Thursday, April 30, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Future Maters
Last year I didn't plant a garden and I hated myself for it all summer. This year I'm going to be too busy (lazy) to have a full sized garden so I pried open my wallet and bought three Grow Boxes. One for tomatoes, one for peppers and one for whatever Shelly wants, probably okra. I was going to get Earth Boxes but they were too expensive, went to a site on making your own and figured by the time I finally made them right, that too would be too expensive. Then I found this site the garden patch kind of expensive but if I use them year after year it's not much. I use to have "The Garden Report" and both of my readers liked it alright so I guess I'll do that again this year.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Prohibition Still Doesn't Work
The violence in Mexico is caused by prohibition, not firearms.
Jacob Sullum | April 22, 2009
During his visit to Mexico last week, President Obama suggested that Americans are partly to blame for the appalling violence associated with the illegal drug trade there. "The demand for these drugs in the United States is what's helping keep these cartels in business," he said. "This war is being waged with guns purchased not here but in the United States."
Obama is right that the U.S. is largely responsible for the carnage in Mexico, which claimed more than 6,000 lives last year. But the problem is neither the drugs Americans buy nor the guns they sell; it's the war on drugs our government insists the rest of the world help it fight. Instead of acknowledging the failure of drug control, the Obama administration is using it as an excuse for an equally vain attempt at gun control.
"More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States," Obama claimed last week, repeating a favorite factoid of politicians who believe American gun rights endanger our southern neighbor's security. The claim has been parroted by many news organizations, including ABC, which used it in a 2008 story that suggested the sort of policy changes the number is meant to encourage. The story, which asked if "the Second Amendment [is] to blame" for "arming Mexican drug gangs," quoted a federal official who said, "It's virtually impossible to buy a firearm in Mexico as a private citizen, so this country is where they come."
But as Fox News and Factcheck.org have shown, the percentage cited by the president greatly exaggerates the share of guns used by Mexican criminals that were bought in the United States. Fox estimates it's less than a fifth, while Factcheck.org says it may be more like a third.
If the guns used by Mexican drug traffickers do not mainly come from gun dealers in the U.S., where do they come from? Many of the weapons are stolen from the Mexican military and police, often by deserters; some are smuggled over the border from Guatemala; others come from China by way of Africa or Latin America. Russian gun traffickers do a booming business in Mexico.
Given these alternatives, making it harder for Americans to buy guns, in the hope of preventing straw buyers from supplying weapons to smugglers, is not likely to stop Mexican gangsters from arming themselves. The persistence of the drug traffickers' main business, which consists of transporting and selling products that are entirely illegal on both sides of the border, should give pause to those who think they can block the flow of guns to the cartels.
The futile effort to stop Americans from consuming politically incorrect intoxicants is the real source of the violence in Mexico, since prohibition creates a market with artificially high prices and hands it over to criminals. "Because of the enormous profit potential," two senior federal law enforcement officials told the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, "violence has always been associated with the Mexican drug trade as criminal syndicates seek to control this lucrative endeavor."
The more the government cracks down on the black market it created, the more violence it fosters, since intensified enforcement provokes confrontations with the police and encourages fighting between rival gangs over market opportunities created by arrests or deaths. "If the drug effort were failing," an unnamed "senior U.S. official" told The Wall Street Journal in February, "there would be no violence."
Perhaps it is time to redefine failure. Three former Latin American presidents, including Mexico's Ernesto Zedillo, recently noted that "we are farther than ever from the announced goal of eradicating drugs." The attempt to achieve that impossible dream, they observed, has led to "a rise in organized crime," "the corruption of public servants," "the criminalization of politics and the politicization of crime," and "a growth in unacceptable levels of drug-related violence."
Instead of importing Mexico's prohibitionist approach to guns, we should stop exporting our prohibitionist approach to drugs.
Jacob Sullum | April 22, 2009
During his visit to Mexico last week, President Obama suggested that Americans are partly to blame for the appalling violence associated with the illegal drug trade there. "The demand for these drugs in the United States is what's helping keep these cartels in business," he said. "This war is being waged with guns purchased not here but in the United States."
Obama is right that the U.S. is largely responsible for the carnage in Mexico, which claimed more than 6,000 lives last year. But the problem is neither the drugs Americans buy nor the guns they sell; it's the war on drugs our government insists the rest of the world help it fight. Instead of acknowledging the failure of drug control, the Obama administration is using it as an excuse for an equally vain attempt at gun control.
"More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States," Obama claimed last week, repeating a favorite factoid of politicians who believe American gun rights endanger our southern neighbor's security. The claim has been parroted by many news organizations, including ABC, which used it in a 2008 story that suggested the sort of policy changes the number is meant to encourage. The story, which asked if "the Second Amendment [is] to blame" for "arming Mexican drug gangs," quoted a federal official who said, "It's virtually impossible to buy a firearm in Mexico as a private citizen, so this country is where they come."
But as Fox News and Factcheck.org have shown, the percentage cited by the president greatly exaggerates the share of guns used by Mexican criminals that were bought in the United States. Fox estimates it's less than a fifth, while Factcheck.org says it may be more like a third.
If the guns used by Mexican drug traffickers do not mainly come from gun dealers in the U.S., where do they come from? Many of the weapons are stolen from the Mexican military and police, often by deserters; some are smuggled over the border from Guatemala; others come from China by way of Africa or Latin America. Russian gun traffickers do a booming business in Mexico.
Given these alternatives, making it harder for Americans to buy guns, in the hope of preventing straw buyers from supplying weapons to smugglers, is not likely to stop Mexican gangsters from arming themselves. The persistence of the drug traffickers' main business, which consists of transporting and selling products that are entirely illegal on both sides of the border, should give pause to those who think they can block the flow of guns to the cartels.
The futile effort to stop Americans from consuming politically incorrect intoxicants is the real source of the violence in Mexico, since prohibition creates a market with artificially high prices and hands it over to criminals. "Because of the enormous profit potential," two senior federal law enforcement officials told the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, "violence has always been associated with the Mexican drug trade as criminal syndicates seek to control this lucrative endeavor."
The more the government cracks down on the black market it created, the more violence it fosters, since intensified enforcement provokes confrontations with the police and encourages fighting between rival gangs over market opportunities created by arrests or deaths. "If the drug effort were failing," an unnamed "senior U.S. official" told The Wall Street Journal in February, "there would be no violence."
Perhaps it is time to redefine failure. Three former Latin American presidents, including Mexico's Ernesto Zedillo, recently noted that "we are farther than ever from the announced goal of eradicating drugs." The attempt to achieve that impossible dream, they observed, has led to "a rise in organized crime," "the corruption of public servants," "the criminalization of politics and the politicization of crime," and "a growth in unacceptable levels of drug-related violence."
Instead of importing Mexico's prohibitionist approach to guns, we should stop exporting our prohibitionist approach to drugs.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Military resurrects deadly flu virus
From Green Left Weekly, October 22, 2003
AUSTIN — The US military is attempting to resurrect the influenza virus that killed up to 40 million people in 1918. Several genes of the extraordinarily lethal “Spanish flu” have been isolated and introduced into contemporary flu strains. The new strain has proved to be lethal for mice, while the contemporary flu it was made from had hardly any effect.
The Spanish flu was highly infectious and killed a very high percentage of those infected, including many younger people. It caused life expectancy in the US in 1918 to drop by 10 years.
Despite the very dangerous nature of the 1918 virus, efforts to reconstruct it began in the mid-1990s, when Dr Jeffrey Taubenberger from the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology succeeded in recovering and sequencing fragments of the viral RNA from preserved tissues of 1918 victims.
After partially unravelling the genetic sequence of the virus, the scientists went a step further and succeeded in creating a live virus containing two 1918 genes that proved to be very lethal in animal experiments.
A resuscitation of the Spanish flu is neither necessary nor warranted from a public health point of view. Allegedly, the recent experiments sought to test the efficacy of existing antiviral drugs on the 1918 construct. But there is would be no need for antiviral drugs against the 1918 strain if it was not recreated in the first place. “It simply does not make any scientific sense to create a new threat just to develop new countermeasures against it”, said Jan van Aken, a biologist with the anti-biological weapon group, the Sunshine Project. “This particularly dangerous eradicated strain could wreak havoc if released, deliberately or accidentally.”
Construction of new maximum security (BSL-4) laboratories for “bio-defence” research has been justified by Washington in part by citing the potential of the Spanish flu as a biological weapon. Influenza usually requires a low level of containment; but when scientists begin recombining virulence-related genes, the danger dramatically increases. The University of Texas Medical Branch's BSL-4 plans influenza “gene reassortment” experiments in maximum containment.
“This kind of research is creating a vicious circle and could prompt a race by bio-defence scientists to genetically engineer unthinkable diseases”, said Edward Hammond from the Sunshine Project.
“If Taubenberger worked in a Chinese, Russian or Iranian laboratory, his work might well be seen as the `smoking gun' of an offensive bio-warfare program”, noted van Aken.
AUSTIN — The US military is attempting to resurrect the influenza virus that killed up to 40 million people in 1918. Several genes of the extraordinarily lethal “Spanish flu” have been isolated and introduced into contemporary flu strains. The new strain has proved to be lethal for mice, while the contemporary flu it was made from had hardly any effect.
The Spanish flu was highly infectious and killed a very high percentage of those infected, including many younger people. It caused life expectancy in the US in 1918 to drop by 10 years.
Despite the very dangerous nature of the 1918 virus, efforts to reconstruct it began in the mid-1990s, when Dr Jeffrey Taubenberger from the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology succeeded in recovering and sequencing fragments of the viral RNA from preserved tissues of 1918 victims.
After partially unravelling the genetic sequence of the virus, the scientists went a step further and succeeded in creating a live virus containing two 1918 genes that proved to be very lethal in animal experiments.
A resuscitation of the Spanish flu is neither necessary nor warranted from a public health point of view. Allegedly, the recent experiments sought to test the efficacy of existing antiviral drugs on the 1918 construct. But there is would be no need for antiviral drugs against the 1918 strain if it was not recreated in the first place. “It simply does not make any scientific sense to create a new threat just to develop new countermeasures against it”, said Jan van Aken, a biologist with the anti-biological weapon group, the Sunshine Project. “This particularly dangerous eradicated strain could wreak havoc if released, deliberately or accidentally.”
Construction of new maximum security (BSL-4) laboratories for “bio-defence” research has been justified by Washington in part by citing the potential of the Spanish flu as a biological weapon. Influenza usually requires a low level of containment; but when scientists begin recombining virulence-related genes, the danger dramatically increases. The University of Texas Medical Branch's BSL-4 plans influenza “gene reassortment” experiments in maximum containment.
“This kind of research is creating a vicious circle and could prompt a race by bio-defence scientists to genetically engineer unthinkable diseases”, said Edward Hammond from the Sunshine Project.
“If Taubenberger worked in a Chinese, Russian or Iranian laboratory, his work might well be seen as the `smoking gun' of an offensive bio-warfare program”, noted van Aken.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Unified Conspiracy Theory
I've been watching too many video's about 2012, the Illuminati, empty detention camps and hundreds of thousands of coffins in Atlanta.
There were things that some conspiracy sites were saying that didn't make sense to me.
So I came up with a unified theory.
The government knows that there is a comet or something headed towards the earth. It will arrive in December of 2012. The detention camps are for the people that are going to raise hell because they don't get to go underground, literally. Certain people will get to go to safety, deep below the surface of the earth. As for coffins in Atlanta...
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 1600 Clifton Rd. Atlanta, GA 30333, USA
800-CDC-INFO (800-232-4636) TTY: (888) 232-6348, 24 Hours/Every Day - cdcinfo@cdc.gov
There were things that some conspiracy sites were saying that didn't make sense to me.
So I came up with a unified theory.
The government knows that there is a comet or something headed towards the earth. It will arrive in December of 2012. The detention camps are for the people that are going to raise hell because they don't get to go underground, literally. Certain people will get to go to safety, deep below the surface of the earth. As for coffins in Atlanta...
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 1600 Clifton Rd. Atlanta, GA 30333, USA
800-CDC-INFO (800-232-4636) TTY: (888) 232-6348, 24 Hours/Every Day - cdcinfo@cdc.gov
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Wisdom from Iowa
Iowa Supreme Court upholds gay marriage.
We begin with the County's argument that the goal of the same-sex marriage ban is to ensure children will be raised only in the optimal milieu. In pursuit of this objective, the statutory exclusion of gay and lesbian people is both under-inclusive and over-inclusive. The civil marriage statute is under-inclusive because it does not exclude from marriage other groups of parents--such as child abusers, sexual predators, parents neglecting to provide child support, and violent felons--that are undeniably less than optimal parents. Such under-inclusion tends to demonstrate that the sexual-orientation-based classification is grounded in prejudice or "overbroad generalizations about the different talents, capacities, or preferences" of gay and lesbian people, rather than having a substantial relationship to some important objective. See Virginia, 518 U.S. at 533, 116 S. Ct. at 2275, 135 L. Ed. 2d at 751 (rejecting use of overbroad generalizations to classify). If the marriage statute was truly focused on optimal parenting, many classifications of people would be excluded, not merely gay and lesbian people.
We begin with the County's argument that the goal of the same-sex marriage ban is to ensure children will be raised only in the optimal milieu. In pursuit of this objective, the statutory exclusion of gay and lesbian people is both under-inclusive and over-inclusive. The civil marriage statute is under-inclusive because it does not exclude from marriage other groups of parents--such as child abusers, sexual predators, parents neglecting to provide child support, and violent felons--that are undeniably less than optimal parents. Such under-inclusion tends to demonstrate that the sexual-orientation-based classification is grounded in prejudice or "overbroad generalizations about the different talents, capacities, or preferences" of gay and lesbian people, rather than having a substantial relationship to some important objective. See Virginia, 518 U.S. at 533, 116 S. Ct. at 2275, 135 L. Ed. 2d at 751 (rejecting use of overbroad generalizations to classify). If the marriage statute was truly focused on optimal parenting, many classifications of people would be excluded, not merely gay and lesbian people.
Saturday, April 04, 2009
U2 Pride
Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride
Oath Keepers
Spokesman Stewart Rhodes of Oath Keepers states his organization's goal is to remind military members their oath of allegiance is to the U.S. Constitution, not a particular president."And just for the record not me or anyone else in my platoon would ever follow an order to disarm the American people," he wrote.
The organization describes itself as a non-partisan group of members of the military as well as peace officers "who will fulfill our oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, so help us God."
Among the orders the soldiers are pledging NOT to obey:
1. We will NOT obey any order to disarm the American people. … Any such order today would also be an act of war against the American people, and thus an act of treason. We will not make war on our own people, and we will not commit treason by obeying any such treasonous order.
2. We will NOT obey any order to conduct warrantless searches of the American people, their homes, vehicles, papers, or effects – such as warrantless house-to house searches for weapons or persons. … We expect that warrantless searches of homes and vehicles, under some pretext, will be the means used to attempt to disarm the people.
3. We will NOT obey any order to detain American citizens as "unlawful enemy combatants" or to subject them to trial by military tribunal. … Any attempt to apply the laws of war to American civilians, under any pretext, such as against domestic "militia" groups the government brands "domestic terrorists," is an act of war and an act of treason.
4. We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a "state of emergency" on a state, or to enter with force into a state, without the express consent and invitation of that state's legislature and governor. … It is the militia of a state and of the several states that the Constitution contemplates being used in any context, during any emergency within a state, not the standing army.
5. We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty and declares the national government to be in violation of the compact by which that state entered the Union.
6. We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps. … Such tactics … by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto, and by the Imperial Japanese in Nanking, turn[ed] entire cities into death camps. Any such order to disarm and confine the people of an American city will be an act of war and thus an act of treason.
7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext. … Such a vile order to forcibly intern Americans without charges or trial would be an act of war against the American people, and thus an act of treason, regardless of the pretext used.
8. We will NOT obey orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people to "keep the peace" or to "maintain control" during any emergency, or under any other pretext. We will consider such use of foreign troops against our people to be an invasion and an act of war.
9. We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies, under any emergency pretext whatsoever.
10. We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.
"We will not make war against our own people. We will not commit treason. We will defend the Republic," the organization's website states. "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually affirm our oath and pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor."
Friday, April 03, 2009
Barney Frank and Ron Paul team up on hemp
Liberal Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., and libertarian Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas Republican who made a fine show in the GOP presidential primaries last year, find common ground today on hemp farming:
Their new bill, "The Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2009 otherwise known as HR 1866, would remove restrictions on the cultivation of non-psychoactive industrial hemp. They claim nine other sponsors, nearly equally divided between the parties.
"It is unfortunate that the federal government has stood in the way of American farmers, including many who are struggling to make ends meet, from competing in the global industrial hemp market," said Paul, adding that some of the Founding Fathers who grew hemp themselves "would surely find that federal restrictions on farmers growing a safe and profitable crop on their own land are inconsistent with the constitutional guarantee of a limited, restrained federal government."
Eric Steenstra, president of the group "Vote Hemp" added that with all the recent discussion about Mexican drug wars, "it is surprising that the tragedy of American hemp farming hasn't come up as a no-brainer for reform," calling the plant "a versatile, environmentally-friendly crop that has not been grown here for over 50 years because of a politicized interpretation of the nation's drug laws by the Drug Enforcement Administration. President Obama should direct the DEA to stop confusing industrial hemp with its genetically distinct cousin, marijuana." He said jobs "would be created overnight, as there are numerous U.S. companies that now have no choice but to import hemp raw materials worth many millions of dollars per year."
According to Vote Hemp, U.S. companies that manufacture or sell products made with hemp "include Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, a California company who manufactures the number-one-selling natural soap, and FlexForm Technologies, an Indiana company whose natural fiber materials are used in over two million cars on the road today. Hemp food manufacturers, such as French Meadow Bakery, Hempzels, Living Harvest, Nature's Path and Nutiva, now make their products from Canadian hemp. Although hemp now grows wild across the U.S., a vestige of centuries of hemp farming here, the hemp for these products must be imported. Hemp clothing is made around the world by well-known brands such as Patagonia, Bono's Edun and Giorgio Armani."
Under current drug policy, industrial hemp can be imported, but U.S. farmers are not allowed to grow it. "The DEA has taken the Controlled Substances Act's antiquated definition of marijuana out of context and used it as an excuse to ban industrial hemp farming," Steenstra said.
Their new bill, "The Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2009 otherwise known as HR 1866, would remove restrictions on the cultivation of non-psychoactive industrial hemp. They claim nine other sponsors, nearly equally divided between the parties.
"It is unfortunate that the federal government has stood in the way of American farmers, including many who are struggling to make ends meet, from competing in the global industrial hemp market," said Paul, adding that some of the Founding Fathers who grew hemp themselves "would surely find that federal restrictions on farmers growing a safe and profitable crop on their own land are inconsistent with the constitutional guarantee of a limited, restrained federal government."
Eric Steenstra, president of the group "Vote Hemp" added that with all the recent discussion about Mexican drug wars, "it is surprising that the tragedy of American hemp farming hasn't come up as a no-brainer for reform," calling the plant "a versatile, environmentally-friendly crop that has not been grown here for over 50 years because of a politicized interpretation of the nation's drug laws by the Drug Enforcement Administration. President Obama should direct the DEA to stop confusing industrial hemp with its genetically distinct cousin, marijuana." He said jobs "would be created overnight, as there are numerous U.S. companies that now have no choice but to import hemp raw materials worth many millions of dollars per year."
According to Vote Hemp, U.S. companies that manufacture or sell products made with hemp "include Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, a California company who manufactures the number-one-selling natural soap, and FlexForm Technologies, an Indiana company whose natural fiber materials are used in over two million cars on the road today. Hemp food manufacturers, such as French Meadow Bakery, Hempzels, Living Harvest, Nature's Path and Nutiva, now make their products from Canadian hemp. Although hemp now grows wild across the U.S., a vestige of centuries of hemp farming here, the hemp for these products must be imported. Hemp clothing is made around the world by well-known brands such as Patagonia, Bono's Edun and Giorgio Armani."
Under current drug policy, industrial hemp can be imported, but U.S. farmers are not allowed to grow it. "The DEA has taken the Controlled Substances Act's antiquated definition of marijuana out of context and used it as an excuse to ban industrial hemp farming," Steenstra said.
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