After about 35, one's circulation starts to deteriorate at a rate of about 1% per year regardless of what you want or do. Aging is going to happen regardless.
The best medicine in the world is to provide babies and youth with disease free years throughout their growth into young adults. We have gone from having an average lifespan of about 35 years in 1900 in the USA to something in the 70s by taking a lot of measures that have had real negative future environmental consequences.
It is a balancing act. But I have doubts that anyone is going to live to 200 in this century. I am just beginning to understand that 80% of the people that are 65 and older have significant knee and hip pain ... oh my.
I am just trying to encourge youth to be optimist, proactive, and productively work for change.
Like it or not, we are all human. There is no mistake or atrocity committed by our ancestors to which we are immune. All it takes is what sounds like a good reason and a compelling need and nearly all of us will put on armbands and march off to do what we think is the right thing, damn the torpedoes and confident we'll be the heroes of the museums of the future.
The main difference between us today and our ancestors is that the industrial build up of high-energy processes in the first half of the 20th century has left us capable of mistakes and atrocities on a scale our ancestors could only dream of in bad mushroom nightmares. A couple of the Caesars would probably have been down with the idea of murdering 6 million people if they could find that many people and acquire the means to do it, but it took the Nazis and modern technology to realize that possibility. Since then we deliberately created the possibility of a few people having a petulant fit and leveraging the work of decades to kill millions of people in a matter of minutes. Even though that never got used, we are still paying the tab for the fact that it was created.
The young always think the solution is simple -- just don't do stupid stuff! But when you look back, none of that stuff looked quite so stupid when it was done as it does now. Hindsight is always 20/20. I can think offhand of half a dozen outfits that are actively trying to launch a technological Singularity, only minimally heedful of the fact that this could be the first act in the Terminator movie franchise. When you look at our other problems, the promise of superhuman intelligences to help us clean up our mess seems very inviting. I've gone on record myself as saying it might be our only hope, given our inability to self-govern with the modalities we now have available. But everything new is danger, and new things are shiny and we tend not to be thinking of the danger until it's too late. So it has always been, but most particularly since the wave of invention that started in the 18th century and really got rolling in the 19th.
Everything would be easy if you could merely move the pieces around to where you, in your infinite wisdom, know they are needed. But the reality is that there are billions of other players who have their own ideas about where those pieces need to be, and no matter how high your station there's probably someone else ready to challenge your decisions. Politics is the art of taking these multifarious players and cajoling them into alignment so that things can get done. It's an ugly, messy, very human thing that looks ridiculous when you compare it to how technology works. But it's all we have to work with. People are no different today than they were thousands of years ago, we just command far more destructive powers than our ancestors did.
I will turn 50 the day after Valentine's Day next year. I have been privileged to see a remarkable cross-section of how our industry creates our world through the window of my job, which takes me into all sorts of manufacturing and processing facilities. Most people simply do not understand the scale of industrial endeavour. The cheapest hack put in place in a chemical plant would seem obnoxiously expensive to a hobbyist. It is a bit intimidating to be That Guy without whom a million dollar project might not proceed if you don't get it right. A simple thing like a forklift, essential if you have to move thousands of pounds of stuff around (such as, for example, if you want to purify your own pitchblende) is completely out of reach for most individuals. When you look at the big picture -- where an aircraft carrier is going to sail, whether to punt or send in the troops when the tsunami overwhelms a nuclear power plant -- it's easy to see what should have been done in the rear-view mirror, but when you are thinking of how you'll justify yoruself at the stockholder's meeting next year it's not so simple.
And an awful lot of the most evil Smile that has gone down is down to that sort of thing more than real evil; the banality of politics seems to be a far more toxic thing than mere hate.
Anyway, enjoy your youth. One day you will be 49 years old and reading this sort of thing from people thirty years younger than you and trying to figure out how to explain it to them.
I would assume the people in charge at the time of the problem or the majority in control of the politics that fund or make legal said topic.
If only things were so simple and worked on such short time scales. If only cause and effect were so easy to observe. If only one could know all the consequences of ones actions. Then we could say for sure that "A" did this, the result was "B". "B" is bad and therefore it was "A's" fault.
Some simple examples:
In my opinion the human population is far to big for various reasons (Never mind if I am right or wrong about that for now). That means pressure on resources, energy, food water, etc. Why is the human population so big? Because of improved medicine, improved working conditions, more efficient agriculture, distribution etc.
All of those things have been evolving with a lot of hard work by many well meaning people for generations.
Who is to blame when the limits are reached and catastrophe ensues?
What about the automobile? Great idea, mobility and freedom for all. It was estimated that if traffic in London continued to grow as it was a hundred or so years ago then the whole place would soon be six feet deep in horse ****. The automobile got us out of that jam whilst enabling us to do do so much that we could not imagine doing before.
Turns out the automobile also brings with it a huge pile of problems with pollution, road casualties etc etc etc.
Who's fault is that? Henry Ford's?
Clock Loop in his juvenile way has decided that all problems are caused by the over 50's. Which is in a perverse way true, after all the young guys did not exist when what ever perceived problem was kicked off.
It seems very unlikely to me that the youngsters of today are going to be the first enlightened generation who all live together in peace and harmony and all agree with each other about how to solve the worlds ills, whilst also being smart enough to foresee all the negative consequences of their decisions. I wish them luck though.
As for the idea the suggestion that the basic ingredients of cannabis are going to fix everything, well, I'm at a loss for words.
I suggest you all go back and read those PUBMED articles, I know the medical terminology is pretty deep, but its also pretty blatant in the results. Also, those articles said nothing about smoking anything. I can't even begin to address all the various topics raised by many of you that completely avoided an obvious example of total failure when it comes to modern pandemics of our time. Honestly I don't even care, just go back and read those two pub med articles, and heck, go talk to your local representative about them, bring them a copy, help them read and understand them, so mabee, just mabee, we can at least get TWO modern pandemics of our time wiped out using a substance that is much less harmful and way more effective than what modern medicine is using today. Or you can continue to find new angles of attack towards someone that doesn't care, really, I just care that you do something about it, and if it stirred you inside, good, use that anger to read and understand the two PUBMED articles I posted, and then DO SOMETHING.
So why have allies if we don't help one another? Also, who said that a company has any authority over a government, when it comes to major disasters that not only could have been prevented if we acted quick, but many governments would have had the legal authority to act due to the volume of radioactive material that was involved. Our navy just steamed off the coast and did RAD checks... while both the japan and us government sat back and let some incompetent company simply watch it all melt down and contaminate the whole ocean. The reason we originally started the idea of government was to protect the population from major disasters caused by greedy humans that hide under the shadow of a company.
WHY BE ALLIES IF WE DONT EVEN HELP EACHOHTHER? Also, How many navy service people did we send to the Philippians? And we couldn't do that for japan, don't you all know that the area didn't become radioactive until many DAYS into the disaster (due to the lack of power for the water pumps, something that would have been solved in a day or two using the military)
We can't mitigate a nuclear disaster, but we go into places like IRAQ full force, over something that WE DIDN'T EVEN FIND. And many other no-name countries over in the middle east who barely even have a pot to Smile in, of which most people can't even find on a map, who aren't even ALLIES?
You sure that toxic binary weapon of mercury, fluoride, chlorine, arsenic, and BPA hasn't completely clouded an entire generation's brains into total complacency?
Oh, and when disasters happen, the luxury of waiting it out and watching, isn't something we should be doing, but yet, hurricane Katrina, the gulf oil spill, and the japan nuke disaster are all examples of a completely retarded generation of leaders who obviously sat in their mansions and watched the disasters unfold on their big screen T.V.s like some kinda real-life perverted movie.
We can't stop the radiation now, all we can do is make it legal for doctors and scientists to use a WEED that grows everywhere to treat the RESULTS of this disaster. I suggest you all start printing those PUBMED articles, and HOUND your representatives, DON'T ARGUE WITH NATURE, IT WAS HERE BEFORE YOU. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17952650
Clock Loop, the disaster in Japan was critical within a couple of days. It's easy to say with 20/20 hindsight that we could have moved this or that there and fixed it but the fact is TEPCO thought (incorrectly, like many fallible people and institutions) that they had it in hand until it was too late, and before there was a chance to even ask for those resources you're talking about to be moved into place, the damage was done. It just isn't that simple.
As for your PubMed articles, yes, there are holes the medical ostrich-heads need to be pulled out of, but those aren't going to get you living to 200. THC is a rather minor player in that regard compared to DMSO.
People suck, people have always sucked, and it's not just people who are old now who suck. Young people have always -- and really we have records -- complained about the old screwing up their world, and old people have always -- again, written in Latin -- complained that the kids aren't right. The only differenced in this age is the magnitude of screw-ups that we are capable of making, and the problem that causes is probably not a thing we can fix within ourselves.
I fully understand guys. I am not a naive woman and frankly age is just a number. Lets face it Wisdom is not always correct.
I don't want to toot my own horn but at my young age I have accomplished many great feats, yet here I am being slightly told that I am a pup that needs to settle down and in so many words, just let it be because I am out of my league. Fine "wise men" (or now its "wise toxic men" ) of the world I quit! happy now. I mean I understand the uphill fight as I read more and more while learning history in parallel.
You all bring to the table very valid points and its frustrating cause your all winning. I am "in irons" with this topic and cant make up wind.
But before I go here is Wisdom for you.
The solution is so simple - Quit releasing toxic stuff. Amazing idea! Now this idea would never work because my Wisdom can not be gained from the blind eye of the Capitalist system with its greed and massive consumption. Perhaps China had it right all along about the West!
I meant old farts respectfully
Back to props, pcb's and PID's.
Perhaps China had it right all along about the West!
Really, I do not think China is a very positive way to make an environmental point. They have NO pollution laws, their rivers are a mess from all the factories poluting them so THEY can make a buck off the folks in the West.
Really, I do not think China is a very positive way to make an environmental point. They have NO pollution laws, their rivers are a mess from all the factories poluting them so THEY can make a buck off the folks in the West.
But before I go here is Wisdom for you.
The solution is so simple - Quit releasing toxic stuff. Amazing idea!
And here is some wisdom for you, Reach: If we shut one plant down, just one, it sends a ripple effect out not just through the Capitalist economy which can so rightly be criticized but through the chain of production that makes civilization possible. It's a big enough problem that getting into a chemical plant to do maintenance work is almost as much fun as going through an airport nowadays. In today's concentrated supply chain, you take one plant offline and that's probably 10% to 20% of the world's supply of what might be a precursor chemical for all sorts of other things you'd never identify with toxic waste. After hurricane Katrina there was nearly a crisis in the American food chain because one sugar refinery which is responsible for over 10% of the US supply was destroyed, and there were no other refiners to take the crops which had been knocked over and were about to rot in the fields. The US government spent tens of millions of dollars to get that plant online, no questions asked to the suppliers, because it was so critical.
So you take all the plants that are spewing toxic waste and take them all out of the chain at once, what do you get? Chaos, privation, starvation, and plague. You have no more fertilizer. You have little to no fuel, which means no modern scale farming. You have no medicines, you have no plastics (which you might not mourn except that nearly everything you take for granted in modern life depends on them).
"Just stop" is an answer only in the way the French Revolution was an answer to the problem of kings. And as in that case, it will only replace the solved problem with a much bigger one. Very smart non-evil people are actually trying to figure out how to walk back the corner we've painted ourselves into, but it is a very, very hard problem made so much harder by the issues of human realpolitik that, realistically, I don't expect it to get solved.
Pretending that the problem is simple and that old people are just stupid or evil is not going to fix anything.
Here is the Wikipedia article on Life expectancy.... It just demonstrates my assertion that we have made a lot of progress, mostly by reducing deaths at childbirth, eliminating childhood diseases, and the miracle of antibiotics.
Medicine will never be able to cure everything. Cancer deaths in the elderly may in part just be a byproduct of living longer.
Regarding pollution, I started to read my copy of Silent Spring again when I recommended it at the beginning of this thread. It isn't easy to work through as the US environment in 1962 was indeed a mess and Rachel Carson did present a lot of ugly realities.
But she also pointed the way ahead for many good measures that have been taken seriously. We now require factories that dump water into rivers to provide environmental safety by growning trout in their holding ponds... back then a chemical was safe if it merely did not kill a lab rat. And we test pesticides and herbicides on birds, fish, and amphibians in labs, before broadcast spraying can wreak havoc out in nature.
This thread is not about legalizing cannibis... such a topic is really a not starter here.
The Fukijima disaster is indeed a wakeup call to the world to be more responsible about nuclear energy. Sadly progress often comes after major setbacks, not because of timely warnings. I just can't see that tying the two issues of cannibis and nuclear energy together is going to really move the world to a better nulcear power and nuclear waste policy.
I did check, and Silient Spring is now published with a Chinese translation that is at least available in Tawian. But I also saw an article in today's Taipei Times concerned that one of Taiwan's leading book sellers in now excluding titles that Mainland China bans as they have outlets in Mainland China.
In other words, the USA has many people that are aware and concerned about the world's problems long before people in other countries are permited to know what is going on or allowed to get involved in good solutions. That is the world in 2013.
I did read the PUBMED material on cannibis, and the abstracts presented are NOT conclusive proof of medical breakthroughs for cancer or herpes. Cannibis is a palative therapy for the most part. Reduction of tumors in lab animals may not produces the same results when attempted by another lab (science requires confirmation that results are repeatable), or when applied to the whole spectrum of cancers that are out there.
My own personal experience with a whole generation of wide-spread cannibis consumption has been negative as users do not think clearly, are easy to impress with misinformation, can't perform well in the work place, and are a danger to society behind the wheel in a car or when operating machinery.
I am willing to consider compassionate use for terminal cancer patients as a valid therapy, but the medical marijunna lobby is an obvious scam for people that want to profit from legal technicalities. Herpes has long periods of remission in people that live and eat properly and there may actually be better solutions in anti-viral meds discovered through trying to find a solution to AIDS. Herpes is generally not fatal, just painful during flareups that come and go.
In other words, doctors look at all the potential treatments and select the best. They don't and should not latch on to one solution that is driving an agenda of the industry that produces it.
Bikini Atoll was indeed a huge screw up where an H-bomb test ended up much larger than expected. My point was that we did finally learn from that the scope of environmental disasters that radiation in the atmosphere can produce.
As far as blaming my generation... i was born in 1947 and DDT was invented in the 1870s. The majority of the environmental disasters of Silent Spring had occured before 1960 (the book was published in 1962), and I wasn't yet a teenager. I went to the Univesity of Oregon in 1966 and the Wilamette River was then a 'dead river due to a major Weyerhausser pulp mill in Springfield, Oregon'. Today it is alive with fish and people actually enjoy swimming in it... but the loggign and lumber industry has also collapsed and gone off to Canada.
Nuclear power didn't suit me. I was forced to resign my job at the Hanford Nuclear area after about 8 months due to a disagreement with my boss. I was deeply unhappy at a well paying job where the majority of my work was invented to add cost to a cost-plus government project. But it was obvious to me that I'd never be blindly pro-nuclear power for the sake of a good career and a steady paycheck..... the majority of my co-workers just wanted to ride the gravy train which collapsed about a year after I left.
Reach : I agree . Age is a number. I dare any of you out there to do what she does.
to all else ........ I have a job for you ..... come back with a essay on the BRIC countries and its impact on the environment ..
China is DeltaP ( pollution ) is far more nasty then our own .
Its these LDCs that are the main playiers in our ecosystem.. they can make or break us . ..
Reach:
The problem with the old farts is that we need them as much as they need us !
The are both the problem and the soluition . .
Its the Old farts whom got us in to this mess and at the most basic level . made us .
they put us on this planet and now we the kids * from there prospective * have to help them fix the problems with there decades of wisdom .
It appears on the face of things to me .that as we get older We fork .
Some farts become people in power and make really bad decisions we live with
some farts as they get older do some really cool things . look at what the founders of apple and M.S and the rest of them did for us .
we are just as likely to do the same and split .
We however Like the farts bfore us have history and wisdom to use to not do the same mess twice .
Ill bet the kids here are gonna use Our screw ups and learn from them .
and the thing you and I mess up Reach and Me ect , are gonna be noticed by our folowing kids and they are gonna learn from us .
the bad part is when the farts of the world cant keep up with how things are changing .
I have 2 parents whom are in there 60s . and trust me , its like they are the kids some days .
* in fact its VERY frustrating for me on a weekly basis ,
then I have a 80+ YO Iam teaching her how to use her 1st ever PC ad how to use the internet .
This thread has devolved into forbidden territory re: the forum guidelines. Therefore, I'm locking it from further posting. May it sink quietly into oblivion.
Comments
The best medicine in the world is to provide babies and youth with disease free years throughout their growth into young adults. We have gone from having an average lifespan of about 35 years in 1900 in the USA to something in the 70s by taking a lot of measures that have had real negative future environmental consequences.
It is a balancing act. But I have doubts that anyone is going to live to 200 in this century. I am just beginning to understand that 80% of the people that are 65 and older have significant knee and hip pain ... oh my.
I am just trying to encourge youth to be optimist, proactive, and productively work for change.
I had to do a little checking Jordan that is the recent documentary (not a movie) I saw - here is a trailer for it.
I would assume the people in charge at the time of the problem or the majority in control of the politics that fund or make legal said topic.
The main difference between us today and our ancestors is that the industrial build up of high-energy processes in the first half of the 20th century has left us capable of mistakes and atrocities on a scale our ancestors could only dream of in bad mushroom nightmares. A couple of the Caesars would probably have been down with the idea of murdering 6 million people if they could find that many people and acquire the means to do it, but it took the Nazis and modern technology to realize that possibility. Since then we deliberately created the possibility of a few people having a petulant fit and leveraging the work of decades to kill millions of people in a matter of minutes. Even though that never got used, we are still paying the tab for the fact that it was created.
The young always think the solution is simple -- just don't do stupid stuff! But when you look back, none of that stuff looked quite so stupid when it was done as it does now. Hindsight is always 20/20. I can think offhand of half a dozen outfits that are actively trying to launch a technological Singularity, only minimally heedful of the fact that this could be the first act in the Terminator movie franchise. When you look at our other problems, the promise of superhuman intelligences to help us clean up our mess seems very inviting. I've gone on record myself as saying it might be our only hope, given our inability to self-govern with the modalities we now have available. But everything new is danger, and new things are shiny and we tend not to be thinking of the danger until it's too late. So it has always been, but most particularly since the wave of invention that started in the 18th century and really got rolling in the 19th.
Everything would be easy if you could merely move the pieces around to where you, in your infinite wisdom, know they are needed. But the reality is that there are billions of other players who have their own ideas about where those pieces need to be, and no matter how high your station there's probably someone else ready to challenge your decisions. Politics is the art of taking these multifarious players and cajoling them into alignment so that things can get done. It's an ugly, messy, very human thing that looks ridiculous when you compare it to how technology works. But it's all we have to work with. People are no different today than they were thousands of years ago, we just command far more destructive powers than our ancestors did.
I will turn 50 the day after Valentine's Day next year. I have been privileged to see a remarkable cross-section of how our industry creates our world through the window of my job, which takes me into all sorts of manufacturing and processing facilities. Most people simply do not understand the scale of industrial endeavour. The cheapest hack put in place in a chemical plant would seem obnoxiously expensive to a hobbyist. It is a bit intimidating to be That Guy without whom a million dollar project might not proceed if you don't get it right. A simple thing like a forklift, essential if you have to move thousands of pounds of stuff around (such as, for example, if you want to purify your own pitchblende) is completely out of reach for most individuals. When you look at the big picture -- where an aircraft carrier is going to sail, whether to punt or send in the troops when the tsunami overwhelms a nuclear power plant -- it's easy to see what should have been done in the rear-view mirror, but when you are thinking of how you'll justify yoruself at the stockholder's meeting next year it's not so simple.
And an awful lot of the most evil Smile that has gone down is down to that sort of thing more than real evil; the banality of politics seems to be a far more toxic thing than mere hate.
Anyway, enjoy your youth. One day you will be 49 years old and reading this sort of thing from people thirty years younger than you and trying to figure out how to explain it to them.
Some simple examples:
In my opinion the human population is far to big for various reasons (Never mind if I am right or wrong about that for now). That means pressure on resources, energy, food water, etc. Why is the human population so big? Because of improved medicine, improved working conditions, more efficient agriculture, distribution etc.
All of those things have been evolving with a lot of hard work by many well meaning people for generations.
Who is to blame when the limits are reached and catastrophe ensues?
What about the automobile? Great idea, mobility and freedom for all. It was estimated that if traffic in London continued to grow as it was a hundred or so years ago then the whole place would soon be six feet deep in horse ****. The automobile got us out of that jam whilst enabling us to do do so much that we could not imagine doing before.
Turns out the automobile also brings with it a huge pile of problems with pollution, road casualties etc etc etc.
Who's fault is that? Henry Ford's?
Clock Loop in his juvenile way has decided that all problems are caused by the over 50's. Which is in a perverse way true, after all the young guys did not exist when what ever perceived problem was kicked off.
It seems very unlikely to me that the youngsters of today are going to be the first enlightened generation who all live together in peace and harmony and all agree with each other about how to solve the worlds ills, whilst also being smart enough to foresee all the negative consequences of their decisions. I wish them luck though.
As for the idea the suggestion that the basic ingredients of cannabis are going to fix everything, well, I'm at a loss for words.
So why have allies if we don't help one another? Also, who said that a company has any authority over a government, when it comes to major disasters that not only could have been prevented if we acted quick, but many governments would have had the legal authority to act due to the volume of radioactive material that was involved. Our navy just steamed off the coast and did RAD checks... while both the japan and us government sat back and let some incompetent company simply watch it all melt down and contaminate the whole ocean. The reason we originally started the idea of government was to protect the population from major disasters caused by greedy humans that hide under the shadow of a company.
WHY BE ALLIES IF WE DONT EVEN HELP EACHOHTHER? Also, How many navy service people did we send to the Philippians? And we couldn't do that for japan, don't you all know that the area didn't become radioactive until many DAYS into the disaster (due to the lack of power for the water pumps, something that would have been solved in a day or two using the military)
We can't mitigate a nuclear disaster, but we go into places like IRAQ full force, over something that WE DIDN'T EVEN FIND. And many other no-name countries over in the middle east who barely even have a pot to Smile in, of which most people can't even find on a map, who aren't even ALLIES?
You sure that toxic binary weapon of mercury, fluoride, chlorine, arsenic, and BPA hasn't completely clouded an entire generation's brains into total complacency?
Oh, and when disasters happen, the luxury of waiting it out and watching, isn't something we should be doing, but yet, hurricane Katrina, the gulf oil spill, and the japan nuke disaster are all examples of a completely retarded generation of leaders who obviously sat in their mansions and watched the disasters unfold on their big screen T.V.s like some kinda real-life perverted movie.
We can't stop the radiation now, all we can do is make it legal for doctors and scientists to use a WEED that grows everywhere to treat the RESULTS of this disaster. I suggest you all start printing those PUBMED articles, and HOUND your representatives, DON'T ARGUE WITH NATURE, IT WAS HERE BEFORE YOU.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17952650
As for your PubMed articles, yes, there are holes the medical ostrich-heads need to be pulled out of, but those aren't going to get you living to 200. THC is a rather minor player in that regard compared to DMSO.
People suck, people have always sucked, and it's not just people who are old now who suck. Young people have always -- and really we have records -- complained about the old screwing up their world, and old people have always -- again, written in Latin -- complained that the kids aren't right. The only differenced in this age is the magnitude of screw-ups that we are capable of making, and the problem that causes is probably not a thing we can fix within ourselves.
I don't want to toot my own horn but at my young age I have accomplished many great feats, yet here I am being slightly told that I am a pup that needs to settle down and in so many words, just let it be because I am out of my league. Fine "wise men" (or now its "wise toxic men"
You all bring to the table very valid points and its frustrating cause your all winning. I am "in irons" with this topic and cant make up wind.
But before I go here is Wisdom for you.
The solution is so simple - Quit releasing toxic stuff. Amazing idea! Now this idea would never work because my Wisdom can not be gained from the blind eye of the Capitalist system with its greed and massive consumption. Perhaps China had it right all along about the West!
I meant old farts respectfully
Back to props, pcb's and PID's.
That is not what I meant. I believe it stems from Decline of the West
And here is some wisdom for you, Reach: If we shut one plant down, just one, it sends a ripple effect out not just through the Capitalist economy which can so rightly be criticized but through the chain of production that makes civilization possible. It's a big enough problem that getting into a chemical plant to do maintenance work is almost as much fun as going through an airport nowadays. In today's concentrated supply chain, you take one plant offline and that's probably 10% to 20% of the world's supply of what might be a precursor chemical for all sorts of other things you'd never identify with toxic waste. After hurricane Katrina there was nearly a crisis in the American food chain because one sugar refinery which is responsible for over 10% of the US supply was destroyed, and there were no other refiners to take the crops which had been knocked over and were about to rot in the fields. The US government spent tens of millions of dollars to get that plant online, no questions asked to the suppliers, because it was so critical.
So you take all the plants that are spewing toxic waste and take them all out of the chain at once, what do you get? Chaos, privation, starvation, and plague. You have no more fertilizer. You have little to no fuel, which means no modern scale farming. You have no medicines, you have no plastics (which you might not mourn except that nearly everything you take for granted in modern life depends on them).
"Just stop" is an answer only in the way the French Revolution was an answer to the problem of kings. And as in that case, it will only replace the solved problem with a much bigger one. Very smart non-evil people are actually trying to figure out how to walk back the corner we've painted ourselves into, but it is a very, very hard problem made so much harder by the issues of human realpolitik that, realistically, I don't expect it to get solved.
Pretending that the problem is simple and that old people are just stupid or evil is not going to fix anything.
Medicine will never be able to cure everything. Cancer deaths in the elderly may in part just be a byproduct of living longer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
Regarding pollution, I started to read my copy of Silent Spring again when I recommended it at the beginning of this thread. It isn't easy to work through as the US environment in 1962 was indeed a mess and Rachel Carson did present a lot of ugly realities.
But she also pointed the way ahead for many good measures that have been taken seriously. We now require factories that dump water into rivers to provide environmental safety by growning trout in their holding ponds... back then a chemical was safe if it merely did not kill a lab rat. And we test pesticides and herbicides on birds, fish, and amphibians in labs, before broadcast spraying can wreak havoc out in nature.
This thread is not about legalizing cannibis... such a topic is really a not starter here.
The Fukijima disaster is indeed a wakeup call to the world to be more responsible about nuclear energy. Sadly progress often comes after major setbacks, not because of timely warnings. I just can't see that tying the two issues of cannibis and nuclear energy together is going to really move the world to a better nulcear power and nuclear waste policy.
I did check, and Silient Spring is now published with a Chinese translation that is at least available in Tawian. But I also saw an article in today's Taipei Times concerned that one of Taiwan's leading book sellers in now excluding titles that Mainland China bans as they have outlets in Mainland China.
In other words, the USA has many people that are aware and concerned about the world's problems long before people in other countries are permited to know what is going on or allowed to get involved in good solutions. That is the world in 2013.
I did read the PUBMED material on cannibis, and the abstracts presented are NOT conclusive proof of medical breakthroughs for cancer or herpes. Cannibis is a palative therapy for the most part. Reduction of tumors in lab animals may not produces the same results when attempted by another lab (science requires confirmation that results are repeatable), or when applied to the whole spectrum of cancers that are out there.
My own personal experience with a whole generation of wide-spread cannibis consumption has been negative as users do not think clearly, are easy to impress with misinformation, can't perform well in the work place, and are a danger to society behind the wheel in a car or when operating machinery.
I am willing to consider compassionate use for terminal cancer patients as a valid therapy, but the medical marijunna lobby is an obvious scam for people that want to profit from legal technicalities. Herpes has long periods of remission in people that live and eat properly and there may actually be better solutions in anti-viral meds discovered through trying to find a solution to AIDS. Herpes is generally not fatal, just painful during flareups that come and go.
In other words, doctors look at all the potential treatments and select the best. They don't and should not latch on to one solution that is driving an agenda of the industry that produces it.
Bikini Atoll was indeed a huge screw up where an H-bomb test ended up much larger than expected. My point was that we did finally learn from that the scope of environmental disasters that radiation in the atmosphere can produce.
As far as blaming my generation... i was born in 1947 and DDT was invented in the 1870s. The majority of the environmental disasters of Silent Spring had occured before 1960 (the book was published in 1962), and I wasn't yet a teenager. I went to the Univesity of Oregon in 1966 and the Wilamette River was then a 'dead river due to a major Weyerhausser pulp mill in Springfield, Oregon'. Today it is alive with fish and people actually enjoy swimming in it... but the loggign and lumber industry has also collapsed and gone off to Canada.
Nuclear power didn't suit me. I was forced to resign my job at the Hanford Nuclear area after about 8 months due to a disagreement with my boss. I was deeply unhappy at a well paying job where the majority of my work was invented to add cost to a cost-plus government project. But it was obvious to me that I'd never be blindly pro-nuclear power for the sake of a good career and a steady paycheck..... the majority of my co-workers just wanted to ride the gravy train which collapsed about a year after I left.
to all else ........ I have a job for you ..... come back with a essay on the BRIC countries and its impact on the environment ..
China is DeltaP ( pollution ) is far more nasty then our own .
Its these LDCs that are the main playiers in our ecosystem.. they can make or break us . ..
Reach:
The problem with the old farts is that we need them as much as they need us !
The are both the problem and the soluition . .
Its the Old farts whom got us in to this mess and at the most basic level . made us .
they put us on this planet and now we the kids * from there prospective * have to help them fix the problems with there decades of wisdom .
It appears on the face of things to me .that as we get older We fork .
Some farts become people in power and make really bad decisions we live with
some farts as they get older do some really cool things . look at what the founders of apple and M.S and the rest of them did for us .
we are just as likely to do the same and split .
We however Like the farts bfore us have history and wisdom to use to not do the same mess twice .
Ill bet the kids here are gonna use Our screw ups and learn from them .
and the thing you and I mess up Reach and Me ect , are gonna be noticed by our folowing kids and they are gonna learn from us .
the bad part is when the farts of the world cant keep up with how things are changing .
I have 2 parents whom are in there 60s . and trust me , its like they are the kids some days .
* in fact its VERY frustrating for me on a weekly basis ,
then I have a 80+ YO Iam teaching her how to use her 1st ever PC ad how to use the internet .
BOB
-Phil