Questioning vaccine safety now means the establishment considers you part of a political ‘hate group’! Social media is censoring ‘anti-vax’ content, demonizing parents of un-vaccinated children and those who are ‘hesitant’ (meaning asking any questions of officials and not obediently following orders), and deliberately confusing average folks about the role and efficacy of ‘science’ in our society.
If the science is solid it can bare all scrutiny, that’s the point of science! It’s not supposed to be a dogmatic religion.
So why is all the censorship necessary? And, can we still call this ‘freedom’? Obviously not.
You have got to be out of your mind.You’ve got to be crazy enough to slap aside the hand that is offering you the Kool-Aid.You’ve got to be mad enough to call it a spade when everyone else is calling it a sunflower.You’ve got to be nutty enough to see a new world around the…
The Girl Scouts was as close as this suburban girl ever got to learning any kind of traditional skills growing up.I quit it early on, considering ‘badge earning’ to be well beneath my expanding “cool kid” facade.
But if there’s a badge worth earning, midwifery would be up there with the loftiest of them. I’m humbled and proud to say I got to experience it last night for the first time.
I bit of critical background:I’m squeamish.Considering we didn’t have children of our own and I didn’t have my own dog to take care of, let alone any pet previously to our dear Papi, at about age 42, it seems to me squeamishness pretty much comes with that territory.
It’s because I was well aware of this personal limitation that I NEVER imagined we’d have so many animals.
Chickens, for us and many other clueless homesteaders, are the Gateway Livestock.Then came ducks, turkeys, sheep, pigs, and more dogs.But we both swear we’ll never get cows or horses.(Ahem)
Considering my penchant for ‘Too Much Information’ I’ve now been acclimated to loads of poop, vomit, blood and morbid sounds of all sorts.It also got me scared, very scared, about all that can go wrong with pets and livestock.And how painful that is, and knowing this truth in advance is useless.It does not help the pain by expecting it.It does help though to be prepared.So far I give us a C+ on that when it comes to the critters.
My TMI penchant leads also to so much online and in books about serious diseases and awful complications and the myriad very dirty deeds endemic in the farm life.Talking to others more experienced will also always bring sad stories and sometimes tragic ones.
Maybe I don’t quite deserve my badge just yet, but I’m fairly certain I saved our ewe and her young lamb last night by being at the right place at the right time and doing my usual C-level work.🙂
When our ewes have lambed in the past I was not there to witness the actual event, only woke up to find the lambs delivered, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.On one occasion I found one mutilated by our young puppy and I had to kill it.I cannot speak about this moment still today a year later without tears.It was the most confusing, stressful, tragic, sorrowful day of my life.Like most in the so-called advanced economies, we grew up very sheltered from death and from the act of killing.Hubby would’ve handled it far better had he been home.I was alone and a basket case.
I was alone again this time when Buttercup gave an unusual and very loud bark audible from inside the house that clued me in that something was going down.I went to the stalls and saw mama was in labor.I was determined to watch it all and learn.
I was hoping and intending to remain a bystander to nature’s miracle.
Take a bow, Buttercup!
As it happened I could tell something was wrong right away.Then I doubted myself. Then I went back and forth a dozen times, yes, no, yes, no.
Then I concluded, no, something’s really wrong here, get help.Help?Like from who?I called two friends with more experience and they didn’t answer.I looked through our book on sheep, panicky by that time.I call Hubby.He calls his folks and searches online while I pace waiting for the bread in the oven to finish so I can go back to the stalls.
I muse, even in this stressed state: “Oh, we’re both waiting on buns in the oven.”Yes, that’s how I cope with stress, and most things really, goofy humor.
It doesn’t occur to me again that the fetus that the ewe cannot seem to push out is in fact dead until hours later.Yet, I felt it, even considered it immediately, instinctually at the very first moment I saw it. I just tried to over-ride that feeling with too much doubt and reasoning and wishful thinking.
On the phone with Hubby we decide there’s really nothing I can do alone in the dark with no experience and no equipment and no nearby vet.Then he calls back and has changed his mind.He urges me to go back out, put on some rubber gloves, and see if I can help her.
And he was right!As soon as I touched the fetus it was obviously dead and my foolishness at waiting hours to “realize” this washed over me.I strained, along with mama to get it out, knowing if not she would surely die as well.
At last it came free, followed by another smaller, but wonderfully alive little treasure!
We did it!
I’m happy to report as of this writing about 16 hours later, mama and babe are doing well, eating and drinking and getting to know each other.
Yes, I was alone, but really, it was very much a team effort. Thanks y’all!
Because I’m fascinated with all things ‘culture’ I could not skip the rabbit hole of addiction in modern American life. I’ve done a good bit of exploration in the last few months and I’m pleased to say, I’ve had enough already.
And, I’ve managed to come to a few conclusions.
If a 12-Step Program has worked for you in getting sober and/or clean, congratulations, you are the exception to the vast majority.
The 12-Step Programs have flooded and over-run the recovery market despite any scientific validity to their claims or efficacy in their numbers and despite clear conflicts of interest in public/private partnerships. It is a huge money-making industry globally.
If a 12-Step Program program has not worked for you, you are in the vast majority, and there are other options, if you know where to look.
I’ve heard or read many accounts that Alcoholics Anonymous is a cult. I’d call it a ‘soft cult’.
There is no doubt it is brainwashing and many in these programs who dare to do the due-diligence of intellectual inquiry readily admit this fact.
I have a great deal of respect for awareness and honesty, so I am not in any way arguing that those in the throws of active addiction might not need a good dose of brainwashing. More power to y’all, paint those mantras all over your walls, because it’s awesome you’re still alive and we want to keep it that way as long as possible! (On that note, thank you to Rick, who shared stories and information and found success in a 12-Step Program, as well as being the one who was the impetus for me in this exploration of addiction.)
But, I really wish now to speak to those very many who may need or want help and have not been successful with the current acceptable brainwashing techniques or soft cults.
Unlike what AA, NA and others are telling you, you did not ‘fail‘. It’s not that you ‘didn’t want it bad enough‘ or that you ‘haven’t reached rock bottom yet’ or that you ‘didn’t work The Steps‘ or that you ‘just don’t get it‘. If you continue to go back into 12-Step recovery programs again and again, which is most often the case, thinking this time you’ll ‘succeed‘, consider this: To keep doing the same thing over and over again but expect different results is the hallmark of insanity.
If you’ve heard this nonsense about yourself, and believed it, you’re still buying into the biggest lie in 12-Step brainwashing propaganda. Stop that now!
It didn’t work for you, that’s all. Not at all unusual. Now, don’t stop there, and find something else that will work, please.
Here’s some others who also say it didn’t work for them either, and who found other ways to deal with their addictions.
We’re trusting the wrong people! We’re losing our skills of discernment! We’re losing our skills, all of them, along with our common sense!
Some might be inclined to wonder why a homesteading blog has anything to do with culture. What do addictions & distractions, conspiracies or occult knowledge, or geopolitics, or geoengineering, or junk science, or spirituality have to do with growing food, raising livestock, or just in general reclaiming our wise traditions?
Addictions and distractions are what’s rotting our culture from the inside-out. Our institutions are not solving these crises, they are exacerbating them. Quite possibly on purpose.
Yet folks continue to support them, continue to throw money at them. Why?
I think our ancestors were smarter than that, or we wouldn’t be here right now as witnesses to the masses skipping to the guillotine!
Maybe it’s time we started listening more to some good old-fashioned common sense rather than to white coats paid by blue bloods to serve black ties? (Several puns intended; let me count the ways!)
We’ve had a good run at addictions this time around, distractions are another rabbit hole for another time.
Thanks for joining me on this latest little wondering and wandering. Brighter posts to come, surely! 🙂
Breeding ‘hygiene’ for disease resistance, doesn’t this sound better than robo-bees and other tech-heavy ‘solutions’ because our honeybees can’t keep up with the pesticides and other environmental toxins?
I don’t know if this is the answer, but if it means fewer chemicals, why not give it a shot?
We will continue to try for ‘hygienic bees’ and minimal treatments here on the wee homestead, because we don’t want to be dependent on chemicals to keep any of our livestock thriving. There’s got to be a better way!
By THE BEE REPORTFEBRUARY 18, 20192:29 PM Researchers looked for areas that differ between the unhygienic bees (left) and hygienic bees (right). / Photo: York University The key to breeding disease-resistant honey bees could lie in a group of genes – known for controlling hygienic behavior – that enable colonies to limit the spread of harmful […]
Addiction solutions are big business. Make that BIG Business. From Big Pharma to recovery clinics to psychiatry, from religions to self-help to metaphysics. Enormous industries have been built up to solve this always-escalating crisis of addiction.
But undeniably the biggest and most well-known solution to addiction are The 12-Step Programs, used by Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and a long list of other recovery programs. Anyone who has ever looked into addiction recovery has come first across a 12-step ‘solution.’
In fact, they are so ubiquitous it’s hard to find anything else. The 12-step programs have not only dominated the market for coming up on a century, the 12-step program created the recovery market, thanks to Bill Wilson and the Oxford Group.
According to the Oxford Group’s 12-Step website, Bill Wilson, Frank Buchman, and Mary Baker Eddy created the foundations for the 12-Step Program.
As fate and the WWW would have it, I know a thing or two about Mary Baker Eddy.
Her “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” was selected as one of the “75 Books By Women Whose Words Have Changed The World,” by the Women’s National Book Association and in 1995 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She was also the Founder and President of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in the later years of her life.
She is considered a major founding figure in the Human Potential Movement, also called the “New Thought” faiths, the precursors of the New Age Movement, of Unity Church, that is of Oprah and The Secret fame.
Many volumes of her work are praised by religious thinkers worldwide and her Christian Science Monitor has won 7 Pulitzer Prizes and Christian Science Reading Rooms have been established around the world, all attesting to her remarkable influence during her lifetime until today.
My own family, on my mother’s side, are Christian Scientists and I attended their church as a child. What I most remember are the large block letters on the wall behind the pulpit that said “God is Love”.
According to Ralph Waldo Emerson on ‘Religious Science’: “The emphasis is on positive thinking, influence of circumstances through mental processes, recognition of a creative energy source and natural law (referred to as God, First Principle, Universal Intelligence, and other terms) that manifests as the physical universe, and the rejection of a good/evil duality.”
I have a copy of her most famous text where the seal on the cover reads: “Heal the Sick. Raise the Dead. Cast out Demons. Cleanse the Lepers” in fine print around a symbol of a cross and crown.
Eddy was born of an elite New Hampshire family, married 3 times, first to George Washington Glover, a well-known Mason. Christian Science and Freemasonry have maintained a symbiotic relationship to this day. Her first school of Christian Science “Mind Healing” was started in 1867.
From the Preface: “Since the author’s discovery of the might of Truth in the treatment of disease as well as of sin, her system has been fully tested and shall not been found wanting; but to reach the heights of Christian Science, man must live in obedience to its divine Principle.”
“We think that we are healed when a disease disappears, though it is liable to reappear; but we are never thoroughly healed until the liability to be ill is removed. So-called mortal mind or the mind of mortals being the remote, predisposing, and the exciting cause of all suffering, the cause of disease must be obliterated through Christ in divine Science, or the so-called physical senses will get the victory. Unless an ill is rightly met and fairly overcome by Truth, the ill is never conquered. If God destroys not sin, sickness, and death, they are not destroyed in the minds of mortals, but seem to this so-called mind to be immortal. What God cannot do, man need not attempt. If God heals not the sick, they are no healed, for no lesser power equals the infinite All-power; but God Truth, Life, Love, does heal the sick through the prayer of the righteous.
Unfortunately for Mary Baker Eddy, despite all her efforts at righteous prayer, it was not enough, as she spent the majority of her life ill.
“She was recorded as having been sick for most of her life: anxious, erratic, doubled-over, her frail body wracked by mysterious intermittent pains. Eddy’s temper tantrums and day terrors alienated her siblings and forced her parents into a lifelong tiptoe. She required constant rocking as a child, and when she was an adult her family commissioned an oversized cradle in which she spent many of her days. Harold Bloom describes Eddy as “a kind of anthology of nineteenth-century nervous ailments.”
“In her later years Eddy apparently became paranoid, believing that 50,000 people were trying to kill her by projecting their evil thoughts. She wrote that if she died it would be due to malicious animal magnetism rather than from natural causes.” (wiki)
One biography claims she had an addiction to morphine. That’s another interesting parallel, considering Bill Wilson, previously mentioned of the social engineering institution known as the Oxford Group and founder of this famed 12-Step Program, used magic mushrooms to find his inner-voice of God, who then cured him of his alcoholism, and dictated his 12-step cure to addiction.
Yes, just like the New Age ‘Bible’ called ‘A Course in Miracles’, the 12-step Program was reportedly ‘channeled.’
He later went on to help manufacture synthetic LSD.
According to the Narcotics Anonymous site, 33% of addicts get clean from their 12-Step Program. According to Dr. Lance Dodes, author of “The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science of 12-Step Programs” that figure is less than 10%.
As I skimmed through the Basic Text of Narcotics Anonymous, the parallels to Eddy’s principles are obvious. The addict has an incurable disease over which they will remain powerless for the rest of their lives unless they adhere forever to the Principles. The Principles according to the 12-step site are:
Absolute Honesty
Absolute Purity
Absolute Unselfishness
Absolute Love
Not a tall order in the least, right?!
“NA meetings usually close with a circle of the participants, a group hug and a prayer of some sort. Prayers used to close meetings today include the “we” version of the Serenity Prayer (God, Grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”); the Third Step Prayer (“Take my will and my life. Guide me in my recovery. Show me how to live.”) or the “Gratitude Prayer” (“That no addict seeking recovery need ever die . . . My Gratitude speaks when I care and when I share with others the NA way.”) (wiki)
According to Narcotics Anonymous’ “Basic Text” the problem with the addict is the: “inability to deal with life on life’s terms.” He has a terminal disease which can only be dealt with by adhering to the Program.
“We tried drugs and combinations of drugs to cope with a seemingly hostile world. We dreamed of finding a magic formula that would solve our ultimate problem—ourselves.”
In other words, addicts cannot adapt to their environment, and the problem is not the environment, the problem is the addict himself.
According the Prayer, you need the wisdom to know what you cannot change, and what you cannot change is your environment. So it would appear to me we have leagues of folks being brainwashed into adjusting to a hostile environment.
“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
If you can’t fit in, it’s your fault, because the society is just fine, and if you can’t see that, that’s your problem. You just don’t get it! Once you are off the drugs, and healed by mind-spirit, you’ll see how great the culture really is. If not, just buy better rose-colored glasses, perhaps.
The Basic Text is peppered with similar mantras as Eddy’s about ‘unconditional love’ and our never-ending battle against our disease and selfless demands like: “We learn that we keep what we have only by giving it away. . . No matter how much we give, there is always another addict seeking help.” Double-speak. Life-long commitment. Collectivism.
I suggest what’s happening is a transferring of addiction, from drugs to the collective and the designers of the system know this explicitly and implicitly. It’s done with a goal in mind . . .(to be continued).
Why can’t we find a bit of help in temporary manual labor? I remember when boys went around to all the neighbors during the summer months looking for odd jobs. That seems to be a thing of the past, why? No incentives? No need? No care? No initiative? Too entertained? Too coddled? Too weak? Too sick? Too fat? Too spoiled? Too drugged?
I wrote that paragraph well over a month ago when I first started this series. I have since had a godsend: Help. Good help! And just in the nick of time, too, because my electrocuted shoulder was getting worse by the day. As fate would have it, she was once addicted to pain medication, prescribed by her doctor.
I’m extremely fortunate to be able to make the choice between forced from pain to go on such meds and forcing myself to stop using my arm until the time it has naturally healed. The chiropractor sounds optimistic on my behalf with that caveat—if you stop using it, it will heal and not be a recurring issue. If you do not, it will keep returning.
Unfortunately most folks in this country do not have this option, they cannot afford to rest. I don’t like doing it and it’s not like money is falling from the trees around here, so it’s not a particularly easy choice. But, when I hear such terrifying stories about withdrawing from these drugs, my mind says, “Pay now, or pay later!”
Kyla says quitting pain pills was the hardest thing she’s ever done, and that’s coming from someone who’s suffered a lot of hardship. A normally active and attentive young woman suffering from a broken ankle falls into years of opiate use to the point she didn’t want to get out of bed anymore and whose life was unraveling.
She’s certainly not alone. According to WebMD in 2015, 2 million Americans had substance abuse disorders related to opioid medications. With the recent headlines my guess is today’s numbers are off the charts in comparison. And as with so many other vices, Americans lead the way by consuming 80% of the world’s prescription opioid drugs. (Talbottcampus.com)
Kyla’s doctor served time in prison for his choice to ‘over-prescribe’ these drugs. Over-prescribing is the professional term for trafficking.
“Licensed traffickers,” Rick calls them, “as are the clinics giving out methadone and suboxone.”
They flew doctors to “seminars’ in fancy vacation destinations. Doctors who didn’t get on board were offered speaking fees to endorse OxyContin. The feds finally sued Purdue in 2007, with Purdue pleading guilty to felony charges, admitting that it had lied to doctors about OxyContin’s abuse potential.
Under the agreement, the company paid $600 million in fines and its three top executives at the time pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges—after thousands of deaths as a result of their actions. The executives paid $34.5 million out of their own pockets and performed four hundred hours of community service. It was one of the harshest penalties ever imposed on a pharmaceutical company but how can one take it seriously when the people responsible got away with pleading guilty to misdemeanors at a time when by 2001 Purdue was selling $1 billion of OxyContin yearly. In total, Purdue Pharma has made $35 billion, and the Sackler family walked away with around $13 billion.
The FDA also played an important role, for example, not reviewing Purdue’s promotional literature which included a video that claimed addiction was “very rare”; this was eventually removed, but the damage was done. And of course, even if addiction rates were low when patients used the drug as their doctors intended, many quickly learned to break the tablets up and snort it or inject it. Again, becoming addicted is more likely to occur in people who have less impulse control—those in the lower part of the bell curve.”
This is an expensive and destructive myth: Again, becoming addicted is more likely to occur in people who have less impulse control—those in the lower part of the bell curve.”
In an attempt to serve in the recovery of all these folks a very lucrative and thriving industry has developed, which is the subject of my next post on the topic.
