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Monday, December 30, 2002
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Timothy Wilken, MD writes: Capitalism and the Great Market are features of Neutrality. Neutrality requires unlimited resources. Humanity has had unlimited resources in our endless supply of fossil fuels. Our present economic crash now being compared to the Great Depression is the result of approaching end of fossil fuels. As of August 2001, 23 out of 44 nations [representing 99% of world oil production in 2000] have passed their production peaks. Most of humanity is unaware of this approaching crisis, but the governments of the world are aware and are now acting to control the last of the fossil fuel on the planet. This of course is the real purpose of America's coming war with Iraq. Our leaders are trying to secure control of the Iraqi oil. Saddam Hussein is threatened to set the Iraqi oil fields on fire if pressed too hard in the coming war. He did set the oil fields of Kuwait on fire in the Gulf war of 1990. Over six hundred wells burned. It took Red Adair, hundreds of millions of dollars, and over three years just to put out the fires. How many millions of gallons were burned is unknown. Recently the workers of Venezuelan oil industry have gone on strike. Prior to the strike Venezuela was exporting 3 million barrels of oil a day to the United States. Now they are exporting none. They have even started to import gasoline because the autos and trucks of their nation are running dry. This past friday oil closed at $32.72 a barrel. If things don't go well in the new Gulf war, and Hussein does successfully torch the oil fields, the price of oil could triple. (12/30/02) | |
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Alice Bailey & Djwhal Khul write: It will be through the steady, consistent and organized work of the men of goodwill throughout the world that world unity will be brought about. At present, such men are only in process of organizing and are apt to feel that the work to be done is so stupendous and the forces arrayed against them are so great that their - at present - isolated efforts are useless to break down the barriers of greed and hate with which they are confronted. They realize that there is as yet no systemized spread of the principle of goodwill which holds the solution to the world problem; they have as yet no idea of the numerical strength of those who are thinking as they do. They ask themselves the same questions which are agitating the minds of men everywhere: How can order be restored? How can there be fair distribution of the world's resources? How can the Four Freedoms become factual and not just beautiful dreams? How can true religion be resurrected and the ways of true spiritual living govern the hearts of men? How can a true prosperity be established which will be the result of unity, peace and plenty? (12/30/02) | |
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BBC News: Science -- China has closed more than 3,000 internet cafes, in what the government says is part of a national workplace safety campaign. The official Chinese news agency said the closures were a safety measure prompted by the deaths in June of 25 people in a fire at an internet cafe in Beijing. The report says nearly 12,000 other internet cafes have been closed until safety improvements are put in place. But critics have accused the Chinese Government of using the safety issue as an excuse to impose tighter controls on the licensing of internet cafes. ... Although ostensibly the crackdown is to improve worker safety, BBC correspondent Holly Williams says that China is keen to crack down on web usage, especially internet chatrooms where anti-government opinions may be expressed. Under strict new laws introduced in November this year, children under the age of 16 were banned in internet cafes, managers must keep lists of all those using their facilities, and doors and windows must not be locked. ... China has already heavily restricted internet usage in the country, with a recent US study finding that up to one in 10 websites were deliberately blocked to Chinese internet users. Despite such restrictions the internet is hugely popular in China, with more than 45 million internet users as of mid-2002, compared to just half a million in October 1997. (12/30/02) | |
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New York Times -- With an experiment of soap film and a short glass fiber, mathematicians at New York University have worked out some underlying principles of how something like a willow tree withstands powerful gusts. The same researchers showed two years ago why flags flap in the wind. Years ago, biologists started observing how plants had adapted to the flow of wind and waves around them. Some, like Dr. Steven Vogel, a professor of biology at Duke University, put sections of trees in wind tunnels and videotaped how leaves rolled up into tight streamlined cones when buffeted by high winds. ... "Natural structures tend to be more flexible than the stuff we build," Dr. Vogel said. "We build to a criterion of stiffness. Nature tends to build to a criterion of strength. It usually takes less material." ... "We've got a lot to learn from nature," Dr. Vogel said. "This is the way it ought to happen. An experimental biologist who takes some measurements and some physical scientists who say, `Hey, maybe there's a general principle involved.' " Dr. Vogel and Dr. Shelley A. Etnier of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington have found that some plants like daffodils not only bend, but also twist. Because daffodil flowers always flop to one side (unlike tulip flowers, which stand straight) when strong winds blow, daffodils twist, so that the back of their petals face into the wind. Dr. Vogel snipped off a few daffodils from the thousands on the Duke campus. "We just swiped what we needed," he said. "One razor blade is your collecting equipment." Wind tunnel experiments showed that with their backs to the wind, daffodils experienced one-third less drag. "By being deliberately weak and twisting," he said, "they avoid being stressed so much in bending." (12/30/02) | |
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New York Times -- For the first time in the recent efforts to locate and destroy chickens infected with Exotic Newcastle Disease in Southern California, contaminated birds have been found at a commercial poultry farm. The discovery led state officials this week to destroy more than 100,000 chickens used for egg production, sending a shiver through the state's $3 billion poultry industry. "This was one commercial flock infected," said Larry Hawkins, a spokesman for the United States Agriculture Department in Sacramento. "Is that huge? Is that a killer for California poultry? No, but this is a very serious discovery. It adds a new dimension to the problem. If we don't get a handle on this, we may find ourselves with many flocks infected, and that would certainly not be good news." Exotic Newcastle Disease, which does not affect humans, has bedeviled California poultry on occasion for decades. The last serious outbreak was in the 1970's, when a statewide outbreak threatened the industry across the country and led to the destruction of almost 12 million chickens, at a cost of more than $50 million. Most of California's commercial poultry operations are in the central part of the state. The recent outbreaks have been confined to the south in Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, where state officials in November initiated a quarantine against the export of any birds or of any eggs that had not been washed, sanitized and packed in new material. (12/30/02) | |
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New York Times -- As it runs through Orin Edwards's ranch, the Belle Fourche River bubbles like Champagne. The bubbles can burn. They are methane, also called natural gas, the fuel that heats 59 million American homes. Mr. Edwards noticed the bubbles two years ago, after gas wells were drilled on his land. The company that drilled the wells denies responsibility for the flammable river. An hour's drive west, the artesian well on Roland and Beverly Landrey's ranch has failed. After producing 50 gallons a minute for 34 years, the well, the ranch's only source of water, stopped flowing in September. A well digger who examined it blames energy companies drilling for gas nearby, but the companies dispute that. So the couple — he is 83 and ailing; she describes herself as "no spring chicken" — hauls water in gallon jugs and drives 30 miles to town weekly to wash clothes and bathe. Dave Bullach, a welder who lives near Gillette, couldn't take it anymore. For two sleep-deprived years, he endured the incessant yowl of a methane compressor, a giant pump that squeezes methane into an underground pipeline. There are thousands of these screaming machines in Wyoming, where neither state nor federal law regulates their noise. Mr. Bullach stormed out of his house at midnight last year with a rifle and shot at the compressor until a sheriff's deputy hauled him off to jail. This is the cantankerous world of energy extraction in the Rocky Mountain West, where natural gas is abundant and cheap to remove, and where the Bush administration, in its aggressive push to increase domestic energy production, is on the brink of approving the largest-ever gas-drilling project on federal land. Here in Wyoming's Powder River Basin, the Bureau of Land Management says that early next year it will give final approval to the drilling of 39,000 wells on eight million acres. (12/30/02) | |
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New York Times -- In response to criticism that the federal government was failing to meet its goals for wetlands conservation, the Bush administration today revised its guidelines to the Army Corps of Engineers for mitigating the loss of wetlands from development. The new guidelines require a "watershed-based" approach in which the wetland needs of an entire watershed are taken into account, rather than only the site of the development. For example, if a developer destroys 10 acres of wetlands, he can no longer just plant 10 acres of trees nearby. Instead, the corps must advise the developer if other, more potentially valuable areas in the watershed need replenishing, even if the acreage does not match precisely what would be lost. "It's an effort to look at the overall need within the watershed and go through a process to restore the functions and values of the types of wetlands that are being lost," said Ben Grumbles, assistant administrator for water at the Environmental Protection Agency. (12/30/02) | |
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Alice Bailey & Djwhal Khul write: It is - above all else - the refusal of that public to face life as it is and to recognize the facts for what they are. The mass of men need arousing to see that good comes to all men alike and not just to a few privileged groups, and to learn also that "hatred ceases not by hatred but that hatred ceases by love". This love is not a sentiment, but practical goodwill, expressing itself through individuals, in communities and among nations. ... Security, happiness and peaceful relations are desired by all. Until, however, the Great Powers, in collaboration with the little nations, have solved the economic problem and have realized that the resources of the earth belong to no one nation but to humanity as a whole, there will be no peace. The oil of the world, the mineral wealth, the wheat, the sugar and the grains belong to all men everywhere. They are essential to the daily living of the everyday man. (12/29/02) | |
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Daan Joubert writes: Now that the gold price has shown its willingness to break loose above the glass ceiling around $325-330 that existed for 6 months, one can realistically begin to speculate what are the likely targets during the bull run. ... It follows therefore that the longer term outlook for gold has a target at $650 and possibly also at $812. (12/29/02) | |
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Alice Bailey & Djwhal Khul wrote: The distribution of the world's resources and the settled unity of the peoples of the world are in reality one and the same thing, for behind all modern wars lies a fundamental economic problem. Solve that and wars will very largely cease. In considering, therefore, the preservation of peace, as sought for and emphasized by the United Nations at this time, it becomes immediately apparent that peace, security and world stability are primarily tied up with the economic problem. When there is freedom from want, one of the major causes of war will disappear. Where there is uneven distribution of the world's riches and where there is a situation in which some nations have or take everything and other nations lack the necessities of life, it is obvious that there is a trouble-breeding factor there and that something must be done. Therefore we should deal with world unity and peace primarily from the angle of the economic problem. ... It is essential for the future happiness and progress of humanity that there should be no return to the old ways, whether political, religious or economic. Therefore, in handling these problems, we should search out the wrong conditions which have brought humanity to its present state of almost cataclysmic disaster. These conditions were the result of religious faiths which have not moved forward in their thinking for hundreds of years; of economic systems which lay the emphasis upon the accumulation of riches and material possessions and which leave all the power and the produce of the earth in the hands of a relatively few men, while the rest of humanity struggle for a bare subsistence; and of political regimes run by the corrupt, the totalitarian-minded, the grafters and those who love place and power more than they love their fellowmen. (12/27/02) | |
6:10:54 AM 
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© TrustMark
2003
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
1/1/2003; 4:07:11 AM.
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