A strange diabetes of the soul

I was near Folkestone last week wondering around quaint villages with chocolate box gardens manicured to within a fraction of perfection. They have had a lovely sunny summer so cafes have moved outdoors. Tiny smart tables perched on paving stones are edged by happy grey-haired pensioners neatly apparelled. You get the feeling this is an affluent bunch and having all the basics fret about the floral display out front. Have they chosen wisely or do colours clash? Is that a weed mounting a rearguard action on the rose border? Everywhere there are shops selling bric-a-brac. Upmarket stuff such as watches, jewellery, furniture and war memorabilia. I fear as the elderly pass away here, their worldly goods are vomited into these cluttered shops. It reminds me of the Isle of Wight, twenty odd years ago, where huge baskets of personal mementoes were displayed as abundant as the tourists that flood there in the summer. 

The problem is we are not good custodians. This generation is a use and dump lot. I include myself. My mother's generation kept heirlooms, first world war medals, delph from great grandmother’s dressers and even her own wedding dress and veil from over 60 years ago is carefully stored. Because I moved from country to country my mother has become an unwilling custodian of my junk too. Things are packed in tissue paper stored in vacuum seal or filed in different coloured folders.  Her attention to detail and painstaking tidiness is in direct opposition to my sorting capacities which invariably involve a trip to the dump. There I offloads huge quantities of stuff with great satisfaction. Every time I visit I intend to clear all my debris from her life. Always I am floored by that group of belongings that mean too much to throw away (like my 20 years of diaries) but are impossible to take with me. 

The developed world suffers from too much stuff. It is a real problem. Once driving across Canada we came upon field after field of storage container . Acres of them storing the debris of their owners lives. Unable to throw their belongings away they pay to have them stored at appropriate temperature and humidity to keep them preserved. All these containers and indeed dumps seem huge monuments to our present-day fixation of acquiring things. Everywhere, postmen and and couriers hurry up driveways to deliver yet more parcels. We are fond of these packages which make every day feel like a celebration. The only problem is our homes have only so much capacity. Cupboards become full, the garage’s overflowing and attics creak with their loads. So our excesses end up in the nearest landfill.  It is a metaphor for what we truly value. It is what we increasingly fuel our lives with, but at what cost. And I don't even mean financially. The things that distract us from the most important essential aspects of life are to be feared not embraced. 

Instead of sustaining our spirits we suffer from a strange diabetes of the soul. Materialism is attachment to the insistent self. We require a fire that burns away veils and leads us closer to spiritual reality. Prayer is the essential spiritual conversation of the soul with God. It is a spiritual food that sustains the life of the spirit. When we sincerely start on the path of spiritual search, true contemplation and meditation illumines our path. Our hearts are gladdened and uplifted but even more importantly our priorities realign. Earthly inclinations are transmuted into heavenly attributes and our actions become inspired by selfless service to humanity. The results can be breathtaking. We don't need to buy containers of stuff. In each of us there is a richness closer than our life vein. May we all find the space and time to become the person we were destined to be and our actions contribute to a better society.

"O God! Refresh and gladden my spirit. Purify my heart. Illumine my powers. I lay all my affairs in Thy hand. Thou art my Guide and my Refuge. I will no longer be sorrowful and grieved; I will be a happy and joyful being. O God! I will no longer be full of anxiety, nor will I let trouble harass me. I will not dwell on the unpleasant things of life.
     O God! Thou art more friend to me than I am to myself. I dedicate myself to Thee, O Lord."

‘Abdu’l-Bahá

Arsine, you don't smell it, you just die!

Arsine is an unpleasant gas and I had a big cylinder full of it.  We used it in gas deposition chambers to dope semi-conductor surfaces in our microelectronics lab in Queens. The main route of exposure is via inhalation although poisoning through the skin has been documented.  This gas attacks the haemoglobin in the red blood cells causing them to be destroyed by the body.  

Most people are more familiar with hydrogen cyanide as a means of killing.  Hydrogen cyanide irritates the eyes and the respiratory tract.  There is a faint smell of almonds that around 50% of the population will be able to detect.  In forensics, both gases will leave the victims with particularly red blood, a usual indicator that some sort of poisoning has occurred.  Unfortunately, with Arsine you will be dead long before you smell it.  There may be a slight smell of garlic on the breath of a victim of arsine poisoning and for cyanide poisoning that sweet almond smell can sometimes be detected.  It is particularly scary that Arsine does not smell, you know your nose will not alarm you to its presence.  

I reckon arsine even looks ugly, but that could be my paranoia. This flammable gas, ignites spontaneously in air, and as well as being highly toxic is one of the simplest compounds of arsenic. Here is a picture of a molecule of the stuff.  Perhaps, you are more familiar with its other form arsenic?  

Years ago they used the Marsh test to determine if arsenic had been used on a corpse.  This test produces arsine as an intermediate product. Despite its lethality, it finds some applications in the semiconductor industry.  Which is why, when I worked in university in N. Ireland, I had a huge canister of the stuff in the access corridor of our laboratory.  Not a small tiny campsite gas cylinder a huge one a meter and a half high.  

Remember that exposure to arsine concentrations of 250 ppm is rapidly fatal: concentrations of 25–30 ppm are fatal for 30 minute exposure, and concentrations of 10 ppm can be fatal at longer exposure times.  That is 10 parts per million, not an awful lot of the stuff is needed to take you down, silently without a smell not even a sniff of warning.  So, to have a huge tank of the stuff sitting in plain view was giving the fireman heart palpitations.  He had come to do the yearly fire inspection of the building and had reached the tenth floor without any major complaint.  Finding a corridor full of some of the most toxic gases, on this the last floor, was like a nightmare.  Part of their job is knowing when they are called to a building, in the event of a fire etc, exactly what the major dangers are.  Being aware that here in a quiet innocent corridor such dangers lurked was very important.  I felt sorry for him filling in all his papers.  For firemen it must seem the rest of the world is just trying to be difficult, lighting fires in forests, putting oil on stoves and forgetting, or buying in huge quantities of extremely toxic gas.  

He was a reasonable man in an unreasonable world.  I sympathised, he shrugged his shoulders and said not to worry.  They had just done a safety analysis on a Monsanto factory in N. Ireland and had found there, the biggest store of mustard gas in Western Europe.  That is the stuff used during the world war I.  Mind you that it turns out is the tip of a very unpleasant iceberg.  Among the many achievements of this company Monsanto has:

1.   Produced rBGH, also known as Bovine Somatotropin. It is a synthetic hormone that is injected into cows in order to increase milk production. However, many studies have shown that this produces adverse effects, behaving as a cancer accelerator in adults and non-infants. This biologically active hormone is associated with breast cancer, colon cancer, lung cancer and prostate cancer.

2.   Other major products have included the herbicides 2,4,5-T, and DDT. The excitotoxin aspartame, and the controversial PCBs were also developed and produced by Monsanto. The company was sued, for the side effects of its Agent Orange defoliant used by the US military in the during the Vietnam War. More than 21,000,000 US gallons (79,000,000 L) of Agent Orange were sprayed across South Vietnam. According to the post-war Vietnamese government official statistics, 4.8 million Vietnamese  were exposed to Agent Orange, resulting in 400,000 deaths and disabilities, and 500,000 children born with some form of birth defect.  Furthermore, internal documents from the companies that manufactured it reveal that at the time Agent Orange was sold to the U.S. government for use in Vietnam, it was known that it contained a dioxin. 

3.     Its most recent pesticide Round-up is thought to be worse than DDT. Monsanto is the world’s largest producer of the herbicide “Glyphosate”, commonly used in “Round-Up”. (Glyphosate is the most used herbicide in the USA, and Roundup is the number one selling herbicide worldwide since at least 1980.) Roundup is also at the heart of much controversy in the scientific and health community, concerning human and mammalian side effects. A 2008 scientific study has shown that Roundup formulations and metabolic products cause the death of human embryonic, placental, and umbilical cells in vitro, even at extremely low concentrations.

  

I remember being reassured, all the years ago, that whatever horrors we had in our university Microelectronics Lab at least we were not the worst offenders.  Several decades later I am no longer reassured and am wondering what these guys are doing to us and our environment.  I won’t call it the most evil company on earth but some do.   Mind you be warned this article is a bit over the top!

See http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-complete-history-of-monsanto-the-worlds-most-evil-corporation/5387964