FOOT AND MOUTH DISEASE AND HEALTH

by Betty Luks
As one watches the dreadful television scenes of the burning pyres of animals in the UK and realises just what losses the farmer is incurring, not only losing his herd that would have taken many a year to build up, but also his financial losses, the question is asked - WHY? As a layman, it is hard to understand let alone explain what is going on. After all, the farmers were heard to say they have done all that was legally required of them.

Not all readers would be aware of the work done by League supporters in the field of health for soil, animals and humans. You could say that generally League supporters favour a study of health rather than a study of disease. Frank Bawden, the South Australian State Director of the League from 1946 to 1991, was one of the founders of the Soil Association in Australia and was instrumental in bringing out to Australia such pioneers as Lady Eve Balfour of the UK. Lady Phillis Cilento appeared on many a League platform as she promoted the concepts of healthy diets and living. Peter Bennett promoted the health of the soil and Dr. Ziema McDonell has spoken on League platforms a number of times over the last year.

As recorded in Thought for the Week, Sir Albert Howard gained much of his knowledge in this field by observation and experience, and Andre Voison Soil, Grass and Cancer based much of his work on the observation and interpretation of research in many parts of the world and the evidence he presents in his book is striking. He establishes the methods in which mineral elements of the soil condition the organic matter of the vegetable cell and govern its metabolism. He goes on to show that the influence of the soil is transmitted to the cell of the animal, thanks to the grass, the basis of the animal's feeding and that the metabolism of the cells of human tissues is secondarily affected by the same factors.

He wrote in 1959, "When certain soil elements become modified, disappear or are exaggerated, cellular metabolisms become disordered and illness appears."

Nature is unforgiving (we can disobey natural laws but cannot ignore the results) and, sadly, the British farmer (if Albert Howard and Andre Voison are correct) will have to rethink his approach to health and disease.

QUEENSLAND LABOR TO RUSH 'HATE LAWS' THROUGH

THE FAILURE OF GOVERNMENTS

by Antonia Feitz
The real problem in Australia is not the Federal Government, but that we don't have an effective Federal Government. Globalisation is emasculating governments. Globalists believe that the role of governments now is "to explain the inevitability of change and its benefits for the community and to recognise there are losers to be looked after as well as winners". Thus spake The Australian's economics editor, Alan Wood (20/2/01)

For learning his globalisation catechism so well, Prime Minister John Howard should surely get a gold star. Listen to this: "...I have frequently said and I'd say again that managing the impact of change is the biggest challenge that governments have in liberal democratic societies such as Australia."

Queensland's Bob Borbidge sings the same song: "... we have been lousy managers of change."

Clearly 'governing' is out, and managing the people's discontent while unrestrained markets and multinationals wreak social and economic havoc in Australia is in. It's beyond belief that they still don't get it. They still think if they just explained things better we dolts would see the light and agree that destroying Australian society is really a Good Thing. To claim that man hasn't the wit to establish a just and decent society because he is subject to market forces beyond anybody's control is a dismal, arrogant and profoundly immoral viewpoint. It's nonsense too.

All that's lacking is the political will to take control, and that's why members of the Business Council of Australia are getting so agitated. They know there is an alternative to this reckless destruction of civil society for all their lies about 'inevitability'. Of course, the alternative might mean that multinationals won't get to establish their borderless utopia for maximising profits and to hell with the majority of the world's population, the 'losers'. But when even billionaire financier George Soros says there's no such thing as a "market society", why do our elites persist in trying to bring about such a thing? When will they accept the political reality that the Australian people simply will not tolerate a society of pre-ordained winners and losers - i.e., a "market society"? It's non-negotiable.

We know from authoritative sources like The Australian's Davos-attending international editor Paul Kelly that Australia was a test case for globalisation. What happens if / when it fails?

CHERNOBYL AND OUR WORLD-CASINO ECONOMY

by William Krehm Editor, Economic Reform (Toronto, Canada), wkrehm@intemet.look.ca - from ERA Newsletter, March-April 2001

Their Shared Mathematics of Destruction
In November both the American and Canadian election campaigns were run on the assertion that an unprecedented level of prosperity and budgetary surpluses had been achieved. Only when the American balloting was finally disposed of did the disturbing truth burst into the media: the boasted New Economy was in tatters. Its glories, we now learn, had been based on an unprecedented burden of debt that has begun backing up like neglected plumbing.

Almost at the same time, 14 years after the nuclear meltdown of the Chernobyl reactors in the Ukraine, the final reactor was finally shut down. And the world press carried a resume of its staggering costs: a fifth of the entire territory of the Ukraine was so heavily poisoned with radiation that it will be unsuited for human life or agriculture for countless centuries. The victims of the disaster have been more numerous than those of the Hiroshima bomb. The wretched hospital system in the Ukraine is clogged with the resulting cancer patients and the deformed children. The lethal clouds covered a good part of Europe where their affects are less readily monitored.

For years the reactors, known to be deadly, were kept working because the mouse-poor country needed their power output, no matter at what human price. The grieving over the shutdown of the final reactor was as much for the irreplaceable jobs as for the loss of life.

Ultimate indictment of enthroned greed
Such catastrophe in the heart of Europe can only be compared with the condition of sub-Saharan Africa. There is the same spread of disease from AIDS to the revival of tuberculosis. Average life-spans are dropping precipitously and child mortality is rising. Population is declining. Two areas that historically provided the slaves (as in "Slavs") for much of Europe and the Americas are now threatened with being left unpeopled. Cities have been abandoned to moulder and fall apart. Africa, the Ukraine and Belarus are the ultimate indictment of enthroned greed.

There is a reason for the similarity of results in the two areas. The Chernobyl reactor and New Economy of which Africa is the principal victim are based on the same exponential mathematics, the significance of which still has to be grasped by economists. Forget about models where the compounding takes place at fixed interest rates... (The common mathematics of our New Economy and nuclear physics is attested by the use of the spreading importance of the term "derivatives" borrowed from mathematics and physics by high finance little more than a decade ago.)

The future is cut up and appropriated
All this is by-product of a society, where the enhancement of shareholder equity is the priority to which, as wheat to the scythe, everything else bows. Not even the rules of accountancy are exempted. The future is cut up and appropriated, as were the commons in early sixteenth century England to serve as deer-parks. The 16th century, the "Age of Plunder", moved from the enclosure of the commons, to the privatising of the pillage of the monasteries, to the piracy on the seas by which much of the Spaniards' loot from their conquests ended up in England. In the process no stock can fall short of the exponential curve built into such a model without paying a ruinous penalty.

But do stock-market jocks command the freshman maths to dig all this? They don't have to. It is all incorporated in the graphs that usually accompany analyses in our financial press. When you see these graphs standing up vertically like a Viagra ad, you know that their alleged record has been exponential, and exponential it must continue. And if you have overlooked the exponential pattern on the way up, you have plenty of opportunity to catch it on the way down.

These days it is not unusual for outstanding high-tech shares to lose more than half their market evaluation in a matter of weeks. And each time this happens money which today is exclusively credit is destroyed throughout the economy. The consequences are beyond the concerns that have suddenly taken over orthodox commentary about whether the cyclical "landing" of the economy will be "soft" or "hard". The fact is that the globalized, deregulated economy is without landing gear. And it has little to do with the traditional "cycle".

The financial institutions of most of the world are immobilised with capital losses reaching as far back as the seventies. Those cycles are flatter than a Firestone tyre. To borrow from political lingo "there has been no closure". The load of bad debt inherited from the financial crises has not been made good. It has merely been translated into ever more crushing debt taken over by governments, and the general public.

The fractured societies of east Europe and Africa will not revert to where they were 10 or 20 years ago on their own. There is moreover an important sense in which the economics of the Western world are in worse shape than the Soviets were at the time when those Chernobyl reactors went berserk. The clean-up workers sent into what had become atomic furnaces were without protection and were clueless about the danger. But in the same Soviet Union there was a profession of physicists who could stand comparison with that of the West. It knew exactly what Chernobyl was about. That contrasts with the cluelessness of the officially recognised economics profession in the West.

Most economists get their doctoral degree without knowledge of Keynes or the relevance of the laws of freshman high-school algebra to economy. That is why we are headed into what can be the greatest bout of deflation with central bankers who have taken vows never to mention "deflation", with countries whose laws prevent them from incurring a deficit even in times of depression. The toll in human lives of that can easily outstrip that from the Chernobyl disaster.

MULTIPLE CHEMICAL SENSITIVITIES UNDER SIEGE (Part 2)

One example of the pharmaceutical industry's direct attempt to present anti-MCS information at a medical conference was at the 1990 meeting of the American College of Allergy and Immunology. Sandoz (now Novartis) was scheduled to sponsor a one day workshop that characterized people with MCS as mentally ill (24). This company was a large manufacturer of pesticides and pharmaceuticals (25), including anti-psychotic, anti-depressant, and sedative medications (14). Therefore, Sandoz stood to benefit both from pesticides being exonerated as the cause of MCS and from people with MCS being treated with psychiatric drugs. As it turned out, people with MCS outraged by the workshop risked their health to protest the event and were able to shut it down (26).

The pharmaceutical industry also influences research on MCS. First and foremost, it is not pursuing research on MCS (other than to perhaps fund a few studies to try to discount it), despite being a major source of funding for medical research to help those with other diseases. Secondly, as was evident when the Ciba-Geigy lobbyist opposing funding for MCS research in New Mexico, the industry is not only refraining from doing research on MCS itself but is attempting to block research by others as well.

A recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine outlined a myriad of ways that financial ties with the pharmaceutical industry may influence physicians (27). "The ties between clinical researchers and industry include not only grant support, but also a host of other financial arrangements. Researchers serve as consultants to companies whose products they are studying, join advisory boards and speakers' bureaus, enter into patent and royalty arrangements, agree to be the listed authors of articles ghost written by interested companies, promote drugs and devices at company-sponsored symposiums, and allow themselves to be plied with expensive gifts and trips to luxurious settings" (p. 1516). In fact, some industries, including the tobacco industry, have paid authors up to $10,000 to publish letters in high-profile scientific journals (28, 29).

The author of another New England Journal of Medicine article wrote, "The practice of buying editorials reflects the growing influence of the pharmaceutical industry on medical care" (30). Since these conflicts of interest are increasingly encroaching on the medical profession in general, it is highly likely that some of them apply to physicians opposed to MCS as well."

BOOKS for further reading
"World Without Cancer" by Edward G. Griffin. Edward Griffin was one of the first writers to expose the nexus between cancer and big business. One of the chapters is titled "Politics of cancer therapy". Price: $28.00, Posted $33.00.

"Quick Poison: Slow Poison" by Kate Short. This is research by an Australian for Australians. After six years Kate brings the results of her exhaustive research into the public view. Farmers take note: She argues that the risk to exports from poison residues could upset the livelihood of many in the rural sector. By letting those affected by pesticides "Quick Poison: Slow Poison" presents the human face of the pesticide risk and reveals what has often been a litany of corporate deceit and government inaction. Price: $25.00, Posted: $28.00.

Footnote
Heard on Queensland radio recently
Vaccination rates for children have increased from 50 percent to 90 percent now that doctors are paid for every vaccination they carry out.

"Mad-cow' Disease
Rumours are circulating that already an outbreak of 'mad cow' disease has occurred in the south-east of South Australia - but has been 'hushed up'. Another unsubstantiated rumour is that in Victoria there are a number of persons hospitalised who have been diagnosed with the human variety of the disease. These are not matters that can be hushed up indefinitely. If there is any truth to the rumours it is only a matter of time before the news 'breaks'. Again, if there is any truth to the claim that this disease is caused by organophosphates, commonly used by farmers, one reason given as to why there has not been a wider 'outbreak' of the disease is that unsubsidised Australian farmers are too cash-strapped to purchase the recommended amounts of the chemicals, whereas, the European Union farmers are heavily subsidised and can afford them...Ed.

COMPUTERS CAUSING MEMORY SHUTDOWN?

According to an article by Margot Denny in The Sunday Times, 4/2/01: "Growing numbers of people in their twenties and thirties are suffering from severe memory loss because of increasing reliance on computer technology according to new research. Sufferers complain that they are unable to recall names, written words or appointments, and in some cases have had to give up their jobs. Doctors are blaming computer technology, electronic organisers and automatic car navigation systems. They claim that these gadgets lead to diminished use of the brain to work out problems and inflict "information overload".
A preliminary study of 150 Japanese people aged 20 to 35 has shown more than one in 10 are suffering from severe memory problems; leading researchers from Japan's Hokkaido University have called for further investigation.
They're losing the ability to remember new things, to pull out old data or to distinguish between important and unimportant information. It's a type of brain dysfunction, said Toshiyuki Sawaguchi, a professor of neurobiology. Young people today are becoming stupid.

One high-flying 28-year-old salesman treated by Dr. Sawaguchi was forced to give up his job when he found himself forgetting where he was going, who he was seeing or, when he finally got there, what he was selling.

Australian author and child psychologist John Irvine said yesterday that computers could make people lazy. When we work with computers we expect it to do the memory work for us, by pressing save. People don't need to remember as much information as before because the computer does it for us. As a society we are becoming more anxious as a result of spending more time with faceless and sometimes frustrating computers. Once anxiety increases then learning decreases,Dr. Irvine said.

However, Zyron Krupenia, a clinical psychologist from Perth said: "While computers could encourage mental laziness with people, they also require logical thought patterns such as lineal filing systems, which can be stimulating. The same fears were discussed when pocket calculators were introduced. Everyone said we would forget how to do maths, and that's not true."

Antonia Feitz's comment
That's NOT true? How many children today can do long division, multiply without a calculator, or even add up and subtract? There's nothing wrong with calculators, but children should still know how to perform basic mathematical functions. Memory is like every other faculty: use it or lose it.

FINAL DATE FOR SUBMISSIONS EXTENDED

THE OTHER LEAGUE PUBLICATIONS

The latest issues of the Heritage Journal and The New Times Survey are outstanding and we recommend them to our readers. Heritage celebrates the centenary of Federation with articles about Australia's first Governor-General and lists Australia's Prime Ministers. Nigel Jackson writes on "Shakespeare and the Soul of Britain" and author Rex Gilroy compiles material from his book Pyramids in the Pacific for an article questioning "Were the Aboriginals the First Australians?"
The Australian Heritage Society's "Citizens of the Century" are nominated and there is much more to be read. Annual subscription is $30.00. Post direct to: PO Box 163, Chidlow, WA, 6556.

The New Times Survey has as its editor Mr. Jeremy Lee. Now, what can we say about the work of Jeremy Lee that hasn't been said before? His article in the February edition on the dangerous neutrality of the present Christian Church is simply brilliant. In "Credits, Creeds and Crisis" he writes, "The disease, simply, is neutrality - the avoidance of controversy and conflict, which means never taking a stand. It has reached the point where "taking a stand" on anything is regarded as being outside the ambit of the church..." This stand is contrasted with that taken by Leo the Great, Bishop of Rome in 452 AD, when Rome was threatened by Attila the Hun and his 30,000 armed barbarians. A must read.
The New Times Survey is published monthly $25.00 annually. Subscriptions sent to the Melbourne address: GPO Box 1052J, Melbourne, 3001.

SOUTH AUSTRALIA TO FACE ENERGY CRISIS

BOOKS, BOOKS, BOOKS

"Thine is the Kingdom": An excellent little booklet to help the reader understand the approaches to health and disease is Ralph Laslett Duck's Thine is the Kingdom. It gives an overview of the two approaches and the philosophies undergirding them. Sir Albert Howard's work is mentioned, along with the work of Dr. Antoine Béchamp and Louis Pasteur. $6.50 posted.

"The Aids Time Bomb": In the light of the terrible tragedy now taking place in Africa, Dr. John West's book The Aids Time Bomb is an important read. He asked the question "Are there millions with AIDS and other diseases related to 'dirty' polio and other vaccines? Make up your own mind. $18.50 posted.

QUEENSLAND BOOK MAILING SERVICES

SYDNEY CONSERVATIVE SPEAKERS' CLUB 2001

2001 INVERELL FORUM COMING UP - March 23rd-26th