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Author Topic: Blasts from the 2012 to 2013 past when there was more HOPE 🌟  (Read 3441 times)

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AGelbert

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Wowauonihan: To respect and honor everything around us

The people that were here before we got here are returning to the old ways because they work. For those who believe the "old ways" were a Malthusian struggle with danger and disease that kept human population numbers down (and consequently sustainable), science has a refutation of this grim view of the past. Women in hunter gatherer groups were not sedentary; they were very mobile.

Research has shown that active women do not ovulate monthly and can go several months without ovulating. This, not danger and disease, was the main population regulating mechanism for Homo sapiens. When women became sedentary, they began to ovulate regularly. They became sort of like a queen bee that has all its food brought to it and therefore can devote all her energy to making babies. All those human versions of the queen bee got the population ball rolling and antiseptic techniques in medicine made it go to the lengths we have today.

The bottom line is that we (both male and female) were not designed for a sedentary life style. A hunter gatherer can eat meat every day and never get heart disease or hardening of the arteries from cholesterol plaques because his metabolism is never placed in the situation where it has too much excess energy to store.

The cheapest energy, the kind you get from ethanol, goes straight to the liver where it is stored in fat cells (IN the liver) that eventually inhibit liver cell oxygenation and cause death (cirrhosis). Booze is just another great example of why too much energy is bad.

Refined sugar, just below alcohol in the "quick fix cheap high energy charge" category, is responsible for the Diabetes epidemic sweeping the world's human population (First Nations tribes have suffered mightily from the effects of alcohol and refined sugars in their diets but the rest of Homo sapiens is heavily impacted now as well).

The First Nations knew for thousands of years that it is deleterious to human health AND the human spirit to get too much of a "good thing". Now they are attempting to get back in balance. If the 1% and Wall Street would realize that the functional equivalent in human affairs of wanting too much of a good thing (GREED), really IS bad, we would all be better off.
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Historically, Native nations had their own systems of food generation, relying on tribal knowledge for harvesting, planting and consumption techniques. But over the last 200 years, federal Indian policy disrupted and, in some cases, devastated the traditional practices of Native nations. Federal Indian policy has undoubtedly destroyed the control Native nations once held over their land and traditional agriculture, altering the diets of Native peoples. These historical dynamics have contributed to some of the devastating health statistics on Native homelands, including high rates of diabetes, obesity and devastating health conditions.

First Nations recognizes that healthy Native citizens are the cornerstone of a healthy community and nation. Thus, our work in the area of Native food systems has been aimed at increasing Native control over systems of food generation and consumption.

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Formed in 1973, the Oglala Sioux Parks and Recreation Authority (OSPRA) is a tribally-chartered program of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. Their goal is to develop and implement wildlife protection policies on the Pine Ridge Reservation, encompassing about 2 million acres in South Dakota. Moreover, the Oglala Sioux Parks and Recreation Authority regulates and monitors hunting activities, water systems, and other natural resource functions. They are also charged with managing the tribal bison herd. The herd numbers over 700 bison that harvest on four separate pastures with 35,000 acres of land and natural water resources.

Oglala Sioux Parks and Recreation Authority is guided by the following values:

Woope Sakowin: Seven basic values or laws of OSPRA brought by the White Buffalo Calf Woman who became a buffalo.

Cante Ognake: To care for the welfare of the people in your heart, to be generous, to share, to help, to give.

Wowaunsila: To have pity and compassion for everything that moves.

Wowauonihan: To have respect and honor those we respect, that is everything around us.

Wacin Tanka: To have patience and tolerance.

Wowahwala: To be humble, to seek humility.

Woohitike: To have principals and discipline ourselves, to follow our principals, not to fear those things that change and happen around us; We must be brave and courageous.

Woksape: To have understanding and wisdom.

Other tribes throughout the USA are growing and marketing many types of traditional First Nations crops like organic heirloom corn (many different colors), apple orchards, berries as well as meat protein foods like organic chicken.
http://www.firstnations.org/

Nobody talks about it but if 7 billion humans ALL operated human powered machinery to preserve their health and keep ovulation cycles down to two or three a year, THAT could be considered a renewable energy source and using it would lower global energy demands by maybe 5%. You get less babies nad less energy demand. What's wrong with that? Get off those lazy butts butts and get your asses in gear! Don't you know there's an energy war on? Now everybody attach a one ton rock to a cable and, using gearing and a bicycle chain, move that rock up every day! When the rock is coming down, you use it to run a generator that powers something in your house for a while like resistance heating for cooking or winter. And if your wife is fertile, crack the whip to get her cranking that rock up there! For you ladies with couch potato husbands, tell those freeloaders that they will eat cold food if the stove isn't charged up and you are not going pay any hospital bills for some cholesterol laden pig! Da Godmuder has spoken!  ;D
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Research has shown that active women do not ovulate monthly and can go several months without ovulating.

Expand please. Women living close to the earth I've known, ovulate closely in relation to the moon. I don't doubt, the wilder a woman, the less she ovulates, I'm just wondering about the studies. And I guess it seems to me, women ovulating with the moon has a nice symmetry, as an ideal. The asymmetry of the ovulation cycles of the hunter/gatherer have much to do with the reality that the hunter/gather way is cyclically harsh, more dependent on immediate stimuli in relation cycles of the earth.

WHD,
I hear you about the moon and menstrual cycles. I know there are surgeons that won't schedule operations within a couple of days of the full moon because of blood flow problems. The lunar gravity definitely affects us. However, a fine tuned metabolism apparently bypasses lunar cycle induced ovulation. Take a look at this chart:


The paper is here.

http://www.cbcrp.org/symposium/previous/2003/pdf/pike.pdf

It mostly deals with modern female diseases. I had to look up Menarche (first menstrual cycle) because , if I ever studied it, I'd forgotten but notice menarche is much later in the hunter gatherer ladies. That is VERY significant because those young lasses have been jail bait magnets for eons. Their delayed menarche helped keep away the dudes wanting a lot of kids. The first birth was earlier for the hunter gatherers BUT, with a three year lactation period, another delay for a new child was built in if the culture assumed that the new kid should not be in competition for breast milk with the older sibling. A lower birth rate fits elegantly.

agelbert,

I know a number of women who have suffered from reproductive area cancers. The way we treat the earth, is it any wonder at all that illness would be concentrated there?

WHD,
Yes, it's logical that when toxins accumulate, reproduction will definitely be inhibited. Women are more vulnerable than men in this area because, unlike us, they've got all their eggs (around 500 of them - though in much reduced size from the ones that come down the fallopian tubes during ovulation) before they reach puberty.

Men have continual gametogenesis so, unless the testicles get a huge shot of toxins or radionuclide damage, they CAN, in theory, still make good sperm.

Women, on the other hand, with toxins in tissues from industrial pollutants from their birth as well as radionuclide exposure, are literally damaging every single egg decades before it may or may not be inseminated.

It's truly amazing that we are not saddled with more disease and deformities than we now suffer from. That is why I continue to believe all the hysteria about overpopulation is generated by 1% media propaganda. The "problem" is being poisoned away.

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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154. Neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander’s Near-Death Experience Defies Medical Model of Consciousness

Interview reveals how a near-death experience changed everything neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander thought he knew about consciousness, spirituality, and life after death.
You may listen to the 52 minute interview at this link or read snippets from the taped interview below.  I really enjoyed the butterfly 🦋 wing experience.
http://www.skeptiko.com/154-neurosurgeon-dr-eben-alexander-near-death-experience/

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What I do remember from deep inside coma, for one thing my first awareness was I had no memory whatsoever of my life. I had no language, no words. All of my experience in life, knowledge of humans, Earth, the universe, all of that was gone. The only thing I had was this very kind of crude existence. And I call it in my book the “earthworm’s eye-view,” because it really was just a crude, kind of underground.

I have a vivid memory of dark roots above me and there was a kind of monotonous pounding, a dull sound in the background pounding away eternally. It was just murky and gross. Every now and then a face, an animal or something would boil up out of the muck and there might be some chant or roar or something. Then they’d disappear again.

It sounds very foreboding to talk about it right now, but in fact, since I knew no other existence I don’t remember being particularly alarmed when I was in that setting. I think that that was the best consciousness that my brain could muster when it was soaking in pus. It turns out that that seemed to last for a very long time. Given that it was my first awareness of anything, it actually seemed to be years or eternity. I don’t know. It seemed like a very, very long time.

Then there was a spinning melody, this bright melody that just started spinning in front of me. Beautiful, beautiful melody compared to that dull pounding sound that I’d heard for eons. It spun and as it spun around, it cleared everything away. This was the part that was so shocking and so hard to explain. It was as if the blinders came off and the reality there was much more crisp, real, and interactive and fresh than any reality I’ve ever known in this earthly existence. That part is very shocking and hard to explain when you go through it, and yet what I’ve found since then is that a lot of people who have had NDEs discuss the same kind of hyper-reality. But it’s very shocking to see it.

For me, I was a speck on a butterfly wing. I had no body awareness at all. In fact, I had no body awareness through this entire kind of deep coma experience. I was a speck on a beautiful butterfly wing; millions of other butterflies around us. We were flying through blooming flowers, blossoms on trees, and they were all coming out as we flew through them.

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Of course, as I healed—it probably took three or four weeks for a lot of my neuroscience and neurosurgical training to come back—all along that time I was still writing all this down and not reading anything. I was very tempted but my son had told me, “You want this to be worthwhile, don’t read anything else. Just write it all down.” I just was shocked; I was buffeted because my neuroscience mind said, “No, that couldn’t happen.” The more I heard about how sick I was, my cortex shut down, “No, that’s impossible, your cortex was down.”

Of course, for a while I was going after the hypotheses that involved formation of these very complex, intricate memories either right before my coma or right coming out of it. That really did not explain it at all. Part of the problem, when you get right down to it, is that whole issue of remembering the melody because that was a very clear part of it. I remember the elation when I figured that I could just remember that melody and that spun the melody in front of me.

Then all of a sudden, boom! Everything opened up and I went back out into that valley, so crisp and beautiful, and my angel was with me, as I came to call her, my companion on the butterfly wing. And then out into the core, outside of the universe. Very difficult to explain in that fluctuation.

I guess one could always argue, “Well, your brain was probably just barely able to ignite real consciousness and then it would flip back into a very diseased state,” which doesn’t make any sense to me. Especially because that hyper-real state is so indescribable and so crisp. It’s totally unlike any drug experience. A lot of people have come up to me and said, “Oh that sounds like a DMT experience, ”or“ That sounds like ketamine.” Not at all. That is not even in the right ballpark.

Those things do not explain the kind of clarity, the rich interactivity, the layer upon layer of understanding and of lessons taught by deceased loved ones and spiritual beings. Of course, they’re all deceased loved ones. I’ve kind of wondered where it is that these people are coming from. They say, “The brain was very sick but it was very selective and made sure it only remembered deceased loved ones.” They’re just not hearing something.
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It seems to me that they’re really barely making a dent in the medical model that we have. The medical model that we have sees us as these biological robots and death as kind of the ultimate Boogeyman. Can we really believe that we’re really going to change such an entrenched system?

Dr. Eben Alexander: I think so. I think that is very much a possibility. There’s this whole issue of mind and brain and duality versus non-dualism and the physical material reductivist models. I go into this in great detail in my book but I think you have to go back about 3,000 years to really get to the beginning of the discussion and to start to see why certain things have transpired.

I think most importantly was the part of this discussion that happened between Rene Descartes and Spinoza back in the 17th Century. They started us into our current era. Our current era is one of mind/consciousness/our soul has been put in the realm of the church more-or-less. There was kind of a truce of sorts that I guess Descartes came up with back then to say there’s mind and then there’s body and just let the natural scientists, those with an interest like Francis Bacon and Galileo and Newton, let’s not burn them all at the stake. Let some of them survive.

So I think it was a good thing to have that truce so that science survived. I mean, I’m a scientist and I love science and the scientific method. I’ve just come to realize that the universe is much grander than we appreciate. So I have to simply broaden my definitions.
I think science is still very important to get us there. Getting back to that mind/brain issue, what happened over time is science kind of grew up and got to be more and more powerful at giving us many things. Science has been a real wonder. But I think that it’s been somewhat at a price and that price came from splitting out mind and body back then and that dualistic approach because as science gained more and more of an upper hand, people were losing track of the kind of mind part of it, the consciousness part.

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Can we really then hope to get out of the consciousness loop that we’re in now? Is it just going to be a matter of a philosophical shift like we had back in the 1700’s? Or is there something fundamental to the way that we’re constructed that’s going to keep us limited in how much we can really tap into and understand that knowing that you experienced?
Dr. Eben Alexander: In my view, what I think is going to happen is that science in the much broader sense of the word and spirituality which will be mainly an acknowledgement of the profound nature of our consciousness will grow closer and closer together. We will all move forward into a far more enlightened world. One thing that we will have to let go of is this kind of addiction to simplistic, primitive reductive materialism because there’s really no way that I can see a reductive materialist model coming remotely in the right ballpark to explain what we really know about consciousness now.

Coming from a neurosurgeon who, before my coma, thought I was quite certain how the brain and the mind interacted and it was clear to me that there were many things I could do or see done on my patients and it would eliminate consciousness. It was very clear in that realm that the brain gives you consciousness and everything else and when the brain dies there goes consciousness, soul, mind—it’s all gone. And it was clear.

Now, having been through my coma, I can tell you that’s exactly wrong and that in fact the mind and consciousness are independent of the brain. It’s very hard to explain that, certainly if you’re limiting yourself to that reductive materialist view.

Any of the scientists in the crowd who want to get in on this, what I would recommend is there’s one book I consider the bible of this. It’s a wonderful book but it is really for those who have a strong scientific interest in it. It’s called Irreducible Mind, Edward Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, Bruce Greyson, Adam Crabtree, Alan Galt, Michael Grassa, the whole group from Esalen and also based in the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, have done an incredibly good job. Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century is the subtitle and that’s exactly what it is.

I felt their book was quite illustrative and of course it caused a huge splash when it came out in 1987, but again a lot of the reductive materialists like myself were not really going to put in the work to go through all of that. We just thought, “We can’t understand it so it can’t be true.”
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Dr. Eben Alexander: I would say for one thing I think that a healthy skeptical approach to all this is a good thing because it helps us get to the truth. It helps us know the answer. What we have to be careful of, of course, is not getting in the trap of having our prejudices rule the day. A lot of these experiments and studies, how you interpret them will depend a lot on what your prejudices are going in.

I found early on in my experience, I had to do as Descartes recommended when he was talking about getting to the truth, and that was to really ignore or to reject everything I had ever accepted as real. That was the only way to start getting to where I could figure any of this out.

I know that a lot of the reductive scientific crowd out there—I have a favorite quote from Stephen Hawking. He says, “There’s a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority or imposed dogma and faith, as opposed to science which is based on observation and reason.” What I would say is I think his statement is true as a general statement but that science, and certainly those who believe in science and scientists, are as prone to addiction to imposed dogma and faith as our religious zealot. So one has to be very careful to really step back and want to know the truth. That’s what I think we all would like to know.
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Alex Tsakiris: In this case, if we really do step back one of the things that’s troubling to me, and you touched on it a minute ago, is how overwhelming the evidence seems to be. At this point, we can confidently say that near-death experiences didn’t just start happening in the last 20 years since we had advanced resuscitation techniques.

We can confidently say that 4% to 5% of everyone who has a cardiac arrest is having this. There’s obviously hundreds of millions of people over time who have had these accounts and we have thousands and thousands of well-documented, consistent accounts across cultures, across times. These are the measures that we would normally use to say, “This is a real phenomenon.”

And then when the skeptics, and really the mainstream scientists have pounded against it for 20 years with really what amounts to a bunch of very silly explanations but ones that have been carefully looked at and dismissed—was it CO2 , a fear of death, other psychological factors? Is it all the different things like REM intrusion? All these things.

Clearly this would normally be something where we’d be putting a lot of attention into it. Or that it would then become the presumed explanation for it. But none of that’s happening. They have managed to hold back the dyke, you know? So what do you make of that?


Dr. Eben Alexander: Okay, I think in trying to get back to your original question with the previous guest, to me one thing that has emerged from my experience and from very rigorous analysis of that experience over several years, talking it over with others that I respect in neuroscience, and really trying to come up with an answer, is that consciousness outside of the brain is a fact. It’s an established fact.

And of course, that was a hard place for me to get, coming from being a card-toting reductive materialist over decades. It was very difficult to get to knowing that consciousness, that there’s a soul of us that is not dependent on the brain. As much as I know all the reductive materialist arguments against that, I think part of the problem is it’s like the guy looking for his keys under the streetlight. Reductive materialists are under the streetlight because that’s where they can see things.

But in fact, if you’re keys are lost out in the darkness, the techniques there are no good. It is only by letting go of that reductive materialism and opening up to what is a far more profound understanding of consciousness. This is where I think for me as a scientist, I look at quantum mechanics and I go into this in great detail in my book, is a huge part of the smoking gun. It shows us that there’s something going on there about consciousness that our primitive models don’t get.

It’s far more profound than I ever realized before.
That’s where I’m coming from because my experience showed me very clearly that incredibly powerful consciousness far beyond what I’m trapped in here in the earthly realm begins to emerge as you get rid of that filtering mechanism of the brain. It is really astonishing. And that is what we need to explain. Thousands or millions of near-death experiencers have talked about this. Not only that but as you mentioned a few minutes ago, people don’t even have to go to a near-death situation.

There are plenty of mystical experiences that have occurred over millennia that are part of the same mechanism. That’s why all this talk about oxygen, tension, CO2 and all that you can pretty much throw out the window. You really need to be working towards explaining all of those phenomena. Part of the problem is they’re hard to explain but that is a clue.

Willy Lomans was asked, “Why do you rob banks?” He said, “Because that’s where the money is.” Well, same kind of thing. They are hard issues and the whole understanding of what consciousness really involves. I came a lot closer to that in my coma experience and coming out of it and in doing all the very intense homework for the three years since then to try and understand it. It’s a difficult question because it’s close to the real truth that we’re going after. If it were easy it would be widely available. It would already have been written up by somebody who wanted to publish or perish. That’s not how it works. It’s not that easy.
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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RE, regarding your health problems.  It's never too late to improve your diet to reverse certain health conditions.  Even clogged arteries can be reversed (RE'd?) by going on a short term plant based diet.  Of course big pharm would have you believe you need to buy a pill for that, and they just keep you alive instead of fixing the problem.

But I think you know this and have made your choice?  Did I read correctly that your legs were amputated?

EndisNigh,
I agree that, since most cells in the human body are replaced (almost fully - except for the brain cells - every seven years or so) at varying rates (the inner lining of the stomach and intestines have the fastest replacement rates), it's never too late to improve one's health with diet. RE said he has PAD and he had some "rotor rootor" (angioplasty perhaps to widen the arterial lumen?) done to keep his circulation sufficient below the knees so he wouldn't lose that part of his legs.

This short article  on vitamin B12 and vegans is interesting because it mentions some Hindu vegans that don't take B12 supplement but don't suffer anemia because they apparently get their B12 from the bugs that get eaten with the plant tissue.
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It is true that Hindu vegans living in certain parts of India do not suffer from vitamin B12 deficiency. This has led some to conclude that plant foods do provide this vitamin. This conclusion, however, is erroneous as many small insects, their feces, eggs, larvae and/or residue, are left on the plant foods these people consume, due to non-use of pesticides and inefficient cleaning methods.
 
This is how these people obtain their vitamin B12. This contention is borne out by the fact that when vegan Indian Hindus later migrated to England, they came down with megaloblastic anaemia within a few years. In England, the food supply is cleaner, and insect residues are completely removed from plant foods (16).
 
The only reliable and absorbable sources of vitamin B12 are animal products, especially organ meats and eggs (17). Though present in lesser amounts than meat and eggs, dairy products do contain B12. Vegans, therefore, should consider adding dairy products into their diets. If dairy cannot be tolerated, eggs, preferably from free-run hens, are a virtual necessity.
 

http://www.healingnaturallybybee.com/articles/foods33.php
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Opinion: What Is the Human Genome?


The human genome that researchers sequenced at the turn of the century doesn’t really exist as we know it.
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The Human Genome project sequenced “the human genome” and is widely credited with setting in motion the most exciting era of fundamental new scientific discovery since Galileo. That’s remarkable, because in important ways “the human genome” that we have labeled as such doesn’t actually exist.
 
Plato essentially asserted that things like chairs and dogs, which we observe in this physical world, and even concepts like virtues, are but imperfect representations or instances of some ideal that exists, but not in the material world. Such a Platonic ideal is “the human genome,” a sequence of about 3 billion nucleotides arrayed across a linear scale of position from the start of chromosome 1 to the end of the sex chromosomes. Whether it was obtained from one person or several has so far been shrouded in secrecy for bioethical reasons, but it makes no real difference. What we call the human genome sequence is really just a reference: it cannot account for all the variability that exists in the species, just like no single dog on earth, real or imagined, can fully incorporate all the variability in the characteristics of dogs.
 
Nor is the human genome we have a “’normal” genome. What would it mean to be “normal” for the nucleotide at position 1,234,547 on chromosome 11?  All we know is that the donor(s) had no identified disease when bled for the cause, but sooner or later some disease will arise. Essentially all available whole genome sequences show potentially disease-producing variants, even including nonfunctional genes, in donors who were unaffected at the time.
 
Furthermore, the current reference genome sequence is haploid, which means that even if it were compiled from just one donor, the single reference sequence does not report the variation at millions of nucleotide positions between the donor’s two copies (except for X and Y) that we know exist. I understand that the DNA template is being resequenced, to be reported as a diploid sequence, which is progress. Hopefully this will be done in a way that produces phased sequence, in which each chromosome is reported separately, rather than just identifying the two alleles at each variable site along the genome without specifying on which chromosome it lies. Only the former format will represent sequences as they actually exist in the sequenced person, identifying which alleles go together on a chromosome, and are thus linked evolutionarily.
 
Even so the reference human genome will keep changing!
http://the-scientist.com/2012/08/17/opinion-what-is-the-human-genome/
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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How To Create A Low Maintenance Green Roof 🌼

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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I have found some great articles covering various subjects of interest to readers and dealing with our present problems in society and the environment by Robert Riversong. I will be presenting them here for your reading pleasure.
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Civil War: The Conquest of Agrarianism by Industrialism
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“Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals the fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.”
 
- Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States
 
Because much of the myth of American exceptionalism that is the dogma of global empire and the core of our cultural paradigm has its roots in the clash of civilizations that we call the Civil War, I’ve excerpted the following from a most important book on America’s cultural dysfunction – one of the very few honest and accurate analyses of the nature of that internecine conflict (and of the American personality).
 
The Subjugation of the South by the North
 
From Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline
 
Morris Berman, 2012
 
Nearly everything in modern American history turns on the Civil War, because the nascent ideology of America (which can more accurately be described as a mythology, or grand narrative) requires us to “fix” traditional societies and eliminate obstacles to progress. With the Civil War, these two goals converged. What the North did to the South is the model of what America did and does to “backward” (i.e. traditional) societies if it can. We wiped out almost the entire indigenous population of North America, we stole half of Mexico, we literally vaporized a large chunk of the Japanese population, we bombed Vietnam “back to the Stone Age” (in the immortal words of Gen. Curtis LeMay, Air Force Chief of Staff), we “shocked and awed” Iraqi civilians, and spent ten years trying to “pacify” and “nation-build” Afghanistan.
 
The Civil War was, in fact, a clash of civilizations and what was at stake was nothing less than the definition of what constitutes a meaningful life. It was this great conflict which generated the energy that sustained a four-year battle and the death of 625,000 individuals.
 
The popular, school-book version of the antebellum South was one of a backward and immoral place – a national embarrassment – which refused to abandon the abomination of slavery, which led to the Civil War to rectify this injustice. Under the leadership of the saintly Abraham Lincoln, the virtuous Union armies defeated the evil Confederate ones, and the slaves were set free. This remains the political correct and liberal academic version to this day.
 
Slavery was a barbaric system, which the South attempted to defend to the bitter end, but this explanation ignores the complexities that contributed to the war, as well as the fact that the South had a rich intellectual tradition and a virtue of its own. There is, in truth, so much complexity to the relationship between North and South that few historians agree on whether slavery was the primary motive for the War or a smokescreen for concealing other motives, on the nature of Southern society, on the nature of slavery and the motivations and character of the anti-slavery movement, and on the interpretation of the sectional clashes which preceded the final crisis.
 
Among the complexifying elements that contributed to the crisis were economic motives, the desire to preserve the Union at all costs, and the fight over states rights versus federalism, in addition to the nature of the new territories of the westward expansion.
 
Though the denial of the slavery issue as the prime factor is sometimes a form of Southern apologetics, it is never-the-less true that prior to the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, the North had proposed no change in the status of the Negro as a result of the war. This gives credence to the claims of Jefferson Davis (among others) that the real goal of the North was not abolition but domination of the South. Charles Beard, in The Rise of American Civilization (1927), saw the war as a struggle between two conflicting economies, the watershed division between the agricultural era and the industrial era in American history. For him, slavery was more of a footnote to the war, as the most obvious result of the war was the ascendancy of Northern capitalism and the emergence of a plutocracy in the United States.
 
But even this interpretation over-simplifies, as slavery was central to the economic differences between the two American cultures. Without the slavery issue, there would have been no Republican Party, formed as it was by anti-slavery activists, modernizers, ex-Whigs and ex-Free Soilers (who opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories, arguing that free men on free soil comprised a morally and economically superior system to slavery).
 
Most Northerners believed, at least initially, that the war was not about slavery as a moral issue. In an address to a special session of Congress on July 4, 1861, Lincoln stated, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the United States where it exists”, repeating what he had said at his inauguration earlier in the year. Secession, he said, was the real issue, for the Union must be preserved at all costs (the Union Congress passed resolutions endorsing all of this). Lincoln already made it clear that he did not favor social and political equality for blacks “in any way” and was a major proponent of repatriating them to a colony in Central America. For other Republicans, moral opposition to slavery was a non-issue.
 
Union soldiers saw themselves as fighting for the Union and against what they regarded as treason. Only a minority had an interest in fighting for black freedom. A popular Northern war-time ditty went:
 
A willingness to fight with vigor,                                                                                         for loyal rights, but not for the ****.
 
In the case of “contrabands” – slaves who escaped from their masters during the war and sought refuge in Union army camps – the typical Yankee response was indifference or cruelty, often using them as defacto slaves, with the women occasionally ****.
 
Although Lincoln personally believed that slavery was morally wrong, his primary motivations were social and economic. His vision was of a nation of unlimited economic opportunity and upward social mobility – “free labor”, or what would later be known as the American Dream. He had no special prejudices against the South; his goal was to halt further expansion of slavery into the Western territories (what we now call the Midwest) so that the white people could build a better life for themselves through their own efforts. Abolitionists like Horace Greeley, editor of The New York Tribune, rebuked Lincoln in 1862 for not taking a stronger stand against slavery. Lincoln’s reply ought to clear up any doubts as to where he stood on the matter, at least at that point in time:
 
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”
 
All the evidence suggests that the North’s “nobility” in fighting slavery was a long-afer-the-fact justification, an attempt to portray the conflict as a victory of morality over depravity. It’s a thesis that gets people exercised, but it doesn’t wash with the facts.
 
If not slavery as a moral issue, what then of the economic factors? The conflict between an agrarian slave economy and an industrial capitalist one is also enmeshed in the sectional conflict over the future character of the Western territories and the nature of modernity. Historians James McPherson and Eric Foner see the conflict as a clash of worldviews. Foner concludes with the
 
“conviction that North and South represented two social systems whose values, interests, and future prospects were in sharp, perhaps mortal, conflict with one another. The sense of difference, of estrangement, and of growing hostility with which Republicans viewed the South cannot be overemphasized…An attack not simply on the institution of slavery but upon southern society itself was thus at the heart of the Republican mentality.”
 
Each ideology, the Northern and Southern, contained “the conviction that its own social system must expand, not only to insure its own survival but to prevent the expansion of all the evils the other represented”. The conflict had become Manichean; only the aspirations of one of these sides could prevail. To have remained in the Union after Lincoln’s election, says Foner, “the South would have had to accept the verdict of ‘ultimate extinction’ which Lincoln and the Republicans had passed on the peculiar institution [slavery].” Secession, he adds, was “the only action consistent with its ideology”. As the Italian historian Raimondo Luraghi puts it, “no society can ever be expected to commit suicide”.
 
The Southern economy was agrarian, the Northern one industrial. After the 1830s, cotton ceased to dominate the economy of the North, which had then become a manufacturing region. North and West came to depend less on the South and more on each other. While Northern business interests were hardly advocates of war for the sake of the Union, their expanding interests never-the-less could result in nothing less. “Nowhere”, writes Luraghi, “has the industrial revolution…ever been achieved except by compelling agriculture to pay for it”.
 
Between 1800 and 1860, the proportion of the labor force engaged in agriculture in the North dropped from 70% to 40%; in the South, the proportion held fast at 80%. One tenth of Southerners lived in urban areas; 25% of Northerners did. For those engaged in business, the North to South ratio was three to one; for engineers and inventors, six to one. In 1850, only 14% of the national canal mileage ran through the slave states. Those states represented 42% of the country’s population but only 18% of its manufacturing capacity. The city of Lowell, Massachusetts operated more spindles in 1860 than all eleven of the future Confederate states combined.
 
Lincoln’s economic views were central to his political philosophy. Lincoln first came to prominence in rural Illinois as an advocate of better transportation. As a Whig member of the Illinois House of Representatives, he supported the creation of numerous private companies engaged in river, canal, turnpike and railroad construction, as well as the establishment of a state bank in 1835. His vision, according to Gabor Borritt (Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream), was that of endless material progress. The extension of slavery thus had to be opposed, in Lincoln’s eyes, because it flew in the face of this economic objective. Lincoln believed the Union “formed an indivisible economic unit”. In socio-economic terms, Lincoln regarded “unobstructed upward mobility [as] the most important ideal America strove for”.
 
The Republican Party was united, according to Foner (Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men), by the idea that free (entrepreneurial) labor was socially and economically superior to slave labor and that “the distinctive quality of Northern society was the opportunity it offered wage earners to rise to property-owning independence”. Their political pitch throughout the 1850s was that freedom meant prosperity, progress, and upward social mobility, while slavery was an obstacle to all those things. The Republicans held that today’s laborers would be tomorrow’s capitalists, and that if a man failed to rise above his status he had only himself to blame (the legacy of this, as John Steinbeck pointed out many years later, was that in America the poor regard themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”). Lincoln was the perfect representative of this group, because his life embodied the ideology of the self-made man – an ideology that would be carried into the next century by means of Horatio Alger stories.
 
In the antebellum period (let alone much later), the idealization of the self-made man was largely a myth. During that period, 4% of the inhabitants of New York City controlled 50% of the wealth, and only a tiny percentage of the wealthy were self-made; the vast majority being born into wealthy families. As for “free labor” – autonomous or entrepreneurial labor – the reality is that it included wage labor (factory or other types of employment). In 1859, almost 60% of the workforce was employed by another, not economically independent (self-employed). By the late nineteenth century, Lincoln’s argument that wage labor was a temporary state on the road to free labor could not be maintained, and labor unions argued that coercion was as inherent to industrial capitalism as it had been to slavery.
 
“Wage slavery” was a popular phrase in the Gilded Age (during the 1870s and 1880s, the U.S. economy rose at the fastest rate in its history) – a concept that Southerners were bandying about decades earlier. Southerners saw the Linconesque vision of a “race for life” grotesque. They looked North and saw a society of frenetic activity, selfishness and greed and wanted no part of it. Frederick Law Olmsted, traveling through the South at that time, commented that the Southerner “enjoys life itself…[and] is content with being”, whereas the Northerner couldn’t be happy unless he was doing something, making some sort of “progress”. Looking the other way, the Cincinnati Gazette, in 1858, saw a society lazy, decadent and absent of industry.
 
The treatment of the South by the North was the template for the way the United States would come to treat any nation that got in the way of progress: not merely a scorched earth policy, but a scorched soul policy (the destruction of Native American culture was, of course, a preview of this). From Japan to Iraq and Afghanistan, to the extent that we have been able to impose it, we first destroy the place physically and murder huge numbers of civilians (as the North did to the South with 50,000 civilian deaths) and then we Americanize it. Humiliation, the destruction of the identity of the defeated people, has always been an important part of the equation. What the Cincinnati Gazette called introducing “the Northern system of life” later became the American way of life, exported at the muzzle of a gun.
 
Lincoln told an official of the Interior Department in 1862 that, as of 1863, “the character of the war will be changed. It will be one of subjugation…The South is to be destroyed and replaced by new propositions and new ideas”. There was an incessant repetition of the theme of how it was necessary to “Northernize the South”. Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the radical faction of the Republicans in the House of Representaives, believed this would have to “involve the desolation of the South”, and in his speeches of 1865 he said that the Southern institutions “must be broken up and relaid…This can only be done by treating them and holding them as a conquered people”. Slavery notwithstanding, it was hard for the South to regard the North as an ethical society.
 
William Tecumsah Sherman’s march from Atlanta to Savannah in 1864 was a deliberate policy of scorched earth and scorched soul. It was, wrote James McPherson, retribution for secession (not for slavery), a war of plunder and arson. Sherman, himself, said that his aim was to terrorize the state of Georgia and demoralize it. By 1865, the South was “an economic desert”. A quarter of the Confederacy’s white men of military age perished, along with 40% of Southern livestock, 50% of Southern farm machinery and thousands of miles of railroads. Whereas in 1860 the South had 30% of the national wealth, in 1870 it had only 12%.

http://riversong.wordpress.com/civil-war-the-conquest-of-agrarianism-by-industrialism/
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Fishermen Find Lost Baby Walrus, Now Safe at SeaLife Center


Like many sea mammals, baby walruses have a deep tactile connection with their moms who offer them both nourshiment and protection during the early years of their lives. But every once in a while, something goes wrong, and the little ones become separated from their natural mothers.
 
The Alaska SeaLife Center is currently rehabilitating one such baby, a male Pacific walrus calf that was stranded near Barrow last month. The calf, estimated at four to six weeks old when found, was spotted by local fishermen who came across the calf in North Salt Lagoon. A large group of walruses were sighted passing Barrow on floating ice a few days earlier and the calf is presumed to have been separated from this group.


Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/fishermen-find-lost-baby-walrus-now-safe-at-sealife-center.html#ixzz24L4YB2OB


That baby Walrus is amazingly affectionate!


Eat Sleep and Snuggle, Welcome Baby Walrus!
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Agelbert NOTE: My estimate for the first ice free summer at the North Pole of 2017 was a bit off. However, since it may happen this year or next, I was a LOT closer than the 2030-2040 scientific consensus (Seymour Laxon, professor of climate physics at University College) at the time. 😎


Quote
Arctic Ice Melting Fast
The sea ice in the Arctic is expected to hit a record low by the end of the month.

By Edyta Zielinska | August 21, 2012

The ebb of Arctic ice during the warm months of the year is expected to reach an all time low by the end of the summer. There will be 186,000 fewer square miles of ice than the previous lowest record, which was in 2007, according to BBC News, and the ice is expected to continue melting into mid- to late September.
 
“We got very close to a record minimum last year,” Seymour Laxon, professor of climate physics at University College London, told the BBC.  The trend may force scientists to reconsider their predicted date for when the Arctic will be completely melted.  In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that as a result of the melting trends, they expected that the Arctic would be ice-free by the year 2100.
 
“When we had the 2007 minimum, that date was brought forward to 2030-2040,” said Laxon.  “The fact that we look set to get another record ice minimum in such a short space of time means that the modelers may once again need to go and look at what their projections are telling them,”
http://the-scientist.com/2012/08/21/artic-ice-melting-fast/

Yes indeed. The modelers are way too conservative with the 2030 date.
Agelbert's non-peer reviewed thoroughly thorough scientific examination of the arctic ice melt projects the summer of 2017 as the first summer that all the OLD ice will be gone. That summer will be ice free. Of course new ice will form during the fall and winter but there will be less each year as the open ocean albedo (2 to 10% vs 80% for ice) absorbs more heat (from solar photons, RE, not the atmosphere  ;D) thereby delaying ice formation each fall and initiating earlier ice melt each spring. WHD is witness that I have already stated this earlier here.

A bull market in floating houses on the East coast is comin' (and a bear market in low lying ocean front property in the whole fuc king WORLD!).


Quote
Agelbert's non-peer reviewed thoroughly thorough scientific examination of the arctic ice melt projects the summer of 2017 as the first summer that all the OLD ice will be gone.

Quote
WHD is witness that I have already stated this earlier here.

I know I asked you, but I didn't see the response. When you say OLD ice, there's some pretty old fuc king ice on Greenland and Antarctica. Are you saying an entirely ice free world in August/Sept, in 2017? :o Cause that's going to displace WHD's entirely un-peer-reviewed assessment of about 2-3 billion people.
WHD,
No. I'm talking about just the floating stuff in the Arctic. The OLD ice is the kind that doesn't thaw from year to year on the floating ice pack. The floating stuff around Antarctica will last longer but I don't have an estimate on that at this time.

As to the ice of Greenland, once the surrounding sea is ice free during the summer, big chunks may just slide off because of tunneling melt water creating a lubricated based between the land and ice cover and the lack of brake on the glacial slide because the sea has no floating pack in it. I don't think we'll see the ice over Greenland and Antarctica go in our lifetimes (next 20 years or so for me) but we may see some pretty big chunks come o
ff.
agelbert,

Glad to hear it. As if we don't have enough problems, without 3 billion refugees.


He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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I posted on an article by this lady about her decision to change her chicken farming methods despite industry pressures not to do so over a year ago. I thanked her and asked her to keep the welfare of the chickens in mind above and beyond the profit motive while raising them as this would keep their existence less stressful and their overall health would improve because, even though we eat them, we should treat them humanely while they live. I mentioned she would be much happier as well. Apparently enough people talked to her this way because she listened!
 


He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Agelbert NOTE: As far as racist Trump is concerned, our brutal eugenics and anti-immigration past is prologue. THAT was when America was "great", according to that POS POTUS.  Trump wants to return the USA to the Calvin Collidge model of anti-immigration and brutal racist eugenics that Hitler so admired.


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The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics ☠️

Edwin Black
History News Network


Mr. Black is the author of IBM and the Holocaust and the just released War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, from which the following article is drawn.

Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a co-called "Master Race."

But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing.

Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.

California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the Twentieth Century's first decades, California's eugenicists included potent but little known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate and Polytechnic benefactor Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles M. Goethe, as well as members of the California State Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.



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During the '20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with Germany's fascist eugenicists. In Mein Kampf, published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. "There is today one state," wrote Hitler, "in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States."

Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics movement. "I have studied with great interest," he told a fellow Nazi, "the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock."

Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant calling his race-based eugenics book, The Passing of the Great Race his "bible."

Note:  Hitler was praising US immigration policy (actually it was a NO immigration policy) by none other than Calvin Coolidge who's term was from August 2, 1923 – March 4, 1929. Look up what "silent" Cal's home state of Vermont was up to in those days. Just the other day the legislature here in Vermont apologized for sterilizing "undesirables" during that period ranging from Abenakis to French Canadians (better late than never, I suppose). Vermont was on a eugenics roll and Coolidge totally approved of this racist crap.

Learn more here:

http://hnn.us/articles/1796.html]http://hnn.us/articles/1796.html




He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

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The Top 100 Healthiest, Budget-Friendly Foods

Last year, 45 million Americans — more than one in seven of us — participated in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps), the nation’s largest food assistance program. On average, SNAP participants receive $134 per month to buy food and other essentials. But they aren’t the only ones who are trying to work within a budget to feed themselves and their families, and to do so as healthfully as possible.
 
With food prices on the rise and the economy yet to really pick up, Environmental Working Group (EWG) has released a guide called Good Food on a Tight Budget. “EWG researchers assessed nearly 1,200 foods, comparing national average food prices and 19 different nutrients in order to identify the most nutritious foods that are easy on the wallet and the planet,” according to the press release. The top 100 foods are listed in the guide, which also includes quick-and-easy, adaptable recipes and tips for saving time and money while shopping, planning and preparing meals.
 
Bananas, watermelons and pears are among the fruits that deliver “the biggest nutritional bang for the buck.” Broccoli, carrots and onions are “best buy” vegetables, and cabbage, at less than ten cents per serving, is also a versatile one that can be used in salads, sandwiches, stir-fries, stews and soups. Oatmeal, barley and rice make great grains for your budget, your health and the environment, while a variety of beans, nuts and turkey are best bets among protein sources. The guide also covers dairy foods, cooking oils and spices.
 
Some of the best ways to save money, EWG advises, is to buy in bulk when possible and to cook and freeze your food in batches. You’ll also want to avoid most processed foods, which are often more expensive and less healthy than fresh, whole foods. There’s also always the option of growing your own fruits and vegetables.
 
Foods were rated by EWG based on a balance of five factors:
 
1. Beneficial nutrients
2. Nutrients to minimize (saturated fat, sodium and total sugar)
3. Price
4. Extent of processing
5. Harmful contaminants from environmental pollution and food packaging.
 
Nutrients and price took precedence over the rest. Read more about EWG’s methodology here.
 
“Putting good food on your family’s table on a $5-or-$6-a-day budget is tough, but it’s possible,” said guide co-author Dawn Undurraga, EWG nutritionist and registered dietitian, in the press release. “When shoppers fill their grocery carts with the foods on EWG’s lists, they’ll be doing something good for their health and environment, meanwhile lowering their grocery bills and exposures to the worst chemicals.”
 
Download EWG’s Good Food on a Tight Budget guide here.
 
Today, as kids across the country get ready to go back to school, EWG will release its recommendations for healthy and affordable school lunches.


Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/the-top-100-healthiest-budget-friendliest-foods.html#ixzz24dDXa2bM
I just want to add that eating properly is the best investment you can make because it keeps your medical and dental bills down. An apple a day may not keep the doctor away but a proper diet sure will!
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

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IQ Foods: Processed Food Lowers IQ in Children, Nutritious Food Raises It



Processed foods are the staple of far too many diets, particularly in the United States where 105 million people have either diabetes or prediabetes. These processed foods are filled with white sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, aspartame, artificial food colorings, and a wide variety of other toxic substances. Interestingly enough, research shows that these are some of the worst IQ foods. Given the makeup of processed foods, is it any wonder that children are suffering from IQ reduction upon introducing these foods into their diet?
 
IQ Foods: The Findings
 
British researchers uncovered the connection between processed foods and reduced IQ. They followed what 14,000 children ate and drank at the ages of 3, 4, 7, and 8.5 years of age, with answers submitted via parents through questionnaires. The researchers found that if children were consuming a processed diet at age 3, IQ decline could begin over the next five years. The study found that by age 8, the children had suffered the IQ decline.
 


On the contrary, children who ate a nutrient-rich diet were found to increase their IQ over the 3 year period. The foods considered nutrient-rich by the researchers were most likely conventional fruits and vegetables. If children were to eat a wide variety of organic produce, superfoods, mineral-rich plants, and perhaps even consume a food-based multivitamin, the researchers would most likely see a substantial IQ increase. This eating plan would also benefit the children — or even adults — in other aspects of their lives as well, such as better overall health & well-being.
 
Processed foods have been known to wreak havoc on the body for quite some time. One joint American and Spanish study has even found that junk food products, particularly those containing trans fats, can make healthy young men infertile by damaging their sperm. Another study, conducted by scientists from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and the University of Granada, reported that both junk food and fast food consumption can bring on depression. The link was so strong, in fact, that those who consumed fast food were 51% more likely to be depressed. It isn’t surprising that some of the worst IQ foods are the same foods that cause numerous health complications.


Read more: http://naturalsociety.com/iq-foods-processed-food-lowers-iq-nutritious-food-raises/#ixzz24o7rqrTB
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

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Life (Re)Cycle

God's Inordinate Fondness for Beetles 


Death breeds life in the world’s most diverse and abundant group of animals.

By Bernd Heinrich | August 1, 2012

An inordinate fondness for beetles.” That reportedly was the wry retort of famed British biologist J.B.S. Haldane to a theologian who asked him if anything could be concluded about the Creator’s predilections by studying creation. Haldane was referring to the fact that there are nearly half a million beetle species known on Earth. Having been an avid beetle collector since I was a small boy, I can say I share a certain fondness for the insects.
 
The diversity of beetles on our planet is amazing, and their behaviors and life histories are just as varied. Nowhere is this more evident than in beetles that dine upon carrion. I find carrion beetles not only wonderfully diverse, but also emblematic of natural cycles of birth and death, the focus of my latest book, Life Everlasting.
 
As a scientist, I worked for years on the behavior of ravens, the ultimate carcass-disposal specialists, so I was not particularly mindful of the roles beetles play in the recycling process. While large scavengers, such as ravens, eagles, wolves, and coyotes, quickly dispose of animal carcasses in snowy Northern Hemisphere forests, insects take the recycling lead in summer. One group in particular, the burying beetles, or nicrophorines, bury whole carcasses to create an underground smorgasbord for their larvae.



Burying beetles are conveniently attracted simply by setting out a dead mouse. After one beetle discovers a fresh carcass, it wafts an attracting scent to “call” a mate, who arrives in minutes. The pair transports the carcass to a suitable burial site and inters it there.
 
The fate of large animal carcasses, such as moose or deer, may be similarly quick, and it usually involves large scavengers as well as small. Plant carcasses present a more complicated challenge, however, and the disposal of dying and dead trees may take decades, sometimes even centuries.
 
Because it is a process that proceeds at a glacial pace, the decomposition of a tree is not as flashy as a hyena killing an ailing antelope, or even the burying of a mouse by a pair of Nicrophorus beetles. So the fate of dead trees and the roles that beetles play in it are therefore easily taken for granted, especially since one seldom sees the beetles as adults—they come, lay eggs, and leave, and the larvae then stay hidden inside for months or years. Yet the beetles use the tree as a food source, and thereby help degrade its tissues and recycle its remains into other organisms as surely as burying beetles do those of mice and birds.
 
Peel back the bark of almost any tree that is dying or recently dead, and you find the fantastically patterned feeding galleries of beetle larvae, primarily members of the family Scolytidae.



Each beetle species leaves distinctive tracks, and each specializes in depositing eggs in a narrow range of tree species. Digging deeper inside the dead tree, one encounters long-horned beetles (Cerambycidae)

and emerald beetles (Buprestidae),

their much larger larvae move from gnawing the cambium, part of the plant’s vascular system, to burrowing deep into the xylem at the heart of the tree.

Reminded day and night in the summer when I hear the chewing of sawyer beetle grubs in elderly trees,
I think of the thousands of gorgeous beetle species in woods the world over that make forest life possible. The topic of disposal of the dead is reminiscent of metamorphosis, and is key to the ecology of life everlasting. Beetles occupy a major hub of it. Haldane had more reason to be correct than he may have realized.
 
Bernd Heinrich is an internationally recognized scientist and the author of numerous award-winning books, including the best selling Mind of the Raven, Why We Run, and Winter World. He is a frequent contributor to national publications and professor emeritus of biology at the University of Vermont.

http://the-scientist.com/2012/08/01/life-recycle/

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

 

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Defending Wildlife by AGelbert
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Corruption in Government by AGelbert
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Books and Audio Books that may interest you 🧐 by AGelbert
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