Monday, January 9, 2012

The Silent War

The Silent War

What happens if a cardealer wittingly sells a car with damaged breaklines?
If cought high penalty or even jail.

What happens if a food factory wittingly sells contaminated food?
If cought high penalty or even jail.

What happens if a company wittingly sells high poisonous insecticides?
Not much. 'Everyone knows' how to use them.
What does that company when their product because of many casualties is banned in one
contry? They ship it to the next, where it is not jet banned. (Velsicol: Phosvel banned in Columbia, shipment goes to El Salvador)
Same Story: Parathion (E605) banned all over Europe is one of the most dangerous insecti-
cides all over the world. 80% of all lethal intoxications because of this in Central America.
It is still in use there. Where comes our food from?
What happens? Nothing, except some deaths.

Leptophos is similar toxic. Not allowed in the USA. But about $ 4 Mill to ship it to about 50
other countries. Declared as AID!!

And finally: There is a country where the government is cleening all the government buildings from asbestos because it is so dangerous and carcinogen. No one in this importend establishment wants to work in a dangerous environment. But the same government insists on keeping the asbestos mines alive and sells that dangerous stuff to
other countries. (They should know how to use it)
You know that country?
What happens?
Nothing!
Is that a new kind of war? A silent one?


Sunday, January 8, 2012

Remember - Live longer

I got a nice Christmas Greeting from my niece in Oregon: picture of her family and a report or summery of the last year, all the events important to her and the family.
That made me thinking about remembering what happened the last year when you just enter the next one.
Every year of our life is in a kind of box in our brain. If you don't keep track of it, may be in writing or at least in a pile of pictures, then that box is empty. 
See the impression, that a year made on you as a more or less long stretch of a line. A well remembered year would be a long stretch and an other one with no events  kept in mind would be a very short one and so on. 
And there are some years or times that you try to cut out of your life, that shortens the length of that line. 
But watch that line in retrospective: that is your life! If you are able to remember as much as possible, or call it back by reading your notes as my niece does it or looking at old pictures and also face some bad years, that makes your life-line longer.
Than you can say: I had a long history, a long life with so many events worth to remember.
Happy New Year to every one! 
And try to keep your 'life-line' as long as possible! 

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Kill the Horses!

Saturday, March 26th there was a story about the wild horses that live in the Foothills in Alberta. Like everywhere there are two groups of people: the one who protect them and the others, who want them to be 'extinguished'. Thats what the 'extinguisher' said. His arguments 'they have never been here, they don't belong to this country and so on'. He seems to be one of those who shoot and than think or even avoid thinking at all.
The American continent is the birth place of horses. They lived here since 60 million years - slowly evolving from rabbit like creatures to there modern shape - until they were extinguished about 8000 years ago because of climate change and being hunted by humans. Luckily before that there was a migration of early horses over the land bridge to Asia, to Europe and Africa. In the 15th century horses were reintroduced by Spaniards and later on brought to northern regions by the Comanche people.
 When did this 'Extinguisher' arrive in Alberta? I am sure that was quiet late.
How did his ancestors arrive in Alberta? Probably with the help of horses, or did they walk from New York or Halifax to Alberta?
Lucky guy:  horses don't shoot! But some people need some 'thing' to shoot at!
         There was an other argument against these horses: they eat the grass down to the root and kill the grass lands. This happens only when horses are kept in a small area where they cannot move on to other feeding grounds. Watch a horse feeding on grass: it takes the upper third of a lump of grass with his lips, rips it off and moves on. Thats the way, nature keeps them all alive. Horses, zebras and all the animals that relay on grass. Otherwise none of them would survive thousands and millions of years. If there is not enough food, then they go deeper to the grass root.
So what's this all about? Every year we extinguish so many animals and plants that some day our descendants have to show their kids in a book how a bird or a horse looked like. I know, some people would like to see a deer, where one of these horses is feeding on the grass now because they can shoot the deer and killing the horses is not allowed in Alberta. And I hope the latter will not change!

Monday, January 31, 2011

Myth about Sugar

Using brown sugar seems to be 'in' at time. There are storys about the 'bleached' white sugar. "They use chloric acid and even worse mercury to bleach the sugar, don't eat the white sugar!"
Interestingly, every one who is warning me because of my white sugar has a straight  answer when I ask them 'why?' But they don't know it.
It is with all these rumors: many believers and no  knowledge.
And then there is Cane and Beet Sugar. Cane is best, no Beet is best.
In fact: sugar is sugar. Sugar is a specific chemical substance. It is the main energy source for nearly every living. Plants produce sugar using CO2, water and sun light. (This is a short description)
Cane, sugar beet and sugar palm all have the same so called 'Disacharid', that is the sugar that we use. And most interesting: clean sugar after crystallizing is naturally white! You can't make it whiter!
So what is brown sugar? It is nothing else than 'harvested sugar' still mixed with soil from the area where it came from. It is not clean sugar. The process of cleaning takes a lot of time. The solved sugar in the water-dirt-sugar solution has to crystallize. For this process is essential a special sort of lime stone. That means producing white sugar takes time and is costly.
Most countries now use beet sugar, especially in the northern hemisphere because the 'modern' sugar beet now contains up to 35% of sugar compared to 2 to 3% of the origin sugar beet and it grows even in colder regions.
The sometimes different taste of brown sugars comes from the soil that you eat. For example the Caribbean soil is different from soil in Europe or North America.
It makes more money to sell not totally cleaned sugar then the white one. And You buy it and use more of it to get your sweetness. But there is one advantage in the brown sugar: with the soil you get some minerals. Whether this is worth the higher price per gram clean sugar, I don't know.

So, why these rumors? Many of them come from 'naturalists' spreading them without knowing the facts. Some of them come from self-appointed healers. When you go to a healer you are eager to hear some bad things in your live, environment or your habits, foods and so on. To not disappointing you, they have an answer. Doesn't matter whether it's true or not. You are happy, now you know what was wrong!
It doesn't take long and they offer you a just discovered secret about a special plant from Africa or Asia that will take all the mercury and other poison out of your body that you got from the dangerous white sugar.
 For sweetening take what you want, it doesn't matter, just compare the price and do the math.
And first of all: don't listen to rumors without questioning them.
Have a sweet coffee!

Saturday, December 4, 2010

New Form of Life

You heard about the NASA conference, may be you watched it and later on all the comments in the news. All the news showed disappointment,some of them found the conference a bit ridiculously. A bacterium, not a real alien!
I think, that was a very important discovery. We always assume to be the 'top invention' of the universe. So all the more or less intelligent forms of alien life has to be similar to us. See all the science fiction movies (I like them)
But this bacterium shows us that nature has different ways to build living cells. So the life here on earth is only one of millions of different ways to do that.
How often are there mistakes in growing cells. And may be after many attempt one of those 'mistakes' is the one that has a better chance to survive then the ancestors.
Are we one of those 'mistakes'? Alga and later on plants have been long before us on earth. The chlorophyll (what makes a leaf green) is there metabolism mediator. This molecule has in it's center one magnesium atom.
Plants produce oxygen. When there was enough oxygen in the atmosphere some thing happened similar to the change in that bacterium: the magnesium atom was replaced with an iron atom. The basic 'bricks' to build chlorophyll and our hemoglobin are the same. But now that basic substance for all metabolism was able to bind oxygen instead  of CO2. A much more efficient metabolism was developing.
There must be endless tries to change cells. And suddenly there is a new form to outlive the old one.
That takes millions of tries and when the environment is right, there is a success. Our life here on earth is to short to overlook failure and success of these tries. That means we are not the end of the line.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

An extra, has to do with human nature

What a battle right now in the USA! I am not a politician, neither tied up to any party, but used to have my own thoughts.
This hick-hack there has to do with nature too: with human nature, especially with greed. You know Dagobert Duck, that guy sitting on a pile of gold and panicked by the idea one piece got lost.
Let's do the math. Assume the upper 2% get there tax cut. What will they do? Buy some (more) diamonds, another property, may be an island in the Caribbean or a suite in Dubai. Probably they will buy some more stocks to make more money. Or they keep it like Dagobert Duck.
On the other hand, let's give hundred dollar every month to let's say to ten million of now unemployed workers, to those who lost their job because of the Wall Street scandal. That makes one billion a month, twelve billion a year, less then the tax cut for the upper two percent. Important is, what these people will do with that extra money. They will spend it, right there, where it came from: in the US. They pay their bills, their mortgage or even the things they have already charged their cards with.
That makes twelve billion pumped in to the economy every year. Business can recover, hire some people, companies will grow. And who makes the money out of it? Of course the upper two percent with their stocks and investments.
You think I am a communist? Oh no, there will always be some rich and some poor people. That's human nature.
But right now the only thing is to get the economy going again. Both sides are important. There must be some one who can invest, but there must be some one who does the work, the real work that makes the money. No one can eat gold or paper (stocks). If there are fewer and fewer people that do the basic work the 'uppers' have to come down and have to plant there own potatoes. Do they know, where potatoes come from?