Things are coming true. What does this all mean? You have had some wishes and dreams, but sometimes dreams are better kept in the land of maybe’s. This will come home to you today as stuff comes into your life. There were decisions you made, and you can see today the consequences of some of those decisions. Interestingly some are real, and some are imagined. It s hard to realize that being so right sometimes is not the best thing, especially when being right is just an excuse for lording it over others while not really having the answer yourself. There can be some tears. There can be some revelations. There can be some reevaluations. There can be some reunions. It is all part of the day’s energy. But most of all, it is important to watch, to see, and only to be as involved as peripherally necessary.
From left: Henia Belalia, Pancho Ramos-Stierle, Adrienne Maree Brown, Clayton Thomas-Muller, Carlos Jimenez.
Change is coming fast. The brief window we have to turn around the climate crisis, the growing gap between rich and poor, the violence at home and abroad, debt and austerity politics—these are among the most pressing issues facing all of us, especially young people. We asked a group of leaders, all under 40, to talk to us about how they see their lives, their leadership, and their future.
Sarah van Gelder: How do the challenges facing your generation (people under 40) compare with those faced by leaders of the civil rights, women’s, and labor movements? What’s at stake now?
Adrienne Maree Brown: I would say the biggest difference is we’ve increased our exposure to all the suffering and struggle in the world without increasing our capacity to handle it.
The speed of knowledge has increased—now it’s a nearly instantaneous flow of crisis, tragedy, and need, sprinkled with glimpses of triumph, resilience, humanity. And we are supposed to have a coherent opinion on all of it and stay focused on those things we can impact. We need mindfulness practice to come with our smartphones!
Henia Belalia: We’re looking at the frequency and impact of climate-related “natural disasters,” and it’s daunting—how do we take our foot off the gas pedal when we have very few years before we hit a point of no return and it’s game over for the planet?
Clayton Thomas-Muller: I think of our aunties and uncles who were in the American Indian movement, the Black Panthers movement. Back in the day, there was a lot of responsibility on a very small group of leaders, and it was relatively easy for agents of oppression to target those individuals. Whereas today, through social media and digital technologies that can transfer popular education materials to vast audiences, we have a more level playing field.
Carlos Jimenez: Power is becoming more concentrated and more removed from our daily experience.
I assume it never was cool to question capitalism or ask hard questions about systems of oppression. But these days, it feels like we have to stretch in ridiculous ways to question the structures of our society without being seen as radicals or crazy people.
Pancho Ramos-Stierle: In fact, sister Sarah, we are not under 40, we are 13.7 billion years old, our cosmic age, and we are part of an unfolding story of love.
Our pioneer brothers, sisters, and kin of the civil rights movement during the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s didn’t have that gorgeous picture of ourselves, the Earth, from space. And now, we’re able to detect planets outside the solar system that might support life, which is bringing a new sense of our humanity. All of a sudden, all of the nonsense divisions based on the colors of our skin or culture or spiritual practice or religion just vanish, and we’re one sacred living organism that is the wonderful Earth.
Pancho Ramos-Stierle meditates during Oakland’s Occupy protests in 2011. Moments later he and others were arrested as police cleared the plaza of Occupy campers. Photo by Noah Berger.
van Gelder: How do you see where we’re headed as a human community? How does that shape your own choices?
Belalia: One has to believe that another world is possible, but we need to be very real about what that looks like and not just put on Band-Aids.
We’re going to have to make some big changes in how we live. We’re going to have to consume a lot less and give up luxuries. Living in the Global North, in the United States especially, we have a responsibility to the rest of the world to reassess how we live.
How can we create alternatives that are so beautiful that they just naturally are in conflict with a collapsing, broken system?
Brown: In the stories I hear of past generations, we weren’t just moving toward a better world, there was a sense of responsibility to maintain and/or create a better world for the next generations. Right now I think we need to move toward being better and better ancestors.
Thomas-Muller: We need to be talking about a new economic paradigm, not patching up the existing one like some crazed engineer obsessed with patching up the Titanic. For example, green jobs are not created by producing photovoltaic panels under indentured servitude in massive industrial wastelands in China, then shipped to California where young African Americans are hired at minimum wage to install these panels onto rich people’s houses.
If instead we look at the establishment of local economies, the 100-kilometer diet, urban farming, and radicalizing the conversation around the distribution of wealth and land—that’s the conversation that I’m interested in.
Ramos-Stierle: Seeing with the eyes of an astrobiologist has given me an appreciation for technology. Everything can scale up very quickly. Small decisions can have big impacts in all directions—exponentially more so than a few generations ago. Scalable new design principles—local, decentralized, open, non-linear, emergent, biomimetic—all can spread like wildfire today. We not only have the chance now to name a new story, but our generation has the means to live a new story into being.
van Gelder: Can you tell a story from your own experience about how social change is happening today?
Thomas-Muller: We’ve seen the rise of Idle No More, which is being led by the most marginalized group in Canada: First Nations women. Canada is going through a painful process of reconciliation, not unlike what South Africa continues to go through post-apartheid. Idle No More and the tar sands movement and other indigenous struggles have ripped away the scabs of racism. We’re seeing television, print, and radio airing the voices of the most extreme racists against indigenous peoples. What’s kind of beautiful about it, though—as ugly and as painful as it is—it’s driving people to our side of the movement who are sick of the hatred, bigotry, and overall nastiness. So it’s actually expanding our political base of allies and our overall resistance.
Brown: Recently I was involved in facilitating a gathering on black reproductive justice. The folks came into the room with a lot of painful history, and they committed to healing, whatever that took. And it took sitting in that room with each other and listening to each other in new ways, hearing each other’s ancestral stories and current stories. This meeting felt so different. Instead of: “Who’s got the best strategy and the most resources?” it was: “Who’s really committed to transforming inside themselves, how they show up in this movement, and then how we can be together?”
Ramos-Stierle: One of the most revolutionary direct actions I’ve been involved in was building a 20-by-30-foot greenhouse on a third of an acre in San Francisco. We had 100 volunteers show up at the Free Farm to help, and since then, we’ve given away close to 9,000 pounds of local, organic produce.
That greenhouse became one of the main providers of Occupy the Farm a year ago on land administered by the University of California. We planted close to 15,000 seedlings in one day with 300 people, and it was such a celebration to be there disobeying with great love. Children and all the generations stood up for life and beauty.
So how can we create alternatives that are so beautiful that they just naturally are in conflict with a collapsing, broken system?
Patricia Moore, 75, of Charlotte, N.C., is a grandmother concerned about the impact that coal pollution is having on her granddaughter who suffers from chronic asthma. She joined her first protest in November, against Bank of America’s role in coal financing. She and others were arrested after disrupting four bank branches. Photo by Paul Corbit Brown.
van Gelder: Sometimes people working for change get separated into silos. My impression is that those silos are getting less rigid—that people are more open to each other’s perspectives and issues. I’m wondering if you think we’re getting better at working together?
Jimenez: Yeah, I feel like there’s less time spent trying to tell each other what to do and more collaboration, both among members and leaders.
Belalia: For me it’s a systemic change. The corporate powers that are running the world today are all-pervasive, involved in everything from our food to our education to our elections. So for me the systemic is what feels the most authentic.
In our movement, we’re pushing for a paradigm shift that will require connecting migrant rights, economic justice, housing justice, and other social justice issues with the work on runaway climate change.
It feels like we have to stretch in ridiculous ways to question the structures of our society without being seen as radicals or crazy people.
Ramos-Stierle: I’ve heard a lot of people say, “How can you bring peace if you’re not peaceful with yourself?” And then I think, “That’s over!” We need to have both. We need the inner revolution connected with the outer revolution. It’s time for activist people to become spiritual, and for spiritual people to become active.
We need to focus on our means. It really doesn’t matter what you’re doing if you’re making a more violent and resentful world with your brothers and sisters and kin through your work. There’s no reason why we have to wait; we can be making the world more harmonious right now!
Belalia: Part of my own personal philosophy is learning to just be in this moment. What we envision in our minds is part of what we create in the world, so we need to take care of soul and heart, and create a much more tranquil and sane inside to be able to carry out our work on the outside.
Thomas-Muller: Yeah. I share that perspective. Coming from an indigenous perspective, that’s one area where we actually have a bit of privilege: We have only been separated from our relationship to the sacred for a few decades, whereas for other groups, it’s been millennia. The connection we have to the sacredness of Mother Earth has been damaged by the psychotic Western industrial experiment called capitalism. Through re-evaluating our relationship to the sacred and embracing our place in the sacred circle of life, we can fill the gap left by hyperindividualism and consumption.
Activism has to be grounded in something bigger than yourself. However you perceive God, whether that’s through the smile of your child, or by connecting with the sacredness of Mother Earth through hiking in the forest, or going to church, or practicing Buddhism, or being a sun dancer, it’s important to have those elements in your activism so as not to get overwhelmed and to fall. And even with those elements you still fall, because we are facing unimaginable foes in our struggle.
van Gelder: We chose this issue theme now because there’s such urgency around the climate crisis, extreme inequality, and the growing power of the 1 percent. A lot of our change strategies don’t seem to be working in terms of these critical questions. How do you think we can get the real change that we need?
Belalia: Building networks of resistance and resilience is a really powerful way to look at change. From Occupy grew a kind of sustained resistance—the idea that “We’re going to be in a space, and we’re not going to leave until we get something done.”
But Occupy also has done a lot to build sustained resilience. I just spent time in New York with friends who are part of the Occupy Sandy networks, which set up distribution centers after Hurricane Sandy and are still working with those communities. One group I met with is creating workers’ cooperatives.
Jimenez: I’m becoming a big fan of assemblies. Occupy was a space for assembly, but I’m also talking about people’s assemblies like those the social forums tried doing. I can’t emphasize enough how powerful it is when people come together from different walks of life, different traditions, and see that we can work together. I’m thinking a lot about how we can extend invitations and bring in more people so that it’s a bigger assembly every time.
Ramos-Stierle: As brother Carlos was speaking, I was having this vision. Wendell Berry said that if you eat, you are involved in agriculture. I say, if you eat, you’re involved in the movement, like Occupy the Farm, which some of us call Occupy 2.0. Our elder Wendell Berry says, “An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.”
Brown: I’m writing and collaborating around speculative and science fiction, which involves strengthening our capacity for vision and for imagining ourselves in a future where we’re experiencing abundance. I’ve been reading a lot of Octavia Butler and trying to get more people to read her work and to write their own work.
And I’m a facilitation evangelist! Facilitation means to make things easy—facil—to make sure that the time we spend in each other’s presence is authentic, invigorating, and healing, and that it leads to real impact.
van Gelder: My last question: When you think about what you’re doing now and when you look to the future, what do you find most daunting, and what is most hopeful?
Brown: The most daunting thing to me is the scale of change that’s needed.
What makes me the most hopeful is that so many people are asking “How do I live my life? How do I spend my money? How do I care for my babies and care for the loved ones in my life?”
People are realizing the front line is within us, and we have to practice. And that makes me hopeful because I can feel that change in myself and see it in the people I love.
Jimenez: It’s the little things that give me hope, like that I’m starting to see people leading meetings and conferences who look like the people I grew up with—who look like my family.
In terms of fears, the scale, as Adrienne said, is really freakin’ scary. The world could literally collapse. It’s daunting that people don’t even realize how grave the crises are.
Thomas-Muller: What overwhelms me the most is patriarchy. Speaking as a Cree man, I fight internally all the time with patriarchy as it plays out in my life. We come from a matrilineal society. In our traditional way, it was the women who made decisions, and the men were told what to say. We were the spokespersons for some really tough old Cree ladies!
The most daunting question for me is, “How are we going to take out this system of predominantly white male patriarchy that’s driving the destruction across Mother Earth?”
And what is most empowering is seeing the rise of strong First Nations women all across Mother Earth who are rising up and leading the movement, teaching all of us what the sacred feminine creative principle is about and what it means to think seven generations ahead.
Belalia: One of the things that’s the most daunting is how closely politicians are working with corporations, and how blind a lot of people are to their own power.
I was recently invited to work on the next U.S. Social Forum, and it’s really inspiring to me that low-income folk, people of color, women, and LGBTQ are at the core of the process.
Jimenez: Thank you for providing a space for us to creatively weave this thread. Even though we’re coming from diverse backgrounds, it’s amazing that we’re saying similar things, and I’m grateful for the space and definitely think that was cool.
Ramos-Stierle: We’re kind of orphans in this generation. We better pay attention to the elders and listen to the re-generativity of cultures that have been living here for millennia and be a little less arrogant. We need to listen to many examples of selfless service and to everyday Gandhis and everyday Emma Goldmans and everyday Dolores Huertas, everyday Martin Luther King Jrs., and everyday Cesar Chavezes. One little star at a time forms a galaxy, and one little drop creates an ocean. And we see these shifts happening everywhere—like the shifts from scarcity to abundance, from consumption to contribution, from transaction to trust, from isolation to community, from perfection to wholeness.
We are overwhelmed by the ways that we put in danger the magnificent biodiversity of our planet. At the same time, we are recognizing that there are small things that we could be doing on a daily basis.
Like, after this call, I just feel that I love you. That’s what I think is happening. I don’t know you physically, and I feel that you are my sisters for real and my brothers, and we’re connecting with this technology that wasn’t there before. And so if this is the last time that we talk, I’d like you to know that I am going to keep this for the rest of my days in my heart to continue this great journey.
(NaturalNews) How did a plant that is so easily cultivated with so many uses since it was first grown in China around 6,000 BC become illegal? Even the original Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper.
Hemp fiber was used for sails and ropes for sea-going vessels during the 17th and 18th Centuries. Up until the early 20th Century, removing hemp fiber by hand was too tedious and slow for hemp to compete with other industries propelled by the burgeoning machine age.
But as WWI broke out, a German immigrant in California, George Schlichten, invented and successfully tested the first hemp decorticator, which could mechanically strip hemp of its fiber rapidly and efficiently.
Associates of the USA’s newspaper magnate of that time, EW Scripps, showed some interest in using the decorticator on a 100-acre plot of hemp near San Diego for Scripps’ paper sources. Economic circumstances and the war discouraged their plans. [1]
During the late 1930s, editions of Popular Mechanics and Mechanical Engineering exclaimed hemp could now become a billion dollar industry because of the hemp decorticator, making it seem it was a new invention even though it had been around since 1917.
But those re-emerging headlines may have have motivated industrial and banking giants with connections in Roosevelt’s administration to rid the hemp threat to their interests. This led to the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, the first step in squashing the hemp industry.
Even the AMA was thrown off by this legislation because hemp tinctures and oils had been prescribed for several ailments.
Here’s a summarized story that names the vested interests behind that legislation:http://www.princeton.edu.
Amazing hemp benefits
(1) Medicinal: Medical marijuana or cannabis edibles and THC hemp oils have been studied internationally by reputable labs and clinics for their healing properties, especially regarding cancer, for decades.
According to GreenMedInfo founder Sayer Ji, “Indeed, the GreenMedInfo.com project has uncovered 129 distinct disease categories that may benefit from this remarkable plant thus far, and new studies are being added on a weekly basis.” [2]
Classifying marijuana as a drug without medical merit is a lie perpetuated by the Justice Department’s DEA to keep it illegal for their business of arresting and prosecuting peaceful marijuana users.
(2) Foods: Hemp seeds and oils are an abundant source of perfectly balanced omega-6, omega-3, and omega-9 fatty acids. The high level of essential protein amino acids hemp offers provides a more bio-available complete protein than most all other protein sources, plant or animal. [3]
(3) Clothing: Cloth from hemp is tougher and allows for better ventilation than even cotton. You can buy hemp clothing today. Legalizing hemp would lower the costs of the imports of hemp fibers.
(4) Plastics: Around 1940, Henry Ford built a “vegetable car” with mostly hemp fibers, not including the drive train of course. The body was so strong two men with sledgehammers and axes couldn’t harm it. [4]
Properly produced hemp plastics are 100 percent biodegradable and can replace all current petroleum based chemically infested plastics. [5]
(5) Building materials: Several types of building materials, stronger and lighter than wood and concrete with better insulation properties have actually been used recently for housing. [2 – video] [5]
(6) Paper: Instead of deforesting for wood to mill paper with harsh chemicals, a process that manifests countless ecological problems, hemp fibers could be used for paper. It had been used for paper before wood pulp processing. And the paper’s quality is considered superior by many.
(7) Agriculture: Hemp is a hardy plant requiring little water and no synthetic fertilizers or herbicides. It’s a perfect rotation crop because it boosts soil health. In a relatively warm temperate climates, it can be planted and harvested twice a year.
Because it’s easy to grow and harvest with less overhead, it’s also a perfect cash crop for struggling small farms. Kentucky senator Rand Paul is pushing for a bill to legalize industrial hemp growth. It’s already happening in Colorado (http://www.naturalnews.com).
Mainstream media losing all credibility as it fails to break any news on exploding government scandals
Friday, June 14, 2013 by: J. D. Heyes
(NaturalNews) In another sign of the weakening “influence” of the mainstream media, not one of the major scandals currently swirling around the Obama Administration were broken by what you could fairly call the establishment press.
Fact: Over the past few weeks, three major scandals have broken over the Obama Administration, and it is a very sad (and frightening) truth that our pathetic, American, lapdog mainstream media are not responsible for breaking even a single one,” writes John Nolte in Breitbart News’ Big Journalism section.
He goes onto note that the three scandals – involving the IRS; NSA/Verizon phone records; the Justice Department’s improper seizure of Associated Press phone records; and Benghazi – were either broken by foreign media or the so-called U.S. alternative media (of which NaturalNews is a proud member).
Thank goodness for the alternative press
The Verizon story was broken by The Guardian, a British newspaper (the whistleblower in this case, 29-year-old Edward Snowden, an NSA analyst, probably didn’t trust anyone in the U.S. with this story).
How about the IRS’ improper targeting of conservative political action groups? Again, that story was broken “with a planted question,” Nolte points out.
In the case of the Justice Department’s targeting of AP reporters and editors, even The Associated Press failed to break that story; it only emerged after the Justice Department notified the AP what had occurred, so essentially, the department tattled on itself.
And Benghazi? Again, nope. Even though there was plenty of smoke there, the mainstream media – which has been in bed with Obama since day one of his initial campaign – took a pass en mass. There were a few exceptions, most notably Jake Tapper and Sharyl Attkission, but other than that, only Republican members of Congress and Fox News have been aggressively seeking the truth about what actually took place there when our ambassador, Christopher Stevens, was killed and brutalized.
“Left up to the media, we wouldn’t know anything about Libya. All of the media’s energy was collectively poured into ensuring the truth was never discovered,” Nolte wrote. “And do you want to know what makes this realization especially pathetic? In three of the four scandals (the AP being the exception), had our media been less interested in protecting Power and more interested in holding Power accountable, these huge, career-making stories were right there for the taking.”
What’s more, the media has been extremely hypocritical (no kidding) on some of these scandals. Take the IRS’ targeting of Tea Party groups.
In early June an editorial published by the editorial staff at The New York Times was highly critical of the president over his administration’s targeting of the phone records of millions of Americans, all in the name of protecting national security. And rightfully so; it is an abuse of the Fourth Amendment like no other in the history of the country.
“But because Obama told them to, the media hate the Tea Party. So in the face of these complaints and even a few Congressional inquiries, the media either ignored the harassment reports or openly sided with the IRS,” wrote Nolte.
The same thing can be said about what happened in Libya. Because Barack Obama was in reelection mode; and because the mainstream media was all-in to help him get reelected; and because the president’s reelection narrative on terrorism in general was that al Qaeda was on the run – the mainstream press willingly went along and refused to dig deeper on Benghazi. Had that failed operation been scrutinized, many more Americans would have known before Election Day that the administration essentially sacrificed Stevens and three other Americans for the sake of political expediency.
“Our media are not only biased; it is an utter and complete failure and embarrassment. And although there are plenty of remaining table scraps to make meals out of, the media are already losing interest in the IRS, Libya, and AP scandals, but for only one reason – they are absolutely terrified of where they might lead,” Nolte writes.
Two people are dead in the Colorado Springs area due to the Black Forest fire, which continues to rage virtually unchecked about five miles northeast of Colorado’s second largest city (population 400,000.) The fire’ had burned through 15,700 acres by late Thursday afternoon, and was 5% contained. Over 38,000 people in 13,000 homes had been evacuated. The weather was no help on Thursday, as afternoon temperatures spiked to 90°, winds were sustained at 33 mph, gusting to 40 mph, and the humidity dropped as low as 14%. The fire began on Tuesday, June 11, during a record heat wave. Colorado Springs hit 98° on June 10–the city’s hottest temperature ever recorded so early in the year. The temperature topped out at 97° on June 11. The extreme heat, combined with the extreme drought gripping the region, made for ideal fire conditions. Fire conditions will not be as dangerous in the Colorado Springs area on Friday, as a weak cold front is expected to pass through the region during the afternoon, bringing cooler temperatures and increased humidity. Strong winds may still be a problem, though.
Figure 1. The Black Forest Fire burns behind a stand of trees on June 12, 2013, near Colorado Springs, Colo. (Chris Schneider/Getty Images)
Figure 2. Aerial view of a Colorado Springs neighborhood burned in the Black Forest Fire on June 13, 2013. (Image: AP Photo/John Wark)
The three most expensive fires in Colorado history have all occurred in the past year
The 360 homes burned by this week’s Black Canyon fire are the most ever destroyed in Colorado by a fire, and will likely make it the most expensive fire in Colorado history. The previous record was the $353 million Waldo Canyon fire of June 23 – July 10, 2012. That fire killed two people, destroyed 347 homes, forced the evacuation of over 32,000 people, and burned 18,247 acres of land. The High Park fire of June, 2012, which destroyed 259 buildings near Fort Collins, now ranks as the third most expensive Colorado fire (it was the most expensive one at the time.) The Black Forest fire has a long ways to go if it wants to challenge the 2002 Hayman Fire as the largest fire in Colorado history. The Hayman fire burned 138,000 acres, an area about nine times as large as this week’s Black Forest fire.
According to a federal report released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2012, Colorado can expect to see a sharp increase in wildfires during the coming decades, if the climate warms as expected. The report cited research predicting that a 1.8°F increase in Colorado’s average temperature–the level of warming expected by 2050 under a moderate global warming scenario–would cause a factor of 2.8 – 6.6 increase in fire area burned in the state.
Video 1. Aerial view of the Colorado Springs Black Forest fire on June 11, 2013.
Severe thunderstorms pound the Mid-Atlantic
It was another intense day of severe thunderstorm activity for the Mid-Atlantic region on Thursday. A child was killed in Virginia by a falling tree, and at least three people were injured in Albemarle, North Carolina when a violent thunderstorm blew trees onto homes. NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center (SPC) logged 376 reports of damaging thunderstorm wind gusts in the 15 hours ending at 11:25 pm EDT Thursday night, and three of these gusts were 74 mph or greater. SPC is now acknowledging that Wednesday’s bow echo that traveled 600 miles from Indiana to New Jersey was a low-end derecho, with over 150 damaging wind reports. The most impressive thunderstorm winds from the derecho occurred in Wabash County, Indiana, where a “macroburst” produced winds of 90 – 100 mph across an area seven miles long and three miles wide, destroying three buildings and causing extensive tree damage. Total damage from the two-day severe weather outbreak over the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic will likely run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Figure 3. Severe weather reports for the 15 hours ending at 11:25 pm EDT June 14, 2013, from SPC.
Figure 4. Radar composite of the June 12 – 13 bow echo that traveled from Indiana to new Jersey. Image credit: NOAA/SPC.
Tape cassettes seem are like endangered species: not often seen in the wild and on their way to extinction. Conceptual artist Alyce Santoro has come up with a way to use the tape, appeal to fashion and create a whole new way of making music at the same time.
She mixed strips of the old 1/8-inch audio tape with polyester fibers to create a material called “sonic fabric.” The tape and polyester are woven together on a loom — fittingly, older technology seems to work better on audio tape. The audio tape retains its magnetization, which means it can play sounds. The tape, Santoro told DNews, is actually new — it comes from a company that makes audiobooks.
“Hearing” the fabric requires running a cassette player’s tape heads across the clothing. The tape heads pick up the patterns of the magnetic fields on the tape and makes a sound. The original recording cannot be heard because the tape has been woven in with other material. Instead, one hears a kind of warbling tone.
Santoro didn’t stop there. She posted a YouTube video that shows how to take apart an old Sony Walkman and make it into a player. (It involves detaching the tape head and inserting a piece of wood under the “play” button, so the head faces outward). One design on her website even has the Walkman built into a glove, which would “play” the clothes as the wearer runs her hands across them. In 2003 she made a “percussion suit” for Jon Fishman, of the band Phish, who played it at one of the band’s live shows.
Then there’s putting specific sounds on the tape. Rather than deal with the randomness of salvaged cassettes, Santoro designed fabrics that have specific tones recorded on them, such as 131.6 hertz, or C-sharp.
Fashion, recycling, and a little 80s nostalgia – you can’t beat that.
Even by celestial standards, the span between a newly found suspected baby planet and its host star is astronomical — 7.5 billion miles, which is about twice as far as Pluto orbits the sun.
To date, no other other extrasolar planet is as far away from its host star as the fledgling world circling TW Hydrae, a small red dwarf located about 176 light-years from Earth.
Scientists are at a loss to explain how the planet, which is believed to be six- to 28 times as big as Earth, could exist. For starters, the host star is only about 8 million years old, which was believed to be too young to support planets. It also is small, about half as massive as the sun.
Computer models show that a planet 7.5 billion miles from its parent star would take 200 times longer to form than a planet positioned about where Jupiter is in our solar system. Jupiter, which took about 10 million years to form, is around 500 million miles from the sun.
The baby planet was detected indirectly from a telltale gap in a 41-billion-mile wide ring of gas and dust circling TW Hydrae. The gap is believed to be due to the growing planet gravitationally sweeping up material that is then incorporated into the planet. Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope for their survey.
The research is published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Debes (STScI), H. Jang-Condell (University of Wyoming), A. Weinberger (Carnegie Institution of Washington), A. Roberge (Goddard Space Flight Center), G. Schneider (University of Arizona/Steward Observatory), and A. Feild (STScI/AURA)
The most common misconception about nutrition is that we actually know a lot about nutrition.
Fact: no-one studies healthy nutrition and diet in a serious, scientific fashion. We have lots of theories, lots of errors, lots of contradictions, but little true scientific testing in search of truth.
Virtually all of the scientific research into nutrition is ‘illness based’, not healthiness based. This bias creates a lot of knowledge about specific diseases but little understanding of health. When we research ‘illness’, we search for specific causes and specific cures.
Did you ever wonder why everything seems to be bad for you, and almost everything seems to be good for you as well? This is a result of researching illness and ignoring healthiness. Illnesses are ‘specific’. Healthiness is general. Lessons learned by studying illness are poor teachers when trying to attain healthiness.
As a result, we have many theories about nutrition that are repeated over and over, but are simply, clearly wrong. Others are simply myths.
[I distinguish between myths and wrong ideas in this article – although I suspect I have not done so in previous articles. Although many people use the word myth to describe ‘wrong ideas’, I will use the word Myth for ideas that are widely believed, but not proven, and Error for ideas that have been proven wrong].
Some of these theories include:
1. Error: ”Calories in = calories out“.
The truth – poo burns. Normally, it contains about 20 percent fats, but we don’t have much research into how eating more, or less fat changes that ratio. Poo contains calories. So does sebum. So does urine if you are diabetic. Both contain more if you have specific illnesses or if you consume specific diets. Calories in = calories out math simply doesn’t work. If we use it to estimate the weight based on averages in calorie consumption increases in the past two decades, the average weight would be about 900 pounds.
This Error is often stated differently: “Cutting calories will cause weight loss”. Experiments have clearly shown that cutting calories, but consuming the wrong foods (eg. high in carbs) will continue to increase obesity. Cutting back on the wrong foods does not make a difference to a poor diet. Unfortunately, figuring out what are ‘the right foods for you’ can be a huge challenge.
2. Myth: “Vegetarianism is a healthy diet”.
Vegetarianism is an ethical diet, marketed as a healthy diet. It has been studied (a bit) to determine what illnesses might result, and what illnesses might benefit, but it has not been studied from a healthiness perspective. It is very easy for someone who is not a vegetarian to switch to vegetarianism and choose a very unhealthy diet without realizing it.
At the same time, there has been little study of an all meat diet, because it is not seen as an ethical diet. There have been some studies which found an all meat diet can also decrease illness and may improve healthiness in specific cases. But the studies are so few and so limited that, as most studies conclude, “more study is required”.
3. Myth: “Breakfast is the most important meal”.
There is no significant evidence to support this, nor any other eating pattern for optimal healthiness. Of course it can always be said that breakfast is the most important meal – when we recognize that every meal ‘breaks the previous fast’, even if our lunch or dinner is actually our ‘breakfast’. For some people, breakfast is essential to get started, for others, breakfast can easily be left aside until lunchtime or later. Nobody has attempted to measure which of those ‘types’ are healthiest, nor if their healthiness is caused by their eating patterns.
We don’t scientifically test eating times and their effects on healthiness. Hospitals provide food ‘when it is convenient’, not on a schedule to improve or maximize healing or healthiness. When we truly know which eating patterns were healthiest, hospitals will want to know, and senior’s homes might need to change their schedules. It may well turn out that simple eating plans are not as healthy as more complex, diverse eating plans.
4. Myth: “Drink eight glasses of water a day for health”.
“The origins of the “8 glasses of water a day” rule was explored by Dr. Heinz Valtin in a 2002 article and Dr. Tsindos in a 2012 article. After extensive searches of the published literature, they found absolutely no scientific evidence for the idea that most people need to drink at least 8 glasses of water a day.”
How much water should you drink? At the very least, you should listen to your body and let it decide. If you are suffering a headache – the morning after – you are probably suffering from dehydration as your body tried to remove toxins by urinating. Drink some water.
5. Myth: “Vitamins are dangerous”.
More people die from drinking too much water than from taking too many vitamins. Vitamins are called vitamins because they are essential to health. But then it gets complicated – really complicated. All vitamins are studied in isolation – studies of combinations are much more difficult. Scientific studies of vitamins are tested against illness – to determine if they cause, or cure illness. Many nutritional studies were designed to ensure that prisoners don’t get sick.
There are no vitamin studies that test changes in ‘healthiness’. Because of the focus on illness, much vitamin research is ignored. For example, a deficiency of Vitamin C results in scurvy (in theory) – but this research ignores that fact that a diet of meats alone does not result in scurvy, even though the Vitamin C consumed is much less than required to prevent scurvy on a carb diet.
Many so called ‘vitamins’ are actually chemicals created to ‘act like’ natural vitamins – and these are poorly studied with regards to healthiness and illness. It is certainly possible that some of these vitamins are dangerous.
When we are truly interested in learning about healthiness of vitamins and minerals, we will study which vitamin combinations improve healthiness the most – and study their relationships to different dietary regimens.
6. Myth: “Lean meats are good for your heart”.
There is no scientific evidence that lean meats are healthier than fatty meats. The same goes for other low fat foods (milk and cheese). If anything, the science demonstrates the opposite. The ‘avoid fat’ concept is simply a misunderstanding on how fat is created in our bodies – fat is created from sugars.
The lean meat myth was created by the American Heart Association, and is actively maintained by them in full view of much scientific evidence to the contrary. It has become fundamental to their fundraising operations – and it is unlikely they can change without losing a lot of face – and possibly a lot of money.
Most people who restrict themselves to ‘lean meats’ compensate with high glycemic foods like bread, pasta, and sugar. These foods are far worse for your heart and circulatory system than fatty foods.
7. Error: “Fiber is an essential nutrient for health”.
Fiber is not an essential nutrient – in fact, it is not even a nutrient. It is likely that fiber is important for specific dietary regimes, or specific purposes, but is completely useless in other diets. We simply don’t know and there is little scientific research that tests the fiber theories across different diets. Fiber is typically suggested to resolve illnesses that cannot be clearly diagnosed, not to improve healthiness.
8. Error: “You need to consume sugar for your brain to function”.
This is a misconception that is proved wrong by the simple act of fasting. Your blood supply runs out of dietary sugar in less than a day. Your brain has no problem functioning for weeks.
9. Error: “Fasting is unhealthy”.
Short term fasts are prescribed for blood tests etc., but many doctors claim that fasting is unhealthy or simply does not enhance healthiness. The simple truth is that we don’t test overall healthiness, we don’t measure overall healthiness, and we don’t know the facts about fasting either. Sleeping, frankly is fasting. And it’s healthy.
You might wonder how long someone can fast ‘safely’? The answer is simply, ‘it depends’. There are different types of fasts, and different people. If you ask Google, you might think that the longest fast is just over 40 days. But no. Here is a scientific report of a therapeutic fast that lasted 382 days. The patient started at over 400 pounds and emerged a healthy weight of 180 pounds. Fasting can be unhealthy – so can crossing the street.
10. Myth: “Toxins in foods are not at levels dangerous to your health”.
Many foods contain toxins. We know this. Many foods contain ‘natural toxins’ that the plants develop to fight insects. What the toxins do to our bodies, whether they build up or are excreted is poorly studied.
Toxins come in many forms and might be natural, coming from nature, or unnatural, created by man. Many GMO ‘foods‘ contain designer toxins. So do most patented medicines. Every day, more chemicals are created and used on foods and in our environment.
Studies of toxins are extremely weak. We don’t even have scientific agreement on simple questions like ‘Is fluoridated water healthy or unhealthy?’ We have many studies on the toxicity of fluoride and very few studies that suggest it may prevent dental caries. But no studies on healthiness of fluoride. However, in many communities fluoride is routinely added to drinking water.
Conclusions:
a) Simple rules are not so simple, and often not accurate. Take all advice with a grain of salt – I recommend natural salt. But I also recommend that you make your own decisions.
b) Studying illness to create healthiness is a poor choice, resulting in many simple errors.
c) If we want to learn about health, we need to study healthiness.
Elderberries make flu shots look like ridiculous poison cocktails
Thursday, June 13, 2013 by: Lance Johnson
NaturalNews) With the flu season behind us, it’s definitely not time to grow passive and lax toward taking care of our immune system. Now is the perfect time to think about growing, harvesting, and utilizing key anti-flu herbs that protect against virus and bacteria.
A real flu fighter isn’t a cocktail shot in the arm; rather, a true flu fighter is a naturally antiviral, antibacterial, immune building powerhouse. One wonderful food medicine flourishing right among us is the elderberry. This flu fighting Spartan has been used throughout history to deter influenza virus. In fact, in 1995, an entire influenza epidemic was thwarted in Panama utilizing elderberry treatment.
Why do we need flu shots then?
With commercial ads promoting flu shots at every turn, it’s easy to let other “more knowledgeable” accredited people think for us. For some, it seems much easier to pull up to the drive thru, roll the sleeve back, and take the cocktail injection right in the arm, driving off self-assured.
It all sounds nice and beneficial, but when it comes down to it, there are serious unintended consequences that stem from consuming heavy metal laced vaccinations and absorbing a “quick fix” health philosophy:
The number one consequence is the growing rate of autism.
Study upon study is finding increased levels of thimerosal in autistic children. Thimerosal, a preservative used in vaccines, is known to inhibit methionine sythetase by 50 percent in vitro. Normal functioning of methionine sythetase is absolutely necessary for the biochemical development of the brain, attention, and the production of an important detoxifying agent called glutathione.
With thimerosal levels increasing in human tissues, brain function is deteriorating in general. Autism rates in 2000 were 1 in 150. Today autism affects an astounding 1 in 50! This is a serious epidemic that needs further examination. Autism awareness isn’t enough. It’s time to confess the root causes and be honest about autism origins. GMOs, pesticides, plastics, BPA all destroy natural human brain function, and thimerosal from vaccinations is leading this dark parade.
Elderberry makes flu shots look ridiculous
Elderberry simply makes contemporary flu shots look hideous, ridiculous, and insane. Who needs to be injected with formaldehyde, mercury, factory flu strains all in hopes of not getting sick?
It’s much wiser and safer to incorporate elderberries and other antiviral herbs into one’s lifestyle, promoting prevention rather than an insane injection of heavy metal, autism-inducing vaccinations.
Why aren’t we growing fields of this wonderful herb?
Elderberry is found growing wildly in North America, Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia. In 2005, researchers in London studied Black Elderberry and found that it’s 99 percent effective in fighting the Avian Flu (H5N1) virus. In Germany, scientists conducted studies that linked elderberry anthocyanins to enhanced immune function. Elderberry essentially works by boosting the production of cytokines, which are unique proteins that act as messengers that help regulate immune response. Their studies revealed that elderberry’s antioxidant powers were greater than equal doses of vitamin E and vitamin C. Furthermore, this activity has been shown to also decrease swelling in mucous membranes and sinuses.
Elderberry doesn’t wait on the flu, it stays on the offensive
Since flu viruses cannot replicate themselves, they use DNA from living cells to survive. To achieve their destruction, flu viruses puncture living cell walls with spiky features called hemagglutinin. This flu virus invasion can be completely prevented with elderberry because elderberry effectively disarms the spikes and halts the action of their enzymes.
Essentially, elderberry’s cytokine production prevents flu virus invasion before it ever takes hold – a much more effective strategy than heavy-metal-laced flu shot injections.
