A coven of witches has risen.
They practise their dark arts and expound their beliefs in broad daylight. Check over the fence and you are sure to find a fervent believer in witchcraft, with her crystals jangling and her incense burning. Mankind has always been quickly seduced by shyster shamen and their supernatural mumbo jumbo.
The modern witchcraft I fear is nothing more than the kooky beliefs that have become prevalent in society. These sorcerers are deeply offended if you suggest some evaluation of their techniques might be warranted. It’s a ‘holistic’ approach they say. That is, the treatment doesn’t specifically try to fix the problem, but is just generally good for you – like eating your carrots. There is usually no search for the truth in such systems, because the truth isn’t important. Perception is reality; belief the new empiricism.
Part of the reason for this intellectual devolution is our education system. Science is too demanding for Gen Y, so they opt for media studies or public relations – fields where you make up the facts as you go along. These days communication and media studies have about three times the number of student enrolments as does chemistry.
Earth Mother Paganism
The most common form of witchcraft today is ‘Earth Mother Paganism’.
At its root is an unquestioning belief in the benevolence of Mother Nature. If only we’d leave nature alone, all things would be in harmony and the world would be a veritable garden of eden. Nonsense. Mother Nature is, at best, ambivalent to our existence, and at worst, quite keen to kill us off.
To test my theory I walk in the Havelock North Cemetery. My kin are well buried here, in the old part, where graves are in disrepair. The heaving earth has left these graves cracked and broken. Headstones lean and crosses have fallen. The inscriptions and epitaphs on the old stones are fading now. After a generation or two the lichen eats them away, so as to turn even our last vanity to dust.
I strain and read: “Be called a little child unto Him”, Grace Elizabeth, died aged 12 days. Then Beatrice Anne, died at Hastings, aged 2 ½. The graves of children abound. And there’s Ethyl Rose, aged 22; her hips too narrow for the rigours of colonial childbirth.
The Earth Mother ruled in those times and was the merciless killer of the young. Thankfully modern medicine has largely brought the bitch into line. In Victorian New Zealand you had about a 13% chance of dying before your first birthday. Today it’s 0.4%. The biggest single factor that caused this improvement was the development of vaccines to overcome German measles, whooping cough, polio and the like. There is now a new breed of nutters who think vaccines are a bad idea for their pure children of Gaia. I recommend to them, a walk in the cemetery.
Nature looks harmonious from a distance, but don’t be deceived. Entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, is at work. Things trend to chaos. That picturesque forest that fills your heart with feelings of serenity is actually a war zone devoid of a Geneva Convention. Man’s inhumanity to man is nothing in comparison to what insects do to each other. Nature is a world of Darwinian brutality and its first law is survival of the fittest.
The laws of nature are not founded on balance and equilibrium. The natural world is full of asymmetry, disequilibrium and chaos. Plagues, floods, pestilence and climate change have always been with us, causing a great deal of havoc and the occasional extinction of some species or other. They happened long before man, and will remain long after we are gone. Chaos is nature’s favourite state; the basis on which limits are tested and species evolve and adapt. It is not disorder, just a system that is too complicated for us to understand – one in which things have to ‘break’ in order to get better. The brilliant chaos of nature is a great argument for both evolution and God.
The witches that preach harmony and balance can only be right temporarily. Then things will get horribly out of whack – as they should.
Coven of the Über-Clean
At the other end of witchcraft spectrum is the Coven of the Über-Clean.
Here they take exactly the opposite stance. These witches accept the evil intent of nature and rout it out in every crevice of their homes. They scrub and sanitise and fall prey to the fearmongering advertisements we’re constantly confronted with.
At the gym a witch scowls at me, the unclean. I have just failed to sanitise the apparatus I’ve been using. She squirts and rubs the cleansing potion on the hand holds of her elliptical trainer. “You should wipe down these machines every time you use them,” she tut-tuts. I stare, like a man, blank, confused and wordless.
The product she is so keen to splash about is Triclosan. Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston recommends Triclosan as a product for “hospitals or for persons with weakened immune systems”. Many medical experts are very concerned about its use in day-to-day settings. They have demonstrated in a lab, that in a few microbial generations they can quickly breed a resistant strain of E. coli. Triclosan leaves a residue which fades slowly over time. As it does, it loses its efficacy – that is, some of the nasties start to survive contact. Having untrained people using Triclosan 100 times a day is a breeding programme for a superbug. That seems to have been no barrier to some salesman convincing the gym to have it on hand, or for the Coven of the Über-Clean to start their militant campaign to sanitise the world.
The safe sanitisers to use are ammonia or alcohol-based as they kill the bugs, then evaporate in seconds. Over hundreds of years, bacterial resistance hasn’t occurred.
But here’s a tip. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US recommends: “Vigorous hand washing in warm water with plain soap for at least 10 seconds is sufficient to fight germs in most cases, even for healthcare workers.” So what your great grandmother was doing a hundred years ago, still works.
Burn the witches and ban their potions. The history of mankind is littered with the folly of their beliefs – the world is flat, smoking will purify your lungs, leeches will cure. So often what we think is perfectly logical, is eventually proved to be mindless nonsense. Pasteur, Galileo, Nightingale; they looked and saw the evidence. Their principles endure, because they proved them correct.
Florence Nightingale didn’t know poor hygiene was what was killing soldiers in the Crimean War. While she toiled there, her assumptions about the causes of death were completely wrong. She only realised hygiene was the issue later, when she was back in London studying the data. Nightingale is known as a great nurse, but much more importantly, she was a great statistician.
Belief is dangerous. It is only through science that new knowledge is born. Science is not a ‘know it all’ uncle. Good science should be steeped in humility. It should say “I don’t know, but I can find out.” We should not be opposed to homeopathy, natural Mãori medicine or herbal supplements. All we need to do is to demand that they are subjected to proper scientific evaluation.
So next time you take colloidal silver, arnica or echinacea, do some research and see what science has discovered. Some of these things work and some are plain quackery.
Paul Paynter’s froth on witches reads like an adolescent’s petulant bawling and kicking against his Mother’s shin. Even if PP was born in a test tube and sustained solely on synthetic nutrition, air, water, artificial electro-magnetic frequencies, sunlight and of course, pharmaceutical drugs, he would still be comprised of his ‘Earth Mother’. PP’s rant conjures visions of the misogynistic (read scared little boys) Inquisition, in fact PP’s Church of Rationality has simply traded God for Science; the cassock for the lab coat. Confusingly PP has tried to stitch wishy-washy New Agers and OCD gym-goers into the same archetype as those who legitimately heal and live outside the walls of his doctrine.
Although laws these days forbid the actual burning of heretics, those of us who deal in a broader spectrum of measurement than PP’s instruments can cope with are still familiar with being doused in ecumenical dishwater from the petrie dishes and familiar still with the holy scientific theft of information which, if it can’t be appropriated, sucked dry and patented, is then cast back to the ‘damned’ and sneered at from the ramparts.
The issue with PP is not about truth and accountability, it is about faith: PP chooses to place his faith in corporate labs in which the priests of materiality publish truths according to the rabid greed of the shareholders, the PR interpreters and their political stooges then package it as creed for the likes of PP. But only the closed mind is certain and I detect a tremor in the foundations of PP’s Church and maybe he does too for why else would he and his ilk be so anxious to burn the point of difference which gives the lie to his absolutist belief.
The Mother yawns as another wave of insecure left-brainers burns her effigy…again.
I am very angry about this badly referenced, opinionated piece of writing posing as a front for sound scientific positioning. And I am sorry that BayBuzz has considered it worth including. Paul’s historical examples of personage used to prop up a messy argument are all misrepresented, misused and evidence of an incomplete and dangerous comprehension of the subject. Florence Nightingale was oblidged to operate within a fledgling medical system established by Paul Paynter’s own patriarchal scientific construct. Who was responsible for an enormous number of deaths at childbirth during the 19th and early 20th century? Why male doctors of course, who themselves hadn’t understood the importance of washing their hands when delivering babies and tying off umbilical cords.
Perhaps Mr Paynter has heard of Pasteur’s deathbed confession, perhaps not: “I was wrong. The microbe (germ) is nothing. The terrain (milieu) is everything.” Who knows, but it would be great if Baybuzz were to interview someone who actually knows about microbes, biochemistry, immune systems and nutrition- perhaps Thelma at the Lotus Centre, Angela Hair or Ben Warren- they might be able to persuade Mt Paynter to look a little further than his own nose.
As for Galileo- it wasn’t witches who had problems with the heliocentric (sun-at-the-center) view of the solar system, it was the Church- Paul Paynter’s “Science”‘s predecessor in persecution of dissent.
Mr Paynter’s thrashing of parents who choose not to inject toxoids, adjuvants and preservatives into their children’s bloodstream in order to bolster the vaccine industry’s current 35 billion dollar profit is pathetic. He demonstrates a total lack of understanding of the developing immune system- with particular regard to Th1 and Th2 (heard of them Paul?) and the development of auto-immune disease- and before you try to tell me that Dr Andrew Wakefield’s discovery of the association between autism and the MMR vaccine was debunked please remember that the guy supposed to have done it- “Dr” Poul Thorsen- was indicted for embezzelment shortly after- but that little piece of news wasn’t run in the mainstream media was it?
Mr Paynter’s chaos vs harmony has no relevance to his argument against people who operate outside of his ken. In many ways one could argue that the current environmental and social chaos we are experiencing stems from a species trying to exist without magic, without mystery, without reverence for the Earth whose back we tread and that the responsibility for this can be placed directly at the feet of a deity which has tried to shine the torch of truth at phenomena but, instead has done nothing more than gut it and leave it to dry in the sun, devoid of value and meaning. When one adds commerce and politics to science we see the true horrors of bioweapons, genetic engineering, waterways saturated with oestrogen, antibiotics, statins, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, nuclear waste, industrial waste and on and on. And Mr Paynter sits there expounding on the terrible practice of operating medical systems and ways of living which do not subscribe to his tiny measuring device and, in fact attempt to alleviate the disaster that is the modern health of humanity and environment.
Lastly BayBuzz I’d bet my bottom dollar that you would ‘moderate’ any of your writers who used expletives to describe Allah. Your writer Paul Paynter, however has not only been allowed to insult my spirituality but to do it in bold type. I am offended by this as much as I am offended by his rubbish piece of writing.
Yours angrily
Kate White
I suggest: go to bed early with a warm glass of milk.
Not sure if that is an attempt at patronisation, if it is it seems to be coming from one of the band members on the deck of the Titanic. If you’re interested I’d be happy to explain to you why the current medical model is sailing directly for an iceberg. But then, of course ignorance is bliss- I do hope though that you have a lifejacket.
In the first of a series of ‘photographs’ of the iceberg mentioned above I would like to draw Mr Bosley’s and Mr Paynter’s attention to the headlines on TV 1 today (Tuesday 19th) referring to the inevitable outcome when the priests of Science come to the bottom of their box of tricks. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus is, in fact, a lovely example of Mr Paynter’s Darwinian theory and it is faintly surprising that the modern mainstream medical fraternity have not taken heed of their own Apostle in this regard. A small child would be able to tell them that a robust species exposed to certain constant environmental changes often enough will mutate with the aim of survival. And if that species happens to be a bacterium God help the host if they have been silly enough to trust their drug-pushing doctor and haven’t been attending to their own immune system.
I’m afraid Mr Bosley a warm glass of milk wouldn’t suffice. I expect your version of that glass would be pasturized, homogenized, standardised, taken from cows grazing on superphosphate sprayed grass, laced with mastitis and antibiotics (goodness could this have contributed to the bacteria resistance?) and finally bottled in BPA-leaching plastic. No one’s immune system would benefit from that.
The second ‘snapshot’ of the iceberg toward which mainstream medical science is headed is the principal of suppression as opposed to supported expression when applied to: the majority of childhood illnesses those of us over forty experienced as par for the course; allergies, the production of cholesterol and others. The suppression approach denies the ability of the human organism to heal itself when properly supported, disinheriting people of their natural ability to process illness correctly, and neglects the all-important cause.
A classic example of the cause and suppression approach within this model is the use of vaccines to trick the body into generating antibodies supposed to protect a child from contracting the ‘wild’ version of a disease. The unvaccinated child’s developing immune system involved in dealing with infectious antigens can be divided into two broad areas, the larger part: Th1 which is their army for fighting infection, the smaller part being Th2 which is their archival department recording the nature of the infection and generating specific antibodies. Because vaccine manufacturers are so focused on the production of antibodies and they’re packing not one but several toxoids in each shot (measles, mumps and rubella or, in another shot: tetanus, pertussis, diphtheria AND polio) and they’re jabbing children so young their systems are still in flux, the vaccinated child’s immune system is being skewed to the larger part being Th2 which leaves children not only with no army, merely a bunch of librarians to fight off subsequent infections, but also a confused immune system which begins to attack itself: auto-immune disease often manifesting as ‘food intolerance’ and allergies.
The vaccinated child then presents to the doctor with asthma or eczema and is treated with, in the case of eczema a variety of hydrocortisone creams. But the cause has not been addressed and these drugs only alleviate the symptoms for a time. As the eczema progresses mild steroids are introduced to suppress the now chronic itching and oozing of lymphatic fluid which typically appears around joints. The steroid component is increased and as the years go by the sufferer develops thinner and thinner skin, an overloaded liver, a propensity for osteoporosis and they’re still getting eczema.
The vaccinated child may also present to the doctor with a variety of infections: conjunctivitis perhaps, staph or ear infections etc, for which the doctor freely hands out antibiotics, either topical or ingested. (Yes, I’m sorry Mr Paynter there are non-antibiotic alternatives which do work- let’s save the antibiotics for when they’re really needed.) On the surface the infection goes away and everyone’s happy. Underneath the surface the antibiotics have wiped out 70% of the child’s immune system (the gut) and it will take two years of probiotics to return that defence mechanism to its pre-doctor visit state. Ever wondered why one of the known precursors for meningitis is a prior infection? It wasn’t the infection that was the problem it was that the spaceship shields were down by 70%.
The child who wasn’t vaccinated and raised on chippies and coca cola but on good chemical and sugar-free home cooking with a decent home rhythm, kept warm on cold days, kept hydrated with fluoride-free water, kept playing in the fresh air instead of in front of the tv, contracts the measles virus. This child stays home for three weeks or so with the curtains drawn in the day to ease their light sensitivity and is fed a good dose of cod liver oil (vitamin A) daily with nutrient- dense soups and old-fashioned loving home nursing (is this what Mr Paynter calls witchcraft?). Given all these components the chances of complication are extremely low and this child’s body will have been given a chance to heal itself, develop lifelong antibodies and have a stronger immune system than before the contraction of the disease. And no eczema, asthma, autism, leaky gut syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, food intolerances etc.
I was vaccinated and treated with steroids for subsequent asthma and eczema for 32 years. I owe my current allergy-free existence to acupuncture, homeopathy, herbal medicine and nutrition. The instances of vaccine-damage are growing yearly and costing the country far more than basic nutrition and disease education (witchcraft?) for families would. But no one’s looking for the cause because vaccines: the holy grail of the modern medical world, the only medicine you can scare healthy people into taking couldn’t possibly be implicated. There’s too much money (and kudos?) at stake.
The third and fourth photographs also illustrate the reluctance of Science to search too hard for cause if there is a possibility of uncovering a revenue generating culprit. Since 2007 the number of New Zealanders taking sleeping pills has risen from 220,000 to 320,000 including a growing number of teenagers. While the priests of Science are busy arguing about the long-term effects of sleeping pill use the holistic practitioner will perhaps be looking under the pillows and beds of these restless souls to see if that’s where they’re charging their cell phones, perhaps checking to see if they use ethernet cabling or a wi fi router to connect them to the busy world or checking the outside of the house for one of the new ‘smart’ meters, looking on the desk for that nasty DECT (digital enhanced cordless telecommunications) phone or, most insidious, looking for that baby monitor beside the cot. The holistic practitioner would then be forced to pass on a rather unpopular message: the electromagnetic radiation emitted by any of these devices, despite the assurances of ICNIRP (international commission on non-ionising radiation protection- read self-appointed industry affiliated stooges) to the contrary, is sufficient to disrupt the production of melatonin, something we only produce when we’re asleep and there is no light in the room. EMR has a similar frequency to light and the pineal gland cannot distinguish between the two. The hormone melatonin is required for a good night’s rest, for healing and for cancer prevention. So along with that warm glass of milk Mr Bosley I hope you’ve switched to Ethernet, swapped your walkabout for a plug-in phone, tangled with your electricity provider to return your analogue power meter and weighed up the pros and cons of a cell-phone-caused brain tumour. Dr Neil Cherry tried to warn people of this over ten years ago.
That’s right there are indeed good priests of Science who do have the courage to tangle with the likes of the 1.9 trillion dollars/year telecommunications industry. But they are rare, so rare.
Crikey Paul, now look what you’ve done.
This is photograph four: in 2010 Jimmy Suttie successfully applied to ERMA (now EPA) to continue stuffing human genes into cattle, sheep and goats at AgResearch’s franken pharm “Ruakura” out of Hamilton. The usual window-dressing ‘consultation’ occurred whereby the public got to have their blat, the experts were trundled out and ERMA approved the application anyway (happy to forward anyone interested: a chart I worked on with an ERMA employee, of ERMA’s doings with GMOs since 1998).
This trial ostensibly was to have focused on things like therapeutic monoclonal antibodies such as Herceptin, ie cheap human therapeutic proteins, as constituting one of the most attractive candidates for biopharming among other applications. Seemingly breast cancer was the focus of this vivisector’s philanthropic thrust.
One of my main points in my spoken submission during the farce that was that consultation process, was that New Zealand’s grossly high rate of breast cancer might be somewhat alleviated seeing that ERMA had, just last year (2009) finally seen the light and withdrawn all approvals for products containing ‘endosulfan’ (registered for use here since 1960- it’s a pesticide for those who don’t know and haven’t been buying organic veges). (Go look up endosulfan’s role in breast cancer Mr Paynter). I further suggested that if only the aluminium was removed from deodorants and, here’s a scary one: if only women would stop having their breasts crushed, traumatized and exposed to the ionizing radiation of mammograms, we might not need to subject cattle, sheep and goats to the cellular insult offered them by a series of mad priests like Jimmy Suttie. (For those women not in the know- google: thermography)
Dupont wouldn’t have been happy. Neither would the deodorant people.
Suttie eventually faded out of the scene having cost taxpayers in excess of $50 million (over the previous 12 years) with nothing more than three heifers with exploded ovaries and a glut of transgenic milk, blood, faeces and offal sprayed liberally all over Ruakura (anyone remember Pirbright? – yes Mr Paynter that bright candle of Scientific bravado wavers somewhat doesn’t it?).
A little later minion priests under the new direction of Dr Goetz Laible (Oct 2012) rushed outside excitedly with a glass of milk with reduced beta-lactoglobulin (BLG), claiming headline news in having produced, interestingly, exactly the same kind of milk produced by a camel, without the heartache. Strangely they couldn’t explain the absence of the tail of the cow whose milk had caused so much excitement. Ever wondered where your tax dollars are directed?
Photograph five is simply this link: http://www.stuff.co.nz/science/8467207/Lax-GM-rules-may-bite-back-scientists from today’s (Monday 25th) Stuff. Please copy and paste to your browser.
Mr Paynter I could drown you in evidence that your Science is no more infallible than the Church it deposed, that the things done around the world in the name of Science easily surpass the worst atrocities committed by the Church in the name of God untenable as the latter are. I can cover Prof Don Huber’s work on the 40 new plant pathogens which have emerged as a direct result of the use of RoundUp, or perhaps you might be interested in the work of Dr Arpad Pusztai who discovered way back in 1998 that it doesn’t pay to report the truth, having observed that it wasn’t the host organism, nor the transgene which caused the lab rats fed on GE potatoes to develop liver deformities and suffer immune compromise but the technology itself- he was sacked immediately. (This same technology resides in the soy lethicin in the Cadbury’s Easter Eggs your children will be wolfing down this weekend).
I could talk about the atrocious Scientific lies conning people into consuming hydrogenated oils and margarines, or the over 500 independently identified, many of them carcinogenic, chemicals used in the process of fracking to contaminate “processed” water in conjunction with the Earth’s aquifers- that’s right John Key let’s not look too closely at the cancer clusters in the vicinity of the wells in Taranaki nor at what farmers are being payed to spray on their fields. I could cover the cancer industry, and I use the word ‘industry’ deliberately. I could tell you why the Earth’s bees are disappearing and why migratory birds are becoming extinct, I would tell you why the plutonium, uranium, radioactive sulphur, cobalt 60 and strontium 90 found in tuna off California is but a tiny part of the effects of Fukushima on the Earth and that you won’t hear about it in the mainstream news because General Electric builds the nuclear plants and General Electric owns the media. Are your eyes glazing over yet?
Did you know Dr Frederick Klenner was curing polio, meningitis, tetanus, pneumonia, hepatitis, herpes simplex, chicken pox, mumps, measles, mononucleosis, diphtheria, pancreatitis, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever and more with appropriate doses of ascorbic acid (Vit C) back in the 1940s? Did you know that a simple solution of diluted hydrogen peroxide solution, used daily in conjunction with vitamin and mineral intake and manuka honey, will clear a skin wound of infection? Did you know that just these two examples of support for the human body during illness are too cheap to be of interest to the current high priests of Modern Medical Science? They can’t patent Vitamin C. They can’t make money from it therefore it is not available to you who only subscribe to their doctrine.
When Scientific truth is subject to nothing more than the biggest bank account, the most political influence. When one will turn to the list of patrons before one reads a peer reviewed published paper in order to ascertain the ‘bent’ of the work, then you do not have an absolute. How dare you suggest subjecting homeopathy, natural Mãori medicine or herbal supplements, colloidal silver, arnica or Echinacea to such corrupt scrutiny when we all know full well that efficacy of the above will only be confirmed if the information can be appropriated by the likes of Merck or Johnson and Johnson.
In conclusion Mr Paynter I am sorry but your ancestors in the Havelock North graveyard did not die from lack of vaccines: including partially the childbirth example they died from malnutrition. The Earth Mother had no option but to respond to ignorance with natural force. Blaming the iceberg for the ship’s collision is a bit too much Paul really. If you cared to peruse the actual statistics of people who died from every disease for which there is now a vaccine you would find that instances of death dropped off dramatically with the adoption of decent asepsis practice and decent nutrition. On all the graphs, just before the rate of death tails off, right at the bottom of the slope we see the introduction of vaccines and hear the subsequent crowing of embezzled success from the mountaintops of slippery omnipotence.
Your references to humanity’s transient existence on Earth seems to me brimming with an adversarial and yet victim-like response to your environment borne of despair and this truly smacks of one who has not cultivated any recognition of the etheric world or the natural, one who does not see himself as anything more than flotsam and jetsam floating ineffectually on a sea of textbook chaos. No wonder you have so little regard for your Mother. I put it to you that you are suffering from spiritual malnutrition and that, if only you knew it, you are entirely responsible for your own reality.
In response to your bizarrely disjointed comments on gymnasium cleanliness I guess I couldn’t care less except to say that yours and their immune system will suffer from lack of stimulus, the Earth Mother suffers when all that crap washes into her waterways and the only people who really benefit (short-term) are the manufacturers of this wretched Trisoclan.
Yes Mr Paynter belief is dangerous, belief in Science as much as any recipient of our faith.
PS I neglected to mention consideration of that cocktail of thyroid suppressing, I.Q. destroying hydrofluorosilicic acid that Mainstream Science considers a worthwhile contribution to the poisoning of various populations around the world including those right here under the care of the HDC via tap water for drinking, showering in, swimming in, watering our gardens, keeping our goldfish and even washing our cars with. In the absence of any sense within the DHB who have obviously ingested far too much of the stuff, it is to be hoped that the mass medication will end with the referendum.
Also a correction to my spelling of: Triclosan.
Kate, instead of a glass of warm milk, grab a huge gin and tonic, lay back and think of England.
Thanks John but I’m not one of those fellows lying in a life-support capsule in the Matrix. I took my pill and woke up to reality, or, if you prefer, I ate of the fruit of the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil and, although yes, there are grey areas, some things require standing up and being counted as a Human Being. G & T can wait for when there is something to celebrate. I don’t need anaesthetising right now- I have children to protect.
Although I do see a hell of a lot of optimistic ostriches around these days though as the HB soil is currently a little too hard to stick their heads in they’re opting for G & Ts and cricket- but maybe even that’s not working for them any more…
I’ll slice my lemon and drop in the ice on the gordons when the hospitals start employing naturopaths, homeopaths, acupuncturists and herbalists.
What an idiot! I know everyone has their opinion but that was ….