Confirmation: Genetic Mutants Being Grown Underground

One local businessman took his hopes underground. His corn is being grown far from the light of the sun. It’s being grown in a warehouse built in a cave in a southern Indiana cliff. … The corn is grown by the company called Controlled Pharming Ventures. … Controlled Pharming started as a way to help out pharmaceutical companies. To create a secure environment to grow produce that would eventually be used to make medicines. “What we can do underground is offer a very contained production environment, nothing can get out,” Ausenbaugh says. That safe environment is crucial because the genetic modifications made to the corn could not be allowed to mix with the food supply. … – wishtv

If they can do this with corn, why not with people?

How to Prevent Chapped Lips in a Manly Fashion

After having a cold for a few days, I applied some vitamin E to my chapped lips. By chance, seconds later, I found this: Four steps to Prevent Chapped Lips in a Manly Fashion.

Top Six: What People fear, vs. what they should

This from sixwise seems to be proof that most people’s fears are crazy. I blame propaganda. Here are the top six most commonly feared causes of death … yet the least likely to occur! Airplane crashes, Shark attacks, Being murdered, Falling to death, Terrorist attack (one in 9.3 million chance), Natural disaster.

Biggest fears aside, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study that uncovered the actual leading causes of death in the United States (in 2000). Overwhelmingly, these causes stem from our own, modifiable behaviors.

• Tobacco (435,000 deaths, 18.1 percent of total U.S. deaths)
• Poor diet and physical inactivity (400,000 deaths, 16.6 percent)
• Alcohol consumption (85,000 deaths, 3.5 percent)
• Microbial agents (75,000)
• Toxic agents (55,000)
• Motor vehicle crashes (43,000)
• Incidents involving firearms (29,000)
• Sexual behaviors (20,000)
• Illicit use of drugs (17,000)

Have a liver? Fear Tylenol. Also, thank the Florida Supreme Court for protecting drug and death dealing “businesses” of cigarette companies. They stated the financial damages would be crippling to the companies … yet also ruled that cigarette smoking causes the following crippling (and deadly) diseases:

“aortic aneurysm, bladder cancer, cerebrovascular disease, cervical cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, coronary heart disease, esophageal cancer, kidney cancer, laryngeal cancer, lung cancer (specifically, adenocarinoma, large cell carcinoma, small cell carcinoma, and squamous cell carcinoma), complications of pregnancy, oral cavity/tongue cancer, pancreatic cancer, peripheral vascular disease, pharyngeal cancer, and stomach cancer.” -newswire

Obviously wealthy companies are today more worthy of protection from “crippling” than are people. This humanizing of corporations is wrong. No corporation has a heart, a lung or a kidney.

Dead Fish Mystery Perplexes Bay Area Biologists

Thousands of fish in the Bay Area are turning up dead, and biologists still have no answers to this aquatic mystery. Over the last couple of months, an alarming number of dead fish and sharks have been washing up on Bay Area shores. In May, 40 sharks were found dead.

Then, just a couple of weeks ago, 1,000 sturgeon and striped bass were found floating in the Bay and lying on shore, NBC11′s Diane Dwyer reported. Biologists said the phenomenon occurred between the San Mateo Bridge and the Dumbarton Bridge and between San Leandro and the Hayward shore on the East Bay.

… Biologists sent samples of the fish in last week’s die off to a lab for testing. They hope to have the results and the answer to their mystery within a week… – nbc

The Ken Lay conspiracy

CNN is finally catching up with the bloggers and presenting some possible conspiracy angles, if even in jest. CNN fails, however, to mention the mysterious death of Enron Executive, Cliff Baxter.

… “It’s the CIA,” said one mysterious caller to CNNMoney.com. “There [must] be proof beyond any doubt that Ken Lay is dead and there is not a double being used so that Ken Lay can hide somewhere with the money he stole,” wrote a reader. “Make sure somebody in the press sees a body,” added another reader.

There are several theories. The general idea is that Lay faked his death and is now living somewhere south of the border How could he pull off such a feat? Well, he was a one-time friend of President Bush. Even raised campaign funds for him. So either through friendship or even blackmail, then, the government helped.

Or perhaps Lay is dead … but not from a heart attack, as the local coroner said. Maybe the CIA used one of its fancy poisons — you know, the untraceable kind — to keep Lay from embarrassing the President.

Or Lay used a poison himself to keep from suffering the indignity of prison. A sort of Samurai send off. After all, his whole family was with him at the end. (That Fourth of July holiday thing was just a cover).

People cheered when Lay was found guilty of conspiracy and fraud. After all his actions, or inactions, wrecked lives. And after four long years the high and mighty chief executive was finally going to get what was coming to him.

Now that’s not going to happen. Justice is cheated. There must be something to blame besides … fate? … The Bush connection is particularly attractive (Funny. If you mention Bush in a Lay story, you are tagged with Liberal Bias, but if you leave him out you are accused of Right Wing Bias). And, of course, Lay’s final rep was as a cheat … so why wouldn’t he keep on cheating? … But did you notice how fast that autopsy took place? – cnn

India skull man pulls huge crowds

Hundreds of people have flocked to a hospital in the Indian city of Calcutta to see a man holding a sizeable chunk of his head in his hands. Doctors say a section of electrician Sambhu Roy’s skull fell off on Sunday, months after he suffered severe burns. …
Mr Roy got an electric shock while repairing a high voltage wire last October. The doctor who treated him insists that his patient underwent an extremely rare medical phenomenon.

“When he came to us late last year, his scalp was completely burnt and within months it came off, exposing the skull,” surgeon Ratan Lal Bandyopadhyay told Reuters. “Later, we noticed that the part of his skull was loosening due to lack of blood supply to the affected area, which can happen in such extensive burn cases.”

… “When the skull came off, I thought he will die,” the doctor told Reuters, “but we noticed a new covering on his head forming and that might have pushed the ‘dead skull’ out.”

Doctors say that 80% of the outer part of Mr Roy’s skull has now hardened, and they expect him to be completely cured in about three months’ time. – bbc

Real Cannibal Attack in the UK

“The old chap lived a peaceful life with his wife, then someone jumped through his window and bit off his thumb.” … The police source said: ?It was a bizarre and appalling attack on an old man. We have no idea why the attacker chose their house but there are mental health issues in this case. ?Mr Morgan put up a brave fight but was set about in a cannibalistic way. His thumb could not be sewn back on because the attacker had literally eaten it.? – more thesun

No satanic rituals please, we’re Google

It’s no surprise that Google wanted a piece of PayPal’s pie and launched the long-awaited Google Checkout last week. Sell anything you want, says the ‘plex… but no drugs, no booze and no stolen material.

But what’s this in the Terms & Conditions? Users are also prohibited from using Checkout to sell Occult goods (that’s “materials, goods or paraphernalia for use in satanic, sacrificial, or related practices” to you and me).

No word yet on how much commission PayPal makes from sales of inverted crosses and ouija boards, but we’re glad the Goobot is looking out for us. – blogs

False Memory Syndrome

“It seems that our memories are less than trustworthy, and Dutch experimental psychologist Elke Geraerts knows some impressive tricks of the trade for proving this: “We did an experiment with children, showing them pictures from when they were four years old. Some were true pictures but there were also fakes, doctored to show the child in a hot air balloon. And it was very easy [for the children] to get a false memory of being in this balloon.” If a computer-manipulated image is all it takes to make children remember a hot air balloon trip that never happened, can verbal cues, or suggestions, lead to the “recovery” of traumatic false memories, such as ones of childhood abuse? Experimental psychologist Dr Geraerts, from the University of Maastricht, certainly thinks so, as her recent research suggests.” – rnblog

Facinating. Listen to this NPR story. This could explain people’s recall under hypnosis of alien abductions. Anyway, based on this knowledge, a new approach to mental health might be to re-create an amazing positive healthy past based on a person’s real life. Why not use our memory defect for positive results? To get healthy, the person would work with a memory therapist (creative writer / psychologist) and with friends and family to write a book, the person’s corrected life story. Great idea for a movie.

Global Warming: Jellyfish Can Save Us

Transparent jellyfish-like creatures called salps, which are about the size of a human thumb, are swarming by the billions into “hot spots” in the oceans?places where hurricanes are likely to develop. Scientists are hoping that they are transporting tons of carbon per day from the ocean surface to the deep sea, where it will not re-enter the atmosphere .

Salps move through the water by drawing water in the front end and propelling it out the rear in a sort of jet propulsion. In doing so, they vacuum up all the edible material in the water. Some of this material consists of tiny marine plants called phytoplankton, which use carbon dioxide to grow. All the animals that consume phytoplankton absorb the CO2, but when they defecate or die, most of them return it to the ocean, where it recycles. The oceans absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, including some from the burning of fossil fuels and this encourages an abundance of phytophankton.

Woods Hole biologists Laurence Madin and Patricia Kremer of the University of Connecticut and colleagues found that one swarm of these tiny jellyfish covered almost 40,000 square miles of the sea surface and consumed almost 74% percent of phytoplankton every day, removing it from the ocean and preventing it from evaporating back into the atmosphere. Instead, it was contained in their fecal pellets, which sank down into deep water at the rate of up to 4,000 tons of carbon a day. – strieber