TRUTH MATTERS

These “primitive” people at left have perfect teeth and perfect health, yet have no toothbrushes, no toothpaste, no dentists, and no doctors.  How is this possible?  I recently made a post about Joel Salatin and Dr. Joel Fuhrman, two people who are really having an impact on my thinking about food and health. My own eating habits have changed thanks to Dr. Joel Fuhrman and my view of agriculture has changed because of Joel Salatin. But one serious question remained in my mind about food and now, thanks to my reading of “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration” by Weston Price DDS, my question is answered! Let me explain. The problem I was having was that on the one hand, Joel Fuhrman promotes a largely vegetable diet – leafy greens and fruits primarily – and recommends minimizing meat, dairy and grains. But on the other hand, Joel Salatin promotes a lot of meat eating and says things like “my eggs cure people.” How to reconcile these two different pieces of information. Enter Weston Price. (Recommended to me by Joel Salatin in his latest book “Folks This Ain’t Normal”). Price did a very comprehensive scientific study of “primitive” Read more »

I have learned recently that all the deserts of the world are man made … caused by bad agricultural practices … overgrazing and tillage primarily. And they are spreading. I learned this by reading Joel Salatin’s books. He talks in his “Salad Bar Beef” book (p. 50) about how the Sahara Desert used to be lush and green in Homer’s day, but that bad agricultural practices caused it to be a desert today. He also talks about the American West and other deserts. He says that research on India’s Rajputana Desert indicates that by elimination of improper grazing, the earth’s surface will revegetate and cool, encouraging rains to fall. Here is an interesting link supporting this information that deserts are caused by MAN … LINK HERE. Apparently, the UN had a conference on Desertification in 1977 and conferences are continuing today. Here is an article on Israel’s efforts to solve this problem … LINK HERE, but … does the UN understand what Joel Salatin and the Rajputana researchers know? Not sure.

In thinking about implementing Joel’s “proper grazing management” solution to Desertification, the biggest question I have is WATER. How do you get water to the desert to irrigate pasture to get this perennial / herbivore / land healing system going in the first place? Well … interestingly … Muammar Ghaddafi (of all people) seems to have hit on something which at least might help … Google “Ghaddafi Man Made River Project”. I have read that there is something like 200 years worth of Nile river flow in these underground aquifers that Ghaddafi tapped. I haven’t done any calculations, but that seems like it could put a pretty big dent in regreening a whole lot of desert. Incidentally, here is an interesting opinion as to why Ghaddafi was killed. LINK HERE. Evidently he had other cool projects like launching a satellite to get Africa independent in their telecom, and starting a central bank for Africa with a gold backed currency.

Rajputana (Rajasthan) Desert links … HERE The foregoing paper also has some discussion of how albedo of the land affects the hydrologic cycle.  HERE is an excellent paper entitled “The Nature and Causes of Land Degredation and Desertification.”  The word “overgrazing” occurs all throughout the paper.  The authors give their opinion … “Our view is that desertification is a human-induced process of land degradation that can range in severity from slight to very severe and in cause from erosion to salinization to toxic chemical accumulation to vegetation degradation, irrespective of climate.”  HERE is a paper on the effect of albedo of the land (or water) surface on precipitation.

This article is about two guys in their fifties who are revolutionizing health care and agriculture – Joel and Joel. That’s Dr. Joel Fuhrman and Joel Salatin. And about a little known but profoundly important scientist – Professor Antoine Bechamp and his much more famous rival – Louis Pasteur. What the two Joel’s are doing is so profound, we really need trumpets to announce it, but I don’t have any, so I’ll make do with my humble blog. I first heard of Joel Salatin back in 1993 when a friend gave me a magazine that advertised one of his books. As the years passed, I kept hearing more about him and in 2008, went to his Field Day with 2 of my kids. Then in 2010, Joel wrote “The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer” and it was that book that really made me realize what a revolutionary thinker Joel really is. Joel is doing some really remarkable things with his farm. First and foremost, he’s Healing the Land. Joel is using herbivores and perennials to actually BUILD soil, in a time when the vast majority of other farmers are DESTROYING soil. That’s huge because one day if we have no soil, we won’t eat. Secondly, Joel is raising animals with no corn (cows aren’t supposed to eat corn), no antibiotics, no immunizations and no chemical fertilizers. And his animals rarely get sick and he raises a lot of them. Last I heard his farm revenues were something like $2 million a year. So Joel Salatin is revolutionizing agriculture and healing the land.

Now in one of Joel’s books where he’s talking about animal health, he mentions a scientist by the name of Antoine Bechamp. And basically what Joel gleaned from Bechamp is that animals don’t need drugs to stay healthy, they just need their “terrain” to be controlled correctly. In other words, they must be fed the right food and managed the way God intended them to be managed. If they are not, then the microbes mutate and become virulent and animals get sick and die unless we medicate them heavily. So Joel took Bechamp’s advice and began moving cows around the pasture and letting them eat what they were designed to eat – grass. And since he does this, he doesn’t have to medicate and he has generally healthy cows. He takes a similar approach with chickens, hogs and rabbits. Brilliant. Why isn’t everyone doing this? Read more »

My fascination with agriculture continues … How many lbs of tomatoes can you get from a single plant? I would have said 30 until last week … But the real answer is 342!! Just finished reading this book “How to Grow World Record Tomatoes” by Charles Wilber … Incredible! The picture is of Charles Wilber standing on a large step ladder by his tomato plants! The secret is to do it organically, that is, without chemical fertilizer … Wilber uses Kudzu compost and other organic mulches. He also uses indeterminate tomato varieties like Better Boy VFN and trains the plant to have 18 stems which are fastened to 3′ diameter X 5′ high cages stacked on top of one another to make a 15 to 20′ tall cage system. The only things I don’t like about Wilber’s system is digging the soil and making compost manually. I like Patricia Lanza’s “Lasagna Garden” system for soil building. For my 2012 garden season, I am experimenting with a 5′ x 5′ Lasagna bed made with alternating layers of shredded newspaper, peat moss, horse manure, hay and soil from an accidental Hugelkultur bed in my back yard. It’s accidental because it was formed by Curtis Clemons’ bulldozer 11 years ago when he cleared my back yard forest of smaller trees to make it look like a park. He didn’t know he was inadvertently making a Hugelkultur bed, but that’s exactly what he made and now I’m benefiting from it. What used to be a pile of brush and tree trunks is now a mound of beautiful humus full of earthworms and organic material. Google Hugelkultur for more info. I will finish my bed with some wood ashes and blood/bone meal. I wonder if digging some soil from where I buried our dead goat 2 years ago would work just as well as blood/bone meal? :-) I bought some red wigglers (earthworms) from the bait store and layered them into my 5′ x 5′ bed. My plan is to let the earthworms and friendly bacteria work their magic all winter, then hopefully set my own tomato production record next summer. I am thinking about “cooking” the bed by covering with black landscape fabric. Stay tuned for a full report!

Big Bang Cosmology is broken! And a couple of physicists have the fix.  Interestingly, one is a young earth creationist and the other is an Israeli.  Just as Newtonian physics was inadequate for explaining the motion of Mercury and other phenomena, so the failure of Big Bang cosmology calls for a New Physics, based on the “Cosmological Special Relativity” of the late Moshe Carmeli. In this fascinating book (2007), Dr. John Hartnett explains how prior to 1915 astronomers proposed ‘dark matter’ or possibly a hidden planet (Vulcan) to explain the slightly anomalous orbit of Mercury. But in 1915, with the publication of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, this problem was solved. In fact, Einstein was able to calculate exactly the 43 arcseconds that had previously been measured. This meant that ‘dark matter’ was unnecessary and all that had been lacking was new, correct physics.

Fast forward to the early 21st century and we have a similar problem when contemplating the universe. Read more »

I recently got in a discussion about the historical reliability of the 4 Gospels and I realized that I really don’t know very much about this topic. So … I went to a source that has served me well in the area of Apologetics for many years – Josh McDowell, “Evidence That Demands a Verdict.” I’ve only just begun, but here’s one thing I found significant. It’s a statement by Sir William Ramsay.

“Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy … this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians.”[1]

He also wrote

“Luke’s history is unsurpassed in respect of its trustworthiness.” [2]

Who is Sir Willam Ramsay? According to McDowell he is one of the greatest archaeologists of all time. Here’s Wikipedia on him …

Sir William Mitchell Ramsay (15 March 1851, Glasgow –20 April 1939) was a Scottish archaeologist and New Testament scholar. By his death in 1939 he had become the foremost authority of his day on the history of Asia Minor and a leading scholar in the study of the New Testament.
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William Ramsay paid particular interest in the New Testament events, particularly the Book of Acts and Pauline Epistles. When he first went to Asia Minor, many of the cities mentioned in Acts had no known location and almost nothing was known of their detailed history or politics. The Acts of the Apostles was the only record and Ramsay fully expected his own research to prove the author of Acts hopelessly inaccurate since no man could possibly know the details of Asia Minor more than a hundred years of the event. He therefore set out to put the writer of Acts on trial. He devoted his life to unearthing the ancient cities and documents of Asia Minor. After a lifetime of study, however, he concluded: ‘Further study…showed that the book could bear the most minute scrutiny as an authority for the facts of the Aegean world, and that it was written with such judgment, skill, art and perception of truth as to be a model of historical statement’ (The Bearing of Recent Discovery, p. 85). On page 89 of the same book, Ramsay accounted, ‘I set out to look for truth on the borderland where Greece and Asia meet, and found it there [in Acts]. You may press the words of Luke in a degree beyond any other historian’s and they stand the keenest scrutiny and the hardest treatment…’ When Ramsay turned his attention to Paul’s letters, most of which the critics dismissed as forgeries, he concluded that all thirteen New Testament letters that claimed to have been written by Paul were really his. [3]

[1] Ramsay, Sir W. M., The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915, p. 222.
[2] Ramsay, W. M., St. Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1962 (originally published in 1895), p. 81
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Mitchell_Ramsay

In 1776, the same year of the American Declaration of Independence, Adam Smith wrote “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,” generally referred to by its shortened title “The Wealth of Nations.” What makes a nation wealthy? According to this summary of Smith’s work, “Smith held that the wealth of a nation, what we today call the income of a nation, depends upon (1) the productivity of labor and (2) the proportion of laborers who are usefully or productively employed.” Smith was all about division of labor and productivity and the origin of money and such.

But hold on. What is wealth? What is it really? At it’s core? Am I wealthy because I have indoor plumbing? Or because I drive a Volvo? Or because I can choose between a hundred different kinds of boxed cereal at the grocery store? Or because I have a cell phone? Or because I have a big bank account? Hmm. Is my nation (America) wealthy because most people in America have all these things? Is my nation wealthy because we have thousands of massive farms which grow millions of bushels of corn and soybeans using huge combines with air conditiong, TV and GPS? What if those farms (and those farming practices) are destroying our soil instead of building it? Then what? What if 100 years from now America is like the Sahara Desert? Will we be wealthy then? Something tells me that indoor plumbing and Volvos will be irrelevant if we cannot eat.

So what is real tangible wealth? (I’m interested in TANGIBLE wealth in this article, which is to be distinguished from REAL wealth, that is, Treasure in Heaven. See Matthew 6:19-21.)

I would have to say that at the bottom of it, at the foundation of of it … THE (TANGIBLE) WEALTH OF NATIONS IS LAND. Let me repeat that in bold type.

THE WEALTH OF NATIONS IS LAND

And it so happens that our land – our farmland that is – is being destroyed. Year by year. Inch by inch. If you don’t believe me, read Joel Salatin’s book “The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer.” He’s the guy who Chipotle buys their meat from. And in my opinion he’s one of the most important visionaries of modern times. He should get a Nobel prize but I’m sure that will never happen. After all, he’s a lunatic. Anyone who says they are a farmer but doesn’t own a plow is a lunatic, right? Read more »

** NEWS FLASH ** AMERICAN FARMERS ARE DESTROYING OUR ABILITY TO FEED OURSELVES AND THEY DON’T EVEN KNOW IT.

In 2008, I went to Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm (Joel is the guy who sells meat to Chipotle) for Field Day. I came back very inspired and wanted to join his movement somehow. My wife thought I was crazy talking about “healing the land” and such. But is “healing the land” a crazy idea? Is the land even “sick”? Why does it need to be healed?

Well … yes … the more I read, the more I realize that yes, it IS quite sick and yes, it DOES need healing. What am I talking about? Well Joel Salatin has made me realize that tillage and row cropping destroys soil. Let me say that again …

TILLAGE AND ROW CROPPING DESTROYS SOIL Read more »

Shapiro is awesome! James Shapiro that is – bacterial geneticist at the University of Chicago. Two of his papers are a MUST read for anyone wanting to put the final nail in the coffin of naturalism. First, there is his 1997 paper, “A Third Way” – read the whole thing. It’s short and laymen like me can understand it. Secondly his 2010 paper, “Mobile DNA and Evolution in the 21st Century.” Read the conclusion. It’s all you need. Now let me whet your appetite … From “Third Way” …

Localized random mutation, selection operating “one gene at a time” (John Maynard Smith’s formulation), and gradual modification of individual functions are unable to provide satisfactory explanations for the molecular data, no matter how much time for change is assumed. There are simply too many potential degrees of freedom for random variability and too many interconnections to account for.
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It has been a surprise to learn how thoroughly cells protect themselves against precisely the kinds of accidental genetic change that, according to conventional theory, are the sources of evolutionary variability.
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(3) Mobile Genetic Elements and Natural Genetic Engineering. The second major lesson of molecular studies into the origins of genetic change is that all cells possess multiple biochemical agents for natural genetic engineering–processes that include the cutting and splicing of DNA molecules into new sequence arrangements.
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In other words, genetic change can be massive and non-random.
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The point of this discussion is that our current knowledge of genetic change is fundamentally at variance with neo-Darwinist postulates.  We have progressed from the Constant Genome, subject only to random, localized changes at a more or less constant mutation rate, to the Fluid Genome, subject to episodic, massive and non-random reorganizations capable of producing new functional architectures. Inevitably, such a profound advance in awareness of genetic capabilities will dramatically alter our understanding of the evolutionary process. Nonetheless, neo-Darwinist writers like Dawkins continue to ignore or trivialize the new knowledge and insist on gradualism as the only path for evolutionary change. Read more »

My close friends know that I have over the years had a fascination with agriculture – i.e. food production. My first foray into food production was with greenhouse tomatoes. My friends will tell you that the tomatoes were wonderful but making a living at it was hard and I sold that business. My next attempt in agriculture was with grass fed beef. This enterprise was inspired by Joel Salatin and his revolutionary agricultural practices. Unfortunately – again – my specific enterprise failed, but I continue to be inspired by Joel Salatin, my latest read of his being “The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer.” Since about 2001 or so, my father has been praying and encouraging me – of all people – to help the Wai Wai Indians (he’s a missionary to them) improve their agriculture. This year I made my first visit to the Wai Wais in 31 years and my visit made a profound impact on my view of how people feed themselves. Shortly after my return, I was given information by a lady at our church about how the American diet with it’s refined foods and excessive protein and dairy is literally killing Americans by the truckload — by causing heart disease, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune disorders and the like. A month or so later, I watched “Food Inc.” So my fascination with food production continues. I don’t know where it will lead, but I have a funny feeling that God has plans for me related to agriculture.

With that background, I would urge you to read the following insightful article which I ran across just today …

Getting Used to Life Without Food, Part 1
Wall Street, BP, Bio-Ethanol and the Death of Millions
By William Engdahl06/29/2011
http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/william-engdahl/2011/06/29/getting-used-to-life-without-food-part-1 Here’s a snippet from the article …

The record rise in grain and food prices in recent years is not a mere Wall Street profit gimmick, although obscene profits are being made. Rather, it is apparently an integral part of a long-term strategy whose roots go back to the years just after World War Two when Nelson Rockefeller and his brothers tried to organize the global food chain along the same monopoly model they had used for world oil. Food would henceforth become just another commodity like oil or tin or silver whose scarcity and price could ultimately be controlled by a small group of powerful trading insiders. At the same time the Rockefeller brothers were expanding their global business reach from oil to agriculture in the developing world through their technology-driven Green Revolution scheme after the war, they were also financing a little-noticed project at Harvard University. The project would form the infrastructure for their plan to globalize world food production under the central control of a handful of private corporations.

Its creators gave it the name ‘agribusiness,’ in order to differentiate it from traditional farmer-based agriculture — the cultivation of crops for human sustenance and nutrition. The push to place world national governments’ emergency grain reserves into private hands was merely a logical expansion of the original Rockefeller agribusiness strategy, as was their highly mis-represented “Green Revolution” which at day’s end merely promoted a huge sale of US agriculture products from John Deere tractors (using large volumes of Standard Oil Rockefeller products) to US chemical fertilizers made by other companies in the Rockefeller orbit—forcing a trend to large scale farming and forcing millions off the land into cities where they former a cheap labor pool for large multinationals. The highly-touted harvest yields turned out to be actual losses after several harvests. 1