NASdaq Stock Exchange

Arabs are in the process of buying 20% of the NASDAQ Stock Exchange.  Perhaps they will just

buy us out so we have no land to call our own, etc. I believe the saying is: lot, stock and barrel.?

Other countries now own a portion, if not all, of our municipal water operations, our roads,  our businesses,

our ports, . We are such fools for a buck or a pitch that we will get something.  I think it may be because

we do not teach the children to think, to explore, to be curious and aware.

Communist China

In the news today, Mattell Toy Co. apologized to China for the recall of Mattell toys. The toys may

kill your kids, but we mustn't offend Communist China.

Farmers Not Allowed to Plant Seeds

Farmers in Iraq are not allowed to plant their own seeds (reuse) on their farms since we moved in. They are forced to buy

licenses from corporations to receive new seed each year. They have traditional varieties for their area, but the

U.S. military in bed with American companies want them to use GMO seeds patented and sold by American companies.

 

How do they do that?  By Operation Amber Waves. Order 81, issued in 2004 by Paul Bremer, the head of the

Coalition Provisional Authority.

 

Why do they hate us?  Maybe Americans will wake up when U.S. military authorities come into U.S. homes with

human sperm and eggs and require couples to implant the humans to grow in your body. They probably will be

sperm and eggs from warriors. 

  

Bush

Just saw our Pres. on TV and I swear his nose is getting longer.

Considering buying new pillows?

Flame retardants in furniture, pillows, etc may be very dangerous to our health. Folks here like to put-down

the Europeans, but get this......"New chemicals must be proved safe before they can be used in Europe. In good ole

USA, chemicals have to be proved unsafe before you can get them off the market."..New York Times.    Here there is no problem marketing

and spreading chemicals anytime , anything, anywhere until somebody proves them unsafe.  For example, flame retardants (PBDE s) in foam furniture padding, TV casings  and plastics and foam may cause

breast problems...found in mother's milk and now there are big issues around increasing thyroid problems in people connected to chemicals in everything.

 

When are we Americans going to get smart about health? 

Night 2

But people did go out, and they did so despite the warnings of the Churches and city councils. Come dusk, bells were rung, horns were blown, and drums were beaten; city gates were shut, drawbridges raised, and stragglers forced to scurry home to light candles and tend the hearth. In medieval France, and throughout Europe, strict curfews were imposed. Around eight or nine in the evening, a bell sounded to indicate the Couvre-feu, or putting out of fires, from which the word 'curfew' derives.

To make the night even less hospitable, city officials saw to it that chains and logs blocked off major thoroughfares, and that crimes committed after curfew met with stiff penalties. When a woman of Siena was found guilty of assault in 1342, her punishment was halved because she had attacked a man, then doubled because she had hit him in his home, and then doubled again because the infraction had occurred at night. In some Swedish cities, a robbery committed after the curfew bell warranted the death penalty. In many European jurisdictions, killing a house breaker was legal if the crime occurred at night but not after sunrise.

...............................................A good night's sleep for people in pre-industrial society was, at best, a long shot. There may not have been car alarms, ambulance sirens, or pneumatic drills, but there were watchmen shouting, bells ringing, dogs howling, mice scampering, roofs leaking, timbers shrinking, and chamber pots smelling. Most people slept on straw pallets or rough mats, or perhaps shared a cot with two or three siblings, along with fleas, lice, and bugs. Chronic fatigue was the norm, and sleep was valued in ways that we probably can't imagine. What rouses us from our own dogmatic slumbers, however, is Ekirch's assertion that "until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of wakefulness." People, evidently, awoke after midnight and, instead of tossing and turning, they regularly got up to talk, study, pray, and do chores.

Night 1

Excerpt from Arthur Krystal's book, At Days Close: Night in Times Past.

 

Today, those who live far from the tips of the earth, where it is continuous night half the year, rarely find themselves in the dark.  Unless you're hacking your way through jungle or humping along in the desert, some form of artificial lighting, either a light bulb or an LEDis sure to be nearby.  Electric light is so much a staple of modern life that we forget that there are people  around whose parents relied on only two sources of light: the sun and fire.  Thomas Edison's bright idea of 1879 notwithstanding, many homes, until the second or third decade of the 20th century, were lit by small flames burning in gas

lamps. In terms of radiant power, then, the Dark Ages lasted a lot longer than you may have thought.

 

How dark was it?  Let's put it this way: an electric current coursing through a tunsten filament in a small glass vacumn produces a hundred times the light emitted by a candle or oil lamp. And, considering that no European cities deployed any kind of public lighting before 1650, the world atnight was no place to take a stroll.  Moonless nights presented a darknesss so complete that anyone bold enough to step into Shakespeare's "vast sin-concealing chaos" was at risk of losing his footing, his purse, and his life. Carriages tumbled into ditches;  houses were broken into or set on fire; and town squares

filled up with beggars, prostitutes, crooks, and the crooked.  In many cities, gangs roamed the streets. In 1606, a gangbanger by the name of Caravaggio killed a rival in Rome and fled to Naples.  In London, young rakes, with such high-sounding names as the Scowrers, the Mohocks, and the Hectors, staked out territory and busted heads. (It's the street gang, not the noble Trojan, to which we owe the verb "to hector.") As Ekirch sees it, the night was "a forbidding place plagued by pestilential vapors, diabolical spirits, nbatural calamity, and human depravity." No wonder that the Italian proverb admonished, "Who goes out at night looks for a beating."

 

to be continued. . . .