Today’s Whole Health Links
“California fires affect 500,000”
The BBC covers “the day of reckoning” in “California fires affect 500,000.” I’m looking forward for the flippant comparisons to the Katrina “natural” disaster and eventually some serious scholars inside or outside the ivory tower will publish a formal study, exposing more “startling” class and “race” issues.
“Young, black and too white”
It was actually ‘startling’ to find an article called “Young, black and too white” at Salon.com—because Salon.com is about sweet people who are “a little” concerned in a tiny, mousy voice—but not bitter.
It does help that the article is written by Karen Grigsby Bates of NPR fame—but she is writing uncomfortable stuff like this: “It’s a paradox that would have made Martin Luther King Jr. laugh—or perhaps wince. After the decades the previous generations spent battering down the doors to segregated institutions, the first generation of those civil rights beneficiaries—us—has grown up, and we now have children of our own. Per the plan, we are living lives that are extremely integrated. Maybe (and here’s where the wincing comes in) too integrated.”
It is very pleasant for me to read stuff like this because it saves me time. It took too many minutes for me to bang out “Flippant Remarks about ‘Brideshead Revisited’,” “Flippant Remarks about Guns Germs and Steel,” “My Three Sexist Assumptions of the Apocalypse,” and many more… These writings are more like strenuous but necessary therapy for me. It like a backlog of pent up feelings that need to be moved out of the way to make room for something else—something more interesting than the same old imperial-protest story told over and over again…
Karen Grigsby Bates makes “Young, black and too white” a matter of fact instead of a “secret truth” that I must waste my time trying to reveal to an “uncaring” world…
“How to Test Water Purity”
“How to Test Water Purity” introduces me to the possibility that a lay individual in the 21st century can independently check their water supply. My move is to trust but verify and to experiment with just little bit more Earth-scale responsibility.
The Bacteriophage
The bacteriophage is the alterative to penicillin. “Dr. Anthony Smithyman—BioTech Nation” reveals the largely Soviet history of the viral phage and how this relates to the current state of antibiotic resistance. I was unable to see any motivation for large pharmaceutical companies to get on the phage bandwagon—unless of course they can patent an unnecessarily complex synthetic method of producing phages. In the mean time, nature produces these things in our natural water and natural food.