#2
Japanese during WW11 did the same thing with supply lines cut. Developed live harvesting to an art. No refrigeration. I have read several stories of this organ harvesting especially in rural China. Mobile units collect then just dump bodies along the side of the road. Korean war Vets will tell you of the human wave attacks. People are just blades of grass. No checks and balances. Total government rule from a minority few who know what is best for everyone. King of the hill game some of us played as children. Some like our current administration play it for keeps.
#3
The best bet to ruin this game would be the equivalent of suicide pills that so contaminate the internal organs that they would kill the transplant recipient.
The way to do this would be to put it in a small, hard, waterproof pill, that would be easily hidden beneath the skin, so it could not be taken from them in a body search. It could remain there for years.
Since the likely would not be killed during arrest, they would have time to figure out that they were going to be harvested, cut a small hole in their skin, remove the pill and crush it in their mouth.
After a few hundred transplant failures, word would get out that something is severely wrong, but it would take a very long time to figure out what.
In 1969, after six months alone on the Atlantic battling storms, sharks and encroaching madness, John Fairfax, who died this month at 74, became the first lone oarsman in recorded history to traverse any ocean.
In 1972, he and his girlfriend, Sylvia Cook, sharing a boat, became the first people to row across the Pacific, a yearlong ordeal during which their craft was thought lost. (The couple survived the voyage, and so, for quite some time, did their romance.) Ms. Cook, who became an upholsterer and spent the rest of her life quietly on dry land (though she remained a close friend of Mr. Fairfax), lives outside London.
For all its bravura, Mr. Fairfax's seafaring almost pales beside his earlier ventures. Footloose and handsome, he was a flesh-and-blood character out of Graham Greene, with more than a dash of Hemingway and Ian Fleming shaken in.
At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.
At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, I thought you said you were going to apprentice to a pilot.
he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.
As lotp was saying a week or two ago...
Nevada has become the first state in the country to approve regulations that will allow self-driving vehicles on the road in that state.
Google Why does it have to be Google?
has been working on an autonomous car for a couple of years. Back in 2010, it first gave the public a peak at a Toyota Prius it modified with lasers (mounted on the car) and computers. That technology delivered data to the driving system so it computed the speed, direction etc. of the car. In Googles car, theres a person in the driver seat or front passenger seat, but they are not controlling the car.
Since then Google has worked with the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles, automakers, insurance companies and others to develop regulations for self-driving cars. These are the rules for companies to test autonomous cars in Nevada and for general public use. Nevada's a good place to start - for much of the state cruise control and good wheel alignment can let your car self-drive. Then you run into a mountain range. Or even another vehicle once in a while.
Google has already logged thousands of miles testing self-driving cars. CEO Sergey Brin has said he wants the Google autonomous test car to log a million miles without an accident.
#1
I wonder if proposed DoT rules against use of electronic devices by the driver would apply to a non-driving driver? Or more likely (given that this is government I'm talking about) the rules would prevent the car from using electronic devices while driving itself?
Posted by: Water Modem ||
02/20/2012 12:33 ||
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#1
Nothing succeeds like success. DARPA and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) have led the way in an s-load of amazing technologies.
The US has long had a technology oriented scientific community, unlike the Soviet Union that was far more oriented to basic science.
The US realized this created a gap between basic science and technology, which was to be filled by first creating ONR in 1946, and DARPA in 1958.
It worked splendidly. The Vietnam War then gave the impulse and opportunity to field test innumerable technologies, and the agencies kept a steady flow going to the battlefield, giving the US a huge boost in practical war tech.
Both agencies have websites, but post-911 they are far less inclined to release information about ongoing projects, which truly cover the gamut of anything that might be of military use or interest.
RIGA, Latvia: Latvian voters resoundingly rejected a proposal to give official status to Russian, the mother tongue of their former Soviet occupiers, though the referendum defeated Saturday is expected to leave scars on an already divided society.
Russian is the first language for about one-third of the Baltic countrys 2.1 million people, and many of them would like to accord official status to the language to reverse what they claim has been 20 years of discrimination.
As opposed to the discrimination against ethnic Latvians in the 50 years before that...
But for ethnic Latvians, the referendum was a brazen attempt to encroach on Latvias independence, which was restored two decades ago after a half-century of occupation by the Soviet Union following World War II.
Many Latvians still consider Russian the lingua franca of the Soviet Union as the language of the former occupiers. They also harbor deep mistrust toward Russia and worry that Moscow attempts to wield influence in Latvia through the ethnic Russian minority.
With over 93 percent of ballots counted, 75 percent of voters said they were against Russian as a national language, according to the Central Election Commission results. However, in the eastern region of Latgale, which straddles the border with Russia, a majority of voters approved changing the constitution to make Russian a national language. The region is Latvias poorest and has a high percentage of ethnic Russians and other minorities.
Wonder if Putin is going to start demagouging for the 'rights' of the Latgalians...
The referendum sparked high voter participation, with more than 70 percent of registered voters casting ballots considerably higher more than in previous elections and referendums. Long lines were seen at many precincts both in Latvia and abroad, with voters in London reportedly braving a three-hour wait.
Though the Russians who spearheaded the referendum admitted they had no chance at winning the plebiscite, they at least hope the approximate 25 percent of support will force Latvias center-right government to begin a dialogue with national minorities.
Hundreds of thousands of Russians, Belarussians and Ukrainians moved to Latvia and the neighboring Baltic republics during the population transfers of the Soviet regime. Many of them never learned Latvian and were denied citizenship when Latvia regained independence, meaning they dont have the right to vote or work in government.
According to the current law, anyone who moved to Latvia during the Soviet occupation, or was born to parents who moved there, is considered a noncitizen and must pass the Latvian language exam in order to become a citizen. There are approximately 300,000 noncitizens in Latvia.
Politicians and analysts said the plebiscite will widen the schism in society and that the government will have to undertake serious efforts to consolidate the countrys two groups. Many fear the disgruntled minority will keep up the pressure by calling for more referendums to change Latvias constitution for minorities benefit.
Or they could move to Russia, the Ukraine, or Belarus, where they'd at least speak the language.
Posted by: Steve White ||
02/20/2012 00:00 ||
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Animals are insanely complex biochemical machines that produce equally complex tissues. And digestion of such tissues is designed to both take maximum value from them, yet discard chemicals that would be otherwise toxic.
While we can subsist for a while on minimal micro-nutrients, the bodies of people who eat this stuff for any length of time will adapt to find it inedible and loathsome to the taste.
I would relegate this idea to the category of "space food", an all-pill diet they used to imagine was the future back in the 1960s.
"But it has the MDA of protein, carbohydrate, and fats, so you *should* be able to live on it."
#2
..the bodies of people who eat this stuff for any length of time will adapt to find it inedible and loathsome to the taste.
Meat as we know it by taste is largely the result of 20th Century animal breeding and refrigeration. Tender and rare is very modern. Most of what people got as meat for most of history was local and eaten immediately or salted or seasoned heavily - and still is in most of the world. There's an entire business to supply cable channels under the guise of entertainment with the various means both local and international on how to cover the taste of meat.
Don't forget Vegans seem to more or less subsist without it. Every Vegan is not lacking in vitamins or nutrients.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
02/20/2012 10:56 Comments ||
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#4
Actually Vegans DO lack vitamins or nutrients unless extremely careful about what they eat. A minor deficiency can take years to show. Man is an omnivore, the body usually tells you when it needs something if you care to listen.
#5
...yes I understand the point, but those who do pay attention to the vitamin and nutrient content of their diet can make it happen. And yes, those sharp teeth in the front are for something more than grinding grain and veggies and more on the lines of ripping and shredding.
#6
It's often more subtle than that. For example, only recently was it learned that raw food does not equal cooked food as far as useable nutrition goes. People who subsist on only raw food (a fad diet) are very prone to develop malnutrition. This is because cooking makes far more nutrients available, and far easier to digest.
Meat contains a huge number of important nutrients, and it is now known that even if adults are vegetarians, they should feed their children meat at least until their teenage years or they may develop physical problems in their later years. Fairly new research.
However, this is a different subject than what I was driving at. Artificial meat almost certainly does not contain the same nutritional value as real meat. Yes, it can have the same amount of protein and fat, but it will lack trace amounts of hormones, and likely minerals, as well as who knows what our bodies are attuned to receive via meat.
So my suspicion is that this could very well taste like meat at first. But after consuming it a few times, it will start to taste worse and worse. The opposite phenomenon, of nutritious and useful food tasting better and better, is well known.
#7
For about the same area, I can imagine them packing a Taser-type probe ejecting stun gun, as an over-under with a gun. Maybe only three rounds, but far more versatile.
And instead of just a flashlight, combine it with a high intensity strobe light that would temporarily blind at night. Likely using the Taser battery.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
