Floods, SWIFT, Luteolin

Queenslanf Floods
Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured the top image on February 6, 2012.

Looks like AnthroCChange is going to be more precipitation, bigtime

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So what we need is
1) flood towers (Bangladesh is alrady building these... 6 metres? 15 metres? these could contain potable water tanks (see 2 & 3)

2) water purification/filtering - is it really true that tubular sand filters automatically generate effective cellular layers?
Can plastic bottles be safely used for sunlighttreatement? (ie phalathate risk)

3) storage between the floods: underground stone arched cisterns are the best? isoprene bladders? ponds with a layer of plastic bottles to cut evaporation?

4) levees: trouble is: when the levee breaks, there aint no place to go ( except flood towers)

Long term, we are looking at forests replacing grassland, unless we encourage the pachyderms

nasa
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Insecure Banking
Recent times have shown the greatest seizure of bank accounts (Libya), now the (Belgian) transfer service is suborned
Old certainties about banks are crushed.

..CUTTING IRAN OUT OF SWIFT
..press the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT, to shut out Iran's central bank and its other financial institutions from the system used to move money between banks ..Senator Robert Menendez.
..authorize but not compel the Treasury Department to sanction Belgium-based SWIFT and the banks that own it, ..
"SWIFT messages are kind of the glue for the worldwide banking system..
U.S. companies cannot do business with Iran, but foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies can and do.
..making U.S. parent companies liable for business done by their foreign subsidiaries ..
..more payments are being made directly to the National Iranian Oil Company and National Iranian Tanker Co..
..Foreign energy companies involved in joint ventures with Iran
the bill would not cover BP's Shah Deniz natural gas project in Azerbaijan in which a subsidiary of the National Iranian Oil Company owns a stake.
..
reuters..The bill now goes to the full Senate “where the likelihood of passage is considered strong,..
"Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Human Rights Act" ..
SWIFT officials were quick to cave to U.S. pressure...

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dissidentvoice
Stuart Jeanne Bramhall February 3rd, 2012
Capitalism will end when oil runs out, ..Fleeing Vesuvius..2010. ..New Zealand editions ..2011. ..
,,Energy Availability
..We are always taught that the industrial revolution ..was the result of British technological innovation..Smith .. The Wealth of Nations.
..Smith totally overlooks the importance of cheap fossil fuel energy, at first from coal and later from oil..
..Douthwaite .. one bBL oil = labor of a man working 40 hours *51*12...before.. cheap fossil fuels, capitalism was impossible
..production of an economic surplus that can be reinvested in new capital ..to expand production
. a surplus.. possible because of the vast amount of cheap.. work performed by fossil fuel..
..industrialization and capitalism will .. cease when fossil fuel becomes too ..expensive ..

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smashwords

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Vehicles
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for every 100 mg per day increase in magnesium intake, the risk of stroke was reduced by about 9%. nutrition
nutraingredients


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Social Development Minister Paula Bennett felt all the frustrations of Te Aupouri Maori Trust Board, which has been feeding children at five schools in Kaitaia, at a public meeting in the town yesterday kicking off a two-week roadshow about the Green Paper for Vulnerable Children.

Child, Youth and Family, part of Ms Bennett's ministry, has told the board to stop providing lunches to 15 to 20 children each day who came to school without lunch,
nzherald
(makes sense they changed the name from Welfare to Developmen)
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Camelina oil rich in the omega-3, alpha-linolenic acid (ALA)....omega-3.Rapeseed ALA (10%) and sunflower almost none. Camelina oil is more stable than linseed, due-its natural antioxidants, ..
..mustard family,..resistant-flea beetles.. prefers cooler climates
Camelina oil ..64% polyunsaturated, 30% monounsaturated, and 6% saturated fatty acids... high levels of gamma-tocopherol (vitamin E) which confers a reasonable shelf life .

canola (rapeseed) 127 gal/acre
camelina 62-100 gal/acre
from 330-1700 lbs/acre seed with oil content 29-40%... . ..nitrogen up-levels of 80 lb/acre.

Montana 2008 569 lb/acre, down 4.8% over 2007, 400-1000 lb/acre...
1000 kg of Camelina 350 kg of oil, .. press will extract 250 kg. Cold pressing (40°C) is required,

.. 1,800 - 2,000 lb/acre 16-18 inches of rainfall
900 - 1,700 lb/acre 13-15 inches
2,400 lb/acre irrigation
2,100- 2,400 lb/acre 25 inches of rainfall.

blogspot
Camelina sativa.. ..heavily branched, 1-3 feet .. pods.. many small, oily seeds
..gold-of-pleasure, false flax, wild flax, German sesame. One of our favorites is Siberian oilseed;
issg
biodiesel  - will it ever be a good idea?

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Luteolin citrus bioflavonoids. antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and anti-tumor parsley, thyme, peppermint, basil herb, celery and artichoke.

Luteolin displays strong antinociceptive (against pain originating from peripheral nerves) action in mice .(85) ..
Brazilian plant Wedelia paludosa,..including painful conditions.



luteolin, quercetin, chrysin, eriodicytol, hesperetin, and naringenin -- apparently act as anti-inflammatory agents.
Luteolin is found in celery, thyme, green peppers, and chamomile tea.
quercetin include capers, apples, and onions.
Chrysin is from the fruit of blue passionflower
Oranges, grapefruit, lemons, and other citrus fruits are good sources of eriodicytol, hesperetin, and naringenin.
..all six plant compounds target an enzyme TBK1 inhibits.. trigger inflammation.
..luteolin was the most effective .. already known to have anti-inflammatory properties..., Hwang first to provide this new
ars
nutrition
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theoi
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Occupation: in 2011, 722,000 Israelis lived beyond the Green Line, ..settlements and East Jerusalem. ..5% increase over 2010... 1 in every seven Israelis lives outside of 1967 borders ..

richardsilverstein
said that 43% of the West Bank land is inaccessible by Palestinians since it was allocated to Israeli settlements’ benefit.
wafa
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Richard Feynman's lectures on quantum electrodynamics (QED) delivered at the University of Auckland in 1979. These are surely among the very best ever delivered in the history of science.
edge
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..The Rational Optimist
Life Is a Digital Code

It's hard now to recall just how mysterious life was on the morning of 28 February and just how much that had changed by lunchtime.
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Foxconn, which manufactures gadgets for the likes of Apple, Sony, Nintendo and HP, among many others, has had a grim history of suicides at its factories. A suicide cluster in 2010 saw 18 workers throw themselves from the tops of the company's buildings, with 14 deaths.
In the aftermath of the suicides, Foxconn installed safety nets in some of its factories

It's great because it evaporates a little bit faster than alcohol does, which means you can run the production line even faster and try to keep up with the quotas. The problem is that n-hexane is a potent neurotoxin and all these people have been exposed. Their hands shake uncontrollably. Most of them can't even pick up a glass.
I talk to people whose joints in their hands have disintegrated from working on the line, doing the same motion hundreds and hundreds of thousands of times. It's like carparpel tunnel on a scale that we can scarcely imagine. You need to know that this is imminently avoidable. If these people were rotated, monthly, on their jobs this would not happen. But, that would require someone to care. That would require someone at Foxconn and the other suppliers to care. That would require someone at Apple and Dell and the other customers to care. Currently, no one in the ecosystem cares enough to even enforce that. And so, when you start working at 15 or 16, by the time you are 26, 27... your hands are ruined. And when they are truly ruined, once they will not do anything further, you know what we do with a defective part in a machine that makes machines. We throw it away....
com

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newyorker
..An ancient poem was rediscovered—and the world swerved.
by Stephen Greenblatt
..Lucretius anticipated the core scientific vision of modernity...
Audio: Stephen Greenblatt on the radical ideas of the Roman poet Lucretius.
Lucretius; “On the Nature of Things” (”De Rerum Natura”); Books; Writers; Poetry, Poets; Poggio the Florentine (Poggius Florentinus); Epicurus
..

newyorker

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harpers
The accidental universe:
Science's crisis of faith
By Alan P. Lightman
Alan Guth..“the multiple-universe idea severely limits our hopes to understand the world from fundamental principles.” And the philosophical ethos of science is torn from its roots.
Steven Weinberg.. “We now find ourselves at a historic fork in the road we travel to understand the laws
of nature. If the multiverse idea is correct, the style of fundamental physics will be radically changed.”

Lets see: Inflation was proposed to explain the Improbable flatness of being. But if improbability is voided by selection from the manyVerses... the necessity for Inflation has vanished... the place is flat just because it is...
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youtube
Mr. Tim Te Aika's old homestead

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Wind record 12.2% of UK energy demand on December 28, ,,
.. production between December 1, 2011 and January 5, 2012 5.3% of UK power demand, RenewableUK
..to grow by one third this year, .. installed ..to 8,000 MW),

George Lukács, Amenzil, Arporn

Leo Naphta (The Magic Mountain)... He modeled him on George Lukács, - Gee better check that out...
. [Lukacs Minister of Cultural Affairs in the Nagy Government.]

"Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann?" of course I read "Magic Mountain" but we are live now at the gates of the Castle, not up the Mountain.


I confess I havnt read Lukács. Neither did Lukács read Tales of Genjii (ca 1000CE) and "confessions of Lady Nijo" (ca 1300CE) so he cant be serious about the Novel.

wikipedia maintains that
(Lukács)was 'saved from extradition [Vienna 1919] thanks to the efforts of a group of writers which included Thomas and Heinrich Mann'



...Mann, who had often stayed with Lukacs’ parents in Budapest before 1914, reported an early encounter with Lukacs characteristically: "I have met Lukacs personally. He once spent an hour in Vienna giving me his ideas. He was right so long as he was talking"



"the big question was ... how to undo the cultural revolution of the Sixties" - damn straight
nybooks

Georg Lukács and Thomas Mann

Look back now, it is clear that this peak moment(USA oil, USA rocket thrust 1969) was the peak moment for the _possibility_ of human liberation
Its impossible, for those who were not there, to comprehend the sexual/musical/chemical/anthropological/707 liberation. Just realise that today's vapid remanants - women's lib, human rights, de-colonialism,homsexual marriage (!), are mere slivers of the original concepts, and fading further each year.
Human rights are the problem said Karl M. and now we have Paula Bennet scurrying about, worrying when to capture children from poor families, while parroting her captain's refrain that its poor choices.

Capital predicted to stagnate, Check
Proletariate predicted to overthrow Capital. Foiled for the foreseable future (repressive de-sublimation)

Or from an Enthalpathetic view. Combustion of fossil biota has bought us a dream of empire.
Diffuse Enthalpy (photovoltaic crystals, windmills) likely capable of maintaining merely a pre-industrial culture.
Deuterium fusion likely is not capable of containment, so we are on the post-peak slide (or cliff)

I'm working on a theory of cybernetic socialism. Triggered by ideas from Staford Beer.
Capital Enterprise is Started in much the same way in Banksterism and Communism: an arbitrary official (bank or beurocrat) agrees to advance the capital
The distinctive difference is in the Failure mode: If, say, your shoe factory doesnt sell its shoes; under Capital the factory is bankrupted. Under Central planning it staggers on,making unpopular shoes, there is no way to close it.
Somehow Capital introduces an array of new and innovative products; Nike shoes for example. The Stalinist appartchick isnt permitted to instigate new stuff( Trainers, cell phones...) so CApital is the innovater. And teh World destroyer (100 kW personal cars)
Additionally we now have Enterprises "T0oBigToFail - GeneralMotors!... which obviously negates teh advantages of Capitalism

Evidently we are suggesting merely a modulation of Capital. Karl M. of course, maintained that the ruling class would ever resist modulation, so its maybe the boot grinding teh face, forever.


Dialectical Materialism must be supplemented with Flow descriptions, Galastost say,... All Enthalpy and Matter flows across boundaries must be described
- clearly we need Beer style Variety Reduction to Simplify the model.
Can a Republican Constitution specify desirable projects?

Is Bill CLinton correct to state that food production is different, so critical that it must NOT be regarded as just another fungible exportable international market product?
s Malaysia then incorrect to plan to pay to import most of its rice, relying on other profitable enterprises?
Does Clinton indeed believe, ie act upon, his statement. Eh does Haiti get to grow its own food?
Is food even important? If more people are in prison, than on farms in USA, is farming a small affair? (are some of the prisoners growing food?)



The Cybernetic Brain Andrew Pickering © 2009
world_in_torment
cybsoc
Designing-Freedom-Beer scribd
informatics
cybsoc


youtube


Designing Freedom, Regulatinga Nation : Socialist Cyberneticsin Allende’s Chile*
informatics

Designing Freedom Stafford Beer1 Review Anansi Press 1993 ..
Incipient Instability


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After Amenzil village had solar panels installed, its residents had electricity for the first time. Nonetheless, "Israel issued a military injunction" to remove them.

..Spanish NGO Seeba installed them...
... Israeli military commanders have final say...
Village council head Ali Hreizat said:

"(T)hese solar panels were the ray of hope to residents. We have been living here since 1948, and have nowhere to go."


Amenzil is one of many so-called unrecognized villages. Israel denies them basic services, including electricity, water, roads, transport, sanitation, education, healthcare, postal and telephone service, refuse removal and more because under its Planning and Construction Law their illegal even though Bedouin Arabs are Israeli citizens.

They're internal refugees, forced from their homes during Israel's "War of Independence" and prevented from returning. ..
Moreover, many villages are destroyed, their residents displaced to make way for Jewish only development.
imemc

...

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These Pics from 2004, hosted in Photobucket
Oddly I cant access the account( forgot the password) but I can access the pics individually
Photobucket is prone to delete pictures somewhat arbitrarily ..

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Transit of Venus, Centenary of Vitamins

6 June 2012 last chance to see: Transit of Venus

Only six transits of Venus are known to have been observed by humans in 1639, 1761, 1769, 1874, 1882 2004.
[I reckon Mayans must have used a pinhole in a leaf... they knew Venus better than Spaniards did]

..Venus..round black spot with a diameter.. 1/32nd of the sun...
..entire transit (all four contacts) is visible from .. New Zealand.



gsfc

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                External    Sun    Internal     Sun     Greatest     Sun     Internal     Sun      External     Sun (UT)
                Ingress     Alt      Ingress     Alt      Transit      Alt       Egress      Alt        Egress      Alt


Auckland 22:15:25   24      22:33:27    25         01:29:01     28        04:25:08      7          04:43:17      4 
                  10am?                                                 1pm?                     4pm?




Next Transit of Venus 2117CE

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2012 Centenaries:
Alan Turing, Lawrence Durrell, Jackson Pollock, Gene Kelly, Gil Evans, Milton Friedman, John Cage, Woody Guthrie

Vitamins, Wilson cloud chamber

Wheat, Environment IQ & retrotransposons

NZ Wheat a Record

NZ imports 46% of its wheat , less than I had thought.
total Import+produced = 171kg/person 470g/day (I suppose some is 'feed'

A Nth Otago (Canterbury?) farmer got a world record 15+ T/ha yield with 200kg N/ha
and a decent 11T/ha with no N applied - so NZ can grow wheat (maybe this was 'feed'?)

I reckon NZ should try to grow more wheat, just in case the PRC snap up the diminishing crop from Aus, and maybe they lose their taste for Anchor.

Consumption 753,000 T = 171kg/person   (not MT?)

2003 record grower in North Otago, New Zealand (NZ), applied to be listed in the Guinness Book of Records for yields produced by two English feed wheat cultivars that were16.2 t/ha and 14.3 t/ha at 14% grain moisture content from two fields (Chalmers 2003). Such l

,,Canterbury (sic) region of NZ in the 2002-03 season. Savannah, an autumn feed wheat cultivar, was direct-drilled on 6 May 2002 in a stony silt loam soil. Mid-flowering occurred on 1 December 2002. The crop was irrigated six times with approximately 40 mm of water applied each time. Rainfall from sowing to maturity was 505 mm. Two treatments had 207 and 230 kg N/ha applied in three applications, while a third treatment received no N fertiliser. There were three replicates. Soil mineral N was 50 kg N/ha in the top 25 cm shortly after crop emergence. Deeper N measurements could not be taken because the stony soil made sampling impossible.

...exceeded 15 t/ha when N was applied, and around 11 t/ha when no N was applied (Table 1).

Table 1. Yield and mean grain weight (mg) at 14% grain moisture content, and ears/m2 harvested from a crop of Savannah wheat in Canterbury, NZ, in 2003.

Treatment (kg N/ha)      Yield (t/ha)
0                                   11.1
230                               15.5

...unfertilised treatment produced only 11 t/ha (still a very good yield),,

cropscience



2009 Agricultural Production Survey
408,400 tonnes of wheat were harvested, up 19 percent on the previous year.
The area harvested increased 27 percent to 53,900 hectares of wheat.
Barley and maize grain harvests in 2009..
449,800 MT of barley +10 percent. The area +15 percent to 77,800 hectares.
257,000 tonnes of maize +25 percent. The area +26 percent to 23,100 hectares.



stats
fao
     2300kcal = 10MJ

about
scientificamerican


Urine 500litres = 5.6kg N = 230kg cereal so 1kg N = 41kG grain (blog search 2006?)
from above 200kg N ADDS 4Tons of N so 1 kgN = 4000/200 = 20kg Grain

15g/day N in 2 litres?  = 7.5kg
theecologist
rollitup

So because of (unfounded) disgust we replaced bioN with industrialN , or a byproduct of the explosives industry?

Its clear that New Zealand is massively underpopulated, we have, what 750 refugee quota. Gotta be the most selfish and greedy people on the planet.





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IQ
There's a lot of bytes spilled over Heredity vs Environment in Intelligence.
Very little, almost no thought given to the 3rd force: Chaos:

Genes cant possibly describe E11 * E4 synapses. Its done chaotically. tiny initial divergences racking up major cerebral differences,
tiny experiential differences carving major developmental paths

Now we have retrotransposons active in the brain, such that its a mosaic.... Different parts have different genetics.
Racism pales into insignificance,

numerous L1, Alu and SVA germline mutations, as well as 7,743 putative somatic L1 insertions, in the hippocampus and caudate nucleus of three individuals. Surprisingly, we also found 13,692 somatic Alu insertions and 1,350 SVA insertions. Our results demonstrate that retrotransposons mobilize to protein-coding genes differentially expressed and active in the brain. Thus, somatic genome mosaicism

ncbi


2011 Oct 30;479(7374):534-7. doi: 10.1038/nature10531.
Somatic retrotransposition alters the genetic landscape of the human brain.


It gets worse: the chaotic variation which may swamp environmental factors, is itself influenced by the environment...

ncbi

L1 retrotransposons are capable of mobilization in neuronal progenitor cells from rodents and humans and evidence of massive L1 insertions was observed in adult brain tissues but not in other somatic tissues. In addition, L1 mobility in the adult hippocampus can be influenced by the environment

and for "for the youngest active human retrotransposon, SINE-VNTR-Alu (SVA)."
ncbi

its a chaotic jungle in there...

and its also going on in the germ line... its inherited chaos!...

 several subfamilies of Alu elements are expressed in undifferentiated human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and that most expressed Alu elements are active elements.

ncbi

Anyway, I had a high IQ but low socialisation, so I could have benefited from an EQ test, and special classes in how to get along with people.
...
S J Gould as Marxist, proposing we dont test IQ because its evil, or uncorrelated or something. (?)
cpsimoes

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huge cave in Vietnam. If not a claustriphobe, looks grand

nationalgeographic

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Fuukushima, standards for radiation set higher...

..at the Chernobyl [...] clear targets were set .. more than five millisieverts in a year were evacuated, no question [...]

Were Japan to impose similar strictures, .. would have to evacuate some 1800 km² and impose restrictions on food produced in another 11 100 km²
..Dr. Kozo Tatara for the Japan Public Health Association at the American Public Health Association’s 139th annual meeting

standard


..

According to the simulation, the reactor core started melting about 50 minutes after the emergency core cooling system of the No. 1 reactor stopped functioning and the .. an hour and 20 minutes later, the control rod and pipes used to gauge neutrons started melting and falling onto the bottom of the pressure vessel. After about three hours and 20 minutes, most of the melted fuel had piled up on the bottom of the pressure vessel. At the four hour and 20 minute mark, the temperature of the bottom of the pressure vessel had risen to 1,642 degrees Celsius, close to the melting point for the stainless steel lining, probably damaging the pressure ves

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And devastatingly, the government failed to make use of radiation data to predict the movements of the radioactive plumes released from the plant to warn local towns and direct evacuations, the report [by a government-appointed investigative panel] said. The failure helped expose entire communities to harmful radiation, the report said.

nytimes

Seems that Uranium water boilers are terrific, just as long as 1) everyone does the right thing, always 2) nothing goes wrong

but
1) At Chernobyl the operators sort of tinkered, turning off the safety

2) if the cooling fails for 40 minutes the zircon gets bent
if the cooling fails for 2 hours the whole thing slushies in a heap, which might not melt through to the groundwater
... Hydrogen explosions pop off, then you cant get near the thing for 40 years.
Gosh, those pools of old rods are actually dangerous, they can cook off and blow - who knew?

The plumes of radiation wander about. Not such a problem if it doesnt rain (It didnt rain over Tokyo) but it did rain over Wales and Lake Como (sorry about that George Clooney)

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heres the new "safe" reactor design

that pissant pool of water (4) is 'gravity fed' so theres nothing to worry about... seriously ... were safe for 10 half-lives of Pu (350,000 years...)

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eia
china coal use explosion

Very Fast Trains ... quoting very low carbon footprint in Europe, because the electricity is from French Nukes. Good, I just hope not one reactor crew loses concentration for 40 minutes over the next however many years the rods are hot (thousands?)

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Russia is NOT returning to Stalinism
lrb

That the much publicised vertical power structure is a ‘fiction’, as it was called by Aleksei Navalny, one of the instigators of the massive anti-regime demonstrations that took place on 10 December, is evident from the corruption which, according to Harding, ‘has increased sixfold under Putin’s rule’. Escaping the draft, registering a company, buying an apartment, getting into school, passing an exam, being acquitted of criminal charges, trumped up or valid, receiving medical treatment may all require the bribery of public officials. The kickback plague is endemic, inflating by as much as 50 per cent the cost to the state of everything from weapons to highway construction. That the principal players in ‘the greatest corruption story in human history’, as the economist Anders Aslund puts it, include the fabled siloviki – the ‘heavies’: the army, the intelligence agencies etc – is the strongest sign of the absence of a hierarchy. In a hierarchy, local officials would answer to their Moscow superiors: but they don’t.

--------------------------------------------



I have no idea what this 'new food bill' is about, sounds bizarre
I will fight to the death for the right to eat chutney, as soon as I can find the chutney liberation front...

new-food-bill-in-new-zealand
- It turns a human right (to grow food and share it) into a government-authorised privilege that can be summarily revoked.

- It makes it illegal to distribute “food” without authorisation, and it defines “food” in such a way that it includes nutrients, seeds, natural medicines, essential minerals and drinks (including water).

- By controlling seeds, the bill takes the power to grow food away from the public and puts it in the hands of seed companies. That power may be abused.

- Growing food for distribution must be authorised, even for “cottage industries”, and such authorisation can be denied.

- Under the Food Bill, Police acting as Food Safety Officers can raid premises without a warrant, using all equipment they deem necessary – including guns (Clause 265 – 1).

- Members of the private sector can also be Food Safety Officers, as at Clause 243. So Monsanto employees can raid premises – including marae – backed up by armed police.

- The Bill gives Food Safety Officers immunity from criminal and civil prosecution.

- The Government has created this bill to keep in line with its World Trade Organisation obligations under an international scheme called Codex Alimentarius (“Food Book”). So it has to pass this bill in one form or another.

- The bill would undermine the efforts of many people to become more self-sufficient within their local communities.

- Seed banks and seed-sharing networks could be shut down if they could not obtain authorisation. Loss of seed variety would make it more difficult to grow one’s own food.

- Home-grown food and some or all seed could not be bartered on a scale or frequency necessary to feed people in communities where commercially available food has become unaffordable or unavailable (for example due to economic collapse).
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this (non food) sounds exciting, to my biochemical ears...

Pycnogenol® represents a natural blend of genetically programmed (say what?) constant proportions of bioflavonoids including catechin, epicatechin, taxifolin, monomers, dimers of catechin and epicatechin, oligomeric procyanidnins and phenolic fruit acids such as ferulic acid and caffeic acid.
Glycerin, Hamamelis Virginiana (Witch Hazel) Extract, Caprylic/Capric Triglyceride, Organic Camellia Sinensis (Green Tea) Leaf Extract*, Organic Aloe Barbadensis Leaf Extract*, Stearic Acid, Glyceryl Stearate, Cetyl Alcohol, Organic Simmondsia Chinensis (Jojoba) Seed Oil*, Xanthan Gum, Allantoin, Panthenol, Ascorbyl Palmitate (C-Ester), Pinus Pinaster (Pycnogenol®) Bark Extract, Sodium Hyaluronate (Hyaluronic Acid), Tocopheryl Acetate (Vitamin E), Retinyl Palmitate (Vitamin A), Potassium Sorbate, Phenoxyethanol, Ethylhexylglycerin.

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Here On Earth contd...

More On Here On Earth

the Thing I wanted to say, but forgot, about 'Here On Eath', the biggest error:

Tim talks twice aboout life "Breaking apart CO₂" - into Carbon and Oxygen.

This is a basic biochemical blunder. Any first-year undergraduate from 40 years ago would tell you that its H₂O that gets split by light. The H is added to CO₂ to make live stuff, the O₂ comes from the water. This is perhaps life's grandest achievement.
It takes two (count'em) photons and a quantum mechanical array of antenna pigments. The difficulty of getting this together, more than the difficulty of getting complex enough to build a TV transmitter, may be the reason that the we get only static from the billion water planets in this galaxy.
So Flannery exhibits ignorance in basic biochemistry and basic physics. Was a great popularist, now my confidence has been shook.

Here On Earth

Here on Earth

Tim Flannery's new book, a rapid romp through all the usual suspects on Climate.
I hasten to add I support his positions almost entirely.

Startlingly TF raises "the Great Bill Hamilton.... had he lived to combine ... with the expansive vision of Wallace and Lovelock ... may have become the most revered biologist of all time"

Hamilton is, apparently, "the founder of sociobiology" with E O Wilson as its greatest living exponent.

This appears to be an attempt at re-alignment of the politics of evolution.
Wallace as the working class, proponent of co-operation, Darwin as the coupon-clipping rich class proponent of competition

Recent history has S.J Gould as the leftist evolutionist. His big book on evolution has a scant few sentences on Bill Hamilton - I dont know if this is a matter of political taste, I confess I havnt read it..

Hamiltons writings are definitely fascinating. I believe he did produce an explanation of cooperation in ants, because theyre all more related to the queen than they are to each other.
Of course this falls down as an explanation where the queen has multiple matings, or in Termites which are not haploid.
I am a big fan of BH, but I was troubled by his fears that human medicine would produce a 'hospital' society with a cost in supporting deleterious genes, Seemed to smack of Eugenics, and indeed to be unrealistic. Bill certainly walked the walk - got lethal malaria in the Congo searching chimp poo for HIV clues.

Factoid: An Attine ant colony has as many workers as C16 England. Seems that an accumulated surplus entails an army.

We havnt yet found our great explicator of co-operation. Lyn Margulis was up there, but she got a tad extreme in her latter years?

Anyway, back to Flannery. His book feels a tad thin at times. ... Life produces "No waste" - well what is coal? The whole Gaia thing is too singular as Dawkins has said (TF quotes him)
Lovelock has said that Gaia prefers a colder earth, with more forests. But a shallow reading of paleoclimatology shows that warmer than now is typically more forested. Just maybe Gaia is sinking too much Carbon and getting too cold (Ice ages anyone) Not to suggest we should persist in the current project of rapid warming via mining, but as Lovelock has said, we may need all that coal later to stop the next glaciation.

The entire attempt to Align Hamilton on the left with Dawkins on the right really isnt convincingly developed.

Tim Flannery then says humans consume 100 TWatts annually. This crude error, confusing Watts (Power) with Energy (Joules or kWHours if you must) shocked me so that I almost threw the book down. TF Must have dashed this book off in a devilish rush to make such a jejune error.

TF then calls "liberated women ... a powerful evolutionary force" - In as much as liberation for women means forcing them into a wage economy where they believe they cant afford children, that would be a powerful negative. Dont get me wrong, I'm a a big fan of womens lib, even if its just because more rich babies eat more species.

A quick jog through the spread of humans. I admit I have only read the female side (mitochondria) and the recent male side (Y chromosomes) must be as important. Apparently there is a book by S.Wells "The Journey of Man" 2002 - I wonder if there is any more recent?

TF says that mitochondria are in the female line because there are none in the sperm head..
I think the current idea is that sperm mitochondria are destroyed in the Ovum. Anyway they're not so many (There is a suggestion in the western Pacific of one possible paternal mitochondrial line which TF doesnt mention)

TF hails Jim Hansen's book "Storms of my grandchildren" - which title says it all re Climate change.

Very bullish on the humans as mega-fauna killers. We constantly moved into the next bay where scallops and Paua were for the taking in knee deep water (Mason Bay in Stewart Island in the 60s - the end of the line?)
Somehow we've got to stop all this killing and burning... Tim is hopeful
When we killed the Mammoths on the Steppe we apparently choked the growth (grass needs tusks?) so the recent inter-glacial only went to 265ppm CO2 instead of the usual 300 (I dint quite grasp this)

Biophilia will save us... I wonder, having seen Chaweng Beach before the road was sealed, I think Biophilia may be real but toxic. I suspect Collapse, and collapse of tourism, may save more.


Tim was up in New Guinea, seems to like the people. 10,000 years of agriculture? Taro and bananas... most densely populated rural area ... 1614 people/km2 ... (where did he get that impossibly precise number?) 600 varieties of Taro .... really?

I feel that Tim suffers from Jared Diamond envy, Diamond also big in Papua, his books perhaps more gripping and revelatory.

"8.5 kiloWatts derived from burning one kilogram of coal" - there he goes again, no understanding of physics. - thats a meaningless statement Tim.

I enjoyed his previous books more, where he unleashed his undoubted expertise in botany to criticise people in Australia who plant 'native' plants in the wrong parts of Australia. Me, I quite like Pohutukawa in Wellington. Tim also used to rail against save the whales - there just charismatic , while entire biomes of rare plants are being wiped out. I know, Tim, but whales are just so neat...

Chernobyl left some Mediterranean shrimp 1 million times more radioactive than the sea [Polonium 210 856 picocuries/gram] TF is very concerned about chemicals. Gosh I'd sort of forgotten about pollution - I figure if I get to eat broccoli the benefit will outweigh the pesticide. But hes right, and the POP treaty was a big deal. "220,000 deaths from pesticides" sadly doesnt sound a lot to my compassion-fatigued ears.

"Greenpeace taking direct action against Japanese whaling" - thats Sea Shepherd Tim. He just doesnt seem to care about whales that much.

Doesnt like the UN, but vaguely suggests a "Gaian security" no well developed plan (who has?)

His photo of Greenland "extent of summer melt" I strongly suspect is showing areas of high melt of ice, but not down to bare rock as the tone in the picture suggests. watch out for blow-back Tim

He doesnt mention peak oil, peak banking, not even peak phosphate. Its not really a great polemic or call to arms.

Seems he has given up Science research since 2007, and is now hanging out with smart capitalists like Branson, green-tech. I guess that might fly. Not literally of course. Jets will never be anything but planet-heaters.

BUT: The numbers on SO2 intervention may pan out, it may actually be cheapish to fly Sulphate to the stratosphere. Pinatubo was only 18Million tons, global cooling of 2.4Watt/m2 cf human CO2 + 2Watts. Half life of 9 months, so we only need 300 flights per day? - this is me rambling, Tim has no mention of geo-engineering

Seems that the ocean salt level is kept constant by cycling the oceans underground every 10M years where the salt is stripped out. Isnt Gaia amazing?

Tim wants a "global fund to protect our commons" "similar to the US Fed" why am I not clapping?

Guess I'm getting bitter in me old age. But I'm still ready to follow the band if it plays a more stirring, dialectic tune than Tim Flannery

Lyn Margullis, Claude Shannon, Jacopo de Barbari

what is fractional reserve lending?
facebook

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scientificamerican
How many beings is kefir? by the late great Lyn Margulis (Lovelock invented Gaia with her, Carl Sagan was married to her)
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Pakistan
ISLAMABAD: Nato helicopters from Afghanistan intruded into northwest Pakistan and attacked a military check post near the border on Saturday, killing up to 8 1424 troops, Pakistani intelligence officials and a military source said.

dawn
If Pakistan re-opens its border for USA  NATO convoys after this, it will prove itself a pussy nation


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Shannon
1939, when Shannon wrote his Ph.D. thesis with the title “An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics.”

Shannon was then a graduate student in the mathematics department at MIT. He was only dimly aware of the possible physical embodiment of genetic information. The true physical embodiment of the genome is the double helix structure of DNA molecules, discovered...Francis Crick and James Watson fourteen years later. In 1939 Shannon understood that the basis of genetics must be information, and that the information must be coded in some abstract algebra independent of its physical embodiment. Without any knowledge of the double helix, he could not hope to guess the detailed structure of the genetic code. He could only imagine that in some distant future the genetic information would be decoded and collected in a giant database that would define the total diversity of living creatures. It took only sixty years for his dream to come true.

(cf Schrodinger "What is life" who proposed a string of proteins like beads on a necklace - still stuck in the shape motif, sort of like the hieroglyphic theory of language, not a true discrete digital alphabet - Shannon deduced it must be an abstract alphabet)
nybooks

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Jacopo de Barbari in the Capodimonte
Fra Luca Pacioli,mathematician (1445-1518)and a young pupil, probably Guidobaldo da Montefeltro (1472-1508) of Urbino...

Jane Gleeson-White says Nick Mackinnon reckons its Durer
bookishgirl
JGW is also plugging Pacioli as the originator of Double entry bookkeeping, and hence modern capitalism. A neat idea, but I think double-entry was being used before Pacioli' s pamphlet. Also Masaccio was painting a vanishing point in 1426, before Pacioli's maths book. Luca was a bright monk,but. And surely JGWs book worth a look
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Seems that Barbari was the inventor of the "Aerial view" and the "Still Life" - is that possible?

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NatGeographic: SevenWonders of the Natural world: Ive only seen one...
the cave in Palawan
...... if you go, please cough up a decent $40 extra for the rowers, so they will take you even further into the mighty labyrinth

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how-the-movies-saved-my-life antiwar

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aljazeera
Gloria is now "the most hated" ? Gotta love the RP where todays heroine is tomorrows "most hated"
- the poor woman is apparently under arrest..
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... once international credit locks up the tankers and the container ships won't sail. Shortly thereafter it will be lights out.
cluborlov
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Senegal
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Mandarin Chenpi

Citrus reticulata   Tangerine Peel ('Mandarin' ex USA) Chen pi
Tangeritin, a bioflavonoid  in tangerine peel,.. shown to strengthen epithelial cell.. inhibits the metastasis of cancer cells (Bracke et al., 1996).
Naturopath Bill Mitchell.. the compound increases the functional integrity of E-cadherin, .. adhesive protein found to be deficient in tissue samples of most cancer patients.

Tangerine Peel cures Brain cancer ... who knew..
The brain tumour that killed Father was probably tangerine sized when he detected it. so its unlikely any dietry regime would have saved him.
Mother might have objected if I'd arrived with a blender and forbidden all animal fats.

(by 'Saved' we mean extended lifespan) Still you never know. Also since 1991 neutron beams have become more common (a dozen or so in the world?)
I dont know if I will hie me to the nearest nuclear reactor with a neutron pipe when I get that brain cancer diagnosis.
I may grate the occasional Tangeine peel.Dried ChenPi may be the convenient way.

I had a plate of oyster mushrooms Sunday .... $7.50 for 100g.  I may get more of the $40 blackcurrant powder... how pricey to survive?
......
note this story from the BBC is quite different from the 'Naturopath' (?) story above...
Salvestrol Q40 is found at higher concentrations in tangerine peel, than in the flesh ..
..a type of phytoalexin .. converted into a toxic compound by the P450 CYP1B1 enzyme, found in much higher levels in cancer cells.
..20 times more toxic to cancer cells than their healthy equivalents.
Dr Tan said Salvestrol was found in other fruit and vegetables, such as the brassica family..
However, the compound tends to be produced at higher levels when infection levels among crops are high.
......