Indian Military has New Weapon against Terrorism: The World's Hottest Chili!
from Associated Press --
After conducting tests, the military has decided
to use the thumb-sized "bhut jolokia," or "ghost
chili," to make tear gas-like hand grenades to
immobilize suspects, defense officials said
Tuesday.
The bhut jolokia was accepted by Guinness World Records in 2007 as the world's spiciest chili. It is grown and eaten in India's northeast for its taste, as a cure for stomach troubles and a way to fight the crippling summer heat.
It has more than 1,000,000 Scoville units, the scientific measurement of a chili's spiciness. Classic Tabasco sauce ranges from 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville units, while jalapeno peppers measure anywhere from 2,500 to 8,000.
"The chili grenade has been found fit for use after trials in Indian defense laboratories, a fact confirmed by scientists at India’s Defense Research and Development Organization," Col. R. Kalia, a defense spokesman in the northeastern state of Assam, told The Associated Press.
"This is definitely going to be an effective nontoxic weapon because its pungent smell can choke terrorists and force them out of their hide-outs," R. B. Srivastava, the director of the Life Sciences Department at the New Delhi headquarters of the DRDO said.
Srivastava, who led a defense research laboratory in Assam, said trials are also being conducted to produce bhut jolokia-based aerosol sprays to be used by women against attackers and for the police to control and disperse mobs.
Portion Sizes Increase in
Last Supper Paintings
from USA TODAY—
If
your food portions seem to have grown larger
over the years, you have some blessed company.
Two researchers analyzed the food and plate sizes in 52 of the most famous paintings of The Last Supper and found that the portion sizes in the paintings have increased dramatically over the past millennium, from years 1000 to 2000.
Using a computer program, they compared the size of loaves of bread, main dishes and plates to the size of the heads of the disciples and Jesus in the artwork, including Leonardo da Vinci's famous depiction of the event.
Findings published in April's International Journal of Obesity: Over that 1,000-year period, the main course size increased by 69%, plate size 66% and loaves of bread 23%. The biggest increases in size came after 1500.
The researchers used paintings of this event "because it is the most famous supper in history," which artists have been painting for centuries, so the paintings provide information about plate and entree sizes over time, says Brian Wansink, director of the Cornell (University) Food and Brand Lab in Ithaca, N.Y. One possible reason for the increase: Food may have become more available and less expensive, he says.
He did the research with his brother, Craig, a professor of religious studies at Virginia Wesleyan College in Norfolk, and a Presbyterian minister.
The three Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), which include descriptions of The Last Supper, mention only bread and wine, but many of the paintings have other foods, such as fish, lamb, pork and even eel, says Craig Wansink.
The use of fish in the meals is symbolic because it's an image that is used to represent Christianity, he says. Among the reasons for the symbolism: A number of the disciples were fishermen, and Jesus told them "to be fishers of men," he says. Plus, he says, Jesus performed several miracles with fishes and loaves.
Have You Caught Gold Fever? The Value of that Shiny Metal is as Artificial as Paper Money
from
AlterNet.com --
Quick, check out this hot investment tip! For
decades now, the Federal Reserve has been
suppressing the true value of gold to keep its
prodigious impact out of the market, which is
currently dominated by
fiat
currencies like the dollar and
light-speed binary code transactions like
high-frequency trading. If you stripped away the
Fed's continuing manipulation, gold's
free-market value, currently hovering around
$1,000 per ounce, would increase by multiples.
Wait, are you yawning? Why are you leaving?
Here's why: This isn't news. The Federal Reserve, along with investment banks, hedge funds, governments and even you (yes, you), have not been just manipulating the so-called real value of gold and other financial instruments for decades, you've also been manipulating reality itself for centuries. Because gold is just chemical element, or a precious metal as it is called in the business, which means you can't eat, grow or use it to power your house or car.
But what gold is good for, and admittedly has been since the beginning of recorded history, is storing notional value: It is simply an idea made shiny, attractive, and up until our recent Great Depression rerun, pretty lucrative. In other words, it is a hyperreality, a consensual hallucination to borrow a term from novelist William Gibson. It has value as a currency because we decide it does, just like the fiat currency system that replaced it, not because of anything it can actually do on its own.
And the determined devaluation of that notional value has some goldbugs angry.
"The price of gold is largely determined by what people who do not have trust in fiat money system want to use for an escape out of any currency," explained Adrian Douglas, publisher of Market Force Analysis and member of the Gold Anti-Trust Action (GATA) committee's board of directors, in an article titled "More Fed Minutes Document Gold Market Manipulation." "They want to gain security through owning gold."
But as the War on Terror and return of the Great Depression have both shown us, security is often an illusion masking the subtraction of further freedoms and values. It tends to make a small percentage of people very rich, at the expense of others less fortunate. That includes those who cannot afford to pay over $1,000 an ounce for gold futures. Or physical gold, which goldbugs are hoarding for the day they foresee Neil Young's aforementioned knights in armor coming to collect their riches for a king, lately President Obama, demanding their total obedience to what Douglas described as the more democratic fiat money system.
These issues will doubtlessly be discussed when the Commodities Futures and Trade Commission (CFTC) holds public hearings on March 25 examining futures and options trading in the metals markets.
On the docket? A presentation from GATA chairman Bill Murphy explaining massively unsustainable short positions in gold and silver from the usual suspects like HSBC, JP Morgan Chase and more, including the hated Goldman Sachs, ex-employer of current CFTC chairman Gary Gensler. Sure, this probably doesn't come as a shock to anyone familiar with those banks, and their regular practice of naked shorting everything else in financial reach at the expense of trillions in taxpayer bailouts. But for its part, the CFTC is staying out of the gold conspiracy theory for now.
"The idea is to hear what the public thinks the problems are in the markets," a CFTC spokesperson told AlterNet. "We won't question the motives of the people who participate in the hearings. We have panelists that are market participants, but this is just a public meeting."
