John Newell

Austin Cannon wrote:Hello Friends,

My partner and I are first time homeowners and new the rural neighborhood of Appalachia Ohio. We live in the midst of a multi generational family whose land management does not align with ours. One of the largest ways this misalignment comes to the surface is how they manage their trash. Their main waste management is a private landfill that is the hillside behind their house and ours, but on their private property.

Recently they have begun burning their trash once the sun goes down. Help! How do we confront them on this? For one, I am not a confrontational person, secondly I am new to the neighborhood and in my 20’s (they are older than me, thus more intimidating?). In my personal opinion involving the authorities is my last result, but definitely something I would like to avoid.

Last bit of prevalent information in this situation that I would like to emphasize is the multi generational family 75 acre property that our 1.25 acres sits in the middle of. Obviously we don't want to be the squeaky wheel that results in a hostile neighbor dynamic.  

Hello Austin,

You are right to be concerned. Burn barrels, believe it or not, are the largest uncontrolled source of lethal air pollution in North America. I learned the ins and outs of it when I was asked by a woman named Julie Innes back in 2008 who was in a very similar situation to yours. She lived at the end of a dead-end road in the bush. The prevailing wind travelled the length of the road and the smoke would pour in through her kitchen window even when it was closed. She wore a military-grade gas mask in her house whenever the burning was going on which was once a week. Each time it happened, she would call an ambulance and collapse. The ambulance would come and take her to the hospital. Once there, she revived. The doctors claimed she was faking it. She'd been to the Police, the Fire Department, the local Town Council in Minden, Ontario and the local newspaper. The newspaper covered her story on a number of occasions but no one would talk to the neighbours to get them to stop. That was the state of things when she called me.

It was winter, the snow was deep. she explained and showed me how it all worked. She insisted that I not talk to the neighbours because she didn't drive and they were her only way to get to a store for groceries. She was a First Nations woman too, so that was part of what was working against her with the authorities.

The burn barrels in question had fabricated lids that looked like the hood scoops on a muscle car. All of them were pointed directly and her house.

Back home, I checked the legislation and found that burn barrels are illegal in Canada without a permit and are not to be used for burning anything but wood and paper. My next stop was the local OPP - the Ontario Provincial Police. They were non-committal and knew nothing about the health hazards. After that, the Fire Department to find out about permits. Nope, they'd never been asked for a permit on that street. They professed to know nothing. In reality, they knew exactly what was going on. They weren't doing their jobs and didn't want to. Everyone was related in one way or another. The Town Council claimed not to know anything either and refused to do anything including enforcing their own bylaws.

After that, I met with OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino, the top cop who blew the whistle on street racing and changed the laws almost worldwide single-handedly. He did it by fraudulent means but that's another issue. I wrote a book about it.

I've known Fantino since 1967 when we both worked at a grocery/department store called Steinberg's Miracle Mart. So we knew each other. He promised me he would investigate. He didn't.

So with no other options, I went and talked to all of her neighbours and explained to them what they were doing to Julie. They listened. They stopped burning their garbage and no longer took her to do her grocery shopping. She wouldn't talk to me anymore after that. She died of lung cancer and was not a smoker, lived in the wilderness. In my opinion, she was murdered by her neighbours and the Town of Minden's Municipal officials who should have protected her.

James Alun wrote:I’m rapidly approaching my 35th birthday and am finding that my body has decided to increase the growth of my nostril hairs.

This really isn’t a social problem, I wouldn’t entertain such criticisms but the hairs themselves irritate me.

Scissors are my default for beard and moustache but are impratical for nostrils. Plucking probably isn’t great for my follicles and is flipping uncomfortable.
I will tolerate batteries in some areas of my life, ipads and ereaders but not in personal care.

So, does anyone here have experience with manual nose hair removers and/or reccomendations please?

I am twice your age and have had decades longer to figure out how to deal with this issue. Some of the other suggestions about using flame and red hot nails are dangerous and unnecessary. Maybe they work but having worked, they defeat the purpose your nose hairs serve.

Here's what I've found:

There are nose hair tools that are battery-operated. I've tried two different makes of them and was unimpressed.

I resorted and still use tiny fingernail scissors with curved blades. The problem with them is that they have very sharp, pointed ends that are painful when you poke the lining of your nostrils. Puncturing the skin can cause a nasty infection that can evolve into cancer quite easily. The membrane and the snot in your nose and the hairs themselves are all that stand between you internally and the witches brew we all inhale these days thanks to the oil industry and chemical proliferation.

What I did was grind the ends of the nail scissors on my bench grinder so that they're curved instead of pointy. You need the smallest, thinnest styles possible and the blades need to be sharp.

Most of the time, the hair in your nose lays flat against the inside of your nose and out of the way. As we get older, that hair tends to sag a bit and as your health declines as you age, the chemicals you inhale stimulate nasal hair growth. It's a normal part of your immune system. The trouble is when it becomes too much of a good thing and you cannot breathe easily. Plus, they tend to poke you when they get too long.

To trim them, it's best to wait until they're long enough to grip with your fingers, stretch them out of your nostril and cut them off at the base with the curved scissors. Make sure the curve is facing away from your skin or you'll stab yourself. That hurts. To pull the hair out of your nose, your fingers need to be dry to get a grip. So this isn't something you do right after a shower.

With a little practice, you get good at it. luckily, most of the hair grows just inside the walls and roof of the entrance to your nostrils leaving the floor clear so that mucus can drain out. Something you can do to clear mucus and snot is use a Q-tip instead of Kleenex to get the snot out. Sometimes it takes both. With a Q-tip, use a fresh one and stick it up your nose, twirling it as it goes in. With practice, you'll find it will go in all the way. Don't shove it in so far that you lose your grip or you'll be off to hospital to have it removed. DO NOT use plastic Q-tips. If you lose your grip on one of those and it goes down your neck (esophagus) and into your stomach, you will need an operation to get it out. Don't let children do this either.

If you've never used Kleenex to clear your nostrils, you can twist the tissue into a point and twirl that up your nostril. That will absorb sticky snot and liquid mucus quickly. There should be no pain involved at all. If you are hurting yourself, stop and think about what you're doing to figure out what you're doing wrong or if you have a polyp in your nose. If so, then you need to see an Ear, Nose and Throat specialist.

The mucus and the snot are dietary issues that I'll deal with in another post. Runny noses, post-nasal drip, clogged sinuses and ear infections are all part of the same issue. I have find where to start posting these solutions where they won't get lost. No gardener should ever have clogged, runny noses when you can grow your own solution.

Andrea Moore wrote:Hey there,
I'm a trained herbalist in Port Angeles and I teach a lot of classes locally at the Dandelion Botanical Apothecary in Dungeness Seqium and also at Peninsula College. There's others teaching classes in herbalism at these sites, as well. Ravens Roots Nature School is also a very economical and top notch place to get training.

I am not a registered herbalist nor do I plan to become one. I know enough people who are a part of the AHG organization and they appear to be mostly professional folks with established medical licenses in Naturopathy, Nursing, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda. It costs a lot to get the required training and experience to apply for AHG. If you have plenty of money and time then maybe it's worth it, but without it, you can operate as an herbalist and earn a very small living legitimately. Training is a must if you plan to support healing with people. You must have some basic understanding of anatomy, physiology and the herbal actions. You just don't want to hurt anyone or become liable in some way. If you are just a community herbalist operating at a pretty low level then registered level isn't necessary. Most registered herbalists still have to back this up with a medical license and it's like an add-on to their already busy practice (because herbs are popular and big business now!). I don't think that regulation will hit us. Product makers will get hit before we community herbalists do. I hope!

I hustle constantly and I'm barely making it. Many have gone the way of super capitalist product making website marketing strategies and a lot of expensive investments in social media marketing, labelling, branding and shipping. Not my thing but some people do this well and it's a lot of work and takes much time, energy and financial resources. The rich herbalists are doing great--they have every resource and can afford all the tools and gardens and labor and plants and investing. The herbalists without these resources work their butts off and need a lot of time to rest after so much labor. I wish I was younger and had more energy! It is a beautiful profession. To spend so much time with plants, make herbal medicines and help people discover the healing connections to mother earth is a gift. This keeps me going but I've moved from wealthy California and it's not so easy to make a living in wellness here. I love this town and the people here are great but the lower economic situation is tough for an herbalist who used to easily get tons of work and clients and students in northern Cal. I had enough resources and business there to give much of my business and I ran a free herbal clinic in the community! So far I have not met people who are capable of making enough money to do this free work. We are all scraping by. It's still a good job, but be willing to work hard, serve, study long hours, research research learn and learn then maybe if you are lucky and talented and the stars align, you will be a working herbalist who can pay the bills! Oh, and did I mention that it helps to have LAND! I don't have any, but it's so helpful for an herbalist to have a garden--at least I have a small one that teaches me many things and supplies my small household with herbs for health and happiness....

Best of luck!
Drea

Thank you Andrea, I wish you had been around for me to learn from back in the 70s when it would have changed everything and would have made my career and life so much less challenging. Better late than never though. Good ideas only work if you pay attention and you have my attention.  

Bethany Brown wrote:I know I could search the internet, but it’s so hard to filter through everything and figure out what’s legit.
I’m admittedly flaky- I often come up with an idea of what I want to be when I grow up and then change my mind. But one thing I’m considering is registered herbalist, someone to advise people on how to use herbs to improve their health. Does anyone know where to start? What courses are legit?

In 1978, I was in Trinidad on vacation. The morning after I arrived, I was in the washroom coughing up black blood. That was pretty scary. But I was also annoyed. I was 28 years old. I followed my doctors advice my entire life. Yet I was always sick. Now, here I was coughing my life out in great gobs. Once I was able to catch my breath, my first thoughts were, how could this be happening and what can I do about it. That led me to make a personal commitment to take personal charge of my own health instead of leaving it up to my doctors.

Back in 1978, that was a revolutionary concept and there were no books on the subject in local bookstores. The idea that you could resolve poor health with food was known to people who ran spas and sanatoriums devoted to health restoration. But they were outside mainstream public awareness and only rich white people took advantage of them in North America as far as I know.

The father of Nutritional Medicine was a scientist known as Professor Arnold Ehret who published a book titled The Mucusless Diet in 1922. It's still available but not widely known. He was world-famous in his day for the miraculous cures he enabled using fasting and vegetables. As you might expect, the Medical Authorities globally tried to shut him up and disparaged his work. He took care of that for him by slipping and falling over backwards and cracking his skull on the pavement. His work soon disappeared from public knowledge.

In the intervening decades before I found the book, other doctors had picked up where he left off. When they did, they ran into the same problems Ehret did and they became pariahs within the medical community.

Things didn't really get going until the publication of a book called the F Plan Diet in 1980. That book was the first to educate the public on the value of fibre in the diet. That book generated a lot of medical attention and from there, self-help medical books started appearing. Each of them espoused a single, narrow approach to health restoration. There were so many of them that they soon confused the core issue of how to go about a body wide health restoration. There were lots of conflicting ideas that persist to this day. That is where your confusion comes from Bethany.

When I started to attempt to restore my own health and save my life, I soon realized the field was vast and that I'd better start writing things down. In early 1995, one of my interior design customers, my biggest one, insisted that in future, I draw all of their store on computer. I had to learn from scratch. It didn't take me long to realize that compiling the information on computer was the way to go.

By 2015, I'd amassed a huge inventory of health restoration information from countless sources. The best part of that was that unlike pretty well anyone else, I had everything necessary to enable me to sort out what was useful and what was nonsense.

Everything I do goes back to my work with Tropical Fish. I started with them in 1962 when I was 12. Being hearing impaired, I didn't get much out of school, but I studied my fish, bred them, healed them, raised their offspring and most importantly, learned how to feed them correctly. I was in the fish business for 20 years as a hobbyist to a pro. Kind of unique in Canada. That journey taught me the physiological realities of how nutrition and the food consumed directly impact the quality of life of a fish. Any fish. Any creature. However, at the time, I didn't relate that to human health. Humans are exceptional creatures after all and according to medical opinion, food is illness-neutral - even today believe it or not.

Anyway, by the 90s I was well-versed on how the food we eat and what we drink affects every cell in our bodies 24/7. Eventually forums like this one popped up and I participated and started teaching people what I'd learned. No one believed me and I got called everything imaginable. That changed one day when a woman in Alaska agreed with me and confirmed that she'd tried what I said and it worked. That site was called the Grapevine and it was sponsored by a Toronto radio station, CFRB. Eventually, it was yanked because, as happens to most forums, a lot of hostility erupts. That's why this site is so the other way and tries hard to ensure hostility is kept at bay even when their position is wrong and unreasonable. I accept that because I tried running my own forum for a while and found that I spent most of my time fending off trouble-makers, gambling casinos, hookers and other types of fraud. Eventually, I gave up. There were no protections in those days. Now there are.

Anyway, the deal is that when you attempt to convey what you learn in your narrow area of discovery, herbs in your case Bethany, it comes with a hidden price. No herbalist is going to be able to teach you the broad spectrum of how physiology works in real life that you need to know in order to make herbalism stand up to scrutiny. It does not because herbalism, as good as the practice can be is a subject that depends on the purveyor understanding of how the body works. By that I mean, how a normal human body works.

The medical profession started off as barbers and butchers assigned to battlefields throughout history. They had little to no knowledge about what they were doing. So they never practiced healing a normal sick person. When they did start, they started with sick people with no understanding of what a functioning healthy person looked like or how their parts interacted with each other or with food and drink. This is still the case for the most part today. Nutrition as taught to doctors takes 15 minutes in medical school. During  that 15 minutes they learn how to make baby formula. You can check that out by accessing the stated course of studies from any medical school. I looked at three Canadian Universities: the University of Toronto, McGill University of Montreal and Queens University in Kingston.

The other thing wannabe doctors learn in school is which foods interfere with which medications. That's why nutritionists and dieticians have to defer to doctors instead of the other way around. That's why you are told to consult your doctor before embarking on a dietary change. That advice does not presume that your doctor knows anything at all about nutrition. The reality is that most of them know less than you do.

In 2015, I decided to compile my information into a book. The golden rule about that is this: if you don't have a title that will sell your book, DON'T WRITE THE BOOK.

After countless hours of deliberation, I decided Nutritional Medicine was my title of choice. I was almost finished when a doctor published a book titled NUTRITIONAL MEDICINE.

I helped the doctor promote his book in Canada. (He's American). He gave me a copy of it for my efforts. At that time the selling price was $300.00.

The best part was that after reading through it, I realized this doctor had very little understanding about the subject of his own book. He had recorded case studies of illnesses that had been cured using foods and herbs instead of what we call traditional medicine. The term traditional medicine is a misnomer. There is nothing at all traditional about modern medicine. All traditional cures that work are some form of food unless you're talking broken bones and accidental physical damage. Of course, pathogens such as Malaria, and other communicable diseases have an impact as well, especially insects and microbes.  The truth is that people simply cannot get sick if they are eating what they evolved to eat and nothing else. Until the introduction of dairy and grains to our diets, illness was rare. After the introduction of grain, dairy and much later, sugar, humans were just as healthy as other wild animals because that's what we were.

So, what we're mostly talking about is illness due to diet. Herbs are a great way of sorting those issues out. But it helps to know why they work and how your organs are supposed to work.

That's where we come back to; where do you start to learn that stuff?

Well you don't because I haven't published that book yet other than a few proof manuscripts where it's all explained.

It was never published because I was overcome by an inherited genetic condition called Haemochromotosis.  In English that is iron overload. A person with that condition cannot avoid absorbing excess iron from all food sources and having their entire body become toxic. Toxicity like that affects all of your organs, how they operate and how you think. Most people don't notice the impact until late in life. Generally it's misdiagnosed. In my case it's been active since birth. I have all of my report cards and my symptoms were noted by nearly every teacher I ever had. None of them understood what they were remarking about.

That was in part why I was coughing up black blood in 1978. But not entirely. That was mostly due to a lack of enzymes from not eating enough vegetables. It was resolved when I walked out of the washroom and into a garden party next door where I was offered a coconut to drink fresh off the tree in the neighbour's yard. I was cured by the time I finished the coconut.

Anyway, one of the symptoms of iron toxicity is mental confusion. By 2015, I'd long since retired from my interior design business because of my decreasing mental acuity. I could no longer handle the complexities necessary to manage a construction site and the paperwork. Rather than keep going, screw up projects and get sued, I stopped accepting projects. My condition combined with my deafness, left me unemployable and I remained so until 2017 when I started my manufacturing business.

The intervening years from 2007 left me with a lot of dead time. I used it to continue my health restoration research in the hopes of figuring out what was wrong with me. In the process, I learned much more because the internet is now well-populated with truncated information about how to cure nearly anything by yourself. That is if you know where to start and who to believe.

I used my knowledge to solve a couple of murders and identify who the real criminals were in both of them. The authorities don't want to know. One of the people murdered was our then-Federal Finance Minister, Jim Flaherty. I ran my findings by a heart specialist and my GP to see what they thought. They independently agreed with my findings. Both cases were in the first proof edition that ran to over 500 pages.

The title I eventually settled on is A PORTRAIT OF A GOOD SHIT.

My publicist (American) doesn't like the word shit in the title so I've changed the title a number of times. A PORTRAIT OF A GOOD SHIT still wins every survey. So we are still in a standoff. American media won't allow it..Z

I keep learning though and have decided that it would be best to rewrite the book so that more people can benefit. I'm going to do that on this site for the members. The beauty is that you who read it can question what I say and receive an almost immediate answer. In that way, you will very quickly find out whether I know what I'm talking about or not. If it turns out, I'm full of shit, then I'll stop and delete everything and will not publish the book. I have an international reputation for many things and I'm not about to spoil that reputation with a whiff of bullshit.

So there you go, Bethany, you will be able to figure out what you don't know starting with my next post.

How does it fit on this site? Easy, this site is all about permaculture. What is permaculture for ultimately? It's the preservation of knowledge about the natural world. Of those natural elements that everyone wants to preserve are our own children. The fruits of our horticultural endeavours are intended to feed our families, friends and neighbours. My shared knowledge is intended to show you how what you grow impacts your families, friends and neighbours.  I'm hoping to show you how vitally important your interests in the here and now are to future generations. What I'm going to do is offer you a way to shape your own life's purpose. In doing so, I'll give more purpose to my own life.

In the end, this international community will be more cohesive and much closer-knit. That is one of my dreams.

Michael Cox wrote:Thanks for sharing this, it's a great project and an excellent video presentation of the scheme.

Thank you for sharing. I'd never heard of this. The technique is simple and this is a great place to share it. Anyone with disturbed land here in North America could adapt the principles and make it work. I'd say that with time, the Sahara itself could be transformed back into productive land. It's just a matter of time. Combine hydroponics and greenhouse technology, water reclamation technology and the Sahara can turn green.

Brenda Groth wrote:yes there is a chance that it might get too cold here for tilapia..right now the bubbler keeps open water MOST of the time but we dropped well below 0 this week and even some creeks froze over.

our neighbors have bullheads and had a huge bullhead loss 2 years ago, not really sure why..but that was a concern to us.

neighbors the other way have pike, bluebills, perch, large mouth bass and put in some baby fish last year..not sure what all..they tried to get out all the pike first..not sure how successful they were on that.

also i have a gob of baby goldfish..i'm sure they are being eaten by some critters..but in the spring it is amazing how many babies i see..and some are as big as 4" or so..by  now..

this pond has cattails, iris, lotus, lily, arum and lots of water plants as well as the native water plants (i put in babies from a bunch from a water garden supply store 2 years ago)..oh it also has sterile lythrum in it which hasn't spread ..at least so far.

It's good to see the interest in fish species and an effort to balance the population.

I'll add a few points from an aquarist's point of view. Personally, I think all tilapia should be eliminated from North America. They are that invasive. The big problem is they excavate the substrate and kill the plants. They are an ecological disaster waiting to happen. They should even be in home aquariums, they are that invasive if released by some uneducated aquarist in a warm zone.

I'd also skip the goldfish if there is any chance of them escaping your pond. Goldfish are carp, they grow huge and destroy spawning sites for other fish much like tilapia do. Tilapia are different in another way. They are mouth brooders. That means they carry their young in their mouths. So destroying the spawning sites of other fish doesn't impact Tilapia. They multiply and overpopulate any aquatic environment put in and crowd out other species as do carp. So unless you plan to farm them, I'd pass on Tilapia.

There is a myth I'd like to dispel about catfish. They do NOT eat the waste of other fish. Catfish are extremely picky eaters. They are indeed mostly bottom feeder but they are also carnivores that put Bass and Pike to shame. A catfish can easily eat another fish of the same or even bigger than it is itself. In a small pond, you would soon have nothing but catfish. Big ones can even eat birds. They will eat until they look like they should explode. But no, they simply swim around with the other fish hanging out of their mouths as the swallowed parts digest.

On the upside for catfish, they are generally the best-tasting fish going. They don't taste fishy at all and the bones aren't an issue for any catfish species. If the pond is small the fish will stay small except for goldfish. They keep growing until they die if they can get enough food. They can never get all they want, they never stop and they trash their environments as well by scouring the bottom for the merest morsel. They also eat plants. Tilapia uproot plants. So neither is suitable if you want a decoratively planted pond. As mentioned though, Tilapia won't survive a cold snap and definitely not a winter. They are tropical fish native to the Nile River. You don't want them loose in your southern states.

None of the North American fish tolerate chemical pollutants such as runoff for long. In some cases it makes them change sex. Once that happens, they can't breed. Fish like carp and suckers can tolerate pollutants because, unlike catfish, they eat a lot of vegetable material and vegetation uptakes whatever is available. Sometimes the plants die, and sometimes they become tolerant. A fish that eats them and then is itself eaten by something higher up the food chain sends the toxins up the food chain to the apex predators such as bass, pike, perch, pickerel and so on.

The more people who maintain and enjoy water gardens the better. So I applaud your efforts. I'd do it myself but the trees around my house won't allow it and the coons would clean them out pretty quickly anyway.