I've been reading a lot of books about canning, salting, pickling, root cellars, and preservation of food in general. One thing I find fascinating and disturbing is that the methods described do not work any more. Methods of preservation that worked fifty years ago are no longer viable — procedures that would in the past keep something fresh for the winter now sees the food rotten within the week. The old timers interviewed wrote it off as the weather, but I think it's more than that.
As you know, food these days, meats especially, are injected with an incredible amount of antibiotics because the conditions we create food in are so terrible these days. The end result of that is that food pathogens are incredibly strong and can resist almost everything nature can throw at it (since they've had to adapt to our high-power drugs)… so these days everything rots faster than fifty years ago.
Along those same lines, every once in a while people lecture me about how I can't be healthy as a vegan because I'm not getting B12 or Omega-3 fatty acids and so on, telling me that I have to eat animals to get that since humans can't “create” them… The punch line to that is that animals can't create them either. For example, fish get the Omega-3 fatty acids by eating algae. The reason I mention this is that on factory farms (and fish farms), the animals don't eat the source plants any more than meat-eater humans do, and thus don't have those vitamins and acids in their flesh, making them useless to humans.
Ah, the modern world. We're so proud of this luxurious monstrosity we've created, but it will eventually kill most of the life on this planet. Hopefully the next species to achieve market dominance manages their assets a little better than we did.
Q: What's that?
A: It's my foot.
Q: No, what's that?
A: I got frostbite.
Q: I know Canada's cold, but how did you catch
frostbite in the summer?
First person to guess wins nothing but street cred. Well, not street cred, but some kind of cred.
Update: PistPunk got it right (first) when he guessed canned air.
As a point of trivia, you may find it interesting to know that the “suicide bomber” has a longer history in Jewish attacks on Muslims than the other way around, even though Islamic bombers is what we hear about most these days. Christians also used suicide bombs against Muslims (the Knights Templar loaded their own ships with bombs and crashed into Muslim enemies during the Crusades). The Japanese did it during WWII, and the Tamil Tigers, the Viet Minh, the Kurds, as well as other groups in Russia, India, all over Africa, Argentina, Columbia, and Panama have all used suicide bombers. Most of the “martyrs” have been well off and educated, a majority holding university degrees.
Anyway, I was reading this article about right-wing Jewish extremists planning to fly a plane filled with explosives into Temple Mount and destroying the Al-Aqsa mosque or the Golden Dome shrine and killing many in the process. Ignoring the part about “what a fucked up world we live in”, I thought though that the advertisements on the article were somewhat ironic:
Don't like the idea of suicide bombing? Well,
Americans for Peace Now — End This Game Now! On the other hand, maybe you do like the idea. In that case, you can fly with the good folks at the
Tehilim Hotline. Someone needs to write a better contextual ad placement engine I think, that determines not only subject matter, but positive/negative context.
PS. If you want real news, the 9/11 report is BS.
Any of you that have flown regularly including recently know that security is a non-issue and that it would be easy to bring stuff onto a plane and seize control of it. Here's some more on the two stories below. I really think we should start allowing pilots to be armed.
Of course, I think everyone should be armed.
PS. If you're rather read the truth, click here.
A lot of people have been forwarding me these two links:
- Terror in the Skies, Again? – Eye witness report of what appears to be a terrorist “dry run” for future attacks… one of many.
- Part II: Terror in the Skies, Again? – More information, and quotes from pilots (“Folks, I am a Captain with a major airline. I was very involved with the Arming Pilots effort. Your reprint of this airborne event is not a singular nor isolated experience. The terrorists are probing us all the time.”)
Fear mongering, or warning?
Windows Server Question – If I want to execute .exe files as online scripts, but they're giving me a 404 error (even though they are there, and other non-exe files work fine), what permissions do I need to change and how? [Thanks to CT for fixing my problem].
