First Send Them Back to the Stone Age, Then Make Their Home Into a Parking Lot

And you can do it all without messy invasions or nuclear weapons! First send that pesky enemy back to the stone age with EMP weapons -- you don't even need to use nukes! This will create havoc with military command and control, and largely break civilian morale within a few days.Then you can destroy transportation arteries and vital infrastructures such as powerplants, fuel refineries, pipelines and military installations from a distance -- using kinetic weapons fired by electromagnetic cannon!

This one-two punch can be assembled with off-the-shelf components taking very little time and expense.

A smart world conqueror might put off invasion plans until nano-weaponry becomes more advanced. Nothing clears a space so well as nano-invaders capable of stripping a land cleaner than locust. Stealthy in, quick working, then dissolving into the landscape. Entire nations could be turned over, ready for radical makeover practically overnight!

The social democracies of Europe, North America, Japan, and Oceania have allowed humans to take a vacation from history for the past half century or more. This pax cannot possibly last much longer, particularly in the wake of the ongoing Obama devastation of the world economy.

Soon, the world populations will be thrust back into the hands of the warlords, the conquerors, the absolute destroyers of lands and peoples. Again. History coming to life, just when you thought it was obsolete.

Modern weapons research is a bit uneven. Most projects, perhaps, will not survive due to poor conceptualisation and a lack of robustness on the field of battle. But enough of the tools of "the new warfare" will succeed, to change the face of the planet a million times more than the hyped up global warming scare of Gore and Obama.

Buckle up.

Hobbit Home: The Shire Located in Wales

A pilot doing an aerial survey of Wales spotted this outpost of the Shire down below. Apparently the hobbit-builder maintains a website, and explains just how to build a hobbit home.

Some key points of the design and construction:

* Dug into hillside for low visual impact and shelter
* Stone and mud from diggings used for retaining walls, foundations etc.
* Frame of oak thinnings (spare wood) from surrounding woodland
* Reciprocal roof rafters are structurally and aesthaetically fantastic and very easy to do
* Straw bales in floor, walls and roof for super-insulation and easy building
* Plastic sheet and mud/turf roof for low impact and ease
* Lime plaster on walls is breathable and low energy to manufacture (compared to cement)
* Reclaimed (scrap) wood for floors and fittings
* Anything you could possibly want is in a rubbish pile somewhere (windows, burner, plumbing, wiring...)
* Woodburner for heating - renewable and locally plentiful
* Flue goes through big stone/plaster lump to retain and slowly release heat
* Fridge is cooled by air coming underground through foundations
* Skylight in roof lets in natural feeling light
* Solar panels for lighting, music and computing
* Water by gravity from nearby spring
* Compost toilet
* Roof water collects in pond for garden etc.
_woodlandhome_more photos here

Hobbit Homes Movie Set New Zealand
Hobbits are normally secretive, but apparently the author of the hobbit website linked above is a human : hobbit mixed-blood who married into a hobbit family. That explains his willingness to interact with the human world over the internet.

Bad Skin, Bad Brain

Scientists have learned that skin fibroblasts share many of the same peculiar cellular mechanisms as brain neurons. This suggests that the study of skin cells in persons with brain diseases such as schizophrenia, might provide almost as much information as the study of brain cells obtained from potentially dangerous brain biopsies.

Until now diseases like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have been difficult to study biologically, since this would entail taking samples from the patient’s brain. But new research findings from Örebro University in Sweden show that it is just as good to study a certain type of skin cells, since they function in a way that is similar to a type of brain cells that are suspected of playing a major role in both disorders.

“Among other benefits, this makes it considerably easier to develop and test new drugs,” says Ravi Vumma, and the head of the research group Nikolaos Venizelos who is presenting the findings in the journal Neuroscience Letters.

One of the causes of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (previously called manic-depressive syndrome) is assumed to be that the level of important transmitter substances in the brain is too low, which negatively impacts the transmission of signals. That, in turn, is because the cells in the blood-brain barrier are not transporting enough of the amino acids that are needed for the brain to be able to produce signal substances like dopamine, noradrenalin, and serotonin.

“Altered transport of the amino acids tyrosine and tryptophan may be one explanation for the disrupted signal transmission in patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder,” Ravi Vumma explains.

We have therefore mapped how the transport of the two amino acids takes place, what paths they take into the cell. Various amino acids use different transport systems, and to enhance our knowledge about schizophrenia and bipolar disorder it is necessary to identify which systems are relevant for tyrosine and tryptophan.

Moreover, we want to find out whether connective tissue cells in the skin, fibroblasts, transport amino acids in the same way as endothelial cells in the brain, as this would constitute a dramatic enhancement of our ability to study how substances pass through the blood-brain barrier. The two cell types have a similar membrane function, to close out undesirable substances and only transport substances the body needs.

“The research shows that tyrosine and tryptophan largely use the same transport system and that it functions in the same way in both skin fibroblasts and the endothelial cells of the blood-brain barrier.”

On top of this we were able to determine that the inward transport of tyrosine in fibroblasts was lower in patients with bipolar disorder compared with a healthy control group. Since previous research has shown that it was lower in individuals with schizophrenia, his discovery indicates that the two diseases involve a common alteration that is probably caused by a common genetic variation. _SD