Day: March 24, 2015

Organic Dairy Farming Struggles To Keep Up With Demand

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Tom Meersman ~ Mark Wickenhauser stood in the doorway of his weathered 1910 barn and viewed the dark soil that will soon sprout a pasture rich with alfalfa and other grasses. He has worked all his life at the family dairy farm near Cologne in Carver County but switched from conventional to organic farming in 2005.

“It wasn’t the popular thing to do, but I guess I didn’t care,” he said. “It just made a lot of sense to me.”

organic dairyOrganic dairy has come a long way since then. Americans spent more than $5 billion on organic dairy products in 2014, with double-digit annual growth during much of the past decade, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Supply has not been able to keep up with demand, especially during the past year, said Meg Moynihan, organic program administrator for the Minnesota Department of Agriculture.

“I am hearing from just about everybody that supply is very tight, that all of the dairy processing companies are looking for new farmers and that they’re having trouble filling their orders with retailers,” she said.

Shelf space for organic dairy increasing

Luke Friedrich, spokesman for Cub Foods, said demand for organic products is strong at Cub’s 76 stores in Minnesota. In January, the company expanded its Wild Harvest organic line and shelf space, he said, because customers want more organic products.

Most Cub stores have two or more cases of organic milk, Friedrich said, in addition to organic butter, eggs and other products. Continue reading →

Study: Global Medical Expansion Has “Made Us Sick”

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Heather Callaghan ~ The burgeoning “health” care industry has made people see themselves as sickly…

Researchers from Ohio State University had a hunch that the expansion of the medical industry has made people overall view themselves as unwell – in need of help. First psychologically, then physically.

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Illustration by Dees

For all the medical advancements, people are actually worse for the wear despite what the medical community itself will propagate (longer life expectancy, lower cancer rates etc). In this instance, one only need look around to see a thriving “sick care” industry, having nothing to do with reversing illness.

OSU researchers came up with some interesting analyses to determine if medical expansion has made people view themselves as unhealthy. (Does physical illness follow?) Interestingly, they also backhacked the study to see what life would be like if medical sprawl hadn’t take place.

Researchers featured in the July 2015 issue of the journal Social Science Research used several large multinational datasets to examine changes in how people rated their health between 1981 and 2007 and compared that to medical expansion in 28 countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

So, did people feel healthier? Breathe a sigh of relief as the world of medicine expanded drastically during that time? Hui Zheng, assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State, thinks not.

He says: Continue reading →

Institute Finds US Medical System Wastes $750 Billion Per Year

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Anthony Gucciardi ~ The straining medical system in the United States wastes a whopping 750 billion dollars per year, according to a major report by the highly revered Institute of Medicine that was heavily ignored and washed over after it was released three years ago.

Now surely that’s a big number, and it’s really concerning just considering this fact — but I want to put this figure into perspective for you. After all, it’s hard to envision a billion dollars let alone 750 billion. The amount we’re talking about here is not only more than the entire budget for the US Department of Defense, or more than the 2008 banker bailout that everyone is so upset about.

It’s also enough to completely cover healthcare costs for 150 million US workers.

That’s how much the medical system is blowing each and every year. And it’s not on providing excellent care. In fact, according to the report, the ridiculous waste can be categorized a number of really disturbing ways: Continue reading →

The Consciousness Revolution

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Graham Hancock ~ Consciousness is one of the great mysteries of science – perhaps the greatest mystery. We all know we have it, when we think, when we dream, when we savour tastes and aromas, when we hear a great symphony, when we fall in love, and it is surely the most intimate, the most sapient, the most personal part of ourselves. Yet no one can really claim to have understood and explained it completely. There’s no doubt it’s associated with the brain in some way but the nature of that association is far from clear. In particular..

How do these three pounds of material stuff inside our skulls allow us to have experiences?

consciousnessProfessor David Chalmers of the Australian National University has dubbed this the “hard problem” of consciousness; but many scientists, particularly those (still in the majority) who are philosophically inclined to believe that all phenomena can be reduced to material interactions, deny that any problem exists. To them it seems self-evident that physical processes within the stuff of the brain produce consciousness rather in the way that a generator produces electricity – i.e. consciousness is an “epiphenomenon” of brain activity. And they see it as equally obvious that there cannot be such things as conscious survival of death or out-of-body experiences since both consciousness and experience are confined to the brain and must die when the brain dies.

Yet other scientists with equally impressive credentials are not so sure and are increasingly willing to consider a very different analogy – namely that the relationship of consciousness to the brain may be less like the relationship of the generator to the electricity it produces and more like the relationship of the TV signal to the TV set. In that case when the TV set is destroyed – dead – the signal still continues. Nothing in the present state of knowledge of neuroscience rules this revolutionary possibility out. True, if you damage certain areas of the brain certain areas of consciousness are compromised, but this does not prove that those areas of the brain generate the relevant areas of consciousness. If you were to damage certain areas of your TV set the picture would deteriorate or vanish but the TV signal would remain intact. Continue reading →

The Federal Reserve Bank Must Be Destroyed

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Patrick Barron ~ During the years of the Roman Republic, Cato the Elder ended every speech with the phrase “Delanda est Carthago” (Carthage must be destroyed). Rome had fought two wars with Carthage, yet the threat to the Republic remained. Cato saw Carthage as an existential threat and concluded that Rome would not be secure as long as Carthage existed. So fervently did he hold this view that he ended every speech, even about completely different subjects, with the famous phrase. I believe that we Austrians need to adopt a similar phrase to remind the American people that the US faces an existential threat from the machinations of the Federal Reserve Bank. “Delanda est in Susidium Foederatum Bank”…The Federal Reserve Bank must be destroyed. Like Carthage, the Federal Reserve Bank cannot be controlled or restrained. Either it or our republic will survive, but not both. For the sake of our nation, the Fed must be destroyed.

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Founding the Fed Instead of Ending Fractional Reserve Banking

The Fed was founded under false economic premises–to prevent bank runs by providing temporary liquidity to banks which found themselves unable to redeem their certificates and demand deposits for cash and/or specie. The real cause of illiquid banks–fractional reserve banking–was never seriously addressed. It was assumed that banks had the legal right to invest their customers’ demand funds in loans and that runs were caused by over indulging in this practice. But as Murray N. Rothbard explain in What Has Government Done to Our Money?, loaning demand funds instantly places  the bank in an insolvent position, for it cannot redeem all of its demand accounts for cash or specie. Through the process of lending demand funds, the banks have created fiduciary media out of thin air, reducing their reserve ratio below one hundred percent. If the banks do this on a very modest basis, the public may not be aware of the fraud. However, once the rumor starts that the bank is illiquid, there is a literal “run” to the bank to withdraw demand funds. In such a case, even a bank that only modestly lent its demand funds might find itself unable to honor all withdrawal claims and would be forced to close its doors. Continue reading →