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To: carranza2 who wrote (34967)	6/13/2003 12:18:32 PM
From: Eva	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

WOW, strong post, got to agree!

To: carranza2 who wrote (34967)	6/13/2003 1:52:47 PM
From: pezz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

<< the fat and cholesterol absorbed by the bloodstream as a result of eating the cheese-munition will breach the poor Third Worlders' circulatory system, causing premature death,>> Come into the 21st century . Scientific studies are overwhelming supporting the Atkins diet. Fat is good for you!

To: carranza2 who wrote (34967)	6/13/2003 4:26:17 PM
From: jrhana	Respond to of 74559

Let me join Eva in saying I really agree I am not a left winger or fanatic but I do believe in longevity. American tobacco companies do more harm in Latin America than cocaine cowboys do here. Fast food is pure venom The longevity of the Okinawans is starting to diminish precisely as they are beginning to eat US style fast food and leave behind their fish and vegetable diet.

To: carranza2 who wrote (34967)	6/13/2003 5:13:28 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

C2, true, the greatest number of dead are a result of the seduction of the modern way of life and Ted Kaczynski is a proponent of remaining in the Amish style. A modern Luddite [but a murderous one]. I walked back along the road from the creek, from where our water supply down here in Rangataua is drawn, trying to figure out whether to invest more in RoamAD, the WiFi cellular provider start-up in Auckland which will deliver cyberspace to urban areas. Out in the sticks, it's easier to have a broader perspective than while in a traffic jam trying to make an orange light on the way home from the database design centre cubicle. I wonder whether humans are not cannibalistic. Not literally in the sense of actually adopting the Atkins diet using neighbours on the barbie, but literally in the sense of using them to supply needs for the elite. Those who are not too bright take the bait and walk into the mousetrap and become fodder for those who can stay in the front of the stampede into the future. The devil take the hindmost. Even in my idealistic utopia of voluntary interaction, which is largely where have headed in the relatively free democratic zones, there's a constant flow of goods and services to the elite. More so than in the predatorial world of conquest and confiscation of our recent past and which is still the lot of hordes of people. One can get a lot more out of a domesticated animal than a wild one. A wild horse is useful only for dinner whereas a domesticated one is convenient to ride to catch a herd of bison. In the old days of wild humans and a predatorial fight for conquest and survival, eating the defeated and taking their women isn't as useful as a leveraged takeover of a building full of people and other assets for increasing one's well-being. We are all better off in the rat race and cubicle than foraging in the forest, which is now a Department of Conservation protected natural area, excluding the natural humans who would like to hunt and gather there, so there's no external world in which we can choose to live even if we want to. Ted Kaczynski found a Montana survivalist's hut, but there aren't enough for all of us and we'd still depend on the big picture anyway to supply clothes and other essentials if not food. The fact that we are all quite well off, including the crippled unemployed person who wouldn't last a week in the wild, makes it easy to think we are all doing okay. But relatively, we aren't. There are those doing really well and a scale down to those getting nowhere. Continuing my analogies, the human race is like a heat pump, sucking heat out of the colder places and delivering it to the hotter. Our system sucks money out of the poorer places and delivers it to the richer places where the brains and energy and creativity and other desirable attributes of humanity are most concentrated. I don't think it's immoral. It is just a law of nature that living things feed on each other and create the peak beings - the ultimate survivors. A weapon of mass destruction, going back to the point of our discussion, is part of the old-style violent cannibalism of tribal dominance, conquest and involuntary extraction of wealth from neighbours. Your Big Mac and Marlboro weapons of mass destruction are voluntary weapons of mass destruction for transferring wealth, from which the buyers actually extract some benefit [albeit of dubious value - I did eat a Big Mac just a few days ago because we were uncertain whether there was a Subway shop a bit further along the road, so the trick is working on the road to Rangataua]. I prefer my CDMA2000 phragmented photon cyberspace light sabres as a weapon of mass destruction. All around the world, people are flocking to mobile cyberspace devices like moths to a flame and I am extracting wealth from them. I am trying to get to the top of the food chain. It's a war between me, with my QUALCOMM weapon, and McDonalds with their Big Mac weapon and that scuttling, cunning, abstract hunter of arbitrage opportunity, Jay Chen, who is acting as referee in the battle for survival and supremacy. He has no bait for a mousetrap, whether Big Mac or Phragmented Photon. He merely watches the battle from afar, unobserved by those on the battlefield. He pops out from nowhere [or anywhere], places a bet in cyberspace on those he thinks will win and waits for his judgement to be proven right or wrong. The carrot farmer down here in the cold central plateau of New Zealand probably doesn't think about this stuff too much. But that's what's going on. I'm okay with the voluntary cannibalism aspect of Big Macs, Marlboro, CDMA2000 and Jay's cyberwarfare, but I dislike the old-style involuntary cannibalism represented by noocular weapons. Incidentally, it's a joke that Saddam's shells of sarin are considered weapons of mass destruction. A shell lobbed into downtown Noo Yawk wouldn't kill very many people. Mqurice [with freezing fingers and a really, really, slow connection] PS: We need MORE CO2. Warming is good. Our bodies run at 37 degrees and we need heat. Plants love CD2. Biological life is made of carbon. The more the merrier. The stripping of carbon and burial of it in coal, oil and gas deposits is a vast conspiracy to clear the biological beings out of the way to ready the world for silicon, germanium, gallium and It. If people don't like human-scale cannibalism, wait until they notice what's coming next. They'll go nuts, but there'll be nothing they can do about it. It will have us for lunch!

To: carranza2 who wrote (34967)	6/13/2003 10:24:51 PM
From: Cogito Ergo Sum	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

post-prandial Marlboro OH MAN Ten years quit and I can STILL sit back and 'almost' remember the luxurious sensation of those noxious fumes filling my lungs and sating my cravings........

To: carranza2 who wrote (34967)	6/14/2003 12:57:05 AM
From: smolejv@gmx.net	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

I happened upon the following article on Diabetes 2 epidemies and its connection with thrifty genes nature.com Sort of frightening, the answer to the question in the subtitle: Why is the prevalence of type 2 diabetes mellitus now exploding in most populations, but not in Europeans? A corollary of this view based on Europe's food history is that, several centuries before the advent of modern medicine, Europeans, like modern Nauruans, should have undergone an epidemic in type 2 diabetes that resulted from the new reliability of adequate food supplies and eliminated most diabetes-prone bearers of the thrifty genotype. However, there would have been big differences between that postulated earlier European epidemic and the well-documented modern epidemics among Nauruans and among so many other peoples today. In the modern epidemics, abundant and continually reliable food arrived suddenly, within a decade for the Nauruans and within just a month for the Yemenite Jews. The result was a sharply peaked surge in prevalence to 20–50% that occurred right under the eyes of modern diabetologists. That increase will probably wane quickly, as individuals with the thrifty genotype become eliminated by natural selection within a mere generation or two. In contrast, Europe's food abundance would have increased gradually over the course of several centuries, and the result, between the 1400s and 1700s, would have been a slow rise in type 2 prevalence long before there were diabetologists to take note. RegZ dj PS: Oh man, how enticingly easy it is just to copy and paste and not to have rephrase or remember what has been read... Are we - given Google & Co - possibly turning intellectually in the equivalent of the halflietrate person at the cash register ("enter the amount of cash received, then press change-due button"). End of sad rant. PPS: the next nation to go down the tubes due to the above will be (Maurice? you still there?) North Koreans.