Incandescent Imbecility

May I suggest that the people who are stockpiling incandescent bulbs might just be flaming idiots?  Just a thought...  I've used CFLs since they first came out and cost $25 apiece, and while the light was a lot "fluorescent office lighting" back then, they have now gotten to the point where I and my guests can't tell which fixture has the incandescent, which has the halogen, and which has the CFL bulb.

To explain that - I have a reading lamp with a 60W incandescent in it, a second reading lamp with a halogen, a bathroom with a halogen, and everything else is CFL.  Almost invariably, they say the halogen reading light is too "cold" while the halogen in the bathroom is fine, and no-one has ever suggested that the light bulbs in the lounge or kitchen are wrong or give poor light.

For all you people who are going to mutter about "newfangled mumbletty mutter crap not like the good ole days" well guess what the good ole days are gone, behind us, and there's a new reality to contend with and it doesn't include your concerns that your light bulbs are messing with your sense of interior decorating.  If you really DO have such extreme colour acuity that you can tell the difference, change your effing precious decor to match the new lights.  

Do you know how many rooms had to be refurbished when the "good old oil and gas lights" gave way to those same electric incandescent lights that you're now clutching to your bosoms?  Get used to change cos there's gonna be a helluvva lot of change in the next few years, much of it down to your love of those incandescent bulbs and flawless decor...

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We're About To Find Out

. . . what "knife-edge" means . . .

UPDATE: Still more bad news . . .

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See If This Amuses

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Four Year Anniversary

I just realised - four years and a day ago:

Anniversary poor biopsy results 2005

2009-08-22

That's how long ago I had my biopsy results back, with their bleak outlook of almost 70% dysplasic cells in the samples.

I might bother to have another PSA sometime soon, but in all truth, I am still following my diet and don't feel that I have a single worry.

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The Real Solution For Global Warming

... is simple.  Don't expect quite so much convenience, expect to have to do a bit more for the daily bread.

Some friendly things you can do right now to do your part:

• Buy a lot more unprocessed raw food locally, and prepare and cook it yourself. It isn't going to be as much of a range of foods as you're used to, but it will definitely make a difference.
  Also, many people who buy processed food buy the same thing over and over anyway.  Why not swap it for something local, homegrown, and homecooked? There's definitely a time problem if you have long workdays, but those long workdays are generally NOT helping the ecosystem, whereas looking after yourself does help.  Paradox, huh?
• Plan shorter single-car mileages per week.  The train/bus commute may not be as comfortable, but it IS better than doing all those miles in a car by yourself or carpooling with two other people instead of with (as in a bus) 90 people.
  I'm all in favour of inner-city and high traffic density areas becoming Electric-Vehicle-Only areas, with petrol and diesel fuelled vehicle drivers having to pay a daily fee in order to drive in such zones.  Fossil fuelled vehicles are not an option in densely trafficked areas.
• Try to grow some of your food yourself, using minimal processed fertilisers or soil conditioners.
  That way you know what is in that food, beyond a doubt. Secondly, if you stick to natural soil fertilising and conditioning, you avoid much of the fertiliser pollution which plagues agricultural areas.  Monoculture (growing large areas of the same variety) is the single biggest cause of outbreaks of pests that feed on that variety, and that in turn is the single biggest reason factory farms have to use so much pesticide.
• Try bringing up a few rabbits or chickens for the table.
  Our diets require a certain amount of meat, but nowhere near as much as we do eat.  And nothing - no amount of photos of piles of shrink-wrapped packages of the meat you consume every year - nothing at all, brings home the message of what meat really costs to produce in the way that raising, feeding, slaughtering, and then preparing your own meat animals does...  I don't want to turn people vegetarian, but I do want to point out that farming many animals in a monoculture creates the same problems as with food crops, of needing strong chemical means to get rid of the pests that converge and become a plague.

Those are four things you could start doing right now.  They won't alleviate the food crisis, but they will mitigate the effects of overfarming.  They won't remove vehicle emissions from the equation, but they will make a difference.  Taken individually, each one seems like a tiny drop in a huge ocean - but that's how the ill effects have all crept in, one tiny insignificant seeming drop at a time...

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The Real Reason For Global Warming

I can see how perhaps young people can't quite see what grunt work has to do with conservation. And I can also see that yes, they are worried by the Global Warming phenomenon because they will be the ones most affected by it.  Now comes the bit where I'm so so so sorry to have to say...

But right now, convenience, laziness, and shortcuts are what is causing all that ecosystem change.  Our desire for everyone to "have it easy" is what drives factory farming, deforestation, "convenience" stores (that name says it all really) and mountain ranges' worth of garbage and pollution.  It's everyone all over the world trying to dump personal responsibility in exchange for a mysterious shadowy vague "them" to blame it on and who will do the hard work.

And sorry to say, it's not going to go away if that's the attitude people are going to have.  Unless you're prepared to forego that "eco-friendly holiday" that's so conveniently mentioned online for you and which you'll only spend a few hundred tons of carbon and emissions on just from going to and coming back from, you aren't really doing the planet any favours.  Are you conveniently getting all your grocery needs at a giant supermarket chain?  Then if you are, no amount of "ecofriendly!" and "healthy!" signage made from rapidly shrinking supplies of natural resources are actually going to make any of what you buy eco-friendly.

No amount of telling yourself that "X-Mart is just going to have to do a cleaner job" will reduce the impact of that nice clean packaging made from 1000 year half-life plastics, nor will it take back one gram of the pollution spewed into the air to produce that food and ship it halfway around the world from a place where it's cheap, and it won't take away one milligram of the pesticides used to grow that food and which is now in some waterway killing local animals.

And why are those supermarkets still doing that?  Because YOU are letting them, and you're giving them a mandate to keep doing it by continuing to give them your money.  If YOU could be arsed to find local farmer's markets and prepare meals instead of defrosting them, if YOU had a shred of responsibility instead of blaming the supermarket chain, this wouldn't be happening.  Think about that when you're next asked to volunteer to clean up roadside trash or participate in a tree planting and make some weak excuse and go on an eco-holiday instead... 

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This Will Be Their Testament?

How sad. It's because of dickheads like these that we'll finish up with more heatwaves, more bushfires, more extinctions, less fresh water, and ultimately worse living conditions.  Who voted for these morons?  More importantly, who's going to vote for them next time?

If these people are doing this out of some misguided sense that they are saving us money, well guess what senators and parliamentarians and other halfwits, I can't eat our crap plastic money, but I will be really really really pissed off when food costs me all of my scrimped and saved plastic money that you worked so studiously to save for me...

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Cash For Clunkers Ripped Off

UPDATE: at least there's one other person thinking like me.  and a good high profile one, at that.

While Cash For Clunkers is at its heart seemingly a good program, it does have some drawbacks.  As in this little gem of a scheme in Germany, where the cars are just sold again later.  NOT the best outcome.  It would be good if the car dealers there grew a conscience and just injected those engines as well, but my bet is that half of them ARE the element that's turning a profit by reselling those old shit-heaps.

It's not a well-thought-out scheme to begin with, because it brings as many problems as it solves.  And the one problem it does solve best isn't pollution but a kickstart to the economy that was guttering and dying in the USA.  For that, the CfC scheme has been a Godsend, because it gets money out there and circulating again.

Problems it didn't solve:

• Pollution.  As in the example of Germany, where it just moves the heaps around to spew somewhere else, in the States it just gets people to buy another pollution-spewer.  
• Transport.  The people who can afford to upgrade their car, whether by trading in, CfC, or whatever else, already have a car.  People who don't have the wherewithal to afford a car, are still just as screwed as before.

Much better would have been to have two wrinkles on the scheme:

• CfC only available for anyone purchasing an electric, hydrogen, or hybrid car with the rebate.  That would have solved the problem of pollution, and put incentive dollars in the pockets of those that most need them, the clean vehicle industry.
• Clunkers that are in roadworthy condition to have the engine removed and killed, and a new more efficient and clean engine fitted and then allowed to be resold - but only to individual customers, and at a price no more than the rebate plus the market cost of the engine and fitting.  That would provide cheap cars for those who need them but can't afford them, be they in the States or elsewhere in the world.

Used together those two steps would have solved a lot of hassles and also pulled the sting of the scam being perpetrated in Germany.

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Fetchez La Fishing Rod!

Isn't it amazing how the world comes back if you only let it?

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Just A Quick Observation On Weight Loss

I don't know how many TV news articles start with "Losing the weight is only half the story, here's the part that no-one else tells you."

The day one TV station headed an article with that tag, wasn't that the end of it?  Cos after that, everyone is telling you the part that "no-one else tells you" and in fact they need to change the tag to "... here's the part that everyone else has already told you."  Uh, yeah sure it lacks zing, but it's the truth... 

And the only bit I'm sure of is that losing weight IS the battle, just that you have to keep doing it.  %)  The word "diet" means "what you eat" and so to me a "weight loss diet" is equivalent to "what you eat to lose weight."  And there's no time limit on that.  You eat to lose weight, and you keep doing it.

That's the secret to losing the weight, I think.  Once you've found your way to lose weight, make sure it's something you'll be comfortable with for the rest of your life, and then keep doing it.

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Permaculture Tips

As you know, I like doing things that are closer to nature, things like gardening with less fertiliser and less soil preparation - stuff that reads a lot like permaculture, in fact.  I've been experimenting with my vegetable garden here, and in previous places I've lived, and come up with a few thoughts:

Huegelkultur:  Translates from German as "moundculture" and as you can see from this article it's pretty much just that - pile up biomass and pile a mound of soil over it.  I'm Austrian, like the guy Sepp mentioned in that article, and I'm an admirer of doing things in a low-impact low-footprint way.  But I'm not so sure.

• One: raised beds are anathema to permaculture.  They are a way of taking the land's natural lay - and then altering it.  But I do agree that raised beds are better, just please don't call them permaculture.  
• Two: It's a bit ironic to use a tractor to do all this while burning a shitload of fossil fuel and causing pollution.  
• Three: Where did the dirt for the mound come from?  You probably need more than comes out of the ditch, and in fact all the pics I've seen show the logs piled on the ground, and then some "dirt ex machina" appears to cover the logs up.  
• Four: The claim is that the rotting trees cause "natural tillage" by leaving air pockets that you'd otherwise have to plough.  But maybe the superior tillage also has to do with the fact that you dug up a mound of dirt, stuck some logs down, then piled the soil on.  In that process, you've given the soil a "superploughing" to considerable depth. 

Personally, I'd dig a trench, put the biomass in, and then pile the soil back on top, for the same effect.  Oh guess what? I already do that.  I take stuff that's too big to compost or feed to the worms, and dig holes in the garden and bury it.  My grandfather did that, and so did my parents. It's nothing new Sepperl, it's what we've been doing for generations.  

My method uses up all sorts of waste that would otherwise just rot in some midden somewhere.  And I don['t know either why it doesn't create a nitrogen deficient area of soil, but that perhaps comes from the other bits I do which aren't mentioned in the article and perhaps aren't being done.

Another problem in Australia is that summers get too hot to allow plants to be without a source of water, or you lose in one record heat day what took you three months to grow.  Just not worth it to have such deeply-held permaculture convictions.  And the same heat kills off worm farms unless you keep them under a wet blanket (there goes your brownie points for not wasting water) and turns what might have been promising compost into dry water-repelling dust.

Here's the things I've always done in my gardens and which improve any soil.

• DO dig your beds from time to time.  As I said, kitchen scraps, branches, leaves, feathers and bones and skins, all go to the garbage pit under garden bed "F" or wherever I'm currently burying.
• DO fertilise and condition the topsoil and subsoil layers.  Just not with chemicals.  I have compost that I wrap in old carpet pieces in the winter to keep them a bit warm, I have straw and hay and poo from the rabbits and the chickens, and I have worm tea and the leftover worm castings from worm farming.  These need to be dug into the garden bed and that tends to raise the bed enough, and probably encourages nitrogen fixation, water retention, and filters down decay bacteria to the stuff buried lower down.
• While I'm at it.  My excrement is no good in that particular situation, although rabbit chicken goat sheep cow horse and pig poop are okay.  We humans tend to concentrate too many toxins and bacteria that will just turn around and bite us, so our excrement needs to go lay in a trench somewhere dark for a year to decompose further, and then you can dig it under.  
• Urine?  Yes please!  Nothing more satisfying than going out and getting that wee among the veges.  Our urine is sterile, generally, and contains great trace nutrients including some that help in the fixing of nitrogen, thus solving the nitrogen-consuming decomposition problem.
• Hair. I've taken to sweeping up at hairdressers and bringing that to the garden.  Hair contains even more material that breaks down and provides growth factors.  You can dig it into the top/subsoil layers along with the upper material, in among the biomass lower down, or feed it to the worms, in particular, who will find it very filling and tasty.

I also have my garden beds laid out to a width that's the same as the rabbit hutches and chicken runs.  And those have wheels...  I can wheel a hutch full of rabbits over a garden bed and their wastes drop directly onto the topsoil, their urine contains more calcium than an application of lime, the scraps of oaten and lucerne hay form a mulch on the surface to keep moisture in and insulate the soils from the heat.  Two or three initial hand waterings washes the organic waste down into the soil where you want it, and if you were smart you ran poly drip tube in rows so you can now have the advantage of buried drip irrigation.

That 's how I started here last year, but I had to use bought potting mix.  This year, I've gathered all the composted and compostable materials, have a worm farm in production, and got a long job ahead of me digging over a few dozen meters of garden...  But it will produce a top crop this summer.

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Organic Food Is Crap

There has to be something to be taken from this article.  What exactly that something is, though, I couldn't tell you.  It seems to be what one famous surgeon delights in calling "woo," though.  It's a study commissioned to establish some results about organic food.

The result is that "organic food is no better than factory-farm-grown."  The British Food Standards Agency has made a "ruling" to that effect, based on this research.  That is heavy-handed and smacks of bulldozing.  A little.  But let's check a bit deeper, there might be something in this after all.

The study is of course conducted by the very best organisation to do it, a body whose skills in nutritional studies, knowledge of industrial toxins, and skill with biochemistry is unrivalled in the world today, it's the...  hold on, what the hell?  - the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.   What. The. Fuck.

Horses for courses people, and if scientists were horses and the field of nutrition was the trots, that school would be the one circling the glue factory with sleds made of house bricks.  Scientists are the ones always insisting on the right qualifications, and a school of hygiene is not a school of nutrition specialists no matter how you try and spin doctor it.

So what resources are they drawing on?  Oh good, they have the "analysis of 50 years of research into organic food" to draw on.  Which were apparently done at a rate of a thousand studies a year, because the article states that number a bit further on, 50,000 studies were analysed according to the reporter.  Uh, hang on.  BBBZZZZZZZTTTTTT!!!!  Nope, sorry.  Scratch that. Bad reporter, writing things the wrong way and creating a false impression. 

The unqualified researchers didn't actually analyse 50,000 study results, they carefully selected 55 - yes, a whole 55 - of those study results.  The rest apparently "didn't meet the researchers' criteria" whatever that means.  Oh yes, that's a way of saying "the rest didn't demonstrate what we were setting out to demonstrate..."

So.  A body that is not really all that qualified to conduct a nutrition study, carefully selects 0.1% of results out of 50 years of nutritional research, and presents its "findings" to the FSA on the basis of those.

I find it soooo helpful to turn this around, because it will help you to focus on what's relevant here - it's not that they carefully researched 0.1% of all the food studies done in the UK in 50 years, it's more a case of that their findings aren't fully supported by 99.9% of the studies done over fifty years...

And okay - I know that it's not actually unsupported by 99.9% of studies, but even if the study results were completely random, you'd expect that 50% would be favourable and 50% unfavourable.  To only find one tenth of one percent of study results to be suitable for your research indicates a very narrow focus of the research, and possibly a very specific guideline to preselect for the results you want to have come out of it.

Look.  I'm not going to research the researchers, or how they researched, or what their criteria were.  I can only say that it not only appears to be a carefully crafted study and result, but also that it flies in the face of everything that we know as commonsense.  A food produced naturally is natural, and is nutritively what our bodies have evolved to digest.  A food produced with the aid of chemical and physical processes will not be natural, and who knows - especially not a school of hygienists - how well tolerated it will be by our bodies?  There are thousands of ways to hook together carbon hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and just counting them as "nutrients" is not good enough.  After all, hook them together one way and you get oil, another way and you get alcohol.  VERY different effects on our bodies...

Our scientists are always asking us to beware of bullshit, and keep in mind that if it seems too good to be true, then it probably is too good to be true.  Unless it's their bullshit, and they're the ones saying that you can take their shortcuts and still come out with a miraculously indistinguishable product at the end of it.

And let me ask you, if it came down to it, does it change your buying habits?  Not mine.  I will always prefer food I've grown myself or food I've seen grown locally and without much processing, to what's on the shelves in the local supermarkets.  I'll always prefer free range and barn eggs and chickens to chicken factory product, and in fact I prefer my own chickens and their eggs to either of those.

Having just finished watching several nights of news articles about food processors cheating and defrauding us by adding water and bulking agents, cosmetically altering foods with various chemicals to make them more appealing when they're past their storage date, ripping off growers by storing foods for sometimes years, and underweighing, overpricing, and price fixing, I can safely say that I feel better about giving double the money to an organic grower and receiving honest produce than I would if I was saving half that amount but getting months-old food from a multinational giant corporation that's probably about 5% responsible for the global weather crisis due to their disregard for anything except profit.

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Proved Right Again, By Research.

UPDATE:
Here's another article pointing to inflammation as a cause of illness, but this time mental illness. And I don't mean in a roundabout namby-pamby indirect way, either.  This is BAM! direct.  Read the article.

I am always so goddam proud when science backs up my hypotheses.  I mentioned briefly in The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook that I figured that a lot of the damage to our bodies is caused by cellular inflammatory disorders of one kind or another, and here's one that's now being laid right on that very doorstep.

I've had this inkling you see, from reading lots online, that oxidants and other irritants cause inflammation at the cellular level.  These irritants include many of the food additives that are put into our processed foods.  makes sense doesn't it?  An ingredient meant to irritate minced beef into retaining its red colour has got to also irritate your body when you ingest it.  We're made of damn meat...

When the cells are inflamed, there's an increase in "noise" which makes the signals the cells are supposed to react to, harder for the cells to detect.  You can drown out a quite sensible and loud conversation with around half the sound power of white noise, very effectively.  And cells are much simpler things than we are, they can't adapt their sensing to a noisier environment.  So they start no longer seeing the signals that are meant to regulate them.

One of the signals that gets drowned out is the sugar/insulin signal.  Imagine dabbing peroxide bleach on a spot over and over, several times a day, for several years.  Do you reckon you might have a rew raw patch in that spot?  Hell yeah!  Would you do that to yourself/  Probably not.  Yet millions of people every day consume white sugar that has been bleached white with far unfriendlier substances than peroxide...

Here's the real kicker, as far as I'm concerned - when your body gets a free source of carbs such as white sugar, guess where that goes?  Yep, right to storage in your body fat...

I know that the "respected medical and scientific comunity" out there will holler about woo, they'll decline to study something so wild and unfounded, because dammit there's a way to do things and having idea from the laiety is not the way!  Which is a great pity because in the meanwhile people will in increasing numbers die of diabetes, of cancers, and immune diseases while someone somewhere one day decides to put in process the 'porper way" to "do science" and by then it'll be too late for several million souls.

I'm going to bold this.  If you take home one lesson from this article, let it be this:


Food from large food manufacturers, even and especially the "healthy alternative" ones, are pumped out in more kilotons than fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and produced as cheaply as possible, and they aren't formulated to be 100% safe, they are formulated not to spoil and thus cost the manufacturer returns.  

Lastly, remember what I said about the inflammation in cells causing mis-signalling, and then you have to realise that we're actually built around a very complex feedback network of very small signals.  If you want a demonstration of that, just mess your microscopic signals up with a really good getting drunk and subsequent hangover, then imagine if the drunk and the hangover was to last a lifetime...

Cancer cells are similarly miscommunicating about where growth ought to stop...

And we should be communicatiing VERY clearly with food manufacturers who put into their foods additives which are banned across whole continents just so they can stretch a product to make a few tenths of a cent per gram, or to last longer on the shelves so they can ship it farther and cover more markets with it.

In the meantime I'm just going to say to you to avoid white sugar, white bread, overly white salt, the additives that start with an E on most foodstuff in supermarkets, and too much animal fat, because just like us, they concentrate their poisons and irritants that are in their foods, in the fat and organs first.

That happens with us too, of course.  Fatty liver from eating too much inflamed fat which then has to be gall-dissolved and filtered, leaving all the adulterated fat nodules behind to form the liver-kiling specks.  Kidneys failing from trying to pass poisons that are designed to irritate meat, which the kidney is made out of.  And bowels and colons that spend most of their lives in contact with a colour / irritant made from a crushed insect that uses that irritant as a weapon, suddenly developing the cancer that the weapon grade irritant was supposed to cause...

The second take-home from this article is - your body has a remarkable amount of capacity to recover.  If you give it a chance.  Stop eating production line white bread, switch your white sugar for raw sugar, avoid any processed item that has more numerical ingredients than real ones, eat clean fresh vegetables that are in season (but there are exceptions, see my book) and remember that if you remove the irritation source, that will make a huge difference.  If you also learn how to deal with ALL the natural foods our bodies have evolved to, then your body is right in its comfort zone and will function at its most efficient - and you'll get that in health and energy.  

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The Final Solution Could Be...

Almost everyone who stops to think about it knows of at least one environmental impact that they, their lifestyle choices, or their life requirements, make on the Earth.  Go on, ask yourself, ask anyone.  "Yeah I know I shouldn't drive to the shop when I could cycle or walk but..."  or "I know I should walk and save the waste of resources on a 10-speed titanium framed bike but..." and so forth.

It's pretty obvious that just by being alive, we have an impact on the earth.  "If I hadn't just eaten that animal, the last breeding pair of the species might have been saved" or "Damn, if I hadn't just eaten that plant, the last breeding pair of the species that lives exclusively on this plant might have been saved"

I can also see that nuclear waste seems to be providing one of the last refuges for "natural" life on Earth.  There's this Russian woman, see, who's gone back to the Chernobyl region and taken photos of a place which has reverted back to nature, with slightly glowing animals. Check her site here.  And I'm kidding, the animals don't glow or anything, and also, we won't know how long the animals manage to live and breed in the hot zones.  But the hot zones do keep humans out, to a great extent.

So I can see the attraction of solving the problems of disposing of nuclear waste and maintaining natural forests in one solution.  And yep, it would seem that this does neatly solve both problems, although I also say that probably just putting up radioactivity warning signs would have the same effect... %)

But I can also see radical, "fundamentalist' activists thinking along the lines of my first few paragraphs, and stealing material used to safeguard a forest, and spreading that among the ecosystem at large... In fact, I predict that before 2020, some misguided group of eco warriors somewhere is going to do precisely that, seed a large chunk of prime farmland or something like that with nuclear material or some other highly toxic material.

Ironically, the greatest effect on reducing human impact might be one of our more toxic byproducts, and the best of human intentions may result in the best of human extinctions...

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HUGE Plug For Livelocal!

Here's a site that deserves promotion promotion promotion...  LiveLocal is in beta but already showing the things it can do to make a difference.  As a bonus, it's developed and operated right here in Australia but will be useful no matter where in the world you are.  And it's hopefully going to be a bit better than some DIY sites...  The idea of Livelocal is to try stuff that makes a difference and share it, hopefully leading others to also try doing similar things.  Hopefully those things are clever and ecologically sound...

The concept is very useful and will allow you to take advantage of other people's experiences and techniques for sustainable living, and deserves everyone's support.  Everyone has something to contribute on a site like this, and definitely everyone will find something they can learn from it, too.

I'm thinking that if one of the experiments was to be a home gardening information and trading post, we could do away with a lot of supermarket product and the pollution and carbon costs involved in their shipping food all over the world.  There!  An idea already!

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SmogSmart?

It seems that pollution affects intelligence in a negative manner.  But I wonder if all the possible interpretations for these data have been drawn.  The result seems significant enough, but as with every study I've seen, in an effort to be specific enough to prove a hypothesis, it's too narrow in scope to eliminate all the other variables.

My hypothesis is that parents with slightly higher potential and actual intelligence would be more aware of the ill effects of pollution in general, and would tend to avoid those areas of higher pollution.  They would be earning slightly more and thus more able to afford to avoid such areas.  They would also be slightly more aware of the need for proper and balanced nutrition, so if I was running the study I'd also be checking the parents' incomes and the health levels of the children and seeing if the more intelligent children show signs of better nutrition. (As opposed to the signs of less pollution exposure.)

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Caffeine Improves Alzheimer's .. Um .. Something ..

Growing up for some of my youth in Arabia, I'm now very glad I learned to enjoy the odd cup of coffee a day... I seem to remember a few decades ago that people were saying they reckoned coffee improved their memory.

It seems that caffeine may finish up as a treatment for people with memory problems and/or dementia issues.  Something that people obviously realised a long time ago, since coffee has always been a high valued luxury food.

The article states that caffeine improved memory in mice which have been bred to be prone to Alzheimer's, and that it reduced amyloids in the brain and blood by almost one half in both human patients and the mice.

What seems strange to me is that a percentage of people already do drink the required number of cups of coffee (five, if you're wondering, is the dose mentioned in the article) and a percentage of people get Alzheimer's.  Maybe there's already survey/research results out there that can be used to support or disprove the efficacy of caffeine?

Me, I can't wait until coffee is covered by a PBS subsidy...  %)

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Drowning In Flies? There May Be A Reason...

If you only take home one thing from this article, let it be this quote I pulled:

""Ten years ago, we would have said, 'No way. Managed relocation is a stupid idea.' And that's because the best strategy is to reduce greenhouse gases. But we are not reducing greenhouse gases fast enough.""

Insects are one of those things we take for granted, or curse, or occasionally squish.  They are also a large and important part of the whole ecosystem, and the term "Butterfly Effect" was a reference to that.  I'm more inclined to say "Honeybee Effect" because I enjoy growing vegetables and I've been following the beehive extinctions with a bit of a shudder.  Luckily there are plenty of bees around here, and show no signs of dying off.

But if you want to try just one example of the weather changes really messing with life on the planet, try and imagine a world without bees.  It's the most obvious example, but by far not the only one - and some can be a bit unexpected...

On a recent holiday to a rainforest area just north of Albany, T. and I found ourselves enveloped in absolute clouds of bushflies.  Everywhere we went, over a huge segment of the lower southwest, it seemed there'd been a population explosion of flies.  I know a fair portion of Australia, and I knew that clouds of flies like that were unusual.  So I asked a local working at one of the forestry projects.

Turns out, those fly populations had been that high before.  Around the time that people began to introduce sheep and goats and cattle, apparently...  The flies found cowpats and other excrement to be an ideal place to lay eggs, and lived the high life enjoying crapaccinos and other muscine delights.  I am not kidding!  

The pioneer farmers started the explosion, and modern more intensive farming with more animals just kind of put the crap on the cake so to speak.  That particular region is genuine humid rainforest, so the conditions for flies are ideal.

So why were there such record numbers of flies that particular year?  (As I said, I've experienced the region in other years and that particular year was orders of magnitude type worse.)  Well, a shortage of dung beetles apparently.  Yep, the local Lands and Environment departments would buy tens of thousands of dung beetles and airdrop them over the region, the beetles would roll up the poop and their larva eat the fly larva as part of their birthday celebrations.  And that year, either there was a shortage of dung beetles and therefore a higher price for them, or the local authorities didn't have pockets as deep as usual...

Now I'm trying to imagine what the region would be like if dung beetles died off worldwide due to the changing weather, and then imagine a belt of rainforest climate sweeping up Western Australia towards Perth...

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Looking After You, Or Looking The Other Way?

You take a big bite of your corn cob, and life's pretty good. Sweet juice dribbles down. Sounds like heaven? It sure is - as long as you grew the corn yourself and didn't use pesticide around it...

It seems - surprise surprise - that some big chemical companies aren't quite as scrupulous in their processes of establishing how harmful their pesticides are. Are you as surprised as I was? Uh-huh...  The devil's in the details, as usual.

"Inert" material refers to any material that's not directly involved in the pesticidal action, from what I can glean from that article.  So if I needed to suspend my pesticide ingredients in carbon tetrachloride, that becomes the "inert" material in the pesticide.  Can you see where that leads to?   Okay - maybe my example wouldn't pass muster, since carbon tet has been well and truly vilified and exposed as a nasty chemical and even a large pesticide manufacturer might have trouble slipping that in.  But when you're dealing in quantities where a difference of cost to produce of a few cents a litre results in a profit of several million dollars a year, you can see the temptation they must be under...

If you read my last article about vitamins and supplements that are less than 10% of what they claim to be, and the other 90% possibly composed of lead or other poisons, then you see the pattern.  And once again, you aren't going to change that big company's method of doing business by standing there shaking a fist at them.  You'll be much better served by avoiding their product, directly and indirectly.

I suppose I imagine this scenario, as idealistic and misguided as I am:

1. PesticideCo makes nasty pesticideX that makes people's fingernails drop off.  
2. Farmer Harry uses that pesticideX, sells his corn to SupermarketCo.
3. People (hey, that's you and me and everyone!) notice that their friends' fingernails are rolling around and
4. Start buying their corn from local farmers that don't use pesticides, and are local as well.
5. Supermarkets no longer see a demand for Farmer Harry's corn.
6. Farmer Harry gets the buzz and stops using pesticideX.
7. PesticideCo sees sales slump and decides not to make PesticideX any more.
8. They now make PesticideY, or perhaps they close up shop.

But whether PesticideCo goes broke or not, the important thing to come out of this is that you still have your fingernails because you were proactive in your own health.  And enough people just doing that will make the rest of the effects from 5 onwards.

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Supplements "Supplemented" With More Than Just "Natural Goodness"

Interesting little article here, about supplements.  The claim is that some supplements and remedies are contaminated with heavy metals and other poisons.  It's also claimed in that article that there is ten times more hoodia sold in the USA than is grown in the whole world, so yeah, there must be a lot of "hoodia" tablets out there that are less than 10% the plant and 90% fillers.  Similarly, every few months we get another article about various tablets - sold by online presences that purport to be pharmacies - which are mostly filler and/or other components, and often have serious ill effects.

Note that the following excerpt from the article:

"I believe that the problem is narrow, that the well-established and reputable brands deserve their reputations," said Michael McGuffin, president of the American Herbal Products Association.

A warning sign is that this is a spokesperson for a herbal products conglomerate, that kind of indicates a big conflict of interest in making the statement, but then it's also a pretty good general guide to life in general.  Remember that even the well-established brands have been caught out, but in general, reputations are deserved, one way or the other.  

The answer is as always - if it seems too good to be true, then it is too good to be true.  All throughout my blog I've urged people to take personal responsibility, and keep the bastards honest.  It's as true with vitamins and supplements - ask yourself why you're taking them, then ask yourself if they're really what your body needs, and if you really trust the manufacturer / supplier not to cut corners to snip themselves another percent of profit? 

Your body is pretty capable of getting its own vitamins from your daily diet - do you really need to spend that money on a product that may or may not be harmful to you without providing any benefit, or would you be better served spending it on some locally grown fresh fruit?  

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Just Disrespectful.

Here's one kind of science I despise, the smug up-its-own-ass kind that thinks all you have to do is go around being a smart-arse and everyone will realise what idiots they've been and come and sit at your feet with rapt attention...

I have to say here that I'm not a person who's impressed by reiki or homeopathy but I'm pretty sure most of us consider chiropractors to be a useful therapy.  And some would even go so far as to include the above-mentioned and add acupuncturists as well.  After all, it's what works for you, right?  That's why I can't stand the tone of this guy's article and am pushing this article out.  If the Catholic church had its way, we'd still be curing our ills by holding prayer sessions and subsisting on bread and water to toughen us up...  Similarly, if this guy has his way, we'll just stick with Big Pharma using us as guinea pigs for newer drugs with ever more "interesting" side effects...

I was going to leave this as a comment to Mr Insolence but instead I've decided to put it here and post a link in his comments:

"I live in Australia. We don't have a Sn Harkin to contend with, although we do have people who practice alternative medicine, just like everywhere else on earth. We too shudder at "therapeutic reiki" and all the other alternative therapies and snake oils and ill-advised advice. I'm afraid that one day I'll be referred to a homeopath and diluted out of existence, for sure.

But something I'm even more afraid of than someone like Sn Harkin, though, is the kind of person who sneers and thinks just calling something "woo" means that's it, the end of the matter, everyone has to agree with me now, thank you all very much you poor misguided shills you.

Your attitude of (dis)respectful insolence does nothing at all. Harkin's lumping alternative therapists in with the "legitimate" medical workforce? Awww diddums. Not so many centuries ago, Greek and Roman senators were sneaking in all those "alternative" therapists along with the perfectly good astrologers and soothsayers and shamanic herbalists, too. And it's only a distinct lack of public voice in the form of blogs back then that's saved us from the BC version of your ranting...

What I'm saying is - where does your "respectful insolence" stop? My grandma prescribed camomile tea for certain ailments, other herbs for others. Her knowledge was not learned in a University, it was passed down from one generation to the next - generations that had little better to do than exist, work, and observe the effects of certain herbs on certain illnesses and pass that knowledge on to their offspring. It's how all our advances were made at one stage. It's how pharmacology came to exist.

Is that "woo?"

Because if it is, then monkeys, horses, elephants, and scores of other animals do "woo" every day when they select what foods to eat and what to eat along with that food to counteract the toxins present in that food.

What about we say that "proper" pharmaceutical companies are the only thing that doesn't constitute "woo." Oh dear, they actually have a worse record than the animals and my granny. Because my granny never prescribed anything to me that caused severe side effects or death. And yet, every year, we hear about another drug from big pharma that has caused a spate of deaths or injuries or disablements...

Are surgeons the only medical people that aren't "pitching woo?" In my experience and reading, their success rates are not all that crash hot either. They kill more people by direct action than all the faith healers kill by "wooing" someone into ignoring symptoms. Oh yeah - and they come from a long line of bloodletters, "animal magnetists," and people who thought leeches and maggots would cure blood problems and infections. Oh wait, they're bringing those back in mainstream medicine, aren't they?

What I'm saying to you is to stop being a smart-ass insolent pup and start using your brain for what our ancestors used it for - to observe and record and remember and make discoveries instead of knocking other people down."

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Should We Be Fair?

Everyone in the world is being affected by global warming.  Islanders.  There's a whole island off the PNG coast whose people have had to relocate to the mainland, where they are resented and being harassed by the local people.  Just recently a 3yo girl was killed over that particular little disaster.  Other islands are not far off or in the process of relocating to higher ground. Drought and famine stricken.  There are water wars in India, farmers unable to grow crops in Asia, and countless similar events unfolding on the African continent.  Australia is slowly succumbing to a steadily worsening drought.

Mind you, it's not all doom and gloom.  With less than twenty percent of the world considered affluent, most of the world's water use  going into making the foods, goods, and luxuries that this percentage uses, they have consistently good lifestyles, fine foods, plenty of meat, and a wealth of manufactured goods.  They live in houses built with resources (cement, steel, aluminium) which the other 80% of the world are sorely missing even though they may be a major source.

Everyone is suffering ill effects for the benefit of the few, but the few are better insulated from those effects and therefore aren't likely to rate the effects of global warming in the same way as those islanders or famine and drought affected people.

So when there's a call for the affluent to compensate the people who are being affected, I feel all sorts of itchiness and conflict. I'm conflicted, because while I'm a member of the affluent percentage, I'm not really affluent and can ill afford to spend much of my resources on someone else.  Yet that just shows how much more desperately the less fortunate person needs those resources than I do.  If I was conspicuously eating only the finest beef and vegetables flown in from their native country/region on a daily basis, I'd have no hesitation switching to local foods and sending some of my monetary resources to someone in Africa.

But I'm not doing that.  I'm living a pretty modest life by Western standards, and in fact growing some of my own food, using local farmers' markets, and eating low footprint meats and vegetables where possible.  And even if I magically became more affluent and got more money resources, I'd be a bit worried about sending my money to the eight people I owe.

Because, the regions those eight people live in are chock-full of people who would, one way or another, extort steal and obtain the aid I'm sending and abuse it to make themselves as affluent as myself, and therefore my compensation would be wasted.  There would be one marginally more affluent person, and eight people who are now being exploited by two.

Even if my compensation reached those people, even if I was 100% committed to the ideal and sending them 80% of my resources so that we each ended up with a fair share, there's still the exploitation problem - suddenly finding themselves fabulously wealthy by their standards, my eight villagers would be looking for places to spend their new-found wealth.  And finding all the scam and junk in the world ready to absorb their money, leading to some Chinese company exploiting them in a more subtle way but with the same result.

Some people would like you to think that if we all reduce our standard of living, eventually the world's inequities will even out and we'll all have an acceptable standard.  But think about this.  Would you work for $1000 a week, send $800 of that away, and still be able to survive?  Could you live and hold down your job, do the shopping, and get to appointments if you could only drive your car for 1/11th of the number of trips you currently use it for?  Are you prepared to move into your kitchen and dining room and ship the rest of your house to Uganda?

And of course, the 80% you've sent to those other people, will it help them or be stolen or otherwise mis-used?

There's another faction.  On a more sinister note, these are the people who are secretly stockpiling guns among their survival stores, and are already deciding which 32 people they will exterminate to make way for their family...  Less radical members of this faction believe that the Earth has a closed-loop feedback system, and if the problem is caused by too many humans, well then...  pretty soon there will be a bit of a cataclysm or two, and then things will balance out by themselves...

But that ignores the function of that "extra" population - while it could (by someone braver than myself!) be argued that a lot of that extra population contributes nothing but more burden on scarce resources, most of the world's population is involved in garnering the resources we use and turning them into the everyday things we take for granted.  So unless the miraculously-saved "Chosen Ones" are prepared to take on eight other people's work, the standard of living will drop for them. This faction also believes that as we exploit particular resources, there will be effects, often catastrophic, which will work to remove population.  Things like rivercourses drying up due to damming and irrigation schemes are one such direct mechanism.

The more gentle hippie way, of demanding less resources, being satisfied with what nature provides without ripping more out of the earth, sharing resources and work - this is yet another faction.  You can think of this as a small reduction in the standard of living for the elite for the benefit of everyone, and if this is done willingly, then it is a Good Thing for the world, but will still not re-balance things as far as is needed.  I'm already being a good hippie in that I recycle what I can, prefer local to import, deliberately use less and make it stretch further, and try and think of the consequences of my consumption.  I can tell you that it results in a less than ideal lifestyle, but still is far better than the lives of my eight less fortunate extended family.

Personally I believe that the answer lies in the synergy of all the above.  As food and water become scarce, there will be wars and skirmishes which will go down in our history books as one of the bloodiest and most callous times ever recorded.  "Natural" disasters triggered by global warming and exploitation of resources will leave millions, if not billions, dead or dying.  The people who take their cues early and learn to get by on a bit less in order to lessen the impact, will be slightly ahead of the curve and more likely to be equipped to survive.  

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Wine and Cooked Food. FTW.

Two things in articles here and here which point to our diet as the key, the very foundation, of what brought on our intelligence and advancement.  And which should totally smash some of the outdated ideas of diet that are circulating.

If you're a regular reader you know already that I had prostate cancer (and BTW a few weeks back was the four year anniversary of when I first knew I had abnormalities, and just using the diet and nothing else, I'm still clear and expect to be clear well into old age) and that I was kind of pushed into developing a diet for it and am selling the e-book of the diet online.

I'm pretty relaxed about The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook Diet, because that's precisely what the diet is about - NOT forcing unnatural changes in diet - and because the book recognises that we as a species got here largely on the basis of the foods we eat and how we eat them.  Our farmer forefathers may not have had an Internet, but they did have traditional knowledge and what to them was just basic commonsense.

Be that as it may.  Farming and growing food spared us from the need to constantly expend all our energy foraging, and allowed us to perfect tools and techniques for hunting, then domesticating.  Wine introduced alcohol to us, and alcohol inhibited the growth of a range of bacteria and allowed some food preservation to take place.

Wine also has a reputation as a digestive, that is, taken after dinner it helps break down our food.  Remember, the most basic tenet of my diet is to make it easy for my body to use the nutrients in my food. It was one of the things we as a species did to lift ourselves above the survival threshold, and it's what we still need to be doing now.

Another thing - all those "raw" diets.  They insist that we as a species are designed to eat our food raw, but that is pure unadulterated rubbish.  One of the key events of our species was the use of fire.  Do you think that the fire somehow magically got into our brains and made us smarter, while we chewed away on largely indigestible hunks of raw food?  Of course not!  One of the reasons we find fire to have been a key driver of our evolvement is that it enabled us to cook food and thus extract more nourishment from that food.  Over thousands of generations, our bodies have become supremely adapted to cooked food.

And vegans/vegetarians, sorry but meat, and especially cooked meat, was one of the turning points in human development.  Our farmer forebears were so convinced of the benefits of meat that they began to herd and domesticate animals for meat.  And please bear in mind that most "folk wisdom" stems from generation after generation of people without cars and phones and computers and newspapers do distract them, who had little else to do but observe what was going on around them, and draw conclusions from that.  Stuff like "Oh, Bardar eats his meat burnt over coals, and he's bigger and stronger than anyone else.  And to think, he was the skinniest one here, a few years ago..."

I can't believe that despite knowing so little at the time, I was able to accurately hit so many targets with the Zen Cookbook diet.  But then, most of it was folk wisdom, and some of it was folk wisdom confirmed by research and science.  And all of it appears to work, and appears to get proven over and over the deeper I dig into food and nutrition and therapeutic values of foods.

NOTE:
9th June 2005, by the way.  That was when I got my life-crumbling PSA reading that led to tests and biopsies and the Body friendly Zen Cookbook.

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Is This "Analog Green?"

Kind of wrong.  Kind of.  Why would I repurpose a TV into a giant thermometer?  I already have several thermometers, and actually recharge their batteries in a solar charger so that I'm not wasting energy and creating greenhouse gases in the process of finding out how much those greenhouse gases are raising the average temperatures in my part of the world...

Somehow, driving a whole TV and a bunch of circuitry just to do what I'm essentially doing for free now isn't all that appealing to me.  I know - the analog TV is waste anyway - but how about we do a bit of a cost/benefit analysis on these things?

What is the day to day cost of running an old analog TV and Digital Set Top Box (DSTB) compared to the cost of running a newer (possibly OLED or LCD based) digital capable TV?

What is the cost to produce a new digital capable TV versus the cost of having an already produced analog TV plus whatever it takes to produce a DSTB, considering the old TV is going to end up as landfill?

Just how many TVs do I have, anyway?  I've repaired and inherited five TVs in the last year.  I'm desperately trying to think of what to do with any of them, but running them as a display is not one of my preferred options...

I wonder if we haven't well and truly passed the point of survival if we total up all the crap machines we've already got and which are all environmental hazards to dispose of.  Personally, I'm going to wait until I see a recycling scheme that seems to actually create less pollution than it cleans up.

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Not The Origin Of Species

And now for somethng completely weird.   Monty Python, eat your heart out.  (And liver, and fish heads if you like, yes. Wait, fish heads?)

It turns out that breeding programs for endangered/low population species may be doing harm.  What's amazing me here is that this development seems on the face of it to make a mockery of genetics and natural selection.  For a start, read this article. If the researchers haven't made a major stuff-up in their data, and they all check out, then that brings up  a few questions.

In brief, the article states that researchers have found that if you take wild trout and breed them in a hatchery, (or in fact taking wild hatchlings and just raising them in a hatchery,) their offspring are less effective at reproducing or surviving in the wild.  Furthermore, if they do produce offspring, whether with other hatchlings or wild trout, those offspring in turn are also less fit at reproducing or surviving.

See, the problem is, (and yeah I can see you've already leapt past me here but bear with me) you're taking species A and breeding them, you will still get Species A.  If you take Species A infants and raise them in captivity, they are still Species A.  Yet the research seems to indicate that when you release them into the wild or they breed with wild Species A, they somehow produce Species B type offspring with wildly different survival capabilities.

There are two alternative theories for this, neither of them is hugely palatable to me, actually.  Because they point to some ineffable metaphysical properties of Life that we haven't isolated yet.

The first theory, which would to some extent be borne out by a longer study and by examining and studying the successive generations of those hatchery-raised trout, is that there is some way that genetics works which doesn't rely on the usual mechanisms of selection.  Because, of course, you can see the problem here:  What the study has in effect found is that if you take an identical batch of hatchlings produced in the wild, and raise half of them in the lap of luxury and the other half in the wild, then they inexplicably start producing different offspring when you put them back into identical breeding conditions.  That's like saying that the spoiled effete trout can somehow choose which DNA sequences they release into their eggs and sperm.

That would make genetics and selection a lot different than we've found them to be, for sure.  And it means that we humans should see clear breaks in various sections of our own genotype due to things like wars and famines, versus surpluses and wealthy times.  While no real study has been done of this that I know, I very much doubt any such strata of genetic traits versus time or events will be found.

The second theory is just as scary because it gets into the whole nature versus nurture thing, and implies that there may be some equivalent of a "culture" passed on between trout.  The farm-raised trout would thus have less knowledge of the tough ole world out there, be a lot less reproductive because they've not been in a situation where there's constant pressure to reproduce (after all, you're swimming fin to fin with your fellow fishes) and so they don't perform well, and also don't pass on the same "story" to their offspring, leading to the natural "tradition" to be diluted.

That means that all creatures have cultures, and those cultures are important to their remaining a species.  Change the story, change the creature.  Want fatter pigs?  Don't waste generations painstakingly breeding for the fatter pigs, just provide them with treadmills and exercise equipment so they can eat more but burn the calories - then take the equipment away from the next generation...

The whole study seems to  imply that species react to their environment not by natural selection but by somehow choosing which traits they wish to pass on to their offspring out of the DNA junk in their genome.  That means that we should expect to find that if you open the coop doors, the chicks that were born before the door was opened will be different to the chicks that are born afterwards, despite having the same parentage.

And of course it raises the question that if we have trout that grow up differently in the farm than in the wild, why their offspring in turn don't grow up differently back in the wild.  You'd expect that changing the conditions for tame trout would result in recirpocal changes, yet the study seems to imply that this doesn't happen.

I'm therefore leaning towards calling some kind of flaw in the study's base data, because the study produced results at odds with almost everything we know about genetics.  If it waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck, and swims like a duck, then it must be a duck.  Unless of course it was born in the wild and raised in a chicken house with a working TV, when apparently we can expect it to grow up into a gryphon or a turkey or a Jurassic hadrosaur.

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How To Make Worse Look Good...

Why the hell Treehugger keeps coming out with these stupid reportages is beyond me.  Are they serious, for chrissakes, or are they an ironic attempt to make the whole green movement into a joke?  Just take their waxing lyrical and drooling over this POS.

Yes, I'm as conscious of the need to save power as the next person.  But I'm also aware of the total cost of ownership of something like this, ecologically speaking.  Let me get this next few paragraphs perfectly straight and logical.  I'd hate to look like as much of an idiot as their reporter did...

It's a USB hub, right?  We've just about mastered making these out of leftover cardboard and three of the eleven secret herbs and spices, which is to say, they have as much of a carbon and greenhouse footprint as any other gadget of around the same utility and materiel content.  So to begin with, I have the choice of using this hub or any other, probably cheaper, hub.  I can put the extra dollars I've saved into my kitty towards another grey water tank or diverter hose.

But no, the reporter bemoans the fact that we're not going to get a chance to waste money unless we go to Japan.  Screw saving money for some vegetable seeds, let's waste it on a USB hub that does exactly the same job as any other USB hub.

"But this one has switches!" the reporter says.  "I can switch off my unused USB devices!"

Ah yes.  Those switches... my first problem with them is that they are mechanical components.  That means that they will wear out, therefore giving an much shortened lifespan compared to a switchless hub.  Because you'd be operating these switches every time you want to switch off the spare caddy drive or the USB humping dog memory stick, you'll be moving the hub, flexing the cord, and hastening the demise of the cord.  And of course, wearing out those switches.

Then there's the environmental footprint of those additional switches.  First, you're going to be buying a replacement for this hub much sooner than you would have to replace a barebones hub, so over your life as a USB device user, you'd be using more hubs in that life span.  Then, there's extra material involved. How much does that add to the cost of these hubs?  (If you use higher grade switches to extend the whole hub life, expect that those high grade switches will cost more in terms of resource usage, energy, and waste production than cheap switches.)

Then there's the way you'll use these switches.  Let's go back to that caddy drive, and suppose that I use it for a few minutes, then, being a conscientious citizen, I switch it off cos I know I won't need it for 15 - 20 minutes.  Then I switch it back on, with an initial power drain surge when it spins up and boots up, and wait around 10 - 30 seconds for the operating system to find it and activate it.  How much energy have I just used sitting waiting for the caddy drive and the boot-up?  Over the life of the hub, will the energy saved even come close to atoning for the waste involved in manufacturing and building in those switches?

If you think I'm nitpicking the energy savings, here's this same magazine trying to decide whether the combined effect of people dumping analog TVs and buying new DTVs, or buying an additional STB converter, is going to impact the environment.  How nitpicking is that?  So I don't think I'm actually over-thinking this in comparison to what Treehugger should have been doing.

So to add to the nitpicking analysis, here's my next question - will people actually use the switches anyway? If you have to wait for a device to boot each time you need to use it, will you switch it off or just leave it running for the whole session?  Well, I'll be a model greenie and switch off when I don't need it.

And here, last of all, the coup de grace for this piece of greenwash - as I reach towards the hub to switch off the switch, I realise that this is a familiar action - I've been using it all along to just unplug the bloody device when I don't need it!

So somehow, Treehugger has been sucked into a greenwash.  Tsk tsk...

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Meet Meat

I can't really add more to this piece except to say - your diet is you.  Know where you came from, know what you must eat, and you'll know you have a long healthy future.

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Unshy Flies Make Me Question Things

I was just watching two flies running around on the floor.  That started a quick series of thoughts, which culminated in totally despairing of both evolution and creationism.

Because, these flies moved around within inches of each other without the usual flight reaction.  Flies survive because any movement near them triggers a jump / fly reaction when they are grounded.  It's how a fly becomes successful instead of dead.  So why didn't another fly moving nearby trigger the response?

"Oh," I'll get told, "the fly recognised that it was just another fly.  After all, that's how they find each other for mating."  And that raises two more interesting but distressing thoughts....

Firstly, saying it's possible for a fly to "recognise" another fly is to say that the flies have a sense of identity.  "Oh! I'm a fly, that's another fly! Relax again!"  An advanced sense of self is not what you expect to find in a cluster of nerves and neurons that would barely cover the point of a blunt pin.

Secondly, there's this mating strategy, indiscriminate humping.  If you don't have a sense of identity, then you rely on a set of other cues to direct your humping.  Pheromones, sounds, colours.  If you accept that flies have a very simple control mechanism (since there's no room to fit much thinking gear in there) then you'd expect that flies woul;d be humping anything around them with the requisite profile and smell.  Yet they don't...

On the other hand, we've been selectively breeding dogs for thousands of generations now, and you'd think one of the things we'd have selected against would have been indiscriminate humping - and yet highly bred lapdogs do this more than flies or wolves.  So natural selection either selects for some unhelpful traits, or else we don't have the theory quite right yet...

And for a "Creator" to be having to listen to several billion flies' prayers every day "buzz buzz buzz!  send us some nice shit today o lord!" because he gave them some kind of advanced intellectual mechanism is also a bit  of a stretch.

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Be Still The Wildebeest

No more migrating herds.  That's the conclusion one can draw from this article, which is in itself a worrying thing.  But more worrying is that the author also discovers that there are no historical data to work out the rate at which this pattern is changing.   And more worrying than that is our attitude to it.

I bet that you just read that and the hair on the nape of your neck didn't prickle when you read it, you didn't reflexively clench down on your seat from the news.  And yet that's exactly what should be happening, on a pandemic scale.

Because the reduction in migrations is another proof of the damage we've done already, and the fact that some migrations have stopped simply due to extinction is more of the same.  You and I should be shittin' kittens and blue lights, yet we're so numb to what "they" have done to "our" world that we just sort of shrug and move on.

With so many species checking out, isn't it time we stopped cataloging these losses and instead started concentrating on not losing the bastards in the first place?  Did you eat beef more than once or possibly twice this week?  Did that beef come from further than 25 miles away?  Then you're probably indirectly responsible for the death of one springbok or oryx this week.  Multiply that by your suburb and you can see where those herds are going.  Dying of the butterfly effect of our hamburgers and steaks.

A good way to visualise this is to imagine that your steak actually came from a wildebeest or a kangaroo or a reindeer.  Even if you only had one steak or burger, a whole animal had to die for that meal.  Which divides the blame you feel among a few dozen people who also bought beef, but if you're doing that every day, well just start totaling that up in your head...

I'm far from a raving vegetarian - I believe a certain amount of meat is a prerequisite for us to be healthy - but I don't advocate huge beef herds slaughtered hundreds of miles away...  Again, take personal responsibility people!  Think about these things and then maybe go for a bit of locally grown lamb or rabbit or chicken.  Spread the load around, soften the impact...

My parents keenly felt the effect of every wasted scrap of food, because they grew up in a time when food wasn't mass-produced as it is today, and they knew that you made every last bit count, from having that luxurious steak dinner once a fortnight to saving the leftovers and making a casserole or stew.  Because when they grew up, food was still wrested out of the earth with much effort, and everything was used.  We seem to have no such qualms today, and that's not a good thing.

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Hippie Days Are Here Again?

When it came along, it changed everything.  Back before computers and the Internet were mainstream or even available outside educational and military establishments, an MIT prof was already worrying and prodding at the problem.  The whole online food chain was and still is being turned upside down.  Now, even the economists who wrought the current financial crisis are having to admit that greed is not always good, and the large conglomerate is not always best. 

They can't avoid it - large institutions are crumbling and falling apart, the economy is no longer in "free fall" but you can betcha it will never have the authority and clout it has enjoyed...  With every company holding their hand out for a bailout, we'll never associate their name with "prestige" again, except in the sense of the conjurer's prestige.

It's the online food chain that interests me, in more than just one way.  We humans are truly a collective society of individuals.  We contradict everything we are, just by being...  We love to be individuals - and on that rests a large part of our success as a species, that different individuals were different and thought in ways others didn't.  At the same time, the acclaim and support of their peers didn't hurt those individual thinkers, either...  So we do have a large dynamic stress there.

In the beginning, there were ZX80s, VIC-20s, Commodore 64s, and a plethora of small computers.  They were slow and clumsy and primitive by the standards of today's PCs and Macs - but they immediately developed a following, of people that others considered individuallistic, or, less charitably, eccentric.  And those individuals - they most often formed or joined clubs...  Thus demonstrating most succinctly what I'm saying about our dual social natures.

In the social networks of today, you'll find a large percentage of Baby Boomers - because A) we still are a large percentage of the population, but also B) because we still do get what this is about.  We tail-ended on the Hippie Generation, remember?  We were, along with people a bit older than us, against corporate greed and despoiling of the earth, we were for peace and love and ecological and sustainable living.  younger Boomers won't have as much of this a the older ones, but it's there.

So the Boomers get onto facebook and twitter and msn and yahoo and friendfeed and wherever else, and they generally work it.  Hard and for all it's worth.  Because there is now a chance to decentralise and be less intensive.  There is now a chance to stop wrecking and start working with rather than against the earth.  And we're working SN for all it's worth because this way we can co-ordinate and inform one another, collaborate, and more.  It may be our only chance to save what's left in and on the Earth...

Expect to see that proliferation of small companies again soon, each armed with small scale machining technology, making projects that will blow your mind.  Expect to see online sites to share every bit of knowledge and experience, to tie together people from all over the world into individual projects.  Expect that the most incongruous things will pop up online - and succeed wildly.

Don't expect as many projects that are only out there to make money.  For a starter, what is the standard source of income for online ventures?  Advertising dollars, mainly from those same large corporate coprolytes that are being replaced by the web start-ups.  That money is going to dry up pretty quickly, if the web start-ups gain traction.  Second source?  Advertising dollars from other online organisations and start-ups?  Membership fees?

Expect to see some things more relevant and appropriate than gold take the place of the world economic standard.  carbon credits - now there's an idea - how about we give each person an amount of credit inversely proportional to their footprint?   There would all of a sudden be a surfeit of wealthy citizens in the very places that need an injection of wealth the most - poor third world countries where they can't currently even afford the carbon let alone the carbon footprint - and more developed citizens would be comfortable, but very broke.

We put value on a finite amount of material (gold) and to date our currencies have been restricted by that, and "wealth" has been a case of owning the most of a fixed and often dwindling amount of a commodity.  But "Cred" is inversely proportional to your ownership or use of a commodity, and is thus not tied to a standard, nor limited in supply.  The less damage you do, the more wealthy you are.  You don't even need to have a pocketful of Cred or a bank to broker your Cred trades.  All you need is to do less harm, and you will end up with more value.  Use that value to buy some luxuries, but remember that each luxury lowers your Cred.

There's a powerful argument to be made to change to such a system, and not to mess around now trying to flog a dead horse of economic proportions.  It would immediately disincentivise large corporations, and reverse the trend of destroying the world and weather system.  It would remove a lot of the barriers that artificially exist now between aid and those who need it.  And it would usher in a new paradigm in thought and action.

And that may sound all altruistic and hippie-like, but let me ask you this:  Who fucked the world and the economy to the point we've currently sunk to?  I'm pretty sure it wasn't the hippies and their live and let live, do no harm, love the earth ways.

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PS for those of you who made it through the article to this point: I have an idea for a website that embodies a great many of the ideals above, it's a LARGE project and the rewards are minimal, but the Cred would end up inversely large.  Contact me if you want to save the Earth and have skills at ramrodding, coding, or publicising such a beast.

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.

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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...

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