Could the rise in auto-immune diseases like hay fever, asthma, diabetes and even autism over the last 150 years be linked to a corresponding drop in rural living with "dirty" food rich in bacteria and parasites?

So begins An Epidemic of Absence, Velasquez-Manoff‘s new book about a tantalizing hypothesis for a modern medical mystery: Why autoimmune diseases, in which a person’s immune system attacks their own body, are becoming more common, even as infectious and parasitic diseases are beaten back. (Read an excerpt from the book)

 

According to Velasquez-Manoff and the scientists he writes about, it’s no coincidence. A fast-growing body of research suggests that immune systems, produced by millions of years of evolution in a microbe-rich world, rely on certain exposures to calibrate themselves. Disrupt those exposures, as we have through modern medicine, food and lifestyle, and things go haywire.

...

We know tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, came out of Africa with us. It’s been in the human body for at least 60,000 years, and probably longer. But beginning in the late 18th century, there was a wave of TB in Europe, and nobody has ever really been able to explain it. Some people argue that a more virulent strain emerged, and there is some evidence for that when they look at the genetics of it. But there’s another hypothesis.

 

According to this, we had to acquire immunity to tuberculosis because of constant exposure to non-parasitic versions of mycobacteria that basically live in soil. But Europe begins to urbanize in the 18th century. The potato is imported from the Americas, causes a population boom, and people start migrating to cities. They lose the mycobacteria in the natural setting. And without that exposure, immune systems didn’t know how to react to it.

 

Wired: Why is our exposure to parasites and microbes so different now than it was 100 years ago, or 500 years ago?

 

Velasquez-Manoff: Let’s imagine people living in a rural environment, with lots of animals around. That’s the first thing that’s different. We were constantly exposed to each others’ fecal microbes: Feces was on our hands, and we fertilized our crops with it. People were fermenting food or drying it.

 

Today’s processed food is designed not to carry microbes. It’s full of salt and sugar and grease. You’ve seen those photos of McDonald’s hamburgers kept for a year or two that don’t rot: Microbes can’t get a foothold in them.

 

There’s a story about the food question. Bengt Björkstén compared allergies in Sweden and Estonia, a neighboring Baltic country, right after the Iron Curtain started drawing back in 1989. In Estonia, they were lower by two-thirds. He thought the protection came from their food. They had been getting microbes from food that was grown locally and fermented, essentially because it was a poor country. Modern food has to have a shelf life. It has to travel long distances. That happens by various mechanisms, but essentially you’re taking the microbiota off food.

Read more at
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/09/epidemic-of-absence/

This entry was posted on September 4, 2012 at 9:59 PM and has received 990 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Drones are cheap and easy to program - hard to tell what people will do with them ...

At last year’s Paris Air Show, some of the hottest aircraft were the autonomous unmanned helicopters—a few of them small enough to carry in one hand—that would allow military buyers to put a camera in the sky anywhere, anytime. Manufactured by major defense contractors, and ranging in design from a single-bladed camcopter to four-bladed multicopters, these drones were being sold as the future of warfare at prices in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In May, at a different trade show, similar aircraft were once again the most buzzed-about items on display. But this wasn’t another exhibition of military hardware; instead, it was the Hobby Expo China in Beijing, where Chinese manufacturers demo their newest and coolest toys. Companies like Shenzhen-based DJI Innovations are selling drones with the same capability as the military ones, sometimes for less than $1,000. These Chinese firms, in turn, are competing with even cheaper drones created by amateurs around the world, who share their designs for free in communities online. It’s safe to say that drones are the first technology in history where the toy industry and hobbyists are beating the military-industrial complex at its own game.

...
Today, all the sensors required to make a functioning autopilot have become radically smaller and radically cheaper. Gyroscopes, which measure rates of rotation; magnetometers, which function as digital compasses; pressure sensors, which measure atmospheric pressure to calculate altitude; accelerometers, to measure the force of gravity—all the capabilities of these technologies are now embedded in tiny chips that you can buy at RadioShack. Indeed, some of the newest sensors combine three-axis accelerometers, gyros, and magnetometers (nine sensors in all), plus a temperature gauge and a processor, into one little package that costs about $17.

Meanwhile, the brain of an autopilot—the “embedded computer,” or single-chip microprocessor, that steers the plane based on input from all the sensors—has undergone an even more impressive transformation, thanks to the rise of the smartphone. Once Apple’s iPhone showed that fluid and fast visual interfaces on touchscreens were what people wanted, the same insatiable demand for computational power that kicked in with the graphical user interface of desktop computers came to phones. But unlike the desktop, these mini supercomputers also needed to use as little power as possible. The result was a shift to the hyperefficient “reduced instruction set computing” architectures—led by British chip designer ARM, which now dominates the single-chip industry—driving the performance gains of our smartphones and tablets. As it turns out, these chips are also perfect for drones: Fast and power-efficient processors mean that they can go beyond simply following a preprogrammed mission and start to think for themselves.

And the smartphone-drone connection goes far beyond the processors. These days, a standard smartphone has a full suite of sophisticated inertial sensors to detect its position, a feature that’s integrated into everything from games to maps and augmented reality. The demand for higher-quality cameras in phones has launched a similar revolution in image-capture chips, which are used in drones. The need for smaller, better GPS in phones has brought the same technology to drones, too, such that GPS performance that cost tens of thousands of dollars in the 1990s can be had for as little as $10 in a thumbnail-sized device. The same goes for wireless radio modules, memory, and batteries.

In short, this new generation of cheap, small drones is essentially a fleet of flying smartphones. More and more, autopilot electronics look just like smartphone electronics, simply running different software. The technical and economic advantages of coattailing on the economies of scale of the trillion-dollar mobile-phone industry are astounding. If you want to understand why the personal-drone revolution is happening now, look no farther than your pocket.

more at
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/06/ff_drones/?utm_source=Contextly&utm_medium=RelatedLinks&utm_campaign=Previous

This entry was posted on September 4, 2012 at 9:40 PM and has received 2253 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

How different are both major parties? No matter how we vote Reality always wins in the end...

Compare and contrast the platforms of the Republicans and Democrats with the Reality Party:

     The two major parties both propose that the colossal machine of everyday life in America can not only run indefinitely, but continue expanding, and include ever more member people who trade ever more schwag. All that is required, they say, is twiddling the settings of the machine, to get it back to running smoothly as it did in the good old days before the mystifying crash of 2008. They disagree slightly on which dials to twiddle. Reality knows we have entered along-term compressive economic contraction; that there is no way we can persist in the current living arrangement; and that the necessary outcome to avoid immense human suffering can be described as the downscaling and re-localizing of everything we do.

 

     The two major parties regard the rule of law as optional, especially in money matters. Neither party has any will to interfere with a broad array of financial rackets that range from the blatant manipulation of markets, interest rates, and currencies to computerized front-running thievery, traffic in booby-trapped derivatives and counterfeit shorts, pervasive accounting fraud, channel stuffing, irregularities in central bank bullion leasing, flagrant confiscation of private accounts, municipal bond-rigging flimflams, "private equity" looting operations, offshore banking dodges, and untold other scams, rip-offs, and cons that have crippled the basic functions of finance, namely: price discovery, currency as a reliable store of value, and the allocation of surplus wealth for productive purpose. Reality knows that the absence of the rule of law is suicidal. Reality is incapable of pretending that it doesn't matter. Reality provides work-arounds for intractably dishonest political arrangements: civil war and revolution. Both are invoked out of extreme desperation and have unpredictable outcomes. Like Reality itself, they are what they are.

 

     The two major parties pretend that so-called "entitlement" programs can be simultaneously reformed, improved, and abolished - that is, you can have your cake and eat it (with ice cream) at the same time you throw it in the garbage. Reality rejects this incoherent juggling act and proposes that Americans better just make other arrangements for old age, routine medical care, and daily bread. This implies cultural as much as economic transformation and it will occur emergently no matter what empty promises anyone makes. People who want to get food at regular intervals will have to find some way to make themselves useful to others. Medicine will return to the local clinic model and doctors will have to find another motivation for practice besides the acquisition of German automobiles. Old people will have to prevail upon their offspring for care and protection, and they will be expected to play a useful role in the household or community in return if they are able-bodied.

 

     The two major parties both proclaim that the USA is verging on "energy independence." Both parties are lying. Reality knows that the shale oil "game changer" is a mirage. By 2014, the "sweet spots" of the Bakken will deplete faster than new wells can be drilled, and the impairments of banking will constrict the supply of capital investment for that hypothetical future drilling. All the deregulation in the world will not alter the fact that future oil is expensive, exists in places where it is hard to work, and entails unappetizing geopolitical contingencies. Reality favors letting go of automobile-based living and the adoption of walkable communities connected by inland waterways and railroads.

 

      The two major parties believe that the foreign wars are good for business as long as you can minimize the casualties on our side and keep war news off the TV. Reality knows that war as currently practiced by the US Military is a failure if 1.) you can't control the terrain in the foreign theater of operations, and 2.) you can't control the behavior of the foreign population. Notice that we can't do either of those things in Afghanistan or the sundry other places where the US military might be found today. The two major parties also favor the application of war-time "security" operations on the US public inside our borders - i.e. spying, data harvesting, monitoring of cell phone and bank records., et cetera - contrary to what US law and the constitution says. Reality believes that, if the rule of law remains optional, the time will come when American government officials who authorized these activities may be dragged from their command centers and hanged from traffic signals by a citizenry pushed too far.

 

     Mitt Romney and Barack Obama would label Reality a "terrorist movement" if they could and seek to blow it up with predator drones. But Reality is harder to stamp out than truth, which can be shouted down, papered over, fudged, outlawed, etch-a-sketched, exiled, and reviled. Reality is everywhere. It lurks inside and outside the doors of the phony-baloney convention vaudeville shows in its cloak of invisibility, ready to work its hoodoo on the feckless, the fatuous, and the wicked. Reality is America's last best hope. Join the Reality Party.

from http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/09/join-up.html

This entry was posted on September 3, 2012 at 7:14 PM and has received 372 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

In many places in the US every car moving on certain roads is tracked by license plate reading cameras. And the car's driver and passengers photographed. The data is not restricted to suspected criminals, unless you believe that every citizen is potentially a criminal... And all the data is kept for future searches, for years into the future. Just in case the government needs some evidence of you wrong doing, driving in a suspicious pattern. Maybe going by a "known" drug area or a "known" anti-government group.

The same is true in London, UK and much of Europe

Check your calendar, perhaps you missed something, the year might be 1984...

Tag readers are cameras that can be stationary, mounted on poles or traffic signals. Also they can be put on cruisers and vehicles. They can also be hidden.  Their function is to take images of passing vehicles, and they have an extraordinary capacity technologically to be able to do so, and to use optical character recognition to identify the license plate number. The images may include optionally images of the occupants, the driver and passengers, as well. It takes that data, along with the GPS location of the vehicle, the date, the time, etc., and then stores it, matches up the data, and can send it to a centralized data warehousing center where they can log, historically, the movement of your own vehicle as it has passed through and silently triggered any one of the many thousands of tag readers that over the past few years have been put in place without very much public discussion or debate.

TG: Where are they? Cities and towns and everywhere at this point?

CM: Yes. In fact, the federal government has, over the past number of years, embarked on a campaign to use federal funds to either subsidize or to give money for tag readers ostensibly for law enforcement purposes all across the country. In Utah, they were presented in much of the same way that the government and law enforcement presents these surveillance technologies; they roll them out as an innocuous way to take a snapshot of passing vehicles and compare them to a stolen vehicle list. Well, yeah, that’s part of what it does, but then in Utah they came to understand that that was only a fraction of the functionality of the tag readers that were being offered to them for free.  And they expressed shock that the government was actually intending to take a historical record of all the cars that passed through on their interstate and send it off to a data warehouse, which is physically located in Northern Virginia, in Merrifield.

TG: Right. Because the data warehouse in Virginia would be really concerned about stolen cars in Utah, right?

CM: Well, exactly. And you know, one of the great concerns, or a number of important elements here -- there are virtually no real hard restrictions on the retention of this data, or on the use of the data. And when you aggregate it, the real risk to privacy, the greatest risk to privacy comes through both the historic accumulation of data so that it’s not just a snapshot, but actually a history.

But also, when you aggregate it and cross-reference it with other information such as a person’s credit card transactions, what they purchased, when they purchased and why, you can really create a comprehensive profile of a person’s activities, their associations, even really a personality profile on them. Imagine, they know more about you than you probably know about yourself when they take into consideration your movements, your purchases as reflected in card databases, your credit card transactions, each of which record the time, location, nature of your transactions. And that and your cell phone data, well, what’s left?
...

When you aggregate this information and know, for example, who has been parked near an abortion clinic, who has attended a political organizing meeting, and for an individual, what are the chain of activities that you have engaged in? That information does not belong to the government. That is just a clear violation, an intrusion of personal privacy.

There is always a pretext, there is always an explanation.  There is always some boogie man to turn to, a threat of violence. All of the counterintelligence program disruption activities of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970 period, early ‘70s were justified by the government as necessary to prevent acts of violence, and to further law enforcement.  So that’s what they do here.  They say, “Look, this can help prevent acts of violence. If we knew this, we could prevent a terrorist attack  If we knew this, we could prevent lawlessness, we could track stolen vehicles.” There are a lot of pretexts for it.

But ultimately, when you look at the design of these systems, the systems are really massive intelligence networks. A lot of these uses do not require the massive retention and data warehousing that municipalities in the federal government are engaged in. If you look to identify whether a vehicle that just passed a tag reader, for example, is a stolen vehicle, they can send in an alert and have an officer pull it over.  You don’t need to capture and record every single vehicle’s license plates and possibly the photos of the occupants, and then move that into a data warehouse for archiving purposes.  That’s not necessary.

Full article at alternet

This entry was posted on September 1, 2012 at 6:50 PM and has received 420 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

(To the tune of "As time goes by" from Casablanca)

You must remember this

A proof is not a proof

A conjecture is not a conjecture

The fundamental things apply

As pure math goes by

The late William Thurston helped bring about  “The Death of Proof” (Scientific American Blog). You might say that there is a lot of math that can be proved, and maybe if if can't be proved, its not math!

That is true and it depends what you mean by "proved". In Godel's theory most of math can not be formally proved in systems that do not contain contradictions themselves... so are those proofs valid? We act as though they are... And how is this different from physics where it is all conjecture based on experimental evidence and if a new set of experiments comes along that break the old theory we bring in new ones. There is a school of experimental math that works a similar way using computer programs to both create experimental data and to do formal proofs of the conjectures. They even have a journal about experimental math now, so it is getting quiet popular.

Prof Doron Zeilberger in his provocative essay says that proving by computer programming gives more understanding than proving by hand

Some of the experiments in math even become art

This entry was posted on August 25, 2012 at 12:56 PM and has received 1046 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Ok I understand why the army needs to buy hundreds of thousands of bullets, but the Social Security Administration and DHS? Are they expecting to go to war with Syria? Or are they planning to fight people closer to home...

Why Does The U.S. Government Need So Much Ammunition?

In my previous article, I also noted that the U.S. government appears to be very rapidly making preparations for something really big. This week, it was revealed that the Social Security Administration plans to buy 174,000 hollow point bullets which will be delivered to 41 different locations all over America.

 

Now why in the world does the Social Security Administration need 174,000 bullets? And why do they need hollow point bullets?  Those bullets are designed to cause as much damage to internal organs as possible.

 

But of course this is only the latest in a series of very large purchases of ammunition by U.S. government agencies.  The following is from a recent article by Paul Joseph Watson....

Back in March, Homeland Security purchased 450 million rounds of .40-caliber hollow point bullets that are designed to expand upon entry and cause maximum organ damage, prompting questions as to why the DHS needed such a large amount of powerful bullets merely for training purposes.

 

This was followed by another DHS solicitation asking for a further 750 million rounds of assorted bullets, including 357 mag rounds that are able to penetrate walls.

Now why in the world would the government need over a billion rounds of ammunition? If it was the U.S. military I could understand this.  You can burn through a whole lot of ammunition fighting wars. But this makes no sense - unless they believe that big trouble is coming.

 

Personally, I wouldn't blame them for getting prepared.  Our economy continues to fall apart and there are signs of social decay everywhere around us. The American people are more frustrated and more angry than at any other time in modern history.  This upcoming election is only going to cause Americans to become even more angry and even more divided.

 

All it would take is just the right "spark" to cause this country to erupt. It could be the upcoming election. It could be the collapse of the financial system. Or it might be something else. But the conditions are definitely there for it to happen.

 

Unfortunately, the American public is never told to prepare because authorities never want "to panic" the general population. So don't wait for someone to come on the television and announce that a crisis is happening. If you wait that long, it will be too late. Instead, open up your eyes and think for yourself.

 

We all need to work hard to get prepared for the coming crisis while we still can. As you can see, Wall Street insiders, the U.S. government and the central banks of the world are busy getting prepared. Don't put your head in the sand. The warning signs are there and time is running out.

From http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/startling-evidence-that-central-banks-and-wall-street-insiders-are-rapidly-preparing-for-something-big

This entry was posted on August 17, 2012 at 7:12 PM and has received 848 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.

It certainly seems to me that the financial markets and some countries are going to collapse soon. But have banks and governments been preparing on the QT too?

Are The Government & The Big Banks Quietly Preparing For Imminent Financial Collapse?
08/15/2012

Something really strange appears to be happening. All over the globe, governments and big banks are acting as if they are anticipating an imminent financial collapse. Unfortunately, we are not privy to the quiet conversations that are taking place in corporate boardrooms and in the halls of power in places such as Washington D.C. and London, so all we can do is try to make sense of all the clues that are all around us.

Of course it is completely possible to misinterpret these clues, but sticking our heads in the sand is not going to do any good either. Last week, it was revealed that the U.S. government has been secretly directing five of the biggest banks in America "to develop plans for staving off collapse" for the last two years. By itself, that wouldn't be that big of a deal. But when you add that piece to the dozens of other clues of imminent financial collapse, a very troubling picture begins to emerge....

Over the past 12 months, hundreds of banking executives have been resigning, corporate insiders have been selling off enormous amounts of stock, and I have been personally told that a significant number of Wall Street bankers have been shopping for "prepper properties" in rural communities this summer. Meanwhile, there have been reports that the U.S. government has been stockpiling food and ammunition, and Barack Obama has been signing a whole bunch of executive orders that would potentially be implemented in the event of a major meltdown of society. So what does all of this mean?

It could mean something or it could mean nothing. What we do know is that a financial collapse is coming at some point. Over the past 40 years, the total amount of all debt in the United States has grown from about 2 trillion dollars to nearly 55 trillion dollars. That is a recipe for financial Armageddon, and it is inevitable that this gigantic bubble of debt is going to burst at some point.

 

In normal times, the U.S. government does not tell major banks to "develop plans for staving off collapse".

But according to a recent Reuters article, that is apparently exactly what has been happening....
U.S. regulators directed five of the country's biggest banks, including Bank of America Corp and Goldman Sachs Group Inc, to develop plans for staving off collapse if they faced serious problems, emphasizing that the banks could not count on government help.

The two-year-old program, which has been largely secret until now, is in addition to the "living wills" the banks crafted to help regulators dismantle them if they actually do fail. It shows how hard regulators are working to ensure that banks have plans for worst-case scenarios and can act rationally in times of distress.

Does it seem odd to anyone else that only five really big banks got such a warning? And why keep it secret from the American public?

Does the federal government actually expect such a collapse to happen?

 

If federal officials do expect a financial collapse to occur, they would not be the only ones. An increasing number of very respected economists are speaking about the coming financial collapse as if there is a certain inevitability about it.

For example, check out the following quote from a recent Money Morning article....

Richard Duncan, formerly of the World Bank and chief economist at Blackhorse Asset Mgmt., says America's $16 trillion federal debt has escalated into a "death spiral," as he told CNBC.

 

And it could result in a depression so severe that he doesn't "think our civilization could survive it." A former World Bank executive is warning that our civilization might not survive what is coming? That is pretty chilling.

Economist Nouriel Roubini says that he believes that the coming crisis will be even worse than 2008....

"Worse because like 2008 you will have an economic and financial crisis but unlike 2008, you are running out of policy bullets. In 2008, you could cut rates; do QE1, QE2; you could do fiscal stimulus; you could backstop/ringfence/guarantee banks and everybody else. Today, more QEs are becoming less and less effective because the problems are of solvency not liquidity. Fiscal deficits are already so large and you cannot bail out the banks because 1) there is a political opposition to it; and 2) governments are near-insolvent - they cannot bailout themselves let alone their banks. The problem is that we are running out of policy rabbits to pull out of the hat!"

Across the pond, many European officials are echoing similar sentiments. What Nigel Farage told King World News the other day is very ominous.... Today MEP (Member European Parliament) Nigel Farage spoke with King World News about what he described as the possibility of, “a really dramatic banking collapse.” Farage also warned that central planners want to enslave and imprison people inside of a ‘New Order,’ and he described the situation as “horrifying.”

The situation in Europe continues to get worse and worse. The authorities in Europe have come out with "solution" after "solution", and yet unemployment continues to skyrocket and economic conditions in the EU have deteriorated very steadily over the past 12 months.

If all of that was not bad enough, there are an increasing number of indications that Germany is actually considering leaving the euro. Needless to say, that would be a complete and total disaster for the rest of the eurozone.
Of course there are any number of ways that the financial crisis in Europe could potentially play out.

But all of the realistic scenarios would be very bad for the global economy. Meanwhile, our resources are dwindling, war in the Middle East could erupt at any moment and our planet is becoming increasingly unstable. The following is from a recent article by Paul B. Farrell on Marketwatch.com....

Fasten your seat belts, soon we’ll all be shocked out of denial. Some unpredictable black swan. A global wake-up call will trigger the Pentagon’s prediction in Fortune a decade ago at the launch of the Iraq War: “By 2020 ... an ancient pattern of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies is emerging ... warfare defining human life.”

It is almost as if a "perfect storm" is brewing.
Of course the historic drought that is ravaging food production in the United States this summer is not helping matters either. Another summer or two like this one and we could be looking at a return of Dust Bowl conditions.

Anyone that is watching what is going on in the world and is not concerned at all about what is happening is simply being delusional

Recently, a "team of scientists, economists, and geopolitical analysts" examined the current state of the global economic system and the conclusions they reached were absolutely staggering.... One member of this team, Chris Martenson, a pathologist and former VP of a Fortune 300 company, explains their findings:

"We found an identical pattern in our debt, total credit market, and money supply that guarantees they're going to fail. This pattern is nearly the same as in any pyramid scheme, one that escalates exponentially fast before it collapses. Governments around the globe are chiefly responsible.

"And what's really disturbing about these findings is that the pattern isn't limited to our economy. We found the same catastrophic pattern in our energy, food, and water systems as well."

According to Martenson: "These systems could all implode at the same time. Food, water, energy, money. Everything."

Hmmmm - it sounds like they have been reading The Economic Collapse Blog. The truth is that a massive worldwide financial collapse is coming. It is inevitable, and it is going to be extremely painful. So what do you think about all of this?

From

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/are-the-government-and-the-big-banks-quietly-preparing-for-an-imminent-financial-collapse

This entry was posted on August 17, 2012 at 6:21 PM and has received 377 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

This might be worth trying out for a month or two to see if your health improves. Both GMO soy meal and  corn syrup are in many processed foods, ice cream etc. It might help high blood pressure and skin issues shingles issues because an immune response can affect blood vessels and skin.

I think GMO items are labeled in UK and Europe. In USA there is no labeling so far, but there is a move in California to start requiring GMO labeling of foods (I imagine there is too much industry lobbying by Monsanto against labeling)

Are genetically modified (GM) foods making you sick – I mean really sick? Up until recently, all that we could say was thank goodness you’re not a lab rat; GM feed messes them up big time. GMOs (genetically modified organisms) appear to trigger the immune systems of both mice and rats as if they were under attack. In addition, the gastrointestinal system is adversely affected, animals age more quickly, and vital organs are damaged. When fed GM foods, lab animals can also become infertile, have smaller or sterile offspring, increased infant mortality, and even hair growing in their mouths. Have I got your attention?

 

Biotechnology corporations such as Monsanto try to distort or deny the evidence, sometimes pointing to their own studies that supposedly show no reactions. But when scientists such as French toxicologist G.E. Seralini re-­analyzed Monsanto’s raw data, it actually showed that the rats fed GM corn suffered from clear signs of toxicity – evidence that industry scientists skillfully overlooked.

More at http://vitalitymagazine.com/article/dramatic-health-recoveries-reported/

This entry was posted on August 17, 2012 at 5:59 PM and has received 983 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

As I move my stuff from my storage locker to my apartment in Cusco Peru I often chose to pack as much as I can. Three tips that have helped me get more than the weight allowance on a flight: use a duffel bag, be friendly, and try a different check-in agent if the first one doesn't work.

I recently traveled on American Airlines and LAN from Washington DC to Cusco Peru. I had a 69 lb suitcase, a 58 lb duffel bag and 15 lb backpack and a handbag. I was concerned at having to pay for two overweight bags at $100 each according to AA's website. I knew the minimum fee would be $30 for one extra bag (AA gives you one 50 lb bag for free on international flights).

I prayed to the travel angels, connected with the light, expanded my heart and asked myself "what would it take to pay $100 or less in fees". Then I smiled and kept a positive and friendly attitude with the ticketing agent and struck up a friendly conversation with her. And when I put the duffel bag on the scale the ends must have been drooping off the edges of the scale because it only showed 42 lbs! The suitcase showed the whole 69 lbs that I was expecting so the scale wasn't broken. Then the agent researched the fees and discovered that instead of paying the $100 AA overweight fee I could pay the $90 LAN overweight fee. Yippee!

Update: My flight was canceled and I had to return the next day. I could have left my bags to travel without me and picked up in Cusco but I wasn't keen on leaving them at the carrousel in Peru for hours without me so I took them overnight to a friend's house and checked back in the next morning at curbside. This agent was not so friendly and he put the duffel bag on the scale himself end up instead of me putting it on with the ends hanging over the edge. The true weight of 58lb showed. I asked for a break due to flight delay and when he said no I just went inside to check in at the ticket counter instead. This time I showed the agent that I have already checked in and had luggage tags - she just printed new ones and put them on without reweighing. So sometimes it pays if you don't get by the first agent to try another one...

This entry was posted on August 14, 2012 at 8:12 PM and has received 1078 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

It has been a while since my last email on my adventures. I will give some catch up emails another time, meanwhile one question I have been asked is: How can you travel indefinitely (if you are not Bill Gates)? One way is to save money by visiting low cost countries, cooking your own food and using buses rather than planes. I have done this when I lived in Bolivia and had a good time on less than $500 per month.

Looking at the other side of the income-expense equation of traveling there are many ways to make income while you travel. I make more than I spend per day by running my business remotely via skype and email. I have met other travelers who can cover their travel costs indefinitely by travel writing, selling photos, teaching English, doing import-export of local handy crafts or working in local tourism businesses. Once I have paid off all my old business debts and credit cards I will be making more money than I spend. Yay!

Even if you don't make enough to completely cover all your expenses it can let you travel for longer than you could just on savings. Some of the travelers I have met work 8-16 hours per week to cover the week's expenses because they are paying expenses in a low cost country like Peru and earning money remotely in a high pay/high expense country like the US or Europe.

Another approach is the "4 hour work week" (Tim Ferris) one of working for a few months then taking a 3 month mini-retirement of traveling. Rinse and repeat indefinitely. His book and website also have lots of info on starting your own online business or negotiating to work remotely.  I have met some Australian miners who earn enough in a year to travel for two years without working. I have also read of some miners in Australia who work 14 days straight and then take off 14 days living in Bali and traveling in SE Asia - again they do this indefinitely.

More ideas and travel tips at Travel Stack Exchange - a great place to ask and answer travel questions by the way! And other ideas on travel and money from  Benny Lewis, the fluenent in any language in 3 months guy.


What are you long term travel tips?

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