Rabbit Virus Stories Don't Add Up.

Here's one (admittedly not too earth-shattering) revelation for conspiracy theorists.  The article is a discussion of rabbit calici virus, (aka RCV) and the person being interviewed lets slip just one little nugget of information that hints at a fib being told a few decades back.

Also - and this in not conspiracy theory but statement of fact - if you have an organisation where the officers have a title that takes a mental double-take to grasp, then that organisation is way too unwieldy any more.  The interviewee is a "Department of Water, Land and Biodiversity Conservation Natural Resource Management biosecurity unit research officer."  And no - I'm not kidding, although I wish I was.  This is similar to my experience of working in techie jobs:  Once the manager comes into the work area and urges you to save cable ties by cutting them off so they can be re-used, that career is royally stuffed.  Nothing you can do but head for Seek.com...

Anyhow - back to that article and the fib.  It's a simple few words at the end of one sentence.  Here you go:

"We know calicivirus is more genetically diverse in Europe whereas we only brought in one strain and let it go," he said. 

Did we now?  See, as far as I was aware, the official line on how RCV jumped from an island to the mainland has always been "oops - we don't know how the virus got released there!" - the then Department Of Studying How To Get Rid Of Rabbits was actually the CSIRO, and they never claimed to have been the ones who "let it go."

The article above states the official line on the release:

It was first introduced in Australia in 1995 when it was accidentally released from the Wardang Island Research Station in South Australia.

The bold emphasis above is mine.  So it's just a little bit of an inaccuracy - but at the very least it shows that the "Department of Water, Land and Biodiversity Conservation Natural Resource Management biosecurity unit research officer" has a wrong history they're working from, and at the worst, shows that an intentional lie was told in the 90's to cover a clandestine release of RCV onto the mainland.

Some more articles, all of which say it was not "let go" but escaped.  That was the official line at the time, remember:
http://www1.american.edu/TED/RABBIT.HTM
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15020341.600-farmers-clamour-for-killer-virus-to-be-let-loose.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14820000.300-killer-rabbit-virus-on-the-loose.html
http://www.science.org.au/nova/001/001key.htm

Note that RCV is similar to RHD, that RHD can destroy vegetation by contact with infected animals but RCV was chosen because it apparently did not affect plants, and yet that one of the claimed ways RCV "escaped" was via contact with infected vegetation.

Never mind now who's wrong.  Never mind that one very dodgy choice (introducing rabbits for sport and amusement) went horribly wrong and has ruined a lot of the country.  And never mind that this first dodgy choice has been replaced by a smaller, harder to control, and more difficult to predict organism.  Mind instead that stories don't add up, nor add up in the intervening time, that when there is an inconsistency like this, it means that at least one of these things must be untrue.

Worry about keeping the bastards honest.  Make sure the stories add up at the time, and that they don't change over time.  The government should be our tool for better changes, not an instrument to hold power over us by deceit or force.

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Meet Other Strange Meat

So many people out there know that something's wrong.

Why Are Humans Always So Sick?

asks the plaintive headline,  See, this is our smart bugger, knows that something's gotta be wrong.

"Our theory is that when we moved to this super-hygiene environment, which only occurred in the last 50 to 100 years, this led to immune disregulation,"

So funny!  The article mentions type 2 diabetes and obesity. There are others, but they miss them  Cancers are far more prevalent, cellular inflammation followed by displasia gives us those.  And various heart diseases and respiratory diseases, too.

You know when these illnesses started to become far too commonplace, they tell you that it happened 50 to 100 yeas ago.  And they'd be right if the were back in last century.  We've begun to have these delightful modifications to our health for 150 years, give or take a decacde.

The antagonists are fast food companies, companies playing fast and loose with your daily meal, the companies who play fast and loose for a fast buck, and a bunch of chemicals called "additives."  We started using preservatives and modifiers and different techniques around 200 years ago, and within a few months, the hooked people were hooked, and on their way to becoming obese people...  Within a few years, some of those people would have begun showing the first signs of the modern diseases, followed by more and more people as supermarket chains and big business took a grip of our food pipeline.

Now that they've had time to perfect the way of making a $9.50 meal out of a 50c collection of overcooked steamed vegetables and shreds of meat, (and various extenders, plasticisers, flavourings, additives, "nutritional supplements" etc of course,) we suddenly also have this epidemic of people with type 2 diabetes, heart disease, circulatory illnesses, inflamed nerves and musles, tirednesses and weaknesses and mycoid, fungal, or inflammation illnesses.  It's not a coincidence...

I wish they'd just give up trying to convince us (and themselves) that what they're doing is actually not diabolical and couldn't constitute reckless manslaughter in most courts...

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Algae Based Diesel Up To 93% Lower Footprint

I've been watching what Solazyme does with it's algae-based biofuels.  I'm always happy to see a new source of fuel that's cleaner burning, or costs less environmental footprint to produce, or in other ways reduces the need to stink up our world.

According to this report/pressie, the algae-derived biofuel is cleaner to produce, burns cleaner, and that makes it a logical choice to use.  85% less greenhouse gas emissions may be a very optimistic evaluation, but remember that the bulk of the world's pollution load comes not from the humble car, but from trucks, trains, ships, power stations, and aircraft.  And they burn diesel, in many cases...

Before you stop me on the power stations, I know that a lot fo the world's power stations are on coal (which BTW is far dirtier than diesel, even - and especially - the mythical so-called "clean" coal) but there are countless diesels ponking away around the world today 24/7 generating energy for smaller off-grid towns and farms, for isolated villages, and all of them would benefit from a cheaper cleaner source of fuel.

I think it's also high time engine manufacturers started looking into engines that aren't just standard Diesel or Otto cycle engines, and started tuning their existing designs to run better on biofuels.  It's no longer a matter of being the coolest kid on the block cos your technology works more efficiently - it's now a matter of life and death...

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Silly Book Cycle Repeats Cycle Cycles

Silly season continues.  I see a whole lot of wood, which is (kind of) eco friendly I guess.  But it's still an irresponsible use of resources.  It may be kumbaya and personal, but it's also quite disturbing.  I count maybe 12 - 14 books on all that wasted dead tree.  My local library in a small town has a few tens of thousands of books, meaning a few thousand wheels.  No matter what, that would make several tons of wood used.

Moral:  Sometimes silly season lasts a century...

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Tough Love For US Automakers

I love this tough love approach Barak Obama took to the auto manufacturers in the USA, now to hope that Kevin Rudd has the cojones to pull off a few similar iron fist in velvet glove moves here with our greedy almost-monopolistic companies.  And that everyone in the world grows enough of a pair to stick all the banks back in their box again.

Tell you what - if we lost all the large conglomerates and companies, if all banks were suddenly split into individual local banks again, and if every supermarket, hypermart, what-have-you - if they were all shut down today, I reckon by two weeks at the most we'd be over the hiatus, our world would suddenly be a lot cleaner, and a lot of people would start being healthier and happier.  The only downside I can see to it is that it would be hard to get decent coffee and wine.  For a while...  So really, I can't see any downside . . .

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

The Good Life. Part III

So in the last two articles, I summed up how we got to be dependent on the diet we have, how (possibly - there are always a variety of views, after all, and no-one knows for sure which, if any, are right) our forebears ensured that our bodies are now attuned to foods they had around back then, and how food is the biggest and fastest-acting evolutionary driver.

At the moment we're in one of those flux points in our systemic evolution.  We have ways to extend the season of the foods we eat (as opposed to eating only foods in season, with a few exceptions) and to extend high-value foods with less valued foods, to preserve and enhance the flavours and appearances of foods, and so much more.  We know that evolution generally is a good thing, but it acts over tens to hundreds of generations and is no good to us in our current food crisis.

We can either all eat these foods and take the consequences and let evolution, in a thousand or so years, come up with homo trashophage who can eat anything the laboratories of the world can come up with.  Or we can reduce our dependence on those adulterated foods and make careful food choices.

Please note that we also have an economic crisis, which is not over yet, not by a long shot.  And which threatens to undermine the things which those unscrupulous food manufacturers rely on, constant economic growth and consumerism.  We have a very serious climate crisis which no-one can predict the end result of yet and which may yet destroy much of the food infrastructure we are currently in the first stages of adapting the species to.    And indeed, that food infrastructure (land clearing, farming, chemicals to grow the food that then leach into the water table or our bodies, pollution to process and transport that food, refrigerate it, etc) is directly or indirectly responsible for probably 2/3 of the ecosystem, changes which have precipitated this crisis.

So we can choose to continue to damage the Earth, use more and more chemicals and technological means to sustain life on Earth, kill off 90% of the population who will become ecological "also-rans," or we can put a spoke in the wheel of that food machine, go back to basics grown basically, and get that kind of Golden Age come back, only with slightly less rock-like people to enjoy it.

As we really and truly ARE on the cusp of this event, either path is valid.

Put all our faith in technology, and we could end up as I said, able to eat pure chemical nutrients, and technology would insulate us from what will become increasingly hostile weather, remove the need to be responsible stewards of the Earth, and probably eventually lead to lengthy and epic journeys into the Universe to populate other worlds.  The catch is that we will of course be adapted mainly to chemical nutrients and artificial environments, and maybe we'll just stay in spaceships and never bother to make landfall.   After all, look how readily we take to sitting in front of a computer and interacting via technology.

The alternative is that we dismantle the machineries that have allowed us to live comfortably, and face the fact that responsible living entails personal responsibility and we will have to each of us make hundreds of choices every week, not always eat the most convenient packaged food, and spend a lot more time on our food preparation.  On the upside, this does mean that the coming climate shake-up we're in for may not last for as long, and perhaps may not get as severe.

The point is, that both these events are going to happen now no matter what we do, economy and climate events are not going to go away just because we grow a vegetable garden.  But whether you have a vegetable garden and good food habits or not may well dictate how well, and how many members of, your family survive...  And I'm not trying to sensationalise this, nor do I think I'm being extreme.  If experience has taught us one thing, it's that if you're prepared for the worse of two similar scenarios, you're prepared for the less severe as well.  If you keep a garden and have local sources of fresh food, you'll be better off even if nothing happens.

Also, don't forget that if you do brave all the additives, people in a few thousand years may well thank you for conferring immunity on them - but it does bugger-all good for you in the here and now...

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

The Good Life. Part Two.

Food is THE single most important resource this world runs on.  Everything consumes something else, and is in turn consumed by something else.  According to most researchers, this cycle of eating food and becoming food is what drove our ascent to intelligence, and has culminated in me sitting in front of this computer writing this article and you sitting there reading it.  Food is one of our most important evolutionary drivers, so much so that researchers have discovered that changes in food lead to changes in species within a relatively few generations, compared to thousands of generations for most other influences.

Now look at our history.  For hundred of thousands of generations, our forebears ate opportunistically, and remained in almost the same state of advancement for millenium after millenium. They doubtless lived short lives, cut short by misadventure and predators, with a range of illnesses mostly caused by lack of nutrition, and relatively few diseases such as obesity, inflammatory illnesses, or cancers.  This was a kind of Golden Age you could say, where not much changed, you knew where you fitted into the scheme of things, you foraged for your food, and that was it for the next couple of hundred generations.  But also, of course, it wasn't like those ancestors could appreciate that they were in a Golden Age, because they were pretty much stupid animals. The ancestors of dolphins and octopuses must have been gleefully looking forward to dominating the Earth.

But things change.  Somewhere, some pre-human a bit dumber than all the others ate something none of the others had tried to eat before.  And okay - he died, because funny mushrooms are seldom funny.  But if there's one thing history teaches us, it's that there are a lot of dumb ones in any given species.  So another really dumb pre-human found itself strangely attracted to, and ate, some bird's eggs it found.  And it discovered that it wasn't as hungry, could spend some time picking among the forage for "better" foods.  Maybe one of the smarter ones noticed, or maybe this particular one just lived longer because of its habit of eating eggs, and so managed to still be alive to impregnate or be impregnated when its contemporaries had long succumbed to starvation.  No matter - the point is that a particular trick of the genes had been captured in a new generation, and now found an attraction for eggs to be normal.

Now there's a generation of pre-humans who don;t need to spend the entire day foraging and scrambling for food, that leaves time for other things.  Copulating and breeding can only remain attractive for so many hours a day... (And besides it was breeding all these freakish critturs that ate other animals, their eggs and young, and selectively higher-value forage plants!) What to do with the other few hours of the day?  Well, once you'd dozed in the sun a while, pretty much you'd start talking about the weather...

BTW I don't know if it was chickens or eggs or minivelociraptor drumsticks, and I emphasise that this did not happen overnight, it happened over hundreds and perhaps even thousands of generations, and in only a small subsection of the whole species, maybe just one particular valley.  The thing is that whatever powers evolution, whatever forces are at work there, it resulted in that particular population slowly becoming tolerant of the change in their diet, and finally, their bodies were adapted to it and required it as part of their normal functioning.  That particular branch of the species didn't need to spend as much time hunting down food and could afford to spend more time - well, thinking might be a good term for it.

Eventually, out of all those different branches of pre-humanity that had adapted to different diets (and now you can see why it initially took so long) several emerged that also had a strange compulsion to hoard foods...

Also note that in each case, the evolutionary change that provided benefits was the one which prevailed.  That's how evolution works - it doesn't "favour" chickens that flee and hide if they see a hawk-shape in the sky.  It's just that those chickens that don't run and hide get eaten, and so don't pass on anything to future generations...

The most important thing for us to take home from the above is that our bodies are superbly adapted to the food we eat.  Provided it is food that was introduced 7,000 years or longer ago.  Any newer foods and ways of preparing food our bodies are still in the process of adapting to.

Let me give you a most brutal example:  Our foods for the last 200 years have increasingly contained additives and extenders and modifiers.  These may provide us with the benefit of more food being available more of the time, and thus allow us to breed more and more humans with more and more non-food-gathering time in their hands.  But they are not suitable for our bodies, and cause disease and illness.  Those that can tolerate this range of poisons will live longer, and pass on some of those traits.  The rest will die of food-related illnesses and not pass on as many genes.  Look around you at the number of obese people with diabetes, stomach bowel and colon cancers, heart diseases and so forth - do you really think this is the natural lot of people?

So - if you're one of the five people in the whole population whose bodies tolerate all those additives and want to pass on that to the next generation, go ahead.  It will be a valuable thing for future generations, say in the next 1,000 years or so. For the rest of us, there are only two choices, either to become a statistic and one of the negative shapers of evolution, or else do the right thing by ourself and start really looking at every skerrick of food we put into our bodies.

Get a copy of my book, (or email me if you genuinely can't afford it) and add this blog to your reading list.

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

How Do They Avoid Live Prongs?

This wind power device (http://www.clariantechnologies.com/main/page_plugin_wind_power.html) violates the plug/socket rules, unless they have some super secret way to plug it in.  See, power plugs and sockets are sneakily designed.  Anything that's liable to have power coming out of it has socket holes.  That keeps fingers from easily contacting the electricity.  The devices you plug in, they have a set of male prongs to reach in and exploit that female socket.

This system works the way it's supposed to, it keeps everyone except that idiot with the butter knife (yes you, didn't you know you're about to fry yourself?) from coming into contact with lethal quantities of electricity.

Now you come to this little generator.  If you plug it into your existing wall sockets as they claim, then it must have a male plug end coming out of the generator.  Assume you're carrying that plug to the wall socket to plug it in, there's a gust of wind, and the cord slips out of your hand.  You grab to catch it before it falls in the cat's water bowl, and . . .  Kapow!

Okay so you put a socket on the end, that's much safer.  Only.  Now what do you plug it into?  If you put male prongs onto your live electrical circuit in the house, those prongs will be live and just waiting to bite someone as they brush past...

And if they need a special "plocket" installed then they're not as plug and play as the makers claim.

One last nitpick.  The manufacturers claim that if the grid shuts down the generator will also automatically shut down, but I have a couple of problems with that.  One, if there are several of them on one circuit, the grid power shuts down, but each generator sees the others as being still there and still a "grid" power supply so they keep happily on generating.  In other words, nil safety for power and electrical workers.  

Secondly, if, as the makers may also mean, the inbuilt wireless and signalling is used to shut the generators down when the grid goes down, then how does that work and continue to work if there's no power to the wireless transmitting devices?  And you can say "battery backup" or whatever you like and I will still say that anything that relies something as unreliable as batteries that may or may not have been checked and which may or may not work when needed, is as unreliable itself.

And - more importantly:  I would install such a device to make me relatively immune to the grid's shutdowns and fluctuations.  Doesn't it seem stupid to install a power generating device that switches itself off when the power goes off?

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

The Good Life. Part 1.

I guess you who check out my Flickr stream and other online indicators of life know that I've moved out of the city to a tiny place about fifty miles out, on the bank of the Murray river. (Yep, there's a Murray river in Western Australia too, not just the Murray over east which is under stress.)  More recent peeks into the murky stream of my life may have revealed that besides my cat Ghostie, there has been a dwarf holland lop rabbit named Peta Rabbit, aka BimBomBunney. And more recently, a friend who bought a rabbit for christmas passed him on to Trish, who kept him for a while and then passed him on to me, so I now have a rabbit couple.

Also, as soon as the weather permitted me with my wheezy lungs to work outside, I've dug garden beds and planted out the first of a bunch of crops.  This is a BIG block, I figure half an acre or so, and my landlord lets me make gardens etc.  With our weather in Australia, and given the trees that shade the place so nicely in summer, it should be possible to put in a fairly steady rotation of crops.  I've placed a fair selection in tubs and pots, because that way they become portable should I start off on the road anytime soon.  What I'd like to achieve is to have as wide a range of foods as I can, and make this as portable as possible.

Anyhow - one of the first things I noticed when I was given Peta was the profusion of "experts" online who were quite happy dictating the exact types of foods and hay and pellets a rabbit was "allowed" to eat, when that rabbit should sleep, when it should eat, shit, etc.  And it got me wondering - who makes sure rabbits do "rabbit" things out in the wild?  Poor things, they must all be killing themselves with eating whatever they decided they needed, when they needed it....

So with Peta it's been trial and error, commonsense, and rabbit sense.  I'd offer a selection of foods, she'd throw aside foods she didn't like, and eat those that she did like.  If a food she liked was too sugary or too salty or too starchy, I'd make sure there was a bit less of it available than the staple foods of hay and pellets and the other vegetables she liked.  I have a happy healthy rabbit, the "experts" (I noticed, reading the forums) have rabbits whose stools go runny or whose digestive tracts block up, or fat obese rabbits that can no longer do all the things rabbits need to do in order to maintain their health.

This is a bit like many diets out there.  They dictate almost to the species of lettuce you're "allowed," the quantity to the nearest milligram, and so forth.  It's a bit like painting by numbers, you end up with a picture, but it may just not be a picture of health.  Commonsense.  It is to our diets what rabbit sense is to rabbits' diets. You already know that a fast food burger is bad for you.  You're aware that a couple of serves of fresh vegetables a day and a few pieces of fruit are good for you.  And I daresay most people try to do the right thing, which is why a strictly laid-down diet is counter-productive.

Also remember that we are fast losing much of the traditional oral lore of food, as foods are more and more put through production processes that make it unlike that same food would have been one hundred years ago.  How many people have ever seen a beetroot that wasn't in a tin and already boiled in standardised water salt and sugar?  There is a large body of myth surrounding modern food, and the manufacturers feed this Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) by making the truth harder to get to, by giving you "health thermometer" scales on the packaging, by providing lists of ingredients where they deliberately avoid listing the harmful and make the other ingredients as hard to understand as possible.

When I started writing my diet book, I was concerned about my then looming prostate cancer.  As I researched and took the notes that later became my diet book, I was concerned about why I'd been gifted with cancer in the first place, and I was appalled at the things my research uncovered about food practices. You - yes, you reading this - right now have enough toxic material in your kitchen to make yourself very very sick.  And that was what I ended up addressing in the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook more than anything else.  Oh yes - the book has a set of foods that will help reduce cancer cell activity and allow your body to deal with the dysplasic cells - but there's a good helping of that nouveau food lore in there to empower your common sense.

I figure that once you're aware that your average cake mix you're buying for your child's first birthday contains chemicals that cause irritation and blindness, you'll reconsider the cake mix and instead buy flour and sugar and eggs and do it yourself.  Once you know that it's not a nice beefy mince on the tray at the butchers but a platter of meat that's been sprayed with a powerful irritant which is known to cause mucous membrane inflammation, respiratory distress, and may be implicated in bowel and colon cancer, you'll avoid that lovely red-raw-irritated look and pick the darker, naturally aged mince at the better butcher.

Because my research has shown me that food manufacturers don't give a flying fuck what effect they have on your health or the health of the environment, they are only out for profit profit and more profit.  And - and I stress this and can't stress it often or loudly enough - the more a large food conglomerate trumpets about being "healthy" and "natural" the more you can be sure that they totally are NOT being either.

So - take a look at my book, if you can't afford the $15 email me and I'll give you a free full copy of the book.  And follow this blog, put it in your reader list, because I'll keep the food lore flowing.

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Example Of Bad Headline

Dishonesty is, like, everywhere man!  Greedy corporations are takin'...  Oh.  Hang on.  Sorry.  Red meat!  Yeah, red meat!  Gonna kill us, gonna kill us all!  And that brings me back to dishonesty.  One of these headlines has taken a fast and loose approach to the truth in favour of being sensationalist.  See if you can pick which one...

Too Much Red Meat May Shorten Life Span is one headline, while

Study: Lots of red meat increases mortality risk this is the other.  

The first one sounds so damn dramatic, doesn't it? Eat red meat, and for every steak you eat, your lifeline gets shortened by six weeks!  Except it isn't true - it's as the second headline suggests, that there is an increased risk of death to people who eat red meat every day.

These assholes are dealing with people's health and lives here and they would prefer sensationalism to helping.  Yes they are both published by the same news source, and yes they are both women.  But being a woman doesn't preclude you from being a sensationalist asshole.  And it seems that "editorial" staff at Yahoo aren't above seeing the same story twice, and allowing what's basically an untrue headline.

I normally wouldn't get quite this upset, but you know that health is my "thing" and healthy diet is pretty much my alpha and my omega, as I've discovered over and over how important good food is to health.  So to see such an outright beat-up bullshit headline makes me upset.  People read that first headline they start to actively avoid red meat, next thing their bodies are having to learn to cope without the source of aminos and proteins that it's been used to having for all your life, and then you're wide open to a whole range of diseases.

Yes our ancestors had to make do with a low-meat diet but that's it - LOW meat not NO meat and certainly not ALL meat.  And these articles, when you read them, bears that out.  Consuming less red meat is more like our ancestors' diet. It wasn't something you had access to seven days a week, and now that we can, doesn't man we should.  I haven't done the maths (am too slack to!) but suppose everyone in the developed world cut down to one meal with beef per week, one meal with pork, one with chicken, another with lamb or capretto, and you compared the carbon footprint of that, I reckon you'd find several million cattle a year less are needed, with the attendant reduction in greenhouse gases, and an attendant increase in health.  And all those resources that are being put into raising cattle now could be put into feeding a few third world countries...  

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Which Food Would You Choose?

How ironic - as one country makes all the right food choices and ensures the health and wellbeing of its citizens, another country buries their citizens and organic farmers in piles of bureaucratic shit...  

And we're rapidly going down the same path, Aussies!  The damage done by years of Liberal sabotaging of the retail economy by giving advantages to the most heartless and wrongdoing large corporations needs to be undone, and quickly.  Show your support for farmer's markets and small fruit and vegetable markets and local butchers, because otherwise we too will finish up in a legal farce like the USA, our food required to be adulterated and turned to shit, by Law.

Look - the problem in the USA is empire building by the food producers and manufacturers.  The bigger they can get, the more profits they can squeeze out.  The less competition they have, the more they can afford to let the actual nutritional qualities of the food they make be eroded with preservatives and fillers and other shit designed to stretch even more profit out of the product.  And of course, the larger they get, the wider the sphere of damage when their foodstuff is contaminated, the more people's health they will ruin.  All without a single care, consideration, or retribution in the world.

In contrast, a smaller more localised producer will maybe affect a few thousand people, and at that, only as long as it takes for the locals to get the pitchforks and burning torches and run them out of town on a rail...  Large manufacturers have no problems storing fruit and vegetables for (sometimes) years before selling the by now well and truly valueless food at monopoly prices.  Local producers' only weapon is to have the best and freshest produce.

It makes sense that the more you use local produce, the healthier you will live, and the more control you will have over your food and your life.  Don't be lazy, take personal responsibility and KEEP THE BASTARDS HONEST!

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Eco Predictions Fail - both Eco's.

There's a worrying trend.  That's the trend for "experts" to continually revise their estimates.  To the gloomy side.  Just think - in regard to the economy, for example - these are the very bastards that got the world's economic system into this predicament in the first place.  Experts?  Pah.  Greedy little piggy people (sorry to re-invoke a decades-old image) with their little piggy snouts in the trough, expecting you to fill it for them, more likely.

And when you hear these "experts" saying to batten down the hatches, it's going to be worse than we think, then you'd better be considering how you want to go through this never-before-seen event, this World Global Recession the like of which we have never had before, and which therefore the "experts" aren't actually so "expert" about.  Me I'm thinking a nice country vacation to a little hobby farm might be just the thing.  I won't be able to eat dollars once they become worthless, but I can grow food...

I like to remember that there are no "experts" or "specialists" in climate change either, as it's not exactly something anyone could have prior experience with, unless they were extremely long-lived and/or from another planet that's just succumbed to climate change.

But we can see that the worrisome trend of "experts" revising their worst fears to even worse continues, and it's time I became an "expert on the accelerating trend of experts to espouse ever more dire predictions."

Given this article as the latest expert opinion about sea level change, I too can make a prediction:

Since these "experts" revise the timeframe to ever shorter and shorter spans, and the threats to ever more disastrous and dire levels, you can safely say that we don't have a lot of time, we can't actually "fix" what's wrong, and we're in for a rough ride, really really soon.

Don't forget, also, that these revised predictions are generally based on results seen now, in other words when they say "at least a meter rise by 2100" that could mean "actually, five meters rise by 2100.  And the rise doesn't happen all at once in 2100 - it's happening right now to cause such a drastic re-evaluation.  As I'm typing this, the average sea level has risen by a perceptible amount...

In other words, the predictions have been and probably still are woefully under-estimating the actual rate we're stuffing up the world at, and we're already in for a tough and possibly lethal ride.  If you live along the coast, or on low-lying islands, learn to swim...

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

The Slow Food Benefit - Weight Loss

If you can excuse the slightly smug tone of this article, it's actually a good addendum to my Zen Cookbook.  This is why I lost weight while using the recipes in it, because it was a far better way to eat than fast food burgers and pizzas, and I remember thinking that at almost a kilo a week for a few months it was too good to be true.  And, eventually, it was.  Bad food habits crept in again, and so did those lost kilos.

I was eating only maybe one fast food or junk food meal every week or two, but that was enough to make my system misbehave and store fat.  So honestly, reconsider just grabbing that fast burger and chips on the way home, because it really does seem to be a leading cause of obesity and system overload.

What has really driven this home to me is that I've moved south of the city, and about 8km from the nearest supermarket.  I prefer to drive 12km the other direction to get to a fresh produce place named the Spud Shed, and I buy a lot of vegetables and fruit there, because I have animals that like fruit and veg, and because I like a good dollop of fresh F&V in my meals anyway. In four months here I've lost 10kg again, just because I couldn't give in to the temptation to buy a burger or pizza or packaged white bread without either paying the local exorbitant prices or driving into Pinjarra or Mandurah.

While I've been here, T has come to visit me every weekend, and she is an obese person - but only since coming back to Australia.  When she lived in Cyprus in a rural area, she ate plentifully but stayed at her correct weight.  Back in Australia with our processed and additive-laden crap foods, and she not only became obese but also scored Type 2 diabetes into the bargain.

Another friend, J, came to visit on the weekend.  I haven't seen J in years but he was never more than borderline overweight, and now he was thin and trimmed down in weight because he'd "had Type 2 - didn't you know?"  No I didn't know, and as I said I would never have considerd J to be overweight - but he was, as was I, a computer and IT person and we often lived on fast food and junk food.

So what else can I put it down to?  If you eat processed foods with lots of additives, food that has had the natural nutrients processed out of it, and which is an admixture of the processed food itself, plus additives to restore its nutritive content, and extra nutrients that were never in the original food, then your system goes into an overload.  Common signals such as repleteness, insulin triggers, and the general warning signs your body give, get ignored as they are triggered continuously, and systems go out of whack.  (And oh yes, your cells give out literally millions of warnings all day every day when on adulterated foods - just that, like the sound of traffic outside your window, the sound of rain on the roof after a while, your brain ignores them.)

Once one system goes out of kilter, others will follow it.  And before you know it your body is sensing itself under threat and starts to lay in fat to at least provide energy for fighting back the other "infections" it senses.  As it happens, this leads to a vicious circle, because these days, food *IS* the infecting agent, in 80% of the food you eat.  It's what triggers fatty liver and Type 2, arterial plaques, and (in my experience, at any rate) some of the worse cancers such as prostate, cervical, bowel, and colon.  Anywhere that this crap slop that the supermarkets sell as food ends up going through... 

I don't think I need to make this point any more but I will, just for the sake of making it clear:  ANY food that has additives that were not known to mankind 5,000 to 10,000 years ago; any food that is processed in a manner that wasn't around 5,000 to 10,000 years ago; and any food that itself wasn't around 5,000 to 10,000 years ago in it's season;  ALL of these will do you damage.  Just like tobacco does certain damage, so do adulterated foods.  Important - 5,000 to 10,000 years ago we knew how to store certain foods such as cereals and roots against the off-peak seasons, we knew how to preserve foods by smoking, salting, brining, and pickling; and we knew how to make wines and beers.  ALL WITHOUT ANY ADDITIVES.  Not many people died of obesity-related diseases, nor of diabetes, nor of cancers.  'Nuff said . . .

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Brammo Bicycle Best Buy Bamboozlement

Electric Vehicles (EVs) need to make a radical departure from conventional automobiles in order to make an impact.  By that I don't mean that these vehicles should look like a roller skate mated with the ugliest Skoda (which is unfortunately what most manufacturers seem to have taken their cue from) but that they should be sold and marketed in an entire different way.

I've been saying that big showrooms are not the way - you're trying to market frugality and economy here, after all... Most specifically in terms of environmental impact being as low as possible, but preferably also in terms the consumer will understand, i.e. effect on their hip-pocket nerve.  In order to do that you need to take the approach that your vehicle is a commodity not a religious artifact.  Get away from the empire palaces built on obscene profits, the huge glass showrooms, and start selling your cars like an MP3 player - which you can now buy in the electrical good aisle of your local big chain supermarket, and from little booths set up in the local mall.

 This approach (http://i.gizmodo.com/5162905/best-buy-to-sell-12000-electric-motorcycle-probably-with-a-4000-service-plan) is probably exactly along the lines I've been thinking of.  Except for the price for what is essentially a bicycle with a battery and electric motor...

I guess that Brammo is probably trading on being the first one to do this, but that's still no excuse for such an atrocious price.  As with my recent article on the atrociously inflated price of solar panels, the production costs are way down, now pass it on you greedy sods!

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Solar Scammer Sods.

Now that the cost of solar electric power has dived through the $1/watt mark, the solar panels I have on the bus are theoretically worth $120 between them.

I know they were probably bought at a time when solar panels like that (60W) would have cost something like $700 apiece, back when solar panels were still very rare items.  I also know that two years ago I started looking for solar panels in the 60W - 120W range and got prices varying from $500 for a 60W panel and about $700 - $800 for the 120W model.

Since then solar panel technology has supposedly become cheaper, so it was a surprise to me to six months ago to go to a well-known 12V electrics and solar shop and get a price of just under $1,400 (!!!) for a 120W panel.    Clearly it pays to shop around, there are some really dodgy suppliers around.

Why I am looking for more panels is simple - I can get hold of any number of old lead acid batteries and there are some simple gadgets you can make to recondition many of those batteries.  I have enough inverter power in the bus that I could run most of the gear I need, provided I have enough charged batteries.  And I could charge a hella lot more batteries if I had a few more solar panels.  And if the lowered price is ever allowed to be reflected in our Australian prices, I will be able to do that...

Another thing for K-Rudd to look at - rip-off solar places.  I had one offer to install solar panels on the house, "it's cheap, the Government's gonna pay for almost all of it" over the phone.  It was such a pathetic amount of solar panels (eight, I think) and didn't include the installation cost or the cost of inverters in the bit that the "Government's gonna pay for" and in the end I realised it was probably priced at exactly double what it was worth.  And now that the insulation incentive thing has gone through there will be a million salesmen in your phone for that, too...

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Something To Loathe

Please HATE supermarkets with a passion!

Because They Suck!

Just because they are both a root cause and a symptom of why we are where we are today.

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Some People Don't Think Before They Open That Trap.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/02/joel-makower-says-we-have-just-5000-more-days-video.php  missed it by an order of magnitude, it's more like 500 days.

I don't think we have almost 14 years left to amend how we're abusing the earth.  I don't think anyone in their right mind thinks so, and I think that pulling a figure like that out of your ass during a presentation trivialises the problem and no matter how green this guy presents at he's done immeasurable damage to the cause, especially for all those people who now think we have ages before anything needs to be done.

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Here Comes The Algae Over The Hill!

Solazyme, cleverly harnessing the hidden strengths of algae to make diesel fuel.  Also note that the "reporter" actually tastes the oil - I'm told that you can actually use this oil as a food.  If they ever read about using algae to scrub smokestack exhaust and convert it to algae oil, I think they'd soon have a whole lot of power stations producing a whole lot less mess, and giving back diesel fuel instead of consuming it...

While commercialism is the focus of  most sustainable/renewable/zerocarbon power ventures that's not necessarily a drawback, as it helps spur developments like this one and bring us closer to giving Earth a chance to recover.

Here's a thought for you, green technologists out there:

Algae and bacteria are poweful allies indeed.  Between them they do the scutwork of turning all manner of toxic and waste substances into useful sources of food for some other organism.  So how about splitting up the path between garbage and your petrol tank with one or two stages of algae?  One to convert plastics to a biomass that's tailored for algae to eat, another to convert food wastes to that intermediate biomass, and so forth.  Exhaust stack wastes to intermediate biomass, old fish and chips oil to intermediate biomass.  And then you wouldn't have to tailor algae to each specific conversion, just a handful to convert anything to intermediate biomass, and then a handful to take that intermediate biomass and convert it to whatever output product you need - be it fuel oil, animal feed, or a tasty snack food.  BONUS:  More stages = more growth, means you end up with a lot more algae and output product than you put in.

Any biotechs out there want to try that?

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

The "It Doesn't Grow On Trees" Game

My Dad was never a hippy, although he was in the right bracket for it.  And now we're seeing that maybe those hippies were right.  Maybe we need to do things for the earth not because "that might save us" but because we know that even if it doesn't, it's the right thing to do. (BTW Treehugger the singular is "hippie" not "hippy."  I should know cos when it comes to language I could teach Grammar Girl a thing or three, having had to make a special effort to learn English as a toddler and being thrown from a German speaking family straight into an English-only speaking school.)

What my Dad was, is a very smart man who could see the writing on the wall, in the mid 60's and 70's.  So he started a game with m.  "I'm going to tell you something 'doesn't grow on trees'," he'd say.  "You have to tell me why I'm wrong and why it does gow on trees."  Being a kid, a contradiction game sounded like delicious fun to me, and I'd play enthusiastically.

"Don't slam the car door - car DON'T GROW ON TREES YOU KNOW!" he'd say.  And I'd wade in.

"But they had to smelt the metal for the car, using coal or oil or wood.  They all come from trees!"

"Eat all your vegetables.  THEY DON'T GROW ON TREES YOU KNOW!"

"But trees had to be cleared for the farm where they grow, and they use fertiliser that should have been for trees, and the tools that farmer used are like cars, they had to burn something to make his tractor and plough!"

... and so on.  I got tired of the game eventually, and stopped reacting as joyously.  And there are only so many things to point out in life, before you realise, depressingly, that it all comes down to either million-year-old trees or contemporary trees.

A few years ago I was letting a friend's children wash dishes and play in the kitchen, and they broke a large plastic vegetable drainer I'd had for ages and repaired several times after minor mishaps, and when it finally broke beyond repair, I was very depressed.  The children's mother spoke to me and said she'd buy another one, and I remember thinking about my father's game, and about the crude oil that would b processed to make the plastic, the oil/coal energy that would be used to form the new strainer, and the cost of transporting it around the world.

"But," I said, "They grow on trees, you know?"

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Algae As Stack Scrubbers And Biofuel.

I'm thinking that in the Australian Government's push to have clean power, they are barking up the wrong tree if they think "clean coal" isn't an oxymoron.  Whether you pump up sludged-up dinosaurs or dig up their carbonified remains, you're messing with the balance.  Whether you pump the resulting pollution straight into the atmosphere, or if you "scrub" it first.  Either way, it's not at all clean, and the wastes just keep accumulating.  TANSTAAFL, There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

But if you use the pollution to feed algae along the way, and then use that algae as a supplementary fuel to the coal...  Hmmmm...  I'm just saying, if you have a few acres of shallow algae pools and dry the algae with the otherwise wasted smokestack heat, you might just be onto something...

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

A Brilliant, Economical - and Local! - Bore Water Pump!

If you need to pump water up to 200m lift, then a locally-made water pump with only one movin part can probably help you.  I realise that this isn't for everyone.  But I also know that a few of my readers are on hobby farms and the second most prohibitive cost of having bore water is the pump and running power to it.

The Brumby pumps come in a few basic configurations, and use compressed air to lift the water.  The one moving part is a ball valve, and apparently the whole pump's pretty much everything-proof and doesn't jam or wear out.  The Brumbies are very economically priced and because they run on compressed air, you can run a piece of tubing from a compressor somewhere nearer to power (or use solar or wind to compress air) - and that saves the usually horrendous cost of running waterproof electric lines down into your borehole full of WATER.  (Which is the natural enemy of anyone fool enough to hold onto a live electric cable near...)

The pumps can lift up to almost 200 meters, and produce a flow of up to 10,000 liters per hour, according to the video on the website.

Here's an article and a video one of these pumps used in south america to supply a community farm, and here's a link to Brumby Pumps in Toodyay, which is a bit more than an hour's drive out of Perth, and I'll quite happily drive out there and check them out and provide a more in-depth article, if there's interest in the product.

I'm so proud and happy to have found another one of those examples of local ingenuity, and I'm all for Australia leading in such things as cheap water supply and (another article coming up later) small scale biodiesel generating plant.  Also you may have seen solar panels out in the middle of paddocks apparently doing not much, well they are Sunmills, they use a low voltage pump to do the job windmills used to do, of filling stock and irrigation water tanks, and they are developed and made in Fremantle.  Again, if there's interest I'll go and do an in-depth on this technology as well.

For now, please pass these links on to anyone you in turn know who's involved in providing cheap community water, or who has a farm or hobby farm, or even who has a bore for their garden and has let the pump rust in piece because of the expense of replacing it.

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Why I Am Hating On Fast Foods. Again.

I'm not sure why, but it seems that some people are freaked out by the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook because it's a "diet."  Yes it is - but no it isn't.  It's not a diet in the sense that you need to strictly adhere to "5g of this and no more than a pinch of THAT" - no, not at all!  It's a set of guidelines for healthier better eating, and if the major foods are added to your diet and taken at the right times, that's all that counts.  From there, it's just a matter of basically "busking" the recipes (see here for one example) and making sure you have the right ingredients in it.  (That particular recipe had the right combination of particular cooking oil and tomatoes, for example.)

By the way:  Thanks to having moved just a few kilometers away from the temptation of fast and junk foods, I've been using the diet principles a bit more rigorously and suddenly find myself back down by about two kilos in three months, back from the borderline of obese to just slightly overweight for my BMI.  So the book achieves more than just great results with prostate problems, it also manages to trim weight off.

And it goes without saying that fast food more than once or twice a month is probably the worst thing ever you can do for your health, closely followed by not reading the ingredients on your packages of food.

A few possible ways to get the "good" back in your "good food" are here and here.


Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Cooked Or Raw? Strangely Enough, Cooked.

Here's something that supports the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook - actually, several things.  But mainly, here's a question for you:

Given our family tree straight from the apes (I'm not getting into the creationsim vs evolution debate here - we have a clear history as far as foodstuffs and our digestive systems goes and that's that) are we better off with most of our foods raw, or cooked?

The answer may surprise you.

Seems we have had fire for long enough, and used it to prepare our food long enough, to have adapted to actually doing better on cooked food.  And - once again - The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook has been saying that all along...

In the book, I've said that humans are superbly adapted for our diet.  The diet we had up until about 400 years ago, anyhow...  And we are certainly NOT at all adapted for adulterated, processed, additive-laden, and differently-prepared foods.  For instance - did you know that peanut allergies only rose sharply in the last hundred years or so?  Coincidentally, in synchronism with a different, high-temperature, method of roasting peanuts...  Most people with a peanut allergy can eat raw unprocessed peanuts or boiled peanuts or slow low-temp-roasted peanuts just fine...  (BTW Please DO NOT just go off and eat a raw peanut if you're allergic - some people are genuinely allergic to all forms of peanuts, and before you try anything like that consult your dietitian or GP and make sure there's an allergy test done with raw peanuts first. You may, though, get a surprise.)

And we are in fact superbly adapted for our habit of storing certain vegetables and food all year around - so not ALL vegetables need be eaten only in season.  And - as the quoted article states - we are now superbly adapted to eating cooked and prepared foods - as long as we are preparing those foods in the ways our 100-generations-back ancestors prepared them.  So while it's true that tomatoes are one of our best foods for antioxidant lycopene, as I say in the book, tomato paste contains more accessible lycopene than raw tomatoes, and cooking tomato with olive oil and grapeseed oil allows your body to access even more lycopene, up to ten times as much as tomato paste alone.

If you're tired of feeling "a little bit off," tired of not always feeling in top form, or have prostate or other urito-genital inflammations or diseases, or even some more common problems such as Type 2 diabetes or arterial plaques or irritable bowels - my book CAN help.  (In my case, using the guidelines in the book I managed to reverse prostate cancer and also lose a few kilos of weight.  And yes - the diet was the only thing I used to reverse my prostate cancer, in under seven months.  Your mileage may vary, but the health benefits of using this book as your guide to food and eating seem pretty proven to me.)

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Ars'ole'onists Is Too Good A Term.

For anyone that still doubts global warming exists, or who believe the effects will be "manageable."

Oh you stupid stupid person!  Just some quick side notes on the eastern states bushfires, which have irrevocably changed the lives of so many brave people:

• The fires were so uncontrollably voraciously widepsread and successful because the weather was perfect, several weeks to dry out all the fuel to explosive perfection.
• The heat is one of the things that seems to trigger a firebug's addled brain, so the heat must send out an imperative command to their conscious selves to start planning to light fires.  If you were of a religious persuasion, you might say they are getting a foretaste of their afterlife...
• The unseasonal heat made Victoria and South Australia one of the hottest spots on Earth, unseasonla weather that can pretty much be laid fair and square at the door of global warming.  
• From 46C - 47C days (115F - 118F) before and during the firestorm that has raged for almost a week, temperatures in surrounding areas have dropped from the normal mid-30s (93F) to only 7.5C, (or 42F,)which is a winter temperature in this region.
• The energy released in all the fires over the entire firestorm was estimated to be the equivalent of more than 600 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs.  It was spread over a correspondingly wider area and a longer time, but the effect has been pretty much the same.
• The sudden temperature drop can be attributed, I think, to smoke reflecting the sun's heat back.  Wait until there's no more smoke, and the deepest black-burnt ground for thousands of hectares...

Rather than try (as some in the Government are now doing) to hang someone for getting it wrong, I propose that almost everyone that survived got it right, and many of those that perished also had it right but were killed by freaks and artifacts of the fire such as logs blocking roads, fires making flashpoint jumps from tree to tree, and other variants.

For anyone that thinks larger cities couldn't go the same way, think again.  A rise of a few degrees bring the flash point of many materials closer to combustion.  Wooden framed rooves, all those tinder-dry palms standing in a row like so many matchsticks, an exploding car petrol tank - all will help spread flames afar, given a slightly drier and warmer environment.

And the "nuclear winter" effect from flying smoke and ash has been demonstrated in the weather currently being enjoyed by Melbourne.

Suppose one was to sentence an arsonist - a multiple arsonist especially - what would one serve on them?  Time for malicious damage to property by fire.  Time for damaging native flora and fauna.  Time for damaging native reserve and park land.  Reckless disregard for damage and harm caused.  Murder or manslaughter - one sentence per victim - at least hard time for those.

Emotional, financial, and personal hardship, trauma, and damage for each victim.  Double the sentence for each child thus affected.  And no anaesthetic, no chance of parole, and a requirement to be paraded in stocks once a year every year for the term of their life.

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook is now almost three.

It's been quite a few years now since I had news of my prostate cancer, and developed The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook, which this blog is the support blog for.  When I posted this article more recently, I was ecstatic that my results were still so excellent.

If this nice new feature of Blogger works, then this post will auto post on my birthday, and it will have been almost four years that I've remained prostate problem free, without any chemicals or drugs.

(BTW I'm writing this late in December 2008, have recently had another blood test, and still my PSA is at a level of 1.0 or less.  Since this is my 52nd birthday, I should be averaging 1.8 or more PSA, yet my levels are still like those of a 25 - 30 yo man.)

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

EV News N Views N Boos

And not boos in a cuddly sense, either.  I said that I find current EVs are almost always styled to be as ugly as possible (car manufacturers would say "distinctive" but the aim is not to make EVs look like pink monkeys, come on!) and not very well designed electrically.   The Tazzari Zero is along the lines of all of that.  It looks like the unfortunate offspring of a Mini (car, not Mac) and a duck, (army or biological, take your pick, either way is as ugly,) and try as I might I couldn't find all that much grist on the site.  The Register has an article on it as well, there you go.

You may have noticed that while I'm tongueing for an EV to come along, I'm also becoming more and more disenchanted with the piles of battery ridden crap that are out there.  You'd be right, on both counts.  Given that electric cars were available in the 60's, it's frustrating that the current crop of EV's is pretty much exactly the same, give or take a handful of minor differences.  Honestly - you'd think technology that's been around for almost fifty years would have seen some improvements, definitely more than the paltry addition of a PWM controller and Li-Ion batteries - which is what most of our contemporary manufacturers seem to think is radical and wonderful and makes them justified in charging like wounded bulls for the privilege of owning an ugly resource-waster.

You'd also be excused if you (like me) were to wonder why the hell an EV, with less moving parts and and more of what we know are cheap to produce electronics (see things like $20 iPod clones and laptops that sell for $400, meaning they cost under $100 to manufacture) should cost so much and price themselves out of reach of most of the population.

And since EVs are meant to be the vanguard of a movement which is supposed to replace polluting fossil-fuelled vehicles, why then are they all busily researching how to make themselves faster and more powerful and more wasteful of resources?  Come on - some tossers with small penis syndrome out there may be willing to pay you an exorbitant price for your over-powered over-engineered over-wank-factored POS but what we need is less stupid greedy asshat manufacturers like you.  (You're the reason we're in this predicament now, fer chrissakes.)

So mainly it's boo to most of them.

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Longer Light Exposure Better For Cancer?

Sometimes I wonder if people aren't overthinking the things that may or may not cause prostate and breast cancer.  This article says there's a claimed link between longer exposure to artificial lighting and prostate cancer. Mind you, right at the end it's also acknowledged that there's a link between longer exposure to artificial light and breast cancer too.

I'm kind of wondering - maybe it's not actually the light.  After all, that would be the most tenuous and feeble of connections.  But of course even scientists have dreams and aspirations.  ("Hey! Let's find a link between two things that's so tenuous and nebulous that it'll take us two page just to list the causal chain!  THAT should get us a Nobel!")

But of course mostly that's not the way the world works, and the right link, when found, proves to be much more simple to explain and demonstrate.  Occam's Razor dictates that we should plunk for the most simple explanation, and to me there's a much simpler explanation:

People who spend more time under artificial light are generally citizens of more developed countries, and are that portion of the population that spend their time awake for longer at night.  That indicates a certain lifestyle, working long hours and getting recreational time in artificial light.  A lifestyle that eats a lot more processed food and doesn't have the time for homecooked wholefoods...  Or maybe they use more shampoo for some reason not directly linked to artificial light...

And it's easy to find a link between harmful diet and pretty much any cancer - more so than it would be to find a link between artificial light and cancer, I think. (I think even skin cancer, while caused by UV light, is facilitated more by harmful diet than by sunlight - don't forget that our forebears lived in broad daylight and full sunshine and there's no evidence to suggest that a skin cancer epidemic killed off as large a percentage of that population as it currently does of our generation.)

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Measure Your Power Consumption, Greenly

Onzo is a UK company that produces - well, it's not clear from their website, but power related items.  Stuff you can use to measure your house's power consumption and graph it on your PC.  Unfortunately, their website is totally useless (but they do say they want a web designer so that may change soon) but Treehugger found info on this item.  Now I want one...  %)

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

I LOVE This EV!

Electric vehicles need to become desirable and visible.  The Aptera is certainly both of those, but I can't help thinking that they need exposure exposure exposure.  If they ever wanted someone to drive one of their vehicles around and make it visible, let them give me one!  I promise I'll love it and park it in all the coolest places!

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Your Supermarket Loves You(r Money And Not Much Else)

Do food companies actually care about your health?  They would have you believe so, and label all their products with "New! Improved! Healthy!" wording all over the package.  If you believed everything that they write on their packaging, believed all their ads and commercials, then eating sugar frosted floor dust flakes covered in watered-down permeate-boosted milk would turn you into the healthiest person walking the planet.

But we all know that this isn't so.  "Healthy" cereals (for example) are loaded with sugar to capture your taste buds, preservatives, flavour enhancers and modifiers, to make the shit more appealing and give it better "mouthfeel" and so forth.  And to top it off the natural vitamins and trace minerals and nutrional value have been cooked, baked, roasted, and otherwise processed out.

Still think the food companies have your interests at heart and not their bottom line and how they can extract more of your dollars?  How I'm persecuting poor innocent (extremely rich) executives who spend their whole days pondering how to give you the best and healthiest value for money?  Oh puh-lease!

How about knowingly selling poisoned food?  Also, please don't trap yourself into thinking of this as a one in a million occurrence.  It's just that this one gathered some public attention because it killed people, and in fact the decision to ship known tainted product is carried out routinely at every level from the primary producer up.  "Reckon they'll notice?  Nahhhh, screw 'em!" is a far more common reaction than "No! We'll cop a loss and throw this whole batch out!"

... just sayin' ...


Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Your Electric Bill - part 3

How to understand it, what to do to make it smaller.
So far we've covered the electricity bill in overview, and how to use less energy for air conditioning.  There are still a few tips for all the other energy consumers, and a few things to note about your electricity suppliers.

Another tip about the electric bill:
Some suppliers allow you to install so-called "smart meters" which charge you at a different rate depending on which time of day you consume the electricity.  This is useful for the power companies because they get hit with severe usage at peak periods, so they need to run a lot of generating plant to cover that peak.  And it takes a lot of money (which they can't recover the cost of) to crank up and shut off that generating plant.

Therefore, they charge a premium price to consumers with normal meters, and consumers with smart meters during the peak periods - but then when the peak is over, they encourage smart metered consumers to use electricity in off-peak time with the incentive that it will end up cheaper for them.  That slightly reduces their peak load, and slightly raises their offpeak load, so that the generating equipment can be run at a more consistent load.

So you can save money by making sure your main power draws occur in the offpeak time period, if your power company has an offpeak, and if you get them to install a smart meter for you.  You can do this by installing (for example) a timer to turn the hot water system off during peak times, and perhaps your air conditioning or electric heating as well, if the peak period isn't too long.

The last three energy wasters:
Refrigerating your food is the next cost.  A refrigerator is a heat pump, it uses electricity to pump heat out of the inside of the cabinet to a radiating element on the outside.  Every time you open the door, all the cold falls down and out, because cold air sinks.  That means hot air has flowed in around the top, and now the fridge has to use up more energy to pump that heat out.  The simplest way to save energy on refrigeration then, is to open the door less often, and keep it open for shorter periods.  Another thing that may work for you is to put some strips of  plastic along each shelf so it keeps the cold in on the shelf below, but to do this your shelves need to be solid, not the old style wire racks.

Freezers.  Side opening freezers lose the cold just like fridges, only it's a LOT more expensive to re-chill the freezer.  If you can get a top-opening chest style freezer, that makes the most sense, as the cold will tend t stay pooled inside even if you do open the lid.

And if you have a coolroom or pantry with cooling built in, get freezer curtains installed and again, make sure the door is opened as few times, and for as short a period, as possible each day.  You paid for that cooling, don't waste it!

Now we come to the huge range of convenience devices, things such as microwaves, TVs, DVD players, computers and their peripherals, and the whole slew of things that sit there prodigiously consuming your dollars and the environment.  Computers can, depending on their configuration, chew up between 100W and 800W.  LCD monitors can similarly chew through 200W - 400W depending on their size, brightness settings, and so forth.  As well, they both produce waste heat which you then have to use more energy to pump outside with your A/C system...

Also things like your TV and associated set top boxes, satellite decoders, players and media centers, these all draw power like crazy when turned on, and generate heat to boot.  They still generate heat and draw power in so-called "stand-by" modes too.

And quite often, when you put the TV into standby mode after watching, or put the PC to sleep, the majority of ancillary devices remain switched on...

A suggestion:  There are a number of so-called "smart" powerstrips out there, which turn everything plugged into the "switched" outlets completely off when a device attached to the "master" socket stops drawing power.  In other words, you're swapping five or more devices on standby power for one device on standby power (the TV or computer plugged into the master socket) and a small amount of standby power for the powerstrip itself.  Buy several of these strips and plug one "master" device into it, say the DVD player or whatever draws the least stand-by current and still has a remote, and you could be on your way to saving another 50c to $2.00 per day, depending how many of those vampire power devices you take off your energy needs.  Doesn't sound like much but on a typical electricity bill just doing this alone can save you between $10 and $45 in a single bill.

And PCs have an even more power-conscious smart strip, which relies on the USB port of your computer to activate, so there's not even any vampire power circuit inside there drawing current.  Look out for more and more of these devices to come on the market as manufactuirers realise that people like saving the odd fifty bucks per power bill.

The main thing is - you can unplug these devices for now, and only plug them in when you need them.  If everyone in the house has a PC and/or a laptop, do they all really need to be on all day and all night?  I have a PC which is my media center and which quite often got left on just to play MP3's or the FM radio.  Just by having a small radio around and playing my music on that, I've managed to save about $2 a week on my power bill, as I now only turn on the media PC when I want to watch TV or a video.  That's about $26 per electric bill, right there.  (I get mine each quarter.)

Last thoughts - do you really need the microwave clock to be on all night?  How about all the home entertainment system?  Does it really have to be ready to respond ot the touch of a button, or could you perhaps manage to switch on a master switch and then sit and enjoy remote control convenience?

These are all, of course, your choices, all up to you whether you act on them or not.  But in the end, it's not only your dollar but your world and your life that are being eroded away a kilowatt at a time... 

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Why Have There Been So Few EVs?

If this is electric racing, then let me in for some of that...  And let me ask you - if these cars can beat the arse off top fuellers and other technology that's been developed for the past century, then how come car manufacturers couldn't make a decent EV fifty years ago?

Part of the answer of course is that they did, but stopped.  And there has to be a reason behind that failure to develop better tech.  Not any conspiracy, but a nice cosy relationship between the big auto and big oil, the fact that refining is easier than retooling, and a desire to make as many dollars as possible.

Why are the big auto companies still not serious about making good EVs?  That, in a nutshell, is the question.  But when the fastest, highest-accelerating car in the world is powered by batteries and an electric motor, and the most economical and clean in terms of pollution produced per mile are electric, it sometimes seems there's a conspiracy to pollute as much of the Earth as possible and see how many people die off, doesn't it?

Not helping are the pathetic lame-arsed piles of crap the auto companies are trying to lead off with, starting with Toyota's much-vaunted Prius which is really not that much of an advance over most any small economical petrol-engined car.

Why do I say that?  Because to be really serious, Toyota should have led off not with a stupid petrol-engined car that uses electric power like some kind of glorified clock spring reservoir, but a diesel car with plug-in electric capability right from the start.  As we've just seen, despite their protestations, the damn technology IS TOO there, and has been for decades.

And a huge part of the reason is (get braced for it) - US, dear people.  If you dug your heels in and asked at the dealer for a car that's able to run on electric rechargeable power and relatively clean biodiesel at need, then by now that vehicle would exist.  But by buying "one more while I'm waiting for the new clean vehicles" we're all contributing to the feet-dragging.  A bit like "aw, just one more cigarette," really...  And meanwhile, we're shortening the lifespans and reducing the living standards of our children and grandchildren, and working on leaving a many generations legacy of the not-so-good kind behind us...

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Your Electric Bill - part 2

How to understand it, what to do to make it smaller.

Last article, I posted a typical electric bill and decoded some of the obscure bits.  Then I laid out the recording phase of reducing your energy bill, where you investigate what your appliances draw, how long they operate for each day, etc.  You should have a notebook page or three full of figures, notes, and observations.  If you don't, it's probably time to go back and re-read that article, and do take the notes.  

Now for a few thoughts to reduce that energy bill.

How do I reduce my energy usage?

Look at your notepad.  The four most common things that increase your energy bill are listed here.  I bet you'll have found at least two of these things in your own list.

1. Environment Climate Control.  By this, I mean air conditioning, heating, and use of fans.  And most of the time, you can markedly reduce this and save energy, money, and environment.
2. Refrigeration and Food Storage.  Whether you have a single refrigerator or a huge pigeon pair plus a freezer in the garage and a coolroom pantry, there are still energy saving tips.
3. Computers and computer related devices.  A surprisingly large portion of your energy sheet will be consumed by computers and peripherals.
4. Vampire power.  By now most people are familiar with the term "vampire power."  It means the current flowing when a device is "switched off" but still on standby so that you can save getting up, and instead awaken the device with the remote control.

I'll tackle these in order.

Air Conditioning Tips:

When you checked your A/C, you would have found one of several types.  A refrigerated air conditioning system, which is best in terms of keeping the house cool, but expensive to run.  An evaporative cooler system, which is much cheaper to run but won't get as cold as a refrigerated system.  And then there are the newer so-called "inverter" systems which are a refrigerated A/C but save you a little on power - and more if you take the advice I'm about to give.  One other important difference, refrigerated A/C systems can also come as a "reverse cycle" unit that heats as well as cools.

The only type of air conditioning system which you should have running with doors or windows open is the evaporative style cooler.  These have a large (generally 600W - 1200W) motor for the fan, and a small (< 100W) motor to pump water over the cooling screens.  These systems actually need windows or doors open, and the best place to do that is on the side away from the prevailing wind, so that the waste air is sucked out of the house and thus assists the evaporation and the fan.  There's little practical difference between running such systems in "air only" and "cooling" modes, because in cooling mode you're only turning on a small water pump.

If you have a refrigerated A/C system and any doors or windows open, then you deserve the electricity bill you're going to get.  These systems consist of two motors:  A) a fan to move air, as for the evaporative system above, but much smaller because these systems don't need to move quite the volume of air which evap systems need to move, and B) a motor to drive a compressor to provide the cooling.  The fan motor will be running constantly to move air, and the compressor will cut in each time the thermostat clicks on due to the air over it being too warm.  

The compressor motor will draw the majority of the energy, so it's important to keep heat out of the air.  That means, if you have a window or door open to the outside, the thermostat will be on almost contuinuously, and so will that compressor motor, chewing through your dollars...

Keeping the heat outside, by closing doors, drawing curtains on the sun side, etc, should be your primary concern.  The less times the compressor has to run each day, the less will be your energy bill.  Note that by setting the thermostat for not quite so cold a temperature will also result in substantial savings.  The primary best thing a refrigerated A/C does is to remove excess humidity from the air, and that will actually make warmer air seem sufficiently cold, so sometimes just 5 degrees below outside temps can be sufficient.  

The same sorts of things need to be applied in the case of heating, or running the A/C in reverse cycle mode - keeping the outside out is your main priority.

One exception is the new breed of "inverter" A/C units.  These don't just switch the compressor on and off, they can vary the amount of cooling effort of the compressor, so that you don't get the heavy and expensive "surge" that happens each time an electric motor is turned on.  It actually saves you a significant amount over older style A/C systems, and perhaps if your A/C is getting a bit old, an inverter system should be on your list of things to do.

Here's a much less obvious source of poor energy efficiency with air conditioning systems - power wasters in your home that produce heat.  The refrigerator that you're also checking on the energy use of - it uses energy to remove the heat from your foodstuffs and pumps it into the air inside your house! Where your A/C has to process it a second time and cool the resulting hot air...

Less obvious sources of heat again are:  Cooking heat (is your range hood in good order, and does it move that heat outside not back into the house again?) and the heat from TVs, PCs, monitors, and other devices.  Best way is to feel above them with your hand - are they generating a steady warmth even when on standby? When operating?  

The best answer is to not leave such devices running, have a range hood over the cooking area, and if you have a refrigerator in an alcove, try and get some form of venting installed above it that takes the heat outside the house.

Two last things to consider when you're looking at your climate control bill - is there insulation in the ceiling and the walls, and is there a ventilator for the ceiling space?  These two things together can cut your climate bill by a quarter.

In part 3 I'll cover the other power wasters and how to deal with them.

(to be continued)

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!

Basic Engagement Survey

Quick - survey! Please pop over to SurveyMonkey and take the three minutes to let me know what you think!

Visit The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook and help support my work!