Quake!

More tectonic plate activity in the core of the Ring of Fire; Indonesia. Three days of shock and aftershock as the plates move.

Frightened Indonesians suffer new Sumatra quakes

Strong enough that; East African nations issue tsunami alerts


And the original quake was felt in Thailand

People in tall buildings in Bangkok felt the 8.2 magnitude earthquake that shook southern Sumatra, in Indonesia, almost 2,000 km away, yesterday. Office workers in business areas of Silom, Sathorn and Ratchadaphisek were seen running from highrise buildings when the quake struck shortly after 6pm.

The after shocks hit the Philippines. 5.4 magnitude quake jolts Batanes


Luckily though no Tsunami occurred, Indonesia escapes tsunami again as quake takes toll

The post-2004 warning system did work.

Fortunately, the tidal wave produced by the latest quakes reached a maximum height of just two feet. But unlike 2004, when governments were slow to issue evacuation warnings, officials responded quickly this time.

Unfortunately too well. Tsunami alerts quickly followed Indonesian quake; panic prevailed

Indonesia lifts 7th tsunami warning after 6.9-magnitude earthquake

It just goes to show that along with Bird Flu, Global Warming and the possible impact of an asteroid , we need to be aware of the dangers of the ancient crawl of the earth known as tectonic shift.

Powerful quakes terrorize Indonesia, experts warn of 'big one'

A series of powerful earthquakes has terrorized residents in western Indonesia - including one that triggered a tsunami warning Friday - leaving thousands sleeping on plastic sheets in the hills. Seismologists warn the worst may yet to come.

"No one can say whether it will be in 30 seconds or 30 years," he said. "But what happened the other day, I think is quite possibly a sequence of smaller earthquakes leading up to the bigger one."

An 8.4-magnitude quake that shook Southeast Asia on Wednesday was followed by dozens of strong aftershocks - including one measuring a magnitude of 7.8 and another 7.1 - that killed 13 people, damaged hundreds of houses and spawned a 3-metre-high tsunami.

On Friday, a 6.4-magnitude temblor hit the area again, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, triggering the latest in a string of tsunami warnings that was later lifted.

The fault, which runs the length of the west coast of Sumatra about 200-kilometres offshore, is the meeting point of the Eurasian and Pacific tectonic plates, which have been pushing against each other for millions of years. This can cause huge stresses to build up.

"There is a strong indication this foreshadows the big one," said Danny Hillman, an earthquake specialist at the Indonesian Institute of Science. "We all agree there is an 8.5 or stronger earthquake waiting to happen."

Especially when idiots in the region insist on testing nuclear weapons. Or creating mud volcanoes from petroleum exploration. Thus adding a man made element to the mix.

Geothermal plants would tap 'Ring of Fire'

The Pacific Northwest, which sits on the volcano-laden "Ring of Fire" bordering the Pacific Ocean, would seem an obvious spot to pursue geothermal power.

For Gordon Bloomquist, it has been obvious for nearly 30 years. He and others have estimated that by capturing the Earth's subterranean heat and converting it into electricity, they could generate enough power for 2 million homes.

But, only now, as the Washington State University geochemist prepares to retire and take his talents to work on geothermal projects for the World Bank in Eastern Europe and Africa, does it look as if this region may be pushed to exploit the hot-rock power lurking beneath our feet.

Speaking of geo-thermal energy and climate warming let's not forget that this is the region that produced Krakatoa.

However, Becker said, a leaky tectonic quilt on average would lead to greater volcanic activity, earthquakes and plate movement. This would affect almost every aspect of Earth's geography, from sea level to erosion to climate.

"There's sort of a chain of things that follows from a good mechanical understanding of how plate tectonics works," he said.

Like the proverbial butterfly effect, what happens in the core of the Ring of Fire affects us too.

'Ring of Fire' asserts power with tremor
Times of India, India - 16 Aug 2007

Peru has become the latest country to feel the renewed heat from the ‘Ring of Fire’ that unleashes earthquakes around the Pacific almost every day.

At least 337 people were killed after the 7.9-magnitude quake rattled the country on Wednesday. The Ring of Fire stretches along the western coast of the Americas through the island nations of the South Pacific and on through Southeast Asia. It is a series of fault lines in the hardened upper layers of the Earth’s crust.

These lines of weakness are the meeting points of huge continental plates that make up the crust and which literally float on the molten rock of the Earth's core.

These plates are in constant motion, clashing into each other or moving away from each other, creating stresses and pressure build-ups at their margins.

This stress is released through volcanic eruptions, when the molten rock is ejected as magma through fissures in the crust, or via earthquakes, when the pressure causes the crust to buckle and shift.

Two days ago reports fluctuated as to whether the quake was 8.4 or 7.9
it all depended on where it was registered.

But that should have set off warning bells that apparently there were overlapping quakes leading to the next two days of so called after-shocks which were more like quakes than shocks.

A massive magnitude 8.4 earthquake hit southern Sumatra's Bengkulu province Wednesday at 6:10 pm local time. It was followed by 51 tremors, including one in western Sumatra's Jambi province Thursday morning that was measured at a magnitude of 7.8. The severe quakes rattled buildings in three countries and triggered tsunami warnings across the Indian and Pacific oceans.

The powerful earthquake of 7.9 magnitude that struck off the coast of Indonesia had its epicentre about 100 km southwest of Bengkulu.

According to R.K. Chadha, scientist with the National Geophysical Research Institute, Hyderabad, the fault plane was in a northwest-southeast direction. The focus (where the plate rupture actually takes place inside the earth) was at a depth of about 30 km from the ocean floor.

“The length of the fault plane should not be more than 250 km. Its epicentre is 300-400 km further south of the December 2004 quake,” Dr. Chadha said. The 2004 earthquake caused a rupture 1200 km long and pushed the Burma plate by 15 m for the entire length of the fault.

In 2004, the focus was 10 km, and hence it was a shallow earthquake. Unlike deep quakes, shallow ones cause more damage. A tsunami that results from such quakes can be more powerful and widespread compared to deep-seated earthquakes.

The quake that struck at 6.10 p.m. local time on Wednesday had a magnitude of 7.9-8, while that of the 2004 quake was 9. With magnitude being measured on a logarithmic scale, a magnitude difference of one translates to a quake 10 times more powerful.

Though a tsunami can be generated even by a shallow quake of 6.5 magnitude, maximum tsunami energy will always be focussed in the direction perpendicular to that of the fault plane. With the fault plane of Wednesday’s quake lying in a northwest-southeast direction, the maximum energy dissipation would have been in the same direction.

Unlike in 2004, where the direction of energy dissipation from the fault plane was nearly parallel to the Indian coast, maximum energy dissipation from the current quake would not have been in the direction of the Indian coast but into the open ocean. On the northeast direction, the energy dissipation would have been towards Bengkulu island.

Following the 2004 quake, another earthquake of 8.7 magnitude struck off the coast of Sumatra on March 28, 2005, about 200 km south of the 2004 event. It happened in the same subduction zone. “We call this as loading and unloading of stress,” said Dr. Chadha. “When stress is released at one point, it accumulates at another point. And, we had predicted that another quake would strike further south of the March event.”

The latest quake was in the same subduction zone, and lies further south of the March 2005 event.

SEE:

Earth in Upheaval-Updated




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Bio-Fuel B.S.

Another excellent post on the real story behind bio-fuels.

Biofuels: The Five Myths of the Agro-fuels Transition

The agro-fuel transition closes a 200-year chapter in the relation between agriculture and industry that began with the Industrial Revolution. Then, the invention of the steam engine promised an end to drudgery. However, industry’s take-off lagged until governments privatized common lands, driving the poorest peasants out of agriculture and into urban factories. Peasant agriculture effectively subsidized industry with both cheap food and cheap labor. Over the next 100 years, as industry grew, so did the urban percentage of the world’s population: from 3% to 13%. Cheap oil and petroleum-based fertilizers opened up agriculture itself to industrial capital. Mechanization intensified production, keeping food prices low and industry booming. The next hundred years saw a three-fold global shift to urban living. Today, the world has as many people living in cities as in the countryside. [10] The massive transfer of wealth from agriculture to industry, the industrialization of agriculture, and the rural-urban shift are all part of the “Agrarian Transition,” the lesser-known twin of the Industrial Revolution. The Agrarian/Industrial twins transformed most of the world’s fuel and food systems and established non-renewable petroleum as the foundation of today’s multi-trillion dollar agri-foods complex.

The pillars of the agri-foods industry are the great grain corporations, e.g., ADM, Cargill and Bunge. They are surrounded by an equally formidable phalanx of food processors, distributors, and supermarket chains on one hand, and agro-chemical, seed, and machinery companies on the other. Together, these industries consume four of every five food dollars. For some time, the production side of the agri-foods complex has suffered from agricultural “involution” in which increasing rates of investment (chemical inputs, genetic engineering, and machinery) have not increased the rates of agricultural productivity—the agri-foods complex is paying more and reaping less.

Agro-fuels are the perfect answer to involution because they’re subsidized, grow as oil shrinks, and facilitate the concentration of market power in the hands of the most powerful players in the food and fuel industries. Like the original Agrarian Transition, the present Agro-fuels Transition will “enclose the commons” by industrializing the remaining forests and prairies of the world. It will drive the planet’s remaining smallholders, family farmers, and indigenous peoples to the cities. It will funnel rural resources to urban centers in the form of fuel, and will generate massive amounts of industrial wealth.

See

Real Costs of Bio-Fuels

Conrad Black and ADM

Bio Fuels = Eco Disaster

GMO News Roundup

Lost and Found

Boreno is Burning

Agribusiness

Desertification

BioFuel and The Wheat Board

The Ethanol Scam: ADM and Brian Mulroney

ADM

Wheat Board

Farmers


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Global Farmers Fight Back

My comrades who are Free Market Libertarians and mutualists who oppose capitalism in favour of a cooperative marketplace, will find much to praise in this new farmers movement. It poses a real alternative to capitalist globalization and corporatist free trade. None other than creation of a new movement for a cooperative commonwealth.

The latest attempt to destroy the Wheat Board in Canada is an example of the attack by the State on small farmers in favour of the Agribusiness cartels in the developed world. The Green Revolution, the push for GMO crops and patents on crops as well as using arable land for production for export; palm oil, are examples of non sustainable agribusiness versus the sustainable production of local farmers.

The recent Fraser Institute report by Preston Manning and Mike Harris calling for the end of supply management, the Wheat Board , and subsidies in the market place for farmers, does nothing but open up the farm marketplace to the agribusiness oligopolies. Ironic since Manning's daddy ran a party; Social Credit, made up of farmers that saw these same oligopolies as enemies of a producer run economy.


The fact is that the majority of farmers in the world are family farmers, not far removed from their peasant roots. It is the peasantry that provides the basis for the survival of the food economy. But with the advent of capitalist globalization the peasantry has become a new force in the world economy as Warren Bellow points out.

It is agricultural reform, the privatization of the inherent collectivism of peasant farming, the enclosure of common lands that led to the creation of capitalism in Britain. Forced off the land the peasants move to the cities to look for work becoming the proletariat.

But not all have done so, since it is the farmers who support the cities with their food production. And forced by globalization to collectivize farmers are reforming cooperatives to deal with the new demands of the marketplace.

Thai pig farmers protest at CPF headquarters

S. Korea may allow farmers to export locally grown rice: gov't source

Farmers Cooperative Extends Rollout Of SOA Tool

Connecting Coffee Growers and Drinkers

Cameroon: Coffee - Reasons Behind Poor Performance

Phoenixville Farmer's Market returns to town for sixth season

Innovations in rural financial system inPunjab

What began in England over 400 hundred years ago is now writ wide across the globe. It is not Free Trade nor Free Markets but the concentration of capital and its power to monopolize the market. It is the transformation of agriculture from sustainable economics to the economics of unrestrained growth. Thus the land, people and environment suffer as we see in Indonesia as the islands there burn for the sake of the agribusiness palm oil industry.

Whereas export crops like organic and fair trade coffee have become a basis for sustainable export farming, which can support sustainable agriculture as well as meet the farmers need to be part of a global market place.


Free Trade vs. Small Farmers

Walden Bello is Executive Director of Focus on the Global South, a Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute, and a Professor of Sociology at the University of the Philippines at Diliman.

The main battle cry of Via Campesina, whose coordinating center is located in Indonesia, is “WTO Out of Agriculture” and its alternative program is food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means first and foremost the immediate adoption of policies that favor small producers. This would include, according to Indonesian farmer Henry Saragih, Via's coordinator, and Ahmad Ya'kub, Deputy for Policy Studies of the Indonesian Peasant Union Federation (FSPI), “the protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports, remunerative prices for all farmers and fishers, abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies, and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture.”

Via's program, however, goes beyond the adoption of pro-smallholder trade policies. It also calls for an end to the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights regime, which allows corporations to patent plant seeds, thus appropriating for private profit what has evolved through the creative interaction of the natural world with human communities over eons. Seeds and all other plant genetic resources should be considered part of the common heritage of humanity, the group believes, and not be subject to privatization.

Agrarian reform, long avoided by landed elites in countries like the Philippines, is a central element in Via's platform, as is sustainable, ecologically sensitive organic or biodynamic farming by small peasant producers. The organization has set itself apart from both the First Green Revolution based on chemical-intensive agriculture and the Second Green Revolution driven by genetic engineering (GE). The disastrous environmental side effects of the first are well known, says Via, which means all the more that the precautionary principle must be rigorously applied to the second, to avoid negative health and environmental outcomes.

The opposition to GE-based agriculture has created a powerful link between farmers and consumers who are angry at corporations for marketing genetically modified commodities without proper labeling, thus denying consumers a choice. In the European Union, a solid alliance of farmers, consumers, and environmentalists prevented the import of GE-modified products from the United States for several years. Although the EU has cautiously allowed in a few GE imports since 2004, 54% of European consumers continue to think GE food is ”dangerous.” Opposition to other harmful processes such as food irradiation has also contributed to the tightening of ties between farmers and consumers, large numbers of whom now think that public health and environmental impact should be more important determinants of consumer behavior than price.

More and more people are beginning to realize that local production and culinary traditions are intimately related, and that this relationship is threatened by corporate control of food production, processing, marketing, and consumption. This is why Jose Bove's justification for dismantling a MacDonald's resonated widely in Asia: “When we said we would protest by dismantling the half-built McDonald's in our town, everybody understood why -- the symbolism was so strong. It was for proper food against malbouffe [awful standardized food], agricultural workers against multinationals. The extreme right and other nationalists tried to make out it was anti-Americanism, but the vast majority knew it was no such thing. It was a protest against a form of production that wants to dominate the world.”

Many economists, technocrats, policymakers, and urban intellectuals have long viewed small farmers as a doomed class. Once regarded as passive objects to be manipulated by elites, they are now resisting the capitalist, socialist, and developmentalist paradigms that would consign them to ruin. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious “class-for-itself.” And even as peasants refuse to “go gently into that good night,” to borrow a line from Dylan Thomas, developments in the 21st century are revealing traditional pro-development visions to be deeply flawed. The escalating protests of peasant groups such as Via Campesina, are not a return to the past. As environmental crises multiply and the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life pile up, the farmers' movement has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone who is threatened by the catastrophic consequences of obsolete modernist paradigms for organizing production, community, and life.

Farmers hungry for change

At this week's intergovernmental meeting in Rome to assess progress towards the pledge to halve hunger by 2015, the mood was sombre. Figures from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) show not a reduction but an increase of more than 25 million chronically undernourished people since 1996. The figure, now at more than 850 million, is testament to how current global policies are consigning the hungry to stay hungry.

So what is going wrong? In 2002, when the UN World Food Summit pledge was last reviewed, the parallel Forum for Food Sovereignty, organised by non-governmental groups representing small farmers and those who feel the sharp end of hunger directly, concluded that the problem was not a lack of political will, as the FAO asserted, but the opposite. Trade liberalisation, industrial agriculture, genetic engineering and military dominance, it said, were now the main causes of hunger.

The farmers, from 30 countries, who participated in the conference were eloquent about how farming for small producers is more than just a food production system. Edgar Gonzales Castro, from Peru, said his vision of the future was "traditional" agriculture aimed at satisfying the needs of farmers, rather than generating profit. "What matters is that, on the family plot of land, farmers and their families have a range of crops to fill the cooking pot," he said.

"When governments decide to hold public consultations to help guide their decisions, policy experts as well as representatives of large farmers and agrifood corporations are usually centre stage, not small-scale producers, consumers and their organisations," says Pimbert.

The message of the report is that small-scale farmers - the majority of growers in the world - want radically different policies from those being promoted by their governments. The call is for policies to start from the perspectives of food producers and consumers rather than the demand for profit.

If "one-planet farming" means that western governments will only support farming practices that provide healthy, local food, maintain livelihoods for local producers and conserve resilient landscapes, then there is common ground with small-scale farmers. But if it means a uniform system for all, this will accelerate the hunt to source food globally and as cheaply as possible.

This will result in a continuing decline in food quality, with ever higher social and environmental costs, and be lorded over by fewer and fewer transnational agribusinesses. It would lead both to greater obesity and greater starvation, and see the eradication of more farmers and further loss of farmland.

Farmers' Views on the Future of Food and Small Scale Producers is at http://www.iied.org/pubs/pdf/full/14503IIED.pdf

Friends of African Farmers & Fishermen

Friends of African Farmers & Fishermen is a Non Profit local community organisation formed by local women and men who are farmers and fishermen. Due to increasing poverty in the area, the local people formed this organisation of Volunteers to help themselves. Due to lack of money and machinery for farming and fishing, wish to appeal for donations of Farm Machinery ie, tractors, irrigation equipment etc. Donations for our Agricultural and development projects in Volta Region of Ghana. To help women and children to have food to eat.Train the young women and youth to acquire the needed skills. To also help farmers with farming machinery and fishing equipment. This would generate income for the local people.Non Profit Organisation.

SEE:

Free Trade Not Aid

Free Trade and Africa

The War For Chocolate

IWD Economic Freedom for Women

Water War

Development Versus Population Growth

WTO: Privatization of Water

Is There a Silver Lining to the WTO Talks? No




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Tigers As Commodities

The destruction of the wild for expansion of Palm Oil production in Asia is the greatest threat to the last refuge of the wild Tiger.The Ape Will Lie Down With The Tiger That and the Chinese taste for Tigers.

China criticised for 'tiger wine'

BBC[Wednesday, April 18, 2007 15:49]

A recent poll declared the tiger the world's most popular animal China has come under fire for allowing tigers to be bred for the production of so-called "tiger bone wine". The drink is reportedly made by steeping tiger carcasses in rice wine. Those who drink the wine believe it makes them strong. Chinese delegates at the International Tiger Symposium in Nepal are arguing for the lifting of a current ban on the trade in tiger bones and skins. But other Asian nations with threatened tiger populations want the ban to stay. Emotive issue There has been a forceful exchange of views on the issue at the symposium, according to the BBC correspondent in Kathmandu, Charles Haviland. Experts say there are several reasons why tiger numbers have drastically declined, but just one has grabbed the limelight, our correspondent says. The argument centres on the existence of so-called "tiger farms" in China, which have bred thousands of captive tigers with the ostensible purpose of entertaining visitors. But the conservation group WWF, which is chairing the symposium, says these farms are fronts for the production of tiger bone wine. WWF also says the captive tigers cannot survive in the wild, and believes the production of wine and underhand trade in skin and bones also threaten to make wild tiger poaching more lucrative. A senior WWF official said the discussions were heated, with Chinese academics saying their country should lift its ban on the trade in tiger parts. But experts from states like Nepal and Bangladesh, which have threatened tiger populations, are urging that the ban should remain. On Wednesday, a more formal forum of government delegations will begin discussing the fate of the majestic beast, which a recent television poll declared to be the world's most popular animal.

Businesses call for lift on tiger parts ban

Kathmandu - The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has expressed concerns over a campaign by Chinese businessmen to lift a ban on the trade of tiger parts, Kathmandu media reported on Wednesday.

"Since China is the biggest market of tiger parts, the lifting of the ban will affect conservation efforts," the English-language Himalayan Times quoted Sue Lieberman, the director of the WWF's global species programme, as saying. "This is going to be the real and biggest threat for the tigers and the tiger conservationists."

Businessmen are reportedly putting pressure on the Chinese government to lift the ban and are also stepping up their campaign on the international community to allow China to commercially breed tigers for their body parts.

International trade in all tigers and tiger products is banned under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

However, wildlife organisations said illegal trade in big cat skins and body parts is worth about $8-billion a year. The tiger body parts are in high demands in China and other East Asian countries for their perceived medicinal value.

The concern expressed by the WWF coincided with the start of an international tiger symposium in Kathmandu that was being attended by tiger experts and conservationist from 12 nations, including China.

The symposium is to discuss tiger conservation in 10 Asian countries and draw up strategies to protect tigers, which are considered an endangered species.

The WWF estimated 5 000 to 7 000 tigers live in the wild, of which about 4 000 are royal Bengal tigers found in India, Nepal and Bangladesh.

The WWF said that over the past 100 years, tiger numbers have declined by 95 percent and three sub-species have become extinct - with a fourth not seen in the wild for more than 25 years.

The latest government figures from Nepal said about 370 tigers live there in the wild, distributed in Chitwan National Park in central Nepal and Bardiya National Park in western Nepal. - Sapa-DPA

Beasts of burden

As with humans, those animals that cannot profitably be integrated into the productive process are simply discarded. Domestication has focused on a narrow number of species; others not entirely domesticated have been preserved for recreational slaughter - such as deer. But many other species have been exterminated altogether, threatening the biodiversity of the planet. In ‘colonial India and Africa, the flower of British manhood indulged in veritable orgies of big game slaughter’. In north America, the wolf ‘became the symbol of untamed nature’ and was exterminated in most areas, as earlier in Europe, while between 1850 and 1880, 75 million buffalo were killed by hunters (Thomas). In each case, mass slaughter was seen as part of the divinely sanctioned transformation of wilderness into civilisation.

The same mania of extermination fuelled the hunting of humans defined as animals, such as the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, or the indigenous population of the Philippines, the subject of ‘goo-goo hunts’ after the US conquest of 1898.

Many other animal species have disappeared because of the destruction and fragmentation of their habitat. The animal industry is often directly involved in the wrecking of fragile local ecosystems, particularly when forests are cleared to make way for grazing land.

Today we are used to seeing the last survivors of endangered species conserved in zoos. The origin of these zoos formed part of the same colonial mentality that exterminated so many creatures: ‘the spectacle of the zoo animal must be understood historically as a spectacle of colonial or imperial power’ (Baker) with the captive animals serving as ‘simultaneous emblems of human mastery over the natural world and of English dominion over remote territories’ (Ritvo).

Anthropocentric humanism has been detrimental to humans as well as animals: ‘The brutal confinement of animals ultimately serves only to separate men and women from their own potentialities’ (Surrealist Group, cited in Law). What Camatte calls ‘the biological dimension of the revolution’ will involve the rediscovery of those aspects of humanity, some labelled as ‘bestial’, that have been underdeveloped by capital such as rhythm, imagination and wildness.

One consequence of this would be that humans would no longer see themselves as always above and distinct from other animals: ‘Communism... is not domination of nature but reconciliation, and thus regeneration of nature: human beings no longer treat nature simply as an object for their development, as a useful thing, but as a subject... not separate from them if only because nature is in them’ (Camatte).

See:

Tiger Tiger Burning Bright

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Another Dirty Little Secret

Science and Shamanism combine in the unusual discovery of our Lady of Flores aka the Hobbit.

The people of Flores follow an unusual mix of Catholicism and ancestor worship. Sacrificing chickens and reading their entrails was all in a day's work for the archaeologists to ensure their digs proceeded smoothly, with the invaluable help of local villagers.

Catholicism fits well with Ancestor Worship since both deal with veneration of the dead over the living. And Christianity and Ancestor Worship arise from guilt over murder.

Morwood and van Oosterzee now believe our species, modern humans, killed the hobbits about 12,000 years ago.

Another dirty little secret revealed? So the humans occupying the area having race memories realize them through religion.

This was the time of the Stone Age, and for the scientists to assume this is an obvious modernist bias. Like this....



No final word ... the disputed picture of a male hobbit,
which became the defining image of the new species.

Disputed is right this is a male and so far the archaeological remains found are female, hence our Lady of Flores. This is her undisputed skull.

Homo floresiensis (Liang Bua Cave, Indonesia)
and a modern human skull

And here is the result of the female skull being fleshed out...

















But at least we now accept that they are a different species of humans. That was still being contested last fall.

And like the Neanderthals before them, they were wiped out by colonizers say the scientists. Imperialism and War are the natural outcome of Homo Sapiens need to dominate and colonize.



The hobbit pre-dates modern peoples in the region. Though race memory may create a zeitgeist in the wilderness, a hint, a legend, a myth of people who came before. The little people of legend. This is what the shaman experiences in their trance state. It is after all one of our oldest cross cultural beliefs.

This just another cultural/historical conjecture by scientists, based on little evidence and theorizing, speculating, hypothesizing, a priori on looking backwards from todays culture of war and Imperialism. After all they are still contesting the evidence that Our Lady of Flores is a different species.

So this assumption is contestable as well. The fact that humans and our hominid relatives existed side by side does not mean that we killed them off. There is just as much evidence for mutual co-existence, as Kropotkin asserts in his work Mutual Aid, and assimilation, as there is that we wiped out Neandertal.

It appears that our closest living relatives in the primate world are now also discovering tool making , and experiencing their own Primate Stone Age,including the making of spears. Chimps using spears to hunt bushbabies

And like our Lady of Flores, the female of the species stands out in this as well.



This new information on chimpanzee tool use has important implications for the evolution of tool use and construction for hunting in the earliest hominids, especially given our observations that females and immature chimpanzees exhibited this behavior more frequently than adult males.

Mistaking tool use for weapons use has been a common problem amongst anthropologists, archaeologists and historians of religion.

A case in point is William Irwin Thompson's expose of an ancient neolithic shaman's (male) warrior spear which he speculates is not, but is actually a woman shamans lunar calendar calculated on menstrual cycles and womens collective dream time.

Pruetz noted that male chimps never used the spears. She believes the males use their greater strength and size to grab food and kill prey more easily, so the females must come up with other methods.

And to defend themselves and their babies from more aggressive males.

Maria Gimbutas suggests that during the period of Our Lady of Flores and after there was a long period of matriarchal cultural development, which was not based on later armed male nomadic warfare, but settled peaceful civilizing of the world.

There remains no scientific evidence that humans wiped out Our Lady of Flores, they could have assimilated or have been wiped out by disease, lack of food, natural disasters, etc.

It is idle speculation like this that moves beyond science into science fiction. Just like 2001 a Space Odyssey.






See;

Primates

Neandertal

Apes

Evolution

Primates

Magick

Shamanism


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Man Made Volcano

As if Indonesia did not have enough environmental problems; 340000 flee deadly floods in Jakarta, now we find out that the mud spewing volcano that erupted last year is a man-made phenomena.

The Indonesian volcano, known as Lusi, has been spewing steaming mud since May last year, causing 13,000 people to flee their homes (Image: University of Durham)

Drilling for gas most probably caused the eruption of an Indonesian mud volcano, forcing the evacuation of thousands of people, scientists report.

"[The eruption] appears to have been triggered by drilling of over-pressured porous and permeable limestones at depth of around 2830 metres below the surface," says the study, the first published on what caused the eruption.

The study, which appears in the February issue of the journal GSA Today, adds that the volcano has been disgorging 7000-150,000 cubic metres of mud every day since it erupted in May last year.

Such pressures, coupled to the local geology, suggest the flow "will continue for many months and possibly years to come", warn the UK researchers, led by Professor Richard Davies from the University of Durham.

In the coming months, sag-like subsidence several kilometres wide will occur, and around the main vent there is likely to be "more dramatic collapse", forming a crater, the study adds.

An area of at least 10 square kilometres around the volcano will be uninhabitable for years, and over 11,000 people will be permanently displaced, it says.

Add to that the wildfires started by slash and burn operations for palm oil plantations and the continuing disruption and displacement from the 2004 Tsunami and Indonesia is an ongoing environmental disaster.

But do plan to take your holidays there, I hear it is quite nice otherwise.

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Indonesia

Palm Oil

Borneo

Disasters

Environment

Volcano

Tsunami


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Hobbit Controversy

The scientific controversy around Our Lady of Flores, (Lady of Flowers), aka the hobbit, continues...

The hobbit is definitely a new species of human, related to but separate from Homo sapiens, concludes a study by a Florida State University team published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Neuro-paleontologist Dean Falk, the head researcher, says she is "absolutely convinced" the brain of LB1, as the hobbit is officially known, is not abnormal.

The discovery of Homo floresiensis makes it much more likely that stories of other mythical, human-like creatures are founded on grains of truth.

Homo floresiensis (Liang Bua Cave, Indonesia) and a modern human skull

Peter Brown

File under cryptozoology; Dwarves, fairies, picts, brownies, gnomes, little people.

For more cryptozoology news check out this blog; Cryptomundo.




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Bio Fuels = Eco Disaster

The production of biofuels, long a cornerstone of the quest for greener energy, may sometimes create more harmful emissions than fossil fuels, scientific studies are finding.

Says the NYTimes in an article on Palm Oil. Once a Dream Fuel, Palm Oil May Be an Eco-Nightmare

As I have blogged here, Palm Oil production is creating an eco disaster in Indonesia and Malaysia with wildfires and threats to the endangered Organutan population.

And with both the Bush and Harper regimes promoting biofuels in grains and corn the result is increasing prices for these commodities which adversely affect other farm commodities like pork.

The Chair of Manitoba Pork Council says swine producers on the two sides of the Canada U.S. border share a common concern over rapidly rising feed prices resulting from expanded ethanol production.

And this is why the Harpocrites want to open the market up to the big Agribusiness giants like ADM and Cargill who also produce soya, palm oil, etc. But to do that they must eliminate the Wheat Board.

Biofuels are not ecologically sound alternatives to petroleum, they are just another capitalist band-aid, like Kyoto with its carbon exchange marketing.

Capitalism can only offer 'profit based' ways of adjusting to the current ecological and environmental crisis we face. That is because this crisis is about capitalism, which is not sustainable.

That is the real problem of Green Capitalism and all the so called Green alternatives, they are not alternatives at all, merely attempts to ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism.

Without the development of democratic self managed (worker community control) socialism, capitalism Green or otherwise will continue to lead to planetary entropy.


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GMO News Roundup

Lost and Found

Boreno is Burning

Bio-Fuels


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