SHEETS OF HEMP

Hold me closer,

Tiny Dancer,

lay me down in sheets of hemp.

Words from the 1970 tune "Tiny Dancer" by Elton John. Only back then nobody really knew about hemp, so of course I have amended it! The liberties I take.

Image right is of the new Jilly Cholmondeley hemp sheets line. Yet another hemp business in West London, W8 to be exact. On her site she offers free samples of her hemp sheet cloth. Recent reviews include the Independent, which manages to say something negative about hemp even when raving about the one or two hempen products it likes. This week for instance it talked of the 'hemp sandals cliche', funny, all these years I've been promoting hemp I have yet to see hemp sandals, so they can hardly be a cliche. The reference to the Cholmondely line insinuated that all other hemp products were rough and bristly. Obviously, they need to get out of the office and look around or read a book on the subject. Maybe this rag is owned by William Randolph Hearst, or their advertisers, including the cotton industry, have an agenda. Which may be why they are rather tacit about the fact that cotton, including oragnic cotton, uses up too much water - a fact Cholmondeley is not afraid to mention on her site.

Hopefully the Cholmondeley range will help set the record straight, and for those wanting to feel the quality of her sheets, there is an address on her site to send a SAE for a free sample:

Jilly Cholmondeley, 12 Melbourne House, 50 Kensington Place, London, W8 7PW.

Her line will soon be carried by Colin Firth's Eco in W4 (213 Chiswick High Road).

ANYA VS. ONYA

IN THE

GREAT

GAME OF ECO CON

First we had Anya Hindmarch and her uncool pesticide loving cotton bag slagged off in the press after we made some calls to the fourth estate, which resulted in getting lots of press outing the silly fashionistas. However, it seems after the Anya bag people, the Onya bag people have decided to make the press look like fools with a plastic bag. Note the sign in the picture, taken by the notorious Chris Sanders of London; it's made of, yep, you guessed it, plastic. So again the Guardian and The Independent are made to look like fools, as both are listed on the Onya website as papers that promoted their environmentally destructive bag, which they claim has been sold to 380,000. One born every minute, so I am sure they have sold a few more by now.

But just how can they get away with this? It seems as if the journalists involved are complete idiots. For instance, they claim it is made of 'parachute silk'. No one bothers to check what that is, so they go off like crazed George Monbiot fans on their eco crusade not even realising they are zealously promoting plastic. Or, maybe they just work for second rate publications and they do not care.

Sanders, meanwhile, is in hiding at his schmoo safe house, but you can see what he had to say at his secret schmoo site. It turns out that after taking millions of quid off of people in these kinds of scams, some of the perpetrators and the idiots in the press do not like either of us very much. Hemp is never on their agenda, in fact, they are following in the footsteps of the Hearst Media people who tried to vilify hemp to promote plastic.

That is, if they are not on a top level assignment outside the Twin Towers in pursuit of a very important scoop on Paris Hilton. If I disagree with the schmoomaster on anything, it's his posts on Ms. Hilton, who is a public menace. He seems to miss the fact that her family had given money to the stupid sheriff who let her out, overriding the judge's orders. What about all those guys in orange jump suits (made either of plastic or cotton) in Guantanamo Bay?

Hilton is lucky not to have been sentenced in Singapore, as she would not even be wearing an orange jump suit, but her birthday suit, and she would be caned. Now that's sounds like justice. Send her to Singapore, or Guantanamo Bay, where innocent people spend years without any charges. You don't see her crying for them, do you? For cellmates Paris could have Anya Hindmarch and the Onya bag people. Then again there's Abu Ghraib, where the Bushite Republican Guards have raped men, women and children, but where was her cry over that? Like most Americans, she was rather silent. But now she is making noise and having crying fits and her fans are contributing to global warming with an airplane pulling a banner.

A few years back I myself had a free stay in the Twin Towers, when the famous LAPD were terrorising a bunch of hip hop dancers on Venice Beach. Machine guns and helicopters over head, we thought it was al-Qaeda trying to run everyone off the beach. When I called 911 to make a report on police brutality, they came for me. Since I pleaded not guilty to the made up charge of failure to move (I couldn't move, there were cops and kids all over so I had to keep cool and stay put), they took me off to the Twin Towers, where everyone was asking me if I was the guy the cops jumped on the news in Venice...Yea, that was me. It's not a pleasant place, and the guards are a bit sick. Since I did not have Paris Hilton's money, I got shuffled around for a day, they do that, change your cell every hour just as you've gone to sleep, then if they don't like you, lose you in the system and don't allow you to post bail. And since I questioned why the cops did not let the kids do their dance, for which they had a proper permit, I was not as popular as Paris Hilton.

But with all these fans, where is anyone offering to serve out her sentence? Come on now, free room and board at the famous Twin Towers Hilton in beautiful downtown LA and an orange jump suit, which matches the Anya and Onya bags.

THE DEBATE HEATS UP

On a US Senate website there is a list of top scientists who are saying that global warming is not the product of our pollution (posted 15/5/07). The list includes Dr. Claude Allegre, Bruno Wiskel, Dr, Nir Shaviv, Dr. David Evans, Dr. Tad Murty, Dr. David Bellamy, Dr. Chris de Freitas, Dr. Reid Bryson, Hans H.J. Labohm and Tim Patterson, inter alia. Many of these started out as alarmists but have re-studied the data and feel that it is the sun, and not man-made pollutants, which have caused the warming. Only an idiot would deny that there is global warming.

Given the site, one tends to wonder if this is not propaganda, but on the other hand, much of the hysteria, which is promulgated by the likes of Johann Hari and George Monbiot, also looks dodgy. Then there is the fact that the global warming industry is out to make money just like Du Pont and GM. It's hard to take sides, and most honest people would agree that it is a complex argument, best not entrusted to Messrs. Hari and Monbiot. Neither is it to be entrusted to big business or their bestest friend in the whole world, the US government.

One point made by the scientists is that the debate takes energy away from other issues, including the production of ethanol and the curtailing of the cotton industry. I would like to see some real journalists take these on and not just the loud mouths at the Guardian and the Independent. Could it not be that both these papers are in the business of advertising big cars and expensive cotton threads?

The hot air that these papers exhude (and the trees they fell to print their opinions on) is a danger, but if we take a closer look at some of the global warming fanatics, we may want to put a stop to them as soon as we can. Some of them are ready to inject diatomaceous earth (used in kitty litter) into the stratosphere. James R. Fleming, writing in The Wilson Quarterly, notes that they talked about these kinds of big ideas "even as they joked about a NASA staffer's apology for her inability to control the temperature in the meeting room..."

So NASA cannot even keep themselves cool, yet it hosts idiot savants who want to churn ocean water and blast kitty litter into the air. All, of course, at great cost to the taxpayer, and who reaps the benefit? The bevy of savants, journalists, scaremongers and politicians who can divert tax monies to these sorts of schemes... the same people who were crying about global cooling a few years ago. Now they're back, and they are wasting our time as we research proven solutions such as hemp and locally produced ethanol.

BAD VIBRATIONS

Dr. Mae Wan Ho recently did a study of the phenomenon of CCD by placing mobile phones in 4 hives and comparing the reaction to 4 hives with no phones. The bees buzzed off in the hives with the phones. It seems the new generation of mobiles is the culprit.

Dr. Ho will be in London on the 25/26 to discuss her work, and HFV will be taking notes. In the meantime, you may want to tune in to Panorama on BBC 1 this coming Monday, 21 May, as they will be discussing wi-fi and its affects.

For those of you who got the Independent this Monday (14 May), the front cover would have been an eye-opener. Daniel Howden and Andrew Mitchell of Global Canopy Programme write about the major contributor to climate change, which is the burning of the rain forests. Can we stop this madness in time? Or will we soon have a world of no trees and no bees?

ARPIL SHOWERS MAY BRING FLOWERS: THE MONTH IN REVIEW

This is traditionally a month for sowing hemp in northern countries. With quite a bit of that going on, and Hemcore gaining approval for its new facility in England, which the local council granted after they agreed to widen the road, we are looking forward to harvests later this year.

We can also look forward to more consumer awareness, as the bagwars, which took place in posh parts of London, have sparked major newspaper articles about the Anya Hindmarch cotton bags that people were buying for £5 to sell on E-bay for £100. On 25 April, thousands queued at Sainsburys all over the UK, but by Friday, two major publications had questions about that; the first was The Ecologist, whose May issue hit the stands that day with a mention of the protest outside the Camden Sainsburys (p.8). That same day the Evening Standard trashed the bag on their front page. Saturday somehow all the major papers had journalists who had sudden inspirations to also trash the bag, noting that it was made in China, not fairtrade, and made of cotton. They all seem to have received uniquely personal inspirations all at the same time, and so they wrote much the same thing. Poor Anya Hindmarch, whose side I was definitely not on to start with, was being blamed for it all, and Sainsburys was not happy to answer questions. It may be that she listens to some real environmentallists and pulls out of this OK, as after all, I have to say I think she was trying to do the right thing, but got bad advice from We Are What We Do, whose website I won't bother to link to.

But for all that press, it seemed at some point that the press gang were now a bunch of bullies; one paper even tried to sell its own cotton 'ecobag' after they gave her bad press. Neither side said anything about hemp, and this was after I had called the papers, especially the Independent and the Guardian to get them to cover our protest on 25 April. The former, ironically, covered the story not only without any mention of hemp, but without even bothering to spell 'Hindmarch' consistently. So much for lazy journalists.

Much more on the ball is Baroness Tonge, who sent to me an answer from Baroness Amos regarding her question about hemp as a replacement crop for heroin in Afghanistan (posed 29 Jan.). She lamented in her letter that they seemed to not know much about the subject, and ironically, I read this the same day (2 May) that Richard Bacon on BBC5 Live had a panel of 'eco-experts'. These worthies got one question about hemp from a call-in, and they could not answer it, so Bacon said that perhaps we ought to read up about hemp. I tried calling 5 Live but it was by then a dead issue with them, on to silly stuff, such as Question Time in the House of Commons, in which someone asked the Prime Minister if he grew his own.

Maybe the 'eco-experts' on 5 Live will know the answer. May may bring some enlightenment, if not from 5 Live and the other press gangs, at least from Positive News and The Ecologist, which are working with us to provide customers with 100%, made in the UK, organic hemp bags. Already I am carrying my own, courtesy of Bobby Pugh of The Hemp Shop, and people are noticing a bit self-consciously as they reach for their cotton bags) or, in Primrose Hill, simply use the plastic bags. PH is a 'hood where 4x4s are the norm, and dog owners foul the streets because they are too cool to care. Some of them get their kicks from cocaine (because they think that is very cool), but I get mine from cannabis, in the form of my bag. Look for me, and my bag, which I am proud to say is grey and of 'uncomplicated design' at posh places like Harrods, Harvey Nichols, and Anya Hindmarch.

ROCKETS' RED GLARE

An article on schmoontherun may yet get its author in deep doo-doo with Mr. Bush. As he notes in his piece, the American people are getting poisoned, and Mr. Bush has put a gag order on the Environmental Protection Agency so that they cannot do their job. In the meantime, Bush's friends do their job and sell lots of rocket fuel to the US military, which is now spending more money then the mint can even print.

The fuel gets into the water supply, and it then keeps on going. A rocket stops at some point, but the fuel gets into the water, then into the crops, then into you. But not into me, because I escaped and got the hell out. So unless they drag me back in an orange jump suit for disseminating this kind of information, I am safe...unless, of course, they put US rockets where I live (which is a secret location) and then the water all gets full of this. In America, it is happening at 12,000 bases. Osama bin Laden heard about it and decided to retire early, he says Al Qaida does not really need him to mess up America, Bush and Cheney are doing a better job, and no one is allowed to ask questions.

So don't drink the water in Uncle Sam's land. Just shut up and do what you are told. The press is there setting an example, unless they are out at the party for the "Gods of War II" playstation party, where Sony had a live goat slaughtered as a sacrifice to these 'gods', and encouraged people to eat the entrails. In addition, journalists could have things put in their mouths by half-naked wait staff. I was wondering where they were all off to last week when I called the Independent and other papers here to get them to take picures of the Anya Hindmarch bag event, which, as I predicted, turned into a major story. Sony, which makes these violent video games, is itself a media giant. So no surprise that they are not covering the stories about eco bags or rocket fuel poisoning the water supply in America. I guess the Yanks will all have to drink imported French water. Yeah man, live free or die.

WEEDS AND DEEDS

The cotton industry may be forcing us all into oblivion. If not by using up all the water on the planet to feed this weed, or by spraying millions of tons of pesticides every year on them to kill the pesticides it attracts, then perhaps it will get to us by upsetting the balance of nature as GM cotton plants are cultivated. These are already suspect in cattle diseases, as lots of GM cotton seed has been fed to cattle which has become sick. Now it turns out the bees are sick, sick and tired of mankind trying to fool Mother Nature, and they may well buzz off. Could this be in part due to GM cotton flowers? Pesticides are a main suspect, and of course, when you turn lush farmland into desert, you're not helping the planet.

So where are the journalists in the midst of all this? They seem to have buzzed off faster than a fleeing queen from an infected hive. This week we protested the use of cotton in the Anya Hindmarch bag, and not a word of it got into the mainstream press. Then the Evening Standard carries the story about the AH bags being made in China in a sweatshop, and the next day every paper in the UK has a story about how terrible the Anya Hindmarch bag is. Some manage to mention the fact that it is made of cotton, and that this is bad for the environment. But none mention a solution, not a word about hemp, or jute, or even flax. Ah, but that would take work. Lots of queens in the press, but not a lot of workers, maybe they all quit the hive.

Those left behind are happy, however, to promote cotton, with the Independent featuring lots of pictures of white cotton shirts, cheap at £430, or the Times including a catalogue from a company called "Cotton Traders".

So, I urge all readers of this post to call these papers and put them to work on hemp.

The Independent: 020 7005 2000 (ask for Michael McCarthy/David Randall)

The Guardian: 020 7278 2332 (ask for John Vidal)

Daily Mirror: 020 7293 3000

The Sun: 020 7782 4000

Daily Express: 0871 434 1010

Daily Mail/Evening Standard: 020 7938 6000

Daily Telegraph: 020 7931 2000

ETHANOL, HEMP & THE PRICE OF CORN

As the price of a barrel rises these days, and let's review, it has risen sharply since September, 2001, other commodities rise as well; how I wish I had bought gold when it was cheap, at a mere $350 an ounce! Having missed such a golden opportunity, there is comfort in knowing there are other markets. In Iowa this month, the price of a more mundane item, corn, was up for discussion. While it had no such stellar rise as petrol and precious metals , it is nonetheless going up a notch, from $2.00 a bushel to $2.10 a bushel. OK, that's only 5%, but enough to encourage farmers to pick corn this year rather than soy, wheat or cotton.

Part of the rise in the price of corn is due to its cellulose content; cellulose is a carbohydrate which converts easily to ethanol, and for many people tired of paying lots of money for petrol, this is an important bit of information. Truckers have been demanding biofuel for years now in the US, as their incomes are shrinking as inflation rises. So the corn farmers are now able to sell what was once farm waste, the inedible parts of the corn plant, and do the country a service as well. Patriotism, without shedding blood.

However simple some things may be in life, there are always those who can get things wrong, and in the reporting of this in no less a paper than the New York Times, there were worried voices expressing concern about using a food plant to supply energy. Do these people really imagine that they are going to use all the kernels to make fuel? Do they not realise that the kernels are a fraction of the plant's weight, they are the seeds, thus they contain the proteins that make them valuable as a food; the rest of the plant can be dehydrated and fermented for biofuel. We kill two birds here for the price of one.

Sloppy reporting over the years about energy plants is not limited to the Grey Lady in the Big Apple; no less a rag than the UK's Independent will write articles about biofuel without an understanding of the whole picture. Recently, they wrote that it was unfeasible for the UK to farm energy as the rape crop would not produce enough ethanol from its stems. Right they are, but why are they talking about rape when Henry Ford, who certainly did know a thing or two about cars and energy, talked about hemp and farm wastes?

At least the NYT article (Matthew Wald, 16 January, 2006) took notes from those in the business, such as Robert C. Brown, a professor of mechanical engineering at Iowa State, who noted that the idea that using corn for energy was taking food from our mouths was incorrect. Benie Punt, also quoted in the NYT, is a manager of a plant in Siouxland, and he was also able to point out that the leftovers from the ethanol conversion are even used as animal feed.

The scare tactics, interestingly enough, come from the Washington based International Food Policy Research Institute, whose director, Joachim von Braun, warns that: "even a small shift could have big effects...the mouth of your car is a monster compared to your family's stomach needs." OK, one does not need to be a rocket scientist, or related to a former Nazi rocket scientist, to see that this argument is actually better suited towards two other goals - reducing driving and reducing dependence on foreign energy. For an idiot, it stands to reason that we better not use farm wastes to produce ethanol, unless we want a big raise in the price of food.

Actually, by harnessing the energy in farm wastes, the US would quite likely get back on its feet finacially, while providing jobs in the energy and agricultural sectors to its own citizens. If farm wastes were not enought to provide the country with its energy supplies, then certain crops could be grown to provide more, such as hemp, which is one of the fastest biomass producing plants in the world, ready to harvest in a season with little effort. Its stems are high in cellulose, and the seeds can be harvested for oil and cattle feed among other products.

The Founding Fathers grew hemp, so there ought to be little objection to growing this in the US, it can, by the way, be grown in all 50 states. With a little more education and the will to succeed we can. Recently, Sir Richard Branson put his money into ethanol production after listening to Al Gore hold forth on the subject in London. Sir Richard is using farm wastes, thus utilising what is already cheap and available. Little wonder that he became the billionaire that he did.