Preparation 500

Preparation 500
From The Bear Deluxe magazine (June 2011)
1912 words

To our modern way of thinking, this all sounds quite insane.
– Rudolf Steiner, Lectures on Agriculture, 1924

Allan Balliett got sick in 1980. It came on as a flurry of symptoms, all of which seemed to take roost at once, and no one knew what was wrong or how to fix it. A systems analyst for the U.S. Department of the Treasury in Washington, D.C., Balliet suddenly found himself fatigued, his hair falling out “by the handfuls,” too weak and unfocused to adequately unravel the federal computer network. He says he “serial napped” on weekends 40 hours or… Read More »

Swine defense (essay on specious ‘cures’ for swine flu)

Swine defense
From In Good Tilth magazine, Spring 2010

Swine flu is now widespread in 48 U.S. states, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, told health officials July 3 in Mexico that the “the virus is now unstoppable.” 


Add the scarcity of H1N1 vaccine, distrust over the safety of the vaccine itself, and growing demand for alternative or self-prescribed medicine, and it all adds up to an excellent marketing op for unscrupulous businesses preying on a fearful, and suspicious public. Consequently, herbal remedies for swine flu are all… Read More »

Making a Killing

Making a Killing
From The Arab American News
May 25, 2005 [Investigative Journalism]

Portland, Ore. — When most documentary filmmakers offer to shoot their subjects, they usually mean with a camera, cinematically. But Mike Shiley—whose film Inside Iraq: The Untold Stories, opened at McMenamin’s Mission Theater here June 10—thought it would be vastly more interesting to do it with a gun, literally.

In one telling episode, Shiley’s autobiographical film describes how he replaced a tank gunner on a U.S. Army “harass-and-intimidate” mission on Iraq’s northwestern border. During the operation, Shiley fired an M1A1-Abrams… Read More »

Night of a Thousand Stars

Night of a Thousand Stars
From Night of a Thousand Stars and Other Portraits of Iraq (Nazraeli Press: 2006)

At 11:30 p.m. on the night of Jan. 17, 1991, the first Tomahawk missile fired in the Gulf War left its launch platform aboard the U.S.S. San Jacinto in the Red Sea. The missile rose eastward, crossed the Saudi Arabian desert, and then descended, roughly one hour and 600 miles later, on the city of Baghdad. The Tomahawk was soon joined by more than 100 cruise missiles from seven U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf, including two nuclear-powered submarines. The rockets streaked into the city shortly before 1 a.m., as air-raid sirens… Read More »

Distributing the Pain

From The Bear Deluxe magazine

If nature is not a cathedral, then perhaps it is a town meeting, and none the worse for it—a place of intellectual inquiry, give and take, and above all, human responsibility, a place where people seek the truth, bound only by the constraints of common sense and common decency, a place where people make decisions and learn from the consequences.  — Stephen Budiansky, Nature’s Keepers: The New Science of Nature Management (The Free Press: 1995)

You think that because you understand one, that you must therefore understand two, because one and one is two. But you forget that you must also understand… Read More »

Are biofuels fueling hunger?

From Sound Consumer magazine (Sept. 2010)

The U.S. Navy celebrated Earth Day this year by running a biofuels test on a supersonic F/A 18 Green Hornet fighter jet powered by a mixture of traditional jet fuel, and oil pressed from Camelina sativa, a relative of the mustard plant.

The test underscores two trends in U.S. energy policy: an almost fanatical reliance on biofuels as a substitute for oil, and the misconception that anything ‘green’ is good — even if it sports Sidewinder missiles and makes the Hummer look fossil-fuel efficient.

Some experts on food security claim otherwise. Once touted as a panacea for America’s energy… Read More »

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