These are the movies I've rented since this time last year. Some are for my son, some I've rewatched but I do that less often since I made Netflix my video store of choice. I've actually been with them since their inception. And yes, I'm a little generous with the ratings :D
Friday, September 19, 2008
This Past Year's Netlflix Rentals
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Found My Style
HGTV has a show called
Find Your Style
with Karen McAloon.
I've wondered what is my style? I've seen a few episodes but now, when checking for something else, I ran across the show's quiz. Apparently (ahem, as usual), I'm ahead of the curve.
Sleek & Clean
This decor is really a combination of two design styles – modern earthy-organic paired with bold and contemporary colors – that meet to create a surprising, edgy environment. It's young and fresh and not just trendy, but ahead of the curve.
Your design style includes furnishings and light fixtures verging on industrial, with lots of steel and glass that creates a high-tech, urban feel. The colors are either black and white with bold accents, or rich, saturated swathes of color on the walls, fabrics and rugs. Eclectic mixtures of color, texture and material show off your individuality.
Design Tips for Sleek & Clean
Pantone (www.pantone.com), one of the country's premier color forecasters, recently introduced a palette for 2008 that's perfect for your contemporary and modern look. Pantone's "High Profile" palette combines techno with retro, pairing shades of pristine white, ebony black, rich browns, or silvery grays with more glamorous accents of fuchsia, royal purple, gold and silver.
Need inspiration? Find dozens of decorating ideas in Designers' Portfolio:
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Canned Tomatoes
Here's a nice photo process
or a recipe I picked up from the N&O
RECIPE Canned Tomatoes
Ingredients:
20 pounds tomatoes, peeled and quartered
Citric acid, 1/2 teaspoon per quart jar
Basil leaves, optional
Equipment:
8 quart jars with lids and screw bands
Canner pot with rack
Wooden spoon
Thin rubber spatula
Jar lifter
Directions:
1. Fill the canner a little more than half full with water and start to heat. (If it boils before you get to Step 5, reduce heat to warm so it's not too hot when you add the jars in Step 9.) In a separate pot, heat some water for blanching the tomatoes.
2. Wash the jars, lids and screw bands well by hand or in the dishwasher, keeping the jars in hot water or in the closed-up dishwasher. When ready to fill the jars in Step 5, you can keep the lids hot by placing them in hot water in the glass carafe of a coffee maker and setting it on the machine's warmer. Be sure the screw bands are dry.
3. Drop 3 to 5 washed tomatoes at a time in boiling water for about 1 minute, then use a slotted spoon to transfer them to a big bowl of ice water to stop the cooking and to get them cool enough to handle as you peel them.
4. Cut the core out of the peeled tomatoes and then, depending on their size, leave whole or cut in half or quarters and set them aside in a large glass or stainless steel bowl or pot, saving the juice.
5. Once all of the tomatoes have been prepared, start filling the hot jars with the room-temperature tomatoes, leaving 1/2 inch of head space from the top of the jar. As you fill, stop once or twice to arrange the tomatoes with a wooden spoon and press out some juice. You can add 3 to 4 fresh basil leaves along the way. Don't pack too tightly. Ladle in some of the tomato juice to get to the 1/2 inch of head space, but be careful not to use up the juice too early.
6. Run a thin rubber spatula along the inside edge of the jar to release any air bubbles.
7. Sprinkle 1/2 teaspoon of citric acid on top of the tomatoes. Wipe off the threads of the jar with a clean, damp cloth.
8. Using a pair of tongs, remove a hot lid from the water and set on jar. Put on a screw band and tighten.
9. Carefully set the jar, which should still be a little hot, on the rack in the canner. The water should be 1 inch above the tops of the jars. Add more water if necessary.
10. Repeat steps 5-9 with the remaining tomatoes.
11. When all the jars are in the canner, cover and bring to a boil.
12. Once the water starts to boil, start your timer for 45 minutes of processing, adjusting heat as necessary to keep the water at a gentle boil.
13. After processing, use jar lifter to carefully remove the jars and place on a towel on the counter. Leave at least 1 inch of space between the jars so that air can circulate.
14. As the jars cool, you should hear the popping of the lids as they vacuum seal. After cooling 12 to 24 hours, check lids to be sure they are fully sealed, pressing on the center to make sure it doesn't pop back. Remove the screw band and pull gently on the lid to make sure it doesn't come off easily. Store in a cool place.
Roxboro Questions Viability of New Assembly Plant
Force Protection makes armored vehicles used by the military and trains troops in how to use them.
Their blast-resistant Cheetah was scheduled to be assembled in Roxboro, NC but not one single order has been placed.
"One of the largest makers of blast-resistant vehicles for the U.S. Marines is rekindling plans for a Person County facility that went cold this year.
Force Protection, based in Ladson, S.C., was supposed to spend $31 million to rebuild an empty automotive plant outside Roxboro and create 270 jobs over the next three years. That's according to the terms of a deal reached last year between the company and state and local economic development officials.
Force Protection has invested $20 million in upgrading the plant, but manufacturing is on hold indefinitely. The company is wrestling with accounting problems, eroding market share and a failure to generate a single order for the blast-resistant Cheetah, which it plans to assemble in Person County.
Last week, CEO Michael Moody said the company trimmed its work force to 1,540 from a peak of about 2,000 late last year.
Moody also announced an overhaul of operations that will shift some work to Roxboro from a facility in Summerville, S.C.
By year's end, Force Protection expects to be teaching military personnel to operate its Cougar and Buffalo blast-resistant vehicles at the Person County site. Mechanics who go overseas to work on vehicles also will receive training there, spokesman Tommy Pruitt said.
The company will hire to fill some of those spots, but it will also give employees from South Carolina a chance to relocate. Pruitt would not say how many workers the facility will need or how many the company would hire. Nor would he say how the shift from manufacturing to training would affect wages.
The company has about 15 workers at the facility near Roxboro. They were hired locally in recent months to help make upgrades. The company's Web site lists only one job opening at the site -- for a spare-parts analyst, with annual pay of $54,000.
Average pay for manufacturing positions at the plant was expected to be $30,276 a year, plus benefits. The average pay for the training positions will be about $50,000, plus benefits, well above the average Person County salary of $28,496, excluding benefits.
All of the jobs created must pay at least $25,121 a year, not including benefits, according to the deal with state economic development officials.
Glen Newsome, director of the Person County Economic Development Commission, said he has assurances from Force Protection that it will meet hiring and investment targets scheduled for the next three years.
"They've kept us in the loop as to what has been going on, and we have no doubt that they will meet their goals," he said.
Newsome said Force Protection has not missed any incentives deadlines.
Iraq, armor and troops
Force Protection's profile rose after it became a supplier to the U.S. military in Iraq in 2005. The company's vehicles have V-shaped hulls and thick armor and are used to protect troops from roadside bomb blasts.
After peaking at more than $30 a share in the summer of 2007, Force Protection stock has plummeted, closing at $4.03 Monday. Competition from larger suppliers and a decision by the Marines to buy a third fewer bomb-resistant vehicles hurt sales. Force Protection also never received the military contract it had anticipated for the Cheetah line that was to be built in Person.
This year, the company delayed filing its 2007 financial report to the Securities Exchange Commission, saying it needed to restate results for the three- and nine-month periods that ended Sept. 30 because of significant accounting errors.
Without timely financial results, the Nasdaq Stock Market had threatened to delist the company."
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Holly Park at Raleigh Beltline is Getting a Facelift, Trader Joe's
Seems Trader Joe's is becoming an anchor in the same shopping center as Melting Pot and Shabu Shaba. Holly Park shopping center is at the intersection hugging the Beltline at Old Wake Forest Road in (Midtown?) Raleigh.
No word whether Jerry's Artorama has survived the 'upgrade'.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Reincarnation Placement Exam
Your result for Reincarnation Placement Exam ...
Gypsy Camp
49% Intrigue, 51% Civilization, 69% Humanity, 64% Crowded, 24% Busy.
You sing! You dance! You flee from the authorities!
You were a bit difficult to place, because you like civilization and humanity -- but when it comes to work, you don't really fit into the system, the ruts and the rituals, that modern civilization embraces. You like your own ways... your old ways.
We've placed you among a hardy Gypsy family. They'll have you plucking a violin before you can talk, and dancing before you can walk. The road is your home, and your horses are members of your family. You get to wear lots of shiny things.
We expect that you'll have a good life. Even if your people are surrounded by a world where they don't really fit in, they have each other, an oasis of compatibility in an unbalanced world. We know you'll make the most of it!
Friday, September 12, 2008
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Study says most corporations pay no U.S. income taxes
Most U.S. and foreign corporations doing business in the United States avoid paying any federal income taxes, despite trillions of dollars worth of sales, a government study released on Tuesday said.
The Government Accountability Office said 72 percent of all foreign corporations and about 57 percent of U.S. companies doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes for at least one year between 1998 and 2005.
More than half of foreign companies and about 42 percent of U.S. companies paid no U.S. income taxes for two or more years in that period, the report said.
During that time corporate sales in the United States totaled $2.5 trillion, according to Democratic Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, who requested the GAO study.
The report did not name any companies. The GAO said corporations escaped paying federal income taxes for a variety of reasons including operating losses, tax credits and an ability to use transactions within the company to shift income to low tax countries.
With the U.S. budget deficit this year running close to the record $413 billion that was set in 2004 and projected to hit a record $486 billion next year, lawmakers are looking to plug holes in the U.S. tax code and generate more revenues.
Dorgan in a statement called the report "a shocking indictment of the current tax system." Levin said it made clear that "too many corporations are using tax trickery to send their profits overseas and avoid paying their fair share in the United States."
The study showed about 28 percent of large foreign corporations, those with more than $250 million in assets, doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes in 2005 despite $372 billion in gross receipts, the senators said. About 25 percent of the largest U.S. companies paid no federal income taxes in 2005 despite $1.1 trillion in gross sales that year, they said."
Another GAO study found abuse among companies concerning unpaid federal payroll taxes."0ver 1.6 million businesses owed over $58 billion in unpaid federal payroll taxes, including interest and penalties. Some of these businesses took advantage of the existing tax enforcement and administration system to avoid fulfilling or paying federal tax obligations—thus abusing the federal tax system. Over a quarter of payroll taxes are owed by businesses with more than 3 years (12 tax quarters) of unpaid payroll taxes. Some of these business owners repeatedly accumulated tax debt from multiple businesses.
GAO selected 50 businesses with payroll tax debt as case studies and
found extensive evidence of abuse and potential criminal activity in
relation to the federal tax system. The business owners or officers in
our case studies diverted payroll tax funds for their own benefit or to
help fund business operations.
Examples of Tax-Related Abusive and Potentially Criminal Activity:
Business: Construction;
Unpaid payroll taxes: Almost $2.5 million over 12 years;
Activity: Potential illegal check kiting and money laundering.
Business: Health care;
Unpaid payroll taxes: Almost $2.5 million over 7 years;
Activity: Officers took large cash withdrawals prior to filing
bankruptcy multiple times.
Business: Dentist;
Unpaid payroll taxes: Over $500,000 over 10 years;
Activity: Owner owed over $500,000 in personal taxes, put property in
spouse's name, and sold property to children for less than market
value.
Bush Plans To Drink All The Milkshake
Have you been wondering what W plans to do after his presidential term? Well..
I've been wanting to mention this story that has remained under the wire for two years now:
"The land grab project of US President George W. Bush in Chaco, Paraguay, has generated considerable discomfort both politically and environmentally.
His daughter Jenna, under the guise of a humanitarian trip, has secured the private purchase of 98,840 acres of land in Chaco, Paraguay, near the Triple Frontier (Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay), reportedly located in Paso de Patria, near Bolivian gas reserves and the Guarani indigenous water region, within the Triple Border.
Alto Paraguay Gov. Erasmo Rodriguez Acosta revealed he heard that part of the land purchase consists of an ecological reserve (Fundacion Patria), with which Bush is affiliated.
Concern increased with the arrival of Bush's daughter, Jenna, and a source from the Physical Planning Department saying that most of the Chaco region now belongs to private companies.
Luis D"Elia, Argentina´s undersecretary for Land for Social Habitat, says the matter raises regional concern because it threatens local natural resources.
He termed it “surprising” that the Bush family is trying to settle a few short miles from the US Mariscal Estigarribia Military Base.
Argentinean Adolfo Perez Esquivel, 1980 Nobel Peace Prize winner, warned that the real war will be fought not for oil, but for water, and recalled that Acuifero Guaranà is one of the largest underground water reserves in South America, running beneath Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay (larger than Texas and California together).
In an article entitled "We Hate To Bring Up the Nazis, But They Fled To South America, Too", I found some interesting bullets:
* The Cuban news service reports that George W. Bush has purchased 98,840 acres in Paraguay, near the Bolivian/Brazilian border.
* Jenna Bush paid a secret diplomatic visit to Paraguayan President Nicanor Duarte and U.S. Ambassador James Cason. There were no press conferences, no public sightings and no official confirmation of her 10-day trip.
* The Paraguayan Senate voted last summer to “grant U.S. troops immunity from national and International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction.”
* Immediately afterwards, 500 heavily armed U.S. troops arrived with various planes, choppers and land vehicles at Mariscal Estigarribia air base, which happens to be at the northern tip of Paraguay near the Bolivian/Brazilian border. More have reportedly arrived since then.
Yes, this was two years ago - and all executed very quietly and with little to no media coverage here in the U.S. but it was all over the South American press — and not just Venezuela and Bolivia.Here’s a version from Brazil.
Here’s one from Argentina.
"As far as we can understand, all the paperwork and deeds and such are secret. But somehow the news leaked that a new “land trust” created for Bush had purchased nearly 100,000 acres near the town of Chaco.
"And Jenna’s down there having secret meetings with the president and America’s ambassador to Paraguay, James Cason. Bush posted Cason in Havana in 2002, but last year moved him to Paraguay.
"Cason apparently gets around. A former “political adviser” to the U.S. Atlantic Command and ATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic, Cason has been stationed in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama … basically everywhere the U.S. has run secret and not-so-secret wars over the past 30 years.
"Why might the president and his family need a 98,840-acre ranch in Paraguay protected by a semi-secret U.S. military base manned by American troops who have been exempted from war-crimes prosecution by the Paraguyan government?"
Here’s a little background on the base itself, which Rumsfeld secretly visited in late 2005:
U.S. Special Forces began arriving this past summer at Paraguay’s Mariscal Estigarribia air base, a sprawling complex built in 1982 during the reign of dictator Alfredo Stroessner. Argentinean journalists who got a peek at the place say the airfield can handle B-52 bombers and Galaxy C-5 cargo planes. It also has a huge radar system, vast hangers, and can house up to 16,000 troops. The air base is larger than the international airport at the capital city, Asuncion.Some 500 special forces arrived July 1 for a three-month counterterrorism training exercise, code named Operation Commando Force 6.
Paraguayan denials that Mariscal Estigarribia is now a U.S. base have met with considerable skepticism by Brazil and Argentina. There is a disturbing resemblance between U.S. denials about Mariscal Estigarribia, and similar disclaimers made by the Pentagon about Eloy Alfaro airbase in Manta , Ecuador. The United States claimed the Manta base was a “dirt strip” used for weather surveillance. When local journalists revealed its size, however, the United States admitted the base harbored thousands of mercenaries and hundreds of U.S. troops, and Washington had signed a 10-year basing agreement with Ecuador.
It is reported that Rev. Moon bought 600,000 hectares — that’s 1,482,600 acres — in the same place: Chaco, Paraguay.
Another twist: The senior George Bush is reported as the owner of the 98,840 acres in Moon’s neighborhood.
Bush 41 was the first bigshot politician to go prancing around with Rev. Moon in public. Especially in South America:
“In the early stages of the Reagan Revolution that embraced the Washington Times and Moon’s anti-Communist movement, it was embarrassing to be caught at a Moon event,” wrote The Gadflyer last year. “Until George H.W. Bush appeared with Moon in 1996, thanking him for a newspaper that ‘brings sanity to Washington.’” That was while on an extended trip to South America in Moon’s company. A Reuters’ story of Nov 25 of that year describes the former president as “full of praise” for Moon at a banquet in Buenos Aires, toasting him as “the man with the vision.” (And Moon helped Bush out with his own vision thing, paying him $100,000 for the pleasure of his company.) Bush and Moon then traveled together to Uruguay, “to help him inaugurate a seminary in the capital, Montevideo, to train 4,200 young Japanese women to spread the word of his Church of Unification across Latin America.”
"In one way, it makes sense: why not retire in the land where the US military has had a visible presence for over a year and that's ruled by a pro-market, Bush friendly president? Plus, Paraguay gives foreign investors all the same protections it gives its own: for people in Bush's income bracket, the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agreement Agency (MIGA) "insures investors against risks such as expropriation, currency inconvertibility and damages caused by revolution, war or civil strikes."
But as corruption scandals pile up in the Bush administration and legal teams are assembled in anticipation of post-2008 life, perhaps this is the most telling fact about Bush's possible retirement getaway: while the US and Paraguay have an extradition treaty, there's one glaring exemption: "political offenses."
Both the Moonie and Bush land is located at what Paraguay’s drug czar called an “enormously strategic point in both the narcotics and arms trades.” And it sits atop the one of the world’s largest fresh-water aquifers.
...And Nary A Drop To Drink
This fall, two water crisis documentaries that the Triangle will once again most likely pass up (so save it in Netflix) will be released entitled Flow and Blue Gold.
Also, tomorrow, another documentary entitled simply Water will be out on DVD. I could find very little about the DVD other than this description -
"Water itself is the star of this fascinating exploration of the variety of capacities of earth's most common substance. This globe-trotting documentary explains how water plays a vital role in health, manufacturing, hydropower and more. Journeying to Russia, Kazakhstan, Switzerland, Israel, the United States, England, Austria, Japan, Argentina, China and Tibet, the film interviews researchers on the cutting edge of water's future.
Releases on DVD Sep 12, 2008"
Here are some facts it presents:
About Water
* Of the 6 billion people on earth, 1.1 billion do not have access to safe, clean drinking water.
* The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency currently does not regulate 51 known water contaminants.
* While the average American uses 150 gallons of water per day, those in developing countries cannot find five.
* The water and sanitation crisis claims more lives through disease than any war claims through guns.
* According to the National Resources Defense Council, in a scientific study in which more than 1,000 bottles of 103 brands of water were tested, about one-third of the bottles contained synthetic organic chemicals, bacteria, and arsenic.
* Water is a $400 billion dollar global industry; the third largest behind electricity and oil.
* There are estimates that from five hundred thousand to seven million people get sick per year from drinking tap water.
* Californiaʼs water supply is running out – it has about 20 years of water left in the state.
* There are over 116,000 human-made chemicals that are finding their way into public water supply systems.
* In Bolivia nearly one out of every ten children will die before the age of five. Most of those deaths are related to illnesses that come from a lack of clean drinking water.
* The cost per person per year for having 10 liters of safe drinking water every day is just $2 USD.
A beautiful video encouraging Rainwater Harvesting:
When The Rivers Run Dry book review
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Sally D Gains Popularity
I actually grew Salvia Divinorum, or Diviner's Sage, only a handful of years ago. It's beautiful, with each expansive leaf taking on a shiny, reflective property. I'd grow it again if I could find it, like I originally did in a little nursery in Sanford. I'm not even sure they knew what they were growing. It was kept among all the other salvias that are only ornamentals. In fact, the greenhouse keeper told me "good luck getting it to flower. I've had little success." It's not the blooms I wanted, but declined to tell the grower what my true purpose was.
Unfortunately now, YouTube videos showing people tripping on it could be bringing about legislation to ban the hallucinogen. It would be another addition to a growing list of psychoactive substances that have potentially reflective and psychologically healing qualities, but because of day-trippers only using it to get-off recreationally, it's full potential could be mired beneath legal issues. As one site states, "
It should always be used in a thoughtful, intelligent manner, and only by responsible adults that are of sound mind and clear intent."
Popularity of a Hallucinogen May Thwart Its Medical Uses
"With a friend videotaping, 27-year-old Christopher Lenzini of Dallas took a hit of Salvia divinorum, regarded as the world’s most potent hallucinogenic herb, and soon began to imagine, he said, that he was in a boat with little green men. Mr. Lenzini quickly collapsed to the floor and dissolved into convulsive laughter.
When he posted the video on YouTube this summer, friends could not get enough. “It’s just funny to see a friend act like a total idiot,” he said, “so everybody loved it.”
Until a decade ago, the use of salvia was largely limited to those seeking revelation under the tutelage of Mazatec shamans in its native Oaxaca, Mexico.
Today, this mind-altering member of the mint family is broadly available for lawful sale online and in head shops across the United States.
Though older Americans typically have never heard of salvia, the psychoactive sage has become something of a phenomenon among this country’s thrill-seeking youth.
More than 5,000 YouTube videos — equal parts “Jackass” and “Up in Smoke” — document their journeys into rubber-legged incoherence.
Some of the videos have been viewed half a million times.
Yet these very images that have helped popularize salvia may also hasten its demise and undermine the promising research into its possible medical uses.
Pharmacologists who believe salvia could open new frontiers for the treatment of addiction, depression and pain fear that its criminalization would make it burdensome to obtain and store the plant, and difficult to gain government permission for tests on human subjects. In state after state, however, including here in Texas, the YouTube videos have become Exhibit A in legislative efforts to regulate salvia. This year, Florida made possession or sale a felony punishable by 15 years in prison. California took a gentler approach by making it a misdemeanor to sell or distribute to minors.
“When you see it, well, it sure makes a believer out of you,” said Representative Charles Anderson of Waco, a Republican state lawmaker who is sponsoring one of several bills to ban salvia in Texas.
When the federal government this year published its first estimates of salvia use, the data astonished many: some 1.8 million people had tried it in their lifetimes, including 750,000 in the previous year. Among males 18 to 25, where consumption is heaviest, nearly 3 percent reported using salvia in the previous year, making it twice as prevalent as LSD and nearly as popular as Ecstasy.
Recent studies at college campuses on both coasts have yielded estimates as high as 7 percent. The herb’s presence on military ships and bases has prompted enough concern about readiness that the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology was asked to develop the first urinalysis for salvia and is now testing 50 samples a month.
Though research is young and little is known about long-term effects, there are no studies suggesting that salvia is addictive or its users prone to overdose or abuse. Indeed, a salvia experience can be so intense, and at times so unsettling, that many try it just once, and even devotees use it sparingly.
Reports of salvia-related emergency room admissions are virtually nonexistent, likely because its effects typically vanish in just a few minutes.
With little data at its disposal, the Drug Enforcement Administration has spent more than a decade studying whether to add salvia to its list of controlled substances, as is the case in several European and Asian countries. In the meantime, 13 states and several local governments have banned or otherwise regulated the plant and its chemically enhanced extracts.
Known on the street by nicknames like Sally D and Magic Mint, salvia can have vastly different effects depending on dose, potency and the mindset and tolerance of its users, according to researchers and experienced smokers (though bitter, it can also be chewed or consumed as a tincture). Dozens of online vendors sell mild extracts for as little as $5 a gram; the strongest, at up to 100 times the potency of the raw leaf, sell for more than $50.
Users often report a sudden dissociation from self, as if traveling through time. The experience tends to be solitary, introspective and sometimes fearful: a 2003 bulletin from the Department of Justice concluded that salvia was unlikely ever to become a party drug.
“I’ve used several psychedelics, and salvia’s definitely the most intense experience that I’ve had,” said Brian D. Arthur, founder of Mazatec Garden, which sells salvia and other herbs online from a nondescript house in Houston. “Salvia takes you out of the world and puts you in a different place.”
Regular users say it can be a restorative, even spiritual tonic, and recall their visualizations with precision.
One night in August, Nathan K., a 29-year-old father of three from Waco, stretched back in his blue recliner and took a long, purposeful drag from his pipe. As he closed his eyes, he found himself transported into a dream state, he said, as if drifting down a rain forest river. A beatific smile spread lightly across his face.
The effects dissipated after five minutes, leaving him with a sense of well-being. It was, he said, as if a masseuse had rubbed out the knots in his psyche. “Just a very gentle letting go, a very gentle relaxing,” Nathan said on the condition that he not be fully identified.
Those who support the contemplative use of salvia disdain the YouTubers for disrespecting the herb’s power and purpose.
“They’re not really taking it as a tool to explore their inner psyche,” said Daniel J. Siebert, a Californian who pioneered the production of salvia extracts. “They’re just taking it to get messed up.”
At a legislative hearing near Dallas in August, Mr. Anderson argued that by not banning salvia, governments were communicating that it is benign. He noted that Internet purveyors advise that salvia should be used only with a “sober sitter,” and said its legal status might encourage experimentation among some who would never consider a back-alley drug deal.
He also told his colleagues about a video that depicts a salvia user behind the wheel of a car. (In fact, that video, “Driving on Salvia,” is one in a series of popular parodies featuring Erik J. Hoffstad, a production assistant in Los Angeles. In the two-and-a-half minute film, Mr. Hoffstad smokes salvia from a bong in a parked car — his friends made sure he did not have the real keys — and then freaks out when a cat unexpectedly pounces on the windshield.)
“What we really worry about,” Mr. Anderson said at the hearing, “is youngsters doing this and then getting in a vehicle or getting on a motorcycle or jumping in a pool somewhere.”
There have been rare claims of salvia-related deaths, but the links are speculative.
In March, Mario G. Argenziano, a 42-year-old restaurant manager from Yonkers, shot himself in the face 10 minutes after smoking salvia, a police report quoted his wife, Anna Argenziano, as saying. Ms. Argenziano said her husband, a gun collector and marksman, retrieved a handgun from a bedside table to show friends, then pointed it at himself and acted confused.
“Before the shot was fired, he was laughing,” Ms. Argenziano said. She said her husband had no psychiatric history; Yonkers police said they could not determine salvia’s role.
In 2006, Brett Chidester, a 17-year-old described by his family as a model student with no history of mental illness, committed suicide in Delaware at a time when he was apparently smoking salvia several times a week. Entries in his journal, provided by his mother, suggest that his salvia use influenced feelings that “our existence in general is pointless.”
Several months later, a medical examiner changed Mr. Chidester’s death certificate to list his salvia use as a contributing factor. Delaware’s Legislature immediately banned salvia by passing a bill it called Brett’s Law.
Such laws could pose a substantial burden to researchers at institutions like Harvard and the University of Kansas who are convinced that salvia’s active compound, Salvinorin A, holds great promise and will aid in the development of new lines of pain and psychiatric medications.
In 2002, Dr. Bryan L. Roth, now of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discovered that Salvinorin A, perhaps uniquely, stimulates a single receptor in the brain, the kappa opioid receptor. LSD, by comparison, stimulates about 50 receptors. Dr. Roth said Salvinorin A was the strongest hallucinogen gram for gram found in nature.
Though Salvinorin A, because of its debilitating effects, is unlikely to become a pharmaceutical agent itself, its chemistry may enable the discovery of valuable derivatives. “If we can find a drug that blocks salvia’s effects, there’s good evidence it could treat brain disorders including depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, maybe even H.I.V.,” Dr. Roth said.
Many scientists believe salvia should be regulated like alcohol or tobacco, but worry that criminalization would encumber their research before it bears fruit.
“We have this incredible new compound, the first in its class; it absolutely has potential medical use, and here we’re talking about throttling it because some people get intoxicated on it,” said Dr. John Mendelson, a pharmacologist at the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute who, with federal financing, is studying salvia’s impact on humans. “It couldn’t be more foolish from a business point of view.”
Though states are moving quickly, Bertha K. Madras, a deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said federal regulators remained in a quandary.
“The risk of any drug that is intoxicating is high,” Dr. Madras said. “You’re one car ride away from an event that could be life-altering. But in terms of really good studies, there is just very little. So what do you do? How do you make policy in the absence of good hard cold information?”
The State of The Economy in I.O.U.S.A.
I caught this review of another movie (and book by the same name) that's not likely to be in Triangle theaters but might be worth watching:
I.O.U.S.A.
"For 85 minutes, I.O.U.S.A. zips through 200 years of American history to explain how the richest country in the world is currently $9.5 trillion in debt.
"The federal debt seems too incredible a sum to even fully grasp; an easier way to understand such an enormous figure is that if the debt was equally divided among the country's population, each American would owe over $30,000.
"A deficit is nothing new for the United States. The federal government has almost always spent more than it earned in taxes. The film's tour through history actually makes the current debt slightly less distressing; in 1946 World War II spending contributed to the national debt peaking at 120% of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Politicians, regardless of political affiliation, don't want to make the tough decision of cutting spending and raising taxes, especially when it means not being reelected. But (the director) Creadon argues -- without actually being partisan -- that the only way to decrease the national debt is to enact a more responsible fiscal policy that does just that.
"A significant portion of I.O.U.S.A. follows former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker and The Concord Coalition Executive Director Robert Bixby as they tour the country speaking in town hall meetings as part of their Fiscal Wake-Up Tour. Since 2005, Walker and Bixby have made it their mission to educate the public on the reality that the future of the country depends on making difficult financial decisions.
"According to Bixby, the current budget -- with over $700 billion annually allocated for military spending and a yearly budget deficit of over $230 billion -- is "unsustainable" over the long term; future generations are going to inherit an enormous debt while simultaneously shouldering the rising costs of Social Security and Medicare as the country ages. The Iraq war alone is costing approximately $275 million a day.
"Between 1980 and 1990 the national debt more than tripled. After being elected in 1992, President Bill Clinton broke his campaign promise to lower taxes, deciding instead to balance the budget and eliminate the debt by 2012. But we haven't continued to pay down our debt; the rising budget deficit, and what that means for the country's future, is why Walker and Bixby started their Fiscal Wake-Up Tour.
"Aside from voting for more responsible politicians, there is little the average American can do about the budget deficit. But there is something we can all do about an equally serious economic problem: the trade deficit, specifically the amount of Chinese-made goods Americans buy. Warren Buffet famously wrote about the problem in his 2003 Forbes magazine article titled "Squanderville versus Thriftville". During an on-screen interview, Buffet says that he is more concerned with the trade deficit than the budget deficit.
"While true trade between countries is good, the film asserts that the United States is too reliant on foreign countries to produce necessary goods. This situation has created low cost goods and services for American consumers, while destroying the county's manufacturing industry. Workers at a Chinese light bulb factory featured in the film only make $10 a day. So instead of Americans being able to make their own light bulbs at domestic factories that pay a living wage, they buy cheaper light bulbs from China without really considering the long-term financial and ethical ramifications.
"Americans need to start thinking about the consequences of buying foreign goods that could be easily produced in their own country -- even if that means accepting a slightly higher price tag. The current economic relationship is contributing to China's growing prowess and the United States' growing trade deficit.
"To its credit, I.O.U.S.A. does not take political sides; regardless of which party is in office -- politicians on both sides of the aisle are responsible for the current situation -- the United States needs a balanced budget and more equitable international trade relationships.
"For those who think that this sobering issue exists solely at a federal level, the film points out that individual Americans have the same negative savings rate as the country. It's individuals who are buying all of those cheap tchotchkes from China, therefore contributing to the country's trade deficit.
"While it may be easier to simply ignore the complexities of the country's finances, Americans actually have a chance to reevaluate their fiscal policies with the upcoming presidential elections..."
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
That's Religulous!
Bill Maher and Larry Charles (Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm) have come together to make a documentary on the current state of religion in our world. It's due to be released (a limited release, I assure you - the Bible Belt won't run it) in October. Add it to your Netflix Saved Queue now!
Religion, The Fairy Tale
"It's just the Ultimate Hustle. It's just 'pay no attention to the man behind the curtain'...
Why can't God just defeat the Devil and get rid of evil? and it's the same reason the comic book character can't get rid of his nemesis - then there's no story. If God gets rid of the Devil, and he could - he's all-powerful, well then, there's no fear, there's no reason to come to church, there's no reason to pass the plate, we're all out of a job, it's got to go on."
Bill Maher on Larry King
After this, Maher created the website Disbeliefnet.com
Monday, September 8, 2008
The Four Noble Truths
The greatest achievement is selflessness.
The greatest worth is self-mastery.
The greatest quality is seeking to serve others.
The greatest precept is continual awareness.
The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything.
The greatest action is not conforming with the worlds ways.
The greatest magic is transmuting the passions.
The greatest generosity is non-attachment.
The greatest goodness is a peaceful mind.
The greatest patience is humility.
The greatest effort is not concerned with results.
The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go.
The greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances.
The Four Noble Truths
1. The world is full of suffering and stress.
2. The cause of this suffering and stress is desires of physical instincts.
3. If desire can be removed, then suffering and stress will be ended.
4. Desire can be removed by following the Eightfold Path:
Right Views,
Right Thoughts,
Right Speech,
Right Conduct,
Right Livelihood,
Right Effort,
Right Mindfulness,
Right Concentration.
.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Democratic Ecology Products
FROM TILL TO ROOFTOP Philippe Starck, who designed the 2 euro coin is now at work on a line of relatively inexpensive energy-saving Democratic Ecology products.
ENERGIZED Philippe Starck’s new product is a wind turbine.
Plastic stacking Louis XV chairs.
ROCKET MAN Philippe Starck is designing “harmonious” Virgin Galactic spacewear.
Incredible designer - I fell in love with his juicer decades ago and am incredibly excited that he's now working toward making affordable power generators - and of course his wind turbine will look fantastic on your roof!
NY Times article:
"THERE’S no point in arguing with Philippe Starck, because it generally goes like this: (1) The world’s most famous product designer makes a well-meaning and sincere but slightly preposterous claim. (2) You feel obliged to question the preposterous bit. (3) He comes across all hurt and boyish. (4) You feel mean.
Take Mr. Starck’s claim to have “invented a concept called Democratic Design,” which he says gives everyone high-quality products at affordable prices. Sounds great, but didn’t the modern movement try to do that for most of the 20th century? And how can he claim to have “won the battle” by designing “a chair that sells for less than 100 euros,” or $156, when that’s still too expensive for most Western consumers? And what about the 90 percent of the world’s population too poor to afford many of the products most Americans see as essentials? What has Democratic Design done for them?
“Oh please, I’m not God,” pleads Mr. Starck. “I’m just a designer, and I’m doing my best.”
Luckily for the 90 percent, other designers are trying to help them, as illustrated by the recent Cooper-Hewitt show “Design for the Other 90 Percent.” Mr. Starck, meanwhile, is battling on another front: developing relatively cheap, attractive, energy-saving products to “introduce everybody to ecology.”
The first of his so-called Democratic Ecology products, a line he is developing in collaboration with Pramac, an Italian industrial group, is to be introduced in Europe this fall, and in the United States early next year. It is a miniature rooftop wind turbine, priced between $780 and $1,250, which Mr. Starck said can produce up to 80 percent of a home’s energy.
“Imagine a Saturday afternoon, and a guy going stupidly to the supermarket to buy a useless gadget,” Mr. Starck said. “He sees a really sexy object. ‘Oh my God, it’s beautiful. How much does it cost? Five hundred euros? That’s almost what I’d spend on a useless gadget.’ He brings the windmill home, goes to his roof, and 15 minutes later he sees it turning and producing energy. Wow!”
Mr. Starck’s turbine is one of dozens of alternative energy sources that have come onto the market recently, but there are sound reasons for taking his product seriously. One is that it’s deftly designed, not least because the blades are made of transparent plastic, and are virtually invisible on the roof. Another is that it’s designed by him, and Mr. Starck has been so successful at persuading people to buy visually seductive but slightly silly objects — plastic Louis XV chairs, lamps with gun-shaped bases, garden gnome stools and so on — that he may well be able to do the same for something that is actually useful.
That said, it’s been a long time since the design world felt that it had to take Mr. Starck seriously. He’s a gentle giant who bears a resemblance to Fred Flintstone. Now 59, he rose to fame in his native France during the 1980s, when his flair for reinventing everyday objects by casting them as something else — a citrus juicer as a crustacean, plastic stacking chairs as antique ones — was hailed as a playful and very commercial take on postmodernism.
Mr. Starck has since sold hundreds of thousands of those juicers, and nearly a million Louis Ghost chairs, according to their respective manufacturers, Alessi and Kartell. For better or worse, he has also created the designer hotel, aided and abetted by the New York hotelier Ian Schrager, and the showstopping restrooms that now appear in every other would-be cool bar. Mr. Starck has cast himself as a media star by spouting his design philosophy in Franglais sound bites, and bragging about being able to design a chair in the time it took for an aircraft seatbelt sign to go on and off. No other designer could beat him for brio and bankability, but by the mid-1990s he was grouching about being bored by design.
Commercially, he’s still a colossus, bagging plum jobs like the creative directorship of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space venture, which he took on in 2005, and seizing the media spotlight (most recently with a reality TV show he is shooting for the BBC). But at times he seems like design’s equivalent of a dinosaur rocker. Mr. Starck’s confession this March, to the German weekly Die Zeit, that he was “ashamed” that “everything I designed is unnecessary” drew derisory roars in the blogosphere.
Does he still feel that way? “I regret that my job is design,” he said. “Design stupidly produces more things, and for years I’ve spoken about the importance of living with fewer things. But my position is a little ambiguous.”
Indeed it is. To his credit, Mr. Starck was advocating environmentalism long before it became fashionable, but he hasn’t embraced it fully in his work. Nor does he seem to see the incongruity in rattling off a list of eco-responsible activities — his organic diet, the solar-powered oyster farm he owns in Arcachon Bay in southwestern France, and so forth — ending with “the least polluting plane on the market,” his private jet. But now he’s hoping to redress the balance with Democratic Ecology.
The windmill is an encouraging start. Made from the same transparent plastic as his Louis Ghost chairs, they and the other Democratic Ecology products are to be manufactured by Pramac. The timing is propitious, with oil prices way up and everyone from General Electric to the veteran oilman T. Boone Pickens investing in alternative energy. Increasing numbers of homes have metal wind turbines on their roofs, so why not transparent plastic ones?
Next up from Democratic Ecology is a solar panel, a film that covers existing windows. Mr. Starck is also designing a prefabricated green house for the line, with glass walls that can be changed from clear to opaque at the push of a button. The prototype is now being built for him and his family on the site of their old home outside Paris.
An electric car is under development, too, and an eco-moped. Mr. Starck has nearly finished work on a solar- and hydrogen-powered boat, the first of which is to be delivered to the Hotel Bauer, its future owner, in Venice next spring.
“We’re seizing every opportunity to create affordable, high-technology ecology products,” he said. “It’s very, very important that they’re beautiful, because ecology should be a pleasure, not a punishment. One of the most beautiful boats in the world is the Venetian taxi, and our boat will be even more beautiful.”
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
A Spiritual Harvest
Caption Reads:
Young Christian missionaries visit the Olympic green outside the National stadium, also known as "Bird's nest" in Beijing , China, Wednesday, Aug.20, 2008. Nevermind China's ban on foreign missionaries. As the Olympics end, Christian groups are calling their quiet evangelizing throughout the country during the games a success.Attracted by the image of 1.3 billion people ruled by ahteist, the groups prepared for years for what the Southern Baptists once called "a spiritual harvest unlike any other".
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Prediction Specialist: The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least
Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.
Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that it’ll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.
Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.
At least that’s Dr. Kurzweil’s calculation. It may sound too good to be true, but even his critics acknowledge he’s not your ordinary sci-fi fantasist. He is a futurist with a track record and enough credibility for the National Academy of Engineering to publish his sunny forecast for solar energy.
He makes his predictions using what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns, a concept he illustrated at the festival with a history of his own inventions for the blind. In 1976, when he pioneered a device that could scan books and read them aloud, it was the size of a washing machine.
Two decades ago he predicted that “early in the 21st century” blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday night at the festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a cellphone, and when he pointed it at the brochure for the science festival, it had no trouble reading the text aloud.
This invention, Dr. Kurzweil said, was no harder to anticipate than some of the predictions he made in the late 1980s, like the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s and a computer chess champion by 1998. (He was off by a year — Deep Blue’s chess victory came in 1997.)
“Certain aspects of technology follow amazingly predictable trajectories,” he said, and showed a graph of computing power starting with the first electromechanical machines more than a century ago. At first the machines’ power doubled every three years; then in midcentury the doubling came every two years (the rate that inspired Moore’s Law); now it takes only about a year.
Dr. Kurzweil has other graphs showing a century of exponential growth in the number of patents issued, the spread of telephones, the money spent on education. One graph of technological changes goes back millions of years, starting with stone tools and accelerating through the development of agriculture, writing, the Industrial Revolution and computers. (For details, see nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
Now, he sees biology, medicine, energy and other fields being revolutionized by information technology. His graphs already show the beginning of exponential progress in nanotechnology, in the ease of gene sequencing, in the resolution of brain scans. With these new tools, he says, by the 2020s we’ll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves.
This serene confidence is not shared by neuroscientists like Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, who discussed future brains with Dr. Kurzweil at the festival. It might be possible to create a thinking, empathetic machine, Dr. Ramachandran said, but it might prove too difficult to reverse-engineer the brain’s circuitry because it evolved so haphazardly.
“My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an engineer,” Dr. Ramachandran said. “You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.”
Dr. Kurzweil’s predictions come under intense scrutiny in the engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum, which devotes its current issue to the Singularity. Some of the experts writing in the issue endorse Dr. Kurzweil’s belief that conscious, intelligent beings can be created, but most think it will take more than a few decades.
He is accustomed to this sort of pessimism and readily acknowledges how complicated the brain is. But if experts in neurology and artificial intelligence (or solar energy or medicine) don’t buy his optimistic predictions, he says, that’s because exponential upward curves are so deceptively gradual at first.
“Scientists imagine they’ll keep working at the present pace,” he told me after his speech. “They make linear extrapolations from the past. When it took years to sequence the first 1 percent of the human genome, they worried they’d never finish, but they were right on schedule for an exponential curve. If you reach 1 percent and keep doubling your growth every year, you’ll hit 100 percent in just seven years.”
Dr. Kurzweil is so confident in these curves that he has made a $10,000 bet with Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus software. By 2029, Dr. Kurzweil wagers, a computer will pass the Turing Test by carrying on a conversation that is indistinguishable from a human’s.
I’m not as confident those graphs are going to hold up for fields besides computer science, so I’d be leery of betting on a date. But if I had to take sides in the 2029 wager, I’d put my money on Dr. Kurzweil. He could be right once again about a revolution coming sooner than expected. And I’d hate to bet against the chance to be around for this one.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Vertical Horizons in Agronomy
NYTimes article on new ideas when architecture meets farming.
Could be the answer to shipping costs for our produce, meat and dairy needs.
Seems like 'local' takes on a whole new meaning and erecting a farm alongside any other highrise seems just crazy enough to work.
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