Reversing Global Climate Change with Holistic Management
by Carolyn Lee
May 27, 2008
It's important to emphasize that the use of soil carbon sequestration as a way to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere is not just some theoretical construct. This is a natural process that occurs daily in every single tree, plant, and bush on earth! Plants take carbon dioxide from the air through photosynthesis and give oxygen back to it. We all learned that in elementary school science. I'm saying this because there are some very risky ideas being floated in some scientific circles about possible ways to reduce CO2 levels quickly. These ideas are theoretical. They are untested on a large scale and could have disastrous side effects and consequences, if they were to go awry.
How can they even consider taking such risks?! It's unconscionable! It would be absurd, and utterly irresponsible, to experiment on our already fragile planet in such a manner, when a simple, natural, inexpensive process already exists to remove CO2, namely soil carbon sequestration.
No harm can come to the planet in returning the excess CO2 to the soil, only restored soil health and productivity! There is no downside, and there is no risk involved. It's a win-win situation!
My guess is that it's simply a lack of exposure to this idea that has kept it from being more widely adopted. That's why you can make a difference just by passing this information along, to friends as well as everyone involved in the governmental decision-making process.
For More Information
At the bottom of this posting is a list of a variety of related online resources. Become informed yourself, and share this information with others.
Holistic Management International
Now I want to introduce you to a non-profit called Holistic Management International. HMI has been employing restorative land management techniques for more than twenty years. But more importantly, they already have cadres of trained, certified, professional educators available for consultation in the following regions: the United States, Canada, Mexico, Africa, Australia/New Zealand, and Europe. In other words, the expertise is available and ready to go! But their efforts need to be undertaken on a much larger scale worldwide than at present, in order to make a substantial reduction in planetary CO2 in the short amount of time we have left before triggering any more tipping points. There's no time to waste.
With Holistic Management we can increase rangeland health and turn the tide, reversing much of the environmental devastation that has occurred.
Already, more than 30 million acres worldwide are being managed holistically.
Earth’s Breathing System at Risk
The earth’s ecosystem is stressed and malfunctioning due to dramatically diminished biodiversity, rapidly increasing worldwide desertification (land turning to desert), and global climate change. These are three legs of a single stool, not to be separated. This malfunctioning ecosystem has put the earth’s very breathing system at risk, among other adverse consequences, leaving the planet covered with damaged land that has lost its ability to remove sufficient amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere.
The Overlooked, Low-Tech Solution to Climate Change
There is a solution available to address the problem, one that has been overlooked. This solution to the problem of the CO2 we have put in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels and crop and forage residue is low-tech, low-cost and risk-free. It can be implemented with the resources we possess now. Most important, it is simple. With Holistic Management we can increase rangeland health and turn the tide, reversing much of the environmental devastation that has occurred.
Holistic Management®, which works in harmony with fundamental natural processes, is safe, secure, and offers great hope for a better future. The benefits of applying Holistic Management® Financial Planning, Grazing Planning, Land Planning and Biological Monitoring to the problem of climate change range from massively reducing carbon dioxide in our atmosphere to ensuring food and water security to producing greater revenue than the cost of implementation.
Already, more than 30 million acres worldwide are being managed holistically.
Biodiversity, Desertification and Global Climate Change are all Interconnected.
How Much Environmental Benefit Can Be Expected from Reversing Desertification?
The earth's dry rangelands alone are estimated to constitute over 12 billion acres, and the medium to higher rainfall rangelands increases the area significantly. A small increase in soil organic matter over these billions of acres would remove billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere, store it, and go far toward restoring and permanently maintaining atmospheric balance. At the same time, any increase in soil organic matter enhances the soil's ability to store water.
Healthy Land & CO2
For the earth's soils to once more sequester carbon as they formerly did it is essential to restore living soils with ever increasing organic matter and abundant life forms. When we accomplish that, both rangelands and croplands will remove billions of tons of atmospheric carbon and store it in organic matter for ages.
Rangelands
Non-cropland areas, commonly called rangelands, include grasslands, savannas, man-made deserts, national parks, ranches, pastoral areas and deciduous forests. By using grazing and animal impact on our planet’s vast rangelands to restore lands to health and increase organic matter in soils, we can reverse the desertification that has occurred. This has been demonstrated repeatedly for nearly fifty years in several countries.
Croplands
Today, most agricultural soils are far from healthy, having lost much of their organic matter and structure due to the practices of industrial agriculture and other factors. Agricultural practices that mimic nature and restore soil health will remove and store carbon from the atmosphere risk-free. The knowledge to begin doing much of what is required is already available.
The Urgent Need To Reduce Biomass Burning
According to one NASA expert, every year, the equivalent of half of Africa, is burned at some point. This is the biomass burning that occurs in forests and grasslands around the world under traditional land management practices. Biomass burning releases CO2 into the atmosphere in amounts that may rival releases due to cars burning gasoline. In fact, 40% of CO2 annual production is biomass burning.
Holistic Management® vastly increases the productivity of land while significantly reducing any need for grassland burning by utilizing livestock and wildlife to maintain grasslands.
Cattle, Methane, Myth & Reality
“Globally, ruminant livestock produce about 80 million metric tons of methane annually, accounting for about 28% of global methane emissions from human-related activities.” – U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. March 21, 2007
Myth Grazing cattle, by definition, are a leading cause of global climate change for two reasons: they cause desertification by overgrazing land; they add methane to the atmosphere.
Reality Overgrazing results from traditional grazing management practices and deep-seated misconceptions about animal/plant relationships. While all herbivores add methane to the atmosphere, no studies have been performed that reflect methane production by animals on ranges under planned grazing management.
Myth Desertification is caused by overstocking and overgrazing by livestock. This has been a deeply held belief among agriculturalists for centuries.
Reality Desertification is the result of too few animals on the land, not too many. Healthy and significant levels of animal impact from animals simulating the behavior of wild herds on rangeland sets up a chain reaction of events that help heal the land, increase organic matter in the soil and remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store vast amounts of water.
Myth Cattle, which produce methane, are responsible for more greenhouse gases than automobiles.
Reality The research data vilifying cattle has been obtained from mainstream, industrial, feedlot agriculture operations. There is an enormous distinction between animals in factory settings overfed on grains they did not evolve to eat and animals grazing on ranges as they evolved to do. Reports blaming cattle for climate change have caused tremendous damage, and unnecessary confusion, by distracting the debate from some of the genuine contributors to global warming, as well as the crucial role cattle can play in solving the problem.
Quotes from Experts about Cattle and the Environment
These experts tell a much different story than the widespread media reports about cattle that appeared in early 2007. Here are some unsensationalized perspectives on cattle that suggest methane research would produce different results if performed on land and cattle under Holistic Management®.
“Better grazing management and dietary supplementation have been identified as the most effective ways to improve efficiency and reduce emissions from this sector because they improve animal nutrition and reproductive efficiency... Improved livestock management can also reduce atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide through the mechanism of soil carbon sequestration on grazing lands... The bottom line – improved livestock management – is good for the environment and makes dollars and sense.” –U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. March 21, 2007.
“Implementing proper grazing management practices to improve the quality of pastures increases animal productivity and has a significant effect on reducing CH4 emission from fermentation in the rumen." –DeRamus, H. Alan, Terry C. Ct, Dean D. Giampola, and Peter C. Dickison. “Methane Emissions of Beef Cattle on Forages: Efficiency of Grazing Management Systems.” Journal of Environmental Quality Volume 32 (2003): 269-277.
“In many parts of the country, beef cattle are raised using a continuous stocking approach despite the numerous economic and environmental drawbacks of this technique. Continuous stocking is a management system where cattle have uninterrupted use of a unit of grazing land throughout the grazing season.. Because controlled grazing leads to more productive cows and greater liveweight gains per acre, producers can benefit from increased profits while reducing methane emissions per pound of beef produced. An additional benefit of controlled grazing is the increased ability of the pastures to act as a sink for carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas. As pasture quality improves with controlled grazing, carbon builds up in the soil and plant biomass, reducing the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.” –Agriculture Education, University of Missouri, comp. Global Climate Change and Environmental Stewardship by Ruminant Livestock Producers. Missouri: National Council for Agricultural Education, 1998.
“While methane emissions from enteric fermentation represent the transformation of carbon already in circulation between the earth and the atmosphere, burning fossil fuel always results in a net increase in greenhouse gases... In a high-forage system, you're fixing more carbon than you are leaching, so you're actually subtracting from the greenhouse effect... Best efficiency is found in the compromise between utilizing the most energy-efficient feed source (forage) while maintaining herd production high enough to gain reasonable feed conversion efficiency." –Michael Main, Research Associate, Nova Scotia Agricultural College
Seven Things You Can Do To Help
1. Support Holistic Management® International’s outreach efforts to educate others about the need for animals to improve land health and sequester carbon.
2. Buy locally grown organic produce and grassfed meat & dairy.
3. Buy carbon credits for all your personal fuel emissions.
4. Vote with your dollars. Invest in products that conserve resources (water conserving appliances, on-demand water heaters, photovoltaics, etc.)
5. Support low-tech solutions for getting carbon out of the air and high-tech solutions for keeping new carbon from getting in the air.
-- Go to www.factoryfarm.org to learn more about confinement animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Be sure to watch The Meatrix.
-- Go to my blog posting about soy, to learn about the health hazards associated with the consumption of soy foods. A tremendous amount of information about soy is available through the Weston A. Price Foundation, among others.
Monsanto's Harvest of Fear By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele Vanity Fair. May 2008 Issue. Monsanto already dominates America's food chain with its genetically modified seeds ...
Agricultural policy in the United States is definitely going in the wrong direction. Confined animal feedlot operations (CAFOs) and the monoculture planting practices of agri-business are contributing mightily to global warming! The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has been supportive of these practices for decades now. The USDA needs to make some policy changes immediately!
Improper land management has been a major cause of the rise in greenhouse gases over the last century. When land is overused, it becomes degraded and loses its ability to store carbon in the soil. It actually becomes a net contributor to the problem, as any carbon which was previously stored there is released into the atmosphere. Soils can be rebuilt and returned to health.
Education is the key. If the USDA were to begin to advocate the use of sound grassfarming techniques, that would be a big step in the right direction. Let's make sure they choose to take that step.
What can you do to help?
Send all the soil carbon sequestration-related information on this site to your senators and congressmen/women. Probably 99% of them have never heard of this perfectly natural and cost-effective method of reducing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Ask them to order the U.S. Department of Agriculture to support this nation's grass farmers, instead of trying to drive them out of business. Tell them to support a greater emphasis on grassfarming techniques at our publicly-funded, land grant universities. Tell them we want this nation's farmers to be a part of the solution rather than continue to be part of the problem.
Summaries of Studies
Here are summaries of some studies that demonstrate the environmental benefits of grassfarming. These summaries are drawn from the following site: http://www.eatwild.com/environment.html
When properly managed, raising animals on pasture instead of factory farms is a net benefit to the environment. To begin with, a diet of grazed grass requires much less fossil fuel than a feedlot diet of dried corn and soy. On pasture, grazing animals do their own fertilizing and harvesting. The ground is covered with greens all year round, so it does an excellent job of harvesting solar energy and holding on to top soil and moisture. As you will read in the bulletins below, grazed pasture removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere more effectively than any land use, including forestland and ungrazed prairie, helping to slow global warming.
It’s a different story in a confinement operation. Here, the animals are crowded into sheds or kept outdoors on barren land and all their feed is shipped to them from distant fields. On those fields, the crops are treated with fossil-fuel based fertilizers, sprayed with pesticides, and planted, tilled, and harvested with heavy equipment. Each of these operations requires non-renewable fuel. Then the feed is shipped to feed manufacturers where it is dried, flaked or pelleted, and mixed with other ingredients and then, finally, shipped to the waiting animals, using yet more fossil fuel.
There is also a day-for-night difference in “manure management” on the two systems. On well-managed pasture-based farms, the animals spread their manure evenly over the soil where it becomes a natural source of organic fertilizer. The manure improves the quality of the grass, which increases the rate of gain of the animals. It’s a closed, sustainable system.
On factory farms, the excrement builds up in the feedlots and sheds where it fouls the air and releases ammonia and other gasses to the eco-system. The fumes stress and sicken the animals and farm workers, and they lower the quality of life of people in nearby homes. To get rid of the waste, it is shipped to nearby fields where it overloads the land with nutrients. The excess nitrogen and phosphorous pollute the soil and ground water and drain off into streams, rivers, and estuaries where it can create “dead zones” that threaten the fish population.
The news bulletins below provide more detailed information about the environmental benefits of keeping animals home on the range.
Keep ‘Em Moving to Reduce Greenhouse Gasses
All ruminants—including cattle, sheep, bison, and goats—belch up a significant amount of methane gas as they digest their grass-based diet. Methane gas is a potent contributor to global warming, so reducing methane production is an important step in protecting the environment.
Animal scientists have discovered that dividing pasture land into separate areas or “paddocks” and carefully managing the movement of cattle through those paddocks produces the highest quality grasses. Cattle that graze on this succulent grass produce as much as 20 percent less methane. This style of ranching is called “Management Intensive Grazing” or MiG, and it’s practiced by most of the ranchers on eatwild.com.
DeRamus, H. A., T. C. Clement, D. D. Giampola, and P. C. Dickison. "Methane Emissions of Beef Cattle on Forages: Efficiency of Grazing Management Systems." J Environ Qual 32, no. 1 (2003): 269-77.
Long-Lived Cows Reduce Global Warming
Bossy has a short lifespan when she is raised in a confinement dairy, which is the way most cows are raised today. She provides a very high volume of milk, partly due to hormone injections and a high-grain diet, but she lasts for only 2-3 years. Then infertility, disease, physical problems, or inflammation end her milking career, and she is sold at auction for hamburger.
Cows raised on grass are healthier and more fertile, making them good milk producers for up to twelve years. These long-lived and more contented cows may reduce greenhouse gas production (methane) between 10 and 11 percent according to a British Study.
Garnsworthy, P.C., The environmental impact of fertility in dairy cows: a modeling approach to predict methane and ammonia emissions, Animal Feed Science & Technology, 2004. 112: 211-223.
Pasture reduces topsoil erosion by 93 percent
Currently, the United States is losing three billion tons of nutrient-rich topsoil each year. Growing corn and soy for animal feed using conventional methods causes a significant amount of this soil loss. Compared with row crops, pasture reduces soil loss by as much as 93 percent.
(Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food, Robert P. Stone and Neil Moore, Fact Sheet 95-089 )
The Sierra Club recommends grass-fed beef
The Sierra Club recognizes the ecological advantages of raising cattle on pasture and therefore endorses grass-fed beef. The following remarks appear on its website: "Spared of the necessity of antibiotics and pesticides, grass-fed beef is also friendlier to the environment. Ranchers in the grass-fed market tend to be keen stewards of the land, concerned with proper grazing techniques and the nurturing of native grasses. Indeed, many such ranchers think of themselves as grass farmers first, cattle ranchers second."
Organic beef came in second. "If you can't find grass-fed beef, consider organic beef as a next best choice. While organically raised animals may still be confined in feeding operations and finished on grain rather than natural forage, they should at least be free of hormones, antibiotics and pesticides."
A growing number of grassfarmers are practicing "green grazing" or "conservation grazing," a type of management that is specifically designed to restore grazing land to a more natural and sustainable condition.
The T.O. Cattle Company in San Juan Bautista, California has been practicing green grazing since 1993. This process involves carefully controlling herd size and herd movement to "mimic natural disturbance of native ungulates on the landscape." In other words, the cattle are managed so that they have a similar impact on the land as native grazers, which in California include Tule elk, pronghorn, and deer.
Careful monitoring of the project shows that green grazing has: 1) increased the number and vigor of native plants, 2) increased the vegetative cover of stream banks, 3) expanded wetlands, 4) hastened the natural decomposition of cow manure, and 5) extended the growing season of the grassland. In addition, from 1998 to 2000, the percentage of perennial grasses increased from 40 to 50 percent.
Results of this grazing experiment were presented at the Society for Range Management – 2001 Annual Conference in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii.
Lambs control insects and increase crop yield
Insects can take a toll on alfalfa in the winter months. The usual procedure is to spray the fields with insecticides. A group of forward-thinking California scientists decided to apply lambs instead. Letting the lambs graze the winter stubble eliminated the insect problem and also increased the next year's hay crop by 14% over untreated land and 24% over fields treated with the insecticide Lorsban. Let little lambs eat ivy and alfalfa.
(J.N. Guerrero et al. J. of Animal Science Vol 80, Supplement 2, p. 126. "Grazing lambs control insects in alfalfa.")
Grassland may absorb more CO2 than trees
It's a well known fact that trees draw carbon dioxide from the air and store it as carbon, thereby slowing the rate of global warming. But a new study from Duke University reveals that restoring native grasslands might be a better solution than planting trees in wetter areas of the country.
"Grasses are deceptively productive," says lead investigator Robert Jackson. "You don't see where all the carbon goes, so there is a misconception that woody species [such as trees and shrubs] store more carbon. That's just not the case." Grasses store vast amounts of carbon in their underground root mass.
Raising cattle on grass is one way to make it financially feasible to expand our native grasslands. Although cows generate their own greenhouse gasses, the net effect of raising ruminants on pasture is to slow global warming.
Jackson, R. B., J. L. Banner, E. G. Jobbagy, W. T. Pockman, and D. H. Wall. "Ecosystem Carbon Loss with Woody Plant
Finishing cattle on pasture may reduce greenhouse gasses
As the controversy about global warming heats up, more attention is being focused on the amount of greenhouse gasses produced by ruminants. Methane gas, a by-product of rumen digestion, is even more potent than carbon dioxide in trapping the sun's heat, making it a legitimate cause for concern. However, the production of methane gas is only a part of the complex environmental equation. An organization called the Institute for Environmental Research and Education or IERE has been comparing the overall impact on greenhouse gasses of raising animals on pasture or in a typical feedlot.
In the graph below, you can see IERE's side-by-side comparison of the two systems. The black bars represent feedlot animals and the green bars represent pastured animals. Although an animal raised on pasture actually produces more methane (represented by the bars in the category labeled "enteric") the pasture itself reduces the CO2 in the air through a process called "carbon sequestration." The net result is represented in the final bars on the right.
The verdict: fattening ruminants in a feedlot makes a significant contribution to global warming, while raising them on pasture may offset the animals' methane production and actually reduce greenhouse gasses.
Moderate-intensity grazing encourages plant biodiversity and mimics the natural prairie
A team of researchers from Colorado State University led by Richard H. Hart studied plant communities in an area of Colorado that had been either protected from cattle grazing or grazed lightly, moderately, or heavily for 55 years. According to the investigators, "plant species biodiversity was greatest on the moderately-grazed pasture. It had more kinds of plants than the lightly or heavily grazed pastures and was not as completely dominated by the most common species as the ungrazed exclosures. Diversity was least in the ungrazed exclosures, which were overrun by plains pricklypear cactus." The researchers went on to say that "Rangeland today, moderately or heavily grazed by cattle, looks much like the same rangeland looked in the 1800s, before the Great Plains were settled." (Learn more by reading Plant Biodiversity on Shortgrass Steppe after 55 Years of Zero, Light, Moderate, or Heavy Cattle Grazing.)
Grazing animals make a visible contribution to soil fertility
In a conventional feedlot operation, large amounts of manure are deposited in a relatively small space that is devoid of living plants. Because there is an over-abundance of manure and nothing to fertilize, the manure becomes a "waste management problem" rather than a natural resource. Feedlot operators spend millions of dollars a year trying to curb the offensive odors, groundwater contamination, and surface runoff.
In sharp contrast, when animals are finished on pasture, their manure is deposited naturally over a large area of grassland, allowing the nutrients to be put to immediate use. In the photo at right, you can see a vivid illustration of how plant growth is encouraged by a well-managed grazing program. The aerial photograph shows grazing land managed by the T.O. Cattle Company a family-owned business that produces grass-finished beef. (Click on the photo for larger version) The photo was taken less than a year after Joe and Julie Morris began grazing their animals. The large triangular area of dark green just below the center of the photo is the land grazed by the cattle. The lighter green and less fertile areas surrounding the grazed land were either totally rested or less intensively grazed.
Increasing pasture land would help reduce global warming
Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses are increasing in the Earth's atmosphere, leading to changes in our global climate. The grasses and legumes found in pasture are highly effective at removing excess carbon dioxide from the air and storing it in the soil as carbon, a phenomenon known as "carbon sequestration." Soils in the grazing land in the Great Plains have over 40 tons of carbon per acre, while cultivated soils have only 26. In recent years, land that had been planted in row crops was allowed to revert back to pasture as part of the US government's Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). The pasture land gained an average of one-half ton of carbon per acre per year during the first 5 years after planting. This means that 18 million tons of carbon were removed from the atmosphere each year as a result of farmers putting over 36 million acres of land into the conservation program.
Grazing better for the soil than growing grain
Six Minnesota pasture-based ranchers asked researchers to compare the health of their soil with soil from neighboring farms that produced corn, soybean, oats, or hay. At the end of four years of monitoring, researchers concluded that the carefully managed grazed land had:
53% greater soil stability
131% more earthworms
Substantially more organic matter
Less nitrate pollution of groundwater
Improved stream quality
Better habitat for grassland birds and other wildlife
Depending on the way that cattle are managed, they can either devastate a landscape or greatly improve the health of the soil. To be listed on our Eatwild Pastured Products Directory, producers must certify that they use best management practices.
("Managed Grazing as an Alternative Manure Management Strategy," Jay Dorsey, Jodi Dansingburg, Richard Ness, USDA-ARS, Land Stewardship Project.)
Grazed pasture is the best land use for storing carbon
Growing plants take carbon dioxide out of the air and "fix" it into the soil as organic matter. The more carbon dioxide that's taken out of the air, the lower the rate of global warming. Until recently, forested land and ungrazed grasslands were thought to be the best "sinks" or storehouses for carbon. The study iillustrated below concluded that well managed grazed pasture may be far better.
"Soil Organic Carbon in fields of switch grass and row crops as well as woodlots and pastures across the Chariton Valley, Iowa." Final Report. Lee Burras and Julie McLaughlin, Iowa State University, January 25, 2002.
Mother Nature knows better once again
The concentration of carbon dioxide in our air is rapidly rising, a condition that contributes to the greenhouse effect and potential global warming. The more of the carbon that can be contained in the soil, however, the less that escapes into the air. A report released by the USDA's Agricultural Research Service finds that soil stores 2 to 3 times more carbon when the grass was grazed than when it was harvested for hay or not harvested at all.
Another benefit of grazing, the researchers noted, was that grazing also reduces costs by lowering needs for herbicides and producing income from the livestock. They estimated that even putting as little as 10 percent of existing cropland into rotation with grazing would produce significant cost reductions.
Growing corn and soy causes six times more soil erosion than pasture
Farming cannot be sustainable if the topsoil is constantly being eroded. Currently, the United States is losing three billion tons of nutrient-rich topsoil each year. The graph below shows the results of a new study from the University of Wisconsin Discovery Farms Program. Compared with grazed pasture, gently sloped land devoted to soy and corn production lost six times more topsoil each year. According to Dennis Frame, director of Discovery Farms, if the trend of selling cows and moving to grain production doesn't cease, soil erosion and nutrient losses will continue to climb.
-- Go to www.factoryfarm.org to learn more about confinement animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Be sure to watch The Meatrix.
-- Go to my blog posting about soy, to learn about the health hazards associated with the consumption of soy foods. A tremendous amount of information about soy is available through the Weston A. Price Foundation, among others.
Monsanto's Harvest of Fear By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele Vanity Fair. May 2008 Issue. Monsanto already dominates America's food chain with its genetically modified seeds ...
The following passages are from an article by Matthew J. Rales which appeared in the Spring, 2008 edition of Wise Traditions, a publication of the Weston A. Price Foundation. The entire article is not yet available online. Matthew Rales obtained his BA in Environmental Studies from Middlebury College in Vermont. He recently completed an apprenticeship at Joel Salatin's grass-based Polyface Farm and is pursuing a career in grass-based farming at Polyface.
Before the excerpts from Matthew Rales, we have Michael Pollan. His video is an entertaining and thought provoking discussion about the relationships between people, food and plants; gardening, industrial agriculture, and farming.
The last section of the video wonderfully illustrates what is possible with grass and cows. In fact, Pollan is describing his visit to Joel Salatin's farm. He discusses how natural and ecologically balanced this system is, and how much food it produces. (Sandra's comment: It's almost a side benefit that it also takes carbon out of the atmosphere. You can't get better than that!)
In late November of 2006, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization released a startling report. Its official title is "Livestock's Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options". References to this report have been frequent in the last year, especially on environmental and nutrition-related fronts. The report accuses the cow of the worst environmental crimes -- land degradation, water pollution, acid rain, biodiveristy and habitat loss, desertification, deforestation, and foremost among the headlines, global warming. Cows and other ruminants are responsible for generating 65 percent of anthropogenic nitrous-oxide, 64 percent of ammonia, and 37 percent of the world's methane, the U.N. scientists declare.
Ancillary reports that expound upon these figures are everywhere. The American media have enjoyed selling the annihilator-cow theme to an audience conditioned by anti-animal foods propaganda and environmental fabrications, such as the "fact" that greedy farmers in the Amazon eradicate rainforest for more and more land to graze their cattle.
Syndicated nutrition columnists present us with lists of environmentally friendly food choices, invariably free of any and all animal products, and environmentalists cite the report as further evidence to keep cattle out of national parks and "protected" public lands.
But it's not just the mainstream news networks and publications that have circulated these accusations aginst livestock. Alternative energy and sustainable living magazines have produced a smattering of recent articles: "Eat Less Meat", "Meat is Methane", "Save the World; Go Vegan". These catchy titles sit on the magazine rack at your local natural foods co-op. And so the readership of these publications continues to patronize those trendy pseudo-foods like soy milk and veggie burgers -- the production of which is a principle reason for deforestation in the Amazon. The other use for soybeans from these degrading land use practices is feed for confinement animals -- beef and dairy cattle, pigs, poultry and fish -- for which pasteured cows continue to be blamed.
INDUSTRIAL ENVIRONMENTALISM
Make no mistake; rainforests are not cleared in any drastic measure by independent farmers who want to raise a few steers. They are cleared by United Nations-supported corporate giants under the guise of feeding the world and alleviating poverty -- all for the production of more of their patented seed. This seed, of which the U.N. and its "green" lobbyists are so fond, assumes the role of displacer of traditional food and farming all over the world. That means health-giving foods like lamb tallow for frying, lard for baking, and real butter, which the industry-led dietitians have condemned from on high, are the foods these GMO seeds are replacing. It is no wonder the U.N. has launched its campaign against livestock -- these animals represent the only food source that can supply the people with enough good nutrition to empower them (both physically and emotionally) to resist the global onslaught of food police, biotech crops and chemicals.
A recent article in Business Week reports that Brazil alone grows over 25 million acres of soybeans -- all of which are genetically engineered. The Wall Street Journal reports that Monsanto's stock has tripled in the last year due to Brazil's demand for Roundup Ready soybeans -- a genetically engineered plant that can withstand multiple, frequent applications of toxic herbicide.
Allan Nation, editor of the Stockman Grass Farmer, reports back from his recent trip to Argentina that "eight dollar" soybeans for world export are edging out the domestic, sustainable grass-fed beef industry. Why don't we hear environmentalists denouncing this supreme symbol of industrial agriculture with the same passion they muster for condemning beef? Why are the green-conscious not boycotting the oilseed plant that literally drinks Middle Eastern oil in the form of petrochemical herbicides? That's because our society has been conditioned to support a co-opted environmental movement in the name of a chemical-intensive vegetable bypass industry, at the tragic expense of good health to both man and environment via the qualities of grazing animals (those methane-belching creatures that we love to hate) and their products -- meat and milk for people, manure for the soil -- none of which our society can afford to lose.
DESTRUCTIVE PARADIGM
The real paradox of the report is the way in which it avoids dealing with the twin-conundrum of mass-scale monocultural grain production and confinement animal feeding operations (CAFOs). These are the two destructive pillars of an industry gone wrong, yet the U.N. points its global finger not at bad management practices like feedlots and confinement dairies, but at the cows themselves; not at Monsanto, but at real farmers, who raise livestock in accordance with nature's principles -- on grass. [end of first excerpt]
Later, Matthew Rales continues...
SIXTY MILLION BISON
In his fascinating recent book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Charles Mann paints a picture of wild ruminant populations before the arrival of Europeans: "North America at the time of Columbus was home to sixty million bison, thirty to forty million pronghorns, ten million elk, ten million mule deer, and as many as two million mountain sheep". That's just North America. We have not even considered the enormous herds pounding the African plains, nearly all of which are methane-producing ruminants including wildebeest, Cape buffalo, giraffes, gazelles, antelope, kudu -- you get the point. Even today, these animals number in the hundreds of millions; their number were many fold greater in the past. How can it be that we have been able to overlook this perfectly natural scenario and move forward with casting the blame on the world's 1.5 billion domesticated cattle?
Nature's herds are by no means light on the land. Reports from the travels of Lewis and Clark attest to the fact that the herds of bison left not one scrap of fodder for their horses to eat, and the land was coated with a sheet of manure so thick, it turned vast expanses of prairie black. This manure, with the help of sage grouse, prairie chickens and dung beetles was then quickly recycled into some of the richest soil on the planet; this is the same manure that the U.N. blames for poisoning our atmosphere with nitrous-oxide.
MIMICKING NATURE
Managed grazing, which attempts to mimic the grazing patterns of these great wild herds, can produce an abundance of nutritious animal foods, while sequestering massive amounts of atmospheric carbon. We are told by the global warming gurus that the earth is heating up due to excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Through specific grazing strategies we can sequester this excess carbon and form rich, productive topsoil in the process. We do this not by planting more trees, or even setting aside more wildlife preserves. We do this with domesticated ruminants -- pulsing the landscape with large numbers of animals for short periods of time.
In nature, bison and wildebeest graze in huge mobs, remaining in one location briefly, and then they move on to fresh ground. They keep bunched together tightly for fear of pack-hunting predators. These ruminants are Nature's soil-building and fertility management mechanism. We also know that the soils under which these animals graze are our largest land-based carbon sinks on earth. All we need to do, then, is to mimic these native grazing patterns with our domestic stock, and we have an easily achieved, rapid solution to the excess carbon in the atmosphere.
The hoof action, manure, urine, and saliva all act as bio-stimulants on the pasture, encouraging the grass plants to thicken, bare spots to fill in, and species diversity and succession to accelerate forward from simplicity to complexity. The productive grasslands of the world and the massive herds of herbivores that grazed them coevolved together. One cannot exist without the other. The grass relies on the ruminant for its full expression just as much as the ruminant relies on grass. Without ruminants to fertilize the soil and break down cellulose in dry climates, prairies quickly become deserts; and with managed grazing of ruminant animals, deserts can be restored to productive land.
GRASS-FED BUTTER: MOST ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY FOOD
Grass farmers produce the most ecologically sensible food on earth, food derived nearly in its entirety from solar energy. Grass-fed butter is perhaps the finest example of solar energy converted into nutrient-dense food for people. Grass-fed meat and other grass-fed dairy products are equally wonderful, earth-friendly foods. However, I use butter here to illustrate how we can derive pure, nutrient-dense animal energy from solar energy with very few steps in between. Here's how it works: Grass plants convert solar energy (and atmospheric carbon dioxide) into plant biomass, and the cow synthesizes that plant material into her own energy via the cellulose-digesting microbes in her rumen. From this energy she then produces milk, of which the energy-rich portion (the cream) is separated. The cream is then made even more energy-dense through churning into butter. No chemicals or petroleum required (exc ept electricity for churning the butter); just the sun, the grass and the cow (and her rumen flora) in an elegantly simple process.
Let's run a quick comparison to the production of a food that the U.N. and its whistleblowers tell us has a smaller ecological footprint -- the production of vegetable oil. First the soil must be plowed; a process that requires immense amounts of diesel fuel. Then the seed, whether it's rapeseed (canola), soybeans, or corn or any other oil-producing seed, must be planted. This is accomplished by a tractor as well, thus more fossil fuel. After the plant begins to grow, the field must be cultivated to kill the invading weeds. Then the fields are sprayed several times by a tractor-mounted rig, dowsing the fields in oil-derived petrochemical herbicide. If bugs are a problem out comes the pesticide, also derived from oil. Harvest time, and massive combining ensues. The seeds are then trucked cross-country to a factory where a multi-step refining process takes place. The factory is similar in design and practice to a crude oil refinery.
After much chemical and mechanical refining of our seed, we have a product, which is not food, but which the U.N. tells us is the earth-friendly substitute for our solar energy-derived butter.
[end of excerpt]
Carolyn's comment: Obviously we can't trust the United Nations to solve the problem of global warming! They have a hidden agenda, as usual!
-- Go to www.factoryfarm.org to learn more about confinement animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Be sure to watch The Meatrix.
-- Go to my blog posting about soy, to learn about the health hazards associated with the consumption of soy foods. A tremendous amount of information about soy is available through the Weston A. Price Foundation, among others.
Monsanto's Harvest of Fear By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele Vanity Fair. May 2008 Issue. Monsanto already dominates America's food chain with its genetically modified seeds ...
The War on Drugs has turned the black market drug trade into a highly profitable business. Please see this posting for astonishing pictures.
Dr. Ron Paul has a sensible perspective on drugs. And he is quite accurate in comparing the War on Drugs with the War on Terror. Whatever you fight, you actually create MORE of.
Summary: For the first 140 years of our history, we had essentially no Federal war on drugs, and far fewer problems with drug addiction and related crimes was a consequence. In the past 30 years, even with the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the drug war, little good has come of it. We have vacillated from efforts to stop the drugs at the source to severely punishing the users, yet nothing has improved. This war has been behind most big government policy powers of the last 30 years, with continual undermining of our civil liberties and personal privacy.
I would like to draw an analogy between the drug war and the war against terrorism. In the last 30 years, we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a failed war on drugs. This war has been used as an excuse to attack our liberties and privacy. It has been an excuse to undermine our financial privacy while promoting illegal searches and seizures with many innocent people losing their lives and property. Seizure and forfeiture have harmed a great number of innocent American citizens.
Another result of this unwise war has been the corruption of many law enforcement officials. It is well known that with the profit incentives so high, we are not even able to keep drugs out of our armed prisons. Making our whole society a prison would not bring success to this floundering war on drugs. Sinister motives of the profiteers and gangsters, along with prevailing public ignorance, keep this futile war going. Illegal and artificially high priced drugs drive the underworld to produce, sell and profit from this social depravity. Failure to recognize that drug addiction, like alcoholism, is a disease rather than a crime, encourage the drug warriors in efforts that have not and will not ever work. We learned the hard way about alcohol prohibition and crime, but we have not yet seriously considered it in the ongoing drug war.
Corruption associated with the drug dealers is endless. It has involved our police, the military, border guards and the judicial system. It has affected government policy and our own CIA. The artificially high profits from illegal drugs provide easy access to funds for rogue groups involved in fighting civil wars throughout the world. Ironically, opium sales by the Taliban and artificially high prices helped to finance their war against us. In spite of the incongruity, we rewarded the Taliban this spring with a huge cash payment for promises to eradicate some poppy fields. Sure.
For the first 140 years of our history, we had essentially no Federal war on drugs, and far fewer problems with drug addiction and related crimes was a consequence. In the past 30 years, even with the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the drug war, little good has come of it. We have vacillated from efforts to stop the drugs at the source to severely punishing the users, yet nothing has improved. This war has been behind most big government policy powers of the last 30 years, with continual undermining of our civil liberties and personal privacy. Those who support the IRS's efforts to collect maximum revenues and root out the underground economy, have welcomed this intrusion, even if the drug underworld grows in size and influence.
The drug war encourages violence. Government violence against nonviolent users is notorious and has led to the unnecessary prison overpopulation. Innocent taxpayers are forced to pay for all this so-called justice. Our eradication project through spraying around the world, from Colombia to Afghanistan, breeds resentment because normal crops and good land can be severely damaged. Local populations perceive that the efforts and the profiteering remain somehow beneficial to our own agenda in these various countries.
Drug dealers and drug gangs are a consequence of our unwise approach to drug usage. Many innocent people are killed in the crossfire by the mob justice that this war generates. But just because the laws are unwise and have had unintended consequences, no excuses can ever be made for the monster who would kill and maim innocent people for illegal profits. But as the violent killers are removed from society, reconsideration of our drug laws ought to occur.
A similar approach should be applied to our war on those who would terrorize and kill our people for political reasons. If the drug laws and the policies that incite hatred against the United States are not clearly understood and, therefore, never changed, the number of drug criminals and terrorists will only multiply. Although this unwise war on drugs generates criminal violence, the violence can never be tolerated. Even if repeal of drug laws would decrease the motivation for drug dealer violence, this can never be an excuse to condone the violence. On the short term, those who kill must be punished, imprisoned, or killed. Long term though, a better understanding of how drug laws have unintended consequences is required if we want to significantly improve the situation and actually reduce the great harms drugs are doing to our society.
The same is true in dealing with those who so passionately hate us that suicide becomes a just and noble cause in their effort to kill and terrorize us. Without some understanding of what has brought us to the brink of a worldwide conflict in reconsidering our policies around the globe, we will be no more successful in making our land secure and free than the drug war has been in removing drug violence from our cities and towns.
Without some understanding why terrorism is directed towards the United States, we may well build a prison for ourselves with something called homeland security while doing nothing to combat the root causes of terrorism. Let us hope we figure this out soon. We have promoted a foolish and very expensive domestic war on drugs for more than 30 years. It has done no good whatsoever. I doubt our Republic can survive a 30-year period of trying to figure out how to win this guerilla war against terrorism. Hopefully, we will all seek the answers in these trying times with an open mind and understanding.
Why don't we hear about this from the medical system, the government, and the media? Because there is no money to be made from simple, natural, and effective solutions! Sandra
Tonight we are going back to medical basics with the application of the least expensive, safest and perhaps most effective cancer medicine there is. Sodium bicarbonate has been on many cancer patients’ minds this past year. It has not been easy though to get to Rome or even contact Dr. Tullio Simoncini for treatment. And doctors willing to give bicarbonate IVs are not on every corner so it’s been somewhat frustrating to have something so simple and effective remain elusive. If doctors doing such treatments want to be listed by the IMVA for referral please contact us.
Though we have known that oral intake of sodium bicarbonate will have the ‘Simoncini” effect on oral, esophagus and stomach cancer we have not focused at all on the systemic effect of bicarbonate taken orally. Every cancer patient and every health care practitioner should know that oral intake of sodium bicarbonate offers an instant and strong shift of blood pH into the alkaline.
So strong is the effect that athletes can notice the difference in their breathing as more oxygen is carried throughout the system and as more acids are neutralized.[i] The difference can be stunning for those whose respiration is labored under intense exercise loading.[ii] This tells us to take very seriously the oral use of bicarbonate for cancer treatment no matter what other treatment is used.
This diagram shows the diffusion directions for H+, CO2, and O2 between the blood and the muscle cells during exercise. The resulting concentration changes affect the buffer equilibria, shown in the upper right-hand corner of the diagram (yellow). If the amounts of H+ and CO2 exceed the capacity of hemoglobin, they affect the carbonic acid equilibrium, as predicted by Le Châtelier's Principle or the quantitative treatment in terms of equilibrium constants. As a result, the pH of the blood is lowered, causing acidosis. The lungs and kidneys respond to pH changes by removing CO2, HCO3-, and H+ from the blood.
When one reads my thesis on different medicinal substances one has to always remember that I am a protocol man who does not support single shot cures for anything. With the publication of today’s chapter on sodium bicarbonate and maple syrup sodium bicarbonate slips securely into the number three spot right behind magnesium chloride and iodine. Each of these three substances effects directly onto basic human physiology in a way most pharmaceutical drugs do not. When used together we have a super threesome that will inexpensively go far to resolving many of the physical and even some of the emotional problems we and our children face. And if you have not made the connection please note that all three of these substances are used in emergency rooms and intensive care wards and they do commonly save lives every day with their inherent healing powers. See my chapter on emergency room medicine and cancer treatment.
All cancer sufferers and in fact every chronic disease patient should hold clearly in mind that pH is the regulatory authority that controls most cellular processes. The pH balance of the human bloodstream is recognized by medical physiology texts as one of the most important biochemical balances in all of human body chemistry. pH is the acronym for "Potential Hydrogen". In definition, it is the degree of concentration of hydrogen ions in a substance or solution. It is measured on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 14. Higher numbers mean a substance is more alkaline in nature and there is a greater potential for absorbing more hydrogen ions. Lower numbers indicate more acidity with less potential for absorbing hydrogen ions.
Our body pH is very important because pH controls the speed of our body's biochemical reactions. It does this by controlling the speed of enzyme activity as well as the speed that electricity moves through our body; the higher (more alkaline) the pH of a substance or solution, the more electrical resistance that substance or solution holds. Therefore, electricity travels slower with higher pH. If we say something has an acid pH, we are saying it is hot and fast. Alkaline pH on the other hand, bio-chemically speaking, is slow and cool.
Body ph level changes are intense in the profundity of their biological effects. Even genes directly experience external pH. pH differentially regulates a large number of proteins. Increased oxidative stress, which correlates almost exponentially with ph changes into the acidic, is especially dangerous to the mitochondria, which suffer the greatest under oxidative duress. Epigenetics, which may now have begun eclipsing traditional genetics, commonly describes how factors such as diet and smoking, rather than inheritance influence how genes behave.
The following chapter comes after 100 pages of text in the Yeast and Fungi Invaders section of the Winning the War on Cancer book. Please note that sodium bicarbonate taken in water alone will have a powerful effect on entire body physiology because of the instant shift into alkaline pH levels. Bicarbonate can be taken frequently throughout the day with half teaspoons amounts though for long term use lower doses are safer. For cancer patients initial use should be heavy and frequent to force a greater shift because smaller pH shifts can actually stimulate cancer growth.
Common sense knowledge speaks loudly about cancer and Candida patients avoiding glucose. This is similar to the common sense of pilots who know to pull back on the stick to pull out of a dive. That works until you approach the speed of sound and at that point all the pulling in the world will not work. You have to push the stick forward and do what instincts scream not to do. Several died trying until Chuck Yeager pushed that stick forward and became the first man to break the speed of sound.
Bicarbonate Maple Cancer Treatment
International Medical Veritas Association
The bicarbonate maple syrup cancer treatment focuses on delivering natural chemotherapy in a way that effectively kills cancer cells but significantly reduces the brutal side effects experienced with most standard chemotherapy treatments. In fact so great is the reduction that the dangers are brought down to zero. Costs, which are a factor for the majority of people, of this particular treatment are nil. Though this cancer treatment is very inexpensive, do not assume it is not effective. The bicarbonate maple syrup cancer treatment is a very significant cancer treatment every cancer patient should be familiar with and it can easily be combined with other safe and effective natural treatments.
This cancer treatment is similar in principle to Insulin Potentiation Therapy (IPT). IPT treatment consists of giving doses of insulin to a fasting patient sufficient to lower blood sugar into the 50 mg/dl. In a normal person, when you take in sugar the insulin levels go up to meet the need of getting that sugar into the cells. In IPT they are artificially injecting insulin to deplete the blood of all sugar then injecting the lower doses of toxic chemo drugs when the blood sugar is driven down to the lowest possible value. During the low peak, it is said that the receptors are more sensitive and take on medications more rapidly and in higher amounts.
The bicarbonate maple syrup treatment works in reverse to IPT. Dr. Tullio Simoncini acknowledges that cancer cells gobbles up sugar so when you encourage the intake of sugar it’s like sending in a Trojan horse. The sugar is not going to end up encouraging the further growth of the cancer colonies because the baking soda is going to kill the cells before they have a chance to grow. Instead of artificially manipulating insulin and thus forcefully driving down blood sugar levels to then inject toxic chemo agents we combine the sugar with the bicarbonate and present it to the cancer cells, which at first are going to love the present. But not for long!
This treatment is a combination of pure, 100% maple syrup and baking soda and was first reported on the Cancer Tutor site. When mixed and heated together, the maple syrup and baking soda bind together. The maple syrup targets cancer cells (which consume 15 times more glucose than normal cells) and the baking soda, which is dragged into the cancer cell by the maple syrup, being very alkaline forces a rapid shift in pH killing the cell. The actual formula is to mix one part baking soda with three parts (pure, 100%) maple syrup in a small saucepan. Stir briskly and heat the mixture for 5 minutes. Take 1 teaspoon daily, is what is suggested by Cancer Tutor but one could probably do this several times a day.
“There is not a tumor on God’s green earth that cannot be licked with a little baking soda and maple syrup.” That is the astonishing claim of controversial folk healer Jim Kelmun who says that this simple home remedy can stop and reverse the deadly growth of cancers. His loyal patients swear by the man they fondly call Dr. Jim and say he is a miracle worker. “Dr. Jim cured me of lung cancer,” said farmer Ian Roadhouse. “Those other doctors told me that I was a goner and had less then six months to live. But the doc put me on his mixture and in a couple of months the cancer was gone. It did not even show up on the x-rays.”
Dr. Jim discovered this treatment accidentally somewhere in the middle of the last century when he was treating a family plagued by breast cancer. There were five sisters in the family and four of them had died of breast cancer. He asked the remaining sister if there was anything different in her diet and she told him that she was partial to sipping maple syrup and baking soda. Since then, reported by a newspaper in Ashville, North Carolina, Dr. Jim dispensed this remedy to over 200 people diagnosed with terminal cancer and amazingly he claims of that number 185 lived at least 15 more years and nearly half enjoyed a complete remission of their disease. When combined with other safe and effective treatments like transdermal magnesium therapy, iodine, vitamin C, probiotics and other items like plenty of good sun exposure, pure water and clay treatments we should expect even higher remission rates.
It is very important not to use baking soda which has had aluminum added to it. The Cancer Tutor site reports that Arm and Hammer does have aluminum but the company insists that is not true. One can buy a product which specifically states it does not include aluminum or other chemicals. (e.g. Bob's Red Mill, Aluminum-Free, Baking Soda). Sodium bicarbonate is safe, extremely inexpensive and unstoppably effective when it comes to cancer tissues. It’s an irresistible chemical, cyanide to cancer cells for it hits the cancer cells with a shock wave of alkalinity, which allows much more oxygen into the cancer cells than they can tolerate. Cancer cells cannot survive in the presence of high levels of oxygen. Studies have already shown how manipulation of tumor pH with sodium bicarbonate enhances some forms of chemotherapy.[iii]
“The therapeutic treatment of bicarbonate salts can be administered orally, through aerosol, intravenously and through catheter for direct targeting of tumors,” says oncologist Dr. Tullio Simoncini. “Sodium bicarbonate administered orally, via aerosol or intravenously can achieve positive results only in some tumors, while others – such as the serious ones of the brain or the bones - remain unaffected by the treatment.”
The maple syrup apparently enables and increases penetration of bicarbonate into all compartments of body, even those which are difficult or impossible to penetrate by other means. These compartments include the central nervous system (CNS), through the blood-brain barrier, joints, solid tumors, and perhaps even the eyes. IPT makes cell membranes more permeable, and increases uptake of drugs into cells. The maple syrup will make tissues more permeable, too. It will transport the bicarbonate across the blood-brain barrier and every other barrier in the body for sugar is universally needed by all cells in the body. The essence of IPT is that it allows cancer drugs to be given in a smaller dose, far less toxic to normal cells, while building up lethally toxic concentrations in cancer cells. Both IPT and bicarbonate maple syrup treatments use the rabid growth mechanisms of the cancer cell against them.
Dr. Jim did not have contact with Dr. Simoncini and did not know that he is the only oncologist in the world who would sustain the combining of sugar with bicarbonate. Dr. Simoncini always directs his patients to dramatically increase sugar intake with his treatments but has never thought to mix the two directly by cooking them together. Because his treatments depend on interventionist radiologists who insert catheters to direct the bicarbonate as close to the affected area as possible, or physicians willing to do expensive intravenous treatments, I pushed bicarbonate up into the number six slot in the IMVA cancer protocol. With the discovery of Dr. Jim’s work bicarbonate comes back into our number three spot right behind magnesium chloride and iodine.
That number three slot for a brief time was held by hemp oil containing THC. The great advantage that maple syrup and bicarbonate treatment has over this type hemp oil is that it is legal thus easily obtainable. The two together, backed by a solid protocol of other nutritional substances makes winning the war on cancer almost a certainty. When using these substances it is safer to change one’s vocabulary and not say one is treating and curing cancer. Far better to conceptualize that one is treating the infectious aspect of cancer, the fungus and yeast colonies and the yeast like bacteria that are the cause of TB.
Dr. Simoncini says that, “In some cases, the aggressive power of fungi is so great as to allow it, with only a cellular ring made up of three units, to tighten in its grip, capture and kill its prey in a short time notwithstanding the prey's desperate struggling. Fungus, which is the most powerful and the most organized micro-organism known, seems to be an extremely logical candidate as a cause of neoplastic proliferation.”
pH of the blood is the most important factor to determine the state of the microorganisms in the blood. “Sodium bicarbonate therapy is harmless, fast and effective because it is extremely diffusible. A therapy with bicarbonate for cancer should be set up with strong dosage, continuously, and with pauseless cycles in a destruction work which should proceed from the beginning to the end without interruption for at least 7-8 days. In general a mass of 2-3-4 centimeters will begin to consistently regress from the third to the fourth day, and collapses from the fourth to the fifth,” says Dr Simoncini.
There are many ways to use sodium bicarbonate and it is a universal drug like iodine and magnesium chloride. Raising pH increases the immune system's ability to kill bacteria, concludes a study conducted at The Royal Free Hospital and School of Medicine in London. Viruses and bacteria that cause bronchitis and colds thrive in an acidic environment. To fight a respiratory infection and dampen symptoms such as a runny nose and sore throat, taking an alkalizing mixture of sodium bicarbonate and potassium bicarbonate will certainly help.
The apple cider vinegar 1/4 teaspoon and 1/4 teaspoon baking soda taken 2 times or more a day is another treatment as is lemon and baking soda, or lime and baking soda formulas. Perhaps honey could be substituted for maple syrup for those who live in parts of the world where maple syrup is not available but to my knowledge no one has experimented with this.
Go to the International Medical Veritas Association's website for more information about sodium bicarbonate and cancer. My quick search there did not come up with the maple syrup information above, which I was actually searching for. But there are some interesting case studies here. There is a lot of very interesting information on this website.
Though we are told that vaccinations are required for us to be truly healthy, in reality, tremendous evidence supports the opposite conclusion. Vaccination of the masses may well be one of the most damaging things that a population can bring upon itself.
I believe that vaccination of our population over the years is a MAJOR contributor to the explosion of health problems that our society is experiencing. New and devastating diseases mysteriously appear with increasing frequency. And government and the medical establishment are at a loss to understand why!
As far as I am concerned, the answers are as follows: VACCINATIONS, MALNUTRITION, and MEDICATIONS. Really, that's it. What you put into the body makes up the body. There's not much of a mystery there. Vaccination is a major contributor to the destruction of the fabric of our country's health. And without health, you really don't have much.
In recent months, there have been an increasing number of reports of people being FORCED to vaccinate their children, absolutely against both their will and their personal beliefs. This is criminal, and as regular readers of this blog frequently read here, it is also unconstitutional.
Read the articles below and learn HOW and WHY this is so devastating to our health.
Universal Health Care?
This is a commonly debated issue in the presidential campaign. Are you aware that, with universal health care, we will be essentially required to be vaccinated?!? They are not telling us this, but if you look at how vaccinations are being forced on people now, doesn't it make sense that this will increase? Personally, I have ALWAYS been opposed to mandatory health care coverage.
At the bottom of this posting is a segment discussing this horrific potentiality.
Russell Blaylock on Vaccinations
Blaylock is a neurosurgeon who explains what happens in the body when vaccinations are given. Here are links to several articles.
Read them, and you will never again allow yourself or your children to be vaccinated. You may even start telling other people. The first article I read (listed third below) really fired me up, and now I am an avid Blaylock advocate. (In my Food, Glorious Food blog, I wrote about Blaylock's book on MSG and Aspartame, Excitotoxins: the Taste That Kills. Highly recommended - and relatively easy to read. The MSG and vaccine issues are very much related, as you will understand through reading the articles.)
Thanks to Mercola.comfor providing this material. I frequently draw from his website for posts here. Doctor Mercola does humanity a tremendous service by providing access to important health information. His newsletter covers a vast array of topics. Consider subscribing through the mercola.com website. Though he may never know it, Dr. Mercola is a mentor of sorts for me in blogging. He provides a stellar model of service via the blog.
I thank my mother, Carolyn Lee, for compiling this information into a format which I could easily post. Before she did this work, I was stopped by the size of the project. Thanks, Mom. Sandra
Ron Paul on Health Freedom For more information on Ron Paul regarding Health Care in general, see the ronpaul2008.com site. For his position specific to Health Freedom, go to a posting on my blog here. This was drawn from the ronpaul2008 site. "I also opposed the Homeland Security Bill, H.R. 5005, which, in section 304, authorizes the forced vaccination of American citizens against small pox. The government should never have the power to require immunizations or vaccinations."
Mandatory Vaccinations versus Health Freedom
Carolyn Lee (with a few additions by Sandra) April 29, 2008
Does the government have the constitutional authority to force you to vaccinate your children?
Where in the U.S. Constitution does it state that the federal government can mandate vaccinations for anyone?!
Here are three shocking papers by Russell L. Blaylock, M.D. that tie vaccinations to the skyrocketing incidences of autism, ADD, ADHD, Gulf War Syndrome, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's dementia, and ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) in this country.
This may well be the most important reading that you ever do regarding your health.
Highlights from the articles are posted here for your convenience.
I suggest that you print off hard copies, including references, and plan to keep them for the rest of your life. Sometime in the future, you may choose to refuse one or more vaccinations for yourself or a loved one, and you will need documentation of the dangers to show your medical practitioners.
Selected Highlights from the Blaylock articles, with emphasis added:
*Vaccination and Brain Inflammation
A great number of studies have shown that when you vaccinate an animal, the body's inflammatory cytokines not only increase dramatically, but so do the brain's inflammatory chemicals. The brain has its own immune system that is intimately connected to the body's immune system. The main immune cell in the brain is called a microglia. Normally, these brain cells are lying throughout the brain in a resting state (called ramified).
Once activated, they can move around, traveling between brain cells like amoeba (called amoeboid microglia).
In the resting state, they release chemicals that support the growth and protection of brain cells and their connections (dendrites and synapses). But when activated, they secrete a number of very harmful chemicals, including inflammatory cytokines, chemokines, complement, free radicals, lipid peroxidation products, and two excitotoxins -- glutamate and quinolinic acid.
In essence, these brain immune cells are out to kill invaders, since the body's immune system sent an emergency message that an invasion had occurred. With most infections, this phase of activation last no more than a few days to two weeks, during which time the immune system successfully kills off the invaders.
Once that is accomplished, the immune system shuts down to allow things to cool off and the brain to repair what damage was done by its own immune system.
Stimulating your immune system with a vaccine is far different than contracting an infectious illness naturally. Vaccines are made of two components -- the agent you wish to vaccinate against -- for example, the measles virus; and an immune system booster called an immune adjuvant.
These adjuvants are composed of such things as aluminum compounds, MSG, lipid compounds and even mercury. Their job is to make the immune system react as intensely as possible and for as long as possible.
Studies have shown that these adjuvants, from a single vaccine, can cause immuneoveractivation for as long as two years. This means that the brain microglia remain active as well, continuously pouring out destructive chemicals. In fact, one study found that a single injection of an immune activating substance could cause brain immune overactivation for over a year. This is very destructive.
* * * * * *
*The average child receiving all of the recommended vaccines will have some 24 inoculations by age one year and 36 by the time they enter school.
Most of these will be spaced within one month of each other, which means the priming and activation cycle of the microglia will be continuous. In addition, the dose of immune stimulants is excessive. At birth they receive 1 vaccine, at two months of age they receive 6 additional vaccines, at four months of age 5 vaccines, at age six months 7 vaccines and at age one year, 5 vaccines.
In addition, should they follow the new CDC recommendation, they will receive the flu vaccine every year starting at age 6 month through age 18 years. These vaccines contain a full dose of thimerosal mercury.
*In 1983, before the autism epidemic began, children received 10 vaccinations before attending school and the autism incidence was 1 in 10,000. Today they are receiving 24 vaccines before 1 year and 36 by the time they attend school and the autism rate is now 1 in 150 births.
--Also, keep in mind that for every fully autistic child there are ten times that many with lesser degrees of impairment.
* * * * * *
*Normally, the brains immune system, like the bodys, activates quickly and then promptly shuts off to minimize the bystander damage. Vaccination wont let the microglia shut down. In the developing brain, this can lead to language problems, behavioral dysfunction and even dementia.
In the adult, it can lead to the Gulf War Syndrome or one of the more common neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinsons disease, Alzheimers dementia or Lou Gehrigs disease (ALS).
A recent study by the world-renowned immunologist Dr. H. Hugh Fudenberg found that adults vaccinated yearly for five years in a row with the flu vaccine had a 10-fold increased risk of developing Alzheimers disease. He attributes this to the mercury and aluminum in the vaccine. Interestingly, both of these metals have been shown to activate microglia and increase excitotoxicity in the brain.
*You must keep in mind that "health authorities" urge the elderly to get the flu vaccine each and every year. This will keep the microglia in a primed and even activated state continuously. Recently, neurologists announced that the incidence of neurodegenerative disease had been grossly underestimated and that neurological diseases of aging were increasing at a frightening rate. They have no explanation.
Over the last three decades the number of elderly receiving yearly flu vaccines has risen from 20% before 1980 to over 60% today.
If this were not depressing enough, now the public health authorities and medical specialty societies are adding a whole new set of vaccines for those above 50 years of age, including the pneumococcal and meningiococcal vaccines. What is being completely ignored by the promoters of these vaccines is the effect of multiple doses of immune adjuvant that accompany each of these vaccines.
* * * * * *
*Universal Health Care May Increase Vaccine Danger
While a number of people and even physicians, think they desire a universal health care system (a euphemism for socialized medicine), here is something to consider. The government will use access to health care as a way to mandate vaccinations for all Americans. Those who refuse any of the mandated vaccines will be denied access to health care, meaning you will not be able to see a doctor or enter a hospital or clinic.
All federal programs will have completion of vaccine mandates as a requirement. This could be linked to social security, food stamps, housing subsidy programs and other such federal programs. Remember, they use such tactics now for access to schools and daycare centers. One may even have to prove that they have had all their required vaccinations before they can use public transportation, such as busses, trains and airplanes.
Now, you might say, "Why would anyone want to drink raw milk? What's the big deal?"
Humble dairy cows were major contributors in helping the United States of America grow into a great nation. Raw milk and dairy foods supported people in becoming healthy and strong. The commerce of this country developed upon the foundation of small family farms and their dairy cattle. . . . and more
(For links to more in-depth information about Global Warming and related issues, go to the bottom of this posting.)
Everyone who cares about the planet and is worried about global warming needs to see this! Here is the EASIEST way to address global warming. Take carbon from the air and put it back into the Earth. How? With plants, primarily GRASS! Plants consume carbon dioxide (CO2) from the air, put oxygen (O2) back into the air, and produce plant material, including roots. When the roots decay, the carbon stays in the earth to improve the soil. If left to decay on the ground, plant stems, branches, leaves, etc. also build the soil. It's an all-around gain.
Maybe this is the ONLY thing that will work in the short time we have left to lower atmospheric CO2 back to pre-industrial levels.
Finding new energy sources is, of course, a very high priority. REDUCING the carbon which has already been released into the atmosphere back down to below 350 ppm (parts per million) is a huge challenge, since we are already at 455e (e=ppm of CO2 plus equivalents) and rising.
(For links to more in-depth information about Global Warming and related issues, go to the bottom of this posting.)
With grass plus grazing animals, we could do it!
One of the most effective ways of sequestering carbon from the atmosphere back into the ground is through pasture GRASS that is used as a food source for ruminant animals, like cows. What makes the difference is properly MANAGING where the livestock graze. (For more about the importance and value of COWS, see blog postings about Raw Milk.)
Over 50% Comes From Atmospheric Carbon
Here is an excerpt from the article at the end of this posting from Mongabay.com. He is saying that over half the physical material of a tree, comes from carbon in the atmosphere, not from the soil. Presumably, the same is true with grass.
Mongabay: How does one restore carbon to the Earth? Lovell: By actively mimicking nature and thereby allowing natural cycles to reinvigorate. Arid and semi-arid grazing lands co-evolved with massive herds of grazing animals that were kept bunched up by the presence of pack-hunting predators. When humans removed these predators and fenced in the animals we severely disrupted this natural behaviour leading directly to desertification and massive release of soil carbon into atmospheric circulation. The process that actually removes CO2 from atmospheric circulation is photosynthesis. A simple question for anyone — think of the biggest plant you have ever seen — it is probably a huge tree more than 50 metres tall, 10 metres around and weighing hundreds of tonnes. You can walk up to this tree and hit it — it is solid. Where did the material come from to make this tree? Far too many people answer — "from the ground the tree is growing in". The truth is that over 50% of the solid "thumpable" bit of the tree came directly out of the atmosphere as CO2. While a tree is much more visible than grass, the result is the same.
Go to the Soil Carbon Case Studies powerpoint presentation. It is a fabulous illustration of how this works and what is possible. Even desert land CAN be restored to productivity. Water supplies CAN be increased. Wildlife CAN return. At the same time, livestock businesses CAN be INCREASINGLY profitable, producing HEALTHIER ANIMALS and HEALTHIER FOOD for people.
The Solution That Offers Immediate Impact on Global Warming
THE PROBLEM: An increase in carbon dioxide levels in the air, contributing to global warming.
THE SIMPLE SOLUTION: Put the carbon back in the earth where it belongs. Degraded soils can store up to 5 times more organic carbon in their surface layers than they currently hold if the soil management approach changes. Through the application of these types of management methods, Soil Carbon Australia can make an impact on global warming.
THE NATURAL SOLUTION: Carbon is naturally sequested in topsoil via biological processes surrounding actively growing roots of pasture grasses and cereals. Encouraging these processes is cheap, efficient, and ecologically beneficial.
THE ACHIEVABLE SOLUTION: Soil carbon levels can be increased by adopting forms of carbon farming, including time-controlled grazing management, pasture cropping and biologically beneficial farming practices.
Soil Carbon Case Studies The following are actual Soil Carbon case studies and further information.
Please note: File sizes may take some time to download on dial-up connections. Slideshow is available in other languages from soilcarbon.com.au.
Image and text excerpted from the article below from Mongabay.com. The article uses images and information from Soil Carbon.
This simple picture says it all if we allow the grasses to express themselves to the stage shown on the right they absorb CO2 from atmospheric circulation and turn it into plant material. We then manage our grazing animals to eat the grass down to the level somewhere between the middle 2 grass plants. At this point the reduced leaf mass is unable to support the large root mass, and so the plant sloughs off the now excess root material (carbon). The plant then commences to regrow but critically it regrows using carbon absorbed by photosynthesis, not the carbon it previously sloughed off. Repeat this process and you in essence "pump" CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it underground.
Restoring the ability of soil to store carbon by promoting native grasses and vegetation can help reverse global warming, desertification and biodiversity loss, says an Australian researcher.
Land use change — including deforestation, bush fires, and soil degradation — accounts for roughly 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but land management practices can be used to reduce emissions. While reforestation and avoided deforestation have garnered a lot of attention of late, restoration of other forms of vegetation can dramatically increase the capacity of degraded landscapes to store carbon.
Tony Lovell of Soil Carbon P/L in Australia estimates that by actively supporting regrowth of vegetation in damaged ecosystems, billions of tons of carbon dioxide can be sequestered from the atmosphere.
In February 2008, Lovell discussed the potential of soil carbon restoration. Mongabay: What are the advantages of increasing the capacity of soil to store carbon? Lovell:
In arid and seasonally dry areas, continuous grazing creates disasters like that on the left. Returning to herding-style management with long recovery periods between grazings heals the land (right)
We are not so much increasing the capacity of soil to store carbon as restoring its ability to store carbon. The result of conventional agricultural practices such as artificial fertilizing, ploughing, stubble burning, bare fallows, etc is to run down the organic matter in the soil, and it is this organic matter that is the source of stored soil carbon. The main advantages in direct global warming terms (sources/sinks) of restoring soil’s ability to store carbon are that it is immediate, massive and involves capturing excess CO2 from atmospheric circulation. There are additional huge benefits in terms of water retention, drought tolerance, biodiversity increase, cost decreases, etc as well. The immediacy is a result of using the natural biological process of photosynthesis — as the grasses and other plants grow they absorb C02 each and every day. The massive capacity is simple mathematics.
Determining how much carbon dioxide (CO2) can physically be consumed from the atmosphere?
LEFT: This river in Zimbabwe used to flow year-round. Then overgrazing by wandering livestock bared much of the soil in the surrounding area. Today the river flows only as flash floods following heavy rains. Biodiversity loss is severe, livestock are starving, and most wildlife has disappeared. RIGHT: This nearby river had similar problems. It now has water year-round, and flows during most of the year. Drought is rare, biodiversity is increasing, and wildlife has reappeared in large numbers. Soil Carbon P/L notes that capturing just 1 mm more rain per year means: 1 liter more usable water per square meter; 10,000 liters more water per hectare; 1,000,000 liters more water per square kilometer; Less drought, because more water stays in the soil to recharge rivers, springs, and wells; and more forage, because plants can also use that water.
As the planet has 7.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in circulation for each 1 ppm of atmospheric CO2, and there are 5 billion hectares of inappropriately managed or unmanaged, desertifying savannahs on the Earth (which on empirical evidence we contend to be the case), the question that should sensibly be asked is: How much carbon dioxide would be absorbed if policies were put in place (in Australia and elsewhere) that caused the focus of on-ground management to be deliberately directed towards the widespread consumption of cyclical GHGs within the currently under-utilised savannah lands?
Consumption of CO2 per hectare One hectare is 10,000 sq. metres. If a hectare of soil 33.5 cm deep, with a bulk density of 1.4 tonnes per cubic metre is considered, there is a soil mass per hectare of about 4,700 tonnes.
If appropriate management practices were adopted and these practices achieved and sustained a 1% increase in soil organic matter (SOM)6, then 47 tonnes of SOM per hectare will be added to organic matter stocks held below the soil surface
This 47 tonnes of SOM will contain approximately 27 tonnes of Soil Carbon (ie 47 tonnes at 58% Carbon) per hectare
In the absence of other inputs this Carbon may only be derived from the atmosphere via the natural function known as the photo-synthetic process. To place approximately 27 tonnes of Soil Carbon per hectare into the soil, approximately 100 tonnes of carbon dioxide must be consumed out of the atmosphere by photosynthesis
A 1% change in soil organic matter across 5 billion hectares will sequester 500 billion tonnes of physical CO2
Converting global Soil Carbon capacity to ppm of atmospheric GHGs
Every 1% increase in retained SOM within the topmost 33.5 cm of the soil must capture and hold approximately 100 tonnes per hectare of atmospheric carbon dioxide (the variability in the equation being due only to the soil bulk density). We submit that under determined, appropriate management, that this is readily achievable within a very few years
For each 1% increase in SOM achieved on the 5 billion hectares there will be removed 64 ppm of carbon dioxide from atmospheric circulation (500,000,000,000 tonnes CO2 / 7,800,000,000 tonnes per ppm = 64 ppm).
Soil Organic Matter is the plant material released into the soil during the natural phases of plant growth. It includes root material sloughed off below the soil surface and plant litter carried into the soil by microbes, insects and rainfall
Soil Carbon is the elemental carbon contained within Soil Organic Matter (SOM).
One tonne of CO2 contains 12/44 units of carbon (ie 0.27 tonnes of carbon per tonne of CO2.). Therefore 27 tonnes of carbon sequesters 27/0.27 = 100 tonnes CO2 (rounded). NB Carbon atomic weight 12, oxygen atomic weight 16 ie CO2 = 12+(16+16) = 44
The global opportunity and numbers
TOP: This cattle ranch in Sonora, Mexico, is typical of hundreds of millions of hectares of grazing land in arid and seasonally dry areas worldwide. BOTTOM: This is the neighboring ranch, La Inmaculada. The ranch is in the same area; has the same rainfall, same soils, and same plant species. The pictures were taken on the same day and La Inmaculada actually has more cattle than the drier ranch. The only difference between the two is management
It appears that the pre-industrial level of atmospheric carbon dioxide was 280ppm, and that globally we are now at 455ppm, and heading towards 550ppm. To get from 550ppm back to 280ppm, 270ppm must be removed. Globally, a 4.2% increase in SOM would potentially reverse the expected situation. In any case, any form of determined management will substantially reduce the now crippling legacy loadings in the atmosphere. Mongabay: How does one restore carbon to the Earth? Lovell: By actively mimicking nature and thereby allowing natural cycles to reinvigorate. Arid and semi-arid grazing lands co-evolved with massive herds of grazing animals that were kept bunched up by the presence of pack-hunting predators. When humans removed these predators and fenced in the animals we severely disrupted this natural behaviour leading directly to desertification and massive release of soil carbon into atmospheric circulation. The process that actually removes CO2 from atmospheric circulation is photosynthesis. A simple question for anyone — think of the biggest plant you have ever seen — it is probably a huge tree more than 50 metres tall, 10 metres around and weighing hundreds of tonnes. You can walk up to this tree and hit it — it is solid. Where did the material come from to make this tree? Far too many people answer — "from the ground the tree is growing in". The truth is that over 50% of the solid "thumpable" bit of the tree came directly out of the atmosphere as CO2. While a tree is much more visible than grass, the result is the same. The global opportunity and numbers
This simple picture says it all — if we allow the grasses to express themselves to the stage shown on the right they absorb CO2 from atmospheric circulation and turn it into plant material. We then manage our grazing animals to eat the grass down to the level somewhere between the middle 2 grass plants. At this point the reduced leaf mass is unable to support the large root mass, and so the plant sloughs off the now excess root material (carbon). The plant then commences to regrow but critically it regrows using carbon absorbed by photosynthesis, not the carbon it previously sloughed off. Repeat this process and you in essence "pump" CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it underground. Mongabay: What does Soil Carbon Australia offer? Lovell: Our main focus is on raising awareness of the important role soil carbon plays in mitigating global warming, and ideally on having it recognized as a tradeable item under any global emissions trading scheme. This will dramatically change the incentives that farmers respond to and thus bring about a massive positive change in agricultural practices. Mongabay: Where are you working? Lovell: We are based in Australia, and have colleagues in the USA, New Zealand, Spain, England, South Africa and South America. Mongabay: Have you looked at the potential to earn carbon credits for sequestration? Lovell: Yes — it is widely recognized and accepted that soil carbon sequestration works — the only questions are ones of measurement, monitoring and verification (MMV). We as a society have dealt with these MMV issues in regards to afforestation and deforestation so should be able to do so with regards to soil carbon. Mongabay: Are you familiar with "terra preta" soils in the Amazon? If so, how does your process compare with this form of soil carbon? Lovell: "terra preta" is probably the best example of just what we are talking about — a carbon rich, biologically active soil created as a result of appropriate human management. In the 5 billion hectares we want to bring attention to the results will not be as dramatic due to the lower rainfall and inherently poorer quality of the soils themselves, but the results will be significant and well worthwhile. __________________________________
-- Go to www.factoryfarm.org to learn more about confinement animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Be sure to watch The Meatrix.
-- Go to my blog posting about soy, to learn about the health hazards associated with the consumption of soy foods. A tremendous amount of information about soy is available through the Weston A. Price Foundation, among others.
Monsanto's Harvest of Fear By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele Vanity Fair. May 2008 Issue. Monsanto already dominates America's food chain with its genetically modified seeds ...
(For links to more in-depth information about Global Warming and related issues, go to the bottom of this posting.)
How many hurricanes, floods, droughts and famines does it take to get people to acknowledge that climate change is happening and do something? Evidence of warming is happening all over the planet. We humans need to start taking responsibility for repairing the damage that we have created.
THERE IS HOPE! We CAN turn things around - before it is too late.
My mother, Carolyn Lee has been compiling information about this for many years. She has put this together for you. Educate yourself, and pass it on.
To learn about Soil Carbon as a way to start addressing the climate crisis, go to this posting. Sandra
Is Global Warming for Real??
by Carolyn Lee
May 20, 2008
Find out for yourself! Don't take my word for it! But don't take the Bush administration's word for it either.
The best source I have found for ongoing, worldwide news coverage about climate change and global warming is climateark.org,the website of Dr. Glen Barry, a truly dedicated human being. Visit the site regularly for news of the latest scientific findings.
- How people in other countries are already being impacted by the problem. - What other countries are doing, or are not doing, to reduce their contribution to the planet's CO2 burden. - The dedicated individuals and groups around the world who are working collectively to save our home from ruin.
Carbon Equity Reports Read two reports which were prepared by Friends of the Earth for the government of Australia. Read Dr. James E. Hansen's latest papers on desirable CO2 targets. All are quite long and very detailed. Consider making hard copies to review for further study. Until you are familiar with this material, you cannot claim that you know much about global warming!
If you are a supporter of Ron Paul, as I am, you know how absolutely frustrating it has been to see him ignored, trivialized, and even ridiculed by the mainstream media. Here we have a truly patriotic and learned man, a person of great integrity, and he's shoved by the wayside!
Now imagine you're a climate scientist like Dr. James Hansen. How frustrating must it be for him, and the thousands of other scientists like him worldwide, to know that we are reaching -- and even surpassing -- these major tipping points, decades sooner than we expected to... but the media won't give the story the attention it deserves?!What's going on?
Aha!, the light bulbs go on! Is there a pattern here? You bet there is! The powers-that-be have a vested interest in keeping the system going, exactly as it currently exists, just as they have a vested interest in keeping Ron Paul out of the White House. They have absolutely no intention of reducing our reliance on the fossil fuels they own and control. After all, isn't that why we're in Iraq? Isn't that why the next prize to be fought over is Iran, with its huge oil and natural gas deposits?
People, please don't sit around and wait for the media, the government, or the other three candidates, who have ties to the fossil fuel and nuclear power industries, to give you the real skinny on global warming. It ain't gonna happen! Find out the truth for yourself. Do your homework. Global warming is very real and coming at us like a freight train. And the people of the United States are totally unprepared for it, because it is at the very bottom of the list of the Bush administration's priorities.
A comment is in order here about John McCain's supposedly "green" position on the environment. Since war is the most useless, wasteful, and destructive of all human activities, I am hereby declaring that a hawkish McCain presidency would be an unmitigated disaster for our precious planet. Why do you think the U.S. emits 25% of the world's greenhouse gases? How much of that is emitted by the gigantic military/industrial complex in its insane desire for "empire"? And it's not just the enormous amounts of fuel used by our military personnel in those 130 countries! It's also all the fossil fuels consumed in the design, manufacture, and maintenance of weapons systems, aircraft, tankers, etc., etc., etc. that really adds up!
As Ron says, it's pure insanity for us to bomb roads and bridges, and entire cities into oblivion, in Iraq, then turn around and pay millions of dollars to re-build those same bridges, roads, and cities. I ask you, how much more fossil fuel does that waste?!
So, Dr. Paul is actually the "greenest" of all the presidential hopefuls, because he is the only true PEACE CANDIDATE in the race. He's the only one advocating a humble foreign policy and non-intervention. He's the only one who wants to bring the troops home from 130 countries. He's the only one who would not wage a pre-emptive war.
Ron Paul would be the planet's choice for President of the United States!!
Spread the word!! ____________
To learn about Soil Carbon as a way to start addressing the climate crisis, go to this posting.
-- Go to www.factoryfarm.org to learn more about confinement animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Be sure to watch The Meatrix.
-- Go to my blog posting about soy, to learn about the health hazards associated with the consumption of soy foods. A tremendous amount of information about soy is available through the Weston A. Price Foundation, among others.
Monsanto's Harvest of Fear By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele Vanity Fair. May 2008 Issue. Monsanto already dominates America's food chain with its genetically modified seeds ...
EXCELLENT VIDEO! You will never view the immigration issue the same again.
This shows the long term effects of our CURRENT immigration policy. Imagine how it would look if the North American Union becomes a reality, and people from south of the border are free to come to the U.S. (or what used to be the U.S.).
If you want to take action regarding immigration, go to NumbersUSA.com website. From there it is very easy to send faxes to your Congressional representatives regarding immigration issues and bills. Sandra
Immigration Gumballs Posted May 2nd, 2008 This is a MUST SEE video for anyone interested in the immigration debate, whether you are a citizen, an illegal alien or a Congressman. This clip from the longer video, Immigration by the Numbers, features Roy Beck demonstrating the catastrophe of the huge numbers of both legal and illegal immigration by Third World people into the modern nations. He uses standard statistics and simple gumballs to show this disaster in the making.
There are two videos linked to from here. The second video discusses the issues of people feeling disempowered to be able to make a difference in their government. What is power? How can we overthrow power? How do we acquire power and use it to defend our liberties? What is Collectivism?? The video provides valuable education.
Republic or Democracy?
This fascinating video educates us about the definitions of a wide variety of terms: forms of government, economic structures, and more. It informs from a relatively neutral perspective, creating a positive experience and UNDERSTANDING.
The Constitution Gives the People FREEDOMS and LIMITS the Government
Our country was created to be a Republic which was governed according to the Constitution. The video describes what the United States of America IS and what it IS NOT, according to the Constitution. The Constitution gives the people Freedoms and Limits the government. Look how far we have strayed from that.
Watching this, I learned the difference between Democracy and Republic as forms of government. What does freedom really mean?
What is currently operating in the United States is an Oligarchy, with an elite Group ruling the people.
I learned that Communism is actually a form of Capitalism! Every economic system is actually a form of Capitalism. Learn the differences between monopolistic, state-controlled and free market economic systems.
Enjoy learning through watching this video.
From the person who sent this to me. "Watch this story of America that you never got in government school. Feel good about your country. Have hope for America. We can and must do it." Sandra
John McManus narrates a moving tribute to America and discusses the history of what makes America great, and how only we, as informed citizens, can keep the timeless concepts of Americanism alive in our Constitutional Republic.
What form of government would you prefer? ______________
The following video clearly explains how seemingly diverse and unrelated events are actually very much connected. Worldwide events are carefully manipulated by a few individuals.
Monopoly Men (below) is the most informative video I have seen on the shadowy figures who own the Federal Reserve and their plans for world domination. Learn about the role the Rothschild family plays in all of this intrigue. Learn who the Bilderbergers are, and about the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.
Learn who profits from perpetual war.
Something I have not seen conveyed before is the very important role played by the mainstream media in keeping all of this information from the public. And the media's role in the election of particular individuals to the office of U.S. President, so that they may then further the agenda of these power-hungry people.
Wind forward to current time, and evidence that the media meddle in the current presidential campaign by unfairly representing and misrepresenting the various candidates. The media have been caught actively sabotaging Ron Paul's presidential campaign. Why? Because he would not continue the unpublished yet pervasive support that our country has given for so long to these big-money interests. That would really screw up their plans and profits, so everything possible is done to keep people from learning the truth. Go to the blog entry and video about this.
War and Inflation
At the bottom of this blog posting is an excellent article, dated June 9, 2008, War and Inflation. It explains how, without central banks like the Federal Reserve, most wars would not be possible. THE U.S. WOULD NOT HAVE WAR, IF WE DIDN'T HAVE THE FEDERAL RESERVE! The article describes the role of central banks in World War I, Hitler and WW II, and now Iraq. Please go to the end of this posting for this article.
Here is the last paragraph from the article. "It comes down to this. If you hate war, oppose the Fed. If you hate violations of your liberties, oppose the Fed. If you want to restrain despotism, restrain the Fed. If you want to secure freedom for yourself and your descendants, abolish the Fed."
(A note from the article about the Iraq war: "In the entire run-up to war . . . despite a $200 billion deficit, a $9 trillion debt, $5 trillion in outstanding debt instruments held by the public, a federal budget of $3 trillion, and falling tax receipts in 2001, Bush contemplated a war that has cost $525 billion dollars -- or $4,681 per household. . . . And those are government figures; the actual cost of this war will be far higher -- perhaps $20,000 per household.")
As I add things to this posting, it is becoming quite extensive.
Here is a link to a posting about a June 11 article about a CIA ex-administrator who reveals the corruption of the Bush administration and the military industrial complex.
Here is a link to a fascinating audio Who Are the Bilderbergers? Sandra _____________ Would you like facts about the Federal Reserve from the mouth of one of its own officers?
Video Interview of an Officer of the Federal Reserve
Below the Monopoly Men video is Meet the Federal Reserve, a video recorded in May 2008, of a reporter actually getting answers to questions from an officer of the Federal Reserve of Chicago. Fascinating!
The guy actually says that yes, the Federal Reserve is a private bank. That and much more. I'm very amazed that this officer actually said all of this, on video. (Trivia note. Did you know that our money is toxic? When the Fed shreds old bills, they are considered toxic waste.) Sandra ___________ Now to the video that puts all the pieces together.
Actor Dean Stockwell hosts the video, starting off with the following: "Is there a secret history of the United States intentionally hidden by the mainstream media? Could there be a secret society of fat money businessmen whose agenda has been the cause of every major war and economic depression? Is there a shadowy elite gently pulling the strings of our world, to bring about their own self-serving political program?"
Watch the video. It is shorter than some of the videos about the Fed that have been posted here. Only 47 minutes. It is a very well spent hour. Educate yourself! ___________
In this video, Gary Franchi of Republic Magazine goes to the 44th Annual Conference on Bank Structure and Competition in Chicago. He asks Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve some questions and is completely ignored.
He then has a private meeting with Jerry Nelson, Corporate Communications, of the Federal Reserve, who proceeds to answer all of Franchi's questions!! Watch it. 26 minutes.
Meet the Federal Reserve (0:26:38)
_________
War and Inflation Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., June 9, 2009 http://mises.org/story/3010 (mises.org is an excellent website. Ludwig von Mises was one of the major proponents of the Austrian school of economics. If we were to follow this economic model, we would have vastly improved economic health.)
"This institution is the very mechanism by which the dreams of both the fanatical Right and the fanatical Left come true."
The US central bank, called the Federal Reserve, was created in 1913. No one promoted this institution with the slogan that it would make wars more likely and guarantee that nearly half a million Americans will die in battle in foreign lands, along with millions of foreign soldiers and civilians.
No one pointed out that this institution would permit Americans to fund, without taxes, the destruction of cities abroad and overthrow governments at will. No one said that the central bank would make it possible for the United States to be at large-scale war in one of every four years for a full century. It was never pointed out that this institution would make it possible for the US government to establish a global empire that would make imperial Rome and Britain look benign by comparison.
You can line up 100 professional war historians and political scientists to talk about the 20th century, and not one is likely to mention the role of the Fed in funding US militarism. And yet it is true: the Fed is the institution that has created the money to fund the wars. In this role, it has solved a major problem that the state has confronted for all of human history. A state without money or a state that must tax its citizens to raise money for its wars is necessarily limited in its imperial ambitions. Keep in mind that this is only a problem for the state. It is not a problem for the people. The inability of the state to fund its unlimited ambitions is worth more for the people than every kind of legal check and balance. It is more valuable than all the constitutions every devised.
The state has no wealth that is its own. It is not a profitable enterprise. Everything it possesses it must take from society in a zero-sum game. That usually means taxes, but taxes annoy people. They can destabilize the state and threaten its legitimacy. They inspire anger, revolt, and even revolution. Rather than risk that result, the state from the Middle Ages to the dawn of the central-banking age was somewhat cautious in its global ambitions simply because it was cautious in its need to steal openly and directly from the people in order to pay its bills.
To be sure, it doesn't require a central bank for a state to choose inflation over taxes as a means of funding itself. All it really requires is a monopoly on the production of money. Once acquired, the monopoly on money production leads to a systematic process of depreciating the currency, whether by coin clipping or debasement or the introduction of paper money, which can then be printed without limit. The central bank assists in this process in a critical sense: it cartelizes the banking system, the essential conduit by which money is lent to the public and to the government itself. The banking system thereby becomes a primary funding agency to the state, and, in exchange for its services, the banking system is guaranteed against insolvency and business failure as it profits from inflation. If the goal of the state is the complete monopolization of money under an infinitely flexible paper-money system, there is no better path for the state than the creation of a central bank. This is the greatest achievement for the victory of power over liberty.
The connection between war and inflation, then, dates long before the creation of the Federal Reserve. In fact, it dates to the founding itself. The fate of the Continental currency during and after the Revolutionary War, for example, was a very bad omen for our future, and the whole country paid a very serious price. It was this experience that later led to the gold clause in the US Constitution. Except for the Hamiltonians, that entire generation of political activists saw the unity of freedom and sound money, and regarded paper money as the fuel of tyranny.
Paper money is like dram-drinking, it relieves for a moment by deceitful sensation, but gradually diminishes the natural heat, and leaves the body worse than it found it. Were not this the case, and could money be made of paper at pleasure, every sovereign in Europe would be as rich as he pleased…. Paper money appears at first sight to be a great saving, or rather that it costs nothing; but it is the dearest money there is. The ease with which it is emitted by an assembly at first serves as a trap to catch people in at last. It operates as an anticipation of the next year's taxes.
But the wisdom of this generation, attacked by Lincoln, was finally thrown out during the Progressive Era. It was believed that an age of scientific public policy needed a scientific money machinery that could be controlled by powerful elites. The dawn of the age of central banking was also the dawn of the age of central planning, for there can be no government control over the nation's commercial life without first controlling the money. And once the state has the money and the banking system, its ambitions can be realized.
Before the creation of the Federal Reserve, the idea of American entry into the conflict that became World War I would have been inconceivable. In fact, it was a highly unpopular idea, and Woodrow Wilson himself campaigned on a platform that promised to keep us out of war. But with a money monopoly, all things seem possible. It was a mere four years after the Fed was invented under the guise of scientific policy planning that the real agenda became obvious. The Fed would fund the US entry into World War I.
It was not only entry alone that was made possible. World War I was the first total war. It involved nearly the whole of the civilized world, and not only their governments but also the civilian populations, both as combatants and as targets. It has been described as the war that ended civilization in the 19th-century sense in which we understand that term. That is to say, it was the war that ended liberty as we knew it. What made it possible was the Federal Reserve. And not only the US central bank; it was also its European counterparts. This was a war funded under the guise of scientific monetary policy.
Reflecting on the calamity of this war, Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1919
One can say without exaggeration that inflation is an indispensable means of militarism. Without it, the repercussions of war on welfare become obvious much more quickly and penetratingly; war weariness would set in much earlier.
There is always a price to be paid for funding war through the central bank. The postwar situation in America was a classic case. There was inflation. There were massive dislocations. There was recession or what was then called depression, a direct result of capital dislocation that masked itself as an economic boom, but which was then followed by a bust. The depression hit in 1920, but it is not a famous event in United States economic history. Why is that? Because the Federal Reserve had not yet acquired the tools to manufacture an attempt to save the economy. Instead, neither the Fed nor Congress nor the president did much of anything about it — a wholly praiseworthy response! As a result, the depression was brief and became a footnote to history. The same would have happened in 1930, had Hoover not attempted to use the government as the means of resuscitation.
"The dawn of the age of central banking was also the dawn of the age of central planning, for there can be no government control over the nation's commercial life without first controlling the money."
Sadly, the easy recovery of 1920–1922 tempted the central bank to get back into the business of inflation, with the eventual result of a stock market boom that led to bust, then depression, and finally the destruction of the gold standard itself. FDR found that even fascist-style economic planning and inflation could not restore prosperity, so he turned to the ancient method of looking for a war to enter. Here is where the history of the United States and the Fed intersects with the tragic role of the German central bank.
The German government also funded its Great War through inflation. By war's end, money in circulation had risen fourfold. Prices were up 140%. Yet, on international exchange, the German mark had not suffered as much as one might expect. The German government looked at this with encouragement and promptly attempted to manufacture a complete economic recovery through inflation. Incredibly, by 1923, the mark had fallen to one-trillionth of its 1914 gold value. The US dollar was then equal to 4.2 trillion marks. It was an example of currency destruction that remains legendary in the history of the world — all made possible by a central bank that obliged the government and monetized its war debt.
But did people blame the printing press? No. The popular explanation dealt directly with the Treaty of Versailles. It was the harsh peace imposed by the allies that had brought Germany to the brink of total destruction — or so it was believed. Mises himself had written a full book that he hoped would explain that Germany owed its suffering to war and socialism, not Versailles as such. He urged the German people to look at the real cause and establish free markets, lest imperial dictatorship be the next stage in political development. But he was ignored.
The result, we all know, was Hitler.
Turning to Russia, the untold truth about the Bolshevik revolution is that Lenin's greatest propaganda tool involved the suffering of the Russian people during World War I. Men were drafted and killed at a horrific level. Lenin called this capitalist exploitation, based on his view that the war resulted from capitalist motives. In fact, it was a foreshadowing of the world that socialism would bring about, a world in which all people and all property are treated as means to statist ends. And what made the prolongation of the Russian role in World War I possible was an institution created in 1860 called the State Bank of the Russian Empire — the Russian version of the Fed.
The Russian war itself was funded through money creation, which also led to massive price increases and controls and shortages during the war. I'm not of the opinion, unlike the neocons, that the Russian monarchy was a particularly evil regime, but the temptation that the money machine provided the regime proved too inviting. It turned a relatively benign monarchy into a war machine. A country that had long been integrated into the worldwide division of labor and was under a gold standard became a killing machine. And as horrific and catastrophic as the war dead were for Russian morale, the inflation affected every last person and inspired massive unrest that led to the triumph of Communism.
At this juncture in history, we can see what central banking had brought to us. It was not an end to the business cycle. It was not merely more liquidity for the banking system. It was not an end to bank runs and bank panics. It certainly wasn't scientific public policy. The world's major economies were being lorded over by money monopolies, and the front men had become some of the worst despots in the history of the world. Now they were preparing to fight each other with all the resources they had at their disposal. The resources they did not have at their disposal they would pay for with their beloved machinery of central banking.
In wartime, the printing presses ran overtime, but with a totalitarian level of rationing, price controls, and all-around socialization of resources in the whole of the Western world, the result of inflation was not merely rising prices. It was vast suffering and shortages in Britain, Russia, Germany, Italy, France, Austria-Hungary, the United States, and pretty much the entire planet.
"One can say without exaggeration that inflation is an indispensable means of militarism."
– Ludwig von Mises
So we can see here the amazing irony of central banking at work. The institution that was promoted by economists working with bankers, in the name of bringing rationality and science to bear on monetary matters, had given birth to the most evil political trends in the history of the world: Communism, socialism, Fascism, Nazism, and the despotism of economic planning in the capitalist West. The story of central banking is one step removed from the story of atom bombs and death camps. There is a reason the state has been unrestrained in the last 100 years, and that reason is the precise one that many people think of as a purely technical issue that is too complicated for mere mortals.
Fast-forward to the Iraq War, which has all the features of a conflict born of the power to print money. There was a time when the decision to go to war involved real debate in the House of Commons or the US House of Representatives. And what was this debate about? It was about resources and the power to tax. But once the executive state was unhinged from the need to rely on tax dollars and did not have to worry about finding willing buyers for its unbacked debt instruments, the political debate about war was silenced.
In the entire run-up to war, George Bush just assumed as a matter of policy that it was his decision alone whether to invade Iraq. The objections by Ron Paul and some other members of Congress and vast numbers of the American population were reduced to little more than white noise in the background. Imagine if he had to raise the money for the war through taxes. It never would have happened. But he didn't have to. He knew the money would be there. So despite a $200 billion deficit, a $9 trillion debt, $5 trillion in outstanding debt instruments held by the public, a federal budget of $3 trillion, and falling tax receipts in 2001, Bush contemplated a war that has cost $525 billion dollars — or $4,681 per household. Imagine if he had gone to the American people to request that. What would have happened? I think we know the answer to that question. And those are government figures; the actual cost of this war will be far higher — perhaps $20,000 per household.
Now, when left-liberals talk about these figures, they like to compare them with what the state might have done with these resources in terms of funding health care, public schools, Head Start centers, or food stamps. This is a mistake because it demonstrates that the Left isn't really providing an alternative to the Right. It merely has a different set of priorities in how it would use the resources raised by the inflation machine. It's true that public schools are less costly in terms of lives and property than war itself. But the inflation-funded welfare state also has a corrosive effect on society. The pipe dream that the inflation monster can be used to promote good instead of evil illustrates a certain naïveté about the nature of the state itself. If the state has the power and is asked to choose between doing good and waging war, what will it choose? Certainly in the American context, the choice has always been for war.
"The story of central banking is one step removed from the story of atom bombs and death camps."
It is equally naïve for the Right to talk about restraining the government while wishing for global war. So long as the state has unlimited access to the printing press, it can ignore the pleas of ideological groups concerning how the money will be spent. It is also very silly for the Right to believe that it can have its wars, its militarism, its nationalism and belligerence, without depending on the power of the Federal Reserve. This institution is the very mechanism by which the dreams of both the fanatical Right and the fanatical Left come true.
The effect of the money machine goes well beyond funding undesirable government programs. The Fed creates financial bubbles that lead to economic dislocation. Think of the technology bubble of the late 1990s or the housing bubble. Or the boom that preceded the current bust. These are all a result of the monopolization of money.
These days, the American consumer has been hit very hard with rising prices in oil, clothing, food, and much else. For the first time in decades, people are feeling this and feeling it hard. And just as in every other inflation in world history, people are looking for the culprit and finding all the wrong ones. They believe it is the oil companies who are gouging us, or that foreign oil dealers are restricting supply, or that gas station owners are abusing a crisis to profit at our expense.
I wouldn't entirely rule out the possibility that price controls are around the corner. When Nixon imposed them in 1971, neither he nor his advisors believed that they would actually result in controlling inflation. Rather, the purpose was to redirect the target of public anger from the government and its bank over to retailers, who would become scapegoats. In this sense, price controls do work. They make people believe that the government is trying to lower prices while the private sector is attempting to raise them. This is the real political dynamic at work with price controls.
The question is whether you will be taken in by these tactics. It is long past time for us to take note that the cause of the real trouble here is not the manufacturers, or even the war as such, but the agency that has been granted a legal right to counterfeit at will and lower the value of the currency while fueling every manner of statist scheme, whether welfare or warfare. We need to look at the Fed and say, this is the enemy.
Note that the Federal Reserve is not a political party. It is not a recognized interest group. It is not a famed lobby in Washington. It is not really even a sector of public opinion. It seems completely shielded from vigorous public debate. If we truly believe in liberty and decry the leviathan state, this situation cannot be tolerated.
"So long as the state has unlimited access to the printing press, it can ignore the pleas of ideological groups concerning how the money will be spent."
I say to the sincere Right, if you really want to limit the state, you will have to give up your dreams of remaking the world at the point of a gun. Wars and limited government are impossible. Moreover, you must stop ignoring the role of monetary policy. It is a technical subject, to be sure, but one that we must all look into and understand if we expect to restore something that resembles the American liberty of the founders.
I say to the sincere Left, if you really want to stop war and stop the spying state, and put an end to the persecution of political dissidents and the Guantánamo camps for foreign peoples, and put a stop to the culture of nationalism and militarism, you must join us in turning attention to the role of monetary policy. The printing presses must be unplugged. It's true that this will also hit programs that are beloved by the Left, such as socialized health care and federalized education programs. But so long as you expect the state to fund your dreams, you cannot expect that the state will not also fund the dreams of people you hate.
And let me say a few words to libertarians, who dream of a world with limited government under the rule of law, a world in which free enterprise reigns and where the state has no power to interfere in our lives so long as we behave peacefully. It is completely absurd to believe that this can be achieved without fundamental monetary reform. And yet, until the most recent Ron Paul campaign — and aside from Murray Rothbard and the 26-year-long work of the Mises Institute — I don't recall that libertarians themselves have cared much about this issue at all.
In 1983, the Mises Institute held a large academic conference on the gold standard, and we held it in Washington, D.C. (There were scholarly papers and Ron Paul debated a Fed governor. Ron won.) Even back then, I recall that D.C. libertarians ridiculed us for holding such a meeting to talk about the Fed and its replacement with sound money. They said that this would make the Mises Institute look ridiculous, that we would be tarred with the brush of gold bugs and crazies. We did it anyway. And all these years later, the book that came out of that conference remains a main source for understanding the role of money in the advance of despotism or resistance to it, and a blueprint for the future.
Of course the Austrian tradition fought paper money and central banking from the beginning. Menger was an advocate of the gold standard. Böhm-Bawerk actually established it as finance minister to the Habsburg monarchy. Mises's book on the topic from 1912 was the first to show the role of money in the business cycle, and he issued dire warnings about central banking. Hayek wrote powerfully against the abandonment of gold in the 1930s. Hazlitt warned of the inevitable breakdown of Bretton Woods and advocated a real gold standard instead. And Rothbard was a champion of sound money and the greatest enemy the Fed has ever had.
But generally, I've long detected a tendency in libertarian circles to ignore this issue, in part for precisely the reasons cited above: it is not respectable.
Well, I will tell you why this issue is not considered respectable: it is the most important priority of the state to keep its money machine hidden behind a curtain. Anyone who dares pull the curtain back is accused of every manner of intellectual crime. This is precisely the reason we must talk about it at every occasion. We must end the conspiracy of silence on this issue.
I was intrigued at how Ron Paul, during his campaign, would constantly bring up the subject. Most politicians are out to play up to their audiences, so they say things that people want to hear. I promise you that early in the campaign, no one wanted to hear him talk about the Federal Reserve. But he did it anyway. He worked to educate his audiences about the need for monetary reform. And it worked. For the first time in my life, there is a large and very public movement in this country to take this topic seriously.
Monetary economist Joseph Salerno was called the other day by C-Span, which wanted to interview him on television on the need to restore gold as the basis of our currency. As I watched this excellent interview, I was struck by what a great triumph it truly is for liberty that this topic is again part of the national debate. In the 19th-century, this was a topic on everybody's mind. It can be again today, provided we do not eschew the truth in the formation of our message.
It might be said that advocating privatization is politically unrealistic, and therefore a waste of time. What's more, we might say that by continuing to harp on the issue, we only marginalize ourselves, proving that we are on the fringe. I submit that there is no better way to ensure that an issue will always be off the table than to stop talking about it.
Far from being an arcane and anachronistic issue, then, the gold standard and the issues it raises get right to the heart of the current debate concerning the future of war and the world economy. Why do the government and its partisans dislike the gold standard? It removes the discretionary power of the Fed by placing severe limits on the ability of the central bank to inflate the money supply. Without that discretionary power, the government has far fewer tools of central planning at its disposal. Government can regulate, which is a function of the police power. It can tax, which involves taking people's property. And it can spend, which means redistributing other people's property. But its activities in the financial area are radically curbed.
Think of your local and state governments. They tax and spend. They manipulate and intervene. As with all governments from the beginning of time, they generally retard social progress and muck things up as much as possible. What they do not do, however, is wage massive global wars, run huge deficits, accumulate trillions in debt, reduce the value of money, bail out foreign governments, provide endless credit to failing enterprises, administer hugely expensive and destructive social insurance schemes, or bring about immense swings in business activity.
State and local governments are awful and they must be relentlessly checked, but they are not anything like the threat of the federal government. Neither are they as arrogant and convinced of their own infallibility and indispensability. They lack the aura of invincibility that the central government enjoys.
It is the central bank, and only the central bank, that works as the government's money machine, and this makes all the difference. Now, it is not impossible that a central bank can exist alongside a gold standard, a lender of last resort that avoids the temptation to destroy that which restrains it. In the same way, it is possible for someone with an insatiable appetite for wine to sit at a banquet table of delicious vintages and not take a sip. Let's just say that the existence of a central bank introduces an occasion of sin for the government. That is why under the best gold standard, there would be no central bank, gold coins would circulate as freely as their substitutes, and rules against fraud and theft would prohibit banks from pyramiding credit on top of demand deposits.
"Until the most recent Ron Paul campaign, I don't recall that libertarians themselves have cared much about this issue at all."
So long as we are constructing the perfect system, all coinage would be private. Banks would be treated as businesses: no special privileges, no promises of bailout, no subsidized insurance, and no connection to government at any level.
This is the free-market system of monetary management, which means turning over the institution of money entirely to the market economy. As with any institution in a free society, it is not imposed from above and dictated by a group of experts, but is the de facto result that comes about in a society that consistently respects private-property rights, encourages enterprise, and promotes peace.
It comes down to this. If you hate war, oppose the Fed. If you hate violations of your liberties, oppose the Fed. If you want to restrain despotism, restrain the Fed. If you want to secure freedom for yourself and your descendants, abolish the Fed.
ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA – Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul’s newest book, “The Revolution: A Manifesto”, is number one on the New York Times Best Sellers list for May 18th, 2008. The ranking is yet another of the many successes Dr. Paul has had during his presidential candidacy spreading his message of personal freedom and constitutional government.
Upon its official release on April 30th, “The Revolution: A Manifesto” was the number one bestseller on Amazon.com and remains the number one bestseller in political books. _______
Access to Information About Ron Paul Continues to be Blocked
Throughout the campaign, mainstream media coverage of Ron Paul has been severely limited, unreasonably so. Considering how extraordinarily popular Paul is, this indicates how threatened the Establishment is by Ron Paul and what he represents - truth, freedom, and the Constitution. Big business interests and the political mainstream that continues to support these interests are doing everything in their power to prevent people from becoming educated about what life in the United States should really be like.
Ron Paul's book is truly an extraordinary and valuable educational volume, one which every American would do well to read. It shows you how our government should be operating, and how the way our government is operating is absolutely not consistent with the foundations upon which our country was built.
Because of this, the Establishment is trying to block access to the book. Go to your local bookstores and ASK FOR THE BOOK! Let them know there is demand!
Here is one person's experience, followed by my friend's comment about this, . . .
I went to Barnes & Noble in Lacey yesterday to get Ron's book. After about a 30 minute search by an employee they finally found the ONE copy they had -- tucked back in the far corner of the store. Of course Hillary's and McCain's and all the other political personages' books were prominently displayed at the FRONT of the store! I said incredulously, "ONE copy?" And their reply was, "Yes, aren't you lucky to get it?"
Well, at least I have it! But people ought to know to go in and ASK for it! Then maybe they'll wake up and order it, and make it findable.
Just want you to be aware of more conspiracy against Ron Paul and now it is the book stores. Be sure to go into your bookstore and ask for his Book. I ask the question then who owns Barnes and Noble..... maybe there are links back to the powers who control this country??????
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