Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Factoid of the day

actually I learned three fact today

One: The US gets almost half their petroleum needs from domestic consumption, and over half of what they import is from the western Hemisphere.

and EvansPritchard of the UKTelegraph says local oil percentage of the US is even higher and going up.


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Two: Bayer settled a multimillion dollar lawsuit with rice growers in the US.

Did bad pesticide spoil the crops? No, but tiny cross pollination from nearby pesticide resistant GM crops made it impossible to sell rice to Europe and parts of Asia.

Yes, fear of the franken food boogeyman might get you.

yeah, I remember two years ago when we desperately needed rice in the Philippines, the Green lobby of the Catholic church stopped the church from giving out US donated rice because it might be contaminated with GM crops...and Zimbabwe used that excuse to stop South African donations for it's starving too.

Ironically, China found benefits from a similar rice, (fewer health problems due to less pesticide use) and of course although China only recently "approved" it's use, it's been grown there for years.

They figure theoretical "health" problems aren't as bad as massive starvation...

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Three: Pakistan has people supposedly descended from Alexander the Great's soldiers, who still practice polytheism.

the bad news: Wikipedia says the experts have argues yes and no, but the latest analysis suggests they probably are not.

you might be familiar with them (or actually their sister tribe in Afghanistan) from this movie




The Kalash people's reputed connection to Alexander the Great is the basis of the famous Rudyard Kipling story "The Man Who Would Be King", however it takes place among the Kalasha of Nuristan, then known as Kafiristan, in nearby Afghanistan. The story was made into a film in 1975 starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine.

The bad news is that, like other minority religions there, they are being forcibly converted to Islam

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