Are things as bad as they look?

You guessed it: Things are much worse…

Taking Stock of the Oil Spill, Energy and Climate Bills and the FREEDOM TO CHOOSE SUSTAINABLE LIFESTYLES

We are taught about individualism, individual freedoms and values. In reality, however, everything is decided for us well in advance.

How could we be free, if there’s corporate monopoly on everything?

We learn about the importance of diversity when it comes to other species, but we are denied the same knowledge when it come to learning about  humans.
We are en-shackled by the global economy, a prison made by the monetary system. All of our other nightmares are the derivatives of the system.

In a nutshell …

1. Our rulers have imposed upon us a method of doing things, a system of exponentially expanding human ecological footprint called economy, which is destroying the planet.

2. We have been prevented from researching, developing and ultimately opting for alternative lifestyles, sustainable means of running our everyday lives, with zero impact on the planet.

3. Coupled with the economy, an inseparable part of it in fact, is an energy policy that demands more and more fossil fuels, the production and consumption of which is destroying not only the climate, but the very air we breathe, land and water we feed from.

4. We have been hoodwinked into electing an incompetent and ill-meaning President, who’s trying to secure a second term in office by way of appeasing the giant corporations that have no concern other than maximizing their bottom line.

5. Some of those giants strap us inside vehicles that were made by other giants,  keeping each and everyone of us locked in on the wilderness of freeways, polluted roads and streets, so that we would burn the gas they sold us, going nowhere, several hours a day, each day.

6. We are blindfolded. How can anyone find out that the road map the giants have sold us goes nowhere and the destinations marked on them are non-existent? The answer is they can’t.

7. Disasters like the growing oil spill in the Gulf momentarily awaken us to the truth.  Even then, our realization of truth is ephemeral. The giants’ spin machine (our politicians), their agents of disinformation (the media) and other dark forces of information suppression (the Internet Mafia), prevent us from seeing, hearing, experiencing and ultimately making the right decisions by ourselves.

8. By all means then sue the giants. But don’t stop there because the Administration, media and the Internet Mafia deserve equal reaction.

9. Knowledge and information forms the basis of our decision-making process. Access to up-to-date information and knowledge of alternative  points of view can make the difference between whether WE and therefore our civilization survive, or becomes extinct.

10. A major mechanism of evolution is learning… Learning is facilitated by feedbacks. But the social feedback and all other feedbacks lines are short-circuited, corrupted, and converted into loops that come back to the same point over and over again. The giants have retarded the evolution of of human species. When species cease to evolve, they become extinct.  Right now the odds are heavily stacked against the survival of ‘Google Civilization.’

Related Links:

• ‘Google Civilization’ Collapsing from Disinformation
• Gulf Oil Spill and Other News Headlines-Apr 30
• Rig Explosion Suit Cites Criminal Negligence by BP, Others
• Govt Must Deny Google Internet Search Monopoly
• Google Information Terrorism: A Conspiracy Against the People!

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Serial No 1,651. Starting April 2010, each entry on this blog has a unique serial number. If any of the numbers are missing, it may mean that the corresponding entry has been blocked by Google/the authorities in your country. Please drop us a line if you detect any anomaly/missing number(s).

Trick or Treat-ment Concern

Trick designed to warrant more Internet censorship, or genuine concern about misuse of antibiotics

The “Twitter-Antibiotics Misuse” report comes amid  findings by Britain’s health authorities linking the spread of syphilis to Facebook.  See Facebook, Security and Syphilis.

The question now is whether the following is a genuine concern about the proper use of antibiotics or a new ploy designed to warrant more Internet censorship and additional control over the dissemination of information.

NOTES:
1. The report is co-authored with a commercial organization: MixedInk (New York, NY)
2. Antibiotics are prescription drugs; they are NOT available as over-the-counter medicine in  most parts of the world.
3. In this public release only Twitter is mentioned by name.

Public information release by Elsevier Health Sciences

Misinformation about antibiotics can travel to large audience via Twitter: study

Washington, March 30, 2010 – Misunderstandings about proper use of antibiotics have the potential to spread widely through social networks such as Twitter, according to a report in the April issue of AJIC: American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, Inc. (APIC). Researchers from Columbia University and MixedInk (New York, NY) studied the health information content of Twitter updates mentioning antibiotics to determine how people are sharing information and assess the proliferation of misinformation. The investigation explored evidence of misunderstanding or misuse of antibiotics.

“Research focusing on microblogs and social networking services is still at an early stage,” Daniel Scanfeld, MS, MA, and colleagues state in the article. “Further study is needed to assess how to promote healthy behaviors and to collect and disseminate trustworthy information using these tools.” The authors stress that because health information is shared extensively on such networks, it is important for health care professionals to have a basic familiarity with social networking media services, such as Twitter. They add that such services can potentially be used to gather important real-time health data and may provide a venue to identify potential misuse or misunderstanding of antibiotics, promote positive behavior change, and disseminate valid information.

Using content analysis of 52,153 Twitter status updates (“tweets”) mentioning antibiotics between March 13, 2009, and July 31, 2009, researchers categorized each tweet into one of 11 groups: general use, advice/information, side effects/negative reactions, diagnosis, resistance, misunderstanding and/or misuse, positive reactions, animals, wanting/needing, cost and other.

Once categories were established, 1,000 status updates were selected randomly from the complete list of 52,153 tweets and analyzed. The full list of tweets was further explored for cases of misunderstanding or abuse with a search for the following combinations: “flu + antibiotic(s),” “cold + antibiotic(s),” “leftover + antibiotic(s),” “share + antibiotic(s),” and “extra + antibiotic(s)”.

The most common category was “general use,” including a range of updates about taking antibiotics, often simply mentioning the number of days remaining on a prescription and a desire that the antibiotics begin helping soon. The second most common category was “advice and information.” Some updates included the transfer of personal advice or information, such as “get antibiotics if its [sic] serious” or “Garlic generally good, but not specific to strep…” The third most prevalent category was “side effects/ negative reactions,” which included a variety of complaints and side effects from taking the medication. Examples of side effects ranged from the general, such as, “those antibiotics made me want to die,” to the more specific, “I am on antibiotics that make me want to vomit.” Negative reactions generally revolved around inconveniences, such as not being able to drink alcohol or sensitivity to the sun.

The authors also found that while the category of “misunderstanding and/or misuse” only comprised about 700 of the more than 52,000 tweets, such misunderstandings could easily spread to a large audience due to the nature of information flow through the Twitter network. The most popular word combination in this category was “flu + antibiotics,” with 345 status updates including misinformation reaching a total of 172,571 followers. The next most popular word combination was “cold + antibiotics,” with 302 status updates reaching a total of 850,375 followers.

“As people change how they interact, going from passive consumption to active creation of content on the Internet, social networks have become increasingly important sources of information,” said Cathryn Murphy, RN, PhD, CIC, APIC 2010 president. “These findings are a reminder that we need to continue to monitor networks such as Twitter and explore ways to positively impact public health using social networks.”

Related Links:

• ‘Google Civilization’ Collapsing from Disinformation

‘Google Civilization’ Collapsing from Disinformation

Suppression of evolution through disinformation

When will the combined impact of the following factors cause the collapse of Google-cum-Facebook civilization?

• Pillage of natural resources
• Hyperactivity by energy dinosaurs,
  
• Climate change
• Spread of disease
• Drought and deluge
  
• Food shortages
• Empire-building wars
• Suppression of evolution through disinformation
• Capitalism
• Exponential growth economy
• Other mechanisms
  

As for the Angkor civilization …

The Earth Institute at Columbia University (EICU) believes they may have the answer to at least one part of that question. Drought and deluge seem to have driven the ancient Khmer civilization to collapse.

Kudos to EICU for identifying at least one of the probable causes of collapse of the ancient Khmer Empire. And we are convinced they can do a lot more to explore  the role of the above-mentioned factors in the looming collapse.

The following is a public release by the EICU:

Did climate influence Angkor’s collapse?

Evidence suggests changing environment can bring down a civilization

Decades of drought, interspersed with intense monsoon rains, may have helped bring about the fall of Cambodia’s ancient Khmer civilization at Angkor nearly 600 years ago, according to an analysis of tree rings, archeological remains and other evidence. The study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may also shed light on what drives—and disrupts—the rainy season across much of Asia, which waters crops for nearly half the world’s population.

The temple of Angkor Wat, Cambodia (aerial photo). The religious complex of Angkor Wat was center of a civilization that depended for irrigation on a vast network of canals, embankments and reservoirs. Credit: Charles J Sharp

Historians have offered various explanations for the fall of an empire that stretched across much of Southeast Asia between the 9th and 14th centuries, from deforestation to conflict with rival kingdoms. But the new study offers the strongest evidence yet that two severe droughts, punctuated by bouts of heavy monsoon rain, may have weakened the empire by shrinking water supplies for drinking and agriculture, and damaging Angkor’s vast irrigation system, which was central to its economy. The kingdom is thought to have collapsed in 1431 after a raid by the Siamese from present-day Thailand. The carved stone temples of its religious center, Angkor Wat, are today a major tourist destination, but much of the rest of the civilization has sunk back into the landscape.

“Angkor at that time faced a number of problems—social, political and cultural. Environmental change pushed the ancient Khmers to the limit and they weren’t able to adapt,” said the study’s lead author, Brendan Buckley, a climate scientist and tree-ring specialist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “I wouldn’t say climate caused the collapse, but a 30-year drought had to have had an impact.”

Scientists led by Buckley were able to reconstruct 759 years of past climate in the region surrounding Angkor by studying the annual growth rings of a cypress tree, Fokienia hodginsii, growing in the highlands of Vietnam’s Bidoup Nui Ba National Park, about 700 kilometers away. By hiking high into the mountain cloud forests, the researchers were able to find rare specimens over 1,000 years old that had not been touched by loggers. After extracting tiny cores of wood showing the trees’ annual growth rings, researchers reconstructed year-to-year moisture levels in this part of Southeast Asia from 1250 to 2008. The tree rings revealed evidence of a mega-drought lasting three decades—from the 1330s to 1360s– followed by a more severe but shorter drought from the 1400s to 1420s. Written records corroborate the latter drought, which may have been felt as far away as Sri Lanka and central China.

The droughts may have been devastating for a civilization dependent on farming and an irrigation system of reservoirs, canals and embankments sprawling across more than a thousand square kilometers. The droughts could have led to crop failure and a rise in infectious disease, and both problems would have been exacerbated by the density of the population, Buckley says.

The study also finds that the droughts were punctuated by several extraordinarily intense rainy seasons that may have damaged Angkor’s hydraulic system. During a normal monsoon season, Angkor’s hydraulic network could have handled heavy downpours, but after extended droughts, the system may have been vulnerable to massive siltation and clogging, the study suggests. Layers of coarse debris and other sediments found blocking some canals appear to have been laid down suddenly. In other spots, apparently sudden erosion cut canals as much as 8 meters below the surrounding landscape, potentially destabilizing the hydraulic system. Archeologists have found additional evidence that canals were rebuilt and rerouted to cope with water shortages.

In compiling the longest tropical tree ring record to date, researchers found that the third-driest, and the driest, years in the last 760 years occurred back to back in 1402 and 1403, about three decades before Angkor’s fall. The second driest was 1888, which coincided with the 1888-1889 El Niño, a cyclical warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean. By correlating known El Niño cycles measured with modern instruments, researchers have documented how the cyclical warming and cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean brings rain to some places and drought to others. The authors of the current study and other researchers suggest that El Niño, possibly abetted by longer, decades-long cycles across the Pacific basin, may have played an important role in shutting down the monsoon rains in this region, creating withering droughts in the past. Some scientists suspect that warming of the global climate may intensify these cycles in the future, raising the possibility of alternating Angkor-like droughts and destructive floods that could affect billions of people.

Similar studies suggest that abrupt environmental changes may have pushed other ancient civilizations over the edge, including the Anasazi people of the southwestern United States; the Maya people of Central America, and the Akkadian people of Mesopotamia. There is some evidence that other once-powerful kingdoms in what is now Vietnam and Myanmar may have fallen during the late 1700s, following extreme dry and wet periods.

“Both human society and the erth’s climate system are complex systems capable of unexpected behavior. Through the long-term perspective offered by climate and archaeological records, we can start to identify and understand the myriad ways they may interact,” said study coauthor Kevin Anchukaitis, a tree ring scientist at Lamont. “The evidence from monsoon Asia should remind us that complex civilizations are still quite vulnerable to climate variability and change.”

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Related link: An audio slideshow follows the researchers in their search for ancient trees to unlock the workings of the Asian monsoon.

http://www.earth.columbia.edu/videos/watch/108

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Related Links:

• Giga Trends ( April 7, 2008 )
• Human-induced Climate Change ( Feb 25, 2008 )
• Climate Change Spreads “Deadly Dozen” Diseases ( October 8, 2008 )
• Gigantic Sculptures Odes to Moribund Civilizations
• What Florida Might Look Like in 2014

• Failing Ecosystems
• State of the World
• First Wave of World’s Collapsing Cities
  
• Nuking Earth for Lifestyle
• The Economy

• Index of Human Impact on Nature
• Energy Dinosaurs