Texas: Background Check Required Before Evacuation; Different Buses for “Criminals”
December 17th, 2007What do you want to bet that the thought criminals will wind up on the buses with the wanted felons, and that those buses will go to different camps. Surely, if there are going to be different buses for “criminals,” there are going to be different camps. Right? Of course, the article doesn’t get into that.
Nice touch, too, with the ID wristbands provided by AT&T, to update family members on the location of evacuees.
The Nazis forced death camp prisoners to send postcards with positive messages to friends and family that they left behind. Some Jews knew that they were doomed and, instead of signing their names on the postcards, wrote short messages like, “hungry,” and “without clothing” in Hebrew.
The point? Make sure that your AT&T tracking bracelet is on tight, so that your loved know where you are at all times… Yeah right. Of course, for now, they’re saying that wearing the wristband is voluntary.
If you think that the Nazi analogy is a stretch, I suggest, in the strongest possible way, that you read: Inside the CIA’s Notorious Black Sites. Read it all the way through, if you dare.
Via: Houston Chronicle:
Texans seeking to escape the next hurricane or state emergency by evacuation bus will first be submitted to criminal background checks, the state’s emergency management director says.
The idea, according to Jack Colley, is to keep sex offenders and others who may be wanted by police off the same buses used by the most vulnerable during an evacuation: the elderly, disabled residents and children.
“This will allow us to help them evacuate,” Colley said of sex offenders and others wanted for crimes. “We’re not going to leave anyone.”
Though the intent is to make sure vulnerable evacuees aren’t victimized, Colley acknowledged that culling sex offenders and other criminals from a herd of evacuees during a potentially chaotic evacuation comes with plenty of challenges.
“We’ll be able to do it,” he said of the task, declining to be more specific about the process because of safety concerns.
He said the agency’s first concern is to move people out of harm’s way.
But Colley insists a better filter on who gets on an evacuation bus with special needs residents will eliminate potential problems.
“We’re here to save lives,” Colley said.
Earlier this month, it was announced AT&T Inc. [AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance] has contracted with the Texas Governor’s Division of Emergency Management to provide electronic wristbands for those residents wanting them, before they board an evacuation bus.
The wristbands would be scanned by emergency management officials and the person’s name would be added to a bus boarding log. That person’s name and their bus information would be sent wirelessly to the University of Texas Center for Space Research data center.
When the evacuee arrives at a designated shelter, the wristband would be scanned again to help state employees respond to inquiries from the public about the safety and location of evacuated family members.
The decision to wear a wristband is purely voluntary. But anyone who boards an evacuation bus will have to provide a name. There will be no requirement to show an identification card, such as a driver’s license, but officials may ask those boarding for an ID.
Colley confirmed that all of those names will be checked against existing sex offender registries and other criminal background databases. Colley said officials are not interested in evacuees’ past criminal convictions, only if they have outstanding warrants, are sex offenders or parolees.
After Hurricane Katrina, nearly 1,700 parolees failed to check in with authorities in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana.
“We’re all entitled to privacy, but we’re not entitled to anonymity,” Colley said.
Colley would not discuss how thorough the background checks will be. He said the state’s focus was keeping sex offenders and those with current warrants segregated from vulnerable residents.
“We’ll have procedures and we’re not going to advertise what they are,” he said. [It’s different camps for thought criminals. Bet on it.—Kevin]
Colley stressed no one will be left behind during an evacuation because they have a criminal history. But those with warrants or with a sex offense conviction will be evacuated separately.
Lessons from Katrina, Rita
Initially, Houston became the destination for at least 273,000 people fleeing hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Among those evacuees were parolees and others with criminal histories. During those hurricanes, there was no way to segregate sex offenders and others from vulnerable populations during an emergency.
Colley says the state’s intention is to keep evacuees safe.
“We took that very seriously after Rita and Katrina and there was no system,” he said.
What the state is doing, is perfectly legal, according to at least one expert.
“Since it’s a government record they’re checking you against, there is not the same invasion of privacy concerns that may come up in other contexts,” said professor Charles Rhodes, who teaches constitutional law at South Texas College of Law. “I think the need for it would outweigh any privacy concerns. This is a public safety issue”
Rhodes’ only reservation would be the system itself, whether it’s set up to handle, perhaps, a false match indicating someone had a criminal record when they did not. He also wants to know how smoothly such checks could be processed.
“It’s going to be interesting to see how this is implemented in the time of an emergency,” Rhodes said. [No shit, especially if you’re on the ‘cull’ list.—Kevin]
Research Credit: EP
When Fractional Reserve Lending Isn’t Fractional Enough
December 17th, 2007Treat heroin addicts by giving them more heroin.
Via: Telegraph:
The Government must suspend a set of key banking regulations at the heart of the current financial crisis or risk seeing the economy spiral towards a future that could “make 1929 look like a walk in the park”, one of Britain’s leading economists has warned.
Peter Spencer, of the Ernst & Young Item Club, said conflicts caused by the Basel system of banking regulations, which determine how much capital banks must raise to keep their books in order, are the root cause of the crunch and were serving to worsen the City’s plight.
The regulations meant that banks forced to take off-balance sheet assets from troubled structured investment vehicles on to their books had little choice but either to raise money from abroad or cut back dramatically on their spending, he said.
He warned that, if London’s money markets remained frozen and the authorities retain the strict Basel regulations, the full scale of the eventual credit crunch and economic slump could be “disastrous”.
Dismissing the assumption that banks are not lending to each other on the money markets because they lack confidence in each others’ potential solvency, he argued that they were, in practice, prevented from lending the cash at all because it could leave their balance sheets falling foul of the Basel regulations.
“If these funding routes are not reopened it will have massive consequences for the economy as a whole,” he said. “It will make 1929 look like a walk in the park.”
He dismissed as “window dressing” the move announced by central banks around the world this week to pump extra money into the money markets and increase the type of collateral they will accept in return, in an effort to get them running again.
“This won’t get to the core of the problem: the fundamental lack of collateral. As these problems drag on, the consequences for the macro-economy of not relaxing [the Basel regulations] are unthinkable.”
Not only do the regulations, which stipulate that banks must have a minimum of 8pc capital among their liabilities, deter banks from lending to each other, they will also limit the amount they can lend to households and businesses. This could escalate the anticipated economic downturn next year significantly, he said.
His warning follows a speech from Bank of England markets expert Paul Tucker, who said changes to these banking regulations were one of the weapons at his disposal in dealing with the credit crisis.
Prof Spencer said that although Basel II – an updated version of the accord – may loosen the regulation slightly, it is unlikely to be enough to improve the situation.
“The Bank is staring into the abyss,” he said. “The Financial Services Authority must go round and check that all banks are solvent, and then it should cut the Basel capital requirement level from 8pc to about 6pc.
“Until then, with the money markets frozen, the Bank will have to go on being the lender of first resort, rather than of last resort.”
Research Credit: Pookie
N.J. Nears Mandated Preschool Flu Shots
December 17th, 2007Oh sure.
Via: AP:
New Jersey moved toward becoming the first state to require flu shots for preschoolers on Monday after a health advisory board backed new vaccine mandates over the opposition of worried parents.
The Public Health Council voted to require New Jersey children attending preschool or licensed day care to get annual flu shots, and to get three additional vaccines for youngsters starting Sept. 1, 2008.
…
Parents concerned about possible dangers of the new vaccines and government intrusion in family medical decisions have been trying to block the new shots.
They note that flu vaccines contain trace amounts of mercury, a toxic heavy metal, and that mercury-free shots can be difficult to obtain.
According to the CDC and other scientific groups, there’s no convincing evidence the trace amounts of mercury in flu shots cause harm.
Following the vote on Monday, concerned parents said they will keep urging support for a bill that would give parents a right to a “philosophical objection” to vaccine mandates, as many other states have.
The new vaccines will be available for free for low-income families through the federal Vaccines for Children program, and private insurers generally will cover the cost, Bresnitz said.
Electric City Bus Has 200KM Range
December 16th, 2007Via: AutoBlogGreen:
I can assure readers that the electric bus – named “Tindo”, which is the local Aboriginal word for “sun” – is a pure EV.
It will be recharged using a unique solar PV system installed on the roof of the new Adelaide Central Bus Station.
This system generates 70,000 kilowatt hours of zero carbon emissions electricity per year – which makes it the largest grid-connected solar system in our City.
“Tindo” has an operational range of 200 kilometres between charges under typical urban conditions, and as it doesn’t have a combustion engine, it operates quietly and effectively with zero tail pipe emissions.
It uses 11 Swiss-made Zebra sodieum/nickel batteries, giving the bus unprecedented energy storage and operational range.
And the batteries are not affected by external temperatures.
Increase in Incomes of the Top 1% Exceeded the Total Income of the Poorest 20%
December 16th, 2007Via: New York Times:
The increase in incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans from 2003 to 2005 exceeded the total income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans, data in a new report by the Congressional Budget Office shows.
The poorest fifth of households had total income of $383.4 billion in 2005, while just the increase in income for the top 1 percent came to $524.8 billion, a figure 37 percent higher.
The total income of the top 1.1 million households was $1.8 trillion, or 18.1 percent of the total income of all Americans, up from 14.3 percent of all income in 2003. The total 2005 income of the three million individual Americans at the top was roughly equal to that of the bottom 166 million Americans, analysis of the report showed.
The report is the latest to document the growing concentration of income at the top, a trend that President Bush said last January had been under way for more than 25 years.
Earlier reports, based on tax returns, showed that in 2005 the top 10 percent, top 1 percent and fractions of the top 1 percent enjoyed their greatest share of income since 1928 and 1929.
Inside the CIA’s Notorious “Black Sites”
December 15th, 2007Via: Salon:
Inside the CIA’s notorious “black sites”
A Yemeni man never charged by the U.S. details 19 months of brutality and psychological torture — the first in-depth, first-person account from inside the secret U.S. prisons. A Salon exclusive.
By Mark Benjamin
Dec. 15, 2007 | The CIA held Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah in several different cells when he was incarcerated in its network of secret prisons known as “black sites.” But the small cells were all pretty similar, maybe 7 feet wide and 10 feet long. He was sometimes naked, and sometimes handcuffed for weeks at a time. In one cell his ankle was chained to a bolt in the floor. There was a small toilet. In another cell there was just a bucket. Video cameras recorded his every move. The lights always stayed on — there was no day or night. A speaker blasted him with continuous white noise, or rap music, 24 hours a day.
The guards wore black masks and black clothes. They would not utter a word as they extracted Bashmilah from his cell for interrogation — one of his few interactions with other human beings during his entire 19 months of imprisonment. Nobody told him where he was, or if he would ever be freed.
It was enough to drive anyone crazy. Bashmilah finally tried to slash his wrists with a small piece of metal, smearing the words “I am innocent” in blood on the walls of his cell. But the CIA patched him up.
So Bashmilah stopped eating. But after his weight dropped to 90 pounds, he was dragged into an interrogation room, where they rammed a tube down his nose and into his stomach. Liquid was pumped in. The CIA would not let him die.
On several occasions, when Bashmilah’s state of mind deteriorated dangerously, the CIA also did something else: They placed him in the care of mental health professionals. Bashmilah believes these were trained psychologists or psychiatrists. “What they were trying to do was to give me a sort of uplifting and to assure me,” Bashmilah said in a telephone interview, through an interpreter, speaking from his home country of Yemen. “One of the things they told me to do was to allow myself to cry, and to breathe.”
Last June, Salon reported on the CIA’s use of psychologists to aid with the interrogation of terrorist suspects. But the role of mental health professionals working at CIA black sites is a previously unknown twist in the chilling, Kafkaesque story of the agency’s secret overseas prisons.
Little about the conditions of Bashmilah’s incarceration has been made public until now. His detailed descriptions in an interview with Salon, and in newly filed court documents, provide the first in-depth, first-person account of captivity inside a CIA black site. Human rights advocates and lawyers have painstakingly pieced together his case, using Bashmilah’s descriptions of his cells and his captors, and documents from the governments of Jordan and Yemen and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to verify his testimony. Flight records detailing the movement of CIA aircraft also confirm Bashmilah’s account, tracing his path from the Middle East to Afghanistan and back again while in U.S. custody.
Bashmilah’s story also appears to show in clear terms that he was an innocent man. After 19 months of imprisonment and torment at the hands of the CIA, the agency released him with no explanation, just as he had been imprisoned in the first place. He faced no terrorism charges. He was given no lawyer. He saw no judge. He was simply released, his life shattered.
“This really shows the human impact of this program and that lives are ruined by the CIA rendition program,” said Margaret Satterthwaite, an attorney for Bashmilah and a professor at the New York University School of Law. “It is about psychological torture and the experience of being disappeared.”
Bashmilah, who at age 39 is now physically a free man, still suffers the mental consequences of prolonged detention and abuse. He is undergoing treatment for the damage done to him at the hands of the U.S. government. On Friday, Bashmilah laid out his story in a declaration to a U.S. district court as part of a civil suit brought by the ACLU against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing accused of facilitating secret CIA rendition flights.
Bashmilah said in the phone interview that the psychological anguish inside a CIA black site is exacerbated by the unfathomable unknowns for the prisoners. While he figured out that he was being held by Americans, Bashmilah did not know for sure why, where he was, or whether he would ever see his family again. He said, “Every time I realize that there may be others who are still there where I suffered, I feel the same thing for those innocent people who just fell in a crack.”
It may seem bizarre for the agency to provide counseling to a prisoner while simultaneously cracking him mentally — as if revealing a humanitarian aspect to a program otherwise calibrated to exploit systematic psychological abuse. But it could also be that mental healthcare professionals were enlisted to help bring back from the edge prisoners who seemed precariously damaged, whose frayed minds were no longer as pliable for interrogation. “My understanding is that the purpose of having psychiatrists there is that if the prisoner feels better, then he would be able to talk more to the interrogators,” said Bashmilah.
Realistically, psychiatrists in such a setting could do little about the prisoners’ deeper suffering at the hands of the CIA. “They really had no authority to address these issues,” Bashmilah said about his mental anguish. He said the doctors told him to “hope that one day you will prove your innocence or that you will one day return to your family.” The psychiatrists also gave him some pills, likely tranquilizers. They analyzed his dreams. But there wasn’t much else they could do. “They also gave me a Rubik’s Cube so I could pass the time, and some jigsaw puzzles,” Bashmilah recalled.
The nightmare started for him back in fall 2003. Bashmilah had traveled to Jordan from Indonesia, where he was living with his wife and working in the clothing business. He and his wife went to Jordan to meet Bashmilah’s mother, who had also traveled there. The family hoped to arrange for heart surgery for Bashmilah’s mother at a hospital in Amman. But before leaving Indonesia, Bashmilah had lost his passport and had received a replacement. Upon arrival in Jordan, Jordanian officials questioned his lack of stamps in the new one, and they grew suspicious when Bashmilah admitted he had visited Afghanistan in 2000. Bashmilah was taken into custody by Jordanian authorities on Oct. 21, 2003. He would not reappear again until he stepped out of a CIA plane in Yemen on May 5, 2005.
Bashmilah’s apparent innocence was clearly lost on officials with Jordan’s General Intelligence Department. After his arrest, the Jordanians brutally beat him, peppering him with questions about al-Qaida. He was forced to jog around in a yard until he collapsed. Officers hung him upside down with a leather strap and his hands tied. They beat the soles of his feet and his sides. They threatened to electrocute him with wires. The told him they would rape his wife and mother.
It was too much. Bashmilah signed a confession multiple pages long, but he was disoriented and afraid even to read it. “I felt sure it included things I did not say,” he wrote in his declaration to the court delivered Friday. “I was willing to sign a hundred sheets so long as they would end the interrogation.”
Bashmilah was turned over to the CIA in the early morning hours of Oct. 26, 2003. Jordanian officials delivered him to a “tall, heavy-set, balding white man wearing civilian clothes and dark sunglasses with small round lenses,” he wrote in his declaration. He had no idea who his new captors were, or that he was about to begin 19 months of hell, in the custody of the U.S. government. And while he was seldom beaten physically while in U.S. custody, he describes a regime of imprisonment designed to inflict extreme psychological anguish.
I asked Bashmilah which was worse: the physical beatings at the hands of the Jordanians, or the psychological abuse he faced from the CIA. “I consider that psychological torture I endured was worse than the physical torture,” he responded. He called his imprisonment by the CIA “almost like being inside a tomb.”
“Whenever I saw a fly in my cell, I was filled with joy,” he said. “Although I would wish for it to slip from under the door so it would not be imprisoned itself.”
After a short car ride to a building at the airport, Bashmilah’s clothes were cut off by black-clad, masked guards wearing surgical gloves. He was beaten. One guard stuck his finger in Bashmilah’s anus. He was dressed in a diaper, blue shirt and pants. Blindfolded and wearing earmuffs, he was then chained and hooded and strapped to a gurney in an airplane.
Flight records show Bashmilah was flown to Kabul. (Records show the plane originally departed from Washington, before first stopping in Prague and Bucharest.) After landing, he was forced to lie down in a bumpy jeep for 15 minutes and led into a building. The blindfold was removed, and Bashmilah was examined by an American doctor.
He was then placed in a windowless, freezing-cold cell, roughly 6.5 feet by 10 feet. There was a foam mattress, one blanket, and a bucket for a toilet that was emptied once a day. A bare light bulb stayed on constantly. A camera was mounted above a solid metal door. For the first month, loud rap and Arabic music was piped into his cell, 24 hours a day, through a hole opposite the door. His leg shackles were chained to the wall. The guards would not let him sleep, forcing Bashmilah to raise his hand every half hour to prove he was still awake.
Cells were lined up next to each other with spaces in between. Higher above the low ceilings of the cells appeared to be another ceiling, as if the prison were inside an airplane hanger.
After three months the routine became unbearable. Bashmilah unsuccessfully tried to hang himself with his blanket and slashed his wrists. He slammed his head against the wall in an effort to lose consciousness. He was held in three separate but similar cells during his detention in Kabul. At one point, the cell across from him was being used for interrogations. “While I myself was not beaten in the torture and interrogation room, after a while I began to hear the screams of detainees being tortured there,” he wrote.
While he was not beaten, Bashmilah was frequently interrogated. “During the entire period of my detention there, I was held in solitary confinement and saw no one other than my guards, interrogators and other prison personnel,” he wrote in his declaration. One interrogator accused him of being involved in sending letters to a contact in England, though Bashmilah says he doesn’t know anybody in that country. At other times he was shown pictures of people he also says he did not know.
“This is a form of torture,” he told me. “Especially when the person subjected to this has not done anything.”
In his declaration, Bashmilah made it clear that most of the prison officials spoke English with American accents. “The interrogators also frequently referred to reports coming from Washington,” he wrote.
After six months he was transferred, with no warning or explanation. On or around April 24, 2004, Bashmilah was pulled from his cell and placed in an interrogation room, where he was stripped naked. An American doctor with a disfigured hand examined him, jotting down distinctive marks on a paper diagram of the human body. Black-masked guards again put him in a diaper, cotton pants and shirt. He was blindfolded, shackled, hooded, forced to wear headphones, and stacked, lying down, in a jeep with other detainees. Then he remembers being forced up steps into a waiting airplane for a flight that lasted several hours, followed by several hours on the floor of a helicopter.
Upon landing, he was forced into a vehicle for a short ride. Then, Bashmilah took several steps into another secret prison — location unknown.
He was forced into a room and stripped naked again. Photos were taken of all sides of his body. He was surrounded by about 15 people. “All of them except for the person taking photographs were dressed in the kind of black masks that robbers wear to hide their faces,” Bashmilah wrote in the declaration.
He was again examined by a doctor, who took notations on the diagram of the human body. (It was the same form from Afghanistan. Bashmilah saw his vaccination scar marked on the diagram.) The doctor looked in his eyes, ears, nose and throat.
He was then thrown into a cold cell, left naked.
It was another tiny cell, new or refurbished with a stainless steel sink and toilet. Until clothes arrived several days later, Bashmilah huddled in a blanket. In this cell there were two video cameras, one mounted above the door and the other in a wall. Also above the door was a speaker. White noise, like static, was pumped in constantly, day and night. He spent the first month in handcuffs. In this cell his ankle was attached to a 110-link chain attached to a bolt on the floor.
The door had a small opening in the bottom through which food would appear: boiled rice, sliced meat and bread, triangles of cheese, boiled potato, slices of tomato and olives, served on a plastic plate.
Guards wore black pants with pockets, long-sleeved black shirts, rubber gloves or black gloves, and masks that covered the head and neck. The masks had tinted yellow plastic over the eyes. “I never heard the guards speak to each other and they never spoke to me,” Bashmilah wrote in his declaration.
He was interrogated more. Bashmilah recalls an interrogator showing him a lecture by an Islamic scholar playing on a laptop. The interrogator wanted to know if Bashmilah knew who the man was, but he did not. It was in this facility that Bashmilah slashed his wrists, then went on his hunger strike, only to be force-fed through a tube forced down his nose.
The CIA seems to have figured out that Bashmilah was not an al-Qaida operative sometime around September 2004, when he was moved to another, similar cell. But there was no more white noise. And while his ankles were shackled, he wasn’t bolted to the floor with a chain. He was allowed to shower once a week. He was no longer interrogated and was mostly left alone.
Bashmilah was given a list of books he could read. About a month before he was released, he was given access to an exercise hall for 15 minutes a week. And he saw mental healthcare professionals. “The psychiatrists asked me to talk about why I was so despairing, interpreted my dreams, asked me how I was sleeping and whether I had an appetite, and offered medications such as tranquilizers.”
On May 5, 2005, Bashmilah was cuffed, hooded and put on a plane to Yemen. Yemeni government documents say the flight lasted six or seven hours and confirm that he was transferred from the control of the U.S. government. He soon learned that his father had died in the fall of 2004, not knowing where his son had disappeared to, or even if he was alive.
At the end of my interview with Bashmilah, I asked him if there was anything in particular he wanted people to know. “I would like for the American people to know that Islam is not an enemy to other nations,” he said. “The American people should have a voice for holding accountable people who have hurt innocent people,” he added. “And when there is a transgression against the American people, it should not be addressed by another transgression.”
— By Mark Benjamin
New Zealand: Heritage Apples Have Strong Disease Fighting Properties
December 15th, 2007“Science is largely avoiding this area. So we need to refocus and if science is not doing it, than non scientists need to be doing it.”
—Mark Christensen
In his spare time, Mark Christensen, an accountant by trade, took it upon himself to enlist the help of cancer researchers to test heritage apple varieties for compounds (phenolics) that, according to Finish and American studies, have proven health benefits.
There has been no research done on the heritage varieties of apples because they aren’t grown commercially.
If you were to substitute a variety such as Monty’s Surprise in place of a ‘supermarket’ commercial variety, you would receive 3.4 times the amount of phenolics in the skin and 5.9 times the amount in the flesh. Hence one Monty’s Surprise apple a day would be comparable to eating at least four modern apples.
This work sums up a lot of what has been lost by submitting to pathological food production practices, and what we have to gain, if we are willing to do the work ourselves.
Audio from Radio New Zealand – Country Life: Heritage Apples: A Wanganui man is most excited about the cancer preventing properties of Monty’s Surprise apples. File Size:5.3MB. Date: (Fri, 14 Dec 2007)
Via: New Zealand Tree Crops – Research on Heritage Apples by Mark Christensen:
SUMMARY OF RESEARCH FINDINGS TO DATE – March 2006
Cancer Prevention Research and Health
1. Identification of Monty’s Surprise, a New Zealand seedling apple variety as having potential for inhibiting disease in humans.
2. Initial testing of a “Bach” flower essence made from Monty’s Surprise flowers opens up a completely new area of research, with potential health benefits.
3. Fuero Rous, a traditional French cider apple identified as having substantial levels of phytochemicals, with medicinal potential, in the skin and flesh of the apple.
4. Hetlina, a heritage European eating apple recognised as having very high medicinal potential.
5. One high quality “medicinal” apple can equate to eating four modern “supermarket” apples. Justifying the age old adage that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”.
6. Growers of heritage and seedling apple varieties have always believed that they are a treasure, needing to be preserved. Flavour in fruit is an indicator of nutritional content. This research has uncovered simply what people have known and been saying for years – that modern apples do not have the flavour like the old varieties used to. We can now attribute this loss of flavour with the lower levels of health promoting compounds within “modern” fruit.
Diabetes Research
7. Our 2003 research found that Russet apples contain very high levels of the related compounds phloridzin and phloridzin-xyloside. Our latest research identified another variety – just called “Otoko House No. 1” at this stage, that also tested with very high levels. Since these compounds are known to slow down the rate of sugar absorption in the body, we will continue to research their potential benefits for diabetes sufferers in the 2006 year.
Apple Breeding Implications
8. The poor nutritional quality of modern commercial apple varieties, is highlighted by this research.
9. A flaw in modern breeding programmes is alluded to, where amateur breeders and roadside seedlings have higher nutritive value and medicinal potential, than modern commercially bred varieties.
10. At the very least, future breeding programmes for new varieties of food plants should include as a pre-eminent selection criteria, the levels of health-promoting beneficial compounds in the varieties selected.
11. The pre-eminence of Seedling varieties, implies that the rootstock selection is very important in obtaining the maximum phytochemical content in apples. In particular growing a variety on its own roots, should assist in that variety attaining its maximum attainable level of health promoting compounds.
12. It appears that the full extent that a rootstock can influence and moderate the levels of compounds in apples, has not yet been fully appreciated.
13. Also implied by this research is that phytonutrient content may well increase with the age of the tree – with very old trees having the maximum available levels of compounds for that variety. The value in trees being able to reach their full maturity, is another factor that is not currently appreciated.
Biodiversity Implications
14. No two apple varieties are the same – all test with different levels of compounds. There is a strength in maintaining diversity of apple cultivars within the country. New Zealand apple growers have been persuaded over many years to remove old varieties and replace them with supposedly superior modern varieties. From a health aspect, this advice has been wrong. The outstanding varieties identified by this research are all seedling or heritage varieties. This proves the vital importance of maintaining a diverse gene pool of material, in apples as with all plant material.
Tree Crops Potential
15. The potential exists for amateur enthusiasts to grow apple pips and produce more superior varieties than commercial breeders.
16. The medicinal potential of traditional cider apples, (far in excess of modern apple cultivars), identifies a niche for boutique cider and cider vinegar production.
17. Previous research on Red Delicious apples has highlighted how significant the flavanoids and other compounds present in the apples may be on reducing the incidence of cancer, heart disease and stroke. With this report we have identified varieties that have considerably higher levels of the beneficial compounds that influence these diseases. Hence these particular varieties could be grown for their medicinal qualities.
Research Credit: BT and AT
No More Solar & Wind Tax Breaks… Thanks Congress
December 15th, 2007The point here is to make sure that individual clean power systems remain expensive and out of reach for most people. There’s going to be utility scale clean power, and you’re going to pay dearly for it. As for being able to call up your power company to tell them that their services will no longer be required, that’s probably always going to cost a fortune.
Via: Neutral Existence:
A new “scaled down†energy bill was passed through the senate last night and three of the most important items in the bill were taken out to appease oil funded republicans. Unfortunately our senators, democrats and republicans alike, failed our country and environment yet again by bowing to big oil and removing the most influential provisions and tax incentives this country has ever seen.
The tax incentives now set to expire in 2008 will end all federal tax credits on solar, wind and other alternative energy installations. No other tax incentive or provision has brought the solar industry closer to grid parity than this one and now it is gone. Grid parity is the point in which it will actually be cheaper to generate your own electricity on your roof than to buy from your local utility company. Now this idea is great for us, but bad for big business, (oil and coal) so of course, the lobbyist went to work on our republican senators and were apparently very affective at getting that tax break completely removed from the energy bill.
Second major blow to the renewable energy industry was the removal of the $22 billion dollar tax package designed to cut tax breaks for big oil companies and funnel the money towards the renewable energy industry. Of course this is bad for Big Oil considering how poor their financials are currently, (sarcasm: Big Oil showed record highs this year) so yet again the lobbyist went to work on our senators and “poof†the tax package is gone. Not only that, but Bush himself threatened to veto the entire bill if this tax package was not removed, showing yet again, a clear alliance with Big Oil and an unwillingness to do what is right.
Another major blow, was the removal of the alternative energy mandate which would have required all investor owned utility companies to get at least 15% of their electricity from alternative energy sources. Many utility companies complained that this would increase cost and again, “poof†another very influential and beneficial provision was removed from the energy bill.
Los Angeles Times on Precious Metals: “Havens for Survivalists, Conspiracy Theorists and Flakes”
December 15th, 2007Gold foil hat?
Attention: “Survivalists, conspiracy theorists and flakes,” this is my BullionVault affiliate link.
Thank you.
Via: Los Angeles Times:
Fresh interest in gold also has spawned an array of gold-related securities, providing more options for people who want to own the metal without having to take physical possession of it.
Yet professional financial advisors often try to discourage their clients from gold investing in any form. Many say they don’t believe it has a place in a modern portfolio.
In part, gold and other precious metals — platinum and silver — suffer from their long-standing image as havens for survivalists, conspiracy theorists and flakes.
“That’s for the guys we don’t want as clients,” said Michael Glowacki, head of financial planning firm Glowacki Group in West Los Angeles.
Unprecedented Central Bank Collusion Allows Troubled Institutions to Borrow Emergency Funds in Secret
December 15th, 2007What you don’t know can’t hurt Them.
Via: Telegraph:
The crucial elements in the Fed’s move yesterday is not so much the sum of money on offer – $20bn next week, $20bn the week after – but that all depository banks in America can draw from the tap anonymously, without the risk of being found out.
“People looked at what happened to Northern Rock in Britain and said we’re not going to risk that, so hardly anybody has been using the Fed facilities,” said Bernard Connolly, global strategist at Banque AIG.
The Fed is now spreading the net wider by allowing all US banks to use the Term Auction Facility, which offers secrecy and allows them to hand in a much wider set of investments as collateral to raise money, including mortgage securities. Perhaps some credit will at last reach those in urgent need.
