Posted on 02/09/2009 12:36:11 AM PST by nw_arizona_granny
http://www.fda.gov/Safety/Recalls/ucm170638.htm
[Is this one aimed at Freepers???? granny]
Recall — Firm Press Release
FDA posts press releases and other notices of recalls and market withdrawals from the firms involved as a service to consumers, the media, and other interested parties. FDA does not endorse either the product or the company.
Kroger Recalls Three Seasonings Due to Possible Health Risk
Kroger Contacts:
Media: Meghan Glynn (513) 762-1304
Investors: Carin Fike (513) 762-4969
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — CINCINNATI, Ohio, June 30, 2009 – The Kroger Co. said today it is recalling Kroger Popcorn Seasoning Movie Theater Butter Flavored, Kroger Popcorn Seasoning White Cheddar Flavored, and Kroger Fat Free Butter Flavored Sprinkles sold in some of its retail stores because the Company has been made aware by a supplier that an ingredient in the product may have been contaminated with Salmonella.
No illnesses have been reported in connection with the Kroger products.
Stores the company operates under the following names did not receive any of the seasonings being recalled: Ralphs, Smith’s, Fred Meyer, QFC, Fry’s, King Soopers, City Market, and Foods Co.
Kroger is recalling the following items:
* Kroger Popcorn Seasoning Movie Theater Butter Flavored sold in 2.82-ounce jars with a sell-by date of JUN 08 10 under the following UPC code: 011110 72445.
* Kroger Popcorn Seasoning White Cheddar Flavored sold in 2.82-ounce jars with a sell-by date of JUN 09 10 under the following UPC code: 011110 72444. These two seasonings were sold in Kroger stores in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia and Virginia; Dillons and Gerbes stores in Kansas and Missouri; Baker’s stores in Nebraska; and Food 4 Less, Hilander, Jay C, Owen’s, Pay Less and Scott’s stores in Illinois and Indiana.
* Kroger Fat Free Butter Flavored Sprinkles sold in 2-ounce jars with sell-by dates of JUN 08 10 and JUN 09 10 under the following UPC code: 011110 66853. This seasoning was sold in Kroger stores in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia.
Customers who have purchased the above products should not consume them and should return them to a store for a full refund or replacement.
Salmonella is an organism that can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections, particularly in young children, the elderly, and persons with weakened immune systems. Healthy persons infected with Salmonella often experience fever, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting and/or abdominal pain. For more information, please visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website at www.cdc.gov.
Consumers who have questions about this recall may contact Kroger toll-free at (800) 632-6900. For more information, please visit www.kroger.com/recalls.
###
Photo: Product Label
RSS Feed for FDA Recalls Information [what’s this?]
-
-
Page Last Updated: 07/06/2009
Oh, cucumber chips are terrific... Just enough cucumber taste to make them really interesting.
Of course the next step will be to try some marinades and seasonings. So far we have been eating all we make without even missing the salt!<<<
You are having fun, I am jealous.
Isn’t it fun trying new foods.
Now, that sounds interesting. Being pretty watery, I wonder how they will dehydrate.<<<
See post #9435, Dela says they were great.
http://survivingthemiddleclasscrash.wordpress.com/2009/06/05/baking-in-a-wood-oven/
Baking in a Wood Oven
Posted by Barbara Peterson
[2 videos, on building ovens and baking in them]
By Podchef
The Podchef shows how to bake bread, cookies, and other goodies in an outside, wood oven.
The oven? Here is how he built it.
Instructions on constructing the same wood oven that the Podchef has from a company with the following philosophy:
These ovens constitute a radical departure in building technique and use that has made it possible for the first time for small rural based home and village bakeries to be viable and competitive with the industry at any level.
With the ongoing loss of middle class occupations throughout western societies, many with even moderate skills and capital can create an invaluable small business in their communities that will find ready support from them in return.
Many are finding for the first time the joy of meanigful work in the bosum of their communities and free from the distant hidden grip of the corporate world at last. http://www.ovencrafters.net/
Brick OvenHere is a link to a ton of information and plans for making all sorts of wood-fired ovens:
http://heatkit.com/html/bakeoven.htm
The Homestead Revolution – Happy Slaves
Posted by Barbara Peterson
By Ed Howes
Happy Slaves
The lowly earthworm, slaughtered by the trillions or zillions by chemical, corporate, money lover agriculture, is worth many times the pennies it costs to buy your starter stock, if they are not readily available for free. The profitable organic food producer raises them in controlled conditions to increase their rates of reproduction, foil predators and to prevent their escape. Worms are the cheapest labor you can get for your food crops. They work night and day tilling soil for food, which you provide them. They like decaying plant material to eat and they especially like to eat compost. The castings, or worm manure is superior to fresh compost as plant food. As your worm farm – ranch grows in size, you have more and more to add to new garden beds and tree holes. Plant quality and crop volumes sky rocket, requiring mechanical supports.
There is money being made in raising worms for sale and if I have my way, there will be a lot more to be made in the future. However, I find them far more valuable than their market price as personal assistants and manufacturers of organic, super potting soil. My focus will be on finding space for them and feeding them well. There are two types of worms of interest to the gardener. Common earthworms as you may have in your yard, make permanent tunnels and go as deep as two feet. We definitely want lots of them around our plants. Redworms do not make permanent tunnels, like living in rotting manure and garbage beds and stay within about six inches of the surface if it is not too hot, cold or dry. They will eat vegetarian manures and just about any plant materials. They reproduce faster than common earthworms and can be raised indoors for purposes of experiments and breeding. These are the ones that will produce more rich potting soil, dollar for dollar. Feed, water, protect from natural predators and they will help you grow superior plants of every description. Eat the fruit of these plants and you will be superior too. And you will know the difference.
The products and knowledge exist that allow us to grow the best food ever grown in the history of mankind, nearly anywhere we choose to grow it. The best food ever grown will have no shortage of customers for it, good times or bad. In a few years, supermarket produce sections will be pointless. Superfood will have the markets sewed up. Corporate farmers throw in the towel or specialize in non food crops. Old, depleted land comes onto the market for real people to regenerate and restore, at prices real people can afford. We are not going to replace the rainforests in a hurry but why can’t we cover the world in orchards, gardens and vineyards? Wouldn’t this help reduce carbon dioxide levels and reduce the greenhouse effect? It starts in my yard and yours, spreads from there as we choose to expand our own operations and encourage the involvement of others. We think about costs and how we can do more at lower cost. This creates models for the rest of the world. In my vision, poverty is a personal choice, not a fact of life – everywhere.
Quiet Revolution
The Homestead Revolution does not violently overthrow the status quo and corporate, money lover world. It builds a coexisting alternative to accommodate those who want out of the status quo.The greater the accommodation, the more people will opt out.The more people opt out, the less control and manipulation the corporate world wields over its remaining supporters and revolutionaries. This revolution is not subject to legislation and military force. Grassroots political structures can be easily created to gain control of county governments, state governments and lastly, the national government, instead of the usually futile attempts to create top down change.
The homestead revolutionary is free to pursue a quiet life of solitude in total independence from others. Yet, most will work toward improving social contracts at the local level and choose interdependence. We can more readily depend on others when we know it is our choice to do so and we are in a position to end that dependence any time. It is the best of all worlds in my opinion. Food production in a responsible manner, increases our connectedness to each other, wildlife and the natural world. We become less interested in what is in it for us and more interested in how we can help – the comparative values and attitudes of the old order and its new replacement. As we gain independence in our basic life needs, we gain spiritual enlightenment we can share with others, near and far. We become enabled, then empowered, no longer at the mercy of money lovers.
The Homestead Revolution changes the global value system. People, labor and spirit become the new money, the new capital. Partnerships become the measure of wealth, not bank accounts. Locally invested profits insulate the local community from global crisis and money lover economics. We know people often profit from crisis. Maybe it is our turn to be the ones to profit, at the same time we reduce the consequences of corporate dominion throughout the world. The corporate world needs the crises it creates to maintain power. The corporate world will drive people into the Homestead Revolution, once it is up and running. When your enemy increases your numbers, it is so much easier to love your enemy.
Just as terrorists use the Western money lover establishment to their own advantage, the non violent revolutionary can do quite the same. As we decrease demand for corporate product, that which we want temporarily becomes cheaper for everyone. The corporate world, for all its money, military and political puppets, cannot compete with a superior economic value system – it can only compete with those embracing the same value system. Why don’t we put ourselves to work creating a superior value system? Learn the true and potential value of slaves and souls and suddenly no one on earth is expendable or disposable. We can have it, if we want it. When enough of us have had our fill of restriction, repression and corporate fantasy, we will create a very different world. Or, maybe we’ll just leave it to the survivors of the Old World Order. The non violent Homestead Revolution is my alternative to terrorism. In fact, it shares the same goal as the terrorists – destroy an unjust value system. We don’t need the violence and we have a practical alternative. What is your alternative? “Come out of her, my people, that you do not partake of her plagues.” Though today we partake of her plagues and pretend the benefits are worth all the suffering, we know in our hearts there has to be a better way. It has long been my desire to share the one I could see best and now I have.
Here is to liberty and survival, comfort and personal security for the few who see the writing on the wall. We have an opportunity to change an ancient, corrupt value system and benefit everyone on earth. We will never see a better offer. Before you take up arms against your money loving oppressors, please remember you once had a non violent alternative. What did you do with it? Let us daily increase in wisdom, love, gratitude, reverence, healing, peace, joy, happiness, laughter and prosperity.
http://survivingthemiddleclasscrash.wordpress.com/scrumptious-recipes/
Barbara Peterson Says:
March 26, 2008 at 1:56 am
This is my own recipe I call Apple Cornbread Delight. It is sugar-free!
Tools & Ingredients:
1 small flat Pyrex dish with lid
1 stick butter
Sliced cornbread
Agave syrup
H2O
Gravenstein apple (or equivalent sweet apple)
Instructions:
Slice butter cube thinly and place 1/3 to 1/2 cube on bottom of Pyrex dish.
Put 2 TBS H2O on the butter.
Slice apple in thin to medium slices and place on top of butter/H2O.
Sprinkle a liberal amount of Agave on the apples.
Place the cornbread on top of this.
Sprinkle more Agave on the cornbread.
Place some more butter slices around the sides.
Cover and bake at 375 degrees for 25-30 minutes.
Uncover for the last 5 minutes.
Enjoy!
#
Kathryn Smith Says:
March 29, 2008 at 10:43 am
GLUTEN-FREE BAKED FOODS
I served my gluten-free chocolate chip cookies at a party attended by people who don’t even eat gluten-free food. All present commented on how good these cookies are, and nobody noticed that they are wheat-free. In fact, they were surprised to find out.
I have had many compliments on my gluten-free muffins and cakes as well. Again, most present don’t notice the difference between my gluten-free baked goods and a regular wheat-containing recipe. My cakes come out light and fluffy, and my chocolate chip cookies are a command performance. And I never use a gluten-free mix, for reasons discussed below.
MY SECRET IN GLUTEN-FREE BAKING is to add an extra egg to a regular wheat flour recipe, to hold the batter together and lighten the texture. Some cake recipes may require two extra eggs: Use your judgement. The more eggs, the lighter the texture and the thinner the batter.
I use white or brown rice flour. I also use finely-grated nuts from my food processor or blender, when possible. I mix the ground nuts in a 1:1 ratio with the rice flour. Where the chocolate chip cookies are concerned these ground nuts make a real difference in the taste and texture alike. But the recipe is still quite good without the ground nuts.
You can buy ground almonds quite inexpensively from Trader Joe’s, about $5 per pound. Of course, ground walnuts are always less expensive. Ground hazelnuts or filberts add a distinctive flavor which is a classic in German baking, and mixes beautifully with chocolate as the Germans do.
NOTE: Studies on Pubmed, the government medical database, indicate that dogs fed a regular diet containing xanthan gum, which is often used in gluten-free mixes, resulted in enlarged livers. I suggest it’s important to minimize consumption of this heavy-duty gum which, after all, is used to hold cement together and to firm it up. I have checked the Pubmed website in regard to guar gum, which seems to be much more harmless, at least according to what I could turn up about the subject. But we never know what will be discovered years later, and gums are gums. I suggest avoidance, as extra precaution.
Gluten intolerance is chronically under-diagnosed and creates a medical syndrome, the technical term for a chain reaction throughout various bodily systems. An excellent educational source is clinical nutritionist Elizabeth Lipski’s booklet, “Leaky Gut Syndrome”. Discusses symptoms, causes, solutions, and medical testing alike. Very lay-friendly and short in format, yet very in-depth at the same time. Superb!
#
Barbara Peterson Says:
April 19, 2008 at 2:30 am
Unleavened Bread
I got this recipe from Penny. If you celebrate Passover, you will love it. Even if you don’t, you will love it.
1 cup flour (we use whole wheat)
1/4 tsp salt
2 tblspns olive oil or grapeola
1/4 cup water
Mix flour, salt, oil, and water
Knead on floured bread board
Place a small amount of flour on top and roll out flat
Turn over and roll out to desired thinness
Perforate with fork
Place on cookie sheet
Bake at 400 degrees for 8 minutes
Enjoy!
Barb
#
Barbara Peterson Says:
May 13, 2008 at 11:54 pm
I am a little bit here, little bit there kind of cook, so it is difficult to share my recipes, but here goes. Here is one I call
Everything But the Kitchen Sink Chicken Soup
Grab a chicken from the yard, and do the dirty deed or have your husband do it.
Skin the chicken and clean out the insides, saving the innards for Oggie Dog’s Chicken Soup.
Grab a large pot with a lid, fill it with water, and put the cleaned chicken in it.
Bring the water to a boil, then simmer until the chicken is fully cooked and tender.
Remove from heat and cool until it is cool enough to put in the fridge.
Place pot with the lid on it in the fridge overnight.
In the morning, skim the fat off the top of the soup.
Remove the chicken and debone it, placing the chicken back in the pot with the broth.
The bones go to Rita bird and the cats.
Bring the soup back to a boil, then simmer.
Put a couple of cups of rice into the soup.
Season to taste. I usually use salt, thyme, dill, sage, a pinch of marjoram, and dried wild celery.
Take whatever veggies you have handy such as carrots, green beans, blackeyed peas, green peas, corn, etc., and put them into the pot.
Simmer with the lid on until the rice is cooked, stirring occasionally.
This is a fun recipe that makes a huge batch of soup suitable for freezing.
Barb
#
Barbara Peterson Says:
June 8, 2008 at 2:19 am
Well, it’s the third day and my Alfalfa seeds are sprouting. If you haven’t checked out the page on how to sprout alfalfa seeds easily and quickly, here is the link:
http://www.backyardnature.net/simple/alf-spr.htm
All it takes is a jar, a nylon stocking or small screen, and a jar ring or rubber band.
Place a couple of tablespoons of the seeds in the jar, put the stocking or screen on and secure with the ring or rubber band.
Fill the jar about 2/3 full of water overnight to soak the seeds.
The next day, pour the water out through the screen, and fill the jar again. Swish the water around to wash the seeds, then pour it out. Do this a couple of times to clean the seeds.
After you have poured the last bit of water out, shake the seeds around a bit so that they do not clump. You DO want them to stick to the sides of the jar.
Keep doing this every day and in less than a week you will have delicious alfalfa sprouts.
Barb
[Each title is a link to a different site, plus hidden urls...
I know it can be done, as Ben Gilbough and Barny Oldfield built an electric generator of a Franklin car rear end and a regular windmill, in 1910.
In the 1960’s Ben still lived in the home and his electric lights at night, were from the windmill generator.....
Our home was built on a part of his land and he was still going strong in the mid 1960’s....
granny]
http://www.webpal.org/b_recovery/3_alternate_energy/electricity/all_low_rpm/low_rpm_index.htm
MENU: HOME » Reconstruction » Recovery » Renewal » Energy Types
Low RPM Generators
This is the main page on this site regarding the construction of generators. While many of the examples are regarding wind driven generators, the principles regarding the generators themselves apply equally to other motive sources. Anyone contemplating building a low rpm generator should look through all the sources on this page. Those persons specifically building a wind generator should also look at our “WIND” page which has on it many things specific to wind generators such as towers, blades, tails and testing them.
Comparison of Generators and Alternators
Most generators and alternators (like off of a car) need to revolve at around 1800 rpm (that is they have to make 1800 revolutions per minute in order to generate power) and it is often difficult to get a third of that speed with most homemade wind, water or other sources.
Overview: Comparison of Alternators and Generators
SEALED: Comparison of Alternators and Generators
This is the SEALED mirrored version of this site that won’t be opened until after The Great Catastrophe.
Low RPM Generators and Alternators
Since the difficulty with most generators is that you have to turn them too fast before they start generating power these low RPM ones are neat because they put out power at low rpm and so will work with a bicycle, a low head water source, or lower wind power.
The low RPM generators will start generating power at around 100 rpm and remain efficient up to about 600 rpm. Their “sweet spot” is often around 400 rpm but it will vary from generator to generator.
SEALED: Wooden Low RPM Alternators (SEALED)
This is a SEALED mirrored site that won’t be opened until after The Great Catastrophe. This and the link following give more information about building wooden generators. Much of the information is available through the open links.
SEALED: Alternator from Scratch (SEALED)
This is a SEALED mirrored site that won’t be opened until after The Great Catastrophe. The reason that they are mirrored here is that hopefully this way the information will be available later - even if the open links no longer are. Special plans are being made to protect to protect these pages and to distribute them afterwards.
Brakedrum Generators and Alternators
Brakedrum: Use the brakedrum off an old pickup truck to make a low RPM generator!
Although the literature says these brakedrum generators are easy to make, we made ten of them and found it a considerable challenge. Nevertheless, they all worked reliably and are very durable.
SEALED: brakedrum_update
This is the SEALED mirrored version of this site that won’t be opened until after The Great Catastrophe.
Front Disk Generators and Alternators
There seems to be a trend away from brakedrums to disks. Talking with Hugh Piggot, he tells me that he is writing a new book on this subject.
Disk 1: Forcefield Low RPM Disk Alternator
SEALED: Forcefield Low RPM Disk Alternator
This is the SEALED mirrored version of this site that won’t be opened until after The Great Catastrophe.
Disk 2: Making a Volvo Front Brake Disk into a Generator
More details from the same source - on the same idea.
SEALED: Making a Volvo Front Brake Disk into a Generator
This is the SEALED mirrored version of this site that won’t be opened until after The Great Catastrophe.
Wooden Generators and Alternators
Some wind generator designs can be put together very quickly. You can carve less elegant blade designs in an hour or two. Some motors can be used as generators. People have gone out and stuck their wind generators up on top of a hydro pole that is not being used. Hopefully the need is only temporary anyhow, until a more permanent source of electricty is re-established.
These may not produce so much electricity as a metal based generator and may be not as durable but they may be more accessible for one of the main components.
Simplest: Wood Axe
This one is particularly fast to build. Even if you don’t build it you should study this one because the pictures and explanation by Force Field are so excellent.
SEALED: Wood Axe (SEALED)
This is this SEALED mirrored site that won’t be opened until after The Great Catastrophe. This and the two sealed links following give more information about building wooden generators. Much of the information is available through other open links.
SEALED: Homebrew Windgenerator (SEALED)
This is a SEALED mirrored site that won’t be opened until after The Great Catastrophe. Much of the information is available through other open links.
Wooden 2: all the plans and information for another wooden one
BUT these are 9 pages of plans mirrored in .pdf format from Home Power Issue #88 are ones that you can download and print off NOW.
Wooden 3: A key set of plans to study
These are 49 mirrored pages of plans in .pdf format are ones that you can download and print off NOW. While you may not build this unit - you should definitely study these plans from Hugh Piggot because they give you details on many subjects such as how to build a coiler, the winding of a coil and how to wire the coils together.
SEALED: Additional Info on Coils (SEALED)
This is a SEALED mirrored site that won’t be opened until after The Great Catastrophe. Much of the information is available through other open links.
On-line Info: Lots of info on build it yourself windmills
This is a link to Hugh Piggot’s website. Hugh lives in Scotland. This is probably the world’s most authoritative source for build it yourself windmills. For those who look into it ahead of time they can get Hugh’s book. We also have a .pdf file from Hugh (available on our low rpm generators page) - that gives LOTS of details.
On-line Info: North American Source for Hugh’s info.
This is a link to Bob Budd’s website. Bob has built lots of Hugh Piggot’s brakedrum windmills, and he has put out a superb video on how to do it. I have watched the video many, many times with many people and have talked with Bob tens of times, and have gone to visit him and see his windmills in the process of our building ten generators ourselves.
Other Generators and Alternators
Microwave Oven: Making a Microwave Oven into a Generator
This is a particularly neat idea and there are lots of neat ideas at the Windstuff Now site.
SEALED: Making a Microwave Oven into a Generator
This is the SEALED mirrored version of this site that won’t be opened until after The Great Catastrophe.
Testing
Experiment: Testing your theories
Here are some experiments done by another individual developing a low rpm generator. It is an example of the kind of approach that you may wish to take.
Sealed: Testing your theories
Same as above but sealed until after the Holocaust.
This would be old stuff, if only the terrorists did not have nuclear weapons now, in Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea and who knows who else they have shared them with.
granny
http://www.webpal.org/webpal/ad_intro.htm
RESOURCES SITE MAP
Resources for Survival of Nuclear Holocaust
State by State - Survival Information
Nuclear Power Plants
Links to Target Maps (+ survival info) of All 50 States
Target update information
The Ark Two Community
Map of the Interior of the Shelter
Map to the location of Ark Two
Pictures of the Inside of the Shelter
Pictures of the outside of the Shelter
Pictures of the Shelter Construction
Life in the Ark Two Community
Ark Two Programs
The Ark Two Community TEAM leaders
Radiation and Detectors
Official Government Detector Instructions
My explanation - with pictures
Understanding Radiation
How to build a KFM
Free Books for Downloading
You Will Survive Doomsday - HTML
You Will Survive Doomsday - .pdf
11 Steps To Survival - HTML
11 Steps To Survival - .pdf
Your Basement Fallout Shelter - .pdf
Fallout On The Farm - .pdf
Nuclear Weapons Defense Manual - .pdf
Nuclear Weapons Defense Manual - Tables - .pdf
Nuclear Weapons Effects - Radiological Scientific Officers Handbook - .pdf
Nuclear War Survival Skills - (replica)
Ark Two Programs
Overall Purpose of the Programs
Survival Education
Agricultural Recovery
Radiological Monitoring Equipment
Economic recovery
KI Potassium Iodide
State by State Recovery
Family Registry
Information Broadcast
Social Reorganization
Shelter Building (+ offsite links)
A two bus shelter for 24 people
Easy Printing Plans for a Basement Shelter
(offsite links for bug out kits)
(offsite link for KI - Potassium Iodide)
Filtering Air in a shelter
Kearny Air Pump
Ventilation
Free Consultation on Shelter Building
HOME / Reconstruction / Recovery / Renewal / Survival / Ark Two
http://www.webpal.org/webpal/d_resources/arktwo/index.htm
The Ark Two Community
The Ark Two Community is the largest pluralistic survival community in North America without any political, religious, or cultural bias. Its purpose is to ameliorate the catastrophe of a nuclear war and to help restore civilization. Inquiries from all are invited. Write an email to:
survival@webpal.org
The Ark Two Refuge Facility
The Ark Two Community in Canada has a 10,000 sq/ft nuclear fallout shelter as part of its refuge facility. This may be the largest Privately Constructed nuclear fallout shelter in the world. Below are links to photos of it.
Click on photo to link
Construction Photos of the shelter
Construction Photos of the shelter
Forty-two school buses were used as permanent forms for the concrete shelter that was then covered with 5-14 feet of earth. These pictures show the construction process.
Click on photo to enlarge
Artist’s concept of the interior of the shelter
Artist’s concept of the interior of the shelter
The shelter is so large that it is impossible to see it all at once and this artists drawing perhaps gives the best overall view. You will need to enlarge the linked picture in your browser in order to be able see the details.
Click on photo to enlarge
Map of the interior
Map of the interior of the shelter
Even inside the shelter there are placed maps so that people can find their way from one place to another. This is a copy of that map. Again, you will need to enlarge the linked picture in your browser in order to be able see the details.
Click on photo to link
Interior Photos of the shelter
Interior Photos of the shelter
There are dozens of different rooms within the shelter. The photos in this link show you many of them and tell you about most of the others.
Click on photo to link
Inside Photo of The Well
The Miracle of the Well
Miracles are only miracles for those who actually experience them. So you would have had to be there, but I tell you what seemed to me a miraculous experience in how it is that we have come to have an inside well.
Click on photo to link
Exterior Photos
Exterior Photos of the Refuge Facility
Through this link you can take a tour around the outside of the shelter, which also helps one to understand many of its features.
Click on photo to enlarge
MAP to the location of the Refuge Facility
MAP to the location of the Refuge Facility
We tell everyone exactly where the shelter is. Everyone who is local already knows about it and anyone who is not prepared to come to it wouldn’t make it here anyway - with the suddenness of the catastrophe that we expect. The shelter is located in a small village at the end of a cul-de-sac, surrounded by a high fence and a cliff. It is strongly fortified.
Click on photo to link
Photo Outside
History of the Project
This a picture of myself. Many see a similarity between the shelter and Noah’s Ark and their name Ark Two just stuck. Some also think they see some similarity between myself and Noah, but I am not a prophet, I receive no revelations, and have no pretensions in that regard. However, building the shelter has been an adventure and if you would like to know more about the events surrounding its construction - I give some of the history here.
Anyone is welcome to join the Ark Two Survival Community (located in Ontario, Canada) - so long as they do so before the catastrophe occurs. The Ark Two Community is founded and commanded by a government trained and certified Radiological Scientific Officer.
The purpose of the Ark Two Survival Community is to ameliorate the effects of a Nuclear War and to help reorganize society afterwards. The community founder believes that a nuclear war is inevitable and therefore in 1980 built the first phase of the Ark Two Refuge and has since expanded it and prepared many ways to assist survivors - as listed on this web site.
The project has not been favorably received by the local and provincial governments. By 1990, when I stopped counting, it had been subject to over 30 court and commission appearances and that number has greatly increased in the years that followed. Legal costs mounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars. In 1999 there was a raid without warrants involving 7 police vehicles, 4 fire units and over 40 personnel and a K-9 unit, coincidentally caught on video tape by the CBC. Subsequently the facility was hounded with repeated government inspections. Some of the inspectors candidly admitted that it was just harassment, but because of wanting to keep their jobs they of course were not going to put that into writing. It is for this reason that one might refer to the facility as Waco North. A kinder, gentler Canadian version in that The Ark doesn’t have any weapons and in that so far no one has been killed by the raiders.
The general public views the project as being operated by an eccentric (in the most favorable terms) or by a nut-case in what is the more usual expressed attitude. For the forty years in which I have built over two dozen shelters and have consulted on many dozens of others, the general ridicule has been extensive, to say the least. “Why do it then?”, I have often been asked. Why not get a life, enjoy life and quit worrying about doomsday? The answer is that I don’t see the purpose of life, nor happiness in life measured in how many rounds of golf I might play, but rather in service to my fellowman. While I don’t have any “visions” or hear any “voices” this appears to me to be a service to which I have been called.
Still, the shelter remains. Waiting and ready. It has been welded shut by the government but that has only made it secure. If the need arises it can be immediately opened and activated. Equipment and supplies are stored and ready. Members of the Ark Two Community meet regularly and each know their tasks and responsibilities in activating it. We continue to review and improve upon the plans and equipment. We continue to seek others who are interested in the project and can help with it.
You can click here to learn more about Ark Two Community Life
MENU: HOME » SURVIVAL » Index of States
http://dinil-divakaran.livejournal.com/70961.html
Patents (again and again)
I don’t understand - what does patent on (the treatment using) ginger mean?! Anyone out there to enlighten?
India moves to protect traditional medicines from foreign patents | World news | guardian.co.uk
In the first step by a developing country to stop multinational companies patenting traditional remedies from local plants and animals, the Indian government has effectively licensed 200,000 local treatments as “public property” free for anyone to use but no one to sell as a “brand”.
The move comes after scientists in Delhi noticed an alarming trend – the “bio-prospecting” of natural remedies by companies abroad. After trawling through the records of the global trademark offices, officials found 5,000 patents had been issued — at a cost of at least $150m (£104m) — for “medical plants and traditional systems”.
“More than 2,000 of these belong to the Indian systems of medicine … We began to ask why multinational companies were spending millions of dollars to patent treatments that so many lobbies in Europe deny work at all,” said Dr Vinod Kumar Gupta, who heads the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, which lists in encyclopaedic detail the 200,000 treatments.
............
Gupta points out that in Brussels alone there had been 285 patents for medicinal plants whose uses had long been known in the three principal Indian systems: ayurveda, India’s traditional medical treatment; unani, a system believed to have come to India via ancient Greece; and siddha, one of India’s oldest health therapies, from the south.
Researchers found that in Europe one company had patented an Indian creeping plant known as Brahmi — Bacopa monnieri — for a memory enhancer. Another patent was awarded for aloe vera for its use as a mouth ulcer treatment.
“We have shown the authorities that ayurveda, unani and siddha medicinal uses were known in India. We would like the patents therefore lifted,” said Gupta.
In the past India has had to go to court to get patents revoked. Officials say that to lift patents from medicines created from turmeric and neem, an Indian tree, it spent more than $5m. In the case of the neem patent, the legal battle took almost 10 years.
“We won because we proved these were part of traditional Indian knowledge. There was no innovation and therefore no patent should be granted,” said Gupta.
Yoga, too, is considered a traditional medicine and one that is already a billion-dollar industry in the US. Gupta said the Indian government had already asked the US to register yoga as a “well-known” mark and raised concerns over the 130 yoga-related patents issued.
“We want no one to appropriate the yoga brand for themselves. There are 1,500 asanas [yogic poses] and exercises given in our ancient texts. We are transcribing these so they too cannot be appropriated by anyone.
“We have had instances where people have patented a yoga technique by describing a certain temperature. This is simply wrong.”
India is also unusual in that it has seven national medical systems — of which modern medicine is but one. Almost four-fifths of India’s billion people use traditional medicine and there are 430,000 ayurvedic medical practitioners registered by the government in the country. The department overseeing the traditional medical industry, known as Ayush, has a budget of 10bn rupees ($260m).
India’s battle to protect its traditional treatments is rooted in the belief that the developing world’s rich biodiversity is a potential treasure trove of starting material for new drugs and crops. Gupta said that it costs the west $15bn and 15 years to produce a “blockbuster drug”. A patent lasts for 20 years, so a pharmaceutical company has just five years to recover its costs — which makes conventional treatments expensive.
“If you can take a natural remedy and isolate the active ingredient then you just need drug trials and the marketing. Traditional medicine could herald a new age of cheap drugs.”
Medicines ancient and modern
Ginger: Patented to treat obesity. However, officials have found that in a Siddha preparation, extracts of ginger root are used in a treatment for obesity
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-practices.html
Social Collapse Best Practices
The following talk was given on February 13, 2009, at Cowell Theatre in Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, to an audience of 550 people. Audio of the talk is available here. Video of the talk is available here.
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for showing up. It’s certainly nice to travel all the way across the North American continent and have a few people come to see you, even if the occasion isn’t a happy one. You are here to listen to me talk about social collapse and the various ways we can avoid screwing that up along with everything else that’s gone wrong. I know it’s a lot to ask of you, because why wouldn’t you instead want to go and eat, drink, and be merry? Well, perhaps there will still be time left for that after my talk.
I would like to thank the Long Now Foundation for inviting me, and I feel very honored to appear in the same venue as many serious, professional people, such as Michael Pollan, who will be here in May, or some of the previous speakers, such as Nassim Taleb, or Brian Eno – some of my favorite people, really. I am just a tourist. I flew over here to give this talk and to take in the sights, and then I’ll fly back to Boston and go back to my day job. Well, I am also a blogger. And I also wrote a book. But then everyone has a book, or so it would seem.
You might ask yourself, then, Why on earth did he get invited to speak here tonight? It seems that I am enjoying my moment in the limelight, because I am one of the very few people who several years ago unequivocally predicted the demise of the United States as a global superpower. The idea that the USA will go the way of the USSR seemed preposterous at the time. It doesn’t seem so preposterous any more. I take it some of you are still hedging your bets. How is that hedge fund doing, by the way?
I think I prefer remaining just a tourist, because I have learned from experience – luckily, from other people’s experience – that being a superpower collapse predictor is not a good career choice. I learned that by observing what happened to the people who successfully predicted the collapse of the USSR. Do you know who Andrei Amalrik is? See, my point exactly. He successfully predicted the collapse of the USSR. He was off by just half a decade. That was another valuable lesson for me, which is why I will not give you an exact date when USA will turn into FUSA (”F” is for “Former”). But even if someone could choreograph the whole event, it still wouldn’t make for much of a career, because once it all starts falling apart, people have far more important things to attend to than marveling at the wonderful predictive abilities of some Cassandra-like person.
I hope that I have made it clear that I am not here in any sort of professional capacity. I consider what I am doing a kind of community service. So, if you don’t like my talk, don’t worry about me. There are plenty of other things I can do. But I would like my insights to be of help during these difficult and confusing times, for altruistic reasons, mostly, although not entirely. This is because when times get really bad, as they did when the Soviet Union collapsed, lots of people just completely lose it. Men, especially. Successful, middle-aged men, breadwinners, bastions of society, turn out to be especially vulnerable. And when they just completely lose it, they become very tedious company. My hope is that some amount of preparation, psychological and otherwise, can make them a lot less fragile, and a bit more useful, and generally less of a burden.
Women seem much more able to cope. Perhaps it is because they have less of their ego invested in the whole dubious enterprise, or perhaps their sense of personal responsibility is tied to those around them and not some nebulous grand enterprise. In any case, the women always seem far more able to just put on their gardening gloves and go do something useful, while the men tend to sit around groaning about the Empire, or the Republic, or whatever it is that they lost. And when they do that, they become very tedious company. And so, without a bit of mental preparation, the men are all liable to end up very lonely and very drunk. So that’s my little intervention.
If there is one thing that I would like to claim as my own, it is the comparative theory of superpower collapse. For now, it remains just a theory, although it is currently being quite thoroughly tested. The theory states that the United States and the Soviet Union will have collapsed for the same reasons, namely: a severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil (that magic addictive elixir of industrial economies), a severe and worsening foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget, and ballooning foreign debt. I call this particular list of ingredients “The Superpower Collapse Soup.” Other factors, such as the inability to provide an acceptable quality of life for its citizens, or a systemically corrupt political system incapable of reform, are certainly not helpful, but they do not automatically lead to collapse, because they do not put the country on a collision course with reality. Please don’t be too concerned, though, because, as I mentioned, this is just a theory. My theory.
I’ve been working on this theory since about 1995, when it occurred to me that the US is retracing the same trajectory as the USSR. As so often is the case, having this realization was largely a matter of being in the right place at the right time. The two most important methods of solving problems are: 1. by knowing the solution ahead of time, and 2. by guessing it correctly. I learned this in engineering school – from a certain professor. I am not that good at guesswork, but I do sometimes know the answer ahead of time.
I was very well positioned to have this realization because I grew up straddling the two worlds – the USSR and the US. I grew up in Russia, and moved to the US when I was twelve, and so I am fluent in Russian, and I understand Russian history and Russian culture the way only a native Russian can. But I went through high school and university in the US .I had careers in several industries here, I traveled widely around the country, and so I also have a very good understanding of the US with all of its quirks and idiosyncrasies. I traveled back to Russia in 1989, when things there still seemed more or less in line with the Soviet norm, and again in 1990, when the economy was at a standstill, and big changes were clearly on the way. I went back there 3 more times in the 1990s, and observed the various stages of Soviet collapse first-hand.
By the mid-1990s I started to see Soviet/American Superpowerdom as a sort of disease that strives for world dominance but in effect eviscerates its host country, eventually leaving behind an empty shell: an impoverished population, an economy in ruins, a legacy of social problems, and a tremendous burden of debt. The symmetries between the two global superpowers were then already too numerous to mention, and they have been growing more obvious ever since.
The superpower symmetries may be of interest to policy wonks and history buffs and various skeptics, but they tell us nothing that would be useful in our daily lives. It is the asymmetries, the differences between the two superpowers, that I believe to be most instructive. When the Soviet system went away, many people lost their jobs, everyone lost their savings, wages and pensions were held back for months, their value was wiped out by hyperinflation, there shortages of food, gasoline, medicine, consumer goods, there was a large increase in crime and violence, and yet Russian society did not collapse. Somehow, the Russians found ways to muddle through. How was that possible? It turns out that many aspects of the Soviet system were paradoxically resilient in the face of system-wide collapse, many institutions continued to function, and the living arrangement was such that people did not lose access to food, shelter or transportation, and could survive even without an income. The Soviet economic system failed to thrive, and the Communist experiment at constructing a worker’s paradise on earth was, in the end, a failure. But as a side effect it inadvertently achieved a high level of collapse-preparedness. In comparison, the American system could produce significantly better results, for time, but at the cost of creating and perpetuating a living arrangement that is very fragile, and not at all capable of holding together through the inevitable crash. Even after the Soviet economy evaporated and the government largely shut down, Russians still had plenty left for them to work with. And so there is a wealth of useful information and insight that we can extract from the Russian experience, which we can then turn around and put to good use in helping us improvise a new living arrangement here in the United States – one that is more likely to be survivable.
The mid-1990s did not seem to me as the right time to voice such ideas. The United States was celebrating its so-called Cold War victory, getting over its Vietnam syndrome by bombing Iraq back to the Stone Age, and the foreign policy wonks coined the term “hyperpower” and were jabbering on about full-spectrum dominance. All sorts of silly things were happening. Professor Fukuyama told us that history had ended, and so we were building a brave new world where the Chinese made things out of plastic for us, the Indians provided customer support when these Chinese-made things broke, and we paid for it all just by flipping houses, pretending that they were worth a lot of money whereas they are really just useless bits of ticky-tacky. Alan Greenspan chided us about “irrational exuberance” while consistently low-balling interest rates. It was the “Goldilocks economy” – not to hot, not too cold. Remember that? And now it turns out that it was actually more of a “Tinker-bell” economy, because the last five or so years of economic growth was more or less a hallucination, based on various debt pyramids, the “whole house of cards” as President Bush once referred to it during one of his lucid moments. And now we can look back on all of that with a funny, queasy feeling, or we can look forward and feel nothing but vertigo.
While all of these silly things were going on, I thought it best to keep my comparative theory of superpower collapse to myself. During that time, I was watching the action in the oil industry, because I understood that oil imports are the Achilles’ heel of the US economy. In the mid-1990s the all-time peak in global oil production was scheduled for the turn of the century. But then a lot of things happened that delayed it by at least half a decade. Perhaps you’ve noticed this too, there is a sort of refrain here: people who try to predict big historical shifts always turn to be off by about half a decade. Unsuccessful predictions, on the other hand are always spot on as far as timing: the world as we know it failed to end precisely at midnight on January 1, 2000. Perhaps there is a physical principal involved: information spreads at the speed of light, while ignorance is instantaneous at all points in the known universe. So please make a mental note: whenever it seems to you that I am making a specific prediction as to when I think something is likely to happen, just silently add “plus or minus half a decade.”
In any case, about half a decade ago, I finally thought that the time was ripe, and, as it has turned out, I wasn’t too far off. In June of 2005 I published an article on the subject, titled “Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century,” which was quite popular, even to the extent that I got paid for it. It is available at various places on the Internet. A little while later I formalized my thinking somewhat into the “Collapse Gap” concept, which I presented at a conference in Manhattan in April of 2006. The slide show from that presentation, titled “Closing the Collapse Gap,” was posted on the Internet and has been downloaded a few million times since then. Then, in January of 2008, when it became apparent to me that financial collapse was well underway, and that other stages of collapse were to follow, I published a short article titled “The Five Stages of Collapse,” which I later expanded into a talk I gave at a conference in Michigan in October of 2008. Finally, at the end of 2008, I announced on my blog that I am getting out of the prognosticating business. I have made enough predictions, they all seem very well on track (give or take half a decade, please remember that), collapse is well underway, and now I am just an observer.
But this talk is about something else, something other than making dire predictions and then acting all smug when they come true. You see, there is nothing more useless than predictions, once they have come true. It’s like looking at last year’s amazingly successful stock picks: what are you going to do about them this year? What we need are examples of things that have been shown to work in the strange, unfamiliar, post-collapse environment that we are all likely to have to confront. Stuart Brand proposed the title for the talk – “Social Collapse Best Practices” – and I thought that it was an excellent idea. Although the term “best practices” has been diluted over time to sometimes mean little more than “good ideas,” initially it stood for the process of abstracting useful techniques from examples of what has worked in the past and applying them to new situations, in order to control risk and to increase the chances of securing a positive outcome. It’s a way of skipping a lot of trial and error and deliberation and experimentation, and to just go with what works.
In organizations, especially large organizations, “best practices” also offer a good way to avoid painful episodes of watching colleagues trying to “think outside the box” whenever they are confronted with a new problem. If your colleagues were any good at thinking outside the box, they probably wouldn’t feel so compelled to spend their whole working lives sitting in a box keeping an office chair warm. If they were any good at thinking outside the box, they would have by now thought of a way to escape from that box. So perhaps what would make them feel happy and productive again is if someone came along and gave them a different box inside of which to think – a box better suited to the post-collapse environment.
Here is the key insight: you might think that when collapse happens, nothing works. That’s just not the case. The old ways of doing things don’t work any more, the old assumptions are all invalidated, conventional goals and measures of success become irrelevant. But a different set of goals, techniques, and measures of success can be brought to bear immediately, and the sooner the better. But enough generalities, let’s go through some specifics. We’ll start with some generalities, and, as you will see, it will all become very, very specific rather quickly.
Here is another key insight: there are very few things that are positives or negatives per se. Just about everything is a matter of context. Now, it just so happens that most things that are positives prior to collapse turn out to be negatives once collapse occurs, and vice versa. For instance, prior to collapse having high inventory in a business is bad, because the businesses have to store it and finance it, so they try to have just-in-time inventory. After collapse, high inventory turns out to be very useful, because they can barter it for the things they need, and they can’t easily get more because they don’t have any credit. Prior to collapse, it’s good for a business to have the right level of staffing and an efficient organization. After collapse, what you want is a gigantic, sluggish bureaucracy that can’t unwind operations or lay people off fast enough through sheer bureaucratic foot-dragging. Prior to collapse, what you want is an effective retail segment and good customer service. After collapse, you regret not having an unreliable retail segment, with shortages and long bread lines, because then people would have been forced to learn to shift for themselves instead of standing around waiting for somebody to come and feed them.
If you notice, none of these things that I mentioned have any bearing on what is commonly understood as “economic health.” Prior to collapse, the overall macroeconomic positive is an expanding economy. After collapse, economic contraction is a given, and the overall macroeconomic positive becomes something of an imponderable, so we are forced to listen to a lot of nonsense. The situation is either slightly better than expected or slightly worse than expected. We are always either months or years away from economic recovery. Business as usual will resume sooner or later, because some television bobble-head said so.
But let’s take it apart. Starting from the very general, what are the current macroeconomic objectives, if you listen to the hot air coming out of Washington at the moment? First: growth, of course! Getting the economy going. We learned nothing from the last huge spike in commodity prices, so let’s just try it again. That calls for economic stimulus, a.k.a. printing money. Let’s see how high the prices go up this time. Maybe this time around we will achieve hyperinflation. Second: Stabilizing financial institutions: getting banks lending – that’s important too. You see, we are just not in enough debt yet, that’s our problem. We need more debt, and quickly! Third: jobs! We need to create jobs. Low-wage jobs, of course, to replace all the high-wage manufacturing jobs we’ve been shedding for decades now, and replacing them with low-wage service sector jobs, mainly ones without any job security or benefits. Right now, a lot of people could slow down the rate at which they are sinking further into debt if they quit their jobs. That is, their job is a net loss for them as individuals as well as for the economy as a whole. But, of course, we need much more of that, and quickly!
So that’s what we have now. The ship is on the rocks, water is rising, and the captain is shouting “Full steam ahead! We are sailing to Afghanistan!” Do you listen to Ahab up on the bridge, or do you desert your post in the engine room and go help deploy the lifeboats? If you thought that the previous episode of uncontrolled debt expansion, globalized Ponzi schemes, and economic hollowing-out was silly, then I predict that you will find this next episode of feckless grasping at macroeconomic straws even sillier. Except that it won’t be funny: what is crashing now is our life support system: all the systems and institutions that are keeping us alive. And so I don’t recommend passively standing around and watching the show – unless you happen to have a death wish.
Right now the Washington economic stimulus team is putting on their Scuba gear and diving down to the engine room to try to invent a way to get a diesel engine to run on seawater. They spoke of change, but in reality they are terrified of change and want to cling with all their might to the status quo. But this game will soon be over, and they don’t have any idea what to do next.
So, what is there for them to do? Forget “growth,” forget “jobs,” forget “financial stability.” What should their realistic new objectives be? Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and security. Their task is to find a way to provide all of these necessities on an emergency basis, in absence of a functioning economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little or no access to imports, and to make them available to a population that is largely penniless. If successful, society will remain largely intact, and will be able to begin a slow and painful process of cultural transition, and eventually develop a new economy, a gradually de-industrializing economy, at a much lower level of resource expenditure, characterized by a quite a lot of austerity and even poverty, but in conditions that are safe, decent, and dignified. If unsuccessful, society will be gradually destroyed in a series of convulsions that will leave a defunct nation composed of many wretched little fiefdoms. Given its largely depleted resource base, a dysfunctional, collapsing infrastructure, and its history of unresolved social conflicts, the territory of the Former United States will undergo a process of steady degeneration punctuated by natural and man-made cataclysms.
Food. Shelter. Transportation. Security. When it comes to supplying these survival necessities, the Soviet example offers many valuable lessons. As I already mentioned, in a collapse many economic negatives become positives, and vice versa. Let us consider each one of these in turn.
The Soviet agricultural sector was plagued by consistent underperformance. In many ways, this was the legacy of the disastrous collectivization experiment carried out in the 1930s, which destroyed many of the more prosperous farming households and herded people into collective farms. Collectivization undermined the ancient village-based agricultural traditions that had made pre-revolutionary Russia a well-fed place that was also the breadbasket of Western Europe. A great deal of further damage was caused by the introduction of industrial agriculture. The heavy farm machinery alternately compacted and tore up the topsoil while dosing it with chemicals, depleting it and killing the biota. Eventually, the Soviet government had to turn to importing grain from countries hostile to its interests – United States and Canada – and eventually expanded this to include other foodstuffs. The USSR experienced a permanent shortage of meat and other high-protein foods, and much of the imported grain was used to raise livestock to try to address this problem.
Although it was generally possible to survive on the foods available at the government stores, the resulting diet would have been rather poor, and so people tried to supplement it with food they gathered, raised, or caught, or purchased at farmers’ markets. Kitchen gardens were always common, and, once the economy collapsed, a lot of families took to growing food in earnest. The kitchen gardens, by themselves, were never sufficient, but they made a huge difference.
The year 1990 was particularly tough when it came to trying to score something edible. I remember one particular joke from that period. Black humor has always been one of Russia’s main psychological coping mechanisms. A man walks into a food store, goes to the meat counter, and he sees that it is completely empty. So he asks the butcher: “Don’t you have any fish?” And the butcher answers: “No, here is where we don’t have any meat. Fish is what they don’t have over at the seafood counter.”
Poor though it was, the Soviet food distribution system never collapsed completely. In particular, the deliveries of bread continued even during the worst of times, partly because has always been such an important part of the Russian diet, and partly because access to bread symbolized the pact between the people and the Communist government, enshrined in oft-repeated revolutionary slogans. Also, it is important to remember that in Russia most people have lived within walking distance of food shops, and used public transportation to get out to their kitchen gardens, which were often located in the countryside immediately surrounding the relatively dense, compact cities. This combination of factors made for some lean times, but very little malnutrition and no starvation.
In the United States, the agricultural system is heavily industrialized, and relies on inputs such as diesel, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and, perhaps most importantly, financing. In the current financial climate, the farmers’ access to financing is not at all assured. This agricultural system is efficient, but only if you regard fossil fuel energy as free. In fact, it is a way to transform fossil fuel energy into food with a bit of help from sunlight, to the tune of 10 calories of fossil fuel energy being embodied in each calorie that is consumed as food. The food distribution system makes heavy use of refrigerated diesel trucks, transforming food over hundreds of miles to resupply supermarkets. The food pipeline is long and thin, and it takes only a couple of days of interruptions for supermarket shelves to be stripped bare. Many people live in places that are not within walking distance of stores, not served by public transportation, and will be cut off from food sources once they are no longer able to drive.
Besides the supermarket chains, much of the nation’s nutrition needs are being met by an assortment of fast food joints and convenience stores. In fact, in many of the less fashionable parts of cities and towns, fast food and convenience store food is all that is available. In the near future, this trend is likely to extend to the more prosperous parts of town and the suburbs.
Fast food outfits such as McDonalds have more ways to cut costs, and so may prove a bit more resilient in the face of economic collapse than supermarket chains, but they are no substitute for food security, because they too depend industrial agribusiness. Their food inputs, such as high-fructose corn syrup, genetically modified potatoes, various soy-based fillers, factory-farmed beef, pork and chicken, and so forth, are derived from oil, two-thirds of which is imported, as well as fertilizer made from natural gas. They may be able to stay in business longer, supplying food-that-isn’t-really-food, but eventually they will run out of inputs along with the rest of the supply chain. Before they do, they may for a time sell burgers that aren’t really burgers, like the bread that wasn’t really bread that the Soviet government distributed in Leningrad during the Nazi blockade. It was mostly sawdust, with a bit of rye flour added for flavor.
Can we think of any ways to avoid this dismal scenario? The Russian example may give us a clue. Many Russian families could gauge how fast the economy was crashing, and, based on that, decide how many rows of potatoes to plant. Could we perhaps do something similar? There is already a healthy gardening movement in the United States; can it be scaled up? The trick is to make small patches of farmland available for non-mechanical cultivation by individuals and families, in increments as small as 1000 square feet. The ideal spots would be fertile bits of land with access to rivers and streams for irrigation. Provisions would have to be made for campsites and for transportation, allowing people to undertake seasonal migrations out to the land to grow food during the growing season, and haul the produce back to the population centers after taking in the harvest.
An even simpler approach has been successfully used in Cuba: converting urban parking lots and other empty bits of land to raised-bed agriculture. Instead of continually trucking in vegetables and other food, it is much easier to truck in soil, compost, and mulch just once a season. Raised highways can be closed to traffic (since there is unlikely to be much traffic in any case) and used to catch rainwater for irrigation. Rooftops and balconies can be used for hothouses, henhouses, and a variety of other agricultural uses.
How difficult would this be to organize? Well, Cubans were actually helped by their government, but the Russians managed to do it in more or less in spite of the Soviet bureaucrats, and so we might be able to do it in spite of the American ones. The government could theoretically head up such an effort, purely hypothetically speaking, of course, because I see no evidence that such an effort is being considered. For our fearless national leaders, such initiatives are too low-level: if they stimulate the economy and get the banks lending again, the potatoes will simply grow themselves. All they need to do is print some more money, right?
Moving on to shelter. Again, let’s look at how the Russians managed to muddle through. In the Soviet Union, people did not own their place of residence. Everyone was assigned a place to live, which was recorded in a person’s internal passport. People could not be dislodged from their place of residence for as long as they drew oxygen. Since most people in Russia live in cities, the place of residence was usually an apartment, or a room in a communal apartment, with shared bathroom and kitchen. There was a permanent housing shortage, and so people often doubled up, with three generations living together. The apartments were often crowded, sometimes bordering on squalid. If people wanted to move, they had to find somebody else who wanted to move, who would want to exchange rooms or apartments with them. There were always long waiting lists for apartments, and children often grew up, got married, and had children before receiving a place of their own.
These all seem like negatives, but consider the flip side of all this: the high population density made this living arrangement quite affordable. With several generations living together, families were on hand to help each other. Grandparents provided day care, freeing up their children’s time to do other things. The apartment buildings were always built near public transportation, so they did not have to rely on private cars to get around. Apartment buildings are relatively cheap to heat, and municipal services easy to provide and maintain because of the short runs of pipe and cable. Perhaps most importantly, after the economy collapsed, people lost their savings, many people lost their jobs, even those that still had jobs often did not get paid for months, and when they were the value of their wages was destroyed by hyperinflation, but there were no foreclosures, no evictions, municipal services such as heat, water, and sometimes even hot water continued to be provided, and everyone had their families close by. Also, because it was so difficult to relocate, people generally stayed in one place for generations, and so they tended to know all the people around them. After the economic collapse, there was a large spike in the crime rate, which made it very helpful to be surrounded by people who weren’t strangers, and who could keep an eye on things. Lastly, in an interesting twist, the Soviet housing arrangement delivered an amazing final windfall: in the 1990s all of these apartments were privatized, and the people who lived in them suddenly became owners of some very valuable real estate, free and clear.
Switching back to the situation in the US: in recent months, many people here have reconciled themselves to the idea that their house is not an ATM machine, nor is it a nest egg. They already know that they will not be able to comfortably retire by selling it, or get rich by fixing it up and flipping it, and quite a few people have acquiesced to the fact that real estate prices are going to continue heading lower. The question is, How much lower? A lot of people still think that there must be a lower limit, a “realistic” price. This thought is connected to the notion that housing is a necessity. After all, everybody needs a place to live.
Well, it is certainly true that some sort of shelter is a necessity, be it an apartment, or a dorm room, a bunk in a barrack, a boat, a camper, or a tent, a teepee, a wigwam, a shipping container... The list is virtually endless. But there is no reason at all to think that a suburban single-family house is in any sense a requirement. It is little more than a cultural preference, and a very shortsighted one at that. Most suburban houses are expensive to heat and cool, inaccessible by public transportation, expensive to hook up to public utilities because of the long runs of pipe and cable, and require a great deal of additional public expenditure on road, bridge and highway maintenance, school buses, traffic enforcement, and other nonsense. They often take up what was once valuable agricultural land. They promote a car-centric culture that is destructive of urban environments, causing a proliferation of dead downtowns. Many families that live in suburban houses can no longer afford to live in them, and expect others to bail them out.
As this living arrangement becomes unaffordable for all concerned, it will also become unlivable. Municipalities and public utilities will not have the funds to lavish on sewer, water, electricity, road and bridge repair, and police. Without cheap and plentiful gasoline, natural gas, and heating oil, many suburban dwellings will become both inaccessible and unlivable. The inevitable result will be a mass migration of suburban refugees toward the more survivable, more densely settled towns and cities. The luckier ones will find friends or family to stay with; for the rest, it would be very helpful to improvise some solution.
One obvious answer is to repurpose the ever-plentiful vacant office buildings for residential use. Converting offices to dormitories is quite straightforward. Many of them already have kitchens and bathrooms, plenty of partitions and other furniture, and all they are really missing is beds. Putting in beds is just not that difficult. The new, subsistence economy is unlikely to generate the large surpluses that are necessary for sustaining the current large population of office plankton. The businesses that once occupied these offices are not coming back, so we might as well find new and better uses for them.
Another category of real estate that is likely to go unused and that can be repurposed for new communities is college campuses. The American 4-year college is an institution of dubious merit. It exists because American public schools fail to teach in 12 years what Russian public schools manage to teach in 8. As fewer and fewer people become able to afford college, which is likely to happen, because meager career prospects after graduation will make them bad risks for student loans, perhaps this will provide the impetus to do something about the public education system. One idea would be to scrap it, then start small, but eventually build something a bit more on par with world standards.
College campuses make perfect community centers: there are dormitories for newcomers, fraternities and sororities for the more settled residents, and plenty of grand public buildings that can be put to a variety of uses. A college campus normally contains the usual wasteland of mowed turf that can be repurposed to grow food, or, at the very least, hay, and to graze cattle. Perhaps some enlightened administrators, trustees and faculty members will fall upon this idea once they see admissions flat-lining and endowments dropping to zero, without any need for government involvement. So here we have a ray of hope, don’t we.
Moving on to transportation. Here, we need to make sure that people don’t get stranded in places that are not survivable. Then we have to provide for seasonal migrations to places where people can grow, catch, or gather their own food, and then back to places where they can survive the winter without freezing to death or going stir-crazy from cabin fever. Lastly, some amount of freight will have to be moved, to transport food to population centers, as well as enough coal and firewood to keep the pipes from freezing in the remaining habitable dwellings.
All of this is going to be a bit of a challenge, because it all hinges on the availability of transportation fuels, and it seems very probable that transportation fuels will be both too expensive and in short supply before too long. From about 2005 and until the middle of 2008 the global oil has been holding steady, unable to grow materially beyond a level that has been characterized as a “bumpy plateau.” An all-time record was set in 2005, and then, after a period of record-high oil prices, again only in 2008. Then, as the financial collapse gathered speed, oil and other commodity prices crashed, along with oil production. More recently, the oil markets have come to rest on an altogether different “bumpy plateau”: the oil prices are bumping along at around $40 a barrel and can’t seem to go any lower. It would appear that oil production costs have risen to a point where it does not make economic sense to sell oil at below this price.
Now, $40 a barrel is a good price for US consumers at the moment, but there is hyperinflation on the horizon, thanks to the money-printing extravaganza currently underway in Washington, and $40 could easily become $400 and then $4000 a barrel, swiftly pricing US consumers out of the international oil market. On top of that, exporting countries would balk at the idea of trading their oil for an increasingly worthless currency, and would start insisting on payment in kind – in some sort of tangible export commodity, which the US, in its current economic state, would be hard-pressed to provide in any great quantity. Domestic oil production is in permanent decline, and can provide only about a third of current needs. This is still quite a lot of oil, but it will be very difficult to avoid the knock-on effects of widespread oil shortages. There will be widespread hoarding, quite a lot of gasoline will simply evaporate into the atmosphere, vented from various jerricans and improvised storage containers, the rest will disappear into the black market, and much fuel will be wasted driving around looking for someone willing to part with a bit of gas that’s needed for some small but critical mission.
I am quite familiar with this scenario, because I happened to be in Russia during a time of gasoline shortages. On one occasion, I found out by word of mouth that a certain gas station was open and distributing 10 liters apiece. I brought along my uncle’s wife, who at the time was 8 months pregnant, and we tried use her huge belly to convince the gas station attendant to give us an extra 10 liters with which to drive her to the hospital when the time came. No dice. The pat answer was: “Everybody is 8 months pregnant!” How can you argue with that logic? So 10 liters was it for us too, belly or no belly.
So, what can we do to get our little critical missions accomplished in spite of chronic fuel shortages? The most obvious idea, of course, is to not use any fuel. Bicycles, and cargo bikes in particular, are an excellent adaptation. Sailboats are a good idea too: not only do they hold large amounts of cargo, but they can cover huge distances, all without the use of fossil fuels. Of course, they are restricted to the coastlines and the navigable waterways. They will be hampered by the lack of dredging due to the inevitable budget shortfalls, and by bridges that refuse to open, again, due to lack of maintenance funds, but here ancient maritime techniques and improvisations can be brought to bear to solve such problems, all very low-tech and reasonably priced.
Of course, cars and trucks will not disappear entirely. Here, again, some reasonable adaptations can be brought to bear. In my book, I advocated banning the sale of new cars, as was done in the US during World War II. The benefits are numerous. First, older cars are overall more energy-efficient than new cars, because the massive amount of energy that went into manufacturing them is more highly amortized. Second, large energy savings accrue from the shutdown of an entire industry devoted to designing, building, marketing, and financing new cars. Third, older cars require more maintenance, reinvigorating the local economy at the expense of mainly foreign car manufacturers, and helping reduce the trade deficit. Fourth, this will create a shortage of cars, translating automatically into fewer, shorter car trips, higher passenger occupancy per trip, and more bicycling and use of public transportation, saving even more energy. Lastly, this would allow the car to be made obsolete on the about the same time scale as the oil industry that made it possible. We will run out of cars just as we run out of gas.
Here we are, only a year or so later, and I am most heartened to see that the US auto industry has taken my advice and is in the process of shutting down. On the other hand, the government’s actions continue to disappoint. Instead of trying to solve problems, they would rather continue to create boondoggles. The latest one is the idea of subsidizing the sales of new cars. The idea of making cars more efficient by making more efficient cars is sheer folly. I can take any pick-up truck and increase its fuel efficiency one or two thousand percent just by breaking a few laws. First, you pack about a dozen people into the bed, standing shoulder to shoulder like sardines. Second, you drive about 25 mph, down the highway, because going any faster would waste fuel and wouldn’t be safe with so many people in the back. And there you are, per passenger fuel efficiency increased by a factor of 20 or so. I believe the Mexicans have done extensive research in this area, with excellent results.
Another excellent idea pioneered in Cuba is making it illegal not to pick up hitchhikers. Cars with vacant seats are flagged down and matched up with people who need a lift. Yet another idea: since passenger rail service is in such a sad shape, and since it is unlikely that funds will be found to improve it, why not bring back the venerable institution of riding the rails by requiring rail freight companies to provide a few empty box cars for the hobos. The energy cost of the additional weight is negligible, the hobos don’t require stops because they can jump on and off, and only a couple of cars per train would ever be needed, because hobos are almost infinitely compressible, and can even ride on the roof if needed. One final transportation idea: start breeding donkeys. Horses are finicky and expensive, but donkeys can be very cost-effective and make good pack animals. My grandfather had a donkey while he was living in Tashkent in Central Asia during World War II. There was nothing much for the donkey to eat, but, as a member of the Communist Party, my grandfather had a subscription to Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, and so that’s what the donkey ate. Apparently, donkeys can digest any kind of cellulose, even when it’s loaded with communist propaganda. If I had a donkey, I would feed it the Wall Street Journal.
And so we come to the subject of security. Post-collapse Russia suffered from a serious crime wave. Ethnic mafias ran rampant, veterans who served in Afghanistan went into business for themselves, there were numerous contract killings, muggings, murders went unsolved left and right, and, in general, the place just wasn’t safe. Russians living in the US would hear that I am heading back there for a visit, and would give me a wide-eyed stare: how could I think of doing such a thing. I came through unscathed, somehow. I made a lot of interesting observations along the way.
One interesting observation is that once collapse occurs it becomes possible to rent a policeman, either for a special occasion, or generally just to follow someone around. It is even possible to hire a soldier or two, armed with AK-47s, to help you run various errands. Not only is it possible to do such things, it’s often a very good idea, especially if you happen to have something valuable that you don’t want to part with. If you can’t afford their services, then you should try to be friends with them, and to be helpful to them in various ways. Although their demands might seem exorbitant at times, it is still a good idea to do all you can to keep them on your side. For instance, they might at some point insist that you and your family move out to the garage so that they can live in your house. This may be upsetting at first, but then is it really such a good idea for you to live in a big house all by yourselves, with so many armed men running around. It may make sense to station some of them right in your house, so that they have a base of operations from which to maintain a watch and patrol the neighborhood.
A couple of years ago I half-jokingly proposed a political solution to collapse mitigation, and formulated a platform for the so-called Collapse Party. I published it with the caveat that I didn’t think there was much of a chance of my proposals becoming part of the national agenda. Much to my surprise, I turned out to be wrong. For instance, I proposed that we stop making new cars, and, lo and behold, the auto industry shuts down. I also proposed that we start granting amnesties to prisoners, because the US has the world’s largest prison population, and will not be able to afford to keep so many people locked up. It is better to release prisoners gradually, over time, rather than in a single large general amnesty, the way Saddam Hussein did it right before the US invaded. And, lo and behold, many states are starting to implement my proposal. It looks like California in particular will be forced to release some 60 thousand of the 170 thousand people it keeps locked up. That is a good start. I also proposed that we dismantle all overseas military bases (there are over a thousand of them) and repatriate all the troops. And it looks like that is starting to happen as well, except for the currently planned little side-trip to Afghanistan. I also proposed a Biblical jubilee – forgiveness of all debts, public and private. Let’s give that one… half a decade?
But if we look just at the changes that are already occurring, just the simple, predictable lack of funds, as the federal government and the state governments all go broke, will transform American society in rather predictable ways. As municipalities run out of money, police protection will evaporate. But the police still have to eat, and will find ways to use their skills to good use on a freelance basis. Similarly, as military bases around the world are shut down, soldiers will return to a country that will be unable to reintegrate them into civilian life. Paroled prisoners will find themselves in much the same predicament.
And so we will have former soldiers, former police, and former prisoners: a big happy family, with a few bad apples and some violent tendencies. The end result will be a country awash with various categories of armed men, most of them unemployed, and many of them borderline psychotic. The police in the United States are a troubled group. Many of them lose all touch with people who are not “on the force” and most of them develop an us-versus-them mentality. The soldiers returning from a tour of duty often suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. The paroled prisoners suffer from a variety of psychological ailments as well. All of them will sooner or later realize that their problems are not medical but rather political. This will make it impossible for society to continue to exercise control over them. All of them will be making good use of their weapons training and other professional skills to acquire whatever they need to survive. And the really important point to remember is that they will do these things whether or not anyone thinks it legal for them to do be doing them.
I said it before and I will say it again: very few things are good or bad per se; everything has to be considered within a context. And, in a post-collapse context, not having to worry whether or not something is legal may be a very good thing. In the midst of a collapse, we will not have time to deliberate, legislate, interpret, set precedents and so on. Having to worry about pleasing a complex and expensive legal system is the last thing we should have to worry about.
Some legal impediments are really small and trivial, but they can be quite annoying nevertheless. A homeowners’ association might, say, want give you a ticket or seek a court order against you for not mowing your lawn, or for keeping livestock in your garage, or for that nice windmill you erected on a hill that you don’t own, without first getting a building permit, or some municipal busy-body might try to get you arrested for demolishing a certain derelict bridge because it was interfering with boat traffic – you know, little things like that. Well, if the association is aware that you have a large number of well armed, mentally unstable friends, some of whom still wear military and police uniforms, for old time’s sake, then they probably won’t give you that ticket or seek that court order.
Or suppose you have a great new invention that you want to make and distribute, a new agricultural implement. It’s a sort of flail studded with sharp blades. It has a hundred and one uses and is highly cost-effective, and reasonably safe provided you don’t lose your head while using it, although people have taken to calling the “flying guillotine.” You think that this is an acceptable risk, but you are concerned about the issues of consumer safety and liability insurance and possibly even criminal liability. Once again, it is very helpful to have a large number of influential, physically impressive, mildly psychotic friends who, whenever some legal matter comes up, can just can go and see the lawyers, have a friendly chat, demonstrate the proper use of the flying guillotine, and generally do whatever they have to do to settle the matter amicably, without any money changing hands, and without signing any legal documents.
Or, say, the government starts being difficult about moving things and people in and out of the country, or it wants to take too much of a cut from commercial transactions. Or perhaps your state or your town decides to conduct its own foreign policy, and the federal government sees it fit to interfere. Then it may turn out to be a good thing if someone else has the firepower to bring the government, or what remains of it, to its senses, and convince it to be reasonable and to play nice.
Or perhaps you want to start a community health clinic, so that you can provide some relief to people who wouldn’t otherwise have any health care. You don’t dare call yourself a doctor, because these people are suspicious of doctors, because doctors were always trying to rob them of their life’s savings. But suppose you have some medical training that you got in, say, Cuba, and you are quite able to handle a Caesarean or an appendectomy, to suture wounds, to treat infections, to set bones and so on. You also want to be able to distribute opiates that your friends in Afghanistan periodically send you, to ease the pain of hard post-collapse life. Well, going through the various licensing boards and getting the certifications and the permits and the malpractice insurance is all completely unnecessary, provided you can surround yourself with a lot of well-armed, well-trained, mentally unstable friends.
Food. Shelter. Transportation. Security. Security is very important. Maintaining order and public safety requires discipline, and maintaining discipline, for a lot of people, requires the threat of force. This means that people must be ready to come to each other’s defense, take responsibility for each other, and do what’s right. Right now, security is provided by a number of bloated, bureaucratic, ineffectual institutions, which inspire more anger and despondency than discipline, and dispense not so much violence as ill treatment. That is why we have the world’s highest prison population. They are supposedly there to protect people from each other, but in reality their mission is not even to provide security; it is to safeguard property, and those who own it. Once these institutions run out of resources, there will be a period of upheaval, but in the end people will be forced to learn to deal with each other face to face, and Justice will once again become a personal virtue rather than a federal department.
I’ve covered what I think are basics, based on what I saw work and what I think might work reasonably well here. I assume that a lot of you are thinking that this is all quite far into the future, if in fact it ever gets that bad. You should certainly feel free to think that way. The danger there is that you will miss the opportunity to adapt to the new reality ahead of time, and then you will get trapped. As I see it, there is a choice to be made: you can accept the failure of the system now and change your course accordingly, or you can decide that you must try to stay the course, and then you will probably have to accept your own individual failure later.
So how do you prepare? Lately, I’ve been hearing from a lot of high-powered, successful people about their various high-powered, successful associates. Usually, the story goes something like this: “My a. financial advisor, b. investment banker, or c. commanding officer has recently a. put all his money in gold, b. bought a log cabin up in the mountains, or c. built a bunker under his house stocked with six months of food and water. Is this normal?” And I tell them, yes, of course, that’s perfectly harmless. He’s just having a mid-collapse crisis. But that’s not really preparation. That’s just someone being colorful in an offbeat, countercultural sort of way.
So, how do you prepare, really? Let’s go through a list of questions that people typically ask me, and I will try to briefly respond to each of them.
OK, first question: How about all these financial boondoggles? What on earth is going on? People are losing their jobs left and right, and if we calculate unemployment the same way it was done during the Great Depression, instead of looking at the cooked numbers the government is trying to feed us now, then we are heading toward 20% unemployment. And is there any reason to think it’ll stop there? Do you happen to believe that prosperity is around the corner? Not only jobs and housing equity, but retirement savings are also evaporating. The federal government is broke, state governments are broke, some more than others, and the best they can do is print money, which will quickly lose value. So, how can we get the basics if we don’t have any money? How is that done? Good question.
As I briefly mentioned, the basics are food, shelter, transportation, and security. Shelter poses a particularly interesting problem at the moment. It is still very much overpriced, with many people paying mortgages and rents that they can no longer afford while numerous properties stand vacant. The solution, of course, is to cut your losses and stop paying. But then you might soon have to relocate. That is OK, because, as I mentioned, there is no shortage of vacant properties around. Finding a good place to live will become less and less of a problem as people stop paying their rents and mortgages and get foreclosed or evicted, because the number of vacant properties will only increase. The best course of action is to become a property caretaker, legitimately occupying a vacant property rent-free, and keeping an eye on things for the owner. What if you can’t find a position as a property caretaker? Well, then you might have to become a squatter, maintain a list of other vacant properties that you can go to next, and keep your camping gear handy just in case. If you do get tossed out, chances are, the people who tossed you out will then think about hiring a property caretaker, to keep the squatters out. And what do you do if you become property caretaker? Well, you take care of the property, but you also look out for all the squatters, because they are the reason you have a legitimate place to live. A squatter in hand is worth three absentee landlords in the bush. The absentee landlord might eventually cut his losses and go away, but your squatter friends will remain as your neighbors. Having some neighbors is so much better than living in a ghost town.
What if you still have a job? How do you prepare then? The obvious answer is, be prepared to quit or to be laid off or fired at any moment. It really doesn’t matter which one of these it turns out to be; the point is to sustain zero psychological damage in the process. Get your burn rate to as close to zero as you can, by spending as little money as possible, so than when the job goes away, not much has to change. While at work, do as little as possible, because all this economic activity is just a terrible burden on the environment. Just gently ride it down to a stop and jump off.
If you still have a job, or if you still have some savings, what do you do with all the money? The obvious answer is, build up inventory. The money will be worthless, but a box of bronze nails will still be a box of bronze nails. Buy and stockpile useful stuff, especially stuff that can be used to create various kinds of alternative systems for growing food, providing shelter, and providing transportation. If you don’t own a patch of dirt free and clear where you can stockpile stuff, then you can rent a storage container, pay it a few years forward, and just sit on it until reality kicks in again and there is something useful for you to do with it. Some of you may be frightened by the future I just described, and rightly so. There is nothing any of us can do to change the path we are on: it is a huge system with tremendous inertia, and trying to change its path is like trying to change the path of a hurricane. What we can do is prepare ourselves, and each other, mostly by changing our expectations, our preferences, and scaling down our needs. It may mean that you will miss out on some last, uncertain bit of enjoyment. On the other hand, by refashioning yourself into someone who might stand a better chance of adapting to the new circumstances, you will be able to give to yourself, and to others, a great deal of hope that would otherwise not exist.
[There are many interesting comments with this article...granny]
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/01/boondoggles-to-rescue.html
Boondoggles to the Rescue!
Economic collapse has a way of turning economic negatives into positives. It is not necessary for the United States to embrace the tenets of command economy and central planning to match the Soviet lackluster performance in this area. We have our own methods that are working almost as well. I call them “boondoggles.” They are solutions to problems that result in more severe problems than those they attempt to solve.
Just look around and you will see boondoggles sprouting up everywhere, in every field of endeavor: we have military boondoggles like Iraq, financial boondoggles like the doomed retirement system, medical boondoggles like private health insurance and legal boondoggles like the intellectual property system. At some point, creating another boondoggle becomes the preferred course of action: since the outcome can be predicted with complete accuracy, there is little risk. Proposing a solution that might work runs the risk of it not working.
So why not, as a matter of policy, only propose solutions that are guaranteed to simply create more problems, for which further solutions can then be proposed? At some point, a boondoggle event horizon is reached, like the light event horizon that exists at the surface of a black hole. Beyond that horizon, the only possible course of action is to create more boondoggles.
The combined weight of all these boondoggles is slowly but surely pushing us all down. If it pushes us down far enough, then economic collapse, when it arrives, will be like falling out of a ground-floor window. We just have to help this process along, or at least not interfere with it. So if somebody comes to you and says, “I want to make a boondoggle that runs on hydrogen” — by all means encourage him! It’s not as good as a boondoggle that burns money directly, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Once you understand the principles involved, boondoggling will come naturally. Let us work through a sample problem: there is no longer enough gasoline to go around. A simple but effective solution is to ban the sale of new cars, with the exception of certain fleet vehicles used by public services. First, older cars are overall more energy-efficient than new cars, because the massive amount of energy that went into manufacturing them is more highly amortized. Second, large energy savings accrue from the shutdown of an entire industry devoted to designing, building, marketing and financing new cars. Third, older cars require more maintenance, reinvigorating the local economy at the expense of mainly foreign car manufacturers, and helping reduce the trade deficit. Fourth, this will create a shortage of cars, translating automatically into fewer, shorter car trips, a higher passenger occupancy per trip and more bicycling and use of public transportation, saving even more energy. Lastly, this would allow the car to be made obsolete on about the same time line as the oil industry that made it possible.
Of course, this solution does not qualify as a boondoggle, so it will not be seriously considered. The problems it creates are too small, and they offer too little scope for creating further boondoggles. Moreover, if this solution worked, then everyone would be happily driving their slightly older cars, completely unprepared for some inevitable, cataclysmic, economy-collapsing event. It is better to introduce some boondoggles, such as corn-based ethanol and coal-to-liquids conversion. Ethanol production creates very little additional energy but it does create some fantastic problems for further boondoggling: a shortage of food and higher food prices, malnutrition among the poor and inflation. It also reinforces a large existing boondoggle: by funneling resources to petrochemical-based agribusiness, which depletes and poisons the soil and has no future in an age when petrochemicals are scarce, it helps undermine future food security. Coal-to-liquids conversion offers similarly excellent opportunities. By attempting to alleviate a shortage of gasoline, it will cause a shortage of coal, resulting in power outages and dramatically higher electricity rates. It will add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, accelerating global warming. It will probably call for some coal imports, inefficiently moving a very bulky fuel from far away, and fostering energy dependence on suppliers such as China and Russia, further enhancing the trade deficit. Along with corn-based ethanol, this excellent boondoggle reinforces the erroneous notion that Americans will be able to continue to drive cars into the indefinite future, conditioning them to clamor for more boondoggles in place of any real solutions.
With a bit of practice, you should be able to come up with some excellent boondoggles of your own in your own field of endeavor. If your boondoggle works, it will create more problems for you to solve in the next round, as long as there is time for one more round. And if there is not, then you will be where you want to be: at a ground-floor window, staring into an abyss of only a couple of feet. Although by then it may feel unnatural, at that point you must resist the temptation to create yet another boondoggle by jumping down head-first. [Reinventing Collapse, pp 118-120]
The Role Of The Liver In Your Health
Herbal Corner How can one….stave off allergies, lower cholesterol, improve digestion, lose a little bit of weight, calm emotional anger responses, improve eyesight, prevent tendonitis and nervous system concerns, and protect oneself from environmental toxins….all in one fell swoop? Stumped? The answer is: Take care of your liver.
According to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the liver is connected to tendon matters, eye matters, and the nervous system, in addition to the traditionally known digestive function and enzyme releases. It also is the organ associated with anger especially, but emotions in general too. When one is weepy, irritable and when anger flairs easily, suspect liver congestion. This is not illness at all, in the traditional medical sense: Instead, think of a water filter which has been clogged, and which needs to be cleared. A minor matter that can easily be taken care of with herbal and dietary intervention.
It’s an amazing organ, almost with an intelligence of its own. The liver secretes bile, a bitter yellow fluid that breaks down fats and cholesterol. It also secretes enzymes, which by definition break down foods (the function of enzymes in general). By storing glycogen, a metabolite of glucose (blood sugar), the liver somehow knows when to release that glycogen, thus playing a sometimes overlooked role in blood sugar regulation. It breaks down hormones, thus preventing excesses of hormones from circulating in the blood, affecting moods, regulating (indirectly and as secondary role-player) body functions as these excess hormones are broken down, and more. The liver also stores many vitamins, releasing them at times when the body needs them. And it cleanses the blood, assisting allergy control. What a powerful and seemingly knowledgeable organ, eh? To boot, it’s self-regenerating too: Cut out 75% of the liver and that one-fourth of the liver will grow back, regenerating an entire new organ.
The beauty of herbalism is that it works hand-and-glove with mainstream medicine. Each discipline fills in gaps for the other. Where mainstream medicine is superb in operating on the liver, for example, and administering immuno-suppressive medications to stop the immune system from attacking a transplanted organ, it also does not have any medications to regenerate and cleanse the liver.
That is where, as master phytotherapist David Hoffman points out, the green world has lots to offer. Lots, indeed. There are liver “cooling” (anti-inflammatory and sedative) herbs, liver “warming” (stimulating) herbs, liver “protectants” (which build liver tissue), those herbs that promote bile flow and enhance cleansing, anti-viral herbs (yes, you got that right), and more. Liver cleansing and tissue regeneration are keystones in herbal therapy.
Milk Thistle:
Animals administered with sylimarin and sylibin (milk thistle constituents, or chemical components) prior to being fed the poison amanita mushroom cap, which causes liver hemorrhage, have shown 100% protection from the poisonous fungus*. People administered with those same chemical constituents up to 48 hours after eating the poison amanita mushroom show as much as a 50% reduction in fatalities. (Note: The extract is much more potent than the herb alone, as is always the case with any herb. And note that those surviving the fatal amanita mushroom were fed the isolated constituents, not the herb alone). Milk thistle promotes the growth of new liver tissue, promotes bile flow, is gently cleansing, and has a “neutral” thermal temperature according to TCM (meaning that it will neither stimulate an irritated liver nor slow down a sluggish one). It also promotes the flow of mother’s milk and is “perfectly safe” for nursing mothers.** It has mild diuretic effects. No drug-herb interactions have been noted with milk thistle.**
Boldo:
This liver-cleansing herb stimulates bile flow, thus helping to reduce cholesterol and fatty acid deposits. It is used to break up gallstones* and the demulcent (soothing) and antiseptic components of the herb may assist cystitis.* The herb may also be used as an aid to slimming*. Laboratory rats administered with boldine (a chemical ingredient of boldo) showed inhibited liver microsomal enzymes* and many different forms of anti-oxidant protection. Boldo induces the release of calcium ions from skeletal sites where muscles attach*, suggesting that the herb may help to break up bone spurs. Caution: Because of volatile oils, the herb can irritate the kidneys and should be avoided by individuals with kidney disease.**
Dandelion root:
Stimulates bile flow, has mild diuretic effects, cleanses the liver, and has a “cool” thermal temperature***. According to TCM, to “cool” any organ means to soothe irritation, calm down hyper-activity or hyper-secretion, replenish with nurturing fluids, etc. Thus, a person with a liver that has been stressed by over-work from a heavy toxic load will benefit from dandelion root tea or extract. The herb is indicated in biliary tract obstruction**** although there is a risk of colic in this situation, which requires an herbal physician’s care. May cause hyperacidity in some individuals by stimulating secretion.****
Garlic:
Inhibits blood platelet aggregation and is a vasodilator****, helps to break down fats in the blood, cleanses the liver, is mildly antiseptic and a popular food item (pesto is great for your health!) Chop it twenty minutes prior to cooking, instructs Christopher Hobbs in person, and the waiting period promotes the release of the garlicins, active chemical constituents in the herb. Contra-indication: May interact with other blood-thinning medications, because garlic is itself a blood thinner.
Lemon and bitter greens:
Sour and bitter flavors promote the flow of bile, aiding digestion and cholesterol breakdown. There are conflicting theories about sweetening these tastes in herbal schools of thought, points out Christopher Hobbs in personal training. Some herbalists maintain that sweetening fresh-squeezed lemonade is just fine for stimulating bile flow, while others suggest that it’s not merely the chemistry of the bitter or sour flavors, but the sour taste itself which signals bile release from the liver. Either way, I suggest that for any therapy to be effective, it must be not only palatable but tasty. To stick with it, I suggest sweetening the lemonade if that is how you are more likely to drink it, and use a honey-sweetened salad dressing for your bitter greens.
Drink fresh-squeezed lemonade, or eat mesclun salad mix, dandelion greens, arugula or other bitter greens about twenty minutes prior to meals, says Christopher Hobbs in personal training, and bile flow will be stimulated. This, in turn, breaks down fats and cholesterols, while promoting healthier digestion and possibly helping people to slim down a bit, as part of a greater weight-loss management program. To break down fats and cholesterol, avoid fatty and cholesterol-loaded foods while being sure to use healthy oils in cooking. Crisco, lard, margarine, hydrogenated fats in baked goodies, and whipped cream substitutes are far more artery-clogging than butter: Avoid them like the plague.
Suggestions for further reading:
Hobbs, Christopher “Natural Therapy for your Liver” a superb book detailing the functions of the liver from mainstream and Chinese medical perspectives alike. Lists thermal temperatures of herbs (cooling, neutral, warm, etc), charts liver enzymes and which herbs stimulate or inhibit those enzyme productions, discusses fats and oils in the diet, and more. Very well written as a lay-friendly read with scientific depth, which will satisfy a doctor’s interests as well.
For information about healthy dietary oils, see also Linda Rector Page’s “Healthy Healing” book (in health food stores nation-wide as reference material), 11th edition. You can photocopy the article in the book and keep it at home.
*Williamson, Elizabeth, Bsc, PhD, MRPharmS, FLS “Potters Herbal Cyclopedia”
**Hoffman, David, FNMIH, AHG “Medical Herbalism”
***Hobbs, Christopher L.Ac, “Natural Therapy for your Liver”
****Hobbs, Christopher L.Ac and Kraft, Karin MD “Pocket Guide to Herbal Medicine”
© 2008, Kathryn Smith
http://survivingthemiddleclasscrash.wordpress.com/herbal-corner/natural-cold-and-flu-treatment/
Natural Cold and Flu Treatment
The first thing to do when you are sick is, of course, to take care of the symptoms. Then, to address any constitutional weaknesses, should you be susceptible to frequent cold and flu infections. Which means beefing up your immune system. And while mainstream medicinal protocols may offer antibiotic and other treatments, they do not offer ways to strengthen your body and its defenses. That’s where the green world has a lot to offer.
Common Cold and Flu Treatments
If your head, chest and/or sinus cavities are stuffy, steam with herbal teas which clear the condition (see steaming instructions below). Chamomile tea soothes the mucosal membranes, is mildly antibiotic and anti-inflammatory. Elder blossoms are an expectorant, meaning that they loosen mucous. Thus, as mucous is loosened and thrown off into the body for elimination, at first one feels more mucousy than ever. However, precisely because of using an expectorant, the healing process is also more rapid. That plugged-up feeling which at first seems to be exacerbated, will in fact clear up more quickly when using the combination of soothing, mildly antibiotic chamomile along with the expectorant elder blossoms. (Both herbs should be available very inexpensively in bulk at your local health food store, or at Elephant Pharmacy).
How to Steam
Prepare a quart-sized pot of chamomile and elder blossom tea. It need only be mildly strong, not intense. In fact, go easy with elder blossoms, to avoid excreting too much mucous all at once: One moderate pinch of the flowers is all you will need to a quart of water. You could use two or three generous pinches of chamomile to a pot of water. Boil the water, add the tea flowers, turn off the stove and wait for the tea to steep. Once steeped, and when the tea is hot enough to be steamy without burning your skin, bend over the pot of tea (you could do this sitting down at the table) and throw a towel over your head and the pot, to make a tent, which catches the steam. Breathe in through your nose, inhaling the steam. Keep breathing it in: The tea and the steam alike will be therapeutic. Do this as long as there is steam to breathe in. Then, rinse off with very cold water to close your pores, and pat your skin dry. Do not rub your skin with the towel: Being heated up, your skin will be extra sensitive. Just gently pat it dry.
Gargling for sore throats and laryngitis
Use fresh-squeezed lemon juice and warm water, ie unsweetened lemonade, gargling three times a day to put vitamin C directly on the throat and for disinfectant action. NEVER swallow after gargling, because the liquid in your mouth will contain toxic by-products and bacteria. ALWAYS spit it out.
Sage tea is a specific for sore throats, and makes a very good gargle as well as drinking tea. Containing anti-microbial essential oils and being of an astringent nature, it contracts and firms oral gums, brings down swelling in tissues of the throat and mouth, and has anti-inflammatory action. Thus, sage tea may be used for dental and sore throat concerns alike. Gargle with sage tea three times daily to soothe irritated throat tissues and to reduce swelling. Alternate sage tea gargles with warm lemonade gargles as above for optimal healing of sore throats and laryngitis alike.
Safety considerations with sage: David Hoffmann writes in his book Medical Herbalism that “adverse reactions are likely only with overdoses (more than 15 g sage leaf per dose) or prolonged use of red sage. The toxic constituent essential oil, thujone, causes symptoms such as tachycardia, hot flashes, convulsions and dizziness. Avoid during pregnancy.” However, in moderate doses and outside of pregnancy, sage is quite safe. Because of the toxic essential oil thujone, if you have liver problems, avoid the herb altogether.
How to literally burn out a cold or flu infection
St Johnswort has demonstrated anti-viral activity, alongside nervous system anti-inflammatory action. May be safely administered internally except where light sensitivity is increased, as a rare side effect of this herb. Liver secretions of the enzyme CYP3A4 and P450 are increased by St Johnswort, and may interfere with other drugs. Consult your physician if you are taking medications, prior to consuming St Johnswort internally.
Additional herbs for immune system strengthening
Astragalus: great for boosting immune response. Contra-indicated in autoimmune conditions due to its immuno stimulant effects. Good for short-term use but not long-term.
Reishi: Superb strengthener of the adrenal glands, good for fighting fatigue and hormonally boosting immune strength. Effective when used in the long term.
Schisandra: A superb adaptogenic herb, meaning that it boosts adrenal gland function, fights fatigue, hormonally strengthens immune response, increases resistance to internal stress and external stressors, and generally boosts resistance while strengthening the body over the long-term.
Osha: Used for chest colds and lung conditions. Very effective.
For long-term immune strengthening, I recommend doing schizandra berry, Reishi, Siberian Ginseng and/or Ligustrum. Be sure your digestive tract is healthy and that there is no “leaky gut syndrome” present: See clinical nutritionist Elizabeth Lipski’s excellent booklet, “Leaky Gut Syndrome.” Avoid food allergens, especially gluten if gluten intolerance is present, to be sure the integrity of the digestive tract’s mucosal barrier is strong and an effective shield. Keep your liver cleansed and healthy, while using the herbs recommended above for long-term immune and adrenal strengthening.
The idea is to a) strengthen the immune system production with adaptogenic herbs b) strengthen the adrenals c) keep the intestinal and other mucosal barriers strong and healthy and d) cleanse and strengthen the liver.
NOTE: If your thyroid is low, as is common in our society, you may be vulnerable to increased frequency of cold and flu infections. Check with your doctor to be sure your thyroid is healthy and functioning at an optimal level. If your doctor says that your thyroid is “Normal”, check very specifically: Where do you rank on the “normal” chart? You could be on the high end of normal or the low end, in which you are bordering on hypothyroidism, or under-secretion of the thyroid gland. If you are normal but on the low side of normal, consider a kelp supplement to boost your thyroid with iodine as nutrient required for manufacturing thyroxin, a thyroid hormone. Acupuncture can also bring very good results for boosting thyroid function.
Last but not least, be aware that given the same exact blood sample drawn at the same moment, two different laboratories may come up with two different readings. The quality of the laboratory is important. Mainstream and alternative medicine teach different diagnostic methods: One doctor may say a lab reading is “Normal” while another may pronounce it “sky high” or “low”. The yardstick used for determining health or illness, or just plain old need for strengthening in absence of actual illness, vary with different medical schools of thought. When in doubt, go for a second opinion. I trust alternative medical diagnostic methods because their yardstick includes not merely malaise as diagnostic concern, but just plain old need for strengthening of a body system in absence of malaise. That refined diagnostic fine-tuning of the body is key to good health. But we each must go the path we each trust, and to honor yourself is very important. Go the way you believe in and stick with any doctor who is giving you good results. The proof is in the pudding, and different bodies respond differently to various treatment methods. There is no textbook version to any individualized wellness protocol.
A Sante! To your good health!
Kathryn
Ohhh, My Aching Back! How Do You Spell Relief?
Ouch!Perhaps you just came back from a long mountain hike and your muscles, over-all, are achy and tired. Perhaps you simply bend over one day and rip! Your back goes out so painfully that you are lying in a crumpled heap on the floor, with severe pain even just breathing. You might be surprised that your back went out in this sudden and mysterious way: It can happen even to active people.
So whether your situation is sudden and acute, long-term and painful, or just plain old ordinary and mild charley horse aches, there are things you can do without going to see your doctor.
NOTE: In acute cases, I absolutely recommend seeing a chiropractor, immediately. The acute pain may be the result of a pinched nerve or muscle, which will find zero relief with even the best of medical intervention, without first being freed from the bones, which are trapping it.
Arnica Montana, commonly known as “arnica”, is a yellow, low growing, flowering herb found in the European Alps. Among its many constituents is the sesquiterpene lactone called “helenalin,” which has the effect of stimulating local immune activity wherever it is applied. “Phagocytosis” as this immune activity is called brings healing to the local area. Thus, applying arnica oil to any sore, strained, or sprained area speeds the healing process along, reduces swelling, and the nastiest bruises will clear up much more quickly with arnica. Superb healing for even acute sprains, torn ligaments, mild to severe charley horse pain, whiplash, or muscle pain of any kind. Less effective for nerve pain.
As with any other herbs, not all arnica is created equal. It depends on the soil nutrients, the growing and harvesting methods, how it is processed, etc. The one product that I have found to be amazingly effective is the Weleda Arnica Massage Oil. It is available through your local health food store grocer. No brand other than Weleda boasts such rapid or thorough healing effects. I have seen people who could not get out of bed, experience significant enough improvement in a matter of three hours to be able to move again. I also have seen people who don’t believe in herbs experience relief with this product in a very short period of time.
On the other hand, as stressed above, even the Weleda arnica massage oil will be ineffective in the case of pinched nerves. It will bring relief to spastic muscles surrounding the affected area, however, which is very important to do. Contracted muscles will only pinch the nerve/muscle even further: To relax the surrounding muscles is an important part of the therapy, alongside chiropractic intervention.
Arnica is analgesic (Pain-relieving), anti-inflammatory, and a wound healer.
CAUTION: Because helanalin is mildly toxic, do not use arnica on burned, broken or abraded skin. Do not ingest internally. Use topically only.
Baking soda: While hardly considered a herb, this naturally-occurring salt has the power to draw out lactic acid from aching muscles when added to bath water. The lactic acid is responsible for the stiffening and/or spasming of muscles, a protective function of the body any time there has been muscle trauma of any kind. It’s as if the body stiffens up in an attempt to prevent mobility, thus inducing rest and allowing time for the muscles to heal. Any time there has been impact, over-exertion, strain, whiplash, or other muscular trauma, the lactic acid builds up to induce rest. But it also causes pain and spasming. Happily enough, there is relief to be had, and even severe backache pain can be improved (though not completely cured) by a baking soda bath.
To a tubful of hot water, add one cup of ordinary baking soda. Soak in the hot water to release any tension in the muscles. (If you have heart problems, use warm water instead). You will emerge from the bath feeling much improved.
St Johns Wort Oil Note that I specify the oil extract in this case, not the regular alcohol or glycerin extract. The reason is that oil and water constituents in each herb are very different from each other, each with different actions. St Johns Wort *oil* is a highly effective topical anti-inflammatory. I recommend the Gaia brand (available at health food stores), because that company checks their herbs for heavy metal and mercury content, and is of good quality besides.
St Johns Wort has many benefits above and beyond its anti-inflammatory effects, including anti-viral activity and as an effective anti-depressant. It has been extensively studied as an anti-depressant herb, with literally thousands of clinical tests, trials et al having been done. It is as widely used in Germany for depression as Prozac is in America. The hyperforins in St Johns Wort have been proven to boost serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline levels. In order to be effective, the herb must be of high quality, manufacturing processes ditto, and a high level of hyperforins must be present. Ordinary drugstore-purchased St Johns Wort extract will likely not be as effective as other products of superior quality. Use the extract or powdered extract for best results, checking for hyperforin levels prior to purchasing. Karin Kraft, MD and Christopher Hobbs, LAc write in their book “Pocket Guide to Herbal Medicine” (published by Thieme) that when used for treatment of depression, “The herb preparations should be taken for a period of at least 4 to 6 weeks to assess benefit. Solid and liquid hypericum (St Johns Wort) preparations should be given at doses corresponding to 300 mg native extract (standardized to 0.3% hypericin, and/or 2-3% hyperforin), 2 to 3 times a day.”
Very safe for internal consumption, with no toxic effects. Some sensitive individuals may develop light sensitivity as a result of St Johns Wort use: In that case, discontinue use. This reaction, however, is relatively rare.
Chamomile compress: Chamomile has anti-spasmodic effects when applied topically. Make a very strong tea out of it, using one full cup of the dried flowers to a small potful of water. Strain, pour over a towel, and apply directly to the affected area after the compress is sufficiently cooled to be applied without burning the skin, but still hot enough to be therapeutic. Place a dry towel over the wet one to trap the steam and keep the compress warm.
Chamomile also has anti-nauseant effects plus sedative action, thus being very effective in cases of stomach flu and safe for children to use. The Roman chamomile is very similar in action to the German variety, but lacks the gently anti-septic action of the German plant.
Rare allergic reactions to any members of the aster family (of which Chamomile is a member) may result in skin rashes. In that rare case, discontinue use. Chamomile is virtually non-toxic and is safe for ingestion in large quantities, so long as there are no allergic reactions.
Devil’s Claw has been shown to be generally well tolerated and makes an effective substitute for non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, without the gastro-intestinal side effects. Its actions are anti-inflammatory, anti-rheumatic, analgesic and sedative. Extracts are always much more potent than the tablet or capsule version of any herb.
Comfrey leaf has a significant amount of allantoins, which promote wound healing. Allantoins also promote cell proliferation, thus helping scarring to occur properly as a way to seal off any wound and let the healing begin. The herb is an excellent anti-inflammatory, making it highly effective in relieving muscle aches and pains of all kinds. Everything from plantar fascitis (painful feet caused by tissue thickening), backache, muscle ache, inflammation, and burns will benefit from comfrey salve or compresses being applied.
The combination of its wound-healing, anti-inflammatory, and demulcent action in which digestive organs are coated with a gel-like liquid shield, makes it excellent in cases of digestive ulcers. Externally, the leaf extract soothes muscle aches and pains.CAUTION: In his book Medical Herbalism, master phythotherapist David Hoffmann writes that “Care should be taken (when comfrey is applied to) very deep wounds, as external application of comfrey can cause tissue to form over the wound before it is healed deeper down, which can lead to abscess”. VERY IMPORTANT: Comfrey contains pyrrolizzidine alkaloids, or PA’s, which can cause arteries in the liver to contract, resulting in liver disease. They also are carcinogenic in large doses. According to David Hoffmann, ”An average cup of comfrey leaf tea contains 8.3 mg alkaloid,” a relatively low dose. Thus, side effects require large and long-term doses of the herb, and while absorption of the PA’s through the skin occurs in small doses, it is still wise to be cautious. Be sure to purchase comfrey from your health food store grocer marked PA-free or pyrrolizzidine alkaloid-free. In that case, the herb may be taken freely with only beneficial effects.
Yoga is extremely effective in strengthening and creating flexible core torso muscles, which support your back and indeed all of the body. For anybody suffering back pain, I highly recommend a combination of chiropractic, yoga, and any core-strengthening exercises prescribed specifically for you by your chiropractor. Note that your back will slip out of alignment again and again, so long as these supportive muscles are weak. Take good care of them. And, swim a lot!
Core strengthening exercise: Lie down on your back, feet flat on the floor with your knees pointing up to the ceiling. Just relax to let any muscle spasms go. Give yourself a few minutes and just breathe. Then, still in the same position, tuck your belly in toward your back, holding to a count of seven. Release the abdominal muscles, tucking your knees up to your chest and holding them there with your arms. In that balled-up position, count to seven again. Repeat the whole sequence ten times. Do three times daily and combine with yoga exercises for superior effect.
Dolphin swim exercise: This exercise is most beneficial for people who are habitually stooped forward, and for elderly people whose posture has gone in that direction. Muscles in the back will be strengthened while those in front, shrunken by the forward-stooping posture, will be stretched, thus normalizing muscle balance so as to support an upright position.
Lie down on a rug or floor mat, on your abdomen. Gradually lift your head and feet off the floor, slowly, slowly. As you do so, make sure the space between each vertebra is opened up, not compressed. Thus, as you lift your head and feet, you are stretching instead of balling up. Your hands will come up alongside your body, pointing straight behind you. Once you have raised your head and feet as far off the floor as you can comfortably sustain, bring your hands out behind you, pointing up toward the ceiling. Do not let the shoulder blades rise! Keep them down low! Now, wiggle your torso from side to side, like a dolphin swimming along. Keep your feet, head and hands off the ground, and your shoulder blades low. This is a remarkably strengthening exercise! It’s important to follow it up with a gentle stretch:
Yoga roll Sit in a lotus position on the floor or rug or mat. With your hands clasped behind your back, gently lift your head up toward the ceiling, then gently stretch it forward. Go one neck vertebra at a time, in an upward-then-forward motion. Go VERY SLOWLY. Keep going, one vertebra at a time, until your entire back has been stretched in this upward-forward motion, until you end up curled in a ball on the floor. You will feel wonderfully limber and free afterwards, if you have done this exercise correctly and without pushing yourself too hard. Remember: Go easy! This is not about stretching and pain. It’s about ease and gentleness. The lift between each vertebra, combined with the new-found limber muscles, will feel just wonderful!
References:
Potter’s Herbal Cyclopedia by Elizabeth Williamson, BSc, PhD, MRPharmS, FLS (herbal pharmacist). Superb, quick-reference format for each individual herb includes a lay-friendly description of each herb’s action, along with a listing of chemical herbal constituents and clinical tests of interest to your doctor. NOTE: Another book with the same title exists. Be sure to get Elizabeth Williamson’s version. It is superb and very handy to show your doctor to ask questions about drug-herb interactions, based on the chemical ingredients listed for each herb.
Pocket Guide to Herbal Medicine by Karin Kraft, MD and Christopher Hobbs, LAc lists each herb individually, compares effectiveness of each herb with mainstream drugs, gives full disclosure, references chemical ingredients of herbs and clinical tests/studies, drug-herb interactions, and more. It also spells out specific treatment methods such as herbal poultices, dosages, extracts, and other therapeutic methods. Small and handy reference book. Karin Kraft is to Germany what the FDA is to America: She spearheads that organization in Germany. Christopher Hobbs, licensed acupuncturist, is considered the world-top authority on herbal therapy and is a consultant to the health industry worldwide. (He also raves about the Potter’s Herbal Cyclopedia).
Medical Herbalism by David Hoffmann is an enormous volume written very in-depth, using much medical and herbal technical language. I recommend this for herbalists and health practitioners only, but it’s an invaluable source of detailed scientific information. Hoffmann ranks alongside Christopher Hobbs as one of the world’s most-quoted and authoritative herbalists.
The Way of Herbs by Michael Tierra, C.A., N.D a naturopathic doctor who works alongside Christopher Hobbs and is very good. This book is lay-friendly, mentioning chemical herbal ingredients in brief, while describing benefits, actions, cautions etc in lay-friendly languages in an easy reference format.
Kathryn Smith
http://survivingthemiddleclasscrash.wordpress.com/share-your-ideas/
[See notes on Ken Solar at end of post]
9 Responses to “Share Ideas”
1.
Barbara Peterson Says:
March 22, 2008 at 3:10 am
This handy idea comes from Donna Craft:
If you are short on storage space for food, perishables, etc, use a metal trash can in place of an end/kitchen table. Fill can, invert lid, add larger wood or glass top (stablize with museum putty), cover with long table cloth. Instant storage!!!
2.
Barbara Peterson Says:
March 26, 2008 at 1:35 am
I found this on the web. It is an excellent alternative to caustic cleaning chemicals:
“You can use vinegar and hydrogen peroxide to disinfect your kitchen counters, produce and even your cutting boards. All you need is three percent hydrogen peroxide, the type you buy at the drug store, vinegar (white or apple cider), and two clean sprayers, like the kind you use to mist plants. Fill each sprayer separately, one with peroxide and the other with vinegar (don’t mix them together in one bottle – that makes peracetic acid, which isn’t safe and can give you a bad chemical burn). Spritz the item you want to disinfect, first with hydrogen peroxide and then with vinegar, then rinse off under running water. University tests show that this technique killed more potentially lethal bacteria, including Salmonella, Shigella, and even E. coli, than chlorine bleach or any commercially available kitchen cleaner.” (C. Gupta)
(http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/chris/2006/04/05/
super_disinfectant_spray_using_peroxide_vinegar.htm)
3.
Kathryn Smith Says:
March 28, 2008 at 6:45 am
GOING SOLAR—WITHOUT THE EXPENSE OF MAJOR INSTALLATIONS!
Can’t afford an entire solar panel to be installed on your rooftop? Cheer up: There’s hope!
Here’s how you can go solar, one bit at a time, and gain some energy independence during black-outs, cut back on your carbon footprint, reduce your energy bills…and at affordable cost, too!
Log on to Craigslist and check the website for solar gadgets such as solar hot water heaters, solar attic fans, solar generators, etc. I saw two such items recently in nearly-new condition at half their retail cost (Each about $200). When you think of the cost of the energy bill, these gadgets will be sure to repay themselves in very little time.
SOLAR ATTIC FAN: If your attic is not well insulated and is hard to get to, a fan will blow out the hot air, making your home much cooler during hot weather. This, in turn, minimizes the need for turning on the air conditioner.
SOLAR WATER HEATER: Commercial water heaters waste enormous amounts of energy heating up the large reserves of water while we aren’t even using them. Why waste all that energy and CO2 while you are at work and the kids are at school? A solar water heater is bound to save you loads on your energy bill.
SOLAR OVEN/COOKING POT: Available from http://www.kensolar.com for about $260
This is a travelling cooking pot/oven which may be used for camping or at home cooking alike. It acts like a crockpot, cooking your soups or roasts at a slow rate. Temperature ranges between 350-400 degrees. Slow cooking always preserves nutrients, and solar energy ionizes food cells, releasing nutrients and making them more assimilable. This is a handy gadget to have during energy black-outs and for saving your energy consumption during cooking. Cook ahead and plan left-overs from each meal, and bingo! You have reduced your energy usage (of your own physical reserves, that is) and cut stress out of your life.
SOLAR GENERATOR: May be used to run your computer for as much as 4 hours every day, with batteries which store the solar energy. Very useful during black-outs and just to minimize your energy bill and carbon footprint on a daily basis. Very reasonably priced on http://www.kensolar.com
Who knows what else you may find as you surf the web? Go for it and see what you may come up with!
4.
Kathryn Smith Says:
March 28, 2008 at 6:51 am
ENERGY-SAVING TIPS:
STAY COOL:
Extremely hot day? Don’t turn on the air conditioner. Instead, wet down a towel and wring out the excess water. Put inside your freezer for about twenty minutes. Then, take the frozen wet towel and wrap it around your head, like a cold turban. Ahhhh, it feels so good! I remember doing this while helping friends move on a 105 degree day. It worked like a charm, even under those extreme conditions!
If you run cold water over your wrist (palm side of hand facing upward) and elbows (ditto, with the underside of the arm facing up) you will be surprised at how cooling it is.
Y’ALL BE COOL NOW:
Try hosing down the roof on a hot day. The evaporation cools the roof, which in turn cools the house.
Of course, the old Southern trick of closing windows and drapes during the day keeps the sun and heat out of the house. Opening up the drapes and windows at night airs and cools the house. Close up the house tightly again the next day, close all drapes, and you will save lots on air conditioning bills and add comfort besides!
Be sure your home is well insulated. Insulation keeps hot air out and cool air in during the summer. It also keeps warm air inside and cold air out during the winter.
5.
Kathryn Smith Says:
March 28, 2008 at 6:59 am
Here is an energy-saving tip for snow country:
Rake up fall leaves and save in large garbage bags. Just prior to snowfall, pack the bags of leaves around the foundation of your house. When the snow comes, it will form an embankment around the foundation of your home, piled up on top of the lawn leaf bags. This acts as insulator to the foundation of your home, reducing drafts and cold air currents in your house and helping to keep the heat inside.
This worked very well for us while living in New England during temperatures which regularly ranged between zero and negative twenty degrees each winter.
No guarantees about rhodent-free status, though. So be sure to place the lawn leaf bags around the foundation of your home just prior to snowfall, rather than for the long-term.
Check your house for drafts by placing your hand at the openings of doorways (top, floor level, and sides), by feeling the walls (cold=drafts), and the floors (ditto: Cold=drafts). Using rugs can help to insulate your floors and keep your feet warm during cold winters. If you are lucky you may be able to obtain rug scraps nearly free of charge from rug stores, or look on Craigslist for free or inexpensive used rugs.
6.
Wendy Says:
May 8, 2008 at 8:57 pm
My little secret: Strawberries and herbs can grow inside during the cold months (and still flower and fruit) if you set them up in a large jar or even an abandoned fish bowl. Set up on the best windows for southern sun exposure and enjoy a little fresh fruit and herbs all year round.
7.
Barbara Peterson Says:
June 4, 2008 at 4:39 am
I have been using the following combination of white vinegar, salt, and baking soda to wash my clothes in the washing machine, and I have to admit, it works better than the laundry detergent I was using.
The clothes smell fresh, and don’t have an artificial scent! They also come out of the dryer much softer, so I don’t have to use any fabric softener.
Certain chemicals in detergents and fabric softeners give me a rash, and this natural alternative works out beautifully for me.
I love it, and I’m sure you will too. You can’t get any more environmentally friendly than this:
1/2 cup white vinegar
1/2 cup salt
1/2 cup baking soda
Just place your clothes in the machine, turn on the water, and add your ingredients. You will notice the difference in the first load.
8.
Ken Says:
February 11, 2009 at 7:03 am
Ken solar mentioned on your Share Ideas page is no longer in business. He apparently cashed a bunch of checks and then shut down business.
9.
Barbara Peterson Says:
February 11, 2009 at 6:28 pm
Thank you, Ken. I went to the site at kensolar.com, and it no longer exists. I appreciate your bringing this to my attention.
>>>I’m trying to see what crops can be grown at 7200’.
<<<
Garden location - positioning can make a big difference. Row covers are cheap and will give 3-5º protection. These two things will expand the types you can grow.
Here are a couple of articles you may find of interest:
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Organic-Gardening/1975-05-01/High-Altitude-Gardening.aspx
http://gardening.coloradohighaltitude.com/VegetableGardening/index.php
.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.