This blog.

I think it's safe to say at this point that this blog is done with. I myself am done with Weed Garden (assuming it is still an ongoing project) though I hope to be on good terms with you all. However, I want to do something about this blog. Either those of us who have things posted here save what we want, and then I delete it, or I'll keep it up as a historical document. I'll leave that up to you all.

Risking posting here to talk about this.

This is more important than it seems.


Friday, May 08, 2009

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Hawaii votes for Islam Day
LAHORE: Hawaii’s state Senate overwhelmingly approved a bill on Wednesday to celebrate Islam Day – over objections of some lawmakers who said they did not want to honour a religion “connected to September 11, 2001”. “I recall radical Islamists around the world cheering the horrors of 9/11. That is the day all civilised people of all religions should remember,” said Fred Hemmings. The resolution to proclaim September 24, 2009, as Islam Day passed the Senate on a 22-3 vote. The bill seeks to recognise “the rich religious, scientific, cultural and artistic contributions” that Islam and the Islamic world have made. daily times monitor

How do you say 'Seperation of Church and State' in Hawaii?

Apparently you say it with the words "Left Wing Capitulation and Hypocrasy"

I am against the government making any statement regarding religion. I'm preatty sure the U.S. constitution and the current Federal laws prohibit it as well.

What do we think about this?

-Darth FIJ

Congrats Too

Alan and Daggs for not having driven each other crazy yet.

hope the first year is a good omen of better things to come for you both.

-F.I.J.

Death in the Family.

I was just informed that Pam's father passed away two days ago. We should get her a card.

-F.I.J.

after some thought...

I find that I miss the "aura" of the old garden.

This week I'm going to contact a bunch of the orignal crew of the garden.

I want to set up a bi-weekly - tri-weekly meet up, making it easier for people to get off work // make arrangements that don't require the high level of attention of a weekly meeting.

Tentatively, I'm calling this meeting Gan Aleph, ( garden one ) and it's tone is
to be only semi-serious. Other name ideas include, The Gnome Home, Weed Garden O.S. ( old school, yo!...egads I am so white ) and of course, La Cost-ah Lots-ah.

The orignal garden concept had a six item list.
1 political topic, 1 science topic, 1 philosophical topic, 1 satire topic, 1 local topic, 1 et al.
each one got 10 minutes, and in an hour we "ideally" went through a meeting. in pracitce it was more like 2-3, with about 15-20 minutes each topic + rabbit trails, but it worked and it let everyone leave feeling "high".

There was also the failed attempt to post session to the web, which I'd really like to make happen.

If I can get it up and running, I think another good idea would be to use this blog as a "Master List" of Patches that will be "out there" in the aether, and then each patch have it's own blog to keep up with events and postings.

P.H.T.K.T.P. Darth F I J

Obama nd Bush now have something in common

page over to modern sense if you want to know.

p.t.k.t.p. Darth FIJ

Sheldon Richman on Glenn Beck and AETN

One of "my people" , Sheldon Richman (editor of The Freeman), was recently on the Arkansas Educational Television Network show Unconventional Wisdom. He was also on the Glenn Beck show. Watching these two interviews is an opportunity to compare two different styles of news media, as well as different ways of engaging in discussion. There are some pretty big differences between the two. I strongly recommend watching the Unconventional Wisdom interview first.

Haaretz article about controversial T-shirts

Here is a link to the article referenced in the video from my previous post.

occupied

i'm busy the rest of the week, and the best part of next week.
sorry for late update, but I will not be free for anything until after april the 15th

Patching off.

I have removed my posts.

To keep the peace I will be patching off into other blogs.

The blog you can all find me at is...

Modernsense2000@blogger.com

Anyone who wishes can find me there. I'll keep following here for a month or so to make sure anyone who wishes to touch base // contact me can do so.

Controversial T-shirts

This video is relevant to recent posts.

"Meeting Times, Places, Topics, Books, Plays, Songs, what not...INQUIRING FIJ'S WANT TO KNOW!!!"

In the area of books, since we last spoke, I got the audiobook of Rev. Michael Dowd's Thank God For Evolution (I'm about half way through it), We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now (One of the two editors is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide To American History, Thomas E. Woods, Jr. ), Sartre's Nausea, and Kevin Carson's Organization: A Libertarian Perspective. I listened the album of Julia Sweeney's live show Letting Go Of God. I've also watched most of the British television series Planet Earth as well as Watchmen (the movie). Speaking of Watchmen, check this out, it's hilarious if you've read the graphic novel or seen the movie.

Musically, I've been listening to Diana Krall, Cannabis Corpse, Johnny Paycheck, kid 606, Naked City, Toots and the Maytals, Metallica, Bone Thugs N Harmony, Dr. Dre, Bad Brains, Autechre, Rick Ross, The Lonely Island, Air, The Office Space soundtrack, Against Me!, Zu, Squadra Omega, etc.

Since Someone did not get the word

We have moved, call me and I will tell you where you can come and meet any night, any time day or night, have free coffee, free tea, and see a beautiful lakeside setting. James you know my number if not XXX XXXX

On a lighter note and just because a few things to Ponder

For those who wonder these are just a few question Allan seems to ask me when I am trying to work, lets see if we can answer a few of them

Where does the lost sock in the washer and dryer go?
Why does the Indiana driver's license include in its list of possible restrictions "B" for "Blind"?
Why does belly button lint not match your shirt color?
Why do old women die their hair blue?
If a turtle doesn't have a shell is he homeless or naked?
Why is it that when you see someone in a cast or a brace you say ouch?
Before they invented drawing boards, what did they go back to?
How do they get the ship in the bottle ?
If a cow laughed would milk come out its nose?
Isn't it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do "practice"?
Why don't we get goosebumps on our face?
If a man is standing in the middle of the forest speaking and there is no woman around to hear him...is he still wrong?
Does the reverse side also have a reverse side?
Is the grass really greener on the other side?
Why are a wise man and a wise guy opposites?
Why are there flotation devices under plane seats instead of parachutes?
Why is Greenland white?
Why do we sing Take Me Out To the Ball Game if we are already there?
When sign makers go on strike is there anything written on their signs?
Why is it when two planes almost hit each other it is called a near miss? Shouldn't it be called a near hit?
Can your face actually freeze while making ugly faces?
Why isn't there mouse flavored cat food?
How do you know when it is time to tune your bagpipes?
Is it true that cannibals don't eat clowns because they taste funny?

Two opposing views of the current economic troubles

2008 Nobel Prize winning Neo-Keynesian economist, author of The Conscience Of A Liberal, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was recently interviewed on Fresh Air by Terry Gross, here.

Joseph Salerno, editor of The Quarterly Journal Of Austrian Economics (which focuses on the Austrian School of economic theory), senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and economics professor at Pace University is interviewed about the same issues on The Lew Rockwell Show, here. (I would also note that the Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek was from the Austrian school.)

On a related note, I recently bought Money, Banking and The Federal Reserve on DVD, and an MP3 CD of Henry Hazlitt's Economics In One Lesson from the Mises Institute, in case anyone is interested.

Links mentioned in previous posts

Stem-Cell Fast Food - From NASA To Nourishment
Kibbutzim make a comeback
The six video series posted on Youtube titled "Heidegger life and philosophy" is part of the BBC Series "All Too Human" which has three parts about Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. Clicking on each of these links will take you to the version posted on Google Video.

Kibbutzim make a comeback

Here is an article that originally was in the Jerusalem Post and later got its way into US News and World Report. The word Kibbutzim is plural for word Kibbutz in Hebrew referring to the small communalist settlements in Israel. This article primarily on these small communalistic settlements in Israel, but this article is really not about being pro-Israel or anti- Israel. This article deals with the whole issue of the future of small-scale communalistic living.
Kibbutzim make a comeback
By LARRY DERFNER
Eight years ago, Kibbutz Ein Gedi, a tropical paradise overlooking the Dead Sea, was on the verge of closure. The latest blows were the Dead Sea’s receding, which destroyed a great deal of valuable land, and the intifada, which scared away the tourists, a vital source of income.
But for a long time, the kibbutz had been dying of socialism. “There was so much waste,” recalls Yonki Ayalon, one of Ein Gedi’s founders in 1956, sitting at her dining-room table with her husband and daughter. “We couldn’t afford socialism anymore. It cost too much.”
In the old days of the kibbutz movement, so much food would go to waste that pets were typically obese. Since members got unlimited electricity, they commonly left their air conditioners running when they went out to work so it would be cool when they came home at the end of the day, says Daniel Gavron, author of the 2000 book, The Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia.
When the crunch came at Ein Gedi, the first thing the kibbutz did was force members to start paying for their food and electricity.
Next to go was what Ayalon calls the kibbutz’s “hidden unemployment.” There were numerous members working at Ein Gedi’s farm, spa and guest house who weren’t really needed, so many of them were told to find new sources of income. Necessity was the mother of invention; one kibbutznik, for instance, became a masseuse, another a manicurist, another a gourmet French cook, another a quilt-maker, another a taxi driver.
Then, four years ago, the biggest change of all went into effect: Kibbutz Ein Gedi ended its nearly 50-year-long system of equal salaries for all members - no matter what work they did, no matter how well or poorly they did it - and switched to the system of “differential salaries.” Since then, members have been paid according to their productivity, to the amount of wealth they produce.
The result? “Our standard of living is much higher now,” says Ayalon, 71, a clerk at nearby Ahava cosmetics whose husband, Avner, 73, is on pension after a lifetime of farm work. “We have money to travel overseas, to help our children and grandchildren. You see so many people here remodeling their homes.”
The young adults who left Ein Gedi in droves over the last couple of decades have started to return, though usually as renters, not members. “They want Ein Gedi the place, but not the kibbutz,” says the Ayalons’ daughter, Meirav, 44, a public relations consultant.
What happened at Ein Gedi is an example of what’s happened to the kibbutz movement as a whole in recent years - it’s been saved by a strong dose of capitalist individualism. In the last three or four years, the movement - which includes 273 kibbutzim, some 100,000 members and 20,000 non-member residents - has emerged from 20 years of life-threatening economic and social crisis and lifted its head above water.
The average kibbutz household income now stands at approximately NIS 11,000 a month - on a par with the nationwide family average. And after losing an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 members between 1985 and 2005, the kibbutz population has recently been on the rise due to higher birthrates, the return of members who had left (usually young families) and the addition of new members, often outsiders who “marry in” to the kibbutz.
Last year, some 1,200 new members joined the kibbutzim - the first year in more than a generation that saw more people joining than quitting.
“I wrote at the end of my book that the kibbutz was finished. Today I have second thoughts,” says Gavron, himself a former kibbutznik.
SOME SERIOUS problems, though, remain. A few dozen kibbutzim, especially in the far reaches of Galilee and the Negev, continue to fall behind economically; their members are less concerned about how to distribute wealth than about how to create it.
On kibbutzim in general, the population is aged; while the young aren’t leaving almost automatically like before, too many of them still leave - after army service and the near-mandatory year or two of traveling abroad - for the movement’s demographic good health.
The kibbutz may be viable once again; it has a future, but it can never return to its glory days from the 1930s through the 1950s, when it was the elite of Israeli society, when the kibbutznik epitomized socialist Zionism’s “new Jew” - settling the land, fighting the enemy, scorning self-indulgence (at least publicly).
In that era, the kibbutzim produced a hugely disproportionate share of the country’s political and military leaders. Then it attracted the most determined and idealistic youth. Today, the more candid members speak of an unjust “stigma” commonly attached to them - that the only reason they’re still there is because they couldn’t make it in the sink-or-swim world outside. The kibbutz pioneers were known for their holier-than-thou attitude; this stigma upon their descendants is a kind of payback.
Next year will mark the 100th anniversary of the agricultural settlement started by a small group of Zionist laborers at the southern shores of the Kinneret near the Arab village of Umm Juni; the following year, they established it as a communal settlement - the first kibbutz, Deganya.
Spread out across the highway from the Kinneret, Deganya is almost as paradisaical as Kibbutz Ein Gedi. It’s a forest of trees, bushes and flowers dotted with little bungalows and smelling of freshly-mowed grass. On a wilting August afternoon, the most audible sound was of birds chirping, and the most visible movement was of a few pensioners tooling around the narrow pathways on golf carts and bikes. Not much seemed to have changed here in a long time - until one noticed the late-model cars parked in some of the backyards.
Until two years ago, Deganya members couldn’t own their own cars and had to reserve the use of one of the kibbutz’s vehicles. This and many other old ways were put aside with the shift from equal to differential salaries.
Taking a break from her managerial duties at Deganya’s old-age home, Nina Ben-Moshe, born here 70 years ago, recalls the effect capitalism had at the “mother” of the kibbutzim. “All these members who’d been staying home with back problems suddenly felt well enough to go back to work,” she says with a knowing laugh. The kibbutz’s operating deficit closed in almost no time. “There were a lot of parasites in the old days. It’s not like that so much anymore,” says Ben-Moshe.
The head administrator at Deganya, Shai Shoshany, stresses that the kibbutz didn’t make the switch to differential salaries because it was hard up economically, but because so many young people were leaving and older members were chafing at the bit. Deganya wasn’t short on money, it was short on individual freedom and opportunity.
Sitting in his office next to a photo on the wall of A.D. Gordon, the Tolstoyan spiritual father of the kibbutz movement who toiled and is buried at Deganya, Shoshany says: “It used to be understood that young people here would do their army service, take a year or two to travel overseas, then leave the kibbutz and not come back. Now, kibbutz life is an option for them again.”
Recently, four young members who’d left Deganya have returned with their families. One is Moran Chen, who is playing on the floor of her apartment with her infant son, Kinar. Chen’s mother, Nurit, a leading educator at the kibbutz, stops by to give the boy a hug.
On maternity leave from her job as a teacher’s supervisor, Chen, 31, and her partner, Eyal, a doctoral student at the Technion, returned to the kibbutz after spending several years away studying and traveling. “There’s something in the atmosphere now - it’s freer,” she says. “People aren’t looking at you, judging you on whether you’re working hard enough.”
She says she almost certainly would not have come back to Deganya if the kibbutz had stuck with the old, rigid model. “For one thing, I would have had to put my son in kibbutz day care when he was three months old and gone back to work; now I can stay home with him as long as my job allows,” she says. “For another thing, we wouldn’t have been able to save any money; now we can.”
SOME 180 kibbutzim, or two-thirds of them, have gone over to differential salaries, with the remaining one-third keeping to the system of equal salaries - so far. These old-model kibbutzim tend to be wealthy, such as Ma’agan Michael, Be’eri, Gan Shmuel, Gan Yavne and Shefayim. A saying heard around the kibbutz movement is: “The more money you have, the more socialism you can afford.”
Yet even among the majority of kibbutzim that have gone capitalist, it’s not Thatcherist, raw capitalism; it’s what kibbutzniks rightly compare to the “Scandinavian” or “social democratic” economic model. It combines aggressive, business-minded creation of wealth with high, progressive taxes to prevent overly large income gaps, to maintain high-standard public infrastructure and services and to provide a strong safety net for the handicapped and elderly, the latter group being disproportionately large on the kibbutzim.
While a few dozen kibbutzim are hard up financially, the great majority are beautifully maintained rural enclaves with good schools, health care, sports and cultural facilities, pensions and old-age care. “There’s still a far greater degree of mutual care on the kibbutz [than in Israeli society at large],” says Gavron.
Achieving this miniature Scandinavian way of life involves assessing the value of each kibbutz member’s work and paying him accordingly, then taking much more in taxes from the haves than from the have-nots. The upshot at Deganya, says Shoshany, is that the before-tax salary of the average member runs about 15 percent higher than the average Israeli’s, but the after-tax salary is about the same.
At the top of Deganya’s wage scale are professors, attorneys and hi-tech professionals, with the highest monthly salary being NIS 22,000 before taxes and NIS 15,000 after. At the bottom are the banana pickers and other laborers, who receive about NIS 6,000 before taxes and NIS 5,000 after.
“We make less money than most of our friends in the city, but our standard of living is much higher,” says Chen. Noting the expanses of greenery on the kibbutz and the Kinneret right across the road, the swimming pool, the basketball court, the cultural activities, the animals in the shed and petting zoo that Kinar sees every day, and the lifelong friends and neighbors who “smile whenever they see him,” she says: “Who wouldn’t want to raise children here?”
THE KIBBUTZ movement has come an awfully long way from where it was in mid-1985, when disaster struck. What happened then was that the government, faced with inflation running at what Gavron calls a “Zimbabwean rate,” took drastic austerity measures to shrink inflation instantly - which instantly left most kibbutzim with debts they had no hope of repaying.
During the previous years of hyperinflation, they’d been living in a fool’s paradise - borrowing way beyond their means, figuring that by the time they had to pay back the loans, triple-digit inflation would have reduced them to easily manageable size. But in 1985, when the government wiped out hyperinflation overnight, it meant the kibbutzim’s absurdly large loans would remain absurdly large, only this time in real money.
“They owed seven or eight billion dollars, something unreal,” says Gavron.
Yet the government couldn’t just let the kibbutzim go bankrupt; there were 130,000 people living on them at the time - where would they go, what would happen to all those communities, farms and factories? (A few dozen kibbutzim had refrained from taking out large, high-risk loans, and thus were not in such trouble, Gavron notes.) So the banks, which at the time were owned by the state, were obliged to write off most of the kibbutzim’s debt and reschedule repayment of the rest. The kibbutzim were saved from bankruptcy - but they were still deeply, unprecedentedly in debt.
The country had just turned abruptly from socialism toward capitalism; the kibbutzim could no longer count on generous government subsidies and protection from competition. There would be no more overfed dogs and cats, no more leaving the flat with the air conditioner on. The world-renowned experiment in communal living would have to be run like a business.
And little by little they were. On the kibbutzim that switched to differential salaries, many say the new system is actually more egalitarian than the old one. “The inequality was just hidden before,” says Ben-Moshe. Before, kibbutz higher-ups and professionals employed outside received the same salary on paper as the banana pickers, but they often concealed perks from the job, not to mention personal bank accounts, say kibbutzniks.
Meanwhile, about 90 kibbutzim - again, mainly the wealthier ones - are holding on to the system of equal salaries. Yet even they have gone capitalist in ways that once upon a time would have been anathema. They’ve turned their members into consumers, distributing equal amounts of disposable income for food, clothing and entertainment, but holding each member responsible for balancing his budget. Typically, these kibbutzim have also required many members to find profitable work outside, or create small businesses themselves, because the farms and factories at home don’t have enough productive work to go around and are no longer willing to provide make-work.
FACING THE Mediterranean north of Herzliya, Shefayim is seen - and derided - by many Israelis as a symbol of the new, capitalist kibbutz. With some 1,000 members, it sits on some of the most valuable land in the country. It runs one of the most successful shopping centers that stay open on Shabbat, renting space to Toys ‘R’ Us, Ace hardware, Office Depot and other stores, as well as McDonald’s, whose golden arches are visible from the kibbutz’s old industrial zone. The Shefayim water park is mobbed during hot weather, and the 150-room Shefayim hotel is generally full. There’s even a used car lot on the premises.
So many members’ and visitors’ cars are parked here, so many people are bustling around, that Shefayim doesn’t have that country village atmosphere ordinarily found on kibbutzim. Instead, it feels more like a beautifully landscaped industrial park, with great leisure facilities open to the public.
Yet despite all the trappings of capitalism, Shefayim, founded in 1927, is one of the socialist holdouts of the kibbutz movement; all its members still receive the same salary, no matter what kind of work they do (although high earners receive bonuses of a few hundred shekels). However, Shefayim probably won’t be able to hold out much longer, nor will many of the other kibbutzim that make enough money to share it out every month not only equally, but generously as well.
Sitting in the restaurant at Shefayim’s hotel, Shimon Gutsfrucht, 64, seems the ultimate, classic kibbutznik. With a thick, salt-and-pepper moustache and a day’s beard, wearing sandals and a plaid shirt open at the neck and showing tufts of white chest hair, he looks like he came off a produce label from the 1950s. His personality is also classic kibbutz - gruff at first, but very soon warm and generous. I ask Gutsfrucht his position at Shefayim.
“I deal with real estate investments and entrepreneurship,” he replies.
People live very well at Shefayim, he says - just about every family owns a car and takes a vacation abroad once every year or two. A second-generation member, Gutsfrucht says that in his parents’ day, newly married couples were given homes of 27 square meters. “Now they get 120 meters that they can expand to 150,” he says, noting that the new two-story duplexes with gardens at the edge of the kibbutz are for them.
I ask how many of the young people leave Shefayim after doing the army and traveling the world. “None,” he says.
When a Shefayim member marries an outsider, the couple invariably makes its home on the kibbutz. Every year for the last 15 years or so, about 10 new members have been marrying in. Compared to the veterans, these people have wide professional and economic horizons. They have no socialist roots, either. Shefayim’s population is getting younger, wealthier and more worldly. Naturally, they want the kibbutz to move in their direction.
“Five years ago, we first started discussing going over to differential salaries,” says Gutsfrucht. “Three years ago we had the first vote of the membership, and the reformers got about 40%. If we held another vote today, they would get over 50%.”
According to the kibbutz’s bylaws, a two-thirds vote is needed to make such a dramatic change, and Gutsfrucht doesn’t think it will happen within the next year or two. Instead, he gives it about five years. “I don’t delude myself, it’s clear the change is going to come, and it’s causing some friction at the wealthier kibbutzim, including this one.”
At Shefayim, the two camps divide roughly along the lines of age and earning ability; along with most of the older and/or less-skilled veterans, Gutsfrucht opposes the switch to differential salaries, at least for the time being. “It’s going to be hard on the people who’ve worked here all their lives and are now between 50 and 65. If they’re going to be paid according to the market value of their work, they’re going to lose out, and how are they going to find better paying jobs? For their sake, there has to be a transition period,” he says. “But in the end, the change is inevitable.”
At kibbutzim that have already made the change, though, there is a general sense among young and old alike that it was the right decision; the economic and demographic numbers speak for themselves. In fact, their future points toward even more capitalism.
At Deganya, as at many other kibbutzim, the next reform on the agenda is home ownership: transferring the title of kibbutz apartments from the kibbutz to the members themselves, depending on their seniority.
“Even socialists want to pass something down to their children,” says Shoshany.
At the Ayalons’ apartment in Ein Gedi, parents and daughter agree that the kibbutz should eventually stop being a kibbutz entirely and become a “community settlement” - one with good schools and facilities, but without any central economic planning and without high taxes. (Meirav, a public relations consultant, and her brother Rafi, a business consultant, each pay the kibbutz’s top marginal tax rate of 60%.) “The way it is now, it’s neither here nor there,” Yonki suggests.
There’s no disagreement between the Ayalon generations, either, about the kibbutz movement’s socialist past: It was great for its time.
“We needed those old ideals,” says Yonki.
“To settle a new kibbutz in the wilderness meant you weren’t just a pioneer, you were a super-pioneer. My parents were strutting around like peacocks when I came here,” says Avner, who left his parents’ established Galilee kibbutz for Ein Gedi in the early 1960s.
From Meirav’s perspective, the kibbutz movement’s century of life has been a natural process of evolution. “It was abnormal to build the kibbutzim just like it was abnormal to build this country - you needed a bunch of psychopaths to make it work,” she says. “But they had to go through that stage to get to this one.”

Stem-Cell Fast Food

Here is an article from Popular Mechanics please read my comments afterwards.
www.popularmechanics.com/science/research
Stem-Cell Fast Food: From NASA to Nourish
Who needs animals? It's only a matter of time before lab-grown meat turns into the oink-less BLT.
By Ian Christe
Published in the March 2007 issue Popular Mechanics.

It sounds like a sci-fi nightmare: giant sheets of grayish meat grown on factory racks for human consumption. But it's for real. Using pig stem cells, scientists have been growing lab meat for years, and it could be hitting deli counters sooner than you think.

Early attempts produced less-than-enticing results. Then, in 2001, scientists at New York's Touro College won funding from NASA to improve in vitro farming. Hoping to serve something, well, beefier than kelp on moon bases and Mars colonies, the scientists successfully grew goldfish muscle in a nutrient broth. And, in 2003, a group of hungry artists from the University of Western Australia grew kidney bean-size steaks from biopsied frogs and prenatal sheep cells. Cooked in herbs and flambéed for eight brave dinner guests, the slimy frog steaks came attached to small strips of fabric — the growth scaffolding. Half the tasters spit out their historic dinner. (Perhaps more significant, half didn't.)

Today, scientists funded by companies such as Stegeman, a Dutch sausage giant, are fine-tuning the process. It takes just two weeks to turn pig stem cells, or myoblasts, into muscle fibers. "It's a scalable process," says Jason Matheny of New Harvest, a meat substitute research group. "It would take the same amount of time to make a kilogram or a ton of meat." One technical challenge: Muscle tissue that has never been flexed is a gooey mass, unlike the grained texture of meat from an animal that once lived. The solution is to stretch the tissue mechanically, growing cells on a scaffold that expands and contracts. This would allow factories to tone the flaccid flesh with a controlled workout.

Lab-grown meat isn't an easy sell, but there could be benefits. Designer meat would theoretically be free of hormones, antibiotics, and the threat of mad cow disease or bird flu. Omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins could be blasted into the mixture (see illustration above) or dispersed through veins. Revolting? You bet, but have you ever visited a sausage factory? Currently costing around $100,000 per kilogram, a choice cut of lab meat makes Kobe beef seem like a bargain. But meat-processing companies hope to start selling affordable factory-grown pork in under a decade. Bon appétit.

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The short article from Poplar Mechanics fits in with the concept of artificial food or what we at the Weed Garden like to refer to as man-made Manna. It also fits in with my concept of High Tech Self-Sufficiency, HTSS. There are numerous advantages of creating synthetic meats in the method that is described in the popular mechanics article. I would like to mention some nonspecifically mentioned in the article. One, the method could be scaled down for small communities, families, or for individual use to help create high Tech self-sufficiency. Two, it would be a radical way to help reduce cruelty to animals in factory farming. Three, it would be a tremendous way to help feed people in areas of the world where the environment is agriculturally challenged. Four, in times of natural disasters, poor harvest etc. it would be an effective way to make food available where it is needed.
What needs to be done now is to promote the concept of this type and other types of synthetic foods. The economic advantages are so clear it's really not worth debating. What must be done is to fight the neo-Luddites and those biological fundamentalist who would just yell that it is weird. First and foremost, we must promote the concept in emergency situations and in areas that are having trouble feeding their population. Second, I think I would offer an olive branch to animal rights activist who would seriously like to be a part of a method that could perhaps put an end to cruel treatment of animals on farms and in slaughter houses. Third, the same olive branch could be offered to back to nature enthusiast to promote self-sufficient farming. Again here is a method that could produce food in a more direct way with less pesticides and chemicals. Here is a way that makes self-sufficient farming economically feasible. Anyways I would appreciate feedback on this article.



www.popularmechanics.com/science/research

Martin Heidegger Life and Philosophy

I caught a BBC documentary put on Youtube on six short clips short parts called Matin Heidegger Life and Philosophy. Just google the title and you should be able to get it on the Internet. Martin Heidegger is considered probably one of the greatest philosophers in the 20th century influencing political, economic, and social thinkers no matter what their perspective. The documentary is worth seeing and it is worth considering as a discussion for the Weed Garden.
I would like just to offer a comment after seeing the documentary. It is quite possible to be brilliant in one field of knowledge and at the same time completely stupid in another field. It is also possible to be a genius and lack character. Heidegger became a distinguished Nazi member and his renowned scholarship help give needed credence to Nazism. Heidegger also destroyed the careers of a number of distinguished German scholars during his time as being a head of a distinguished German academic institution. Heidegger actively encouraged young people to be associated with Nazism. After the Nazis were defeated Heidegger had little to say about the Holocaust. The documentary goes into these and other subjects in much more depth. The documentary starts with this distinguished Quote from Heidegger.
“He who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors.”
I think we should consider this astute statement by Heidegger as perhaps a motto for the Weed Garden.

An email from 2006 relating to energy independence

In reading John Stossel's article and Amos' post about energy independence, I remembered an email which I sent to Ltlconf about this issue. I still had it in my email account. The date was 9/28/2006. Here it is:

Some things things came to me on thinking about our discussions Saturday night.

On the issue of alternative fuels, I remembered that in a discussion with James I had proposed a role for government in this issue which I still advocate. What I said to him at that time is that government should put solar panels on its buildings. This would demonstrate to the rest of society the benefits of solar panels. Another thing that I view positively is that some school districts are now running at least some of thier buses on biodiesel. I have also heard of the military using biodiesel in tanks. I want government to do more of this sort of thing. I would be for a project whose purpose is to help government to stop using oil as much as possible.

However, outside of government, it is important for each individual and group to weigh the costs and benefits when it comes to energy usage, what fuels to use, etc. They can do this for themselves better than government can. The decisions they make together would lead to the necessary change over to alternative fuels, to the degree needed, and at the most appropriate pace. It is important for government not to interfere with this process. A Manhattan style energy project would take resources away that could be used for this purpose. It also could not address the costs and benefits on as situation specific of a level as well those in those situations.

There are some things that can be done by government to affect the incentives and disincentives in the changeover process. You told me that you believed that the Gulf War was mainly fought to affect who controlled the oil fields of Kuwait. If the U.S. had not involved itself in the conflict, and Iraq had suceeded, oil may have gone up in price. If our military is used exclusively for national defense, oil companies can not count on the U.S. to protect them from volatility in the oil market (or any other market) through foreign policy. This would have given them more of a reason to develop alternative energy sources.

Another possibility is what's called a "green tax shift". A green tax shift means moving taxation away from income and trade and onto pollution and use of natural resources. This idea is related to the Georgist single tax, or land value tax. According to the single tax theory, land should be taxed and human effort should not. Land is not created through human effort, so it should be treated differently than labor, trade, or capital. Therefore, it is the only thing that can be justifiably taxed. So, for example, a house built on someone's land should not be taxed, while the value of the land under it should. Those who advocate the green tax shift simply apply this to natural resources in general, not just land. I hate taxation, but I find this form of taxation, in the words of Milton Friedman, "the least bad tax". Taxing pollution, instead of human effort would discourage the use of oil, and provide an incentive for a change to alternative energy sources. In addition, the economic activity needed for the change over would not be taxed, which would provide another positive incentive in the process.