Whole Foods

In the last few years every time I’ve had a cold it’s knocked me down flat – and the kids bring home a lot of colds. Even working in a job where I can cope easily with a cold, all I was really doing was postponing the recovery period until the weekend. For a variety of reasons revolving around health I recently embarked on a diet composed of whole foods. It’s not easy to be 100% with this, all the time (and I haven’t tried) but most days of the week I do manage to eat only whole foods.

Added to this we have a copy of Nourishing Traditions in the house now and Karen, who is a keen cook (just as well because I’m not) has been dipping into it on a daily basis. We’ve been eating broths and a variety of fermented foods, including a crazy relish thing I like, which seems to have two quite different tastes within it. We’ve also been eating sourdough bread regularly and using unprocessed sea salt and sugar substitute rapadura in place of the usual stuff. Because I was eating only whole foods and Karen liked the look of what I was eating, she decided to try it to. There have been a number of interesting results.

The first thing we noticed (after someone gave me a commericially made cake a week into the diet change) was that my problem with blocked sinuses has mostly gone away. It used to be that when the air was cold or it dropped a couple of degrees as it does in the late afternoon, my nose would block up and I’d sound like I had a cold – which I hated. Sometimes in desperation I would turn on a heater and breath in the warm air just to get rid of it.

The next thing we noticed was that Karen, who normally gets a lot of headaches, had stopped getting them. Again we only realised this one day when she ate some white bread and immediately got a headache. She tested it one more time with some pasta before concluding that headaches were a powerful enough motivating force to put her off refined flour for a long time. Recently I also realised I was getting less headaches than normal. Anyway here’s what Walt Stoll has to say about the issue*.

The National Research Council recommended daily allowance of refined carbohydrates (CHO) is zero.

Until 300 years ago, refined CHO did not exist. The human body has had no time to evolve a way to cope with this substance. For the past five million years, whenever we took CHO into our bodies, all the vitamins, minerals, enzymes, proteins, etc. present in the living food were eaten with the CHO. Now when we eat refnined CHO, our bodies must immediately provide the vitamins, minerals, proteins, enzymes etc. that manufacturing has removed, in order to digest it. This means we must create a definciency in our bodies of the essential substances – the opposite of nutrion: the more we eat the less nutrition we have.

Refined CHO causes more stress to humans than all the other nutritional stressors put together.

More details on the process behind this available here, and I will add that the fermentation process we are putting our wheat through when we make our sourdough bread deals with the problem of phytates. Phytates are a substance present in wheat and when not fermented (pre-digested) bind with minerals in the stomach thereby preventing them from being taken into the body and further enhancing the nutrition starved state of most everyone in our culture.

We have also read a book on Metabolic Typing, I seem to be a ‘mixed’ type and already eating roughly what I need but Karen has shown that she needs to eat more protein, especially in the morning, and as a consequence now has more energy in the first half of the day – especially when compared to how she was when eating fruit for breakfast.

The latest and best improvement we have found though is in my resistance to colds. As I said at the start I have been incredibly vulnerable to them in the last few years but a month back when one of the kids brought a cold home I discovered that I could keep it at bay simply by getting a good nights sleep – this was a turn for the better! Eventually I got a bad nights sleep and caught the cold but even then the symptoms were so minor as to be almost non existant. Then, a week ago another cold arrived in the house and I caught it before I knew it was around. I woke up one morning feeling rough and thought, “oh well, that’s it I’ve got a proper cold this time” but by mid morning I was completely unaware of any symptoms again and had a great day. The next day started the same way and the day after that it was all over. The worst I could say through the whole experience was that I felt slightly tired.

This is such a stunning reversal of my life over the last few years I can hardly believe it. I’m not sure what improvements we were really expecting but there have been a number of pleasant – and substantial – surprises.

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I can’t recommend Nourishing Traditions highly enough. I wasn’t prepared to make a change in my diet unless it could be done with a minimum of fuss.  If I found myself craving any kind of food I knew I would be wasting my time as the use of will-power is never a long term solution. Luckily this book provides healthy substitutes for every food group – including the all important, cakes and delicious slices group.

*This is from a wellness protocol PDF on the askwaltstollmd.com site, the exact URL of which I can’t seem to locate anymore, I have a copy  if anyone is intersted though.

1 gone, 1 back and 1 idle

I’m the idle one, if you haven’t guessed.

The gone one is Ted from Free Range Organic Human who left this parting message (if you haven’t seen it). I didn’t agree with every single thing Ted wrote but I have alwas admired the way he approached his own journey with such an open mind. I also admire his move to go cold turkey on the internet. I’m not ready to do the same myself but I completely understand where he’s coming from.

UPDATE: I just checked back and Ted has made another posting – from what he says leaving the net behind is obviously not easy. This could be interesting.

The back one is Dan, with a personal rebirth and a site rebirth. Don’t be confused by his new portal, the logo is the button you press to get into the main site (It confused me for no more than a couple of minutes:-). He’s starting off with a blog post about his recent personal changes and also a new essay. Dan is moving so fast down the path of personal exploration that I’m being left in his dust – luckily he’s leaving a great trail to follow and a great list of reading for the rest of us.

The Death of the Free Internet

Via Idleworm, The Death of the Free Internet. I remember reading how, with the advent of printing presses, the elite in places like Britian were so incensed that ‘radical leftists’ and the like were printing their own papers (and the common people were being exposed to dangerous political messages) that they passed laws making it harder for non-elite publishers. I’m sorry I can’t recall exactly what these measures were but the main point was that they didn’t work because they were so blatant and heavy handed. In the end the thing that killed the radical papers was the use of advertising.

Naturally there were few advertisers who agreed with the politics of left wing papers and so the establishment papers were able to sell for a substantially lower cost thanks to subsidies from advertisers and eventually came to dominate the market – and so we have the sorry excuse for the media that we all know about today.

It appears from this article that history is about to repeat itself where the internet is concerned. China has tried restricting access to the internet and received a lot of flak for it but now in Canada the subtle approach is about to be tried.

What will the Internet look like in Canada in 2010? I suspect that the ISP’s will provide a “package” program as companies like Cogeco currently do. Customers will pay for a series of websites as they do now for their television stations. Television stations will be available on-line as part of these packages, which will make the networks happy since they have lost much of the younger market which are surfing and chatting on their computers in the evening. However, as is the case with cable television now, if you choose something that is not part of the package, you know what happens. You pay extra.

And this is where the Internet (free) as we know it will suffer almost immediate, economic strangulation. Thousands and thousands of Internet sites will not be part of the package so users will have to pay extra to visit those sites! In just an hour or two it is possible to easily visit 20-30 sites or more while looking for information. Just imagine how high these costs will be.

My only hope is that with the whole decline of civilisation thing, people will be starting to wake up to the nature of the powers-that-be by then and will be more inclined to oppose this move. Although that seems kind of naieve now that I’ve actually written it (but I’ll leave it in anyway). I’ve heard that mainstream people visit mostly commercial sites on the web anyway and was trying to think what they may view that was a bit more off-piste and the only thing I could come up with was blogs. So my other hope is that so many people like blogs that there will be a mass of people upset that they can’t read their favorite blogs or that they have no readers any more and that they will make a difference.

Alternatively it may make not matter anyway. As Kevin has posited, sites like his are great for tracking how much of the population are thought criminals and since his readership only comes from the fringes of society in the first place it may actually be the case that the internet has made no difference to the political landscape anyway. Then on the other hand (my 4th) and to paraphrase Ran’s comments from earlier today, it may be simply that the elite are so mean they’ll just want to crush the free spirited nature of the internet regardless of any strategic considerations.

The only other thing I should mention is that we’ll probably still have email – and email lists, which will still allow for considerable interaction between groups of dangerously like minded people. I wonder how they’ll try to clamp down on those?

EFT and Eyesight

Three years ago I was at an Ecoshow talk and the speaker, who was an eco-psychologist of sorts made an aside about how children develop eye problems and start to need glasses at an age when ‘it all becomes too much and the don’t want to see it any more’. The assumption that our children have a hard time in childhood was of course easy for me to handle but I had never heard the idea that eye problems were a symptom of pschological issues.

I think the next reference I saw to this concept was on Ran’s page where he talks about his attempts to regain his eye sight. He refers to the tension in the muscles around the eye that cause the sight problems as being similar Wilhelm Reich’s concept of body armour.

In my last post about EFT I suggested that the concept of body armour and the EFTconcept of trauma being stored in the body’s electrical system were probably closely related and indeed, as Miguel testified in the comments for that posting the proponents of EFT have had some success with improving eye sight.

From the EFT website here is a brief comment from someone who appears to be a Behavioural Optometrist about the connection between emotion and vision.  And here is a quick case study of someone having their eye problems resolved at an emtional level. Note that those unfamiliar with EFT there will be a bit of unfamiliar jargon but that the improvement in sight will be very obvious. It’s also a good example of just how damn quickly EFT can resolve some problems.

THC kills cancer cells

The SETH group (Scientists Exploring Truth in Healing) are researching alternative cures for cancer – they seem to have a bit of trouble getting funding (imagine my surprise) but they are making some headway.

Using the same tests used to judge new chemotherapies, the SETH team discovered that this herbal compound kills human brain tumor cells at a concentration that is nontoxic to normal brain cells. A computerized microscope captured images of the cells every 5 minutes to compile the time-lapse videos. After 20 hours of treatment, Δ⁹-THC kills all cancer cells but leaves normal brain cells alive. Cell death is evidenced by cells shrinking to inanimate white spheres.

Here’s the link to their time lapse video.

Primitivist Theology

In my last post I wondered at the lengths Ran went to in his recent essay to deal with issues of ideology and today he posted a comment which answers the question much better than my speculation did.

… the main reason I wrote the essay was to go into theoryland and get primitivists out. If you really feel like going into the woods and living on roots and berries and deer that you kill with a handmade bow, go for it! But that’s not what I see. I see people who feel that this society is deeply wrong, and on top of those valid feelings, they build what I believe is a faulty intellectual framework: that we should go primitive. Then they feel guilty that they don’t really like practicing primitive skills, and that they’d rather eat pizza and go on the internet. I’m not trying to stop anyone from going primitive. I’m trying to stop anyone from forcing anyone else to do it…

Perhaps then, it’s an invitation to come and live in the grey areas between the extremes of modern civilisation and pure primitivism. As I said in my last post if we learn to listen to our inner voice (but not to blindly obey it, of course) then we will hopefully lose the need to rely on pre-conceived ideology to guide our lives and will also feel quite comfortable with imperfectly worked-out grey areas.

Joe Polaischer

I’ve just received word via email that Joe Polaischer died yesterday. Joe was a great advocate of Permaculture and preparation for energy descent. Decades before most of us worked out that sustainability was important Joe and his partner Trish were out there showing how it could be done with their work at Rainbow Valley Farm.

He was such a passionate and energetic character I find it hard to believe he could go so suddenly. He will be missed by so many.

I wrote about Joe here and here and in one of my most popular interviews on Raglan Community Radio I discussed all manner of issues relating to living lightly here.

actually, that link goes to his talk from the 2005 Ecoshow that I recorded. The radio interview is here.

The text of the email reads:

We’re sorry to have to let you know that Joe Polaischer of Rainbow
Valley farm died yesterday, at the farm.

Joe’s funeral will be on SATURDAY 16TH FEB at 2.00pm, at the Matakana
Pony Club on Matakana Valley Rd. There will be a gathering after the
burial at the Matakana Hall. Please bring a plate and a bottle.

Rest in peace Joe.

The comedy disguise

I don’t know how long this sort of thing will last but besides the Daily Show and a couple of New Zealand shows that none of you will have heard of, Rugged Indoorsman has a video of a discussion about Iraq’s oil presented as comedy. Read the text first and see how it just looks like really good journalism and then watch the clip and see how that text is turned into comedy in order to get it under the radar of TV programmers.

I’m sure there is more stuff akin to this buried in late night British TV, by all means, let me know.

GE Madness

Ran has a comment from me about the sheer ineptitude of the science of genetic engineering as it currently stands. It’s bordering on comical but it’s also quite insane. The prize for Monsanto et al.  is total control over world food production but the risks are phenomenal. Here’s a brief description of one example of the sort of scary and quite random side-effect that keeps happening when they conduct their ‘highly accurate’ experiments:

Klebsiella planticola, a common soil bacterium, was genetically engineered by a German research institute to make ethanol for industrial purposes. The inventors had planned a recycling system: farmers would give them agricultural slash, which would be used for the bacterial fermentation; the resulting ethanol would be separated out, and the sludge could be given back to the farmers to spread on their fields as fertilizer. It all sounded very good for the environment, but how much soil ecologists impinged on the planning is unclear.

Dr Elaine Ingham of Oregon State University and her graduate student M.T. Holmes discovered to their alarm that soils containing the engineered organism killed wheat seedlings, most likely through alcohol production in the root system, which kills roots at very low concentrations. Mycorrhizal fungi were also killed.

Had the engineered sludges been returned to farmers, it would have drastically degraded their soil, rendering them unable to grow many or all plants. Since K. planticola is a ubiquitous organism, found in the root systems of plants all over the world, the GM mutant could have spread and made ALL soil unable to support crops! Microorganisms are easily spread on surfaces of insects, on the feet of birds, on people’s feet, etc; this engineered bacterium could have spread world-wide quite rapidly. (source)

What the brief description doesn’t say is that the testing of organism in question was tested in sterile soil which is why they didn’t know there would be a problem. The institue in question took an awful lot of convincing before they would accept there was a problem too.

Trouble in Paradise

Here’s another post that I seemes to have misplaced, hopefully there are no more.

 

A few days ago Kevin posted this article on Cryptogon about New Zealand security forces arresting potential ‘terrorists’ in the New Zealand Bush and about a series of dawn raids that were being made. As soon as I read it I was suspicious about the nature of the police activity, not least because of an article that talked about how the people under suspicion were a group of Maori, Environmental & Political activists. “How convenient” I thought to myself, all those people in one easy round-up. At the very least this is going to be used as a propaganda tool

Since then it’s gotten worse. Even a former high profile cop who later became a right wing politician has come out saying the police have been heavy handed in their approach. Plus a government MP has said that he’s uncomfortable with what is going on, although he then (was made to?) retract some of his statements. Hell even the right wing papers seem unusually subdued about supporting police behaviour this time.

The government it denying that the arrests have anything to do with new, ‘anti-terror’ laws currently before parliament. These are laws that will bring us into line with overseas ‘anti-terror’ laws. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide for themselves whether they believe that :-)

There is lots of information on our local Indymedia site and lots of planning of protests about the event, there have even been protests overseas about what has happened here. Scoop.co.nz is of course a good source of info about this as well. One thing you’ll notice if you read up on this is that the police have said they are going to make more raids around New Zealand. At first I didn’t think much about it but then I realized that announcing you’re going to be raiding people who are stashing supplies of weapons is somewhat counter productive – unless you main aim is actually to scare people, or unless you’re raiding people who don’t have a clue that they would be on your list.

This is a Propaganda War. The powers that be will ensure that the high profile pictures of arrests of ‘terrorists’ will be associated with activists of all stripes and what frustrates me is that a lot of activists seem to be happy to reinforce this idea by being publically contemptuous of the police. Indymedia is currently crawling with people using terms like ‘filth’ and openly advocating a violent response and sure enough people like Russell Brown who is your classic left wing sellout journalist are quoting these people.

I felt moved to write something for Indymedia about Activist PR because in my opinion the powers that be couldn’t be happier with the behaviour of most activists in this country, they seem intent on alienating anyone who is slightly mainstream and are naively providing aid to the people putting out the propaganda – the very people they oppose. You can see the scathing response my suggestions received from some people who, to my ears, sound like criminals when they talk about the police. I guess it fits because the police view activists as criminals as well. Interestingly, I got called for one anti-community comment I made in the piece. Truly an oversight, and one that might surprise readers of this blog, but I am the product of middle class training and sometimes it still shows.

A couple of years ago I was given some excellent advice by someone active in the GE movement about the fact that we should be trying something different instead of using the same tired tactics every time – I immediately put his advice into practice in a presentation of our local council about GE where I focused on the image I was putting across as much as the message.

I’d love to see activists get smart and start turning up to demonstrations dressed like ‘nice’ middle class people. No doubt many would think of this as selling out but really what it’s doing is removing distractions so that people can focus on the message. And imagine how much it would shock everyone to see activism associated with the middeclasses – who at the moment feel very alienated by that sector of society.

I suppose this divide should come as no surprise since it’s the people who are already outside the mainstream who are best placed to see deceptions that most of us are under but the double edged sword aspect is that most of this divide is about how people identify with themselves, as Ran and Dan often mention (further reading at this link provided by Dan)

Despite comments about Sheeple and how dumb the general public is from the powers-that-be and those who oppose them, the people in power know that the most powerful force in any country is the population. If they decide to rise up en-masse then they will always win. It’s not going to happen here any day soon but the powers that be are very, very focused on massaging public opinion just in case. I’m sure their paranoia knows no bounds which is why they are so good at PR. I just wish we weren’t so bad at it, like I said on Indymedia, some activists are their own worst enemy in this area.

Things just got a whole lot worse though. I discovered yesterday that the police raided the home of Brian Innes and Jo Pearsall in Taupo. New Zealand is a small place and I heard about it through a friend of a friend – but I checked and it has been reported in the news. This event really rips the cover off as far as I am concerned. I’ve met these people and interviewed Jo prior to an Eco-show (they are the organisers of the event) and they are some of the last candidates I could think of for violent insurrection. The are gentle people. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so damn serious. Jo and Brian are permaculturists, they teach all around the country and started up the eco-show in an attempt to spread the word on a bigger scale. They must be in their 50’s, don’t own a firearm and the police raided their home with police dogs, herded them, their family and guests into the lounge and ‘detained’ them while they searched the house.

This blew me away but then I found something that made me even more curious. The Eco-show just happened last weekend and one of the lecturers who was still staying with them is a Swedish academic who is involved with JAK bank in Sweden. JAK bank is an interest-free bank that has been operating for 40 years using what must be considered to be a proven alternative to conventional banking. To say this gentlemen would be unpopular with the international banking cartel would be something of an understatement. Needless to say the police made off with his laptop.

I mentioned this fact to Kevin in an email and he pointed out this comment from an article he wrote a while back:

I don’t know who’s behind the wheel of this thing, but it’s not Kiwis. There is some kind of insidious, international banking octopus thing happening here. New Zealand politicians are selling their own country out to a global criminal elite that is going to eat this land alive and spit what remains out into the sea.

I’d also recommend this article from Kevin as well on the same subject.

It’s one thing to watch stuff like this happening in the US but quite another to see it happening here. I feel very angry about it – especially about what went down in Taupo. I am not willing to just lie down and let these people do this to our country. I haven’t been doing my alternative news radio show for a while but I am going to have to find the time to get back into it. No one else is doing anything like it in New Zealand – I will have to make a real effort to get it played on lots more stations as well. I hope that other people will feel the same way, I hope that this event will backfire and lots more people will get active. New Zealand has been subject to a lot of propaganda but we’re not as far gone as the US public and I still hold out hope that we’ve got the guts to do something about this.

I know people like Kevin say that the powers-that-be let activism continue because it’s a pressure release valve for the small proportion of society that needs it and it makes no difference anyway but I think that could be another line the powers-that-be have fed us. It’s certainly a comment that makes me think about where I put my energy because a lot of activism is in-effective, it’s true, but I also know that the GE movement in this country has been way more effective than anyone realizes. It’s not just luck that there are no commercial GE crops growing here, it’s because 75% of the public is opposed to it. Essentially what I am saying is that we are not totally powerless.

It will not be easy but if there is the slightest chance we can stop this country turning into a fascist cess-pool then it’s worth making the effort. We can certainly slow them down and it probably won’t be long before centralized power starts to fade away so we might just be able to make a permanent difference. Plus I find it really unnatural to not oppose it, I just hope I’m not the only one.