all right." J. G. Ballard .............. "..the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies." REV 18:3
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Feel the need for some reassurance, find Snufkin...
Is this bad timing or what?
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Graham Robb's Rimbaud biography. not enough about the poetry, perhaps, but sufficient about the life in Africa to demolish the myth of Rimbaud as anti-establishment.
..Konrad von Soest 1403
more Mars Dunes
tracks
..Mars Dunes
bonobos.. may be down to 20% of previous levels.
..using the SkySails ship owners can either increase speed of the ship or reduce the ship’s operating costs.
..rapid prototyping... I was somewhat surprised that you didn't mention the sculptural opportunities. 
..Ikuza 
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Powell in Haiti
Glenverbie Terrace House, Thorndon, Wellington. Weatherboard houses in a deep green roaring 40's city
From 1902 to 1978 you could sit on the outside of the Kelburn Cable Car, and kick the tunnel walls. On a cold morning in 1969 I would descend the 72 steps from my hilltop house, which I shared with 5 women. The sun rising over the crisp harbour, down the steep cable incline, to my job in the NZ Treasury, on the Government Computer - they had one, a 360/40