Boom Times in Paraguay Leave Many Behind

But just a few minutes away by car one recent morning, grandmothers waded through raw sewage in the labyrinthine slum of La Chacarita, scavenging copper wire and aluminum cans to sell at scrap yards.

“Tell me about this growth,” said Cecilia Aguirre, 60, grasping a plastic bag holding her day’s takings, worth about $4. Squinting under the hot sun, she said she worked every day to feed the four grandchildren who live in her home. Asked about Paraguay’s robust economy, she added, “I’ve heard of no such thing in my lifetime.”

Indeed, Paraguay’s economic boom, fueled by bountiful harvests of export commodities like soybeans and corn, exists only in pockets. In parts of Asunción, showrooms are selling out of Porsches and Audis, and cranes are putting the finishing touches on luxury towers like the Ícono, a 37-story skyscraper of SoHo-inspired lofts.

Yet much of the country, which has long figured among South America’s poorest and most unequal nations, remains left behind. More than 30 percent of the population lives in poverty, according to the central bank, and Paraguay ranks near the bottom among South American countries in reducing poverty over the last decade, according to the United Nations.

Social spending for antipoverty projects is minimal, largely because taxation is lacking. Paraguay did not even have an income tax until this year, but even though the new across-the-board rate is low, at 10 percent, few people are expected to pay it, as exemptions and loopholes abound. The result: the economic boom may be accentuating the festering inequality in one of Latin America’s most politically unstable nations.

“Nearly all of the growth is driven by highly mechanized agriculture, which generates few jobs for the population,” said Andrew Dickson, an expert on Paraguay’s development policies at the University of Birmingham in Britain. “With a government that finances itself largely through value-added taxes and taxes on imports, you have a situation rather like a low-income African country.”

Paraguay is a landlocked nation about the size of California, sandwiched between southern Brazil and northern Argentina, with a population of 6.5 million. About 77 percent of its arable land is controlled by 1 percent of the nation’s landowners, according to the last agricultural census, and land disputes simmer in various parts of the country.

Activists claim that for decades large tracts of land were illegally distributed by corrupt officials, leaving many land titles in question. In one particularly bloody clash last June, 11 peasants and six police officers were killed at a soy estate in Curuguaty, in eastern Paraguay.

Legislators seized on that episode as a way to oust Fernando Lugo, the former Roman Catholic bishop who was elected president in 2008, ending six decades of one-party rule. Mr. Lugo had initially been expected to focus on reducing inequality, but faced obstacles in doing so.

Paraguay’s new president is one of the nation’s wealthiest men, the tobacco magnate Horacio Cartes, who was elected Sunday after promoting conservative, business-friendly policies during his campaign. He recognized poverty as an issue but has been vague about any plans for reducing it beyond trying to create more jobs through private investment.

The government’s economists remain bullish about growth, arguing that Paraguay, devastated by a 19th-century war that wiped out most of its male population and ruled throughout much of the 20th century by Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, one of the world’s longest-ruling dictators, is emerging from decades of ostracism in the global economy.

Paraguay sold $500 million of bonds in January in international markets, a rare source of financing for a nation overlooked by many foreign bankers for decades. Inflation and unemployment remain low, at less than 2 percent and less than 6 percent, respectively, and the overall poverty rate has fallen to about 32 percent in 2011 from 44 percent in 2003, said Roland Horst, a board member at the central bank.

“We do have a peasant issue now and then,” Mr. Horst said in an interview. “But there is less tension than 10 years ago.” He said the government had been trying to reduce poverty, noting that a program of giving small cash stipends to people in extreme poverty, begun in 2005, now included more than 75,000 families. Other economists, however, dispute such sunny assessments, arguing that the economy remains subject to wide swings, surging this year thanks in part to favorable weather conditions for certain crops, after contracting slightly in 2012 when farmers struggled with a drought.

They also contend that Paraguay’s social welfare programs remain meager compared with antipoverty projects in neighboring countries, which have lifted tens of millions of people out of abject living conditions. They blame Paraguay’s relatively weak state, with tax collection corresponding to only about 18 percent of gross domestic product, a figure lower than that of African nations like Congo and Chad.

“The statistics showing historically low unemployment are a farce,” said Luis Rojas Villagra, an economist at the National University, who estimates that as much as half of Paraguay’s work force is unemployed or underemployed in jobs with degrading wages and working conditions.

“How is it possible to reconcile the fact that hundreds of people survive each day by sifting through garbage in the municipal dump of Asunción while Paraguayans are also the biggest per-capita spenders in Punta del Este?” said Mr. Rojas Villagra, referring to the Uruguayan resort city where rich Paraguayans vacation alongside moneyed Argentines and Brazilians.

Such contrasts persist across Paraguay’s economy. Pockets of luxury, for instance, are expanding near Ciudad del Este, the city on the Brazilian border renowned as a smuggler’s haven.

One development, the Paraná Country Club, includes mansions selling for more than $3 million, largely to soybean growers or business executives from Brazil who have opened factories in Paraguay, a migration of manufacturing that is starting to resemble that of companies from the United States opening factories in low-wage Mexican border cities.

“2013 is starting to look like an amazing year,” said Thelma Amaral, an architect who designs homes near Ciudad del Este.

But elsewhere, including the soybean regions at the root of the growth, examples abound of disparities and disputes, largely over land. A small leftist rebel group, the Paraguayan People’s Army, has been picking off security forces in remote areas. Last weekend, the group killed at least one police officer and wounded several others.

In December, gunmen shot dead Vidal Vega, a leader of the peasant movement involved in the deadly clash at Curuguaty. He had been expected to be a witness at the criminal trial intended to shed light on the massacre. The inquiry into his killing, as in similar cases of peasant leaders killed in Paraguay in recent years, has turned up few leads.

Ghost Hunters' Steve Gonsalves on His Freakiest Paranormal Experiences - Miami New Times

Courtesy of Seminole Casino Hollywood

Despite the wacky charms of our childhood friends Slimer and Beetlejuice, real ghosts are no joke. And tracking 'em down with high tech equipment takes a special kind of courage. (Balls. It takes balls.)

Enter Steve Gonsalves and Jason Hawes, two of the stars of the SyFy channel's longest running spook show, Ghost Hunters. Their team uses high-tech equipment to investigate paranormal phenomenon all over the country. And while cynics constantly challenge the show's authenticity, the crew insists it's all legit.

With Halloween right around the corner, Steve and Jason appeared last weekend at the Seminole Casino Hollywood for a little metaphysical meet and greet.

Cultist caught up with Steve and chatted about his "first time" (with the paranormal, that is), haters, and his love for all things Universal Studios.

Cultist: What experience first led you to believe in paranormal phenomenon?
Steve Gonsalves: I started researching it long before I had an experience. The first experience I had I was in this graveyard when I was 16, just before I started doing it semi-professionally. I was leaving the graveyard and it felt like something kind of tripped me a little bit, but I was confused. I didn't know if I just tripped over something. I didn't stick around to evaluate what might have actually happened. I don't really consider that a legit experience. Five or six years later I saw a spontaneous fire, which was very strange to me. Just to see a fire start on a table when you know there's nothing there ... I'm in this family's house and it just appears. I know something goofy's happening here (by goofy I just mean unexplained). But I've never seen a ghost, unfortunately.

What do you say to skeptics?
Yeah we get a lot of flack from skeptics. What most people don't realize is, I don't think there's any bigger skeptic than myself. I encourage what they're saying. You shouldn't believe anything unless you see it yourself. What we're dealing with are things that are so fantastic to believe. If you say, "I saw this table sliding across the room" or "I saw this bouncing light," the average person will look at you with raised eyebrows and think, "yeah right, buddy." I sort of appreciate that outlook because you really have to be that way. There's no sense in fooling yourself or other people.

The hateful skeptics are kind of a nuisance. They think we're all liars, which is fine. But when they start to get hateful it's just like, come on guys, really? It sounds horrible, but boil it down to jealousy. I end up finding out that half of these skeptics are members of paranormal organizations, and when we first came out they loved us and said we pushed this into the forefront. But then they always sort of have that mindset that, it should be them on TV. I have yet to meet a skeptic that doesn't have an ulterior motive to what they're feeling or saying.

But in general, I think that mindset is healthy and they should approach it as we do.

What's the science behind your equipment?
It depends on the equipment. While we don't consider ourselves scientists per se, we do take what you could call a scientific approach. If you talk to any scientist, they'll say a scientist is just a person that seeks the answer to a question.

Our EMF gauge measures energy, radiation given off by a fluctuation in the magnetic field. Everything on earth has a static charge to it. Even a pencil on a table is surrounded by static electricity -- as soon as it moves, it becomes electromagnetic. So a movement of energy creates a little bit of radiation, which is what our EMF picks up. If we see a fluctuation it could be something natural or manmade. We look for sources like electricity, power boxes, copper piping, etc. If we don't find a source and it seems to be a free-floating disturbance, we move our meter in every direction and make sure it dissipates, to determine that it's not coming from any one direction.

Once we see and can rule out any natural or manmade source, then we can look at the potential that there's something else there manipulating that energy.... The theory is that spirits are made of energy. So we believe that when we get a little fluctuation and we can't find a source for it, there could be something there. It doesn't mean it's a ghost. It could be geothermal energy, it could be a lot of things -- we just know we can heighten our investigation as there's a chance something could be present. We also use our equipment to disprove claims of hauntings.

We also use digital recorders, cameras that can see in the night, infrared cameras, thermal imaging cameras, full spectrum cameras. We use a device called a geophone that's basically a mini seismograph. It takes an electric impulse caused by a vibration and converts onto digital reading.

Time to Face the Times in Which We Live - Chris Holly's Paranormal World

Last week I received this email from my cable company. They warned us about interruptions in our cable service.  The email was not a surprise as we already had been struggling with our computers, phones and TV service. The email sent by the cable company follows exactly as we received it: Important information about your Optimum Cable serviceBetween October 4, 2012 and October 12, 2012, you may notice a very brief interruption in TV service due to Sun Outages. These interruptions last only a few minutes and are caused by the sun's interference with satellites that deliver TV service. The service will be restored automatically and there is nothing you will need to do. For a complete schedule of anticipated times and channels affected see below. Thursday, October 4, 2012           8:16 AM               4:33 PMFriday, October 5, 2012 8:13 AM               4:34 PMSaturday, October 6, 2012            8:12 AM               4:34 PMSunday, October 7, 2012               8:11 AM               4:34 PMMonday, October 8, 2012             8:10 AM               4:34 PMTuesday, October 9, 2012             8:10 AM               4:33 PMWednesday, October 10, 2012   8:11 AM               4:31 PMThursday, October 11, 2012         8:12 AM               4:11 PMFriday, October 12, 2012               9:11 AM               1:35 PM The truth is our TVs, computers and phones have not been working correctly for many days.  I think giving a shallow view of the problem is the route the cable company is taking as the truth would anger all of their paying customers.  So far our TV screens lock up, or pixelate making everyone on the screen appear to be monster like in appearance when in fact it is the sun hitting the satellites.  For about a week at night while in the middle of watching something on TV the channels will begin to change. All we can do is sit and wait until it stops in hopes that we can change back to what we were watching. That however is sometimes possible and sometimes not. Our computers are a mess. Trying to use email is a trip to impossible land.  Our phone service is ridiculous with lost calls or no service at all. Obviously the sun is going about the business of beating up our technology driven society by giving us a lesson on being too reliant on our wireless world, cable and satellite controlled way of life. The fact we have not had a huge energy grid failure can only be a miracle as our old beaten down system needs only a slight hit to bring it crashing to a halt. I think the sun and earth are going to battle it out over the next years to come and the losers will be all of us and our way of life that we willingly gave over without much thought or concern to what we knew was coming our way. We knew the sun was going to do what it has and will always do and that we would be sitting ducks to whatever a blasting angry sun decides to shoot our way. We dealt with it as humans do all things they do not fully understand or want to discuss with hands over our eyes and ears and fingers stuck in our ears!   I hope as many of you as possible are prepared to take care of your needs if your area becomes blacked out and shut down due to massive problems due to solar activity or wild weather that is now the new way of our times. Apparently we are entering a new era which I think of as the era of the 2000 teens - which will bring clearly to all people the real problems facing this planet and those who live upon it. Since we moved into the year 2000 life on this planet has moved down a difficult path of war, weather turmoil and nature cycles including the sun as well as many major events long overdue to occur that will happen whether we like it or not. I was never a believer that the world will end in one day or that December 21st 2012 would be a day of any specific activity or cause any significant world event.  It may be a marker of cycles coming and continuing as we  slowly continue to move ahead to a period of time when volcanos  are due to erupt , earthquakes due to shift our crust and weather shifts along with our magnetic poles changing-  all now due to  take place. It is time for these things to occur. The earth will do as it has and will continue to run its cycles whether we like it or not. We are the beings that seem unable to handle or adjust to the ever changing shifting nature of this planet.  Why we all seem so shocked that these events are due and about to happen is the true mystery. We know this happened before and know it will happen again. Why we all seem so stunned is the real question? We have had many years of understanding the nature of our planet yet we just sat here and did nothing to protect our species from a future that was definitely a known fact. Why we act somehow surprised is a true mystery. Science has been telling us for years that we are overdue in many cases for huge natural disasters yet we have not done one constructive thing to try to prepare for our survival when these things begin to explode around us. I find this fact far more mysterious than the idea the earth and sun are going to do their thing with us along for the ride … like it or not!  It may happen over many years or happen over the teen years of 2000. What is sure to occur is our being relentlessly shown the error of our ways and this will be the turning point of how we lived and how we may need to change. This time we may not all survive the disasters due to hit this planet however it may be turning point where we learn we are part of this system and have to learn now to live in it or we will perish as a species. We are in a time of complete planet turn around and that is what people are sensing and some preparing for. It will be a time when those who were ready can ride the times and those who were not may not survive.  This is a sad statement to make but one we may all see to become a hard truth. Simple things like having enough supplies on hand so you are able to survive in your home for a matter of weeks or a few months will make a drastic difference in who will and will not be able to weather some of the possible catastrophes due on this planet.  It could take many weeks for help to arrive if we face a major disaster on the scale of a Yellowstone eruption and having food and water plus supplies to take care of you and your family could mean the difference of making it to the point when help can arrive or not. Those who are not able to have a supply of food or the ability to stay sheltered and warm may not survive the time required for government or national  help to arrive . These are things we all should have been thinking about since we knew that we were living in a cycle or era of time when nature was due on many levels to explode, shift, change poles and force new weather patterns across the face of this earth.  We can sit and look shocked or play dumb all we want, however, that is not going to change the facts of life concerning living upon this wild and ever changing planet.The future of mankind on planet earth may one day look very different than it does today. We may stop our tendency to live in large cities that need goods shipped to them for daily survival from long distances. We may need to return to using more of our land with the population spread out where it can survive on local markets and local goods. We may return to farming over all our lands instead of having large workable futile farms sitting shut down in farm ghost towns not producing anything but weeds while small areas of large monopoly farming is controlling our food sources. Look at what happened to this plan with this year’s drought.  Many farms were not able to produce the large amounts of goods required while many green plush farm lands along the eastern coast line sat closed and over grown. Obviously our plan did not plan for the obvious, like area drought or flood. We may find that hate and war is not ever going to be a success and start to pull away from the violence that consumes our world on a daily basis. We may decide to stop hate and try something else as we hang on for dear life and watch nature teach us a thing or two about how we think, live and act towards each other. So you see I do not think we are going to have a big sudden change this December 21st or any other one day coming our way. I think for years now we have been heading towards a new era. I do not think all of us will see the other side of this new way of life due to the fact not many of us have paid attention or given any thinking or effort to how they might survive difficult times. Sadly this will result in some dark times ahead for mankind.  Our future on this planet will change; there is no question about that. All we can do is recognize we have mountains ahead to climb on many levels from changing our actions towards each other to help us survive the actions of nature.  Those who are ready will have a far greater chance of making it through the era of our times and the possible changes ahead of us all.For now be aware these things are due to happen. You have to be responsible for your own survival and safety. If we have major grid failures or loss of communications it will be every man to handle things on his own. I hope you think about this and do what you can to be one of those who see it through to the other side of a changing tide.  Until then I wish you protection from all things that may harm you and happiness in your days, warmth and light in your nights and maybe a few extra cans of food in your pantry next to the candles and flashlight!************************************************************************

Who's In Charge Inside Your Head? - NY Times

ZOMBIE bees?

That’s right: zombie bees. First reported in California in 2008, these stranger-than-fiction creatures have spread to North Dakota and, just recently, to my home in Washington State.

Of course, they’re not really zombies, although they act disquietingly like them, showing abnormal behavior like flying at night (almost unheard-of in healthy bees), moving erratically and then dying. These “zombees” are victims of a parasitic fly, Apocephalus borealis. The fly lays eggs within honeybees, inducing their hosts to make a nocturnal “flight of the living dead,” after which the larval flies emerge, having consumed the bee from the inside out.

These events, although bizarre, aren’t all that unusual in the animal world. Many fly and wasp species lay their eggs inside hosts. What is especially interesting, and a bit more unusual, is the way an internal parasite not only feeds on its host, but also frequently alters its behavior, in a way that favors the continued survival and reproduction of the parasite.

Not all internal parasites kill their hosts, of course: pretty much every multicellular animal is home to numerous fellow travelers, each of which has its own agenda, which in some cases involves influencing, or taking control of, part or all of the body in which they temporarily reside.

And this, in turn, leads to the question: who’s in charge of your own mind? Think of the morgue scene in the movie “Men in Black,” when a human corpse is revealed to be a robot, its skull inhabited by a little green man from outer space. Science fiction, but less bizarre than you might expect, or want to believe.

Providing room and board to other life-forms doesn’t only compromise one’s nutritional status (not to mention peace of mind), it often reduces freedom of action, too. The technical phrase is “host manipulation.”

Take the tapeworm Echinococcus multilocularis, which causes its mouse host to become obese and sluggish, making it easy pickings for predators, notably foxes, which — not coincidentally — provide an optimal environment for the tapeworm to move into the next phase in its life cycle.

Sometimes the process is truly strange. For example, a kind of fluke known as Dicrocoelium dentriticum does time inside a snail, then an ant, followed by a sheep. Ensconced within an ant, some of the resourceful worms migrate to their host’s brain, where they manage to rewire its neurons, essentially hijacking its body.

The manipulated ant, in response to Dicrocoelium’s demands, then climbs to the top of a blade of grass and waits patiently and conspicuously until it is consumed by a grazing sheep. Once in its desired happy breeding ground, the worm releases its eggs, which depart with a healthy helping of sheep poop, only to be consumed once more by snails, which eventually excrete the immature worms for another generation of unlucky ants to consume.

It may be distressing to those committed to “autonomy,” but such manipulators have inherited the earth. Including us.

Take coughing, or sneezing. It may be beneficial for an infected person to cough up or sneeze out some of her tiny organismic invaders, although it isn’t so healthful for others nearby. But what if coughing and sneezing aren’t merely symptoms but also, even primarily, a manipulation of us, the “host,” by influenza viruses? Shades of zombie bees, fattened mice and grass-blade-besotted ants.

Just as Lenin urged us to ask “who, whom?” with regard to social interactions — who benefits at the expense of whom? — the new science of evolutionary medicine urges a similar question: who benefits when people show symptoms of a disease? Often, it’s the critters that are causing the disease in the first place.

But what about the daily, undiseased lives most of us experience? Voluntary actions are, we like to insist, ours and ours alone, not for the benefit of some parasitic or pathogenic occupying army. When we fall in love, we do so for ourselves, not at the behest of a romance-addled tapeworm. When we help a friend, we aren’t being manipulated by an altruistic bacterium. If we eat when hungry, sleep when tired, scratch an itch or write a poem, we aren’t knuckling under to the vices of our viruses.

But it isn’t that simple.

Think about having a child, and ask who — or rather, what — benefits from reproduction? It’s the genes. As modern biologists recognize, babies are our genes’ way of projecting themselves into the future.

Unlike the cases of parasites or pathogens, when genes manipulate “their” bodies, the situation seems less dire, if only because instead of foreign occupation it’s our genes, our selves. But those presumably personal genes aren’t any more hesitant about manipulating our bodies, and by extension our actions, than is a parasitic fly hijacking a honeybee.

Here, then, is heresy: maybe there is no one in charge — no independent, self-serving, order-issuing homunculus. Buddhists note that our skin doesn’t separate us from the environment, but joins us, just as biologists know that “we” are manipulated by, no less than manipulators of, the rest of life. Who is left after “you” are separated from your genes? Where does the rest of the world end, and each of us begin?

Let’s leave the last words to a modern icon of organic, oceanic wisdom: SpongeBob SquarePants. Mr. SquarePants, a cheerful, talkative — although admittedly, somewhat cartoonish — fellow of the phylum Porifera, “lives in a pineapple under the sea... Absorbent and yellow and porous is he.” I don’t know about the pineapple or the yellow, but absorbent and porous are we, too.

David P. Barash is an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington and the author, most recently, of “Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature.”

Time to Face the Times in Which We Live

Author: Chris Holly

Last week I received this email from my cable company. They warned us about interruptions in our cable service.  The email was not a surprise as we already had been struggling with our computers, phones and TV service. The email sent by the cable company follows exactly as we received it:

Important information about your Optimum Cable service

Between October 4, 2012 and October 12, 2012, you may notice a very brief interruption in TV service due to Sun Outages. These interruptions last only a few minutes and are caused by the sun's interference with satellites that deliver TV service. The service will be restored automatically and there is nothing you will need to do. For a complete schedule of anticipated times and channels affected see below.

Date      Start      End
Thursday, October 4, 2012           8:16 AM               4:33 PM
Friday, October 5, 2012 8:13 AM               4:34 PM
Saturday, October 6, 2012            8:12 AM               4:34 PM
Sunday, October 7, 2012               8:11 AM               4:34 PM
Monday, October 8, 2012             8:10 AM               4:34 PM
Tuesday, October 9, 2012             8:10 AM               4:33 PM
Wednesday, October 10, 2012   8:11 AM               4:31 PM
Thursday, October 11, 2012         8:12 AM               4:11 PM
Friday, October 12, 2012               9:11 AM               1:35 PM

The truth is our TVs, computers and phones have not been working correctly for many days.  I think giving a shallow view of the problem is the route the cable company is taking as the truth would anger all of their paying customers.  So far our TV screens lock up, or pixelate making everyone on the screen appear to be monster like in appearance when in fact it is the sun hitting the satellites.  For about a week at night while in the middle of watching something on TV the channels will begin to change. All we can do is sit and wait until it stops in hopes that we can change back to what we were watching. That however is sometimes possible and sometimes not.

Our computers are a mess. Trying to use email is a trip to impossible land.  Our phone service is ridiculous with lost calls or no service at all.

Obviously the sun is going about the business of beating up our technology driven society by giving us a lesson on being too reliant on our wireless world, cable and satellite controlled way of life. The fact we have not had a huge energy grid failure can only be a miracle as our old beaten down system needs only a slight hit to bring it crashing to a halt.

I think the sun and earth are going to battle it out over the next years to come and the losers will be all of us and our way of life that we willingly gave over without much thought or concern to what we knew was coming our way. We knew the sun was going to do what it has and will always do and that we would be sitting ducks to whatever a blasting angry sun decides to shoot our way. We dealt with it as humans do all things they do not fully understand or want to discuss with hands over our eyes and ears and fingers stuck in our ears!   I hope as many of you as possible are prepared to take care of your needs if your area becomes blacked out and shut down due to massive problems due to solar activity or wild weather that is now the new way of our times.

Apparently we are entering a new era which I think of as the era of the 2000 teens - which will bring clearly to all people the real problems facing this planet and those who live upon it. Since we moved into the year 2000 life on this planet has moved down a difficult path of war, weather turmoil and nature cycles including the sun as well as many major events long overdue to occur that will happen whether we like it or not.

I was never a believer that the world will end in one day or that December 21st 2012 would be a day of any specific activity or cause any significant world event.  It may be a marker of cycles coming and continuing as we  slowly continue to move ahead to a period of time when volcanos  are due to erupt , earthquakes due to shift our crust and weather shifts along with our magnetic poles changing-  all now due to  take place. It is time for these things to occur. The earth will do as it has and will continue to run its cycles whether we like it or not.

We are the beings that seem unable to handle or adjust to the ever changing shifting nature of this planet.  Why we all seem so shocked that these events are due and about to happen is the true mystery. We know this happened before and know it will happen again. Why we all seem so stunned is the real question? We have had many years of understanding the nature of our planet yet we just sat here and did nothing to protect our species from a future that was definitely a known fact. Why we act somehow surprised is a true mystery. Science has been telling us for years that we are overdue in many cases for huge natural disasters yet we have not done one constructive thing to try to prepare for our survival when these things begin to explode around us. I find this fact far more mysterious than the idea the earth and sun are going to do their thing with us along for the ride … like it or not!

It may happen over many years or happen over the teen years of 2000. What is sure to occur is our being relentlessly shown the error of our ways and this will be the turning point of how we lived and how we may need to change. This time we may not all survive the disasters due to hit this planet however it may be turning point where we learn we are part of this system and have to learn now to live in it or we will perish as a species. We are in a time of complete planet turn around and that is what people are sensing and some preparing for. It will be a time when those who were ready can ride the times and those who were not may not survive.  This is a sad statement to make but one we may all see to become a hard truth.

Simple things like having enough supplies on hand so you are able to survive in your home for a matter of weeks or a few months will make a drastic difference in who will and will not be able to weather some of the possible catastrophes due on this planet.  It could take many weeks for help to arrive if we face a major disaster on the scale of a Yellowstone eruption and having food and water plus supplies to take care of you and your family could mean the difference of making it to the point when help can arrive or not. Those who are not able to have a supply of food or the ability to stay sheltered and warm may not survive the time required for government or national  help to arrive . These are things we all should have been thinking about since we knew that we were living in a cycle or era of time when nature was due on many levels to explode, shift, change poles and force new weather patterns across the face of this earth.  We can sit and look shocked or play dumb all we want, however, that is not going to change the facts of life concerning living upon this wild and ever changing planet.

The future of mankind on planet earth may one day look very different than it does today. We may stop our tendency to live in large cities that need goods shipped to them for daily survival from long distances. We may need to return to using more of our land with the population spread out where it can survive on local markets and local goods. We may return to farming over all our lands instead of having large workable futile farms sitting shut down in farm ghost towns not producing anything but weeds while small areas of large monopoly farming is controlling our food sources. Look at what happened to this plan with this year’s drought.  Many farms were not able to produce the large amounts of goods required while many green plush farm lands along the eastern coast line sat closed and over grown. Obviously our plan did not plan for the obvious, like area drought or flood.

We may find that hate and war is not ever going to be a success and start to pull away from the violence that consumes our world on a daily basis. We may decide to stop hate and try something else as we hang on for dear life and watch nature teach us a thing or two about how we think, live and act towards each other.

So you see I do not think we are going to have a big sudden change this December 21st or any other one day coming our way. I think for years now we have been heading towards a new era. I do not think all of us will see the other side of this new way of life due to the fact not many of us have paid attention or given any thinking or effort to how they might survive difficult times. Sadly this will result in some dark times ahead for mankind.  Our future on this planet will change; there is no question about that. All we can do is recognize we have mountains ahead to climb on many levels from changing our actions towards each other to help us survive the actions of nature.  Those who are ready will have a far greater chance of making it through the era of our times and the possible changes ahead of us all.

For now be aware these things are due to happen. You have to be responsible for your own survival and safety. If we have major grid failures or loss of communications it will be every man to handle things on his own. I hope you think about this and do what you can to be one of those who see it through to the other side of a changing tide.

Until then I wish you protection from all things that may harm you and happiness in your days, warmth and light in your nights and maybe a few extra cans of food in your pantry next to the candles and flashlight!

? Copyright ©- 2012 Chris Holly all Rights Reserved
Chris Holly’s Paranormal World
Email chrisholly61@yahoo.com phone 631-877-4818

Reproduced courtesy of Chris Holly

 

Who's In Charge Inside Your Head? - NY Times

ZOMBIE bees?

That’s right: zombie bees. First reported in California in 2008, these stranger-than-fiction creatures have spread to North Dakota and, just recently, to my home in Washington State.

Of course, they’re not really zombies, although they act disquietingly like them, showing abnormal behavior like flying at night (almost unheard-of in healthy bees), moving erratically and then dying. These “zombees” are victims of a parasitic fly, Apocephalus borealis. The fly lays eggs within honeybees, inducing their hosts to make a nocturnal “flight of the living dead,” after which the larval flies emerge, having consumed the bee from the inside out.

These events, although bizarre, aren’t all that unusual in the animal world. Many fly and wasp species lay their eggs inside hosts. What is especially interesting, and a bit more unusual, is the way an internal parasite not only feeds on its host, but also frequently alters its behavior, in a way that favors the continued survival and reproduction of the parasite.

Not all internal parasites kill their hosts, of course: pretty much every multicellular animal is home to numerous fellow travelers, each of which has its own agenda, which in some cases involves influencing, or taking control of, part or all of the body in which they temporarily reside.

And this, in turn, leads to the question: who’s in charge of your own mind? Think of the morgue scene in the movie “Men in Black,” when a human corpse is revealed to be a robot, its skull inhabited by a little green man from outer space. Science fiction, but less bizarre than you might expect, or want to believe.

Providing room and board to other life-forms doesn’t only compromise one’s nutritional status (not to mention peace of mind), it often reduces freedom of action, too. The technical phrase is “host manipulation.”

Take the tapeworm Echinococcus multilocularis, which causes its mouse host to become obese and sluggish, making it easy pickings for predators, notably foxes, which — not coincidentally — provide an optimal environment for the tapeworm to move into the next phase in its life cycle.

Sometimes the process is truly strange. For example, a kind of fluke known as Dicrocoelium dentriticum does time inside a snail, then an ant, followed by a sheep. Ensconced within an ant, some of the resourceful worms migrate to their host’s brain, where they manage to rewire its neurons, essentially hijacking its body.

The manipulated ant, in response to Dicrocoelium’s demands, then climbs to the top of a blade of grass and waits patiently and conspicuously until it is consumed by a grazing sheep. Once in its desired happy breeding ground, the worm releases its eggs, which depart with a healthy helping of sheep poop, only to be consumed once more by snails, which eventually excrete the immature worms for another generation of unlucky ants to consume.

It may be distressing to those committed to “autonomy,” but such manipulators have inherited the earth. Including us.

Take coughing, or sneezing. It may be beneficial for an infected person to cough up or sneeze out some of her tiny organismic invaders, although it isn’t so healthful for others nearby. But what if coughing and sneezing aren’t merely symptoms but also, even primarily, a manipulation of us, the “host,” by influenza viruses? Shades of zombie bees, fattened mice and grass-blade-besotted ants.

Just as Lenin urged us to ask “who, whom?” with regard to social interactions — who benefits at the expense of whom? — the new science of evolutionary medicine urges a similar question: who benefits when people show symptoms of a disease? Often, it’s the critters that are causing the disease in the first place.

But what about the daily, undiseased lives most of us experience? Voluntary actions are, we like to insist, ours and ours alone, not for the benefit of some parasitic or pathogenic occupying army. When we fall in love, we do so for ourselves, not at the behest of a romance-addled tapeworm. When we help a friend, we aren’t being manipulated by an altruistic bacterium. If we eat when hungry, sleep when tired, scratch an itch or write a poem, we aren’t knuckling under to the vices of our viruses.

But it isn’t that simple.

Think about having a child, and ask who — or rather, what — benefits from reproduction? It’s the genes. As modern biologists recognize, babies are our genes’ way of projecting themselves into the future.

Unlike the cases of parasites or pathogens, when genes manipulate “their” bodies, the situation seems less dire, if only because instead of foreign occupation it’s our genes, our selves. But those presumably personal genes aren’t any more hesitant about manipulating our bodies, and by extension our actions, than is a parasitic fly hijacking a honeybee.

Here, then, is heresy: maybe there is no one in charge — no independent, self-serving, order-issuing homunculus. Buddhists note that our skin doesn’t separate us from the environment, but joins us, just as biologists know that “we” are manipulated by, no less than manipulators of, the rest of life. Who is left after “you” are separated from your genes? Where does the rest of the world end, and each of us begin?

Let’s leave the last words to a modern icon of organic, oceanic wisdom: SpongeBob SquarePants. Mr. SquarePants, a cheerful, talkative — although admittedly, somewhat cartoonish — fellow of the phylum Porifera, “lives in a pineapple under the sea... Absorbent and yellow and porous is he.” I don’t know about the pineapple or the yellow, but absorbent and porous are we, too.

David P. Barash is an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington and the author, most recently, of “Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature.”

The Battle To Find Sasquatch - Times Colonist

The sasquatch is just waiting to be discovered in B.C., but too few want to admit or investigate it, says a Vancouver Island wildlife biologist and author.
“And we have what has to be the best sasquatch habitat anywhere on the planet right here on the B.C. coast,” said Courtenay’s John Bindernagel, author of the 2010 book The Discovery of the Sasquatch.
“The question for me is no longer ‘Does the sasquatch exist or not?’ but ‘Why has the existence of the sasquatch been resisted for so long?’ ” Bindernagel said.
Now 70, he believes enough sightings, tracks and other evidence of the large ape-like sasquatch — Coast Salish for hairy man — have been collected to provide evidence of the creature’s existence in B.C. and North America.
Bindernagel has collected casts of massive, human-like tracks from Strathcona Provincial Park and even heard a “whoo, whoo, whoop” call. It’s similar to a chimpanzee’s call in Uganda, but he believes it is a sasquatch calling out for its own kind.
Bindernagel comes to the investigation of the sasquatch as a scientist. He studied at the University of Guelph and the University of Wisconsin and holds a PhD in wildlife biology. He has worked in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Central America, teaching, conducting research, surveys and preparing and implementing wildlife management plans and conservation measures before returning to Vancouver Island, where he worked as a consultant.
The Discovery of the Sasquatch is Bindernagel’s second book on the subject and the most scholarly in its approach. Even he admits his first book, North America’s Great Ape: The Sasquatch, was undertaken with a hobbyist’s approach to the subject.
But the first book attracted the interest of some of the world’s best-known biologists, including chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall. And after its publication, Bindernagel said something unusual started to happen: People began contacting him with reports of sightings. But before they even began to talk with him, they wanted to know one thing.
“They would ask, ‘Are you serious about this?’ ” said Bindernagel. “That was always the question — ‘Are you serious about this?’
“I had to say, ‘Yeah, obviously I am.’ ”
So he began to collect their reports. Bindernagel also began to collect and document details of other reported sightings and bring them together, looking for patterns or repeated details.
But he started to run into what he calls a roadblock of “prevailing knowledge.” Too many scientists were unwilling to look at evidence from various sightings. They refused to give much credence to the plaster casts of tracks. “We can’t get our papers accepted at professional conferences, so our colleagues have remained ignorant of the  evidence,” Bindernagel said.
“The scientific gatekeepers keep saying, ‘No, no, no, having Bigfoot on our agenda would taint our whole conference.’ ”
So in his latest book, he attempts to take a scholarly approach, reviewing and summarizing the existing evidence. He also tries to put it in the context of scientists’ approach to “the discovery process.”
It’s a process he contends is taking far longer than it should because of scientific reluctance. “We have scientists demanding evidence, like DNA,” Bindernagel said. “At the same time, they are ignoring the evidence we do have.
“Not having the evidence you would like doesn’t excuse you from examining the evidence that’s available.”
However, scientists such as Grant Keddie, curator of archeology at the Royal B.C. Museum, take exception to the notion scientists are ignoring the evidence. There just isn’t any to study, they say.
Keddie said in the past, he has conducted investigations into several sightings, including one report of a creature running in front of a passenger-filled bus near Errock in the Fraser Valley in the mid 1970s.
He said he went to the site, conducted a methodical, systematic grid search, as used in archeology, and found nothing. Samples of scat turned out to be coyote droppings.
Newspaper reports had described footprints so deep they could only have been made by a creature weighing at least 800 pounds. But Keddie said he made deeper prints running in hiking boots.
Police investigators were called in and turned up four men who had rented a gorilla suit, then waited for a bus, before one ran across the road.
Another report came from a man with no experience in the B.C. backcountry. An interview revealed the sighting came after a stint in a pub, where locals joked the man was heading into sasquatch country.
But Keddie said when stories are refuted, the proven falsehoods don’t seem to gain the same traction in the public mind. Nobody remembers them when the next report becomes public. People again start blaming “scientists” for ignoring the evidence.
Keddie said if any evidence was to emerge that was even remotely solid, such as a bone or tooth, the top physical anthropologists in Canada would be on the next plane to B.C.
“So when I get asked, ‘Have you ever talked to anyone who is really believable or who has good solid evidence?’ I say, ‘So far I haven’t,’ ” Keddie said.
But Jeff Meldrum, associate professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University, said it’s only a matter of time before such evidence surfaces.
Meldrum said in a telephone interview that within the last 15 years, new discoveries have scuttled ideas of human evolution being a linear process to modern homo sapiens. It now looks more likely that as many as six early humans, or hominin, occupied the world at the same time in human prehistory.
Discoveries like the 2003 find in Indonesia of homo floresiensis, the remains of a one-metre-tall creature dubbed “the Hobbit,” have rocked previous theories. Estimated at 18,000 years old, this creature was clearly living at the same time as early humans.
Meldrum said such discoveries have seen even previous sasquatch skeptics starting to consider more seriously the idea of a North American ape-like creature, another species of hominin living now.
“The prospect that such populations might have persisted into the present is not so far-fetched,” he said.
“The scientific community is coming around to recognize that this is a very legitimate question.”
rwatts@timescolonist.com

The Battle To Find Sasquatch - Times Colonist

The sasquatch is just waiting to be discovered in B.C., but too few want to admit or investigate it, says a Vancouver Island wildlife biologist and author.
“And we have what has to be the best sasquatch habitat anywhere on the planet right here on the B.C. coast,” said Courtenay’s John Bindernagel, author of the 2010 book The Discovery of the Sasquatch.
“The question for me is no longer ‘Does the sasquatch exist or not?’ but ‘Why has the existence of the sasquatch been resisted for so long?’ ” Bindernagel said.
Now 70, he believes enough sightings, tracks and other evidence of the large ape-like sasquatch — Coast Salish for hairy man — have been collected to provide evidence of the creature’s existence in B.C. and North America.
Bindernagel has collected casts of massive, human-like tracks from Strathcona Provincial Park and even heard a “whoo, whoo, whoop” call. It’s similar to a chimpanzee’s call in Uganda, but he believes it is a sasquatch calling out for its own kind.
Bindernagel comes to the investigation of the sasquatch as a scientist. He studied at the University of Guelph and the University of Wisconsin and holds a PhD in wildlife biology. He has worked in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Central America, teaching, conducting research, surveys and preparing and implementing wildlife management plans and conservation measures before returning to Vancouver Island, where he worked as a consultant.
The Discovery of the Sasquatch is Bindernagel’s second book on the subject and the most scholarly in its approach. Even he admits his first book, North America’s Great Ape: The Sasquatch, was undertaken with a hobbyist’s approach to the subject.
But the first book attracted the interest of some of the world’s best-known biologists, including chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall. And after its publication, Bindernagel said something unusual started to happen: People began contacting him with reports of sightings. But before they even began to talk with him, they wanted to know one thing.
“They would ask, ‘Are you serious about this?’ ” said Bindernagel. “That was always the question — ‘Are you serious about this?’
“I had to say, ‘Yeah, obviously I am.’ ”
So he began to collect their reports. Bindernagel also began to collect and document details of other reported sightings and bring them together, looking for patterns or repeated details.
But he started to run into what he calls a roadblock of “prevailing knowledge.” Too many scientists were unwilling to look at evidence from various sightings. They refused to give much credence to the plaster casts of tracks. “We can’t get our papers accepted at professional conferences, so our colleagues have remained ignorant of the  evidence,” Bindernagel said.
“The scientific gatekeepers keep saying, ‘No, no, no, having Bigfoot on our agenda would taint our whole conference.’ ”
So in his latest book, he attempts to take a scholarly approach, reviewing and summarizing the existing evidence. He also tries to put it in the context of scientists’ approach to “the discovery process.”
It’s a process he contends is taking far longer than it should because of scientific reluctance. “We have scientists demanding evidence, like DNA,” Bindernagel said. “At the same time, they are ignoring the evidence we do have.
“Not having the evidence you would like doesn’t excuse you from examining the evidence that’s available.”
However, scientists such as Grant Keddie, curator of archeology at the Royal B.C. Museum, take exception to the notion scientists are ignoring the evidence. There just isn’t any to study, they say.
Keddie said in the past, he has conducted investigations into several sightings, including one report of a creature running in front of a passenger-filled bus near Errock in the Fraser Valley in the mid 1970s.
He said he went to the site, conducted a methodical, systematic grid search, as used in archeology, and found nothing. Samples of scat turned out to be coyote droppings.
Newspaper reports had described footprints so deep they could only have been made by a creature weighing at least 800 pounds. But Keddie said he made deeper prints running in hiking boots.
Police investigators were called in and turned up four men who had rented a gorilla suit, then waited for a bus, before one ran across the road.
Another report came from a man with no experience in the B.C. backcountry. An interview revealed the sighting came after a stint in a pub, where locals joked the man was heading into sasquatch country.
But Keddie said when stories are refuted, the proven falsehoods don’t seem to gain the same traction in the public mind. Nobody remembers them when the next report becomes public. People again start blaming “scientists” for ignoring the evidence.
Keddie said if any evidence was to emerge that was even remotely solid, such as a bone or tooth, the top physical anthropologists in Canada would be on the next plane to B.C.
“So when I get asked, ‘Have you ever talked to anyone who is really believable or who has good solid evidence?’ I say, ‘So far I haven’t,’ ” Keddie said.
But Jeff Meldrum, associate professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University, said it’s only a matter of time before such evidence surfaces.
Meldrum said in a telephone interview that within the last 15 years, new discoveries have scuttled ideas of human evolution being a linear process to modern homo sapiens. It now looks more likely that as many as six early humans, or hominin, occupied the world at the same time in human prehistory.
Discoveries like the 2003 find in Indonesia of homo floresiensis, the remains of a one-metre-tall creature dubbed “the Hobbit,” have rocked previous theories. Estimated at 18,000 years old, this creature was clearly living at the same time as early humans.
Meldrum said such discoveries have seen even previous sasquatch skeptics starting to consider more seriously the idea of a North American ape-like creature, another species of hominin living now.
“The prospect that such populations might have persisted into the present is not so far-fetched,” he said.
“The scientific community is coming around to recognize that this is a very legitimate question.”
rwatts@timescolonist.com