Why you should start “voting” at the grocery store (instead of your polling place)

Posted in Healthy Food & Agriculture on July 14th, 2013 by dhawkinsmo

HOW TO SLAY THE FEDERAL “BEAST” (And the Monsanto Beast and the Health Care Beast and Big Pharma Beast as well) (This post prompted by all the posts I see on Facebook about politics)

1) Begin “voting” at the grocery store instead of your polling place (voting at the polling place is getting us nowhere)
2) Stop buying grocery store corn fed beef which is horribly destructive to human health, our ecosystems and our land, nasty corn fed lifeless milk and concentration camp eggs
3) Call Art Ozias at Breezy Hill Farm in Centerview, MO and get an education about “real” beef, “real” milk and “real eggs.” Call David Kesten of David’s Pasture LLC for a much improved chicken (compared to grocery store chicken) and “real” eggs also
4) Read everything you can from the Weston A. Price Foundation and about the Paleo Diet / Lifestyle and Google “Blue Zones Oprah”
5) If everyone in America would do nothing more that Steps 1-4 above, we would see great progress toward the goals in my title above. Why? How?

Because it would revitalize rural America causing millions of Americans to realize their dream of moving OUT of the cities and back to the country and small towns (where we all belong). As this occurs, people would become more self sufficient / local community sufficient and would need LESS $ income, therefore less taxes both federal and state (thus “starving the beast”). There would be less demand for corn fed beef (most corn goes through cows) and thus for the “Franken-corn” and the “Franken-soybeans” from Monsanto used to feed the Franken-cows whose Franken-beef and Franken-milk are slowly killing us all. We would all be much more healthy and fit and this would solve the Health Care Crisis and reduce our dependence on Big Pharma to keep us healthy (Big Pharma doesn’t actually keep us healthy at all – it just masks our symptoms). We would all drive less because we wouldn’t need to go to the city very often because we would be either producing our own food or trading with neighbors for it and the more people that practiced this kind of lifestyle, the more access we would have to LOCAL Upwards soccer clubs and baseball leagues instead of having to drive so far. There would be less dangerous trucks clogging I-70 because we would be buying much less trucked in food and if we got radically simple with our housing (you’d be surprised what 1 guy and a small portable sawmill can do), then there would be less trucking for building materials as well.

End of rant. :-)

“Germs” Are Not Evil! (We Baptists Should Have Known This of All People)

Posted in Creation/Evolution, General Science, Healthy Food & Agriculture on July 13th, 2013 by dhawkinsmo

I’m sure you’ve all seen this sign or a similar signs in bathrooms. Evil, horrible looking little green monster representing the “germ” that’s out to get us, but “Oh thank heaven, Proctor and Gamble to the rescue!” Our little darlings will not die from some dread disease because the wonderful people at Proctor make anti-microbial soap which everyone should use to kill those evil nasty germs.

Well, hold on. That’s a really nice marketing message that sells a lot of P&G product, but it’s just not true. Or at best, it’s a half truth. The truth is – and we Baptists should have known this better than others because we read our Bibles more (I’ve heard Catholics call us the “Bible Cult”) – Genesis 1:25 states that “God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.”

Did you catch that? Germs creepeth. Do they not? And God said all these critters are “good” right? And nothing in Genesis 3 about the Fall & Curse indicates anything to me that microbes suddenly went from being “good” to being “evil.” (I differ from Answers in Genesis on this one) So why are we buying a marketing message from P&G that says otherwise? Can someone please tell me? Well, I think the answer is that all of us (including Baptists) like to pick and choose which Scriptures to emphasize and which ones not to emphasize, and this is one which is never preached on (or perhaps I was sleeping through that one). Too bad it’s not once in awhile because it’s a pretty important message. If we study this out, we find that disease is not “caused by germs” as we have been taught. (Germ Theory proposed by Robert Koch)  Rather, disease is caused by living our lives contrary to God’s Design for Nature. This involves food, work habits and rest, and also things like freedom from stress, worry and guilt, and a focus on others, rather than one’s self. Many of us are very good students of the Bible, but may I suggest that in this area, we could use a little improvement? More on the fallacies of Germ Theory found HERE.

By the way … I was first introduced to the idea that “germs are not inherently evil” by none other than the “Pastor of the Pasture” – Joel Salatin.  I think it was in his book “Salad Bar Beef.”  In this book, Salatin introduced me to Antoine Bechamp, rival of Pasteur, who taught that disease was caused by “conditions” in the body (he called it “terrain”), not by germs.  Yes, the germs attack the body, but only if “provoked” by unhealthy conditions in the body.

The “Paleo” Lifestyle

Posted in Healthy Food & Agriculture on July 10th, 2013 by dhawkinsmo

INTEREST IN THE “PALEO” LIFESTYLE IS GAINING STEAM. At the forefront of this movement is the Weston A. Price Foundation, founded thanks to the work of Dr. Weston A. Price, DDS, founder of the research arm of what is now the American Dental association. Dr. Price and others are quoted in the follow recent paper (2009) in the Journal for Dental Research. To summarize the research simply, eat and live like a cave man and you’ll have near perfect teeth and near perfect health. OK, OK, I know we don’t wanna live like cave men, but we can all get very close to that in terms of food and exercise, just by buying a freezer, contacting your local farmer and moving your diet toward 100% grass finished beef, lamb and dairy and pastured eggs. (ideally from hens with no grain supplement, but near impossible to find). For Weston Price’s original work free online, here’s the link … http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200251h.html. For a great summary of the Paleo diet from a Price / Mellanby fan / blogger … click here … http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/03/reversing-tooth-decay.html. The beautiful thing about transitioning to this type of eating / lifestyle is that doing so will contribute to reversing desertification / topsoil loss, pasture / woodland degradation, species extinction and global warming. For those involved in PRODUCING this type of food, I can think of few better lifestyles PLUS I know of no better way of sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with people than by first showing them how to feed themselves.

“Hunter-gatherers are typically characterized as being largely free from dental caries [cavities], periodontal disease, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancers, and obesity (Truswell, 1977). For instance, dental authorities report “never [having] seen paradontal [sic] disease in the Zulus living in their native reserves” (Cleave and Campbell, 1966), or Eskimos untouched by civilization with “magnificent dental development” and “so high an immunity to dental caries” (Price, 1945). The scarcity of dental CNCDs among huntergatherers coincides with an absence of systemic CNCDs. Prevalence of diabetes among Zulus living in tribal conditions was “extremely rare,” and for Eskimos it was reported to be less than 2 per 10,000 people (Price, 1945). Other diseases, such as coronary thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, gall stones, and rheumatoid arthritis, were similarly rare in populations with hunter-gatherer lifestyles such as reported in Africa, Australia, or other continents prior to the adoption of Western lifestyles (Trowell, 1960). When individuals with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle transitioned to Western lifestyles as a result of agriculturization, migration, colonization, or other circumstances, CNCDs appeared. Within this context, CNCDs are referred to as diseases of civilization, degenerative diseases, Western diseases, diseases of modernization, or New World diseases. The change from native foods to modern foods in one Eskimo community was reportedly associated with a 144-fold increase indental caries (Price, 1945). The prevalence of diabetes in this community is now considered “a major public health problem” (Acton et al., 2002). Zulus transitioning to Western lifestyles experienced a quick deterioration of periodontal tissues and an increase in the prevalence of diabetes from rare to that observed in Westerners (Cleave, 1974). Ethiopian Jews migrating to Israel were afflicted by a six-fold increase in caries rates (Sarnat et al., 1987) and “a rapid deterioration in periodontal status” that occurred hand-in-hand with the development of “early signs of risk factors for diabetes” (Trostler, 1997). Several other diseases typical of civilization have been documented in human migration studies: allergies (Geller-Bernstein and Kenett, 2004), cancers (Stemmermann et al., 1979), and cardiovascular diseases (Robertson et al., 1977). These nutrition transition reports are typically narrative—and consequently reflect a low level of evidence—but are convincing because of the consistency of the reports across investigators, populations, and scientific disciplines. Some reports suggested that the CNCDs associated with nutrition transitions were reversible (Price, 1945; O’Dea et al., 1980; O’Keefe and Cordain, 2004), a finding which is consistent with World Wars I and II evidence. http://www.ohsu.edu/xd/education/schools/school-of-medicine/departments/clinical-departments/psychiatry/grand-rounds/upload/Dietary-Carbs-Dental-Systemic-Dz.pdf

America the Beautiful?

Posted in Christianity/America on July 4th, 2013 by dhawkinsmo

Every July 4th, many people sing “America the Beautiful” and I have been one of them for many years. But lately, some pretty big events in my life have caused me to question EVERYTHING, including some very entrenched beliefs about America, our history and the songs we sing every year. They say that to ASSUME things makes an ASS out of U and ME. (Get it?) And I (and probably 99% of Americans with me), have always *assumed* that everything in this song plus everything we have been taught about America is true. Well, it’s not I’m afraid, and I think it’s high time we sort out some of the fact from some of the fiction. Let’s take a look.

First, the title … “America, the Beautiful.” How did “America” get its name?  Turns out it comes from an explorer named Amerigo Vespucci. You can read about him HERE. Why isn’t it called “Columbia” after Columbus who (supposedly) discovered America? Good question and the article above explains. The name “America” is based on the European (German specifically) perspective but the truth is, there have been many “discoverers” of “America” throughout history, for example, the Chinese. The Chinese discovered “America” long before Columbus did.  You can read about that in Gavin Menzies’ recent book, “1421: The Year China Discovered America.” Fascinating read.  So if we really wanted to be accurate about our country’s name, we would have to say that, for good or evil, or in reality a little of both, it was named by it’s current reigning conquerors – Europeans.  How about the “beautiful” part?  Is “America” beautiful?  Sure in some ways, but in other ways not so much. Stay with me and let’s explore this a bit. Read more »