Bush Announces Ultimate Weapon Against Evil Ones

by Hardly Waite, Gazette Senior News Analyst

June 24, 2002

The White House today announced that the government will step up its efforts to reduce basic freedoms and civil liberties of Americans in an effort to reduce the threat of terrorist attacks.

President Bush, appearing at a late-morning meeting in the Rose Garden, told reporters and a small group of White House insiders that since it is freedom that the Evil Ones hate us for, it only makes sense to reduce freedom in an effort to reduce the risk of attacks.

“The Evil Doers,” he said, “will not rest as long as Americans have freedom.  So we can undersize their threatability by cutting down on our excessive freedoms.”   Bush then made reference  to an opinion survey of Evil Doers conducted by UPI International which polled a broad sampling of terrorists worldwide in an effort to determine Evil Ones’ views on American freedom. “What they hate us for most,” Bush said, “is our freedom to criticize elected officials and to check out whatever library books we want. Therefore, we have to take decisive action to fix these things up.”

Bush did not elaborate, but Press Secretary Ari Fleisher later hinted to reporters that the administration would be sending to Congress a bill to facilitate the confiscation of library check-out records.

“The President feels,” Fliesher said, “that the events of September 11 could have been prevented had the FBI been able to monitor library check-outs.”

Mrs. Bush, a former librarian, is believed to have contributed her expertise in the formulation of the soon-to-be-announced administration plan to seize the records of libraries suspected of checking out books to known or potential Evil Doers.

Our Congressman,  Dr. Burgess,  Sent Us an Email

 by Hardly Waite

Gazette Senior Editor

Our congressman Michael Burgess bravely sent us this email on the 9th anniversary of the Sept. 11 massacre:

“While it has been nine years since the tragic events of September 11, 2001, we as Americans, and many across the world, still feel the stinging grief and sadness we felt on that terrible day.

“Today we remember the 2,977 Americans who perished because of the attacks, and we also remember the 5,661 American soldiers who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and gave their lives, and thank them for their sacrifice, so that we may be safe and free.

“Our country was deeply wounded that day, and for many the wound has not fully healed. We must never forget, though, the way Americans came together in the days and weeks following the attacks, and presented a united front against evil and hate.

“Some may feel sadness today, others anger – but as we reflect on the anniversary of 9/11, we should all feel pride for our country’s efforts since that day, which have paved the way across the globe for democracy and freedom for those who otherwise would have never known the blessings of liberty.”

Let’s see if I understand.

What Dr. Burgess is saying is that 2,977 Americans died on Sept. 11, 2001, presumably killed by the actions of someone who may have been somehow connected to someone who might have been in Afghanistan, so we Americans, because of the “stinging grief and sadness we felt on that terrible day,” have sacrificed the lives of 5,661 American soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq “so that we may be safe and free.”

What a deal!

Dr. Burgess does not mention (slipped his mind, I guess) that we freedom-loving Americans in the course of this noble effort to make the world right have killed a countless and never to be counted number innocent Afghan and Iraqi men, women, and children, that we have tortured, raped, and pillaged to our hearts’ content, that we have squandered so much money that we don’t even know how to count it, and that we have poisoned the environment of the nations we have brought “liberty” to to the degree that their lands are barely inhabitable.   Dr. Burgess does not mention that tens of thousands of additional Americans have been wounded and ruined for life both physically and emotionally.  Nor that we have sacrificed what little bit of “honor” we had left as a nation in these imperial endeavors. Nor that the great benefactors of our generous sacrifice have been the ultra rich in America, Afghanistan, and Iraq who have stuffed their pockets full of dollars.

Those are minor issues, apparently, since we have “presented a united front against evil and hate” (that’s the main thing) and we have “paved the way across the globe for democracy and freedom for those who otherwise would have never known the blessings of liberty.”

Before we set out to make ourselves “safe and free” by bringing liberty to Iraq, the Gazette published the picture above and asked if this Iraqi family, the “enemy” we were so worried about at the time, would survive our noble endeavor.  I don’t know the answer to this question, but I do know that thousands just like them did not survive the consequences of our largesse.

All about Walking and Habits and Keeping your Balance in a Topsy-turvy World.

by Gene Franks

Note: This article first appeared in Gazette #38 (Spring of 1992).

Ultimately, there is no way to escape taking responsibility for ourselves.—Tarthang Tulku.

He who stands on tiptoe is not steady.—Lao-Tsu.

It is not difficult to accumulate great quantities of knowledge from many great teachers. What is difficult is to practice that knowledge in one’s life. One who is too enthusiastic in the pursuit of much knowledge may obstruct his or her realization of even a small amount of it.—Master Hua Ching Ni.

The performers and composers [of modern popular music] don’t necessarily believe in what they’re saying or what they’re doing, but they know that if you write a song about love it’s got a 3,000 per cent better chance of going on the radio than if you write a song about celery.–Frank Zappa.

The quotation above from Frank Zappa has nothing at all to do with this article. I added it because I like it, and because it never fits with anything else I write. And because this article consists of my own songs about celery. It’s stuff I’ve always wanted to write but thought, probably correctly, that no one would want to read.

The quotations about balance are there because when this article was first published, in Pure Water Gazette #38 (Spring, 1992), it appeared alongside a very good article by Dr. Ralph C. Cinque called “Let Your Body Find Its Own Balance.” Dr. Cinque had just published a book called Quit for Good: How to Break a Bad Habit, which conveniently led my article to where it was trying to go:

The Best of Servants, The Worst of Masters

Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.–Samuel Beckett.

Samuel Beckett’s words will be especially meaningful to those who hang around with dogs a lot, because they have surely witnessed the unsavory canine custom of immediately repeating dietary mistakes. When a dog’s stomach rejects something he has eaten, man’s best friend stubbornly overrules nature and eats it again. Because of  habit, we do the same.

If we were not chained to our past by habit, we would simply renegotiate our contract with the world each morning. We would say, “My mouth tastes like crap today because of those cigarettes I smoked yesterday; I’m not going to smoke anymore” and mean it. Instead, like dogs chained to our vomit, we go on day after day, year after year, doing things we don’t approve of or even enjoy because habit, “the worst of masters,” compels us.

Beckett’s definition says also that habit is ballast. Large ships must take on a heavy substance, often water, to provide stability and keep them upright. Without it they would float willy-nilly or even capsize. Without the ballast of habit, our lives would be unbearable. According to Dr. Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics), “Fully 95 per cent of our behavior, feeling, and response is habitual.” Habit makes most of our small decisions and performs most of our routine actions. Tomorrow when you put on your shoes, notice that you have a habit of putting on one or the other first. Life would be unimaginably complicated if we had to begin each day with a weighty decision about which shoe to put on first and which leg to put into our trousers first. Activities like playing the guitar and driving a car would be torturous if not totally impossible without habit, “the best of servants.” Even our ethical behavior is essentially habit. Most of us have formed the habit of being honest, so we do not have to decide with each new transaction if we are going to play it straight or try to cheat someone.

The Zalenski Principle

Imagine you just got a job in the Accounting Department of the Ace Funnel Company. Ace is a very big place. They have 75 people in the Accounting Dept. alone. You see right away that their accounting system is hopelessly archaic, so you step right in to tell the department chief, who worked his way up through the ranks and has been department head for seventeen years, all about the superb new accounting methods you learned about in college, confident he’ll adopt your new program.

Though this will sound pessimistic, your chances of radically changing eating habits that you have been following since childhood are about the same as getting the old accounting Chief to throw out his system and adopt yours. In both cases, deep ruts are hard to get out of. Hard, but not impossible.

There is wisdom in resistance to change both in the body and the office. Imagine the chaos if the Old Chief adopted the reforms suggested by each of the 331 college-trained accountants he’s hired over the years. The old system may not be perfect, but at least everyone understands it and has learned to adapt to it. Like the Old Chief, the body defends its traditions. Imagine the chaos if you completely revamped your eating habits with every diet plan you read in a magazine. The gravy-and-biscuit plan you learned as a child may not be ideal, but your body has adjusted to it and is suspicious of radical changes. This is why “diets” almost never have any lasting value. Although Dr. Eatwell’s Grapefruit and Poached Egg Plan may sound wonderful to your rational brain, you won’t be able to stick with it long because the Old Chief deep within you will find a way to veto it and put you back on the Biscuit and Gravy Plan he’s familiar with.

Now, the really interesting thing about all this is how the enforcers of tradition deep within us go about keeping us in line. When you think about it, changing what you eat should be very simple. If you had to pick up a Greyhound bus, that would be hard; but simply eating a grapefruit rather than a fried egg, or not putting a cigarette to your lips, should be very easy. No special strength or talent is needed to not eat a fried egg. yet we all know that the fried egg question, to eat or not to eat, can be an excruciatingly complex dilemma. It holds, in fact, our most intimate contact with the most basic philosophical issues of all time: “Who am l?” and “Who’s running things?” This is the old question of free will vs. pre-destination that clerics and philosophers have fretted over for so long.. Is there really an “I” who makes choices and carries out decisions, or are we just piano keys that bounce around at the whim of some great unseen Player?

At the personal level, you make a rational decision to raise your right hand above your head and you do it. This proves you can make choices and act, doesn’t it?  But it does not explain what made you want to raise your right hand. Did you initiate the act, or was it the Old Chief behind the scenes whispering in your ear?

For some time something has caused me to believe that “I think, therefore I am” should more correctly be “Something makes me think that I think, therefore it is, or thinks that it is.” For some time something has caused me to believe also that we are totally free to act yet at the same time our actions are totally pre-determined. That I could never think through this paradox did not stop me from believing it, and I got very excited a few years ago when I discovered that Arthur Koestler in his book Janus: A Summing Up has come up with a pretty fair explanation of all this in his concept of “holons.” I hope you’ll read it.

Assuming you have decided, or something has made you decide, that you don’t want to eat fried eggs anymore, how do you get yourself to not do it?

An interesting approach to this problem that I have experimented with is one I learned from my old friend the late Edward Zalenski. I call it the Zalenski Principle. Ed, a mathematician, linguist, superb human being, and passionate student of the mind’s machinations–a man who had himself psychoanalyzed not because he had “problems” but because he found his mind to be fascinating–believed that our poor performance in dealing with inner inertia is due mainly to lack of practice and self-confidence. After the third attempt at reform fails, we throw up our hands in despair. Ed believed that you can gain rational control of your life by following a specific exercise.

Here’s how he said to do it. Choose a very easy change in your life. Do it and keep doing it. No matter how easy and how simple, purposefully carry out the change you have selected. When your first change is thoroughly established, pick another change, slightly more difficult, and put it in practice; then another, and another, each successively more difficult. In Ed’s words, each time that you decide to do something and then do it, there is an imperceptible click in your brain and you gain self-confidence. Like everything else, success is a habit.

You might begin this system by saying to yourself: “Up until now, habit has caused me to put on my left shoe first each morning. But now,  I ‘m taking control of this activity, and from now on, no matter what else happens, I’m putting on my right shoe first.” Clearly, the change to right-shoe-first isn’t going to improve your life a lot, but according to Zalenski, each time you perform the action you reinforce the habit of making up your mind and sticking to your decision. You might need several practice projects before you ‘re ready to tackle fried eggs.

There are two pitfalls to this system I discovered through experience. First, you must distinguish between projects and goals. Goals are long-range aspirations–things you hope to achieve. A goal for a salesman might be: “I will sell six cars this week.” Projects are always easily achievable if you can just get yourself to do them: “I won’t eat any donuts this week.” Work on projects, not goals. Otherwise you set yourself up for failure. 

The second pitfall concerns what I call “obsolete desires.” Your wants and needs change, so don’t lock yourself into a long-term project that will be incompatible with you of the future. The safest thing is to stick to the “one day at a time” Alcoholics Anonymous system and renew your project every day. Even with donuts, it’s best not to run your project over a week at a time, because some university researcher with a General Foods grant is sure to announce that after years of animal research he has proven that cancer is caused by lack of donuts. My own third or fourth Zalenski project was “No matter what, I’ll eat breakfast every day.” This seemed like a good idea, since at the time I was trying to free myself from the terrible habit of eating most of my food at night. I did not foresee that a few months later I would get interested in fasting, and you can’t fast and break-fast on the same day. I got talked out of my project by Emerson and his dictum about a foolish consistency being the hobgobblin of little minds. Or was it the Old Chief quoting Emerson to get me back on his pig-out-at-night plan?

Self-deification, or How to Become Wonderful

One must learn to love oneself . . . with a wholesome and healthy love . . . that one may endure to be with oneself and not go roving about.–Zarathustra (via Nietzsche).

Through practice of the Zalenski Principle I have developed a will power of steel. I now have complete self-control. The world is at my feet. Wealth and power beyond measure . . . sleek automobiles, beautiful women–whatever I want is mine. Send a large handful of money today for my booklet that tells how you, too,  can develop iron-fisted control over your life! Do it today! Don’t be miserable another minute!

The truth is, alas, that my will power is still a lot more like cardboard than steel. About three on the one to ten scale. It is true that I did many Zalenski projects, but the result was not an iron-fisted control over my habits; instead, I fell prey to yet another habit–the habit of doing projects. By the mid-1970s 1 had projects for everything What I read. What, when and how I ate.  How I spent my leisure time. How I got to work. What radio station I listened to.  How many almonds I got to eat per day.  My whole life became a project. A girlfriend of the time, in gleeful derision, called it my Self-Deification Plan.

This was a great time for me, not because I accomplished everything I tried, but because I tried a lot of different things. Life, someone recently explained to me, is like a big clothing store that is filled with garments of every size, shape, fabric, and color. The garments are habits. The word habit, in fact, originally meant garment, and we still refer to the strange clothes people wear when they ride horses as a “riding habit.”  Habits are, literally, the garments of the personality. They are the practices that define us. “First we make our habits, then our habits make us,” John Dryden said.  And we have often heard, “The clothes make the man.” The art of living, then, is to find habits that fit you and suit you and to keep them  and nurture them. It is equally important quickly to reject and discard ill-fitting and unsuitable habits.

The value of the Zalenski projects for me was that they let me sort through a large variety of life’s offerings–to try on things I normally would not have tried. Some things that I tried clearly did not fit. I vowed to commit Jane English’s beautiful translation of the Tao Te Ching to memory, but the Old Chief would not hear of it. Try as I would, I forgot the first poem before I could learn the second. Other efforts fit me so well that they became important parts of my life. A project to use my car only on weekends resulted in several years of riding my bicycle 75 miles a week to work.

Try It!

The great Hatha teacher Sir Paul Dukes said that he struggled for years with the enigma of “why all the great religions insist on the association of prayer and fasting” until one night the “childishly simple” solution presented itself to him during sleep. “It was, merely, to try! It was as if a voice said clearly, ‘No man can give you the answer, you must find it for yourself, by experimentation.”‘

It was the Dukes Try it! logic that led to the greatest of my projects. I had noticed that the periods of greatest happiness in my life were the times when I walked a lot. Some of my best memories were sunny afternoons walking home from work. Probably I had always walked more than most people,  but it had never been a priority in my life. In December of 1975 1 decided to do an experiment to find out what would happen to my body and especially to my mind if I took a walk every day over a long period of time. Therefore the project: “During 1976, no matter what else happens, I will take a walk of at least 2 miles each day. No exceptions, no substitutions.” Two miles was no big deal. I often walked a lot farther than that. The hard part was doing it every day, since like most people, I believed I didn’t have time.

The Great Walking Project

The first few walks were hardest: walks on cold, windy nights after a long day at work. By the end of three weeks the habit of taking a daily walk was formed, and soon walking became such a regular part of my day that not doing it didn’t occur to me, just as it didn’t occur to me to stop when 1976 ended and 1977 started or when 1977 became 1978. At this writing (2/92), the string of consecutive walks that started in January of 1976 is intact. That’s about 5,900 consecutive walks without a miss.

In addition to putting me squarely in Emerson’s “Little Minds” column, this means that there hasn’t been a single day during the last 16 years when I felt too bad to take a 2-mile walk. Hepatitis and a prolonged, painful heel spur were the main challenges. But the great achievement, to me at least, is that not once during the past 16 years have I felt so low and had so little respect for myself that I said, “Screw it, I don’t have time to take a walk today.” That was definitely my tendency in the pre-1976 days. My conclusion to the experiment is that regular, sustained outdoor physical exercise does indeed promote a positive, healthy mental environment.

[As of this revision, done in February  of 2000, the string of walks is still intact and covers 24 years. I estimate the number of consecutive daily walks to be somewhere upward of 8,700.]

[As of this revision, done Sept. 1, 2008, the string of walks is still intact and now covers 31 years and 8 months. Consecutive walks total 11,569.  There’s been no real challenge to the string since 2000, although I’ve started defining a walk a bit differently.  I’m 69 at this writing and have a slight limp.  I rationalize that with a limp my distance traveled is partially sideways and sideways walking is as significant as straight-ahead walking from the point of view of exercise. Therefore, it’s now the time spent and my perception of the exercise accomplished rather than the distance covered that I go by.]

[As of this revision, done the last day of December of 2009, the string of walks is still intact and covers 33 years.  The number of consecutive daily walks is, I calculate, 12,053.  I am now 71 years old, and the nature of the walks has changed.  I don’t go as fast or as far as I used to, but I go every day.  On cold and rainy days I take the easy way and walk at the mall. I rationalize not walking as far as I used to by saying that the slight limp I have now causes me to walk about 1/5 as far sideways as I do forward.  Walking sideways should count for something.]

[As of this revision, done the last day of December of 2016, the string of walks is still intact and now covers 40 years. That’s 14,610 consecutive walks by my reckoning. I am now 78 years old and the length of the walks is shorter. I think of it more as time than distance, looking at at least half an hour as acceptable. I rationalize that since it’s more work to walk a mile now than it used to be to walk two, a mile should be enough. My health is very good, although I move a lot slower than I used to. Hernia surgery a couple of years ago presented a challenge, but I kept the string going by taking two walks the day before the surgery. If that’s cheating, so be it: it’s my project, so I make the rules. There have been a couple of sprained ankles.  The last one was really bad and consequently I took some shorter walks with a cane and I had to invoke the time vs. distance rule.]

[As of this revision, made on my birthday, December 14, 2019, the string of walks goes on.  At the end of the year, a couple of weeks away, the total should be about 15,705, spanning 43 years. I turned 81 today. Following the reasoning mentioned above, I don’t worry about the distance covered any more but rather make sure I spend half an hour or so a day walking. My main health issue now is balance. And vision.  Cataract surgery coming up soon.  No  contact with medical treatment since hernia surgery in 2014. I work six days a week, 8 hour day, but not very hard. I like what I do and have no plan for quitting. The biggest challenge in walking now is balance. Falling down not only hurts; it’s embarrassing.  Crossing busy streets is a challenge. I now walk more in parks than on the streets.]

[As of this revision, made the final day of 2020, the string of walks is intact. I can’t say that Covid challenged it; in fact, having fewer alternative activities made walking more desirable.  Main issues now (I just turned 82)  are balance, weakness in my lower legs, and overall lack of stamina, meaning I just can’t go as fast or as far as I used to. I feel very fortunate that my joints all work well and I have none of the usual knee or hip issues that older people often have.  I had cataract surgeries on both eyes this year and I see better, but balance is still the big challenge. I haven’t asked for a medical opinion on balance, or anything else for that matter.  Walks are now almost always at parks (I hate crossing streets!) and I always walk during the daylight hours.  Current totals: 16,071 consecutive walks over a 44 year period. By the way, at 82 I still work full time, but not very hard.]

[This revision is being made on December 16, 2022, two days after my 84th birthday. I ended the string of consecutive walks on May 16, 2022. It covered more than 45 years of my life, from ages 38 to 83, and consisted of some 16,572 consecutive walks. I ended the string voluntarily on May 16 after deciding that walking was becoming so stressful  that it was better to call it quits. I reported earlier that balance and lower leg strength were the biggest challenges. I had taken several falls. Walking was becoming more difficult–so difficult that I no longer enjoyed it. In mid-September, four months after ending the string of walks, my left leg quit working and I fell at home and couldn’t get up. Briefly, I  had a subdural hematoma probably resulting from a fall. After surgery to drain blood off of the brain and a couple of months of physical therapy I’m back home (I live alone) and working half days. Walking? I walk a lot better than I did before the surgery, but still have balance problems. I walk independently, with a walker, or with a cane. I’m happy with that. I currently walk half an hour a day inside my home (not as boring as you would think) and, believe it or not, it’s pretty good exercise. I plan to take up back yard walking when the weather permits and I’m a little stronger.]

Someone, Schopenhauer I think, said that your happiness depends far more on the amount of exercise you get than on your “philosophy of life.” I agree. Happiness is not a moral issue, and I think it’s about 96 % dependent upon health. Regardless of your bank balance or your religion, if you feel well, life looks pretty good, but if you feel bad, life sucks.

I hereby invite and challenge all Gazette readers to participate in the joy of walking. You don’t have time? Then I challenge you to love yourself enough to demand of life at least 3/4 of an hour of each day to go outdoors and spend time with your best friend–you! You don’t need any special instruction or equipment to start. You’ll figure it out as you go along. I’ll cite no authority to support daily walking other than Dukes: Try it! I challenge you to get out and walk around every day for at least a year to see how it changes your life. It’s not just about exercise. It’s about learning “to endure to be with oneself,” in Nietzsche’s phrase.

Gazette Awards Franks

I took my 5,000th consecutive walk at about the same time Nolan Ryan was getting his 5,000th strikeout. You know what kind of publicity he got and what kind I got. All my press releases were wasted.

A little later, the Denton Record-Chronicle printed a big article honoring as paragons of environmentalism some former grass-clippings baggers who swore off bagging and began participating in the local “Don’t Bag it” campaign designed to save the landfill.  I was again passed over, though in my life I have never bagged or even considered bagging a single blade of grass. The paper’s pages were filled with the smiling faces of happy reformed baggers who had bought new mulcherizing mowers at the local garden stores ( whose ads were, conveniently, on the same pages of the newspaper) in order to not bag their clippings properly. I had ignorantly been not bagging un-mulcherized and often even un-mowed grass. When they get around to having Don’t Mow it, Don’t Edge it, Don’t Fertilize it, Don’t Prune it, and Don’t Water it campaigns, I will already have been not doing all these things for decades, but I’ll probably still get no award. My natural modesty seems to make me invisible.

The big blow came the same year when Time named Ted Turner Man of the Year. I won’t say I expected to win, but it pissed me off none the less when l heard that Time owns over half the stock in Turner’s broadcast network. It’s like the Yankees naming Joe Torre Major League Manager of the Year. So, I reasoned, if Time can choose its own, so, too, can the Pure Water Gazette. Therefore:

The Pure Water Gazette proudly names Gene Franks recipient of its prestigious first-ever Persistent Perambulation award, given in recognition for his walking aimlessly about Denton, Oaxaca, Winfield, KS, McAlester, OK, Mountain View, AR, New Orleans, Long Beach, Las Vegas and many, many other interesting places during every single day for the last many, many years. The following interview was recorded immediately after the awards ceremony. [The following was originally conceived as a self-interview, but self-interviewing is a difficult art, so I later turned the interviewing over to veteran Gazette columnist Tiger Tom.  Tiger Tom is a surly interviewer. Your indulgence is requested.]

A Rare and Exclusive Interview With Gene Franks, conducted by Gazette columnist Tiger Tom 

Tiger Tom: Congratulations on your big award, Gene. How does it feel to finally get the national acclaim you’ve always said you deserve?

Gene: Wonderful! I’m at loss for words. I didn’t even know I was being considered.

Tiger Tom: Of course. But I see you overcame your natural modesty and put a picture of yourself at the top of the article. It doesn’t look much like you, though. Howard Musick was really kind to shrink your feet and give you all those extra teeth. And why did he put that tattoo on your arm? I’ve never seen that..

Gene: He did take certain artistic liberties. The tattoo really says “Born to raise tomatoes,” and it’s on my chest, just over the battleship. But there are really two pictures of me in this issue.

Tiger Tom:  Oh, yeah?.  Where’s the second picture?

Gene: It’s the guy with the big pipe. That’s me a long time ago, when I was a lot older and more serious.

Tiger Tom: I suppose the pipe stands for all the burdensome habits of youth. I hear you had plenty of them. The picture could show you being crushed by a gigantic bottle, or buried under a pile of pork chop bones. Or being choked by a big roach clip.

Gene: I can’t deny any of that. Most young people who  pursue this folly or that think someday they’ll quit. I was lucky enough to do it.

Tiger Tom: Unless I miss my guess, now you’re going to tell us how you did it. 

Gene: I’m glad you asked, although I don’t have a neat step-by-step plan. The main thing about changing  is genuinely wanting to change. That comes first. When you are ready to change, opportunities to do so will present themselves. There is a saying among yoga people: “When the student is ready, the guru will appear.” When you are genuinely ready to change or to achieve something, the means, the guru, appears in the form of a person, a book, an event, or maybe just an idea that pops into your head. When you desire something genuinely, you begin to think of yourself as a changed, a different person, and this sets in motion events at deep levels we are not consciously aware of. Our separateness is an illusion. We are all hooked into a complex and marvelous network of information.

Jesus said that as a person “thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Changing yourself is mainly a question of  imagination, not will power. Whether you think of “thinking in your heart” as praying, visualizing, using self-hypnosis, or practicing Silva Mind Control, or just walking around imagining that you are different,  the method is the same. Praying or visualizing is like leaving magazine articles about your new plan on the Old Chief’s desk so he’ll read them and think the whole idea is his. 

One word of caution: When the Old Chief (whoever or whatever you conceive him or Him to be) gets into the act, his methods are often heavy-handed. You usually have a chance to do things the easy way with some conscious effort, but if you don’t take advantage of it, the Old Chief might arrange to have both your arms broken to help you quit cigarettes. 

Tiger Tom: That’s all pretty vague. Why don’t you give an example. Tell us how you stopped eating meat. I’m sure you’re dying to. Not that I haven’t heard this story before.

Gene: This won’t be what you expect, since I wasn’t “thinking in my heart” of becoming a vegetarian at all. In fact, I really didn’t even know what a vegetarian was. But in my late 20s I was very unhappy and very unhealthy. I deeply wanted and needed to change some things. I’d caught on that, among other things, the good old standard diet pushed by the establishment was doing me in. I wanted to eat better, but I was totally stupid about nutrition. I read the books of Adele Davis that were popular at the time. She preached the need for supplements by the handful and vast amounts of animal protein. Adele reported all the animal studies (not always honestly, I learned later) that show that rats have heart attacks and their balls fall off if they are deprived of hog liver. Stuff like that. I did not want my balls to fall off, so I increased my already-high intake of hog liver and started eating even boiled duck eggs, which are gross and chewy, like eating a rubber ball.

Tiger Tom: Please just get to the point.

Gene: The point is that all the while I was trying to be a good disciple of Adele Davis and learning to wash my raw liver down with ox blood, I kept having disturbing thoughts. Like, I heard a radio report about the USDA allowable for rodent hairs and insect parts in processed meats. The typical bureaucratic solution: if you can’t keep the rats and roaches out, set up a “minimum allowable” that makes it OK. As if 10 parts per million rat hair in sausage isn’t gross, but 11 parts is. My mind’s eye saw pictures of big cauldrons of bubbling bologna batter stirred by greasy, sweaty workers who from time to time cleared their throats and spat, Now and then a roach or a rat plopped in and became part of the slurry. 

Tiger Tom: Wouldn’t you rather talk about walking? 

Gene:  I’m just getting warmed up. The punch line is at hand. One night I was eating a hot dog and watching Perry Mason with the rest of America when an over whelming flash of enlightenment flooded through my mind. I realized, down deep where it really matters, that the rubbery mass in my mouth was the dead flesh of a creature just like me. I was eating a corpse! They had embalmed it and ground it up and colored it and changed its name to disguise the fact that it was putrefying flesh, but the fact was that I was eating a rotting cadaver. The veins and gristle and pus and blood were there: they were just ground up so I wouldn’t recognize them. I coughed out the bite in my mouth, and that was my last hot dog. Like it or not, I was a vegetarian. 

Tiger Tom: I hear you’d been smoking weed before you ate the dog. You always leave that part out. I suppose this story has a moral.

Gene:  Of course. I sincerely wanted to improve my health. The guru appeared in an unexpected way. I was trying to change but was going in the wrong direction. You have to try–to put some demands on the system. Going in the wrong direction is better than doing nothing. 

Tiger Tom: Tell us how you quit smoking. Be brief! 

 Gene: Smoking was easy. I had been smoking 20 years and really wanted to quit. For a few weeks I visualized myself as a happy, healthy non-smoker. Then I quit smoking and took up snuff (to break the puffing habit but keep the nicotine). Snuff was such a disgusting habit that I soon quit it very easily. The whole thing was easy. I’m surprised more people don’t do it that way. 

Tiger Tom: Not exactly the classical method. And it sounds like there’s no money to be made from it.  This interview is supposed to be about walking. You’re so big on quotes, I suppose you’ve got a big tub full of quotes somewhere about walking.

Gene: Of course. Endorsements from everyone from Adam to Zenobia. But I’ll go right to the top and stick with Jesus, who has already appeared a couple of times in this issue. Jesus’ whole life is an endorsement of walking. He walked everywhere, except for an occasional donkey ride. And the Bible nowhere mentions him jogging, doing pushups, going to the gym or exercising in any other way. He was always walking around the countryside, and even when he wanted to go out on the lake where his disciples were, did he swim? No, he walked. That proves that walking is the world’s greatest exercise.

Tiger Tom: I hope lightening doesn’t strike us! I’ve heard some of your weird ideas about walking. There’s room for just one.

Gene: Nothing weird about this. It’s just common sense. Much of our alienation from the Earth, our great loneliness, results from not walking enough and from wearing thick-soled shoes. The sensitive bottoms of our feet are our link with the Earth–the place where we make intimate contact with the Mother. Life is a learning process. Earth, the Mother, teaches and nurtures us through the bottoms of our feet, where our most direct contact with her takes place. Reflexology has recorded correspondence between specific sites on the bottoms of the feet and all parts of the body. Walking barefoot provides us a loving, whole-body massage by the Earth. That we seldom walk, and when we do it is with ever-thicker shoe-soles that insulate us from intimacy with the Earth, explains why we are so abysmally stupid about certain things, though we’re so very clever about others. There’s no way to learn in a classroom the rich, sensual lesson that the Earth teaches us when we walk on damp soil and feel mud ooze between our toes.

Tiger Tom: I hope you don’t expect them to put mudwalking in the school curriculum! You’ve blabbed on so long that now we don’t have room for a lot of really good stuff, including Shirley Wilkes-Johnson’s recipes, that were supposed to go in this issue.

Gene: Shirley will understand. As for recipes, here’s a quick one of my own, from my “Simple Recipes” collection. This is also a walking recipe.  It’s a recipe for pecans.

Pecans

While walking in the South, especially at night when you can’t be seen, stuff pockets with pecans picked up from people’s yards. As you walk, place two pecans in palm of hand, squeeze until one cracks. Eat parts that taste good and throw parts that don’t in other people’s yards. Repeat until one pecan remains. Do not crack remaining pecan with teeth, but hold as “food for thought” and meditate while walking on the theme: “If the universe were perfect, would pecans exist only in pairs? “

Tiger Tom: Oh, brother.

The Pure Water Occasional catalogues the intriguing happenings of the complex world of water.

The Grumps

by Tiger Tom

One thing you may not know about tigers is that they don’t go around looking for people to eat. To a healthy tiger in the wild, a human is approximately as appetizing as a parking meter. Only when they get so old or sick that they can’t catch anything else do Tigers eat people. People are very easy to catch because their senses are so dull. They can hardly smell or hear, and at night they are almost blind. There is a saying among tigers: Blind as a man. Among tigers, man-eating is a perversion practiced only by a minority. But for some reason people call all tigers “cruel” and “bloodthirsty.”

People who murder tigers are called sportsmen, but have you ever heard a tiger who kills a person called a sportstiger? That’s because people are speciesists. Remember the word. Speciesism. I use it a lot. It means a prejudice toward the interests of one’s own species and against those of others. Lots of humans who do not consider themselves to be be racists or sexists are often speciesists. Former governor Ann Richards of Texas, the darling of human minorities, once said about turkeys and Thanksgiving, “There can be few purposes higher than being the centerpiece of this great American dinner.” She said that because turkey raisers vote and turkeys don’t. It’s pure manshit. Ask a turkey his opinion of Thanksgiving. Do people really think cows are “honored” to become Big Macs and tigers to become rugs? And does Richards, also a big Bambi blaster, also think that deer and javelina pigs are honored to have their brains splattered by a hunk of flying metal thrown by her rifle?

Humans are great speciesists also when it comes to nutrition. They fret a lot about the nutrtional quality–the relative fat, protein, and cholesterol–of other species’corpses, but little is ever said of the effect of eating human bodies on vultures and tigers. In fact, humans show little concern for how their own dietary habits affect others who eat them. Here’s the only reference I can find. It’s from a book called Man-Eaters of Kumaon (Oxford Univ. Press, 1946) by a famous sportsman named Jim Corbett. Jim said:

It is a popular fallacy that all man-eaters are old and mangy, the mange being attributed to the excess of salt in human flesh. I am not competent to give any opinion on the relative quantity of salt in human or animal flesh; but I can, and I do, assert that a diet of human flesh, so far from having an injurious effect on the coat of man-eaters, has quite the opposite effect, for all the man-eaters I have seen have had remarkably fine coats.

Manshit. That’s his opinion. Mine is, “Show me a man-eating tiger, I’ll show you a cat with bad breath.” Humans are junk food for tigers.

Now, to my contest, which is about human nutrition. You probably won’t be able to think of an answer to my question, though. I based this story on one by Mark Reinhardt. Shakespeare had his Holinshed and I have my Mark Reinhardt. Here is the story of the Grumps. (Probably because of a transliteration problem, Mark thought they were called the Groans). Pay close attention to this story.

Creatures from the planet Grumpus have taken over Earth. These hideous beings are uglier than men and even more cunning and treacherous. It quickly becomes obvious that the Grumps, who have a voracious appetie for flesh, plan to use Earth as a giant ranch to provide human meat for the tables of Grumpus.

You were unlucky enough to be chosen representative of the human race. It’s your job to attempt to change the Grumps’ ideas. You are taken to their leader, a sexless being who, seeing that his/her appearance is unnerving to you, quickly takes on the appearance of Groucho Marx to put you at ease.

Groucho lets you see a portfolio he has prepared for the High Council of Grumpus. It outlines his plan for Earth. You look at pictures of long rows of women confined in stocks-like devices with milking machines attached to their breasts. You see pictures of colorful and efficient “mangrumpies” branding, castrating, and de-fingering livestock. De-fingering is necessary, Groucho explains, to prevent stock from injuring themselves and each other; it’s much easier than trimming the nails. A sickening feeling swells in your throat as you stare at a picture of long rows of carcasses suspended by a hook through a heel. Groucho explains that Grumpan religion demands Kosher slaughter.

Viewing the portfolio so inspires you that you speak passionately of the massive human suffering that the Grumpan plan will cause. You speak of the violent, painful death of herds of innocent men, women, and children. You tell of tears and heartaches, of families torn apart, of the agony of the slaughterhouse. You appeal to the Grumps to show compassion.

Groucho cuts you short. “Compassion?” he laughs. “What’s this about compassion? Surely youy agree that the strong have the right to exercise dominion over the weak. After all, you kill and eat the other animals of the Earth, don’t you? Your religion even gives you a mandate to do that, you claim.”

“Yes, of course,” you answer, “but in our case. . .”

You stop short at the sight of a hulking figure that has appeared in the doorway holding a long, sharp knife like the ones you saw in the portfolio. You cast a final entreating glance at Groucho, whose face now wears an icy smirk. “You know,” he says coldly, “the animals of other planets might taste better than you. Goodness knows they eat better. So I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you can explain to me how butchering you wouldn’t be exactly what you’ve always done to your fellow creatures here, I’ll spare your miserable race.”

Then Groucho raises his eyebrows, puffs on his cigar, makes a smacking sound with his lips, and says, “On the other hand, if you can’t convince me, I can hardly wait to sink my teeth into one of your young people cooked with its mother’s milk. Don’t you call it a ‘cheeseburger?'”

He leans back in his chair, chews on his cigar, and waits for your reply. What will you tell him to save the people of Earth from the butcher’s knife?

Editor’s Note: The piece above originally appeared in Gazette #40 (Winter, 1992), so please don’t enter the contest now. The deadline has passed.

The Pure Water Occasional catalogues the intriguing happenings of the complex world of water.

New Report Challenges Fundamentals of Genetic Engineering;
Study Questions Safety of Genetically Engineered Foods

U.S. Newswire  January 2002

NEW YORK — A study released today reveals a critical, long-overlooked flaw in the science behind the multi-billion dollar genetic engineering industry, raising serious questions about the safety of genetically engineered foods.

In a new review of scientific literature reported in the February issue of Harper’s Magazine, Dr. Barry Commoner, a prominent biologist demonstrates that the bioengineering industry, which now accounts for 25-50 percent of the U.S. corn and soybean crop, relies on a 40-year- old theory that DNA genes are in total control of inheritance in all forms of life. According to this theory — the “central dogma” — the outcome of transferring a gene from one organism to another is always “specific, precise and predictable,” and therefore safe.

Taking issue with this view, Commoner summarizes a series of scientific reports that directly contradict the established theory. For example, last year the $3 billion Human Genome Project found there are too few human genes to account for the vast inherited differences between people and lower animals or plants, indicating that agents other than DNA must contribute to genetic complexity.

The central dogma claims a one-to-one correspondence between a gene’s chemical composition and the structure of the particular protein that engenders an inherited trait. But Dr. Commoner notes that under the influence of specialized proteins that carry out “alternative splicing,” a single gene can give rise to a variety of different proteins, resulting in more than a single inherited trait per gene. As a result, the gene’s effect on inheritance cannot be predicted simply from its chemical composition — frustrating one of the main purposes of both the Human Genome Project and biotechnology.

Commoner’s research sounds a public alarm concerning the processes by which agricultural biotechnology companies genetically modify food crops. Scientists simply assume the genes they insert into these plants always produce only the desired effect with no other impact on the plant’s genetics. However, recent studies show that the plant’s own genes can be disrupted in transgenic plants. Such outcomes are undetected because there is little or no governmental regulation of the industry. “Genetically engineered crops represent a huge uncontrolled experiment whose outcome is inherently unpredictable,” Commoner concludes. “The results could be catastrophic.”

Dr. Commoner cites a number of recent studies that have broken the DNA gene’s exclusive franchise on the molecular explanation of inheritance. He warns that “experimental data, shorn of dogmatic theories, point to the irreducible complexity of the living cell, which suggests that any artificially altered genetic system must sooner or later give rise to unintended, potentially disastrous consequences.”

Commoner charges that the central dogma, a seductively simple explanation of heredity, has led most molecular geneticists to believe it was “too good not to be true.” As a result, the central dogma has been immune to the revisions called for by the growing array of contradictory data, allowing the biotechnology industry to unwittingly impose massive, scientifically unsound practices on agriculture.

“Dr. Commoner’s work challenges the legitimacy of the agricultural biotechnology industry,” said Andrew Kimbrell, Director of the Center on Food Safety. “For years, multibillion dollar biotech companies have been selling the American people and our government on the safety of their products. We now see their claims of safety are based on faulty assumptions that don’t hold up to rigorous scientific review.”

The study reported in Harper’s Magazine is the initial publication of a new initiative called The Critical Genetics Project directed by Dr. Commoner in collaboration with molecular geneticist Dr. Andreas Athanasiou, at the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, Queens College, City University of New York. Contact: Dr. Barry Commoner of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, 718-670-4182

The Pure Water Occasional catalogues the intriguing happenings of the complex world of water.

Gazette Fair Use Statement

The World’s Problems on a Plate:

Meat Production is Making the Rich Ill and the Poor Hungry

by Jeremy Rifkin

Friday, May 17, 2002

In June, agricultural ministers from around the world will gather in Rome for the World Food Summit. The meeting will focus on how to create a sustainable approach to development and get food in the mouths of the nearly 1 billion who are currently undernourished. More interesting than the agenda, however, will be the menu. At both the official dinners and at NGO gatherings, expect to see the consumption of large quantities of meat. And herein lies the contradiction.
Hundreds of millions of people are going hungry all over the world because much of the arable land is being used to grow feed grain for animals rather than for people. Cattle are among the most inefficient converters of feed. In the US, 157 million metric tons of cereal, legumes and vegetable protein suitable for human use is fed to livestock to produce 28 million metric tons of animal protein for annual human consumption.

The worldwide demand for feed grain continues to grow, as multinational corporations seek to capitalize on the meat demands of affluent countries. Two-thirds of the increases in grain production in the US and Europe between 1950 and 1985, the boom years in agriculture, went to provide feed grain.

In developing countries, the question of land reform has periodically rallied peasant populations and spawned populist political uprisings. But the question of how the land is used has been of less interest. Yet the decision to use the land to create an artificial food chain has resulted in misery for hundreds of millions around the world. An acre of cereal produces five times more protein than an acre devoted to meat production; legumes (beans, peas, lentils) can produce 10 times more protein and leafy vegetables 15 times more.

The global corporations that produce the seeds, the farm chemicals and the cattle and that control the slaughterhouse and the marketing and distribution channels for beef are eager to tout the advantage of grain-fed livestock. Advertising and sales campaigns geared to developing nations are quick to equate grain-fed beef with a country’s prestige. Climbing the “protein ladder” becomes the mark of success.

Enlarging and diversifying their meat supply appears to be a first step for every developing country. They start by putting in modern broiler and egg production facilities – the fastest and cheapest way to produce nonplant protein. Then, as rapidly as their economies permit, they climb “the protein ladder” to pork, milk, and dairy products, to grass-fed beef and finally, if they can, to grain-fed beef.

Encouraging other nations to do this advances the interests of American farmers and agribusiness companies. Two-thirds of all the grain exported from the US to other countries goes to feed livestock rather than to feed hungry people.

Many developing nations climbed the protein ladder at the height of the agricultural boom, when “green revolution” technology was producing grain surpluses. In 1971 the Food and Agricultural Organization suggested switching to coarse grains that could be more easily consumed by livestock. The US government provided further encouragement in its foreign aid program, tying food aid to development of feed grain markets. Companies like Ralston Purina and Cargill were given low-interest government loans to establish grain-fed poultry operations in developing countries. Many nations followed the advice of the FAO and have attempted to remain high on the protein ladder long after the surpluses of the green revolution have disappeared.

The shift from food to feed continues apace in many nations, with no sign of reversal. The human consequences of the transition were dramatically illustrated in 1984 in Ethiopia when thousands of people were dying each day from famine. At the very same time Ethiopia was using some of its agricultural land to produce linseed cake, cottonseed cake and rapeseed meal for export to the UK and other European nations as feed for livestock. Millions of acres of third world land are now being used exclusively to produce feed for European livestock.

Tragically, some 80% of the world’s hungry children live in countries with actual food surpluses, much of which is in the form of feed fed to animals which will be consumed by only the well-to-do consumers. In the developing world, the share of grain fed to livestock has tripled since 1950 and now exceeds 21% of the total grain produced.

The irony of the present system is that millions of wealthy consumers in the first world are dying from diseases of affluence (heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, cancer) brought on by gorging on fatty grain-fed meats, while the poor in the third world are dying of diseases of poverty brought on by the denial of access to land to grow food grain for their families. We are long overdue for a global discussion on how best to promote a diversified, high-protein, vegetarian diet for the human race.

Jeremy Rifkin is the president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington DC

Fair Use Policy.

White Poison: The Horrors of Milk

by Shanti Rangwani

December 3, 2001

Got milk? If not, then thank your lucky stars. Because if you do, medical research shows that you are likely to be plagued by anemia, migraine, bloating, gas, indigestion, asthma, prostate cancer, and a host of potentially fatal allergies — especially if you are a person of color.

Ignoring this, the government declares that milk is essential to good health, subsidizes the milk industry to the tune of billions of dollars, and requires milk in its public school lunch programs. And celebrity shills sporting milk mustaches tell us that milk is rich in proteins, calcium, and vitamins — and very cool to boot.
They forget to tell you about the dangers lurking in that innocuous-looking glass of white. Once criticized only by naturopaths and vegans, now the health effects of milk are being decried by many mainstream doctors. The supposedly hip milk mustache is actually a creamy layer of mucus, live bacteria, and pus.

Former Chairman of Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University, Frank Oski, M.D. even has a book called Don’t Drink Your Milk which blames every second health problem kids suffer on hormone-ridden commercial milk. Sixty percent of ear infections in kids under six years of age are milk-induced, and milk consumption is the number one cause of iron-deficiency anemia in infants today according to the American Association of Pediatrics.

But milk is also a racial issue. Almost 90 percent of African Americans and most Latinos, Asians, and Southern Europeans lack the genes necessary to digest lactose, the primary sugar in milk. The milk industry’s response is classic: they have launched new campaigns arguing that non-whites can digest milk if they take in small sips during the day. There is a burgeoning industry worth $450 million a year churning out products designed to minimize lactose intolerance.

Lactose intolerance is the most common “food allergy,” but to call it an allergy is to take a white-centric view that trivializes the fact that most of the world’s people are not biologically designed to digest milk.

Milk does no body good, but for the vast majority of the world’s people — people of color — it is a public health disaster.

No other animal drinks cow’s milk, not even calves once they are weaned. The late Dr. Benjamin Spock, the U.S.’s leading authority on child care, spoke out against feeding “cow’s glue” to children, saying it can cause anemia, allergies, and diabetes and in the long term, will set kids up for obesity and heart disease, the number one cause of death in this country.

Most of milk’s much-vaunted protein is contained in casein — which is also a raw material for commercial glue. Undigested, it simply sticks to the intestinal walls and blocks nutrient absorption.

The mainstream media and the government ignore the medical studies showing that milk is a serious health threat, in part because people of color are the main victims. The institutionalization of racism is highlighted by U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesperson Eilene Kennedy’s statement on milk, that the government’s recommended food pyramid is intended for “the majority of Americans. It doesn’t communicate to all Americans.”

The USDA continues to require that school lunch programs include milk with every meal, and recommends that we glug milk for calcium, even though Harvard studies show an increase in osteoporosis and bone-breakage in people who consume milk. It says we should drink milk to prevent heart disease (and is echoed by Larry King) even though saturated fat constitutes 55 percent of milk solids.

The dairy lobby perpetrates lies to ensure its profits. It benefits directly from the exaggerated support prices the government shells out for this “health food.” The government pays over a billion dollars a year for surplus butter. A General Accounting Office (GAO) study concluded that a reduction in the government price support system would have netted consumers savings of $10.4 billion from 1986 to 2001. And the USDA pays inflated prices to purchase dairy products for both the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and federal school lunch programs — milking the taxpayers and actually getting them to pay for poisoning 26 million school kids.

The milk lobby has whipsawed its way into the highest echelons of power. Staffers under Richard Nixon were indicted for accepting $300,000 from the dairy lobby for making milk part of the school lunch program.

Dr. Robert Cohen of the Dairy Education Board, a nonprofit organization dedicated to exposing the milk lobby, contends that the dramatic 52 percent rise in asthma deaths among minority kids in New York coincided with the surplus milk, cheese, and butter pumped into them under the USDA’s free school lunch and breakfast giveaway programs. The incidence of asthma deaths may be even higher since asthma is not a reportable disease, and asthma deaths are sometimes certified as cardiovascular disease.

There is also a direct link between milk consumption and prostate cancer among African Americans, who have the highest incidence of this disease in the world. A study in Cancer has shown that men who reported drinking three or more glasses of whole milk daily had a higher risk for prostate cancer than men who reported never drinking whole milk.

The controversial Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) — banned in most countries — is pumped into U.S. milch cows to increase annual yield (50,000 pounds of milk per cow today compared to 2,000 pounds in 1959). Milk from cows treated with BGH is likely to contain pus from their udders since the hormone leads to mastitis, or udder infection. BGH use results in a tumor-promoting chemical (IGF-I) that has been implicated in an explosive increase of cancer of the colon, smooth muscle, and breast.

The antibiotics dairy farmers use to treat BGH-caused infections in cows appear in their milk and greatly hasten human tolerance to most antibiotics, a potentially life-threatening state of affairs. The Center for Science in the Public Interest reports that 38 percent of milk samples in 10 cities were contaminated with sulfa drugs and other antibiotics.

A fightback is beginning. Protesters picketed New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s planned milk promotion campaign with a photo of the mayor wearing a milk mustache over the caption, “Got Prostate Cancer?” Giuliani (who, like his father, has prostate cancer) dropped the campaign. And doctors from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) persuaded Washington, D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams not to declare May 11 as “Drink Chocolate Milk Day” by presenting evidence that milk is harmful, especially to people of color.

The PCRM — composed of some of the leading doctors in the U.S. — has campaigned extensively in the health and consumer press and led a successful legal effort in 1999 to make dairy products optional in the federal food guidelines. The campaign was supported by a number of prominent civil rights organizations and leaders, including the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, Martin Luther King, III, Jesse Jackson, Jr., the National Hispanic Medical Association, and former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders.

The dairy lobby remains cozy with most medical practitioners to perpetrate its “drink milk” propaganda. However, not one of the 1,500 papers listed in Medicine that deal with milk points to its goodness — only to the pus, blood, antibiotics, and carcinogens in milk, and the chronic fatigue, anemia, asthma, and autoimmune disorders milk consumption causes.

The time has come for the milk industry to face the kind of scrutiny that the tobacco companies face today. Meanwhile, discard the moo juice.

This article appeared originally in ColorLines

Shanti Rangwani is an allopathic doctor and a columnist for the Times of India.

Power Steer

By Michael Polan

March 31, 2002

Garden City, Kan., missed out on the suburban building boom of the postwar years. What it got instead were sprawling subdivisions of cattle. These feedlots — the nation’s first — began rising on the high plains of western Kansas in the 50’s, and by now developments catering to cows are far more common here than developments catering to people.

You’ll be speeding down one of Finney County’s ramrod roads when the empty, dun-colored prairie suddenly turns black and geometric, an urban grid of steel-fenced rectangles as far as the eye can see — which in Kansas is really far. I say ”suddenly,” but in fact a swiftly intensifying odor (an aroma whose Proustian echoes are more bus-station-men’s-room than cow-in-the-country) heralds the approach of a feedlot for more than a mile. Then it’s upon you: Poky Feeders, population 37,000. Cattle pens stretch to the horizon, each one home to 150 animals standing dully or lying around in a grayish mud that it eventually dawns on you isn’t mud at all. The pens line a network of unpaved roads that loop around vast waste lagoons on their way to the feedlot’s beating heart: a chugging, silvery feed mill that soars like an industrial cathedral over this teeming metropolis of meat. (more…)

Meat from Diseased Animals Approved for Consumers

By Lance Gay

Introductory Note from Pure Water Gazette Columnist Tiger Tom: Nothing kills your appetite faster than biting into a big gristly tumor. 

WASHINGTON – The federal agency overseeing food inspection is imposing new rules reclassifying as safe for human consumption animal carcasses with cancers, tumors and open sores.

Federal meat inspectors and consumer groups are protesting the move to
classify tumors and open sores as aesthetic problems, which permits the meat
to get the government’s purple seal of approval as a wholesome food product.

“I don’t want to eat pus from a chicken that has pneumonia. I think it’s
gross,” said Wenonah Hauter, director of Public Citizen’s Critical Mass
Energy Project. “Most Americans don’t want to eat this sort of contamination
in their meals.”

Delmer Jones, a federal food inspector for 41 years who lives in Renlap,
Ala., said he’s so revolted by the lowering of food wholesomeness standards
that he doesn’t buy meat at the supermarket anymore because he doesn’t trust
that it is safe to eat.

“I eat very little to no meat, but sardines and fish,” said Jones, president
of the National Joint Council of Meat Inspection Locals, a union of 7,000
meat inspectors nationwide affiliated with the American Federation of
Government Employees. He said he’s trying to get his wife to stop eating
meat. “I’ve told her what she’s eating.”

The union is battling related Agriculture Department plans to rely on
scientific testing of samples of butchered meats to determine the
wholesomeness of meat, rather than traditional item-by-item scrutiny by
federal inspectors. A 1959 federal law requires inspectors from the
Agriculture Department’s Food Inspection and Safety System to inspect all
slaughtered animals before they can be sold for human consumption.

The Agriculture Department began implementing the new policy as part of a
pilot project in 24 slaughter houses last October, and plans to expand the
system nationwide covering poultry, beef and pork. The agency this month
extended until Aug. 29 the time for the public to comment on the regulations,
and won’t issue final rules until after the comments are received.

In 1998, the inspections and safety system reclassified an array of animal
diseases as being “defects that rarely or never present a direct public
health risk” and said “unaffected carcass portions” could be passed on to
consumers by cutting out lesions.

Among animal diseases the agency said don’t present a health danger are:

– Cancer;

– A pneumonia of poultry called airsacculitis;

– Glandular swellings or lymphomas;

– Sores;

– Infectious arthritis;

– Diseases caused by intestinal worms.

In the case of tumors, the guidelines state: “remove localized lesion(s) and
pass unaffected carcass portions.”

“They just cut off the areas,” said Carol Blake, spokeswoman for the
Agriculture Department’s inspection and safety system.

But Jones and consumer groups say production lines are moving so fast that
they can’t catch all the diseased carcasses, and some are ending up on
supermarket shelves.

“When I started inspecting, inspectors were looking at 13 birds a minute,
then 40, and now it’s 91 birds a minute with three inspectors. You cannot do
your job with 91 birds a minute,” Jones said.

The Agriculture Department is also experimenting with proposed rules that
would require federal food inspectors to monitor what the plant employees are doing, rather than inspecting each carcass individually. They are aimed at
bringing a new scientific approach to federal meat inspection to cut down on
E. coli bacteria and other contamination.

The inspection and safety agency says a survey of pilot plants using the new
system concluded that less than 1 percent of the poultry examined at the end
of the production line and released for public consumption was unwholesome.

At a public hearing on the findings this year, Karen Henderson of
Agriculture’s division of field operations admitted that defective carcasses
are being approved for human use under the pilot program.

“Absolutely. There’s no system that we are aware of that is capable of
removing every defect from the process,” she said.

Felicia Nestor, director of the Government Accountability Project, a
Washington watchdog group, said the pilot project found chickens with higher levels of fecal and other contamination than in traditional methods of
inspecting.

“A lot of diseased animals are going out,” she said.

A. Raymond Randolph, a federal appeals court judge, this month said federal
food safety laws require meat and poultry inspectors to examine every carcass that moves through slaughterhouses and processing plants.

“The laws clearly contemplate that when inspections are done, it will be
federal inspectors, rather than private employees, who will make the critical
determination whether a product is adulterated or unadulterated,” he said.
“Under the proposed plan, federal inspectors would be inspecting people, not
carcasses.”

Scripps Howard News Service
July 14, 2000

On the Net: The Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service is at  http://www.fsis.usda.gov. The federal inspectors’ web site is
http://www.the-inspector.com

How Much Does Food Really Cost?

by Hardly Waite, Pure Water Gazette Senior Editor

    There is a pervasive misconception about food prices in the United States because of the way we keep our books. We like to congratulate ourselves for having “cheap” food by world standards and to attribute this low cost to our efficient and highly productive food provision system. This is because most people are not aware that the price we pay for food at the market is only a tiny part of the real, complete price.. The real cost involves hidden dollars as well as non-monetary costs of far greater importance. Viewed in its totality, we pay more for food than any nation on earth.

For example, there are massive taxpayer-funded subsidies for transportation systems, including super highways, bridges, harbors, and airports that allow long-distance shipping of large quantities of food items. This makes food appear artificially cheap. People do not consider that without super highways local growers would not be able to compete with multinational corporate farmers. These subsidized transportation systems greatly benefit large corporate food producers and actually work to the disadvantage of small local food producers by flooding their market area with cheap food brought in from great distances. What we pay for roads is part of the cost of food.

Publicly financed global communications systems also greatly aid large corporate food producers at the expense of small growers, and they, too, must be considered as part of the cost of food. One estimate is that U. S. corporations benefit from subsidies and externalized costs to the tune of $2.4 trillion per year. This corporate welfare comes out of our pockets.

Another potent subsidy item is university research, which is rarely if ever aimed at helping small farmers or local markets. Instead, it focuses on high-dollar technologies that benefit corporate agribusiness and do great harm to smaller producers and usually to the environment. For example, The Ecologist reports the case of a mechanical tomato picker that was developed at considerable public expense at the University of California. It greatly reduced labor costs for large tomato farmers, but its purchase price was so high that smaller growers could not afford to use it in their fields. “This one technology,” says The Ecologist, “helped to consolidate California’s 4,000 tomato farms into just 600 in about a decade.” Taxpayers paid a little less for tomatoes at the market, but they also got to pay for some very expensive research. The 600 surviving companies got fatter and richer, but 3,400 smaller tomato farmers, not to mention innumerable laborers who were replaced by the picking machines, would be hard pressed to see the benefits of this publicly financed research..”

And then there are the direct subsidies we taxpayers give to “farmers.” When they talk about farm subsidies on the Ten O’ Clock News, people envision the Brown family keeping their little vegetable farm going with the help of an Agriculture Dept. check. Actually, in both the U.S. and the United Kingdom, a full 80% of the government’s financial help goes to the richest and largest 20% of the “farmers.” The needy farmers being fed at the public trough, of course, are multinational agribusiness conglomerates who use part of their subsidy checks to gobble up the family farms of the Browns and their neighbors who did not qualify for subsidies. Add the cost of farm subsidies into your food budget.

Perhaps the most intangible of the costs of agribusiness food, however, is the  “health tax.” How do you estimate the cost to your health of consuming nutrient-depleted foods, drinking pesticide contaminated water, and breathing polluted air? Perhaps the greatest cost of all is hidden in the impact of corporate agriculture on the environment and the health of citizens. Air pollution, greenhouse gasses, soaring cancer rates, fossil fuel and water depletion–these are all hard items to assign costs to. But pay for them we do, each time we purchase a factory-raised chicken or a loaf of phony bread at the supermarket

The Pure Water Gazette urges its readers to support local growers and to resist the agribusiness effort to globalize food production and destroy small food producers. Buy locally and organically whenever you can. The slightly higher price you pay the local grower is a bargain.