☘️ Pro-Freedoms & civil engagement, nonviolent action & civil disobedience, Bitcoin, against Agenda 2030; INFJ endeavouring to use humour &exposure as a vehicle
@ThatEricAlper Trip to Tipp 1997 Tipperary, Ireland. Headliners Prodigy & Manic Street Preachers. Also Fu Fighters, Kula Shaker, The Cardigans, Reef, Fluke & The Supernaturals.
A Japanese immunologist spent 20 years proving that the chemicals trees release into the air walk into your bloodstream, hunt down your stress hormones, and arm your immune system in ways no therapist or pharmaceutical has ever matched, and most of the data has been sitting in Japanese medical journals for two decades waiting to be translated.
His name is Qing Li.
He is a clinical professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo and the president of the Japanese Society of Forest Medicine. The Japanese government has been funding his research since 2004, and the body of work he has produced is the reason forest bathing is now an officially prescribed clinical therapy in Japan and Korea.
The story actually starts in 1982, when the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries coined the term shinrin-yoku to describe the practice of slow, mindful walking in a forest. They did it for a practical reason.
Japan was urbanizing fast, stress-related illness was climbing, and the country had thousands of square kilometers of forest sitting unused. The idea was to give people a reason to walk into the trees... They had no idea what was actually happening to the human body during those walks until Qing Li ran the first proper experiment in 2005.
He took twelve healthy adult men on a three-day, two-night trip to a forest park. They walked for a few hours each day. Nothing strenuous. No prescribed routes or breathing exercises. They simply walked slowly through the trees, breathing the air, looking at the forest.
Li drew blood and urine samples before the trip, on the second day, on the third day, on day seven after returning home, and again on day thirty.
The numbers that came back from the lab were not what anyone expected.
The activity of a specific type of immune cell called the natural killer cell, which is the cell your body uses to hunt down cancer cells and virus-infected cells before they can spread, had jumped by roughly 50 percent during the forest trip. The actual number of natural killer cells circulating in the bloodstream had increased significantly.
Three different anti-cancer proteins that those cells produce, called perforin, granzymes, and granulysin, had all risen sharply. And the effect did not disappear when the men went home. The immune boost was still measurable on day seven and was still partially present on day thirty.
Two hours a day in a forest had upgraded the immune system for a full month.
Li ran the same experiment with women a year later and found nearly identical results. Then he ran it with a control group who took a three-day trip through an urban area with the same amount of walking, the same hotel quality, and the same diet.
The urban group showed no measurable change in natural killer cell activity at all. The forest was doing the work, not the vacation.
The mechanism turned out to be a class of airborne molecules called phytoncides. Trees produce these compounds to defend themselves against insects, bacteria, and fungi. Pine, cedar, oak, and cypress trees release them in particularly large amounts, especially in warmer weather and after rainfall.
When you walk through a forest, you are inhaling those molecules into your lungs and absorbing them through your skin, and once inside your body they appear to directly stimulate the production and activity of the very immune cells Li was measuring in his lab.
Roughly 50 percent of the health benefit of a forest walk, according to Li's data, comes from the chemistry of the air itself. The other half comes from what the forest is doing to your nervous system.
This is where it stops being only about the immune system and starts being about stress.
A separate Japanese research team measured cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, in 84 participants across 35 different forest sites. They drew samples before and after a 30-minute walk in each forest and compared them to control walks in matched urban environments. The cortisol levels of the people who walked in the forest were lower than the cortisol levels of the people who walked in the city by a significant margin. Their heart rates were lower. Their blood pressure was lower.
The activity of their parasympathetic nervous system, which is the part responsible for rest and recovery, had gone up. The activity of their sympathetic nervous system, which is the part that drives fight or flight, had gone down.
Then a researcher at the University of Michigan named MaryCarol Hunter ran the cleanest version of this experiment ever done. She recruited participants from a city and told them to take a nature pill three times a week for eight weeks.
They were free to choose the time, the place, and the duration of the nature experience, as long as it was outside, in daylight, and free of phones, conversations, and aerobic exercise. They sent her saliva samples before and after each session so she could measure cortisol changes accurately and rule out the normal daily drop in stress hormones that happens to everyone.
The result was that participants experienced a 21.3 percent drop in cortisol per hour spent in nature, with the biggest payoff happening between minutes 20 and 30 of the walk.
After that, the cortisol kept dropping, but more slowly. The threshold dose for measurable stress relief was just 20 minutes outside in something that looked and felt like nature.
What none of this means is that nature is a substitute for therapy or for medication when someone genuinely needs them. Therapy treats different things than a walk does, and Li himself has been careful in interviews to call forest bathing a complementary intervention rather than a replacement for clinical care.
But what the research has settled is that the human body has a physiological response to being among trees that operates on the same biological systems modern medicine is trying to reach with drugs and clinical protocols, and that response is fast, measurable, and free.
The strangest part of Li's work is the implication he keeps repeating in interviews. The average person now spends more than 90 percent of their life indoors. Their cortisol stays elevated. Their natural killer cells stay sluggish.
Their parasympathetic nervous system rarely gets a chance to take over. The system that was tuned by millions of years of life under a canopy of trees is being asked to run permanently inside a box made of drywall and screens.
Your body has not forgotten what it is supposed to do in a forest. It is waiting for you to walk into one.
Glorious sunset and tide from Ned's Point in Buncrana last night. A fleeting few moments between the showers on the shores of Lough Swilly. Summertime on the Inishowen Peninsula in County Donegal is hard to beat! Ireland's most northerly section of the Wild Atlantic Way.
Lance Bass and his partner, Michael Turchin, used IVF and surrogacy to obtain a little boy and a little girl.
But their own words reveal something disturbing about the fertility industry.
The women hired as surrogates and the children created are treated as disposable objects—not human beings with inherent worth and dignity.
Here are just a few shocking statements from Lance and Michael on the process of hiring egg donors, surrogates, and creating children…
1. “We got all the way down the path of about to retrieve their eggs… Some just wouldn’t produce enough eggs, some weren’t good genetic matches.” — Michael Turchin
2. “Not only did we need to get a new egg donor now because we found out she had early lupus, but on top of that, when we did our egg retrieval, we only had two healthy embryos... once she miscarried, we had to start all over from scratch again.” — Michael Turchin
3. “[W]e found a new donor and we love the donor, so we have our embryos ready to go right now. Unfortunately, we just lost our surrogate that we’ve had for over two years. And so now begins the process of finding a replacement surrogate...” — Lance Bass
Notice the language: new donor, replacement surrogate, healthy embryos, genetic matches.
This is what happens when human reproduction becomes a commercial process. Women are treated like breeders, selected and replaced according to whether they meet the desired specifications.
Children are treated as products of a system that screens, selects, and manufactures them according to their parent’s wishes and not just embraced for who they are.
The women involved deserve better than to be treated as means to an end. The children involved deserve better than to be treated as products designed to fulfill adult desires.
Every child has inherent dignity. Every woman has inherent dignity.
IVF and surrogacy undermine that dignity by turning human reproduction into a marketplace where adult preferences come first and children's rights are ignored.
We should reject these practices and work toward ending them.
Edward Snowden said it the best:
"When you say 'I don't care about the right to privacy because I have nothing to hide,' that's no different than saying 'I don't care about freedom of speech because I have nothing to say.'"
"Simply because you are following the law, doesn't mean that you'll be exempt from governmental interference in your private life."
I don't think anybody really grasps how desperate this situation is.
University professors are now saying they are unable to teach history because reading long books and passages is how a person learns history. College kids are incapable of reading more than a few pages.
Some classes don't assign any reading at all now, only lectures.
There is an assumption among the people managing this decline that reading is just a way of receiving information. It isn't. Proper reading is how we build the mental muscle to synthesize ideas and evaluate them.
If the catastrophic decline in reading and literacy is not addressed now, we risk losing everything.
Western civilization cannot survive the death of reading because it was built by people with the kind of cognitive depth that a culture of deep reading brings:
Complex reasoning, extended internal dialogue, the capacity to hold opposing ideas in tension. Our systems and institutions are complex, and they require well ordered minds to maintain them.
Reading forms minds, and the West was built by the richest minds in history.
🇮🇪'The banks got bailed out - we got sold out' 🏧
Ireland paid 42% of total cost of European banking crisis. https://t.co/XQaOHIdJgW
Why were Irish people, under threat from the ECB required to do so? - @vincentbrowne (bring back #vinb)
#twip#marian#Ge18#TEN
It’s not social media that’s “inflaming tensions”.
It’s not Elon Musk.
It’s not Nigel Farage.
It’s not the ‘far-right’.
It is the very deliberate policy of mass uncontrolled immigration & open borders.
This policy has to end or it will destroy Western nations.
You have to be 16 to drive.
You have to be 18 to vote.
You have to be 21 to drink.
You have to be 25 to rent a car.
Why are teachers talking to our kids about sexuality at 12?
Why are kids encouraged to mutilate their bodies at 13?
This gender ideology madness needs to end.