onoway

Latest word I heard about the bombers was that nobody will allow the body of the one brother to be buried in "their" cemetery. Have to feel some sympathy for the funeral director! I understand bitterness and anger but this strikes me as being both silly and irreligious. As far as that goes, why don't they cremate him if nobody will accept the body? Anyone know?

Source, please? This is another myth which is disseminated and promoted by big ag. Rodale Institute has been running a study for 30 years and found that organic production is not only more profitable but also more productive, after the initial 3 years. Aside from that, the price in the stores is artificially low for big ag products. You and I are paying for the cheaper prices of unsustainably grown product in the stores through massive subsidies supporting industrial agriculture. The other thing is that sterilizing the soil with chemicals cannot in the long run be a good thing; any production at ALL then rests on continuing and ever increasing amounts of petrochemicals which is not sustainable by any definition I'm aware off. Aside from that the runoff of agricultural chemicals from fields ending up in lakes and rivers is leading to massive costs trying to stop the pollution from killing the waterways and lakes. In Canada you can look at Lake Winnipeg as a prime example; the States has been worrying about the amount of agricultural runoff chemicals entering the Gulf of Mexico from runoff for some years, but so far have been largely unable to figure out how to deal with it. Things do not work in isolation, they are interconnected and ignoring that leads to problems. I have cited other farmers who are leaders in showing what can be done through permaculture techniques, which once set up will basically run themselves to a large degree, with almost no input at all from the farmer, and produce enormous quantities of food. One person I have mentioned before is Will Allen http://www.jhsph.edu/news/stories/2012/willallen.html who is raising an amount of food per acre on three acres of land, without chemicals or GMOs, that commercial ag farmers can only dream of. Admittedly his projects are labour intensive but he has deliberately designed it that way to involve kids who otherwise had nothing to do and nowhere to go, so it is a multipurpose endeavour. Geoff Lawton has been travelling the world teaching permaculture now for years as well as heading up successful reclamation work on soils too depleted/saline even for chemicals to work profitably as there was no structure left in the soil. Using permaculture techniques he demonstrated how the soil became LESS saline, something some scientists have maintained was impossible aside from using massive quantities of water to wash the salts through the soil, which he didn't do. (Couldn't have even if he had wanted to, not much water around the Dead Sea.) So has Shep Holtzer and Joel Salatin, all farmers who haven't used chemicals or GMOs on their land ever, and all of them are highly successful farmers by any standard. Between the names I have mentioned they cover all climates (Sepp is from the Austrian Alps, Lawton is from Australia and is best known for his work greening the desert, and Salatin is from the eastern US.) They all have highly integrated systems which largely run themselves, and which focus on growing soil and avoiding monocropping. Their places are prime examples of the terms sustainable and highly profitable. BTW as far as starvation is concerned, there are any number of people raising enormous quantities of food even in back yards and the "OH MY GOD WE ARE ALL GOING TO STARVE NEXT YEAR UNLESS WE (xyz)" is a fearmongering myth and a truly big crock of B.S. It's not even a matter of a lot of money. It's a matter of education and paying attention to the bloody science outside the self serving pap being fed to media and governments by big ag. and which belongs if anywhere only in the National Enquirer with stories of people being impregnated by aliens on their saucer. OMG our sun is going to die... well yes but not in any sense of the word is it foreseeably imminent or even within a few generations. So it's somewhat premature to panic. Same with food production. OTOH if we do throw all our resources into promoting big ag then that scenario could indeed come true through increasing costs and inaccessibility of chemicals combined with the chemical sterilization/ salination of soils. And possibly even sooner, through increased reliance on GMO seed which fails for some reason. There have already been instances of crop failures in both the US and Africa of GMO crops, to say nothing of India where the result of changing over to GMO crops led to massive numbers of farmer suicide and a resulting ban on any sort of GMO seed anywhere in one of India's major food producing areas.

Try thinking about what heroin, or better example, methamphetamine, does to the human system. That's sort of the equivalent of inorganic fertilizer. Farmers dose the fields with artificially concentrated or manufactured chemicals which boost the growth of the plants. Too much will kill them. It literally kills or at least makes the earth highly inhospitable to the organisms found in healthy soil. Because of that, plants become more and more dependent on the artificial fertilizers to yield at all, so what you end up doing is really a sort of hydroponics with the soil mostly just holding the plants in place. Just as addiction in people, it takes a while for the soil to recover. The Rodale institute found that once the artificial dosing was stopped, it took an average of three years for conventionally farmed land. Incidentally they also found over a 30 year study, organic farming was also both more productive and more lucrative than conventional farming. The transition period is a real barrier for farmers to change though.

As a concept they can be a good idea. The problem is that the concept has been given free expression to overwhelm food production without any long term studies or safeguards just in case we are not quite as clever as we think we are. It has happened before from time to time such as the escape of bees now known for good reason as killer bees, or the use of thalidomide for morning sickness. Good intentions and great concept. A bit of a problem in reality. There is also a very real possibility that SOME GMO combinations would be just fine and others not so much. We have no ideas which are which nor controls to manage the not so good ones. I think people who worry about the "unnatural" aspect think somewhat like this. There is a world of difference between GMOs and mutations or hybrids or the results of virus and bacterial activity. First of all none of those happen on the scale that GMOs are being introduced, and secondly the ones that don't work well within natural systems don't survive and reproduce. The GMOs are being supported artificially with chemicals, fertilizers, pesticides, cultivation. When any of these aren't adequate, at least some GMO species won't thrive and yield (reproduce), witness Monsanto's own admission after the major corn crop failure in Africa. I doubt you will ever find anyone who would maintain that fish and tomatoes might somehow naturally ever host each other's genetic material. Natural systems have evolved over the centuries to interact and are interconnected and intertwined. It may be problematic to introduce organisms which are alien. We can and have flooded GMOs into the systems without any idea what - if any- affect this might have over time. For example: We do know that most people lose the ability to a greater or lesser degree to manage milk as they get older. The body stops producing the enzyme required to digest it. If over millennia the body cannot maintain the ability to digest milk, how is it going to handle totally unknown genetic material? The patents are granted on the concept of the material being unique, unknown in nature. A few years ago I read a study done in Scotland looking at the result of feeding rats GMO feed. The research showed that GMO foods caused a change in the bacteria of the gut. They found this interesting but had no speculation as to whether this might be important and if so in what way. Recently other researchers found that certain changes in the bacteria of the gut are precursors to diabetes. Is there a connection? (I tried to find the Scottish study again but the link was on a now defunct computer and I was unable to find it again to see if the type of changes were the same.) It's something that needs to be looked into. It particularly becomes important when there has been an independent study showing severe health issues connected to the GMO feed being fed to lab animals. We need to know if this is replicable and if it's a result which shows up with other GMO material. Perhaps the most scary possibility is that GMO plants might be associated with bee colony collapse. If bees are unable to cope with the pollen from GMO plants then a diabetes epidemic is a very minor problem. Perhaps it isn't the GMO plants, perhaps it's a chemical required by those plants, or perhaps there's no connection at all. We should KNOW, is the point. There is also the problem that the GMOs are actually causing some problems to become worse, as in what has happened with the corn borer. It has already developed a degree of immunity to the poisons embedded in the genetic material so now scientists are scrambling to find a more lethal poison to regain control. That's the path we have taken with antibiotics and it has not been a particularly successful path to follow. The main problems I see with GMOs :We are allowing GMOs to become the basis of food production without a backup in case an unsuspected weakness suddenly shows up, such as the blight which caused the potato famine in Ireland because almost all the potatoes grown were genetically similar and they all happened to be susceptible. We know as they are at present, GMOs are not sustainable over time because of their heavy reliance on chemical fertilizers etc. We simply don't know enough about what if anything they are doing to us and/or the environment over time. The predatory and thuggish behaviour of the companies, Monsanto in particular, is doing their best not only to obstruct any effort to find out the truth but to restrict options to reverse things if any or all GMOs turn out to be a disaster. It's not science, it's lobbying, marketing and media manipulation that got them where they are.

That idea is precisely what Monsanto works tirelessly to promote and they have the funds to do so. Yet- why are they so adamantly opposed to letting independent scientists do long term studies on their products? Why are people like Dr. Vandana Shiva, eminently qualified AND experienced with what happened over a number of years when large tracts of land were transferred into GMO crops, still voices in the wilderness? Why have some scientists who worked for Monsanto for a number of years, quit saying they could no longer in good conscience continue? Most products destined for market for internal use are required to be demonstrably safe before they are released. GMO foods have this reversed..it appears to be the responsibility of others to prove they aren't. How and why should this be the case? Most of all, why, when the possible ramifications of GMO seeds could be devastating, are they being given carte blanche to preempt the world's food supply WITHOUT any independent science to support the technology? We don't allow drugs for pimples onto the market without scientific studies but our food supply isn't important? If GMO products were so wonderful and had no downsides then surely farmers would embrace them without duress. They've had no problem with hybrid seed. If people have to be starved, threatened, bullied and legislated into GMO seed then of course people who watch this wonder why. I listened to an interview the other day with a man who supposedly had seen the light and gone over to supporting GMO products. He offered nothing more than the unbelievably arrogant opinion that anyone who was concerned about them was basically an anti science Neanderthal deliberately ignoring the evidence. He had nothing to offer as to exactly what the science or evidence was he was talking about, but did a sort of verbal wave of the hand suggesting anyone who wasn't a mentally deficient yahoo would know. Unfortunately the interviewer apparently had no background in the topic so he couldn't (or didn't) challenge him at all about exactly what science he was referring to so the interview was extraordinarilly frustrating to listen to. As far as people thinking science is unimportant, I wish politicians cared (a lot) more about it.

The reason for at least some of the anti science paranoia is because too many times it has turned up that science is not actually being presented, but a selection of biased results. So how are people to trust they are getting the whole story? There are probably hundreds of examples (TED Talk Dr. Ben Goldacre) in the area of prescription drugs alone. To belabor a point, Monsanto has never run any tests (that anyone can access at least) on the safety of GMO foods for longer than 90 days. When independent scientists ran one for longer and found massive health issues occurring from cancers on down, they were subjected to a massive attack on their competence and protocol, but nothing whatsoever in terms of alternate studies with different (and safer) results. Science is too often becoming a sort of commercial viability issue which is touted if things work out and selectively ignored if not, it has little or nothing to do with the pursuit of knowledge. More and more Government research agencies are being replaced by commercial outfits and it's only reasonable to assume they are not disinterested parties. The controversy on climate change illustrates how a scientist can select a theory and find other scientists to support it energetically, while others equally energetically dispute everything about it. So how can people expect non scientists to take science seriously when it appears that science is often a bandwagon that some scientists leap onto and other scientists mock? How are non scientists supposed to make a decision about which to believe? It turns science too often into a sort of popularity contest and it isn't surprising that a whole lot of people say "a pox on science, those guys can't even make up their minds what's what, or if they do know they wont tell us, so what's the point?"

You must have been quite pleased to hear her comment :) Someone once said that anyone who was rich enough could create their own reality, example given being Howard Hughes. Perhaps therein lies the real problem of the growing inequality between the super rich and the rest of us. Eventually the world becomes their fantasy and they see no reason why everything/one should not behave as they would wish..a sort of King Canute syndrome.

According to the interviews I've heard about this, generally not much changes after each of these disasters. After the one before this where people were trapped in a burning building apparently the only change was a law saying you couldn't lock people in the workplace. Apparently the incidence of child labour has gone slightly down but otherwise conditions are generally still appalling and every time something is done to correct things the business owners find a way around it. There also isn't any compensation for families either as even if anything is designated they seldom if ever get it. Apparently some western businesses have been inspecting the business locations of the companies they do business with directly, but then those businesses subcontracted the orders out and THOSE businesses are NOT inspected as the western companies don't even know about them. Mike: as far as I know, the day before the building collapsed, the workers were ordered out of the building but the next day the owner told them the building was safe and they had to go back to work. Since even with working up to 16 hours a day, many of them are barely able to feed their families, they really had no choice. This is the sort of thing unbridled free enterprise spawns with the ethically challenged.

On the news today there was a story about Australia considering opening shipping lanes across the Great Barrier Reef to companies planning to ship uranium, coal etc. Apparently this is prompting consideration of designating it an Endangered World Heritage Site. Australia is not a third world economy and should behave better than this. Though I could (and do) say the same of Canada and the quest for unfettered development of the tar sands and oil pipelines crossing vulnerable ecological areas. Among other things. I just had hopes that no other western country had a government so mindnumbingly focussed on getting a dollar no matter it costs, as we do.

I've never used a bread machine but find that it is easier and faster to mix it by hand than to use a mixer, though admittedly messier. The one essential I wouldn't be without is a plastic scraper to scrape up the dough, otherwise it IS a pain. Robin Hood flour used to give them away but they're harder to come by now. What really makes a difference is the flour. If you get the chance to try some RED FIFE wheat flour go for it. Hard to find as it is a heritage wheat but really worth it, the flavour is unbelievably good. I wouldn't have believed it 'til I tried it.

You don't have to have either a dutch oven or pizza stone to get the texture. If you want to bother, you can mist the loaf from time to time while it's baking and/or (easier) as Helene suggested, put a pan of water on the lowest shelf of the oven. It isn't essential for most bread though. Most bakeries don't do this, some specializing in some types of french bread have special fittings in the ovens to push steam in. I don't know that you will ever get precisely the same flavour bread you would get in France anyway because the flours are different, and the water makes a difference as well. You can make very good bread without it though. Just make sure that it doesn't dry out while rising.. bakeries do use low levels of steam in something called a proofer to help the yeast breads rise before it goes into the ovens, also not necessary for an excellent loaf at home. It looks to me as though the top is baking before the bottom is done. You might try lowering the oven temp a bit, try 400 degrees. Use a low rack in the oven. You have quite a lot of salt in the recipe and salt retards rising, so make sure the loaf is risen properly before you bake it. Length of time out of the fridge has little to do with it. Actually I would knead the bread lightly when it was about half risen after it came out the fridge just to make sure the dough had an even temperature throughout and wasn't cold on the bottom where the air can't warm it as it can the dough just covered by saran or a cloth or whatever you use.Actually that might be the source of your problems right there. If you are keeping it in a cast iron pan to raise it,when it comes out of the fridge I would get it out of there and into a stainless steel or warmed glass/ ceramic bowl. Even then I would knead it just a bit after a while to make sure it was warmed evenly. Not much kneading.. half a minute or so should do it. Kneading a whole lot isn't necessary.Once you've got the gluten developed with the first mixing/kneading if you want a slightly finer grained/flavoured loaf just let it rise and knock it down a couple of times before you make it up for the pan and final rising. I don't usually bother. It also likely wouldn't do too much for this type of bread which has had a chance to develop full flavour in the fridge.Too much kneading can also cause problems but bread is usually pretty forgiving.

It has nothing to do with you owning a cell phone or not. It has to do with some other people who DO own smartphones being able to get your credit card and other information from cards safely tucked away in the wallet in your pocket, while they are still standing possibly a few feet away. if you have concerns about this then both Vampyr and jwccslic had suggestions about how to prevent anyone from being able to do this with your info.

Years ago we spent some time in Connecticut as house parents in a nation wide program which was supposedly intended to help highly intelligent kids from disadvantaged backgrounds to get into and succeed in university. Out of the 10 or so kids, only 3 of them fit the criteria. Of the others, one was the son of a US colonel and a couple could barely read ..about primary school level..(these were kids in the last two years of high school)..who had been sponsored because (as the letter in one file said) "he's a really nice kid and this will likely be the only chance to see anything of the world outside (X)." The rest were there because they would enhance the high school basketball and football teams. It was a sad example of a program set up with possibly the best intentions in the world but which cost a great deal of money and had little real value for any except perhaps two of the kids. Maybe that's enough to make it worthwhile, but something so simple as better screening would have made it so much more useful. Still, as it was, either they didn't have any other applicants or the hosting school board didn't approve them as it was supposed to be a larger group. Aside from anything else, waiting until a kid is in grade 11 or 12 to do something about a disadvantaged background seems questionable. It was interesting that most of the kids were clearly cynical about the whole business, especially the ones who knew they were there for the sports programs.

Just updating the latest figures. How far can the gap stretch before something tears?

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/24-3

A couple of things about this: 1) the Snopes link says that it is partially true and the date on that is 2009. There've been a lot of advances in computer technology since then. Apps were just beginning to get seriously underway about then. Smart phones can do a lot now that phones didn't or couldn't do then. The second thing was that the CBC said that they tried it themselves and were successful in buying something with credit card info they had read in a co worker's pocket in their wallet, it wasn't just a rumor.

thanks Apparently it's identity theft which is more of a concern than money issues as credit card charges are usually taken care of by the banks, but passports, driver's licenses or other chipped i.d. is another story. It's getting to be a crazy world.

Well nobody showed up either week so I suppose that's that. If someone else wants to try then let me know if I can help.

what odds it's somebody's thesis? Did you notice, proudly sponsored by the University of Twente?

On the CBC today there was a story about an app, (they used it on a samsung phone) readilly available to anyone, that can read credit cards through wallets and fabric if they are within a short distance,( such as in a checkout line)? It could also read such things as passport information and some new driver's licences which have that sort of chip in them. They said they contacted Google, who apparently didn't think it would be a problem. Visa and Mastercard told them that they have redesigned the safety features in their cards to prevent this, but a) the CBC people supposedly were successful in their trials and b) those upgraded designs don't apply to interact cards. The CBC suggested that people keep credit cards and such in a protective sleeve but did NOT say what sort of material that might be made up of, which wasn't exactly helpful. Anyone know anything more about this? I suppose it might help in the redistribution of wealth, at least for a while, perhaps this should have been in the inequality thread. Somebody has been a busy entrepeneur to develop such an app :ph34r:

Mike, you speak sometimes of the school system in Chicago..you might find this interesting. Rutherford Institute Sues Chicago School After Teacher Is Suspended, Accused of Weapons Possession for Lesson on Wrenches, Pliers https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/on_the_front_lines/rutherford_institute_sues_chicago_school_after_teacher_is_suspended_accused

They don't have pressure cookers in Monaco?

If innocent until proven guilty is really in force there may be some problems down the pike as in the news conference they were saying things like, "the citizens of Boston can breathe a sigh of relief now." There wasn't a shred of suggestion that the kid is innocent or even that someone else might have been involved. They're likely right but it sounded to me like such comments might make for some legal arguments about fair trials and so forth. Aside from that, kudos to the law enforcement people. They did a great job. Between them and the terrific job the hospitals and first responders did, Boston has acquitted itself extremely well and should be proud.

Ages ago was living in Chicago and looking out the kitchen window into the back yard. A man came pounding down the alley, vaulted the fence, dashed alongside the house onto the front walk and disappeared down the street. A moment later two policemen followed him, running for all they were worth. Since nobody tried to come into the house it was all sort of entertaining. We never did find out what it was all about. The situation in Boston is very different though.

One of the things, Mike, that you need to consider is what sorts of risks people might turn to who are in unstable and difficult situations. If they can't see any way within the system to overcome their problems they might decide they had nothing much to lose is they did get caught if they bought a gun and robbed a gas station or mugged someone or worse. That's the sort of risk I would prefer we don't push people to take. Going back to the thread topic, I suspect that there is a growing number of people, not just in the States, who are being nudged ever closer to that point.