but no one's told them what to be righteously angry about.

If I had an audience with the protesters, I would point out the difference between a dollar bill and a dollar coin. Dollar bills represent money that the banking system (the Federal Reserve's shares are mostly owned by banks on Wall Street) has lent into circulation, and is collecting interest on, whereas Dollar Coins are debt-free money created by the government.

This Bill was BORROWED from Wall Street.

Prgmr.com owner Luke Crawford has some diary entries at k5 where he talks about his business...

I've been happy customer of his for the past 2 years, so this comment is a vote for Luke.

Excess estrogen (usually produced by adipose tissue, but sometimes from pesticides or other sources of xenoestrogen/phytoextrogen) is what causes man-boobs.

If you examine the flow chart at my link, you'd see that progesterone is easily converted into testosterone, so the right amount will make male astronauts who are starved for progesterone precursors more manly.

HTH, hand.

Postmenopausal women lose bones because they don't produce nearly as much progesterone as they used to, while they still produce some 40-60% of the estrogen they used to make. "Hormone Replacement Therapy" poisoned women by supplementing estrogen and a fake progesterone, Provera, which the body is unable to convert into other hormones.

Supplementing progesterone is a much better bone-salvager than bisphosphonates, but natural hormones can't get patented. Furthermore, you don't need a prescription for progesterone, because it is entirely safe at any dose (as compared to insulin, which is also available without a prescription, but which is exceedingly easy to overdose on), and was available before the 1930-something food & drug act went into effect (grandfathered in), and Doctors need to get people to come back for periodic appointments to get refills for prescriptions that only they can authorize.

Science has known for 40+ years than hypothyroidism causes elevated cholesterol levels (cholesterol is converted into pregnenolone, then to progesterone, then to the stress & sex hormones, but this conversion process does not work well if a person is hypothyroid), but there's more money in a patented pill than in properly treating thyroid problems. T4-only treatments with synthroid are not appropriate, because many bodies do not adequately convert storage T4 to the active T3. Because the medical profession does not adequately treat hypothyroidism, they assume that someone who's on synthroid is adequately treated, and make a lot of money treating the symptoms of hypothyroidism. Ahh, that doesn't make perfect sense but I'm pressed for time and can't craft the wording better right now, sorry.

diietary starches are more hazardous than sugars. Fruit is good, but the sugar in fudge (butter, cocoa, sugar) is better than cake (sugar, oil, flour).

Saturated fats are 1000x safer than polyunsaturated fats, especially fish oil.

Polyunsaturated fats help take out insulin-producing cells in the pancreas, somehow...

If anyone knows which experiment proved that unsaturated fats are actually "essential", please let me know, because I'm quite curious.

Germany's economic strength comes from having a most of the banking system's profits being reinvested in the country, according to Ellen Brown:

... However, there are other Western public banking models that are successful without oil booms. Europe has a strong public banking sector; and leading it is Germany, with eleven regional public banks and thousands of municipally-owned savings banks. Germany emerged from World War II with a collapsed economy that had degenerated into barter. Today it is the largest and most robust economy in the Eurozone. Manufacturing in Germany contributes 25% of GDP, more than twice that in the UK. Despite the recession, Germany’s unemployment rate, at 6.8%, is the lowest in 20 years. Underlying the economy’s strength is its Mittelstand—small to medium sized enterprises—supported by a strong regional banking system that is willing to lend to fund research and development.

In 1999, public banks dominated German domestic lending, with private banks accounting for less than 20% of the market, compared to more than 40% in France, Spain, the Nordic countries, and Benelux. Since then, Germany’s public banks have come under fire; but local observers say it is due to rivalry from private competitors rather than a sign of real weakness in the sector.

As precedent for a public option in banking, then, the German model deserves a closer look. ...

-The Public Option in Banking: Another Look At The German Model

One of the neater things I've read about is how Lockheed Martin went back to Tesla's technology to make a communication system for miners:

A magnetic-wave generator developed by Nikola Tesla over 100 years ago as a wireless communication device has been updated by engineers at Lockheed Martin to save lives after mining disasters.

Magnetic waves -- unlike radio waves -- can penetrate hundreds of metres of solid rock. MagneLink, the fridge-sized device developed by Lockheed Martin, allows for phone calls and text messaging. It was tested this year at a mine in Virginia, and production is expected before 2011.

-Nikola Tesla’s patent redux (very short)

Heres another link: Tapping Tesla to Save Trapped Miners

If Tesla was 100 years ahead of everyone else, that means we should be plugging our devices into the Aether ("The wheelwork of nature") soon.

Did you hear how Mother Earth is creating a new island in the canaries?

She's got it in for us, I swear. Nothing like putting a blowtorch in the hidden depths of your oceans to screw with those gnats on the surface: "They think they're so important, I'll show them."

A lot of words there. Hope you like eating paint/stain (linseed oil, etc). Good luck with that. I'm going to stick to butter and other foods that humans have been eating for thousands of years.

Will concede to your point about cheap palm oil being a problem, but I would suspect this is more to the refining process (strips beta carotene) and the relatively high proportion of polyunsaturates (compared to butter/coconut oil) than anything else.

You may be interested in reading something by Dr. Ray Peat sometime. Perhaps you can answer his question about which experiment proved that polyunsaturated oils are "essential". I too would be interested, so please do drop an email if you know.

You've put some words in my mouth, and I disagree with some of your other points.

Cholesterol is important because it's what the hormones are made out of. There's a nice graphic on the "Progestogen" wikipedia page... Refined sugar isn't nearly as bad as starch. HFCS is undesirable because it's made from corn, and there can be significant contaminates.

I used to eat a lot of raw meat, and it never caused me any trouble, but neither did I notice much of a benefit. Agree that many ppl spend a lot of money on the "raw" trend...

Disagree. People can put on weight with 800 calories/day if they have poor thyroid function, for example. The thyroid gland does not respond favorably to the polyunsaturated oils.

Palm oil comes from Asia and Africa, so it was never "introduced". Basically: Citation Required.

In the United States, Vegetable oil is always made from corn, soy, rapeseed, safflower, or a blend.

Says who? I gave a link to "lipid peroxidation", which CANNOT happen when the fat is Saturated.

IF you're an ruminant that has four stomachs, then your digestive system has time and space to biohydrogenate those nasty oils. If you're a single-stomach'd animal, your body fat composition generally reflects the type of fats in your diet

Never heard of this. Link?

The premise is that most humans do better eating properly-raised dairy & meat than plant seeds and too many raw vegetables. Most plants need to be cooked because of the anti-nutrients. Even potatoes are problematic because they have so much starch - I can eat starch, but people who want to lose weight need to juice their potatoes and cook that.

Fruits are great, as long as they're not taken in excess.

Polyunsaturated oils have been proven to be toxic. Coconut oil is the best plant oil, even though it doesn't have vitamin A. Palm oil is pretty good, but we can get too much beta carotene (very high in unrefined palm oil) too.

... the polyunsaturated fatty acids or PUFAs in vegetable seed oils are the bane of human health — they actually cause cancer, diabetes, obesity, aging, thrombosis, arthritis, and immunodeficiencies. Their only appropriate use, he says, is as ingredients in paints and varnishes.

hth. :)

Besides the enzyme inhibitors, another poison in soybeans are the isoflavones, aka "phyto-estrogens". Estrogenic substances decrease the availability of oxygen and tell tissues to divide. Generally speaking, soybeans are only edible fermented, as a condiment. Cooking does not deactivate the isoflavones.

Hempseed and flaxseed are rich sources of polyunsaturated fatty acides, which cause lipid peroxidation, thereby increasing a body's vitamin E requirements.

Potatoes and tubers are the best vegan source of protein. Sprouting seeds may make the protein in these items more usable, but you have to be careful. Protein deficiency (getting the wrong amino acids, etc) is insidious because it's so slow, and is easily confused for something else. Liver needs protein to do a lot of its jobs, etc...

Vegetarians like to say that they're getting all the protein they need. And by the numbers, beans and grains do have good amounts of protein... But these proteins are locked up for storage, and have Protease inhibitors to interfere with their digestion. Trypsin is what makes Soybeans so inedible...

Potatoes are the best vegan source of protein, because potatoes' defenses are against the microbes that cause rotting, whereas the above-ground portions of the plants have all sorts of defenses against animals.

Gelatin is a good source of protein because of the kinds of amino acids that it has, and does NOT have. The recent news about synthetic human gelatin is a bit more important than this form of synthetic meat, methinks.

The federal government gets a substantial part of every US worker's salary.

Wikipedia has this example tax computation for someone making $40,000/year... About 16% of this worker's wages are paid to the government. If you double the Social Security and Medicare portions (to account for the part the employer pays), this rises to 21%.

So the effective cost for the government to hire U.S. workers is substantially less than it is for the private sector.

There, fixed that for you. :)

Interesting, thanks for the details.

CO2 is protective too - I wonder why it's not used more frequently.