having a one week family break. yes you monday after.
bob
Saturday, June 28, 2025
Friday, June 27, 2025
Mencken’s Forgotten Wisdom on War
I never read anything written by Mencken and not because he was unheard of. Everyone quotes him back in the day. Perhaps he was our consience.
This certainly explains why he was not championed in our libraries.
Goring is right of course. At least today we have Trump in the hot seat runing interferance on our war mongers. So thin a reed.
Understand something basic. WAR destroys wealth. Rebuilding creates new wealth for a lucky few.
Mencken’s Forgotten Wisdom on War
by Jim Bovard | Jun 25, 2025
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/menckens-forgotten-wisdom-on-war/
As a stampede of weasels just sought to con America into supporting another Mideast war, it is time remember America’s most underrated critic of bellicose folly. H.L. Mencken is famous for his smackdowns of politicians and ridicule of government and of much of American culture. But he also offered sage advice for citizens judging officialdom itching for carnage.
On May 9, 1939, The Baltimore Sun published Mencken’s essay on “The Art of Selling War.” This piece, included in the Second Mencken Chrestomathy published in 1995, deserves a far higher position in the Mencken and antiwar pantheon.
In words that are painfully relevant for today’s news, Mencken warned, “The fact that all the polls run heavily against American participation in the threatening European war is not to be taken seriously.” Mencken continued:
“Wars are not made by common folks, scratching for livings in the heat of the day, they are made by demagogues infesting palaces…The very unpopularity of war makes people ready to believe, when they suddenly confront it, that it has been thrust upon them…because their own demagogues have been pretending, all the while, to be trying to prevent it.”
Seven years later, the same points were echoed in an interview by Nazi kingpin Hermann Goering, who was on trial for war crimes in 1946 at Nuremberg:
“Of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece…But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along.”
Goering explained why self-government was a mirage when rulers chose war:
“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
Goering committed suicide before he could be triumphally hanged.
Back in 1939, Mencken wrote in his same article, “The main reason why it is easy to sell war to peaceful people is that the demagogues who act as salesmen quickly acquire a monopoly of both public information and public instruction.” Looking at the peril of another world war, Mencken warned, “On the day war is declared, the Espionage Act will come into effect, and all free discussion will cease…Any argument against the war itself, and any criticism of the persons appointed to carry it on, will become aid and comfort to the enemy.”
Mencken predicted, “A few weeks of [pro-war] razzle-dazzle will suffice to convert most people to the war an to intimidate and silence the stray recalcitrant who holds out.” Thanks to massive pressure to confirm and submit, “The dissenter is not only suspected by all his neighbors; he also begins to suspect himself.”
(Okay, maybe not dissenters who follow the Libertarian Institute, but most of the rest of them.)
Mencken’s perspicacity was shaped by bitter experience during World War I. In 1915, the most popular song in America was “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier.” Two years later, President Woodrow Wilson and his propagandists easily ignited war fever. Mencken chronicled the lies used to justify intervention until his views on the war were silenced. He watched as his fellow German-Americans were vilified and hounded as if they were all seeking to detonate the U.S. Capitol. He watched Wilson endlessly invoke the ideal of liberty as the government seized nearly absolute power, including the power to conscript millions of Americans to fight wherever Wilson chose (including Siberia) and to send more than a hundred thousand American troops to their death in Europe. Mencken was targeted by the Justice Department for surveillance. His 1917 essay, “Why Free Speech is Impossible During War,” was suppressed.
Mencken helped re-define the war after Armistice Day. In 1920, he ridiculed “the posse of ‘two thousand American Historians’ assembled by Mr. Creel [chief of the U.S. Committee on Public Information] to instruct the plain people in the new theory of American history, whereby the [1776] Revolution was represented as a lamentable row in an otherwise happy family, deliberately instigated by German intrigue.” Hyperbole? No. Robert Goldstein, the producer of the patriotic film The Spirit of ’76, was convicted under the Espionage Act in 1917 for denigrating British soldiers during the Revolution and thereby endangering support for Allies.
On the eve of the 1920 presidential election, Mencken wrote that Americans were tired “of a steady diet of white protestations and black acts; they are weary of hearing highfalutin and meaningless words; they sicken of an idealism that is oblique, confusing, dishonest, and ferocious.” Mencken explained why a typical voter would support Warren Harding: “Tired to death of intellectual charlatanry, he turns despairingly to honest imbecility.”
Maybe some Donald Trump voters last year had the same sense of resignation. But the push for war with Iran is bringing out every charlatan in the land. Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) may have offered the most shameless defense for launching a U.S. bombing campaign: “This is not warmongering. This is peace mongering.”
Mencken mostly silenced himself during the Second World War. FBI agents repeatedly investigated him, even interrogating his physician. But, as biographer Fred Hobson noted, Mencken’s “earlier acquaintance with J. Edgar Hoover may have helped forestall any further investigations.” After the war, he bitterly lamented in his dairy, “The course of the United States in World War II was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the [Baltimore] Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt’s foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.”
H.L. Mencken was recently labeled “The Greatest American Critic of the Great War” by the Roads to the Great War website. Mencken wasn’t perfect; he had some boneheaded pro-war utterances, perhaps due to his youthful infatuation with philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. But Mencken offers an antidote to people exposed to the angst-ridden laptop bombardiers who increasingly dominate social media and political discourse.
It’s Not a Broken System: From Food to Development, It’s a Masterpiece of Control
The next phase will see us transition to restotative agriculture which recovers the soils while also preserving the optimized geometry. We really need thousand acre fields to supply bulk feed and fodder.
The rest needs to be managed by cattle impact at the least while integrating the wild...
It’s Not a Broken System: From Food to Development, It’s a Masterpiece of Control
June 24, 2025
https://www.activistpost.com/its-not-a-broken-system-from-food-to-development-its-a-masterpiece-of-control/
Industrial agriculture is not a system in crisis. It is a system in command. Engineered with precision, it reflects the civilisational logic of industrial modernity: domination over cooperation, profit over sufficiency, scale over ecology. It is not malfunctioning—it is functioning exactly as designed.
Across three volumes—Food, Dependency and Dispossession (2022), Sickening Profits (2023) and Power Play: The Future of Food (2024)—I have mapped this critique in layered terms. What emerges is not a sectoral failure but a planetary regime of dispossession: a machinery that converts ecological life into economic assets, undermines autonomy under the banner of development and metabolises resistance into market-friendly reform.
The food system is not broken. It is a weapon. And it is intended as such. It concentrates power, severs people from land, deskills and displaces producers and commodifies nourishment. It benefits financial capital and corporate actors while externalising its costs—to health, biodiversity, labour and culture.
In the Global South, ‘development’ is the velvet glove of structural dependency. It arrives cloaked in the language of poverty reduction and climate resilience—while deepening indebtedness, consolidating proprietary seed systems and subordinating food sovereignty to export-driven logic. For all its rhetoric and well-laundered PR, Bayer is not saving Indian agriculture. It is enclosing it.
Behind the slick brand messaging lies a familiar pattern. Corporate contracts replace commons. Proprietary inputs replace knowledge. The land is enclosed—not always by fences, but by code, debt and bureaucratic abstraction. This is not progress. It is programmed disempowerment. Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of rationalisation is no longer metaphor—it is agronomic policy, algorithmic governance and institutional capture.
Post-development theorists like Arturo Escobar and Gustavo Esteva have long exposed ‘progress’ as a colonial narrative—one that erases plurality and imposes a singular vision of modernity. Barrington Moore’s study of agrarian class structures illuminated a deeper truth: the fate of democracy and dictatorship often hinges on how land is owned, who controls surplus and which coalitions form around agricultural production.
Robert Brenner adds further ballast: capitalism doesn’t arise from innovation alone, but from the violent reordering of class and land relations. And Jason W Moore’s world-ecology perspective insists that nature isn’t a backdrop—it’s embedded in the very logic of accumulation. Progress, in this light, is not an upward arc—it’s a marketing campaign for dispossession.
Sickening Profits traces the links between major asset management firms—BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street—and the intersecting sectors of seed, chemical, food manufacturing and pharmaceuticals. These firms do not merely invest. They synchronise.
The result is a system where ultra-processed, chemically intensive food degrades health; pharmaceutical giants respond with treatments; and investment firms profit from both sides. Complicity is woven into this circuit through pension schemes and sovereign investment channels, tying the wellbeing of workers to the very structures of subordination that erode public health and ecological integrity.
This is not a bug. It is the system’s logic, rendered visible. As Marx warned in his theory of the metabolic rift, capitalism ruptures the organic exchange between humans and nature, degrading both soil and society in pursuit of surplus.
Power Play: The Future of Food explores how the next phase of agri-capitalism (arguably morphing into some kind of techno-feudalism) is digital. Precision farming, AI diagnostics, blockchain land registries, gene editing—these are not neutral tools. They are instruments of enclosure. They deskill farmers, centralise decision-making and consolidate control in proprietary platforms.
Ecomodernist fantasies promise that technology will decouple growth from harm. But these technologies entrench extractive dynamics, incentivise monoculture and transform farmers into data nodes. Technological intensification does not democratise the system—it de-democratises it.
Yet there are countercurrents. Bhaskar Save, the ‘Gandhi of Natural Farming’, showed that abundance need not come at the cost of integrity. His farm was not just productive—it was sacred. Like Gandhi, Save believed that true self-reliance begins with the soil. His methods were not merely agronomic—they were ethical, spiritual and political.
In Hind Swaraj (1909), Gandhi critiqued Western industrial civilisation as a ‘black magic’ that worships speed, machinery and consumption. His vision of swaraj—self-rule rooted in locality, restraint and interdependence—remains a radical alternative to the extractive logic of modernity.
The land is not a resource but a spiritual commons—a living matrix of memory, culture and identity, not Bayer’s digital fiefdom. To degrade the land is to sever a people from their cosmology. Resistance, then, is not just material—it is metaphysical.
And yet, this system is not only defended by corporations. It is legitimised by institutions. Certain well-funded departments or academics at the likes of Florida and Saskatchewan universities and Cornell’s Alliance for Science churn out industry-supported research that launders the talking points of Big Ag. Careerists in lab coats and lecture halls—comfortably embedded and institutionally insulated—serve as the intellectual wing of agri-capitalism. They do not study the system. They shield it, most notably from their social media pulpits—if not hourly then certainly daily.
The Diggers in 17th-century England, led by Gerrard Winstanley, understood that land is the basis of freedom. Their call to reclaim the commons was not symbolic—it was revolutionary. Today, their spirit lives on in every seed swap, every land occupation, every act of mutual aid that defies the logic of extraction. They understood that enclosure is the architecture of domination. To invoke the Diggers is to declare: we will not be tenants on a planet owned by capital.
Moreover, the logic of industrial agriculture does not stop at the soil. It continues inward—into the human body. The gut microbiome, the body’s internal soil, is degraded by ultra-processed foods, pesticide residues and pharmaceutical overuse. As external landscapes are homogenised for profit, so too are internal ecologies. This is not metaphorical colonisation. It is biochemical, political and intentional.
Power no longer governs only through territory and labour—it now operates through microbial environments, metabolically reproducing the conditions for chronic illness and chronic dependency.
Reclaiming food is not a matter of better policy. It is a matter of rupture. The industrial model cannot be reformed into justice. It must be confronted, disarmed and displaced.
But this is not just a politics of refusal. It is a politics of renewal.
Agroecology is not a niche alternative—it is a living practice of resistance and regeneration. It centres biodiversity, local knowledge and ecological reciprocity. It is not about scaling up—it is about rooting down.
Wendell Berry’s agrarianism reminds us that the health of culture and soil are inseparable. His call for affection, stewardship and place-based living is not nostalgia—it is insurgent wisdom.
Slow living, seed sovereignty, territorial autonomy—these are not lifestyle choices. They are counter-hegemonic acts. They interrupt capital flows. They assert values incompatible with the market logic of control.
And the Zapatistas? They remind us that autonomy is not a dream—it is a practice. In the highlands of Chiapas, they have built a living alternative: agroecological farming, communal governance and education rooted in dignity. Their call for “a world where many worlds fit” is not a slogan. It is a blueprint.
The dominant food system is not simply an outcome of contemporary power—it is its architecture. To dismantle it is not merely to fix food; it is to rupture the civilisational logic of industrial modernity itself. In this system, control masquerades as efficiency, dispossession hides behind the veil of development and the commodification of life is sold as progress.
Reclaiming food, then, is not a technical task—it is a civilisational reckoning. It demands the end of a worldview that sees land as property, humans as inputs and nature as capital. To dismantle the food system is to make space for another order. It is not merely an agricultural revolution—it is a revolution in how we live and relate.
Finally, this isn’t an academic paper or a corporate brief. There’s no funding behind it, no institution to answer to. Just a voice—clear-eyed, outside the fold and speaking because silence is not an option.
The cloud contraction conundrum: Earth’s unsettled science
I never expected serious variation in cloud cover, and yes this will drive real global warming.
THe CO2 MEME was alway wrong headed, and irrelevant to climate itself except over geological time. This is way mor immediate.
Golbal forest farming needs to become policy.
The cloud contraction conundrum: Earth’s unsettled science
06/24/2025 // Willow Tohi // 1K Views
Tags: carbon dioxide, Censored Science, Climate, climate alarmism, climate models, climate science, cloud contraction, cloud cover, Ecology, environment, Fact Check, global warming, jet stream, NASA, real investigations, research, solar heating, truth, unsettled science
https://www.naturalnews.com/2025-06-24-the-cloud-contraction-conundrum-earths-unsettled-science.html
Study reveals shrinking cloud cover, not CO2 alone, drives 80 percent of recent solar heating.
Satellite data shows storm-cloud zones have been contracting 1.5 to 3 percent annually since 2000.
Declines in shipping pollution and natural cycles may contribute, but feedback loops from global warming are feared.
Climate models understate cloud dynamics, undermining policy decisions.
Scientists warn current warming projections may be too low, demanding urgent reevaluation.
Scientists have long jousted over the drivers of planetary warming, but a bombshell study published in Science last month has reignited debates over the role of clouds and exposed critical flaws in climate models reliance on carbon dioxide as the dominant factor. The research, led by NASA’s George Tselioudis, reveals that shrinking storm-cloud zones account for 80 percent of increased solar heating since 2000, with profound implications for climate policy. As satellites detect a worldwide contraction of midlatitude and tropical storm-cloud bands, the findings suggest a messy, unpredictable climate system — one where carbon-centric solutions may be dangerously incomplete.
The cloud contraction finding: A new paradigm in solar heating
Observations from NASA’s Terra satellite reveal a radical truth: the Earth’s reflective “sunscreen” is failing. Over the past two decades, storm-cloud zones — critical for reflecting sunlight — have shrunk by 1.5–3 percent per decade. This contraction has allowed 0.37 Watts per square meter of solar radiation to penetrate, driving a startling 60% of the energy imbalance fueling recent warming.
“Nobody can get a number that’s even close [to explaining this deficit] until now,” said Tselioudis, emphasizing that cloud dynamics, often sidelined in climate discourse, are now center stage. The study attributes roughly 80 percent of reduced reflectivity to shrinking cloud coverage rather than changes in cloud properties — such as dirtier, darker droplets — undermining assumptions that pollution reductions alone explain the trend.
Yet the causes remain tangled. While reduced sulfur emissions from shipping (a public health victory) may be brightening skies, natural ocean cycles and jet stream shifts — possibly worsened by warming itself — could also be at play. “It’s a complex soup of processes,” said NASA’s Norman Loeb, whose team corroborated the cloud-albedo findings in August’s Climate Dynamics study.
Climate models under fire: Ignoring Earth’s dynamic clouds
The research delivers a stinging rebuke to climate models, long hailed as policymakers’ guides. Existing simulations poorly capture the role of large-scale atmospheric shifts like narrowing equatorial storm belts or midlatitude cloud zone contractions. As Tselioudis noted, models “didn’t see this coming,” leaving their warming projections — used to justify trillions in carbon mitigation — increasingly dubious.
At the AGU Fall Meeting last week, University of Chicago climate dynamicist Tiffany Shaw confessed, “We don’t know if these cloud trends will continue.” The eastern Pacific, for instance, has paradoxically grown cooler, strengthening regional winds that could slow cloud-shrinkage, while other regions show weakening patterns. “The real world will show us the answer,” she conceded — a tacit admission of models’ limits.
Worse, if warming itself is destabilizing clouds — a “Feedback Loop Dilemma” posited by physicist Helge Goessling — the study implies prevailing warming forecasts are alarmingly conservative. “If the trend holds, we’re in trouble,” warned Max Planck scientist Bjorn Stevens, citing unprecedented feedback potential.
Policy implications: Carbon myopia vs. complexity
The study’s publication coincides with a troubling milestone: 2024 became the hottest year on record, with oceans absorbing unprecedented heat. Yet policymakers continue to pivot on CO2 alone, even as Tselioudis’ work highlights the far greater impact of shrinking cloud cover.
“This underscores how narrow our climate strategies are,” said former EPA scientist Judith Curry. “We’re treating warming like a single-variable equation when the real world is infinitesimally more complicated.”
Critics argue that funneling trillions toward carbon taxes or wind farms ignores this complexity—and risks diverting funds from adaptive measures like seawalls or drought-resistant crops. “You can’t regulate cloud feedbacks,” noted climatologist John Christy. “We need humility, not hubris.”
The cloud over climate science
As debates over the 2023 UN Climate Conference in New York continue, the new findings force uncomfortable questions. Could 50 years of climate science have misdiagnosed planetary heat-regulation? Has the fixation on CO2 blinded researchers to atmospheric processes that are “literally determinative of future warming,” as Goessling warned?
For now, the message is clear: Our skies remain unpredictable, our models faltering. As clouds shrink and scientific consensus cracks, one truth emerges: The climate future is stranger — and more uncertain — than we imagined.
US Dollar Now Effectively Replaced As World’s Reserve Currency by This Asset,
Globally the best store of wealth has been stocks. you can run away. I remember an old dutchman who bot Canadian railway stocks before WWII, came to New York after and established his identity and got his stock reissued. He had burned the original certs.
Try fleeing with a pound of gold in your suitcase. Today bitcoin is your friend.
US Dollar Now Effectively Replaced As World’s Reserve Currency by This Asset,
According to Black Swan Author Nassim Taleb
By Henry Kanapi
US Dollar Now Effectively Replaced As World’s Reserve Currency by This Asset, According to Black Swan Author Nassim Taleb
Economist and best-selling author Nassim Taleb says a single asset has overtaken the US dollar’s position as the world’s de facto reserve currency.
Financeflux | On June 22, 2025
In a new interview with Bloomberg, the Black Swan author says that the US dollar has lost its status as a reliable safe-haven asset, noting that people prefer to invest in the stock market rather than hold a currency that declines in value over time.
He also says that America’s sweeping sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine marked the beginning of the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. According to Taleb, gold is now the world’s reserve currency, highlighting that the dollar’s credibility eroded after America and its allies weaponized the USD.
“That would end up being reflected in stocks, the slow decline of the dollar, and effectively, there’s a second risk. The first one is the deficit, the second one is effectively that the dollar is losing its status as a reserve currency…
You can see the accumulation of gold in the reserves and the behavior of gold over the past 12 months. And it didn’t start with Trump’s policies. Of course, it started with Biden when he froze the accounts of people connected to Putin, and of course, thinking that it would be limited there, but people not connected to Putin decided to stay away from the euro and the dollar.
And gold is effectively now the reserve currency. Transactions take place in dollars and euros, usually dollars, and at the same rate, however, they get converted back into gold. And we can see that from the accumulation of reserves.”
Thursday, June 26, 2025
GM crops fuel rise in pesticide use despite early promises, study show
We also understand that we now have the understanding to operate without inputs.
The changeoever swill have to be generational.
GM crops fuel rise in pesticide use despite early promises, study shows
Spread of GM crops has not contributed to chemical reductions or land reclamations, but to increased use of the pesticides they were claimed to curtail. Report: Claire Robinson
GM crops have increased agriculture’s dependence on pesticides rather than reducing it, a study published in April 2025 found.
Drawing on data from four GM crops – Bt cotton, herbicide-tolerant (HT) soybean, HT and/or Bt maize, and HT canola, the researchers – including agricultural development expert Prof Glenn Davis Stone from Washington and Lee University and Bt cotton expert K. R. Kranthi of the International Cotton Advisory Committee – traced the surge in chemical use over three decades.
They found a paradox: while GM seeds were supposed to reduce pesticide use, their introduction caused pesticide use to soar. The researchers explain this outcome using the Jevons paradox, an economic theory that dates back to 1865. British economist William Stanley Jevons argued that efficiency in resource use often leads to more, not less, consumption. The study applies this idea to GM crops, which were claimed to reduce pesticide use, but in reality have made it skyrocket.
The researchers consider the two most prevalent GM seed-pesticide technology regimes: Bt crops and herbicide-tolerant (HT) crops. Both seeds are billed as efficient technologies: HT crops are claimed to facilitate more efficient weed control, and Bt crops are claimed to control insect pests more efficiently.
However, the researchers found that, “Like other technological efficiencies… the increased use of GM crops over the past 30 years has not contributed to input reductions nor to land reclamations, but to the expansion of agricultural land and increased use of the very pesticides these technologies are purported to curtail.”
This is due to the complexity of agricultural systems: “The efficiencies of GM crops not only lower the cost for individual farmers to use, in aggregate, more pesticides; they also make those pesticides ever more essential to the political economy of agriculture through the input-intensive monocultures in which they are embedded. In fact, increases in chemical usage occur throughout these GM crop systems because technological substitutions like GM seeds cannot be separated from their cascading impacts on labour, weed and pest ecology or agricultural decision-making.”
Bt cotton in India: Farmers buy more insecticides than ever
The authors consider the example of GM Bt cotton in India. Bt cotton was introduced with the promise of reducing insecticide use. The technology initially worked. Farmers used fewer insecticides and had lower input costs. The government supported its spread, so that by the mid-2000s, Bt cotton covered most cotton-growing areas. But within a few years, the trend had reversed. Pests developed resistance and new pests appeared. In response, farmers sprayed more insecticides. By 2018, cotton farmers in India were spending 37% more on insecticides than before Bt cotton’s introduction.
What began as a cost-saving solution turned into a treadmill of higher expenses and increased pesticide use. The authors comment, “The irony is that the wide adoption of Bt cotton, a technology with the express purpose of reducing insecticide sprays, is itself a key reason that Indian farmers apply more insecticides to their fields now. There is simply much more cotton now grown in India, and it is planted in monocultures that demand more of many kinds of resources.
“This is agricultural elasticity: With new social and biological technologies like Bt cotton seeds and fertilizer subsidies, cotton cropping can expand, and farmers can intensify their efforts as capitalist cotton producers. These complex interactions only emerge after time, complicating the original technological efficiency of spraying less by requiring more inputs like fertilizers, land and water.”
GM crops and chemical use
The study shows that this pattern was also found in the US with GM herbicide-tolerant crops. These crops initially made weed management more efficient, as farmers could save labour costs, as well as spraying only broad-spectrum glyphosate, which is cheaper than other herbicides. And crucially, they could apply glyphosate herbicide to the growing crop without fear of killing it.
The result was a dramatic escalation in glyphosate application, particularly in soybean cultivation. Among US farmers, the number of soybean acres treated with glyphosate jumped from 9.2 million to 113 million between the pre-HT year of 1994 and 2018. During this time, the number of soybean hectares rose from 24.9 million to 36.1 million, and the percentage of area treated with glyphosate rose from 15% to 87%.
Monsanto (now Bayer) promoted glyphosate as a weedkiller with a complex mode of action that would delay resistance in weeds. But this claim turned out to be false, as the study emphasises. As glyphosate-resistant weeds spread, farmers had to spray more of the chemical. When glyphosate alone failed to control the weeds, manufacturers created GM crops tolerant to even more toxic chemicals, such as dicamba and 2,4-D. Farmers began spraying these chemicals as well as glyphosate. As the authors of the new study point out, “These herbicides add yet more externalised public cost in the form of volatile herbicide drift.”
Likewise, in Argentina, Brazil, and Canada, GM crops promised simpler weed control but delivered higher herbicide use.
In modern chemical intensive agriculture, farmers adopt GM crops; they use more chemicals; pests and weeds adapt; and companies develop new GM traits and chemicals, which farmers buy again.
The researchers call this an agricultural efficiency “trap”. With the GM crops examined in the study, at first, there is an appearance of greater efficiency and productivity. But over time, farmers are locked into systems that increase pesticide use and raise long-term costs. Those costs include externalised ones like deforestation, soil degradation, water pollution, plant damage from spray drift, and labour exploitation.
Whole systems approach needed
The researchers write that it is not useful to analyse the effects of GM crops on the level of individual elements like resource use, chemical input or land use. Instead, agricultural efficiencies are best analysed at a system level, to account for the complex social, ecological and political factors at play that skew different parts of the production system.
Beyond the GM crops issue, an example given by the researchers is irrigation technologies, which allow for more efficient use of aquifer resources, enabling agriculture to expand to use more water across a larger landscape and in higher value, more water-intensive crops. The end result will be increased demand for, and use of, water.
Another example is land sparing. Powerful lobbies are calling for what they term the “sustainable intensification” of agriculture – the idea that maximising yield from existing farmland by increasing fertiliser and pesticide use will theoretically “spare” land for nature. The researchers point out that this is a discredited notion because “increasing efficiencies generally induce agricultural expansion. Statistical models considering yields and forest loss across the tropics conclude that expansion is more common than land-sparing… especially when political economic conditions encourage private land accumulation, create new demands for products or allow new land to be developed.”
The researchers conclude, “GM crops are simply the latest of many technological innovations that have enabled a form of capitalist agriculture to persist. HT crops exemplify this with their clear connection to rises in glyphosate use. Farmers around the world, especially over the long term, have increased their use of those herbicides that the GM crops are designed to work with. Bt crops provide a subtler example of the Jevons paradox in that their spread has increased land use, intensified monocultures and paradoxically increased pesticide applications in India.”
They recommend pursuing alternative systems that sidestep the Jevons paradox trap by seeking systemic change rather than “incremental technical fixes toward efficiency”. They state, “In complex living systems like farms, efficiency is much too narrow a goal. Instead, the long game of stability through diversity makes for a better evolutionary strategy.”
Therapeutic DMSO Combinations Revolutionize Medicine
This is obviously important and reminds us that best lab practise is no where to be found. Is eveyone just learning?
would you expect your engine to be pulled apart by an apprentise for repairs to work out?
all meds discovered in the past two centuries demand really good combinations testing particualrly when it works.
Therapeutic DMSO Combinations Revolutionize Medicine
How DMSO being mixed with numerous common medications creates a myriad of remarkable therapeutic possibilities
By A Midwestern Doctor
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/06/no_author/therapeutic-dmso-combinations-revolutionize-medicine/
Over the last nine months, I’ve worked to bring the public’s attention to dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) a forgotten natural therapy which rapidly treats a wide range of conditions and that many studies have shown is very safe (provided it’s used correctly), and, most importantly (thanks to the 1994 DSHEA act which legalized all natural therapies) is now readily available. Since I believe DMSO has immense potential to offer the medical community and individual patients, I’ve diligently worked to compile evidence that best supports its rediscovery. As such, throughout this series, I’ve presented over a thousand studies that DMSO effectively treats:T
Strokes, paralysis, a wide range of neurological disorders (e.g., Down Syndrome and dementia), and many circulatory disorders (e.g., Raynaud’s, varicose veins, hemorrhoids), which I discussed here.
A wide range of tissue injuries, such as sprains, concussions, burns, surgical incisions, and spinal cord injuries (discussed here).
Chronic pain (e.g., from a bad disc, bursitis, arthritis, or complex regional pain syndrome), which I discussed here.
A wide range of autoimmune, protein, and contractile disorders, such as scleroderma, amyloidosis, and interstitial cystitis (discussed here).
A variety of head conditions, such as tinnitus, vision loss, dental problems, and sinusitis (discussed here).
A wide range of internal organ diseases, such as pancreatitis, infertility, liver cirrhosis, and endometriosis (discussed here).
A wide range of skin conditions, such as burns, varicose veins, acne, hair loss, ulcers, skin cancer, and many autoimmune dermatologic diseases (discussed here).
Many challenging infectious conditions, including chronic bacterial infections, herpes, and shingles (discussed here).
Many aspects of cancer (e.g., many of cancer’s debilitating symptoms, making cancer treatments more potent, greatly reducing the toxicity of conventional therapies, and turning cancer cells back into normal cells), which I discussed here.
Fortunately, much in the same way DMSO caught on in the 1960s, providing that evidence has allowed it to make a rapid resurgence (e.g., I’ve now received over 2,000 stories from readers who have often had remarkable improvements from using it).
Combination Therapies
DMSO’s ability to treat a wide range of illnesses results from it having a variety of highly unusual properties that appear to address the root causes of disease. At the same time however, since DMSO has so many different therapeutic mechanisms (e.g., increasing parasympathetic activity, increase circulation, regenerating senescent cells, being highly anti-inflammatory, blocking pain conduction etc.), despite having now reviewed thousands of studies on it, there is still a great deal I do not understand about the substance. As such, one of the greatest challenges throughout this series has been to avoid claiming anything about the substance that’s not supported by the existing scientific literature, particularly when it’s a question many want answers to.
DMSO is one of the most studied, yet still poorly understood, pharmaceutical
products of our time.
Note: after seeing this quote, I queried a few AI systems, which concluded that between 50,000 to 100,000 studies have been published on the medical and chemical properties of DMSO.
One of DMSO’s most noteworthy abilities is its ability to enhance the effects of other substances, which in many cases makes it possible to surmount major dilemmas traditionally seen with those therapies.
Unfortunately, since there is an almost infinite number of substances one could combine with DMSO’s function as a “vehicle” remains one of the least studied aspects of the compound, and is specifically for that reason I had this subject be the last major part of the series. Likewise, over the years I have come up with so many different potentially promising therapeutic DMSO combinations, but I still have not been able to try most of them.
This is particularly important, as while DMSO helps the majority of recipients (e.g., around 85-90% of readers reported relief from chronic pain) in many instances where DMSO alone is not sufficient to address an ailment (e.g., pain), a combination therapy will.
Note: DMSO (alone or combined with other agents) can be administered in a variety of ways such as a liquid (sometimes applied with a cotton swab, brush, or gauze), a cream, gel, roll-on or spray; taken internally as an oral solution, infusion, or injection; nebulized or used as eye drops, ear drops, nasal drops, mouth rinses, enemas, and bladder irrigations. In many cases, multiple modalities are done concurrently (e.g., oral and topical DMSO is often quite helpful for systemic arthritis).
Combining DMSO
In pharmacology, DMSO is often referred to as a “vehicle” that helps other drugs get into the body. Because of this, while DMSO only has one approved (intravesical) use (which has led to many thinking it must not be safe), a variety of drugs are on the market that use DMSO as a vehicle to bring them inside the body. This is because DMSO is a unique solvent that:
• Will pass through biological membranes without damaging them (which is extremely unusual and believed to be due to its exchange and interchange with water in biological membranes).
Note: in addition to not harming the skin, when tested with other substances that could enter the brain, DMSO was not observed to alter the cells lining the blood-brain barrier or the brain tissue.
• Once it contacts the skin, it rapidly spreads throughout the body (e.g., within an hour of being applied to the skin, it can be found within the bones and teeth).
Note: DMSO does not penetrate tooth enamel or nails.
• It is a highly potent solvent that can dissolve a wide range of substances.
• If a substance is dissolved within DMSO, DMSO can typically bring it into the body. While a few other substances can also serve as vehicles, DMSO is the most potent in pharmacology (e.g., this study found that DMSO was more effective than propylene glycol at delivering topical steroids into the body).
Note: after a report of copper chloride and DMSO coloring someone’s skin, a team attempted to replicate this effect with a variety of dyes but were unable to do so (nor could they alter autoimmune skin discoloration).
• In addition to bringing substances into the body, DMSO also greatly increases circulation and by taking the place of water (as it is small, can form hydrogen bonds and is relatively polar) while being both fat and water soluble, changes the permeability of the cell membrane, allowing new things to enter the cell and waste products to leave cells. As a result, DMSO is able to both spread what it transports throughout the body and significantly enhance the body’s innate ability to circulate what has already been absorbed (including to previously inaccessible areas).
As such, DMSO enables the topical administration of drugs that would normally require injection, and in many cases, can significantly increase their potency (e.g., because it penetrates deep regions of the body that pharmaceuticals typically have difficulty entering or because it bypasses the barrier that cells have to foreign substances).
Note: there are likely other reasons why DMSO increases the potency of substances mixed with it, but the ones I’ve looked at are more speculative and did not have enough evidence supporting them.
Decades ago, I had a friend who used DMSO to get high by mixing it with street drugs who shared that the high from it was much stronger than what one would experience from injecting the drug (which is traditionally the strongest high one can experience) and that their group quickly realized they could only do this with pharmaceutical grade drugs as street preparations had a variety of impurities which frequently made them get quite ill when taking them. About ten years after sharing this with me, my friend died from a drug overdose (which did not involve DMSO). In contrast, most of the people I know who’ve mixed DMSO with natural substances either had positive to neutral experiences at worst.
In my eyes, there are a few key lessons from this story:
1. One of the major risks of DMSO is applying it to the skin if a toxic substance is already present. For example, in 1965, the German Magazine Der Spiegel (No. 19) shared that the original investigator of DMSO:
[Herschler] wanted to investigate whether certain highly toxic pesticides were soluble in DMSO. The researcher felt how soluble they were when he sprayed some of the solution onto his skin. DMSO transported the poison into the body within minutes. The poison worked: Herschler temporarily suffered from impaired consciousness and shortness of breath.
Likewise, within the thousands of comments I’ve received here, a reader shared a case they heard of where someone accidentally got a (fortunately non-fatal) overdose of nicotine because it was on the skin DMSO was applied to, causing it to be rapidly absorbed into their system.
Because of this, we always emphasize the importance of cleaning the application area before applying DMSO. Remarkably, aside from these precautions, to the best of my knowledge, no one has reported (either to me personally, in the literature, or within the DMSO community) becoming seriously ill from applying DMSO to skin that had a contaminant or toxin on it. This suggests that users have been consistently diligent about cleaning beforehand, or that the actual risk is limited to highly toxic substances—i.e., most compounds typically present on the skin are not harmful enough to cause systemic toxicity when absorbed through DMSO.
Note: one possible explanation for this unexpected outcome is that DMSO, as a bidirectional “channel opener,” may not only enhance the absorption of compounds into tissues but also facilitate their excretion—helping to mitigate any potential harm.
2. Many agents will become significantly more potent when mixed with DMSO. With natural substances, this is generally not an issue (as their potency and toxicity are typically much less than pharmaceuticals), but it is still a real risk to consider. Despite this, I have not run into reports (either in the literature or from readers) of a natural combination DMSO therapy creating serious issues (which was quite surprising).
3. Since very little quality control exists for them, one of the major problems with street drugs are all the things they are cut with (or impurities that accumulate during the manufacturing process). For this reason, even though many people over the years have used DMSO as a creative way to get high, I strongly advise against doing this (especially since there is also the risk of an overdose if too much is given at one time).
4. This same impurity issue could apply to anything else too. For this reason, whenever making DMSO mixes that others have had success with, it is essential to obtain a pure mixture (e.g., many pharmaceutical and supplement preparations contain multiple ingredients beyond the primary pharmaceutical).
Note: I am now receiving stories from readers who’ve had success using DMSO combined with hematoxylin to treat cancer (which is a remarkably effective cancer treatment). The standard hematoxylin preparations are bound to a [toxic] metal because this makes them better able to stain tissues than pure hematoxylin. For this reason, I’ve tried to emphasize the importance of only mixing DMSO with pure hematoxylin.
As such, caution should be taken when taking potent pharmaceuticals at the same time as DMSO. Presently, I’ve reviewed a lot of published reports and reader stories where a pharmaceutical drug was mixed with DMSO and applied topically with no issues following, however to the best of my knowledge, none of those were with drugs that can easily cause overdoses. The one exception comes from Jim McCann (a longtime DMSO practitioner), who reported seeing cases of individuals becoming seriously ill when an IV was given that contained both DMSO and an (unspecified) anticoagulant or steroid. Given that topical preparations of heparin (which was the IV only anticoagulant in use at McCann’s time) and steroids mixed with DMSO have caused no issues in clinical trials, if his observations were correct (which they may not have been), I suspect they resulted from both being infused together in an IV.
At the same time however, while drug potentiation is a potential safety concern, it is also invaluable in medicine. This is because frequently, it is quite difficult to get a drug to its target site in the body, requiring sustained high doses of it so that enough of the drug arrives at the target site (which can require exposing the body to a toxic dose).
DMSO Drug Interactions
Given DMSO’s ability to potentiate pharmaceuticals, this raises an obvious question—is it safe to take it alongside other drugs? The best answer I can share is that:
• Most of the combinations have not been studied, particularly those that entered the market after the 1960, and hence are unknown (much in the same way many interactions between approved pharmaceuticals are almost entirely unknown).
• Many DMSO authors (to play it safe) advise not taking DMSO if you are taking pharmaceuticals, which in my eyes is useless advice as 61% of Americans are on at least one and the people who tend to need DMSO the most tend to be on numerous ones for their symptoms.
•DMSO’s potentiation is the strongest if taken alongside a drug (e.g., particularly if both are in an IV infusion), and it is generally thought that if there is a two hour separation between them, the potentiation is much less.
•While it potentiates drugs, DMSO can also mitigate many toxicities of pharmaceuticals (e.g. gentamicin’s kidney toxicity).
• If a pharmaceutical is fairly toxic (e.g., gadolinium for an MRI), it’s generally a good policy not to take it alongside DMSO.
• In many cases, DMSO reduces the amount of a drug needed to get the desired effect (which is quite helpful if the drug is toxic at the prescribed dose but nonetheless continued out of necessity). Because of this, it’s essential to monitor the effects of the drugs you are taking and determine if lower doses are indicated due to DMSO’s potentiation (or DMSO healing the underlying problem that the drug was being prescribed to address).
• Likewise if you are taking other drugs, starting with a low dose of DMSO and gradually working it up is advised (so you can monitor for side effects).
• Severe drug reactions from concurrently taking DMSO and another drug are actually quite rare and the DMSO community has found most drugs can be taken alongside DMSO.
Presently, the specifics we know on this topic are as follows:
• In a 1967 report of 500 cases, investigators noted that a few of the patients concurrently on a medication (2 on insulin, 2 on digitalis, 1 on nitroglycerine and 1 on quinidine sulfate) had the effects of their drugs increase and needed to be switched to a lower dose (whereas other drugs like the psychiatric ones of the era were never potentiated).
• When Merck conducted DMSO clinical trials in 1965, they reported the two primary issues were alcohol and barbiturates becoming potentiated (e.g., suggesting benzodiazepines might be as well). In a few cases, this resulted in people who drank cocktails after becoming extremely drunk.
• Studies in humans and animals (detailed here) showed that DMSO accelerated the elimination of alcohol by 16.67%-28.33%, increased the lethality of alcohol to animals (particularly if DMSO was taken an hour before alcohol) and significantly increased both the cognitive impairment and reduced nerve conduction seen with alcohol consumption.
• DMSO has been observed to enhance the potency of certain opioids (e.g., morphine patches), NSAIDs, Novalgin, anticonvulsants (e.g., gabapentin), sedatives (e.g., trazodone), corticosteroids, gold salts, insulin, barbiturates, and antibiotics—which in many cases can be extremely advantageous.
Note: insulin potentiation is hypothesized to result from DMSO’s protein refolding capacity restoring the functionality of the body’s insulin receptors.
• DMSO has been observed to reverse the effects of Botox (which is a toxin that paralyzes muscles, so by healing that injury, Botox stops “working”).
• DMSO has not been reported to potentiate anticoagulants (e.g., change INR values) as it works through a different pathway to increase circulation and eliminate clots than those drugs do (with aspirin being the one exception, as numerous users have reported they could lower their dose). That said, the possibility of potentiation is there, so I believe it is important to monitor your coagulation values while on the drugs to ensure you are not being excessively anticoagulated.
Note: the only signs I’ve seen arguing the opposite are that I’ve had two or three readers report they began having nose bleeds after starting DMSO.
•In a sample of roughly 10,000 people receiving antibiotics and DMSO concurrently, 4 reported experiencing significant reactions from the drugs that typically are very rare, suggesting a potentiation of toxicity occurred, which I believe followed either a fluoroquinolone, sulfonamide or macrolide, with the most severe following a fluoroquinolone (while in contrast DMSO did not potentiate other toxic antibiotics like dioxidine). Likewise, while DMSO typically improves chemotherapy, there have been a few reports of rare but significant side effects sometimes seen with chemotherapy drugs in individuals taking both concurrently.
Note: some of these reactions included circulatory problems/dizziness, generalized allergies, and hematomas.
For this reason, with more toxic drugs (applying abundance of caution), some advise spacing them out at least 2 days from DMSO.
Note: in some of these instances, the patient did not disclose to the DMSO providing doctor that they were on those other drugs, which illustrates why it’s important to make sure everyone has a clear understanding of what else is in the picture.
• A few compounds have been shown to become more toxic with DMSO (e.g., mice and rats given quaternary ammonium salts showed increased toxicity when pentolinium tartrate and hexamethonium bitartrate were dissolved in DMSO, but not when given alone, and DMSO also increased the lethality of benzene), while in contrast other toxic substances (e.g., decamethonium iodide) became less toxic with DMSO.
•Other non-pharmaceutical interactions can also occur. For example, DMSO neutralizes chlorine in drinking water (reducing it to chloride) providing an emergency way to “purify” chlorinated water.
Carrying Size
Many of the bacteria in your mouth are highly pathogenic. Nonetheless, (to the best of my knowledge), no one has gotten sepsis from putting DMSO into their mouth. This is because while DMSO (a very small molecule) is extremely effective at transporting things inside the body, as things get larger, DMSO can no longer transport them, and even the smallest viruses are far larger than DMSO’s maximum carrying size.
Note: while bacteria cannot be transported by DMSO, a theoretical risk exists for the smaller toxins some produce.
Much of this was originally learned after the discovers of DMSO realized a non-injectable way to administer insulin would be extremely helpful for diabetic patients, but regrettably discovered this didn’t work as insulin (a peptide) was too large to enter the body with DMSO. In contrast, most natural chemicals and pharmaceutical drugs are within DMSO’s size limit and hence can be absorbed.
Note: DMSO’s ability to function as a vehicle increases with increasing DMSO concentrations, but in some cases, 90% DMSO is a more effective carrier than 100% DMSO.
As best as I could tell, the exact skin carrying limit of DMSO has not been definitively studied, and most current sources agree it transports substances less than 500 Daltons (Da), and may to a lesser degree transport those between 500-1000 Daltons (whereas insulin is 5808 Da).
Note: one study sensitized participants to injected allergens and then tested whether topical DMSO mixed with the allergen could elicit the same reaction. They found that penicillin consistently elicited a reaction, while castor beans induced a small reaction, while cotton seeds, celery, and buckwheat did not. This suggests a small degree of penetration of roughly 10,000 Da substances with DMSO. In the case of vaccines (which need larger biomolecules to enter the body), I’ve seen conflicting data (e.g., one study showed DMSO made it possible to deliver a plasmid based vaccine through the skin, while many others showed it interfered with the oral typhoid vaccine).
I suspect the actual limit is higher, as I’ve seen many cases of larger drugs that are clearly being transported (e.g., ivermectin is 875 Da). Stanley Jacob found that DMSO significantly increased the penetration of heparin into dog urinary bladders.1,2,3 Likewise, many studies have found a DMSO-heparin gel was therapeutically active in patients.
Heparin for context has a molecular weight of 2,000-30,000 Da (typically averaging 12,000-15,000 Da or 4,000-6,000 Da for low weight formulations), greatly exceeding the 500 Da threshold, suggesting either that the 500Da limit is wrong, that all of those studies and outsiders investigating them made an erroneous conclusion (e.g., benefits attributed to DMSO-Heparin were just due to DMSO), or that heparin being extremely electronegative increases DMSO’s ability to transport it.
Note: a Dalton is equal to the mass of a Hydrogen atom, so a strand of human DNA is approximately 2,080,000,000,000 Da, whereas aspirin is 180.16 Da and prednisone is 358.43 Da.
Lastly, that limit (which is not constrained by the skin) appears to be much higher inside the body. For example, there is some evidence suggesting DMSO can bring molecules larger than 70,000 Da through the blood-brain barrier (suggesting an even wider range of possibilities for DMSO IV mixtures).
Holistic 20-minute daily eye care routine emerges as shield against glaucoma, cataracts and digital strain
Here is a breifing on eye manipulation that leads to improved results.
As usual it requires effort and vractise, but the redults should be apparent.
AllvGood
Holistic 20-minute daily eye care routine emerges as shield against glaucoma, cataracts and digital strain
06/23/2025 // Willow Tohi // 2.2K Views
Tags: alternative medicine, cataracts, Chinese medicine, Du meridian, eye exercises, eye health, glaucoma, goodhealth, goodmedicine, goodscience, healing arts, health science, holistic eye care, natural cures, natural health, natural medicine, Naturopathy, prevention, remedies
https://www.naturalnews.com/2025-06-23-holistic-20-minute-daily-eye-care-routine.html
A tailored 20-minute eye care routine combines traditional practices and modern science to combat glaucoma, cataracts and digital eye strain.
Eight exercises, including acupressure and palming, are designed to improve blood flow, reduce intraocular pressure and relieve fatigue.
The 20-20-20 rule and proper device use guidelines complement the routine to mitigate screen-related harm.
Regular optometrist visits remain critical for preventive care alongside home exercises.
Gentle yet consistent practice maximizes benefits without causing pressure-related injury.
As prolonged screen time fuels a global rise in eye strain and chronic conditions like glaucoma and cataracts, a holistic 20-minute daily eye care routine is gaining traction as a proactive defense. Combining time-tested techniques from practitioners like Dr. William Bates, who pioneered palming in the early 20th century, with acupressure traditions from Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the protocol addresses both modern and age-old eye health challenges. Designed for at-home use, the routine — culminating in eight targeted exercises — aims to balance muscle relaxation, blood circulation and nerve stimulation, offering a tangible response to vision threats exacerbated by technology.
Historical and scientific foundations of holistic eye care
At the heart of the routine lies Dr. William Bates’ palming technique, developed over a century ago to combat tension-induced vision issues. This method, emphasizing deep relaxation, aligns with emerging evidence that eye strain stems not just from external stressors but also from internal states like anxiety. Meanwhile, TCM’s acupressure focuses on meridian pathways, particularly around the eyes, to enhance qi (energy) and blood flow. For instance, the Gallbladder 20 (GB20) acupoint, massaged to relieve dryness and pressure, reflects ancient anatomical knowledge of blood vessel pathways. Modern studies support these practices: stimulating GB20, located at the base of the skull, improves vertebral artery circulation, which nourishes ocular nerve tissues.
The fusion of these traditions with contemporary research underscores the routine’s versatility. Exercises such as monocular focus training target the ciliary muscles, the same structures responding to digital screens’ constant focus shifts. “This mix approaches eye care systematically,” explained Dr. Mei Lin, an integrative optometrist in Shanghai, “bridging herbal remedies like bilberry with targeted movements that replicate the dynamic nature of sight.”
The 8-step protocol: Exercises explained
The routine begins with stimulating GB20 to reduce blood pressure obstruction and progresses to techniques tailored to specific needs:
Scalp combing: Enhances Du meridian energy flow, promoting alertness and stimulation of Bladder and Gallbladder meridians.
Monocular focus: Strengthens ciliary muscles to combat myopia, using small text to mimic the eye’s natural contraction-expansion cycle.
Eye rotations (closed): Relaxes the six extrinsic eye muscles post-screen use, easing stiffness from fixed postures.
Eye squeeze and release: Lubricates dry eyes by activating tear glands, critical for glaucoma patients managing intraocular pressure.
Socket acupressure: The “Eye Bagua” zone’s stimulation aids detoxification and circulation, reducing deep orbital tension.
Key additional steps:
5-Acupoint massage: Targets points like Chengqi (Stomach 1) to boost local blood flow and Jingming (BL1), a primary TCM point for vision clarity. Guidelines stress gentle pressure — no more than needed to touch bone — preventing nerve irritation.
Palming: Concludes the routine by enveloping eyes in warmth to induce deep relaxation, with darker visual fields signaling optimal rest.
Each exercise is structured to transition from activating (e.g., acupressure) to restorative practices (palming), ensuring both physical and mental rejuvenation.
Adapting ancient techniques to digital demands
The routine’s efficacy in the modern era hinges on pairing these exercises with the 20-20-20 rule, a digital-age guideline to reduce screen harm. Every 20 minutes of device use, gazes are redirected to objects 20 feet away for 20 seconds — a practice Dr. Lin likens to “micro-rehabilitation” for eye muscles. Combined with the routine, it prevents muscle fatigue and blurred vision.
A recent study in JAMA Ophthalmology noted that 86% of participants who integrated screen breaks with the acupressure protocol reported reduced headaches and improved focus within two weeks. Meanwhile, TCM’s emphasis on position and breath — such as back support during palming — reflects today’s ergonomic priorities.
Expert consensus: Routine and professional care are complementary
While the routine offers daily relief, its architects caution against overlooking clinical intervention. “This is preventive care, not a substitute for exams,” states optometrist Richard Hsu. Glaucoma, for example, progresses silently, making annual optometrist visits imperative despite home exercises. The routine’s design acknowledges this: patients with severe issues, like macular degeneration, are advised three daily sessions (1 hour total), reinforcing the idea of habit as both companion to and extension of professional care.
Empowering proactive vision health in a high-tech world
In an era where screen time extends beyond work into schools and social life, the 20-minute routine represents a pragmatic, accessible safeguard. By merging centuries-old practices with evidence-based techniques, this method offers more than symptom relief — it fosters resilience against conditions once seen as inevitable with aging. As digital integration deepens, such protocols become not just beneficial, but necessary. As Dr. Lin summarizes: “Eyes aren’t machines. They need rhythm, rest and routine — and now, we have science to