By William J Mann
Eh... Im 100 pages into this and not sure if I will even finish it.
Its.got.some.good.local color and quite a bit about the 1920's but its just not getting me. Ill give it another 100 pages and see
By Shane Harris
Library book
This book opens up with incident of the Chinese hackers who stole the plans for the F-35. I remem er reading about this in another book and they sais when askex why all that info was just sitting on those unprotected computers in the first place. And why the hell wasn't it at least encrypted. The answer was it's just not practicable to encrypt all that. When it waz stolen the info was encryptex on the fly as it left the building. I guess everyone has a different version of practicable.
Xxi The Pentagon now sees cyber warfare as the "fifth domain" along with "land, sea, air and space." The generals see a "cyber pearl harbor" in our future. The ability to disrupt uor normal way of life would be myriad in that kind of scenario. God help us!
Cyber warfare is going on right now while we speak. Stuxnet aside, (which of cojrse was our own foray into the craft) Cyber warriors are out there right now figuring out bigger and better ways of attacking. This is very disturbing news indeed. Cyber wars will dominate in the immediate future I predict.
US Cyberwarrior Badge
I find it difficult to take notes on topics like these for fear of pissing people off. But dude wrote a whole book on the subject with all this pseudo-classified information put out there for all the world.to see and he isn't worried.
I knew that.blackout in 2003 was a hack job.
Essays:
Joe Stewart on Chinese hackers.
http://mobile.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-14/a-chinese-hackers-identity-unmasked
By Shane Harris
Audiobook
Im dugbthis outnto listen to now because im going to start Shane's new book today @war.
So part one today was all about Iran Contra. I remember being in an Army hspital watching the trials of this and being dumfounded at how Ollie North got away without saying anything. I thought wow were both soldiers and if I went to my Commander and did that they'd throw me under the jail.
This is all ro give us the back story of Mr Poindexter who would assume command of the country TIA effort after 9/11. This is to let us know I guess where he comes from.
By Brian Krebs
Starting this one today. Looks.good.
Why do I do this to myself. I read these booms about online crime and then let it vet me paranoid. It really is amazing the lack of security you really have online. Oh sure there are tip to help.secure things better but really like life itself if someone really wantit they will take.it from you. Everyone is in the same boat but somehow knowing about what can happen makes it worse. A friend of mine told.me about a new trivia app she thought I should download. When i told about the permission you have to give these people.for these "free" games she looked blank. So I showed her that the game has the rivht to take over your phone and asked, "doesn't that scare you?" She said,"yeah so what." Wow not.concerned at all. Good way to live really. I have not.downlaoded one app since I found this out and she says "who cares." I really wish I could be more like that sometimes. Trust in fate. The worls is basically a good.place filled with mostly.good people. Like Cheryl Strayed in Wild, sometimes ya gotta trust in your stars to protect you.
Ok having said that here's the bad news:
Pg 7 "90% Of email sent worldwide is spam."
the author, who is very "too" much in thenstory self.titles this period "pharma wars" In a quick search it.seems it never really got legs. But good try. This phrase describesnthe two.top spammers peddling hardon pills and how they basically.took down each other.
Here comes my high horse.
Now really people.You get an unsolicited email for this dick hardening substance and you clixk on the link (which of course you should never ever do in the first.place) and.order it? (Omg im literally.dying with how stupid and dangerous that is). Then you send your credit.card info to some anonymous person in another country. And you expect.that you're not.going.to get ripped off? Really? Sseriously?
Back in the early nineties on the computer there was the evolution of the banner ad. Garish ugly intrusive it dominated web pages all of a suddem out of no where as people first started to round up suckers and (oops i mean customers) make some money. I remember way back then thinking tjis willl never last. People will just ignore it (cause obviously no one would actually by hat they are selling at.least in that way) and it will go away. Well people didn't ignore and.today its bigger than ever. What seems to me like sheer stupidity or incredinle bravery ie buying from these people, doesn't seem to bother a vast majority of others. Spam is here to stay the main reason why is because it works.
By Karen Armstrong
Audiobook
Should be good. Just started it today. Agree with the title thougb alot of heartache surrounds mans proclivity to religion.
By Chris Kyle
Ebook
Good book I guess. Just read it to go the the.movie though. Still not happy with things that.glorify the stupidest war ever fought by Americans, but like Chris says in the book dont hate the men who fight the stupid war they are just doing their job. And right you are sir.
After watching the movie...
He died??? R U F'n kiddin me? He died? Read.the whole book no one thought to mention that little tidbit. The theatre was dead silent as the lights came back on. No one said a word we just all quietly exited...
He died???
By Cheryl Strayed
Ebook
Good book. Quick read. Good descriptions and tellling experiences in dealing with death and dying. Reall just read it to go see the movie though.
After seeing the movie...
Loved this movie. The.parts about dealing with the death of her mother were fabulous. The scenes the whole shebang. Loved it. Will.see it again when it comes to dvd.
By Richard Holmes
LIt's brary Kindle Ebook
I've said it nd I'll say it again,"I f'n hate saying r" worst software ever for trying to take notes like this. Always dropping stuff, other stuff disappears completey unadjustable in every aspect horrible app.
So this book opens up with the expedition of Cap Cook in the Endeavor to Otaheite to set up an observation post to track the 1769 transit of Venus. The only other contact with white men was some French fisherman and 2 yrs before a visit by HMS Dolphin. I bet they certainly wondered about them when they appeared as out of nowhere. Great documentary on youtube about it, very well done.
The first expedition in the Endeavor:
In 1766 the Royal Society engaged Cook to travel to the Pacific Ocean to observe and record the transit of Venus across theSun. Cook, at the age of 39, was promoted to lieutenant and named as commander of the expedition.[19][20] The expedition sailed from England on 26 August 1768,[21] rounded Cape Hornand continued westward across the Pacific to arrive at Tahition 13 April 1769, where the observations of the Venus Transitwere made. Then opening sealed orders they explored Australia where they named Botany Bay.
The second trip in the Resolution:
Still looking for Dalrymple's "southern continent"...
Cook commanded HMS Resolution on this voyage, whileTobias Furneaux commanded its companion ship, HMSAdventure. Cook's expedition circumnavigated the globe at an extreme southern latitude, becoming one of the first to cross the Antarctic Circle (17 January 1773). In the Antarctic fog,Resolution and Adventure became separated. Furneaux made his way to New Zealand, where he lost some of his men during an encounter with Māori, and eventually sailed back to Britain, while Cook continued to explore the Antarctic, reaching 71°10'S on 31 January 1774.
Cook was killed by Natives in Lahaina (Hawaii) (the Sandwich Islands) "I always say give mee a Douche bag and a Sandwich and I'll conquer the world.
Death of Captain James cook by Johann Zoffany circa 1795.
11% Joseph Banks figures prominently throughout this book as is fitting. In his botanical experiments in Kew Gardens...
"The poet Coleridge among others refers to him as a reliable source of new exotic and experimental drugs such as Indian hemp, ‘Bang’ and cannabis."
Coleridge was smoking the weed. Later he was addicted to opium.
15% Hershel (who was busy building telescopes that were more powerful that ever [he found Uranus! Haaa! Couldn't help it sorry had to laugh] recieved some help.for this man...
"John Michel, a Quaker astronomer who had retired to Bath nursing some strange, unacceptable ideas — such as the existence of ‘black holes’ in space from which light itself could not escape."
16% while they were making their discoveries (Herschel and his sister a brilliant adtronomist in her own right and firsy state sponsored female scientist) the read the top books of the day of the lat 1700's which included...
"Don Quixote, the Arabian Nights, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy – all tales of fantastic adventures or eccentric heroes. Caroline does not seem to have been permitted the most fantastic and eccentric of them all, William’s favourite, Paradise Lost.
16% Although fisrt named George's Star, the official name of the new planet would be Uranus.
I love it when Keats accuses Newton of unweaving the rainbow.
This is one of those periods in time when an isolated area becomes the scene of rapid advancement. Not sure why it happens really. The mechanics of this phenomena would make a good study. Here is this place and time dubbed "the Romantic Age" by some and "the Golden Age" by others where rapid advances in science, art, music and literature coalesce to explode into a veritable renescaince.
200 lbs equals 14 stone in this time period.
3722 "So the comet that appears in the Bayeux Tapestry turned out to be Halley’s on a previous periodic visit; it reappeared without disaster in 1986, and is next scheduled in 2061."
I remember studying this in my "Davinci Code" Phase.
5164 "the Periodic Table, first suggested by John Dalton as a ‘Table of 20 Elements’ in 1808 (and organised by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleyev in 1869, using the card game of patience as a model). Then, much more needed to be discovered about the three processes of transformation as defined by Priestley and Lavoisier: combustion, respiration, oxidation."
And Lavoisier, because he was a scientist and a tax collextor, was guillotined after the French Revolution.
5599 And this from the mouth of Humphrey Davy after experiments with nitrous oxide,"“Nothing exists, but Thoughts! — the Universe is composed of impressions, ideas," He never realizes how true those statements are. Later Cosmologists and physicist would try to prove just that with their revolutionary new ideas.
5696 Coleridge "felt that the new poetry and the new science were so closely entwined that they must somehow merge, and invited Davy to move north and establish a chemistry laboratory in the Lake District." He felt the similarities and blending of all this experimentation. Later in the book, the author details.some anomosity in this group as well.
5866 Meanwhile, Davy completely missed the chance to found the science and study of anesthesia with his nitrous oxide experiments. He pronounced it a dead end and moved on. But many would have benefited. Like this poor soul,"Fanny Burney’s account of her own mastectomy — having a breast removed, without anaesthetics, by a military surgeon in her Paris apartment in 1811 — is perhaps more shattering than any account of a limb amputated on the battlefield during the Napoleonic Wars."
6677 "speculations were dramatically brought back to life, ten years after Thelwall’s lecture, by an astonishing and brutal series of public experiments performed in London on 17 January 1803. The perpetrator, as Banks noted grimly, was another Italian, the Professor of Anatomy from Bologna, Giovanni Aldini."
They allow him to take a freshly hung criminals' corpse and hook electrodes to it (including an anal one) and juice the dead body to reanimate it. And these experiments were the talk of the town. This is where the inspiration for Mary Shelly's Frankenstien or Prometheus Unbound came from. Amazing! The author comments that this is also the."first science fiction novel."
6629 Under the effects of the electric current, the body flopped around and the author gives us this bit of speculation,"That small, grotesque detail of the opening eye may well have caught a young novelist’s imagination."
This fascination with electricity did not end there. The quack medicine craze some 100 years later saw many devices that allowed you to rub electricty on certain body parts.to promote health.
6649 So it was really just a myth of animosity between poets and scientists. "This gradually hardened into the dogma that the ‘Romantic poets’ (as they eventually became known) were fundamentally anti-scientific. The myth can be observed forming on one signal occasion at a dinner party hosted in his north London studio"
This is Haydon's Christ entering Jerusalem. It has a little surprise in it,"Haydon had laid his dinner table directly beneath the huge rectangular canvas. A triumphant, youthful, bearded Christ rides at evening through the ancient city of Jerusalem, surrounded by a mob of enthusiastic disciples. The whole crowd sweeps downwards towards the viewer. But in one remote corner, set apart at the right of the picture, appear unmistakeable portraits of Wordsworth, Newton and Voltaire. Newton here represents analytic science, Voltaire godless French philosophical scepticism, and Wordsworth natural English piety. Haydon, perhaps provokingly, had dressed his old friend in a kind of monkish robe. There is one other striking figure just behind them. The young John Keats, his mouth wide open with a kind of shout of wonder, appears in animated profile from behind a pillar. During the increasingly rowdy dinner-table discussion that developed, the painting provoked a debate about the powers of Reason versus the Imagination. The destructive and reductive effects of the scientific outlook were mocked."
Love paintings with surprises (again from my "Davinci Code" phase.
7205 Davy was so successful in bringing the wonders of chemistry to the.maases that,
"Chemical Chests’ began to go on sale in Piccadilly, priced between six and twenty guineas. Davy would later emphasise how few pieces of equipment an experimental chemist needed."
7313 "On 24 May 1812 the great Felling colliery mining disaster had shaken the population of Sunderland. Every miner in the coalpit, all ninety-two of them, was killed under horrific circumstances.' This is the disaster that got Davy staryed on the safety lamp.
7337 It's really amazing what people overcome.in their lives; Like Faraday,"[whom] had difficulty in pronouncing his ‘r’s, so that as he himself said, he was always destined to introduce himself as ‘Michael Fawaday’. In fact none of this prevented him from eventually becoming one of the greatest public lecturers of his generation."
7483 All things are recycled...
"In a thoughtful mood Davy wrote a new kind of metaphysical poem, ‘The Massy Pillars of the Earth. It reflects on the human condition, and suggests that since nothing is ever destroyed in the physical universe, only transformed (the First Law of Thermodynamics), then man himself must be immortal in some spiritual sense. It also returns in a new way to Davy’s early Cornish beliefs about starlight as the source of all energy in the universe:"
Today, scientists belive that all that matter sucked in the black hole is use in creation on the other side in whitentheynterm a white hole. All things are recycled. We are stardust!
Davy, by inventing the safety lamp and the method to keep copper hulls clear, showed that science can benefit mankind.
8135 Joseph Bank at the foefron of science.for so long railed at those who would.try to change it.
"But Banks was trying to hold back a tide of history. It was no coincidence that it was the young men from Cambridge, John Herschel and Charles Babbage, who were leading the astronomers away from the Royal Society. The increasing separation and professionalisation of the individual scientific disciplines had begun at the universities. It would become the general hallmark of Victorian science."
8211 "Sir Joseph Banks died on 19 June 1820, nursed by his faithful and long-suffering wife. 45 With his death, after over forty years as President of the Royal Society, there was the sense that a distinctive era in British science had come to an end. Within a decade this had sharpened into a growing feeling of uncertainty and crisis." The end of an era.
8469 Young John Herschell, Sir Williams' son, never forgot the kindness of his aunt Caroline.
"When he formed the Royal Astronomical Society with Charles Babbage in 1820, their first Honorary Member was his aunt Caroline, and this gesture sealed the bond between them."
8743 And aging Davy on happiness,"The art of living happy is, I believe, the art of being agreeably deluded; and faith in all things is superior to Reason, which, after all, is but a dead weight in advanced life, though as the pendulum to the clock in youth.’
Yes Delusion is somewhat necessary at all times in life really. But Dennis Miller says it best "ya just gotta sell it."
9051 "By the end of the 1820s British science had lost its three international stars, the three scientific knights whose names had been renowned throughout Europe. The deaths of Joseph Banks in 1820, William Herschel in 1822, and finally of Humphry Davy in 1829, marked the passing of an age."
1858 painting by Jon Gilbert. The greatest minds of the.previous era.
9061 Thomas Carlye comments on the passing of the age with a piece in,
"the Edinburgh Review in spring 1829. Here Carlyle announced the demise of Romanticism and the relentless arrival of ‘the Age of Machinery’."
9129 excerpt fro Babbage's book...
"Babbage concluded the book with a suggestive comparison between the contrasted scientific styles of Wollaston and Davy. The first had been a meticulous, patient scientist, utterly without worldly ambition, and modest and private in his profession. He was primarily interested in getting precise results that avoided all possibility of bias or error. The second was a restless scientific enquirer, rapid and ambitious in all his work, superb at popularising and explaining his projects, driven by the desire to pursue and establish the truth, and to be the first to do so at whatever cost. Wollaston, he concluded, was a pure, saint-like man of science, while Davy was also a publicist and visionary: ‘Wollaston could never have been a poet; Davy might have been a great one.’ In the future, Babbage seemed to imply, British science would need both."
This struck me due.to a.Simpsons episode. In it, Lisa brilliant science experiment is over shadowed by Bart's antics. And Skinner, in consoling her, explains that every scientist must be part (insert scientist here) and.part PT Barnum. He's telling Lisa that brklliance i disco ery is not enough. To really make a difference you must make them like and use and enjoy the invention.
Found it (Love the internet) It's the Duffless episode and the quote is
"Every good scientist should be one part P.T. Barnumand one part B.F. Skinner."
Yes! This is wjat Babbage was saying.
9325 Thenter scientist is coined and,"came rapidly into general use from this date, and was recognised in the OED by 1840."
9345 The times they were a changin'. ..
"Yet with the growing public knowledge of geology and astronomy, and the recognition of ‘deep space’ and ‘deep time’, fewer and fewer men or women of education can have believed in a literal, Biblical six days of creation. However, science itself had yet to produce its own theory (or myth) of creation, and there was no alternative Newtonian Book of Genesis — as yet. That is why Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared so devastating when it was finally published in 1859. It was not that it reduced the six days of Biblical creation to myth: this had already been largely done by Lyell and the geologists. What it demonstrated was that there was no need for a divine creation at all. There was no divine creation of species, no miraculous invention of butterflies’ wings or cats’ eyes or birds’ song. The process of evolution by ‘natural selection’ replaced any need for ‘intelligent design’ in nature. Darwin had indeed written a new Book of Genesis."
There's a great book called The Man Who Found Time about Hutton, arguably the father of modern Geology.
Depp time brought forward by Hutton and the Lyell and deep space brought on by Herschell opened the world to bigger things. Then with the "Origin of Species" it was done. But this "magical thinking" yet persists. This from Stengle's God and the Multiverse which is on shelves today...
Ok it wont let me copy the text. The book is On shelves now get it. The author says its time.to come back to reality and leave the magical thinking to philosophists.
9329 "Reading Buckland on geology, Mary Somerville mournfully observed: ‘facts are such stubborn things’. This jumped out at me because this was John Adams quote at the Boston Massacre trial. Either she got it.from hin or they both got.from somewhere else. Hmmm.
9392 The next generation at work advancing the craft,"His [Faraday's] experiment with magnetic coils and a galvanometer (which was made to move without physical contact), carried out at the Institution’s laboratory on 29 August 1831, was said to have ended ‘the Age of Steam’ at a stroke, and begun the new Age of Electricity’.
9414 "The geologist Charles Lyell began in 1830 to bring out his classic work Principles of Geology, which would finally use scientific evidence to reject the Biblical account of short-scale creation of the earth, as maintained by every authority from Cuvier and Paley to Buffon and Buckland. Lyell’s proposal of a ‘deep time’ corresponded to the ‘deep space’ cosmology of William Herschel. It would ultimately provide the supportive authority for Charles Darwin, his great friend, to accept the deep time necessary for evolution by natural selection to take place."
The Great Moon Hoax appeared out of no where and took legs before it could be proven wrong. Hoax's are a part of human nature and will always be with us.
Picture from the New York World of the Moonpeople.
9601 "Before the Great Moon Discovery story was blown, a mid-West preacher was collecting subscriptions to send a crate of Bibles to the poor benighted lunar men, and Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore was considering the possibilities of a whole new genre of fiction: the science fiction hoax (he would launch it with a vivid — but entirely fictitious — account of the first balloon crossing of the Atlantic the following"
Books:
John Hawkesworth
Hawkesworth’s Account of Voyages Undertaken … for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere and Performed by … Captain Cook
Documentaries:
Captain Cook: Obsession and Discovery -Taking Command: http://youtu.be/_y9-5NZ2AfY
By Steven Johnson
Audiobook
Just started this on yesterday at the gym wr did glass. It sort of like a written "The Day the Universe Changed." Pretty cool so far.
Wow that was fast. Maybe the documentary will stick better. Still waiting for that from the library.
By Daniel Rassmussen
Audiobook
Well back to the gym after a two week break nursing a sore shoulder. Felt good to be back and to kick off the whe "new year new me bullshit" (ha I love that). This for appearex on the list lasf January glad >'m finally getting around to it. I'm going through the old lists now from 201r and filling it the gaps. So many books, so little time on this planet.
So I'm goi g along listening to the Haiti revolt by Toussaint Louverture as a sort of leadin I guess to the American uprising. Anyway with my mind wandering (the internet has eaten my brain; Isn't that right Nicky Carr) I pick up this little tidbit.
So get this' with the uprising in San Domang (I know it's Santa Domingo but this is jow it's pronounced for some reason), Napolean sends Le'Clerc to subdue the island and after a brief success he fails. They bring in specially trained man eating dogs bred in cuba and turn them loose on the island. So the dogs(unbeknownst to the French) are color blind and eat soldiers as well. That is the funniest (stupidest) thing I've ever heard. Can you imagine that? "Polay vu there Jean Claude let's turn loose zee fucking dogs. We'll show zeese bastards. Oh shit zee fucking dogs are eating us. Shit how could have forseen this?" Shit round up zee fucking dogs. Omg lmao!
By George Motz
Library Ebook
The best burgers ti be found in America. I recommended you watch the documentary too of the same name. This is so pretty bizarre stuff here. From burgers covered in green chili to melted peanut butter it is all here.
By Michael Blanding
Ebook
This quote below from Chapter One refers to Coke's early origins as a patent medicine "One of the most notorious showmen, Clark Stanley, publicly killed hundreds of rattlesnakes to advertise his Snake Oil Liniment, which was eventually discovered to be little more than camphor and turpentine—forever making the term “snake-oil salesman” synonymous with fraud."
This from Chapter Two referring to Nazi Coke "When supplies of concentrate ran out, he created a new grapefruit-flavored beverage, naming his new concoction “Fanta,” and using forced labor from concentration camps to produce it. He stopped short only of changing the name of the company, risking death at the hands of a Nazi general when he refused."
A sordid past indeed.
And then then Pepsi challange caused Coke to add more sugar to be more like Pepsi (ya can't make this stuff up). The move proved to be both a disaster and a blessing to Coke.
Here we have the day. "Company executives stood up before a packed press conference on April 23, 1985, forever after known as “Black Tuesday” among the Coke faithful. Unfortunately for Coke, word of the change had already leaked. The day before, Pepsi had taken out a full-page ad in The New York Times declaring victory in the Cola Wars with the statement “The Other Guy Just Blinked.” Two books with yhis title appeared at this time.
I remember this. I remember thinking what the hell is the big deal. But for Pepsi I guess it was. Pepsi declared itself winner of the cola wars. However Coke returned to the old formula and returned to its' dominant position.
These guys take their sugar water very seriously. There's this:
"For the first time, average Americans began putting their money into the market in significant numbers—either on their own or through the vehicles of mutual funds or pension funds. These institutional investors began to push for higher and higher returns, and companies obliged them, focusing everything on their quarterly earnings statements in a new emphasis that became known as the “shareholder value movement.” The idea dates back to an obscure 1975 book by economist Alfred Rappaport. But the philosophy was articulated most famously by Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric, who declared in 1981 that plodding growth of “blue chip” companies was no longer good enough for him. Instead, he pushed GE’s earnings into high gear by cutting waste and inefficiency wherever he found it—including downsizing through massive layoffs.
[And so began the "screwing of the American working class" movement-thanks Jack]
He set the tone for other companies, who rushed to please Wall Street by any means necessary—including accounting tricks, stock buybacks, and rampant acquisitions of other companies. Flush with stock options, CEOs profited handsomely, even as they sometimes hurt the long-term success of their companies through an emphasis on short-term growth." A practice that continues today. The corporations bend over backwards for new customers while the aggrieved existing customers exit in droves. Can't they see that there is no future in this practice. Corporate America hello keep your loyal customers happy. And I donr mean with after transactions surveys. This only serves to demonstrate further your contempt. Its starts with payingnyour employees anliving wage so they feel like they have a stake in the outcome. You get what you pay for and if you pay dirt wages you will continue to get dirty output. And godammit I want a real person to answer the phone. I'm fed up with your endless answering computer trees and I will start voting with my purchasing power by utilizing only companies who can get these few basic concepts of business right. [Wow Ed that mighty fine looking high-horse, shut up I mean it lol].
So now the low price of corn (subsidized by our largess [your tax dollars at work] made for a cheap surplus. And when someone figured out how to make.sugar out of itt (forgive me Mr Burke) was the day the universe changed. The author gives us this:
For decades, the price of sugar still kept a lid on how big Coke was able to go. That changed in the 1980s when Japanese scientists invented high-fructose corn syrup. Unlike sucrose—subject to the whims of international sugar markets—the new sweetener could be made here at home, where corn subsidies keep the prices at rock-bottom levels. “Cheap corn, transformed into high-fructose corn syrup,” wrote Michael Pollan in 2003, “is what allowed Coca-Cola to move from the svelte 8-ounce bottle of soda ubiquitous in the ’70s to the chubby 20-ounce bottle of today.” Coke rolled out a 50 percent high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) version of its trademark beverage in 1980, delighted to discover that consumers couldn’t tell the difference. In 1985, it switched to a 100 percent HFCS version.
Uh! Not so fast there. You can tell the difference, its subtle granted but there is a difference. My lil, brother, an avid Coke.drinker, got a hold of.some.from Mexico where they still use sugar and he assures me the difference is.plain. And we would find out later the untoward effects of adding corn sugar to everything. This would be the genesis of the Diabetes and obesity epidemic that would.soon sweep America. But hey Coke got a cheap sweetner....sweeet.
A quick search online show many places now selling "real sugar" Coke. So yeah they did notice Coke and they are.paying more to get it. Time to roll out a new Coke?...ha! Just kidding.
Lets hit this horse one more time I think he's still breathing. There's this:
"As Eric Schlosser describes in Fast Food Nation,
[A great book btw which I highly recommend ]
in the 1990s a 21-ounce medium soda at McDonald’s sold for $1.29, while a 32-ounce large soda sold for only 20 cents more. But the cost for ingredients was only 3 cents more—for 17 cents of pure profit. Everyone won—
[In the long run we actually lost (not weight mind you) but we the consumer lost]
the customer got exponentially more soda, the restaurant got more profit, and the company sold more syrup. And if that wasn’t enough, customers could request to “supersize” their drinks—a stomach-busting 64 ounces and 610 calories a pop. By 1996, supersizing accounted for a quarter of soft drink sales. (It was the same story at the 7-Eleven chain of convenience stores, which introduced the 32-ounce Big Gulp, the 44-ounce Super Gulp, the 52-ounce X-Treme Gulp, and finally the 64-ounce Double Gulp.
[I remember Dennis Miller commenting on the size of drinks in this period "And have you seen the size of the sodas now? I could dock my Hobie Cat in there."
The true champion, however, was “The Beast,” an 85-ounce refillable cup released by Arco service stations in 1998.)"
The beast indeed.
This was all a part of the 80' super abundant glutinous culture that would come back to bite us in our now fattened asses.
But even today that legacy remains. When I go the the local movie house I get a snack and I want to get a small soda (which I fell is still too big for me really) to wash it down. The guy always tells.me thats it's acctually cheaper to buy the big soda. Imagine that? Its actually cheaper to get the oversized monstrosity. I say yes I dont care. Give me the small one anyway. But I don't see many others doing that.
"In 1994, Coke began introducing a new 20-ounce bottle, fashioned from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic in Coke’s trademark “contour” shape—a variation on the old green-glass hobbleskirt bottle. It quickly replaced the 12-ounce can to become the standard serving size for Coke."
More coke please! Oh and did you notice here we have the introduction of the planet killing PET bottle from our corporate overlords. Not only will we destroy our own health with this devils brew but now we can also destroy the whole planet as well. Yea! More Coke!
Eventually they put the classic shape on the 2 liter bottle as well. I remember seeing that and thinking wow that's cool. I didnt make me buy Coke (Pepsi man here) but I did think it was pretty cool nonetheless.
19.1% We are definely getting fatter. This on that:
"Every day , it seems, there’s new evidence of America’s expanding waistline—from a policy on Southwest Airlines requiring customers to buy two seats if they are going to spill over from the eighteen inches allotted in one, to the motorized carts Wal-Mart now offers for people too large to amble around the store by themselves. [There are many signs of our gluttony in the aisles of Wal-Mart] In medical terms, a person is obese when his or her body mass index (BMI) tops 30.2 And after holding steady for much of the last century, the percentage of American adults checking that box has more than doubled, from 14 percent in the 1970s to 34 percent today, translating into some 75 million people.
Another 34 percent of adults with a BMI over 25 are classified as “overweight,” placing more than two-thirds of the adult U.S. population into one of those two categories. And along with those statistics come increased risks for diseases such as high blood pressure and heart disease. The prognosis for the next generation is just as bad, with the percentage of obese teenagers more than tripling, from 5 percent to 18 percent over the past thirty years, and the number of obese children climbing to 20 percent.
Bleak indeed.
The backlash was coming and Coke was due for its comeuppance. This from our author:
20.5% "The opening salvo was fired by a nonprofit group called the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), which released a report about soda in 1998 called Liquid Candy that teased out the connections between soda and health issues...
Below is the graphic from the cover of the CSPI report. Pretty easy to see who they blame. As Adbusters will tell you that branding they love so much can be turned agaisnt them quite easily. Coke is not printed on the bottle but that distinct "hobbleskirt" bottle tells us immediately whose it is.
"No one talked about obesity.” The report would change that—drawing the connection for the first time between the corresponding rise in soda sales and obesity rates over the previous twenty years, and sparking a debate that eventually spilled out into a national backlash against sugary soda."
"[The] CSPI was founded in 1971, one of the first of the many “public interest” groups that proliferated in a period that business historian David Vogel calls the last of the “three major political waves of challenge to business that has taken place in the United States in [the twentieth] century” (the first two being the Progressive Era and the strong push by organized labor in the post-Depression 1930s). Groups such as the Sierra Club, Common Cause, and Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen used any means possible to curb the power of big business at a time when public support for corporations was at a low ebb."
Back then we had a better chance than today of reigning them in and the task appears monumental. But I assure intrepid reader we can make them take notice. Yes we can.
"...when CSPI did an update of Liquid Candy in 2005, the percentage of calories from soft drinks in the average person’s diet had gone up 25 percent.)
The report was catnip to the media, which ran story after story about the findings—singling out Coke more often than Pepsi as a harmful substance fed to youth. The Coca-Cola Company sat back silently, even as its surrogate, the National Soft Drink Association, aggressively contradicted CSPI’s claims. “Soft drinks make no nutritious [sic] claims,” said a spokesperson for the trade group. “We are simply one of the nice little refreshments people can enjoy as part of a balanced diet.”
Cue the lightning strike! Lmao Balanced diet ha!
30.3% Now on to the 800lb gorilla bottled water. Bottled water, although marketed as a.pure solution to water, has been found again and again to be no more pure that tap water. Let me be the first to tell you it's ok to start drinking your tap water. In many cases it's actually more pure than that water you are payimg for. Its not necessary to buy water. In fact its counterproductive. The more you buy and the less tap you use will leave less impetus to keep our tap water supplies clean. Stop paying for water. Inspite of the "preferred advertisement" on facebook with Poland Spring with the "mountain stream" on the bottle it not true. It's called marketing ,(I call it plain old manipulation). Turn on your bullshit detector and put on your hip - waders, cause Nestle is slinging it with this one. And I stand there staring outraged at the unmitigated gaul of Nestle with the help of Facebook invading my space...a friend likes it. You like it? Are you f'n kidding me? You like it? You like being force fed advertising or do you like rapine and theft of natural resources. Which is it cause im confused. Want to find out what a good neighbor Nestle (the parent company of Poland Spring) is just ask someone from Maine. They will tell you the real story about these blackgaurds.
This from the author:
"A classic study by the Natural Resources Defense Council of more than one thousand bottles of water in 1999 found that while most samples were safe, nearly a quarter tested above state standards for bacterial or chemical contamination (only 4 percent violated weaker federal standards). More recent studies have continued to find problems: In 2000, the American Medical Association found some bottled water had bacterial counts twice the level of tap. A 2002 study by the University of Tuskegee of brands including Dasani, Aquafina, and Poland Spring found mercury, arsenic, and other chemicals above the EPA limits. A 2004 study by the FDA found low levels of perchlorate, a derivative of rocket fuel, in samples of spring water. As recently as 2008, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG) found thirty-eight different pollutants in bottled water, ranging from bacteria to fertilizer and Tylenol, and concluded that consumers “can’t trust that bottled water is pure or cleaner than tap water.” (The study did not reveal the types of water it tested, saying only that they were “popular” brands.)"
30.3% This on the so-called "halo effect" where corporations try to pretend they actually care:
"Of course, there were limits to what a corporation could do—since legally its obligations were to increase profit for its shareholders, not spread its wealth to solve the world’s problems. Henry Ford had found that out in 1916, when his Ford Motor Company was sued for using profits to give discounts to customers instead of dividends to shareholders. The judge in the case sided against him, ruling that “a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of its stockholders.” It’s that principle that has caused Joel Bakan to argue that corporations are essentially “pathological” entities—maximizing profit at the expense of any other good—whether workers’ rights, environmental improvements, or even its own customers’ pocketbooks. “The corporation’s legally defined mandate is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others,” he writes."
Yep that about sums it up
58.4% There's this:
"Despite the growing attention Plachimada was receiving in the international press, the local activists in Kerala were skeptical of being co-opted by international nonprofits who wanted to use the fight to push their own issues."
This statement above is telling. The whole "help" industry is in itself an industry. They will deliver help but it will be their way only and while.they push their own agendas.
Excellent book
Books:
Constance Hays in her book The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company. As
David Michaels: Doubt Is Their Product
Michele Simon: Appetite for Profit
Elizabeth Royte: Bottlemania
Maude Barlow Blue Gold, Blue Covenant and Blue Future (also she has a documentary called Blue Gold)
Nantoo Banerjee, Cokes Bumpy RidenThrough India
By Bartow Elmore
Library book
Citizen Coke is a peak into the infrastructure of the sugar water giant the author groups this with other "extraction" industries like steel or lumber. The company take existing cheap surpluses ie, sugar and water anx made them into a product. The genius was letting others supply the products and becoming a consumer of these products. Unlike the vertical organizations that flourished in the period. Coke proved and pioneered that you dont need to own everything in your sector, better to buy it and run cheap. This "Coca-Cola capitalism" as the author refers to it was the model that would prove very effective not just for Coke but many other industries as well.
22 I hear Mr Burns saying "best drink since Mr Pemberton mixed his potions over at 107 Marrietta street.
26 Although Pemberton invented the formula and got the Coke phenomenon started, it was Asa Candler who pushed the product to national distribution.I
Hire's Root Beer was started about the same time as Coke, also Dr Pepper. These companies were the competition and together they started the soda fountain culture of the gilded age. Shortly Pepsi would come on the scene and give Coke a formidable adversary.
Pg 57 In the early years of Monsanto, the company was saved by a timely investment from Coke ti buy of saccharine stores. The author quotes the Monsanto corporate literature,"without Coke there would be no Monsanto. That sounds about right.
So this book tells the story of Coke by following the trail of the ingredients.
57 this is the sugar section and there is plenty of it. So much so that it would "overload consumers tastebuds were it not for the jigh concentrarions of acids" in the drink (can you say rust remover?). And get this,"the Ph is so low trucks transporting the concentrated mixture require hazzardous material signs." This is what we drink. Yikes!
The interventions of the governemnt and the aquisitions of the Spanish American War caused a sugar boom. The start of WWI changed all that. The unstable sugar prices caused alot of heartache for theass users like Coke. Pepsi actually went.out of business because of it and Hershey, another power user, barely hung on. That author says Hershey was a different kind of tycoon. He believed in spending the money in community to benefit all. When we visited Hershey park last year my Dad turned over a small trinket in the gift shop and it said made in China. When we checked further everyrhing said made in China. Naturally we were outraged and I imagine poor r Hershey is rolling in his grave over this travesty.
Pg 104 Coke sailed through the Depression years without a hitch. The outbreak of WWII brought new challenges. The "Boss" Robert Woodruff partnered Coke with the US military. And no lesser a soldier then Ike himself demaded Cokes for his soldiers. And with that partnership, Coke made all the sugar rationing go away, created the illusion of being patriotic, and assured the creation of millions of new thirsty customers after the war. Not only this but it ialso "sewed theds for foreign expansion" after the war (pg 107). Not bad for a sugar-water company. Pepsi, now back in business, was left both chagrined and outraged.
On to the Coca...
No secret really Coca Cola wanamed for cocaine amd had it as part of its ingredients for many years. Then public opinion turned away from the drug. Like marijuanna, it became associated with black people having a good time and there's no way.the man is gonna stand for that. Make it illegal. You have them black people sniffin that damn cocaine and gettin all wild and the next thing you know they'll be raping white women. I can just hear them. This is how the tide of oppressipn usually roles. We love to have beliefs and then impose them on others.
Didn't know this
Cocaineless cocaine extract is still in Coca Cola. They took it out when they went to New Coke figuring they could finally get rid.of it once and fo all, but no. Coke was reinstated under the name Coca Cola Classic and the coca exract called merchandise #5 was put back in. It remains today.
Now on to the caffeine:
Cover of Time Magazine 1950 at the height of Cokes power
269 Pollans' book The Omnivores Dillemma describes the fact that with HFCS being so cheap it created the aga of the Big Gulp, and we all asked them to Supersize it.
279 Apparently, artuficial sweetner is just as bad, if not worse, than real sugar. It does you no good to drink diet.
286 Here the aurhor talkes about the farm subsidies. And how counterproductive the whole program really is.
