A couple of months ago I was searching for something online. Don’t remember exactly what it was, and whether it was related to milk or not. Anyway, one of the links that popped up was to a site called www.notmilk.com. The link is at the bottom of this post.

When I first clicked on it, I thought it was sort of a wacko site, maybe done by some fringe element. When you read the milk letter it really makes you think, “Yikes!”. I had not heard of many of the claims, so it was a little surreal to read through some of the stuff.

I don’t know if everything is scientifically proven, but some of the things appear to be validated when I check around on the web. Even if only part is true, it is still rather interesting. So you may want to check it out. One warning though - the milk letter is a little disgusting, so if you’re squeamish at heart you may want to pass on it, or perhaps read it away from mealtimes.

Not Milk

Article by Rick Steves listed some things other countries do differently. Two interesting ones:

Switzerland:
The interiors of most public restrooms are lit with blue light. Apparently junkies can’t see their veins so well in blue light, so they go elsewhere to shoot up.

The Netherlands:
If residents want to receive mail addressed only to “resident” (i.e. junk mail), they put a “yes” sticker on their mailbox. If they don’t want unsolicited fliers, ads, and credit card offers, they put a “no” sticker on their mailbox. This is one idea I would love to see adopted by the US post office. It wouldn’t cut down on everything, but it would be a start.

Today we visit the barnyard, and look at cows and plumbing.

Foot and mouth disease is a viral infection that normally targets cattle and pigs, although it can also affect sheep, goats, and other cloven hoof animals. Symptoms include fever, blisters inside the mouth and on the feet, foamy saliva, weight loss, lower milk production in cows and sometimes death.

In England, they had a 2001 outbreak that resulted in around 2000 cases. In the effort to contain the disease more than 7 million sheep, cows and pigs were killed. The estimated costs to Britain was $16 billion. The outbreak is now believed to have been caused by infected pigs that were fed garbage that had not been properly heat-sterilized, and the garbage is thought to have contained remains of infected meat that had been illegally imported to Britain.

In August 2007 the disease re-appeared at a farm in Surrey, England. The interesting thing was that virus was found to be a strain linked to vaccines and not normally found in animals. Turns out there was an American/French owned research facility nearby. It appears that there were three researchers doing research on hoof and mouth. A report by the Health and Safety Executive determined that there was no evidence that the disease leaked from the facility into the atmosphere or through solid waste disposal. Liquid waste disposal, however, was another story.

The lab waste is run to a chemical effluent sump, where it is supposed to be treated. However, they think one of the researchers may have dumped too much waste or too high a concentration of virus into the sump, so not all the virus was killed. Another possibility is that some virus particles were washed off when the researchers took showers, which connect into the drain lines AFTER the chemical sump. You’d think they’d dump everything from the lab into the first treatment area, and be sure to design it for all scenarios, but I guess not.

From the first treatment area the waste is piped underground to a second treatment area, where caustic soda is supposed to neutralize any live viruses. When they investigated the drainage piping going between the two treatment areas, they found displaced joints, racks, tree roots into pipes, unsealed manholes, etc. It appears that during heavy flooding around that time (some parts of England got up to 5” in a day), the virus escaped into the surrounding soil and areas. It was further transported by roadwork construction trucks and possibly also by some dirt transfer.

So all this damage occurred because no attention was paid to the old drainage pipe and the overall design of the plumbing system was not so great. You’d think that with all the safety precautions, they’d look at all the possibilities. I wonder if it’s a case of “out of sight, out of mind”, and that the fancy stuff was in the lab and the plumbing and ground outside was ignored.

If you went on a tour of the facility would you see guys in spacewalk type suits, carefully handling things, with the guide saying, “We have the latest precautions here, hermetically sealed protective suits, .000001 micron superclean ventilation, 26 step safety procedure, and state of the art chemical treatment of waste..........Then we dump it all into that little ol’ hole in the ground over there.......”

Reminds me of the Monty Python sketch, where the doctors are very impressed when they find out the hospital operating room has “the machine that goes ping”.

Interesting article in the paper today about the assasination of Robert Kennedy. I never really heard much about this one. Turns out there are far more unanswered question about his killing than his brother’s killing. Some of the items:

Sirhan Sirhan fired his gun from a few feet in front of Kennedy. However, the LA coroner determined that of the four shots fired at Kennedy, all were fired from behind Kennedy, and the fatal shot was fired 1” behind his ear.

Sirhan’s revolver held 8 bullets, yet audio experts detected 13 shots. Two of the sounds on the tape were “double shots”, where the shots are so close together they couldn’t have come from the same revolver.

Several witnesses saw a security guard draw a gun and one saw him fire it.

One bullet was found in a ceiling panel behind Sirhan, which means he would have had to turn around to fire it. This points to shooters in front of him.

One witness reported a womna in a polka dot dress who fled from the kitchen with an unidentified man shouting “We shot him, we shot him”. When a bystander asked who got shot, she said “We shot Kennedy”. LA police apparently spent hours trying to convince the witness that she was wrong, and she finally gave in. Forty years later, she stands by her original statement.

Sirhan told an FBI agent in 1975 “I don’t remember anything after the woman in the polka dot dress asked me for coffee, and heavy on the cream and sugar”. He couldn’t remember anything after that until he remembers being overpowered after the shooting. He said, “I must have done it, but I don’t remember”.

All in all, very interesting stuff. While all the conspirancy fans have focused on Dallas, seems like there’s an awful lot of evidence pointing to Los Angeles as the location where the real conspiracy occurred.

Link to article today:
RobertKennedy

There was an opinion piece in the May 26 SF Chronicle that mentioned that the rate of Lyme disease is growing at 4 times the rate of growth of AIDS. That caught my eye. It also mentioned that the Connecticut Attorney General launched a probe into the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA) regarding their Lyme Disease guidelines, which are used by insurance companies to deny longterm care for Lyme disease. Apparently the medical idea of “do no harm” to your patients took a back seat to cronyism, conniving, and capitalism. (Today we look at the letter ‘c’.......)

The link below details the attorney general’s complaint:

Attorney General Lyme