BITS AND BOBS'08 is winding down, and there is, or was, a wave of good feeling in the air (as I write we are reading about the massacre in Mumbai). The GOP is out, and many people think the Messiah is arriving on 20 January '09. Actually I think the US Secret Service arrives in full force that day with 4 years of overtime trying to protect Obama from the KKK and whoever else does not agree with having an Arab for a President. At least in my case, they don't have to worry too much, my attacks are only verbal. But then again, as Homeland Security was spending so much time on this site earlier this year, maybe there is some agency that protects US politicians from the likes of me. Not being able to find Osama bin Laden, they are taking up other duties in an effort to look busy and justify taking $50billion a year from the pockets of the taxpayers.
The big question is what will happen to hemp in the Obama years (or Biden years, if the KKK gets a lone gunman on a grassy knoll)? Will he legalise it? Or will he just grow his own under UV lights in the White House, which will come under DEA scrutiny for the large energy bill?
And talking of energy bills, I might note that people are talking about energy bills. Since the politicians dragged their feet on developing energy, we all had to pay up to $150 a barrel for oil. The price dropped, due in no small part to the fact that we did not have $150 to pay for crude anymore. And now there seems little money left to develop energy to get us out of this mess, even if energy sourcing is as simple as stepping on the floor. For those of us moving at more than a foot dragging pace, our feet generate electricity, as the Rotterdam dance space Club Watt has found out. So the beat of the music leads to the beat of the feet and the owners beat the high electric bills that come with high powered strobe lights. An article in the New York Times by Elisabeth Rosenthal this weekend points out that this is not just a one-off, but part of an enterprise called the Sustainable Dance Club. The energy produced by an average person dancing is about 20 watts. The Observer picked up on this article, which their science editor Robin McKie wrote about on Sunday. His notes go further, as he explores the possibilities of other forms of naturally existing or human induced motion being harvested to make power.
Getting back to the NYT, two other articles were of interest in regards to energy, one of hydrogen pumps on Santa Monica Boulevard (for girls who just wanna have fun...) which will be used to fuel hydrogen cars. Shell Oil is behind this, but other oil companies are behind the times and may not cooperate. The other article was a bit less high tech, it talked about rental bikes in European cities. I live in London - I want them here. That way I could combine mass transport for the long, or uphill treks, and bikes for short/downhill treks. If they were smart, they could even put on little energy devices on to catch the motion of the wheels and harvest that. A day's riding could bring in both a profit on the rentals and a device with stored energy.
Switching back to the Observer, I was stunned to find a lengthy article on bottled water by Martin Hickman. This had become a recent issue with me, as my fellow author on the Hemp for Victory book, Sam Heslop, had just sent around an e-mail warning about dioxin poisoning from plastic water bottles. Some of these are stored two years or more before they reach the shelves, and they can leak a lot, so much so that movie stars are claiming that they are getting cancer, especially breast cancer, from all the trendy bottled water they drank. Hickman knocks tap water as it contains chlorine, but with so many of these article in trendy lefty mags like the Observer, it does not do the full research. Fact is, a home water filter is not that expensive, and can filter these out. Hickman also fails to note that on occasion the bottled water is a scam, for instance, one enterprising New Yorker made millions out of filling trendy bottles full of tap water and selling it as a top brand before his scam got switched off. There is no word from this journalists as to what we are supposed to do with the millions of empty bottles, maybe we can just dump them in someone else's backyard, along with the millions of copies of the Observer that get used to sell us these ideas every weekend. Still waiting for them to use hemp paper...
Maybe, though, we well see the Independent using some - as they have been in talks with Zac Goldsmith, former publisher of the Ecologist, to be bought out. Goldsmith spoke last month at Friends House, and as usual, when hemp is brought up, there is a trendy crowd that tries to hide its ignorance by pouring scorn on the subject; he was not affected, and enthused about hemp to my friend Sagar Shah. It is good to see honest people like Goldsmith in the environmental movement, sadly, we are beset with trendy hippy trippy types who are either dopers or useful idiots for big business or both. David Shayler was the epitome of this, it was so bad that when he started talking about hemp I asked him to stop. Where is he now? In Amsterdam, where a few foolish people believe he is the Messiah. Some of them are apparently giving him money, and those journalists who have no for lengthy research, see him as a source of a quick article. I saw him once this year, at a 9/11 Truth Event, where he was so unwelcome that an organiser smashed a glass bottle at his bare feet to send him a message to stay away.
So here's to '09. '08 has been one bad year overall for many people. Out with the suicide terrorists and false Messiahs, and in with hemp, Zac Goldsmith, rental bikes and non-petrol based energy production.
The big question is what will happen to hemp in the Obama years (or Biden years, if the KKK gets a lone gunman on a grassy knoll)? Will he legalise it? Or will he just grow his own under UV lights in the White House, which will come under DEA scrutiny for the large energy bill?
And talking of energy bills, I might note that people are talking about energy bills. Since the politicians dragged their feet on developing energy, we all had to pay up to $150 a barrel for oil. The price dropped, due in no small part to the fact that we did not have $150 to pay for crude anymore. And now there seems little money left to develop energy to get us out of this mess, even if energy sourcing is as simple as stepping on the floor. For those of us moving at more than a foot dragging pace, our feet generate electricity, as the Rotterdam dance space Club Watt has found out. So the beat of the music leads to the beat of the feet and the owners beat the high electric bills that come with high powered strobe lights. An article in the New York Times by Elisabeth Rosenthal this weekend points out that this is not just a one-off, but part of an enterprise called the Sustainable Dance Club. The energy produced by an average person dancing is about 20 watts. The Observer picked up on this article, which their science editor Robin McKie wrote about on Sunday. His notes go further, as he explores the possibilities of other forms of naturally existing or human induced motion being harvested to make power.
Getting back to the NYT, two other articles were of interest in regards to energy, one of hydrogen pumps on Santa Monica Boulevard (for girls who just wanna have fun...) which will be used to fuel hydrogen cars. Shell Oil is behind this, but other oil companies are behind the times and may not cooperate. The other article was a bit less high tech, it talked about rental bikes in European cities. I live in London - I want them here. That way I could combine mass transport for the long, or uphill treks, and bikes for short/downhill treks. If they were smart, they could even put on little energy devices on to catch the motion of the wheels and harvest that. A day's riding could bring in both a profit on the rentals and a device with stored energy.
Switching back to the Observer, I was stunned to find a lengthy article on bottled water by Martin Hickman. This had become a recent issue with me, as my fellow author on the Hemp for Victory book, Sam Heslop, had just sent around an e-mail warning about dioxin poisoning from plastic water bottles. Some of these are stored two years or more before they reach the shelves, and they can leak a lot, so much so that movie stars are claiming that they are getting cancer, especially breast cancer, from all the trendy bottled water they drank. Hickman knocks tap water as it contains chlorine, but with so many of these article in trendy lefty mags like the Observer, it does not do the full research. Fact is, a home water filter is not that expensive, and can filter these out. Hickman also fails to note that on occasion the bottled water is a scam, for instance, one enterprising New Yorker made millions out of filling trendy bottles full of tap water and selling it as a top brand before his scam got switched off. There is no word from this journalists as to what we are supposed to do with the millions of empty bottles, maybe we can just dump them in someone else's backyard, along with the millions of copies of the Observer that get used to sell us these ideas every weekend. Still waiting for them to use hemp paper...
Maybe, though, we well see the Independent using some - as they have been in talks with Zac Goldsmith, former publisher of the Ecologist, to be bought out. Goldsmith spoke last month at Friends House, and as usual, when hemp is brought up, there is a trendy crowd that tries to hide its ignorance by pouring scorn on the subject; he was not affected, and enthused about hemp to my friend Sagar Shah. It is good to see honest people like Goldsmith in the environmental movement, sadly, we are beset with trendy hippy trippy types who are either dopers or useful idiots for big business or both. David Shayler was the epitome of this, it was so bad that when he started talking about hemp I asked him to stop. Where is he now? In Amsterdam, where a few foolish people believe he is the Messiah. Some of them are apparently giving him money, and those journalists who have no for lengthy research, see him as a source of a quick article. I saw him once this year, at a 9/11 Truth Event, where he was so unwelcome that an organiser smashed a glass bottle at his bare feet to send him a message to stay away.
So here's to '09. '08 has been one bad year overall for many people. Out with the suicide terrorists and false Messiahs, and in with hemp, Zac Goldsmith, rental bikes and non-petrol based energy production.
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