A blog about energy, the environment and the bottom line.
every other thing 'added' to Geve, an impulsive choice for a blog title; my impulse to pen my thoughts, and share these with you, and a blog is the best place. I started by writing on travel in India, then on beautiful New Zealand; as I get my way around I want to share my views. The world is becoming a more difficult place to live in; though we have no other choice we do nothing to change things.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
The full truth of the ancient wars between Greece and Persia
Briefly, the Persian Empire, founded by Cyrus The Great, the Achaemenid, (Hakhamanish), in 500 B.C., and which at it's greatest extent stretched from the present territories of Europe's Macedonia/Romania, the regions around the mouth of the river Danube, and present day Eygpt and parts of Libya, all forming it's grand western borders. To the east, it's extent reached the Indus river, and the river Oxus north east of the Caspian and Aral seas in the far north east.
One very brief mention, the Persians used paid labor to build their royal Capitals, and the kings were judged by their personal role in the Empire's politics and sentiments-this is well attested by historical chronicles that were finally brought to full literary fruition in the Shah Nameh that chronicled good kings from bad; not as now popularly alleged that the Persians were blind and dumb subjects of their kings.
The great Greek historian, Herodotus, who was born in Ionia, a Persian province of Greek cities in western Turkey, grudgingly admits of "the Persian Law" that does not change and is equally applied to all subjects! The Bible calls this "the Persian Laws that changeth not."
Greek society at that time was a full senatorial voting democracy, but for an elite class only; the rest were workers and slaves, with abundant male and female resources for any work you may wish to extract from them. Greek politics comprised of bickering and quarrelsome city states. The Spartans, particularly, were the bullies of the region. The Spartans' military society demanded all boys, from the age of seven, were given over to a mentor, a Spartan warrior, who, in his bid to cement the ties between soldier and learner, used the small boy as his concubine; any amount of historical Greek records will attest to this. They proudly proclaim the paedophilic relationship as part of military training!
The Persian Achaemenid dynasty held their vast empire for around 220 years, upto 336 B.C., with its collapse at the hands of Alexander the Great, who, incidently, considered himself heir to Cyrus, made Babylon his capital, never returning to Macedonia, and is known to have adopted Persian court etiquettes and adorn himself with the Persian purple. He married three Persian royal ladies, one of whom bore him his son and heir, who never lived to take his father's throne. Alexander's Empire of Asia collapsed, literary, on his death bed, disintegrating into five kingdoms. The Persian Empire had lasted for over 200 years.
Anyone familiar with the present politics of the great powers, the United States, have no doubts this great country is indeed a great power, although it got a thorough drubbing in Vietnam, and is not making much headway in Iraq.
Clay tablets found in the Persian royal Capitals, Persepolis, Susa and Ekbatana describe the wars with Greece as a necessary military 'arm' of politics, to keep the city states warring with one another. The Persians were carrying on a diplomatic war with Greece, bribing their leaders with gold, which kept the Greek city-states disunited, for over 150 years, well after their victories over Persian forces in the 4th century B.C.
Further, what is little known, and generally ignored, is that the western regions of present Turkey, known as Ionia, were a significantly large group of Greek cities under Persian rule; and keeping the mainland Greeks warring was as much in the interests of Persia, as keeping the communists in check was in US interest in the twentieth century!
Now, coming to the contention that the Greek victories "saved" Western civilization, allow me to present the full truth, rather the other side of the truth.
At the time of the Greco-Persian wars, in the 4th century B.C., the rest of Europe had no organised states other than the Greek city states on Mainland Greece, and we had Macedonia on it's northern borders. The rest of Europe comprised of warring rural pre-Germanic, pre-Slavic and Scythian village tribes, at most a huge mass of tribal and nomadic warring groups ruled by chieftains and petty kings. The earlier European civilizations in Greece and on the island of Crete, the Mycenaean, had long disappeared.
So to contend, the Greco-Persian wars saved Western Civilization, none existed at that time in heartland Europe! The Greeks were in fact Dorians, who migrated to the Greek mainland from Asia, and the Greek language is Indo-European, the same as ancient Persian!
To say that these wars saved the present day Western Civilization is to place everything about European civilization in some time warp.
Right through the next great European civilization, the Roman Empire, it's eventual collapse at the hands of Germanic tribes, the spread of Christianity that supported the divine rights of kings, the later rise of the Carolingian and European kingdoms, from the time of Charlemagne and the German kings, right down to the absolute Russian and French kings, we have autocratic or near despotic monarchies for some 1700 years, ruling over Western Civilization!
Everything was farthest away, in ideas, to the so called Greek democracy, which latter was, in any case, a senatorial voting right for an elite class to choose a leader from amongst themselves, whilst the rest, workers or slaves, slaved, or were done away in the gory gladiator battles, in Roman times!
To equate present Western democratic institutions to a non-existent Western Civilization based on Greek ideals that stretched back to the days of Greece or Rome, is to take all the innumerable despotic kings and monarchies, through 1700 years, and throw them into oblivion, into the ignorant man's well!
Of course, all these wild conjectures are possible by taking fullest advantage of the complete collapse of Persian civilization at the hands of the great spread of Islam, for the Zoroastrian Persian Empires fully disappeared off the face of history after the advent of Islam, that is the sad part. Pre-Islamic Persian civilization could boast of several ruling queens,and women as Generals and leaders. It was not for nothing that Alexander had fallen in love with the then Persian Orient, a fact kept well hidden from the popular image today.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Norman Borlaug dies-one of the world's greatest human being.
Norman E. Borlaug, the plant scientist who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself and whose work was credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives, died Saturday night. He was 95 and lived in Dallas.
The cause was complications from cancer, said Kathleen Phillips, a spokeswoman for Texas A&M University, where Dr. Borlaug had served on the faculty since 1984.
Dr. Borlaug’s advances in plant breeding led to spectacular success in increasing food production in Latin America and Asia and brought him international acclaim. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
He was widely described as the father of the broad agricultural movement called the Green Revolution, though decidedly reluctant to accept the title. “A miserable term,” he said, characteristically shrugging off any air of self-importance.
Yet his work had a far-reaching impact on the lives of millions of people in developing countries. His breeding of high-yielding crop varieties helped to avert mass famines that were widely predicted in the 1960s, altering the course of history. Largely because of his work, countries that had been food deficient, like Mexico and India, became self-sufficient in producing cereal grains.
“More than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world,” the Nobel committee said in presenting him with the Peace Prize. “We have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also give the world peace.”
The day the award was announced, Dr. Borlaug, vigorous and slender at 56, was working in a wheat field outside Mexico City when his wife, Margaret, drove up to tell him the news. “Someone’s pulling your leg,” he replied, according to one of his biographers, Leon Hesser. Assured that it was true, he kept on working, saying he would celebrate later.
The Green Revolution eventually came under attack from environmental and social critics who said it had created more difficulties than it had solved. Dr. Borlaug responded that the real problem was not his agricultural techniques, but the runaway population growth that had made them necessary.
“If the world population continues to increase at the same rate, we will destroy the species,” he declared.
Traveling to Norway, the land of his ancestors, to receive the award, he warned the Nobel audience that the struggle against hunger had not been won. “We may be at high tide now, but ebb tide could soon set in if we become complacent and relax our efforts,” he said. Twice more in his lifetime, in the 1970s and again in 2008, those words would prove prescient as food shortages and high prices caused global unrest.
His Nobel Prize was the culmination of a storied life in agriculture that began when he was a boy growing up on a farm in Iowa, wondering why plants grew better in some places than others. His was also an unlikely career path, one that began in earnest near the end of World War II, when Dr. Borlaug walked away from a promising job at DuPont, the chemical company, to take a position in Mexico trying to help farmers improve their crops.
The job was part of an assault on hunger in Mexico that was devised in Manhattan, at the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation, with political support in Washington. But it was not a career choice calculated to lead to fame or honor.
Indeed, on first seeing the situation in Mexico for himself, Dr. Borlaug reacted with near despair. Mexican soils were depleted, the crops were ravaged by disease, yields were low and the farmers could not feed themselves, much less improve their lot by selling surplus.
“These places I’ve seen have clubbed my mind — they are so poor and depressing,” he wrote to his wife after his first extended sojourn in the country. “I don’t know what we can do to help these people, but we’ve got to do something.”
The next few years were ones of toil and privation as Dr. Borlaug and his colleagues, with scant funds or equipment, set to work improving yields in tropical crop varieties.
He spent countless hours hunched over in the blazing Mexican sun as he manipulated tiny wheat blossoms to cross different strains. To speed the work, he set up winter and summer operations in far-flung parts of Mexico, logging thousands of miles over poor roads. He battled illness, forded rivers in flood, dodged mudslides and sometimes slept in tents.
He was by then a trained scientist holding a doctoral degree in plant diseases. But as he sought to coax better performance from the wheats of Mexico, he relied on a farm boy’s instinctive feel for the plants and the soil in which they grew.
“When wheat is ripening properly, when the wind is blowing across the field, you can hear the beards of the wheat rubbing together,” he told another biographer, Lennard Bickel. “They sound like the pine needles in a forest. It is a sweet, whispering music that once you hear, you never forget.”
Norman Ernest Borlaug was born on March 25, 1914, in his grandfather’s farmhouse near the tiny settlement of Saude, in northeastern Iowa. Growing up in a stalwart community of Norwegian immigrants, he trudged across snow-covered fields to a one-room country school, coming home almost every day to the aroma of bread baking in his mother’s oven
Friday, August 14, 2009
US Health Care Reforms!
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
NEDA-THE GIRL WHO WILL NEVER DIE!

Neda Soltani, you live on, we are dead.
Neda, the petite girl who died from a sniper's bullet during the Iran protests, stands for all we have to get back in life- beauty, pure spirit, innocence; child like and faultless, a brave courageous human being.
Neda, you have not died; you live now, and we have to learn to come alive!!!
She will ever be the symbol of a free Iran!!!
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26 06 09 And one of the greatest entertainer of the last century, who was all set to woo the world again in the twenty-first, 50 shows over the next few months, Michael Jackson, will not live to do this; the hands of death, a cardiac arrest last night, robbed this world of one of the finest human being.
Let his faults die with him, because this was a gentle person, sad and lonely, who never hurt a fly, the whole world is in his debt for something he gave us all, something difficult to define in a few words.
And it is painful and bewildering to see the adulation and grief for Michael, it would have been encouraging if Michael had received support, emotional and more, when his huge debt was made known to the world or when he was caught up in that sordid accusations of paedophile behaviour-the point is not whether these were true or otherwise, but the extent of grief and loss felt now could have been shown him as support and anger for him. But the world is fickle and all the grief and tears will fade away with time.


