Ocean11

It's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. And here's Matsuyama City Library . If you're interested in raising cows, pigs and chickens, Joel Salatin's books on the subject are also in the library.

I think carving's easy.

Diamond book not having I'm afraid. I borrowed it from my excellent local library.

Oyuki kigan, there is a solution to the totally artificial problems mentioned in that interesting article. Joel Salatin at Polyface Farm has a model that creates soil, thereby sequestering CO2 (and providing meat). There's actually no mystery to it. Soubs, you might enjoy the Diamond book. He covers the relationship of Greenlanders with the Inuit. Very interesting it is too. Some European Greenlander women reckoned they'd have a better chance of survival with the flat faced pogs and absconded...

Saw 'Crash' a couple of weeks ago. It's a very well crafted film. (I wonder if any non-American can watch it and not feel a bit ... ambivalent ... about America afterwards.) Also saw 'Otoko-tachi no Yamato' at the weekend. I expected it to be good and it was. What a terrible story of waste.

Diamond likens Australian agriculture to mining - the nutrients in the soil are essentially sucked out and nothing is returned until it's just toxic dust which poisons the water. That's maybe why the Permaculture movement arose there.

In 'Collapse', Jared Diamond has some pretty harsh things to say about water management in Australia (as well as the national tendency to 'mine' the environment as a whole). The sad thing is, all the means for slowing down emissions and beginning to fix carbon are all available and economical now. But we prefer to twiddle our thumbs, spending billions on nuclear fusion and considering reckless fixes involving the whole atmosphere and the whole ocean. From next year, my local NPO is going to start a forestry project to try to improve the CO2 absorbency of our local forests.

Read all about it. Or watch the Flash movie . Another approach. (Although my mate Bhadrinath in India says D1 aren't to be trusted, the approach is probably workable.)

Mantas, Australians need to forget about their European 'Home' and get some carols that go 'Little Jesus didn't know about the stuff that they call snow' or some such.

Green the deserts using proven methods. Use soil-building methods of livestock farming.

Find the quiver! There are 3 carving instruments, not including bikes and gardening equipment.

If you can kidnap SJ1 and torture him, I expect you'll get most of the info you need. Nothing brutal mind you. Just have him tied up in a chair so that he can hear his mails coming in with that super loud incoming mail signal they have, but don't let him reach the PC. He'll spill all he knows in 5 minutes.

I'm going to indulge in a bit of 'oyabaka' if you'll excuse me. I just found these old pics and thought they were quite silly. Ponkyuta!

Well deport him for breaking the law then, not for his religion or for his views on public modesty. Do you have the rule of law, or the rule of exhausted tolerance?

It's a shame that we Anglo Saxons have been so keen on establishing and encouraging mad theocracies, whether in Iran, Iraq, Israel, or indeed the US. If only we would stop and have a bit of patience with what was there before...

Complimentary pens. (I won't include complimentary propelling pencils because I have several from my former company that are very light and strong, and look like cruise missiles.)

I wouldn't ever buy shoes online. Nor a helmet. Even if the size fits, the shape very well might not.

Actually, the mother of one of the punks came down the stairs of their ratty apartment just as I was finishing up. She said 'Sore ha uchi no tansha dayo!" although she didn't seem to notice that the severed fuel line was leaking petrol all over the concrete. I just said "Ah so desu ka. Shiranakatta." as I put my bolt cutters in my bag and cycled off. Things were much quieter in the neighbourhood after that, but there were no other consequences.

muikabochi, I always used to sit there stalwartly drinking through the talking as if I had no notion of the conventions. I expect this was more than a trivial annoyance for my colleagues.

From Mantas' first link; "A white supremacist website has promoted the march. " I'm not sure about the reliability of that.

nOOb annoys me too. I fully expected you to object at some point. I'm surprised though that you tolerate 'gives me the shits'. I always picture CB and Bushpig as having shitty underwear since they always use the expression. (Hello lads ). On the subject of linguistic annoyances, the expression "Do the math" enrages me. Having organized my life so that I never have to 'do the math', I find this kind of rude and peremptory direction very offensive. If you want the maths done, you do it yourself. And it's 'maths', not 'math'.

> sooner or later he just might eat it. Yes, I was thinking "but he died doing what he loved, following his passion". Straightlining it down that gully, he hardly even left any tracks. Not much room for error there. I mean ... ask EBC.

farquah, I'll check that they fit that make of car and take some pics and pm you this weekend.

I have one with my NPO where we'll bake bread and potatoes in an earth oven on a hillside overlooking the sea, and a Christmas party with some Canadians and Americans no doubt with some guitars and blues harps. And that's it. It shouldn't be too trying.

> "that's why we will never, ever, beat them" They'll beat themselves in the end if we stop confirming them and their prejudices at every turn. Iran only turned to Islamic fundamentalism after the US and UK turned them off democratic politics by installing a brutal 'king'. It's interesting that the tolerant Australians are being led in this rare display of intolerance by white supremacists (if I've read the stories correctly...)