Revolutionary New Cement That You Will Never See

h/t BrassCheckTV

Stronger than cement – and lighter too

More banned technology

How would like like a building material that is stronger than cement and SIX TIMES lighter?

Better yet, one of its main ingredients in the waste product of a plant that literally grows like a weed.

Well, Big Brother says you can’t have it because the plant – hemp – is “dangerous to society.”

Here’s the reality about cement:

1. The manufacture of traditional cement is incredibly energy intensive, so much so that many cement companies seek and receive legal variances to not only burn coal, but also medical waste and used automobile tires as fuel for their kilns.

2. After oil refineries and chemical plants, cement factories are the most polluting factories in the world, spewing tons of microparticles containing toxins like arsenic and mercury into the air.

What Do Patriots Want For America?

I recently participated in a poll that the Nader organization asked its subscribers to chime in on. Since so many people consider me a freak for endorsing Nader, I wonder how these issues fit within the other’s agenda. You can take the poll, yourself, but just as well, go see the results broken down in a variety of ways.

Post-Election Survey Results

In addition to ranking the top choices of all the respondents, as summarized in the e-mail, we also weighted the results based on a simple system in which we gave 5 “points” to each respondent’s first choice, 4 to the second choice, 3 to the third, 2 points to the fourth choice, and 1 point to the fifth.  The top chart at the right (red bars) shows the percentage of the weighted total “votes” received by each of the issues.

The charts that follow show the distribution of the responses in the individual issue categories from 1 (most important) to 5.

You can read the information at the link below:

final_survey_tally_sheet_04dec

Some points of interest from the results:

• A full one-third of the respondents chose the adoption of single-payer healthcare as either their top issue or ranked it second. Almost 12 percent picked it in one of the five slots, also giving that issue the highest raw total.
• Withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, when combined with major cuts in the US military budget, shows a strong preference for peace, in addition to good health.
• Third in the weighted total rankings is the conversion to a renewable energy economy. Stopping nuclear power plants and enacting a carbon tax were not highly popular avenues for accomplishing this goal, which would seem to anticipate the intense debate that will take place over the coming years on just what will be required to put the US and the world on a sustainable energy footing.
• There is a broad consensus among the respondents in favor of corporate reform, re-regulation, and sanctions and supervision as remedies for increasingly evident corporate malfeasance.

So, how much do you Obamites differ from these desires? Would you rank anything differently? Do you expect Obama to pursue these issues?

Now I’m A Wingnut… Who da Thought It?

Alternet just published  an article from Hullabaloo where Digby just called me a wingnut because I want to know that Obama was born in America. Wingnut because she apparently doesn’t think that the documentation can be forged or changed and only a nut case would hear all the bs from Africa and just shrug it off as unimportant or idiocy.

But let me tell you a little story that keeps me questioning the validity of his birth certificate.

20 years ago, my Dad came back into our lives. He gave us up for adoption when I was 8 and we went through the pain of changing my name and birth certificates, etc. He became interested in the Sons of the American Revolution, a society of men that can trace their roots in America back to someone who fought in the Revolutionary War (it just so happens that I have many relatives who did so).

But to become a member, one had to prove their birth right and show the lineage. Since we were adopted, I had to spend years and dollars to get the paperwork that would acknowledge that a person named Nivens was born at the hospital on the date and time given, because every “official”  record now shows another person being born on that day and time.

Do not tell me that the paperwork cannot be manipulated for I have lived through it.

So, Ms Digby and all you Obamaites who think it is ludicrous to ask for more proof than a ‘copy’ of a Birth Certificate (for I can show you one today,where  that person was never born at that place or time), just because you saw a graphic on a web page means absolutely NOTHING.

My questioning doesn’t come because of what reTHUGlicans or any asshole “wingnut” has to say. Nor would I just disregard it due to what a Progressive Wingnut and blog owner might have to say about their idol.

It is because the Kenyans are so adamant about him being born there that there is some sort of story that needs follow up. Someone needs to explain why the very Kenyan Ambassador would make these claims, not to mention the entire village his family still lives in.

This is quite easy to prove, because the man supposedly has the original BC. Show it and shut up.

And for Digby, if you and the rest of the so called ‘progressive’ blogs weren’t so sycophantic to Mr Obama, you might hold some clout on this subject, but I see that virtually all of you have swallowed his pecker to the shaft and don’t mind the choke.

My bet is that it wouldn’t matter to you if he was or wasn’t and American born citizen, would it?

Wingnuts’ Crazy Obama Conspiracy Theory to Be Discussed by Supreme Court?!?

I have only been tangentially aware of this wingnut conspiracy theory that Obama isn’t really a US citizen. It’s the typical kooky stuff you see when Democrats are in charge.

But this is pretty amazing:

[L]egions of anti-Obama bloggers are so convinced he was born in Kenya that they’ve filed more than a dozen lawsuits nationwide.

They cite the Constitution’s requirement that presidents be “natural born citizens.” They want the election declared void if Obama doesn’t deliver an original birth certificate — subject to an inspection by forensic experts — to be sure.

One litigant’s U.S. Supreme Court filing is scheduled to be discussed in private by the justices later this week.

Justice Clarence Thomas distributed to his colleagues a request that the high court weigh in before the Electoral College makes Obama’s victory official later this month. The justices may decide in a Friday conference whether to hear or cast away a lawsuit dismissed in a lower court and appealed by a retired New Jersey lawyer named Leo C. Donofrio, who also has his own Web site.

Like most of the commentators on this issue, I wouldn’t expect them to get involved. But then I insisted they wouldn’t get involved in Bush vs Gore either. You just never know.

But the mere fact that they are considering it gives the whole thing currency it shouldn’t have. Evidently, the court considers hearing a lot of pending stays and rarely grants them, so this isn’t entirely unusual. But this is real crackpot stuff you would think could have been disposed of without the full court having to consider it. The fact that it was Thomas who did it just makes it all the more questionable.

This is just the first of many national underground obsession among the wingnuts. They love this stuff — the kookier the better. The problem is when it goes mainstream — and sometimes it does. It pays to keep an eye on them.

B’Man: I am sick and tired of people who simply believe anything they are told. The reTHUGlicans are the worst, but these “progressives” are just as bad. They fall for the two party paradigm and find themselves totally beholden to “their choice”, when their choice is but another version of what we always have: Big Money Cronies.

I don’t “believe” that Obama was born in Kenya, but I do know that something is strange about the story and unlike some of the Obama nut suckers, I am not so fast to suck one. I believe that someone should come out and address the Kenyan officials and produce the original birth certificate. This would easily make this go away without simply pulling a Digby and swallowing everything as Gospel.

At least we have Jane Hamsher telling Obama’s mouthpiece to STFU after he told me to STFU:

Obama Deputy Steve Hildebrand: Liberals Need To STFU

People on the left are not looking at Obama’s appointments with a jaundiced eye because they think he needs to apply some liberal orthodoxy litmus test.   They have legitimate concerns that people like Geitner, Summers and other Rubin acolytes created this mess, and it’s reasonable to ask why they’re being appointed to get us out of it.  While some of us want to give Obama a chance to fulfill the promises he campaigned on and work with the staff of his choice in order to do so, we’d have to be a bunch of intellectually dishonest kool-aid swilling freaks to pretend  his economics team didn’t have some troublesome baggage.

And after the past eight years, it’s a bit much to stomach someone saying “just shut up and trust me, because I know better.”

There is a lot of speculation right now about what will happen with the 13 million member email list the Obama campaign built, and there is some talk of Hildebrand running an organization that manages it.

I wonder how long those membership numbers will hold up when any criticism of Obama is greeted with patronizing lectures and sneering condescension for its liberals?

I Don’t Forget Shit

And now I know why…

Attacking Alzheimer’s with Red Wine and Marijuana

Two new studies suggest that substances usually associated with dulling the mind — marijuana and red wine — may help ward off Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of age-related memory loss. Their addition comes as another study dethrones folk remedy ginkgo biloba as proof against the disease.

At a November meeting of the Society of Neuroscience in Washington, D.C., researchers from Ohio State University reported that THC, the main psychoactive substance in the cannabis plant, may reduce inflammation in the brain and even stimulate the formation of new brain cells.

Meanwhile, in the Nov. 21 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, neurologist David Teplow of the University of California, Los Angeles reported that polyphenols — naturally occurring components of red wine — block the formation of proteins that build the toxic plaques thought to destroy brain cells. In addition, these substances can reduce the toxicity of existing plaques, thus reducing cognitive deterioration.

Together, the studies suggest scientists are gaining a clearer understanding of the mechanics of memory deterioration and discovering some promising approaches to prevention.

Previous research has suggested that polyphenols — which are found in high concentrations in tea, nuts and berries, as well as cabernets and merlots — may inhibit or prevent the buildup of toxic fibers in the brain. These fibers, which are primarily composed of two specific proteins, form the plaques that have long been associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

UCLA’s Teplow and his colleagues monitored how these proteins folded up and stuck to each other to produce aggregates that killed nerve cells in mice. They then treated the proteins with a polyphenol compound extracted from grape seeds. They discovered the polyphenols blocked the formation of the toxic aggregates.

“What we found is pretty straightforward,” Teplow declared. “If the amyloid beta proteins can’t assemble, toxic aggregates can’t form, and, thus, there is no toxicity.” If this also proves true in human brains, it means administration of the compound to Alzheimer’s patients could “prevent disease development and also ameliorate existing disease,” he said. Human clinical trials are upcoming.

At Ohio State, researchers led by psychologist Gary Wenk are studying the protective effects of tetrahydrocannabinol, commonly known as THC. They found that administering a THC-like synthetic drug to older rats performed better at a memory test than a control group of non-medicated elderly rodents.

In some of the rats, the drug apparently lowered inflammation in the hippocampus — the region of the brain responsible for short-term memory. It also seems to have stimulated the generation of new brain cells.

“When we’re young, we reproduce neurons and our memory works fine,” said co-author Yannick Marchalant, another Ohio State psychologist. “When we age, the process slows down, so we have a decrease in new cell formation in normal aging. You need those cells to come back and help form new memories, and we found that this THC-like agent can influence creation of those cells.”

Wenk added two cautionary notes to his report. First, to be effective, any such treatment along these lines would have to take place before memory loss is obvious. Second, the researchers still have much work to do.

“We need to find exactly which receptors are most crucial” to the generation of new brain cells, he said. This discovery would “ideally lead to the development of drugs that specifically activate those receptors.”

In the meantime, should aging baby boomers who are worried about old-age mental impairment light up a joint? Wenk was cautious in his answer, no doubt because marijuana is suspected to be harmful to health in other ways.

“Could people smoke marijuana to prevent Alzheimer’s disease if the disease is in the family? We’re not saying that, but it might actually work,” he said. “What we are saying is it appears that a safe, legal substance the mimics those important properties of marijuana can work on receptors in the brain to prevent memory impairments in aging. So that’s really hopeful.”

This story was furnished by Alternet, but first appeared on Miller-McCune.com. I would also note that the link they use to justify the one small sentence about marijuana being harmful to health is from the same damned people who want to keep it illegal. Imagine that. It takes them 13 months to figure out and admit the country is in a recession, they will wait forever to tell the truth about this. Too much money to be lost in Big Prison and Big Meds.