Gillard, epigenitics, steel

Feminism falls to a faux male warrior myth?

On 3 March, Greer wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that she “fell in love with” the “matter-of-fact” Gillard long ago. Omitting entirely Gillard’s politics, she asked, “What’s not to like? That she’s a woman, that’s what. An unmarried, middle-aged woman in power – any man’s and many women’s nightmare”.
That Gillard might be a nightmare to the Aboriginal women, men and children whom this quintessential machine politician has abused and blamed for their impoverishment, while implementing punitive and racist measures against their communities in defiance of international law, is apparently not relevant. That Gillard might be a nightmare to refugees detained behind razor wire, children included, in places that are “a huge generator of mental illness”, according to Australia’s ombudsman, is of no interest.
That Gillard has pledged to keep Australian soldiers in Afghanistan indefinitely and that the overwhelming majority of those killed or wounded has happened during her period as prime minister, is beside the point. Gillard’s feminist distinction, perversely, is her removal of gender discrimination in combat roles in the Australian army. Thanks to her, women are now liberated to kill Afghans and others who offer no threat to Australia, just like their comrades in “hunter-killer” units currently accused of massacring civilians

Pilger antiwar

Germaine spoke tonight for the arts festival, I failed to show

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The epigenetics of the cells in the brains of alcoholics is messed up-- both the epigenetic markers on the DNA and epigenetic markers on histones ... epigenetics is one of the main ways our genomes have for restricting the expression and movement of transposable elements..they found that ERVs were stripped of their DNA methylation in the alcoholic brain, and saw the expected huge increase in ERV mRNA as a result of this.

So, take home message-- they found a ton of ERV mRNA floating around in the brain cells of alcoholics.

..
The authors think that ERVs .. are actively contributing to the brain damage ... inducing neuroinflammation. ,,
com
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com
periodic table of swearing
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Steel
slack quenched bloom , mere bainite
scribd
[ no mention of East African steel?]

200 BC Celtic metallurgists supplying the Roman Republic with swords made from manganese iron ores mined in Austria ( Noricum).

blast furnace in westernEurope (± 1300). By
1500, the indirect process of decarburizing cast iron to producewrought and malleable iron and German steel dominated iron- and steelmaking strategiesafter the transition was made to utilizing the larger and more efficient Stucköfen and blastfurnaces. ..
Wayman (2000),
* are excerpted fromBarraclough (1984a).
Date Event
1900 BC First production of high quality steel edge tools by the Chalybeans from thehigh quality iron sands of the south shore of the Black Sea.
1200 BC End of the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean region; steel isprobably being produced by the bloomery process.*
800 BC Carburizing and quenching are being practiced in the Near East.*
800 BC Beginning of the European Iron Age. Celtic metallurgists begin makingnatural steel in central and eastern Europe
.650 BC trading through Europe of iron currency bars, often percentage of raw steel
400 BC Tempered tools and evidence for the ‘steeling’ of iron from the Near East*
300 BC The earliest documented use of crucibles for steel production was thesmelting of Wootz steel in Muslim communities (Sherby 1995a).


[Wootz bars said to come from Sri Lanka, hilltop ridges forced air through the bloom?]
Damasc blades could be bent 90 degrees? Some say that some organic additive put carbon nanotubes into the blades.






200 BC Celtic metallurgists begin supplying the Roman Republic with swordsmade from manganese-laced iron ores mined in Austria (AncientNoricum).
55 BC Julius Caesar invades Britain
50 BC Ancient Noricum is the main center of Roman Empire ironworks.Important iron producing centers are also located in the Black Mountainsof France and southern Spain.
43-410 AD Romans control Britain.
125 AD Steel is made in China by ‘co-fusion’.*
700 High quality pattern-welded swords being produced in the upper RhineRiver watershed forges by Merovingian swordsmiths from currency barssmelted in Austria and transported down the Iron Road to the DanubeRiver.
1000 First documented forge used by the Vikings at L’Anse aux Meadows(Newfoundland)
1250-1350 First appearance of blast furnaces in central and northern Europe
+/- 1465 First appearance of blast furnaces in the Forest of Dean (England)
1509 [“Natural” (German)] steel made in the Weald [Sussex, England] by finincast iron*
1601 First record of the cementation process, in Nuremberg*


1607 First shipsmith forge in the American colonies used at Fort St. George,Maine
1613/1617 Cementation process is patented in England.*

1709 Abraham Darby discovers how to use coke instead of coal to fuel a blastfurnace.
1720 William Bertram invents manufacture of ‘shear steel’ on Tyneside.
1742 Benjamin Huntsman adapts the ancient process of crucible steel-productionfor his watch spring business in Sheffield, England.
1758 John Wilkinson begins the production of engine cylinders made with theuse of his recently invented boring machine.
1763-1769 James Watt designs and patents an improved version of the Newcombatmospheric engine, i.e. the steam engine.
1774 John Wilkinson begins the mass production of engine cylinders used inWatt’s steam engine pressure vessels.
1775 Matthew Boulton and James Watt begin mass production of steam engines.

1784 Henry Cort redesigned reverbatory puddling furnace, decarburization of cast iron to produce wrought and malleable iron without contact with sulfur containing mineral fuels.

1804 Samuel Lucas of Sheffield invents the process of rendering articles of castiron malleable.
1828 Adoption of the hot air blast improves blast furnaces
1835 Steel is first made by the puddling process in Germany.*
1837 In England, Joseph Nasmyth introduces the steam-powered rotary blowingengine.
1839 William Vickers of Sheffield invents the direct conversion method of making crucible steel without using a converting furnace.
1856 Gasoline is first distilled at Watertown, Massachusetts.
1856 Bessemer announces his invention of a new bulk process steel-productiontechnique at Cheltenham, England.*
1862 Robert F. Mushet sets up his Titanic Steel and Iron company in the Forestof Dean and begins producing alloy steel with tungsten and titanium.

,,,
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two-lives-added-to the tree-of-souls
discovery

Syria,John Holloway, Wedelia paludosa

Syria
On March 5, Russia Today (RT) headlined, "Stratfor leaks: NATO commandos in illegal special ops in Syria," saying:

On March 4, the Syrian Free Press claimed 100 foreign mercenaries captured after regaining control of Homs. Most were French. Others were from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states. They had weapons supplied by America and Israel.
On March 5, 13 French officers were captured. RT said Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper reported it.

On March 7, RT said Mossad, CIA and Blackwater elements are operating inside Syria. In addition, according to Lebanon's Al-Manar, "around 700 gunmen were recently arrested in the former rebel stronghold of Babar Amr."

They came from Gulf states, Iraq and Lebanon. Qatari intelligence operatives were with them, as well as fighters from Afghanistan, Turkey, France and other European countries.

syrianfreepress
rickrozoff


Iran's Fars News Agency says Tehran has "corroborative evidence to prove US involvement in arms smuggling into Syria."

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab and African Affairs Hossein Amir Abdollahian said thousands of weapons and mercenaries have entered a number of Syrian border towns and cities.
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AFP 5 Mar -- Israel on Monday allowed the Palestinians to export two truckloads of date bars from Gaza to the West Bank in what was the first such trade between the territories since 2007, the military and an NGO said. The rare move was permitted as part of a World Food Programme (WFP) initiative to feed Palestinian school children, Israeli NGO Gisha said in a statement, which hailed the trade as "an important step." But the military said it was a "one-off" trade and did not mean its nearly five-year ban on exports between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank was being lifted.
mondoweiss
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youtube
John Holloway Auckland historian
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1,091 possible new planets, bringing the total count to 2,321—up from 1,235 candidates formally announced last February.
Of the 46 planet candidates found in the habitable zone (where liquid water could exist), 10 are near-Earth-size.
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An examination order allows the police to force someone to turn up and answer their questions, on pain of a year in jail if they refuse.

Judith Collins assures us that the police will never abuse this power:
In response to the concerns of some groups, the 7-year threshold means that examination orders are not available to investigate such crimes as protesting,{sic}

norightturn
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fan is designed to sit on top of a freestanding wood or pellet stove, and generates its own electricity without cords or batteries. Your Ecofan AirMax starts automatically when placed on top of a stove http://www.gaiam.com/product/ecofan+airmax.do
and adjusts its speed with the stove temperature.


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r20

The official fishing-industry suck-arse brigade is proposing a Protection zone where you can actually keep fishing...
"Rob Murdoch, general manager of research at NIWA told Wilcox, "I think New Zealand is taking a very pragmatic approach to creating a MPA. I think it is a good first step.""
- would that be the guy who fired Jim Salinger for speaking out about climmate change?
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A shipping container from Auckland to Singapore costs $1553 while it cost only $486 from Sydney, as Oram concludes, "shipping costs dwarf whatever productivity gains the ports can achieve so the government must investigate them. If it refuses to do so, yet it heaps pressure on council-owned port companies and their unions to eke out efficiency gains, the government, quite simply would be acting uneconomically and, worse, immorally."
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, it is fascinating to watch how formerly radical organizations like the Center for Biological Diversity and individuals like Andy Kerr and Andy Stahl, the bête noires of the timber industry in the late 80s and early 90s, become seen as sell-outs by the next generation of environmental radicals.
...maybe Kerr and Stahl do see more room for collaboration with the timber industry ...
...the formerly hard-core are seen as selling out over time, to be replaced by a new cadre of the real activists. Donnelly equates Oregon Wild with the Sierra Club, suggesting that the former’s willingness to think about collaboration with the timber industry is equivalent to the latter’s extremely unfortunate embrace of fracking as a bridge fuel. ..
lawyersgunsmoneyblog
[whatever happened to the RAN Rainforest Action Network - they were pretty darn radical in the late 80s]
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Why now, and what next?

Why was 2011 the year that brought such a ferocious assault on labour standards? .. the long-term economic decline experienced by working- and middle-class Americans. For the past thirty-five years, wages for non-professional employees have been on a steady, if gradual, decline,.. If the country continues in the broad policy directions of neoliberal trade, privatization, de-unionization and deregulation, there is no possibility but that living standards for most Americans will continue to decline, as the country is slowly but inexorably competed down to the level of less wealthy trading partners. This broad reality provides the fundamental background framing contemporary politics. For the economic elite, the primary political challenge is how to manage the politics of decline ..
radicalphilosophy
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Andrew Breitbart suffered his untimely death just hours before he was set to release damning video footage that could have sunk Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.
Around three weeks ago on February 9 during the ‘Blog Bash’ event in Washington DC, Breitbart made a prophetic comment that takes on a somewhat chilling nature given the fact that he died in the early hours of March 1st.
Speaking to Lawrence Sinclair of Sinclair News, Breitbart stated, “Wait til they see what happens March 1st.”
It’s almost certain that Breitbart was referring to his plan to release damning footage of President Obama that he...
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wedelis daisy

Wedelia paludosa protected against paracetamol-induced hepatotoxicity, an effect not observed over oxidative stress-related parameters.
Hepatoprotection is likely mediated by some terpenes present in W. paludosa extrac
Bay Biscayne Creeping-oxeye,
Sphagneticola trilobata, commonly known as the Bay Biscayne Creeping-oxeye, is a plant in the Heliantheae tribe of the Asteraceae (sunflower) family. It is native to the Neotropics and is widespread as an invasive species in the Pacific.
\activity up to the lowest dose of 0.68 mg/mL in the in vitro assay against trypomastigotes of T. cruzi, the causative agent of Chagas' disease (American trypanosomiasis).

antinociceptive Wedelia paludosa, a Brazilian folk medicine dolorous pathologies. kaurenoic acid and luteolin marked antinociceptive
more active than acetyl salicylic acid, acetaminophen, dipyrone and indomethacin...

mendeley
luteolin is present only in leaves and stems, but in small quantities. .. support its popular use for the treatment of algesic processes.
nutrition
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low DHA levels in red blood cells are associated with smaller brain volumes and a ‘vascular’ pattern of cognitive impairment even in persons free of clinical dementia.

..1,500 dementia free ..average age of 67 ..MRI brain scans. .. tested to measure mental function, body mass, and the omega-3 fatty acid level in their red blood cells
DHA levels in the lowest 25% ..had lower brain volume.. appear two years older
bottom quartile also scored lower on tests of visual memory and executive function, such as problem solving and multi-tasking and abstract thinking.
Brain scans also showed signs of less blood supply ..

neurology
nutrition diet

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. People who have psoriasis were significantly more likely to have the gene variants known to defend against HIV-1 and delay its progression to AIDS.
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Mangosteen, Jolo Drone, Mercury

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the purple stuff in the rind (& in Kumera skin)
...alpha-mangostin, beta-mangostin, garcinone B, and garcinone E, which are collectively called xanthones.

Queen Victoria offered knighthood to any subject who could bring her a mangosteen fruit in prime condition. No one succeeded.

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Feb 29, 2012
US drones over the Philippines
By Jacob Zenn

airstrike Abu Sayyaf Jolo first known use of the unmanned aerial assault craft in AFP..
reportedly killed 15 Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah
incl Zulkifli bin Hir (alias Marwan), Gumbahali Jumdail ( Doc Abu), and Mumanda Ali ( Muawayah)
Marwan US$5M reward ..was in JI's central command,..the markaziyah, founder of the Kumpulan Mujahidin Malaysia,

conspired in 2002, bombings Bali with ..brother, Rahmat,..radios and cash..
In August 2003, Marwan Mindanao,..training Abu Sayyaf members in explosives..

Muawayah Singaporean military officer Indian descent.. 2002 Bali bombing $50,000 reward ..

Doc Abu, Mindanao's Tausug ethnic ..kidnapping, Sipadan, Malaysia in 2000 Dos Palmas Palawan 2001.
..villagers reported to the AFP.. left a sensor at his hideout ..
a separate air strike on October 2011 killed Marwan's aide, Madarang Sali, and three other Abu Sayyaf . ground operations .. "counter-productive" because they "cause locals to have negative perceptions of the military".

October 18, 2011, 100 MILF fighters + Abu Sayyaf ..13 AFP special force killed.

drone tracked the sensor

Luz Ilagan, called for the abrogation of the US Visiting Forces Agreement and an end to US military intervention ..

net
atimes
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guardian
youtube
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See Lotsa Planets (Saturn at midnight?)
For once in my life I have a hig up bedroom facing distant east horizon - sunrises, for tha sodden mind...
hope to see Mercury

space

googleusercontent
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Saturday, May 7, though the mornings before and after should be almost as good. You will need a low, cloudless eastern horizon.

First to rise will be Venus, about an hour before sunrise -- check your local paper for local sunrise time.

Venus will be joined by Jupiter about 5 to 10 minutes later. Jupiter will appear about 4 degrees (half a binocular field) to Venus' left. Your fist held out at arm's length covers about 10 degrees of the night sky.

A few minutes after Jupiter's appearance, Mercury will rise directly below Venus. About 5 minutes after that, Mars will join the other three. The Red Planet will appear another half binocular field to the left of Jupiter. [Skywatching Tips: Viewing Planets in 2011]

Doomer Porn, Putin Fanon

Doomer Porn
I am not in the Olduvai camp. The downshoot surely wont be back to the stone age.

It does seem that Wage-Slave-Labour, ie Capital, depends on surplus, which depends on EROEI ie fossil fuels.

Hard to envisage the post concentrated-energy ie diffuse energy economy

Where I sit the wind blows every day, more or less, and the wind turbines power the entire city. Dams + geothermal + wind do 70% of the countries energy. Fine if the rains persist.
Which it looks like they will.

Unfortunately the populace is gripped by a fierce intensity, a determination not to be human.
Thin on the ground, determined to bar refugees (660 per year permitted!). Triumphant in their weatherboard Cu-Cr-As soaked pine bungalows, still yet worth a dozen years pay,
determined to drive 100kW chariots from their 'driveway', determined not to live next to their kin.
Blissful fugue adoration for Capital. Lockouts of unions, even 'on the waterfront' where the navvies humping sacks were long replaced by a single guy way up in the seat of a massive container crane.

I suppose that on the worlds way down, in the grab for the last drop, some fools will let fly some nukes. I refuse to believe that a mere 50 cities burning will do for a nuclear winter.
Surely at least a third of people will survive.


horizonsofsignificance   dark-mountain   disasturbation-and-doomer-porn   yoism

‘Few men realise,’ wrote Joseph Conrad in 1896, ‘that their life, the very
essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only
the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.’
uncivilisation




machines-making-machines-making


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Shipping Container Architecture
- exactly where in Wellington is that house?


firmitas   cryptogon   progressiveradionetwork

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Putins sensible propoganda
rt.com

the Arab Spring was initially received with hope for positive change. People in Russia sympathized with those who were seeking democratic reform.
However, it soon became clear that events in many countries were not following a civilized scenario. Instead of asserting democracy and protecting the rights of the minority, attempts were being made to depose an enemy and to stage a coup, which only resulted in the replacement of one dominant force with another even more aggressive dominant force.
Foreign interference in support of one side of a domestic conflict and the use of power in this interference gave developments a negative aura. A number of countries did away with the Libyan regime by using air power in the name of humanitarian support. The revolting slaughter of Muammar Gaddafi – not just medieval but primeval – was the manifestation of these actions.
No one should be allowed to employ the Libyan scenario in Syria.

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This just in: Zionists still disgusting, threat to world peace.
timeinc     change     blogspot



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Fanon, the absence
blogspot
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Fukushima

medialens

The explosion leveled the walls, leveled the structure for the Unit 4 spent-fuel pool all the way down to the approximate level of the bottom of the fuels. So, there’s no water in there whatsoever,” an NRC official said on March 16, according to the transcripts. [...]

“If this happened in the U.S., we would go out to 50 miles,” Bill Borchardt, the NRC’s executive director for operations, told NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko on March 16.
wsj
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Energy consumption is still increasing rapidly, 550 exajoules (523 Quadrillion BTUs) ..primary energy in 2010.
..80% fossil fuels, 11.3% bio-energy mainly wood 5.5% nuclear, 2.2% hydro, 0.4% other renewable

1 to 10 exajoules time to rise: 12 years nuclear, 33 crude oil, 39 natural gas, 52 coal, and 59 hydro-power.

exajoules (E18 joules) Quadrillion (E15) BTU's ..

1 joule = 9.48 E-4 BTU.
1 boe (barrel of oil equivalent) = 5.45 E6 BTU. = 5.75E9J
1 ft³ of natural gas = 983 BTU. 1.04E5
1 m³ = 3.6E6J??

1 metric ton of coal = 22.72 E6 BTU.
1 exajoule = 174 million barrels of oil equivalent.
1 foot³ = 0.02832 meters³




businessinsider
theoildrum
businessinsider
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Pepe, PTaka

Pepe on Syria
The Arab League's Ministerial Committee had approved the report, with four votes in favor (Algeria, Egypt, Sudan and GCC member Oman) and only one against; guess who, Qatar - which is now presiding the Arab League because the emirate bought their (rotating) turn from the Palestinian Authority.

So the report was either ignored (by W\/Report_of_Arab_League_Observer_Missionestern corporate media) or mercilessly destroyed - by Arab media, virtually all of it financed by either the House of Saud or Qatar. It was not even discussed - because it was prevented by the GCC from being translated from Arabic into English and published in the Arab League's website.

Until it was leaked. Here it is, in full. columbia
The report is adamant. There was no organized, lethal repression by the Syrian government against peaceful protesters. Instead, the report points to shady armed gangs as responsible for hundreds of deaths among Syrian civilians, and over one thousand among the Syrian army, using lethal tactics such as bombing of civilian buses, bombing of trains carrying diesel oil, bombing of police buses and bombing of bridges and pipelines.

Once again, the official NATOGCC version of Syria is of a popular uprising smashed by bullets and tanks. Instead, BRICS members Russia and China, and large swathes of the developing world see it as the Syrian government fighting heavily armed foreign mercenaries. The report largely confirms these suspicions.
atimes

Keyboard warriors are calling for war
(Christopher R. Hill) " strikes on civilians(sic)" bad "NATO bombing of civilians" better

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PTaka on Libya
Fortunately, the Libyans recognize America’s now new found freedom fighters simply for what they are, radical extremist Islamists who have been handed the keys to government courtesy of the contradictory bourgeois thinking of dead beat intellects, the neoconservatives and their stooges like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Nicolas Sarkozy. Because Libyans are not cultural dopes they are in the process of launching a counterrevolution so that they may have subsidized housing, subsidized healthcare, and subsidized education that was all available free of charge from Moammar Kadhafi. You know the kinds of freedom people in Greece wished they possessed, or in Portugal, or Ireland, or Spain.
ptaka
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he uncovered his polished bow of the horn of a wild ibex … of 16 palms; these the worker in horn had worked and fitted together, and smoothed the whole with care … This bow he set firmly against the ground, bent it, and strung it … Then he opened the lid of his quiver, and took out an arrow, a feathered arrow that had never been shot, loaded with dark pains and immediately he fitted the bitter arrow to the string … And he drew the bow, clutching at once the notched arrow and the string of ox’s sinew; the string he brought to his chest and to the bow the iron arrowhead. But when he had drawn the great bow into a curve, the bow twanged and the string sang aloud, and the sharp arrow leaped.

The bowman is Pandarus, son of Lycaon, the target is Menelaus, within easy range under a truce, Athena having induced the treacherous attack to ensure that there will be no peace settlement. The listener would have immediately recognised the weapon, not a simple wooden reflex bow but one of horn or with a horn belly to add compression energy. Only the weapon with which Odysseus kills the suitors in the other epic was a more powerful compound bow, with layers of dried horse tendon on the back to add tension to compression, but that weapon, a very rare import from the far steppe, could not be strung by bending against the ground because it is so powerful that it reverses itself when unstrung (Odysseus evidently knew how to pull in the horns with bastard strings, because he strung it while sitting down). But in the Iliad all bowmen are despised because they can attack from a distance, and treacherously too, as Pandarus did.
lrb
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Heike Monogatari struggles between the Taira (Heike) and Minamoto (Genji) houses...
ca 1131 - 1191

Gion Shõja no Kane no Koe
Shogyõ mujõ no Hibiki ari

‘The bell of Gion Temple recalls the impermanence of all things’

... next only to Murasaki Shikibu's Genji Monogatari
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Afghanistan...
? Do you form up a patrol and go after them? Do you periodically send harassing patrols after them? What do
you do?" As the interpreter conveyed my questions, the captain's head wheeled around abruptly
to look at the interpreter and then shot a look back to me with an incredulous look on his face
and literally laughed in my face, and said, "No! We don't go after them; that would be
dangerous!"
rollingstone
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American troops are reported to be staging and massing on Masirah and Socotra, one island located close to Hormuz and the other in the Indian Ocean. About 50,000 troops have been massed on the two islands, bringing boots on the ground to about 100,000 in the Persian Gulf region. ..This presages some sort of amphibious landing, because the United States will have to fight its way to Tehran to change its regime to prevent the collapse of arguably their greatest scam, the fiat petrodollar..


Masirah has some kind of airport (GoogleEarth) but Socotra has one dinky runway - hard to see where you'd put 50K troops

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c/o sparklepony
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tropical forests in America store around 118 billion tons of carbon, a fifth more than indicated by previous findings.
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Fukushima
Gee, all those old hot rods, ARE dangerous.... who knew?

: Rapidly dropping water level at Fukushima Daiichi No. 4 — Leak continues from Reactor Well/SFP/DS — Almost 3 times higher on Monday
February 3rd, 2012 at 9:48 am ET
enenews

The structural integrity of the damaged Unit 4 reactor building has long been a major concern among experts because a collapse of its spent fuel cooling pool could cause a disaster worse than the three reactor meltdowns. [
enenews

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Microscopic, sponge-like African fossils could be the earliest known animals—and possibly our earliest evolutionary ancestors,..
The creature, Otavia antiqua, was found in 760-million-year-old rock in Namibia and was as tiny as it may be important.
"The fossils are small, about the size of a grain of sand, and we have found many hundreds of them," Anthony Prave U St. Andrews
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ping pong planets - ejected after thousands of yers...
nationalgeographic

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