White Phosphorus Quotes

The sea had changed. It was dark green now with white-horses, and the rocks shone yellow like phosphorus. Rumbling solemnly the thunder-storm came up from the south. It spread its black sail over the sea; it spread over half the sky and the lightning flashed with an ominous glint. "It's coming right over the island," thought Snufkin with a thrill of joy and excitement. He imagined he was sailing high up over the clouds, and perhaps shooting out to sea on a hissing flash of lightning.

I argue against purism not because I want a devastated world, the Mordor of industrial capitalism emerging as from a closely aligned alternate universe through our floating islands of plastic gradually breaking down into microbeads consumed by the scant marine life left alive after generations of overfishing, bottom scraping, and coral reef–killing ocean acidification; our human-caused, place-devastating elevated sea levels; our earth-shaking, water poisoning fracking; our toxic lakes made of the externalities of rare-earth mineral production for so-called advanced electronics; our soul-and-life destroying prisons; our oil spills; our children playing with bits of dirty bombs; our white phosphorus; our generations of trauma held in the body; our cancers; and I could go on. I argue against purism because it is one bad but common approach to devastation in all its forms. It is a common approach for anyone who attempts to meet and control a complex situation that is fundamentally outside our control. It is a bad approach because it shuts down precisely the field of possibility that might allow us to take better collective action against the destruction of the world in all its strange, delightful, impure frolic. Purism is a de-collectivizing, de-mobilizing, paradoxical politics of despair. This world deserves better.

Those who visited that exhibition-room found an auto-de-fé of immense skies in ignition, globes blotted out by bleeding suns; hemorrhages of stars, flowing down in purple cataracts over tumbling tufts of clouds. Against this background of terrible din, silent women passed, nude or appareled in jeweled stuffs, like the bindings of the old Evangelists; women with hair of shaggy silk, with pale blue eyes, hard and fixed, and flesh of the frozen whiteness of milk; Salomes holding, motionless upon a platter, the head of the Baptist, which shone, soaked in phosphorus, under the quincunxes with shorn leaves, of a green that was almost black; goddesses galloping on hippogriffs and streaking, with the lapis lazuli of their wings, the agony of the clouds; feminine idols, in tiaras, upright on thrones, at the top of stairs submerged in extraordinary flowers, or seated, in rigid poses, upon the backs of elephants with green-mantled foreheads and breasts strung with pearl-ropes like cavalry bells, stamping about upon their own heavy image, reflected in a sheet of water and splashed by the columns of the ring-circled legs!

I don’t see any option except to stick to the plan. Split up, infiltrate, find out why they’re here. If things go bad—” “We use the backup plan,” Piper said. Jason hated the backup plan. Before they left the ship, Leo had given each of them an emergency flare the size of a birthday candle. Supposedly, if they tossed one in the air, it would shoot upward in a streak of white phosphorus, alerting the Argo II that the team was in trouble. At that point, Jason and the girls would have a few seconds to take cover before the ship’s catapults fired on their position, engulfing the palace in Greek fire and bursts of Celestial bronze shrapnel.

An aurora swirled in the night skies above Bataan, radiating around the smoke-shrouded peaks of the Mariveles Mountains. Intermittent flashes from phosphorus bombs and incendiary shells bathed the jungle in blinding bursts of white light. The rumbling, subterranean tremors had scarcely subsided when American stockpiles of TNT and ammunition dumps were detonated, causing the peninsula to convulse. Thousands of rounds of projectiles, from artillery and mortar shells to rifle bullets, streaked across the sky in arcing rainbows. "Never did a 4th of July display equal it in noise, lights, colors or cost," observed one officer.

Another set of mismatch diseases that can be caused by farming diets are nutrient deficiencies. Many of the molecules that make grains like rice and wheat nutritious, healthful, and sustaining are the oils, vitamins, and minerals present in the outer bran and germ layers that surround the mostly starchy central part of the seed. Unfortunately, these nutrient-rich parts of the plant also spoil rapidly. Since farmers must store staple foods for months or years, they eventually figured out how to refine cereals by removing the outer layers, transforming rice or wheat from “brown” into “white.” These technologies were not available to the earliest farmers, but once refining became common the process removed a large percentage of the plant’s nutritional value. For instance, a cup of brown and white rice have nearly the same caloric content, but the brown rice has three to six times as much B vitamins, plus other minerals and nutrients such as vitamin E, magnesium, potassium, and phosphorus. Refined

At this point, the sequence of my memories is disrupted. I sank into a chaos of brief, incoherent and bizarre hallucinations, in which the grotesque and the horrible kept close company. Prostrate, as if I were being garrotted by invisible cords, I floundered in anguish and dread, oppressively ridden by the most unbridled nightmares. A whole series of monsters and avatars swarmed in the shadows, coming to life amid draughts of sulphur and phosphorus like an animated fresco painted on the moving wall of sleep. There followed a turbulent race through space. I soared, grasped by the hair by an invisible hand of will: an icy and powerful hand, in which I felt the hardness of precious stones, and which I sensed to be the hand of Ethal. Dizziness was piled upon dizziness in that flight to the abyss, under skies the colour of camphor and salt, skies whose nocturnal brilliance had a terrible limpidity. I was spun around and around, in bewildering confusion, above deserts and rivers. Great expanses of sand stretched into the distance, mottled here and there by monumental shadows. At times we would pass over cities: sleeping cities with obelisks and cupolas shining milk-white in the moonlight, between metallic palm-trees. In the extreme distance, amid bamboos and flowering mangroves, luminous millennial pagodas descended towards the water on stepped terraces.

I sat up a bit and looked out over the railing toward the ocean. The sight always took my breath away. The dark green velvet of the front yard contrasted with the radiant white of the sand dunes that separated the family’s property from the beach. The white mounds cut a wavy line across the deep blue of the Atlantic, like the finger paint of a child in his first attempt to create something beautiful. Feathery sea oats grew in clumps across their tops. The water glistened and the sun danced on the phosphorus. An illusory field of diamonds.

The cruel act of not being loved back by the person you love the most burns like white-hot phosphorus. Maybe it’s not that there was no love, just not enough. Maybe they loved themselves more than they loved you. They might’ve promised they’d walk through fire for you, and you realized too late that they were the one lighting the match.

The nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium analysis (N-P-K), which federal law requires to be printed on bags of fertilizer, is basically irrelevant in an organic program. Feeding the soil and plants with nothing but nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium is like feeding your kids nothing but white bread.

Modern commerce has deliberately robbed some of nature's foods of much of their body-building material while retaining the hunger satisfying energy factors. For example, in the production of refined white flour approximately eighty per cent or four-fifths of the phosphorus and calcium content are usually removed, together with the vitamins and minerals provided in the embryo or germ. The evidence indicates that a very important factor in the lowering of reproductive efficiency of womanhood is directly related to the removal of vitamin E in the processing of wheat. The germ of wheat is our most readily available source of that vitamin. Its role as a nutritive factor for the pituitary gland in the base of the brain, which largely controls growth and organ function, apparently is important in determining the production of mental types. Similarly the removal of vitamin B with the embryo of the wheat, together with its oxidation after processing, results in depletion of bodybuilding activators. Refined white sugar carries only negligible traces of body-building and repairing material. It satisfies hunger by providing heat and energy besides having a pleasant flavor. The heat and energy producing factors in our food that are not burned up are usually stored as fat. In the preceding chapter we have seen that approximately half of the foods provided in our modern dietaries furnish little or no body-building or repairing material and supply no vitamins. Approximately 25 per cent of the heat and energy of the American people is supplied by sugar alone which goes far in thwarting Nature's orderly processes of life. This per capita use is unfortunately on the increase

This is illustrated in the following case. A minister in an industrial section of our city, during the period of severe depression, telephoned me stating that he had just been called to baptize a dying child. The child was not dead although almost constantly in convulsions. He thought the condition was probably nutritional and asked if he could bring the boy to the office immediately. The boy was badly emaciated, had rampant tooth decay, one leg in a cast, a very bad bronchial cough and was in and out of convulsions in rapid succession. His convulsions had been getting worse progressively during the past eight months. His leg had been fractured two or three months previously while walking across the room when he fell in one of his convulsions. No healing had occurred. His diet consisted of white bread and skimmed milk. For mending the fracture the boy needed minerals, calcium, phosphorus and magnesium. His convulsions were due to a low calcium content of the blood. All of these were in the skimmed milk for the butter-fat removed in the cream contains no calcium nor phosphorus, except traces. The program provided was a change from the white flour bread to wheat gruel made from freshly ground wheat and the substitution of whole milk for skimmed milk, with the addition of about a teaspoonful of a very high vitamin butter with each feeding. He was given this meal that evening when he returned to his home. He slept all night without a convulsion. He was fed the same food five times the next day and did not have a convulsion. He proceeded rapidly to regain his health without recurrence of his convulsions.

From the data presented in the preceding chapters and in this comparison of the primitive and modernized dietaries it is obvious that there is great need that the grains eaten shall contain all the minerals and vitamins which Nature has provided that they carry. Important data might be presented to illustrate this phase in a practical way. In Fig. 95 will be seen three rats all of which received the same diet, except for the type of bread. The first rat (at the left) received whole-wheat products freshly ground, the center one received a white flour product and the third (at the right) a bran and middlings product. The amounts of each ash, of calcium as the oxide, and of phosphorus as the pentoxide; and the amounts of iron and copper present in the diet of each group are shown by the height of the columns beneath the rats. Clinically it will be seen that there is a marked difference in the physical development Qf these rats. Several rats of the same age were in each cage. The feeding was started after weaning at about twenty-three days of age. The rat at the left was on the entire grain product. It was fully developed. The rats in this cage reproduced normally at three months of age. The rats in this first cage had very mild dispositions and could be picked up by the ear or tail without danger of their biting. The rats represented by the one in the center cage using white flour were markedly undersized. Their hair came out in large patches and they had very ugly dispositions, so ugly that they threatened to spring through the cage wall at us when we came to look at them. These rats had tooth decay and they were not able to reproduce. The rats in the next cage (illustrated by the rat to the right) which were on the bran and middlings mixture did not show tooth decay, but were considerably undersized, and they lacked energy. The flour and middlings for the rats in cages two and three were purchased from the miller and hence were not freshly ground. The wheat given to the first group was obtained whole and ground while fresh in a hand mill. It is of interest that notwithstanding the great increase in ash, calcium, phosphorus, iron and copper present in the foods of the last group, the rats did not mature normally, as did those in the first group. This may have been

There are some phases of modern physical degeneration in which most of us take part with remarkable complacency. We would consider it a great misfortune and disgrace to burn up the furniture in our homes to provide warmth, if fuel were available for the collection. This is precisely what we are doing with our skeletons by a process of borrowing, simply because we fail to provide new body repairing material each day in the food. You are all familiar with the tragic misfortune that overtakes so many elderly people through the accident of a broken hip or other fractured bone. Statistics show that approximately 50 per cent of fractured hips occurring in people beyond 65 years of age never unite. We look upon this as one of the inevitable consequences of advancing age. In Chapter 15 I have referred to the small boy whose leg was broken when he fell in a convulsion while walking across the kitchen floor. That bone did not break because the blow was hard but because the minerals had been borrowed from the inside by the blood stream in order to maintain an adequate amount of the minerals, chiefly calcium and phosphorus in the blood and body fluids. He had been borrowing from his skeleton for months because due to a lack of vitamins he could not absorb even the minerals that were present in the inadequate food that he was eating. The calcium and the phosphorus of the milk were in the skimmed milk that he was using but he needed the activators of the butter-fat in order to use the minerals. Simply replacing white bread with these activators and the normal minerals and vitamins of wheat immediately checked the convulsions

white phosphorus flowers, burning without oxygen,

After the bloodbath of the First World War, army commanders from western democracies were under great pressure at home to reduce their own casualties, so they relied on a massive use of artillery shells and bombs. As a result far more civilians died. White phosphorus especially was a weapon of terrible indiscrimination.

white, cobwebby threads attached to roots. These are the underground parts of special fungi that deliver phosphorus to trees in return for carbon.

How? Next time you’re in a forest, dig into the duff, and you’re bound to find white, cobwebby threads attached to roots. These are the underground parts of special fungi that deliver phosphorus to trees in return for carbon. Textbooks once described the exchange as exclusive, one tree to one fungus, until the data begged to differ. Simard’s work was among the first to prove that fungi branch out from the roots of one tree to connect dozens of trees and shrubs and herbs—not only relatives but entirely different species. [This “wood-wide web” is an underground Internet through which water, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and even defense compounds are exchanged.] When a pest troubles one tree, its alarm chemicals travel via fungi to the other members of the network, giving them time to beef up their defenses. Thanks to researchers like Simard, foresters are now encouraged to leave birch and large hub trees in the forest to give seedlings a fast connection to the network.

cup of brown and white rice have nearly the same caloric content, but the brown rice has three to six times as much B vitamins, plus other minerals and nutrients such as vitamin E, magnesium, potassium, and phosphorus.

The practice of tipping a paint brush started contaminating everybody and everything in a watch dial factory. Painters noticed that after sneezing into a handkerchief, it would glow. You could see the brush twirlers walking home after dark. Their hair showed a ghostly green excitation, and they could spell out words in the air with their luminous fingers. Some, thinking outside the box, started painting their teeth, fingernails, eyelashes, and other body parts with the luminous paint, then stealing away to the bathroom, turning out the lights, and admiring the effect in the mirror. There was no problem finding gross radium contamination in a factory. There was no need for a radiation detection instrument. All you had to do was close the blinds. Everything glowed; even the ceiling. Most workers were each swallowing about 1.75 grams of radioactive paint per day. By 1922, things started going bad in the radium dial industry. In the next two years, nine young radium painters in the West Orange factory died, and 12 were suffering from devastating illnesses. US Radium, the biggest watch-dial maker in town, strongly denied that anything in their plant could be causing this. No autopsies were performed, and the death certificates recorded anemia, syphilis, stomach ulcers, and necrosis of the jaw as causes. The dead and ailing, however, had dentists in common, and these health professionals had noticed unusual breakdowns of the jaws and teeth in all of these women. It was beginning to look like another case of an occupational hazard, following closely behind tetraethyl lead exposure at General Motors and “phossy jaw” from white phosphorus fumes in the match industry. Could it be the radium?

White phosphorus is highly toxic, and people who made matches routinely developed “phossy jaw,” a terrible condition in which the jaw bone disintegrates.