Thread: BASIC LIST / SUGGESTED ITEMS FOR LONG TERM SURVIVAL

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science - David H. Freedman - The Atlantic

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

By David H. Freedman


When a five-year study of 10,000 people finds that those who take more vitamin X are less likely to get cancer Y, you’d think you have pretty good reason to take more vitamin X, and physicians routinely pass these recommendations on to patients. But these studies often sharply conflict with one another. Studies have gone back and forth on the cancer-preventing powers of vitamins A, D, and E; on the heart-health benefits of eating fat and carbs; and even on the question of whether being overweight is more likely to extend or shorten your life. How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all.

For starters, he explains, the odds are that in any large database of many nutritional and health factors, there will be a few apparent connections that are in fact merely flukes, not real health effects—it’s a bit like combing through long, random strings of letters and claiming there’s an important message in any words that happen to turn up. But even if a study managed to highlight a genuine health connection to some nutrient, you’re unlikely to benefit much from taking more of it, because we consume thousands of nutrients that act together as a sort of network, and changing intake of just one of them is bound to cause ripples throughout the network that are far too complex for these studies to detect, and that may be as likely to harm you as help you. Even if changing that one factor does bring on the claimed improvement, there’s still a good chance that it won’t do you much good in the long run, because these studies rarely go on long enough to track the decades-long course of disease and ultimately death. Instead, they track easily measurable health “markers” such as cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and blood-sugar levels, and meta-experts have shown that changes in these markers often don’t correlate as well with long-term health as we have been led to believe.

On the relatively rare occasions when a study does go on long enough to track mortality, the findings frequently upend those of the shorter studies. (For example, though the vast majority of studies of overweight individuals link excess weight to ill health, the longest of them haven’t convincingly shown that overweight people are likely to die sooner, and a few of them have seemingly demonstrated that moderately overweight people are likely to live longer.) And these problems are aside from ubiquitous measurement errors (for example, people habitually misreport their diets in studies), routine misanalysis (researchers rely on complex software capable of juggling results in ways they don’t always understand), and the less common, but serious, problem of outright fraud (which has been revealed, in confidential surveys, to be much more widespread than scientists like to acknowledge).

If a study somehow avoids every one of these problems and finds a real connection to long-term changes in health, you’re still not guaranteed to benefit, because studies report average results that typically represent a vast range of individual outcomes. Should you be among the lucky minority that stands to benefit, don’t expect a noticeable improvement in your health, because studies usually detect only modest effects that merely tend to whittle your chances of succumbing to a particular disease from small to somewhat smaller. “The odds that anything useful will survive from any of these studies are poor,” says Ioannidis—dismissing in a breath a good chunk of the research into which we sink about $100 billion a year in the United States alone.

And so it goes for all medical studies, he says. Indeed, nutritional studies aren’t the worst. Drug studies have the added corruptive force of financial conflict of interest. The exciting links between genes and various diseases and traits that are relentlessly hyped in the press for heralding miraculous around-the-corner treatments for everything from colon cancer to schizophrenia have in the past proved so vulnerable to error and distortion, Ioannidis has found, that in some cases you’d have done about as well by throwing darts at a chart of the genome. (These studies seem to have improved somewhat in recent years, but whether they will hold up or be useful in treatment are still open questions.) Vioxx, Zelnorm, and Baycol were among the widely prescribed drugs found to be safe and effective in large randomized controlled trials before the drugs were yanked from the market as unsafe or not so effective, or both.

“Often the claims made by studies are so extravagant that you can immediately cross them out without needing to know much about the specific problems with the studies,” Ioannidis says. But of course it’s that very extravagance of claim (one large randomized controlled trial even proved that secret prayer by unknown parties can save the lives of heart-surgery patients, while another proved that secret prayer can harm them) that helps gets these findings into journals and then into our treatments and lifestyles, especially when the claim builds on impressive-sounding evidence. “Even when the evidence shows that a particular research idea is wrong, if you have thousands of scientists who have invested their careers in it, they’ll continue to publish papers on it,” he says. “It’s like an epidemic, in the sense that they’re infected with these wrong ideas, and they’re spreading it to other researchers through journals.”

Though scientists and science journalists are constantly talking up the value of the peer-review process, researchers admit among themselves that biased, erroneous, and even blatantly fraudulent studies easily slip through it. Nature, the grande dame of science journals, stated in a 2006 editorial, “Scientists understand that peer review per se provides only a minimal assurance of quality, and that the public conception of peer review as a stamp of authentication is far from the truth.” What’s more, the peer-review process often pressures researchers to shy away from striking out in genuinely new directions, and instead to build on the findings of their colleagues (that is, their potential reviewers) in ways that only seem like breakthroughs—as with the exciting-sounding gene linkages (autism genes identified!) and nutritional findings (olive oil lowers blood pressure!) that are really just dubious and conflicting variations on a theme.

Most journal editors don’t even claim to protect against the problems that plague these studies. University and government research overseers rarely step in to directly enforce research quality, and when they do, the science community goes ballistic over the outside interference. The ultimate protection against research error and bias is supposed to come from the way scientists constantly retest each other’s results—except they don’t. Only the most prominent findings are likely to be put to the test, because there’s likely to be publication payoff in firming up the proof, or contradicting it.

But even for medicine’s most influential studies, the evidence sometimes remains surprisingly narrow. Of those 45 super-cited studies that Ioannidis focused on, 11 had never been retested. Perhaps worse, Ioannidis found that even when a research error is outed, it typically persists for years or even decades. He looked at three prominent health studies from the 1980s and 1990s that were each later soundly refuted, and discovered that researchers continued to cite the original results as correct more often than as flawed—in one case for at least 12 years after the results were discredited.

Doctors may notice that their patients don’t seem to fare as well with certain treatments as the literature would lead them to expect, but the field is appropriately conditioned to subjugate such anecdotal evidence to study findings. Yet much, perhaps even most, of what doctors do has never been formally put to the test in credible studies, given that the need to do so became obvious to the field only in the 1990s, leaving it playing catch-up with a century or more of non-evidence-based medicine, and contributing to Ioannidis’s shockingly high estimate of the degree to which medical knowledge is flawed. That we’re not routinely made seriously ill by this shortfall, he argues, is due largely to the fact that most medical interventions and advice don’t address life-and-death situations, but rather aim to leave us marginally healthier or less unhealthy, so we usually neither gain nor risk all that much.

Medical research is not especially plagued with wrongness. Other meta-research experts have confirmed that similar issues distort research in all fields of science, from physics to economics (where the highly regarded economists J. Bradford DeLong and Kevin Lang once showed how a remarkably consistent paucity of strong evidence in published economics studies made it unlikely that any of them were right). And needless to say, things only get worse when it comes to the pop expertise that endlessly spews at us from diet, relationship, investment, and parenting gurus and pundits. But we expect more of scientists, and especially of medical scientists, given that we believe we are staking our lives on their results. The public hardly recognizes how bad a bet this is. The medical community itself might still be largely oblivious to the scope of the problem, if Ioannidis hadn’t forced a confrontation when he published his studies in 2005.

Ioannidis initially thought the community might come out fighting.

Instead, it seemed relieved, as if it had been guiltily waiting for someone to blow the whistle, and eager to hear more. David Gorski, a surgeon and researcher at Detroit’s Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, noted in his prominent medical blog that when he presented Ioannidis’s paper on highly cited research at a professional meeting, “not a single one of my surgical colleagues was the least bit surprised or disturbed by its findings.” Ioannidis offers a theory for the relatively calm reception. “I think that people didn’t feel I was only trying to provoke them, because I showed that it was a community problem, instead of pointing fingers at individual examples of bad research,” he says. In a sense, he gave scientists an opportunity to cluck about the wrongness without having to acknowledge that they themselves succumb to it—it was something everyone else did.

To say that Ioannidis’s work has been embraced would be an understatement. His PLoS Medicine paper is the most downloaded in the journal’s history, and it’s not even Ioannidis’s most-cited work—that would be a paper he published in Nature Genetics on the problems with gene-link studies. Other researchers are eager to work with him: he has published papers with 1,328 different co-authors at 538 institutions in 43 countries, he says. Last year he received, by his estimate, invitations to speak at 1,000 conferences and institutions around the world, and he was accepting an average of about five invitations a month until a case last year of excessive-travel-induced vertigo led him to cut back. Even so, in the weeks before I visited him he had addressed an AIDS conference in San Francisco, the European Society for Clinical Investigation, Harvard’s School of Public Health, and the medical schools at Stanford and Tufts.

The irony of his having achieved this sort of success by accusing the medical-research community of chasing after success is not lost on him, and he notes that it ought to raise the question of whether he himself might be pumping up his findings. “If I did a study and the results showed that in fact there wasn’t really much bias in research, would I be willing to publish it?” he asks. “That would create a real psychological conflict for me.” But his bigger worry, he says, is that while his fellow researchers seem to be getting the message, he hasn’t necessarily forced anyone to do a better job. He fears he won’t in the end have done much to improve anyone’s health. “There may not be fierce objections to what I’m saying,” he explains. “But it’s difficult to change the way that everyday doctors, patients, and healthy people think and behave.”

As helter-skelter as the University of Ioannina Medical School campus looks, the hospital abutting it looks reassuringly stolid.

Athina Tatsioni has offered to take me on a tour of the facility, but we make it only as far as the entrance when she is greeted—accosted, really—by a worried-looking older woman. Tatsioni, normally a bit reserved, is warm and animated with the woman, and the two have a brief but intense conversation before embracing and saying goodbye. Tatsioni explains to me that the woman and her husband were patients of hers years ago; now the husband has been admitted to the hospital with abdominal pains, and Tatsioni has promised she’ll stop by his room later to say hello. Recalling the appendicitis story, I prod a bit, and she confesses she plans to do her own exam. She needs to be circumspect, though, so she won’t appear to be second-guessing the other doctors.

Tatsioni doesn’t so much fear that someone will carve out the man’s healthy appendix. Rather, she’s concerned that, like many patients, he’ll end up with prescriptions for multiple drugs that will do little to help him, and may well harm him. “Usually what happens is that the doctor will ask for a suite of biochemical tests—liver fat, pancreas function, and so on,” she tells me. “The tests could turn up something, but they’re probably irrelevant. Just having a good talk with the patient and getting a close history is much more likely to tell me what’s wrong.” Of course, the doctors have all been trained to order these tests, she notes, and doing so is a lot quicker than a long bedside chat. They’re also trained to ply the patient with whatever drugs might help whack any errant test numbers back into line. What they’re not trained to do is to go back and look at the research papers that helped make these drugs the standard of care.

“When you look the papers up, you often find the drugs didn’t even work better than a placebo. And no one tested how they worked in combination with the other drugs,” she says. “Just taking the patient off everything can improve their health right away.” But not only is checking out the research another time-consuming task, patients often don’t even like it when they’re taken off their drugs, she explains; they find their prescriptions reassuring.

Later, Ioannidis tells me he makes a point of having several clinicians on his team. “Researchers and physicians often don’t understand each other; they speak different languages,” he says.

Knowing that some of his researchers are spending more than half their time seeing patients makes him feel the team is better positioned to bridge that gap; their experience informs the team’s research with firsthand knowledge, and helps the team shape its papers in a way more likely to hit home with physicians. It’s not that he envisions doctors making all their decisions based solely on solid evidence—there’s simply too much complexity in patient treatment to pin down every situation with a great study. “Doctors need to rely on instinct and judgment to make choices,” he says. “But these choices should be as informed as possible by the evidence. And if the evidence isn’t good, doctors should know that, too. And so should patients.”

In fact, the question of whether the problems with medical research should be broadcast to the public is a sticky one in the meta-research community. Already feeling that they’re fighting to keep patients from turning to alternative medical treatments such as homeopathy, or misdiagnosing themselves on the Internet, or simply neglecting medical treatment altogether, many researchers and physicians aren’t eager to provide even more reason to be skeptical of what doctors do—not to mention how public disenchantment with medicine could affect research funding.

Ioannidis dismisses these concerns. “If we don’t tell the public about these problems, then we’re no better than nonscientists who falsely claim they can heal,” he says. “If the drugs don’t work and we’re not sure how to treat something, why should we claim differently? Some fear that there may be less funding because we stop claiming we can prove we have miraculous treatments. But if we can’t really provide those miracles, how long will we be able to fool the public anyway? The scientific enterprise is probably the most fantastic achievement in human history, but that doesn’t mean we have a right to overstate what we’re accomplishing.”

We could solve much of the wrongness problem, Ioannidis says, if the world simply stopped expecting scientists to be right. That’s because being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary—as long as scientists recognize that they blew it, report their mistake openly instead of disguising it as a success, and then move on to the next thing, until they come up with the very occasional genuine breakthrough. But as long as careers remain contingent on producing a stream of research that’s dressed up to seem more right than it is, scientists will keep delivering exactly that.
“Science is a noble endeavor, but it’s also a low-yield endeavor,” he says. “I’m not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life. We should be very comfortable with that fact.”
David H. Freedman is the author of Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us—And How to Know When Not to Trust Them. He has been an Atlantic contributor since 1998.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science - David H. Freedman - The Atlantic.

The Progressive Mind » Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science - David H. Freedman - The Atlantic

The Anatomy of a Breakdown

Tess Pennington
November 13th, 2012
Ready Nutrition
Comments (70)

Read by 3,498 peopleThis article has been generously contributed by Tess Pennington of Ready Nutrition. After joining the Dallas chapter of the American Red Cross in 1999 Tess worked as an Armed Forces Emergency Services Center specialist and is well versed in emergency and disaster management & response. You can follow her regular updates on Preparedness, Homesteading, and a host of other topics at www.readynutrition.com.


If we can all agree on one thing, it’s that the government and disaster organizations alike grossly underestimate how dependent the majority of the population is on them during and after a disastrous event takes place. We need not look any further than the last major disasters that have occurred to find our answers: the Haitian earthquake that occurred in 2010, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the 2011 super tornado of Joplin, MO, and even as recently as Hurricane Sandy.

As preppers are well aware, when the needs of the population cannot be met in an allotted time frame, a phenomena occurs and the mindset shifts in people. They begin to act without thinking and respond to changes in their environment in an emotionally-based manner, thus leading to chaos, instability and a breakdown in our social paradigm.
When you take the time to understand how a breakdown behaves and how it progresses, only then can you truly prepare for it.

The Anatomy of a Breakdown

This glimpse into a systemic breakdown is based on an isolated, limited disaster or event where emergency responders have been deployed. I must emphasize that all bets are off if the event is wide spread, affecting multiple tens of millions of people simultaneously.

Phase 1: The Warning

Although disasters such as earthquakes and tornadoes can come on so quickly that timely warnings are not always given, for the most part, governments typically provide adequate time to get a population ready in advance. Local governments even go as far as to err on the side of caution and sternly warn the citizens to evacuate.

For one reason or another, there will be a select group that stays behind. Some of these citizens are prepared and ready for what may come and may feel the need to stay to defend what is rightfully theirs but the majority of the population will not be ready for what they are about to endure. Those that are in this unprepared majority who choose to ride out the disaster do so because they are either unaware of how to fully prepared for disasters, have become complacent or numb to the heeds of warning from the local government and news media, or are overly confident.

This is the point in this cycle where herds of people go to the grocery stores frantically grabbing supplies. Most grocery stores will not be able to meet the demand of the people’s need for supplies, and many could go home empty handed.

Bracing for the disaster, the prepared and unprepared will be hoping for the best outcome. What many do not realize is the hardest part of this event is soon to be upon them. Within days, the descent into the breakdown will begin.

Phase 2: Shock and Awe (1-2 Days)

After the initial shock wears off of the disaster, many will have difficulty in coping and adapting to what has just occurred. As they are trying to wrap their thoughts around the severity of the disaster, their losses and what their future holds, local government leaders are scrambling for answers and trying to assess the situation.

At this point, the unprepared survivors will be expecting organizations and local government to step in to meet their immediate needs at any moment. The reality of the situation becomes more bleak when they realize that due to downed power lines or debris blocking roadways and access points, emergency organizations, emergency response and distribution trucks supplying food, water, fuel and other pertinent resources will be unable to get to the area. Once the realization hits that resources are scarce and the government leaders are incapable of helping them in a timely fashion, desperate citizens will take action into their own hands.

The breakdown has begun.

Phase 3: The Breakdown (3-7 Days)

Have you ever heard the saying, “We’re three days away from anarchy?” In the wake of a disaster, that’s all you have is three days to turn the crazy train around before crime, looting and chaos ensue. In reports during the aftermath of hurricane Sandy, residents from Staten Island were pleading for help from elected officials, begging for gasoline, food and clothing.

“We’re going to die! We’re going to freeze! We got 90-year-old people!” Donna Solli told visiting officials. “You don’t understand. You gotta get your trucks down here on the corner now. It’s been three days!”

Similar stories of looting occurred during the tornado in Joplin, MO of 2011. This time, the looting occurred from national guard soldiers patrolling the area.

“The night of the tornado, as emergency responders rushed from one shattered home to the next, Steve Dixon sat outside his father’s destroyed house with a baseball bat. They wouldn’t see me sitting here in my chair, I was in the dark,” he told NPR. “I’d turn my bright spotlight on them and tell them they needed to move on. Then when the police came by, I’d tell them which way they went.”

Multiple factors contribute to societal breakdowns including failure of adequate government response, population density, citizens taking advantage of the grid being down and overwhelmed emergency response teams.

For whatever reason, 3-5 days following a disaster is the bewitching hour. During this short amount of time, the population slowly becomes a powder keg full of angry, desperate citizens. A good example is the chaos that ensued in New Orleans following the absence of action from the local government or a timely effective federal response in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In such troubled times, people were forced to fend for themselves and their families, by any means necessary. This timeline of Hurricane Katrina effectively illustrates “the breakdown,” and within three days, the citizens of New Orleans descended into anarchy, looting and murder (Source).

If this scenario isn’t bad enough, at the end of this time frame, there will be an increase in illnesses due to cramped living quarters from emergency shelters, sanitation-related illness, compromised water sources and exposure to natural elements. In the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, sanitation- related epidemics became a large concern for the disaster victims. In fact, the outbreak erupted into the world’s largest cholera epidemic despite a huge international mobilization still dealing with the effects of the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake (Source).

Victims from Hurricane Sandy are also beginning to see their share of illnesses. Due to the horrible weather plaguing the area, many of the evacuation shelters in Brooklyn were closed last week for sterilizing due to a vicious viral outbreak that struck.

Phase 4: Recovery (8-30+ Days)

Despite what we want to believe, most recoveries are slow and difficult in progression and require long-term planning. On average it takes a city around 1-2 weeks after the event took place to start this phase of the cycle. Every disaster is different and the length of recovery efforts vary greatly on the nature of the incident.

7 years after Hurricane Katrina leveled parts of Louisiana, the state is still in the recovery phase.. ”We are in a process of long-term rebuilding,” said Christina Stephens, Spokeswoman for the Louisiana Recovery Authority. “There is at least another 10 years of recovery.” (Source)

Within this recovery phase, essential goods and resources could will still be hard to come by, thus forcing local officials to implement the rationing of resources to ensure there is enough for the population. We are seeing this right now with the gasoline rationing in New York.

It could be months before the destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy is cleaned up. Damaged communities are coming to terms with the devastation that delivered an unprecedented punch to the region’s economy, causing more than an estimated $50 billion in losses and forcing hundreds of thousands to rebuild their lives. (Source)

Don’t Be Another Statistic

Now that you understand what we’re dealing with, there are ways you can use this information to prepare for the next event so that you will be a part of the population that is ready for what may come.

Trust yourself. Learn to be self-sufficient and rely on yourself. When it is all said and done, you are the only one who can care for yourself and your family the best. You will be the one who has your family’s best intentions at heart. Having a stock of your family’s favorite canned or dry goods, a supply of water and a simple medical kit can maintain your basic needs for a short-lived disaster. This simple preparedness supply could set you apart from the unprepared.

If you live in a highly populated area, understand that resources will diminish quickly, so preparing beforehand can circumvent this. You can always start out with the basic 10 preparedness items you will need to skirt through a disaster:

1. Food and alternative ways to cook food
2. Water
3. Fuel for generators, cooking stoves and mantels, charcoal for outdoor grills
4. Batteries
5. Generator
6. Emergency lighting
7. Ice
8. Medical supply
9. Baby formula
10. Sanitation supplies

Or, if you want a more comprehensive supply, take a look at the 52-Weeks to Preparedness series.

Educate yourself. Learn from the disasters, folks! Each time there is a disaster, the same pattern occurs: the warning, shock and awe, the breakdown and recovery. Study the effects of disasters that effect your area and what items you will need to get through the event. Further, find the weak points in your preparedness supply and correct them. Supply inventories twice a year can do wonders in this area.

Get into the mindset. Learning what to do in the face of a disaster or how to care for your family during extended grid-down emergencies can put you well ahead of the race. The more prepared you are, the faster you are at adapting to the situation. You can learn anything as long as you research, gather and apply the information. For example, while many on the East coast were still in shock from Hurricane Sandy and were sitting in their homes panicking and watching their perishable food items go bad, those that had learned how to survive in off-grid, cold environments were well prepared for this type of disaster, and had already begun packing their perishable items in the snow to preserve them. It’s that simple!

Practice makes perfect. Practice using your skills, your preps and prepare emergency menus based around your stored foods. The more you practice surviving an off-grid disaster, the more efficient you will be when and if that event occurs. Moreover, these skills will keep you alive! For a list of pertinent skills to know during times of disaster, click here.

Further, to make your family or group more cohesive, cross-train members so they can compensate for the other during a disaster.

In summation, only until we see the cycle for what it is and the effects it has on society will we be able to learn from it. There is always a breakdown in some form or fashion after a disaster. If you can prepare for this, you will be able to adapt more quickly to what is going on around you.

The cycle is there and we can’t look past it. Prepare accordingly and do not overlook ensuring you have your basic preps accounted for.

This article has been contributed by Tess Pennington of Ready Nutrition. Subscribe to Tess’ Get Prepped Weekly Newsletter for more emergency preparedness tips, homesteading ideas, and insights. As a subscriber to her free newsletter you’ll receive the latest updates from her 52 Weeks to Preparedness Emergency Preparedness and Disaster Planning Series. It’s well worth your time, and oh, did we mention it’s totally free?

Ready Nutrition and SHTFplan.com take your privacy very seriously and will not distribute or share your email address with other parties.

The Anatomy of a Breakdown

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Upcycle: From Old Furniture to Kid's Play Kitchen DIY Project

http://stitchesandnails.blogspot.com/2011/04/whats-cooking.html

Christmas is coming and you could create a wonderful one of a kind gift for the little one in your life.

What joy this could bring to child by bringing their imagination alive with play. Check craigslist.com for old dressers or entertainment centers that you can find cheaply and sometimes even free.

The Homestead Survival: Upcycle: From Old Furniture to Kid's Play Kitchen DIY Project

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

DIY Natural Hair Color Boosters - Brunettes, Blondes, Redheads

There are plenty of natural-ingredient hair care products on the shelves these days, but you'll know exactly what you're putting on your head if you whip up your own treatments made mostly from things you can find around the kitchen.

http://www.wholeliving.com/142062/diy-hair-treatments/@center/144874/diy-beauty#/26836


The Homestead Survival: DIY Natural Hair Color Boosters - Brunettes,Blondes,Redheads

Monday, November 12, 2012

Homemade Magnetic Makeup Board DIY Project

This is cool! Make your own magnetic makeup board. Cheap frame from Dollar General, metal board from Ace Hardware, spray paint board and 2 plastic soap holders for brushes. Cut pieces of adhesive magnetic stripes and stick on back of makeup. @ Pins f


The Homestead Survival: Homemade Magnetic Makeup Board DIY Project

Pins for the home

Pins for the Home : The Cutest Home Blog

Brightly Colored Ice Sculpture Fun Yard Homemade Project For When It Snows



ice ballons

i saw the idea on flickr, way back in the summertime and i just waited and waited for the right time. preschool ice sculpture time!! we are all graduated from preschool, but sweeties that they are, the teachers invite the “alumni” to contribute pieces, too. The girls filled sand-shape-toy-things (my head is somewhere else, i cant think of what they’re called!) shaped like an octopus and a seahorse and a turtle, they were very cute. but then, we HAD to do the water balloons.
watch for leaks. food coloring SHOOTING out of a tiny hole in a balloon = dangerous to wall paint. and tiles. and your clothes.

lucky for us, we got a little snow and had a little cold.

i took a pr of scissors to the frozen balloons to get the plastic off, and they were so cool.

and a little messy. i recommend black gloves – won’t see the stains, won’t get food coloring on your hands!

the day we brought them over, it was bright and crisp and DANG COLD

such a pretty little burst of color!

this is really my favorite part of the winter.



ice ballons « the queen says:

Strategic Relocation: Where To Go When It Hits the Fan (Full Movie)


Mac Slavo
November 16th, 2012
SHTFplan.com
Comments (122)
Read by 7,127 people


Joel Skousen, one of the world’s foremost experts on home security, retreat preparedness and strategic relocation, says that no preparedness plan is complete unless you’ve taken into account the single most critical threat we face during a widespread emergency.

The number one threat that I concentrate on. It’s not terrorism, it’s not natural disaster, it’s not even government or war.
The major threat is population density.
Because every crisis that threatens, even a local crisis, can turn exponential because of close proximity to people who cannot help themselves. Even good people panic in a crisis…

The obvious answer would be to move to a rural area and out of the way of hungry, thirsty and desperate masses of people. But, that’s easier said then done. The majority of Americans, even though they’d do it in a heartbeat if given the opportunity, simply don’t have the available resources to get out of Dodge and live the life of an off-the-grid homesteading survivalist.

Frankly, this is not easy.
It’s not easy because very few people can go and leave their jobs, and go out into rural areas where there’s safety.
In other words, security financially is the antithesis of security in terms of location, because the safest locations are where there’s very few people, very rural, and that’s the opposite of what you need to have jobs.
…
Even for a survival expert like myself it isn’t a clear cut easy choice – you have compromises that every location has.
…

You don’t want to be part of a major metropolitan area when that happens.
This is the crux of what I teach people in Strategic Relocation.
People mostly have to stay within population centers to earn a living…
How to prepare contingency planning so that you can get out into retreat areas and have the information, the forewarning signs, to know how to do that. That’s really the only way to survive.
Most people cannot get rural right now. They can’t make a living. It’s just impossible. So, this is a solution for everyone.

With an extensive discussion about geopolitical events, motivations of those in power, and possible scenarios that could instantaneously change the world as we know it, Joel Skousen and Alex Jones tackle some of the questions you are no doubt asking yourself.

• What are the most likely collapse scenarios we face?
• Where will I go when it hits the fan?
• Would my current residence be the best place to weather the storm?
• Which states and regions are the safest?
• Can I prepare a strategic location ahead of a disaster and relocate in time if disaster strikes?

With detailed maps of the United States and provinces of Canada, Skousen not only provides regional threat assessments, but also explains the nuances of the decision-making process and what factors to consider, including critical aspects like population density, transportation thoroughfares, demographics, and personal finance.
Learn how to develop a strategic relocation plan customized to your specific needs and abilities in this two and a half hour documentary made available for free by Alex Jones, Joel Skousen and Infowars.com.



Watch for free on Youtube, Get the DVD With Extended Information, Get the Book, Get the DVD+Book Combo


Strategic Relocation: Where To Go When It Hits the Fan (Full Movie) With Joel Skousen and Alex Jones

Saturday, October 27, 2012

Don't Throw The Peels - Best Collection Ever Of What To Do With Them




Citrus Wallop Fruit Salad Recipe
http://everybodylikessandwiches.com/2011/01/citrus-wallop-fruit-salad/






Citrus Peels Vinegar Natural Cleaning Recipe
http://fountainavenuekitchen.com/orange-vinegar-a-green-cleaner/






Candied Citrus Peel Candy
http://www.closetcooking.com/2011/02/candied-orange-peel.html




5 Ways to Use Dried Citrus Peels
http://pakagri.blogspot.com/2012/08/5-ways-to-use-dried-citrus-peels.html




Citrus Peel as Fire Starter
http://www.realsimple.com/new-uses-for-old-things/new-uses-summer/citrus-peels-00000000016212/index.html




Body & Soul: Citrus Scrub
After clicking the website link below -look to the bottom on the page
http://www.motherearthliving.com/natural-beauty/citrus-scrub-zmrz12aszdeb.aspx




5 Great Grilling Flavor Boosters

http://www.rachaelraymag.com/food-how-to/cooking-tips/chefs-flavor-boosting-grilling-tips/




Homemade Citrus Scouring Scrub Recipe Any citrus peels should work. To make your own Citrus Scouring Scrub you will need the following: 3 tbsp dried, ground citrus peels 3 tbsp borax 5 tbsp baking soda Combine all ingredients in an old shaker container (such as an old parmesan container) and sprinkle wherever you needed. Use a wet sponge or cleaning rag to scrub over the area where you sprinkled the cleaner. Wipe up all of the cleaner.

http://homemakerschallenge.com/2012/03/30/homemade-citrus-scouring-scrub/citrus-scouring-scrub-all-natural-cleaner/





Orange Peel Wine - Easy way
http://www.cookingchanneltv.com/recipes/laura-calder/orange-peel-wine-recipe/index.html





Orange Peel Sorbet Recipe
http://stepbystepgourmet.blogspot.com/2012/02/orange-peel-sorbet.html

The Homestead Survival: Don't Throw The Peels - Best Collection Ever Of What To Do With Them

Maddie’s Amazing Fever-Reducing, Headache-Calming, Belly-Soothing, Health Drink

Submitted by Jennifer on Thu, 02/24/2011

• Fever
• Headache
• Recipes
• Stomachache

Topics:
Recipes, Fever, Headache, Stomachache


When my assistant Maddie came to me and said her 3 year old daughter wouldn’t drink any of the teas I had prescribed for her recent illness, I was surprised. I’d even gotten arrogant -- I mean Chinese herbs, they’re usually yucky, no surprises there. Its really a matter of gentle insistence -- after some gentle but firm encouragement the first few times, my son associates them with getting better (his mother is also an herbalist, so for better or worse he’s had to indulge me). But teas with sweet slippery elm and honey? Sickeningly sweet loquats? Ginger tea? I hadn’t met the child who wasn’t a taker.
Well, nature doesn’t tolerate a no-growth situation, at least not in me... So, when her little girl rejected the best assets I had in my mental medicine chest, I was stumped. Guess what? Mama to the rescue. After a few tries, my same darling assistant had concocted her own brew. Her little one will drink it, and it has since been tested and given the stamp of approval by her friends as well. In this case, it turns out that my assistant’s daughter much prefers cold drinks. This was an easier fix than I even anticipated (If your child doesn’t have a temperature preference, I prefer any teas to be warmed in the tradition of Chinese medicine for slightly easier assimilation.)
I think this recipe is brilliant for any illness that includes heat or fever. It would also be wonderful for indigestion, stomachache, or headache of any variety. Substitute or add chamomile and it is perfect for any time, during times of wellness or illness to calm and build immunity.
So here it is, the answer to your fussy-drinker’s prayers -- with respect and gratitude to all mother’s like Maddie out there who respond to their child’s “no’s”, not with frustration, but with heightened perseverance and creativity :

Maddie’s Fever-Reducing, Headache-Calming, Belly-Soothing, Health Drink
“She liked it. It was even a bit spicy because of the ginger. She didn't drink all of it but I feel it was a success. I later added a little rice milk too it by special request...reminded me of London”



ingredients:

• 2 mint (herbal) tea bags
• juice of 1/2 a lemon
• 1/2 an inch to 1 inch of ginger root (depends on how much heat you can handle)
• 2 Tablespoons of honey (use maple syrup in children under 15 months of age)
• 32 oz of water

In a small pot add water and ginger root. Bring water almost to a boil. Take pot off of heat. Add tea bags and let steep for 5 mins. Add lemon and honey.

For Iced tea: let the finished tea cool completely before adding ice or putting in the fridge.
Variations: Substitute one or both mint tea bags for chamomile at night. Serve hot.

http://www.mommyser.com/myblog/maddi...g-health-drink