The Story of Stuff

It's a visionary, dynamic, and even confrontational short film on where we get our stuff from-"The Story of Stuff" by environmental activist Annie Leonard.

If you haven't had a chance to see it yet, click here to view it on their awesome and interactive website.

You can also click here to read a recent piece from the New York Times on the effect "The Story of Stuff" is having in America's classrooms.

Darwin Is Dead!-The Black Swan of Paleontology

If you would like to contribute to our year-long "celebration" of Darwin's 200th birthday, please send your articles, editorials, or any other creative and informative pieces to nvclub108@gmail.com

Hobbits don't just belong to all you Lord of the Rings buffs. The discovery of dwarf-like hominid skeletons in the Indonesian islands has thrown yet another wrench into the ever-increasing complex puzzle that is the "accepted" theory of the origin of human species.

Click here to head on over to our hometown New York Times website and read all about it

Swine Flu: A Tale of Evolution, Economics, Power Politics and International Law.

A provocative and challenging article from our friends at Above Top Secret.
Click here to check it out.

Here's an excerpt

So why not tell the truth? Because what's really on the table is the profitability of large scale industrial animal husbandry, never mind international travel and other trade. Strategies for passive population reduction are also part of the play of course, but more as an opportunistic sidebar. Industrial animal husbandry includes hog and poultry barns as well as cattle feedlots.

Large scale operations crowd 10's of thousands of animals together, pump them full of antibiotics, antivirals and vaccines to keep them alive, and force-feed them for slaughter to provide meat for our tables. The practice is defended as "efficient" and economically necessary. Unfortunately, such conditions virtually guarantee the creation of new, and often virulent, diseases.

Far more reliably than laboratory petri dishes, industrial animal husbandry operations literally force microbes and viruses to mutate, thereby initiating and accelerating the evolutionary process and creating new diseases. These new diseases sometimes infect people. The role industrial agricultural practices play in creating human diseases has been known for decades - long enough to determine that current practices are dangerously unsustainable.

However, food is an essential commodity - the market is better than guaranteed, and the profit margin can be amazing. So the world's ruling financiers started controlling our food supply early on, and went for large-scale high-profit industrial food production and animal husbandry.

The problems were clear by the 1970's. First came Rachel Carson's expose; then there was the other swine flu scare; Mad Cowdestroyed Britain's cattle industry and devastated other nations' cattle producers too; and the bird flu crisis did the same to poultry producers in Asia. The writing has been on the wall for a good while.

Darwin Is Dead!-The Postdated Check

If you would like to contribute to our year-long "celebration" of Darwin's 200th birthday, please send your articles, editorials, or any other creative and informative pieces to nvclub108@gmail.com

From "Life Comes From Life"

Karandhara: Modern proponents of Darwinism say that the first living organism was created chemically.
Srila Prabhupäda: And I say to them, "If life originated from chemicals, and if your science is so advanced, then why can't you create life biochemically in your laboratories?"
K: They say they will create life in the future.
SP: What future? When this crucial point is raised, they reply, "We shall do it in the future." Why in the future? That is nonsense. "Trust no future, however pleasant." If they are so advanced, they must demonstrate now how life can be created from chemicals. Otherwise what is the meaning of their advancement? They are talking nonsense.
K: They say that they are right on the verge of creating life.
SP: That's only a different way of saying the same thing: "In the future." The scientists must admit that they still do not know the origin of life. Their claim that they will soon prove a chemical origin of life is something like paying someone with a postdated check. Suppose I give you a postdated check for ten thousand dollars but I actually have no money. What is the value of that check? Scientists are claiming that their science is wonderful, but when a practical example is wanted, they say they will provide it in the future.

Suppose I say that I possess millions of dollars, and when you ask me for some money I say, "Yes, I will now give you a big postdated check. Is that all right?" If you are intelligent, you will reply, "At present give me at least five dollars in cash so I can see something tangible." Similarly, the scientists cannot produce even a single blade of grass in their laboratories, yet they are claiming that life is produced from chemicals. What is this nonsense? Is no one questioning this?
K: They say that life is produced by chemical laws.
SP: As soon as there is a law, we must take into consideration that someone made the law. Despite all their so-called advancement, the scientists in their laboratories cannot produce even a blade of grass. What kind of scientists are they?
Dr. Singh. They say that in the ultimate analysis, everything came from matter. Living matter came from nonliving matter.
SP: Then where is this living matter coming from now? Do the scientists say that life came from matter in the past but does not at the present? Where is the ant coming from now—from the dirt?

Those scientific folk are still at it. Click here to read about the latest claims for a "second genesis". They're "knocking at the door!"

Darwin Is Dead!-Chemical Evolution

If you would like to contribute to our year-long "celebration" of Darwin's 200th birthday, please send your articles, editorials, or any other creative and informative pieces to nvclub108@gmail.com

Chemical Evolution: A Molecular Concept Of Life

By The Late Dr T.D Singh (HH Bhakti Swarup Damodar Maharaja)

The theory of chemical evolution rests upon three assumptions:

1) The hypothetical primitive atmosphere must have been either reducing or neutral. This means that there was no free oxygen in the atmosphere in the earth’s distant past.

2) Simple molecules like amino acids, purines, pyrimidines and sugars were formed within this atmosphere under the action of ultraviolet radiation, electrical discharges, radioactivity, thermal energy and so on.

3) In the course of time, these molecules gave rise to proto-proteins, protonucleic acids and other protocellular components, which in turn gave rise to the so-called protocells and finally to the living cell.

We can briefly analyze these assumptions by purely scientific reasoning and argument. It is a foregone conclusion of many molecular evolutionists that the primitive atmosphere consisted of carbon in the form of hydrocarbon, such as methane, nitrogen in the form of ammonia, oxygen in the form of water and sulfur in the form of hydrogen sulfide. This was first proposed by Oparin, the Russian evolutionist, and Urey, the American physicist.

Based on this assumption, Miller performed an experiment in 1953 in which he passed an electric discharge through a gaseous mixture of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapor. Amino acids such as glycine, alanine, aspartic acid and glutamic acid were observed as some of the components of the reaction products. Since amino acids are the smallest units of the protein molecule, Miller’s experiment gave the molecular evolutionists great hope and encouragement for their idea of the chemical origin of life. They claim that such steps are the ones that will finally lead to life. However, in the light of many experimental findings, such a claim is far from truth. It is just the wishful thinking of the chemical evolutionists.

The idea of the primitive reducing atmosphere has received strong and serious criticisms from scientists of various disciplines. Their arguments suggest overwhelming drawbacks in the conjecture. Available data from geology, geophysicists and geochemistry argue strongly against this idea. Abelson, for example, argues that there is no evidence for the reducing atmosphere, and that ammonia would have quickly disappeared because the effective threshold for degradation by ultraviolet radiation is 2,250Å. He suggests that a quantity of ammonia equivalent to the present atmospheric nitrogen would be approximately 30,000 years.

Abelson has also suggested that if the primitive atmosphere contained large amounts of methane gas, geologic evidence for it should be available. Laboratory experiments show that irradiating a highly reducing atmosphere produces hydrophobic organic molecules that are absorbed by sedimentary clays. This suggests that the earliest rocks should have contained an unusually large proportion of carbon of organic chemicals. However, this is not the case.

From observations based on the stratigraphical record, Davidson concludes that there is no evidence that a primeval reducing atmosphere might have persisted during much of Precambrian time. Brinkmann shows from theoretical calculation that dissociation of water vapor by ultraviolet light must have generated enough oxygen very early in the history of the earth to create an oxidizing atmosphere.

Besides these, there have been huge numbers of other arguments and findings against primitive reducing atmosphere. Recently, many geo-scientists have also expressed great doubt about it. In light of these arguments, the idea of a primeval reducing atmosphere does not seem tenable.

The First Lady Rocks!

An encouraging sign at least from the White House Garden, as the First Lady Michelle Obama grows a fully organic garden, which is perturbing the agri-business monopolies to no end.

Click here to read more.

Let's hope and pray she continues to be a prominent example of down-home, GMO free living and loving of the land for young and old alike.

Darwin Is Dead!-The Darwin Delusion

If you would like to contribute to our year-long "celebration" of Darwin's 200th birthday, please send your articles, editorials, or any other creative and informative pieces to nvclub108@gmail.com

The Darwin Delusion is a new book by Lailitanatha Dasa, scheduled for release this summer.

Click here to check out a recent interview on ISKCON News with Lailtanatha as he details his motivations and inspirations for writing this book. It should be a heck of a read!