If you eat chicken, please watch this report from UK’s, The Guardian.
Two-thirds of fresh retail chicken in the UK is contaminated with campylobacter, a nasty bug that affects about 280,000 people a year.
Sickening chicken production is not just confined to the UK. Remember to buy organic.
Three of the UK’s leading supermarkets have launched emergency investigations into their chicken supplies after a Guardian investigation uncovered a catalogue of alleged hygiene failings in the poultry industry.
Undercover footage, photographic evidence and information from whistleblowers has revealed how strict industry hygiene standards to prevent the contamination of chicken with the potentially deadly campylobacter bug can be flouted on the factory floor and on farms.
As high as two out of every three chicken could be contaminated.
“Margins are low, so volumes have to be high and a few key players control the market.” Yet this drive for cheaper and cheaper meat has dangerous consequences. Undercover footage, photographic evidence and accounts from whistleblowers reveal a catalogue of hygiene failings in a poultry industry that supplies the likes of KFC, Tesco, Aldi, Asda, Marks & Spencer and Nando’s. Two-thirds of fresh retail chicken in the UK is contaminated with campylobacter, making more than 250,000 of us sick every year. Ron Spellman, Leader of The European Association of Meat Inspectors, is shocked by the incriminating evidence from one factory. “My god. It’s just unbelievable the amount of guts there are on the floor”.
Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed: The Real Reason For The 40 Hour Workweek
by DAVID CAIN
Work 40 hours per week and you feel the need to spend in order to enjoy your free time more?
Well I’m in the working world again. I’ve found myself a well-paying gig in the engineering industry, and life finally feels like it’s returning to normal after my nine months of traveling.
Because I had been living quite a different lifestyle while I was away, this sudden transition to 9-to-5 existence has exposed something about it that I overlooked before.
Since the moment I was offered the job, I’ve been markedly more careless with my money. Not stupid, just a little quick to pull out my wallet. As a small example, I’m buying expensive coffees again, even though they aren’t nearly as good as New Zealand’s exceptional flat whites, and I don’t get to savor the experience of drinking them on a sunny café patio. When I was away these purchases were less off-handed, and I enjoyed them more.
I’m not talking about big, extravagant purchases. I’m talking about small-scale, casual, promiscuous spending on stuff that doesn’t really add a whole lot to my life. And I won’t actually get paid for another two weeks.
In hindsight I think I’ve always done this when I’ve been well-employed — spending happily during the “flush times.” Having spent nine months living a no-income backpacking lifestyle, I can’t help but be a little more aware of this phenomenon as it happens.
I suppose I do it because I feel I’ve regained a certain stature, now that I am again an amply-paid professional, which seems to entitle me to a certain level of wastefulness. There is a curious feeling of power you get when you drop a couple of twenties without a trace of critical thinking. It feels good to exercise that power of the dollar when you know it will “grow back” pretty quickly anyway.
What I’m doing isn’t unusual at all. Everyone else seems to do this. In fact, I think I’ve only returned to the normal consumer mentality after having spent some time away from it.
Relaxing on the lawn costs nothing and is much healthier than TV or X-box.
One of the most surprising discoveries I made during my trip was that I spent much less per month traveling foreign counties (including countries more expensive than Canada) than I did as a regular working joe back home. I had much more free time, I was visiting some of the most beautiful places in the world, I was meeting new people left and right, I was calm and peaceful and otherwise having an unforgettable time, and somehow it cost me much less than my humble 9-5 lifestyle here in one of Canada’s least expensive cities.
It seems I got much more for my dollar when I was traveling. Why?
A Culture of Unnecessaries
Here in the West, a lifestyle of unnecessary spending has been deliberately cultivated and nurtured in the public by big business. Companies in all kinds of industries have a huge stake in the public’s penchant to be careless with their money. They will seek to encourage the public’s habit of casual or non-essential spending whenever they can.
Corporations spend millions to get your kids to nag you to make purchases. It’s true.
In the documentary The Corporation, a marketing psychologist discussed one of the methods she used to increase sales. Her staff carried out a study on what effect the nagging of children had on their parents’ likelihood of buying a toy for them. They found out that 20% to 40% of the purchases of their toyswould not have occurred if the child didn’t nag its parents. One in four visits to theme parks would not have taken place. They used these studies to market their products directly to children, encouraging them to nag their parents to buy.
This marketing campaign alone represents many millions of dollars that were spent because of demand that was completely manufactured.
“You can manipulate consumers into wanting, and therefore buying, your products. It’s a game.” ~ Lucy Hughes, co-creator of “The Nag Factor”
This is only one small example of something that has been going on for a very long time. Big companies didn’t make their millions by earnestly promoting the virtues of their products, they made it by creating a culture of hundreds of millions of people that buy way more than they need and try to chase away dissatisfaction with money.
We buy things to make us happy. But do they really make us happy?
We buy stuff to cheer ourselves up, to keep up with the Joneses, to fulfill our childhood vision of what our adulthood would be like, to broadcast our status to the world, and for a lot of other psychological reasons that have very little to do with how useful the product really is. How much stuff is in your basement or garage that you haven’t used in the past year? The real reason for the forty-hour workweek.
The ultimate tool for corporations to sustain a culture of this sort is to develop the 40-hour workweek as the normal lifestyle. Under these working conditions people have to build a life in the evenings and on weekends. This arrangement makes us naturally more inclined to spend heavily on entertainment and conveniences because our free time is so scarce.
I’ve only been back at work for a few days, but already I’m noticing that the more wholesome activities are quickly dropping out of my life: walking, exercising, reading, meditating, and extra writing.
The one conspicuous similarity between these activities is that they cost little or no money, but they take time.
Suddenly I have a lot more money and a lot less time, which means I have a lot more in common with the typical working North American than I did a few months ago. While I was abroad I wouldn’t have thought twice about spending the day wandering through a national park or reading my book on the beach for a few hours. Now that kind of stuff feels like it’s out of the question. Doing either one would take most of one of my precious weekend days!
The last thing I want to do when I get home from work is exercise. It’s also the last thing I want to do after dinner or before bed or as soon as I wake, and that’s really all the time I have on a weekday.
This seems like a problem with a simple answer: work less so I’d have more free time. I’ve already proven to myself that I can live a fulfilling lifestyle with less than I make right now. Unfortunately, this is close to impossible in my industry, and most others. You work 40-plus hours or you work zero. My clients and contractors are all firmly entrenched in the standard-workday culture, so it isn’t practical to ask them not to ask anything of me after 1pm, even if I could convince my employer not to.
The eight-hour workday developed during the industrial revolution in Britain in the 19th century, as a respite for factory workers who were being exploited with 14- or 16-hour workdays.
As technologies and methods advanced, workers in all industries became able to produce much more value in a shorter amount of time. You’d think this would lead to shorter workdays.
But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.
We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.
Western economies, particularly that of the United States, have been built in a very calculated manner on gratification, addiction, and unnecessary spending. We spend to cheer ourselves up, to reward ourselves, to celebrate, to fix problems, to elevate our status, and to alleviate boredom.
Can you imagine what would happen if all of America stopped buying so much unnecessary fluff that doesn’t add a lot of lasting value to our lives?
The economy would collapse and never recover.
All of America’s well-publicized problems, including obesity, depression, pollution and corruption are what it costs to create and sustain a trillion-dollar economy. For the economy to be “healthy”, America has to remain unhealthy. Healthy, happy people don’t feel like they need much they don’t already have, and that means they don’t buy a lot of junk, don’t need to be entertained as much, and they don’t end up watching a lot of commercials.
The culture of the eight-hour workday is big business’ most powerful tool for keeping people in this same dissatisfied state where the answer to every problem is to buy something.
You may have heard of Parkinson’s Law. It is often used in reference to time usage: the more time you’ve been given to do something, the more time it will take you to do it. It’s amazing how much you can get done in twenty minutes if twenty minutes is all you have. But if you have all afternoon, it would probably take way longer.
Most of us treat our money this way. The more we make, the more we spend. It’s not that we suddenly need to buy more just because we make more, only that we can, so we do. In fact, it’s quite difficult for us to avoid increasing our standard of living (or at least our rate of spending) every time we get a raise.
I don’t think it’s necessary to shun the whole ugly system and go live in the woods, pretending to be a deaf-mute, as Holden Caulfield often fantasized. But we could certainly do well to understand what big commerce really wants us to be. They’ve been working for decades to create millions of ideal consumers, and they have succeeded. Unless you’re a real anomaly, your lifestyle has already been designed.
The perfect customer is dissatisfied but hopeful, uninterested in serious personal development, highly habituated to the television, working full-time, earning a fair amount, indulging during their free time, and somehow just getting by.
Is this you?
Two weeks ago I would have said hell no, that’s not me, but if all my weeks were like this one has been, that might be wishful thinking.
A giant femur. Smithsonian destroys giant skeletons.
A US Supreme Court ruling has forced the Smithsonian institution to release classified papers dating from the early 1900′s that proves the organization was involved in a major historical cover up of evidence showing giants human remains in the tens of thousands had been uncovered all across America and were ordered to be destroyed by high level administrators to protect the mainstream chronology of human evolution at the time.
The allegations stemming from the American Institution of Alternative Archeology (AIAA) that the Smithsonian Institution had destroyed thousands of giant human remains during the early 1900′s was not taken lightly by the Smithsonian who responded by suing the organization for defamation and trying to damage the reputation of the 168-year old institution.
During the court case, new elements were brought to light as several Smithsonian whistle blowers admitted to the existence of documents that allegedly proved the destruction of tens of thousands of human skeletons reaching between 6 feet and 12 feet in height, a reality mainstream archeology can not admit to for different reasons, claims AIAA spokesman, James Churward.
«There has been a major cover up by western archaeological institutions since the early 1900′s to make us believe that America was first colonized by Asian peoples migrating through the Bering Strait 15,000 years ago, when in fact, there are hundreds of thousands of burial mounds all over America which the Natives claim were there a long time before them, and that show traces of a highly developed civilization, complex use of metal alloys and where giant human skeleton remains are frequently found but still go unreported in the media and news outlets» he explains.
Giant bones were destroyed by the Smithsonian Institute.
A turning point of the court case was when a 1.3 meter long human femur bone was shown as evidence in court of the existence of such giant human bones. The evidence came as a blow to the Smithsonian’s lawyers as the bone had been stolen from the Smithsonian by one of their high level curators in the mid 1930′s who had kept the bone all his life and which had admitted on his deathbed in writing of the undercover operations of the Smithsonian.
«It is a terrible thing that is being done to the American people» he wrote in the letter. «We are hiding the truth about the forefathers of humanity, our ancestors, the giants who roamed the earth as recalled in the Bible and ancient texts of the world».
The US Supreme Court has since forced the Smithsonian Institution to publicly release classified information about anything related to the “destruction of evidence pertaining to the mound builder culture” and to elements “relative to human skeletons of greater height than usual”, a ruling the AIAA is extremely enthused about.
«The public release of these documents will help archaeologists and historians to reevaluate current theories about human evolution and help us greater our understanding of the mound builder culture in America and around the world» explains AIAA director, Hans Guttenberg. «Finally, after over a century of lies, the truth about our giant ancestors shall be revealed to the world» he acknowledges, visibly satisfied by the court ruling.
A site on Apache Mountain, where many Apache warriors jumped to their deaths in order to avoid the U.S. cavalry, may soon overlook a copper mine.
Thanks, John McCain!
Of course they stuck this into the NDAA because they know the NDAA always passes, regardless of the horrible things that may be hidden in there. No elected official wants to be seen as “unpatriotic” for voting no on the “defense” bill.
On December 4th, the House passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which included a provision to transfer 2,400 acres of Apache ancestral and ceremonial lands to a foreign mining company.
“Since time immemorial people have gone there. That’s part of our ancestral homeland. We’ve had dancers in that area forever – sunrise dancers – and coming-of-age ceremonies for our young girls that become women. They’ll seal that off. They’ll seal us off from the acorn grounds, and the medicinal plants in the area, and our prayer areas.”
~ Terry Rambler, chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe
Prior to the House vote, the House and Senate Armed Services Committee attached a provision to the NDAA that would transfer Apache ancestral lands located in the Tonto National Forest to Resolution Copper, a subsidiary of Rio Tinto an Australian-English mining company. Sen. John McCain (R- AZ) was instrumental in pushing to get the provision language included.
All 2,400 acres are part of Apache ancestral and ceremonial lands. So although Republican lawmakers have tried for years to secure the transfer of these lands, they have always run into strong opposition from the San Carlos Apache Tribe and Democratic lawmakers and conservation advocates.
“The blatant greed being presented by these members of congress is astounding. The company has spent a fortune buying candidates for office in the same way one would collect baseball cards. And now for their thousands per candidate, they expect to destroy the cultural heritage of a native tribe for billions. How much is our collective cultural heritage worth? To these candidates, not much at all it seems. Legalized bribery has made them no longer stewards of our nation, but instead greedy puppets of corporate masters, willing to dance on their string for the crumbs tossed to them. Disgraceful.”
~addicitinginfo.org
Apache leaders learned of the inclusion of the provision to the NDAA while attending, ironically, the White House Tribal Nations conference. Republican lawmakers have tried for years to secure the transfer of these lands, but have always run into strong opposition from the San Carlos Apache Tribe and Democratic lawmakers.
Christopher Dunn – Author of the best selling book on the pyramids “The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt ” photo: gizapyramid.com
Have you read the theory from Christopher Dunn about the Great Pyramid on the Giza Plateau being first used as a power plant? Dunn is a master craftsman and an engineer and has long argued that ancient Egyptians had used far advanced power tools in their intricate cutting and working of granite and other hard stone. This has led him to contemplate, at length, the source of the energy required by the these power tools, and to ultimately propose that the Great Pyramid of Giza was the power plant at the center of an ancient, hi-tech national power grid!
Dunn’s initial book The Giza Power Plant was published in 1998 by Inner Traditions – Bear & Company. In it, Dunn argues that based on his measurements of Egyptian monuments, ancient stone cutting achieved a high-precision accuracy surpassing modern accuracy standards in building.
Dunn has published many magazine articles on his hypotheses concerning ancient technology, including an August 1984 article “Advanced Machining in Ancient Egypt” in Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine.
Dunn wrote the foreword to Edward F. Malkowski’s 2007 publication The Spiritual Technology of Ancient Egypt: Sacred Science and the Mystery of Consciousness.
He also produced the DVD documentaries The Giza Power Plant and Ancient Wisdom: Christopher Dunn: Ancient Power Plants And Advanced Technology: Egypt In The New Millennium.
In 2010 Dunn’s second book “Lost Technologies of Ancient Egypt: Advanced Engineering in the Temples of the Pharaohs” was published (Bear & Company). In it Dunn documents repeatable precision three-dimensional machining, sometimes highly symmetrical, on the oversized statues in Egyptian temples similar in nature – and all but identical – with such machining as is capable of being made on modern computer controlled machining centers (CNCs). Dunn stops short of drawing conclusions of how such precision was accomplished, arguing only that it happened.
Chris Dunn holds the position of Project Engineer and Laser Operations Manager at Danville Metal Stamping, a Midwest aerospace manufacturer. He is now a senior manager with that company. photo: gizapyramid.com
“Dunn’s pyramid odyssey began in 1977 when he read Peter Tompkins’ book Secrets of the Great Pyramid. His immediate reaction to the Giza Pyramid’s schematics was that this edifice was a gigantic machine.
Discovering the purpose of this machine involved a process of reverse engineering that has taken over 24 years of research.
In the process he has published over a dozen magazine articles, including the much quoted “Advanced Machining in Ancient Egypt” in Analog, August 1984. He has had his research referenced in a dozen books by various popular authors of alternative history.
Chris has also appeared on the Discovery Channel, Travel Channel, Pax Television and Lifetime Television discussing aspects of his book. One aspect, in particular, is the incredible work of Edward Leedskalnin who built Coral Castle . Another is the precision of ancient Egyptian granite artifacts, which Chris believes is the smoking gun evident of civilization existing in prehistory that is more advanced than previously believed.”
Though the power plant theory may explain every characteristic and noted phenomena found within the Great Pyramid, without actually replicating its function (way beyond my own personal resources) it could be ignored or dismissed as being too fantastic by those who feel more secure with conventional views of prehistory.
Discover something old | Myths, Mysteries and Earth's Ancient History.
