Divorce Your Car --and get into a relationship with a Bike!

Tim McNamara wrote:
> In article >,
> bill > wrote:
>
>> Tim McNamara wrote:
>>> In article >,
>>> bill > wrote:
>>>
>>>>> bill > wrote:
>>>>>> Genetically modified foods are and have been a fact of life for
>>>>>> hundreds of years through selective breeding and grafting of
>>>>>> orchard trees. Don't fool yourself that just because a scientist
>>>>>> did it in a lab it is any different, cause it ain't what grows
>>>>>> in the wild.
>>>> Tim > wrote:
>>>>> There is a difference between selective breeding and
>>>>> hybridization, and sticking fish genes in a tomato.
>>>> Still, people should not worry about growing strange body parts or
>>>> anything. Why should it be immoral or "Against God's wishs" if an
>>>> improvement is found in a DNA lab?
>>> IMHO it's not about being moral or against God's wishes (not being
>>> a Believer, I don't think in those terms). It's about introducing
>>> unknowns into the environment that were formerly impossible by
>>> natural selection. We don't know the potential adverse
>>> consequences. What if genetic modification of a food results in a
>>> prion-mediated disease that takes a decade to show symptoms?
>>> Millions of people could be affected before the problem was known.
>> Take it in stride. You don't know what you are inhaling every time
>> you ride in traffic either. Remember the MTBE fiasco about 5 years
>> ago? Some of the gas stations were putting "MTBE Free" in bigger
>> letters than their prices, as if that was the biggest selling point.
>> Industry puts plenty of unknowns into the environment and we never
>> know until some focus group makes a big stink over it. Life goes on.
>
> Except for the focus groups often having a very good point. MTBE is a
> bad thing once it gets into groundwater. Groundwater is a rather
> important thing, after all. I'm not willing to buy the James Watt
> vision of the world, being "it doesn't matter if we chop all the trees
> down because God's going to end the world anyway and save the
> righteous."

James "Dumb-Ass" Watt.
I never read anything written by an obvious moron.

Granted we have another one of these nuts in office now,
> surrounded by an administration that is loyal not to him but to the vast
> interests they served in the private sector. Just follow the money and
> the smell of cigars.

Heh, heh.
I can't wait until the November mid-term elections that should make him
a dead in the water president.
>
>>> Of course, this can happen without genetic modification, too.
>>> Hundreds of thousands of Britons ate BSE-infected beef products,
>>> but fortunately human susceptibility to the prion appears to be
>>> rare and cases of vCJD have numbered below 200 as far as I know.
>>> About 800 BSE-infected cattle are thought to have gone to market in
>>> the U.S., although this is a mathematical projection due to the FDA
>>> and USDA basically refusing to do competent testing over the past 6
>>> years. It's more important to them to protect rich cattle
>>> interests than the public health.
>> I can't argue about the 'Competency' of the FDA or USDA since both
>> are afraid to rattle the rich farmers too much.
>
> It's not "rich farmers" so much as the rich middlemen such as Tyson's,
> Cargill, etc. There aren't very many rich farmers. There are a lot of
> rich middlemen who can afford their own senators.

Yeah, you got that right, and Tyson's is one brand I won't touch since
finding a bunch of it spoiled and still on the shelves at a Safeway
years ago.
>
>>> In many cases, genetically modified organisms are solutions in
>>> search of a problem. They are a supply-side phenomenon and are
>>> quite unnecessary as far as food goes.
>> Most of the GMOs that I have read about are modified to withstand a
>> particular plant disease or to survive long periods without water, or
>> something like that. There is a need or some foods might not be
>> available at all.
>
> This os one of the failures of the Green Revolution, the proponents of
> which never fail to blow their own horns while overlooking the tragic
> consequences in many parts of the world. The Green Revolution
> introduced inappropriate crops to places all over the world, which
> required technologies and inputs that were not going to be reliably
> available. Basically they tried to Americanize agriculture in places
> where American agricultural practices are not appropriate. Now the
> effort is to make up for that failure with GM crops, rather than having
> been more intelligent in the first place and helping develop locally
> appropriate agricultural practices.

Years ago I read that the lowly Cherry tomato, which will grow almost
anywhere could help to solve world hunger, and I can attest to that. I
had a half acre yard that I planted some Cherry tomatoes on and within a
few months I had so many every week I was begging the neighbors to take
them by the bucket full. If I could have eaten that many tomatoes I
never would have had to buy food again, but short of starving, you can
only take so much of any one thing.
>
>>> There is a better argument for using GMOs to produce medicines
>>> (most insulin is now produced by GMO bacteria to closely mimic
>>> human insulin; previously diabetics used animal insulins extracted
>>> from pigs, cows, horses, etc.).
>> I read a lot on that and one of the technical journals I have a
>> subscription to states that they are now looking at ocean organisms
>> right down to the single celled plankton and finding all kinds of
>> naturally occurring 'interesting' compounds. It used to be the rain
>> forests, but now that it is more profitable to burn them to grow beef
>> for McDonalds that is kind of fading into history.
>>
>>> The testing for medicines is far more stringent and the risk of
>>> GMOs getting released into the wild is far far lower. And GMOs may
>>> be useful for other technologies such as nanotechnology.
>> The amount of research and computerization would surprise you. The
>> big Pharma companies are searching through 100's of thousands of
>> compounds weekly and tossing the ones that don't fit the bill for the
>> one thing they are looking for. If something doesn't just happen to
>> be effective at curing AIDs or Cancer or one of the money pit
>> diseases they will just toss the formula, and not consider that it
>> may cure the common cold. Lots of waste going on, and they don't like
>> to share, so another company might discover 5 years down the road a
>> miracle cure that one company tossed out.
>>
>> Bush is the biggest enemy of research right now, since that fool
>> thinks stem cell research is immoral. Good thing that after November
>> he will be a real "Lame duck". Worst president in my lifetime, except
>> maybe Truman. Bill Baka
>
> Hmm, I was born in 1959 so my perspective is different. Bush is the
> worst President in my lifetime, followed closely by Ronald Reagan.

Roger that.

> Personally I do not believe the Democrats will regain control of either
> the House or the Senate.

Been watching the news lately? I thing Foley just handed both houses to
the Democrats. The voters aren't totally stupid and I think they will
realize that the Republicans could care less about family values other
than talking about it at election time.

The absence of leadership on any issue on that
> side of the aisle will doom them to failure yet again, as people will
> choose the devil they know. The Democrats have just not offered an
> alternative vision to vote for, unlike the Republicans in 1994, who
> understood that it isn't enough to hope that the voters will vote
> against the other side and vote you in by default.

Clinton got my attention when he showed up on the Arsenio Hall show and
played his Saxophone in 1992, so he had a certain 'cool' factor that
neither Bush has had. Since 1980 we have had Republicans with a stick up
their ass, so I think change is due. If Hillary runs, she gets my vote,
Gore really won the popular vote in 2000, and I think 2004 just showed
how a corrupt party can manipulate the votes. No way could Kerry have
lost that badly when Bush was already unpopular.
Bill Baka

Ludmila Borgschatz-Thudpucker, MD wrote:
> "bill" > wrote in message
> m...
>>> And this is exactly why as nations develop, population levels off. So if
>>> we really want to control population we need to educate, educate,
>>> educate.
>>>
>> You really do believe the view through your rose colored glasses, don't
>> you.
>
> While he be educatin', everybody else be fornicatin'.
>
>
Didn't anyone notice that the rich types have one or two kids so they
have "Heirs", while the welfare class has more kids to get a raise?
Bill Baka

On Sun, 08 Oct 2006 11:42:01 -0700, bill > wrote:

> Amy Blankenship wrote:
>> "bill" > wrote in message
>> ...
>>> Tim McNamara wrote:
>>>> In article >,
>>>> bill > wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Tim McNamara wrote:
>>>>>> In article .net>,
>>>>>> "george conklin" > wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Small farms would condemn about 75% of the current world's
>>>>>>>>> population to death. That is not a solution except for death.
>>>>>>>> I don't know if the 75% is correct but the basic idea is sound.
>>>>>> No, it's not. Where do you think 75% (actually more) of the
>>>>>> world's population gets its food now? From small farms. Large
>>>>>> scale agribusiness farming is the purview of economically developed
>>>>>> countries which feeds a fraction of the world's population
>>>>>> regularly, and which does provide emergency capacity when food
>>>>>> production fails in ecologically difficult areas due to drought,
>>>>>> flooding, fires, etc. In the latter case, large scale farming does
>>>>>> save lives. However, 75% of the world's population is not all
>>>>>> going to suffer such catastrophes at once.
>>>>> 75% of the world's population is surplus anyway. I just read where
>>>>> the United States is going to top 300 million around October 15.
>>>>> Compared to the country (this one) I grew up in that is about 150
>>>>> million too many. We are paving over everything, quite literally. I
>>>>> went to visit the houses I grew up in, back in Illinois and all the
>>>>> corn fields I grew up playing in are now built over with housing or
>>>>> "Condo-fields". If we keep replacing corn with people we are going
>>>>> to be in deeper **** than we are now. Rolling the global population
>>>>> to about 1 billion (max) and keeping it there with some no growth
>>>>> thinking is about the only way the human race will be here in
>>>>> another 200 years. I think we are setting ourselves up far a mass
>>>>> plague or starvation that is going to thin out the population. We
>>>>> just plain doesn't need so many people.
>>>> I suspect that there are points of agreement that we could find, but
>>>> there are also points of disagreement. For example, your claim that
>>>> 75% of the population is "surplus." Of course, that gives you a 4:1
>>>> chance of being one of the surplus ones. ;-) I agree that there is
>>>> overpopulation not only in America but around the world as well. I
>>>> cannot bring myself to call anyone "surplus," however. They have
>>>> every bit as much right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
>>>> as I have.
>>> My actual solution was to ship food to them that had fertility
>>> impairment hormones in it or mandate a vasectomy or tube tie in order
>>> to qualify if people already had 2 or more children. Nobody gets hurt,
>>> but nobody gets to have 10 kids they can't feed, either.
>> I think you're operating under two fundamental misconceptions:
>> 1) That civilizations never reach a point where population stops
>> increasing
>> 2) That children never feed their parents
>> If you look at the most developed nations, population growth through
>> reproduction is in the near-zero to negative range, depending on which
>> country you're talking about. This implies that as more and more
>> nations become industrialized, population will level off or even
>> decline. The reason we have such extreme population growth now is that
>> we have better education, health care, food production, and food
>> distribution. So mortality is down.
>
> Way off base for the US. We get one pregnant Mexican having a baby here
> and the whole illegal family stays, so that one 'Citizen' gives a whole
> pre-existing family the right to stay here. Mortality due to disease is
> down from what it used to be, but then people in non-developed countries
> just have more children who then starve and of course, we send them
> food. Us Natural born Americans don't have that many children because we
> are too busy working to survive the high cost of living to support all
> the immigrants who we have to support through social programs. China and
> India are both over 1 Billion and will keep going as long as we keep
> bleeding money to them, which will eventually make us the "EX"
> superpower.

For the U.S., it's a birth rate of 14.14 natural born Americans per 1,000
population compared to a death rate of 8.26 deaths of both natural born
and immigrant Americans per 1,000 population ( C.I.A. 2006 est. ). I'm
sure the rest of your info is just as accurate.

>> Now let's look at the second premise. In the developing world,
>> children are often valuable hands to produce food and/or the means to
>> get food. So in that sense, developing nations can't afford "pet
>> children" who are not expected to return any value to the family in the
>> way we do in the US. So people in developing nations tend to reproduce
>> more because they need the additional hands and because of higher
>> infant and child mortality rates.
>
> You don't read much, do you? The reason they try to reproduce so much is
> that there is a high rate of infant death caused by the birth of a new
> child. Once there is a new baby to breast feed the next older one is
> expected to survive on adult food and often dies from malnutrition.
> Our answer to this? Throw money at them or "Adopt" a child in a far away
> land, thus making it our problem.
>
>> Small amounts of education, especially for female children, greatly
>> reduces mortality among infants and children, so population will
>> initially spike as education becomes available.
>
> Uh-huh!
>> But this makes the benefits of education tangible, so developng
>> peoples slowly spend more and more time in school in order to reap more
>> benefits of education. This extends the childhood years, and people
>> begin to reproduce less. In addition, since the children are spending
>> all their time learning, they are not an asset to the household, but a
>> drain on it until they become productive in their teens or twenties.
>> At which time they are themselves ready to reproduce, so they split off
>> into their own households *and never return any value to the parent
>> household.*
>> And this is exactly why as nations develop, population levels off. So
>> if we really want to control population we need to educate, educate,
>> educate.
>>
> You really do believe the view through your rose colored glasses, don't
> you.
>
> Bill Baka

In article >,
bill > wrote:

> Clinton got my attention when he showed up on the Arsenio Hall show
> and played his Saxophone in 1992, so he had a certain 'cool' factor
> that neither Bush has had. Since 1980 we have had Republicans with a
> stick up their ass, so I think change is due. If Hillary runs, she
> gets my vote, Gore really won the popular vote in 2000, and I think
> 2004 just showed how a corrupt party can manipulate the votes. No way
> could Kerry have lost that badly when Bush was already unpopular.

Gore did win the popular vote in 2000, including Florida, and should
have won the election. In 2004 there were massive voting irregularities
that tipped the election from Kerry to Bush. In both cases, the
election came down to a state where the person in charge of the vote was
also an ambitious Republican that happened to also be in charge of the
Bush campaigns for those states. In both cases, neither of the
Secretaries of State of Florida and Ohio had the ethical wisdom to
recuse themselves from certifying the vote, or alternatively to stay out
of involvement in the Bush campaigns in those states.

The Diebold problem makes it certain that the 2006 and 2008 election
results will not be reliable. Not to mention Republican strategies
across the country to make sure that likely Democratic votes aren't cast
in the first place.

Tim McNamara wrote:
> In article >,
> bill > wrote:
>
>> Clinton got my attention when he showed up on the Arsenio Hall show
>> and played his Saxophone in 1992, so he had a certain 'cool' factor
>> that neither Bush has had. Since 1980 we have had Republicans with a
>> stick up their ass, so I think change is due. If Hillary runs, she
>> gets my vote, Gore really won the popular vote in 2000, and I think
>> 2004 just showed how a corrupt party can manipulate the votes. No way
>> could Kerry have lost that badly when Bush was already unpopular.
>
> Gore did win the popular vote in 2000, including Florida, and should
> have won the election. In 2004 there were massive voting
> irregularities that tipped the election from Kerry to Bush. In both
> cases, the election came down to a state where the person in charge
> of the vote was also an ambitious Republican that happened to also be
> in charge of the Bush campaigns for those states. In both cases,
> neither of the Secretaries of State of Florida and Ohio had the
> ethical wisdom to recuse themselves from certifying the vote, or
> alternatively to stay out of involvement in the Bush campaigns in
> those states.
>
> The Diebold problem makes it certain that the 2006 and 2008 election
> results will not be reliable. Not to mention Republican strategies
> across the country to make sure that likely Democratic votes aren't
> cast in the first place.

Why are Democrats against tamper-proof voter ID cards? Why are they against
letting illegal aliens vote? Why do they pay homeless and indigent people
to vote? Why do their dead people keep voting? TWICE? LOL

Maybe this time some forged documents and last-minute "news" (like a
decades-old DUI charge released 5 days before the election) will work
/against/ the Dems. Hell, it's just hardball politics, right?!?

Bill Sornson wrote:
> Why are Democrats against tamper-proof voter ID cards? Why are they
> against letting illegal aliens vote?

Bzzt. Meant they're against /preventing/ illegals from voting. My bad.

"Tim McNamara" > wrote in message
...
> In article >,
> bill > wrote:
>
>> Clinton got my attention when he showed up on the Arsenio Hall show
>> and played his Saxophone in 1992, so he had a certain 'cool' factor
>> that neither Bush has had. Since 1980 we have had Republicans with a
>> stick up their ass, so I think change is due. If Hillary runs, she
>> gets my vote, Gore really won the popular vote in 2000, and I think
>> 2004 just showed how a corrupt party can manipulate the votes. No way
>> could Kerry have lost that badly when Bush was already unpopular.
>
> Gore did win the popular vote in 2000, including Florida, and should
> have won the election. In 2004 there were massive voting irregularities
> that tipped the election from Kerry to Bush. In both cases, the
> election came down to a state where the person in charge of the vote was
> also an ambitious Republican that happened to also be in charge of the
> Bush campaigns for those states. In both cases, neither of the
> Secretaries of State of Florida and Ohio had the ethical wisdom to
> recuse themselves from certifying the vote, or alternatively to stay out
> of involvement in the Bush campaigns in those states.
>
> The Diebold problem makes it certain that the 2006 and 2008 election
> results will not be reliable. Not to mention Republican strategies
> across the country to make sure that likely Democratic votes aren't cast
> in the first place.

Don't forget the 1888 election which the Republicans also stole, Grover
Cleveland (D) won the popular vote but lost the Electoral vote to Benjamin
Harrison (R), the scoundrels have been stealing elections for years. :<)

In article <MKfWg.8842$Go3.6670@dukeread05>, "di" >
wrote:

> Don't forget the 1888 election which the Republicans also stole,
> Grover Cleveland (D) won the popular vote but lost the Electoral vote
> to Benjamin Harrison (R), the scoundrels have been stealing elections
> for years. :<)

LOL. I grew up near Chicago in the last couple decades of the Richard
J. Daley machine. There are scoundrels on all sides.

"bill" > wrote in message
m...
> Amy Blankenship wrote:
>> "bill" > wrote in message
>> ...
>>> Tim McNamara wrote:
>>>> In article >,
>>>> bill > wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Tim McNamara wrote:
>>>>>> In article .net>,
>>>>>> "george conklin" > wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Small farms would condemn about 75% of the current world's
>>>>>>>>> population to death. That is not a solution except for death.
>>>>>>>> I don't know if the 75% is correct but the basic idea is sound.
>>>>>> No, it's not. Where do you think 75% (actually more) of the world's
>>>>>> population gets its food now? From small farms. Large scale
>>>>>> agribusiness farming is the purview of economically developed
>>>>>> countries which feeds a fraction of the world's population regularly,
>>>>>> and which does provide emergency capacity when food production fails
>>>>>> in ecologically difficult areas due to drought, flooding, fires, etc.
>>>>>> In the latter case, large scale farming does save lives. However,
>>>>>> 75% of the world's population is not all going to suffer such
>>>>>> catastrophes at once.
>>>>> 75% of the world's population is surplus anyway. I just read where the
>>>>> United States is going to top 300 million around October 15. Compared
>>>>> to the country (this one) I grew up in that is about 150 million too
>>>>> many. We are paving over everything, quite literally. I went to visit
>>>>> the houses I grew up in, back in Illinois and all the corn fields I
>>>>> grew up playing in are now built over with housing or "Condo-fields".
>>>>> If we keep replacing corn with people we are going to be in deeper
>>>>> **** than we are now. Rolling the global population to about 1 billion
>>>>> (max) and keeping it there with some no growth thinking is about the
>>>>> only way the human race will be here in another 200 years. I think we
>>>>> are setting ourselves up far a mass plague or starvation that is going
>>>>> to thin out the population. We just plain doesn't need so many people.
>>>> I suspect that there are points of agreement that we could find, but
>>>> there are also points of disagreement. For example, your claim that
>>>> 75% of the population is "surplus." Of course, that gives you a 4:1
>>>> chance of being one of the surplus ones. ;-) I agree that there is
>>>> overpopulation not only in America but around the world as well. I
>>>> cannot bring myself to call anyone "surplus," however. They have every
>>>> bit as much right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as I
>>>> have.
>>> My actual solution was to ship food to them that had fertility
>>> impairment hormones in it or mandate a vasectomy or tube tie in order to
>>> qualify if people already had 2 or more children. Nobody gets hurt, but
>>> nobody gets to have 10 kids they can't feed, either.
>>
>> I think you're operating under two fundamental misconceptions:
>>
>> 1) That civilizations never reach a point where population stops
>> increasing
>> 2) That children never feed their parents
>>
>> If you look at the most developed nations, population growth through
>> reproduction is in the near-zero to negative range, depending on which
>> country you're talking about. This implies that as more and more nations
>> become industrialized, population will level off or even decline. The
>> reason we have such extreme population growth now is that we have better
>> education, health care, food production, and food distribution. So
>> mortality is down.
>
> Way off base for the US. We get one pregnant Mexican having a baby here
> and the whole illegal family stays, so that one 'Citizen' gives a whole
> pre-existing family the right to stay here. Mortality due to disease is
> down from what it used to be, but then people in non-developed countries
> just have more children who then starve and of course, we send them food.
> Us Natural born Americans don't have that many children because we are too
> busy working to survive the high cost of living to support all the
> immigrants who we have to support through social programs. China and India
> are both over 1 Billion and will keep going as long as we keep bleeding
> money to them, which will eventually make us the "EX" superpower.

First, you're talking about population growth in the US through immigration
vs reproduction, which is exactly what I said.

China and India are growing, but their populations are stabilizing as they
need to educate themselves more to be able to fill the tech jobs that are
being outsourced there.

>> Now let's look at the second premise. In the developing world, children
>> are often valuable hands to produce food and/or the means to get food.
>> So in that sense, developing nations can't afford "pet children" who are
>> not expected to return any value to the family in the way we do in the
>> US. So people in developing nations tend to reproduce more because they
>> need the additional hands and because of higher infant and child
>> mortality rates.
>
> You don't read much, do you? The reason they try to reproduce so much is
> that there is a high rate of infant death caused by the birth of a new
> child. Once there is a new baby to breast feed the next older one is
> expected to survive on adult food and often dies from malnutrition.
> Our answer to this? Throw money at them or "Adopt" a child in a far away
> land, thus making it our problem.

You don't read *well* do you? I did way they reproduce more in part because
of higher infant and child mortality.

>> Small amounts of education, especially for female children, greatly
>> reduces mortality among infants and children, so population will
>> initially spike as education becomes available.
>
> Uh-huh!
>>
>> But this makes the benefits of education tangible, so developng peoples
>> slowly spend more and more time in school in order to reap more benefits
>> of education. This extends the childhood years, and people begin to
>> reproduce less. In addition, since the children are spending all their
>> time learning, they are not an asset to the household, but a drain on it
>> until they become productive in their teens or twenties. At which time
>> they are themselves ready to reproduce, so they split off into their own
>> households *and never return any value to the parent household.*
>>
>> And this is exactly why as nations develop, population levels off. So if
>> we really want to control population we need to educate, educate,
>> educate.
>>
> You really do believe the view through your rose colored glasses, don't
> you.

I just call it the way I see it. Do you really think that the fact that
people in developed nations don't even reproduce enough to sustain their own
numbers isn't a natural result of the way nations come to be developed?

"bill" > wrote in message
om...
> Ludmila Borgschatz-Thudpucker, MD wrote:
>> "bill" > wrote in message
>> m...
>>>> And this is exactly why as nations develop, population levels off. So
>>>> if we really want to control population we need to educate, educate,
>>>> educate.
>>>>
>>> You really do believe the view through your rose colored glasses, don't
>>> you.
>>
>> While he be educatin', everybody else be fornicatin'.
> Didn't anyone notice that the rich types have one or two kids so they have
> "Heirs", while the welfare class has more kids to get a raise?

That's obvious. But more people have more wealth as nations develop. The
"poor" in the US usually have at least one television, air conditioning,
clean water, and enough food to eat most of the time. These are things that
are wealth beyond belief compared to undeveloped nations or even here
100-150 years ago.