Category Archives: Libertarian living

Parasite Planet: Eastern Lubber Grasshoppers

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Writing about parasites on the body-politic reminds me of an on-going infestation closer home. In fact, in my home. In my garden, to be precise.

I’m talking about the eastern lubber grasshopper, which, as grasshoppers go, is a rather fine looking specimen: Yellow, with black and red markings, he grows to a plump three inches, which is about three inches more than I care to see.

I didn’t know the name until recently, but the face is familiar from a couple of months back, when I saw a whiskered gold-and-black snout peering out from behind a window-bar. Being generally well-disposed to all God’s creatures outside the human world, except cockroaches and  slimy things- that-go-squish, I let him hop along without interfering.

Too bad. It turns out that the eastern lubber is a nasty pest that defies the birds around here because he gives off an evil-tasting  juice when he’s crushed.  That explains why he can hop along without flying. He knows no one wants to eat him.  The books say he hisses when he’s cornered, but so far I haven’t seen any sign of it, and if  he does, I hiss pretty well myself.

What I’ve caught the lubber doing so far is bad enough, hiss or not.  He and his mates turned a stately crinum – a purple Queen Emma, at that –  into a moth-eaten wreck, with broken leaves and chewed-up buds.  Some tender bromeliads now look like half-eaten salad and even the Black Magic Ti’s in the corner of the yard are pitted and pock-marked.

All while I was researching politics and not paying attention.

It turns out that there’s not much that can be done to eastern lubbers, once full-grown. The time to have caught the suckers was in the spring, when they were newly-hatched.

Too bad that then they were cute little bugs that just begged for Jain treatment.

 

Summers in a lush, semi-tropical yard take the Jain out of you and put in a Japanese killer.

Look out! Samurai lawn-woman!

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTSv5Gihgz028vEX4Z7v1t5ishob61-BPH0Q1OAWWoS5zcJFEvE

Oh-oh-oh..

If you’re old enough to remember John Belushi, you know what I”m talking about.

Seriously, though, in gardening, blood-lust is the way to go.

Chemicals kill too many things that need to live and organic baits aren’t fast enough, although I’m told something called Nolo bait works slowly to cut back the lubber population.

I took the cave-woman route and prowled around in the afternoon, bathed in sweat in 90-plus humidity, brick in one hand, a long bamboo stick in the other, nudging and prodding leaves to uncover my prey.

Lubbers, fortunately, are not just show-boats who stick out with their gaudy ensemble, they’re cocky, stupid show-boats, who don’t even think to hide.

Prodded with a stick, they slide, swing under a stem, and hop, sometimes quick enough to get away for a few seconds, but downright lethargic next to your average, in-shape cockroach.

Unlike cockroaches, lubbers die easily. A sharp prod disembowels them. One hit of a brick, and their head and chest cave in.

Filled with loathing and rage on behalf of my violated crinum, I rubbed the edge of the brick vindictively back and forth through my victim’s entrails to make sure that there would be no last-minute heroics.

He didn’t die alone.

Over the past couple of days,  a reign of terror has been unleashed on the lubber population here. Fully a dozen have met a gruesome fate at my hands, with little remorse shown.

I intend to smash and eviscerate every single future lubber I see, with no quarter given for age or sex.

Somewhere in all this, I’m sure, there’s a lesson about karma, human-life, and the powers-that-be, to whom we’re not much more than garden pests and useless feeders to be exterminated.

But, right now, I’m not in the mood to hear it.

I’ve got me some lubbers to hunt.

Cognitive dissonance in some libertarian circles

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Negligent burning of baby in public sector:

NAZI POLICE STATE

Dear God

[Source: Will Grigg, Pro Libertate, republished at LRC blog]

Note: Grigg is  pro-life.  No criticism of his excellent piece is  intended.

Intentional baby-killing in private sector:

A WOMAN’S RIGHT TO CHOOSE 

Cell phone photos taken of late-term abortions at the abortion clinic of Dr. Douglas Karpen (Houston, Texas).

Criminal charges against Dr. Karpen were dismissed in December 2013, but under pressure from pro-life groups and accumulating testimony from former employees, investigation of the clinic has been re-opened.

USG injected Guatemalans with syphilis & gonorrhea

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From the National Security Archive:

Washington, April 25, 2011—Between 1946 and 1948, U.S. public health researchers infected hundreds of Guatemalan prisoners, soldiers and mentally ill patients with syphilis and gonorrhea, without their knowledge or consent, in order to test the effectiveness of penicillin. The experiments were carried out in Guatemala under the cloak of confidentiality, and the results were never published in the United States. But after a scholar discovered archives chronicling the program at the University of Pittsburgh and published her findings last year, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) took custody of the documents and on March 29 made them publicly available.

In the press release issued by the National Archives, the collection is described as consisting of some 12,000 pages of reports, correspondence, patient records and graphic photographs of the effects of syphilis infection on Guatemalan subjects. The papers belonged to the late Dr. John C. Cutler, an expert in sexually transmitted diseases and a leading researcher at the U.S. Public Health Service, who designed and oversaw the syphilis experiments. Before his death in 2003, Cutler donated the records to the university. NARA has since posted the collection on-line for public access, and made the originals available through the National Archives in Atlanta.

According to Cutler’s main report on the syphilis study, the program began with an invitation to carry out human experiments in Guatemala from the head of the Venereal Disease Control Division of Guatemala’s Public Health Services, Dr. Juan Funes. With funding from the National Institute for Health, Cutler arrived in Guatemala in the fall of 1946 to lead the project, co-sponsored by the U.S. Public Health Service, the Pan American Sanitary Bureau and the Guatemalan government. The first experiments were carried out in Guatemala’s Central Penitentiary, where the U.S. researchers sought to transmit syphilis to prisoners by paying infected prostitutes to have sex with them. When this method proved inefficient, the team decided to inoculate subjects directly with the disease. Looking for a way to infect a large number of subjects and study the effects over a period of months, the team settled upon the country’s “insane asylum” as the ideal site for their work. There, they had hundreds of captive and vulnerable men and women patients with no understanding of the procedures being performed on them, and the freedom to experiment without constraint or consultation with families.

It is clear from the language of the report that the U.S. researchers understood the profoundly unethical nature of the study. In fact the Guatemalan syphilis study was being carried out just as the “Doctors’ Trial” was unfolding at Nuremberg (December 1946 – August 1947), when 23 German physicians stood trial for participating in Nazi programs to euthanize or medically experiment on concentration camp prisoners. (Sixteen of the doctors were found guilty and seven were executed: see the University of Missouri-Kansas City Web site on the Nuremberg Trials.)”

 

Humanitarian killer: Abortionist Douglas Karpen

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Credit: Life Dynamics

An example of the explicit, real racism practiced by the left’s humanitarians and “feminists,” a racism that is never criticized in the major media.

Here, it’s analyzed by Judie Brown at CNSNews.com in a piece written on June 28, 2013:

“Abortionist Douglas Karpen, who operates two abortion facilities in Houston, Texas, is currently under criminal investigation. His practice of twisting “babies’ heads off” their bodies in order to ensure that a late-term abortion results in death for the baby was discussed in exclusive live interviews with three of his former employees. And the fireworks began.”

These letters were co-signed by 20 Texas lawmakers.”

What were the fire-works about?

They were set off when African-American pro-life activists asked why it was that Douglas Karpen, a white man, was allowed to keep his clinic open while being investigated for homicide, while the clinics of Kermit Gosnell and James Pendergraft, both black men, were instantly raided and shut down.

The question should be asked, because racism is already a large part of the abortion industry, which was founded on the eugenicist hopes of self-identified racists, like Margaret Sanger.

Abortion Inc. also targets poorer women in the US, usually Hispanic and black,  and it causes the deaths of more than three times the number of black babies as white.

Yet Gosnell’s trial, although pushed off the front pages, has had at least some attention from alternative sites, whereas Karpen, whose crimes are even worse, appears to have slipped under the radar:

She described how some babies would emerge too soon and would be alive, moving, and breathing. She also told of how Karpen would sometimes deliver the babies feet first with the toes wiggling until he stabbed them with a surgical implement. At the moment the toes would suddenly splay out before going limp. Sometimes he would kill the babies by ‘twisting the head off the neck,’ according to Edge……

…‘Sometimes he couldn’t get the fetus out,’ she explained. ‘He would yank pieces – piece by piece – when they were oversize. And I’m talking about the whole floor dirty. I’m talking about me drenched in blood.’

Karpen also injured the mothers recklessly:

Rodriguez also accused the abortionist of showing disregard for the safety of his patients. She indicated that he would sometimes insert the instruments through the woman’s stomach if it was the easiest way to kill the baby.

Edge also claimed that she routinely observed Karpen ‘hurting patients on the table’ and not telling victims of botched abortions that he had lacerated their cervix or uterus.”

Yet, in December last year  a grand jury refused to indict Douglas Karpen:

Operation Rescue alleged that Karpen was murdering babies in in a similar way as convicted Pennsylvania abortion Kermit Gosnell, who was found guilty of three counts of first-degree murder for intentionally killing babies born alive during late-term abortions.”

Documents show that Karpen had a lengthy history of using high-pressure sales tactics on under-age minority girls to get them to undergo  dangerous late-term abortions, tripling his medical fee in one case, and threatening them to stop them telling their parents.

Virgin Birth – the product of Kriyashakthi

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UPDATE

The long excerpt I posted below, supposedly about a woman who had the experience of virgin birth, is intended to bolster my argument that such things have been recorded throughout history and that religious texts outside Christianity have described them.

However, I don’t subscribe to the author’s eco-feminism and gnosticism.  I should add that I’ve noticed not a few blogs recently that are essentially Gnostic, not Christian,  advocating radical celibacy. They might have been around all along, of course.

There is a strong radical celibacy movement that derides human sexuality, originating from Putin’s Russia (more on that later).

Caveat lector, as always.

ORIGINAL POST

The Virgin birth is the central mystery of Christianity, inseparable from the Cross and the Resurrection.

Nor -in a more generic form –  is it unique to Christianity.

From the pregnancy of Kunti with Karna (in Hinduism) to the birth of the Buddha from Maya, virgin birth has been described and sanctified across cultures.

Moreover, any study of yoga will tell you that such a thing is not an impossibility, within the frame of reference of yoga.

Shakti (energy) creates spontaneously, when the attention is powerful.

That observation is the basis for the popular “Law of Attraction” but it is a foundation of Hindu belief, finding its confirmation in Christian doctrine. On the other hand, Incarnation is denied both in Islam and  some forms of Judaism.

HInduism  affirms both incarnation (avatar) and the Trinity (the law of three – creation, preservation, and destruction).

One reason I came to Hinduism spontaneously while quite young and while in a thoroughly Christian atmosphere was my experience of Kriyashakthi, which until then I thought was my personal secret.

I experienced spontaneous precognitive experiences, as well as experiences of repeated synchronicity and “attraction,” which made me doubt the “scientism” around me.

The explanation for these experiences I found only in yoga texts, which is what drew me to a syncretist Hindu-Christian belief I retain to this day.

It was in Hinduism that I found the teaching that let me understand and accept the doctrines of Christianity unproblematically and without the sterile speculations of modern deist and atheist Christians like Tillich and Kung.

This understanding differs from the mainstream teachings of both Judaism and Judaism’s cousin, Islam.

More below about Kriyashakthi and Virgin Birth (I don’t subscribe to the blogger’s feminist theories):

“In the early 70’s I read and wrote a review for a book about the Ojibwa or Chippewa people. (Sorry, I can’t remember the title.) The author spent a decade re-searching oral stories from the Ojibwa’s old traditional speakers that existed before the coming of the Whiteman. One story was that wise-women of the tribe looked for certain young maidens that possessed grace, intelligence and compassion. Sometimes a candidate for conceiving and giving birth this way wouldn’t show up for a generation or two. Nevertheless, these wise-women kept an eagle-eye open for her. When found, men were not allowed to court her. When she reached the age of fertility, her first period, she was instructed to fast for several days and, if willing, was required to dance around a fire in a sacred women’s lodge built far away from the village. This ceremony occurred while she was ovulating. Ideally a state of bliss or ecstasy was reached during which, according to hidden wise women knowledge, it would be possible for her to conceive and give birth in the “old Way”. They also knew that a child born this way would be blessed with gifts of healing, clairvoyance or leadership. The Great Spirit would give to the child whatever tools the tribe might be in need of. I believe this is what happened among The Essenes along The Dead Sea over 2,000 years ago. Jesus was the result. It’s my guess that they planned it. Also, I might venture to say that this “old way” of conceiving and giving birth was considered a no-no during a time when patriarchy was firmly established. Was this why King Herod felt so threatened, enough to try and have all the new born males put to death in his kingdom?

It’s assumed that the law of parthenogenesis results in the birth of females only. This has been shown to occur in animal, insect and microscopic species but it may operate differently among humans, for there is a visionary power us humans possess. The Sanskrit term for it is Kriyashakti or, in short, Shakti; the mysterious power of thought which enables us to produce external, perceptible, phenomenal results by its own inherent energy. Any idea will manifest itself externally if one’s attention is deeply concentrated. If a woman envisions a boy it’s quite possible she will give birth to one. “In the Mother Cell begins all living things. The Creative Principle is feminine. The highest divine mystery is Brahamana, the feminine of Brahma.” (according to Hindu mythology) If I haven’t scared the reader off by dipping into religious lore, one might ask the biological reason for the presence of the hymen in women. I believe only one species of whale has a hymen but it is to keep sea-water out. Among us humans the hymen remains a “medical mystery”. Some folks think it’s there merely as fodder for comedians. Is it there because Nature, the great conservative, has a higher form of conception and birth in mind for women? One might also inquire about dermoid cysts—-or certain types of them.

Looking up dermoid cysts in Chambers Medical Dictionary, under Medio-logical Records, one finds; “dermoid cystic growths; embryonic growths or tumor-like formations found in women which are of congenital origin, containing evidence of being dejecta membra, or the remains of pregnant growths, in the embryonic fetal period of gestation, somewhat akin to the primary state of being with child.” Some of these dermoid cysts, sometimes mistaken by surgeons for tumors, but really are embryos, are similar in all respects to the products of female gestation, containing bones, hair, teeth, flesh, glands, portions of the scalp, face, eyes, ribs,—–in short, all the organs of the human body—what else could they be but virgin embryos in the process of development? The following is from a recent news item (as of Oct.’09) : A dermoid cyst, also known as benign cystic teratoma, which develops “from germ cells which are primitive cells that are capable of producing eggs and all human tissues,” Dr. Judith Reichman says on MSNBC’s Web site, www.msnbc.msn.com. “A dermoid cyst is formed if the germ cells multiply bizarrely without fertilization, forming an encapsulated tumor that contains hair, sebaceous or oil materials, cartilage, bone, neural tissue and teeth.”
In a lecture delivered before the New York Academy of Medicine in 1933, on “Immaculate Conception—a Scientific Possibility”, Dr. Walter Timme, eminent endocrinologist, presented evidence to prove that Immaculate Conception is physiologically possible. The parovarium of the female reproductive organs, he claims, in some cases can produce living spermatozoa capable of impregnating eggs in the same body, causing them to develop without male fertilization.
They’ve been known to appear in young girls from 8 to 16 that have their hymens intact. Unbeknownst to them, one of their eggs had parthenogenetically been fertilized and then had stopped developing and, typically getting trapped in their fallopian tube, had to be removed, as the failed embryo had become toxic. There is reason to believe that parthenogenesis was the primordial form of re-production for all life, while sexual generation (epigenesist) arose later as a result of inferior environmental and nutritive conditions resulting in diminished fertility. In other words, males develop in order to insure the survival of the species. [Lila You could also say that sex developed after the Fall, which created an “inferior environmental and nutritive condition….”]

Anthropoid apes, our closest biological cousins, have a monthly period while in captivity and on a artificial diet.

[Lila: By restricting the diet, for instance, menstruation can be controlled.]

“When returned to their natural habitat and diet they will bleed in the Spring and Fall like most mammals. Back in 1969 I used to live at Hippocrates Health Institute, in Boston, where everyone drank wheatgrass juice, ate raw sprouts, fruits, nuts and vegetables and nothing else. That means, no bread, grains, meats, or dairy products. The root philosophy at Hippocrates is that “Life Comes Only From Life”. After a month or two on this living food diet some women would have their periods lessen in the amount of blood-loss; and the overall discomfort and cramps they usually experience practically vanished. One woman in particular, who I got to know as a sister, lost her period completely and enjoyed total health. I also met several women who experienced extended fasts of one month or more. They had no periods as well. It’s also quite common that many women athletes lose their periods. Non-menstruating women, providing they are on a (super)-natural diet, faithfully practicing yoga or getting lots of vigorous exercise, like women athletes, enjoy a superior, overall health with a robust vitality. They’re able to re-absorb vitamins, minerals and hormones otherwise lost during menstruation. I should say that women on a normal, civilized diet should have their period. This is nature’s way of cleaning house. We can’t all be raw-fooders. Frankly, most of us can’t even imagine wanting to be a super-natural-health-nut. I do not encourage going in this raw-food direction unless one truly studies the subject in depth with experienced teachers. A commitment to this lifestyle is taxing—-at least until one eliminates the accumulations of a toxic, civilized diet. There are artistic depictions of Mary standing on the Crescent Moon. Did our ancestors know that women had to rise above the moon (menstruation) in order to immaculately conceive? Indeed it seems obvious, from what we’ve observed thus far, that a clean, living food diet is necessary for eliminating wasteful monthly menstruation and is the foundation for the process of parthenogenesis. Part of the condition required for a virgin birth is alkalinity. A proper raw-food diet alkalizes the blood. In a way we are like alkaline batteries—80% alkaline, 20% acid—which allows us to hold our life-force completely. If this balance is upset, as in a “civilized” diet, the life-force fails to fill the body and illness results.

It’s obvious that the human race is over-sexed. The earth has amassed way too many bodies that don’t know how to get along with each other and are straining the earth’s resources.

[Lila: Here the author’s eco-feminism is unnecessarily tacked on.]

This is old news. But sex is beautiful and deemed necessary by almost everyone I know. I’m the last person to say it is wrong or evil. Still, 50% of marriages end in divorce. Think of rape, disease, un-planned pregnancies, over-population and the endless battle of the sexes. Oh well, we must pay the fiddler for our modern lifestyles. I do. In almost every culture on earth and in almost every major religion stories of The Virgin Birth abide. The following is an old Fijian legend: “There was a great chief in Tonga who had an exceedingly beautiful daughter. He hid her from the eyes of men, for he had never seen one worthy to be her husband. Down on the sea-beach he built a fence, thick, strong and high. Here she used to bathe after which it was her custom to lie down for a time upon the clean white sand within the fence, that she might rest a while, and that her body might dry. So it came to pass that the Sun looked down upon her, and saw her and loved her; and in the course of time a child was born to her, whose name she called Sun-child”.

Film to expose abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s serial infanticide

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UPDATE

A conservative site has a list of other abortion facilities guilty of negligence, showing that the Gosnell case is not an outlier. This is the ugly, brutalizing industry that abortion activists try to prettify with touchy-feely movies.

ORIGINAL POST

A film-maker couple is intent on exposing the murderous career of Kermit Gosnell, the millionaire African-American Philadelphia abortionist who was found guilty of severing the spines of new-born babies whom he had failed to successfully abort. It has been called the most important story not being covered by the major media in America:

“It has been described as one of the most important stories never told: the case of Kermit Gosnell, an abortion doctor some believe killed thousands of babies over the span of three decades.

From the 1970s to early 2010, the sign on Gosnell’s West Philadelphia clinic read “Women’s Medical Society.” But in 2010, after investigating claims of an illegal prescription drug operation, federal agents discovered what they call a “house of horrors.”

Three years later, a jury found Gosnell guilty on three counts of murder for killing babies that were born alive. He was also convicted of manslaughter in the death of a 41-year-old Bhutanese immigrant who died from a botched abortion while under his care.”

Trying to work up funding for their project, the film-makers, Anne McElhinney and her husband Phelim McAleer, ran into problems with the supposedly independent crowd-sourcing site, Kickstarter, which they believe tried to censor the project.

Heritage.org reports that Gosnell  killed at least a hundred babies and it published gruesome photos of the body parts stored in the clinic:

Abortion doctor's 'house of horrors'

Gosnell’s assistants (including a 15 year old)  were untrained, but participated in the procedures and prescribed medicine; Gosnell’s instruments were rusty and old and the clinic was filthy.

“This case is about a doctor who killed babies … What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors …. Over the years, many people came to know that something was going on here. But no one put a stop to it.”

This was the number of reporters at this trial:

bench

This is the grand jury report on Gosnell’s house of horrors.

Some excerpts:

“Mrs. Mongar was just one of many patients victimized by Gosnell’s depravity. There were scores more. At least one other mother died following an abortion in which Gosnell punctured her uterus and then sent her home. He left an arm and a leg of a partially aborted fetus in the womb of another woman, and then told her he did not need to see her when she became sick days later, having developed a temperature of 106 degrees. He perforated bowels, cervixes, and uteruses. He left women sterile. He also killed live, viable, moving, breathing, crying babies. He killed them by cutting their spinal cords after their mothers had delivered them after receiving excessive amounts of medication designed to induce active labor. This report documents multiple murders of viable babies. The evidence makes a compelling case that many others were murdered.”

According to the report, Gosnell made $10-15,000 every night from a few hours of work.

Even more damning was his attitude:

“Gosnell routinely cracked jokes about babies whose necks he had just slit. He treated his patients with condescension – slapping them, providing abysmal care, and often refusing even to see or talk to them – unless they were Caucasian, or had money.”

Gosnell’s procedures were performed on babies that had been delivered, were viable, and  exhibited pain.

“After the baby was expelled, Cross noticed that he was breathing, though not for long. After about 10 to 20 seconds, while the mother was asleep, “the doctor just slit the neck,” said Cross. Gosnell put the boy’s body in a shoebox. Cross described the baby as so big that his feet and arms hung out over the sides of the container. Cross said that she saw the baby move after his neck was cut, and after the doctor placed it in the shoebox. Gosnell told her, “it’s the baby’s reflexes. It’s  not really moving.”

Gosnell crushed the skulls of babies that had been delivered and were viable:

“Under further questioning, Massof acknowledged that Gosnell and he almost al
ways cut the spinal cords, and sometimes suctioned skulls as well, after the babies were fully expelled by their mothers, when there was clearly no need or medical reason to collapse the skull. Tina Baldwin’s testimony also made it clear that Gosnell was not cutting spinal  cords, crushing babies’ skulls, or suctioning in order to allow the head to pass through the cervix. Even while claiming that Gosnell sometimes suctioned a fetus’s skull in order to
get  it through the birth canal, her description of his technique belied her claim: She said
that he would “crack” the neck after the head was out – when only the baby’s torso was
still inside the mother – and then suction the brain matter out.”

Her killed several of the women who came to him with over-dosages and bad medication, and, at least in one case, refrained from doing anything to reverse his actions:

“After returning several minutes later with the medicine case, however, Gosnell did not use any of the drugs in it to try to save Mrs. Mongar’ s life. O’Neill said that she tried to use the defibrillator “paddles” to revive Mrs. Mongar, but that they did not work. Still no one called 911. Even though an overdose was immediately suspected as the cause of Mrs. Mongar’s cardiac arrest, O’Neill testified that Gosnell instructed her not to administer Narcan, a drug that could have reversed the effects of the Demerol. She said that Gosnell told her it would not work on Demerol – which is not true according to the toxicology expert who appeared before the Grand Jury. O’Neill testified that Gosnell took the time to look through the case of medicines and that he was “thrilled” to find it was up-to-date. This is puzzling, since he seemed to have no intent of actually using the drugs to try to save Mrs. Mongar.”

In 2013, Population Research Institute reported on the suppressed story and blamed ideology for the media silence:

“The mainstream media has done an excellent job of completely ignoring the trial of Kermit Gosnell. As everyone knows by now, Gosnell was the Philadelphia abortionist famous for “snipping the spines” of newborns who happened to survive his efforts to abort them.

The state health authorities ignored his clinic for 17 long years. Then one of his patients died from a drug overdose. At long last, the authorities decided to come in and take a look around.

They were horrified by what they found. There was blood and animal feces everywhere and the stench of urine filled the air. Jars filled with the severed feet of babies lined the shelves, ghoulish “trophies” of Gosnell’s grisly work.

Then, when the investigators attempted to check the medical licenses of Gosnell’s employees, whom he referred to as his fellow “doctors,” they found that they had none. They were practicing medicine without a license.

After Gosnell’s arrest became public, present and past workers in his abortion mill began to come forward with their own stories. They spoke of babies crying after being born alive, only to be silenced by Gosnell’s scissors. They spoke of having to wrap up these tiny corpses in tissue and throw them in a deep freeze.

This trial should be making the headlines in every major paper, and be leading the news broadcasts each night. Every other mass murder story in America ignites a media frenzy, after all. Yet Gosnell’s trial has been greeted by silence. The national media is doing its best to pretend it doesn’t exist.

One Washington Post blog writer explains the lack of coverage in an article entitled Why Kermit Gosnell hasn’t been on page one: “I say we didn’t write more because the only abortion story most outlets ever cover in the news pages is every single threat or perceived threat to abortion rights. In fact, that is so fixed a view of what constitutes coverage of that issue that it’s genuinely hard, I think, for many journalists to see a story outside that paradigm as news.”

Again, a post on HuffPost Live echoed this sentiment: “For what it’s worth, I do think that those of us on the left have made a decision not to cover this trial because we worry that it’ll compromise abortion rights. Whether you agree with abortion or not, I do think there’s a direct connection between the media’s failure to cover this and our own political commitments on the left. I think it’s a bad idea, I think it’s dangerous, but I think that’s the way it is.” In other words, the mainstream media, predominantly leftist, sees this case as detrimental to abortion “rights”, so they ignore abortion wrongs.”

Many pro-life activists believe Gosnell is only the tip of the iceberg:

“Prosecutors say Gosnell routinely cut live babies in the back of the neck to sever their spines. Pro-abortion groups have suggested Gosnell’s alleged murder of live children is the exception in the abortion industry.

But a video released by the pro-life group Live Action shows Washington, D.C., abortion doctor Cesare Santangelo telling a 24-weeks pregnant woman he will not give medical care to a baby born alive.”

Natural AC: Five plants that can dehumidify for free

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Tillandsia Royalty Free Stock Images

I’ve been looking around for natural methods to combat humidity for those days when the air-conditioner fails….or in places where it isn’t used.

For instance, AC isn’t as popular in Europe as it is in the United States.

That’s for a variety of reasons – including greater environmental awareness, better built homes, and popular fear of illness from constant exposure to cold air. Many Europeans think  air-conditioning makes you sick.

[Read this American tourist’s AC-induced cultural-shock in France.]

AC is also a lot of maintenance and expense.

So, finding a way to get humidity down without becoming dependent on a complicated mechanical device has got to be attractive to anyone with a survivalist bent.

There are several well-known natural methods to reduce humidity, but they still take quite a bit of effort and not all the ingredients are easy to come by in developing countries.

One of them requires hanging cheese-cloth (or gunny, burlap, or jute) bags of rock-salt from the ceiling, with buckets beneath to catch the water as it drips down.

Rock-salt is a desiccant, which means it extracts the moisture from the air until it is water-logged itself.

If you’ve ever had a salt-shaker that got clogged on humid days, you know how that works.

By the way, the solution to moisture in salt-shakers is simple – throw in a few grains of raw rice. They’ll absorb moisture in the shaker and keep your salt dry.

If rock-salt (salt with large crystals) is unavailable where you live, you can also spread table-salt in pans and leave them on counters or shelves. Table salt will absorb some atmospheric moisture until it’s too wet do absorb any more.  After the salt becomes water-logged, it can still be heated, dried, and reused.

Other dehumidifiers include baking soda , silica, and charcoal briquets. They do well as desiccators, but they’re not cheap in many places and they need to be replenished…or, in the case of silica, heated for reuse.

I’ve never tried salt or silica this way, so I don’t know if it actually has an appreciable effect on the humidity inside a house that’s worth the effort and clutter of pans and bags all over the place.

A simpler and more aesthetic method would be to grow indoor plants that absorb humidity.

At first, this seems counter-intuitive, because most plants add to the moisture content of the air.

If you live in an arid area, humidifying plants can be very useful.

That’s besides all the other proven benefits of house plants – purifying the air, improving mental focus and general health, speeding up healing, and making it easier for you to breathe.

Still,  there are a few plants that reduce humidity or at least balance it.

DoItYourself.com has a list of five “plant dehumidifiers” that are easily grown indoors:

1. The Peace Lily, which needs watering just once a week and sucks in moisture from the air the rest of the time.

2. The Reed Palm, which also purifies the air.

3. English Ivy, which you can hang from the ceiling out of your way, where it will reduce humidity and take care of airborne mold.

4. Boston Fern, which balances the humidity in the air, in addition to reducing it.

5. Tillandsia (also known as air-plant), which doesn’t even need a root system to absorb water an nutrients from the atmosphere.

The catch to this list is that when I researched the names of plants that add to humidity indoors, three names on this list –  the peace lily, the English Ivy, and the Boston fern – showed up on the list of humidifiers as well.

So, if humidity is a severe problem where you live, it might be better to just stick with the Reed plant  (one of the most useful plants in permaculture) and Tillandsia.

Tillandsia, a type of bromeliad, needs no soil and very little watering and can be mounted on cork, wood, wire, twigs, on a shelf or wall cabinet.

No cost water-harvesting when you stop raking

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From Brad Lancaster’s Rain-water Harvesting blog comes the welcome advice that less is more. Raking removes ground cover, encourages water evaporation, dries out soil. The result is poor soil quality, lower aquifers and dry, unhealthy vegetation. Leave the leaves alone!

“Fortunately, there is a way to harvest water, even during droughts.  It costs nothing, and requires no expenditure of energy.  Can this be true?  Grab yourself a cool drink, take a seat, and let the litter fall.  Leaf and stem litter, that is.

A handful of mesquite leaf litter, delivered free of charge by the canopy overhead, can help retain water on your landscape. Photo credit: Julia Fonseca

You’ve been spending too much time raking and bagging those leaves, seed pods and twigs.  They could be working for you, if you don’t throw them out.  No, I’m not talking about composting.  Composting is work too! But if you just left the litter where it fell, it would in time form a nice natural mulch that would slow erosion, build up the water-holding ability of the soil, and help make the soil easier to dig, if you do decide to dig a swale someday.  Be a litter harvester!

Plant litter is so important that it is one of the three key measurements that the Natural Resources Conservation Service uses as a measure of watershed condition. Plant cover, litter, and rock all help stem erosion of sloping land.  If it’s not raining, only litter and rock can retard runoff, and shade the soil, AND retain moisture.  (But see my rant against crushed rock landscaping.)

A layer of litter will work for you every time it rains well enough to penetrate the litter layer, making it more difficult for the sun to evaporate moisture from the soil below. So, if you do need to rake up litter, then consider moving it to areas where it can mulch a plant.

Even when it isn’t raining, a layer of leaf litter recruits workers to improve your soil. Unlike rock, leaf and twig litter is readily colonized by tiny organisms, and those attract others and pretty soon you have unpaid laborers tunneling into your soil, creating “macropores” for better, deeper infiltration.  In urban Tucson you can also get thrashers, cactus wrens and towhees tilling the ground and scratching for goodies!

All work together to decompose your litter into smaller pieces, and that helps pump extra carbon into the soil.  Extra carbon in your soils is part of the magic.  Soil carbon boosts the ability of the soil to hold water for later use by plants, resulting in a healthier and more drought-resistant landscape.”

Comment

My interest in rain-water harvesting is not theoretical.  Apart from the rising cost of water in the US itself, which means higher bills during a time of recession, water has become a serious crisis in many countries, including India.

The southern state of Karnataka has a critical shortage of water and even in Tamil Nadu, which traditionally has torrential rains from two monsoons, water has become an election issue.

In part, this is because of a massive demand from increasing numbers of corporations, foreign and domestic, that flock to the state and receive preferential access at every level.

In part, it is because of  the government subsidy of agricultural water-use that leads to waste and mis-allocation.

There’s also the government-subsidized real estate boom, which created in India exactly what it created in the US – a huge misdirection of  funds into home-building . That’s led to shortages in building materials like concrete and sand.

It’s also put a big dent in the water table in many areas.

These days, bottled water is a necessity in many urban areas, but it’s expensive and makes for dependence on the water-supplier.

Water self-sufficiency is the answer,  both at the level of the house-hold and of the nation.

Rain-water harvesting: Green living on a Bangalore roof

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From Rainwaterharvesting blog, run by a Bangalore couple who are active in the water-conservation and rain-harvesting movement in India:

“Almost all the rain on the building site falls on the roof. In Bangalore it can rain 970 mm in an average year. This meant that our house roof with an area of 100 square metres had 97,000 litres of pure rainwater falling on it. With the idea why allow it to go waste, we started to harvest it? This harvesting was done at many levels.

From the staircase rooftop which had an area of 10 square metres, we placed a Rain barrel and collected the water on the roof itself. A small platform was designed and the 500 litre Rain Barrel placed on it. On the staircase roof we placed a gutter to collect the rain. This came down into a vertical pipe with an end cap called the first rain separator. During the first rain and subsequently when we want to clean the roof or the rain gutter we open the cap and the dusty water flows out through the first rain separator. Then after a ‘Y trap’ rainwater flows in through a ‘dhoti filter’ into our rain barrel. We checked the rainwater quality using a H2S strip test and found the water potable. Sometimes when there is slight contamination we use a method called SODIS (Solar Disinfection) to treat the collected rainwater for drinking purpose. Here you fill a PET bottle with the rainwater and leave it in the sun for 5 hours. The water is now sterilized and can be brought into the house cooled and is ready for drinking. This is not a low cost solution for water treatment but a no-cost solution.  Our annual requirement of drinking cooking water comes from this rain barrel alone.

Rain Barrel

We also have an Ecosan toilet on the terrace. This pan in the toilet separates solids and liquids at source. We collect the urine in a barrel, dilute it and use it as a fertilizer for our terrace garden. The solids are covered with ash every time we use it. This is then transferred to some Blue drums we have kept on the terrace and again covered with earth or straw. We then plant trees in these drums. Trees such as Papaya, lemon, curry leaves, sapota are planted and they grow well. No waste from our toilet on the terrace leaves the roof.

The rainwater falling on the Ecosan toilet too is collected in a 200 litre rain barrel and used for ablution purpose.

We have a box type solar cooker to cook our lunch on the terrace. A solar water heater heats water for bath and for the kitchen. During cloudy days we use a ‘Gujarat boiler’ which uses bio-mass for the water heating. The Gujarat Boiler also generates ash for us to use in the Eco-san toilet. We have planted many trees in front of the house and the twigs and branches from the trees are used for the Gujarat Boiler.

Next we have placed a bathroom on the terrace itself. This also has a front loading washing machine which is one of the most water efficient ones in the market. We collect the water from the bath we have on the terrace bathroom as well as from the washing machine in a small ferro-cement tank placed just below the roof slab. We then pump it up to a planted reed filter to clean up the grey-water using a small pump. The reed filter is Cattails – reeds found in lakes- placed in 4 blue drums. In a fifth drum we have sand and gravel filter to clean up the grey-water further. This treated grey-water is then used for the terrace garden where we sometimes grow rice paddy.  Some extra grey-water is also used for flushing the toilet in the ground floor. No greywater is allowed to go waste.

The rice on the rooftop grows well on even a small area. We place 2 sheets of a pond lining material called Silpaulin with a brick edging. The sheet is then filled with a mix of compost, vermi-compost and red earth up-to a depth of 2 to 3 inches. Rice paddy is then planted in it. The water required for the paddy comes from grey-water alone. For the fertilizer the urine from the Eco-san toilet is used. Kitchen waste which is composted is also added to the soil. We have had productions of paddy to the tune of 1 kg per square meter. We have also found that we can grow 4 crops of rice in a year. Millets can also be grown instead of rice. Vegetables such as tomatoes, brinjals, lady-fingers, chilies all grow on the terrace though the monkeys who frequent this place can also be a nuisance at times.

A small wetland has also been created in a ferro-cement tank where different plants and fishes occupy and clean water.

Solar photo-voltaic panels on the roof provide enough power for us to store in batteries and use to light 11 bulbs in the house. The house incidentally has no fans let alone AC’s thanks to the cool terrace as well as thanks to the trees planted on the sides which enfold it in shade.

A well designed rooftop can provide all the water required for a house-hold, provide energy for cooking , lighting and water heating, provide food-grains and vegetables , enhance bio-diversity as well as absorb all the waste-stream from the house from the kitchen and bathroom / toilets and convert it to reuse .

Jamaicans Oppose Homophile Thought-Control

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Update: Just to be clear, I don’t believe in criminalizing homosexuality.  My attitude to the question of gay marriage is,  whatever…

If gays want to get married and churches want to marry them, that’s between them and their churches.

I don’t think Christianity sanctions it, but then Christianity also doesn’t sanction psyops, market manipulation, total war, and any number of other things that society (and many churches) accept wordlessly.

However, I do have a problem with the gay lobby preventing people from expressing their views, by demonizing traditional morality as hate-speech. And  I abhor fraudulent history…

ORIGINAL POST

From MassResistance.org

Why is free-speech in opposition to homosexuality being shut down as “hate speech” or a form of mental illness? A Jamaican church group involved in mass resistance to the pro-gay lobby makes the case:

The Jamaican-Gleaner, May 27 2013

“He [Dr West] added: “So to say we are all mad and irrational is an insult. ‘Homophobia’ was deliberately constructed by a psychologist to make persons against any same-sex act to have a phobia, which in medical language is a mental illness.”

Yesterday the coalition took out a full-page advertisement in The Gleaner, declaring that ‘Speaking Truth is NOT Homophobia’, but that it is common sense, medical sense and economic sense.

Urging persons to reject the homosexual lifestyle, the advertisement quoted statistics from researchers at Johns Hopkins Center University for AIDS Research in the United States, published in the medical journals Lancet and AIDS Behaviour.

Among the findings quoted were that 98 per cent of the difference in HIV rates between MSM (men who have sex with men) and heterosexuals can be explained by anal receptive intercourse; MSM is the only group with increasing HIV in countries of all income levels; HIV is out of control among MSM in France; HIV rates in black MSM are 100 times that of the general population in the United Kingdom, United States and Canada; and HIV is disproportionately high and increasing among MSM in the US, despite significant increases in ‘rights’.

Evidence clear

“We think it is important that in public discussion facts are brought to bear rather than simple ideology. And these are the facts that there is clear medical evidence that same-sex intimate behaviour among MSM is detrimental, these are the reasons why we reject it, not because we are all mad,” West stated.

He said the main reason for the ‘irrational’ label was to silence the discussion.

“What we have found is that in countries where this political homosexual lobby is advancing, they seek to silence you. You are labelled as homophobic, you are mad, you are not worth listening to, your opinion is of no consequence. But these are fundamental sociological changes and we must have these discussions,” he stated.

“Fight evidence with evidence. If you have a problem with what we are saying, then bring the evidence, don’t just dismiss us as mentally ill.”