Just finished reading "What is the What" by Dave Eggers. This is a biographical novel of Valentino Achak Deng, one of many thousands of people--mostly young boys--displaced and driven out of the Sudan by civil war. I am now, more than ever, convinced that these souls were offered as an "acceptable" sacrifice to the "gods" that be--and fueled by the FIRST WORLD'S (mostly the USA's) insatiable appetite for crude oil products and/or the alleged uranium "found" in the Sudan (and said by the Bush administration to have be used to raise money for Ben Laden.)
Check out www.valentinoachakdeng.com
Stone Pillows
a thousand
thousand
souls walk'd there
and laid
their little bodies down
just to rest...there....
on the red n dusty ground
laid their heads
upon a stone...
their backs
upon the arid land...
cicada whir...whimper'd prayer...
the whirling wind
first, gentle as mother's touch
dries their tears....
then eats their dust
leaving their bones
like scattered twigs
among the stones
--Nana K, 2/23/2007
Friday, February 23, 2007
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Are We Dying to be Civilized?
Several years ago during one of my return trips to college, one of my professors, originally from India, stated that we, as a society, had become too “clean,” –too germ conscious—that there were people living on the streets of Calcutta with healthier immune systems than most Americans have. This was both a shock and a revelation to me! I had always been taught, “cleanliness was next to Godliness.” Why shouldn’t “cleaner” be better?
And here is another lesson-- learned in Sunday school: A limb that isn’t used withers away. By extrapolation we can say that an immune system that isn’t used or challenged withers away.
In our society, today, most people have had several “rounds” of antibiotics, used antibacterial soaps and cleaner, eaten foods with preservatives—all of which reduce or eliminate the good organisms in our gut, along with the bad. And our immune system has become that “limb” which, in the absence of challenge, withers.
Living symbiotically in our gut should be billions of helper bacteria—bacteria that precondition—eat—process—all the food we eat before it is absorbed into our bloodstream and carried around our bodies. And these helper organisms also condition our immune systems to know pathogens when encountered, and to recognize “self” or "host"–our own tissues.
But pathogens that slip in may trigger autoimmune responses if their "molecular signature" is sufficiently similar to one of the "host" tissue signatures. In fact, some autoimmune diseases are now identified as being triggered by bacterial infection, such as Crohn's disease (Kobayashi et al, 2005; Maeda et al, 2005), which is an intestine autoimmune disease that causes chronic inflammation. Dilated cardiomyopathy is associated with a heart specific virus infection triggering dendritic cell-induced autoimmune heart failure (Eriksson et al, 2003). It has been argued that the broad range of autoimmune disorders discussed above, as well as rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, and others, are due to multiple exposure to pathogenic bacteria and viruses (von Herrath et al, 2003). This class of autoimmune diseases can be attributed to breaches of the immune response against pathogens, by which invaded pathogens trigger a sustained immune response by molecular mimicry.
About 70 % of our immune system is in our gut--and it needs to be toughened into a fortress from which our immune system can mount a defense against invaders --pathogens-- rather than our own tissues!
We do ourselves, our children and future generations a great disservice by depending on and over using antibiotics and antiseptics. To help undo the damage we need to incorporate probiotics into our diets—that is, raw fermented products like yogurt, kefir, buttermilk (and/or the soy milk versions of these) and fermented vegetables such as saurkraut. Probiotics can also be taken in pill form if preferred.
Add to this a future where certain global warming may wreck havoc with our entire way of life....
We need to take strong measures now-- we run the risk of being unable and unprepared to defend ourselves from the next slightly virulent bug that comes along (not to mention worldwide pandemics such as HIV and threatened avian flu.)
Several years ago during one of my return trips to college, one of my professors, originally from India, stated that we, as a society, had become too “clean,” –too germ conscious—that there were people living on the streets of Calcutta with healthier immune systems than most Americans have. This was both a shock and a revelation to me! I had always been taught, “cleanliness was next to Godliness.” Why shouldn’t “cleaner” be better?
And here is another lesson-- learned in Sunday school: A limb that isn’t used withers away. By extrapolation we can say that an immune system that isn’t used or challenged withers away.
In our society, today, most people have had several “rounds” of antibiotics, used antibacterial soaps and cleaner, eaten foods with preservatives—all of which reduce or eliminate the good organisms in our gut, along with the bad. And our immune system has become that “limb” which, in the absence of challenge, withers.
Living symbiotically in our gut should be billions of helper bacteria—bacteria that precondition—eat—process—all the food we eat before it is absorbed into our bloodstream and carried around our bodies. And these helper organisms also condition our immune systems to know pathogens when encountered, and to recognize “self” or "host"–our own tissues.
But pathogens that slip in may trigger autoimmune responses if their "molecular signature" is sufficiently similar to one of the "host" tissue signatures. In fact, some autoimmune diseases are now identified as being triggered by bacterial infection, such as Crohn's disease (Kobayashi et al, 2005; Maeda et al, 2005), which is an intestine autoimmune disease that causes chronic inflammation. Dilated cardiomyopathy is associated with a heart specific virus infection triggering dendritic cell-induced autoimmune heart failure (Eriksson et al, 2003). It has been argued that the broad range of autoimmune disorders discussed above, as well as rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, and others, are due to multiple exposure to pathogenic bacteria and viruses (von Herrath et al, 2003). This class of autoimmune diseases can be attributed to breaches of the immune response against pathogens, by which invaded pathogens trigger a sustained immune response by molecular mimicry.
About 70 % of our immune system is in our gut--and it needs to be toughened into a fortress from which our immune system can mount a defense against invaders --pathogens-- rather than our own tissues!
We do ourselves, our children and future generations a great disservice by depending on and over using antibiotics and antiseptics. To help undo the damage we need to incorporate probiotics into our diets—that is, raw fermented products like yogurt, kefir, buttermilk (and/or the soy milk versions of these) and fermented vegetables such as saurkraut. Probiotics can also be taken in pill form if preferred.
Add to this a future where certain global warming may wreck havoc with our entire way of life....
We need to take strong measures now-- we run the risk of being unable and unprepared to defend ourselves from the next slightly virulent bug that comes along (not to mention worldwide pandemics such as HIV and threatened avian flu.)
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
One of the most compelling and intelligent works on global warming in print –Clearly stating how our Mother Ship came to this precarious state! Check out this link to Spencer Weart's site:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.html#contents
A hypertext history of how scientists came to (partly) understand what people are doing to cause climate change.
This Web site created by Spencer Weart supplements his much shorter book, which tells the history of climate change research as a single connected narrative. On this Web site you will find a fuller history (about 250,000 words). Or see what critics say about the book and then order it from Harvard University Press or Amazon.com.
"To a patient scientist, the unfolding greenhouse mystery is far more exciting than the plot of the best mystery novel. But it is slow reading, with new clues sometimes not appearing for several years. Impatience increases when one realizes that it is not the fate of some fictional character, but of our planet and species, which hangs in the balance as the great carbon mystery unfolds at a seemingly glacial pace." — D. Schindler
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.html#contents
A hypertext history of how scientists came to (partly) understand what people are doing to cause climate change.
This Web site created by Spencer Weart supplements his much shorter book, which tells the history of climate change research as a single connected narrative. On this Web site you will find a fuller history (about 250,000 words). Or see what critics say about the book and then order it from Harvard University Press or Amazon.com.
"To a patient scientist, the unfolding greenhouse mystery is far more exciting than the plot of the best mystery novel. But it is slow reading, with new clues sometimes not appearing for several years. Impatience increases when one realizes that it is not the fate of some fictional character, but of our planet and species, which hangs in the balance as the great carbon mystery unfolds at a seemingly glacial pace." — D. Schindler
When I first heard the term "global warming" sometime in the mid 1970s, I was curious, at first, and then became absolutely convinced that this was a certainty if we humans continued to consume carbon based fuel sources.
Millions of years ago, when our Mother Ship was very young, the atmosphere was, scientists say, full of all sorts of gases, including huge amounts of CO2 and was very toxic to life AS WE KNOW IT NOW. It took most of the succeeding MILLIONS of years for plants and animals to process and use most of that CO2, transforming it, with their dead bodies, into coal, oil, peat..... And now in just a few hundred years we are harvesting that coal and oil at an alarming rate and churning a vast amount of that carbon back out into the atmosphere as CO2. What it took millions of years to do, we are undoing so fast that I fear it is almost too late to "put on the brakes."
--G S Callendar in the 1930's, actually, I think, coined the term "greenhouse warming." By the 1950s, at Callendar's urging a few scientists really began to look into the issue of increased atmospheric CO2 causing a greenhouse effect--or a gradual increase in global average temperature. "Google" Callendar and see what you find! He was shouting and few people listened!
Millions of years ago, when our Mother Ship was very young, the atmosphere was, scientists say, full of all sorts of gases, including huge amounts of CO2 and was very toxic to life AS WE KNOW IT NOW. It took most of the succeeding MILLIONS of years for plants and animals to process and use most of that CO2, transforming it, with their dead bodies, into coal, oil, peat..... And now in just a few hundred years we are harvesting that coal and oil at an alarming rate and churning a vast amount of that carbon back out into the atmosphere as CO2. What it took millions of years to do, we are undoing so fast that I fear it is almost too late to "put on the brakes."
--G S Callendar in the 1930's, actually, I think, coined the term "greenhouse warming." By the 1950s, at Callendar's urging a few scientists really began to look into the issue of increased atmospheric CO2 causing a greenhouse effect--or a gradual increase in global average temperature. "Google" Callendar and see what you find! He was shouting and few people listened!
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