Finally, someone has set a positive example

In Indonesia, as commonly happen in the developing countries, the tobacco corporations rule the games. Where in U.S. the tobacco companies are prohibited from engaging in product brand sponsorship of concerts, we hardly find in this country a single event of musical concerts or even sport exhibitions without any involvement of the tobacco companies.

The young people who smoke are not stupid, they are just the victims of very aggressive marketing campaign. The tobacco marketers know very well how the AIDA ("awareness-interest-desire-action") works in their brains as a tool, by inverting the 'fool' into 'cool'.

Then A.K. has set a good example for the youth that should be followed by other well-known musicians... But she, did it the first time, No One...

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For immediate release 28 Jul 2008

Alicia Keys Sets Example for Entertainment Industry by Withdrawing Tobacco Sponsorship of Indonesia Concert

Statement of Matthew L. Myers, President, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids

WASHINGTON, D.C.– U.S. singing star Alicia Keys has set a positive example that should be followed by musicians and entertainers worldwide by demanding the withdrawal of tobacco industry sponsorship of her July 31 concert in Jakarta, Indonesia.

We applaud Ms. Keys for taking quick action to disassociate herself from the tobacco industry and to prevent her name, image and talent from continuing to be used to market cigarettes to children.

It is critical that the tobacco company involved, Philip Morris International/Sampoerna, and concert promoters immediately end the sponsorship and all tobacco-related marketing and branding associated with the concert.We call on all involved in the music and entertainment industry, including performers and promoters, to follow Alicia Keys’ example and adopt policies of rejecting all tobacco sponsorship and other tobacco promotions.

We also call on tobacco companies to immediately cease all such sponsorships and promotions.

Read complete article

Mpower

• Irony is when some people get extraordinary rich by selling tobacco to the mass, but there are other people who must spend millions & millions to make this earth smokefree.
• You have to have good reasons for leaving Microsoft: to change the world (John Wood) or to clean the world (Bill Gates)
  
  Billionaires Back Antismoking Effort

Bill Gates and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced their half-billion-dollar pledge in Midtown on Wednesday.

By DONALD G. MCNEIL JR
Published: July 24, 2008

Bill Gates and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced on Wednesday that they would spend $500 million to stop people around the world from smoking.

The World Health Organization estimates that tobacco will kill up to a billion people in the 21st century, 10 times as many as it killed in the 20th.

This time, most are expected to be in poor countries like Bangladesh and middle-income countries like Russia. In an effort to cut that number, Mr. Bloomberg’s foundation plans to commit $250 million over four years on top of a $125 million gift he announced two years ago. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is allocating $125 million over five years.

Since 1999, the Gates Foundation has spent more than $2 billion on AIDS programs and about $1.2 billion on malaria. Mr. Gates has just left his Microsoft post for full-time foundation work and said he intends to form partnerships with other philanthropists.

The announcement was made at a joint news conference at TheTimesCenter in Midtown Manhattan attended by foundation staffers and foreign students enrolled in a tobacco control program at Johns Hopkins University that is supported by Mr. Bloomberg. He has campaigned against smoking for years, but this is a new direction for the Gates Foundation.

Thanking Mr. Gates, Mr. Bloomberg said, “I’m an optimist, but I’m also a realist.”
“All the money in the world will never eradicate tobacco,” he added. “But this partnership underscores how much the tide is turning against this deadly epidemic.” The new donations far outstrip current spending of about $20 million a year on antismoking campaigns in poor and middle-income countries, according to a recent W.H.O. report.

The $500 million would be spent on a multipronged campaign — nicknamed Mpower — that Mr. Bloomberg and Dr. Margaret Chan, director of the health organization, outlined in February. It coordinates efforts by the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use, the World Health Organization, the World Lung Foundation, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the foundation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

It will urge governments to sharply raise tobacco taxes, prohibit smoking in public places, outlaw advertising to children and cigarette giveaways, start antismoking advertising campaigns and offer people nicotine patches or other help quitting. Health officials, consumer advocates, journalists, tax officers and others from third world countries will be brought to the United States for workshops on topics like lobbying, public service advertising, catching cigarette smugglers and running telephone help lines for smokers wanting to quit. A list of grants is at tobaccocontrolgrants.org.

Dr. Richard Peto, an Oxford epidemiologist who leads studies on the effects of smoking in the developing world, called the announcement “excellent news.”
“I reckon this will avoid tens of millions of deaths in my lifetime and hundreds of millions in my kids’ lifetimes,” he said.

Catherine Armstrong, a spokeswoman for British American Tobacco — one of the Western tobacco companies that focuses on sales to the third world — would not comment directly on the new initiative. But she said, “We have no problem with government organizations educating people on the risks of tobacco.”
A spokesman for Philip Morris, which makes Marlboro, the world’s most popular cigarette brand, said the company agreed that children should be kept from smoking but thought that raising cigarette taxes promoted smuggling and counterfeiting.

Mr. Bloomberg, founder of the financial news company bearing his name and creator of the Bloomberg Family Foundation, has long been known for his antipathy to tobacco. During his administration, New York has adopted several antismoking measures, including a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants, and significant increases in cigarette taxes.

The global campaign promises to be a struggle. Cigarettes not only are highly addictive and supported by huge advertising campaigns, they are also an important source of income for many foreign governments. In China and other countries, tobacco is a state-owned monopoly, and low- and middle-income countries collect $66 billion a year in tobacco taxes.

Only about 5 percent of the world’s countries have any antismoking measures like those the campaign envisions. But Dr. Peto said antismoking campaigns were already having some effects, even in countries where no-smoking signs are often ignored. He surveyed thousands of tobacco users in China in the 1990s — “before the government was taking it seriously,” he said — and found 4 percent who identified themselves as former smokers. Now, he said, 20 percent do.

In India, where people have long chewed tobacco but widespread smoking is more recent, Dr. Peto said he found almost no one who had quit. “India is where China was in the mid-1990s,” he said.

Smoking is not widespread in most of Africa, where only about 20 percent of men smoke, and Mr. Gates said on Wednesday that he hoped to prevent a surge in smoking there.

Waves of lung cancer deaths — which typically begin about 40 years after smoking takes hold in a society — help convince the next generation that smoking is dangerous, as in the United States in the 1960s, Dr. Peto said. And, he added, “When doctors and journalists start to take it seriously, things start to change.”

The Gates Foundation’s main focus has been global health, but up until now it has concentrated mostly on infectious diseases. Mr. Gates said he had been “looking at” tobacco deaths but was unsure what to do. “We were thrilled when Michael and his experts took the lead,” he said.

World No Tobacco Day

I don't really care of people choosing to paint their lung in black, so long as they give no harm to other people. But this is not the case, almost impossible for non-smokers to freely breath clean air in every day life. Smokers are every where, they are in your office, in the street, in the mall, in the restaurant and even in the bus. I, myself, "smoke indirectly". It is not necessary to show all the statistics related to smoking on health, social issue or economy here, we can just google or wiki it. Numbers will come up as quick as the time you need to light up your cigarette.

WHO says we need to break the tobacco marketing net as the theme for World No Tobacco Day 2008: "Tobacco-Free Youth". The tobacco industry spends billions of dollars worldwide on advertising, promotion, and sponsorship. They catch us young and their marketing tactics are serious threat to us. The tobacco industry stands behind almost every important and big events, from music concerts, sport games to social activity sponsorships. They spend billion dollars to get much more amount of dollar reward, including from their young customers.

It is not surprising if the result of study of Academy of Tobacco Studies does not find the link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. The group who did the study is funded by cigarette companies, perhaps that's the 'why'. Nick Naylor's job requires him to inform the public of these results, as well as defend the rights of smokers. You can read and see the whole in the novel and movie. Whether or not this reflects the actual story in the industry, we (I) never know but it is a fiercely satirical look at today's "spin culture."

As a non-smoker, it is difficult to imagine how it is possible that too many smart people are falling in love with nicotine and why it is so difficult to say good-bye even if their spouses and/or children tell them not doing so. I found now that there is an answer: blame it to dopamine, it creates the effect. Dopamine plays a critical role in nicotine (and other) addiction. Smokers are victims, the poor guys that have no strength to stop the addiction. I thought that will-power can motivate them to quit smoking, such as "no matter what, I will not harm myself and others through smoking!." That's not easy ... So dear smokers, just continue what you are doing. It is dopamine who controls your choice. Just remember when you blow the nicotine to your and other lungs, the bosses in the cigarret industry will be smiling at you and saying: "Thank you for smoking..." That's all they want to keep saying... to stay in the list of the top rank richest persons. For the youth who started to enjoy smoking... no worry, dopamine will work nicely in your brain for the rest of your life. Just like virus, whether you like it or not, it is good in surviving...

Think twice before you light up another cigarette.

Elegant Universe

Awesome Clips

Multi-touch Screen

Sky Diving

Optical IllusionRussian Climbing

The MEATrix

Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

- KENNETH E. BOULDING

If the UN-FAO Report on "Livestock’s Long Shadow –Environmental Issues and Options" does not mean anything to you, you might find this award winning movies interesting: The Meatrix I, II, and II1/2 (Indonesian subtitled). Whether we (represented by Leo) take the blue pill and remain in a fantasyland or will he face the bitter pill reality? ... it's all in our hands. Some may say that the movie is a crap or not a serious one, still there are truth in it. Just read several articles and find the facts and statistics relating factory farm issues. There are disturbing facts and several dangers on factory farming and food safety: artificial hormones, antibiotic resistant germs, massive pollution/environmental problems, cruelty treatment, antibiotics overuse, mad cow disease and community destroyed. We should save the environment and our health by considering not consuming cow-meat again.

Fast Food Nation, published in 2001 and a New York Times bestseller, was an incendiary nonfiction exploration of the factory farming and fast food industry. Fast Food Nation is a Recorded Picture Company production directed by Richard Linklater and written by Eric Schlosser and Linklater. With several issues shown in the book and in the 'documentary movie', I’ll be quite surprised if they're not vegetarians in real life. The same surprise, if I found that Morgan Spurlock is continuing his rituals having meals in McDonald resaurants after being supersized at the 30th day period. He is an American independent filmmaker who wrote, produced, directed and starred "Super Size Me", an Academy Award-nominated 2004 documentary film.

Other things to chew on (other than the french fries you're lovin' it!):

[The statistics are showing those in the US, but they should be approximately applicable to any place in the globe. Btw we all have only one earth]

• More energy is consumed by the beef industry than any other single industry in the US,
• If we were to reduce by 50% our meat consumption, we could totally eliminate our reliance on nuclear power throughout the US,
• The same resources that are used to produce one pound of beef can produce sixteen pounds of grain,
• Rainforests account for an astounding 80% of the eart's vegetation, and are critical to our ecosystem. The US imports 10% of its beef from Central and South America. In order to meet this need, rainforests are being eliminated at a pace of one acre every five seconds.

The decision about what to put on your dinner plate tonight is one that has profound processional effects. It sets in motion a whole series of events and activities that are shaping the quality of life on earth. Behind the chuck steak hides the forests that have been cut down, our children's food and water supply, our children's top soil, their future environment. And we have to look at the steak and say, 'That costs too much.' Real power lies in the decisions you make in the supermarket and in restaurants and in your kitchen.
(Robbins, John, "Diet for a new America"; Robbins Research Report, "The Fate of Our Planet" - cited from Anthony Robbin's "Awaken the Giant Within")

Inconvenient Truth

The contents of this post were taken from The McDougall Newsletter

According to the 2006 UN report, global production of meat and milk will more than double by 2050. We cannot let this happen. Our planet is already being devastated. Long-overdue changes based on the truth could halve livestock usage by 2015.

According to a report, Livestock’s Long Shadow –Environmental Issues and Options, released in November of 2006 from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock* emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to every one of the most serious environmental problems. (The release of this report was not covered by any of the major news outlets, only a few mentions are found on the Internet.)

*livestock refers to beef cattle, dairy cattle, chickens, pigs, and a few other animals domesticated for food uses.

The Following Are Some of the Findings from the UN Report:

Atmospheric Damage
Animal agriculture is responsible for 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions as measured in CO2 equivalents. By comparison, all transportation emits 13.5% of the CO2. In addition to CO2, environmentally toxic gases produced by livestock include nitrous oxide, methane, and ammonia generated from the animals’ intestines—belching, flatus, and manure. The report says “The impact is so severe that it needs to be addressed with urgency.”

Livestock:
- Produces 65 percent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2.
- Accounts for 37 percent of all human-induced methane (which is 23 times as warming as CO2).
- Generates 64 percent of the ammonia, which contributes to acid rain and acidification of ecosystems.

Land Damage
- The total area occupied by grazing livestock is equivalent to 26 percent of the ice-free terrestrial surface of the planet. In addition, the total area dedicated to producing feed crops for these animals amounts to 33 percent of the total arable land.
- Clearing forests to create new pastures is a major source of deforestation, especially in Latin America where, for example, some 70 percent of former rainforests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing. The forests are the major “sinks” for removing the greenhouse gases from the atmosphere—they are the “lungs of the Earth.”

Water Damage
The livestock business is among the most serious users of the earth’s increasingly scarce water resources; in addition, contributing to water pollution, excessive growth of organisms, depletion of oxygen, and the degeneration of coral reefs, among other things.

- The major water-polluting agents are animal wastes, antibiotics, hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers, and the pesticides used to spray feed crops.
- In the United States livestock is responsible for 55 percent of the erosion and sediment, 37 percent of the pesticide use, 50 percent of the antibiotic use, and a third of the load of nitrogen and phosphorus put into freshwater sources.
- Widespread overgrazing disturbs water cycles, reducing replenishment of above and below ground water resources. Significant amounts of water are withdrawn for the production of feed.

Species Loss
Livestock’s very presence in vast tracts of land and its demand for feed crops also contribute to loss of other plants and animals; livestock is identified as a culprit in 15 out of 24 important ecosystems that are assessed as in decline. The loss of species is estimated to be running 50 to 500 times higher than background rates found in the fossil record.

Al Gore Does Not Discuss the Role of Food Animals
Not once during the 96 minute presentation, An Inconvenient Truth, did Al Gore mention animal foods as a cause of global warming or suggest any form of management of livestock as a solution. This oversight would be similar to not mentioning cigarette smoking in a discussion of lung cancer. With all due respect to Al Gore, I must speculate as to why he ignored this essential connection. Ignorance could not have been the reason. Catastrophic damage to our environment from livestock, especially cattle, has been recognized for decades. Nor do I believe his exclusion of this topic was for political correctness. His documentary is filled with unrestrained challenges to almost every segment of business and society. Al Gore is a brave and honest man, but he has human frailties, too.

Al Gore identified one reason for his leaving out the livestock connection in his documentary when he said, “You know more than a hundred years ago, Upton Sinclair wrote this: ‘It's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it.’” Al Gore has been involved in the business of raising Black Angus cattle for most of his life. Today quite a few Angus breeders from around the country are among his closest friends.

To explain the second source of his blindness to livestock’s role in global warming, I offer one of my personal quotes, “People love to hear good news about their bad habits.” With no intention to offend, I must point out that Al Gore’s physical appearance reflects overindulgence in the Western diet—filled with meat, chicken, seafood, milk, and cheese. To speak plainly, he cannot see over his own dinner plate.

Does Global Warming Matter Enough?
For forty years I have believed people would rise up and take action once they realized that the vast majority of human sickness and suffering in developed countries is due to eating animal foods. The masses have remained quiet. For the past decade I have witnessed the growing epidemic of childhood obesity—a misery caused largely by the fast food giants. All this time I have waited for informed citizens to rise up in protest, or at the very least, to boycott the perpetrators of this child abuse. The sellers of easily procured beef burgers and milk shakes thrive uncontested by a single one of us.

Until now, inaction meant other people and their children became fat, sick and died prematurely—somehow, we have been able to live with those immoralities. The inconvenient truth is that most human beings find the destruction of fellow human beings, even little ones, acceptable. You can assume these same people will sit idly by and let the entire earth be destroyed. But we cannot let this happen, because this is our world, too. This time, failure to act means we and our children will be lost, along with those who do not seem to understand or care.

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. warned that “our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Nothing matters more than solving global warming. Those of us—meaning you and I (experts or not)—who have the ability to take action, have the responsibility to take action.

Action Items

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
- Leo Tolstoy

We frequently heard "action speaks louder than words" words though words are not always less important than word-less...

Looking at the mind map in the previous post, alot of things can actually be done to make the global warming cooler. So, see what have been doing. Let's start with the easiest and easier things: using energy saver light bulbs, optimizing natural lightings, buying LCD screen to replace the tube monitor, planting trees, constructing absorption well in the yard, working out 3x a week in the gym, etc.

It looks easy to practice all of the those acts, doesn't it? Any 'regular' persons can do it and even there are several other things every of us able to do. Seem as easy as any action listed above, I consider the followings as the major ones (but we may have different opinion or priority):

1. Converted car into water fueled. It is not literally a water powered car that I built. I only planted a device that produces hydrogen from water by electrolisys. This is not a new thin by the way. Many people may have developed this since years ago. Daniel Dingel did it in Filipina and many others in the US and perhaps all over the world. But not many have the courage to bring it in public. The inventor, Stanley Meyer, was reported as poisoned at a restaurant in 1998. Conspiracy theories persist that oil companies and the government were involved in the death (wow!).

Mine is not as sophisticated as those people have developed. It is a very simple, yet very cheap, device could be made by any junior high school (not the lazy ones for sure). And you could find the secret or the diagram by googling it with key words: water fuel, hydrogen, etc. I would not make a claim that the device I bult works successfully as I haven't made empirical obervation and measurement of the performance improvement. To minimize any possible risk, this prototype is installed in a 1975's Volkwagen as an experiment car. I am not confident enough to implant it in my SUV's ignition engine at this moment. However, for the sake of going green, contributing in pollution reduction, developing clean-renewable energy, it will be part of the SUV's fueling system very soon... once it's noticed that there is nothing wrong with the VW and it is positive result with having it installed, at least on the reduced emission and fuel saving (yes, gasoline is needed still, but hopefully at a lower amount)...

2. Stop eating meat !!! This is the hardest part. I was raised in a carnivorous family, omnivorous community. Being a vegetarian (not yet a vegan) in a non-vegan world is not easy. In the past, I ridiculed those who not eating what the Nature had provided. I told one who practiced it as an oxymoron.

There are Lacto-vegetarian, Ovo-vegetarian, the combination of those types and vegan. I consider my self as Seafo-vegetarian. I am eating sea food still, but I quit eating meat, especially of animals "possessing self awareness of life-conscience". First, I dropped beef from my diets since last year and later on chicken is also absent from my dish and plate. It's really a big challenge. One who said that he could resist of not choosing "rendang" and "ayam bakar" in Padangese restaurants or tenderloin steak in Outback's, most likely he/she was lying. Replacing steak with tempe and fried chicken with tofu, would it work for me? That's a big question mark?

.

It was very difficult in the beginning or even to got it started, but after we accustomed we can just do it so joyously. It's a matter of the ability to control the will-power in a one square-inch spot in the head. The reason behind this decision is a combination of several factors, that I may want to explain in the upcoming post(s). I did not say that this was a victory of the brain over the belly, not at all. It's just a matter of choice. Btw, I have made a life changing decision in the past, far greater than this. I have changed the way I live... now I want to change the way I eat - no matter what. I would not be able to change others, families, communities, the world, ... if I could not change my self. "No matter what" is strong words to bear in mind for moving forward with rational things we strongly believe, especially if we did not follow the crowds.

I am not accussing any one, but I just recall PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) argue that being a 'meat-eating environmentalist' is an oxymoron. I am not sure, to me it just like 'deafening silence', 'a mournful optimist', 'cruel kindness', 'brutally honest', 'marijuana medicine', 'smoking doctor' or 'buncit indah' words.

I noted that Fuel and Food are notorious topics most widely discussed in the mainstream media these days (besides the 'never-ending' competition between Obama and Omama v. Ograndpa...) Then, taking those two subjects for discussion is necessarily appropriate as an effort to improve our planet earth and its inhibitants' life, if followed with adequate actions. Let's check the week's breaking news:

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On "Earth Day" Tuesday, the price of a barrel of crude hit a record $119.90, a fivefold increase since the beginning of 2002!
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Today, rice prices hit record. This week's 5 percent jump in Thailand rice takes prices to $1,000 a ton, nearly triple their level at the start of the year, intensifying fears of social unrest in Asia. This week, even the United States felt the reverberations, as major retailers started to notice signs of panic buying. Sam's Club, a unit of retail giant Wal-Mart, said on Wednesday it was capping sales of rice at four bulk bags per customer per visit!

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Serious issues we are all facing...