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03 July 2020
Anti-People
02 July 2020
Geo Washington - enslaved people - washingtonpost.com © 1996-2020
** What does this mean? Should all reference to Geo Washington be removed from US History? Must we tear down all statues and destroy all of his pictures and remove all the copies on coins and the US One Dollar Bill? Of course Not! That would just be stupid and a one-sided control!
Yet there are some who would say so!
Read and heed!
Austin
Yet there are some who would say so!
Read and heed!
George and Martha Washington enslaved 300 people. Let’s start with their names.
Austin
Moll
Giles
Ona Judge
Paris
Hercules
Joe
Richmond
Christopher Sheels
William Lee
That’s just 10 names of the more than 300 people enslaved by George and Martha Washington. They worked and traveled most closely with our nation’s first First Family as chamber maids, postilions, cooks, waiters, laborers, seamstresses and valets.
Did you know that George Washington had only one tooth in his mouth when he became president in 1789, thanks to bad health and 18th-century dentistry? But his false teeth were not made of wood, as is often described in folk songs and lore. His dentures were made from the pulled teeth of slaves.
Roll that around in your head for a minute.
Did you know that the president was often unwell, having survived two wars and a nasty bout with a cutaneous form of anthrax? He was tended to by Richmond and William Lee during long stretches when he was unable to sit or stand.
Did you know that some of the names belong to people who were “dower slaves,” legally controlled by Martha? She had the money in the family as a widow who was left with thousands of acres and hundreds of people when her first husband, Daniel Parke Custis, died.
Did you know that when Ona Judge escaped, Martha, insisted that George do everything in his power to track her down so she could gift her to a granddaughter as an attendant (thus avoiding the need to reimburse her first husband’s estate for loss of property)? And yes, the correct word is “property,” because next to acreage (as in real estate), the enslaved composed the greatest source of wealth for families such as the Washingtons.
And let’s not forget that one of the reasons that our nation’s capital was moved to Washington, D.C., was it was closer to Virginia, where slavery was practiced and protected under law. When Washington traveled to New York — or, later, to Philadelphia — to preside over a newly formed government, he left all but a few of his slaves behind at Mount Vernon. Once Washington moved north, he was legally at risk of losing his slaves in the City of Brotherly Love.
Did you know that Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 held that if you lived in that state for more than six months with enslaved people, they could successfully petition for their freedom?
Correspondence shows that Washington thought he was exempt from that law because his work required that he reside in the state for an extended period. His attorney general, Edmund Jennings Randolph, cleared up that false the impression when he knocked on Washington’s High Street door in Philadelphia one day to say that Randolph’s own slaves had familiarized themselves with that law and were packing up to leave.
So the Washingtons came up with an elaborate shuffling plan to cycle in and out of Pennsylvania so their slaves would never hit the legal threshold for freedom. Sometimes they would take a trip back to Virginia. Sometimes they would just make an excuse to go across the river to New Jersey. The schedule was complicated and burdensome, but Washington kept it up because he and Martha were determined to keep the people they owned in bondage.
Washington explained in a letter to his secretary Tobias Lear that the scheme was meant to deceive the enslaved and the public, said Erica Armstrong Dunbar, a professor of history at Rutgers and author of the book “Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave Ona Judge.”
The man who supposedly never told a lie figured out how to stretch the truth.
Did you know that Washington’s cook, Hercules, also escaped? He did so on Washington’s birthday, a departure with an unmistakable message.
These are just some of the stories. (Many others are in Dunbar’s book, which ought to be on Americans’ reading list about our real history.) The Washingtons had hundreds of people on their official slave census. Mostly, we don’t know their names or their stories. There are no buildings named for them. No statues. Yet their toil and their torture helped to build a new nation.
Many say Washington deserves some measure of grace because he arranged to free some of his slaves upon his death. So, he did in death what he would not do in life?
We must own up to the fact that he owned people, that those people were separated from their loved ones, made to work without pay, made to live without dignity, made to suffer whippings, made to disappear. Because of that, their names are monuments unto themselves.
Names we should remember.
Austin
Moll
Giles
Ona Judge
Paris
Hercules
Joe
Richmond
Christopher Sheels
William Lee
. . . And so many more.
CORRECTION
An earlier version of this column said that Tobias Lear knocked on Washington’s door in Philadelphia to alert him that his own slaves were planning to leave in accordance with Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act of 1780. It was Edmund Jennings Randolph. This version has been updated.
14 June 2020
Are you ready for the Eternity which follows? #2
Our temptations are linked to our thoughts!
You can not be tempted by things that you do not know or think about!
If you can control your thoughts you will control the temptations which can
so easily beguile us!
1.
charm or enchant (someone), sometimes in a deceptive way.
{Isn't that so much today shows how people are beguiled or enchanted. Even to the point where children's cartoons and books show being enchanted?}
{Isn't that so much today shows how people are beguiled or enchanted. Even to the point where children's cartoons and books show being enchanted?}
Thus by learning how to control our thoughts in life; we can control the temptations in our existence! It is that simple, no thoughts no temptation!
People have been beguiled thru out history by cleaver ideas or tempting elements placed upon our pathway! {History is replete with millions of such examples, some simple and many with some great sources of temptation!}
If only we could keep our mind's eye upon the key purposes in our life - many if not all distracting temptations would not be a bother or distraction to us. This just shows how people become depressed and distracted in their lives! It comes down to what do you allow into your mind and follow?
Today with the great number of distractions in people's day to day life - it has become a massive confusing mess of almost endless possibilities! Cell fons, the internet, TV, radio, and print advertisements! This massive system has been hammering the minds of everyone with distracting information {propagander.} This system has become the downfall of many good people! Hopefully, you are not one of these?
Without going into the many different distracting things in our society - let's just step back and re-access your priorities!
It comes down to " Exactly what and how much of the subsequential data is really necessary? "
** The answer is if you are able to selectively screen and pick the items of information in your life - how much more improved your life would be!
It is up to you!
12 June 2020
Are you ready for the Eternity which follows? #1
Ready for Eternity? { Part 1 of }
This is an overview of our eternal person and being!
We all have a (1) Body that everyone sees, a (2) Soul that resides in our mind and a (3) Spirit which is connected to the Lord God Almighty!
Some will ask why should I care?
The primary reason is this is the real eternal you! What some will say?
Our Spirit is directly from God and it is not much you can do about it!
Since you are a triune being, your best effort is to learn how to manage what you have! It comes down to the best 2 out of 3 scenarios!
So given you have no real control over your God-given Spirit, that is a done deal, look toward your Body and Soul for your efforts to prepare for Eternity!
Turning to the two parts you can work with; your Soul resides in your Brain while in this earthly body. This is where most people fail to understand and come to control our destiny! Since the world offers so many different and interesting things to be and do! Here is the pitfall of so many people in their life!
Looking at all the eye candy, and rumors of excellent with so many entertaining things of supposed beauty and fame! What an advertising program the Devil uses to catch people's attention to lust after the wasted and wretched vices in life! Most of you are familiar with what we are talking about here! The next section will be how and why we use our body in this earthly life!
If you were truly interested in how to have the best existence and attempt to really be at the best possible point in your life! This is where you would be spending much of your time! This is extremely important since we only come this way once!
The question you must answer is how will you live your earthly existence?
** We will look at the who, what, and the why of your life!
This is an overview of our eternal person and being!
We all have a (1) Body that everyone sees, a (2) Soul that resides in our mind and a (3) Spirit which is connected to the Lord God Almighty!
Some will ask why should I care?
The primary reason is this is the real eternal you! What some will say?
Our Spirit is directly from God and it is not much you can do about it!
Since you are a triune being, your best effort is to learn how to manage what you have! It comes down to the best 2 out of 3 scenarios!
So given you have no real control over your God-given Spirit, that is a done deal, look toward your Body and Soul for your efforts to prepare for Eternity!
Turning to the two parts you can work with; your Soul resides in your Brain while in this earthly body. This is where most people fail to understand and come to control our destiny! Since the world offers so many different and interesting things to be and do! Here is the pitfall of so many people in their life!
Looking at all the eye candy, and rumors of excellent with so many entertaining things of supposed beauty and fame! What an advertising program the Devil uses to catch people's attention to lust after the wasted and wretched vices in life! Most of you are familiar with what we are talking about here! The next section will be how and why we use our body in this earthly life!
If you were truly interested in how to have the best existence and attempt to really be at the best possible point in your life! This is where you would be spending much of your time! This is extremely important since we only come this way once!
The question you must answer is how will you live your earthly existence?
** We will look at the who, what, and the why of your life!
10 June 2020
Tt's is not a know all show all! - part 1
Having lived longer than many of you who read this - I must say that all the schemes of humans will generally go astray! How?
Why?
When?
Will it be considered?
Most people will agree that the world is going off in many different directions and tangents! Most of the things they worry about or go around sprouting and confessing will matter little to naught in the vast Eternity which looms before us! We could list over a thousand things which are being voiced in the common public today - yet not touch much of anything important on the whole eternal truth!
Everything here upon this earth is temporary and conditional!
It has a beginning and an end - the only exception is the spirit of humans - which is eternal! Yes, your Spirit is Eternal!
The condition of a person's flesh is not the important thing. It doesn't matter if that flesh is circumcised or holy. Nor the color, or position, or social position you are in the here and now! It is the condition of the spirit that matters with God. Today the act of circumcision is not the issue, but acts of holiness are still deemed by many as essential for receiving salvation.
This same legalistic thinking lives on today in the doctrine of water baptism, church membership and other acts of holiness which some preach are necessary for salvation. While these things are important to recognize - it comes down to where does your Conscience and Faith rest!
Faith alone in the love of God, as expressed through Jesus, is the only thing that God demands for justification.
* Seek the Kingdom of God and His Righteousness
{Jesus Christ}and all the other things will be added unto you!
Matt 6:33
Religious rites mean little or nothing when looking at Eternal Salvation!.
The only thing that counts is becoming a new creation.
09 June 2020
Spiritual rebirth.
Spiritual Rebirth?
John 7:19 'Did not Moses give you the law, and yet none of you keepeth the law? Why go ye about to kill me?'
John 7:16-19 (NKJV)
16 [a]Jesus answered them and said, “My doctrine is not Mine, but His who sent Me. 17 If anyone wills to do His will, he shall know concerning the doctrine, whether it is from God or whether I speak on My own authority. 18 He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory; but He who seeks the glory of the One who sent Him is true, and no unrighteousness is in Him. 19 Did not Moses give you the law, yet none of you keeps the law? Why do you seek to kill Me?”Footnotes:
- John 7:16 NU, M So Jesus
They denied that they desired to kill Him, but the scriptures declare that they had already plotted or tried to kill Him three times.
They also knew much about God. It was required of the Jewish men to memorize large portions of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible). Their whole society revolved around God's moral standards and countless religious observances. However, they did not know God.
There is a difference between knowing about someone and really knowing them. Likewise today, millions of people are acquainted with knowledge about Jesus. They may even be moral and observe religious ceremonies, but if they don't personally experience knowing Jesus, they are not saved and will not make it to heaven. Even the devils believe and tremble but they aren't saved.
Our spiritual man became dead unto (separated from) God through sin. Just as we didn't accomplish our physical birth, we cannot produce this spiritual rebirth. We are totally incapable of saving ourselves, therefore, we need a Savior. We simply believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and we are saved.
08 June 2020
Old Diet vs New Diet
This post originally appeared on Nautilus and was published on November 12, 2015.
This article is republished here with permission.
A strong indication that fiber, the raw material solely fermented by microbes were somehow boosting microbial diversity in the Africans.
How did the microbiome of our ancestors look before it was altered by sanitation, antibiotics, and junk food?Indeed, when Sonnenburg fed mice plenty of fiber, microbes that specialized in breaking it down bloomed, and the ecosystem became more diverse overall. When he fed mice a fiber-poor, sugary, Western-like diet, diversity plummeted. (Fiber-starved mice were also meaner and more difficult to handle.) But the losses weren’t permanent. Even after weeks on this junk food-like diet, an animal’s microbial diversity would mostly recover if it began consuming fiber again.
This was good news for Americans—our microbial communities might re-diversify if we just ate more whole grains and veggies. But it didn’t support the Sonnenburgs’ suspicion that the Western diet had triggered microbial extinctions. Yet then they saw what happened when pregnant mice went on the no-fiber diet: temporary depletions became permanent losses.
When we pass through the birth canal, we are slathered in our mother’s microbes, a kind of starter culture for our own community. In this case, though, pups born to mice on American-type diets—no fiber, lots of sugar—failed to acquire the full endowment of their mothers’ microbes. Entire groups of bacteria were lost during transmission. When Sonnenburg put these second-generation mice on a fiber-rich diet, their microbes failed to recover. The mice couldn’t regrow what they’d never inherited. And when these second-generation animals went on a fiberless diet in turn, their offspring inherited even fewer microbes. The microbial die-outs compounded across generations.
Many who study the microbiome suspect that we are experiencing an extinction spasm within that parallels the extinction crisis gripping the planet. Numerous factors are implicated in these disappearances. Antibiotics, available after World War II, can work like napalm, indiscriminately flattening our internal ecosystems. Modern sanitary amenities, which began in the late 19th century, may limit sharing of disease- and health-promoting microbes alike. Today’s houses in today’s cities seal us away from many of the soil, plant, and animal microbes that rained down on us during our evolution, possibly limiting an important source of novelty.
But what the Sonnenburgs’ experiment suggests is that by failing to adequately nourish key microbes, the Western diet may also be starving them out of existence. They call this idea “starving the microbial self.” They suspect that these diet-driven extinctions may have fueled, at least in part, the recent rise of non-communicable diseases. The question they and many others are now asking is this: How did the microbiome of our ancestors look before it was altered by sanitation, antibiotics, and junk food? How did that primeval collection of human microbes work? And was it somehow healthier than the one we harbor today?
The National Institutes of Health’s Human Microbiome Project, the first phase of which finished in 2012, was billed as a “road map” of human microbes. But as Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, a microbiologist at New York University who studies remote Amerindian communities, told me, the effort is “really the American microbiome project; it’s not the human microbiome project.”
So a remarkable and somewhat quixotic effort has begun to catalog and possibly preserve, before they disappear, the microbes of people who live in environments thought to resemble humanity’s past—people whose microbiomes may approximate an ancestral state. Researchers are motoring down rivers in the Amazon, off-roading in the East African savanna, hiking into the mountain villages of Papua New Guinea. They see themselves as rushing to catalog an ecosystem that may soon disappear.
“It’s really our last chance to harvest a lot of these microbes from around the world,” Rob Knight, a microbiologist at the University of California, San Diego, told me. “We have to do it before it’s too late—and it’s very nearly too late.”
He and others suspect these populations won’t retain their traditional ways much longer. Antibiotics, thought to deplete microbes, are already used frequently in some communities. And as modernization and acculturation progresses—as these peoples move toward the sanitized, indoor-dwelling, junk food-eating reality that characterizes much life in developed nations today—some human microbes, or perhaps certain configurations of those microbes may be lost forever.
For now, scientists are careful to characterize the quest as purely descriptive; they want to know-how these human microbiomes affect our bodies. Yet a kind of microbial ark—a storage vault for potentially endangered human microbes—is perhaps implied. Martin Blaser, a microbiologist at New York University and Dominguez-Bello’s husband, argues that because Westernized peoples may have lost important microbes, we may have to repopulate ourselves with microbes derived from more traditional-living populations—from, say, Amazonian Amerindians or African hunter-gatherers.
That’s certainly a long way off. No one understands much about the dizzying variety documented so far—which microbes are good, which harmful, which irrelevant. One constant, though, is that people living subsistence lifestyles have tremendous diversity compared to westernized populations—up to 50 percent more species than North Americans or Europeans. That includes not only bacteria but eukaryotes—single-cell protists and large, multicellular worms. These organisms, which are often missing in the West, have historically been considered pathogens. But some evidence now suggests that they can favorably shape the microbiome, benefiting the host.
Most study subjects live in the tropics; their microbial communities may reflect tropical environments, not an ancestral human state. Yet even “extinct” microbiomes from higher latitudes—including from a frozen European mummy—are similarly configured to break down plant fiber, adding to the sense that the Western microbiome has diverged from what likely prevailed during human evolution.
The Sonnenburgs think fiber is so important that they’ve given it a new designation: microbiota-accessible carbohydrates, or MACs. They think that the mismatch between the Westernized, MAC-starved microbiome and the human genome may predispose to Western diseases.
Scientists studying these communities suspect that while mortality is high from infectious diseases, chronic, non-communicable diseases are far less prevalent. At the same time, researchers since the late 20th century have repeatedly observed that even in the West, people who grow up on farms with livestock, or exposed to certain fecal-oral infections, like Hepatitis A and sundry parasites—environments that, in their relative microbial enrichment, resemble these subsistence communities—have a lower risk of certain Western afflictions, particularly hay fever, asthma, and certain autoimmune disorders.
Many who study the microbiome suspect we are experiencing an extinction within that parallels the extinction gripping the planet.No one wants to bring back the killers of yore. But the suspicion—and the hope—is that beneficial microbes can be separated from the dangerous ones and that “good” ones can be restored. Or perhaps we can simply treat the community we already harbor better by feeding it healthier fare.
The United States Department of Agriculture recommends between 25 and 38 grams of fiber for adults daily; most Americans consume substantially less fiber-rich food, including nuts, whole grains, certain fruits, and vegetables. The guideline stems, in part, from the research of An irish-born physician named Denis Burkitt. While working in Uganda in the 1960s, Burkitt became convinced that the high-fiber African diet explained the Africans’ relative lack of colon cancer.
The problem with the fiber hypothesis, however, has always been twofold. People who eat plenty of fiber seem to have a lower risk of many diseases, including heart disease and diabetes. But when scientists have fed fiber to volunteers, they haven’t historically observed many benefits. And this underscores the real mystery: By what mechanism does fiber improve health?
Soluble fiber is an umbrella term for complex plant sugars—including some polysaccharides, oligosaccharides, and fructans. The molecules consist of simple sugars linked together in long, hard-to-dismantle chains. If you dump a load of fiber—or microbiota-accessible carbohydrates—onto a colonic community of microbes, those that specialize in fermenting it will bloom. And they’ll start churning out short-chain fatty acids, including butyrate, whose smell you might recognize from aged cheese, and acetate, which gives vinegar its sharpness.
These acids, Sonnenburg thinks, are one of the long-sought mechanisms by which fiber prevents disease. Rodent studies suggest that as they diffuse into circulation, they stimulate the anti-inflammatory arm of the immune system—cells that help you not attack tree pollen and other harmless proteins—preventing allergies and other inflammatory diseases. The calming effect reaches as far as the bone marrow and lungs, where, as a recent Nature Medicine study showed, the acids reduced animals’ vulnerability to asthma.
As Justin Sonnenburg put it, “We have this unsupervised drug factory in our gut.” The question facing microbiologists today is how to properly tend to that factory.
Here, studies of populations living more traditional lifestyles may provide clues. In the past, most people likely imbibed many times more fiber than today. If you eat minimally processed plants, which humans have for millions of years, you can’t avoid fiber. Modern hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists certainly eat loads of it. The Hadza of Tanzania, for instance, consume at least 10 times more than Americans, in tubers, baobab fruit, and wild berries. Agriculturalists, like those Burkina Fasans, also eat more fiber than Western populations, in porridges and breads made from unrefined grains.
Given this constant supply of microbiota-accessible carbohydrates, human microbiomes of the past, the Sonnenburgs argue, likely produced a river of these short-chain fatty acids. That probably changed some with the transition to agriculture, which made diets less diverse. But an even more drastic shift occurred quite recently, with the advent and widespread adoption of refined foods. As a result, westernized populations, the Sonnenburgs think, have lost healthful, fiber-fermenting microbes. And we suffer from a kind of fermentation byproduct deficiency.
HUNGRY
MICROBES: A healthy gut hosts a number of microenvironments. A fatty diet lacking in fiber causes some of our internal, ancestral microbes to devour a mucus lining, potentially leading to inflammatory bowel disease.
Photo by: Kristen Earle/Sonnenburg Lab
The resulting picture was unlike any rendition of the microbiome I’d seen before. One animal had eaten plenty of fiber, the other hadn’t. In the fiber-fed ecosystem, similar bacteria clustered with one another, not unlike schools of fish on a reef ecosystem. An undulating structure prevailed across space. But in the non-fiber diet, not only was diversity reduced, the microbes were evenly distributed throughout, like a stew boiled for too long.
At this point, Sonnenburg sat back in his chair and went quiet, waiting for me to notice something. To one side of both images, microbes were mostly absent—the mucus layer on the lining of the gut. But that layer was twice as thick in the fiber-fed mice than the non-fiber fed. That difference amounted to about 30 nanometers, far less than the width of a human hair. But one day we may look back and shake our heads that Western diseases—from diabetes to colon cancer—stemmed from 30 nanometers of mucus that, somewhere along the way, went missing in the developed world.
We think of the Western diet—high in unhealthy fats, sugar, and proteins—as overly rich. But what’s missing from the diet may be just as, and perhaps more, important than what’s abundant.
Years ago, while still a post-doc, Sonnenburg discovered that something very odd occurs when those MAC-loving microbes go hungry. They start eating mucus. “This is the stage where you say, ‘Oh my God. They’re eating me.’ ” Sonnenburg said. “You can see it.”
Our ancestral microbe variety may have faded over time due, simply, to our fiber-poor diet.We need that mucus. It maintains a necessary distance between us and our microbes. And as it erodes with a poor diet, the lining of the gut becomes irritated. Microbial detritus starts leaking through. One of the more striking discoveries in recent years is that you can see this stuff, called endotoxin, increase in the bloodstream immediately after feeding people a sugary, greasy, fast-food meal. The immune system responds as if under threat, leading to the “simmering inflammation” the Sonnenburgs think drives so many Western diseases.
We need inflammation to combat infections or aid tissue repair. But chronic inflammation—a danger signal blaring indefinitely—can lead to all manner of cellular dysfunction, contributing to many degenerative diseases.
I came away from Sonnenburg’s office with a sense that I’d glimpsed a principle underlying our relationship with microbes. Wringing calories from wild, fibrous fare required a village—microbes specialized in distinct tasks, but each also dependent on its neighbors. The difficulty of the job encouraged cooperation between microbes. When you withheld fiber, though, you removed the need for that close-knit cooperation. The mutually beneficial arrangements began to fray.
Sonnenburg’s experiments help contextualize what others are finding in peoples who hunt and forage. The Hadza, one of the last remaining hunter-gatherers on Earth, live near Lake Eyasi in Tanzania, a region of east Africa thought to be the birthplace of our species. An analysis of their microbes published last year detailed an immensely diverse community, including a number of microbes new to scientists.
The Hadza harbor a variety of bacteria called treponema, which are absent in the developed world. They’re spirochetes related to the pathogen that causes syphilis. Every rural, non-westernized group studied so far, including various Amerindian groups, also have treponemas, as do our primate relatives.
Cecil Lewis, a geneticist at the University of Oklahoma in Norman who studies the microbiomes of native people, including of Amerindian populations, suspects they may belong to an “ancestral microbiome”—a community that accompanied us since before we were human. Maybe anti-syphilis medication wiped them out in the West, Knight speculates. When I asked what they might do, or what their loss might mean, Lewis and others responded that no one really knows.
Yet the treponemas have genes that help in breaking down complex carbohydrates, suggesting a role in fermentation. And that dovetails with the other striking feature of the Hadza and Amerindian microbiomes. Where we have just a few strains of, say, prevotella bacteria, the Hadza have a kaleidoscopic variety. Again, diet is implicated. Breaking down tough, wild plants may require a diverse team of microbes. What happened to Western diversity? It’s possible we’ve inadvertently killed that wealth, or never possessed it at all. But another possibility, as Sonnenburg’s experiments suggest, is that because we haven’t fed those microbes, we’ve lost them. Our ancestral variety may have faded over time due, simply, to our fiber-poor diet.
HEALTHY
FIBER: In the past, most people likely consumed many times more fiber
than today. Modern hunter-gatherers eat loads of it, more than Western
populations. The Hadza
of Tanzania consume at least 10 times more than
Americans, in baobab fruit,
Photo by: Ingetje Tadros
Trials testing prebiotics, food for the fiber-fermenting bacteria, suggest that you can increase microbial richness with more fiber, and improve metabolic function. But here’s the wrinkle: In studies from Europe, only individuals who already harbored a baseline diversity benefitted from these dietary interventions. Those whose microbial communities were too impoverished didn’t—or couldn’t—respond to the new diet. They seemed to lack the ability.
The Sonnenburgs point to these studies as evidence that we need the right microbes—their unique alchemical talents—to unlock nutrients from food. Where do we get them? Our particular genes can influence the makeup of our microbiome, perhaps influencing our propensity to develop disease or put on weight by shaping our microbial community. But another reason for lacking a the bacterium is more straightforward: We may never have encountered it in the first place.
Those environments where a relatively prolific sharing of microbes still occurs—daycares, cowsheds, homes with lots of siblings, and homes with dogs—seem to protect against allergies, asthma, some auto-immune diseases, and certain cancers. These observations, often grouped under the rubric of the “hygiene hypothesis,” appear to highlight a phenomenon separate from diet: access to microbial wealth, and possibly to unique microbial heirlooms.
Consider the spiral-shaped, stomach-dwelling bacterium Helicobacter pylori. For at least a century, H. pylori has been declining in the developed world. Most of our great-great grandparents probably had it; now less than 6 percent of children do. Unlike the microbes that interest Sonnenburg, H. pylori doesn’t eat what we eat. It eats us, its host. And unlike microbes thought to jump aboard from food, water, soil, or other animals, H. pylori only come from other people—particularly, scientists think, our mothers. It’s a human-adapted microbe that’s passed between generations.
H. pylori is infamous for causing ulcers and gastric cancer, but mounting evidence also suggests that, by subverting the immune system to ensure its own survival, the bacterium may protect against asthma, obesity, and possibly other inflammatory diseases. If there’s an ecosystem restoration project implicit in the study of the ancestral microbiota, H. pylori serve as an important counterpoint to the emphasis on diet. You can eat all the fiber you want (unless your food is contaminated with feces) and you’ll never re-acquire microbes like H. pylori. The only way to restore such microbes may be to deliberately reintroduce them.
Even that idea is complicated. Years ago, Dominguez-Bello discovered a unique Amerindian strain of H. pylori in an isolated Amazonian tribe, a bacterium whose ancestors had presumably come over the Bering land bridge with the forebears of native Americans some 15,000 years ago. The native strain was disappearing, however. When people of different ancestries mixed in South America, Dominguez-Bello found, imported strains outcompeted native ones. African and European H. pylori strains were driving Amerindian ones extinct.
Why did that matter? We may fare better with “our” particular microbes. A study on Colombians last year found that when people of primarily native American ancestry harbored imported European or African H. pylori strains, their risk of gastric cancer increased dramatically. The introduced bugs didn’t match the native genotype. And that mismatch seemed to increase the risk of malignancy.
“This type of thing could be happening in many microbes,” Barbara Schneider, a molecular the biologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and co-author on the the study told me. “There’s no reason to think that helicobacter should be unique.”
We might call this the “family heirloom” problem. Some fraction of our microbes may be uniquely adapted to our particular genetic quirks—to our particular branch of the human family. Once they’re lost, there may be no recovering these microbes. Meaning that, because I was born and grew up in the U.S., “my” helicobacters and treponemas may be gone forever.
In their book, The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-term Health, the Sonnenburgs argue forcefully that boosting fiber intake is the best way to cultivate a healthier community of microbes. Given the many unknowns, their advocacy surprised me. The science wasn’t settled; what if they were wrong?
They’d fretted over this scientific uncertainty, they said, but decided that the diet they pushed—really a variant of the Mediterranean diet—would probably not cause harm, and would likely benefit adherents, even if everything they thought about the microbiome was wrong.
Not long after we spoke, Stephen O’Keefe, a gastroenterologist at the University of Pittsburgh, published what may be the best evidence yet (in people) that supports the Sonnenburgs’ microbiota-accessible carbohydrates hypothesis.
O’Keefe has long puzzled over the high risk of colon cancer among African-Americans compared to native Africans. Like Burkitt 60 years ago, he suspected that a diet rich in fiber might explain what he quantified as a 65-fold disparity. To prove it, he put 20 rural South Africans on a high-fat, high-meat diet—including hot dogs, hamburgers, and fries; and he put 20 African-Americans on a high fiber African diet, including corn porridge, beans, and fruit. In contrast to earlier studies, however, his team visited the subjects at home, preparing their meals and supervising them.
Changes occurred quickly. Inflammation of the colon, which increases the risk of cancer, decreased in the African-Americans on the African diet; and it increased in the Africans on the American diet. Production of the fermentation by-product butyrate thought to prevent colon cancer, increased in those eating African fare, and declined in those eating American-style. And here’s what struck me: In the fiber-poor, meat- and fat-fed microbiome, O’Keefe saw a “loosening” of those tight-knit communities oriented toward fermenting fiber. He’d done in people what Sonnenburg had done in rodents—rattled the ecosystem—and it took just two weeks on an American-type diet. He also demonstrated that regardless of the microbes you may not have inherited, what you feed the microbes you have can make a big difference in how they behave.
Years ago, impelled in part by their oldest daughter’s constipation problems, the Sonnenburg family revamped its diet. They threw out all processed foodstuffs, and began eating plenty of veggies and whole grains. They bought a dog. Justin Sonnenburg began hand-milling his own wheat berries for bread. He took up gardening. And when he compared his archived microbes from years ago with recent ones, he discovered that his microbial diversity had increased by half. “That’s a huge difference,” he told me, “as big as the difference between Americans and Amerindians.”
It remains to be seen what detailed analysis will reveal about this diversification—how many came from his dog, from soil, from the sourdough he handles; how many might have been there all along in depressed numbers, and bloomed on a fiber-rich diet. What it showed the Sonnenburgs, however, was that without fully understanding how the microbiome works, you can still push it in a healthier direction.
“If we wait to the point where we are beyond a shadow of a doubt, with double-blind studies translated to regulations, we’re going to be waiting decades,” Sonnenburg told me. “But right now, all the arrows are pointing in the same direction, toward fiber.”
Moises Velesquez-Manoff is a journalist and author of An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases.
Peter van Agtmael’s photos are from Stanford University’s #nextgreatdiscovery Series
The "Y " male marker
Most of the research focuses on the Y chromosome as a marker for fetal microchimerism. This does not mean that sons, rather than daughters, uniquely affect their mother’s bodies, but rather reflects ease of measurement: the Y chromosome stands out among a woman’s XX genes. And there is nothing to suggest that the presence of male cells in women’s brains wield a particular influence. Nonetheless, the findings gesture toward an array of questions about what it means for one individual to play host to the cellular material of another, prompting scientists to look into whether this phenomenon affects physical health or influences behavior, or even carries metaphysical consequences.
More later
God Wants You Well.
God wants you well!
Today some preachers are saying that healing is of the devil, but that’s not the message Peter gave. Notice what Peter said under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Not only was Jesus doing good when He healed people, but He healed all that were oppressed of the devil, not by God. That scripture clearly proves that sickness is not from God.
Isaiah 53 should end all debate. It was written prophetically about Jesus, the Messiah. Isaiah 53:4-5 says,
“Surely he has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes, we are healed.”
These verses reveal that physical healing is a part of the atonement of Christ. The Lord redeemed us from sickness just as much as He redeemed us from sin. He would no more want us to be sick than He would want us to sin. Those are radical statements to many Christians because we’ve been taught that forgiveness of sins is what salvation is all about. Well that’s certainly a vital part of salvation, but that’s not all that Jesus accomplished. We were also healed by His stripes. Sickness is not of God just as sin is not of God. Thank You, Jesus!
Just in case anyone might be thinking that the healing spoken of in Isaiah 53:4-5 is not physical but only emotional, the Bible gives a commentary on Isaiah’s prophecy. In Matthew 8:16 Jesus healed all the sick people brought to Him, and verse 17 says this was done…
“That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses.”
Therefore, Scripture comments on itself and makes it very clear that the healing spoken of by Isaiah is referring to physical infirmities and sicknesses. If Jesus bore our sicknesses, then we don’t have to.
You may be asking yourself, “What about Paul’s thorn in the flesh?” I wish I had space to answer that in this article because those scriptures are not talking about a sickness of Paul’s that the Lord would not heal. However, I do have an entire teaching revealing what Paul’s thorn in the flesh was.
That teaching is the second in a four-part series I have entitled God Wants You Well. The first teaching in that series deals with healing as a part of Christ’s atonement, the second deals with Paul’s thorn in the flesh, the third reveals reasons why people are not healed, and the fourth teaches that healing is governed by laws and reveals some of those laws. I encourage you to take advantage of these resources we are offering on healing.
Reference: AWMI.net - God wants You well!
Holy Spirit Teacher
Holy (Ghost) Spirit Teacher
John 7:15 'And the Jews marveled, saying, How does this man know letters, having never learned?'
JOHN 7:14-15
Jesus received His wisdom and knowledge by direct revelation from the Spirit of God rather than by the teachings of man. Jesus had been learning, but not through man. The Holy (Ghost) Spirit was His teacher. Jesus had to be taught the things of God. This looks contrary to Colossians 2:3, which says that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Jesus. If Jesus was God manifest in the flesh, why would He have to learn or be taught?
The harmony between these apparently opposite statements is that Jesus' spirit man was 100% God and had all of the wisdom and understanding of God in it, but it was manifest in natural flesh. It wasn't sinful flesh but it was flesh, nonetheless, and had to be educated. Jesus was not taught by man, but He was taught by the direct revelation of the Holy Spirit. The knowledge was within Him but it had to be drawn out.
At the new birth, a born-again man's spirit 'is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him' (Col. 3:10).
'We have the mind of Christ' (1 Cor. 2:16), and 'an unction from the Holy One and ye know all things' (1 Jn. 2:20). All of these things are a reality in our spiritual man. However, just as Jesus had to be taught, so we must draw this wisdom and knowledge out of our spirits and renew our minds with it (Rom. 12:2).
This is one of the main ministries of the Holy Spirit to the believer. Through the new birth, we have received the mind of Christ in our spirit man and are in the process of growing in wisdom by drawing this knowledge out of our spirits and renewing (or reprogramming) our minds. **This wisdom has to be drawn out by faith, by time spent in the Word, and prayer.
07 June 2020
It’s time to choose sides.
It’s time to choose sides.
** Just make sure you understand the REAL battle and enemy.Date: 6/8/2020
It’s time to choose sides. Just make sure you understand the REAL battle and enemy.
For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets— who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight and defeat.
Women received back their dead by resurrection. Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life.
Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two,
they were killed with the sword.
They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated— of whom the world was not worthy—wandering about in deserts and mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.
And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us,
that apart from us they should not be made perfect.
(Hebrews 11:32-40)
05 June 2020
So here we are stuck in race relations - 2020
What happened to Integration?
** We need to get over thinking we can control everything and all people!Date: 6/6/2020 2:07:59 AM ( 35 h ) ... viewed 27 times
Don't shoot the messenger!
If back in the 1960s, when the segregation laws were being removed under LBJ; the new laws should have been applied unbiased across the board to everyone, to all citizens everywhere! Regardless!
Desegregation should have applied to any and all races or ethnic groups. Because then there would not have been any racial or ethnic laws to hamper and or confuse the People! This means that we would not have had the past of over 50 years of racial integration, with strife, plus all the other tension problems!
Because once you recognized the problem and eradicated the segregation laws; that should have been the end to segregation period - forever!
But No! - that did not happen - there had to be some equity adjustment as a form of both punishment or reprisal for all the slavery issues of the past 150 years! It only seemed fair!
But in fact, it grew into a scheme where new laws now placed the Black groups in certain special places of preface and with more opportunities! So that In place of a total integration - it became reverse segregation with special options for Blacks! This just caused continued racial tensions!
With many " Black " only activities! The list is long with many things still in force today! It should never have been law to have special { or any Race Only} thing! We need to get over thinking we can control everything with a special application of almost everything!
If we had just eliminated completely the idea of any racial special groups - there would not be " Black or White or Green " or whatever or anything!
It would have and should have been one nation under God!
With no racial discrimination or posting, just plain American citizens - Period!
That is why we are still fighting the slavery issue and perusing a lost cause! Because the only real answer is a fair, and complete integration without the type of special racial classes in the nation!
No special preference, with all just every one plain American citizens!
But everyone had to put their 2 cents worth, to supposedly make everyone happy! But it did not work and is not working - in fact it is getting worse and intensifying!
Let's stop being {whatever color or group orientated} just because someone wants to have special racial privileges!
People use the system to get advantages and or money!
It has led to political wrangling and major problems! WHY?
We need to get over thinking we can control everything or all people!
Discipline Brings Life if You Repent
Discipline Brings Life
Matthew 18:18-19 'Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.'
MATTHEW 18:15-19
Verses 18 and 19 have many applications but taken in context, they are specifically referring to church discipline. Some might think that church discipline is only symbolic and carries no real weight; however, Jesus is making it clear that in the spiritual realm, discipline that is directed by the Holy Spirit has much power.
The scriptural commands concerning church discipline are designed to help restore the brother or sister who is in sin just as much as they are designed to protect other members of the body from that sin. If the person being disciplined repents, the objective has been achieved and no further action should be taken. Church discipline is two-fold. It consists of withdrawing both our fellowship and our intercession.
Proper intercession can actually keep Satan 'at bay' though an individual is living in great sin. This is good if the person uses this freedom to repent and come back to God. But, if the person takes this freedom from the wages of sin to commit more sin, there comes a time when this form of intercession ceases to be beneficial. In that case, intercession against Satan's attacks should be withdrawn, and we should actually retain that person's sins unto him so that he can no longer get by without experiencing the death that sin brings (Rom. 6:23). As he starts reaping what he has sown, it, hopefully, will cause him to turn back to the goodness of God that he once enjoyed. This is the binding and loosing being referred to in this verse. Heaven and earth are affected by our binding and loosing.
Why our tears?
** Prayer has never been telling God how much you need or know about Him, rather it is a consciousness that He already knows. **
The reasons for tears are many and varied - yet they do come. No matter how well your life is or has been you may feel good - Until Sorrows Come and Tears follow! But why?
When all else fails tears come. This is when you can find people seeking God through a prism of tears. A pronounced difference can be seen by observing two different types of people in their prayers. While two people can both be sincere in their prayers, one will wail and cry because of troubles that have come upon them, yet the other person who has learned through tears and trouble has to become more dependent upon God.
Before troubles and tears have come on the first man, his prayers tend to wonder and be poetic or stereotyped, as he begins, with such reverence and lofty things as if a great deal of astronomical information - or such may sound grand or be gratifying to the Almighty. Ending with some form of " World without end, Amen!"
Then when you see a God-seeking person touched by tears in their life prayer has a certain cadence and phraseology in their devotions. Listen to a soul who has been through the furnace fire of affliction and been bathed in a fountain of tears.
There is a difference, gone are the platitudes and flights of Poesy for prayer is now laying holding of God! Perhaps not as beautiful as before but more directly to the point - because the power of purpose is there!
Prayer has never been telling God how much you need or know about Him, rather it is a consciousness that He already knows. It is the realization of personal dependence upon the God of the Universe and a plea for His intervention or Blessings.
04 June 2020
He will send forth His angels
Angelic Protection
June 4
Matthew 18:10 'Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven.'
MATTHEW 18:10-11
We have angels assigned to us. Hebrews 1:14 further reveals that their purpose is to minister to us (i.e. on our behalf). In the Old Testament, Psalm 91 teaches on the ministry of angels to God's people.
Some have realized this truth and have taken it even further to say that we are supposed to speak to our angels and they will obey our commands. There is no instruction in scripture to do this nor is there any example of it being done. Many of the angels' protective duties described in Psalm 91 are preventative, and we certainly could not effectively command these activities.
Rather, these angels are dispatched exactly as this verse describes - by looking at the Father's face. God Almighty controls them for us; however, we do have a part to play. In Psalm 91 it is those who dwell in the secret place of The Most High, that are able to benefit from angelic activity (v. 1). Verse 2 further instructs us to say that the Lord is our refuge and fortress and that we are trusting in Him.
It is the combination of our faith in God and His faithfulness to us that releases the angels on our behalf. If it was solely up to God, His provision would be the same for everyone because of His mercy and grace. However, we have to receive God's grace by faith (Eph. 2:8). As you seek the Lord, become aware of His ministering spirits which were created to minister for us, and speak forth your faith in this area, He will send forth His angels on your behalf.
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