Month: January 2008

Ice Is In

The hot new beverage is cold. It’s cold as ice. There’s even a blog for crunching addicts icechewing.com.

According to the Wall Street Journal: Some Sonic Drive-In franchises sell it in cups and in bags to go. Ice-machine makers are competing to make the best chewable ice, with names like Chewblet, Nugget Ice and Pearl Ice. One manufacturer calls the ice-loving South the “Chew Belt.”

Sales of machines that make easier-to-chew ice jumped about 23%, to 16,673 units in 2006 from 2003, according to data from the Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Institute. Some ice chewers, including country-music star Vince Gill, have had the machines installed in their homes. Compulsive ice eating was observed at least as far back as the 1600s, according to “Pagophagia, or Compulsive Ice Consumption: a Historical Perspective,” an academic article published in the journal Psychological Medicine in 1992
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Zakaria: We’re Fighting the Wrong War

Zakaria: We’re Fighting the Wrong War | Newsweek Voices – Fareed Zakaria | Newsweek.com
Pity the U.S. presidential candidates. They had their positions on Iraq all worked out by last summer and have repeated them consistently ever since. But events on the ground have changed dramatically, and their rhetoric feels increasingly stale. They’re fighting the Iraq War all right, but it’s the wrong one.

The Democrats are having the hardest time with the new reality. Every candidate is committed to “ending the war” and bringing our troops back home. The trouble is, the war has largely ended, and precisely because our troops are in the middle of it. Click on the under-lined Newsweek link to see the rest of this insightful article.

And Then There Was One

And Then There Was One
An arrow whizzed past Altair toward Vincent, missing the cameraman’s chest by inches.

Purá knew how dangerous a member of an isolated tribe could be if he believed his life was threatened. But even Purá, who had always relied only on the help of his small tribe to survive, couldn’t fathom how hostile that Indian might be if he had lived for years with no established communion with another living soul.

Purá turned and ran as fast as he could through the forest, terrified. The amazing story to create a 20,000 acre sanctuary for the last Indian of a decimated Amazon Tribe.

Meat The Earth

Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler – New York Times
3.jpgIf price spikes don’t change eating habits, perhaps the combination of deforestation, pollution, climate change, starvation, heart disease and animal cruelty will gradually encourage the simple daily act of eating more plants and fewer animals.

Mr. Rosegrant of the food policy research institute says he foresees “a stronger public relations campaign in the reduction of meat consumption — one like that around cigarettes — emphasizing personal health, compassion for animals, and doing good for the poor and the planet.”

It wouldn’t surprise Professor Eshel if all of this had a real impact. “The good of people’s bodies and the good of the planet are more or less perfectly aligned,” he said.

The World in 2016

Waving Goodbye To Hegemony
Twenty-first-century geopolitics will resemble nothing more than Orwell’s 1984, but instead of three world powers (Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia), we have three hemispheric pan-regions, longitudinal zones dominated by America, Europe and China. As the early 20th-century European scholars of geopolitics realized, because a vertically organized region contains all climatic zones year-round, each pan-region can be self-sufficient and build a power base from which to intrude in others’ terrain. But in a globalized and shrinking world, no geography is sacrosanct. So in various ways, both overtly and under the radar, China and Europe will meddle in America’s backyard, America and China will compete for African resources in Europe’s southern periphery and America and Europe will seek to profit from the rapid economic growth of countries within China’s growing sphere of influence. Globalization is the weapon of choice. The main battlefield is what I call “the second world.” Continue reading “The World in 2016”

“The Plague” did not kill indiscriminately

Study shows Black Death did not kill indiscriminately | Top News | Reuters
“A lot of people have assumed that the Black Death killed indiscriminately, just because it had such massive mortality,” anthropologist Sharon DeWitte of the University at Albany in New York, said in a telephone interview.

People already in poor health often are more vulnerable in epidemics. “But there’s been a tradition of thinking that the Black Death was this unique case where no one was safe and if you were exposed to the disease that was it. You had three to five days, and then you were dead,” DeWitte said. The plague epidemic of 1347 to 1351 was one of the deadliest recorded in human history, killing about 75 million people, according to some estimates, including more than a third of Europe’s population.

DeWitte analyzed skeletons unearthed from the East Smithfield cemetery in London, dug especially for plague victims and excavated in the 1980s, for bone and teeth abnormalities that would show that people had health problems before they died of plague. She found such abnormalities in many skeletons, suggesting these people had experienced malnutrition, iron deficiencies and infections well before succumbing to the Black Death.

Saddam Planned To Re-Start WMDs : Interrogator

Interrogator: Invasion Surprised Saddam, Tells 60 Minutes Former Dictator Bragged About Eluding Capture – CBS News
Piro spent almost seven months debriefing Saddam in a plan based on winning his confidence by convincing him that Piro was an important envoy who answered to President Bush. This and being Saddam’s sole provider of items like writing materials and toiletries made the toppled Iraqi president open up to Piro, a Lebanese-American and one of the few FBI agents who spoke Arabic.

“He told me he initially miscalculated… President Bush’s intentions. He thought the United States would retaliate with the same type of attack as we did in 1998…a four-day aerial attack,” says Piro. “He survived that one and he was willing to accept that type of attack.” “He didn’t believe the U.S. would invade?” asks Pelley, “No, not initially,” answers Piro. Continue reading “Saddam Planned To Re-Start WMDs : Interrogator”

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