One of the biggest recent changes in education has to do with how we learn to read and write and how this is taught in schools.

There have been many sweeping changes in our Western way of life introduced after the war.

Television arrived. People from one end of a country to the other listened to the same programs, watched the news, followed the soaps, loved and laughed at the same figures, together. And as they did, they began to talk and think and dress the same way. People moved into cities away from the countryside, schools got bigger and school budgets smaller.

One of the biggest and most profound changes to take place was to do with how our children are taught to read.

The tried and tested Phonics approach went out the window and kids were left floundering,

The result is that many children leave primary school unable to read properly.

Diane McGuinness tackles this head-on in her book “Why Children Can’t Read” And What We Can Do About It.

Her analysis of the changes in the education system in the English speaking world in recent generations is vital to understanding what went wrong and why.

Hers is not a narrow view. She compares the development of spoken language and the reading and writing systems developed in such different languages and cultures as Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Sumerian, Russian, Hindu, Arabic, Hebrew cultures, cultures both present and past and brings it together into a simple, logical system that works.

This is one of the most vital books you can read if you want to understand a key factor in development and continuing existence of our culture.

Being able to read and to write are vital skills in our modern world.

Individual prosperity and cultural richness are interdependent, built on a bedrock of language, spoken and written and read with understanding.

Welcome to 2019. What do you want to achieve this year.

This is the month of gym memberships, great plans, enthusiastic work-outs.

After the mellow memories of flavoursome Christmas have flown, with the budget battered to bits, we look to the hard world of weary work outs, with early morning starts or late finishes, hoping to whittle away inches from the waist — but not from the bank balance.

So how to do this?

Salads and snow don’t sit well together. Never have done, never will. A cold lunch on a cold day brings cold comfort to the chilled soul on a grey January day.

This is the time for hot, steaming comfort food: pies and pasties, baked potatoes and cheese, thick bowls of soup, hearty stews with dumplings, warm bread straight from the oven, dripping with butter. Things that stick to your ribs and keep you warm. The winds outside can blow cold and hard from the north but on the inside, you stay warm and cosy.

But what if you pushed your waistband beyond the limit over Christmas?

Eating ketogenic will keep you fit, lose you inches, feed your face and trim your figure.

What’s not to love?

We’ll look at this more in future posts.

I am quoting here a paper by Dr Rex Newnham.

He called it “Boron, The Neglected Element is Essential for Sustainable Healthy Bones and Joints“.

Boron is a chemical element found in varying amounts in soil, rocks and water. It is essential for plant growth and without sufficient boron in the soil, plants are unable to grow. If it is not in the soil or water, it is not in the plants grown on that soil, and is missing from the diet or animals or humans fed on foodstuffs grown on poor soils.

It tells the story of how he overcame the pain of arthritis and remained painfree for the rest of his life. In the course of his lifetime, he helped many people with his research and the simple formula he developed to handle the problems he experienced. It became popular and spread widely simply through word of mouth from satisfied people who had taken is advice and used his formula.

He also backed up his research with a publication called “Beating Arthritis and Beating Osteoporosis”.

Dr Newnham’s simple, low-cost and effective solution is designed to handle the mineral deficiency which underlies the conditions of arthritis and osteoporosis. This, of course, was not so popular with some drug companies which saw his simple mineral formula as competition for their patented, profitable, expensive drugs — drugs which did not improve people’s condition in the long term, only helped with the pain and sometimes had their own unpleasant side effects.

So let’s see what Dr Newnham wrote:

“I spent most of the period of the 1980s doing epidemiological work and researching the areas of the world where there is more or less than the normal prevalence of arthritis of about 20%, and areas where there is more or less than the norm of boron in the soil or water.

The Human Nutrition Research Center in North Dakota has furthered some of my work and they have shown how 3 mg a day of boron will reduce the average loss of calcium in post menopausal women from 117 to 64 mg per day. The same boron will also raise the level of 17 beta estradiol to normal in these women. Dr. Forrest Nielsen shows that boron and calcium work together at the cell membrane and this affects the modification of hormone action. (5) Now there are many others who have shown how the arthritic diseases are associated with allergies. Allergies can also be caused by problems at the cell membrane level where the allergen or histamine or similar do not move freely across cell membranes. It looks as if boron may be very relevant here. In order to sustain good health we need 6 mg a day or more of boron which is now a food supplement or a medicine in some places. This is sustainable and is even essential for health.”

Here he tells his story in his own words and I have quoted his paper exactly as written. Below if you are interested you can see the references for his paper and the research it is based on.

It seems to me to be important to offer this information and circulate it. It may be of use to you personally or someone you know, to improve their health and live a more comfortable and active life.

My best wishes for you in 2019.

l . Lawrence J,S. Rheumatism in Populations. Heinemann. 1974
2. Herbert L.S. The Hot Springs of New Zcaland, HK Lewis & Co. London. 1921.
3. Bentwich Z. & Talmon Y. Prevalence of Rheumatois Arthritis in an Israeli Population. Hebrew University 1980.
4. Meyers OL, Daynes G, Beighton P.Rheumatoid Arthritis in a Tribal Xhosa Population in the Transkei, Southern Africa. Annals of Rheumatic Diseases. 36. 1977. P62-65
5. Nielsen F.H, Biochemical and Physiological Consequences of Boron Deprivation in Humans, Environmental HeaIth Perspectives. Vol. 102, Supplement 7, Nov. 1994. P59-65.

Skip McGrath is a longtime online entrepreneur, starting as an ebay seller who developed also into an amazon seller

His attitude is one of care and integrity and great warmth which shines through in his emails. He comes across as someone you can trust

The Silk Road has fascinated me ever since I first heard about it.

The ancient route across Europe and the Middle East, across Asia all the way to China.
Legendary Marco Polo travelled the road nearly a thousand years ago across lands that were unimaginable to those who lived at that time,

A journey on horse back, camel back and even yak, over snow-capped mountains and rocky passes, through deep valleys and wide open, vast deserts, stopping only at remote caravanserais for rest, water and some conversation. it’s a life so different to our western world today.

What was it like then? Joanna Lumley takes an adventure through time to show us a glimpse of life as it once was lived by so many, as it has been for hundreds of years before and still is for a few following their traditional way of life.

Our modern Western world has gone through many changes. We can see so much with the touch of button and a good internet connection that we can see it all sitting at home.

Is that the same as the smell of spice in the bazaar, the colours on the ceiling of the mosque, the feel of the handmade carpet.

We think that the education of our children is something that takes place in good faith by well-intentioned people who have no other agenda than the betterment of our next generation.

Perhaps it was once so, and perhaps with individuals, it is still the so. There are teachers who believe in the unique value of each child under their care, they believe in the future of the race, they believe in the nurturing and furtherance of the young mind, hoping to develop the best qualities of each individual, in the service of his own life, his future and the family and community he is part of.

But what of the outside forces that shape our education system, introducing labels with stigma attached.

There is the child who is not taught to read with phonics on a step by step basis, building up familiarity and recognition with the sounds and shapes of the letters he is seeing, how to combine, how different combinations are used to show different sounds, shape the way a word is pronounced, shifting its meaning slightly to tell us details such as when the action took place, now or in the far distant past, or still dreamed of in a future time, whether one or more people were involved and so on.

When the child didn’t spend enough time for that child to learn the letters all of the alphabet and know them cold, then is it any surprise that the same child sometimes can’t read a word that begins with a letter he or she can’t recognise.

What would you say? You would probably say the first thing that came into your head when the teacher asked you to read aloud in class. It doesn’t mean the child has dyslexia or has a mental disorder needing a drug to handle it or glasses so he can read.

It just means the child needs to practice recognising the letters of the alphabet a bit more and learn how to put the sounds together with other letters to make the sounds that words are made up of.

It’s a skill learned at school, at the mother’s knee or grandmother’s kitchen table, wherever it takes place. But it needs to take place, in every language with every student if that child is to learn to read and write.

It used to be called “The Three R’s”; Reading, Writing and ‘Rithmetic.

That’s a bit old fashioned nowadays, and sounds a bit boring.

But it’s still the backbone and foundation of a skillset that sets the child up for life.

And no amount of psychobabble or medication will substitute for doing the work and learning the basics.

When you look into how to take care of yourself and your health, there is an ocean of information out there. Where to start?

There are so many approaches and conflicting ideas, that it is hard to understand what works and who to believe. Wherever you look there are conflicts of interest.
Profit driven companies sell their breakfast cereals to children who love the taste. While the cereals are full of toxic weedkillers that the child consumes along with milk from cows pumped full of antibiotics.

Most doctors have little information about nutrition, it is not a part of their medical training, so when confronted by disease, they only have one route to take — the drug route.

So who knows what actually works or used to work before the scene got muddled by men with dollar signs in their eyes.

There are a number of health of health improvements a person can make just by tweaking their nutrition. Now, I didn’t say diet, I said nutrition,

What’s the difference?Giving your body the building blocks it needs to be healthy and stay healthy is what really matters. Giving your body something you like because it tastes nice and you fancy eating some of it doesn’t mean it did your body any good. It doesn’t mean your body can take that stuff you just put in your mouth and use it to turn it into blood, beautiful silky hair, strong nails, teeth and bones and lovely skin.

It takes a variety of different things, all together, to add up to a strong, healthy body.

Some things we need more of, and some things we only need a little tiny bit of and it goes a long way to keep us in good health.

Minerals like copper, that lovely, shiny orange coloured metal, are vital for skin, and blood sugar levels. We only need small amounts, but when there’s not enough, it can really make a big difference.

Another simple element we need is sulphur. It’s in onions, garlic and similar vegetables. Your body loves it to make strong joints, to fight infections and it’s also good for our skin.

Manganese is something used to build the structure of bones, like scaffolding to support the work of other parts of the bones.

Some are well known like calcium and magnesium. They are stored in our bones so they are there like having money saved in the bank for when we need it when there’s not enough coming in. Where do you find these elements?
Surprisingly enough, there is loads of both these two nutrients in green, leafy vegetables.

Unfortunately, there’s not so much in donuts and biscuits, and a glass of coke.

So, mouthful for mouthful, when your food really works for all of your body and not just for the taste and the way it’s feeling good in your mouth, you’re heading in the right direction.

Diabetes. It is a scourge of modern life — a lifestyle disease.

It’s not a broken bone which hopefully can be fixed and you carry on with your life after a few weeks or months.

It’s not like having a baby which is a normal part of life for women.

It’s a condition that is relentless, progressive — and expensive.

It costs billions in direct health care costs in the UK alone.

Factor in the cost of a lifetime of multiple drugs after diagnosis, of annual screenings and monitoring patients in doctor’s surgeries and hospitals up and down the country.

Factor in the rising rates of people developing Type 2 diabetes as they grow older into middle age onwards.

Factor in the earlier and earlier ages at which Type 2 diabetes is now being found and being diagnosed. It’s now much more common in young adults and appearing even children.

It leads to complications. It brings about other medical issues which in turn are costly and life changing — leg ulcers, leading to gangrene and leg amputations, progressive blindness, kidney failure, impotence to list a few of the common and more severe ones.

It can increase the risk and occurrence of heart problems and strokes, of blood pressure problems and cholesterol issues. And those in turn add to the list of medications a person can be prescribed by their doctor. Not to mention the side effects that medications have.

It has been said Diabetes is incurable.

And for the pharmaceutical industry, the life time dependence on the drugs and other medical supplies such as testing kits, syringes to inject insulin or draw blood samples for lab work, dressings for leg ulcers, creams and ointments for open wounds, the training of nurse practitioners, the production costs of supplies, equipment such as blood testing meters for patients on insulin, the scientists and technicians employed to produce all the drugs and paraphernalia needed — it spirals into a mind-boggling demand on health care budgets and it has to be said, health profits for the pharmaceutical industry.

Considering that for the most part, doctors do not study about nutrition and its relationship to health as part of their medical degrees, very few look beyond the conventional approach they are taught in university, to use a drug or medicine to get a result when presented with ill patient.

However, a medical researcher in Nottingham University, Professor Ron Taylor asked some different questions and took a different approach. He evolved a therapy based on a diet approach to help the body to resolve the issues which were contributing to patient’s diabetes. He achieved success with his program.

Another doctor, Michael Mosely, well-known from his work with the BBC as a presenter, was shocked to be given a personal diagnosis of diabetes. He didn’t want to start taking drugs or medication to handle his condition. He found the program of Professor Taylor, followed it and resolved his diabetes condition within a very short time without the need of drugs or medication.

Dr Michael Mosely has written a book about his experience popularising the pioneering work done by Professor Taylor, in the book “The Blood Sugar Diet”. It’s tough. There are many reviews online of people who are successful practitioners of the methods outlined in the book, who got off their diabetes medications, and got the all clear from their doctor.

If you want to do more, you can buy the book from Amazon or find out about the program here:
thebloodsugardiet.com/

All the best and I wish you every success if this applies to you or someone you know.

Aileen

Public Domain.

So, what is it?

Technically anything out of copyright has passed into the public domain. There are slightly different laws about copyright in different countries relating to copyright. The general purpose of copyright however, is to protect the individual who created a work of art, an invention, a piece of music or some other product so that other people cannot profit from his or her work until he or she has had a reasonable chance to or claim it as their own.

Public domain is defined in “Whatis.com” as

“Public domain is a designation for content that is not protected by any copyright law or other restriction and may be freely copied, shared, altered and republished by anyone. The designation means, essentially, that the content belongs to the community at large. Copyright restrictions vary among types of content and different countries.”

There are limitless amounts of material in the public domain, available for recycling and reusing, reinventing or recreating into new, exciting and different forms.

Splurge on it.