Feast and Famine

Keep It Simple, Superfoods 2

2012-02-10T15:11:00.011-05:00

Keep it Simple

Superfoods 2

Apologies for the delay in resuming this superfoods adventure. As to simplicity, think: foods of bold, bright color and variety. Am posting Part 2 as its own entity so folks who've waited for the next bit, can now find it!

Let's begin with a how-to story:

A ninety-nine year old, dear neighbor, still living independently, taught me a great deal about superfoods and enduring quality of life.

When I first dropped by in a neighborly fashion, to ask if she needed anything from the farmers market, she was enjoying the mid-day meal, which she'd prepared for herself.

I was struck speechless. Hers was not an iceberg lettuce as veg, nor TV-dinner kitchen. I looked at prettily served "old-fashioned" foods we imagine we've no time for, anymore.

She had prepared a small piece of salmon with tarragon and lemon, sliced beets, kale, half a small winter squash. Colors? Oh you bet: bright anti-oxidant ones: wine-red, deep green, orange.

Ever the gracious lady she asked me to join her and apologized for having only prepared small portions with nothing to offer me.

She in fact offered me plenty, and lived beyond her century mark doing it. She was at least as well informed about current events as I, and still went walking every day. She simply dazzled me with her acuity of mind, and I watched her "feeding" her longevity and zest for life each quiet meal.

So, beyond learning from elders, and we should be so lucky, what do we already have in our kitchens, and what can we stock in--of anti-inflammatory, longevity-enhancing, anti-oxidant-rich, preventative medicine foods?

Water:

Given our new global reality of Fukushima-in-meltdown, I urge us all to use filtered water. After some soul-searching, and post-Fukushima months of searching, I decided to recommend a state of the art filter here at feastandfamine. It troubled me as I have offered years of pro bono info to our global community, and this reco would send me a small percentage of a filter's purchase price. I finally "got over myself" as even nutritionists have to eat:
http://www.pureeffectfilters.com/#a_aid=YeomanGardener

Spice Shelf Superfoods:

Cinnamon: Much-loved in apple pastries and on cinnamon toast. Turns out, it's a new whizbang in holistic medicine, in preventing and treating diabetes.

Turmeric: The yellow-color in curry powder blends and ball park mustard. You'll find it in nutriceuticals now: liver-protective, anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer. You can add it to soups, stews, rice, even popcorn. Try whisking ~1/2 tsp. into the eggs for an omelet.

Cayenne: Bright fiery red, it stimulates circulation, digestion and heart vigor. Dr. Christopher, an early 20th century American herbalist, carried cayenne in his materia medica of herbs and spices on buggy-ride house calls. In the event of heart attack, he stirred 1 tsp. cayenne into a glass of water and had the patient drink it down. (Not medical advice; see your doctor!)

Cloves: Wars were fought in the Middle Ages and Renaissance over control of the spice routes. Cloves in particular were prized. A single clove bud simmered with meat, in the days before refrigeration, helped prevent spoilage for much longer than normal. When idjits in the Dutch East Indies cut down all the aromatherapy-diffusing clove trees on an island for some other profitable crop, plague swept the island. Clove is anti-viral, lovely in gingerbread, cookies, mulled cider. Traditional soup stocks include simmering a whole onion, also anti-microbial, stuck with a couple spice cloves.

Garlic: The "stinking rose" of ethnic cuisine is now sufficiently researched to encourage consumption even by the timid! Helps with healthy cholesterol and good liver function, heart health, anti-cancer, even aphrodisiac.

Grains:

Again, think color. Many of us have grown up with nutrient-robbed white rice. Consider bulk sources for red jasmine rice, red Bhutanese rice, forbidden black rice (once grown only for Chinese Emperors!) and of course brown rice.

Health food stores now offer a sprouted, then dried brown rice, at higher cost, which ~triples nutrient content. Some enthusiasts are doing that with special rice cookers or with handy-hands-at-home improvisations. Some cooks even brew anti-oxidant-rich green tea for the sprouting/cooking, which turns out to be yummy:
http://www.instructables.com/id/HOWTO-make-GBR-germinated-or-sprouted-brown-rice/?ALLSTEPS

Quinoa: Beige, black or red, an awesome grain, cooking in 20 min. vs 45 for brown rice. It's nearly comparable to milk as a complete protein. It works well as a hot breakfast cereal, very sustaining, or as a side dish or stuffing. Pretty good as a gluten-free substitute for tabouli.

Beans:
If you soak beans overnight and pour off a couple water-soaks, you 1) decrease the "fart-factor" and 2) increase digestibility and nutrient content. How? Soaking seed activates the conversion of stored starch into B-Vites, Vit-E and enzymes. At almost zero cost to us humans. I like the Biosta 3-tiered Sprouter; glass jars with mesh lids also work well.

Almonds:
A nut recommended by Edgar Cayce, eaten as a 3/day cancer-preventative, and by Deepak Chopra, M.D. in this era. Chopra suggests soaking ~12 organic raw almonds overnight, which starts the biochemical transformation of sprouting, enhancing food value. Pour off the water at breakfast and munch, or add a little fresh water and blend for almond milk.

(You may have to request almonds imported from Spain or Sicily for raw/organic--to bypass the USDA's edict to organic California growers, imposing fumigation or heat-treatment on their almonds.)

Berries:

Superfoods, Inc. Bright colors are your clue: Blue of bilberries and the blueberries of New England, red of raspberries and strawberries, purple of grapes and elderberries.

I simmer dried elderberries and bilberries (1 Tbs each/gal.) before using that fragrant liquid to brew tea for kombucha! (See "Kitchen Probiotics" linked under the Preparedness header, right sidebar.)

During WWII, the RAF fed bilberry jam to flight crews heading out on night bombing raids over Nazi-occupied Europe. Bilberries and blueberries are good for eyesight and are included in formulations to protect the eyes.

Amazonian rainforest berries are of such Superfood value, that they may help protect the rainforest as source for sustainable crops, and alternative to clear-cutting: Check out acai berries, camu-camu,.. mega-nutrient and protective against degenerative disease.

In Tibet and Mongolia, and perhaps eventually in similar Rocky Mt. habitat, Tibetan Goji Berries reign as superfood extraordinaire, essentially mega-vite in a berry. Add to cooked cereals, rice, soak to add to fruit salads or yoghurt:

http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/goji-berry1.htm

Raw Cacao:
The Female Food Group! Yes, premenstrual women crave chocolate. Reason? Very rich source of magnesium, nature's calmative and anti-spasmodic (Take note guys!) Magnesium deficiency is very common, and can be a factor in leg cramps as well. Moreover, raw cacao is regarded as a heart-healthy superfood among holistic physicians, and also contains an ingredient for a feel-good neurotransmitter. Dark organic chocolate bars with 70-85% cacao contain max phyto-nutrients and least sugar. Bliss.

Teas:

Tea bags are an amazing marketing success--bigger profits from packaging and using lesser grades of tea. Go for bulk organic at health food stores, food co-ops or on line sources. I like Mt. Rose herbs. Any reputable supplier should be testing for rad-fallout from Fukushima, by the way.

Consider brewing bulk high-anti-oxidant teas in a French-press "coffee" pot or a tea pot. Bulk organic teas are high-quality and can be brewed again with another pour of hot water.

Organic teas of high preventative-medicine value: Green, white peony and white silver needle from Asia; the red teas: honey bush and rooibos from South Africa; yerba mate' from South America.

Veggies:

Bright color and preferably organic: Carrots, pumpkin, winter squash, sweet potatoes; deep greens: kale, mustard, turnip and beet tops, chard, oriental greens; beets; gold-fleshed and purple-fleshed (!) potatoes; endive, escarole and radicchio for salads, ditto watercress and parsley, the latter's high life force praised in The Secret Life of Plants.

So, brightly-colored, high-flavored foods meet grandmother wisdom--in our own kitchens and changing food choices--a home-style bounty.

And more and more restaurants are featuring "locavore" foods: locally grown and whatever ripens in a given season. (Which means pumpkins in Oct, strawberries in June, not December, peas and spinach with nights still cool, and asparagus as harbinger of summer's plenty.)

Can the northern hemisphere continue to count on out-of-season produce shipped thousands of miles from the southern hemisphere? And vice-versa, north to south. A global people, yes, but we may be about to learn an old thing anew--to cherish what feeds us near at hand.)

I wish you good eating and home-style conversation. See you at the farmers markets, and in gardens everywhere!

photo: forbes.com

Superfoods at Home

2011-12-02T09:08:00.026-05:00

Tibetan Goji Berries

Superfoods at Home
Part 1: Gov't permitting
Part 2: Keeping it simple

Part 1: Here you'll find simple ways to enjoy super-nutrient, vitamin-rich foods in your own hearth and home, whether an apartment tiny kitchen or a dream one. Even the homeless with a couple jars and a campstove, we hope, can improve their family's health with this info.

Grandmother wisdom of various cultures, we'll explore, and ah-hah's from the sustainable living paradigm. You'll learn down-home good eating, way less expensive than processed foods from the tender ministrations of the chemical-food industry.

Food self-sufficiency means what? An energy bar? Tubs of Y2K stores long past their sell-by date? Nuking dried noodles?

Could food self-sufficiency mean domestic terrorism?--to the looney-tunes running the Washington asylum.

As I write this, the US legislative branch is debating (and the Senate has passed) a bill to make independent-minded citizens subject to arrest and "indefinite detention." By the military.

Not just Occupy-Wall-Street protestors (goaded on by agents provocateurs.) US citizens could be under suspicion as domestic terrorists for having seven days' stored food!

How far does that play out?... Mormons? Seventh Day Adventists? Farmers with root cellars? Granny makes a year's supply of strawberry jam? Puts berry-contraband on her pantry shelf?!! How about crock pickles?

In a world gone mad, "the homeland as part of the battleground," politicians are miming Capt. Bligh, control-freaking bounty, and the ship of state.

This attempted "final solution" to the Bill of Rights impediment to absolute power, morphs us-ward, how? How on earth could this be sanctioned, let alone bullied into being?

Here's how--In direct lineage of "Operation Paperclip", end of WWII, which secretly brought high-ranking and "skilled" Nazis into US government, intelligence services and industry--against the express wishes of FDR and Truman, otherwise known as Presidents. A covert triumph of the military-industrial complex and fascist attitudes toward citizenry. For more about Operation Paperclip, see:

http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2009/04/water-water-everywhere-fluoride-in.html

Given government emergency response to Hurricane Katrina, as poor sections of New Orleans went glub-glub, people dying on roof tops, can we count on government to save us, to feed us?... And feed what exactly? MRE's? Spam?

See "7 Fat & 7 Lean Years" to weigh food self-sufficiency vis-a-vis government as Ultimate Daddy. Or Big Brother:

http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2008/06/7-fat-years-7-lean.html

So, what do we do in the quiet of our own kitchens?

For starters, consider the "convenience" of the kitchen microwave. If nuking food and fluids--damages vitamins, creates free radicals and corrupts even water molecules--such a deal! Initial cautionary research was buried by the power of industry and bribing of legislators.

An old story. Researchers who churn up cautionary warnings, which could affect corporate carte blanche and bottom line, suddenly find themselves pink-slipped, or denied grant funding.

For an eye-popper, have you come across Dr. Emoto's research about the effect of microwaves on water molecules? (Maybe in the film, "What the Bleep Do We Know!" Link below shows examples of of his discoveries.) Emoto freezes water samples which form amazing, intricate crystals. Water crystals exposed to microwave look hemorrhaged, caveat emptor: http://www.whatthebleep.com/crystals/

We'll now explore simple protocols to increase the vitality of food and the life force of people enjoying it. Food itself as vitamins, in Superfoods 2, Keeping It Simple:

http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2012/02/keep-it-simple-superfoods-2.html

Black Rain: Gov News Blackout

2011-08-02T16:13:00.003-04:00

Black Rain:

Info-Blackout

It's raining Fukushima-radiation on the global Commons. Radioactive "black rain" brings down the heaviest fallout.

But what if it's not reported?

2. Aug., 2011: What if the news services fail to mention lethal Geiger counter readings at the reactors, now, beyond the range of the instruments?

It rains a lot in Seattle, and the US government has been running tests forJet-Streamed Japan radiation, hinting that results may be withheld.

A matter of "national security."

The US and Canadian governments refuse to declare Public Health concerns--the "community security" of safe water, produce, milk, meat and fish. Refuse to even warn their citizens to minimize radiation exposure.

Your basic crime against humanity.

Leuren Moret—internationally respected expert on nuclear power and DU-weaponry--is on the job, and has released her court statement as an expert witness in a lawsuit brought to force Japanese government officials to evacuate more than 350,000 children from the Fukushima area where they are being forcibly exposed by the government to lethal doses of radiation.

Moret states:

"The west coast of North America is thousands of miles across the vast Pacific Ocean, a long way from Fukushima Daiichi and the radioactive solids, liquids, and gases being released daily and recklessly to poison both near and far. Already we are seeing the effects in North America.

“Air filters from cars in Seattle have been analyzed for hot particles and indicate that Seattle residents are inhaling 5 hot particles a day, in Tokyo it is 10 hot particles a day, in Fukushima Prefecture it is 30-40 times higher - 300-400 hot particles a day.

“Hot particles and alpha emitters such as Uranium and Plutonium have not even been mentioned by the government or TEPCO...

"People on the west coast of the United States and even in Arizona are reporting a metallic taste in their mouths – an indication of radioactive particles in the air as in Japan.

"On the night of June 14, a nuclear incident occurred in the Reactor 3 building in the spent fuel pool when huge bursts of gamma ray fluorescence lit up the night sky and turned the reactor building as bright as the sun, indicating the spent fuel rods and melted uranium and plutonium were boiling off, vaporized along with the rest of the fission products.

"The radiation from this unreported but very dangerous event was released without protecting the residents of Fukushima Prefecture – especially the children. But the radiation was detected at elevated levels from 2:30 AM until 7:30 AM on a monitor in Ibaraki Prefecture. How many Curies were released? When will this nuclear war against the Japanese people and the Northern Hemisphere ever end?

http://www.examiner.com/exopolitics-in-seattle/leuren-moret-nuclear-genocide-of-babies-children-japan-u-s-canada-grows#ixzz1Sh0xJqSy

The Japanese government and TEPCO continue to do spokesperson tut-tut's about any danger. In fact, the disaster rages on, un-contained and mum's the word.

The Japanese government fails to warn but does mobilize to threaten, with a new law criminalizing citizen reportage.

Corporate-control of government makes nuke-fools of us all.

With children most at risk, infant mortality rates are reported rising in US West Coast cities, report by an MD and an Epidemiologist.

http://counterpunch.org/sherman06102011.html

UC Berkeley had noted San Francisco rad-iodine levels at 18,000% above levels deemed safe--an EPA sophistry. There are no safe levels

Radioactive iodine has a short half-life: 8 days. This makes it a useful marker for ongoing radiation release. It does not otherwise linger for months or centuries.

"Fresh" Tokyo contamination by radioactive iodine (and cesium) is being detected. The failed GE-designed reactors continue to spew.

Tokyo pet owners agonize over pets suffering nosebleeds, hair loss, uncontrollable diarrhea, death. Parents agonize over children suffering nosebleeds, chronic illness, fatigue.

Meanwhile, down on the farm, meat and dairy livestock eat radioactive pasture and hay. This includes North America, take note.

In Japan, beef cattle have been fed highly-radioactive rice straw; the cattle slaughtered for human consumption. (Black rain being implicated.)

Cesium-contaminated beef has been fed to school children and to passengers on the bullet train. For a week. The government then did after-the-fact recall.

Loss of face trumping food safety, apparently.

More radioactive beef is turning up. It's not rocket science; it is animal husbandry--the fodder is contaminated.

Governments indulge in CYA (cover-your-@ss) to hide misdeeds and retain power. Governments lie. Governments under threat of citizen backlash even turn on their electorates.

Please see family-empowerment info provided, to help safeguard us on earth where we live in community. You'll find a total of four radiation-related articles, right sidebar.

We're not likely to learn this info on national news:

http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2011/03/radiation-remedies.html

Food & Farmland: Radiation Detox Update

2011-06-06T11:29:00.011-04:00

Food & Land Detox

Morning after the Japan quake, I woke in a state of horror and wrote "Radiation Remedies," describing actionable protocols for families and communities in Japan and worldwide: http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2011/03/radiation-remedies.html

Fallout contamination of farmland lay dead ahead, an agony in general, and in particular as I used to farm.

June 12, 2011: Three months later a concerned US Medical Doctor and Epidemiologist team reports disturbing findings: "A 35% Spike in Infant Mortality in Northwest Cities Since Meltdown."

http://counterpunch.org/sherman06102011.html

Local solutions to global event are the thrust of these articles. Hang on; good news and common sense follow.

Growing ever more timely, as river flood waters in the American heartland currently breach levees and rise around aging US nuclear power plants. (2/3 of which now exposed as leaking radioactivity from decaying underground pipes.)

"Dominion over the earth" mentality has constructed nuke power on flood plain, and on fault lines (Japan, California, etc.)

CorpGov has insured lax standards, insured corporate profit. And coverup.

At Fukushima meltdown, I had immediately stopped buying milk for kefir and cottage cheese; stopped planting spring veggies; stopped buying field crops; stocked in tea and rice--Asian tea plantations and rice paddies lay at hazard.

Farmland-contamination exceeded my knowledge base; I burrowed for further info, in problem-solution mode, with an urgency to communicate global aftermath and local precautions.

Meanwhile, Japan, the US, the EU, and compliant media circled the wagons--a wall of silence in an attempt to hide nuclear catastrophe and the GE-designed reactors of Fukushima.

With media-zip-lips regarding radiation danger and needed Public Health protocols, those who trust mainstream broadcasting were lulled into--well, it may have been scary, but it's yesterday's news--Pass the TV remote control.

So, what does the nuke industry do to bury its mistakes, protect its workers?

It turns out that healing clay, bentonite--mentioned in Rad-Remedies' detox baths--is strewn like talcum over the raw bottoms of nuke disaster, absorbing radioactivity.

It's been dropped like snow around Chernobyl, for example. Nuke-mess-techs spread bentonite paste over themselves under their HazMat suits. http://www.aboutclay.com/info/Articles/protection_from_radiation.htm

Shoes used outdoors should be left at the door and not tracked into the house. Bentonite can be added to wash water to absorb radioactivity from clothes. Fruits and veggies can be soaked in bentonite water for 10 minutes and rinsed to render them more safely-edible. Details follow.

Hawaii, jewel of the Pacific, has been Jet Stream gob-smacked with radioactivity. Many thanks to Mike Rivero for posting solutions implemented by a Big Island organic dairy, "Milk and Honey Farm."

They are applying boron to their soils, and feeding it to their cows. Allegedly useful for humans as well:

"... Boron is used extensively in the nuclear industry. Sodium borate is regularly used for standby liquid control systems, in case of emergencies. It was used in Cheronbyl in 1986 mixed with sand to prevent further radiation leakage. It was also used in 1999 in Tokaimura, Japan, to absorb the massive amounts of radiation after an accident at a plant. Currently it is being dumped on fuel rods and in surrounding waters of the Fukushima plant. Boron is widely recognized as extremely safe and can be used to capture radioactivity on our soils, gardens, orchards, etc. It also can be safely ingested by humans and animals. Boron will accept radiation and ionize it within our bodies, after which our bodies will safely excrement the boron and radioactivity.

"We have begun feeding our cows and goats sodium borate at milking times, as well as adding it to free choice kelp and water troughs. In the past years we have monitored boron and other minerals in the soil and have added as necessary to bring levels up to recognized healthy levels. As a safety measure we are planning to implement a boron dosage to all of our pastures, as well as neighboring pastures. For humans, boron can safely ingested at a dosage of 4-10 mg per day. Borax, 11% boron, can be used as a tea and sprayed on your gardens, or land surrounding your home, at a rate of 10# of Borax per acre, 1#, if using elemental boron. Borax can also be ingested at 1/8 tsp to 1 litre water for women, ¼ tsp to 1 litre water for men. Fortunately, red wine and coffee are significant sources of boron, as well as non-citrus fruits, red grapes, plums, pears, apples, avocados, legumes and nuts! Boron is known to be non-carcinogenic, non-mutagenic and has been used internally to protect the astronauts in space as they leave the earth’s protective magnetic field...

"According to Cheryl McCoy, Aboutclay.com, Calcium Bentonite Clay acts as a magnet absorbing anything with a positive charge, ie radiation and toxicity. She suggests washing all produce which may be considered radioactive in 1 part clay to 8 parts water in a non-metallic bowl, soaking for 10 minutes, then rinse and dry as usual. Bentonite clay can be added to catchment tanks, drinking water or raw milk to isolate radioactivity, which will not be released once captured by clay. Also, the body cannot digest clay, but will rather release clay through excrement. Clay can be added to milk or drinking water at a dosage of 1 oz liquid calcium bentonite to 1 gallon raw milk or drinking water. Either allow to settle and pour off or mix and consume clay and liquid. 1-2 oz liquid bentonite clay can be safely consumed per day by an adult, with significant detox abilities...."

http://hawaiihealthguide.com/healthtalk/display.htm?id=915&hhsid=9ea42c3eb9d93ab4faf7ca3cd98ee6d8

Those in positions of "public service" seem to have lost contact with life forms on earth, with humanity. We can hope for whistle-blowers--hope and local change through global-community service.

Input is welcome, all of us in this together.

photo: Delvin Farms, Woodbine farmers Market

Detox "Gift" of Fukushima, 24. May Update

2011-04-26T15:29:00.087-04:00


*US Lies under That Mess*

Detox "Gift" of Fukushima

Riveting graphic, from Norway, which had been the world's only open source for jet stream radiation-info. Suddenly closed to the public, the above Xenon-133 flow over North America is a geek-ferreted Norsk Institute glimpse of the "truth we can't handle."

Thanks to Alexander Higgins and http://www.dutchsinse.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/tracer_h_1828.gif for further world maps of Fukushima, live.

Can any good come of Fukushima? You may be surprised.

Chernobyl-aftermath left nearby land too contaminated for crops and habitation, and left people with thyroid cancer or low thyroid function, "hypothyroid."

There was too little potassium iodide on hand to save thyroids. We may have learned something in the interim about healing nutrients like iodine-rich edible seaweeds, and about detox.

(Hopefully we'll also, somehow, discover ways to heal land and sea.)

Please see "Radiation Remedies" for a backgrounder:

http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2011/03/radiation-remedies.html (I had thought to insert further info there, but the piece would begin to bulge out, like a Strasbourg goose or a stuffed turkey.)

Here's what we know how to do, now:

Poor thyroid function has seemingly become an industrial world norm, affecting health insidiously--poor energy and emotional stability, disturbed sleep and metabolic rate, cold hands and feet, depression, thinning hair & eyebrows, lowered life force/libido, plus immune-vulnerability to degenerative diseases including cancers.

More meds being the paradigm of addressing the dismaying symptoms.

How could this happen? The thyroid needs iodine. Salt was iodized, right?

Iodine has incestuous close cousins in the Periodic Table, which can displace iodine from doing its spark plug sort of work in the thyroid, and murk up biochemistry--Those cousins are chlorine, fluorine, bromine.

Without necessarily assigning ill-motive, let's look at daily reality.

Chlorine:

Water is heavily chlorinated, a public health good--not the only means of water purification, just the cheapest for now. Chlorine combines willy-nilly with other water contaminants and can gravitate to the thyroid. Filtering it out of drinking and shower water can be taste- and life-enhancing.

Fluorine:

After Nazi scientists discovered the mind- and will-numbing "benefits" of fluoridating public water supplies of captive peoples, Nazis and their know-how were secretly imported to the US at the chaotic end of WW2.

See, Fluoride Problem, Part 1:

http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2009/04/water-water-everywhere-fluoride-in.html

Fluoride Solutions, Part 2:

http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2009/04/water-water-flouride-part-2.html

Downeast Maine Conjecture:

Two acquaintances on the Maine Island where I lived developed thyroid cancer. Not a large population; I found this shocking. The terror of the diagnosis sent them straight into the arms of surgery, radiation and chemo.

I asked a county health nurse about the demographics of thyroid cancer, who said, "You don't know the half of it. There's a quiet pandemic of thyroid cancer in the area."

Why, I ruminated, and chewed on that data-cud for awhile.

Here's a hypothesis, which will be up to wiser heads to sort out:

1) The coast of Maine has been notorious for "bad air days." Origin: New York City/Boston corridor and Ohio River Valley--industrial and perhaps nuclear smog. Nuclear power plants are known to occasionally vent radioactive iodine, without necessarily considering it the same public health concern, as might, the public.

2) Downeast Maine public water is generally heavily fluoridated. Are thyroids not at optimum health due to fluoride, and perhaps more vulnerable to thyroid dysfunction? The area's startling obesity alone would make one wonder.

Maine Fluoride Anecdote:

A fellow degree'd in Public Health on the island began giving community talks on disturbing health effects of fluoride. One of the towns was sufficiently alarmed as to hold a referendum--They voted down fluoridation of their public water supply!

Come to find out, a blocking maneuver had been set in place to delay/prevent removal of fluoride--the community decision could not be implemented for a year, "pending further review."

Bromine:

President Eisenhower, retired Army General, tried to warn us about the Military-Industrial-Complex in his parting address. Instead, seemingly infinite funding has waterfalled into creating US Imperium--land, sea and sky--sans oversight or Constitutional-restraint.

The apparently untouchable nuclear and armaments industries are obvious carbuncles on the body politic.

Less obvious: the Chemtrail Program, that murking of skies with pollutants, including ethylene dibromide, a bromine compound, plus heavy metals, blood cells, micro-organisms. Not your garden variety jet exhaust. See Chemtrails and health effects, updated 26. April, 2011:

http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2010/04/chemtrails-earth-solutions.html

The protocols we are instituting now to deal with Fukushima, also help detox the environmental outrages of Ike's Military-Industrial-Complex.

Cleansing out Toxins:

So, we find ourselves with generally less than optimal thyroid function, in a populace growing indignant and pro-active re government/media lying--about Japan's Fukushima disaster and its global radioactive fallout.

Surprising developments may follow.

Sufficient dietary iodine can help displace the thyroid contaminants of the industrial world, including uptake of radioactive-iodine.

As more people begin eating protective edible seaweeds as iodine source, and perhaps taking Lugol's iodine, an unexpected, a beneficial consequence may be at work:

We could activate the potential for more vigorous life force and mental acuity---a globally-focused hope for a more earth-friendly future.

The proof is in the doing.

An additional health-response to Fukushima fallout involves detox clay baths, with other health benefits in train. www.pascalite.com

You see, the body silts up, through living, through toxic exposures. It's ancient wisdom to help it heal through detox--the forgotten spring cleanses of grandmother-wisdom, and in healing waters.

Detox Baths, and Benefits beyond Fukushima:

Am about to talk about the Three P's: poop, pee and perspiration. The body excretes toxins with vigor, given the protocols, and may not smell grand in the process. Be aware that you may poop and pee more, and maybe feel crummy for a bit.

Drinking plenty of water helps; 2-4 liters, in fact. And by water, I mean, water. Coffee and tea don't cut it; they just dehydrate the body.

Consider a few "normal" oddments which can be favorably affected by detox clay baths:

Aluminum Antiperspirants:

Ladies especially, please note. The body excretes toxins by sweating. Antiperspirants, however, prevent sweating altogether. Think, log-jam or plumbing blockage.

Toxins (and aluminum) instead back up into breast tissue and lymph nodes of breast, arm pit, and arm, the very lymph nodes biopsied when breast lumps cause a scare.

(Herbal deodorants are now available which do not block perspiration, and deal with the bacteria-buildup which is otherwise smelly.)

So, when doing a clay bath, submerge arms and as much of breasts or chest as possible.

Mercury Fillings & Dental Radiation:

While doing a detox clay bath, and shifting body parts, be sure to submerge jaws at some point, which may have been filled with mercury-amalgam, and have received doses of radiation since childhood. Tilting head back, also submerge head and forehead, with nose above water!

Partnered Clay Baths:

Don't. Clay has tremendous drawing power, and the initial baths of someone highly toxic can actually change the color of the clay to rust, brown, black. In a shared soak, marinade from the more toxic partner can make the healthier one whoozy and ill.

Ejaculate:

Men grown highly toxic from environmental exposures may climax burning semen. Just ask young wives and divorcee's of Gulf War Vets. Women have reported this relational shock when their partners return from war zones; they report burning and inflamed vaginal tissue and cervix.

Young women, out of love and sorrow for their PTSD'd partners, have endured the burning, and some have had to lose their fertility to complete hysterectomies as a result.

US Vets have also been fathering babies with the same cyclopean birth defects as babies born where the US drops Depleted-Uranium bombs. Women in DU'd Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans first ask, "Is the baby healthy?" before asking, "Is it a girl or boy?

The Veterans Administration has apparently not prescribed detox protocols, like clay baths, none at all.

Clay Baths for Adverse Vaccine Reactions:

Mothers of suddenly-autistic toddlers, following vaccination, report gradual return of their children to cognitive and social skills following the protocol of cleansing clay baths.

Conclusion:

We may have lost our way for awhile. Fukushima fallout could be our nightmare wake-up call.

Implementing healing protocols in response to this disaster, could potentially heal us as individuals and families. Heal us to renewed competence in both local and global community.

kelp photo: http://marinebio.org/

NEW Radiation Remedies, Update 26. Jan. 2012

2011-03-12T06:45:00.125-05:00

NEW Radiation Remedies

Japan, the exquisite, the formidable, and now a microcosm of worst-case scenario Nuclear Paradigm--a meltdown wasteland. On the macrocosm, we have a planetary and accelerating disaster. Timeline of events, coverup, and citizen precautions follow. Map(s) above, date from April 2011.

26. Jan. 2012 Update: " Japan as a nation state has been destroyed. Its landmass and territorial waters are contaminated. Part of the country is uninhabitable. High levels of radiation have been recorded in the Tokyo metropolitan area, which has a population of 39 million (2010) (more than the population of Canada, circa 34 million (2010)) There are indications that the food chain is contaminated throughout Japan...

"The fundamental question is whether the vast array of industrial goods and components "Made in Japan" -- including hi tech components, machinery, electronics, motor vehicles, etc -- and exported Worldwide are contaminated?...

"While the business media has narrowly centered on the impacts of power outages and energy shortages on the pace of productive activity, the broader issue pertaining to the outright radioactive contamination of the country's infrastructure and industrial base is a "scientific taboo" (i.e the radiation of industrial plants, machinery and equipment, buildings, roads, etc)..."

Chussodovsky: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28870

12. March, 2011: Japan, struck by mega-quake and tsunami, declared a nuclear power emergency. Reactor radiation was released intentionally to ease pressure--we've since learned, uncontrollably. It had been hoped the high tech prowess of that society could contain the nuclear disaster; it could not.

15. March 2011: Explosions and meltdown. The uproiling cloud of radioactivity exceeds Chernobyl, exceeds all experience. Living heroes, with the knowledge to know they're doomed, have tried to contain nuclear catastrophe; they cannot. Nor can life in the mother sea absorb the lethal outflow.
Japanese people are being under-informed and told to seal themselves in their homes, many of which have rice paper walls. The US is being actively misinformed.

How could that be?

GE...We Bring Godzillas to Life!

General Electric (GE) is responsible for the design of the exploding Japanese nuclear reactors, joining BP in the business of terra-cide. GE will face monstrous litigation, which their pay-no-taxes, big bucks will try to sidestep.

GE also owns media outlets--NBC, MSNBC and CNBC (known as "CNBS" to traders.) Major media protects its turf, its access, its perks. "Journalists" soon grasp where their bread is buttered and avoid the unemployment line, by mouthing the party line.

Reportage, therefore, of the caliber of Soviet-era "Pravda," just more bucks and air-brushed glamor.

Germany, in response to public outcry against nuclear power's latest disaster, has shut down seven nuclear reactors for three month review.

And America? With its many reactors, including the same fatal GE-design, and the known-unknowns of military bases? God help us.

12. April: Japan now admits it: Fukushima erupta has devolved to a new Chernobyl-- a "7"--there being no higher code-red alarm.

A Cesium-137 radiation cloud is flowing over the western US as I write this, jet-streaming eastward. Small town newspapers, not controlled by GE, have urged people to remain indoors.

13. April: Why, WHY have we not been warned and informed? A "Veterans Today Exclusive" reveals content of the world-encircling rad-plume, and outs the perpetrators of silence.

This is not a drill:

"The daily outflow of deadly radiation from Japan’s Four Chernobyl’d Reactors increased Ten Times on March 31.
The Japanese Government in conjunction with GE and the American CIA cut off information the next day.
Information has resumed and is “controlled”.
The March 31st Radioactive Plume is expected in the States, the EU and Asia on April 11th and 12th. The Southern Hemisphere will get all this spread out over the next year.
The Plume contains Radioactive Iodine, Strontium, Plutonium, Cesium and other highly lethal radioactive substances."

A. Stay indoors as much as you can, and especially when it rains.
B.Get into the habit of checking your shoes and those of guests at the front door. Store umbrellas away from clothes
C. Drink spring water from deep underground old sources. Try to make it local.
D. Do not bathe or wash clothes/dishes in radioactively contaminated water. That is a bit of a problem. You can stock up on baby wipes. That should help some. In the Northeast US Poland Springs is good if a bit acid, so counteract with bicarb once a day – a tsp. in a glass of water. E. Food: This is a puzzle. Buy New Zealand beef from US Wellness Meats. In about a year’s time that will no longer be a good source, as the radiation will eventually cross the equator. Broad leafy greens are known to absorb radiation from rainwater. There was an idea that thicker skinned veggies would be the best but as it turns out, foods rich in minerals will pick up all the nasties as easily for they are heavy metals. Beware of coconuts, and avocados, both rich in potassium, and therefore good at picking up metals . All dairy products are no good. They have Strontium 90, which at the behest of the dairy industry, was made illegal to report the last time this happened. Take it on faith because the probe that will pick it up is attached to a isotope radiation detector that costs $10,000, and up, and there is a waiting list! However you might want to get one of the $600 dollar detectors and you can use it to measure Gamma rays on your food in the market while you are shopping. Gammas are easier to detect. That way you can buy more intelligently. There are waiting lists for those, too. Proceed as if everything changed on March 11, 2011. It did"

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/04/11/veterans-today-exclusive-what-to-do-about-the-radioactive-poison/

Japan, the EU and the US, in a neat hide-the-pea-under-the-walnut maneuver, have dramatically increased radiation levels deemed "safe"--when absolutely no levels are safe.

Protecting the nuclear industry and GE apparently being Job #1.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has further disgraced itself, in May--test results would become infrequent and likely no longer be made public.

Citizen Precautions:

1) Green Tea: Historically, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surprising healing data would emerge. People not vaporized on the spot suffered radiation sickness. Cancers came later. Those who drank copious amounts of green tea tended to recover. White tea, especially Silver Needle, may be even more effective.

2) Clay Baths: Healing clay or bentonite has drawing power, pulling toxins out of the body. Clay baths have been taken to help heal the body of exposure to heavy metals, industrial and agricultural poisons and radiation. Drink plenty of water to avoid dehydration. Amount of clay ranges from 1 Tbs. to 1 cup per hot bath.

Bentonite is available at pharmacies. More exotic clays, rose, green and white, are stocked by health food stores. A particularly powerful clay is mined in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming: http://www.pascalite.com/ Rinse off after thirty minute soak.

A foot-bath is also effective. It can be as simple as a bucket, of wide enough diameter for the feet, set on a folded towel to help retain water warmth, the legs and bucket wrapped in a towel. 1 Tbs-1/4 cup clay. Might be a useful time sit in comfy chair and disengage from electronics, just close eyes, very soothing.

Mothers of autistic children report improvement using clay baths. Appalled at the shock of a happy child suddenly screaming into nightmare and remoteness following vaccination, mothers have activated into solution-mode. Clay baths are an ancient form of healing and are real.

3) Bentonite Veggie/Fruit Wash: The white clay, bentonite, is used by the nuclear industry to sop up radiation from its numerous spills and mishaps. If you use a salad spinner to rinse produce, try a soak of bentonite water, ~1 Tbs/gal. for 10 minutes. Pour off; rinse.

4) Baking Soda and Sea Salt Baths: The usual protocol calls for one pound baking soda and one pound sea salt. This is a bit weird--the water can actually turn opaque-gray and slimy if there's been significant radiation exposure--from medical procedures or mishaps. Be sure to drink water while soaking, and rinse off in shower afterward.

5) Lugol's Iodine: solution is taken by drops. With the 2.2% solution, the general recommended dosage is 1-2 drops in a glass of water with 1tsp apple cider vinegar, depending on body weight, 2x/week, (or 3x in the event of nuclear emergency. Are we there yet, EPA? ) Follow directions on your particular bottle; do not exceed dosage. Lugol's is inexpensive and the bottle contains 1200 doses, sufficient to share. Lugol's source:

http://www.bloodrootproducts.com/Lugol%27s-Lugols-Iodine-C22.html

7. September, 2011: Re Lugol's Iodine, I have just spoken with the very knowledgeable herbalist at the above link. Given the magnitude of Fukushima's ongoing radioactive fallout, it is now recommended to apply Lugol's daily--apply it topically to inner wrist or tummy, 1-4 drops. The herbalist stressed that Lugol's may be our most important remedy--Impaired thyroid function is now "normal" due to reasons discussed in the four radiation articles here. (See right sidebar.) Impaired thyroid function is associated with the diabetes epidemic, Alzheimer's, cancers, depression, chronic fatigue, etc. As an aside he is currently finding radioactive contamination at 1,000% normal in 1-2% of the herbs he tests (and rejects.)

10. Sept. Update: In applying therapeutic Lugol's iodine to wrist or tum topically, a guideline is as follows: If the iodine smear is absorbed in less than 12 hours, Houston we have an iodine deficiency. That can mean:

1. Meager intake.

2. Or, very high radioactive-iodine fallout, increasing need. As Japan/US/EPA have suppressed data, who's to know?

I have had a disturbing revelation in that regard. As a nutritionist, I have included sea veggies in my diet routinely for many, many years. I started on Lugol's Iodine by mouth mid-March. Ergo, all bases covered, or so I thought.

On the reco of the herbalist who formulates Lugol's, I began applying Lugol's topically on a daily basis. And watched appalled as the iodine was absorbed quickly.

Folks, this is not a drill. See to your families?

6) Sea veggies: contain natural iodine. The Japanese have high intake of edible seaweeds and till now have enjoyed exemplary health and longevity. Maine Coast Sea Veggies, a source in the US, has had a predictable increase in international orders when, say, a nuclear power plant in Europe vents radioactivity:

"Marine phytochemicals found only in sea vegetables have been shown to absorb and eliminate radioactive elements and heavy metal contaminants from our bodies. "

http://www.mountainroseherbs.com/

When Chernobyl blew, at least some of the children received potassium iodide. Why are parents, under Fukushima-cloud, not being advised that they and especially their children are at risk of thyroid cancer?

Governmental-let's- pretend, and media-silence, stand as a colossal breach of public duty.

7) Kombucha: A probiotic cultured from teas. Most medical research on its efficacy comes out of Eastern Europe and Germany, where MD's prescribe it. Kombucha is now available in health food stores in the US and some supermarkets. It can be made at home. See why-do and how-to at following link; scroll down:

http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2009/05/flying-pig-flu-power-up-immunity-with.html

8) Aloe vera Leaf Cancer Remedy: See your doctor, but this Brazilian remedy is worth a look. A Friar Minor living in the Amazonian hinterland learned it from the locals, and shared it with the world.
http://www.healingcancernaturally.com/aloe-vera-honey-rum-treatment.html

9) Zapper: The Naturopath, Dr. Hulda Clark, developed a zapper to deal with parasites and diseases. It was somewhat complex. More user-friendly and affordable 9V-battery-powered zappers have been developed, some utilizing Dr. Wilhelm Reich's research. Don Croft's version was reportedly sent to a Chernobyl First Responder, dying of radiation sickness and cancers. The man used it 24/7 and is said to have recovered. http://www.worldwithoutparasites.com/

10) Food: We don't yet know how radioactively-contaminated global agriculture may become. If fresh produce gets to be off-limits, it would be wise to have dry goods in pantry. Dried nettles are very high nutrient and delicious added to soups, beans, grains; ditto dried mushrooms, dried garlic, onions, peppers, spinach, spices, sea veggies. Stock in mung beans, which are very easy to sprout.

Quinoa cooks in twenty minutes and was called the "mother grain" in Inca times. Rice from the Far East is looking iffy. Brown and red rice take 45 minutes to cook, delicious/nutritious drizzled with soy sauce.

Our fast-paced society may return to higher-nutrient foods and meals together.

Teas from Japan and China may not be safely available. Chlorella, a valuable tonic and chelator of heavy metals and toxins, is grown in Japan, alas. Existing stocks represent a premier food. Hawaiian-grown spirulina, also an excellent superfood, might be purchased now as well.

The following link was sleuthed by savvy-friend and contains a moving account by a Japanese physician, speaking of heroes, who gives an account of staying at his hospital in devastated Nagasaki and insisting all staff and patients be fed macrobiotic foods and absolutely no sugar. His patients recovered from radiation sickness, and he and staff were able to remain a vital and healing presence in the midst of radioactive rubble:

http://www.livewellnaturally.com/Health-and-Nutrition-Articles/Nutrition-Articles-2010/Protect-Yourself-from--Radiation-2-22-10-.html

Nuclear power plants may be a wrong turn for living things, and they've been built on tsunami-vulnerable coasts and fault lines. Common sense has not prevailed. Natural disasters and human error do happen. Best scenario, don't live near one, though millions do. It might be sensible to stock in some of the radiation remedies and nutritious foods for your family, for community.

Fukushima photos: www.acidcow.com

Frankenfood Grains & Infertility

2011-02-21T15:10:00.017-05:00

Frankenfood
&
Infertility

America's Food & Drug Administration. which gave the world Thalidomide and Aspartame, has granted GMO-agriculture carte blanche. The FDA does not require labeling of Frankenfood ingredients.

Caveat emptor. Here's a brochure to help you out:
http://www.nongmoshoppingguide.com/download.html

That cozy corporate/government deal may not stand. The damage to livestock and humankind is reaching critical data-mass.

Also, outrage is mounting regarding the wanton destruction of heirloom seed stocks and destruction of farmers whose fields are contaminated by neighbors' GMO crops. The Monsanto corporation is bent on litigating non-compliant farmers into penury and bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, in the pantheon of heroes, an emeritus professor at Purdue University, Don M. Huber, has issued a warning regarding a NEW micro-pathogen found in high concentrations in GMO Roundup-ready corn and soy, causing spontaneous abortions in farm animals, and so much more. Farmers are already alarmed and aware.

In a letter to the US Secretary of Agriculture, Dr. Horner urges an immediate GMO moratorium. Dr. Horner has both cred and expertise. Kudos to him for also having cajones. This may finally draw the line, in what's left of AgriBiz soil.

Professor Horner:

.....
"For the past 40 years, I have been a scientist in the professional and military agencies that evaluate and prepare for natural and manmade biological threats, including germ warfare and disease outbreaks. Based on this experience, I believe the threat we are facing from this pathogen is unique and of a high risk status. In layman’s terms, it should be treated as an emergency.
.....
"This is highly sensitive information that could result in a collapse of US soy and corn export markets and significant disruption of domestic food and feed supplies. On the other hand, this new organism may already be responsible for significant harm (see below). My colleagues and I are therefore moving our investigation forward with speed and discretion, and seek assistance from the USDA and other entities to identify the pathogen’s source, prevalence, implications, and remedies.
.....
"Unique Physical Properties

"This previously unknown organism is only visible under an electron microscope (36,000X), with an approximate size range equal to a medium size virus. It is able to reproduce and appears to be a micro-fungal-like organism. If so, it would be the first such micro-fungus ever identified. There is strong evidence that this infectious agent promotes diseases of both plants and mammals, which is very rare.

"Pathogen Location and Concentration

"It is found in high concentrations in Roundup Ready soybean meal and corn, distillers meal, fermentation feed products, pig stomach contents, and pig and cattle placentas.

"Linked with Outbreaks of Plant Disease

"The organism is prolific in plants infected with two pervasive diseases that are driving down yields and farmer income—sudden death syndrome (SDS) in soy, and Goss’ wilt in corn. The pathogen is also found in the fungal causative agent of SDS (Fusarium solani fsp glycines).

"Implicated in Animal Reproductive Failure

"Laboratory tests have confirmed the presence of this organism in a wide variety of livestock that have experienced spontaneous abortions and infertility. Preliminary results from ongoing research have also been able to reproduce abortions in a clinical setting.

"The pathogen may explain the escalating frequency of infertility and spontaneous abortions over the past few years in US cattle, dairy, swine, and horse operations. These include recent reports of infertility rates in dairy heifers of over 20%, and spontaneous abortions in cattle as high as 45%.

"For example, 450 of 1,000 pregnant heifers fed wheatlege experienced spontaneous abortions. Over the same period, another 1,000 heifers from the same herd that were raised on hay had no abortions. High concentrations of the pathogen were confirmed on the wheatlege, which likely had been under weed management using glyphosate.

"Recommendations

"In summary, because of the high titer of this new animal pathogen in Roundup Ready crops, and its association with plant and animal diseases that are reaching epidemic proportions, we request USDA’s participation in a multi-agency investigation, and an immediate moratorium on the deregulation of RR crops until the causal/predisposing relationship with glyphosate and/or RR plants can be ruled out as a threat to crop and animal production and human health.

"It is urgent to examine whether the side-effects of glyphosate use may have facilitated the growth of this pathogen, or allowed it to cause greater harm to weakened plant and animal hosts. It is well-documented that glyphosate promotes soil pathogens and is already implicated with the increase of more than 40 plant diseases; it dismantles plant defenses by chelating vital nutrients; and it reduces the bioavailability of nutrients in feed, which in turn can cause animal disorders. To properly evaluate these factors, we request access to the relevant USDA data.

"I have studied plant pathogens for more than 50 years. We are now seeing an unprecedented trend of increasing plant and animal diseases and disorders. This pathogen may be instrumental to understanding and solving this problem. It deserves immediate attention with significant resources to avoid a general collapse of our critical agricultural infrastructure."

Thanks to George Ure of urbansurvival.com for sleuthing the link: http://farmandranchfreedom.org/gmo-miscarriages

Photo courtesy of a UK site:
http://dotconnectoruk.blogspot.com/2010/08/kelloggs-loves-their-frankenfood.html

Gluten Mishaps, Part 3

2010-12-09T16:57:00.007-05:00

Gluten Mishaps

Part 3

Going gluten-free stirs up three areas of challenge: Hospitality, Restaurants, and Self-Sabotage.

Do-able? Yes indeed, and deliciously liberating, but let’s be real---a big step for your own and for your family’s well-being---Here we go, first broad brushstrokes, then family systems and case histories:

Hospitality of family and friends:

So, you’ve told everyone you’ve gone gluten-free. You feel fab; you’re nearing ideal weight; you have never felt so good. You share the good news, to the point of being obnoxious!

Nor have you enjoyed such mental clarity before, and there’s the rub. You may be rocking the boat of old friendships, even your marriage, and the we-don’t-talk-about-that mine field of family systems.

“Sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down. Sit down; you’re rocking the boat.”

Lots of hospitality is just warm-hearted. But then, there's pushy---If getting you to eat gluten can turn you back into your old self, gluten may happen in the hospitality venue.

Examples:

1) “But, I made this birthday cake for you special. It’s your favorite.” (Tears may well.) “Just a bite? That can’t hurt?”

2) “You think you can come in here and disrupt the kitchen demanding weird foods just for you? Where do you get off? Grow up. The world doesn’t revolve around you, and this family certainly doesn’t.”

3) A host tries to serve you gluten again and again, as you repeatedly, politely refuse. Till you finally give in and push it around the plate. Till you nibble a bit just for courtesy’s sake. The host or hostess will feel gratified for that moment, but no one can do your gluten crash for you. It’s private and may be protracted.

Restaurants:

Fast food eateries are guaranteed gluten-disaster-zones. It may take a few gluten crashes to realize that hardly any restaurants safely accommodate the gluten-intolerant population. That will likely change, as it’s a lucrative market share, but in the interim, caveat emptor.

Please see Gluten Can-Do, Part 2 for “Egregious Examples” of Restaurant pratfalls: http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2010/10/gluten-can-do-part-2.html

Doing Yourself in, aka Self-Sabotage:

Eating (or drinking) gluten, and going into a gluten crash can feel like a sudden burst of energy. It can even be addictive. In fact, it’s a jolt to the adrenals, which respond by gushing the stress hormone, cortisol. Histamine reaction-headache may also ramp up.

After agitation, comes malabsorption---a drop in energy will likely follow the faux-energy of the adrenal-jolt---with possible depression, possible remorse, relapse of gluten-related medical conditions and candida mental fog.

What does malabsorption actually mean? It means, the body not absorbing the nutrients it needs for serene functioning: Not absorbing the energy-powering B-Vites, calming minerals, essential fatty acids, Vitamins A,D,E. Big stuff, and the bod is not happy thus deprived.

Gluten-malabsorption can cause pretty ruthless self-absorption.

On what? On getting needs met. The malabsorption joke being---there’s never enough!

Enough what? Enough nummies, enough possessions to feel buffered and safe, enough acclaim, enough money, enough love.

In gluten crash dis-equilibrium, sudden poor judgment can impact your future.

A Gluten Crash may feel like the perfect time to:

1) Tell off your boss and quit your job, without having lined up Plan B.

2) Break a commitment, not show up, not take the final, nor bother to explain.

3) Suggest to your spouse that you’re fed up, and heading to Cancun.

4) You may imagine any behavior at that time to be justified and long over-due.

Gluten can, thus, be “used” when feeling overwhelmed, as a sort of oblique blow to self or others:

1) Heavy date coming up? Eat gluten, and behave like a jerk.

2) Big test? Eat gluten, and become too agitated to sleep or concentrate.

3) Leaving on a trip, which makes you uneasy? Eat gluten, and misplace car keys, tickets, forget vital papers, or just blow it off.

Case Histories:

These make for hard reading. Please feel free to skip the heavy stuff, and just enjoy becoming gluten-free with the great recipes in Part 2. Mishaps do happen, however. Check back to this section when feeling upbeat and robust.

Fertility: I once worked with a couple who ostensibly wanted children. Translation: The husband did, very much so. The wife, however, was ambivalent. Poignant sabotage followed.

She was adored by her husband and enjoyed being the one and only focus of his devotion. Their jobs also gave them summers free for international travel. She was concerned that resort stays would have to end, with the expense of children and the business of diapers.

So? Her biological clock was ticking away. When they decided to try to conceive, it had to be IVF, the costly and not altogether benign in-vitro-fertilization. I saw them through three IVF’s. Three.

What happened? Her husband helped with the hormone shots, much fussing and pampering. She conceived. Eureka. Each of those three times, as the pregnancy advanced, she ate gluten, inadvertently or otherwise; went into inflammatory process, and miscarried.

Last I knew, their insurance company had refused to fund another $10k+ procedure.

Child with Auto-Immune Disease: Please see Part 1 in this series for the ways in which gluten reaction can trigger auto-immune diseases:

http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2010/10/gluten-stress-part-i.html

In this child's case, she suffered from Crohn's Disease---the intestines can become so damaged by the body attacking itself, that the intestines may have to be surgically removed. The person is then fitted with an external plastic pouch into which feces empty.

The child's whole family came for the consult, and the whole family had presenting symptoms of gluten-intolerance. It's easier to go gluten-free if the family does so; they were willing. The little girl, age 9, carried adult manner of knowing pain, was listless, easily tired.

She was being medically treated with anti-inflammatory drugs. Questions about her diet had not been posed. The family had been eating gluten at every meal.

Changing her food over to non-gluten grains, the child became, well, a child: rosy-cheeked, pain-free, giggly and playful. Her parents, however, had come from pretty stressful gluten-intolerant families of their own. Odd behavior can continue to emanate from hard childhoods.

The little girl went to a friend's birthday party. She was sent off without any gluten-free treats of her own, a basic no-no. Naturally, she phoned home and asked if she could eat some of the wheat flour birthday cake. Her mother said, yes.

I heard about this when a mutual friend alerted me---the child had been in the ICU for ten days, in Crohn's Disease reaction to the gluten eaten.

Trust Fund Baby: This client had difficulty in going gluten-free, as she ate NO meals at home. She easily spent $2-3,000/mo. on restaurant meals. Why? She deserved it, that’s why, and her rich and neglectful family could pay for it from here to eternity. Bought-meals were a sort of bitter shadow-boxing with the family which had not nurtured.

The maitre de filled in, more or less, and the spa attendants, and the plastic surgeon.

Surgeries the Many: In fact some food allergy clients undergo surgery after surgery in an effort to grow more beautiful, more perfect, remove pain parts, and feel intensely nurtured by medical health care professionals.

The “never-enoughness” of nutrient malabsorption can actually foster medical symptoms and emergencies. No sh*t, Sherlock. If we’re talking liposuction and face lifts, eventually the bod just looks abused and scarred. Think: Michael Jackson.

I had one client married to a very wealthy man, a bank VP. She got back at him with costly shopping sprees and many plastic surgeries (during which she experienced the “mercy” of anaesthesia.) Hot shot hubby was a pedophile of his own children, and on “business trips” to Thailand. Troubled wife did not want to give up her lavish life style.

Botox and face lifts had made her facial skin so rigid she could barely move her mouth to speak. She was severely gluten-intolerant and went on bulimic binges when overwhelmed with her disaster of a nuclear family.

Gluten-Intolerant People Tend to Partner. Why?

1) Gluten-intolerant folks simply understand one another. As individuals, they may have been shunned as weird, quirky, out-of-the-box thinkers; maybe somewhat dyslexic, maybe accident-prone. (Very tempting to insert George W. Bush quotes and pratfall photos here.)

2) They may feel drawn to one another by a commonality of pain, of having both come from dysfunctional, perhaps alcoholic, family systems.

3) As gluten can affect thyroid function, here’s an interesting pattern of partnering: Those with over-stimulated thyroid function tend to be high-spirited, maybe co-dependent, and may mate/join with lower thyroid function, aka Depressives… Pumping up leaky bicycle tires and pretending that everything’s FINE.

4) Another, less benign, partnering: Gluten inflammation can cause agitation/anger, rage-aholic behavior. In Chinese medicine, it’s called “excess liver chi.” Many gluten-intolerant families may be structured as control freak abuser and browbeaten victim(s.) This being a flavor which perpetuates down the generations and can breed mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse.

Those endeavoring to break that curse or pattern have 12-step options, and often enter service professions, having dealt with emotional emergencies since childhood, e.g., ER personnel, crisis hot line, counseling, pastoral work, social services, etc.

Coming up for air, here’s the deal: The clarity in going gluten-free changes patterns, some of them very old, some inter-generational. Some old alliances may not change with you.

There are helpers along the way, 12-step, and just synchronicity and grace. It’s a journey worth doing, a marvelous adventure, like-minds and warm hearts.

You get your life back.

The Obligatory Disclaimer:
Public service info offered at this site should in no way be construed as medical advice. For any health concerns, see your health care professional.

Laurel & Hardy: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/ba/L%26H-west-wide.jpg/450px-L%26H-west-wide.jpg

Sad clown: http://images.cdn3.inmagine.com/168nwm/imagesource/ie176/ie176038.jpg

Gluten Can-Do, Part 2

2010-10-22T17:36:00.010-04:00

Gluten Can-Do

Part 2

Info You'll Find Here:

Gluten How-to
Gluten-free Grains
Cross-Contamination
Label-Reading
Organic
Flour-Grinding Self-Sufficiency
Hidden Gluten
Restaurants
Note to Budding Entrepreneurs
Pasta
Why Me?
Self-Sabotaging the Healing Process
Holiday Recipes, Gluten-free!

Holidays are coming up, and there’s good news tonight:

How about a gluten-free feast with all the comfort foods of your family tradition... gluten-free lasagna, pizza, turkey stuffing, gravy, cornbread, biscuits, pita bread, matzo, pecan and pumpkin pie?!!

(Go for organic turkey btw: commercial turkey breast is often injected with gluten. Better flavor, too.)

There are gluten-free (G-F) beers for the football hours of the day. (Check the better wine and cheese, micro-brewery shops, and health food stores.)

Put a big smile on the faces of family and friends as they help out in advance, nobly sampling your trial-run recipes!

What about birthdays? G-F birthday cakes and tortes? Chocolate cake?!! You bet.

Even, gluten-free wedding cake! The Clinton daughter had a tiered extravaganza at her recent nuptials. (It can be managed more economically.)

How-to/Can-do:

My mom was a great cook. When she “got it,” that she and her side of the family were gluten-intolerant—a family of great cooks, glutenized---she turned on a dime.

Went right on baking cookies, pies, cakes from The Joy of Cooking. No contented-eater realized any difference in mouth-feel or taste---just in freedom from indigestion.

Here’s how she did it: To each cup of gluten-free (G-F) flour mix, she added ½ tsp xanthan gum. Good to go, off and running.

Xanthan gum (or guar gum) is needed to give G-F baked goods elasticity. Otherwise, leavening causes rising, but without xanthan, batter/dough will fall---You’ll have baked a doorstop.

Bread: Yes, sandwiches, grilled cheese, and cinnamon toast can still happen! Lots of bread choices at supermarkets and health food stores these days.

Gluten-free bread baking is a different technique than wheat/rye breads. Bread machines do a good job. If elbow grease is the m.o., it’s stirring rather than kneading. Home-made is way better than bought, and more affordable.

The Bette Hagman book, The Gluten-Free Gourmet Bakes Bread is a useful resource.

Holiday recipes will conclude this Part 2 discussion.

Gluten-free Grains:

Rice is the least allergenic grain and is usually a component of gluten-free flour mixes. In transitioning from gluten-inflammation, you might want to go with the various organic rices for awhile: basmati, red, black, short and long grain, risotto, sushi, mochi.

Soaking whole unprocessed grains overnight, by the way, does a sort of biochemical magic trick. The stored starch begins its now-we-grow conversion to B-Vitamins, Vitamin E and enzymes. You will have created enhanced food-based nutrients in your kitchen, with no BigPharma fee!

(Use grain soaking-water to cook. In the case of beans, you're wanting to decrease the fart-factor, by discarding one or two soaking waters. Nutrient enhancement still occurs.)

All dried beans and peas are gluten-free. Remove any mixed-in grain kernels, and rinse before soaking/cooking. Combining beans/peas with G-F grains makes complete protein btw, for example, chili beans and cornbread, or tofu and rice.

G-F mixes may contain ground rice, tapioca, arrowroot, potato starch, coconut flour, sorghum, garbanzo, fava bean, quinoa, buckwheat/kasha (not a grass-grain), amaranth, teff, cornstarch. Hardly boring, or smacking of deprivation.

Many, many supermarkets have a burgeoning G-F section. "Bob's Red Mill" G-F mixes and flours seems to be most widely available as of this writing.

Cross-Contamination:

Ten, twenty years ago, enterprising companies began to realize that gluten-free foods were poised to become a bonanza. They went after market share, not always understanding safe G-F how-to.

There were mess-ups:

Using same cookie and bread machines as last batch of wheat flour production, and marketing as G-F.

Not testing flours used to be sure they were G-F. How not? May have been stored in same silo as gluten grains; also grinding issue. See next item.

How about grinding corn on the same stones as wheat, in a mill full of wheat flour dust? That's pretty much the norm Large gluten-duh there.

One well known company apparently still does this, grinding ten pounds of corn on wheat-contaminated stones; discarding it, and then marketing the subsequent cornmeal as G-F. Sometimes true, sometimes not, and not acceptable.

(A gluten-intolerant friend has urged me to name names here. To keep life defamation-free, I prefer to recommend intelligent reading of labels; see below. The company is otherwise excellent, based in Texas.)

Label-Reading:

Gluten-intolerant food lovers become label-readers. Label ideally needs this customer assurance: Manufactured in a G-F facility, and tested to be gluten-free.

Organic:

In a perfect world, I wish we could all cook with all organic ingredients. We’re talking, higher mineral, vitamin, anti-oxidant content, and no AgriBiz poisons: Your basic no-brainer.

Do what you can. Bulk community food buying can help expedite that shift to power-packed organic nutrition.

Cornstarch and corn products are a special case in point, because of Monsanto. Commercial cornstarch is just about guaranteed to be GMO-contaminated. “Rapunzel” makes a GMO-free, organic cornstarch, useful for bread-making and berry pie thickening, a health food store item.

Flour-Grinding Self-Sufficiency:

Many families just eliminate cross-contamination-roulette by grinding their own flour fresh. It's way more economical than buying flour or prepared mixes. It's also tastier and higher in vitamins.

Flour left sitting around on shelves promptly begins oxidizing vitamins away. Assuming they haven't been milled out, and added to animal feed!

When I was doing the starving student routine at university, I began buying organic grains at wholesale, and fresh-grinding. My budget bought me a primitive hand-crank grinder which did weekly tries at shoulder dislocation.

Now there's a great German-engineered hand-flour-grinder, "The Family Grain Mill." Children actually jockey into line to get a crank at it!

Sources: www.lehmans.com/ www.pleasanthillgrain.com/

Electric mills, including the Vita-Mix, make home grinding easy. Worth considering, for great taste and nutrient-content if nothing else.

Hidden Gluten:

Vitamin supplements and prescription medicines may contain gluten in binders, excipients and coatings. Read the label. Supplements must read: G-F. For meds: consult your pharmacist.

Soy sauce/tamari: Some yummy crackers and rice cakes have been marketed as G-F, using San-J Wheat-free Tamari. Alas, this has been a matter of gluten-roulette, as soybeans are often contaminated with gluten grains from crop rotation and silo storage. “Wheat-free” was the descriptor, and not reliably true.

Now San-J is marketing a certified G-F Tamari. Be sure any manufacturer claiming G-F tamari has actually shifted to the certified G-F product.

The threat of litigation may be focusing the minds of manufacturers on this issue.

TVP, HVP, MSG, caramel color, yeast extractives, artificial and natural flavors, seasoning salts are probable gluten sources. The FDA, toothless and cowed by corporate interests, does not make this easy for consumers. Much gluten can be hidden, including MSG.

Condiments with thickeners, grain vinegar. Many G-F now offered.

Cosmetics with wheat/oat gluten may cause irritation.

Chocolates, arghh. Consider Navitas Organic Raw Cacao. Read labels.

Label must read: gluten-free, and hopefully tested for same, from a dedicated gluten-free facility.

The purchasing power of the gluten-intolerant community is ensuring this shift to clear labeling. As tedious as it may be, money talks.

Fast-Food: Count on it; there’s gluten and a chem-soup of gluten-containing food additives.

Restaurants:

More and more restaurants are stepping up to the market share plate and offering G-F meals. That may or may not be accurate.

Egregious Examples: croutons thrown on salad; flour-based roux in soups; same spoon used to stir/serve gluten and G-F dishes; foods chopped on bread board full of crumbs; wheat pasta water used to cook rice in an oriental restaurant; gluten containing condiments and seasoning salt; corn tortillas steamed or fried in same pot as flour tortillas; decorative gluten-based desert sauces or canned whipped cream.

Busy restaurant kitchens tend to be madhouses. The head chef may be totally with you on the need for careful G-F food prep. The sous chef, however, may be distracted. The wait person who delivers it and throws on last minute items, may be utterly clueless.

Note to Budding Entrepreneurs:

Gluten-intolerant customers are loyal if food offered proves to be safe for them and delicious. There’s a huge demand for cafes, bistros, bakeries, fine restaurants catering to G-F cuisine. Go for it.

Pasta:

Very good news here. A Canadian company, "Tinkyada," makes superb rice pasta, both organic and non-organic.

When I realized dee-lish G-F lasagna could still be a groaning board item, my whole attitude to gluten-free foods brightened!

You can serve Tinkyada spirale pasta salad, fettucini Alfredo, pasta primavera and portobello lasagna to Italian friends with glee and without embarrassment. It’s simply yummy.
Earlier G-F pasta renditions were simply, disgusting: mush. Now, there’s al dente!

Why Me?

A reasonable question, and a burning one, when we open up kitchen cabinets and fridge, stuffed with obvious and hidden gluten.

So, there' seems to be a problem with eating it. What to do?... Save it till it mummifies? Landfill? Donate to local food pantry, perhaps?

How did the gluten-glitch ever happen?

An Italian MD surmises that about 10,000 years ago, wheat- and barley-growing peoples from the Fertile Crescent (now known as the Middle East) began overrunning cultures which had subsisted on wild roots, berries and game.

Ireland, which has an unusually high incidence of gluten-intolerance, was a last outpost of invasion. Native Americans and Native Hawaiians also come to mind. The Italian MD calls gluten-intolerance, an "apparition of hunter-gatherers among us!" www.celiac.com

Self-Sabotaging the Healing Process:

It takes weeks/months for gluten-damage to small intestine and other body systems to heal. But it DOES heal.

When folks start to feel better, they may decide, the heck with it, I want bakhlava/Oreo cookies/Campbell's chicken noodle soup/take-out pizza/sweet and sour prawns... or candlelight and Mama Luigi's eggplant parmigiana with my sweetie... whatever.

Eating gluten can then trigger a return to old symptoms, oh and much else, which will be discussed in Gluten Mishaps, Part 3.

Some clients in fact are maybe too familiar with drama, and eat gluten every 3 to 6 weeks or so, dancing into health, and then staggering back into old symptoms... Heroically recovering, to do it again. The 12-Step community is very familiar with that pattern.

As to only eating gluten now and then, an Irish MD www.celiac.com relates it to the "occasional ingestion of rat poison." But we learn by doing, sometimes over and over again.

Recipes:

Familiar pie crust, G-F:

http://www.celiac.com/articles/683/1/Pie-Crust-5-Gluten-Free/Page1.html

Pumpkin Pie, coconut/tapioca crust:

http://gluten.lovetoknow.com/Gluten_Free_Pumpkin_Pie

New Orleans Pecan Pie, rice/tapioca crust:

http://planetgreen.discovery.com/food-health/emeril-pecan-pie.html

German Chocolate Cake:

http://www.celiac.com/articles/22215/1/-German-Chocolate-Cake-Gluten-Free/Page1.html

Flourless Chocolate Cake, dense, rich:

http://glutenfreegoddess.blogspot.com/2007/01/flourless-chocolate-cake_11.html

Pizza Dough: (In freezer section of some health food stores)

http://gluten.lovetoknow.com/Gluten_Free_Pizza_Dough

Gravy: Turkey, Goose, Duck, Cornish Game Hen:

http://glutenfreegirl.blogspot.com/2006/11/it-is-absurdly-easy-to-make-gluten.html

Bread, for Bread Stuffing:

http://www.cookingbread.com/recipes/gluten_free_bread/gluten_free_farmhouse_bread_recipe.html

Sandwich Bread:

http://www.glutenfreecookingschool.com/archives/finally-really-good-sandwich-bread/

Cornbread:
http://www.celiac.com/articles/853/1/Cornbread-Deluxe-Gluten-Free/Page1.html

Biscuits:
Thanks to a friend's Chef-son! Substitute 2 c G-F flour, 1 tsp xanthan gum, for all-purpose flour in recipe:

http://unteachablelessons.blogspot.com/2010/10/place-for-my-stuff.html

Matzo:
Some sources recommend oat matzo; this nutritionist would not:

http://www.celiac.com/articles/22058/1/Gluten-Free-Matzo-Matzah/Page1.html

Pita Bread:
1) rice, tapioca, sorghum, or 2) teff

http://www.grouprecipes.com/61081/gluten-free-pita.html

http://milkforthemorningcake.blogspot.com/2008/02/teff-pitta-breads.html

Mashed Potatoes:

Try organic Yukon Golds. Instant mashed potatoes can contain gluten.

Candied yams:

Marshmallows may contain gluten; check labels. Try yams with chopped walnuts, grated organic orange peel, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, a little Sucanat or molasses, butter melted on top.

Yeoman's G-F Muffins:

Use organic ingredients:
2 eggs
1/2 c Sucanat or honey
1/3 c cold-pressed sunflower or sesame oil
1+ c kefir or yoghurt or buttermilk or Rice Dream
sprinkle Himalayan or "Real Salt"

In separate bowl:
2 c G-F flour
1 tsp xanthan gum (if not in flour mix)
1 tsp cinnamon
2+ tsp ginger if gingerbread
1/2 tsp cloves
1-2 Tbs Lewis Labs (G-F) Brewer's Yeast
2 tsp Hain Featherweight (G-F) baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda (if you've used kefir/yoghurt/buttermilk)

Mix dry into wet; add:
1/2 c raisins or chopped apricots or Tibetan GojiBerries
1/2 c walnuts or pecans or sunflower seeds (if no diverticulitis)
if gingerbread: 1/3 c chopped crystallized ginger

Spoon into buttered muffin tin
Bake 25-30 min. at 400 degrees

Conclusion:

Wishing you all delicious holiday celebrations to remember.

If you're far away from those you've loved, maybe invite someone who's all alone. For what's a celebration without hospitality?

Often the slender poor in developing countries are more welcoming and generous, than those with much. Including girth!

Stay tuned for:

Gluten Mishaps, Part 3

The Obligatory Disclaimer:
Public service info offered at this site should in no way be construed as medical advice. For any health concerns, see your health care professional.

photo: Norman Rockwell painting, 1943, "Freedom from Want"

http://lve.scola.ac-paris.fr/anglais/thanksgiving/freedom.jpg

Gluten-Stress, Part I

2010-10-08T12:36:00.032-04:00

Gluten-Stress
Part I

Unrecognized reactions to gluten-grains can land families, children, the elderly in doctors’ offices, pharmacies, health food stores, and hospital emergency rooms.

Gluten-intolerance is rarely diagnosed; instead wide-ranging symptoms are treated. The symptoms are in fact a medical cash cow.

What is Gluten?

A grain-based allergy-inducer and auto-immune-nightmare---caused by eating/drinking foods made from:

Wheat, barley, rye, spelt, kamut, triticale. Oats may or may not be tolerated.

(Oats are generally not tolerated, though an effort is being made to produce oats organically, and without any contamination by wheat in the planting fields, silos, and milling facilities.)

Other grains can be deliciously substituted; gluten-free foods are increasingly available.

Gluten-Intolerance is Becoming More Common. Why?

Antibiotics: In feed-lot-meat, and long-prescribed for every human sniffle---prescribed without probiotics, and without understanding about antibiotic-caused gut damage.

Candida: Systemic and pandemic, following our antibiotic follies. (See "Age of Antibiotics meets Law of Unintended Consequences") in:
http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2009/05/flying-pig-flu-power-up-immunity-with.html

Grain hybridization: To increase gluten-content for ever-fluffier bread.

Grains poisoned by AgriBiz: Trigger allergic immune reaction in some of us.

GMO grains: Inherently allergenic, and of unknown long-term effect.

Vaccines: Contaminated by heavy metals, adjuvants, and cross-species viruses, vaccines have activated gluten reactivity--especially in the Autism Spectrum population. (See): http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2010/01/alzheimers-autism-link-vaccine.html

Chemtrails: The bizarro fallout from worldwide chemtrail spraying is of concern to health care professionals--Days of heavy spew are followed by an increase in hospital Emergency Room admissions. Fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue cases have risen markedly since the op began. With such auto-immune disorders and toxic body-burden, digestion may malfunction as well. (See): http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2010/04/chemtrails-earth-solutions.html

Alcoholic Family Systems: Alcoholic families tend be gluten-intolerant. ACA's (adult children of alcoholics) tend to marry one another, thus increasing the gene pool of potential gluten-reactivity down through the generations. (See: Gluten Good News at article's conclusion.)

Native American & Native Hawaiian: Eating white man grains made native peoples dysfunctional---It made them conquerable. Wheat flour is ground zero for native loss of physical and mental health. Traditional diets were based on corn, beans, squash, quinoa, amaranth (and in Hawaii, poi.) When missionary sweets, sandwiches, oatmeal, and fry bread became come-lately traditions, health and mental clarity suffered.

So, what’s the Problem? Wheat’s the Staff of Life, Right?

Wheat and gluten grains can cause a whole-body and brain inflammatory process, starting in the GI tract.

Not a feel-good experience, despite gluten being in many comfort foods.

Stay tuned: Gluten-free nummies will follow in the series.

Examples of Gluten GI Tract Inflammation:

Acid reflux

Stomach ulcers

Spastic colon

Ulcerative colitis

Irritable bowel syndrome

Leaky gut syndrome

Diverticulosis

Crohn’s Disease

GI tract inflammation means mal-absorption of whatever nutrients we do manage to eat in this junk food era.

The body’s no fool, and realizes it’s not getting the goodies it needs for health and well-being.

It sends out distress urgency signals, also known as out-of-control cravings.

It is, thus, possible to become obese and still not satisfy the body’s needs. We are not “what we eat”; we are what we digest.

What Does Mal-Absorption Feel Like? (crummy) What Does It Do?

People with a grain-, and often a secondary lactose-intolerance, do not absorb vital nutrients, including:

B-vitamins, the energy-gifters; calming minerals like calcium and magnesium; fat soluble vitamins like A, E and D. Fats and essential fatty acids do not absorb well.

People get it that something’s not right; they buy supplements to try to blast some help through the mal-absorption.

Later on, we’ll talk about actually healing inflamed digestion, so it can do its job again.

Gluten and Mental Well-Being:

Gluten reactions may lead to inflammatory processes in brain function.

Say what? Say, the symptoms are legion. Tremendous grief-load of suffering goes by many names.

Symptoms are medicated, rather than a potential gluten problem being suspected and addressed.

An Allergic Reaction to Gluten May Trigger:

Dyslexia (and eccentric ah hah’s of cognition)

Learning disorders (Ritalin)

Sleep disorders (OTC and prescription sleeping pills)

Depression (Prozac, etc.)

Bipolar disorder (Lithium)

Anxiety attack (Paxil, etc.)

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (tranquilizers)

Suicidal depression (sedation)

Schizophrenia (Thorazine, lock-ward, etc.)

Dementia

Dysfunctional, inter-generational family systems with:

Control freak and victim scenarios

Various types of abuse and domestic violence

Alcohol and drug abuse, workaholism to quell above symptoms/experiences

Gluten and Auto-Immune Disease:

The chronic gluten inflammatory process, with its damaged-gut-leakage of poorly digested whatevers, right into the lymph and blood stream, can wear down adrenals and make the immune system punch-drunk with overload.

The body may begin attacking its own tissues.

Possible Auto-immune Reactivity to Gluten:

Fibromyalgia

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Multiple Chemical Sensitivity

Eczema, psoriasis, zits.

Arthritis

Lupus

Gall bladder “attack”

Thyroid dysfunction

Type 2 Diabetes

Tachycardia, arrhythmia, mitral valve issues

Asthma, COPD

Reproductive difficulties, including ovarian cysts, fibroids, endometriosis, infertility, erectile dysfunction

Crohn’s Disease

Cancers

Why Isn’t Gluten-Intolerance Diagnosed from the Get-Go?

Is nutrition taught in medical schools?

No.

A few courageous physicians (and dentists) are studying holistic approaches on their own, including nutrition.

They are the exception, however, to the dominant slash/burn/poison (surgery, radiation, chemo) paradigm.

Support such medical trail-blazers; seek them out. Give them market-share, and the medical industry will eventually follow.

What's the Gluten Good News?

Gluten-intolerance is relieved by not eating gluten. (Details in Part 2).

1) It’s possible to eat fabulously well, gluten-free.

2) Vitality and mental clarity become more and more "normal" and reliable.

3) Greater feeling of competence and safety.

4) Chronic symptoms become noticeable by their absence---Including lessening of cravings and of pain.

Pain is a body-distress cry. Meds---to numb pain symptoms---have been the reigning modality.

Madison Ave has helped make meds must-have's. We've bought into it. Who wants pain, for goodness sake.

The parallel holistic approach to well-being may involve dietary and life style change, and maybe detox, rather than numb-out. Goal: vitality.

Not a journey for the faint-hearted. But what an adventure!

Stay tuned for:

Gluten Can-Do, Part 2

The Obligatory Disclaimer:
Public service info offered at this site should in no way be construed as medical advice. For any health concerns, see your health care professional.

Resource: http://www.celiac.com

Ancestral Rumination: http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com/2009/06/claim-they-have-native-american-blood.html

photo: Cereal Killers: Celiac Disease & Gluten-Free A to Z by Dr.Ron Hoggan

BPee'd Gulf of Mexico

2010-07-25T14:09:00.018-04:00

Sea Death Diaspora
plus
Censored Gulf Eyewitnesses

Y2K to 2010: How Dumb Does Preparedness look Now?

1999: I'm attending a talk by a Privacy Expert. (Short answer: We have none.)

The guy now works private sector, ex-"intelligence services." Still of course has many contacts in that shadow world.

An audience member, all but hyperventilating, asks about Y2K. The fellow sighs, gives a world-weary look at the gullible, and drops a bombshell.

He barks a sort of laugh, and says, "Y2K is a non-event, a planned event, a trial-run."

What?!! ripples through the crowd.

"It will answer a couple questions--who and how many prepare? After the ball drops at Times Square with a resounding dud, all those who did prepare, and annoyed family and neighbors urging them to do the same, will be marked as fools.

"Ever after, preparedness will be firmly associated in the public's mind with lunatic fringe. When the real deal comes down, the innocents/the stoopid will beg for government to save them--Mission accomplished."

British Crown Petroleum:

We are awash in the end game of government/corporate collusion in flagrant profiteering. BP, oil industry poster child and our lax oversight for max profit, have led us where?

To dark cauldron of mother-sea eco-cide.

Millions of folks with once-valuable beachfront property, fishery-related and boating businesses are being ill-served by BP obfuscations, and government soft-shoe promising any day now a quick fix.

No overflights allowed. Dispersant to force the seafloor hemorrhage down below visibility, dispersant adding monstrous toxicity to water wind and rain. Crude oil, methane and dispersant creating dead zone like the Black Sea--no oxygen. Plankton, the ocean's food chain foundation, dying, gone. Massive fish and crustacean kills; death of marine mammals...

Mouthpiece news from professional liars.

People directly affected are understandably in denial. How can they up and leave? Sell homes and businesses as black gunk fouls shores and estuaries? With property values mellllting? The kids are in good schools...we know our neighbors...we've lived here for generations...

It is deeply disturbing to be uprooted, disorienting, grief-inducing; it's scary.

As BP's oil volcano continues doing an Exxon-Valdez-equivalent every couple days, millions may find their groundwater polluted, air unbreathable, crops destroyed. What to do? Wait or act?

Heartfelt Response, Then and Now:

In past oil spills, locals and anguished others who travel to help, have wiped crude oil off shore birds and tried to save cetaceans.

A few weeks back I came out of a market. Curious, I walked over to a table with whatnots for sale and a gallon jar with dollar bills, a fund raiser of some sort--Money was being raised to send a vanload of children down to the Gulf to help with cleanup.

"Uh, what protection will you provide for the kids?" I asked.

"Oh, they'll wear rubber gloves."

"Do you realize it's a HazMat situation? Full body moon-gear? Do you know Exxon-Valdez cleanup crews were not issued proper gear, passed black pee while working, and have died of cancer?"

"Maybe we'll buy surgical masks at the hardware store before we leave."

Local Report:

A friend 800 miles north of the BP hemorrhage has had the wits scared out of her in her own backyard. She lives in central Texas, where it's hot HOT. Her ducks love summer showers and frolic with their wings outstretched and beaks raised to drink in the cooling rain.

Rain came; her ducks scuttled cowering to their hut. She tested the rain gauge with pH paper--drop in pH a full point from normal 7.0 to 6.0--acid rain up from the Gulf's BP cauldron.

She moved her ducks west out of the windpath, and poured baking soda into the pond to try to nuetralize the acid. Acid, and what else in BP-rain and -wind?

Not slow on the uptake, she's putting her house on the market.

Censored Gulf Eyewitness Testimonies:

(Huge thanks to Deborah Dupre' writing for SF Examiner:)

Corexit, BP Dispersant

Dying to Help:

"Coughing up blood is among horrors that eyewitnesses are reporting in south Louisiana where BP medics diagnose the sudden widespread, burning, itching skin, lesions and marks as "scabies" or staph and government health focus on "stress" and mental condition of millions of people poisoned with what scientists report is 11 times more lethal than crude oil toxins now in Gulf and coastal water and air. Americans are still encouraged to eat Gulf seafood.

On July 29 Global Justice Radio Blog Talk Radio program hosted by Rev. T.K. (Kathryn) O'Shannahan-Hyland and Vin Beazel called "Agent Orange Alert," listeners heard eyewitness and personal accounts of internal bleeding from orifices including coughing up blood and nose bleeds.
.....
EPA analyst whistleblower Hugh Kaufman recently explained that "we have dolphins that are hemorrhaging. People who work near it are hemorrhaging internally. And that’s what dispersants are supposed to do." (Author's emphasis: See Censored Gulf news: People bleeding internally. Millions poisoned. EPA whistleblower, Dupre, D. Examiner, July 21, 2010 and MSNBC: Corexit injures human plus hides criminal evidence (video))
.....

Barefoot Doctors have since reported that they need a network of people of goodwill to offer a room in their homes for Gulf Coast volunteers to detox.
.....
On the radio program, Laila Bicksler stated that most people down in south Louisiana haven't the means to even get as far as New Orleans if they want to do so. She agrees that the rest of the public, away from the coast, are unaware of just how dangerous the toxins are that people are being exposed to the point that fund-raisers are solely to pay out-of-work fishermen.
......
Is the Gulf seafood safe? Gulf seafood safety is questioned not only in the Gulf Coast area, but nationally since the Gulf provides seafood on the tables of Americans throughout the country, seafood possibly tainted with dangerous poisons due to the prolonged use of chemical dispersants applied on oil flowing out of Deepwater Horizon's oil well and sprayed into the air.
.....
In late July, a Tulane University study revealed that samples of crab larvae from the area tested positive for hydrocarbons. The “orange blobs found lodged in the bodies of tiny blue crab larvae collected from marshes that stretch from Texas to Florida” appear to contain Corexit." (Fox 8 in New Orleans, reported on IntelHub) Not only are blue crabs a favorite Gulf food; other fish eat crab larvae..."

http://www.examiner.com/x-10438-Human-Rights-Examiner~y2010m7d31-Exclusive-Censored-Gulf-news-Coughing-up-blood-Eyewitnesses-horror-stories

N.B. Yeoman speaking:

The food chain extends onto the land-- raptors eat tainted fish; coyotes eat oil-soaked dying pelicans; alligators eat coyotes.

Humans eat shrimp cocktail, if they still find government assurances believable.

Dengue Fever & BP Spill Complications:

"The timing of this outbreak of Dengue fever (in Florida and Central America) presents two additional problems; the symptoms of Dengue fever are very similar to that of exposures to chemicals such as those contained in crude oil and the dispersants currently being used in the contaminated areas of the Gulf of Mexico, potentially making it difficult to diagnose the source of a sufferer’s symptoms. Worse yet, there looms the possibility that Corexit and other toxins present in the Gulf area may weaken the immune system, thus setting the stage for more severe forms of the disease in people who are, or have previously been, exposed to the virus..."

http://preventdisease.com/news/10/072110_dengue_CIA.shtml

Path of Oil Spew:

Rounding Florida, the oil/methane toxic stew enters the Gulf Stream. Which leads where? Through the Caribbean, up the East coast of the US, toward the UK, which has enjoyed warm Gulf Stream-moderated climate, and may experience the return of BP's own.

At risk? Pretty beaches, prime real estate, shipping harbors, and some of the world's richest fishing grounds. Livelihoods, life styles, viability of life near coasts and rivers which flow into the sea.

Preparedness as If Life Forms Mattered:

For a wake up call about government preparedness, please see:

http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2008/06/7-fat-years-7-lean.html

I once lived on the San Andreas Fault. Most folks had a backpack of temporary essentials ready to rush out the door at the first tremblor.

If BP pollution of sea, air, land and groundwater does drive millions from their homes, perhaps forever, how do we prepare?

Initially, by getting our minds around it, and trying for sane thought. We may not need the home theater system.

Think, Okie Model-T and what could be fitted into small space for future life.

There are many useful lists on line, and the items read more like a weekend camping trip, than perhaps a long haul. Here are a few to consider:

Hiking boots, comfy, broken-in, for each family member

Tent

Matches

Water filter

First aid kit

For ways in which to prepare one's home, or prepare to leave, please see: http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2008/08/hearth-home-infrastructure.html

Given US government response to Hurricane Katrina--the blocking of international and local aid, the incursion of Blackwater mercenaries-- it might be time to consider your family and friends in the what-if scenario of continued oil spew and large-scale evacuation of coastal peoples.

dark wave photo: nydailynews.com

"Teams of Oxen" From the Journal of Yeoman Gardener: Life on the Farm

2010-07-08T17:07:00.006-04:00

Teams of Oxen

When I first had walked the farm, woodland and meadow had smelled to me like the foothills of the Alps.

Only later I learned that the soil itself when dug, released an astonishing fragrance of lemon! Never smelled it before or since anywhere else on earth.

Mama and I had looked up at each other, from elephant pits we were digging for orchard trees, to see which one of us was losing her marbles.

But we both stood wafted in lemon zest, and knew we'd stumbled out of our depth.

Went to my neighbor Harlon about it. Waved to his wife who would become my great friend. He and I talked market prices for cattle, and I slipped in my question:

"Uh, Harlon, grubbing out a root with a mattock or loosening up the soil, you ever smell anything, well... different?

"Nope, cain't say as I have. Thar's manure smell, and fresh-turned land, that deep crumbly soil in sprang, and sometime a kinda lemony smell, sometime like mint down along the river bottom, all kinda rich wholesome smells, I'd say, but nuthin unusual. Land's alive, is all."

Thought about my neighbor and his generations of knowing as I squatted on my heels tossing aside rock where I'd been digging a tomato hole. Each winter the land frost-heaved yet more rock, but this was a new discovery--

Pulled out a flat stone, greenish, not from around here, a worked stone. It appeared to be a spear point, finely edged. For deer maybe, or bear. I held it in my hand and felt the coolness of the deeper soil where it had lain.

Looking across the meadow, I remembered an old, old man telling me how it used to be in this valley.

He had helped build the grist mill, long since fallen, where even longer ago hunter-gatherers had lived, stalking game, picking elderberries and fox grapes along the spring branch and stream.

He had stopped to talk to me, the old man.

"Do you know what yo're adoin?" he asked. Well, I hoped I was doing alright.

He meant: "You know the way of thangs long, long ago," girl, "how it used to was, wilderness time?"

Busy planting a fireside apple tree by the spring house in a thicket of hoe, mattock and shovel, with a wheelbarrowload of "richening" for the soil, I stopped to listen to his story.

Sat down, paid attention to his sun-lined face and stooped wiry body, work-beat-up hands.

"The valley, all dense wooded back when I were a sprout, they cut down huge old chestnut trees and oaks, black walnut, cherry and maple with axes and two-handled crosscut saws.

"Teams o' oxen were roped to them stumps and the men hollered out commands and cracked whips overhead. Roots, they was broken and plumb wrenched from the land.

"Now back then, white folks new to the land from hardscrabble far away built a water mill where them two bold streams come together--for sawin up timber and for grindin grain.

"Farmers they brought in sacks o' field corn, red and yaller, and wheat, buckwheat. Had it ground up fresh to make cornpone, yeast bread an' sourdough buckwheat cakes.

"It tasted mighty good; had more strangthening to it 'n that light bread folks eats nowadays." (He was talking about puffy white store-bought loaves.)

He looked at the sapling I was about to plant.

"Anymore, don't nobody 'member how t'were. We carried chestnuts 'r a load o' field corn ('r moonshine)" he looked mischief my way, "down the mountain once't a month, an' it took couple days thar and back ag'in on them ol' dirt tracks by mule 'n wagon.

"Didn't nobody much ever come thisaway." He chuckled. "T'weren't safe. Didn't take kindly to law 'r 'ligion slippin in from outside."

He turned and considered the old farmhouse that was my home now. Stood quiet for awhile, remembering.

"I he'ped clear this land, and timber we felled built this house o' yourn. You figurin on fillin the bottom plumb up ag'in? Fruit trees and windbreak evergreens I seen you plantin, 'n I don' know what all.

"You have iny idea, the work it is to open up land to the plow?"

photo: Ross Farm Museum

Mind Control

2010-04-28T01:02:00.010-04:00

Mind Control

Ex-Nazi parents shadowed the life of classmates in the German high school I attended.

Refugee classmates from East Germany spoke Russian among themselves. Their parents had fled west at great risk to reach the "German Economic Miracle", having known only Kaiser, Hitler and Stalin.

The school system operating at that time rewarded rote learning: student questions were rebuffed as an unacceptable challenge to authority.

The past stalked the present.

But before we go there, let's time-travel a bit, a waltz to the European theater, 1944-45...

Unbeknownst to the "Greatest Generation" fighting WWII, past infiltrated our future.

As the war ground down to its bitter end, US and Allied military and intelligence agents fanned across German-occupied territories in urgent pursuit of Nazi know-how.

They sought V-2 rockets, the torment of London; A-Bomb development status; chemical, biological, psychological weaponry prowess--And above all, they sought high level perps.

Our guys tracked down scientists, MD's, and military, many of them SS members, a jack-booted elite, the creepiest of Hitler's goons.

The sight of their SS uniform insignia alone, its paired lightening slashes, struck terror in those they caught and tortured.

A rogue group of our military brass--or is that, a brassy group of our military rogues--launched a pre-emptive immigration tidal wave of upper-crust Nazis via top secret, "Project Paperclip."

Pre-emptive? Yes, it being against the express directives of FDR and Truman to absolutely NOT bring home war criminals.

A war was on; military sidestepped this small presidential impediment.

The US military brought home Nazis, rockets, and their devil's stew: tons of poison gas, and captured bio-warfare agents, to be "researched" stateside on human subjects in top secret military hideaways and V.A. hospitals.

(See references at end of article, including the Nazi-fluoridated water connection.)

LSD emerged as an experimental drug used by the Nazis, which was pounced upon by military intelligence (..faint oxymoron laugh line..)

Why? Just too useful a prospect, because LSD could cause hallucinations, panic attack, and suicide when clandestinely administered. Hotdiggity.

The drug was given to unwitting soldier volunteers and V.A. patients by US physicians and psychiatrists, operating in an unbroken macabre lineage begun by Mengele, the infamous Auschwitz MD.

What could we expect of such malpractice?

Our introduced whirlwind of Nazi ghouls helped create a shadow world of illusion, the ends justifying whatever means. Stalin loomed on the other side of the shadow. We "had no choice."

It's gone down something like this: We plant stink-weed, venus-fly-trap deep in the Dismal Swamp, while magically promising vineyards.

"By their fruits shall ye know them."

The Radical 60's

I first became aware of LSD as paradigm-shift-event in a large university auditorium filled to capacity. I'd been drawn by announcements plastered all over town.

A debate! the signs breathlessly enthused, between a pharmacologist and Timothy Leary, by then in guru-guise.

The pharmacologist spoke quietly about the clear and present dangers in casually ingesting psycho-active substances.

"Consider", he warned, "in hope of quickie enlightenment, what if you end up with liver damage, psychosis and brain damage? Self-induced damage, for goodness sake. Isn't that too big a risk?"

The audience instead guffawed as Leary, the Peter Pan of academia, mimed yawns and rude gestures, winking and leering at the students. Leary!... a kindred adventurer, an escapee from Harvard, from suburban sameness, from an increasingly plastic world.

When the pharmacologist peetered out into silence, Leary smirked, including the audience in a we're in-this-together embrace. Next he climbed onto the table, to everyone's delight.

Dressed all in white, yoga pants and Indian shirt, he crossed his legs, lit a candle in front of him, and ordered all the lights extinguished.

"No, I said, all of them."

All that could be seen: candle flame and Leary. All that could be heard was his opening Om and hypnotic tones toward expanded consciousness.

Project Paperclip and MK-Ultra

Meanwhile military and CIA continued working with former Nazis, their damning records expunged, to facilitate Nazi know-how for America, and not the Soviet Union, giving us the superpower edge.

Nutsis stayed in on the action, subsumed into government, NASA, intelligence agencies, and the corporate world.

The key, they hissed, to effective mind control is easy: Activate "suggestibility" in a shattering process of disintegration.

Our eagerness for Nazi torture techniques, honed in prisons and concentration camps, enabled us to implement trauma-based mind control.

Trauma specifically focused to create a personality rupture, multiple personalities, compartmentalized from one another.

Torture-induced personality offshoots could be hypnotically-triggered by a CIA handler to perform robotically:

As assassin (Manchurian candidate), as espionage courier with photographic memory, as playtoy for depraved movers and shakers in politics, entertainment, sports, and yes, religion.

For Reasons of National Security

Project Paperclip morphed straight into MK-Ultra.

Its trauma-based behavior modification targeted the savaging of little children into dissociated but useful slavery.

Children were betrayed by parents, teachers, clergy and left to CIA-sadists for sleep-, food- and water-deprivation, Sodom and Gomorrah ritual abuse, drugs and electroshock.

Congress launched an MK-Ultra investigation in 1977, which was shut down after seven months, for reasons of national security.

High level low-life-perps, named by victims in references below, still figure in the nightly news and beam for the press at meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations and at charitable photo-ops.

They continue their proclivities nationally and internationally, never brought to justice, for reasons of national security.

The corruption oozes wide and deep. Some perps and participants retire to six-figure speaking engagements, corporate bonus-dom, cushy pensions; some even enjoy Secret Service protection and presidential libraries.

Then and Now

Interestingly, as I tracked down references to MK-Ultra cited in bibliographies, I kept hitting this block in red font: "Google intercepts this link."

Internet censorship may be counter-productive, inspiring deeper digging; nor will censorship "disappear" the legacy of Project Paperclip and Mk-Ultra.

We are living it.

We have allowed rogue government to perform an ongoing coup d'etat. We have let slip freedoms while being threatened with terror and enticed by proffered "safety."

As to safety and sleight-of-hand, let's do one more time-travel peek, there and back again:

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the US began mobilizing out of the Great Depression into the industry of war.

(As intended by FDR, whose spooks had broken the Japanese code and had fore-knowledge of the attack. They sacrificed men and ships to enrage isolationist America into patriotic fervor, enlistment and war bonds. True story.)

The Japanese admiral who oversaw the Pearl Harbor attack, and watched American response, warned his high command: "We have awakened a slumbering giant."

America, the slumbering giant, may now be obese, fluoridated and entranced by patented TV mind control frequencies (see ref's below.)

A good friend thinks so; he thinks America is beyond all hope.

He is not feeling warm and cozy about any future vis-a-vis apparently successful corruption among banksters, "public servants", and the military-industrial complex.

His surrender to Realpolitik tells him we are checkmated into choosing among three brutalities, the US, Russian and Chinese. That's it; forget the magical thinking; "they" have won.

That may be the end of the story. I wonder.

We have not heard the last from contrarians in America, nor kindred folk worldwide, masses of us dismayed at what the Statue of Liberty seems to have become.

We are many, all races, continents. We pay attention; we network; we dig for unreported news. We build community and intend life-friendly futures.

We doubt the sincerity of power promising to police itself. We doubt governments which invest in stun-gun-tasers and beam weaponry to control "civil unrest."

We hope for peace, change we can count on.

For a long while people fear tyranny, but then, they turn on it.

References:

Project Paperclip:
Secret Agenda, The US Gov't, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945-1990 by Linda Hunt, St Martin's Press, 1991.

Nazi fluoride connection via Project Paperclip: http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2009/04/water-water-everywhere-fluoride-in.html )

MK-Ultra:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA

Victim Expose' Books:

Thanks for the Memories, The Memoirs of Bob Hope's and Henry Kissinger's Mind-controlled Slave, self-published by Brice Taylor, 1999.

Trance Formation of America by Cathy O'Brien with Mark Phillips, Reality Marketing, Inc., 1995.

A sampling of CIA drug activities: http://www.homepagedaily.com/Pages/article7800-the-cias-5-most-mind-blowing-experiments-with-lsd.aspx

100 US Mind Control Patent Abstracts: http://www.scribd.com/doc/16685354/-100-US-Patent-Abstracts-Mind-Control-Neural-Manipulation-by-EM-Fields-and-Other-Patents

HDTV mind control: http://adventofdeception.com/mind-control-hdtv-hulu-sound-of-silence

photo: homepagedaily.com

Chemtrails Overhead, 30. Dec. 2011 Update

2010-04-16T16:46:00.049-04:00

Chemtrails:

Earth Solutions

Chemtrails?... shmemtrails. Cut the paranoia--"persistent contrails" are filling the sky.

Maybe.

Up in northern New England, using high-powered binoculars. I watched the-whatever being emitted from the tail section of unmarked white planes. Not from the forward jet engines at all. Some observers have noted spray-emitters tucked under wing flaps along the whole wingspan.

Chemtrail Plane Interior

Have been watching the weird sky-blurring for fifteen years or so. It helps to be an early riser, waking to the last stars and walking to meet first light.

While citizens sleep, jock-jets, often partnered in fours, begin doing parallel spew, laying down X's and crosses, improbable swirls. Chemtrails even span broad daylight, but who's looking; it's just contrails, right?

Heck of a curious flight pattern, usually preceding expected rain, and often nowhere near busy airports. Air on earth begins to smell chokingly-foul.

The "trails" smog once-luminous sky, sometimes causing oily sun halos and oil-scum on puddles. After one particularly gross chemtrail-rain, coastal puddles lay an oily dark red--on the organic farm of friends.

In well-watered New England, heavy spewing in advance of weather front brought deluge, field crop wash-out and two summers ago, Irish potato blight.

Now watching the phenom in arid Rocky Mountains, spew-planes materialize as weather-harbingers, in advance of hoped-for rain and snow--Spew occludes a once-brilliant sky, and the weather front fizzles out--in another form of crop failure, called drought.

Co-inky-dink of long observation, as the US government and military have boasted about "controlling the weather."

Anything else on that agenda?

Unusual contents of chemtrail fallout have been reported from lab analysis--soaring levels of aluminum, barium, strontium, heavy metals, as wells as blood cells, micro-organisms, ethylene dibromide. Jet exhaust?

Problem:

Hospital Emergency Room admissions--for severe respiratory distress, asthma attack, flu-like symptoms--often spike up that night, and over the next day or two. Children and the elderly being particularly affected.

"Chemtrail cough" may persist for months thereafter, a dry hacking non-productive cough which interrupts sleep of self and the whole household. People complain of "allergies."

One winter of particularly heavy chemtrail spraying in New England, the cough pandemic was treated as pertussis, whooping cough. Many prescriptions for antibiotics.

Note to gardeners and hikers: Staying outdoors all day under heavy chemtrail spraying can trigger a more severe immune reaction. Outdoorsy holidays, like America's Fourth of July celebration, often feature arrival of unmarked chemtrail planes overhead.

Chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia cases appear to have increased since the spraying operation began. Those made ill report mental fog and short term memory embarrassments.

As an aside, aluminum functions as a savage neurotoxin, and is found in shriveled Alzheimer's brains on autopsy.

It will be up to whistle blowers to come forward with the why of it.

Rep Kucinich tried to stop the chemtrail operation in Oct. 2001, but the bill was gutted, tabled and disappeared. Chemtrails were described in the bill as an "exotic weapons system."

Dec. 2011 Update:

A just-the-facts-ma'am Chemtrail, "Geo-engineering" documentary has been produced, "What in the World Are They Spraying?"--by Michael Murphy and G. Edward Griffin (who wrote Creature from Jekyll Island.)

The film ends with a request to freely copy the DVD--let people know what the US, Canada and NATO countries are spraying above civilian populations. A friend lent me a copy, which had been handed out at the local "Occupy" protest against corporate and government abuses.

I put off watching it, as I had seen earlier chemtrail videos which just leave the viewer feeling desperate and impotent--a possibly desirable condition from the standpoint of control freak government.

I was startled at the quiet, dogged passion of this film. G. Edward Griffin in particular kept "What in the World Are They Spraying?" focused on:

1) Lab analysis by courageous scientists and physicians.

2) Toxic fallout of aluminum, barium and strontium on agricultural lands, forests and watersheds.

3) Worldwide concern for the health of future generations.

Solutions:

1) A Doctor of Homeopathy and Naturopathy in Tennessee, Dr. Wm. von Peters, has formulated a homeopathic detox-remedy, "Chembuster."
http://www.worldwithoutparasites.com/ChemBuster.html

2) Useful resource; Regional reports; Input from health pros: http://www.globalskywatch.com/

3) Given that folks seem to be having a toxic reaction to the spew's fallout, both immediate and chronic, consider Chlorella, a fresh water alga cultured by two Japanese firms: Yaeyama Chlorella and SunChlorella. (Look for date of manufacture before 11. March, 2011, when Fukushima blew.)

Chlorella is recommended in the protocol to recover from heavy metal exposure, including the removal of mercury-amalgam fillings.

4) Chemtrail-cough of many months' duration has been resolved using a garlic elixir, easily made at home. For recipe, see:

www.feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2009/11/garlic-elderberry-for-oink-flu-blues.html

5) The probiotic, Kombucha, seems to build immune strength and vitality, while also flushing out toxic body burden from chemtrails and daily living.

In Europe, Kombucha can even be found in pharmacies, as MD's prescribe it in the event of catastrophic or chronic disease states.

Making Kombucha at home is not as easy a recipe as garlic elixir. For convenience, you can find bottles of it in the cooler-section of health food stores.

If you're up for a kitchen adventure in good health, here's the Kombucha-how-to; scroll down: www.feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2009/05/flying-pig-flu-power-up-immunity-with.html

Conclusion:

Who flies and maintains unmarked chemtrail jets? Surely there are fine men and women among them. How on earth can they fly above civilian populations with high tech navigation, and no moral compass?

Are they induced to poison air, which their own families breathe, for "national security." With the added threat of Court Martial for questioning orders?

Or do mercenaries of Blackwater ilk sit at the controls, drawn by big bucks and macabre power? Are they provided with drugs from the military's arsenal, to enhance performance and focus on the task at hand?

America is busy waging resource wars, rewarding Wall Street, and bankrupting itself. At some point, even black ops may run out of funding.

For now, chemtrails continue as a "known unknown." The Military-Industrial-Complex--which Ike warned us about in his presidential farewell address--seems to be enjoying carte blanche to foul the aerial-Commons.

Who can change the US trajectory of mayhem and corporate profiteering?

Congress? (insert laugh line.)

Oath Keepers? We can hope.

www.oathkeepers.org/oath/2009/03/03/declaration-of-orders-we-will-not-obey/

photos: elproyectomatriz.files.wordpress.com

http://libertyforlife.com/military-war/BWMD/images/chemtrail-gear4.jpg

Birthing Time: Journal of Yeoman Gardener; Life on the Farm

2010-04-08T06:51:00.005-04:00

Birthing Time

"She won't drop that calf till her bag's so tight her teats is astickin straight out."

Harlon demonstrated, pointing his index fingers stiffly away from center. We were standing by the pines studying Agnes, heavy to the ground with her first calf.

I'd been afraid to stray far, not being sure about Agnes, whose udder had distended improbably already. But my neighbor was right; she kept on swelling and eventually had a pretty little calf.

I'd gone looking for Harlon to ask him what to watch for. Found him on a hillock on his place, arm-deep in a standing cow's hindquarters. The cow, thick neck extended, eyes bulging, was bellowing; Harlon was a brown study, silent, eyes closed.

He was in up to his shoulder joint, probing to turn a breech birth, feeling for tiny hooves and limbs. The water "had broke" and his side up against the cow glistened with fluids that had cradled and nourished the calf.

A turkey buzzard smelling maybe life/maybe death circled overhead, lazing on updraft.

The herd chewed cud; bees hummed in clover; the cow with each outbreath, bawled. A man slowed in a blue pickup, saw Harlon had it in hand, so to speak, nodded to me, headed on. I settled on a boulder.

Harlon opened his eyes, staring into middle distance. Did a maneuver like a dancer twirling a partner, then using his free hand to lean on the cow's bony rump, heaved free. His arm withdrew with a great sucking noise. Bloody fluid gushed, calf nose and forelimbs soon followed.

Harlon stepped back, reached down for his "Ford" cap, adjusted it, then his shirt and used it to wipe goo off his chest and arm, watching all the while.

The calf was curving down toward the ground. Leaving off bellowing to peer back, the cow began making soft throaty welcoming sounds. Calf plopped onto the grass.

Mama cow stood there a minute straining out afterbirth, then lumbered half-circle to her baby and began licking her clean.

Calf tried to stand, tottering into the strokes, swaying as though earth were aqueous, till she found the udder, butted and brought down first rich milk, slurping, milk overflowing. Did a little dance.

Harlon stood in the morning light, and took in his herd, his dewy, rolling land. Nodded toward nowhere in particular.

photo: fragmentsfromfloyd.com

Detox Solutions: Heavy Metal Madness

2010-03-08T21:00:00.018-05:00

photo:www.takepart.com/thecove

Detox Solutions:
Mercury Madness

Last night I watched "The Cove", 2010 Oscar-winner for best documentary. An expose'. Those involved in the film actively live a profound love affair with the sea and with cetaceans. The film exposes brutality to dolphins, and their mercury contamination.

It's nearly seismically disturbing the way the film makes us privy to:

A "Flipper" retrospective of our stunning human cluelessness at turning captured dolphins into performing clowns.
Covert dolphin-slaughter in a blood-filled Japanese cove.
And then, and then...the lady in the photo above who wears mermaid-tailed flippers to undulate among cetaceans in the wild blue sea.
An Aussie surfer who swoops the wave crests with pods of dolphins, reports that he was saved from shark attack by dolphin guardians.
In ancient Greece it was against all human law to harm a dolphin, for they were known to rescue the drowning.

I had spent charmed spells of childhood watching the changing sea and frolicking around cetaceans, besotted with dolphins.

Their mercury disaster was the final butt-kick for me regarding heavy metals.

I had been ruminating a detox article for some time since learning a friend and his wife had been eating 25 (yes, twenty-five) lobsters weekly, apiece, for months of lobster season. So? Symptoms of mercury poisoning muddled friendship and aborted any future.

What symptoms?

Short term memory loss, one showing early symptoms of Alzheimer's and one having demented rage episdodes. Behavior included agitation, motor-mouth, pounding repetition, not remembering having already said it umpteen times, interrupting every two minutes. Insomnia, depression, crushing headache, reclusiveness, pain.

"The Cove" website has a calculator, read and weep, for the amount of mercury ingested from that level of bacchanalian seafood consumption: http://www.takepart.com/gotmercury

Say you're cracking open a 1.5-pound or 2-pound lobster and sloshing morsels into lemon-butter. That's ~24oz x 25/week or, drumroll please... 8286% of the EPA limit, weekly. (The site also calculates your tuna fish casserole or lox and bagel.)

EPA limits are mentioned?

Psst, there are no safe levels for heavy metals.

Do industrial effluent producers and BigPharma, that purveyor of mercury and aluminum-tainted vaccines, grease palms to ensure lax standards? One wonders. Heavy metals can be
devastatingly neurotoxic, damaging to fetuses, and immune dysregulating.

Then we've got mercury amalgam fillings which the AmericanDentalAssociation dare not admit to being a wee problem jammed up there against the brain, lest it open a Pandora's box of litigation. Holistic physicians routinely mandate that the mercury be removed from the mouth, however, to clear the way to better health.

What about the toxic-metal subtext of "beneficial fluoride?" Say it often enough and the words become linked in the mind, like a meme. (See the 2 part fluoride expose' in right sidebar of this blog.)

What about aluminum found in antacids, anti-perspirants, baking powder, city water treatment systems, and your annual flu shot?...Found in the brain? Backed up in lymph nodes of breast tissue? Oh? Builds up? Bummer.

So, Houston, we may have a problem.

WHAT THEN ARE SOME DETOX SOLUTIONS?

Clay Baths:

Healing clay draws out toxins of all sorts through the skin. The clay is powerful, as little as a heaping tablespoon. The clay in the tub may actually change color, to brown, darker gray, greenish-black.

Autistic children, those thought to have been less able to detoxify mercury in vaccines, seem to respond well to clay baths. Mothers report exciting improvements in cognitive ability and social skills.

Pascalite clay is especially potent for detox baths. One of the lobster eaters began doing a whole series of them with beneficial result: http://www.pascalite.com/

Small amounts of pascalite are also taken internally, and the paste is used as an awesomely effective poultice. Some physicians recommend that it be taken internally to help bind up the heavy metals released and prevent re-uptake by the body. Read testimonials on the pascalite site. I used it on my farm for livestock health and human!

Chlorella:

A spring-water-grown superfood which helps flush out mercury, lead, cadmium, aluminum, etc. The two brands readily available in the US and are SunChlorella and Yaeyama Chlorella.

Cilantro or Fresh Coriander Leaf:

Also amazingly effective in removing mercury, etc. Add to salads, soups. Make cilantro pesto!

Sea Veggies, i.e., Kelp, Dulse, Wakame, Kombu, Sea Lettuce:

The iodine in sea veggies helps protect the thyroid gland from goiter, that bullfrog swelling of the throat, and also protects the thyroid from uptake of radioactive-iodine, released by nuclear power plants and in nuclear disasters. It also helps to displace fluoride, a useful side-bene.

Kombucha:

The super-nutrient lactic ferment from Eastern Europe and Asia, made from tea. See the article descibing its how-to and use: Power Up Immunity with Kitchen Probiotics: http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2009/05/flying-pig-flu-power-up-immunity-with.html

CAN MY DOCTOR DO TESTS FOR ME?

There are blood work lab tests available for heavy metal toxicity, also hair analysis. Holistic physicians often request them when patient health and vitality are poor. The holistic shtick is all about clearing out toxins, as first step in wellness, so the bod can then absorb nutrients needed to feel vital and fit again.

Just as a thought exercize, how many cases of unrecognized heavy-metal-malaise are being treated with blood pressure meds, tranquilizers, anti-depressants? How many road-rage cases have breathed too much auto exhaust on freeway commutes, and are actually miserable with heavy metal body burden?

In "The Cove" one of the Japanese officials who attempted to make the local dolphin industry appear benign--including the selling of mercury-laden dolphin meat--had hair analysis done on himself. At the time, dolphin meat was compulsory eating for school children near the area of the dolphin-capture-and-butchery site.

The fishery bureaucrat's mercury levels turned out to be high.

Pierced by a Scrutiny: Shamanic Journeys

2010-02-26T11:22:00.012-05:00

www.spirittapestries.com

Pierced by a Scrutiny:

Shamanic Journeys

On the north slope of the forest in the rich wine-keg smell of woodland soil, we raked back oak and maple leaf mould and planted American ginseng.

At the foot of the slope, the trees thinned out into alders along the spring branch which skirted the near side of the mill pond meadow, a meadow which had once been water.

A meandering trout stream had been dammed long years ago to power a grist and saw mill on the property, forming the mill pond. Deep soil had gradually filled in behind the wooden dam, and the meadow was the richest land on the farm.

Looking down from the ginseng slope, sitting quiet, I’d watch wild turkey, deer and fox cross the meadow.

We fenced off the forest to keep out the sheep and cattle, the four-footed equivalents of Visigoths sacking Rome. They were “Feinschmecker” as the Germans would say, nosing out the most delectable herbage.

The fence protected the ginseng, and allowed the gradual return of native herbs and wildflowers, which farm animals would otherwise eat or trample into oblivion.

Galax grew on the forest floor, with shiny leathery leaves that stayed evergreen in the snow, deepening in hue to burgundy-green in the winter months. At Christmastime, I had gathered small bunches of the parasol-like leaves, and woven them into wreaths with red wild rose hips, musky-scented boxwood and cones of hemlock and alder.

Rhododendrons and dogwoods arched overhead in the understory of great trees as I now walked toward a favorite quiet place which lay in a hollow of boulders and lichens.

Squirrels had built a nest nearby in a lightning-scarred tree. A red-headed woodpecker had worked the decayed parts of the trunk, probing for insects, leaving parallel lines of holes encircling the tree.

I settled myself into a granite cleft, and listened—wind, murmurous, soon to be winter-strident; water flowing; creatures moving at stealth in the forest.

I dozed, seemingly, then startled into acuity to see an ancient face in a tree stump and hear a voice, as though a spring rose at my feet: “My heart soars like a hawk.”

At that instant great russety wings soared up through the trees. It was my first glimpse of the red-tailed hawk. In all my years at the farm, that hawk remained a presence, nesting and overwintering.

One winter’s night, years later, I lay awake white-eyed as wind hurled sleet against the north window and pummeled the tin roof. Tree branches crashed in the forest from the weight of the ice. The power was out; no lights, no moon.

I lit a bayberry candle and imagined creatures abroad in the storm—bedraggled birds with their wings indrawn, deer startled by the wild thrashing of the canopy.

In the wanton violence of the night, creatures of mythology seemed palpable: fierce heart-pounding banshees wailing, and titans striding the mountaintops.

Then I slept, hang-gliding through the storm and the cosmos, and woke to silence, and brilliant silvery light. The forest and all the world gleamed crystal. I bundled into layers and on the upper fretwork porch met my Norwegian elkhound, who sat on my foot.

My eyes ached at the loveliness. Pine trees on the hillside were bent with the weight of the ice.

I heard myself beginning to babble mindlessly to my dog, to fend off the primeval and its monstrous beauties.

I felt suddenly pierced, pierced by a scrutiny.

On the tallest white pine, eyes glittering, the hawk watched. I froze into silence; sat there shattered, all my foolishness rubble at my feet. May I never be plumbed by such a force in human form.

The ice sheaths, loosened by sun melt, falling with the sound of bells. The hawk spread his vast wings, and vanished.

hawk detail

Alzheimer's & Autism Link? A Vaccine Connection

2010-01-06T15:10:00.002-05:00

Alzheimer’s & Autism Link?

A Vaccine Connection

A Canadian MD, looking formidable as a martial arts practitioner, has gone toe-to-toe with toxic medicine. He’s gone and turned whistle-blower about vaccines.

His documenting pix show cranial nerve damage.

“When the eye deviates inward, outward, and/or the smile is asymmetrical in bulk and tone and alignment – these are damages in the brain…”

Look in the mirror. Look at friends.

He links Alzheimer’s, Autism, Parkinson’s, MS, and other yukho diseases. Say what? And schizophrenia, learning disorders and manic depression? Tourette’s Syndrome? Gimme a break.

His gripe about the vaccine paradigm? He sees those diseases as all, all, being caused by vaccines, by vaccine-induced mini-strokes at the capillary level. White blood cells and toxins silt up in the narrow passage; nutrients and oxygen get blocked. Things fester and do not flow.

Andrew Moulden, MD, & PhD in Clinical Neuropsychology, states:

“…ALL vaccines, from infancy to geriatric, are causing the exact same brain damages irrespective of what disease or disorder comes out. The damages are specific to end vascular “mini strokes….

…Gulf war syndrome is affecting and disabling 250,000 troops and 42,000 deaths. These vaccinated soldiers show the exact same neurological damages after vaccination as the infants and children are exhibiting after each childhood vaccination. These are strokes… This is just the tip of the iceberg.

These microscopic strokes are happening to the brain and body in immediate and delayed, waxing and waning, acute and chronic ways. This is receiving a plethora of clinical labels. In basic physiology, the base cause is common across the board.

There is no such thing as an acquired genetic epidemic…vaccinations are the mass culprit for most of this.

…Thankfully, vaccine injuries, relative to brain functions, have mainly disconnected the white matter connecting cables tracts while leaving the cortical “lightbulbs” (gray matter) intact. The white matter brain cables can re-connect. This means motor and language and sensory functions, including much cognitive function, can be fully recovered…”

http://vactruth.com/2009/07/21/dr-andrew-moulden-interview-what-you-were-never-told-about-vaccines/

And has the good doctor faced opposition from pharmaceutical and medical vested interests?

You betcha! He has founded a clinic and charity to offer solutions, including detox and hyperbaric oxygen therapies. Interesting fellow.

Detox Solutions?

Yes, indeed. As to vaccines, and their aluminum and mercury “adjuvants”, mothers—of suddenly autistic, formerly happy-go-lucky children—are a force to be reckoned with. You’ll find links about their efforts at Moulden's site. www.BrainGuardMD.com

In Praise of Whistle-Blowers

This being Twelfth Night, Epiphany, the old celebration of the coming of the Wise Men, it seems a good time to celebrate truth-tellers. http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/ They herald a more human-friendly future than the waning age, which has celebrated greed—CEO’s and lobbyist-lubed politicos as cult heroes.

And yes, we’ve made personal, political and medical decisions which may have left us with detox challenges. I will be writing an upcoming article on detox protocols. Stay tuned.

Solstice Hot Chocolate and a Fireside Tale

2009-12-20T17:18:00.006-05:00

Solstice Hot Chocolate

&
a Fireside Tale

Wind surges against the Maine coast cottage, blizzard not so much coming down, as hurtling sideways before the north wind. Dogzilla, a huge mound of black lab, snores softly by the fire.

A time for wicked good hot chocolate (recipe follows), warm cookies, and a good story, a north wind story about money spent, not in Maine, but long ago Texas…

A “blue norther” shrieked down out of Arctic Canada, down the Great Plains, through Indian Territory and blasted frontier Texas.

A man and his son had built a sod house on the nearly treeless prairie, digging down to earth floor, piling up oblongs of sod for wall, doing crossbeams, and more sod for roof. The boy bunked in the loft and his dad in the room below, used for bedstead, kitchen and everything else.

They were sod-busters who plowed up and planted the deep prairie loam; ran a few cattle. Hadn’t much cash money, but hunted, cleared land and did alright for themselves.

When they’d finally brought in a decent crop of wheat and been paid cash on the barrelhead, the father counted out a bit for a warm winter coat for his boy, who till then had cut holes in burlap or wool blanket for his head and arms, roping it tight against the wind.

Boy pocketed the money and went off to town in the buckboard. Was gone all day. Came back looking smug-pleased with hisself, sporting a pearl-handled six-shooter, a flashy Colt 45, the holster tied down to his thigh. Set about doing the evening chores without meeting his father’s eye.

His dad went close-mouthed, nodded; didn’t say a thang. That was hot harvest time.

Come December and the first blue norther, his daddy shouted up into the loft just before dawn:

“Horace??... Horace!! Strap on your six-shooter, Son. It’s colder ‘n hell outside…”

Wicked Good Spicy Hot Cocoa

1Qt. organic milk

1 rounded Tbs. Sucanat (organic dehydrated sugar cane juice; yum)

2 Tbs. organic unsweetened cocoa

1 tsp. cinnamon

½ tsp. cardamom

¼ tsp. clove

¼ tsp. ginger

1/8 tsp. cayenne

Heat milk. Mix other ingredients with a little water to make a thick syrup. Swirl into hot milk. Serves 1-4, depending on appetite!

photo: www.freefoto.com

"Garlic & Elderberry for Oink-Flu Blues" Preparedness in Interesting Times

2009-11-16T14:36:00.008-05:00

Garlic & Elderberry

for

Oink-Flu Blues

Garlic, as antibiotic? Garlic elixir?

Only side-effect being garlic breath?

You’re kidding, right?

Actually, garlic eaten as infection-fighter and tonic immune-builder, is as old as pyramid building at Giza and the daily ration of Roman legionnaires. It’s way more interesting than just a frozen pizza option! Garlic heals, fortifies and builds strength.

We’ve lived an inside joke—pinch-lipped Puritans, who boiled veggies to death, looked down on later Mediterranean immigrants who ate garlic at ebullient, anti-oxidant-rich meals! Garlic-eating connoted Ellis Island late-comers, scorned by the entrenching WASP “Elites.”

The Mediterranean diet has since met the DAR, and we enjoy the gift of garlic-rich meals from Italy, France and the Middle East.

Given the pandemic buzz in our currently interesting times, has garlic deeper health potential?

You betcha.

Read on for in-house remedies* and elixirs.

(Yes, various capsules are currently available, but if not, what can be done at home?)

What if health care, as reigning BigPharma paradigm, just supposin’, what if health care were to break down?

19th Century MD remedy:

Interesting tidbit gleaned from the 19th century eclectic physicians about garlic and severe infections. This is pre-antibiotic info—an entire bulb of garlic was separated into garlic cloves, peeled, minced and mixed into lard. Lard was then readily available. Cold cream would serve as well.

The garlic remedy was then packed onto the soles (only) of the feet of a patient with high fever, flu, pneumonia, etc., the mixture covered, and held in place with socks. Within just a few moments the patient will have garlic on their breath.

The author observed this remedy put to use in a case of scarlet fever. Fever broke; the patient went into deep sleep and woke many hours later, smelly but well.

(This is mentioned as an anecdote, potentially worth noting if other help is not near, and should in no way be construed as medical advice.)

Garlic Elixir Recipe:

1c organic cider vinegar

1c organic raw honey

8-12 large cloves garlic, peeled

Plop above three ingredients into blender and liquefy. Pour into glass jar or two; cover with lids. Let age 5 days in fridge. Take 1Tbs daily in juice or water. An additional dose or two can be taken, in case of the “epizoodic”, as they say in the South.

Lingering Cough:

This garlic elixir is potent stuff, and astonishingly is reported as having cleared up hacking “Chem-Trail Cough”, dating from heavy spraying this summer. Suddenly, deep lung crud is brought up by the garlic tonic, and months-long coughing ends.

Whatever one’s opinion or observations of the skies, locally many of us have been watching unmarked white jets spewing out dense something or other.

Emergency Room admissions seem to peak after heavy spraying—instances of respiratory distress, e.g., asthma attack, bronchitis, pertussis, pneumonia; also burning eyes, dehydration and flu-like malaise.

The jets generally fly in teams of 4 or 5, making repeated parallel passes and X’s overhead. I have watched through binoculars as dense spew was emitted from the tail section, not the engines, of unmarked planes, perhaps setting the jet contrail-argument into question.

Before each torrential, crop-destroying summer rain this year, we watched the jets at play. Some spews rained down oily and caused circular smog “rainbows” around the sun.

After one such LA-sky blanketing, the rain puddles on our local organic farm had a reddish oily scum and the air stank oddly of chemicals.

Anomaly? Dunno, but in-home garlic has been a useful resource. It’s not too late to fall-plant in many parts of the country.

What to do about garlic breath?

1) A whole clove (the spice, that is) in the mouth clears garlic smell. Clove is also anti-viral and not a bad idea when out and about. A small jar of whole clove in the glove compartment of the car could be useful, to pop a spice clove in the mouth before entry into snuffling, coughing crowds.

2) In India, cardamom seed is often chewed after a garlicky, spicy meal. Good digestive as well.

3) Fresh mint sprig chewed; ditto, good digestive.

Elderberry Elixir:

There’s pretty interesting medical data on elderberry as an anti-viral. Expensive syrups and capsules are available from Switzerland and Israel. The brand names are some variation on the botanical name of the plant, Sambucus (canadensis).

What can we do at home, more economically?!!

Elderberry Recipe:

1Qt or liter filtered water

1 rounded Tbs organic dried elderberries

1 rounded tsp organic dried ginger root

1 rounded tsp organic dried rosehips (or juice of ½ lime or lemon if available)

Bring water, elderberries and ginger root to simmer, covered. Set timer for 30 minutes. Tea will turn a gorgeous purple-plum color. Turn off heat. Add rosehips or citrus juice. Cover. Drink in 5 minutes.

A second, still yummy though weaker brew can be made when tea is drunk. Add another quart of water to plumped-up elderberries and ginger. Bring to boil; turn off and leave to steep. Nice to pour into a glass bottle and drink while out doing errands or at the office.

For additional good health home remedies, see: “Power-Up Immunity with Kitchen Probiotics”: http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2009/05/flying-pig-flu-power-up-immunity-with.html

*The organic ingredients for the remedies can probably be found at your local health food store or food co-op. Being service-oriented, the store managers will likely be willing to order in product which represents a community good.

photo: www.startribune.com

"Woman, Armed & Dangerous" From the Journal of Yeoman Gardener: Life on the Farm

2009-10-04T15:35:00.008-04:00

Woman,

Armed & Dangerous

“You have got to have a gun in the house. A shotgun.”

“I’d blow off my right knee cap and all my toes.”

“A revolver, then.”

“No.”

“Now listen,” he says, getting pretty exasperated, “Jeezlouise, you’ve launched this harebrained idea with no more sense than a lady bug. An organic farm? A woman, alone—in redneck country? Wake up. It’s Appalachia; it’s not a movie set for Shangri-La.”

“Guns scare me.”

“Oh yeah?” My friend readies his next retort. “There are scarier things than guns.”

“Um. Only thing loaded in this house is going to be the pantry.”

“Look, settle down for criminy sake. We’re not talking Findhorn here. You think elves and fairies are going guard your house for you?”

“No. My dog will.” The Norwegian elkhound, a fluff-ball puppy, does an endearing wiggle. “Well, not just yet maybe, but soon--Eventually, he’ll look like Nanook of the North—And anyway, I’ve got good neighbors.”

“I will teach you,” he managed, “to use a gun.”

“Don’t you remember? I’m from Texas; I know how to use one.”

My Texas granddaddy hunted dove and quail, squirrels, and kept his hunting rifles in the hall under the stairs, near a Pre-Raphaelite print of Joan of Arc, and floor to ceiling books. A shelf at child level held Treasure Island, Huckleberry Finn, Greek Myths and fairy tales, poetry, Mother West Wind stories. Hall smelled of book must and gun powder.

One hot summer when we went back to visit, Mama asked her father about the big hole in the back screen door; flies were coming in. Granddaddy made a growling sound, cussed. We drew out of him, a story –

No-accounts had moved nearby with two vicious dogs, which had proceeded to savage one pet after another. Neighbors had tried to complain; “Now see here…” The newcomers smirked.

Then one morning early, Granddaddy heard terrible howling. Those marauders had just destroyed a gentle and beautiful little dog I’d loved all my life, and were coming after the one with the donut tail, who usually smiled. Doc was frantically trying to burst through the screen door to safety.

Granddaddy unlatched the door, let Doc in, relatched it, and went to the front hall. He returned to find the killers lunging and snarling. Without breaking stride, he let off both shotgun barrels; then heaved the carcasses onto his garden wheelbarrow.

He trundled the wheelbarrow down the sidewalk made uneven by roots of big old hackberry trees, and dumped the varmints out by the owners’ front porch. Knocked on the door. Stepped aside so they could take in the scene. Gave them a look with those piercing County Attorney eyes of his. Suggested, “Sue me.” Turned on his heel.

I was eight that year. Pauline, the dearest friend of my dead grandmother, loaded me, a double-barreled shotgun, and a basket of fried chicken into her raunchy pickup.

We went jolting across prairie land of her big North Texas ranch and had a picnic by the pond where my grandmama used to love to fish.

Pauline had been a classical singer and a great beauty. She laughed as I hoped to live—starting in her belly and chuckling through her thrown-back throat. The sound reverberated, soared into bells and cackles till her eyes twinkled, and I could hardly breathe with delight.

She lived in a grand house, but wore jeans and a plaid shirt, and when we went out into that bright Texas light, a ratty straw hat more fit for a mule.

I was engulfing a friend chicken leg (crisp, lots of black pepper) when Pauline announced that it was time for me to learn how to handle a gun. “And close your mouth when you eat,” she said.

I’d stopped chewing and was staring at her, slack-jawed. I was big enough, she said, getting lanky. (Big enough? I was still playing with dolls and purtties.)

My legs went limp; inside, a roadrunner blur. I did a quick inventory of possible diversionary tactics, but Pauline had that now look about her. I had lifted that shotgun; I could barely lift it.

I came to with a start to hear in disbelief her plan for me to blow toad frogs out of the water’s edge, and bring home frog legs.

“How about I bring home wild flowers—you know, Indian blankets and Queen Anne’s lace and Indian paintbrush, a real pretty bouquet?”

“We could do that, too.”

Lunch sickened down in some catacomb of faraway sound and misery. I picked up the gun. I liked frogs.

Pauline explained to me about the care of rifles. The metal was hot from the sun, and smelled acrid, alien. Jamming the butt into my right shoulder to avoid the recoil bruise, I let loose a blast that shattered the water’s surface. Pond sank back into eerie silence.

Pauline looked down at me sprawled, dazed, and understood. With a sharp pocket knife, she sliced bent legs from the flattened amphibian abdomens. We rode back.

My granddaddy breaded and fried the legs. He reported that they were good.

So as not to be stupid around guns, I eventually decided it was appropriate for me to learn how to handle them, and by age twelve, could hit a bull’s eye with a 22. And that was that, or so I thought.

On the Blue Ridge Mountain farm, my dog did eventually grow up, as did I. Together, we dealt with a succession of four-legged and two-legged varmints.

My neighbor, Eula, had a gangrel coon hound named Little Pup, black with brown markings, floppy-eared, knobbly-kneed, the Ichabod Crane of dogs. Friends watched him slinking around the house, and dubbed him “the praying mantis!”

But Eula loved him, and assured me he was from championship blood lines. Out of deference to her, I ground my teeth, and kept quiet about my aggravation against the beast.

My Norwegian elkhound, stalker of moose and bear in the old fjord country, was still young. He was uncertain about the etiquette of dealing with a big dog belonging to somebody I liked, so Little Pup squatted and defected on Bear’s toys; stole his bones.

This I knew would sort itself out, as Bear’s chest broadened and he grew in strength, but Little Pup soon added me to his gestures of contempt.

He’d poop on the porch, or wait till I’d prepared raised seed beds in rich soil. I’d unkink myself from stoop labor and see him running back and forth across the soft earth, trompling.

I hissed at him, or rapped on the kitchen window, in a state of increasingly wild exasperation. And he always came back.

How could I complain? I was still an outsider; my neighbor loved her dog, would be hurt, consider it a rebuke…

This assault on my gardening efforts finally grew intolerable; I needed wiser-head advice. I put my tools away, and stomped up the hill to the
old country store.
It was weathered, turn of the 20^th century, heated by a barrel stove kept at “roar”, and stuffed and tumbling over with every possible farm and personal item. It smelled of wood smoke, leather, sweet feed, bailing twine, chewing tobacco, peppermint candy, dust.

I bought my bibbed “overhalls” there, a lamb nipple to put on a coke bottle, work boots, fence staples, barbed wire stretcher, starch in a forty year old bottle, rubber rings for spring lidded jars, flypaper, blocks of brown mineral salt for the cattle to lick, things like that.

You could find horse liniment, bag balm, hair reviver, liver pills, castor oil, needle and thread, fishing lures, apple peeler and slicer, or a gallon-jar butter churn.

I plopped down on a smoke-darkened, ladder-backed chair, and watched Mrs. Marshall piece a quilt at the treadle sewing machine.

“See your potatoes is up”, she said.

“Yup. Just poking through.”

“Maybe they’ll make.” (She’s the one who’d given me the start of the Kennebecs.)

I made a growling rumble. She looked up over her sewing glasses, went, “Hm”, and considered my fidgets and flashing eyes.

“What’s troublin you, honey?”

“It’s that dog.”

“Teddy Bear?”

“No, ma’am. That Little Pup. Trampling my garden, and I don’t know what to do.”

She thought a minute, and chuckled. Leaning on the old Singer, she heaved herself up out of the chair, and hobbled over to the counter.

The place had not been de-inventoried since the 1920’s. Rummaging around among the jars of penny candy, October beans, sorghum molasses seed and beef jerky, she pulled out, for goodness sake, an old sling shot!

Weighed it in her hand, drew a bead at the ceiling, checking the soundness of the rubber bands. Looked across the jars at me, and grinned.

“You know how to operate this thang? Early, when no one’s up?”

She put it in my hand with a conspiratorial look, and sat down heavily in her chair. I leaned back in mine, content, knowing that all would soon be well.

I became the silent scourge, repelling the Hun. Little Pup would approach the house, see me leap from behind a bush, and pull out my weapon. He’d skitter, showing the whites of his eyes.

Bear, who had his own confused grievances against Little Pup, soon learned how gratifying it was to hustle him off the place. Little Pup grew scarce and wary.

“Now, you know”, my fellow conspirator proposed, dishing me up a big slice of cornbread, “We don’t never need to speak about this.” She handed across a glass of buttermilk. “Not to airy a soul….” I buttered the hot cornbread.

“You want sorghum on your cornbread?”

“Oh, yes ma’am, I sure do.”

“Put a stick of wood in the cookstove, would you, honey?”

She tucked the sling shot into her apron pocket, her face soft with laughter.

Well, that worked, and I like low-tech solutions, but couple years down the road, something was getting into my chickens.

When I had to hire brawn to help me with the extra work the vanishing bridegroom and I had launched together, I was fool enough to hire a 15 year old boy.

The price was right, but Lord, he was high maintenance, wanting to ride the tractor like a hotrod, and being slapdash about chores if I wasn’t there checking up on him.

I told the boy about something slinking around the chicken pen at night, sending Bear into fits. He wanted more detail, and so I sat up that evening to see what I could see--turned out to be a wild-eyed mongrel, with an appetite for breast of chicken. Teddy Bear took out after him. I shouted some.

When the boy and I were moving winter-heaved rock out of the garden next morning, I told him what I’d seen. He let out a hoot; said, “Yeehah! Jest hold on a minute; I’ll be right back.”

I was muttering to myself, about winter somehow breeding boulders out of garden loam, and using a grub-hoe to pry one loose, when he came sauntering back into the garden.

I stood there panting, gearing up to fuss about how long he’d been gone… when I saw the gun.

He squared his shoulders; jutted his chin.

“A 22,” he said.

“I can see that.”

“With rat shot; fix you right up.”

“Hm.” I gave him an uneasy look.

He set up tin cans for me to practice on, and I began pinging off one after another. Boy had a wad of chewing tobacco in his cheek, spat; wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Shee-ut,” he said. And lower pitch, “Tay-xus.”

I kept the rifle, unloaded, in the entryway. When I heard raucous chicken hysteria in broad daylight, I was pruning a Roxbury Russet up in the orchard, and ran bellowing down the hill.

A bizarre-looking dog came loping around the barn, yellow, pale-eyed, a yellow hound/husky blend, and met me, maniacal, hurling stones and abuse. I recognized the dog. He took off.

Twice more he came; I spoke to the owners, alcoholics, who lived a ridge away. He tried again. I warned the men: “Keep your dog out of my chickens. He comes after them again, I’ll kill him.”

I intended no such thing; I did intend mayhem.

Barely daybreak, I heard chicken squawking, Teddy Bear barking. I grabbed up the rifle, stuffing in cartridges as I ran. The dog had a plump layer in his jaws. Bear was after the dog. I shouted for Bear to stay out of the way.

Seeing the gun, the mustard husky-cross lit out in a swirl of dropped feathers. I drew a bead running and peppered the beast with rat shot. He twisted and yelped, and never returned.

Three days later my hen that I’d given up for dead, skittered down out of the woods with a bald pink rump. Didn’t lay many eggs for awhile.

I called the boy to come get his rifle. He toodled on over, riding his dad’s tractor, and idled the engine to talk. Wanted to hear the whole story; grinned big and saucy when he heard how it had worked out.

Handing the rifle up to him, I stood in the dirt of the road, as the diesel vroom of the big Ford tractor faded out of the valley.

Moon rose; owl called; sweet scent of lilies filled the night.

Barter Economy: Preparedness in Interesting Times

2009-09-06T14:03:00.020-04:00

Barter Economy

Thanks to barter, I can post to my own blog again. Had been blocked, but never fear, from out of the world-wide-phone booth leaps a geek friend, cape billowing, to part the cyber-sea !!

Couple months back, a question from him, turned into a lengthy professional consult by me.

Agreement—he would “pay” me with his skill sets. He would figure out the posting snafus, and make the writing experience more user-friendly.

Result of barter arrangement: no money-burden; needs met; two clients well-satisfied.

Barter of goods and services, hello new economy, is an economy old as camel caravans, Cornish tin, Roman wine, attar of roses, cinnamon, silks, and Baltic amber…

Though money was scarce, farm goods "bought" goods from sea and overland; harpists sang for their supper; tinkers bartered repairs. Younglings apprenticed to master craftsmen, or sailed for the New World in exchange for 7 years labor—things of value, or craft skills and labor as medium of exchange.

All this, without skimming of the money pot by the banking cartel of the Federal Reserve... Stay tuned as the predator class tries to muscle in on local economic solutions. Example?... Recent destruction of the silver- and gold-backed Liberty Dollar movement.

If the US dollar (the peachback "fiatsco" backed by nothing but empty promises to pay) is debased into oblivion, what then?

Barter will survive, though the bankster, lobbyist and congressional gravy train may not.

What do we have of value which we could use as a medium of exchange? What skills, what goods, what willingness will emerge from the derivatives-implosion dead ahead?

A cord of wood for x-bushels of apples?
Childcare for groceries or meals shared?
Tutoring in exchange for training in carpentry?
Use of a commons-vehicle by neighbors who take turns doing errands for the community?
Or digging and weeding a garden with a master gardener to learn how, and to share in harvest?

We don’t yet know all we can do together.

It’s Labor Day Weekend in the US, summer’s end, a time of County Fairs, farmers markets, picnics and yard sales. En route to the fair, I “hit” eight yard sales on a lightning scan for bargains.

Interesting developments: glass canning jars from grandmother time are not being sold anymore: they’re being put to use to prepare for winter and uncertain times.

BigBox gulag-shlock is being disgorged, in the “new” belt-tightening economy, but I watched people gravitating to useful items—kitchen pots, wool blankets, work boots, and exercise equipment to pull the plug on the couch potato era! Small amounts of fiat exchanged for something solid.

In an odd echo from an earlier, cash-strapped barter reality, the dustbowl 1930’s, I had the strangest call this week—May amount to exactly nothing, but I heard from “To Kill a Mockingbird” yesterday!

Do you remember Atticus Finch being paid with barter—sack of hickory nuts, mess of collard greens—for his legal fees?

Same thing happened with my Texas grandfather. He was once deeded mineral rights to a property by a man who had no cash to pay for legal work that Granddaddy had done for him.

No money meant Grandmama sewed the children's clothes, patched, turned the cloth to the unfaded side and cut and sewed again. Granddaddy tended not just his legal practice, but a big family garden, milk cow, egg-layers, smoke house for backyard-raised hams and bacon. A skilled woodsman, he brought home dove and quail.

Money stayed tight for the family with nothing much coming in, but barter of mineral rights, maybe wood split, a plucked chicken, things like that.

Mama used to laugh at her “oil money.” She’d get a couple dollars of royalties a year. Well, now an oil company actually wants to drill, and they’re trying to track down my cousins! May just be a dry well, or any revenue divided among a big family, but yesterday, I heard from my granddaddy’s time.

So you never know about barter, but it may be coming, and we’ll turn our thoughts to what really has value, holds value… holds true.

Cell Phones: If I Only Had A Brain

2009-06-13T09:14:00.017-04:00

Cell Phones:

If I Only Had a Brain

Era definer: Cell clamped to ear; car, sidewalk, office, restaurant—stored next to nutlets, ovaries, purse, pocket and bedside table. Gotta do; gotta go, 24/7.

We are connected; cell phones, towers, satellites. We are the brain-buzz, brain-fry generation and we be billions on the move. Connected to work, to friends, opportunities, news, and what else?

What if, just supposing, cell phone technology were profitably unregulated, with not a peep about health effects over time?

Not regulated? You mean, the US Congress has looked after its re-election coffers, and not the Commons? Well, knock me over with a peachback.

So what’s the big deal? Telecom offers essential life tools and technology, right? And anyway, we don’t do long-term.

Well, cell phones and cell towers and satellites a-beaming make for a big old biological experiment on all life, including us human beans. It’s like Mengele writ large, with Madison Avenue must-have come-hithers thrown in.

Parents are urged by telecom ads to show their devotion, and do the right thing by their kids—provide cell phones in the interest of child safety.

Safety?!!

Check out this graphic from a 2003 Swedish study on young rats, age comparable to human teens.

(Note that cell phones are called mobiles in Europe/UK.)

Lower image shows brain after two-hour exposure to cell (mobile) phone frequencies.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1241519&blobtype=pdf

We’re talking not just buzz-brain, but brain damage. And not nursing homes, but the young. Studies are beginning to expose a plague of pediatric brain tumors, which have surpassed even childhood leukemia.

Dr. Joseph Mercola, holistic physician and Doctor of Osteopathy, asks the following questions:

“Do you suffer from any of these common illnesses and ailments, which have all been scientifically linked to cell phone information-carrying radio waves?

* Alzheimer’s, senility and dementia
* Parkinson’s
* Autism
* Fatigue
* Headaches
* Sleep disruptions
* Altered memory function, poor concentration and spatial awareness “

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/3/18/how-cellphone-radiation-affects-your-cells.aspx

Taking Action:

So, given the known unknowns in an unregulated industry, what can we do to exercise some personal common sense? If EMF exposure is not actually well-thought-out, not body/mind-friendly, can we limit exposure? (EMF = electromagnetic frequencies.)

Robert O. Becker, MD wrote a warning for us: His book, Cross Currents, suggests we get a clue about EMF-saturation of home and work space. Some of his suggestions are included in a zinger pro-active list by Mike Adams of naturalnews.com:

* Save cell phones for emergencies and use land lines whenever possible. Make sure cell phones are turned off when not in use, and avoid using them inside a car. When you do use cell phones, use appropriate air tubes and shielding devices: see RFSafe.com and LessEMF.com for available products. Keep cell phone chargers unplugged when not in use.

* Do not buy cordless DECT phones, which emit a constant electromagnetic signal even when not in use.

* Unplug electrical appliances when not in use.

* Keep your bedroom free of electrical appliances, especially near your head while you sleep, use a battery-operated alarm clock rather than electric; unplug lamps.

* Remember that walls, floors, and ceilings do not block EMFs when arranging your furniture.

* Replace dimmer switches with regular switches to eliminate high-frequency radiation, or "dirty electricity," that can be hidden in your home's electrical wiring.

* Avoid low-voltage halogen and fluorescent lighting (including the currently popular energy-efficient compact fluorescent lighting). Fluorescent lighting has been shown to cause migraines, and contains mercury, which is a hazardous material that can create huge health and environmental problems.

* Avoid the use of appliances with variable speed drives, such as fans, heaters, front-loading washing machines and some furnaces.

* Avoid the use of microwave ovens, hair dryers, electric toothbrushes, electric blankets, heating pads, baby monitors, and other electric products.

* Use LCD computers and TV screens and avoid plasma TVs. Keep computer use to a minimum; keep unplugged when not in use.

* Avoid areas with wireless networking (WiFi) - internet cafes, airports.

* (Yeoman research: Minimize time in WiFi’d libraries, hospitals, schools, and now even churches. If you have WiFi at home, for goodness sake, unplug the thing when not in use, especially at night. Parents have reported their children having terrible nightmares, insomnia when WiFi is positioned next to or below child bedrooms.)

* Walk barefoot on the beach or earth, or hug a tree. Wear shoes with a sole made from natural materials – all of this may help you release excess EMFs into the earth and ground your body.

* If you are currently buying or building your own home, make sure you choose a home at least 5 miles from the nearest microwave or cell phone tower, high tension power line, or other radio and TV transmitters.

Good sources for EMF related products include LessEMF.com, RFSafe.com, and CutCat.com. “

http://www.naturalnews.com/z022926.html

Conclusion:

Big stuff going on here, but there’s plenty we can do. For starters, we can do EMF-shielding in our offices and homes; it helps.

What does that look like? Well, try affordable, cut-to-size screens for PC or laptop; an apron to wear over heart and vitals while sitting at the computer, both from lessemf.com. You get the drift. The solutions are not high-tech, and they’re not expensive. Stress and crummy health are what’s expensive.

Getting our minds around even needing to do this is one big arghhhhh. EMF pollution is like air molecules, everywhere.

But do we have to breathe it?

Our tower/antenna proliferation on schools, homes, offices, churches, mountain tops, and even the sea bed is either vigorous industry in action (the Madison Avenue meme), or unregulated lunacy.

If lunacy, towers, towers everywhere, and Telecom’s sweetheart deal with Potomac-Swamp-Legislators, may yet come under scrutiny.

So, what’ll it be? Step right up—mice in a maze, or informed human beings?

Useful Links:

Electromagnetic Health News, including hotdamn local action: http://electromagnetichealth.org/category/electromagnetic-health-blog/

Marblehead Mass. learns that cell phone tower placement is not a community decision: http://www.wickedlocal.com/marblehead/news/lifestyle/columnists/x1713654197/COLUMN-The-antennas-are-coming

Cordless phones vs. land lines: http://www.campaignfortruth.com/Eclub/060306/CTM%20-%20cordlessphonedanger.htm

The Swedish Association for the ElectroSensitive, including links to latest developments: http://www.feb.se/index_int.htm

European studies: http://www.energyfields.org/index.html