Robert Crayhon

In Sour Economy, Some Scale Back on Medications, runs the article in the NY Times. Question: can we who know of natural ways to heal provide the science and guidance to show these patients that their statins can be replaced with–guess what–a healthy diet, exercise, and perhaps some fish oils and carnitine? Time to step it up, nutritional medicine practitioners. Your country needs you.

Read or listen to Amy Goodman’s interview with the author of the new book, The Fruit Hunters. Especially interesting is the story of the miracle fruit, which the FDA has banned for apparently no good reason.

This is one of the most toxic compounds on earth, and there is no reason we should continue to produce it in the U.S.  Also known as compound 1080, this substance should be banned.

Here is a bill that supports long a overdue objective examination of whether vaccines have any benefit.

This is my favorite poem of spring, that speaks to me not only of nature, but of relationships, personal and international. Ours is a time of walls being built and of boundaries being broken, and of men having neighbors whose behavior cannot be explained.

MENDING WALL

Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun,

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs.

The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

‘Why do they make good neighbors?

Isn’t it Where there are cows?

But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,

But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me~

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Here is David Halberstam, in 1992, describing the greatest threat to America then–and now.

Not sure of who you want for President? Let the Candidate Calculator help you decide. I don’t know how accurate it is, but I was surprised at the candidate it recommended for me.

…we seemed to agree that it’s pretty likely that humans will be extinct one day. Reading George Monbiot’s book, Heat, shows that we are not too likely to tackle the climate change issue, and who knows what this world will look like in a hundred years.

But more to the point–humans don’t seem to act as a group to do what is in our self-interest. Earth seems like a gigantic kindergarten class where everyone is fighting over the cookies, and no one (in power) cares or acts upon the real things that affect us all.

Amazing to think in a few hundred or a thousand years this whole human experience on planet earth could be over or very nearly over.

As this Sunday, August 26, 2007th cover story describes, pollution in China is unprecidented in human history. This pollution not only causes damage to the health of the Chinese, but everyone worldwide, as the pollution China generates spreads throughout Earth’s atmosphere.

The answer? Let’s send a message to China that we don’t want good made cheaply if that means the destruction of the environment and unsafe drinking water for 500 million Chinese. Boycott Chinese goods. Otherwise, we are partners in this destruction of China’s people and the environment of the world–not to mention the acceleration of global warming.

There is something deeply upsetting about the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund. Of course, it is wonderful to donate money to help the victims of this hurricane, but imagine if our government helped the victims adequately. Isn’t that what government, ultimately, is for? To collect money to spend it where the greatest need is, on projects such as Amtrak, Katrina relief, etc.?

Or has that Katrina money been spent in another gulf?

I want to give money to the Bush-Clinton Katrina fund, but doing so would make me feel like I am being taxed twice.