Description: A plump, medium-sized (5 inches) aquatic frog with smooth, slippery skin, large, webbed rear feet and clawed front legs. Color ranges from greyish to brownish, marbled with darker shades (the underside is generally creamy white), though albino varieties are also rapidly becoming popular for pet keeping. Often these frogs are confused for their smaller cousin, the African Dwarf Frog. How to tell the Clawed Frog from the Dwarf Frog.
Habitat: Warm, quiet waters. A warm fishtank with water at least 30cm (12 in) deep around 24°C (75°F) is recommended, with gravel substrate and a filter. (Preferably with hiding place. Frogs tend to get a bit freakish if they can't sometimes hide.) Also, these guys need a really good cover so they don't go exploring outside their tank! Now I'm going to tell you a very sad story; Several years ago, my sister got 2 Albino African Clawed Frogs. The pet store sold them as African Dwarf frogs (they look pretty similar when young...though I've never seen albino dwarf frogs). Well, she thought they were really cool and named them Humpty and Dumpty). They were housed in a hexagon plastic tank full of water (the gallon and a half size) along with a huge goldfish. This setup would probably have been just fine for dwarf frogs, but the clawed frog is more likely to be "hoppity" and managed to jump through a small opening in the top (which I think was supposed to be for air filters and heaters etc.) and it hopped all the way out of her bedroom, all the way down the stairs, all the way to the living room, where it stuck itself to a window and dried up. It was the saddest, most pathetic thing you ever saw ...so close to freedom and yet so far! The next frogs my sister got were truly dwarf frogs and no such problems occured. The moral of this story is, make sure that all openings are well sealed, either with a net or something so that they can't get out! I get mail all the time from people with stories like this! I also got a story with a not so sad ending: Hi, My name is Chris. I have an African frog that I used to keep in a very cool aquarium that I have. It is a 60 Hex that is 4 feet tall and 12 inches wide(side to side). This take also has a stand and cap, each one being adding 1 foot the the height of the aquarium. I once discovered, to my dismay, that he had escaped one day. I searched all over my room and around my apartment. I couldn't find him. The next day, my room mate got home(who actually owns the frog, but keeps him in my tank since he has proven himself inept at being an aquarist) and I told him. We both looked around and he found the frog by the door to the patio. When I first saw the frog I was instantly reminded of the desciated, flattened frogs seen on the roadside after losing a fight with a car. We both were sure he was dead. I went ahead a put him in some water just to be sure, but when he just sank and didn't move, I took him out. I was morbidly curious about the frog so I took a close look at him. I was amazed at how much dust he had collected and how rubbery his skin had become. Then I was even more amazed to see his nostrils move. Here was this desicated little frog(about a year old) with rubberized skin, dust, hair, sunken in eyes and no discernible life signs, except his nostrils were moving! I quickly put him back in the bowl of water but drained it so that his nostrils were above water. Then I took a wet paper towel and very gently cleaned all the dust and stuff off of him. Within a few hours, he began moving(a little) and his eyes took on their normal shape again. In the next few days, some of his fingers, skin and webbing came off and we again were worried whether or not he could recover enough to eat and keep healing(he had been fed on guppies). Fortunately, I fed him some blood worms and I put 1 guppy into the bowl with him as he recooperated. After a few days, he ate the guppy and I knew he was going to be alright. About a month later he has regrown all his fingers, skin, and webbing. He has also not been given the opportunity to escape again. Hard to believe, but this little frog survived a six foot jump(narrowly missing the light) to the the floor and a 2 day safari into the dusty depths. I'm gonna try to get my roommate to rename him to Evil Kanevil.
Read more information on tank set-up in the Housing Your Pet Frog section. (see the Frog Doctor for details on illness prevention.) Diet: Brine shrimp, and various commercial fish foods. These guys are scavengers, meaning they'll pretty much eat anything they can swallow. They find their prey by smell and touch. One visitor recommended Tetra's ReptoMin. "It contains all the vitamins and such, though I have found they prefer to have each stick broken into at least three pieces. I think this is a vital piece of info for your sheet. People may be taken aback at having to feed just shrimp or feeder fish as the cost can really get up there. ReptoMin can be gotten cheaply (especially if by mail order) and last a good long while. I use feeder fish only as a treat with ReptoMin as the only other food sorce. I have had my frogs a number of years (not one sickness to date) and had one successfull breeding, so it must be good food." Another writes that "specially-formulated food for ACFs is available at xenopus express for only $3.00 a pound (much more cost-effective than 'Reptomin' -- $30+ per pound)." Habits: Calm. These guys are incredibly hardy and live a long time. Dont believe me on this one? Here's the most impressive testimonial I've heard yet, sent in by a visitor in June, 1999! (Note: the frog described is probably a Clawed Frog, because Grow-A-Frog kits never sold Dwarf Frogs in their kits.)
Many years ago I saw one of the Grow-a-Frog kits in an upscale toystore for the 1st time. Couldn't resist. So bought 2. Sent one to my nephew and kept one. He wasn't as lucky as I was. His tadpole came, began to metamorphose, but died before completing the process. Mine finished the process and still lives. It never occurred to me to note the year, for who would have thought he'd live so long! It was either 1980 or 1981, but no later. He's just fine and still sings when I clean his bowl. I've changed containers over the years to different shapes and slightly different sizes to offer some variety in his life. As far as I've been able to tell, he's never been sick a day in his life. He may be a she. Many dogs, cats, gerbils, rats, tropical fish, one snapping turtle, and one cockatiel have become members of our family. All lived full lives and went to pet heaven & received burial in our flower beds. Neighbors always fed our menagerie when we went on vacations, but as the years ticked away, they worried that our frog might die on "their watch." They were as relieved as we, each time we returned to find everything OK including our beloved frog. I'm a science teacher, but think that has little to do with our frog's longevity. My daughters are both grown and on their own. I guess I should start thinking about who I should entrust him with in my will. I've always assumed he was an African Dwarf. We didn't name him for many years because we never expected him to live much longer. After a while, when visitors always exclaimed, "You mean that frog is still ALIVE?", we started calling him "Alive."
I sold my large house after 27 years of loving it & moved to a condo in a downtown historical district. Fortunately, the re-location didn't bother him a bit. That was 2 years ago, & he's just fine.
These frogs also are pretty fun to watch. They do a loop-de-loop dance in the water from the tank floor to the top of the water when they mate, usually preceeded by a lot of "clasping", where the male grabs onto the female as she swims around. (It looks a lot like "hugging" to me) Tadpoles hatch within two days.
How to Tell Males from Females: Females are often larger and fatter than males, and they have a little extension between their legs (see photo). The frogs mature after 10 months to a year, and the males begin vocalizing at this age in the evening hours. males also develop dark mating pads on the undersides of their hands and arms.
I am afraid of guard dogs with bees in theirs mouths and when they bark they shoot bees at me because the bees smell like a pen and I don't like the way pens smell cuz they remind me of writing things.
AllUrHiveRblong2usBy Your Powers Combined...Join Date: 2002-12-20Member: 11244Members
Yarbles, great bolshy yarblockos to you I'll meet you with chain, or nohz, or britva, any time, I'm not have you aiming tolchoks at me reasonless. It stands to reason, I won't have it.
NarfwakJoin Date: 2002-11-02Member: 5258Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS1 Playtester, Playtest Lead, Forum Moderators, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Gold, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica PT Lead, NS2 Community Developer
The four repeater rule in Ethernet states that no more than four repeaters or repeating hubs can be between any two computers on the network. To ensure that a repeated 10BASE-T network will function properly, the following condition must be true: (repeater delays + cable delays + NIC delays) x 2 < maximum round-trip delay. Repeater delays for 10BASE-T are usually less than two microseconds per repeater. Cable delays are near 0.55 microseconds per 100 m trip. NIC delays are about one microsecond per NIC. The maximum round-trip delay (the 10BASE-T bit time of 0.1 microseconds times the minimum frame size of 512 bits) is 51.2 microseconds. For a 500 m length of UTP connected by 4 repeaters (hubs) and 2 NIC delays the total delay would be well below the maximum round-trip delay. Repeater latency, propagation delay, and NIC latency all contribute to the four repeater rule. Exceeding the four repeater rule can lead to violating the maximum delay limit.
When this delay limit is exceeded, the number of late collisions dramatically increase. A late collision is when a collision happens after the first 64 bytes of the frame are transmitted. The chipsets in NICs are not required to retransmit automatically when a late collision occurs. These late collision frames add delay referred to as consumption delay. As consumption delay and latency increase, network performance decreases. This Ethernet rule of thumb is also known as the 5-4-3-2-1 rule. Five sections of the network, four repeaters or hubs, three sections of the network are "mixing" sections (with hosts), two sections are link sections (for link purposes), and one large collision domain.
NarfwakJoin Date: 2002-11-02Member: 5258Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS1 Playtester, Playtest Lead, Forum Moderators, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Gold, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica PT Lead, NS2 Community Developer
YO, FRANK, CAN YOU PLEASE STOP USING OBSCENITIES AS CITY NAMES IN SIM CITY 4?
It’s just embarrassing all around. I thought it was a cool idea for us to share the regional map and for us to both take turns building on it together, but your naming scheme is ridiculous.
For instance, let’s talk about “a sex orgy,” the town you built north of mine with a freeway hookup that you insist on calling the “freeway of love.” It’s getting to the point where I can hardly play the game. Off the top of my screen is a big arrow that says, “To a sex orgy,” and there are all these cars and busses driving that way. According to my mayor panel, 25% of my Sims commute to a sex orgy for work.
Recently my favorite Sim sent me a letter saying that she was “moving to a sex orgy” because “they had better education there.” Damn you, Frank!
And let’s talk about the town you built to the East. I can’t bear the thought of building my planned high-speed rail line through “My Anus.” And forget about laying some pipe there.
The worst part? 34% of my landfill is being used to house garbage from My Anus. Of course, you’ve done a good job of keeping the pollution low in My Anus; according to the regional map, anyone at a sex orgy is attracted to My Anus in droves.
NarfwakJoin Date: 2002-11-02Member: 5258Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS1 Playtester, Playtest Lead, Forum Moderators, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Gold, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica PT Lead, NS2 Community Developer
George Monbiot The Guardian, December 31, 2002
With the turning of every year, we expect our lives to improve. As long as the economy continues to grow, we imagine, the world will become a more congenial place in which to live. There is no basis for this belief. If we take into account such factors as pollution and the depletion of natural capital, we see that the quality of life peaked in the UK in 1974 and in the US in 1968, and has been falling ever since. We are going backwards.
The reason should not be hard to grasp. Our economic system depends upon never-ending growth, yet we live in a world with finite resources. Our expectation of progress is, as a result, a delusion.
This is the great heresy of our times, the fundamental truth which cannot be spoken. It is dismissed as furiously by those who possess power today - governments, business, the media - as the discovery that the earth orbits the sun was denounced by the late medieval church. Speak this truth in public and you are dismissed as a crank, a prig, a lunatic.
Capitalism is a millenarian cult, raised to the status of a world religion. Like communism, it is built upon the myth of endless exploitation. Just as Christians imagine that their God will deliver them from death, capitalists believe that theirs will deliver them from finity. The world's resources, they assert, have been granted eternal life.
The briefest reflection will show that this cannot be true. The laws of thermodynamics impose inherent limits upon biological production. Even the repayment of debt, the pre-requisite of capitalism, is mathematically possible only in the short-term. As Heinrich Haussmann has shown, a single pfennig invested at 5% compounded interest in the year AD 0 would, by 1990, have reaped a volume of gold 134bn times the weight of the planet. Capitalism seeks a value of production commensurate with the repayment of debt.
Now, despite the endless denials, it is clear that the wall towards which we are accelerating is not very far away. Within five or 10 years, the global consumption of oil is likely to outstrip supply. Every year, up to 75bn tonnes of topsoil are washed into the sea as a result of unsustainable farming, which equates to the loss of around 9m hectares of productive land.
As a result, we can maintain current levels of food production only with the application of phosphate, but phosphate reserves are likely to be exhausted within 80 years. Forty per cent of the world's food is produced with the help of irrigation; some of the key aquifers are already running dry as a result of overuse.
One reason why we fail to understand a concept as simple as finity is that our religion was founded upon the use of other people's resources: the gold, rubber and timber of Latin America; the spices, cotton and dyes of the East Indies; the labour and land of Africa. The frontier of exploitation seemed, to the early colonists, infinitely expandable. Now that geographical expansion has reached its limits, capitalism has moved its frontier from space to time: seizing resources from an infinite future.
An entire industry has been built upon the denial of ecological constraints. Every national newspaper in Britain lamented the "disappointing" volume of sales before Christmas. Sky News devoted much of its Christmas Eve coverage to live reports from Brent Cross, relaying the terrifying intelligence that we were facing "the worst Christmas for shopping since 2000". The survival of humanity has been displaced in the newspapers by the quarterly results of companies selling tableware and knickers.
Partly because they have been brainwashed by the corporate media, partly because of the scale of the moral challenge with which finity confronts them, many people respond to the heresy with unmediated savagery.
Last week this column discussed the competition for global grain supplies between humans and livestock. One correspondent, a man named David Roucek, wrote to inform me that the problem is the result of people "breeding indiscriminately ... When a woman has displayed evidence that she totally disregards the welfare of her offspring by continuing to breed children she cannot support, she has committed a crime and must be punished. The punishment? She must be sterilised to prevent her from perpetrating her crimes upon more innocent children."
There is no doubt that a rising population is one of the factors which threatens the world's capacity to support its people, but human population growth is being massively outstripped by the growth in the number of farm animals. While the rich world's consumption is supposed to be boundless, the human population is likely to peak within the next few decades. But population growth is the one factor for which the poor can be blamed and from which the rich can be excused, so it is the one factor which is repeatedly emphasised.
It is possible to change the way we live. The economist Bernard Lietaer has shown how a system based upon negative rates of interest would ensure that we accord greater economic value to future resources than to present ones. By shifting taxation from employment to environmental destruction, governments could tax over-consumption out of existence. But everyone who holds power today knows that her political survival depends upon stealing from the future to give to the present.
Overturning this calculation is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. We need to reverse not only the fundamental presumptions of political and economic life, but also the polarity of our moral compass. Everything we thought was good - giving more exciting presents to our children, flying to a friend's wedding, even buying newspapers - turns out also to be bad. It is, perhaps, hardly surprising that so many deny the problem with such religious zeal. But to live in these times without striving to change them is like watching, with serenity, the oncoming truck in your path.
NarfwakJoin Date: 2002-11-02Member: 5258Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS1 Playtester, Playtest Lead, Forum Moderators, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Gold, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica PT Lead, NS2 Community Developer
NO! NO! NO! THEY'RE ALL GONNA LAUGH AT YOU! NO! THEY'RE ALL GONNA LAUGH AT YOU! THEY'RE ALL GONNA LAUGH AT YOU! NO! NO! THEY'RE ALL GONNA LAUGH AT YOU! THEY'RE ALL GONNA LAUGH AT YOU! THEY'RE ALL GONNA LAUGH AT YOU! NO! THEY'RE ALL GONNA LAUGH AT YOU! NO! NO! THEY'RE ALL GONNA LAUGH AT YOU! NO!
FamDiaper-Wearing Dog On A BallJoin Date: 2002-02-17Member: 222Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor
I know a song that'll get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves. I know a song that'll get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves. I know a song that'll get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves. I know a song that'll get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves. I know a song that'll get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves. I know a song that'll get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves. I know a song that'll get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves. I know a song that'll get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves. I know a song that'll get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves. I know a song that'll get on your nerves, get on your nerves, get on your nerves.
Comments
A plump, medium-sized (5 inches) aquatic frog with smooth, slippery skin, large, webbed rear feet and clawed front legs. Color ranges from greyish to brownish, marbled with darker shades (the underside is generally creamy white), though albino varieties are also rapidly becoming popular for pet keeping.
Often these frogs are confused for their smaller cousin, the African Dwarf Frog.
How to tell the Clawed Frog from the Dwarf Frog.
Habitat:
Warm, quiet waters. A warm fishtank with water at least 30cm (12 in) deep around 24°C (75°F) is recommended, with gravel substrate and a filter. (Preferably with hiding place. Frogs tend to get a bit freakish if they can't sometimes hide.)
Also, these guys need a really good cover so they don't go exploring outside their tank!
Now I'm going to tell you a very sad story;
Several years ago, my sister got 2 Albino African Clawed Frogs. The pet store sold them as African Dwarf frogs (they look pretty similar when young...though I've never seen albino dwarf frogs).
Well, she thought they were really cool and named them Humpty and Dumpty). They were housed in a hexagon plastic tank full of water (the gallon and a half size) along with a huge goldfish. This setup would probably have been just fine for dwarf frogs, but the clawed frog is more likely to be "hoppity" and managed to jump through a small opening in the top (which I think was supposed to be for air filters and heaters etc.) and it hopped all the way out of her bedroom, all the way down the stairs, all the way to the living room, where it stuck itself to a window and dried up.
It was the saddest, most pathetic thing you ever saw ...so close to freedom and yet so far!
The next frogs my sister got were truly dwarf frogs and no such problems occured.
The moral of this story is, make sure that all openings are well sealed, either with a net or something so that they can't get out! I get mail all the time from people with stories like this!
I also got a story with a not so sad ending:
Hi, My name is Chris. I have an African frog that I used to keep in a very cool aquarium that I have. It is a 60 Hex that is 4 feet tall and 12 inches wide(side to side). This take also has a stand and cap, each one being adding 1 foot the the height of the aquarium. I once discovered, to my dismay, that he had escaped one day. I searched all over my room and around my apartment. I couldn't find him. The next day, my room mate got home(who actually owns the frog, but keeps him in my tank since he has proven himself inept at being an aquarist) and I told him. We both looked around and he found the frog by the door to the patio. When I first saw the frog I was instantly reminded of the desciated, flattened frogs seen on the roadside after losing a fight with a car. We both were sure he was dead. I went ahead a put him in some water just to be sure, but when he just sank and didn't move, I took him out. I was morbidly curious about the frog so I took a close look at him. I was amazed at how much dust he had collected and how rubbery his skin had become. Then I was even more amazed to see his nostrils move. Here was this desicated little frog(about a year old) with rubberized skin, dust, hair, sunken in eyes and no discernible life signs, except his nostrils were moving! I quickly put him back in the bowl of water but drained it so that his nostrils were above water. Then I took a wet paper towel and very gently cleaned all the dust and stuff off of him. Within a few hours, he began moving(a little) and his eyes took on their normal shape again. In the next few days, some of his fingers, skin and webbing came off and we again were worried whether or not he could recover enough to eat and keep healing(he had been fed on guppies). Fortunately, I fed him some blood worms and I put 1 guppy into the bowl with him as he recooperated. After a few days, he ate the guppy and I knew he was going to be alright. About a month later he has regrown all his fingers, skin, and webbing. He has also not been given the opportunity to escape again. Hard to believe, but this little frog survived a six foot jump(narrowly missing the light) to the the floor and a 2 day safari into the dusty depths. I'm gonna try to get my roommate to rename him to Evil Kanevil.
Read more information on tank set-up in the Housing Your Pet Frog section.
(see the Frog Doctor for details on illness prevention.)
Diet:
Brine shrimp, and various commercial fish foods. These guys are scavengers, meaning they'll pretty much eat anything they can swallow. They find their prey by smell and touch.
One visitor recommended Tetra's ReptoMin. "It contains all the vitamins and such, though I have found they prefer to have each stick broken into at least three pieces. I think this is a vital piece of info for your sheet. People may be taken aback at having to feed just shrimp or feeder fish as the cost can really get up there. ReptoMin can be gotten cheaply (especially if by mail order) and last a good long while. I use feeder fish only as a treat with ReptoMin as the only other food sorce. I have had my frogs a number of years (not one sickness to date) and had one successfull breeding, so it must be good food."
Another writes that "specially-formulated food for ACFs is available at xenopus express for only $3.00 a pound (much more cost-effective than 'Reptomin' -- $30+ per pound)."
Habits:
Calm. These guys are incredibly hardy and live a long time. Dont believe me on this one? Here's the most impressive testimonial I've heard yet, sent in by a visitor in June, 1999! (Note: the frog described is probably a Clawed Frog, because Grow-A-Frog kits never sold Dwarf Frogs in their kits.)
Many years ago I saw one of the Grow-a-Frog kits in an upscale toystore for the 1st time. Couldn't resist. So bought 2. Sent one to my nephew and kept one. He wasn't as lucky as I was. His tadpole came, began to metamorphose, but died before completing the process. Mine finished the process and still lives. It never occurred to me to note the year, for who would have thought he'd live so long! It was either 1980 or 1981, but no later. He's just fine and still sings when I clean his bowl. I've changed containers over the years to different shapes and slightly different sizes to offer some variety in his life. As far as I've been able to tell, he's never been sick a day in his life. He may be a she. Many dogs, cats, gerbils, rats, tropical fish, one snapping turtle, and one cockatiel have become members of our family. All lived full lives and went to pet heaven & received burial in our flower beds. Neighbors always fed our menagerie when we went on vacations, but as the years ticked away, they worried that our frog might die on "their watch." They were as relieved as we, each time we returned to find everything OK including our beloved frog.
I'm a science teacher, but think that has little to do with our frog's longevity. My daughters are both grown and on their own. I guess I should start thinking about who I should entrust him with in my will. I've always assumed he was an African Dwarf. We didn't name him for many years because we never expected him to live much longer. After a while, when visitors always exclaimed, "You mean that frog is still ALIVE?", we started calling him "Alive."
I sold my large house after 27 years of loving it & moved to a condo in a downtown historical district. Fortunately, the re-location didn't bother him a bit. That was 2 years ago, & he's just fine.
These frogs also are pretty fun to watch. They do a loop-de-loop dance in the water from the tank floor to the top of the water when they mate, usually preceeded by a lot of "clasping", where the male grabs onto the female as she swims around. (It looks a lot like "hugging" to me) Tadpoles hatch within two days.
How to Tell Males from Females:
Females are often larger and fatter than males, and they have a little extension between their legs (see photo). The frogs mature after 10 months to a year, and the males begin vocalizing at this age in the evening hours. males also develop dark mating pads on the undersides of their hands and arms.
It stands to reason, I won't have it.
When this delay limit is exceeded, the number of late collisions dramatically increase. A late collision is when a collision happens after the first 64 bytes of the frame are transmitted. The chipsets in NICs are not required to retransmit automatically when a late collision occurs. These late collision frames add delay referred to as consumption delay. As consumption delay and latency increase, network performance decreases. This Ethernet rule of thumb is also known as the 5-4-3-2-1 rule. Five sections of the network, four repeaters or hubs, three sections of the network are "mixing" sections (with hosts), two sections are link sections (for link purposes), and one large collision domain.
It’s just embarrassing all around. I thought it was a cool idea for us to share the regional map and for us to both take turns building on it together, but your naming scheme is ridiculous.
For instance, let’s talk about “a sex orgy,” the town you built north of mine with a freeway hookup that you insist on calling the “freeway of love.” It’s getting to the point where I can hardly play the game. Off the top of my screen is a big arrow that says, “To a sex orgy,” and there are all these cars and busses driving that way. According to my mayor panel, 25% of my Sims commute to a sex orgy for work.
Recently my favorite Sim sent me a letter saying that she was “moving to a sex orgy” because “they had better education there.” Damn you, Frank!
And let’s talk about the town you built to the East. I can’t bear the thought of building my planned high-speed rail line through “My Anus.” And forget about laying some pipe there.
The worst part? 34% of my landfill is being used to house garbage from My Anus. Of course, you’ve done a good job of keeping the pollution low in My Anus; according to the regional map, anyone at a sex orgy is attracted to My Anus in droves.
Stop it! Just ... stop it!
"It's always blue or green in the movies."
"So we cut the yellow one?"
"NO WAI-"
KA-BOOM!
The Guardian, December 31, 2002
With the turning of every year, we expect our lives to improve. As long as
the economy continues to grow, we imagine, the world will become a more
congenial place in which to live. There is no basis for this belief. If we
take into account such factors as pollution and the depletion of natural
capital, we see that the quality of life peaked in the UK in 1974 and in the
US in 1968, and has been falling ever since. We are going backwards.
The reason should not be hard to grasp. Our economic system depends upon
never-ending growth, yet we live in a world with finite resources. Our
expectation of progress is, as a result, a delusion.
This is the great heresy of our times, the fundamental truth which cannot be
spoken. It is dismissed as furiously by those who possess power today -
governments, business, the media - as the discovery that the earth orbits
the sun was denounced by the late medieval church. Speak this truth in
public and you are dismissed as a crank, a prig, a lunatic.
Capitalism is a millenarian cult, raised to the status of a world religion.
Like communism, it is built upon the myth of endless exploitation. Just as
Christians imagine that their God will deliver them from death, capitalists
believe that theirs will deliver them from finity. The world's resources,
they assert, have been granted eternal life.
The briefest reflection will show that this cannot be true. The laws of
thermodynamics impose inherent limits upon biological production. Even the
repayment of debt, the pre-requisite of capitalism, is mathematically
possible only in the short-term. As Heinrich Haussmann has shown, a single
pfennig invested at 5% compounded interest in the year AD 0 would, by 1990,
have reaped a volume of gold 134bn times the weight of the planet.
Capitalism seeks a value of production commensurate with the repayment of
debt.
Now, despite the endless denials, it is clear that the wall towards which we
are accelerating is not very far away. Within five or 10 years, the global
consumption of oil is likely to outstrip supply. Every year, up to 75bn
tonnes of topsoil are washed into the sea as a result of unsustainable
farming, which equates to the loss of around 9m hectares of productive land.
As a result, we can maintain current levels of food production only with the
application of phosphate, but phosphate reserves are likely to be exhausted
within 80 years. Forty per cent of the world's food is produced with the
help of irrigation; some of the key aquifers are already running dry as a
result of overuse.
One reason why we fail to understand a concept as simple as finity is that
our religion was founded upon the use of other people's resources: the gold,
rubber and timber of Latin America; the spices, cotton and dyes of the East
Indies; the labour and land of Africa. The frontier of exploitation seemed,
to the early colonists, infinitely expandable. Now that geographical
expansion has reached its limits, capitalism has moved its frontier from
space to time: seizing resources from an infinite future.
An entire industry has been built upon the denial of ecological constraints.
Every national newspaper in Britain lamented the "disappointing" volume of
sales before Christmas. Sky News devoted much of its Christmas Eve coverage
to live reports from Brent Cross, relaying the terrifying intelligence that
we were facing "the worst Christmas for shopping since 2000". The survival
of humanity has been displaced in the newspapers by the quarterly results of
companies selling tableware and knickers.
Partly because they have been brainwashed by the corporate media, partly
because of the scale of the moral challenge with which finity confronts
them, many people respond to the heresy with unmediated savagery.
Last week this column discussed the competition for global grain supplies
between humans and livestock. One correspondent, a man named David Roucek,
wrote to inform me that the problem is the result of people "breeding
indiscriminately ... When a woman has displayed evidence that she totally
disregards the welfare of her offspring by continuing to breed children she
cannot support, she has committed a crime and must be punished. The
punishment? She must be sterilised to prevent her from perpetrating her
crimes upon more innocent children."
There is no doubt that a rising population is one of the factors which
threatens the world's capacity to support its people, but human population
growth is being massively outstripped by the growth in the number of farm
animals. While the rich world's consumption is supposed to be boundless, the
human population is likely to peak within the next few decades. But
population growth is the one factor for which the poor can be blamed and
from which the rich can be excused, so it is the one factor which is
repeatedly emphasised.
It is possible to change the way we live. The economist Bernard Lietaer has
shown how a system based upon negative rates of interest would ensure that
we accord greater economic value to future resources than to present ones.
By shifting taxation from employment to environmental destruction,
governments could tax over-consumption out of existence. But everyone who
holds power today knows that her political survival depends upon stealing
from the future to give to the present.
Overturning this calculation is the greatest challenge humanity has ever
faced. We need to reverse not only the fundamental presumptions of political
and economic life, but also the polarity of our moral compass. Everything we
thought was good - giving more exciting presents to our children, flying to
a friend's wedding, even buying newspapers - turns out also to be bad. It
is, perhaps, hardly surprising that so many deny the problem with such
religious zeal. But to live in these times without striving to change them
is like watching, with serenity, the oncoming truck in your path.
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Speed freak:
<img src='http://www.hardocp.com/images/news/1045431210Uk9iSMzEoL_1_1_l.gif' border='0' alt='user posted image'>
Barbara's Big Bouffant:
<a href='http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Academy/2057/bbb.html' target='_blank'>Barbara's Big Bouffant</a>
YES! Rosebud Frozen Peas. They're full of country goodness and green peaness.