cool link

http://www.soilandhealth.org/index.html

Cure for dengue fever

Cure for Dengue - Papaya Juice

" ... I would like to share this interesting discovery from a classmate's son who has just recovered from dengue fever. Apparently, his son was in the critical stage when his pallet counts dropped to 15 after15 liters of blood transfusion.

 

His father was so worried that he sought another friend's recommendation which saved the life of his son. He told that he gave his son raw juice of the papaya leaves. From a pallet count of 45 after 20 liters of blood transfusion, and after drinking the raw papaya leaf juice, his pallet count jumps instantly to 135. Even the doctors were surprised. After the second day he was discharged. He asked me to pass this good news around.

Take tow pieces of raw papaya leaves (no stem or sap), clean, pound and squeeze them with filter cloth getting just about one tablespoon per leaf. Serve two tablespoon once a day. Do not boil, cook or rinse with hot water as it may lose its strength.

It is very bitter and you have to swallow it like Won Low Kat. But it works.

You may have heard this elsewhere but if not I am glad to inform you that papaya juice is a natural cure for dengue fever that is rampant these days and reported death toll is rising in Lahore after Karachi and Peshawar. ... "

 

~ Link ~

back to the future all over again (2)

An interesting post at the Controversies in History blog:

 

Myth of Ancient Nuclear War

Was the ancient indian war of mahabharatha a nuclear war?? Did ancient indians use weapons if mass destruction (WMD) while in the west humans were still in their primitive settlements?

Oppenheimer

The architect of modern atomic bomb who was in charge of the manhattan project was asked by a student after the manhattan explosion, “How do you feel after having exploded the first atomic bomb on earth”. Oppenheimer’s reply for the question was , “not first atomic bomb, but first atomic bomb in modern times”. He strongly believed that nukes were used in ancient india. what made oppenheimer believe that it was a nuclear war was the accurate descriptions of the weapons used in the mahabharatha war in the epic which match with that of modern nuclear weapons. Video

Mohenjadaro and Harappa

Scientists Davenport and Vincenti put forward a theory saying the ruins were of a nuclear blast as they found big stratums of clay and green glass. High temperature melted clay and sand and they hardened immediately afterwards. Similar stratums of green glass can also found in Nevada deserts after every nuclear explosion.

Radio Active Ash

A layer of radioactive ash was found in Rajasthan, India. It covered a three-square mile area, ten miles west of Jodhpur. The research occurred after a very high rate of birth defects and cancer was discovered in the area. The levels of radiation registered so high on investigators’ gauges that the Indian government cordoned off the region. Scientists then apparently unearthed an ancient city where they found evidence of an atomic blast dating back thousands of years: from 8,000 to 12,000 years.

The blast was said to have destroyed most of the buildings and probably a half-million people.
Archeologist Francis Taylor stated that etchings in some nearby temples he translated suggested that they prayed to be spared from the great light that was coming to lay ruin to the city.

 

Crater Near Bombay

Another curious sign of an ancient nuclear war in India is a giant crater near Bombay. The nearly circular 2,154-metre-diameter Lonar crater (left image), located 400 kilometers northeast of Bombay and aged at less than 50,000 years old, could be related to nuclear warfare of antiquity. No trace of any meteoric material, etc., has been found at the site or in the vicinity, and this is the world’s only known “impact” crater in basalt...  Full post >>  

back to the future all over again

Precession and the Golden Age: How Much Did the Ancients Know?

By: WALTER CRUTTENDEN
By: Archaeoastronomer and Author

 

    In 1901, divers working off the Greek island of Antikythera found the remains of a 2,000-year-old clocklike mechanism. Now in the Greek National Archaeological Museum, the extraordinary find is a complex assembly of twenty or more precision gears designed to compute the motions of the Sun, Moon and planets. Nothing comparable is known from ancient scientific texts, and from a traditional historic point of view, such a mechanism should not have existed for at least another thousand years. The discovery of the Antikythera Device is equivalent to finding a supercomputer on a farm in the 18th century.

    Archaeological finds that upset our current understanding of history are growing increasingly common. The incredible discovery of six pyramids in Caral, Peru, is a case in point. These structures that surround a huge plaza and circular kivas (no one knows what they were used for) have been reliably dated to 4,700 B.C. That is 400 years before the accepted date of the Great pyramid at Giza. Like the Greek computing device, they are out of place and out of time sequence with our current understanding of history. It was not expected that ancient people in South America built pyramids before the Egyptians.

    The Antikythera device, ancient pyramids, astronomically aligned megaliths and similar structures found around the world were apparently built to monitor the movement of the heavens – at least that could be one of their uses. The vast majority of Neolithic tombs built prior to about 1000 B.C. in Europe and North Africa; ziggurats of the Middle East; henges and great stone markers in Britain and around the world, appear to be oriented toward the equinox, solstices or four cardinal points. With this preponderance of evidence it now seems likely these ancient builders not only understood the motions of the heavens but most likely tracked the precession of the equinox as well.

Precession of the Equinox

The “precession of the equinox” is the slow movement of the equinox (that point in time each Spring and Fall when night and day are of equal length – and the Earth’s axis sits at an exact ninety degree angle to the Sun) against the background constellations.

    Today, on the first day of spring––the Vernal Equinox– if you look due east at sunrise, you can see the constellation Pisces is fading from view and Aquarius is rising to take its place. This is what is meant by the “dawning of the age of Aquarius”. It is not just an astrological colloquialism but a convenient way for layman or astronomer alike to note the rough position of the equinox relative to the twelve constellations of the zodiac.

    The equinox moves slowly taking about 24,000 years, more or less, to precess through all twelve signs and return to its starting position. Plato called this cyclical time period the “Great Year”. The motion of the equinox is how one tells the time within this great cycle.

    Although most historians and scientists still teach that the precession of the equinox was not discovered until about 150 B.C. by Hipparcus, that is now being questioned. Giorgio de Santillana, the late professor of the history of science at MIT, documented in his book, Hamlet’s Mill, that this cycle was well known to dozens of ancient cultures around the world. In fact he tells us the Great Year is one of the most prevalent myths of all time, as popular as the great flood myth.

Dark and Golden Ages

 

Ancestral people acknowledged the precession of the equinox and believed the Great Year had its seasons. Similar to yet different than the seasons of spring, summer, fall and winter in the solar year - the Great Year was thought to be punctuated with a Golden Age of incredible beauty at one end, and a Dark Age of misery at the other. The Vedic Indians and early Mediterranean cultures had different names for these periods of the Great Year, and the Greeks simply called them the Iron, Bronze, Silver and Golden Ages. Thus, there was a valid reason why we find ancient cultures so intent on tracking the precession of the equinox.

    Just as we want to know our place in the solar year with its changing conditions, ancient people wanted to know their place in the Great Year. Many of the ancient myths, before the last Dark Age, spoke of a long lost Golden Age and lamented the coming of the Dark Age and its pending loss of culture and knowledge.

    And this is what an examination of the archaeological record shows. Around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago Mohenjodaro and the Indus Valley were in full bloom; the megaliths of Britain and the great pyramids in Caral, Peru, and Giza were newly constructed; the ziggurats, gardens, dams and great water systems of Mesopotamia were fully functioning. A vast agricultural civilization also existed within the Amazon and much of the Americas, and the amazing fifty-ton, carved architectural columns of Gobekli, Turkey , were already 5,000 years old! ... Read full article >>

the true classic of terrorism

New York Times

September 11, 2005

By TOM REISS

''The Secret Agent,'' Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel about an anarchist plot to blow up the Royal Observatory at Greenwich -- in fact, a scheme by a secret police agent to stir up a government backlash -- has acquired a kind of cult status as the classic novel for the post-9/11 age. Conrad's villain, the Professor, who never goes out without a glass vial of high explosives in his breast pocket and a detonator in his palm, has been taken to be a prescient portrait of the terrorists who menace our own world.

Few remark on Joseph Conrad's ''other'' great novel of terrorism, ''Under Western Eyes,'' published in 1911. Perhaps the problem is that it rhapsodizes not about detonators of chemicals but on the explosive materials of the soul -- and also that its terrorists are a bit too close to home: educated, middle-class, lofty in their delusions, yet far from the satisfying diagnosis of simple psychopathy.

[ ... ]

Though often invoked earnestly, ''The Secret Agent'' is essentially a satire of British and European attitudes toward terrorism and counterterrorism. Except for a handful of characters, the novel is populated by allegorical cartoons -- the wily Russian Mr. Vladimir, the meddling flatfoot Chief Inspector Heat, the haughty British aristocrat Sir Ethelred -- and the plot, deliberately small-scale, is based on a real-life, fairly harmless incident that occurred when an anarchist tried to blow up the Royal Observatory in 1894. In the novel, the attack is concocted by a secret agent of a foreign power in order to make the British change their liberal ways and crack down on terrorists. (This part of the story seems stunningly up-to-date: ''England lags,'' says the diplomat who hatches the plot. ''This country is absurd with its sentimental regard for individual liberty.'') The real evil of the novel emerges from the exigencies of counterterrorism, not the anarchist plotting itself.

Conrad began writing during the first great terrorist wave of modern times. From 1881 to 1901, the death toll from anarchist attacks included two American presidents (Garfield and McKinley), one French president (Carnot), a Spanish prime minister (Canovas), an Austrian empress (Elizabeth) and an Italian king (Umberto I). Paris anarchists hurled their ''engines'' on the floor of the Bourse and in crowded theaters and cafes.

Yet despite its high profile in Europe, terrorist violence had a far greater scope within the czarist empire. The first generation of Russian terrorists came out of the 60's counterculture -- the 1860's in Russia bearing a striking similarity to the 1960's in the United States, with Russian students growing their hair, following gurus who extolled the ''new man'' and starting communes. Some of the students fell into the emerging terrorist underground, joining groups with names like ''Hell'' and ''the People's Will,'' bent on assassinating the czar and bringing on revolution.

[ ...]

By 1911, Conrad was living in London, a British subject, while the empire into which he'd been born was in upheaval. Thousands were being killed or wounded by terrorists every year; newspapers had introduced special sections devoted to printing daily lists of political assassinations and bombings. That year ''Under Western Eyes'' was published. Instead of presenting eccentric anarchists pursuing images of ruin and destruction, it explores why real young people throw away promising careers and family ties to become terrorists, and so feels especially resonant now. The terrorist threat of the day comes from ''the East.'' Indeed, the Russian East was seen at the time much as the Islamic East is seen now: as vast and violent and unfathomable, the seat of despotism and religious fanaticism.

[ ... ]

The event that sets the plot in motion is based on the day in 1881 when the People's Will assassinated Czar Alexander II, the ''liberator czar'' of Russia's serfs, only Conrad substitutes a more recent and less sympathetic victim, the ruthless interior minister de Plehve, who was blown up in his carriage in 1904. As the story opens, the hero, Razumov -- the name means ''son of reason'' -- a diligent, apolitical student, is visited at midnight by a classmate he barely knows named Haldin, who announces, ''It was I who removed de P this morning.'' His bomb also killed a number of bystanders, ''reckless -- like a butcher,'' admits Haldin. Razumov says little but thinks furiously while his idealistic classmate defends his act: ''This is not murder -- it is war, war. . . . The modern civilization is false, but a new revelation shall come.'' Razumov decides that, rather than helping Haldin escape, he will betray him to the police.

The novel's second half takes place in Geneva, among an international tea-circle of ruthless terrorists biding their time in exile. Now it is Razumov's turn to drift in uninvited, and only we are the wiser that he has become a government spy.

''Under Western Eyes'' is less tightly constructed than ''The Secret Agent,'' but when it puts us into the psychic world of the terrorists, a place where violent action is the ultimate proof of sincerity, it is dazzling, unique. We see the cult of the suicide bomber in the mystic terrorists of 100 years ago: ''The mere mention of his achievement plunges me into an envious ecstasy,'' swoons a terrorist salon hostess about Haldin. ''Why should a man certain of immortality think of his life at all?'' The act of entering into this world was apparently so disturbing to the son of Apollo Korzeniowski thathe suffered a kind of nervous breakdown while completing ''Under Western Eyes'' and, according to his wife, for months afterward he would speak to the characters of his story as if in a dream....   Full article >>