Kick influenza and colds to the curb with garlic

An easy, inexpensive and beneficial remedy for the cold and flu season could be as near as your food pantry. Commonly known as "Russian penicillin," garlic has been used throughout history for everything from stomachaches to parasites and leprosy. In fact, the ancient Ebers Papyrus documents no less than 32 illnesses that respond to the herb. However, garlic really shines when we use it to stay healthy and flu-free while the rest of the masses sneeze and cough away. And what better way to reap the benefits of this odorous bulb than with a traditional 52-clove garlic soup or gingered garlic tea?

Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP): Meet the new deal, same as the old deal

By Billy McMahon

(The Observer) In August of this year, I traveled deep into rebel territory in Chiapas, Mexico, to the jungle compound of “La Realidad” — a major base of operations for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. I was welcomed by the masked revolutionaries and invited to stay as long as I liked. They called me “compañero” and asked me to write of their global struggle against neoliberal capitalism, which they call the War Against Oblivion. Their 20 years of rebellion began on January 1, 1994 — the day the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. From union halls in Chicago to rebel villages in Chiapas, the new era of global “free trade” has been denounced as an affront to workers’ rights and human dignity.

GMOs: respected analyst says they could destroy life on the planet

(Alliance for Natural Health) Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a scholar, statistician, Wall Street analyst and advisor, professor at New York University, and the bestselling author of Fooled by Randomness  and The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. He predicted the 2008 financial crisis by pointing out that commonly used risk models were wrong. (He was correct, and he became quite wealthy from the strategic financial decisions he made at that time.)

Now his analysis of our use of genetically modified organisms shows that GMOs could cause “an irreversible termination of life at some scale, which could be the planet.” Taleb and his two co-authors argue that calling the GMO approach “scientific” betrays “a very poor—indeed warped—understanding of probabilistic payoffs and risk management.”

Taleb believes GMOs fall squarely under the rule that we should always err on the side of caution if something is really dangerous. This is not just because of potential harm to the consumer, but because of systemic risk to the system, which in this case is the ecosystem that supports all life on the planet: