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Published: 2008-05-25 07:16:26 +0000 UTC; Views: 1069; Favourites: 33; Downloads: 0
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Well - it might as well be anti-winkle cream. Every bit of it you use on your aging face, to bolster your sagging ego, goes down the drain, into the sea. Millions of tonnes of it, every year, killing things. Save your money, and stop slaughtering the winkles.[Entry into #CoolClimate 's Art contest.]
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Comments: 119
thats lovely 
keep it up
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Thank you - I did three more in the same vein, pouring pooh over perfumes, shampoos and mascaras.
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The damage these creams and thousands more products do is enormous, the worst thing about it all is the total ignorance and lack of interest by regulatory authorities, governments, media (silence bought and paid for), conservationists, medical authorities etc. Doesn't matter what evidence, scientific and supporting anecdotal (I consider anecdotal evidence to be valid, it gives some idea of whats happening).
Back in the days of Queen Elizabeth the first arsenic salts were big in cosmetics with attendant skin lesions and other health problems caused by arsenic. How stupid and ignorant to use something so toxic, fortunatly today, with modern science, we use nothing like arsenic in cosmetics. We now use poisons no one knows or understands with names no one can pronounce - real scientific.
How about methyl parabene, a preservative used in many skin care products and cosmetics and most sunscreens - absorbed through the skin, very toxic and highly carcenogenic.
Then we will put on some anti-perspirant, aluminium based, perfectly harmless but by strange coincidence a high proportion of breast cancers start in the axilla (arm pit), right where you spray or roll on the anti smell chemicals.
Wrinkle cream and other assorted chemical concoctions labelled cosmetics, all in place - check
Slap on some toxic, highly carcinogenic sun screen - check
Anti-perspirant, spray or roll on copious ammounts, its hot outside - check.
Now we are ready for a day at the beach, sun, surf, sand and a film of chemical scum on the water.
With over 2,000 new chemicals invented every year (less than %15 tested for safety, environmental and health effects), food with a list of ingredients that reads like a shopping list for an industrial chemical company and totally drug based medicine (read the licencing studies for these drugs, turns out %85 have no demonstrable benefit or medical usefulness and that's by the drug companie's own studies which are highly biased to start with) and human beings are the first species in existance that is attempting to committ autogenicide for profit - not really sapient, no other animal is that stupid.
Love the concept and message, too many people use products like this without any thought to what it is doing to their own health or the monumental damage such chemical concoctions do the environment. Even worse, most don't care and aren't interested even if what they are using will eventually kill them.
Compared to what we use today in cosmetics (and just about everything else) arsenic and mercury are pretty benign - we certainly are much smarter than our ancestors who used arsenic based cosmetics.
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!00% agreed. I am incensed at the ridiculous claims made by TV advertsising 'visibly reduces wrinkles by up to 63%'; 'increases shine and lustre up to five-fold.' These are outright lies, all of them. Mind you, so is most advertising. Why these companies aren't told to put up or shut up greatly perturbs me. Instead, they are allowed to make obscene profits selling shoddy products which do not and cannot possibly work. What amazes me is that like religion, so many people can be fooled into believing the unbelievable.
In my earlier life I was an industrial chemist, so I well know the dreadful effects so many chemicals can and do have upon the environment. The use of the nonionic alkyl-phenol ethylene-oxide surfactants (APE's) for instance, which are now banned in some regions, but are still used in vast quantities. The breakdown products were found to act like oestrogen, the effect noted when among other changes, the number of female alligators born in the Everglades started to far outweigh the number of males. The awful DDT is another instances, nearly wiping out whole species of water-birds due to egg-shell thinning.
We don't know what we are doing, that's the problem. All our tests are useless, because we don't and cannot test for what we cannot anticipate - Thalidomide is a case in point.
Still, it's all probably academic anyway. Our current, ever-increasing rates of depletion, despoilation, population and atmospheric pollution will render this planet life-free in a remarkably short time. I give it two hundred years max and less than that before humans vanish into a greenhouse hell. It's the natural way, after all - the growth/death of bacteria on an agar plate is a perfect example.
Global warming is here already and here to get worse, not just to stay. Chaos Theory teaches us that systems like 'the weather' don't just get steadily worse - they change state very suddenly. Mind you, the system is so vast that the suddenness looks to be slow, but it's happening already. People think global warming means things will get slowly hotter, but this is wrong. It means that the limits of what can and does occur will become wider. The highs will be higher, the lows lower. It will snow in mid-summer and give us heat-waves in winter. Sudden frosts will kill crops and newborn animals; harvests will fail due to freezing or burning. Hailstones will get bigger and more frequent; floods and droughts will increase and deepen; winds will become fiercer, hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes stronger and more frequent. Agriculture will start to fail, Insurance companies will go bankrupt; infrastructure will become overloaded and start to fall apart and our carefully ordered society will descend into a screaming, slashing all-out fight for survival.
Not a pretty picture, but the inevitablity of it all seems undeniable. Unless we find ways of altering our 'ever-more' society, limiting our numbers and removing CO2 from the atmosphere, we are doomed.
Thank you for the fav and have a nice day!
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As usual Australia will be the last place to ban anything or even acknowledge the harm done. Fluorine, being abandoned elsewhere for very good reason, just recently added to water in QLD because Anna Blight thinks not having highly toxic, extraordinarily corrosive drinking water makes us look stupid (I know personally of one person killed by this fluorine).
Fluorosialic acid is an active ingredient in glass etching compounds, if it can corrode glass then what does it do to teeth (I can show a nice picture of that too).
Drive down the road and look at the verge, nice neatly killed grass from chemical weed control, highly toxic and very damaging to all forms of life (we are getting large numbers of deformed fish in the Bremer River but no one is really interested in finding out exactly why plus periodic fish kills and I know at least some of these are caused directly by herbicides). In the north global warming is blamed for the reef dying but a thousand years ago it was just as hot or even hotter than now, the reef didn't die then. The humble coral pollyp requires a symbiotic algae to live, not hard to work out that profligate use of herbicides washed onto the reef every time it rains kills the algae and thus the pollyps and eventually the reef (this is of course a crackpot theory so totally ignored by authorities and researchers).
The global warming theory is pretty shoddy and the observed facts fail to support the theory. Our emissions and pollutants are causing great harm but not global warming (palaeoclimatology indicates a thousand year lag period between a rise in greenhouse gases and subsequent global warming). There is at least 10,000 years of historical precedence and a thorough understanding of the mechanics of climate change caused by extensive deforestation (the Sahara is a good example of local climate change and its subsequent effects) but now extensive deforestation is world wide so the effects are world wide and the observed facts fit the theory.
Either way the cure is the same, trees are made from CO2 so trees are a way of reducing atmospheric CO2 and if its deforestation trees reverse this too. Buggered if I know how carbon credits and carbon trading are going to fix anything (except profit, small industries will be wiped out increasing control and domination by mega-corporations, the World Bank will become a defacto world government and the problems will worsen, not improve) but no government is advocating tree planting.
Weather change certainly occours fast and if we don't start replanting it will only worsen at an increasing rate. Already dust on the horizon is a "normal" feature of the East Coast of Australia as the country turns into desert. High rainfall areas now qualify as semi-arid, all our waterways are drying up or dying and with water becoming critical our governmentw want a bigger population because its good for the economy.
Our cities are starting to resemble the agar example, no matter how much glitz and glitter is spread around to make it look pretty the central regions of the city feel dead and lifeless (apart from the people and pigeons but they seem half dead too).
There is a lot of concern in high places, I have come across proposals to ban misinformation on the internet. Under these proposals misinformation is defined as any information that could conceivably interfere with a companie's profits - roll on thalidomide and viiox like drugs, warning people will be illegal under these guidelines (the company that made Thalidomide wants it reregistered, according to them it has "beneficial uses," AKA profit potential).
In the US there is strong pressure on the EPA to increase permissable levels of fluorides in the environment, the agricultural chemical companies have these new organofluoride insecticides and they can't make their mega profits under current regulations. Considering the much higher reactivity of fluorine compared to chlorine these chemicals will be much worse than DDT, Dieldrin, Chlordane etc ever were.
Despite constantly being bombarded with propaganda about how much longer our life expectancy is compared to just a hundred years ago I am seeing monumental increases in chronic debilitating diseases afflicting ever younger people, diseases that a little research shows are entirely man made (thus easy to prevent except someone is going to have to cut back on profits). I feel like I'm doing something wrong, at only 52 I am just about the only person I know around my age who isn't already getting serious about dying but, even worse, I'm beginning to feel that being healthy at my age is almost illegal.
This is all wasted, I'm just preaching to someone (as are you) who is alredy aware of the reality of modern industry, economics and government priorities, would be better served making someone who isn't think. Those who haven't already worked it out just don't want to know, some even get aggressive if you give them some information they don't like (like all these cancer research charities are a total waste of time, effort and money, there is already several very effective treatments for cancer that rarely require a chop job, don't poison anyone and don't use highly ineffective, cancer causing radiation - I can personally vouch for one of them and seen the results of another - or the concept that homosexuality isn't an abomination in the eyes of this God character (that crops up in my book somewhere) but quite natural, just look at the number of animals with the same predilections, or that most diseases we suffer from are the result of the medical industry or our own stupidity).
Still, a bit of discussion and swapping of ideas is good, I'm always seeking new knowledge, got a terminal case of curiosity.
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LOL - I agree with practically everything, except perhaps the global warming bit. I think the salient point is that were putting far more CO2 into the atmosphere thanthe system can handle, and we're increasing the rate. All the trading rubbish in the world isn't going to affect it more than a gnat's piss. I'm a student of Chaos Theory, which says that it's not just going to get hotter - the highs will get higher, the lows lower, and the incidence of both much more unpredictable. We think the weather is bad at the moment - wait until it really gets going and then watch our infrastructures crumble. And then the riots will start. You and I won't be around, but I wouldn't give a rat's arse for the chances of a baby born today.
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With the enormous rate of deforestation we are crippling the CO2 cycle too, a great way to accelerate the rate of damage from all sources.
The weather has already become pretty wild and more unpredictable. The sick thing is the total lack of action by those who can make a difference. Increasingly legislation at all levels is being enacted to protect mega-corporations from the responsibility of their own actions driven by ever increasing greed.
The idea of a constantly growing economy is the biggest fraud ever perpetrated. A growing economy requires selling more and more which requires either a growing population (with the money to spend) or ever increasing trinkets and gimicks that everyone must have and items that are less reliable and last about long enough to be sold.
Nothing is made to last, that has an enormous impact on resourse use and makes the government forcing us to use energy saver light bulbs (that you can't see properly with so need to run extra lights) instead of incandescant bulbs look silly. Buy a house now and the yard is too small for a cloths line (or you aren't permitted to put one up because it spoils the look of the estate), driers use a hell of a lot of energy.
I wouldn't bet on not being around, at the current rate of change things could be pretty serious in only twenty years. Already we are starting to fight over dwindling resources rather than using alternatives (many already exist).
No one seems to realise that our civilisation is only one week from total anarchy, a failure in supply for any reason will only take about one week to start having effect when food starts getting low.
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You and I think totally alike. It is plain to anyone with half a brain that big business runs things - and I include religion here - it is merely business in any of its guises. The prblem is that nobody really cares what happens beyond their one lives ... and why should they. Altruism is all very well, but I sometimes wonder.
There is an ad on telly at the moment, for life insurance. The actor says:
'Naturally I put my family and their welfare above everything ..'
Okay so take this scenario. You are bound in a chair with the finger of your right hand held to press a button. There are two buttons, one of which your finger will press in 30 seconds. Your left hand is on a lever which can switch the buttons on the right, but no matter what you do, in 30 seconds your right finger will push one of them.
One of the buttons will send a bullet through the head of your twelve year-old daughter.
The other button will operate a small flame-thrower which will incinerate your cock and balls, currently dangling beneath the chair.
Choose.
Finally, I'm not sure the 'one week before total anarchy' is quite right - I wouldn't give us more than three days - and then watch the population plummet!
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Self preservation will win, just too terrible to contemplate and, if you know who's responsible, the thought of possible retribution will justify the decision.
Four days for the supermarkets to be cleaned out completely, three days for fridges and pantries to empty so by day five the natives are getting restless but civil authorities can still maintain order. By day seven order is packing for a vacation and the boys in blue are an endangered species. After that being somewhere else (and well armed) is a very good idea.
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Agreed. The animals will all go very quickly and then we'll start eating each other. I doubt whether anyone has seriously factored that into any of their scenarios, but it is 100% logical/inevitable. As you say, stocking up on weapons and amunition should be a priority ... and then we welcome the Jehovah's Witnesses in with open arms.
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Home delivery fresh meat on the hoof.
Even just a three day trucky strike causes serious problems. The government thinks legislation banning trucky strikes solves the supply problem but there are other things that could interfere with transport and/or supply.
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I'm being alert for increases in the failure of crop and livestock production due to 'weather'. Sudden 'unseasonal' frosts killing off all the new-born lambs or heat-waves searing the seed-setting wheat-fields. Ten years off perhaps?
It'd be interesting to be able to stand back from it all and watch it happen. At least we now have the TV series 'After humans' to warn people that everything is not as 'we can fix it' as they think.
Is it not ironic to realise that the raggedy old men we all used to make fun of as they wandered the streets with their sandwich-boards reading 'The End Is Nigh' and 'Doom!', had it right all the time!
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As far as weather goes we can make all sorts of guesses or predictions but what will ultimatly happen will probably be very different. Unless se start changing our cavaleer treatment of our world things are going to continue to get worse.
As it is it will probably take thousands of years for all the toxins we have filled the world with to be neutralised, broken down or safely incorporated in silt. There are places in the world now where there is so much drug residue in the ground water that a glass of water should require a doctor's prescription.
The doomsayers may have been right but for the wrong reasons, God doesn't have to smite anyone, we are doing a good job of that to ourselves. Maybe death by accumulated poisons is a bit slow but it will build up momentum and become more obvious before too long. There is already a developing epidemic of mobile phone induced brain cancers, when you see the increasing numbers of people with a phone virtually grafted to their ear this will become a big problem in the next ten to twenty years.
I have this perverse desire to live long enough to see our current system come crashing down. I would rather see changes across the world for the better but this is less likely than me winning first prize in lotto.
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LOL - agreed. It's just a shame that we'll take everything else with us, but in the grand scheme of the cosmos, I doubt it matters whether the world goes lifeless in 2100, or remains full of life until the sun swallows it in 4 billion year's time. I have the comfort that I don't believe in gods of any sort and generally look upon things from the Occam's Razor viewpoint. So ... string theory? Please! What a load of rubbish. Dark matter? I think not. That top scientists still adhere to the Big Bang theory amazes me - have they never heard of the law of conservation of mass? Even if the bang that started our particular universe came from a very small source, it itself must have come from somewhere. I think my 'exploding uber-massive black hole' theory is the only possibility. After all - what does a black hole do when its insides can no longer withstand the pressure of its outsides - something has to give, surely? Blooey - another 'universe'
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Astrophysicists need dark matter to explain all the missing bits of the universe. They haven't thought of the possibility that their theories of the universe might be wrong (after all, much of physics is based on the works of a plagiarist, Einstein, who never understood his own theories, not a good basis). We don't even know our own planet, what chance of the universe. Doesn't help that physicists who try and publish or study anything that contradicts popular theory end up driving a broom for a living. Objectivity in science is another term for career suicide.
Big Bang is scientific hocus pocus for, "God did create everything and we ARE the centre of the universe." Isn't it an astonishing coincidence that we just happen to be right in the middle, where everything began. There is also the long drawn out wheeze theory to try and maintain the single point origin idea but make it better fit actual observations.
Why does there have to be a beginning and an end, just because humans can not truly understand infinity.
I don't believe there is any real evidence for the sun burning up its fuel and turning into a super giant. Firstly think about the probability of controlled nuclear fusion on a solar scale. Starts off slow, a few atoms fusing here, a few there, chain reaction accelerates the rate of fusion, few seconds later reaches critical rate, bang, no more big ball of hydrogen. Calculations of gravitational forces in the sun don't reach the requred level for fusion. Secondly the sun is kind of cold for something running on fusion and the puzzler is that the sun's atmosphere is far hotter than its surface which is right off for the nuclear idea but about right for plasma.
If 97% of matter in the universe is plasma then that means there are enormous rafts of stray electrons wandering around. The theory that the sun acts more like a plasma lamp than an amazingly stable, highly regulated fusion engine actually fits the observed facts more closely. For some reason the idea of electricity in the universe is almost totally ignored, the idea that electrical forces account for much of what is observed isn't taken seriously.
How is a dust cloud in which the particles are separated by meters or tens of meters or more supposed to coalesce in to a planetary system by gravity. There isn't a gravitational locus to pull everything together.
A little bit of plastic, with gravitational attraction insufficient to pull a speck of dust from even 1mm away will, after rubbing with suitable material, pick up pieces of paper even against the full gravitational attraction of a planet. Now that is sufficient force to begin coalescing a dust cloud.
Everywhere you look in the universe you notice redshift, presumed to be caused by suns, galaxies whatever racing away from us under the residual impetus of the big bang. I put forward another possibility. Space isn't empty, it is full of wandering atoms and molecules, most notably hydrogen. When light passes through air it lengthens its wavelength and that is what redshift basically is. The further light travels in the universe the more hydrogen (and other things) it encounters, effectively it is travelling through a very tenuous atmosphere. I haven't come across anyone proposing this idea but I also haven't come across any reason why this idea is not, or could not be, valid. To me it makes more sense than the idea that everything came from a single point origin (varying in size from the size of an orange to the size of a medium planet) and in which we just happen to be in the exact centre.
The conservation of mass isn't quite as rigid as first thought, matter can be created and destroyed, such events have been observed but possibly can't be explained.
I have this weird idea thet there is a lot more that we don't know than what we do know and have the even stranger belief that when observed facts fail to fit or support the theory it is the theory that should be changed, not the facts.
I'm not fully convince of the existance of black holes although there is more evidence in their favour than for dark matter, big bangs and nuclear powered stars. More correctly, I'm not convinced of the theory of black holes, I think black holes will turn out to be very different to what we think they are. Whatever they are they are certainly strange and the normal laws don't apply.
At this rate between us, by the end of the week we will have written enough for a book.
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LOL - agreed - we'd have a book debunking almost everything.
Not sure about your conclusions re the sun - I think there's enough evidence to show that it is consuming its hydrogen, and like the constantly dipped-into peanut-butter jar, will 'soon' run out. I call 4 billion years 'soon' because in the cosmic scheme of things, time is meaningless. How do you measure or compare something without limits?
You ask "How is a dust cloud in which the particles are separated by meters or tens of meters or more supposed to coalesce in to a planetary system by gravity. There isn't a gravitational locus to pull everything together." I think our theorists might actually have got this one right when they explain it by 'accidental accretion' - random collisions will eventually create a locus big enough to exert gravitational pull upon its smaller neighbours which it will canibalise to form a central body. Other accretions will either fall into it or establish stable orbits if large enough. This I thnkk is logical and can be fairly easily demonstrated.
Black holes too I think are logical and their effects can be observed. The single-point big-bang I can live with - but they're wrong in assuming there was just one - there were and will be others, hopefully a long way away from me while I'm alive!
The universal red-shift is easily explained by the fact that in an expanding system, it doesn't matter where you are - everything is moving away from everything else. I seem to recall however that some objects have been detected actually coming towards us. Sometimes I guess this can be explained by gravity/collisions, but I wouldn't be surprised if in fact some of these objects are from another 'universe' - a different 'big bang'.
The puny humans we are, we have to believe that things have a beginning and an end - we cannmot conceive of something that has always been and will always be. The cosmos - I can't say universe any more, because of my conviction that there are many - is eternal, unending, boundless. We can't imagine this.
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Unfortunatly logic doesn't always apply, ther is some pretty weird things going on in the world that defy explanation. Logical argument is good for discussion and mental exercise but the problem is how to prove, or disprove something.
Unfortunatly science is not objective, it is very political and there is also vested interest to muddy the waters further. All we can do is be aware of the shortfalls, look at the theories, look at the available evidence and compare all that with observation and experience (not having a 10m telescope in the back yard cuts back on the observation bit re the universe thing) and discuss various points with others.
Without contrary viewpoints little would actually be learned (contrary viewpoints, even if wrong, help point out weaknesses in current theory or may even lead to the realisation that the theory is also wrong and makes for interesting conversation).
Haven't had any serious universal discussions for years so my universal brain cells are a bit rusty, nice to dust them off and see if they still work.
What irks me most is when data that is contrary to accepted theory is found more often than not the data is altered or reworked to fit the theory. Then you have to wait a whole generation untill the old guard retires and a new crop of scientists grab hold of the tree and give it a good shake.
Getting into the multiverse idea is even more outlandish, probably why I like the idea, and there are plenty of alternative theories concerning the way such a system would be set up.
The bottom line is that, where the universe is concerned most of what we think is still mostly guess work. We have a lot of data but its the interpretation of the data that is problematic. I love anomalies, they remind me that we still don't really know much and you can learn more from a single anomalie than a thousand normal things.
I'm just hoping to live long enough for someone to find out something for certain, a theory where the theory and observed facts aggree on all points (looks like I will have to live a very long time, but I don't mind, gives me more time to learn things I don't know and do things I've never done).
Maybe the truth lies in the realm of science fiction.
I think cosmos is a better term than universe (especially if it does turn out that there is more than one of the buggers, I suspect there is but it won't sit still long enough for me to get a picture of it).
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I know - sad isn't it. Chaos rules and we don't understand it. I don;t know if you've done any Chaos Theory study - there was an excellent program about it on TV quite a few years ago - why it isn't often repeated I don't know, because it explains so many things. It starts of course with the Butterfly effect, thorugh Attractors and Strange Attractors. It explained chaotic flow in streams, fibrillation in heart attacks and the red spot on Jupiter. I strongly suggest you try and find it if you can, and haven't already seen it.
I guess we'll always have the 'data-reworking' problem to deal with. Sometimes it is deliberate falsification and at other times, the researcher doesn't even realise he;'s doing it. Smoking studies are an example of big business controlling research but quite what the motives behind the 'cold fusion' silliness were, I guess we'll never know!
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Weirdness all around, its what makes the world so interesting and life so worth while but most people entirely fail to notice.
I believe I saw that program, quite interesting but I think chaos theory worries those who pull the strings so it tends to get ignored in the hope it will go away. Its right up there with quantum mechanics and if you really want weird try high spin state monoatomic elements AKA orbitally rearranged, monoatomic elements. The properties of ORME's are pretty unusual, superconducting, variable mass dependant on certain conditions, tendency to disappear in a flash of light, repells all magnetic fields and can weigh less than nothing, i.e. antigravity properties. They aren't new, they were known at least 7,000 years ago but were recently rediscovered (around 1990). There was a lot of political shit surrounding ORME's and ORME research (like 100% effectiveness in treating cancer, able to make fuel cells a reality and a few other things that worry established mega-corporations and paranoid governments) so its hard to find out much about them.
There is plenty of free energy (don't need cold fusion) around, just look at the energy in a thunder storm. Where does the lightning come from?
Early theories believed that electrical charge builds up in storm clouds until there is sufficient for a discharge. Now we have aircraft that can fly in all but the worst of storms the theorised conditions haven't been found. Now gamma rays are blamed for lightning and there is reasonable evidence for this theory but there are also a high proportion of anomalies, lightning strikes for which there is no evidence of gamma rays so we are back to square 1.
Nicola Tesla may have had the answer to that but his inventions and research is under tight lock. He discovered how to extract electricity from thin air (remember the idea of transmitted electricity back in the 60's that never eventuated? that was one of Tesla's inventions), just needed an aerial and a converter unit.
The other thing with science is that there is a lot of really good research that just gets overlooked and forgotten or its significance not noticed or realised (and some gets burried in case someone does notice). I think some of the best science is amongst the forgotten and overlooked but how do you find it amongst the millions of scientific papers when you don't even know what you are looking for.
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Very true - I heard that the patents for artificial diamonds were bought and sat on by Pittsburgh Plate Glass so that the diamond trade wouldn't collapse. I know of Tesla, naturally, but had forgotten about the broadcast electricity idea - I dimly remember it now you mention it.
I'm certain there are many inventions that could help us which are being deliberately suppressed by organisations which would suffer were they revealed. What does annoy me is the apparent ease with which electric and hybrid cars are now, suddenly able to be produced. However the most annoying thing is the incredible lying going on. We're meant to believe an electric car is environment-friendly? It's merely a once-removed trick - all the coal and oil consumed and the pollution produced in the production of the electricity is hidden behind a thin veil of technology. I would also reckon that in fact, due to low energy conversion rates, electric cars probably produce more pollution than petrol ones. The proviso is I suppose, that if the electricty is produced solely by non-polluting methods, say geo or hydro, then the electric car is possibly an improvement. France produces over 75% of its energy by nuclear means, so their electric cars merely produce the most deadly pollution possible. Australia still produces 90% of its energy from fossil fuels, so electric cars there are a complete fallacy.
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A far better solution in the short term would be the old high efficiency carbies invented and developed by many people, including Ford and Chevrolet, that gave 100MPG plus with a V8 in a two ton car.
The old "out of sight, out of mind trick - exemplifies my belief that no one thinks beyond the propaganda/advertising.
Not just the extra pollution through converting energy through two inefficient processes rather than one but the toxic metals and chemicals in the batteries and the highly toxic byproducts of making them.
If the car had all external surfaces covered with solar panels then they might be able to claim better fuel efficiency.
Not really fussed by geo, no one knows what sort of effect pumping so much cooling water into hot rock will do to the planet in the long term.
I'm more than a little worried by the push to promote nuclear as "green" due to its lack of carbon emmissions, nuclear waste is much worse. Besides, CO2 is only a minor greenhouse gas, water is hundreds of times more effective in causing heating/cooling effects and we are pumping just as much of that into the air as CO2 and with rainfall dropping across the world, much of it is staying there.
Back in 1982 I built a car with a small Chevy V8 that produced around 280HP and returned 28MPG and I managed that on a very tight budget. A few more dollars spent and I could have got 35MPG with ease. Our modern streamlined, computer designed, fuel injected, computerised everything cars don't get anywhere near that (in fact the average fuel economy for the old Model T is better than the average fuel economy from today's equivalent - so much for technology and automotive development).
They actually had more efficient electric cars back before 1920, they were quite popular with doctors doing house calls and other people with similar transport requirements so the idea that hybrid/electric cars is new and cutting edge is utter BS.
Even a wood burning car would be better, to ensure sufficient wood (and to cut running costs) you need to grow sufficient timber to run the cars so it is a cyclic fuel, what you burn you have to replace so you can burn some more. Not the best but is better than pull it out the ground, burn it and pump the waste into the air - linear.
The technology to produce cheap ethanol by bacterial digestion/fermentation of any form of cellulose was developed at the QLD Uni back in the late 80's, that would remove about 20 to 30% of landfill to make fuel and all those trees pushed up into a heap and burnt to make way for bigger roads and more houses could be put to better use and, like the wood example, more vegetable matter would have to be grown to supply the raw materials to produce ethanol. Distillation could be done quite readily with solar power, you only need to heat the water/ethanol to just over 60C.
In their wisdom the Uni management sold the patents (not usage rights with conditions, the smart thing to do, but the whole bloody lot), lock, stock and barrel to a US company who hasn't done anything with them.
There are solutions available now to many of our growing problems, most are just not profitable enough or can't be patented.
Even land fill tips are a total waste of valuable resources, everything that goes into a tip can be used in one way or another and the byproducts (ethanol for one) are quite profitable.
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In the end though, whatever we do is merely postponing our inevitable end. There must come a day when the population has maximised, the last cow is dead, the last tree has been cut down, the last oil well runs dry and the last coal-seam peters out. What does it really matter whether it's today or tomorrow? The point is I suppose that we're the only creatures that can think, so it only matters to us, and what do we matter? Not a bit. The cosmos goes on without us with only a few scars on neighbouring moons or planets and an orbiting relic or two to show that we were ever here. All the technology in the world will not save us because we cannot alter the way we live - it is natural life progression. Give us a better way, and we merely use it to make more things and more of us. Goodbye everybody.
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I think what happens to other animals matters to them, I believe other animals think in their own way. They have memory, they have things they obviously like and don't like and if you own a dog or cat they show frequent signs of being pretty smart, like working out how to open a door, how to get your attention. Just because we can't understand their limited language or means of communication doesn't mean they can't think. Ive seen more people who show no signs of cogitative ability than animals (maybe some bacteria are less intelligent).
As the animal with the greatest capacity to think and the greatest capacity to deliberatly and knowingly alter our environment then if we were truly sapient (as our scientific nomem indicates) then we would look after our world ane everything in it, not tear it apart, use it a a rubbish tip and repeatedly rape it. We are the only animal in existance stupid enough to deliberatly try and commit autogenocide because it is profitable.
We don't actually need the economy and we certainly don't need continued economic growth, only greedy people need that. All we need is to have somewhere to live, enough to eat and get by from day to day and some entertainment as a break and relief to continued work, a bit of variety. We should be working to live, not working for a living.
That's a concept very few people seem to understand, that nothing really matters and we humans are not monumentally important, even bacteria are more important than us, they are at least useful. If we became suddenly extinct it would actually greatly improve life on this planet so we are as far from important as you can get, we are the cancer eating away at our world, we are the disease making our planet sick and if the planet has any awareness, any ability to affect life on it then when it does get around to doing something we are in trouble (if we survive that long anyway).
The petri dish example is one governments and other organisations with power shoud take note of, our cities are like those colonies and as they continue to grow in population density the problems of maintaining that city increase exponentially and there will come a point when they begin to collapse, to choke in their own filth (sanitation can only clear away so much and only a strong steady breeze can clear the pollution from the air, well, move it somewhere else).
There will be survivors, the only thing to hope for is that they will be the smart ones, smart enough to try living with the world instead of exploiting it.
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You're right of course - obviously some animals can think and reason - I suppose I really meant '
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One I find reprehensible is the "sport" of salmon tossing. Its just a fish so no one protests, I wounder if there would be the same lack of reaction if it was dead koala tossing instead.
Not only is it a grose waste of food but it is disrespectful to the animal.
Catch and release is not something I like, you catch fish to eat, not to play with. When you have enough you stop fishing.
Fish aren't cute and cuddly so bleeding heart animal lovers don't bother with championing their needs.
Commercial fishing is just as reprehensible, high priced species - into the freezer, low value species - over the side to leave room for more high priced fish.
Its all about lack of respect for other creatures who share our world and provide us with what we need to live, nothing should be wasted if it is feasible to get it to the table.
Hundreds of thousands of tons of food thrown out every year, doesn't look pretty, wrong size, marked, keep the prices up, left overs etc. We produce enough food to feed 10 billion and yet there are millions of people starving, that is reprehensible. How can we call ourselves civilised when we let people starve because feeding them reduces profits?
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I remember the dreadful days of the UK milk glut - pour it into old quarries - or the butter mountain - not sure what they did with that. All the sugar from the West Indies that was dumped at sea. My uncle was a long distance lorry driver and used to have a certain brand of cat-food in his sandwiches becuase it was all salmon. If the price is reduced because there's a glut, then profits decline and of course that can't happen.
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Alternatly, with more people being able to afford it profits could greatly increase. Not much profit in something not sold.
The concept of "reasonable profit" seems very foreign to big business, they prefer record profits.
Some pet foods are better quality (at half the price) to the human equivalent.
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The concept of more frequent lower profits doesn't appear to have entered their little brains in those days. Nowadays the concept of price-reduction for multibuys is seen everywhere. I sometimes wonder though just how many products would be left on the shelf if we removed all those which were not what they claimed to be or did not do what they purported to. Very few, I should think. Do you remember when jam had bits of fruit in it? I am disgusted at how many products have turned into flavoured xanthan or cellulose gums. Sharwoods Mango Chutney used to contain big lumps - now it is all mush. I wrote them an email congratulating them for ruining a good product - no reply.
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One of the ancient Greek philosopher's, can't remember which one, stated that for good health we need, good food, clean water and clean air. Well now we don't have any of these but we are supposed to believe we are healthier than our grandparents.
I'm waiting to find the honest lable - entirely synthetic, contains no trace of natural product.
Even the fruit grown today is almost synthetic, cultivars produced for their pulp devoid of flavour and nutrients, power grown on a chemical coctail. Meat animals force fed an entirely unnatural diet pumped full of hormone, antibiotics (too bad if you have an allergy to the antibiotics), ground up offal and other garbage, our meat is adulterated before it is even killed.
The Sharwoods I get (from SE Asia) is still full of lumps but I don't know what they are, don't seem like mango to me.
About the only way you can stay healthy now is to have a decent block of land, enough to keep a few cows for milk and meat, some sheep to keep the grass in the orchard down, some pigs, good for garbage disposal and taste much better for it, goats (bloody good eating) for weed control and a vegetable patch - damn, I'm starting to sound like one of those crazy hippies from the 60's, maybe they were smarter than we thought. My mangos are starting to ripen and boy are they tasty - wouldn't swap one for a whole tray of shop ones.
Can't even buy a decent ham or real bacon any more (not on my income anyway) and setting up a smokehouse in the back yard is against council regs (actually just about everything is against some sort of law or regulation now, even half the law).
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It's a point, isn't it - a food may well contain lumps, but are they lumps of what they're supposed to be. There was a story some years ago of a manufacturer of tinned pears who was using chokos, but although there is no proof this ever occured, it makes you wonder just what it is you're eating!
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No proof, what do you think the hoppers full of chokos was for. There was proof all right, the official investigators just couldn't find it, blinded by bribes. Some independant analysts had no problems, just tested the contents of a few cans, found chokos in with the pears. Put me right off tinned pears, kept getting hard, woody "pears."
Mince was a good one, throw a big patty in the pan and a few minutes later it had shrunk to nearly the size of a 50 cent coin and the pan was full of water. Fortunatly mince is now pretty well regulated, you only get a little water.
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I hated those woody pears - suspiciously fibrous. I only buy premium mince, though I have reallu no idea whther it's any better than the fatty muck that seems to constitute the regular stuff. I rarely buy sausages fdor the same reason - god knows what goes into them - everything else, I suspect!
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The premium mince does seem considerably better than the rest, definetly less fat for most (some are a bit suspect but surprisingly few I have come across).
Sausages aren't much better than floor sweepings most times. Every time I find some good ones they seem to disappear after a few months.
Just to be on the safe side I reduce sausages to charcoal sticks, improves the flavour and kills most suspect bits (there are still a few suspect bits that are just impervious to anything).
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Mmmm - I love charcoaly sausages - I have to admit that I do the same! I like the crunch and besides, charcoal is supposed to be good for you in moderation!
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Only way to eat them and the charcoal filters the gas from the baked beans.
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I never thought of sausages as antifartfood ...
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Its the charcoal.
Don't know if it works or not, I have the right enzymes to break down bean starch so they aren't fartogenic to me.
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It's probably the bloody msg that does it anyway.
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Yes, that stuff would kill a mongrel dog. Discovered that many cases of food poisoning have nothing to do with bacteria, its the poison in the food and MSG is one of the worst.
I've had a few people tell me its supposed to be banned here but its still in everything. Besides, there are some other countries that still permit its use so its unlikely to be banned here, we are always the last to remove poisons from use.
When I discovered how toxic MSG was we went through our pantry and removed everything with (about a third of what was in there) MSG, 621 or yeast extract listed in the ingredients. The improvement in everyone's health was astonishing, even the kids asthma disappeared.
Unfortunatly the food industry uses at least a dozen different names for MSG to hide its presence and get around legislation and restrictions so keeping it out of the diet is hard but you certainly know when you haven't.
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How do you go on Vegemite? Surely they great Aussie spread can't be a villain? Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!
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Now I'm going to have to look at the list of ingredients, I like Vegemite on toast occasionally.
I just get sick of getting poisoned by what is supposed to be food, eating out is getting like playing Russian Roulette, never know when an innocuous meal or snack is going to make you feel like shit and they reckon smoking is bad for you. You can live without smoking but not food or water.
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I'm the same about 'external food'. With my lactose intolerance, or whatever it is, I have to be careful of any meal that might have been made with milk or 'milk solids'. I wonder sometimes when I come home and end up coughing up mucous half the night, just what it was I ate that had the lactose in it. Before I found out what it was, my coughing got so bad, John would have to upend me and pat me like a cystic fibrosis sufferer and I'd cough up a cupful of sparkling clear bubbly mucous. We only found the cause by accident, when John decided we were both too fat and put us onto soy 'milk'. Bingo - my problem vanished overnight.
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That soy milk is not real good, soy contains isoflavins that are really bad news, they are hormone analogues. I have a couple of papers on soy here somewhere but can't remember all the detrimental effects of consuming soy products but only fermented soy is safe.
So if you wind up growing an impressive set of breasts you'll know why.
It really is quite amazing what some compounds can do to ruin your health and when it is a food product that makes it even worse, you can't be sure of sucessfully avoiding it (who looks for the list of ingredients on a hamburger or quarter of roast chook).
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Bleagh! Mind you, both John and I are overweight, so the breasts are already prominent, though I've not noticed any lactation so far.
I don't drink much soy myself, but I'll warn John!
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Don't know how anyone can drink soy milk anyway, it tastes like crap.
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Thank you, dear - we all need to do our bit for the environmment, before it does its bit to us.
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I picked this as my favorite from your gallery to feature in my journal . Please don't respond unless, for some reason, you don't want it there.
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LOL - I saw it there and commented already - thank you!
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