XIAM007

Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World

Thursday 26 January 2012

Oklahoma state senator has introduced a bill that would ban the use of Aborted Human Fetuses in Food -

Oklahoma state senator has introduced a bill that would ban the use of Aborted Human Fetuses in Food - 






Based on something he read online, an Oklahoma state senator has introduced a bill that would ban the use of aborted human fetuses in food.


Yes, you read that correctly.


No, he's never heard of any instances of this happening before, Sen. Ralph Shortey told the Associated Press.


But Shortey read that it might be happening, so he thought the bill would, at the very least, give any food companies toying with the idea an "ultimatum."


The legislation, known as SB 1418, is only a couple of paragraphs long. It states:


"No person or entity shall manufacture or knowingly sell food or any other product intended for human consumption which contains aborted human fetuses in the ingredients or which used aborted human fetuses in the research or development of any of the ingredients."


Shortey, a father of two who worked as an oil and gas production consultant, told the Associated Press that he found online evidence that some companies outside of Oklahoma use embryonic stem cells to develop artificial flavors.


Shortey did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday, but the Daily Oklahoman reported his motivation for the bill:  "Shortey said he filed the bill after reading last fall that an anti-abortion group, Children of God for Life, had called on the public in March 2010 to boycott products of major food companies that partnered with a biotech company that produces artificial flavor enhancers, unless the company stopped using aborted fetal cells to test their products. The company has denied the allegation."


Federal food safety officials have never heard of such a thing. A U.S. Food and Drug Administration spokeswoman told the Associated Press that the agency has never gotten any reports of fetuses being used in food production.


Shortey, elected in 2010, has introduced a spat of controversial bills including denying Oklahoma citizenship to children of illegal immigrants born in the state. Another bill he wrote would have allowed police to confiscate the homes and cars of illegal immigrants. He also tried to advance a bill that would have required presidential candidates to provide proof of citizenship before being allowed on Oklahoma's primary ballot. 


Read more - 
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2012/01/oklahoma-lawmaker-ban-fetuses-food.html

Pat Sajak says he and Vanna White got drunk before 'Wheel of Fortune' tapings back in the day -

Pat Sajak says he and Vanna White got drunk before 'Wheel of Fortune' tapings back in the day - 


Pat Sajak admits that in the early days of "Wheel of Fortune" he and Vanna White would knock back a few during breaks.
He was asked on ESPN 2's "Dan Le Batard is Highly Questionable" whether he was ever intoxicated on the show. Sajak responded with a laugh, "Yes," People reported. "When I first started and was much younger and could tolerate those things. We had a different show then.
At the time, the show had a long break during tapings when he and White would go to a nearby Mexican restaurant for margaritas.
"Vanna and I would ... have two or three or six and then come and do the last shows and have trouble recognizing the alphabet," he said. "I had a great time. I have no idea if the shows were any good, but no one said anything, so I guess I did OK."




Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/01/26/pat-sajak-says-vanna-white-got-drunk-before-wheel-fortune-tapings-back-in-day/?intcmp=features

116 people turned down honour from Queen in past three years -

116 people turned down honour from Queen in past three years - 


The Daily Telegraph disclosed yesterday for the first time the official list of everyone who rejected an honour between 1949 and 1999, and has since died.
Pressure is mounting on ministers to release the identities of other people who have rejected an honour in the past decade.
New figures from the Cabinet Office show that over the past three years 116 people have rejected honours, but they are not identified.
They show that 30 people turned down honours in last year’s Queen’s Birthday and New Year’s honours lists. That compared with 46 in 2010 and 40 in 2009.
Authors JB Priestley and Roald Dahl and the painters Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and LS Lowry were among 277 people on the list, which was disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act after a 15 month battle with the Cabinet Office


Read more - 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/honours-list/9041875/Revealed-116-people-have-turned-down-an-honour-in-three-years.html

Japanese Finance Ministry made a whopper of an announcement: Year ending March 2013, Debt = One Quadrillion Yen -

Japanese Finance Ministry made a whopper of an announcement: Year ending March 2013, Debt = One Quadrillion Yen - 

Yesterday the Japanese Finance Ministry made a whopper of an announcement: in the year ending March 2013, total Japanese debt will surpass one quadrillion yen, or ¥1,086,000,000,000,000. This is roughly in line with the Zero Hedge expectations that by this March total Japanese debt would surpass one quadrillion yen. In USD terms, at today's exchange rate, this is precisely $14 trillion. And while smaller than America's $15.4 trillion (net of all post debt ceiling breach auctions), which was $14 trillion about a year ago, the GDP backing this notional amount of debt, which just so happens is greater than the GDP of the entire Euro area, is a modest ¥481 trillion, so by the end of the next fiscal year, Japan will have a Debt to GDP ratio of 225%. And that's not counting all the household and financial debt. So prepare to add quadrillion to the vernacular. At this exponential rate of increase quintillion will appear some time in 2015 and so on. Yet the scariest conclusion is that as Bloomberg economist Joseph Brusuelas points out, America is not only next, it already is Japan. Actually scratch that, America is worse than Japan, which at least generated a real housing bubble in the years just preceding the onset of its multi-decade credit crunch, something not even America could do in comparable terms. More importantly, "the debt-to-GDP ratio of the U.S. recently surpassed 100 percent, and it did so in the four years after the onset of the recession, compared with the six years it took the Japanese debt-to-GDP ratio to do so." The Japanese may be better than America in most things, but when it comes to destroying its economy, the US has no equal. Brusuelas' conclusion: "If below trend growth is the most probable scenario in the U.S., the most likely alternative is that the U.S. economy is headed for a lost decade… or two." So... go all in?


Read more - 
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/%C2%A51086000000000000-quadrillion-debt-and-rising-and-whythe-%C2%A5-will-soon-be-lost-decade-or-two

Physicists Discover Quantum Speed Limit -

Physicists Discover Quantum Speed Limit - 




The speed of light is the cosmic speed limit, according to physicists’ best understanding: No information can be carried at a greater rate, no matter what method is used. But an analogous speed limit seems to exist within materials, where the interactions between particles are typically very short-range and motion is far slower than light-speed. A new set of experiments and simulations by Marc Cheneau and colleagues have identified this maximum velocity, which has implications for quantum entanglement and quantum computations.


In non-relativistic systems, where particle speeds are much less than the speed of light, interactions still occur very quickly, and they often involve lots of particles. As a result, measuring the speed of interactions within materials has been difficult. The theoretical speed limit is set by the Lieb-Robinson bound, which describes how a change in one part of a system propagates through the rest of the material. In this new study, the Lieb-Robinson bound was quantified experimentally for the first time, using a real quantum gas.


Within a lattice (such as a crystalline solid), a particle primarily interacts with its nearest neighbors. For example, the spin of an electron in a magnetically susceptible material depends mainly on the orientation of the spins of its neighbors on each side. Flipping one electron’s spin will affect the electrons nearest to it.


But the effect also propagates throughout the rest of the material — other spins may themselves flip, or experience a change in energy resulting from the original electron’s behavior. These longer-range interactions can be swamped out by extraneous effects, like lattice vibrations. But it’s possible to register them in very cold systems, as lattice vibrations die out near absolute zero.


Read more - 
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/01/quantum-information-speed/