OBITUARY NOTICE

I note with sadness the passing of a great agriculturalist, who was a great inspiration to me as he was also my grand uncle. Below is an article about him. May more people follow his example and improve our agriculture so we can feed everyone.

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Norman Borlaug, 1914-2009, the Greatest Human Being That Ever Lived

Lisa Spinelli in The Phoenix, 15 September, 2009

With all these recent celebrity deaths, it's pretty lame of us media types that we haven't given more press/public attention to a real hero that has passed away. While Patrick Swayze may have made a lot of great films and seemed like a nice guy, and Michael Jackson was the King of Pop and an amazing entertainer, Norman Borlaug was a true hero that saved hundreds of millions of people's lives. Borlaug, dubbed the "Greatest Human Being That Ever Lived" by Penn and Teller, died of lymphoma at the age of 95 in his Dallas home on Saturday, September 12.
A Nobel Peace Prize winner, Borlaug was also the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal and has been called the father of the Green Revolution. He has also been credited with saving more lives than ANYONE that has ever lived. Why? Because he helped to develop a high-yielding, short-straw wheat variety that was more resilient than any other wheat out there. This meant that millions of people in Mexico, India and Pakistan were saved from eminent starvation with the development of this new wheat. Crops were established and hundreds of millions of people projected to be starving to death by the 1980s were saved. Since its creation, the dwarf wheat he helped create has been planted in crops in six Latin American countries, six in the Near and Middle East, and several countries in Africa and helped save millions more from famine.
"There are 800 million hungry people on earth, as many as 400 million in Asia alone," Borlaug said at the IARI Auditorium at New Delhi on March 16 2005. He went on to say, "We will have to double the world food supply by 2050," a feat he saw as improbable with our current agricultural resources and means.
Still actively pursuing his dreams to end world hunger through biotechnology well into his 90s, this amazing man was still the president of the Sasakawa Africa Association, an sister organization of the Carter Center and whose goal is to test and promote higher-yielding technology for maize, wheat, rice, grain legumes, and roots and tubers to help feed African nations, up until this year. And he was also still teaching at Texas A&M with a center there named after him, the Norman E. Borlaug Center for Southern Crop Improvement.. He also has numerous other research centers across the world in Bolivia, the UK, and the US standing in his name. Borlaug is immortalized within a stained glass window called the "World Peace Window" at St. Mark's Cathedral in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is survived by his two children, his grandkids and more than a pair of great grandkids.
It says something as a country and as a society when we give more press to someone who entertains than who helps actually save lives. I'm not saying we shouldn't mourn Swayze's or Jackson's deaths, far from it, I was totally struck when I heard about MJ dying and even a bit sad about Swayze. But to have SUCH little press out there about this true global hero's death is just down right despicable when every other image on TV, like CNN, is still about MJ and now Swayze (and yes Kennedy too but that's a whole other ball of wax) and there's a mere two-second blip about Borlaug. Sad. The man deserves a great tribute and he should be plastered all over the TV screens as well as all the dailies.
This man has done so much to help our world and the human race it's impossible for me to have time to relate it all right now. Here are some more credible places to read about this amazing individual: New York Times, and ForbesNorman Borlaug, 1914-2009, the Greatest Human Being That Ever Lived

CANNABIS AND COMEDY

I have been spending time in New York, hanging out with Mike Stranger and his gang. They often pop into Galaxy Global Eatery, Denis Cicero's place at 15th and Irving, next to Irving Plaza. This weekend there will be hemp on the menu not only at Galaxy, but a few doors up at 117 E 15th Street, Belmont Lounge, when Mike and his gang put on a comedy night with Arielle Adamy on Saturday, 12 September. Be there or be square! 7-9pm, $10 cover, no drink minimum. For info contact Mike at 917 940 5507.

TOO LOW FOR ZERO

An article from the AP. Keystone cops in the Flevoland province of Holland, east of Amsterdam, take the law into their own hands only to find they've destroyed a field of industrial hemp that belonged to Wagenigen University and Research Centre. They estimated the value of the 47,000 plants at US$ 6.45 million. Simon Vink, spokesperson for the university, said it was less than zero. Isnt't it about time they learned the difference? Just imagine what may happen in the US when hemp is made legal...

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JAPANESE WEARING HEMP

Just in from the New York Times blogsite, below is an excerpt of an article about Japan's first lady and her use of hemp.

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Japan’s New First Lady Not From Venus, Was Only Visiting
By Robert Mackey
Itsuo Inouye/Associated Press Japan’s next first couple, Miyuki Hatoyama and her husband Yukio Hatoyama, last week in Tokyo.
Here’s something you need to know about Japan’s next first lady, Miyuki Hatoyama: she used to be an actress. That may help to explain why Japanese voters were apparently not worried about handing her husband, Yukio Hatoyama, a landslide victory and the keys to the prime minister’s office despite the fact that he is married to a woman who wrote last year that she traveled to Venus in a U.F.O. in the 1970s.
On Wednesday, The Times of London’s Richard Lloyd Parry reported from Tokyo that Ms. Hatoyama, “a musical actress, cookery writer, clothesmaker and television personality,” is given a sort of free pass by Japanese voters because she “falls into the category of public figure known as ‘tarento,’ or ‘talent,’” who are expected to be kooky.
She has apparently been making good use of that pass. As Mr. Parry reports, Ms. Hatoyama wrote in “Very Strange Things I’ve Encountered,” a book published last year, that before she divorced her first husband and married Mr. Hatoyama, she may have visited our neighboring planet:
“While my body was sleeping, I think my spirit flew on a triangular-shaped U.F.O. to Venus,” she said. “It was an extremely beautiful place and was very green.” Her first husband suggested that it was probably just a dream — but Mr. Hatoyama, she insisted, would not be so dismissive. “My current husband has a different way of thinking,” she said. “He would surely say, ‘Oh, that’s great!’”
As Reuters reported, Ms. Hatoyama also amazed a daytime television audience this year with the information that she personally knew Tom Cruise during a past life, when he was Japanese, and still hopes to one day make a film with him. The film, she assured viewers, will win her an Academy Award “for sure,” and “will change your values.” Ms. Hatoyama added that, in his spare time, her husband is helping to make her vision a reality by “translating the script into English even though he is tired after work.”
Yukio Hatoyama/Associated Press An undated photo of Yukio and Miyuki Hatoyama in younger, more carefree days.
Apparently Mr. Hatoyama is paying his wife back for her help with crafting his image. The Telegraph’s Julian Ryall noted last month that Ms. Hatoyama, who is 66, now “describes herself as a ‘life composer’ who selects people’s clothes and food — including those of her husband — and designs home interiors.” Mr. Ryall also reported that in a more recent television interview, she “appeared wearing a skirt she had made from hemp coffee sacks purchased in Hawaii.”

MARGARET ATWOOD WEARING HEMP

In today's Observer there is an article which mentions that Margaret Atwood is wearing some hemp. About time. Too many of these attention getting so-called environmentalists are wearing nothing but cotton, at times pesticide free cotton which uses up twice as much water.

If half these people practices what they preached we would be able to make a difference in our world by getting away from cotton, one of the biggest and dirtiest industries on the planet. It uses up so much water that we may soon have water wars. The press does not like to talk about this, as their advertisers would not appreciate it...and if you happen to buy the Observer today, not to be mean, but do note how many large car ads there are in it (as I have done so many times on this blog...nothing like outing the hypocrisy of the left).

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Margaret Atwood on a voyage to the world's end
In her latest novel, the Canadian writer describes an Earth ravaged by an ecological disaster. She's crossing the Atlantic now on the Queen Mary 2 for what's billed as the greenest book tour ever – with songs thrown in

Tim Adams
The Observer, Sunday 30 August 2009

Margaret Atwood is currently at sea. She has set sail for the first leg of a book tour to promote her novel The Year of the Flood, an everyday tale of pestilence and pandemic, set in the near future (and required campfire reading for the eco-warriors in south-east London).
Atwood's ark is Cunard's Queen Mary 2. You can track her progress across the Atlantic on a blog that charts the nautical adventure. The choice of transport is highly appropriate to her book, a dystopia which imagines a Darwinian cult surviving after an ecological disaster has destroyed nearly all humanity in a plague called the "Waterless Flood". It is not science fiction, she insists, but a realistic extrapolation of the present. She is giving nightly readings from it to the liner's passengers, sharing top billing with Dr Peter Dean, a forensic scientist and expert on the Jack the Ripper murders. You only hope the captive audience wasn't expecting Elaine Paige.
It will be, Atwood believes, the greenest world book tour ever – not an air mile in sight. She has taken her "veggie vows" for the voyage, and has stocked up on the fairest traded coffee; her wardrobe for the captain's table features a good deal of hemp. Her latest blog detailed with some dry excitement the particular constituents of the "eco-paper for the programmes at the tour events" which, of all the papers on the market, has the "lightest impact on biodiversity and our climate". "God's Gardeners" in her book – who are desperately trying to reinvigorate life by devotional composting on a Mad Max planet destroyed by venal drug companies and infernal burger franchises – would no doubt be proud.
When Atwood docks in England those programmed tour events will include a series of special stage adaptations of the book, starring Atwood alongside Diana Quick and Roger Lloyd Pack, an evening of light musical apocalypse that will feature some of the hymns from the book sung in praise to the Gardeners' patron saints: Jacques Cousteau, James Lovelock, and Stephen Jay Gould. (On the boat, so far, Atwood confesses, she has bottled out of breaking into song with: "We praise the tiny perfect Moles/That garden underground;/The Ant, the Worm, the Nematode,/Wherever they are found…"; or crooning soulfully her characters' tribute to an evolutionary Creator: "We cannot always trace your path/through Monkey and Gorilla/Yet all are sheltered underneath/Your heavenly umbrella" – but she insists that, come dry land, she will.) "The events will be in the image of the Gardeners," she says. "Keep it plain, keep it local, keep it cheap, keep it green – this was our motto." All proceeds will go to the RSPB.
Atwood, the sharp-eyed prophet of quirky doom, is 69 now, but she has never, it seems, forgotten the Eden into which she was born. All of her nightmarish visions – the vicious subjugations of The Handmaid's Tale (the Taliban's book at bedtime), the genetically engineered hell of Oryx and Crake (to which the current book forms a kind of sequel) – have been created, you guess, in pointed contrast to her formative years. Her father was an entomologist, a taxonomer of all Linnaeus's creatures (as such a kind of role model for Adam One, the Gardeners' leader in The Year of the Flood).
From when she was a baby he took Atwood with him, along with her elder brother and her mother, a dietician, on expeditions from their ostensible home in Ottawa migrating north when the ice melted, south when the snow came, the time between spent in a tent or "in a cabin built by my father on a granite point a mile by water from a Quebec village so remote that the road only arrived two years before I was born".
It was 1939 and the world was at war – Carl Atwood's contribution to the armed struggle was a study of the ecology of hardwood forests – but Atwood lived in a kind of magical natural paradise in places where humans had hardly set foot. "At the age of six months," Atwood has written, "I was carried into the woods in a packsack, and this landscape became my hometown."
She and her brother were schooled in the mornings by their mother, "the athlete of the family who was fond of horses and ice skating and any other form of rapid motion that offered escapes from domestic duties". Otherwise they played in the woods, or read compulsively.
Society, in the form of school, which Atwood attended full time in Toronto only from the age of 11, came as a dull shock. "I was now faced with real life," she has recalled, "in the form of other little girls – their prudery and snobbery, their Byzantine social life based on whispering and vicious gossip, and an inability to pick up earthworms without wriggling all over and making mewing noises like a kitten." Perhaps the most chilling of all her books is Cat's Eye, an account of the effects of bullying on a child. Atwood was so precocious in her learning that she was placed in a class four years her senior. It was at about this time that she started to read Orwell; she never looked back.
At university she was tutored by the renowned literary theorist Northrop Frye, famous for his resurrection of William Blake as a major poet, and for his work on the archetypes of literature. Frye gave Atwood, she has suggested, a framework for her unusual creative mind; she responded first with a critical book about Canadian literature, which she saw as being all about Survival (as opposed to American novels – "The Frontier" – and British ones – "The Island") and subsequently with a series of novels and volumes of poetry that have all been survival stories of one kind or another.
In the manner of her parents, who always considered themselves "exiles from Nova Scotia", she has lived an insistently nomadic life. Her most settled period, perhaps, came in the years after she divorced her first husband and married fellow novelist Graeme Gibson and they made a home in Alliston, Ontario, in 1973. They lived a Fearnley-Whittingstall existence without the hype. "We had cows, chickens, geese, sheep, ducks, horses, cats, dogs and peacocks, to name a few," she has remembered. "Many of these we ate in our jolly meals punctuated by the sound of our bottles of home-made beer exploding in the cellar and Graeme's children asking if this was Susan on the plate."
Subsequently they lived all over the place: in Toronto's Chinatown, in a Norfolk manse, said to be haunted by nuns in the parlour; in Australia. In the Eighties, when she was writing her breakthrough book, The Handmaid's Tale, she was in West Berlin; trips to Poland, East Germany and the former Czechoslovakia all contributed to the book's intense claustrophobia.
Her concerns have remained consistent from her childhood, though: the ways in which the individual, and particularly the individual woman, comes to be constrained and deluded by irrational convention or insidious coercion. She herself has fiercely and imaginatively resisted any such constrictions, though the dangers of pigeon-holing are ever present: "The kind of thing that may have got you called a mean dangerous radical red-toothed bitch when you were 30," she recently noted, "may now be treated as the scatterbrained utterance of a cute old biddy. I'm not quite there yet but I can see the turn-off."
Atwood is anything but scatterbrained. The current novel makes a companion volume to last year's book, based on a series of lectures, entitled Payback, which dwelt, brilliantly and presciently, on the idea of debt in the western imagination. The political philosopher John Gray called it "the most probing and thought-stirring commentary on the financial crisis to date".
Written before the financial catastrophe, and with an eye to the balance and frugality of her upbringing, Atwood noted that the obligation of debt was "the governing leitmotif of western fiction" from Faustus on, and that once debt becomes "harmless and fashionable", empires and societies tend to crumble.
In Payback she put forward a "limits to growth" argument that suggested the biggest debt mankind had incurred was to the planet. She imagined a fable in which "Scrooge Nouveau" was visited by "the Spirit of Earth Day Past": "The end result of a totally efficient exploitation of Nature would be a lifeless desert," the Spirit warns. "All natural capital would be exhausted, having been devoured by the mills of production, and the resulting debt to Nature would be infinite. But before then payback time will come for mankind…"
The Year of the Flood imagines that payback. Adam One and his Gardeners are hopelessly trying to undo the unnatural havoc of technology, digging for victory: "Some would term our efforts futile, but if all were to follow our example, what a change would be wrought for our beloved Planet!"
Their creator, scanning the horizon for disaster from her deckchair on the Queen Mary 2, munching on her Endangered Species chocolate bars, and dreaming of unpolluted promotional stunts beneath the brim on her hemp hat, would no doubt concur.
Born 18 November 1939, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Her father was an entomologist. She was home-schooled till 11 by her dietician mother and later studied at Toronto university and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Best of times Both her poetry and novels have received critical acclaim with The Handmaid's Tale (1986), Cat's Eye (1989), and Alias Grace (1996) all nominated for the Booker prize, which she finally won for The Blind Assassin in 2000.
Worst of times Following an idyllic childhood Atwood's move to a school in Toronto at the age of 11 was a difficult one for her.
Her experiences informed Cat's Eye – a novel on the effects of bullying.
They say "She's an incredibly inspiring figure and she's one of the funniest, sharpest, truest people, and maybe that's why she's scary, because there aren't that many people who'll dare to be that."
Novelist Ali Smith
She says "A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together."
"I returned to this world because people kept asking me what happened two minutes after Oryx and Crake ended. I didn't know. So in order to find out what happened, then I had to go back and write another book.''

NUTRITIONAL ANALYIS OF

ROCKY MOUNTAIN HEMP HEARTS

Roger Snow kindly sent to me another package of his hemp hearts and hemp chocolate bars. I have shared these with a friend of mine who is a body builder, the protein content of hemp is quite impressive and of use to such people.

A complete breakdown on what 100 gm of his hulled hemp seeds contain is as follows:

Calories 567

Protein 30.6g

Total fat 47.2g

saturated fat 5.2g

palmitic acid 3.44g

arachidic acid 0.2

linoleic acid (Omega - 6 EFA) 27.56g

linolenic acid (Omega - 3 EFA) 8.68g

stearic acid 1.46g

monounsaturated fat 5.8g

oleic acid 5.8g

polyunsaturated fat 36.2g

linoleic acid (Omega - 6 EFA) 27.56g
linolenic acid (Omega - 3 EFA) 8.68

total essential fatty acids 36.24g

carbohydrate 10.9g

cholesterol 0.0g

total dietary fibre 6.0g

sugars 1.99g

fructose 0.45g

glucose 0.30g

sucrose 1.24g

maltose 0.1g

lactose 0.1g

Vitamin A (B-carotene) 4 IU

Vitamin B1 (Thiamine) 1.38mg

Vitamin B2 (Riboflavin) 0.33mg

Vitamin B6 0.12mg

Vitamin C 1.0mg

Vitamin D 2277.5 IU

Vitamin E (d) -A- Tocopherol 8.96 IU

Sodium 9.0mg

Calcium 74.0mg

Iron 4.7mg

Tetrahydrocannabinol None detectable

SPIES, LIES AND CANNABIS

Image left is of two who do not seem to know when to take an exit. They demand much more than their 15 minutes of fame; former MI5 desk clerks Annie Machon and David Shayler. These two came along to the 9/11 Truth Movement and, with the help of Belinda Mackenzie, pushed their way to the front. Many regretted their involvement, as they seemed to go out of their way to make it all look like a circus. At one point, Shayler even pushed an eyewitness aside and started to promote his own absurd views during a viewing of "9/11 Eyewitness" in East London.

The press loved it, they could use them to bash the 9/11 movement. There was nay a word about the real evidence or the likes of William Rodriguez, who spoke time and time again around the world, but was shunned by journalists as they spent their time feting Shayler and giving him abundant space.

Now much the same is happening with hemp. Shayler, sitting on a squat in a dress and calling himself both the Messiah and Dolores Kane, a transvestite persona he has taken on lately, had decided to mention hemp quite often. Much as we talked about hemp, he never took the trouble to wear it or even read much about it. His transvestite garb is most likely cotton. His whole act is a scam, and he is not only squatting houses, but squatting the hemp movement. If only we could get a court order to evict him, or he would just shut up...

But sadly the press, which cannot be bothered to get the story on hemp, will use him as a reference and cast discredit on a very real issue.

NEW MACHINE MAKES WAVES

Mark Anslow has just written a very interesting article in the Ecologist (June, 2009, p. 12). It is about a device created by Alvin Smith which harnesses water motion. His creation consists of a ballast and floats connected by a piston. A wave passes it, the float is lifted, the piston is raised and water is compressed. The float then sinks back down on the tail of the wave on to a second float, compressing the water again on the downstroke. It needs no electricity to run, nor even lubrication.
The energy can be summoned at will. One machine can generate 1 megawatt, enough for 1,700 homes, at prices lower than market.
These can work even in reservoirs.
Imagine a future with these, and other non-petrol based devices, such as solar towers, giving us clean energy and reducing the price of oil. But, like industrial hemp, they may be in for some suppression from the powers that run the media and the global economy.
I encourage all to stay tuned to this idea and support it so it does not get thrown aside. Click here for the Searaser site and more info.