Another supermarket caught out.

Devalueing the pound. And, seemingly, the kilo. On top of charging well-documentedly exorbitant prices, it seems some supermarkets also want to screw you on the quantity. (Various TV news shows have now caught out various supermarkets charging huge markups in some suburbs, and blaming quadruple prices on some mythical middleman. It's pretty much accepted. The stuff the farmer gets paid a dollar apiece for, you end up paying five to ten bucks for.)

So today we have two almost identical packs of pork chops. These two:

If you look cursorily, they are a pair of chops each, pretty much standard butchering. Now look closely at the price. One is "0.312Kg" and costs $3.74, the other is "0.568Kg" at $6.80? How come? Being pissed off at the store already for this:

(yeah, that's two bags of moldy oranges without even trying to look deeper - look at the center, and at the top left,)
we decided to become investigative reporters and used their vegetable scales. I didn't have the presence of mind to take a photo of this at the time, so I weighed it again once I got home:

Yep. Their "0.568Kg" is actually under 300g. We bought both (obviously not at sticker price but by arranged price instead) so I could do this article.

So - in the one night, this store decided to try and sell me mold-contaminated oranges, then sell me almost half as much pork as they were charging for.

People - keep the bastards in check - check everything!

If you don't (as we did) then they will get away with this. In this case, the supermarket made good the price for us once we made them aware of the error. You should always point such errors out and give them a chance to make good.

(Oh - and in the end, besides the evidence [which was yummy] I decided to just use the supermarket for cat litter and milk, I'll buy my other produce elsewhere thanks. Not that I already don't do that.)

Have YOU Adopted The "Consumer Position?"

This is pretty much an object lesson in how commercialism directly affects your health.  I can't really improve on the advice given in this article, they sort of say it all.

If it wasn't grown in your own back yard, you have no idea whatsoever what the commercial interests all along that supply chain have done in order to get their hands on a few extra precious dollars. 

Did the growers use radioactive fertilisers on the tomatoes you're eating?  Don't laugh, in the US it's perfectly legal to ship poisonous radioactive crap across a state border where they can legitimately add it to fertilisers.  And don't laugh because you're in Australia, because several million tons of the shit found its way into Australian soils as fertiliser, before someone figured it out and put a stop to it.

Did the transport company save some loading and put the tomatoes in the same shipment as some insecticide, and by any chance did one of those barrels leak and contaminate the whole load?  Again, don't laugh, because that has happened right here in WA, a long time ago I'll grant you, but we had to dump a whole load of groceries in the bush town I lived in as a kid becuase of precisely that. 

And then - the supermarket.  Did they store those tomatoes for six months before putting them on the shelves?  Because they all do that.  There are guidelines for the length of time you may store vegetables, but it's been proven over and over by reporter and investigators that these are being well and truly ignored and that our vegetables only get to us when they have become protoplasm with almost zero health benefits.

So if you feel slightly violated and raped, it's because we're all copping that, in the interest of the mighty dollar.  Grow your own or get used to the sting...

Ur errols, let me show u sum moar.

In the headlong rush to buy CFLs - how much of a footprint does it take to MAKE the bastards in the first place?


I haven't yet investigated this - but let's suppose that a filament bulb has a 2000 hour lifespan compared to a 10000 hour lifespan for a CFL of similar light output. (I know they claim to last ten times as long but I haven't seen this kind of lifespan yet. Your mileage may vary...)


Let's pick 60W incandescent which is about an 11W CFL. The incandescent will therefore consume 120,000KWh in its lifespan. The CFL will consume 110,000KWh over it's lifespan. That incandescent (and its replacements, up to four more, possibly) would consume 600,000KWh in the same time span as the CFL. But an incandescent bulb takes very to make. Some silica for the glass, piece of brass for the holder, some resistance wire. Wonder how much of a footprint these old school materials have? I'm betting we've perfected the humble light bulb and it's parts.


Now a CFL lamp has a formed tube, which has to be evacuated and dusted with some quite exotic (and poisonous) material, filled with a specific gas, and then soldered to a circuit board containing around a dozen parts, one of them being a pretty complex little transformer that has to be formed and wound with copper wire. Another is a chip or switching transistor and we're only just beginning to realise how much of a footprint such components have in manufacture, and then in the waste disposal cycle...


Now - another misconception, that by switching to CFL globes we'll save the planet. It's a crock, a misdirection, a way to make you feel as though you're saving the planet. Home lighting accounts for maybe 30% of the home's electricity use, if that. (That's an educated guess, I'm sure you could look up the actual figures online and get six different results, I'm basing this on back-of-the-napkin numbers gleaned from the house I'm in.)


And domestic use is wayyyyyyy under half of electricity use, I forget the exact figure but again it's on record and I'm guesstimating it to 30% again, once again you may find other figures online but I bet they are the same side of 50% as my guess.


You're only using about 1/3 of the electricity you'd have wasted on 1/3 of 1/3 of the power consumption each day, or in other words, saving about 1/27th of the energy bill. But then again, people feel virtuous upon installing nice environmentally friendly globes and tend to leave them on for longer periods, thus using more power... It sort of balances itself.


So I'm not advocating to not use CFLs - after all, we do need to reduce our electricity consumption. Awareness is important, and nothing reinforces that awareness like changing your light bulbs and doing your bit. And the more aware you are, the more likely you are to turn off the TV and stereo at the power point, or the unused ligthing in the office before you go home.


Just keep an eye on ALL sides of the coin and know that whatever we do there will always be a price to pay - just pick your least unacceptable alternative.

Generic Prescriptions and those emails...

I've made a discovery the last few months. Beware "bait and switch" medications.

Readers from wayback may know I use Ambien (Stilnox) on a regular basis to combat insomnia. I've been using Stilnox to help ne get to sleep on bad nights for almost six years now. I still only need half a tablet to enable sleep, I try and avoid using them when I've had more than two drinks, and they have worked exactly as the pharmacological company designed them to, for me.

About two years ago I switched from the specific to a generic brand, and it worked exactly the same, half a tablet and I was waking up refreshed the next morning. Then the last few packs of generic tablets were - a bit different, a different packaging, different shape... And, for some reason, despite supposedly being exactly the same thing, far less effective...

One of the things Stilnox are designed to be, is non-habituating. That means your body doesn't become immune to them and need you to take more and more for the same effect. Another thing they are not, is habit-forming, i.e. I can go out bush for weeks and all that happens is I go back to my old sleepng pattern.

So imagine how cheesed off I felt when I had to use a second half tablet almost every time. This is the same generic brand, just that they've changed something. To make it cheaper, no doubt. And thinking that no-one will notice because most people pop Ambien like a party drug, anyway. Just to prove the point I went back to original Stilnox and - half a tablet, every time...

So before you buy that online medication from some "reputable source" think on this - in the case of generic ambien, I am guessing they changed the type of binder to be cheaper, and it's somehow made the tablet less effective. And they are a rather large and respectable generic pharamcological house. Imagine how badly you can get ripped off by online scammers, including tablets made with some quite nasty binders and fillers. Is it worth it?

Cell Pwn "Dangers"

Taking a shot at Dr George Carlo now. Yes, I'll wait until you've watched this whole boring clip...

The thing is, is that I've worked with radio transmitters since I was 15, and have absorbed thousands of kilowatts, a few hundred watts here, a few kilowatts there, and have cancer-free fingers.

(Radio techs when tuning in aerials or transmitter finals stages invariably are close to generally high-power radio frequency [RF] equipment and most of us have at some stage expereinced a nasty "RF burn" where the radiated energy arcs across and burns a neatly cauterised hole, generally in one's finger cos that's the bit closest to the antenna or output stage of the transmitter.)

I can't see quite the phenomenally lethal effect Dr Carlo claims - after all, most phone handsets can only output between 0.5 and 2 watts, and I've been in proximity to 25 to 5000 watts as part of my job, for around 14 years.

The good Dr tries to make (bad) analogies that seem to demonstrate that he actually has little knowledge of the phenomenon of electromagnetic radiation, and my favourite malapropism is his analogy of the radio signal ("passing right through - the human body can't see it") as a clothesline, and then you go and put data on it and that's like putting clothes on the clothesline. Bullshit Dr Carlo.

He seems to think the data has some magical power that can increase the transmission. Look at it from this point of view, people - the batteries in a cellphone can only output a certain amount of power, over 50% of that power is going to be wasted as heat (ever notice your phone gets warm after a long conversation? Well that is power that *didn't* get radiated as a radio signal) and that means that no matter how you try to slice and dice it, there can't be more energy than that in the radio signal.

It may well be that because the signal is held close to the brain when the phone is in use and radiating, it could cause cell damage and cancer. Certainly, statistics seem to bear that out, and it's maybe worth your while to consider a headset for your phone so you can keep it away from your brain. But bear in mind that a bluetooth headset is also a transmitter, and you'd be sticking that inside your ear... While a low to medium cellphone user might not ever experience a tumour cause dby cellphone use, playing it safe and using a wired headset can't hurt.

But back to Dr Carlo's clumsy and somewhat inappropriate analogy. A clothesline is not "invisible" to human flesh and is nothing at all like a radio wave either. Unless you're whipping it up and down or sideways in lovely long waves, and then try standing near a peak that's whiping back and forth and tell me if it would be any worse if there were clothes on the line.

Try this - ride a motorbike full tilt into a clothesline with or without clothes on it, and either way it's not going to end well. So if the radio wave is going to do damage, it will do that damage whether it has clothes on it, data on it, or silence on it. Okay - there may be a way that imposing data (which has a square wave shape) on the signal might generate more harmonics - but as any good RF tech will tell you, if you have a harmonic then your signal power is getting divided between the signal you want to send and the harmonic. If you have a lot of harmonics, then your pitifully small amount of power you can suck out of the battery has to be divided up between all the harmonics and the desired signal equally, so you're going to have minute amounts of signal at each harmonic.

Next - that signal has to radiate in all 360 degrees, your head will intercept maybe 100 degrees worth, so about 1/3 of that small amount of power. move the phone three centimeters further away from your ear and your head will only intercept maybe 70 degrees (about 1/5th) of the signal, etc. Move it further away, say 6cm, and that drops down to maybe 25 degrees, or 1/12th of whatever radiation is coming out of the antenna.

That's why a headset is a good idea, no matter what. It gets the danger (if it is a danger) away from your delicate brain to the point where radiation from the cell handset is minute.

But the funniest thing I still think is the "clothes on the line make it dangerous" analogy, in other words it's the data that does the damage. If that were so, then being hit with a phonebook with all blank pages shouldn't hurt at all, while a full phone directory's worth of data printed on the pages would make it lethal...

Food Do, Food Don't.

An article on the "future of food" - I look on this with the same kind of horror as I do when I see lists of additives (as you can find in the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook in the appendix) and or these mushrooms served by a supposedly healthy restaurant.

Why? Pasta that cooks in 90 seconds is either being subjected to sterilising type heat or else is made in a different way to permit full cooking in a minute and a half. Either way it's not going to be an ideal food. And the sauce is in a sachet, totally brilliant idea except that - well, it needs to be preservatived up beyond belief to prevent lawsuits, and is not likely to be good for you either.

And no, I'm not advocating raw vegetables as a basis for diet - our ancestors first started cooking and processing certain vegetables for a good reason. They were KEEN observers and noticed that certain foods were just better for them when heated or processed in some way. Or lasted longer, or had some other survival benefit. Notice our ancestors had to be survivors or we might very well not be here today... %)

In fact, this article documents a few points I've already made in The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook, namely that we NEED certain processing and certain foods. Once again fats emerge as a key concept, and I can expand on the following paragraphs, where the italic smaller font is my comments:

"Studies at Ohio State measured blood levels of subjects who ate servings of salsa and salads. When the salsa or salad was served with fat-rich avocados or full-fat salad dressing, the diners absorbed as much as 4 times more lycopene, 7 times more lutein and 18 times the beta carotene than those who had their vegetables plain or with
low-fat dressing." (There's a bit more to this, of course. A full fat dressing can be any of a range of oils, but in my research, olive oil has always been of the most benefit generally, and an oil rich in vitamin E such as grapeseed oil, about 2 or 3 times more effective again, than just vegetable oil. The best oil for extracting the lycopene, for example, is 1/4 grapeseed and 3/4 olive oil, used for cooking instead of other fats. It's also possible to add another fat for specific flavouring, but the base should always be that olive/grapeseed mix.)

and that's just for one group of compounds... I've found that almost three years after my win over prostate cancer, where I used the diet exclusively to reverse my prostate cancer, and then stuck loosely to the principles of the diet ever since, my PSA levels first dropped from 4.2 to 0.8 and have never climbed above 1.0 again since. That puts my prostate health at around the late 20's to mid 30's - and I'm 51.

So if just a bit of consideration of your diet can do that much for you, think what you can achieve if you put just a bit of effort into it. And avoid 90second pasta dispensed by some grotty machine on a street corner...

Polyunsaturated fats - not great, actually.

Sticking to less of the supposedly healthy oils might just save your cojones. (Or your prostate - but close enough, would you let anyone with a knife near either unless it has become dread necessity?)

Poly-and-mono-unsaturated fats are generally thought to be healthy for one, and it's again to balance that we should direct our attention. 25g of fat is supposed to be our limit, with 50g being about where I'd call it a day. Mind you, 50g is about 7mm (3/8") to 1cm (1/2") of a slice off the smallest face of half a kilo (about a pound) of butter. A few tablespoons of olive oil, to be sure.

Thing is that a pack of take-away fries or fish and chip shop chips can easily have all that fat stuck to them and soaked into the potato. Add a piece of fish or a burger and you're eating the next three days' worth of fat allowance.

The supposedly ideal approach used to be to avoid fats. Avoid animal fats especially, in favour of these newfangled poly and mono unsaturated fats. And now comes the kicker - to the average human palate, the two biggest components of flavour are - you guessed it - fats and sugars, closely followed by saltiness. Prod at the greasy salty baconburger in the sickly sweet bun you're eating and ponder that for a moment...

Diets have traditionally been regarded as bland because they have little flavour. In my diet book though, I still recommend balance. And dietary studies bear it out. The reason we crave the "flavour" that fat gives to a food is because we need it. Same for the sugars and salt.

That's why I recommend a balanced diet, an aware attitude, where you know that you need only stick to sensible limits in order to let your body work efficiently.

One word of warning - if you eat processed "diet" meal packs as seen in many supermarkets, you deserve all ill health you're going to get. LOOK - I mean, really look - at the ingredients list and then look them up in the Additives list in the diet book and realise that all the other things they do to your body come at a price - your body will start to "hoard" precious nutrients in an effort to cope with the damage - and how does that help your diet or your health?

I just find it so interesting that EVERY article which has a tip for healthy eating and living recommends precisely what I do. Save yourself the price of the book if you like, but be aware that I've now been on the principles outlined in the book for over three years and actually lost some weight, have had no further trouble with my prostate.

I've also experienced a reduction in the signs of guttate psoriasis which used to make my legs itchy and splotchy red as well, and my blood sugar and insulin levels are normal.

I've experienced a drop in testosterone levels, which is not alarming and in fact is beneficial, and it seems that over the three years, my digestive system has also returned to much more normal operation, no wild acid refluxes and IBS like symptoms.

And I LOVE my flavourful food and my cooking, across just about every style of cuisine known to humanity. Even if you aren't ill with any of the modern diseases caused by poor diet, you should take a look at the book.

Cos by then we won't need them

Audi - great ideas - later...

Calculate The Energy Savings

Quick link - to USA Energy Star pages which contain information relevant universally.

"Global Climate Change" followup

I mean, has anyone thought seriously about what any global climate change will entail? In a past article I said that any climate shifts will have disastrous results.

Analyse: In South Africa, there seems to be no mention of drought and famine until around the same time as we seem to think global warming may have started, which unsurprisinlgy enough, was a century or so after we started digging up fossil fuel and burning it in copious quantities to fill our energy needs to industrialise.

It seems reasonable to link the two, that climate changes of what appear to have been relatively minor magnitude, caused rather a large change in the condition and lifestyles of South Africans. You can't tell me that it's just a case of out of control breeding, because that just doesn't sweep over a entire continent for no reason...

To continue that analysis, then. When you think of South Africa, besides the famines, what is the other symptom of the region that springs immediately to mind? Did you say violence and inhumanity?

People will go to incredible lengths to ensure that their DNA passes on into the next generation, including rationalising murder and genocide as "culling" or "they deserved it" or any number of other such sops to our conscience. Wars are fought for religion, and religions are collections of people who want to survive as a group as well as individually.

Even without the incredible pressure which global climate change will bring to bear, we don;t actually have a period of recorded history in which there wasn't a war going on somewhere.

Project: The current trend to failing crops and food production forward a few more years. Which demographic in their right mind will send food and medical aid to a third world country when their own children in turn are starving and ill?

Think: About the incredible havoc and destruction of human lives that are taking place in South Africa with conventional weapons and explosives. Project that forward to a point in time when a developed nation with a massive armoury of WMD decides that their best chance is to reove some of the competing populations of the world.

Think: In Russia, that flashpoint is much closer than in Australia, even though we are in a drought of epic proportions. The United States also are reaching a point where their large population is makiing demands on the land, food, and medicine economy which can't be sustained for too many more years, and the population there is swelling from illegal immigrants and birth rate.

Act: Reduce your footprint. Carbon, greenhouse gas, energy (heat) release, footprint from overly processed and transported food, from the amount of trees that have to be felled for new building and for farmland, the amount of energy that has to be expended to dig the metal of your next car out of the ground and form it into a car, the amount of noxious and toxic byproducts that have to be produced to produce the plastics and electronics and throw-away disposables you use each month.

If every person that owns one kept their car for an extra year and used it less each year, the impact would be huge. If every person who purchases a steak bred on farmland that would be better off growing lower impact foods switched a couple of meals a year to that lower impact food, that too would make tons (literally) of difference per person.

Think: About: It...

Maybe Call It "Global Climate Change?"

- would that make it clearer to the ostriches?

Some people will go to extraordinary lengths to stick their head in the sand. Especially about things like global warming...

Our previous Prime Minister spent his entire record number of terms in office denying that greenhouse gases existed, that global warming existed, or that we needed to do anything about it. He apparently also thought that petrol companies were fair and honest and didn't need policing, and that the entire Australian population was composed of creatures of the IQ and mentality of sheep and could be lied to over and over without cottoning on...

I'm sad to say that on the latter matter, the Australian masses almost always proved him right...

But for years now one other person has been conducting a one-bigot campaign against global warming activism. He uses his humour email list to conduct a campaign that, if he stopped and really thought about it, would have him heading for the fallout shelter instead of spouting inane little digs.

Here's a quote, about a snowfield in Hohenfels, Germany: "Looks like they don't have any Global Warming either.Mother Nature seems to want to make it perfectly clearwho is in charge and who is full of BS." (BTW Hohenfels means "high rock" or "high cliff" and is a skiing spot I remember from my childhood as being a good snowfield. So he's even baseing this snide sideswipe on on a fallacy.)

All of the last several years he has been posting photos of unseasonally cold weather around the UA and the world and saying "See? No global warming here!"

And in the process, he's been ignoring the one thing that scares intelligent people everywhere and is forcing ever faster changes in our behaviour and abuse of the ecosystem: Life is delicatley balanced, a shift of just a few degrees in either directon will be disastrous.

Also, weather is a closed system with really only one energy input, being the energy from the sun. When we unlock the energy that used to be stored beneath the ground in the form of fossil fuel, we are effectively releasing ancient energy into a delicately balanced system. In addition, we're also disturbing that delicate balance by changing the composition of the atmosphere and the way that the atmosphere retains the energy of the sun.

Therefore, if the weather starts heading for extremes of cold, we had better prepare for the rebound in the other direction. As in, for example, a record drought in Australia, which we have been experiencing for over twenty years and which is affecting the world economy. Want to see global warming in action Herman? Come visit Australia and see what were once viable and productive farmlands fallen into drought-stricken baked mud flats.

Arguing about the semantics of the words "global warming" at a time like this is a bit like fiddling while Rome burns, or wandering around your empire in a brand new suit of nothing.

The rest of us, do something now to halt the changes, do our bit, and we may come out of the "Global Climate Change" with most of us still intact...

Coughaesthetic

Oh and here's one from a flu far far away an in the past:

It happened that I was working at Channel Nine in the Store at the time, and I had the flu and a nasty cough. The nice chemist had given me a Chemist's Own Brand (read - "cheapie") orange flavoured cough syrup which I kept on my desk to save the day, but neither it nor Panadol were helping me. In fact, I was so fluffy-headed from the flu that it would take me one to two hours to book in one delivery of stock items.

By the afternoon I'd generally start coming around a bit more and by knock-off time I was usually alert and awake enough to drive myself home. Then came the fateful morning when I arrived at my desk and the bottle was empty. I figured "I'll get one at lunchtime" and I proceeded to plough into the work for the day. And had it all finished by midday.

So at lunchtime, I headed for the chemistand got another bottle of the Wonderful Orange Elixir and sat it on my desk- throat sooooo sore, - took a Panadol and a measure of WOE and settled in to breeze hrough the last bits of outstanding work. - Only - I was back. Back to doing everything in a somnolent state. Back to doing everything in a s-l-o-w somnolent state where I forgot what I wanted to do, generally taking careful note of how fucked up everything was, and then not finding any way to get back in sync again.

Turns out my body doesn't like Codeine very much, and especialy it doesn't like Codeine with Paracetamol. So every day I'd arive pico bello, take my medicine and end up a zombie.
So another thing to watch, codeine snd panadol.

Read your labels, check interactions, and preferably know what makes you react badly.

Skinflint Skim Food.

You ma have watched Current Affair last night, and heard about the "adulteration of our milk" with a thing called "permeate." I can honestly say that I have been lucky enough to have milk fresh from a farm, and thus have something to compare supermarket milk to.

I can therefore also say that there IS a difference. You can see that supermarket milk is more transparent ("thinner") than fresh minimally processed dairy milk. No it doesn't taste the same, but then all processing of milk alters the taste from the rich bacteria-laden brew that comes out of a cow's teat. Some of that is actually beneficial.

Adding permeate is just adding back what's left after extracting most of the useful parts of whey, which is in turn wat's left of milk after extracting the most useful parts of milk for making cheese. So yes permeate is a long way down the ladder from milk, and shouldn't be there - but at least it's not going to be any more harmful to your health than milk. And in some cases the thinner milk is actually good, such as in baking.

So really, permeate should go into the bread instead of full cream milk, thus reducing the cost of bre... Hang on, that's right, bread already uses he minimum amount and form of milk possible, adulterated by whatever the bakeries use to stretch the milk as far as possible...

Adulteration of food is nothing new. Frederick Accum was among the most vocal and active of anti-fraud activists, back in the early 1800's no less. He used a then still fairly high tech medium - he published a book - to actually name the merchants and manufacturers, and they shut him down with legalities and innuendo. Today, you still notice manufacturers shutting down sites where the public are encouraged to name and shame, and more importantly, you still notice that adulteration of food is taking place, just that the handling of it takes a different form.

In Accum's time, he noted with some grim glee that each of the primary foodstuff and pharmacy manufacturers were poisoning one another in a circular spiral of karma and bad digestion. He didn't need to specifically note however that this was also true of the general consumer too, the person whom all these adulterations eventually filtered down to, en masse.

Today we find that as each manufacturer uses some technique to stretch their ingredients, we lose once. Then because most of those ingredients in their turn come from a source that has already diluted or adulteratd these basic building blocks, we're losing out in a geometric progesssion...

But times have changed.

Where in Accum's day it was a case of slip in whatever you could and bank on the public's ignorance to not recognise poison in their food when they encountered it, our time is a time of disclosure.

Nowadays it's a case of slip in whatever you can, disclose as little of the true nature of the additives or find some loophole to allow you to remain within disclosure law as you can, and bank on the public's ignorance to not recognise poison in their food when they encounter it...

In Accum's day, there were as yet few additives. (Which are nowadays produced mostly by laboratory processes from waste products from another manufacture stage.) The reason was that there were then no processing plants able to manage this process. There were none, because the energy that ws needed and that we would soon unlock in the form of electric power from fossil fuels was not yet available, along with the spike in the production of poisonous emissions and greenhouse gases that would march hand in hand with the exploitation of fossil fuels.

In our day, we have added more illnesses and cancers to our repertoire than at any other time in the development of the world, not a mean achievement by any means. And do I think that the increase in additives, onset of pollution and huge increase in the incidence of cancers and other illnesses is all coincidental? What do you think?

Once again, I can never overtstate this enough - manufacturers could not get away with this shit if it wasn't for one very important group - US - the buying public. If we don't use every avenue open to us to bring these greedy companies to heel, they will continue to poison us. It's that simple. Check products carefully. Read labels, and at all times keep yourself aware of the latest deception being practised on us by nitpicking loophole seekers.

This is the price of keeping your own health, and the health of your family and people you care about. Let someone else forge the pioneering work of attempting to assimilate these poisons into the human genome...

What IS a Healthy Lifestyle, Anyway?

Hmmm so fit and healthy people like Lisa Curry Kenny get heart problems despite (or perhaps because of) her training and active life. There's no justice in the world, so the important thing is to take lessons from the injustices - in this case, that exercise and healthy living can make you very very sick.

Okay okay that was unfair - it should read "that exercise and healthy living can make you very very sick if it's not part of a balanced lifestyle and diet." Exercise is commendable but please don't overdo it, and remember that balance in all things is far more important for your health.

Prostate Cancer Risk Reduced By Green Tea

. . . with a caveat: While this article makes perfect sense, due to the known antioxidant properties of green tea (when prepared right!) there is the caveat of evolutionary pressures.

If you're not of Asian extraction, then probably your body has NOT evolved to take advantage of the precise properties of green tea as the Asian bloodlines will have evolved to.

That said, you will probably not suffer any ill effects from downing a cup or three of green tea a day. Also of course, green tea should not be the one and only prong in your plan of attack, you should also follow the other guidelines of The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook because the balanced approach and proper use of the foods will be far more beneficial than just trying one thing.

Last thing - this is not just for prostate cancer prone people - many cancers could be avoided by following a better diet, and the The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook has a lot of tips for keeping a healthy diet.

No Fleas, yet No Pesticides

The easiest way to kill the fleas harbouring in the carpet of the house from where Tiddles scratched them and the little bugger bred and multiplied? "Quick Henry - the Flit!" is not the answer. Nor is getting the pest man in with his goggles and mask and his jolly toxic sprays.

Latest research seems to say - vacuum the little sods. Kills them dead. Apparently. Hell, I say - why stop there? Vacuum Tiddles too!

Honey, could you please check the fuel rods?

Yeah they're coming in thick and fast now, for no readily discernible reason. Here's another way to live off grid and probably get paid for contributing to the grid in fact: Toshiba's personal nuclear reactor...

If this is not a hoax, it will probably be quite expensive for the average householder, but for motels and roadhouses and office blocks, it could be an answer to the cost of powering from the huge, expensive, polluting, and ugly Grid, the power network that has to span almost every city, town, village, highrise, factory, farmhouse, and homestead in Australia to supply the all-important energy needs of those places.

Actually, you may find that suburban streets could probably band together and set these up, the output at 200KW is enough to power about 90 toasters or 220 refrigerators, so if you go figuring it out, about 10 - 20 houses average usage.

Contrary to my title above, these things are sealed and pretty much maintenance free. And if you buy one you'd better hope so too - I hate to think what a 100,000 hour service would cost otherwise...

This is the kind of technology that, while entrenched power monopolies would love to be able to malign and create FUD around, will end the global warming cycle. 10,000 of these deployed around Australia will take away the need for several hundred megawatts worth of generator plant burning dirty fuels, and (more inportantly) take away the need for grid-supplying power cable runs across tens of thousands of miles as we currently have.

Aside from returnng material like aluminium and copper to the stockpile, this clears visual pollution, traffic hazards, and the need for surge power capacity that we have to currently build into the grid. Combined with houses supplying some of their power with cheap wind and solar electricity, the need for surge capacity will largely disappear.

Once again - tell your local Member about it, write about it, bring it to public attention - we can make Australia an example of how to do it right.

Cheap Cheap Solar Cells Hit Manufacture Stage

Have to give out this link - these are going to revolutionise a variety of solar electric technologies. How about your house covered in solar panels for $3000 instead $15000?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/technology/18solar.html?ex=1355634000&en=091b06819623f9d0&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

LATEST NEWS:

• http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/green-tech/cheap-solar+power+everywhere-nanosolar-powersheets-go-on-sale-really-are-cheap-335096.php
• http://www.news.com/8301-11128_3-9835241-54.html?tag=newsmap

Additives? Just say NO!

The evidence against additives keeps mounting up. I'm very glad I take the stance I do against additives and adulteration of whole foods, because if just one person more starts reading and taking note of the labels of the foods they eat, I consider that a victory and am glad to have given one more person a chance at healthy life.

In The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook, I think I made that point, and at the risk of saying it again - it takes our bodies hundreds of generations to adjust to new foods. Even if the human species is evolving at a faster and faster rate, it's not going to be possible for YOU personally to "evolve" to adapt to additives and preservatives and other crap in your food.

Personally, I check every tin, every packet, and every sachet the first time I encounter it during shopping, and if the ingredients aren't listed or the list is made hard to figure out, or if the list looks like a chemistry experiment in progress, it goes on my ignore list. If you're at all concerned about your health and the health of your family, you'll do the same.

The best way to survive the next few decades will be to eat minimally processed whole foods, cook the food yourself, and remember that what our ancestors were eating 7,000 to 12,000 years ago is what we are just becoming adapted to now...

Another Biodiesel Problem, Solved!

With this breakthrough, biodiesel has become fun again! Now that Rice University boffins have found a way to digest the major slimy slippery waste byproduct into another fuel, (ethanol,) there is no reason to avoid biodiesel any longer.

I don't know about you, but I played with biodiesel despite having no motor to test it in, and what really stumped me was the litre of slippery glycerin that is left behind for every 11 litres of oil you crack into diesel.

Because larger players have been getting into making biodiesel, the demand for glycerin has decreased sharply, one might say... Being able to sell or give it away to an ethanol refinery would solve the major problem, once a month/year/whatever you can have your waste glycerin removed and turned into something useful!

According to the article, each litre of glycerin digests into almost a whole litre of ethanol, meaning there will be little waste to worry about, and I'm betting that the waste there is, will be something that is easily biodegradable, being just the waste from bacteria digestion.

I'm thinking here - car engines run on petroleum, and are not really suited to running on ethanol. Old diesel engines were not really made for biodiesel, either. But once the advantages of biodiesel became apparent, diesel engine manufacturers got wise and now there is hardly a diesel engined domestic car that doesn't claim to run on it.

Similarly, petrol distributors have been adding ethanol and methanol to petroleum, and slowly car manufacturers have changed engines so they will run on these augmented fuels.

Now here's another thought - diesel engines were also NOT designed to run on neat vegetable oil, yet some are capable. If a diesel engine could run on a blend of vegetable oil and biodiesel, then you could say that 15 litres of vegetable oil will make 13 - 14 litres of useable biodiesel blend, and 1 -2 litres of glycerin, which, according to the story I linked to, will become 1 -2 litres of ethanol.

Negligible waste - now that is something to aim for!

The beautiful thing is, that we know that car engines, both petrol and diesel, are capable of running on these alternative and much cheaper and cleaner fuels, so put pressure on car manufacturers. The best way we can do that is by avoiding products with pansified petrol-only-sipping engines or fussy-fossil-diesel-thanks motors...

So pressure away - it will finally be YOU and YOUR CHOICES that determine the future of the world.