THE URINE REVIEW: December 27, 2001
(All the lowlights from another pissy year...)
I SEE DEAD PEOPLE
As usual, what really pissed me off this year is
the injustice all over our stupid planet. While a few fat bastards are
fighting over all the cake, billions of human beings live in atrocious
conditions. Exhibit A: on Sept. 11, while something like 3,000 people
perished in New York City, almost 40,000 children died of hunger
worldwide. And, according to UNICEF's State of the World's Children
Report, another 35-40,000 died each and every day of 2001. So what do
we do? We spend over one hundred billion dollars (so far) chasing a
handful of terrorists down some caves. Where might we have spent that
money? Let's start with the basics (all figures from the United
Nations 1998 Human Development report): $9 billion could provide clean
water and sanitation for everyone on earth, $12 billion could provide
reproductive health services for all women worldwide, $13 billion
could give everyone on Earth enough food to eat; $6 billion could
provide basic education for everyone who now lacks it. And we've still
got about 60 billion bucks to play with. So you see, the solutions are
right in front of our eyes. But instead, 2001 was filled with
horrific, infuriating stories such as the following. Enjoy!
BUSINESS IS BRISK IN THE LIVE HUMAN ORGAN TRADE
An article in uPhoria
magazine paints a disturbing picture of the black market trade in live
human organs around the world. According to the donor bank employee
interviewed in this article, the human body is worth about $35,000,
and the skeleton can be sold for $200 a gram. Corporations such as
Osteotech and Cryolife Inc. contribute to a multi-billion dollar
industry by, for example, buying hearts from India for $150 and
selling them for $5000. The most horrifying news is that healthy
children who are brought to doctors in "third world" countries are
often unnecessarily operated on so that the doctor can sell their
organs or eyes to these corporations.
GOSH, WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT CLONING COULD HAVE SIDE EFFECTS?
The New
York Times has published an article that reveals that scientific
evidence is mounting that cloning is not only more difficult than
expected (with, at most, a three per cent success rate), but also
often results in severe developmental delays, heart defects, lung
problems and malfunctioning immune systems. Cloning experts and
developmental biologists have discovered that cloning creates random
errors in the expression of individual genes. These errors can then
produce unpredictable problems at any time in the life of the animal.
Examples included cloned mice who developed normally and then grew
grotesquely fat as adults, and cow clones born with enlarged hearts or
lungs that don't develop properly.
HOW ABOUT A REFRESHING COCKTAIL OF TOXIC ROCKET FUEL?
How much would
it cost to get you to eat rocket fuel every day for six months? How
about a cool grand? Sound absurd? The military contractor Lockheed
Martin has begun the first large-scale tests of a toxic drinking water
contaminant on human subjects, paying them each $1,000 to ingest a
daily dose of perchlorate, an ingredient in rocket fuel. This, because
perchlorate has been found to be the likely source of contamination of
hundreds of water supplies in southern California, and the
Environmental Protection Agency will begin testing water supplies this
year to set national regulations on the chemical. If the military
giant can persuade the EPA that perchlorate is a "safe" ingredient to
drink, they will save millions of dollars in cleanup costs. The most
absurd thing about this story is that they had no trouble finding 100
doorknobs to take the thousand bucks. (Los Angeles Times)
MODERN SLAVERY
The American Anti-Slavery Group estimates that there
are still 27 million people living as slaves in the modern world.
While countries like Mauritania and Sudan continue blatant slave
buying, selling and trading, even America has an estimated population
of one million slaves, as illegal immigrants are brought into the
country and are forced to work or threatened with imprisonment if
turned over to authorities. (Newsweek)
BETTER GET ANOTHER OPINION
Following a 1999 report from the Institute
of Medicine that revealed that as many as 100,000 North Americans die
annually from medical malpractice, comes a survey of 1200 doctors,
nurses and hospital executives which found that 95 per cent of doctors
and 89 per cent of nurses have witnessed a "serious medical error." In
case you missed it, the 1999 report concluded that iatrogenic (caused
my medical treatment) illness was the third leading killer in North
America, after tobacco and alcohol, but ahead of traffic accidents and
shootings. (Reuters)
PSYCHO KILLERS
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights has released a
list of hundreds of cases of murders, suicides, and extreme violence
from the past 15 years and found the common denominator in all of
these were the use of antidepressants or tranquilizers by those
committing the violent acts. The bottom line is that psychiatric drugs
such as Ritalin, Lithium, Zoloft and Luvox sometimes cause severe side
effects that cause hostility and violence. "Psychiatric drugs cause
violence," concludes the report. "Not everyone who takes a psychiatric
drug commits acts of violence, but clearly some do. The research is
unequivocal." (www.cchr.org)
MIND CONTROL FOR DUMMIES
If you've never heard about MK-ULTRA, there
is a brilliant primer for beginners at www.guerrillanews.com. Check
out the eight-minute film that lays out the facts about the CIA's most
controversial program ever. The Most Dangerous Game traces the roots
of psychological warfare from 1946, when America imported Nazi
scientists to the States in order to keep them out of Russian hands.
These guys didn't get enough hugs as children, as they went on to
develop brainwashing techniques that included electro-shock treatment,
light and sound deprivation, physical torture, and drugs such as PCP,
mescaline, amphetamines and LSD to destroy the wills of innocent
civilian and military subjects.
WHEN GOOD COSMIC BEINGS GO BAD
The leader of a UFO cult in Brazil is
being sought by authorities under suspicion that the cult she leads,
the Superior Universal Alignment, has used at least 13 children for
"ritual satanic purposes." I'll leave the details to your imagination,
because what they are accused of is pretty vile. The authorities also
claim that after the ritual abuse, the children are murdered and their
vital organs are sold on the black market. 70-year-old Valentina de
Andrade, who claims to be a cosmic entity of "light, love and truth"
is reportedly hiding in Buenos Aires, Argentina. (Institute of
Hispanic Ufology)
GETTING HIT ON THE HEAD LESSONS
The town of Eskisehir, Turkey, is
doing its part in bringing us back to the dark ages by staging boxing
matches between four-year-old girls. CNN-Turk reports that a female
boxing tournament in that town included a fight between the youngsters
who "exchanged blows to the head and repeatedly knocked each other
down." Despite fears that boxing at age four could complicate neural
development, fight promoter Aysun Aygun, a trainer for the Turkish
national female boxing team, said that boxing "teaches young children
discipline."
FIND THE ENEMY, KILL THE OCEANS
Looks like the U.S. military is at it
again. This time, it's the Navy, who have been secretly testing their
"Low Frequency Active" (LFA) sonar in the world's oceans for years,
and in the process deafening and killing dolphins and whales. Now the
Navy is seeking approval to deploy LFA Sonar (which is designed to
detect enemy submarines) across 80 per cent of the world's oceans.
Scientists are concerned that acoustic waves from the LFA, which is
billions of times more intense than that known to disturb whale
migration and communication, will damage their hearing and interfere
with "vital biological activities of marine mammals." Others fear that
long-term exposure to LFA could push entire populations of dolphins or
whales to extinction. Anyone who cares is asked to help protest this
move at the website of the Natural Resources Defense Council at
www.nrdc.org.
THE FUTURE IS PHAT
Among the many predictions tossed around at the
annual convention of the World Future Society last week, comes the
news from Thomas T. Samaras, a science and medical researcher from San
Diego, that "based on current trends, 100 percent of Americans will be
obese" within the next 100 years. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinal)
CAN YOU SAY "GOD COMPLEX"
Here's the most ludicrous scientific
proposal I've heard in a while: a team of American astronomers claims
that it would be "alarmingly simple" to move the Earth into a
different orbit and to move other planets into new orbits in order to
make them hospitable for human life. The researchers claim that in a
billion years the sun will be 10% brighter than it is now, and in
three billion years the sun will be 40% brighter. In order to avoid "a
definite end to life on our planet," the astronomers envision
increasing the radius of the Earth's orbit. While they're at it, they
figure they can move around the other planets and moons in our Solar
System, making some of them suitable for human life. I would recommend
these geniuses think of some solutions for the problems we have now,
or we won't be here in a billion years, duh... (BBC)
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Copyright 2002 by Andreas Ohrt
Email:aohrt@hotmail.com
Website:www.curioustimes.com