occidentalis
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Posts posted by occidentalis
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Fair point, but animal welfare is not the stated reason behind the IWC moratorium; and it would be impossible for western nations (and particulary the US) to make any argument against whaling on animal welfare terms because of their horrendous treatment of animals in factory farms.
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The US is backing a deal that would legalise commercial whaling for the first time since the international ban was introduced over 20 years ago. Nations will vote on the deal at the IWC meeting.
I have an alternative view that may prove unpopular; I believe that regulated commercial whaling (of some whale species) would be far better for whale conservation than unregulated 'scientific' whaling, which is what we have now.
This only applies to species of whales whose numbers have increased to levels where they can be sustainably taken (ie without reducing the long term viability of the population). Any whale species still under any threat of extinction should be outright banned from hunting.
Without getting into too much conspiracy theory, I think the current state of affairs actually suits all the powers involved - Japan basically gets to continue doing whatever it wants while being able to complain about western interference, Australia and other anti-whaling nations get to feel morally superior without actually having to do anything, and Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherd get to raise funds and make their supporters feel good. The losers in all this are the whales who basically have no protection.
Remember, the IWC is entirely voluntary; Japan could just choose to leave it as Iceland did. Iceland can now legally do whatever type of whaling it wants. Japan could do that, but it doesn't, because wants to stay in the IWC so that it can play a particular role in international whaling politics, so it can present a particular narrative to its citizens.
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Download http://www.knoppix.net/
Use it to save your photos and other documents to an external harddrive
Throw laptop away
buy a mac
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watch out kids, the serpent has teeth ;)
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has there ever been land yabbys in W.A.??? wonder if they are edible?
Yes there are a couple of species, they occur in moist areas in the karri forest around Margaret River and Walpole.
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Hi guys,
a good friend of mine has just found out that the seminoma (testicular cancer) he was hoping he was free of has come back. This guy is a really beautiful soul and I am offering him my complete support. I'd like to request any assistance from all of you generous people. He's not a member here but he's definitely one of us.
Treatment of this type of cancer has an excellent prognosis, and my friend has an excellent attitude. He is having conventional treatment but wants to go hard with well-studied 'complementary' therapies also. He is well informed and capable of high level literature review himself, but if anyone has any ideas for less well known therapies then throw them out there ;)
I'm going to get started growing some reishi for him today, but I need a culture. Can anyone help out with that? Or any other medicinal mushrooms that may be of help. I have trametes which I will get going also. However Reishi are quite slow to grow, so if anyone has any dried mushrooms, or knows a good supplier in Aus, that would be awesome.
Also, if anyone has any good general wellbeing medicinal herbs, or anything you think might help in this situation, we would really appreciate it.
Thanks a lot
C
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Really? There's a gall wasp named after Acacia longifolia:
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Wasps are a common cause of galls in Acacia
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The selectivity of releases and self censorship of this "un-biased" source of info, that's my gripe.
I think that many people have missed the fact that while this is an unbiased release, the data itself is entirely biased, because it was all written from the perspective of the US. Perhaps that is why it doesn't have any terrible dirt on Israel (or really the US itself)? Because US and Israel views mostly align.
Seriously if this guy supports the official story about 9/11 and sees nothing sinister in the Bilderberg Meetings then I'd be careful about the opinions formed due to his selective and pointed leaks.
Take a different angle on it - maybe he just doesn't have any direct information that contradicts the official story of September 11 or reveals sinister machinations of the Bilderberg meetings, and so he's just saying he supports them because he doesn't want to get drawn into the type of paranoid delusionary conspiracism that abounds on the internet... which would be one of the greatest dangers he could face. He would instantly be written off as a nutjob. I'd take the same tack if I was in his position.
The thing about wikileaks is it doesn't really express opinions on the material it releases or world events generally. They just release it, in fairly raw form, and allow others to do the interpretation. Assange calls it 'scientific journalism'.
The D.O.S attack on the bank institutions by an unknown group of underground hacker activists conveniently called 'anonymous' (so that anyone can claim affiliation with the group whether they do good or cause chaos as pretext to make the internet more "secure") are carrying out a virtual false flag and are part of the intricate conspiracy.Dude, do you know much about Anonymous? They are perhaps the most anarchistic 'organisation' in the world. They are not part of any kind of intricate conspiracy, because there is no 'them'. Their antics generally resemble those of most other bored teenageres; ocassionally displaying a hint of intelligent thought. Maybe if there is an intricate conspiracy at work here then Anonymous are being manipulated to some extent, but if so the conspirators are doing a pretty piss poor job of it. Their attack on Amazon was a complete flop and their other targets have only taken minor damage. If the people behind the Grand Conspiracy had plotted a false flag in order to restrict internet freedom, I think we'd be seeing something more equivalent to September 11 itself in the online world.
man, Rense is a big dangerous fucking con job.
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Under Australian copyright law, you never lose the rights to your creation unless you deliberately sign them away.
Creative Commons licenses are pretty useful. You can pick one that suits your purposes and make it clear in writing that you are allowing the use of your photo under those conditions only.
with the guy who lost his photo to CSIRO, as I understand it the only situation where that could happen would be if he couldn't prove that he took the photo originally.
If you have proof that it is originally your photo (ie you have the original raw file, or an uncompressed jpg on your computer, and the other party doesn't; and/or if the EXIF data says it was taken with a camera and lens that you own, etc...) then you should be fine if it came down to a court case. You can also put tags in EXIF data with some cameras, so you can put your name. Not that hard to strip out EXIF data, but another layer of protection.
Whether or not you watermark is up to you; some photographers do, some don't. Personally i think it's a bit of a waste of time and the only reason I would do it is if I was making available sample photos for a client or whatever, and in that case I would put a big watermark across the whole photo. Small ones on the bottom can always just be cropped out. Basically if you're dealing with the kind of person who will intentionally try and steal your photo, then there are very few technical barriers in the way of that, so why ruin your photos with watermarks?
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The narrow phyllode variety tends to be found in drier areas, further north and east.
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If there's any more to go around, count me in. Let me know and I will pay you straight away.
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An Interpol warrant has been put out for Assange, so it seems the powers that be have decided he is more than just a nuisance now.
He has hinted that if anything happens to him, there is a very special cache of information that is ready to be released so he has a bit of collateral. He is also a very well known person now and has a lot of supporters, some of whom are no doubt very well connected.
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Different countries implement the UN treaties on drugs in different ways, and change will occur at state and national levels before it is formalised in international agreements. Look at Cannabis in the US and to a lesser extent in Australis. It is managed very differently in different jurisdictions.
While you might be right that Coca leaf may be legalised through the UN, that won't necessarily have any effect on Australia and if it does, it probably won't be for quite a long time.
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I think the flavouring agent thing is just there to cover Coca Cola and other companies that use decocainised coca in their soft drinks. I don't think it would apply to the tea bags.
I do not believe Delisse to be decocainised as it is the most popular brand in South America and people there wouldn't waste their time on a decocainised product.
I think that Customs has just not caught on to this yet. It seems you are maybe also slightly confused about Customs and Quarantine (AQIS); as they are entirely separate agencies and do not always communicate.
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Thankyou once again Mr Trout
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Why are 'fatty foods' included in this ? because they are higher in carbon ?
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I'm pretty sure those very linear features in radar images are just artifacts as I've seen them many times. They always appear towards the far end of the range of the radar. They also always occur in directions radiating outwards from a single point directly from the station (ie like spokes where the station is the hub), and they tend to occur when there are spotty rainshowers in the area.
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I've been there. From the ground it just looks like a bunch of antennae. It wasn't until I got google earth and started looking around that I noticed the crazy geometry.
The official story is that it's a radio telescope used to communicate with submarines in the Indian ocean.
The fireball story is pretty cool though.
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It is actually not as implausible as you like to say it is, I even posted an article for you to go over with simonicinis opinion on genetics, seems you didnt get to that one either.
Ok, I just read the article. It doesn't actually give me anything to go on. It just says he thinks that genetics has failed as an explanation for cancer, but doesn't give any reasons why. Then he says :
Many thinkers – especially biologists – believe that by applying the Darwinian theory to the evolution of living beings, it may be possible to progress down a new path when it comes to the so-called degenerative diseases such as cancer, cardiopathies, and mental illness. According to this line of thought, these diseases are not attributable to environmental or genetic factors as is presently believed, but to infections.
Which says to me that either his english is not very good, or perhaps he doesn't really know what he's talking about, because one thing you learn in first year medical school is that disease is usually a process resulting from a combination of all three factors that he mentions. I think that infections has been understudied as a cause of cancer and I think that we will find out a lot more about this over the next few years (particularly viral infection).
No doubt, infections play a role in some types of cancer. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and so far he has not presented us with ANY evidence. Just conjecture.
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Your logic is mind-blowing.
The man is an oncologist, it is funny how condescending you are, do you really believe an oncologist would choose to believew that because cancer is white and because candida is white, therefore it must be candida. Why didnt he choose flour or some other substance.
I have no idea about him or what he believes, but the line of logic I described is pretty much exactly what the video used. Maybe they misrepresented his ideas.
However, if one wanted to prove that Candida caused cancer, it would be pretty easy as far as cancer research goes. Expose some healthy rats to high levels of Candida and see if they get cancer more often than rats not exposed to Candida.
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Tumours are white and Candida is white so therefore Candida causes cancer?
Some fungi (Cordyceps) can grow on the bodies of insects, so therefore Candida (an entirely different form of fungus) causes cancer?
The logic is mindblowing.
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shamanic plants, Banisteriopsis rusbyana is considered a synonym to Diplopterys cabrerana. That means that is an alternative name for the same species.
Also, those seeds do not look like Diplopterys seeds. They look like Banisteriopsis seeds.
That is why gerbil asked if you think that B. rusbyana is a separate species to D. cabrerana.
What do you think? Are these two names for the same species (as we believe), in which case you have identified this plant incorrectly, or are they two different species?
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shamanic plants, Banisteriopsis rusbyana se considera un sinónimo de Diplopterys cabrerana. Esto significa que es un nombre alternativo para la misma especie.
Además, esas semillas no se parecen a las semillas de Diplopterys. Son pareciendo a las semillas de Banisteriopsis.
Es por eso que gerbil preguntó tu si crees que B. rusbyana es una especie distinta a D. cabrerana.
Qué crees tu? Si estos son dos nombres para la misma especie (como creemos, y como creen los scientificos), entonces tu esta planta has identificado de forma incorrecta, o son dos especies diferentes?
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GREENPEACE AUSTRALIA PACIFIC Internet Petition
in Sustainable Technologies & Ethical Living
Posted · Edited by occidentalis
No, it's actually quite easy to calculate if you know enough about the biology of the species, and although I'm not an expert on whales I'd guess that for most of the whale species that would be hunted we would know enough to be able to predict population sizes and calculate a sustainable harvest rate. You really just need to know the rate of reproduction, the lifespan, and a bit about the ecology to fairly accurately predict population sizes and determine sustainable harvest levels, which is how all fisheries are managed (or should be). In fact because of their long lifespan whales should be even easier to do long term population modelling with, because a bad year will not wipe out the fishery like it would with sardines, it will just result in less reproduction for that year.
The baleen whales may be some of the most sustainable meat out there... they feed from the bottom of the food chain which means they are extremely efficient at converting something humans can't eat (plankton) into something humans can eat. On the other hand, whale meat is highly contaminated with mercury; the baleen whales less so than the toothed whales but still not something I would eat simply for that reason regardless of the other issues.
I think what we 'must eat' is whatever it is that sustains the highest number of people with the lowest environmental, social, and animal welfare cost. Why draw a line between farmed and wild? If it's sustainable, and the animal had a happy and healthy life and a humane death, what difference does it make? Considering much of the world either can't get enough to eat at all, or is obese and diabetic from eating the shit spewed out of the industrial food system, we need to consider all options from a rational perspective. That's why I'm asking people to step back from the emotive 'environmental' rhetoric around whaling and see it for what it is, international politicking at its best with little to no relevance to the real issue at hand (ie the conservation of whales).
That's the thing, under the scientific research loophole there is no bag limit. Under a commercial whaling arrangement there will be.
As for how to actually police it, I can't answer that - but there are dozens of other international treaties that would have very similar enforcement protocols and I'm sure if you did a bit of googling on international law you would find some examples of regulatory mechanisms that would work in this situation.
What are the regulatory mechanisms in the IWC that prevent commercial whaling under the current moratorium?