from Michael Pollan:

1. Don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as      food.                                                                                       2. Avoid foods containing ingredients you can’t pronounce.
3. Don’t eat anything that wouldn’t eventually rot.
4. Avoid food products that carry health claims.
5. Shop the peripheries of the supermarket; stay out of the middle.
6. Better yet, buy food somewhere else: the farmer’s market or CSA.
7. Pay more, eat less.
8. Eat a wide diversity of species.
9. Eat food from animals that eat grass.
10. Cook and, if you can, grow some of your own food.
11. Eat meals and eat them only at tables.
12. Eat deliberately, with other people whenever possible, and always with pleasure.

full interview with MSN

confession:  i eat meals, but often in front of my computer…have to clean the keyboard regularly….it gets nasty… and i’m not sure my grandmother would recognize tempeh, tofu, and soymilk as food…but hey, her idea of living well was eating steak three times a day….

You can hear all kinds of wild stuff on the internet.  If you’re not careful, you might end up thinking Lyndon Larouche or one of his front groups is a credible source….

England’s Economist, however, is by no means a radical publication, but nevertheless enjoys a good reputation for clear vision and honest reporting.  So when they run a story like this one, with this headline, you want to be sure you’ve got a good plan:

Bankruptcies in America

Waiting for Armageddon

Mar 27th 2008 | NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition

The recent rise in corporate bankruptcies in America may well be a sign of much worse to come

Illustration by David Simonds

This story from the Sydney, Australia, Herald-Sun talks about the likelihood that the dollar will, over the next three to five years, cease to become the world’s common currency.  No matter who gets elected in November, this is going to take the US down a few pegs and diminish our ability to influence world affairs–such as the boycott of Iran that the Junta is currently orchestrating.  For now, they are succeeding, and there are no signs that Hillary or Obama disagrees with the tactic, but if US banks lose their hegemonic position in the world market, plenty of countries will be only too happy to tell us to go wipe our ass with our stupid greenbacks.  At a certain point, oil will speak louder than anything else.

STATE-backed sovereign wealth funds are likely to diversify their investments and move away from US dollar-denominated assets, a World Bank official says.

Central banks are likely to follow suit, shifting away from the US dollar over the next “three to five years,” World Bank principal investment officer Arjan Berkelaar told a business conference in Sydney yesterday.

Sovereign funds, which are either government-owned or controlled, will increasingly switch from high-grade fixed-income assets such as government bonds to equities and broader-based assets including infrastructure and commodities, he said.

Alternatives would include investments denominated in the euro and pound, with some possible interest in the higher-yielding Australian and New Zealand currencies.

more

Russian Intelligence Sees U.S. Military Buildup on Iran Border

By RIA Novosti

29/03/08 — - MOSCOW, March 27 (RIA Novosti) - Russian military intelligence services are reporting a flurry of activity by U.S. Armed Forces near Iran’s borders, a high-ranking security source said Tuesday.

“The latest military intelligence data point to heightened U.S. military preparations for both an air and ground operation against Iran,” the official said, adding that the Pentagon has probably not yet made a final decision as to when an attack will be launched.

He said the Pentagon is looking for a way to deliver a strike against Iran “that would enable the Americans to bring the country to its knees at minimal cost.”

He also said the U.S. Naval presence in the Persian Gulf has for the first time in the past four years reached the level that existed shortly before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Col.-Gen. Leonid Ivashov, vice president of the Academy of Geopolitical Sciences, said last week that the Pentagon is planning to deliver a massive air strike on Iran’s military infrastructure in the near future.

A new U.S. carrier battle group has been dispatched to the Gulf.

The USS John C. Stennis, with a crew of 3,200 and around 80 fixed-wing aircraft, including F/A-18 Hornet and Superhornet fighter-bombers, eight support ships and four nuclear submarines are heading for the Gulf, where a similar group led by the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower has been deployed since December 2006.

The U.S. is also sending Patriot anti-missile systems to the region.

(from Information Clearing House)

A new development in Las Vegas has been stopped in its tracks by the money crunch.  Coming soon to  a construction site (or a Bell’s Bend) near you?

Las Vegas’ Project CityCenter, the largest private development in the Unites States, was to be 8 acres of shops, casinos, hotels, condos, and theaters. But now it looks like big portions of the project may remain in a state of half-built rubble piles for years to come, due to the current credit crisis in the United States. So what did this shining dream of real estate moguls look like before it turned all Resident Evil: Extinction?

Here is what developers claimed the CityCenter would like like back when the started construction.

Last week, Deutsche Bank AG, the lender on the Cosmopolitan Project (the piece of this structure that’s on the far right), started foreclosure proceedings after developer Ian Bruce Eichner was unable to get more financing for the world’s biggest mega-mall. Let that be a lesson to everyone who looks at gleaming architecture renderings and imagines they’re seeing the future. Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty.

click here to see a picture of what it really looks like…

and click here for pictures of Burning Man and pueblos on Mars

(whaaaat!?)

Under the rather ill-fitting title “Manhood in the Age of Aquarius,” Tim Hogdon has written the story of the Digger movement in San Francisco, as well as a take on the history of The Farm in Summertown. I haven’t even gotten to the Farm section yet, but if it’s as well-written and authoritative as the Diggers chapter, it’s a great bit of history.

There are copious footnote/links, as well. Two that stood out for me are “Mutants Commune,” an edgy, passionate sociopolitical rant from the Haight Street days, still strong enough to produce a flashback; and an (alas, incomplete) interview with Peter Berg and Judy Goldschaft, who went from being Diggers to founding the Bioregional movement. Although they don’t talk about bioregionalism in the interview, they give a great feel for the matrix in which the movement arose.  As staid as the Green Party gets sometimes, it’s good to remember where we came from.

While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ‘escort’ $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush’s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.

Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there’s a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush’s man Bernanke was using ours.

This week, Bernanke’s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.

Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers’ bordello: Eliot Spitzer.

Who are they kidding? Spitzer’s lynching and the bankers’ enriching are intimately tied.

How? Follow the money.

more

by J. McMichael
I try to forget that heating steel is like pouring syrup onto a plate: you can’t get it to stack up.  The heat just flows out to the colder parts of the steel, cooling off the part you are trying to warm up.  If you pour it on hard enough and fast enough, you can get the syrup to stack up a little bit.  And with very high heat brought on very fast, you can heat up one part of a steel object, but the heat will quickly spread out and the hot part will cool off soon after you stop. 

Am I to believe that the fire burned for 104 minutes in the north tower, gradually heating the 200,000 tons of steel supports like a blacksmith’s forge, with the heat flowing throughout the skeleton of the tower?  If the collapse was due to heated steel, the experts should be able to tell us how many thousands of tons of steel were heated to melting temperature in 104 minutes and how much fuel would be required to produce that much heat.  Can a single Boeing 767 carry that much fuel? 

Thankfully, I found this note on the BBC web page ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_1540000/1540044.stm or: http://public-action.com/911/jmcm/BBCNews ): “Fire reaches 800 [degrees] C — hot enough to melt steel floor supports.” 

That is one of the things I warned you about: In the 20th Century, steel melted at 1535 degrees Celsius (2795 F), (see http://www.chemicalelements.com/elements/fe.html ), but in the 21st Century, it melts at 800 degrees C (1472 F). 

***

In order to weaken those joints, a fire would have to heat the bolts or the flanges to the point where the bolts fell apart or tore through the steel.  But here is another thing that gives me problems — all the joints between the platter and the central columns would have to be heated at the same rate in order to collapse at the same time — and at the same rate as the joints with the outer columns on all sides — else one side of the platter would fall, damaging the floor below and making obvious distortions in the skin of the building, or throwing the top of the tower off balance and to one side. 

But there were no irregularities in the fall of those buildings.  They fell almost as perfectly as a deck of cards in the hands of a magician doing an aerial shuffle. 

***

If the fire melted the floor joints so that the collapse began from the 60th floor downward, the upper floors would be left hanging in the air, supported only by the central columns.  This situation would soon become unstable and the top 30 floors would topple over (to use Loizeaux’s image) much like felling the top 600 ft. from a 1,300 ft. tree. 

This model would also hold for the north tower.  According to Chris Wise’s “domino” doctrine, the collapse began only at the floor with the fire, not at the penthouse.  How was it that the upper floors simply disappeared instead of crashing to the earth as a block of thousands of tons of concrete and steel? 

In trying to reconstruct and understand this event, we need to know whether the scenes we are watching are edited or simply shown raw as they were recorded. 

But let us return our attention to the fire.  Liquid fuel does not burn hot for long.  Liquid fuel evaporates (or boils) as it burns, and the vapor burns as it boils off.  If the ambient temperature passes the boiling point of the fuel and oxygen is plentiful, the process builds to an explosion that consumes the fuel. 

Jet fuel (refined kerosene) boils at temperatures above 160 degrees Celsius (350 F) and the vapor flashes into flame at 41 degrees Celsius (106 F).  In an environment of 1500 degrees F, jet fuel spread thinly on walls, floor, and ceiling would boil off very quickly.  If there were sufficient oxygen, it would burn; otherwise it would disperse out the open windows and flame when it met oxygen in the open air — as was likely happening in the pictures that showed flames shooting from the windows.  Some New Yorkers miles distant claimed they smelled the fuel, which would indicate fuel vapors were escaping without being burned. 

Note that jet fuel burning outside the building would heat the outside columns, but would not heat the central load-bearing columns significantly.  Following this reasoning, the jet fuel fire does not adequately explain the failure of the central columns.

***

I have just one other point I need help with — the steel columns in the center.  When the platters fell, those quarter-mile high central steel columns (at least from the ground to the fire) should have been left standing naked and unsupported in the air, and then they should have fallen intact or in sections to the ground below, clobbering buildings hundreds of feet from the WTC site like giant trees falling in the forest.  But I haven’t seen any pictures showing those columns standing, falling, or lying on the ground.  Nor have I heard of damage caused by them. 

Now I know those terrorists must have been much better at these things than I am.  I would take one look at their kamikaze plans with commercial jets and I would reject it as — spectacular maybe, but not significantly damaging.  The WTC was not even a strategic military target. 

But if I were given the assignment of a terrorist hijacker, I would try to hit the towers low in the supports to knock the towers down, maybe trapping the workers with the fire and burning the towers from the ground up, just as the people in the top stories were trapped.  Even the Japanese kamikaze pilots aimed for the water line. 

But you see, those terrorists were so sure the building would magically collapse that way, the pilot who hit the north tower chose a spot just 20 floors from the top ( http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/worldtrade010911.html or: http://public-action.com/911/jmcm/ABCNews ). 

And the kamikaze for south tower was only slightly lower — despite a relatively open skyline down to 25 or 30 stories ( http://a188.g.akamaitech.net/f/188/920/15m/www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/graphics/rubble_ny091101.htm or: http://public-action.com/911/jmcm/wtcgeog )

The terrorists apparently predicted the whole scenario — the fuel fire, the slow weakening of the structure, and the horrific collapse of the building — phenomena that the architects and the NY civil engineering approval committees never dreamed of. 

Even as you righteously hate those men, you have to admire them for their genius. 

 

 

.

http://www.gocomics.com/tedrall/

From the pen of Michael O’Gorman, founder of Farms Not Arms, 15 theses on the importance of  peace and agri-culture:

 14)   How we live as individuals effects how we behave as a society and a country.  American writers from Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman, to Scott Nearing and Wendell Berry have shown us that our connection to the land is essential to being peaceful people.  Generations of Amish, Mennonites and others have chosen farming as part of a simpler life, without need or capacity for violence.  And a generation of young Americans growing up during the War in Vietnam pushed organic farming as the ultimate statement against a country that had lost its moral center of gravity.  More than ever, in a shrinking world, we need to look at how we farm, how we eat, and how we live as both means and ends in our search for a more peaceful and just world.

 

15)   Farming is life.  It transcends politics.  “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares” is not only one of the world’s oldest anti-war statements it is a real life instruction for a real life activity.   The famous statue at the UN by the same name shows a massive man with massive strength doing a massive job.  As farmers and farm workers, men and women, we have the strength for doing just that.

more

Everyone including their own Supreme Court.  It’s all about the short-term bottom line for these guys, it seems.  In its entirety, from the LA Times:

Bush’s EPA hurts the environment, again

In overruling the EPA, Bush again shows his disregard for the environment and the courts.

March 17, 2008

What do you do when the president behaves as if he is above science and the law? When it comes to environmental regulation, George W. Bush has repeatedly ignored both, and this country’s system of checks and balances has been powerless to stop him.

The latest outrage came last week when the Environmental Protection Agency released its new standard for ozone, the primary ingredient in smog. The administration lowered the standard that regions must meet to comply with clean-air rulesfrom 84 parts per billion to 75, which seems like progress until one considers that the EPA’s panel of independent scientists had recommended a standard no higher than 70 parts per billion. The higher limit set by the EPA won’t protect Americans from the damaging effects of ozone, which irritates the lungs, worsens asthma and kills susceptible populations.

Ignoring scientists is nothing new for Bush, but in this case he also ignored the U.S. Supreme Court. The EPA wanted to include a tougher secondary standard during growing seasons, designed to protect forests, crops and other plants from ozone, which retards plant growth and depletes soil moisture. Alarmed at the costs this would exact on polluters, the White House Office of Management and Budget sent a letter to EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson saying the EPA couldn’t impose such limits without considering their economic effect. This is flatly untrue; a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court in 2001 held that the EPA did not have to consider the costs of its clean-air regulations, only their scientific basis. When the EPA still refused to back down, the White House sent a curt letter saying the agency had been overruled by the president: The secondary standard was out.

The administration, in fact, seems to be making a habit of defying the Supreme Court. On the same day the EPA was releasing its watered-down ozone standard, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) was posting a letter to Johnson questioning why the agency’s efforts to crack down on greenhouse gases had apparently “been effectively halted.” Last April, the court ruled that the EPA had to regulate carbon dioxide and other gases linked to global warming. Waxman’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which was already investigating the EPA’s inexplicable refusal to let California regulate greenhouse emissions from vehicles, now will also examine its refusal to crack down on CO2 nationwide.

We could go on listing the casual abuses of power, but why bother? Bush is immune to criticism, shrugs off every court ruling and is unswayed by scientific evidence. There is only one check on his power that he won’t be able to dodge — the end of his term. It’s vital that voters replace him with someone who will reverse his extraordinary attacks on public health and the environment as quickly as possible.