TRUTH MATTERS

Well I’m sure it depends on their field. But in the Life Sciences, I suspect it’s more about grant money. Richard Lewontin is a leader in the field of Population Genetics. He gave a talk at UMass Amherst, home of the late, great maverick scientist, Lynn Margulis and here’s what Lynn reported …

[Question to Dr. Margulis] You have attacked population genetics—the foundation of much current evolutionary research—as “numerology.” What do you mean by that term?
[Answer by Dr. Margulis] When evolutionary biologists use computer modeling to find out how many mutations you need to get from one species to another, it’s not mathematics—it’s numerology. They are limiting the field of study to something that’s manageable and ignoring what’s most important. They tend to know nothing about atmospheric chemistry and the influence it has on the organisms or the influence that the organisms have on the chemistry. They know nothing about biological systems like physiology, ecology, and biochemistry. Darwin was saying that changes accumulate through time, but population geneticists are describing mixtures that are temporary. Whatever is brought together by sex is broken up in the next generation by the same process. Evolutionary biology has been taken over by population geneticists. They are reductionists ad absurdum. Population geneticist Richard Lewontin gave a talk here at UMass Amherst about six years ago, and he mathematized all of it—changes in the population, random mutation, sexual selection, cost and benefit. At the end of his talk he said, “You know, we’ve tried to test these ideas in the field and the lab, and there are really no measurements that match the quantities I’ve told you about.” This just appalled me. So I said, “Richard Lewontin, you are a great lecturer to have the courage to say it’s gotten you nowhere. But then why do you continue to do this work?” And he looked around and said, “It’s the only thing I know how to do, and if I don’t do it I won’t get my grant money.” So he’s an honest man, and that’s an honest answer.

UN.BE.LIEV.ABLE. Read more »

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”
― Hippocrates

Why is it that when I used to go to the doctor for an ear infection or sore throat my doctor never told me this in spite of the fact that he took the Hippocratic Oath?

Instead he told me “Here’s a prescription … $70 please … bye!” Cha ching.

NOTE: I haven’t been to the doctor (or a dentist) for over a year because finally – no thanks to him – I learned what Hippocrates was teaching 2500 years ago.

(Thank you Joel Salatin, Weston Price, Joel Fuhrman and others)

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/248774.Hippocrates

Rat lifespans almost doubled with “buckyballs.” Wow! I’ve always wondered how Methuselah lived for 969 years. I’ve always believed that he really did, but of course I’ve only been able to speculate about how he did it. Well … according to this new cool study, the lifespans of rats was nearly doubled by feeding them something called “buckyballs” …

Chronic Buckyball Administration Doubles Rat Lifespan
Posted by Lyle J. Dennis, M.D. on April 16, 2012 in Drugs · 42 Comments

C(60) fullerene is a naturally occurring molecule containing 60 carbon atoms arranged in a sphere. It is famously known as the buckyball, short for buckminsterfullerene, and discovered in 1985. Since 1993, the molecule has been suspected to have multiple potential biological benefits. This list includes UV and radioprotection, antiviral, antioxidant, and anti-amyloid activities, allergic response and angiogenesis inhibitions, immune stimulating and antitumour effects, enhancing effect on neurite outgrowth, gene delivery, and even hair-growing activity.
In the current study researchers fed the molecule dissolved in olive oil to rats and compared outcomes to a control group of rats who got plain olive oil. The main question they wanted to answer was whether chronic C60 administration had any toxicity, what they discovered actually surprised them.
“Here we show that oral administration of C60 dissolved in olive oil (0.8 mg/ml) at reiterated doses (1.7 mg/kg of body weight) to rats not only does not entail chronic toxicity,” they write “but it almost doubles their lifespan.” “The estimated median lifespan (EML) for the C60-treated rats was 42 months while the EMLs for control rats and olive oil-treated rats were 22 and 26 months, respectively,” they write.
Using a toxicity model the researchers demonstrated that the effect on lifespan seems to be mediated by “attenuation of age-associated increases in oxidative stress” FULL ARTICLE

Can’t wait to read about them trying this on humans. Could we live to be 150? 180? I think that would be cool. Still would be a long ways from 969 but it’s a start. Personally, I think they will keep on discovering things and may in time discover the “Methuselah Secret.”

WOW. I’M SPEECHLESS. I just watched the most incredible film at http://backtoedenfilm.com/ ! For many years I have had the feeling that modern man is in a sort of slavery. Many of us work at jobs we don’t like for pay that just barely makes ends meet. Many like me have yearned for freedom from the treadmill and craziness we see in the modern world and are taking small steps. We live in the country, we garden, we keep a dairy cow or goat and a small flock of chickens. Some of us have wells or other independent water systems and so on. But one of the things that has consistently baffled me about self sufficient living is gardening. I’ve seen my friends for years tilling, tilling, tilling, hoeing, hoeing, hoeing, weeding, weeding, weeding, adding fertilizer, spraying pesticides and fixing broken tillers. In short, working far too hard for the produce they get. I knew there had to be a better way and this year I discovered Charles Wilber and his world record 300+ lb tomato plants. I also discovered permies.com, Hugelkultur, and Patricia Lanza and her Lasagna Gardening method and I felt like I was very close to having the answer. But I was only close. I knew I had not arrived yet because I still had not solved the mystery of how to grow fruit trees with no pesticides. And the Lasagna gardening method still had one piece that was not acceptable to me – purchased peat moss. To me the ultimate gardening system should use freely available materials, no fertilizers, no watering, AND be ten times less work than tiller gardening. So I kept Googling and talking to people. Then it happened! A friend told me about a film called “Back to Eden”. He said it was about no-till gardening so it Read more »

**NEWS FLASH** April 16, 2012 – Joel Salatin just did his own rebuttal.  I am inserting his rebuttal ahead of mine because it is much better. A recent letter from Joel to the NY Times…….

To the New York Times and everyone interested in truth:

The recent editorial by James McWilliams titled THE MYTH OF SUSTAINABLE MEAT contains enough factual errors and skewed assumptions to fill a book and normally I would dismiss this out of hand as too much nonsense to merit a response. But since it specifically mentioned Polyface, a rebuttal is appropriate. For a more comprehensive rebuttal, read the book FOLKS, THIS AIN’T NORMAL.

Let’s go point by point. First, that grass grazing cows emit more methane than grain-fed. This is factually false. Actually, the amount of methane emitted by fermentation is the same whether it occurs in the cow or outside. Whether the feed is eaten by an herbivore or left to rot on its own, the methane generated is identical. Wetlands emit some 95 percent of all methane in the world; herbivores are insignificant enough to not even merit consideration. Anyone who really wants to stop methane needs to start draining wetlands. Quick, or we’ll all perish. I assume he’s figuring that since it takes longer to grow a beef on grass than on grain, the difference in time adds days to the emissions. But grain production carries a host of maladies far worse than methane. This is simply cherry-picking one negative out of many positives to smear the foundation of how soil builds: herbivore pruning, perennial disturbance-rest cycles, solar-grown biomass, and decomposition. This is like demonizing marriage because a good one will include some arguments. Read more »

Ahoy science geeks!  Shapiro strikes again with another article that is a feast for weird minds like mine!  In an article he wrote in January of this year, Shapiro says

Truly, bacteria are the smartest cell biologists on the planet because they control events in cells of higher organisms in a way that mere human scientists can only dream of imitating.

And I love the final question he poses …

(II) How did the bacteria come to be such sophisticated cell biologists and evolve the capacity to produce molecules that subvert the cell control regimes of higher organisms to their own (i.e. the bacteria’s) benefit? To my mind, this is a far deeper and, ultimately, far more rewarding question to pose.  Read more »

Yesterday on Facebook I about gave somebody a coronary by saying “I think paying a visit to your local grass fed beef rancher is more important than voting for president.”  So let me explain … First, most people agree that the federal government is too big and that the dollar is being destroyed and that abortion should not be legal and taxes are too high and so on, right?  Secondly, nothing really substantive has changed for a very long time whether a Democrat or Republican has been president.  Third, it has recently occurred to me that we have a much bigger problem on our hands than any of those listed above, namely that (a) our farmland is being destroyed by our agricultural practices and thus our ability to feed ourselves in the future (browse my blog), and (b) the only real solution for reversing this land degradation is … drum roll … Holistic Grazing Management of Grass Fed Beef (or bison or wildebeest or some large herbivore).

So … strange as it sounds … the most “responsible citizen” thing you can do might just be … buying grass fed beef / dairy products from your local rancher!   Maybe more important than voting for president. Read more »

Three cheers for Hungary! Banning Monsanto GMO corn. http://planetsave.com/2011/07/21/hungary-destroys-all-monsanto-gmo-maize-fields/ Gotta love it! But you know … you too can put Monsanto on a much needed “diet” by doing something relatively simple … (a) buy a freezer so that you can (b) stop buying meat, milk and eggs from the (Monsanto supplied) grocery store, and start (c) buying all your meat, milk, cheese, eggs and chicken from a local farmer who raises these items on PASTURE, not GMO corn and soybean feed.  Some may ask,”Why is GMO bad?  Can’t we feed more people with GMO feed?”  The answer is – in the short term yes, but in the long term no.  In fact, the current agricultural paradigm of row cropping is destroying our farmland and thus, our future ability to feed ourselves.  Adopting a new (actually ancient) agricultural paradigm centered around perennial pasture and grazing herbivore herds does the exact opposite – it actually reverses land degradation and will allow us to feed more people over the long term.

A friend recently posted a warning about Whooping Cough (Pertussis) and of course, the mainstream medical community is pushing vaccines to stop it. But are vaccines the answer? I think not. I have been gradually accumulating evidence for a scientific case AGAINST all vaccinations. Let me share some of it with you.

1) Animals in the wild do not get vaccinations of any kind and they do just fine.
2) Joel Salatin, quite possibly the most successful farmer in America right now by a number of measures, does not vaccinate ANY of his animals for anything (and gives no antibiotics) and his animals do just fine.
3) Antoine Bechamp, a rival of Louis Pasteur, taught in the 19th century that microbes are not intrinsically pathogenic. They become pathogenic because of unnatural “terrain” – the environment in the body because of an unnatural diet, stress, etc. I was introduced to Bechamp by Joel Salatin, who uses his principles to keep his animals healthy with no medication.
4) Now over 100 years later, mainstream science is finally starting to discover what Bechamp proposed way back then. Read more »

According to KevinMD.com, it would take about 200 – 747 jet crashes per year to equal the preventable deaths in hospitals …

… statistically speaking hospitals are just about the most dangerous places to be in the United States. Three times as many people die every year due to medical errors in hospitals as die on our highways — 100,000 deaths compared to 34,000. The Journal of the American Medical Association reports that nearly 100,000 people die annually in hospitals from medical errors. Of this group, 80,000 die from hospital acquired infections, many of which can be prevented. Given the above number of admissions that means that 1 out of every 370 people admitted to a hospital dies due to medical errors. So hospitals are very dangerous places.

It would take about 200 747 airplanes to crash annually to equal 100,000 preventable deaths. Imagine the American outcry if one 747 crashed every day for 200 consecutive days in the U.S. The airlines would stand before the nation and the world in disgrace. Currently in our non-transparent health care delivery system, Americans have no way of knowing which hospitals are the most dangerous. We simply take uninformed chances with our lives at stake. LINK HERE Read more »