M Ljin

I have been making bone plectrums recently from rib bones scavenged from someone else's dinner (I am vegetarian but not afraid to work with animal parts! They'd have gone to waste anyway...)

I am finding them much better than the plastic picks that people tend to use these days. I think that the thickness and rigidity make it much better for what I would use them for, and they seem to be more dextrous as well.

Wooden plectrums I have made in the past, but giving it to a family member who does a lot more flatpicking than I do, and he found that it abraded too much at the strings. It was willow wood, so maybe a finer grained wood would have worked better...

Apparently antler & bone picks have been used in many parts of the world since ancient times, long before plastic was invented!

I forgot to mention that here it's strained. So if you have uses for whey, then straining and then using the whey could be an option to reduce the bulk of the yogurt.

I tend to get SAD... for the month of July. Yes, I am in a somewhat northerly part of the northern hemisphere.

I think it's because there is a lull in the summer where it's too sunny, hot, very dry, not terribly much is ripening, and I can be sensitive to the excess light so it makes me feel tired. I live in a sunny part of the valley, too. Once the late summer rains get started, I start feeling better with all the mushrooms, ripening fruits & vegetables, et cetera.

Winter, I don't get seasonal depression. I used to get schooling-induced depression, but that's another thing entirely. I notice that the more I try to resist the seasonal pull to rest and recover and stay inside, the worse I feel, so I have been finding it best to let myself sort of hibernate, not do more than I'm up for, and minimize energy expenditure. I don't "hibernate" as deeply as some people around here, but then again the house I live in is hot on account of living in a very well insulated house with people who like warm air. I'd not have it so hot if it were just me!

Cheesecake maybe?

How much yogurt did you make and how many people eat it? Here the regular batch is a half gallon and it almost always lasts at least a few weeks if it doesn't get eaten in the first week (which is more likely).

Thank you for sharing! Would you mind providing links to the articles you learnt this from?

And, if you can get past the old-fashioned attitudes:

It is sad to hear of her departure but I can't help but look to her life and have gratitude for it and all that Dr. Ingham has given us and done for the field of soil health--and thus the health of all earthly beings. Maybe loss and gratitude go hand in hand?

I think it's a very nice idea, though I need to care for my own come spring, which are all weedy now and aren't doing too well. I'd better plant some from seed too, or get a crown from a roadside somewhere: they would probably be better adapted.

I think there is so much to be gained by communities ordering things in bulk together. I was thinking, for instance, what if we all ordered enormous bulk organic beans, sunflower seeds, etc. to get here to the village, and then split them up based on individual contributions and/or need? No one in between, it's a way to get together as a community, and cheaper too... not ideal as I'd prefer we grow and harvest our own, but better anyways.

Some people might say it is not good for local business... but it's cheaper for local people, and would bring community together for local people, meaning it's good for local people. On the other hand getting it at the health food store only enriches one person. I care about the people who keep local businesses, but sometimes there are simpler ways of getting things done that are a positive for everyone.

edit.. And by communities I don't necessarily mean intentional communities that probably already do this, but natural villages.

J.P. Waters wrote:On page 65, they allude to DTP vaccine safety concerns and DTaP replacing it.

Here is a little more detail on the difficulties, complexities, and 'perplexities'  with vaccines.

"...our findings can be summarized in one sentence: We discovered vaccines train the immune system in ways no one expected..."

This isn't the end of a discussion on vaccines, just the beginning of a new discussion.

From the YT description:

"TEDxAarhus 2018 by medical doctor and professor in global health Christine Stabell Benn and learn how hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved every year just by using the existing vaccines smarter. Christine Stabell Benn is a medical doctor and professor in global health. By studying real-life effects of vaccines in Africa, she has found that vaccines do much more than protect against the target disease; they have so-called non-specific effects."

JPL: Here is the link to the paper cited within the presentation:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28188123/

The gist of this video is as follows.

Vaccines are not good or bad, but rather it depends greatly on the type of vaccine. Dr. Benn studied the effects of various vaccines, not only on resistance to the disease in question, but upon overall health, and found that the results were surprising.

1. A live vaccine, e.g. for polio, which was not present in Guinea-Bissau, dramatically increased the survival rate of children compared to control--inexplicably, as polio is not present in Guinea-bissau.
2. Dead or non-live vaccines such as DTP (diphtheria, tetanus & pertussis, which make up the majority of vaccines in developed countries, dramaticallydecreased the survival rate of children compared to control.

Generally speaking, only the resistance to particular diseases was measured, not the effects on the overall, long-term immune system health. Benn & others found that while it is clear that all the currently in-use vaccines do increase resistance to particular diseases, non-live vaccines have a universally negative impact on survival and an increase in hospitalizations over time compared to control & live vaccines, whereas live vaccines that contain the living pathogen, universally had a tremendously positive impact on survival.

She compares the difference to a tennis coach versus a ball machine. The tennis coach (live vaccine) is a flexible organism capable of responding and teaching adaptability to the immune system whereas the ball throwing machine teaches only a single movement, getting the immune system trained in unnatural, maladaptive ways.

Benn suggested that with minor changes to the vaccination regimens and a strong emphasis on live vaccines, we could save many millions of children and prevent numerous hospitalizations and diseases. However, she suggests that the pro or anti vax politics gets in the way. The WHO is "pro vaccine" so it wouldn't listen to these suggestions, and most healthcare organizations are set on replacing all live vaccines with dead ones (the unhealthy sort). She also fears that "anti vaccine" people will not see the virtues of live vaccines.

Non-live vaccines are most common in developed countries, whereas live vaccines are often used in developing countries--likely the reason being that they are much easier to make without expensive equipment and chemicals.

Now for my commentary. I think that it is because dead vaccines are more difficult to make and easier to make a profit on, that is one reason. If you can make your own live vaccines from some home-concocted homeopathic dilution of a sick person's saliva, what medical company stands to profit from it? Capitalism is very keen on making everything predictable and dead and the same. Just like how industrial farming must have everything in straight, monocropped, weed free rows for efficient machine harvest, it cannot cope with the idea that perhaps the messy, unpredictable nature of life might actually be a blessing in disguise.