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This is just so bizarre, it either has to be a fabrication or…true. Either way, it makes for great reading and imagination fuel :

…the seeds from which these monster vegetables were grown spent two weeks orbiting the earth.

On their return they were cultivated in giant Chinese hothouses….

Scientist hope the pumpkins, as well as two-foot long (06.m) cucumbers, 14lb (6.3kg) aubergines, and chilli plants which resemble small trees, could provide an answer to the world’s food crisis.

It is thought the near zero gravity conditions in space result in super-sized fruit and vegetables with a higher vitamin content.

Crucially, the plants are said to produce harvests which are ten to 20 per cent higher than normal - offering a rich source of food for the country’s 1.3 billion people.

Researchers fired off a batch of 2,000 seeds into space in 2006 on the Shijian 8 satellite.

After germination the best specimens were selected for further breeding.

And now for the much awaited explanation for why sending seeds into space for a few weeks can result in monster fruit and veg :

…it is thought cosmic radiation, micro-gravity and magnetic fields may play a part.

Oh. Okay.

So what happens when a child is ‘germinated’ in orbit?

Giant Space Children to unleash havoc on Earth?

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In the UK, Brits are supposedly “going mad” for a squirrel dinner. Not because squirrel is particularly nutritious, but for ethical and green reasons :

It’s low in fat, low in food miles and completely free range. In fact, some claim that Sciurus carolinensis - the grey squirrel - is about as ethical a dish as it is possible to serve on a dinner plate.

The grey squirrel, the American cousin of Britain’s endangered red variety, is flying off the shelves faster than hunters can shoot them, with game butchers struggling to keep up with demand.

…its new-found popularity is partly due to its green credentials.

‘People like the fact it is wild meat, low in fat and local - so no food miles,’ says Simpson.

Ridley reckons that patriotism also plays a part: ‘Eat a grey and save a red. That’s the message.’

Don’t worry if you’re repulsed by the idea of nibbling on all those tiny squirrel bones. Perhaps insect flesh is more to your fancy :

David Gracer lifts a giant water bug, places his thumbs in a pre-sliced slit in its underside, and flips off its head. “Smell the meat,” he says, sniffing the decapitated creature, and the people gathered around the table willingly oblige. Members of the New York Gastronauts, a club for adventurous eaters, they murmur appreciatively as they scoop out and swallow the grayish, slightly greasy insect flesh.

“Perfumey, tastes like salty apples,” one says. “Like a scented candle blended with an artichoke,” another adds.

The giant water bug, or Lethocerus indicus, a three-inch-long South Asian insect that looks uncannily like a local cockroach, is just one of the items on the menu of this bug-eating bacchanal.

Gracer, a self-described “geeky poet/nature boy” who teaches composition at a community college in Providence, Rhode Island, has made it his duty to persuade ordinary Americans to eat insects.

Gracer wants people to move away from getting their protein from traditional livestock such as cows, pigs, and chickens because raising livestock has a huge negative impact on the environment…,

“Americans have no idea how wasteful these large mammals are,” Gracer says. “If you want to feed a lot of people, insects are the best choice in terms of getting the biggest bang for your buck.”

It takes 869 gallons of water to produce a third of a pound of beef, about enough for a large hamburger. By contrast, to supply water to a quarter pound of crickets, Gracer simply places­ a moist paper towel at the bottom of their tank and refreshes it weekly.

Insects, he says, also need less food and space than vertebrate sources of protein and therefore could replace or supplement food resources that may become scarce in the future, such as fish stocks, which a recent study indicates may collapse by 2048.

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In the fallout from the fantastical conjob that convinced poor people to buy homes they simply could not afford, when prices were peaking, first you lose your house, then you lose everything in it :

The foreclosure crisis is hitting yet another American locale: the self-storage center.

As they lose their homes, people are turning to these humble cinderblock and sheet-metal boxes to store their stuff. But some people cannot keep up with their storage bills any better than they could handle their mortgage payments, and storage companies are auctioning off their property for a pittance.

A cottage industry has developed to profit from these lost and abandoned items.In three brisk days, Mr. Snyder held auctions at 23 U-Store-It facilities. At the first site, in Gurnee north of the city, he raised the door on an indoor unit, revealing what was essentially a one-room apartment…The contents sold for $675.

The next warehouse, in Waukegan, brought a unit full of — depending on how you look at it — cherished household possessions or somebody’s trash. Boyd bought the bulging plastic bags for all of $6.

For some units, $6 is too much. “A dollar bill, first dollar bill takes it,” Mr. Snyder implored in front of one unit. “Come on, this is everything they own!” To no avail.

What’s left of the dream - the dream they crammed into minds through political speeches, through ceaseless advertising, through dozens of ‘lifestyle’ shows telling you you’re nothing if you don’t own your own home, through all the newspaper and evening news shows hyping the ‘property boom’, and how you had to get in quick or miss out forever - are tatters almost worthless.

Well, maybe worth one dollar.

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Millions of sane and happy people across the West use cannabis infrequently for pain relief, often because the pharmaceuticals available can’t do the same job, with so few side effects. As the scientific data mounts in favor of medicinal cannabis, surely the days can only be numbered when doing so remains a crime.

Some of the latest research results here :

Cannabis significantly reduces neuropathic pain compared to placebo and is well tolerated by patients with chronic pain conditions, according to clinical trial data to be published in The Journal of Pain.Investigators at the University of California at Davis, in conjunction with the University of California Center for Medical Cannabis Research (CMCR), assessed the efficacy of inhaled cannabis on pain intensity among 38 patients with central and/or peripheral neuropathic pain in a randomized, placebo-controlled, crossover trial.

Researchers reported that smoking low-grade (3.5 percent THC) and mid-grade (7 percent THC) equally reduced patients’ perception of spontaneous pain.

“[A] significant … reduction in [a 100-point visual analog scale of] pain intensity per minute was noted from both 3.5 percent and 7 percent cannabis compared to placebo,” authors wrote. “Separate appraisals using the patient global score and multidimensional [eleven-point neuropathic pain scale also] revealed that both active agents alleviated pain compared with placebo.”

“In the present experiment, cannabis reduced pain intensity and unpleasantness equally. Thus, as with opioids, cannabis does not rely on a relaxing or tranquilizing effect, but rather reduces both the core component of nociception (nerve pain) and the emotional aspect of the pain experience to an equal degree.”

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What an absolutely curious thing for Prince Philip to say :

Rising world food prices are due to overpopulation, Prince Philip says in a rare documentary on the Queen’s husband of 60 years.

“The food prices are going up - everyone thinks it’s to do with not enough food, but it’s really that demand is too great, too many people,” said the outspoken royal, 86, according to a British newspaper.

“It’s a little embarrassing for everybody, no one quite knows how to handle it.”

Absolute twaddle. The main reason why food prices are soaring is from blood-sucking ‘food speculators’, who’ve discovered they can inflict as much damage and pain falsely inflating the prices of wheat, corn and rice as they did doing the same to oil.

Here’s how Philip managed to get religious leaders like the Pope to step into line with globalist environmentalism :

“It seemed to me that most religions attributed the world to some special creation and I said, ‘Well look, if you believe God created the world you ought to take an interest in its well-being’.”

Or at least take an interest in the establishment of a global tax, on carbon for starters.

Here’s some previous thoughts from Prince Philip on what he’d like to do about the “too many people” problem :

“In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.”

Feel the humanity.

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They may not have had much need for wheels, or shaving, or most forms of communication, but our neanderthal relatives sure knew how to eat healthy, when they weren’t poisoning themselves learning what not to eat :

Our early ancestors lived on a diet lacking in cereals, dairy products and refined sugar for centuries before farming developed and some scientists believe that the human body is still best suited to this kind of food.

Volunteers in the trial, run by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, were allowed to eat only foods from a prescribed list, which included fresh or frozen fruit, berries or vegetables, lean meat, unsalted fish, canned tomatoes, lemon or lime juice, spices and coffee or tea without milk or sugar, for three weeks.

All dairy products were banned as well as beans, salt, peanuts, pasta or rice, sausages, alcohol, sugar and fruit juice.

After three weeks, the 14 volunteers who completed the study had lost an average of five pounds…
Scientists found that volunteers who ate the stone age fare for just three weeks had lowered blood pressure and a reduced risk of clots.

It’d be interesting to know what health professionals in the future make of our age of highly processed, sugar and salt rich foods. We’ll probably come up trumps with some of the worst and most physically destructive eating habits in the entire history of man.

They won’t understand in the future, of course. We will be mocked. But they’ll have no idea, no comprehension, of how utterly fantastic so much of the food we’re told is bad actually tastes.

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Photo from the LA Times

“We have come together today to say goodbye to an old friend, and beloved relative to so many gathered here. We will all miss him, and remember him fondly. Now let us begin the dissolving of his body….” :

Since they first walked the planet, humans have either buried or burned their dead. Now a new option is generating interest — dissolving bodies in lye and flushing the brownish, syrupy residue down the drain.

The process is called alkaline hydrolysis and was developed in this country 16 years ago to get rid of animal carcasses. It uses lye, 300-degree heat and 60 pounds of pressure per square inch to destroy bodies in big stainless-steel cylinders that are similar to pressure cookers.

Entrepreneurs are racking their brains to think up a way to make this an acceptable part of the modern American green-friendly funeral. Claiming that dissolving your loved one in lye and then tipping the syrup down the drain is far more eco-friendly than carbon-belching crematoriums is part of that initial green push for acceptance, and approval.

Not surprisingly, many people find this process an appalling way to deal with the dead.

It’s going to be a tough sell.

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The Robert Downey Iron Man movie certainly isn’t the first piece of American entertainment where a fictional superhero steps in to do what the military and politicians cannot.

From the UK Guardian :

Since they were born on the eve of the second world war, America’s superheroes have been enlisted for all sorts of undercover propaganda duties, from promoting patriotism, war bonds and recycling (even of comics themselves) to warning about health, drugs and landmines.

So it’s nothing new that Iron Man, the latest in Marvel’s pop-icon pantheon to hit the big screen, is coming to the rescue of the United Nations. In a specially customised comic book, Ol’ Shellhead and his costumed cohorts will battle that most terrible of supervillains, a tarnished public image, by demonstrating the UN’s positive, proactive roles. Will it work? It’s debatable: over the years these earnest, message-laden stories have not always been too effective as weapons of mass persuasion.

When it comes to propaganda, superheroes were probably at their most convincing in the early 40s, when they and their frequently Jewish creators and publishers, were tackling Hitler himself long before America entered the fray after Pearl Harbor. Seventy years ago this year, two young bespectacled Cleveland Jews, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, saw their nerdish fantasies published on four-colour newsprint as Superman burst off the pages of the first Action Comics and sparked a battalion of imitators. Their Man Of Steel started out as a champion against corrupt employers and other scoundrels but he and other superheroes would soon find the perfect bad guys in the Nazis and the Japanese.

For the February 27 1940 issue of Look weekly, Siegel and Shuster were commissioned to create a two-page expose showing How Superman Would End The War. After he pummels Germany’s fortifications on the Siegfried Line, Superman grabs Hitler and Stalin and flies them to Geneva where they are found guilty of “unprovoked aggression against defenceless countries” by the League Of Nations, forerunner of the UN. This condemnation of the Nazis seems to have worked as propaganda. It reportedly infuriated Joseph Goebbels, himself a master propagandist, so much that he angrily proclaimed “Superman is Jewish!” in a meeting.

In his Look strip, Superman was restrained from giving the captive Fuhrer “a strictly non-Aryan sock on your jaw”. A year later, another Jewish partnership, New Yorkers Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, unleashed their super-patriot Captain America, garbed in the stars and stripes flag, who finally gave Hitler that threatened punch on their first issue’s front cover. This was too much for some American Nazi sympathisers and opponents of their country entering the war. Simon and Kirby’s studio became the target of hate mail, obscene phone calls and sinister types lurking outside, until mayor Fiorello LaGuardia himself rang Simon to assure him of round-the-clock police protection, saying, “You boys over there are doing a good job. The city of New York will see that no harm will come to you.” Once the war was won, however, Captain America hung up his shield. Somehow his comeback as a 50s “commie basher” in the Cold War and Korea never caught on.

As for the UN, superheroes have come to its rescue before. In November 1967, The Justice League Of America featured the UN symbol on the cover of issue 57, in a very right-on plea for racial harmony called “Man, The Name is - Brother!” The UN even had their very own team of superheroes devised by Wally Wood for Tower Comics in the 60s. Called the THUNDER Agents (The Higher United Nations Defence Enforcement Reserves), they were led by Dynamo, dressed in the UN’s blue and white colours. Rather than relying on Marvel’s characters, the UN could have resurrected this team, but THUNDER Agents vanished after only 20 issues and only aging comic collectors remember them now.

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Former Forbes business correspondent Benjamin Fulford thinks he knows what is really going on in the world today :

“…you will notice that Asian countries have stopped buying US government bonds. The US secret government has retaliated by artificially raising food and oil prices.

We are in the middle of World War 3. The US and Israel have been taken over by Nazis and the rest of the world is trying to take them down.

The reason the society has not started assassinations yet is that the Nazis in the Bush/Clinton administration want any excuse to start all out world war. However, if starvation begins in earnest, there will be assassinations.”

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Romanwyg has rounded up a huge gallery of the graffiti and stencil art on display at the Cans Festival in London. Here are some fresh Banksy artworks :

Go Here For The Full Gallery

More Banksy Art At His Website

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Altered art by Banksy

In the UK, some 4.5 million CCTV cameras, and billions spent installing and maintaining them, has proven to be a complete waste of money.

CCTV cameras don’t stop crime, they just move it on, and increase the work load for police and investigators. As Philip K Dick pointed out back in the early 1970s, authorities can have all the surveillance cameras and audio recorders they want, but someone still has to sit down and sift the data, and that’s the cruncher.

Note in the story below how the alleged failure of CCTV cameras to radically cut crime is used as an argument to now ramp up the monitoring and surveillance of innocent people to extraordinary new levels.

From the UK Guardian :

Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.

The warning comes from the head of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) at New Scotland Yard as the force launches a series of initiatives to try to boost conviction rates using CCTV evidence. They include:

· A new database of images which is expected to use technology developed by the sports advertising industry to track and identify offenders.

· Putting images of suspects in muggings, rape and robbery cases out on the internet from next month.

· Building a national CCTV database, incorporating pictures of convicted offenders as well as unidentified suspects. The plans for this have been drawn up, but are on hold while the technology required to carry out automated searches is refined.

“We are [beginning] to collate images from across London…The images are from thefts, robberies and more serious crimes. Possibly the [database] could be national in future.”

Cheshire deputy chief constable Graham Gerrard, who chairs the CCTV working group of the Association of Chief Police Officers, told the Guardian, that it made no sense to have a national DNA and fingerprint database, but to have to approach 43 separate forces for images of suspects and offenders.

…there were discussions with biometric companies “on a regular basis” about developing the technology to search digitised databases and match suspects’ images with known offenders.

The end aim is a national grid of cameras linked to a central database (which will live on police and Scotland Yard servers), with the video flooding in constantly ’searched’ by face, body and gait recognition technology to build up a virtual CCTV life of those deemed worthy of surveillance.

That’s after they release your image to the net because you are suspected of being involved in a crime.

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The next time you’re taking a holiday and enjoying the snorkelling in the refreshing Cuban waters off Guantanamo Bay, don’t forget to pick up a few souvenirs before you head back to your non-cage home :

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Attaching lots of wires to an infant’s head has resulted in some fascinating discoveries about the minds of the very young :

…from the moment we first open our eyes, we possess the essential mental equipment to make sense of the confusion around us.

We are natural-born mathematicians - for example, six-month-olds can distinguish the quantities eight from 16, and 16 from 32. Babies will infer that a rolling ball will keep moving. They also know that when that ball rolls behind a screen it should pop out the other side. And although they can only babble, babies tell us that the germ of our instincts about age, gender and race are laid down in the cradle.

Hopefully we will never learn what babies really think about all those people looming into view pulling stupid faces and talking in weird, high-pitched voices.

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1912 : The sky is brilliant blue, clumped with clusters of fluffy clouds. “I see,” a child begins, “a doggy! A..a…horsey! And…oh, that one looks my Floaty my goldfish.”

2012 : The sky is brilliant blue, small clouds made of soap bubbles and shaped like corporate brands dash and turn on the wind currents. “I see,” a child begins, “a Disney! A…a…Nike! And that one looks like Hillary Clinton in profile!”

Skyvertising, according to ‘flying logos’ creators Flogos, will soon be polluting blue skies above our cities. You can see their video pitch here.

From Dark Roasted Blend :

(Flogos will) shape your logotype into a “cloudy” mixture of soap-based foam and helium - and send it off to drift for miles, as high as 6 kilometers up…

Any form can be made (of any color) and almost any specified location covered. The company seems to maintain that “flogo” shapes are environmentally friendly (they just evaporate after a while, and airplanes will fly through them like through any cloud).

More Cloud Weirdness Here

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It’s the kind of news that makes you wonder why you should even bother getting out of bed. What’s the point? After all, the Universe will eventually dissolve away to nothing in about 100 trillion years, according to this entertainingly morbid piece of ultimate doom speculation :

Over the course of the next few billion years, evolution will seem to go reverse. The largest organisms and least heat tolerant animals will die out, leaving hardy insects and bacteria. Finally, it’ll be so hot on the surface of the Earth that the oceans will boil away. There’ll be no place to hide from the terrible temperatures. Only the organisms that live deep underground will survive, as they have already for billions of years.

And the end. The End of all ends ending endingly :

When the last black hole evaporates, all that will remain in the Universe are photons of radiation, and elementary particles that escaped capture by black holes. The temperature of the entire Universe will reach a final temperature just above absolute zero.

Perhaps…this bleak future of a cold, dead Universe is all that awaits us.

Only 100 trillion years to go, make the most of it.

This piece also contains the standard prediction that humans have got about 10,000 years left before we manage to do ourselves in as a species, or that vengeful bitch Mother Nature decides to smite us verily, permanently.

Rubbish. Humans aren’t going anywhere. We’ll continue to rule this rock. Above ground or under ground. We’ll grow new bodies, store our brains online, learn to feed ourselves from sunlight and populate the solar system. We’re smarter than cockroaches and more vicious than a starving crocodile gobbling down its own offspring. This planet has never seen anything like us.

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It’s not exactly a great way to market your animal rescue charity, which is why PETA doesn’t make too much of this startling statistic :

Since 1998 PETA has killed more than 17,000 animals, nearly 85 percent of all those it has rescued.
PETA and the Humane Society kill more than 4 million pets and stray animals each year. It’s dog and cat genocide, and most who hand over hundreds of dollars in donations every year to PETA, to help save unwanted pets, have no idea this is what they’re doing.

A new movement in dealing with unwanted pets emerges, “no-kill” shelter and community outreach adoption programs. They claim they don’t take in animals just to kill them, but to get them into homes in local neighbourhoods.

PETA, which chews through $30 million a year, and the Humane Society are depicted as all but pure corporate evil by the “no-kill” movement :

“With the resources at their disposal, PETA and the Humane Society of the U.S. could become no-kill in no time…Instead they have become leading killers of cats and dogs, and the animal-loving public unwittingly foots the bill through taxes and donations.”
And all that good meat going to waste.

Millions more pets are likely to hit the PETA gas chambers, as the luxury of pet food, and pet products and pet healthcare bills, becomes an unreality for more and more American families.

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Albert Hofmann, dead at 102, discovered LSD. Or more specifically, he accidentally stumbled across it. Here he details some of his hallucinatory experiments :

He became the first human guinea pig of the drug when a tiny amount of the substance seeped onto his finger…

“I had to leave work for home because I was suddenly hit by a sudden feeling of unease and mild dizziness,” he wrote in a memo to company bosses.

“Everything I saw was distorted as in a warped mirror,” he said, describing his bicycle ride home. “I had the impression I was rooted to the spot. But my assistant told me we were actually going very fast.”

Three days later, Hofmann experimented with a larger dose. The result was a horror trip.

“The substance which I wanted to experiment with took over me. I was filled with an overwhelming fear that I would go crazy. I was transported to a different world, a different time,” Hofmann wrote.

The LSD eventually created by the Sandoz pharmaceutical firm, where Hofmann worked, also known as LSD-25, was supposedly so powerful one gram could induce hallucinations in 10,000-20,000 people. That an entire population could be dosed with LSD through the water supply became a powerful idea in the mid-1960s. Author Philip K Dick had a couple of extra pages added to his FBI file after he published the short story, Faith Of Our Fathers, in 1967, where a totalitarian regime fed powerful hallucinogens to the populace through the water and food supply to hide their true, hideous identities and to keep the people subdued.

While some details of CIA programs to drug unsuspecting civilians with LSD-25 in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly the MK-ULTRA program, have been declassified, the full scope of how LSD-25 was tested on the public, and used as a weapon, remains classified.

Hofmann went to his grave believing that LSD should never have been made illegal, and was a powerful tool for psychological repair, while he also acknowledged its dangers, referring to the drug as ‘My Problem Child’ in a book title in the mid-1970s.

“LSD can help open your eyes,” he once said. “But there are other ways: meditation, dance, music, fasting.”

What Hofmann discovered in 1938 had already blackened the history of the Middle Ages, hundreds of years before. LSD, or lysergic acid diethylamide, was synthesised from ergot, a fungus that grows on wheat and barley. Ergot itself is quite capable of inducing severe hallucinations, and there’s strong evidence to back up the theory that much of the witch and religion-related history and violence across Europe in the 16th and 17th century came as a result of entire bread supplies for villages being ’spiked’ by the presence of ergot fungus in the grains used. Climatic changes saw mature crops being infected by the black fungus, but many villages were too poor to discard of an entire grain crop and the infected crops were turned into bread for the villages and fed to livestock.

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee looks at the online world he helped to create and sees a future of more intense, international and creative collaboration amongst more and more people. It’s still early days for the web :

Making the web free to use had a vital role in spreading its use worldwide.

“The experience of the development of the web by so many people collaborating across the globe has just been a fantastic experience,” he said.

“The experience of international collaboration continues. Also the spirit that really we have only started to explore the possibilities of [the web], that continues.”

The ubiquity of the web gives the impression that its success was inevitable but that was not always the case, said Robert Cailliau, who worked alongside Sir Tim.

Mr Cailliau helped draw up one of the early technical proposals for the web and later helped convince the directors at Cern to “give the web away”.

“The difficult part was explaining to them the true nature of what the web was going to be,” he said.

“We had to convince them that this was going to take off and it was a really big thing. And therefore Cern couldn’t hold on to it and the best thing to do was to give it away.”

He said competing technologies, such as Gopher, which was developed at the University of Minnesota, were also offering a method of using hyperlinks to connect documents across computers on the internet.

“If we had put a price on it like the University of Minnesota had done with Gopher then it would not have expanded into what it is now.”

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A video game reality crossed over into this realm for a bunch of kids queuing in London to buy GTA IV :

The launch of the ultra-violent Grand Theft Auto IV video game descended into real-life horror when a man was stabbed repeatedly in a queue of fans waiting to buy it.

Shoppers thought they were witnessing a promotional stunt for the launch when the blood-soaked victim staggered among them.

They realised the attack was genuine only when police arrived.

Malcolm Critchell, queueing with his nephew Jordan, said: “The victim was covered from shoulder to belly in blood. Everyone thought it was a show to promote the game.”

Another queuer, Marcus Henderson, 24, said: “It was a scene straight from the game itself. In Grand Theft Auto, when you attack someone but don’t finish them off they’ll come and get you. We thought it was a stunt put on by the makers of the game.”

The reality in the video game became the standard against which these kids were assessing the violence they were actually witnessing, and they did what you can do in the game when you see someone else being attacked. Intervene, or stand back and watch. Or run them both over with a car. They stood back and watched, comparing a real world stabbing to a fake one, and believing the reality wasn’t real. Reality didn’t look real enough.