Proof that homeopathy works? - From Kesav Pillaiji.

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>>>4 Belfast homeopathy resultsMADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, wasthe scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemicalremedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have ahealing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for allthat homeopathy was bunkum.........>>>> Prof. Jaques

Benveniste of Paris has further established the wavy effect in successive potentizations, some such dilutions up to 60C causing certain white blood cells lose their staining ability and further confirmed by independent researchers at France, Italy and Canada besides Israel. In one of the stranger episodes in the recorded history of scientific publishing, the prestigious British research journal Nature recently published experimental results which the editors say they consider utterly impossible. The typically indigestible title of the paper is "Human Basophil Degranulation Triggered by Very Dilute Antiserum Against IgE"14, and the conclusions it proposes have been similarly indigestible to the medical community. The main players in the experiment were a special type of white blood cell known as a basophil and an antibody, IgE. When basophils are normally exposed to this antibody, their chemistry and internal structure change, in a way that is easily checked by staining techniques. But what Benveniste and his colleagues found was that the changes occurred even when the antibody was used up to the 120x

potency, a dilution at which it is virtually impossible for even one molecule of the antibody to remain. The results also showed the familiar rhythmic changes in basophil reactions as the potencies increased, a factor still unexplained, even by homoeopaths. The deputy editor of Nature remarked that two centuries of observation and rational thinking about biology will have to be abandoned if the results stand, because they cannot be explained by existing physical laws. The 13 member international research team headed

by Professor Benveniste conducted their experiments after being challenged by two eminent French homoeopaths to disprove homoeopathy once and for all, by conducting a sensitive, tightly controlled experiment in an accredited research centre. The centre chosen was at the University of South Paris, where Professor Benveniste is a Research Director. "That was how it all started", he said. "They challenged us to prove them wrong, and we couldn't." The furore surrounding this experiment has produced some unique reactions within the scientific community, and highlights

an important question: how should the scientific establishment deal with anomalous findings that challenge the very roots of established thought? Nature journal had its own answer: it sent a fraud squad comprising one of its editors, a professional magician, and an investigator of scientific frauds from the USA to Benveniste's laboratories. Over a period of a week they criticised shortcomings in experimental design, studied the laboratory records, and interrogated the researchers. Finally, they failed to replicate the results in a double-blind trial, and declared the experiments "a delusion." Benveniste, not unexpectedly, considered the investigation a witch hunt and an outrage. "I welcome any explanation for our findings" he said, "but not this kind of crap." Dr.Benvesiste's claims in "NATURE" were thus contested by the orthodox allopaths, who battered him on various counts to prove his findings scientifically, with control and experiment studies, much to his consternation. The homoeopaths of the world, together with interested onlookers, can be assured that the matter will not rest there. Further interesting reading on the bizarre reactions

to homoeopathic experiments on the part of the scientific and medical establishments will surface. Benveniste will undoubtedly be back, with a more tightly controlled experiment which will probably decide, once and for all, the future of homoeopathy. THE BELFAST RESEARCH RESULTS CONFIRM THE LONG FOUGHT PROVED THEORIES BY DR.BENVENISTE OF THE WORKING OF HOMOEOPATHIC DILUTIONS, THE RESEARCHER HARASSED AND HOUNDED OUT FOR HIS PUBLICATION IN "NATURE" On 5/15/06, C Hamilton <photoart wrote: 13 things that do not make sense19 March

2005NewScientist.com news serviceby Michael Brookshttp://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=mg18524911.6001 The placebo effectDON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, youinduce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with salinesolution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothingcan be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the aboveexperiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug thatblocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? Thepain-relieving

power of saline solution disappeared. So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect fordecades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effectis somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremorsand muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease (NatureNeuroscience, vol 7, p 587). He and his team measured the activity ofneurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a commontarget for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began tofire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson's. The neuronactivity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the salinewas definitely doing something.We have a lot to learn about

what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "Therelationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderfulmodel to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases inwhich it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in differentillnesses. As yet, we just don't know.2 The horizon problemOUR universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space fromone edge of the visible universe to the other, and you'll see that themicrowave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the sametemperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and ouruniverse is only 14 billion years old.Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no wayheat radiation

could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermalequilibrium we see now.This "horizon problem" is a big headache for cosmologists, so big thatthey have come up with some pretty wild solutions. "Inflation", for example.You can solve the horizon problem by having the universe expandultra-fast for a time, just after the big bang, blowing up by a factorof 1050 in 10-33 seconds. But is that just wishful thinking? "Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred," says University of Cambridgeastronomer Martin Rees. The trouble is that no one knows what could havemade that happen.So, in effect, inflation solves one mystery only to invoke another. A variation in the speed of light could also solve the horizon problem -but this too is impotent in the face of the question "why?" Inscientific terms, the uniform temperature of the

background radiation remains an anomaly.3 Ultra-energetic cosmic raysFOR more than a decade, physicists in Japan have been seeing cosmic raysthat should not exist. Cosmic rays are particles - mostly protons butsometimes heavy atomic nuclei - that travel through the universe at close to the speed of light. Some cosmic rays detected on Earth areproduced in violent events such as supernovae, but we still don't knowthe origins of the highest-energy particles, which are the mostenergetic particles ever seen in nature. But that's not the real mystery.As cosmic-ray particles travel through space, they lose energy incollisions with the low-energy photons that pervade the universe, suchas those of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Einstein's special theory of relativity dictates that any cosmic rays reachingEarth from a source outside our galaxy will have suffered so manyenergy-shedding collisions that

their maximum possible energy is 5 ×1019 electronvolts. This is known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit. Over the past decade, however, the University of Tokyo's Akeno Giant AirShower Array - 111 particle detectors spread out over 100 squarekilometres - has detected several cosmic rays above the GZK limit. In theory, they can only have come from within our galaxy, avoiding anenergy-sapping journey across the cosmos. However, astronomers can findno source for these cosmic rays in our galaxy. So what is going on?One possibility is that there is something wrong with the Akeno results.Another is that Einstein was wrong. His special theory of relativitysays that space is the same in all directions, but what if particlesfound it easier to move in certain directions? Then the cosmic rayscould retain more of their energy, allowing them to beat the GZK limit.Physicists at the Pierre Auger experiment in Mendoza,

Argentina, are now working on this problem. Using 1600 detectors spread over 3000 squarekilometres, Auger should be able to determine the energies of incomingcosmic rays and shed more light on the Akeno results.Alan Watson, an astronomer at the University of Leeds, UK, and spokesman for the Pierre Auger project, is already convinced there is somethingworth following up here. "I have no doubts that events above 1020electronvolts exist. There are sufficient examples to convince me," he says. The question now is, what are they? How many of these particlesare coming in, and what direction are they coming from? Until we getthat information, there's no telling how exotic the true explanationcould be.4 Belfast homeopathy resultsMADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, wasthe scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemicalremedy could be diluted to the point where a

sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have ahealing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for allthat homeopathy was bunkum.In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white bloodcells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine whenthe cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, foundthat homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't containa single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effectcannot be ruled out.So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolvingthings like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then

diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matterwhat the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leavessome kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true thatno homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (InflammationResearch, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are,"Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." Ifthe results turn out to be real, she says, the implications areprofound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.5 Dark matter TAKE our best understanding of gravity, apply it to the way galaxiesspin, and you'll

quickly see the problem: the galaxies should be fallingapart. Galactic matter orbits around a central point because its mutual gravitational attraction creates centripetal forces. But there is notenough mass in the galaxies to produce the observed spin.Vera Rubin, an astronomer working at the Carnegie Institution'sdepartment of terrestrial magnetism in Washington DC, spotted this anomaly in the late 1970s. The best response from physicists was tosuggest there is more stuff out there than we can see. The trouble was,nobody could explain what this "dark matter" was.And they still can't. Although researchers have made many suggestions about what kind of particles might make up dark matter, there is noconsensus. It's an embarrassing hole in our understanding. Astronomicalobservations suggest that dark matter must make up about 90 per cent of the mass in the universe, yet we are astonishingly ignorant what that

90per cent is.Maybe we can't work out what dark matter is because it doesn't actuallyexist. That's certainly the way Rubin would like it to turn out. "If I could have my pick, I would like to learn that Newton's laws must bemodified in order to correctly describe gravitational interactions atlarge distances," she says. "That's more appealing than a universe filled with a new kind of sub-nuclear particle."6 Viking's methaneJULY 20, 1976. Gilbert Levin is on the edge of his seat. Millions ofkilometres away on Mars, the Viking landers have scooped up some soil and mixed it with carbon-14-labelled nutrients. The mission's scientistshave all agreed that if Levin's instruments on board the landers detectemissions of carbon-14-containing methane from the soil, then there must be life on Mars.Viking reports a positive result. Something is ingesting the nutrients,metabolising them, and then belching out gas

laced with carbon-14.So why no party?Because another instrument, designed to identify organic molecules considered essential signs of life, found nothing. Almost all themission scientists erred on the side of caution and declared Viking'sdiscovery a false positive. But was it?The arguments continue to rage, but results from NASA's latest rovers show that the surface of Mars was almost certainly wet in the past andtherefore hospitable to life. And there is plenty more evidence wherethat came from, Levin says. "Every mission to Mars has produced evidence supporting my conclusion. None has contradicted it."Levin stands by his claim, and he is no longer alone. Joe Miller, a cellbiologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, hasre-analysed the data and he thinks that the emissions show evidence of a circadian cycle. That is highly suggestive of life.Levin is petitioning ESA and NASA

to fly a modified version of hismission to look for "chiral" molecules. These come in left orright-handed versions: they are mirror images of each other. While biological processes tend to produce molecules that favour one chiralityover the other, non-living processes create left and right-handedversions in equal numbers. If a future mission to Mars were to find that Martian "metabolism" also prefers one chiral form of a molecule to theother, that would be the best indication yet of life on Mars.7 TetraneutronsFOUR years ago, a particle accelerator in France detected six particles that should not exist. They are called tetraneutrons: four neutrons thatare bound together in a way that defies the laws of physics.Francisco Miguel Marquès and colleagues at the Ganil accelerator in Caenare now gearing up to do it again. If they succeed, these clusters mayoblige us to rethink the forces that hold atomic nuclei

together.The team fired beryllium nuclei at a small carbon target and analysedthe debris that shot into surrounding particle detectors. They expected to see evidence for four separate neutrons hitting their detectors.Instead the Ganil team found just one flash of light in one detector.And the energy of this flash suggested that four neutrons were arrivingtogether at the detector. Of course, their finding could have been anaccident: four neutrons might just have arrived in the same place at thesame time by coincidence. But that's ridiculously improbable.Not as improbable as tetraneutrons, some might say, because in the standard model of particle physics tetraneutrons simply can't exist.According to the Pauli exclusion principle, not even two protons orneutrons in the same system can have identical quantum properties. Infact, the strong nuclear force that would hold them together is tuned in such a way that it

can't even hold two lone neutrons together, let alonefour. Marquès and his team were so bemused by their result that theyburied the data in a research paper that was ostensibly about thepossibility of finding tetraneutrons in the future (Physical Review C,vol 65, p 44006).And there are still more compelling reasons to doubt the existence oftetraneutrons. If you tweak the laws of physics to allow four neutrons to bind together, all kinds of chaos ensues (Journal of Physics G, vol29, L9). It would mean that the mix of elements formed after the bigbang was inconsistent with what we now observe and, even worse, theelements formed would have quickly become far too heavy for the cosmosto cope. "Maybe the universe would have collapsed before it had anychance to expand," says Natalia Timofeyuk, a theorist at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK.There are, however, a couple of holes in this reasoning.

Establishedtheory does allow the tetraneutron to exist - though only as aridiculously short-lived particle. "This could be a reason for four neutrons hitting the Ganil detectors simultaneously," Timofeyuk says.And there is other evidence that supports the idea of matter composed ofmultiple neutrons: neutron stars. These bodies, which contain an enormous number of bound neutrons, suggest that as yet unexplainedforces come into play when neutrons gather en masse.8 The Pioneer anomalyTHIS is a tale of two spacecraft. Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972; Pioneer 11 a year later. By now both craft should be drifting off intodeep space with no one watching. However, their trajectories have provedfar too fascinating to ignore.That's because something has been pulling - or pushing - on them, causing them to speed up. The resulting acceleration is tiny, less thana nanometre per second per second. That's equivalent to

just oneten-billionth of the gravity at Earth's surface, but it is enough tohave shifted Pioneer 10 some 400,000 kilometres off track. NASA lost touch with Pioneer 11 in 1995, but up to that point it was experiencingexactly the same deviation as its sister probe. So what is causing it?Nobody knows. Some possible explanations have already been ruled out, including software errors, the solar wind or a fuel leak. If the causeis some gravitational effect, it is not one we know anything about. Infact, physicists are so completely at a loss that some have resorted to linking this mystery with other inexplicable phenomena.Bruce Bassett of the University of Portsmouth, UK, has suggested thatthe Pioneer conundrum might have something to do with variations inalpha, the fine structure constant (see "Not so constant constants", page 37). Others have talked about it as arising from dark matter - butsince we don't know what

dark matter is, that doesn't help much either."This is all so maddeningly intriguing," says Michael Martin Nieto of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "We only have proposals, none ofwhich has been demonstrated."Nieto has called for a new analysis of the early trajectory data fromthe craft, which he says might yield fresh clues. But to get to the bottom of the problem what scientists really need is a mission designedspecifically to test unusual gravitational effects in the outer reachesof the solar system. Such a probe would cost between $300 million and $500 million and could piggyback on a future mission to the outerreaches of the solar system (www.arxiv.org/gr-qc/0411077 )."An explanation will be found eventually," Nieto says. "Of course I hopeit is due to new physics

- how stupendous that would be. But once aphysicist starts working on the basis of hope he is heading for a fall." Disappointing as it may seem, Nieto thinks the explanation for thePioneer anomaly will eventually be found in some mundane effect, such asan unnoticed source of heat on board the craft.9 Dark energyIT IS one of the most famous, and most embarrassing, problems inphysics. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is expandingat ever faster speeds. It's an effect still searching for a cause -until then, everyone thought the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big bang. "Theorists are still floundering around, looking fora sensible explanation," says cosmologist Katherine Freese of theUniversity of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We're all hoping that upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and so on will giveus more clues."One suggestion is that some property of

empty space is responsible -cosmologists call it dark energy. But all attempts to pin it down have fallen woefully short. It's also possible that Einstein's theory ofgeneral relativity may need to be tweaked when applied to the verylargest scales of the universe. "The field is still wide open," Freese says.10 The Kuiper cliffIF YOU travel out to the far edge of the solar system, into the frigidwastes beyond Pluto, you'll see something strange. Suddenly, afterpassing through the Kuiper belt, a region of space teeming with icy rocks, there's nothing.Astronomers call this boundary the Kuiper cliff, because the density ofspace rocks drops off so steeply. What caused it? The only answer seemsto be a 10th planet. We're not talking about Quaoar or Sedna: this is a massive object, as big as Earth or Mars, that has swept the area cleanof debris.The evidence for the existence of "Planet X" is compelling,

says AlanStern, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. But although calculations show that such a body could accountfor the Kuiper cliff (Icarus, vol 160, p 32), no one has ever seen thisfabled 10th planet.There's a good reason for that. The Kuiper belt is just too far away for us to get a decent view. We need to get out there and have a look beforewe can say anything about the region. And that won't be possible foranother decade, at least. NASA's New Horizons probe, which will head out to Pluto and the Kuiper belt, is scheduled for launch in January 2006.It won't reach Pluto until 2015, so if you are looking for anexplanation of the vast, empty gulf of the Kuiper cliff, watch thisspace.11 The Wow signalIT WAS 37 seconds long and came from outer space. On 15 August 1977 itcaused astronomer Jerry Ehman, then of Ohio State University inColumbus, to scrawl "Wow!" on the

printout from Big Ear, Ohio State's radio telescope in Delaware. And 28 years later no one knows whatcreated the signal. "I am still waiting for a definitive explanationthat makes sense," Ehman says.Coming from the direction of Sagittarius, the pulse of radiation was confined to a narrow range of radio frequencies around 1420 megahertz.This frequency is in a part of the radio spectrum in which alltransmissions are prohibited by international agreement. Natural sourcesof radiation, such as the thermal emissions from planets, usually cover a much broader sweep of frequencies. So what caused it?The nearest star in that direction is 220 light years away. If that iswhere is came from, it would have had to be a pretty powerfulastronomical event - or an advanced alien civilisation using an astonishingly large and powerful transmitter.The fact that hundreds of sweeps over the same patch of sky have

foundnothing like the Wow signal doesn't mean it's not aliens. When youconsider the fact that the Big Ear telescope covers only one-millionth of the sky at any time, and an alien transmitter would also likely beamout over the same fraction of sky, the chances of spotting the signalagain are remote, to say the least.Others think there must be a mundane explanation. Dan Wertheimer, chief scientist for the SETI@home project, says the Wow signal was almostcertainly pollution: radio-frequency interference from Earth-basedtransmissions. "We've seen many signals like this, and these sorts ofsignals have always turned out to be interference," he says. The debatecontinues.12 Not-so-constant constantsIN 1997 astronomer John Webb and his team at the University of New SouthWales in Sydney analysed the light reaching Earth from distant quasars. On its 12-billion-year journey, the light had passed

throughinterstellar clouds of metals such as iron, nickel and chromium, and theresearchers found these atoms had absorbed some of the photons of quasarlight - but not the ones they were expecting. If the observations are correct, the only vaguely reasonable explanationis that a constant of physics called the fine structure constant, oralpha, had a different value at the time the light passed through the clouds.But that's heresy. Alpha is an extremely important constant thatdetermines how light interacts with matter - and it shouldn't be able tochange. Its value depends on, among other things, the charge on the electron, the speed of light and Planck's constant. Could one of thesereally have changed?No one in physics wanted to believe the measurements. Webb and his teamhave been trying for years to find an error in their results. But so far they have failed.Webb's are not the only results that

suggest something is missing fromour understanding of alpha. A recent analysis of the only known naturalnuclear reactor, which was active nearly 2 billion years ago at what is now Oklo in Gabon, also suggests something about light's interactionwith matter has changed.The ratio of certain radioactive isotopes produced within such a reactordepends on alpha, and so looking at the fission products left behind in the ground at Oklo provides a way to work out the value of the constantat the time of their formation. Using this method, Steve Lamoreaux andhis colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexicosuggest that alpha may have decreased by more than 4 per cent since Oklostarted up (Physical Review D, vol 69, p 121701).There are gainsayers who still dispute any change in alpha. PatrickPetitjean, an astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, led a team that analysed quasar light picked up

by the Very Large Telescope(VLT) in Chile and found no evidence that alpha has changed. But Webb,who is now looking at the VLT measurements, says that they require a more complex analysis than Petitjean's team has carried out. Webb'sgroup is working on that now, and may be in a position to declare theanomaly resolved - or not - later this year."It's difficult to say how long it's going to take," says team member Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. "The more we look atthese new data, the more difficulties we see." But whatever the answer,the work will still be valuable. An analysis of the way light passes through distant molecular clouds will reveal more about how the elementswere produced early in the universe's history.13 Cold fusionAFTER 16 years, it's back. In fact, cold fusion never really went away. Over a 10-year period from 1989, US navy labs ran more than 200experiments to investigate

whether nuclear reactions generating moreenergy than they consume - supposedly only possible inside stars - canoccur at room temperature. Numerous researchers have since pronounced themselves believers.With controllable cold fusion, many of the world's energy problems wouldmelt away: no wonder the US Department of Energy is interested. InDecember, after a lengthy review of the evidence, it said it was open to receiving proposals for new cold fusion experiments.That's quite a turnaround. The DoE's first report on the subject,published 15 years ago, concluded that the original cold fusion results,produced by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and unveiled at a press conference in 1989, were impossible toreproduce, and thus probably false.The basic claim of cold fusion is that dunking palladium electrodes intoheavy water - in which oxygen is combined with the hydrogen isotope

deuterium - can release a large amount of energy. Placing a voltageacross the electrodes supposedly allows deuterium nuclei to move intopalladium's molecular lattice, enabling them to overcome their naturalrepulsion and fuse together, releasing a blast of energy. The snag isthat fusion at room temperature is deemed impossible by every acceptedscientific theory.That doesn't matter, according to David Nagel, an engineer at George Washington University in Washington DC. Superconductors took 40 years toexplain, he points out, so there's no reason to dismiss cold fusion."The experimental case is bulletproof," he says. "You can't make it go away."==========================The evolution of dance (video parody)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMH0bHeiRNg & eurl=====================How would you fare under various forms of government?FEUDALISM: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.PURE SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and putsthem in a barn with everyone else's cows. You have to take care of allof the cows. The government gives you as much milk as you need.BUREAUCRATIC SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and put them in a barn with everyone else's cows. They are cared for byex-chicken farmers. You have to take care of the chickens the governmenttook from the chicken farmers. The government gives you as much milk and eggs as the regulations say you need.FASCISM: You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to takecare of them and sells you the milk.PURE COMMUNISM: You have two cows. Your neighbors help you

take care of them, and you all share the milk.RUSSIAN COMMUNISM: You have two cows. You have to take care of them, butthe government takes all the milk.CAMBODIAN COMMUNISM: You have two cows. The government takes both of them and shoots you.DICTATORSHIP: You have two cows. The government takes both and draftsyou.PURE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbors decide who gets themilk.REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbors pick someone to tell you who gets the milk.BUREAUCRACY: You have two cows. At first the government regulates whatyou can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it pays you not tomilk them. Then it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms accountingfor the missing cows.PURE ANARCHY: You have two cows. Either you sell the milk at a fairprice or your neighbors

try to take the cows and kill you. LIBERTARIAN/ANARCHO-CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buya bull.SURREALISM: You have two giraffes. The government requires you to takeharmonica lessons.============================ C Hamiltona moderator ofnew-continuum/adult humor/opinion/pictures "Our ideal is not the spirituality that withdraws from life but the conquest of life by the power of the spirit." - Aurobindo.

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