tagged w/ The Great Change
-
The U.S. Geological Survey said the 3.4-magnitude quake hit at 7:42 p.m. near the Venice boardwalk, a popular recreation spot for tourists and residentsThe U.S. Geological Survey said the 3.4-magnitude quake hit at 7:42 p.m. near the... more
-
-
Cannabis has been reclassified as a Class B drug, meaning that from today, the maximum sentence for possession in the UK rises to two to five years. The change follows a controversial decision by the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith to ignore independent medical research that dissociate the drug from mental illnesses and recommendations to keep it as a Class C. Now in the eyes of the law, weed is as bad as amphetamines and barbiturates.Cannabis has been reclassified as a Class B drug, meaning that from today, the maximum... more
-
-
For a nation that loves its bratwurst and schnitzel, the message is not a welcome one. Germans have been urged to rethink their meat-eating habits if they want to help the planet.
Germany's federal environment agency has issued a strong advisory for people to return to prewar norms of eating meat only on special occasions and otherwise to model their diet on that of Mediterranean countries.
Germans are among the highest meat consumers in Europe, obtaining around 39% of their total calorie intake from meat and meat products, compared with 25% in Italy.
"We must rethink our high meat consumption," said Andreas Troge, president of the UBA, the government's advisory body on environmental issues...
"It hardly means sacrificing quality of life," said Troge. "I don't believe that the Italians are particularly unhappier than us as a result [of eating less meat]."
Hilmar Steppat, of Germany's vegetarian association, VeBu, welcomed the move, saying: "It's good to see politicians are finally waking up to the fact that the amount of meat we eat is unsustainable." He added that although the number of vegetarians had increased from 0.4% in 1983 to around 10% today, Germans were still very big consumers of meat.
Troge cautioned that not only is meat production energy intensive, the methane gas emitted by cattle and the nitrous oxide produced by their dung, which farmers often leave in the fields from where it enters the atmosphere, also harms the environment.
Findings by the World Wildlife Fund also supports the claim that meat production is environmentally damaging. In its recent Living Planet report it said that a single kilogramme of beef requires 16,000 litres of water, taking into account a three-year lifespan for a cow, the grain it eats in its lifetime, and the water it drinks.
According to VeBu, young women are particularly motivated by environmental concerns to give up meat.
Meat production accounts for nearly a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates, though other experts believe that figure is too high.
In the UK food consumed by people accounts for nearly a fifth of national emissions, and meat and dairy products for just over half that, finds the Food Climate Research Network.
The high impact derives from the farmstock fodder grown with chemicals, transport fuels, and the potent greenhouse gas methane from belching cattle and sheep. The government estimates that, kilo-for-kilo, compared with bread, emissions linked to poultry farming are more than four times as high, to pork six times as high, and to beef and lamb 16 times. Besides this, tropical forest is cleared to allow feed-crops, also a source of emissions.
Compassion in World Farming says halving meat-eating would be more effective than halving transport use.
What's good for the Germans is good for the rest of the meat eating World, looks like more and more countries are seeing the connection between a meat diet and methane output that's contributing to greenhouse gases. So how about it USA, China, India, UK?For a nation that loves its bratwurst and schnitzel, the message is not a welcome one.... more
-
-
SAN FRANCISCO - Some of the nation's largest farms plan to cut back on planting this spring over concerns that federal water supplies will dry up as officials deal with the drought plaguing California.
Farmers in the Central Valley said Thursday they would forego planting thousands of acres of water-thirsty canning tomatoes and already have started slashing acreage for lettuce and melons.
As growers in Fresno and Kings counties prepared to sow their dry fields with tomato seeds this week, the giant water district that supplies the irrigation for their sprinklers warned them to think again.SAN FRANCISCO - Some of the nation's largest farms plan to cut back on planting... more
-
-
jkw077
-
added this
-
3 years ago
- |
-
A thick photochemical smog comprised of respirable suspended particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide hangs thick over the Causeway Bay district of Hong Kong, 22 January 2009
Pilot John Horwood says the worse part about flying into Hong Kong is the suffocating, two-mile-thick blanket of pollution that hovers between 15 and 18,000 feet. "The whole cockpit fills with an acrid smell," says Horwood, who started noticing the cloud in 1997. "Each year it just gets worse and worse." What comprises this nuisance — a sprawling high-altitude mass of air pollution that stretches from the Arabian peninsula to the western Pacific Ocean — has long captured the curiosity of scientists. A report released in the Jan. 23 issue of Science breathes fresh air into that ongoing study, confirming that the mass, nicknamed the 'Brown Cloud' but comprised of several small, local clouds, is soot from human burning of wood, dung and crop residue, as well as industrial processes and traffic pollution.A thick photochemical smog comprised of respirable suspended particulate matter and... more
-
-
jkw077
-
added this
-
3 years ago
- |
-
As of last night, a US marshall, 2 state police and a county police are all over Mr. Hixon's area, serving notices to farmers that they are being sued by Monsanto. They arrive in pairs, with two cars parked a quarter mile and half mile down the road. They've served 3 so far and said "a bunch more are coming." No telling how many will be served since Hixon has between 200-400 farmers he cleans seeds for and these farmers have been repeatedly threatened by Monsanto thugs for the last two months, getting "visits," letters, and calls daily.
Farmers report that a Monsanto investigator laughed that they were doing "rural cleansing."
Steve Hixon is a seed cleaner in southern Illinois. He has equipment that takes the plant materials and "cleans" it so that the seeds are separated out and can be given back to farmers to save for the next season. It's a mechanized step up from farmers hand picking seeds off their own plants, which, with hundreds of acres - or even 10 - would not be easy to do.
Mr. Hixon has the non-distinction of being attacked by Monsanto. He is far from alone. Monsanto has been picking off seed cleaners across the Midwest, having already done its thuggish thing in Pilot Grove, Missouri, and in Indiana, attacking Maurice Parr, destroying business for all of them.
Mr. Parr reports that when he was sued, the first thing out of the judge said was how "honored to have a fine company like Monsanto in my courtroom."
"Shortly after someone broke into Mr. Hixon's office and he found his account book on his truck seat where he would never have left it, evey one of his remotely located and very scattered customers had three men (described as goons with "no necks") arrived at each farm, going out onto it without permission ... Mr. Hixon and state police who were called in, believe a GPS tracking device may have been put on Mr. Hixon's equipment." Click here.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Raids-on-Seeds-life-itsel-by-Linn-Cohen-Cole-081215-45.html
In 2002, when Mr. Hixon was at the state legislature for a meeting, he said he told a Monsanto representative there, "If you guys want to take over the seed industry so bad, you ought to buy guys like me out." The Monsanto agent is supposed to have responded "We'd rather put you out of business, it's more fun that way."
..."Of all of Monsanto, DuPont and Dow's agricultural products, genetically engineered food crops might appear to be the least tainted with immediate wartime origins. But this technology emerged from a period when the future of chemical agriculture appeared very much in doubt. With the rapid expansion of the agrochemical industry during the post-World War II era, these companies and their European counterparts had established a profound degree of control over agricultural practices."
But as public pressure and the weight of scientific evidence curtailed the use of DDT and many other chlorinated pesticides in the 1970s, executives and corporate scientists saw the potential for limitless advances -- and ever-expanding marketing potential -- in the incorporation of technological advances into the genetics of seeds. During the 1990s, Monsanto alone spent nearly $8 billion acquiring leading commercial seed suppliers in the United States and internationally; DuPont and others quickly followed suit, leading to today's widespread proliferation of genetically engineered food crops."
Today, in Illinois, our federal agents and police, working on behalf of Monsanto, are terrorizing ... whom? Drug dealers? Financiers who have stolen this country blind? The people who took us to war based on lies and have profited while thousands of American and 100s of thousands of Iraqi have died? No. Our tax dollars are being used to turn our marshals and police into Monsanto agents to terrorize our disappearing farmers.
Terror is palpable in rural America. It defines American farming communities now.As of last night, a US marshall, 2 state police and a county police are all over Mr.... more
-
-
"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about... how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it... I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality."
His enthusiasm was met with much applause from the audience gathered at the UN's east Manhattan conference hall on 11 September for an international symposium called Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness. Earlier Mario Beauregard, a researcher in neuroscience at the University of Montreal, Canada, and co-author of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul, told the audience that the "battle" between "maverick" scientists like himself and those who "believe the mind is what the brain does" is a "cultural war".
Schwartz and Beauregard are part of a growing "non-material neuroscience" movement. They are attempting to resurrect Cartesian dualism - the idea that brain and mind are two fundamentally different kinds of things, material and immaterial - in the hope that it will make room in science both for supernatural forces and for a soul. The two have signed the "Scientific dissent from Darwinism" petition, spearheaded by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, headquarters of the intelligent design movement. ID argues that biological life is too complex to have arisen through evolution.
In August, the Discovery Institute ran its 2008 Insider's Briefing on Intelligent Design, at which Schwartz and Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon at Stony Brook University in New York, were invited to speak. When two of the five main speakers at an ID meeting are neuroscientists, something is up. Could the next battleground in the ID movement's war on science be the brain?
Well, the movement certainly seems to hope that the study of consciousness will turn out to be "Darwinism's grave", as Denyse O'Leary, co-author with Beauregard of The Spiritual Brain, put it. According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one.
Now the institute is funding research into "non-material neuroscience". One recipient of its cash is Angus Menuge, a philosophy professor at Concordia University, Wisconsin, a Christian college, who testified in favour of teaching ID in state-funded high-schools at the 2005 "evolution hearings" in Kansas. Using a Discovery Institute grant, Menuge wrote Agents Under Fire, in which he argued that human cognitive capacities "require some non-natural explanation".
In June, James Porter Moreland, a professor at the Talbot School of Theology near Los Angeles and a Discovery Institute fellow, fanned the flames with Consciousness and the Existence of God. "I've been doing a lot of thinking about consciousness," he writes, "and how it might contribute to evidence for the existence of God in light of metaphysical naturalism's failure to provide a helpful explanation." Non-materialist neuroscience provided him with this helpful explanation: since God "is" consciousness, "the theist has no need to explain how consciousness can come from materials bereft of it. Consciousness is there from the beginning."
See link above for rest of article.
"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz,... more
-
-
Over the last century philosophers, archaeoastronomers, and historians of ancient knowledge and wisdom have been deciphering ancient languages, the origins of ancient temples, and the mythology of ancient civilizations to find the source of inspiration and knowledge for the ingenious contributions these ancient civilizations have left on the earth. Past civilizations are now being newly re-discovered and interpreted for those of us who want to know of our past, our evolution as a species, and the destiny of humanity.
Unfortunately, much of the modern world has completely ignored the knowledge obtained by ancient civilizations, or have not given them any intellectual merit, thus creating a global culture, for the most part, steeped in secular and materialistic pursuits. The time has arrived when our local Milky Way galaxy is interacting with our local star system and the most dramatic changes ever to impact on human destiny are now taking place. Humanity is currently being transformed beyond anything ever imagined. Galactic Alignment, a book by John Major Jenkins, prepares us for this transformation. Over the last century philosophers, archaeoastronomers, and historians of ancient... more
-
-
jkw077
-
added this
-
3 years ago
- |
-
Forests in the Pacific Northwest are dying twice as fast as they were 17 years ago, and scientists blame warming temperatures for the trend, according to a new study.
The study, to be released Friday in the journal Science, is the first large-scale analysis of environmental changes as contributing factors in the mortality of coniferous forests.
The data for this research was gathered by generations of scientists over a 50-year period at multiple sites in Oregon, Washington, California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and southwestern British Columbia. Seventy-six forest plots, all more than 200 years old, were monitored by scientists doing some of the most rudimentary research -- counting trees.Forests in the Pacific Northwest are dying twice as fast as they were 17 years ago,... more
-
-
jkw077
-
added this
-
3 years ago
- |
-
There is much being said about December 21, 2012 as the time when the world will end. I do not agree with this summation. I choose to believe it will be a time of great change bringing us to a new age. An age when materialism and the years we lost our way in our relationship with the natural world will give way to a more natural life. A time when we use the wisdom of those that came before us with the science of today to bring forth an age when humanity returns to its roots. As we see now events worldwide are leading up to that change. And it was not only the Mayans who foretold of these impending catastrophes leading up to a new awakening.
Nostradamus wrote many quatrains about what he envisioned for humans in these times. Regardless of what you may or may not believe about him or his predictions, for me they hold this warning as do the Mayan predictions: we as a civilization are now at a crossroads in a transformational period of consciousness. We are at the road that forks in two directions. We have two choices. We either can continue on the path we are on and face self destruction of our civilization as so many before us that did not heed the signs; or we heed the past, make preparations, change our ways, and see that new age of reformation.
Nothing about the future is written in stone. We as humans have always had a choice in our destiny. It is the choices we have made that have brought us to this point. I believe the years now leading up to 2012 will be ones of great turmoil and perhaps even darkness but how we take that, learn from it, and prepare for the future will determine either our ascension into saving ourselves, or our descension into the abyss. This is a unique time to live in and we are now the defining generation of a new age.
And while we cannot control natural occurences, we can limit our impact on this planet in order to help maintain its balance. Respect for this planet has never been more needed than it is now. It is that respect or lack of it that will ultimately decide our fate.
So what do you believe? Doomsday coming, or a chance to redeem mankind? The choice is ours.There is much being said about December 21, 2012 as the time when the world will end.... more
-
-
According to the National Nanotechnology Initiative, "The worldwide need for nanotechnology workers is expected to reach 2 million by 2015."According to the National Nanotechnology Initiative, "The worldwide need for... more
-
-
PMT is a series of short animated films presenting new ideas about global consciousness and techniques for social and ecological transformation. Our first episode, "Towards 2012," introduces the project, explaining concepts from the best-selling book, "2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl" (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006) by Daniel Pinchbeck, in the author's own voice. Future segments will focus on shamanism, sustainability, alternative energy systems, the Mayan Calendar, quantum physics and synchronicity, human sexuality and a host of other subjects.PMT is a series of short animated films presenting new ideas about global... more
-
-
The acceleration of the Great Change into the new age has already begun....
-
-
jkw077
-
added this
-
3 years ago
- |
-
So, when is this country going to get serious about capping GHG emissions? Now that we have a new president, just how far up on the priority list is it, and will it be enough?So, when is this country going to get serious about capping GHG emissions? Now that we... more
-
-
Exodus 16:14-24 indicates that MANNA was definitely a MUSHROOM. It was a small round thing in the morning dew, it bred larva, and would melt to mush if not dried.
Fly's eggs cause larvae/worms in mushrooms. Daniel 5:3-5 with Exodus 16:32 and Hebrews 9:4 indicates that the mushroom was a DRUG. Those who drank from the cup containing MANNA had visions within the hour. Psilocybin takes 30-40 minutes to induce visions.
Hebrews 9:4 makes it clear that MANNA was the most holy thing to Israelites, kept in A POT OF GOLD in the ARK OF THE COVENANT, in the MOST HOLY OF HOLYS. Psalm 78:24-25 calls MANNA FOOD OF ANGELS, just as MAYAN/INCA PRIESTS from Meso-America called it TEONANACATL FOOD OF THE GODS. Coca and Tobacco Leaves found in Pharaohs tombs suggest it was ancestors of Mayan/Inca Priests who brought MUSHROOMS to Egypt.
MANNA is an Egyptian word, not Hebrew or Aramaic, meaning: The BREAD OF GOD. This is what Moses called it in Exodus 16:15. BREAD OF GOD equals: FOOD OF GOD, equals: TEONANACATL.
John 2:6-9 indicates that Jesus made water into wine by boiling mushrooms (Mushroom-Tea), the waterpots were made of stone, not clay, (stone pots were used for cooking, clay pots used for storing water)...
These pots already contained 2-3 firkins of a substance before the pots were filled with water. A "Firkin" is an Old-English measurement meaning a fourth part. Half to three-quarters of fresh mushrooms with water makes a potent tea. Tea is the safest way to consume field mushrooms, killing dangerous bacteria like E. Coli.
In the Atharva Veda, the Hindus called this Tea SOMA. Greeks called mushroom jelly AMBROSIA. Exodus 16:14-24 indicates that MANNA was definitely a MUSHROOM. It was a small round... more
-
-
jkw077
-
added this
-
3 years ago
- |
-
-
Australia has listed the leatherback as an endangered species blaming overfishing and unsustainable harvesting of its eggs and meat.
Nine species of snails, Bornemissza's stag beetle, three types of orchids and five other plants are also upgraded to "critically endangered"Australia has listed the leatherback as an endangered species blaming overfishing and... more
-
-
Jim Hansen is the 'grandfather of climate change' and one of the world's leading climatologists. In this rare interview in New York, he explains why President Obama's administration is the last chance to avoid flooded cities, species extinction and climate catastrophe
"I have been described as the grandfather of climate change. In fact, I am just a grandfather and I do not want my grandchildren to say that grandpa understood what was happening but didn't make it clear," Hansen said last week. Hence his warning to Barack Obama, who will be inaugurated as US president on Tuesday. His four-year administration offers the world a last chance to get things right, Hansen said. If it fails, global disaster - melted sea caps, flooded cities, species extinctions and spreading deserts - awaits mankind.
"We cannot now afford to put off change any longer. We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead."
After eight years of opposing moves to combat climate change, thanks to the policies of President George Bush, the US had given itself no time for manoeuvre, he said. Only drastic, immediate change can save the day and those changes proposed by Hansen - who appeared in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and is a winner of the World Wildlife Fund's top conservation award - are certainly far-reaching. In particular, the idea of continuing with "cap-and-trade" schemes, which allow countries to trade allowances and permits for emitting carbon dioxide, must now be scrapped, he insisted. Such schemes, encouraged by the Kyoto climate treaty, were simply "weak tea" and did not work. "The United States did not sign Kyoto, yet its emissions are not that different from the countries that did sign it."
Thus plans to include carbon trading schemes in talks about future climate agreements were a desperate error, he said. "It's just greenwash. I would rather the forthcoming Copenhagen climate talks fail than we agree to a bad deal," Hansen said.Jim Hansen is the 'grandfather of climate change' and one of the... more
-
-
jkw077
-
added this
-
3 years ago
- |
