I have heard about some revolutionary supplements that use liposomal technology. Find out more at https://rsvp.vasayo.com

To Revive The Blog?

To revive a blog or not.
Facebook seems to have taken over my need to express myself.

And the bread thing far from represents who I am in this current phase of my life.
I'm not eating bread of any kind, literally or figuratively.
In the literal sense, I'm also almost completely grain free.

















My current side gig:
http://rsvp.vasayo.com

Does he live??

If you've lived in this world but a year or four, you know what (or rather who) I mean by "he".

I have come a long way since Art began this blog. You can see in his title and heading what he proposed this blog to be about.

Well, things that stay the same forever are not really learning and growing and living.

So, we continue to read and search and delve deeper into truths and, quite frankly, our beliefs have changed. Dramatically.

It's hard to identify the exact beginning of the process, as I don't think there really was one.

The first book that helped me to see the intolerence of my Christian views and beliefs was If Grace is True by Philip Gulley, James Mulholland.

I grew up in the World Wide Church of God (WCG) - in the days when it was a cult, and an exclusivist "there is only one true church" group. Somthing Mormon's claim, as do Jehovah's Witnesses and even another major non-Christian religion. My commitment to the WCG shattered many years ago, after they left some of their fundamentalist beliefs behind and embraced, of all things, Christmas. (my picture is actually a book on the subject - a wee photo of me from when I was in a classroom at Ambassador College in Big Sandy Texas)

It thrilled me to see that the exclusivity of my Christian faith was exclusive and doesn't match up with what I believe a loving God to be. If God is love then he adheres to the definition of love as outlined in I Cor 13. But using that as a template for the basic character of God, so much of the rest of the bible is grossly contradictory.

Moving on:

The first book I read that put a kibosh on my belief in Jesus as my saviour was The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light by Tom Harpur

Wow, I tell you this book had me dancing around the living room. I don't agree with everything Harpur says, but the freedom and relief that comes through knowing that the story of Jesus is not about someone that lived 2000 years ago, but a collection of retold stories of many divine god myths, was so liberating. I always cringed the history of the church to kill and destroy cultures and other people. Christianity has a blood-lust history. In fact many today still use the bible as a right to kill others.

Harpur's views are supported again and again through other scholars and religions. All one has to do is read of the other man saviors and religions that date back ten to twenty thousand years.

Some of the below is wish list, and some of them I've read. Please comment if you have other suggestions.

Christ Conspiracy

Jesus Myth

Sons of God

Born Again Skeptic

The Pagan Christ: Is Blind Faith Killing Christianity

If Grace is True

My conclusion after reading books and reviews? "He" never lived. I'm not an athiest. I believe God lives.

But I'm no longer an exclusivist. I believe God lives. But in everyone (now isn't that truly good news?)

The myths are merely there for teaching and uplifting, and showing the light that exists in everyone.

Everyone is a brother and a sister.

We ARE all one. The world fights when it sees itself and separate and divided. We can truly have peace when we see everything is God.

Categories: Bible, BibleProof, Jesus, JesusMythology, Christianity, PhillipGulley, JamesMulholland, PaganChrist, WorldwideChurchofGod, ChurchofGod, HerbertArmstrong, TomHarpur, JesusMyth, ChristConspiracy, Acharya, Leedom, ChristianityBeforeChrist, CrucifiedSaviorsBeforeChrist

Dealing with winmail.dat and unreadable email attachments

Why some emails come with winmail.dat files attached and what to do about it.

Ok, so this is a bit of a different topic for this board, but I have wondered about this for a while. WHY is it that I get those little 'winmail.dat' files on some emails, and of course, .dat extensions are not necessarily ones that you should mess with.

Well here's the answer, and the good news is, the sender gets to deal with it.

The main culprit is Microsoft email products (or perhaps some product using a Microsoft exchange server) that has coding that is unreadable by non-Microsoft products.

So if you get a winmail.dat file on an email from a someone, find out if you are supposed to receive the attachment before you open it, and if they never knowingly sent it, send them the link above to fix it.

Breastfeeding benefits `ignored`

British study found that 9 out of 10 women didn't know the health benefits of breast feeding.

Breastfeeding benefits `ignored`

I'm not sure how this relates to North America, but read this article and see.

New York Times

November 23, 2004
By DAN BARBER
Pocantico Hills, N.Y.

Now that the bloom is finally off the Atkins diet rose, now
that the instinct to, say, make a purée of potatoes feels
slightly less suicidal, let us take a moment to realize
that, when it comes to food, Americans have the tendency to
lose all reason. With the same collective head-scratching
that goes on when we look back at the big hair and shoulder
pads of the 80's, we would do well to ask: What were we
thinking?

This question, of course, applies not just to the Atkins
diet but to pretty much every diet fad Americans have
followed over the last 30 years. In addition to catchy
names, these diets tend to have one thing in common: they
focus on what we eat - not on where what we eat comes from
or how it was grown. Good nutrition has been conveniently,
and profitably, reduced to an ingredient list. (Remember
the grapefruit diet?)

That's a shame - and there's no better time to explore the
ways in which we've been led astray than during
Thanksgiving week, a time when Americans are particularly
focused on food. (And, coincidentally, a time when we are
blessedly between diet fads.) With a little scrutiny, we
can see that our reductionist diet logic dissolves like a
lump of sugar. Just consider the traditional Thanksgiving
spread: it may appear to represent the American pastoral,
but looks can be deceiving.

Start with the turkey. If your image of a turkey's life is
one of green grass and rolling hills, look more closely.
Nearly 300 million turkeys are raised today on factory
farms where they live in windowless buildings illuminated
by bright lights 24 hours a day. (This keeps the turkeys
awake and eating.) The birds stand wing to wing on wood
shavings and eat an overly fortified diet that enables them
to reach an ideal dressed weight of 15 pounds in 12 to 14
weeks. The most popular breed is the Broad Breasted White,
aptly named because these turkeys develop
disproportionately large breasts, which makes it difficult
for the birds to walk (if they had room to do so) and
procreate (assuming they'd want to) without artificial
insemination.

So what kind of bird would fit more accurately with our
agrarian fantasies? Well, how about one that spends most of
its life outdoors? Such birds - called pastured birds - are
able to move around freely. Instead of having to be
injected with antibiotics to stay healthy, they doctor
themselves, seeking out certain plants at certain times of
the year for pharmacological reasons. Because they expend
so much energy moving around, they also grow more slowly:
it takes them a month longer to reach slaughter weight than
factory birds, which is one of the reasons pasturing is
less attractive to industrial farmers. Scientific research
comparing the health benefits of conventionally raised
turkey to pastured turkey is scarce, but some work has been
done on chickens. A study sponsored by the Department of
Agriculture in 1999, for example, found that pastured
chickens have 21 percent less fat, 30 percent less
saturated fat, 50 percent more vitamin A and 400 percent
more omega-3 fatty acids than factory-raised birds. They
also have 34 percent less cholesterol.

The pasture principle isn't limited to fowl. Compared to
most American beef, which is raised on a grain-intensive
diet, pasture-fed beef offers 400 percent more vitamin A
and E. It is also much richer in beta-carotene and
conjugated linoleic acids, all of which inhibit cancer.
It's also higher in omega-3 fatty acids, which are a major
inhibitor of heart disease. These benefits don't exist at
these levels in animal that are fed an unvaried and
unnatural diet.

The pasture principle can be applied to vegetables as well.
We don't live off the food we eat - we live off the energy
in the food we eat. So while Mom asked us, "Did you eat
your fruits and vegetables?" today we might well ask: "What
are our vegetables eating?"

It seems axiomatic but it's worth remembering that in order
to experience the health benefits of the roasted broccoli
at the Thanksgiving table, that broccoli needs to have been
healthy too. We can be forgiven for ignoring the obvious
because most every diet I've seen treats a head of broccoli
the way Gertrude Stein talked about a rose - but a broccoli
is not a broccoli is not a broccoli, especially if you
consider how and from where its grown.

Sadly, the broccoli and the other brassicas on your holiday
table (brussels sprouts, cabbage, turnips, kale, mustard
greens) were most likely grown in a monoculture - a place
where, with the help of large amounts of chemical
fertilizers and pesticides, nothing but the crop is allowed
to grow. Fertilizers are as pervasive in these large farms
as tractors, especially synthetic nitrogen. And you can
understand why: the chemicals bulk up vegetables
beautifully and quickly, enabling them to withstand the
rigors of long-distance travel so that they can arrive at
your supermarket unbruised and brightly colored. But it's a
little like dating someone on steroids: the look and feel
may be an initially appealing, but in the end it's all kind
of disconcerting.

And think what gets lost. A serving of broccoli is
naturally rich in vitamins A and B, and has more vitamin C
than citrus fruit. But raised in an industrial farm
monoculture, shipped over a long distance and stored before
and after being delivered to your supermarket, it loses up
to 80 percent of its vitamin C and 95 percent of its
calcium, iron and potassium. Fruits and vegetables grown
organically, however, have higher levels of antioxidants.
That's largely because a plant's natural defense system
produces phenolic compounds, chemicals that act as a
plant's defense against pests and bugs. These compounds are
beneficial to our health, too. When plants are grown with
herbicides and pesticides, they slow down their production
of these compounds. (Even more important, from a cook's
point of view, organically grown fruits and vegetables
taste better - their flavors practically burst from the
ground and demand to be expressed, and we chefs merely
comply.)

The same rules apply to the root vegetables, whether
potatoes, sunchokes, beets, parsnips or carrots. Seek out
ones grown in nutrient-rich soil for the greatest flavor
and benefit. You can't buy good quality soil in a bag any
more than you can buy good nutrition in a pill. Most
organic farmers encourage complex relationships between
crop roots, soil microbes and minerals - relationships that
become wholly disrupted by chemical additives.

What about the milk and eggs that go into Thanksgiving pies
and tarts? The industrialization of our food supply did not
spare the dairy industry. Not surprisingly, pastured dairy
cattle and laying hens produce more nutritious milk and
cheese - pastured eggs in particular, with their glowing
yellow yolks, have up to three times the amount of
cancer-fighting omega-3's of eggs that come from factory
hens.

As a chef, I am often mystified as I hear diners, rooting
around for a nutrition and dietary cure, ask for this
steamed and that on the side, and in the process deny
themselves pleasure. Choosing what dietary advice of the
moment to follow by putting a wet finger up to the wind,
our patrons decide, or succumb, en masse, to a pummeling of
such wearisome regularity that it begins to resemble the
"rosebud'' of "Citizen Kane": the clue that solves
everything but means nothing.

There is an ecology of eating. Like any good ecosystem, our
diet should be diverse, dynamic and interrelated. In 1984
Americans were spending roughly 8 percent of their
disposable income on health care and about 15 percent on
food. Today, those numbers are essentially reversed. An
ever-more reductionist diet - protein this year,
carbohydrates next year - ignores plant and animal systems
loaded with genetic complexity, and the benefits that
complexity passes down to us.

So as you're getting ready for Thanksgiving, think of
yourself less as a consumer of the harvest bounty and more,
in the words of Carlo Petrini of the Slow Foods movement,
as a co-producer. Try to remember what you know
intuitively: that we can't be healthy unless our farms our
healthy; that the end of the food chain is connected to the
beginning of the food chain; that we can't lose touch with
the culture in agriculture (it dates back to before Dr.
Atkins). To the extent possible, shop at farmers markets
for your Thanksgiving foods. Try to choose diversity over
the abundance that the big food chains offer. Your food
will be tastier, fresher and more nutritious. You'll be
able to have your cake (and your bacon and your bread and
your potatoes) and eat it too.

Dan Barber is the chef of Blue Hill at Stone Barns and
creative director of the Stone Barns Center for Food and
Agriculture.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/23/opinion/23barber.html?ex=1102309482&ei=1&en=da31aa314c9b9f7f

Stress May Speed up Cell Aging
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4054207.stm



Tuesday, 30 November, 2004
Stress 'may speed up cell ageing'

The stress of caring for a sick child can add 10 or more years to the biological age of a woman's cells, researchers have found.

A University of California team suggest stress speeds up cell aging. It does this by affecting key pieces of DNA called telomeres which are involved in regulating cell division, they say. The team says the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study shows how stress could be linked to the early onset of age-related diseases.

Telomeres are strips of DNA at the end of chromosomes which appear to protect and stabilize the chromosome ends. However, they shorten each time a cell divides, until there is nothing left, making cell division less reliable and increasing the risk of age-related disorders. Previous research had suggested that premature ageing was partly caused by stress, but how the mechanism was unclear.

Body's defense
In this study, the researchers examined 58 pre-menopausal women. Nineteen had healthy children, the rest had children with chronic illnesses. The paper confirms the general perception that stress 'wears you out'. All the women completed questionnaires asking them to evaluate the level of stress they felt they had been under during the previous month. Blood samples were also taken so scientists could carry out DNA analysis of telomeres. Levels of an enzyme called telomerase, which helps build and maintain telomeres, in immune cells were also measured.

The researchers found that women who had reported higher levels of psychological stress - those who were caring for sick children - had shorter telomeres. They said that, on average, the difference was equivalent to over a decade of additional ageing compared with women who classed themselves as having low levels of stress. The higher-stress group also had lower levels of telomerase in immune cells. The researchers, led by Dr Elissa Epel, said this implied the immune cells could function less well and could die sooner.

It was also found that the high-stress women also had higher oxidative stress levels - cumulative damage caused by molecules called "free radicals" - which has been shown to speed up the shortening of telomeres in lab studies.

Writing in Proceedings, the researchers said it was not clear exactly how stress affected telomeres, but they suggest changes in stress hormone levels could have an effect. They add that their findings showed how cellular aging could be a way in which psychological stress was linked to the earlier onset of age-related diseases.

Professor Thomas von Zglinicki of the clinical medical sciences department at the University of Newcastle, said: "The paper confirms the general perception that stress 'wears you out' and makes you ageing faster by measuring telomere length, which is one possible bio-marker of ageing and age-related disease."

He said the study confirmed what his team had suggested in 2000.
"We said then that telomere length in human blood might be markers for oxidative stress and the capacity of the individual to cope with it." But Professor von Zglinicki added: "The study is small, and there are a number of unpublished studies that could not confirm telomere length as a strong biomarker.

"So this paper is very interesting and might be very important, but we still need some caution."

I found a good study with some good links on Glycomics:

http://www.searchspaniel.com/index.php/Glycome

http://www.avantrex.com/resources/Sweet2003-2.html

THE FIRST BATH TUB

Adam Thompson, of Cincinnati, is credited with having the first bathtub known in America. During a business trip to England he was introduced to the English way of bathing. On his return to America in 1842 he decided to make a bathtub big enough to contain his entire body, and to be filled by a tank instead of by hand. He built a tank in the attic of his home, pumping water into it from the family pump. Pipes for hot and cold water led to the bathtub, the one for hot water coiled within the length of the chimney, through which hot air and smoke from the kitchen range passed.

The tub was seven feet. long and four feet wide and deep enough to hold the plumpest of persons. It was built of mahogany and lined with sheet lead. On the first Christmas Day after installation of the tub, Mr. Thompson gave a bathtub party, all the men present trying out the wonderful invention. This party was featured in many of the newspapers and created a sensation.

Members of the medical profession fought the idea with warnings that the practice was dangerous to the health, and state and city governing bodies passed laws prohibiting and discouraging the use of bathtubs. The state of Virginia passed a law taxing owners of bathtubs $30 a year. In Boston a law was passed which was in effort from 1845 to 1862, forbidding one to take a bath except on advice of a physician. The cities of Providence, Hartford, and Wilmington put a high water tax on buildings that contained bathtubs, and in Philadelphia a law was proposed making it unlawful to bath between November 1 and March15. This failed of passage by a margin of two votes.