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News Briefs 28-07-2006

I’m just full of questions today. Have instruction manuals always sucked? What kind of punishment would you love to see visited on people who yank out their credit cards in response to spam? Why isn’t free-market capitalism preventing alltheseelectricpoweroutages? With what you have right now, could you make it through 10 days without electricity – with all nearby shops powerless too? And last but not least, can anyone explain why we humans are so insane? (Stupid human tricks run the gamut, but running 135 miles non-stop in 123 degree Fahrenheit heat takes the cake.)

Quote of the Day:

There are 10 types of people in the world — those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

Attribution unknown

  1. Free market Capitalism????
    There is no such thing. Looking for someone to blame for the outages – blame the goverment (I don’t care if they are Rep. or Dem., they are all at fault). If they would get out of everything they have no buisness being in, we’d all be better off.

    1. I Agree With You, And…
      amadeusrex

      I’m a die hard capitalist, too! But, capitalists aren’t perfect either! And, capitalists are bankrolling the clowns that want to overly regulate the market. That being said, capitalism needs some oversight and regulation both from within and without!

      cnnek

      {You Can Teach People How To Think Or What To Think; But, You Can’t Do Both! It Is Better To Teach People How To Think!!!}

  2. Re: Global warming
    Ice ages and periods of warming came and went on this planet a long time before the first unit of fossil fuel was burnt or the first green-house gas other than dinosaur farts went into the atmosphere.

    It seems like yesterday that a few scientists admitted that increased solar activity might have something to do with global warming; last year I seem to recall that someone had started looking at the logs of early British expeditions to the Arctic. Much has been made-here in Canada, at least-of open leads in Arctic ice, for the first time in living memory…as it turns out, such things are not particularly novel. I can’t help thinking of how “Dog bites Man” isn’t news whereas “Man bites dog” is…there’s a lot of people living in the land of academe who will dramatize anything for the sake of tenure or at least a bit of publicity. A little bit of hysteria goes a long way, doesn’t it?

    Of far greater concern to me is the notion that we have polluted the planet to the extent that Teflon is now being found in the blood of Polar Bears. I’m pretty sure that Life will go on-for some species, at least-but less sure that Homo S. will be among them. The times, they will be interesting.

    Cheers

    So many idiots…so little time.

    1. Hi Binro
      I can’t seem to get a handle on this global warming business.Everywhere I look there is different information.
      However I do agree with you that the pollution is sickening.
      I did not know that about Teflon in polar bears but I suppose it happens.
      From some of the stuff I have read homo sapiens is going to get a big shock one of these days.

      shadows

      1. Hi,Shadow… the shock is already here…
        I suspect that many people are just too self-involved to notice. As an example: I’m going on 50 years old; I went through my elementary and secondary schooling here in Canada and when I did there was no such thing as kids dropping dead from peanut allergy…now it’s gotten to the point where school-kids can only bring to school packaged food that is specifically labeled as never having come into contact with peanuts. Something fairly basic has changed; in my local area, two kids have died in the past year from peanut allergy, one merely from kissing her boy-friend who had eaten a peanut-butter sandwich. In my opinion this isn’t some previously unrecognized phenomenon; Human biology appears to have changed. I see it in myself as well…having never been allergic to insect stings I lately nearly died twice from wasp stings.

        On one level there would seem to be simple explanations…i.e., of the 38 species of mosquito currently known here in the province of Ontario, only 14 are regarded as native species. Supposedly some of the reactions being observed are due to folks being exposed to previously unknown allergens…then again, people here are experiencing reactions that nobody does where the alien species of mosquito are native. Ditto with the rates of childhood asthma; what was once virtually unknown here has become virtually epidemic.

        I have no doubt that Life-in some form-will survive…it has already survived cataclysms beyond our imaginings. Whether we will be part of the biosphere is another question. I would speculate that Humanity will survive but in vastly smaller numbers and much reduced physical area. Without getting too Malthusian, I can easily pictue two-thirds of Humanity finding its existence questionable…there’s room to ask whether this planet can support more than a couple of billion people in any sustainable fashion.

        I suspect the ride will get bumpy, we might all want to fasten our seat-belts.

        Cheers

        So many idiots…so little time.

        1. Why the allergies?
          Binro, do you think the allergies are from pollution?
          I know with me that I react to the fumes from the highway I live on.
          It seems like everyones’ immune systems are being destroyed.That is the only reason we would all become allergic to stuff.
          I never heard of peanut allergies when I was a kid.And there was not much asthma in those days either, but I am older than you are.

          I eat all whole food, by choice.I don’t buy tinned or processed food although sometimes when I am not well I use some I keep for emergencies.
          And I have found that the older I get the less able I am to tolerate food that has been processed in any way.
          I can taste chemicals in food where they are used, and I don’t like it.
          But then, even the organic food you buy is sure to be polluted in some way.

          Yup, I am fastening my seatbelt alright.

          shadows

          1. If the allergies aren’t caused by pollutants,
            What would be a more likely culprit? At any given time we have very little idea of what’s in the food we eat or the air we breathe or the water we drink. I tend to think that there will be a very high price to pay before we truly find out what effect any given substance may have on the food-chain…the food-chain that we are part of, whether some wish to admit it or not.

            Cheers

            So many idiots…so little time.

          2. maybe….
            hi Binro. There are a few things you can be absolutly sure of…..chemical residue from the last fifty years
            ..fertilizes..insecticides..herbicides..fluride…..and ALL food additives.

            Your only weapon….plenty of antioxidents. and simple foods prepared yourself.

            nearly all diseases are modern. so in a world with advance medical knowhow and vaccines. WHY are people so sick??????

          3. Nearly all diseases are modern?
            Or is it not perhaps that people are living longer and thus developing diseases that weren’t common when people died in their forties and fifties? Horrible diseases like Alzheimer’s came as a nasty surprise when life-spans increased dramatically in the last century…

            The art of medicine is nowhere near as advanced as some doctors would like to think, but a lot of folks aren’t dying as young as they used to; trouble is that longer life-spans bring a new raft of problems that we’re so far ill-prepared to deal with.

            Cheers

            So many idiots…so little time.

          4. hmmm…
            two things…..firstly, medicine is more advanced now then it has ever been in recorded history.
            Secondly, there is not enough evidence to surport the short life spans of our ancestors. Maybe in the filthy squaller of european cities in the middle ages. But a lot of races enjoyed a fruitful long healthy life. It wasn’t until contact with europeans in the latter part of the last 1000 years that disease spread.

            I can’t see how asthma, juvenile diebetis, obesity, all cancers in people in their 20s and 30s. The plague of breast cancer, high rates of infidelity, a hole host of new diseases amongst mid 40s. Has anything to do with longer life spans.

          5. some other reasons
            With respect to allergies, I suspect that the wider variety of pollutants has something to do with it. I was born in a coal town. Teachers of my parents age did not see nearly as much coughing, sniffling and wheezing back in the old coal dust days, as they did 1980s and later. By the 1980s, the coal had run out, the air wasn’t black any more.

            To address thefloppy1’s last point, about short life spans:

            European cities in the middle ages lacked any kind of sanitary systems, hence the spread of some deseasess. But few people lived in the big cities, most lived in the country. Also, sanitary systems and conditions were not any better in earlier days in Europe, nor anywhere else.

            More importantly, there many reasons why people die, not just the nasty diseases developed by the nasty Europeans of those days.

            For example:

            – Starvation. Not until very recently has any large society been about to produce enough food, reliably, to deal with a few years of bad crops, bad fishing, or bad hunting.

            – Child mortality. In the “good old days”, most people died before the age of 5 or so. This is what brings down the “life expencancy” statistics the most. When we consider why people don’t live a long life, we often forget those who only live a few days. There used to be a lot of them, in all societies.

            – Accidents, wars, wild animals, etc. In the good old days, without ermergency care facilities, ambulances and the like, your chances of survival of these things were much less than they are now.

            – Lack of retirement funds. In the good old days, an average-income person with no family who was too old to work (or farm, or hunt) would starve.

            – Lack of dental care. In the good really old days, before the invention of soup, you would starve when you lost your teeth. That’s when, not if. In some later days, you could still die from an infected tooth. Or the pain would affect your reasoning, and you would pick fights and lose.

            Among these, I think the short life of most children has the most to do with low life expentancy.

          6. Re: hmm
            Firstly, I’m not thinking about the Middle Ages. From a study released in 2004, one observes that the average life expectancy at time of birth in the US in the year 1900 was 49 years. Just shy of a century later that figure had increased by almost three decades and that’s remarkable, especially given the primary cause of the increase. The US, like a number of other Western countries, would be in negative population growth if not for immigration; a large and growing fraction of the population is quite elderly…thus a large and growing number of people are living long enough to develop diseases which previously had not been seen in great numbers.

            Beyond that, there are always statistical anomalies. Look at any era of history and you’ll find cases where individuals were quite long-lived but these cases seem to be disproportionately in the upper classes; you don’t often hear about some dismal peasant living to a ripe old age, mostly because he probably worked himself into an early grave trying to scratch a living out of the ground and because it’s unlikely that anyone else cared. I suspect that many people are suffering from a case of the Good Old Days syndrome…a lot of folks seem to think that food comes from grocery stores and such folks generally seem to have absolutely no idea of how hard it was, until quite recently, in many places, to avoid starving to death.

            As to your last point, well, come on. Air pollution on any wide scale is pretty much a post-Industrial Revolution kind of thing; somehow the prevalence of asthma doesn’t seem all that surprising. Diabetes, obesity? The wide-spread availability of cheap refined sugars certainly seems like a plausible cause. All cancers in people in their 20’s and 30’s? Show me some data, please, I’m not aware of such a thing. In general, I have to stick by the notion that as life expectancy increases, the incidence of any number of diseases will increase…for all we know, someone who dies in their 20’s or whatever may just be someone who would have otherwise been a childhood mortality statistic.

            Cheers

            So many idiots…so little time.

          7. innoculations, chemicals and additives
            I’ve been onto this conspiracy and awful industry for way too many years. I first noticed how ill my grandmother would get when she was taken off her own homegrown garden food (during the mid sixties), as she raised her own chickens, dairy cows and pigs. She also had a nice orchard of a variety of fruit and nut trees, it was all very “organic” but that was long before the whole world realized the positive potential that unprocessed foods had on the human body and the ecosystem, then the fad started. My first books by Adele Davis had encouraged me to feed the proper food to my family in the early seventies. This was in addition to six years of nutrition studies I had done prior to finding her books.

            I have had many rants on the refined white sugar topic (and it’s politics). It is toxic, same thing for saturated fats, and chemical additives. My goodness no one even touches the petro chemical industry nor the drug industries and they are culpable for a myriad of now known diseases. LOL … ask any lawyer, and woe be to world health! But profit is the goal and they do factor in percentages of deaths, as if that is some kind of comfort. It’s all very cold and calculated. —————————–Truth is stranger than fiction.

          8. Adele Davis
            I don’t know if she was the first one who advocated whole foods but she was the first one I ever found and I read the books and raised my kids accordingly.
            Now people act like they think it is a major scientific discovery if they are told by doctors to eat whole foods.

            I recently read that the free range eggs we buy here in Oz are not free range at all.
            There is no one who cares enough to do anything about the situation and you are right Pam, they factor in so many deaths due to chemicals etc.

            Look at the percentage of rat poop and vermin pieces producers are allowed to have in grain
            and flour.

            shadows

          9. I,m sorry Binro
            there is absolutly no way you can convince me that the evidence of so much disease now has anything to do with people living longer. As for cancer in young people….well I did a quick google and came up with many statitics to back what I wrote earlier. Maybe you should try a little research yourself.

            the truth is out there…….where have I heard that before????????

          10. problems with contaminants
            There’s hot-off-the-wires news about contaminants along the gulf coast that were kicked up by Katrina, and the health problems they’re now causing. There’s different info in all the articles, so here are several links and the gist of what they say:

            Chemist finds high level of arsenic in Katrina’s wake.

            Contaminated soil along the gulf coast is causing diseases. Katrina stirred up high levels of arsenic, heavy metals, and hydrocarbons in addition to a host of pathogens such as E-coli and Staph.

            Now that the muck left by the storm is dry, these contaminants are being kicked up in the air, so people along the coast are inhaling them, ingesting them, and otherwise coming into contact with them, which has given rise to a high number of people with related medical problems such as rashes, allergies, infections, and respiratory problems that do not respond to treatment. There are some people along the coast who have had pneumonia ever since the hurricanes struck.

            In 3 Mississippi towns, arsenic levels in the soil are now 27 times higher than the EPA’s safety level, but since these contaminants were stired up by both Katrina and Rita, these contaminants were found in the coastal soils of all four states affected by these two storms.

            Kat

  3. Finally!
    I had to wait until the first of the month to read the news,as I was cut right down.

    Can you understand what your cats are saying Kat?Of course you can, and unfortunately I can understand what my dogs and parrot are saying.
    What they are saying is….Gimme gimme food, gimme your lap, gimme your shoulder.
    But it’s my fault for making them such a big part of my life.

    Some good links.And I love the quote as usual.

    shadows

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