New York Times articles 19 May

In the New York Times yesterday, there was a big ad for rugs: Coir, Jute, Sisal and Seagrass. No hemp. ABC Carpets was the dealer. Sad that hemp is not used, it could be, though of course it can be used for finer purposes and is used extensively for clothing, such as the yoga gear at Minawear.
Another article in the NYT, also from yesterday, discussed passage of the medical marijuana bill in Illinois, making that the 19th state (not counting Maryland, whose law requires participation of academic medical centres and will not go into effect until 2015) to legalise medical cannabis.
Again, no hemp - Illinois is considering making hemp legal - and one wonders why such bills are so little mentoined in the NYT or other mainstream press.
Back in the day, the paper was published on hemp - it was William Randolph Hearst who helped make the switch to tree pulp. The press chops down millions of trees daily to promote rubbish, but has no space to promote hemp - a raw material that America could use to get out of the recession.

Hemp in Kentucky: Historical plaque

This tells the story of the loss of a raw material in the US. Hopefully there will be hemp grown in the Bluegrass State once again, making it legal is key, do sign the petition at www.minawear.com/about-us/ so we can see the fields that James Lane Allen talked about in his 1900 book Reign of Law - which is a novel about life in the Kentucky hemp fields.
On a bibliographic note, it was one of the first American books to have a dust jacked, these came into vogue in the '30s when travelling salesmen needed something eye-catching to sell. The dj is a light green with a similar design to the red cloth covers.

HEALING ONESELF

In the US, a woman has been arrested, thrown in jail, gagged from speaking, and put in solitary confinement - for healing her son. Laurie Jessop used a number of holistic treatments including black salve to cure son Chad of a tumour. Not surprising these days to hear such a story, and then again the Pharisees wanted to arrest Christ for much the same. I guess he was not making the doctors in Jerusalem rich.

This week I had a cold and have been using garlic, so I hope I am not the next victim of the Gestapo. Soon I may be using nettles - which have long been used by mankind. There is a great article about this plant in the current issue of Caduceus [#73] by herbalist Zoe Hawes (pp. 23-24). She notes that it is a 'greedy' plant, taking lots of nutrients from the earth, and thus full of calcium, vitamins B,C & K, minerals and trace elements. The iron content is 4.2mg per 100g. Dandruff is reputed to be cured by an infusion of nettle seeds in water.

Lately there was much buzz about nettles as a fibre, and one UK paper reported on it as if it was the next big thing. However, when I went to the Soho shop mentioned in the article, there were no nettle outfits. The whole thing was sloppy reporting and overhype, but it is very possible to use nettle fibre for clothing, and no, it does not sting when you wear it.

I would like to encourage nettle fiber research, however, so that along with hemp, flax, ramie and jute, it may replace cotton and plastics for clothing and then be recycled as paper. The more natural fibres we use the easier it will be to reduce methane emissions, as clothes made from natural fibres can be recycled into paper, thus reducing logging. What keeps this from happening is the fact that we use a lot of synthetic materials in clothing, so they are not easy to recycle. They are sent to landfills where they decompose and release methane gas.

If we are to heal ourselves and the planet, we need to address this.

COTTON GETS BAGGED

Image right is of Sagar Shah and Kenyon Gibson talking to reporters outside Sainsburys in Camden this morning. [courtesy of Chris Sanders at schmoontherun]

As thousands queued up all over the UK today to support the globalist pesticide companies by purchasing an Anya Hindmarch cotton bag, I stayed in bed soundly asleep...until my conscience woke me up and dragged me out of bed to go and speak up for those who are forced into lives of misery by the cotton industry. So I did not get there at 3 am to hang out with the real die-hards who wanted to bag a bag and go sell it on Ebay (they will soon find out that a limited edition of tens of thousands will not command a very high price...they may be working for less money than they pay the farm hands in Third World countries). But I did get there some time before the magic hour of 8am when the crowd was allowed in.

I met Sagar, who just started a hemp and natural fibres website, and we proceeded to hand out fliers, printed on hemp paper made in the UK.

We got a mixed reaction from the crowd; some wanted to listen, some wanted to go home and sleep (but their girlfriends, who wanted this bag, were not letting them back into bed without it) and others looked like they wanted us dead. Walking around with a bag that proudly proclaims it is made of the real thing, hemp, was not very flattering to all the eco-wannabes engaged in this trivial pursuit of the killer weed.

This last reaction is about what the cotton industry wants for us, and it reminds me of an episode in New York when two thieves took a woman's purse out of her bag. I took it back from them and started to get her attention when they both started to yell and threaten, acting very put out; how dare someone come by and intervene?

The cotton industry is making billions, if not trillions, and they like to keep their slaves working hard on the plantations. So hard in fact, that some 142, 000 a year fall sick or die in India each year alone. Another gang member who might like to threaten me is the pesticide industry, and a third is the press. As cotton uses 50% of all the world's pesticides, they stand to lose a lot of money if hemp, jute, ramie or other fibres are introduced. The press works quite often with whatever bully is in charge of the schoolyard, and right now the hemp industry does not have trillions of dollars, so the press ignores a lot of crucial information. Many journalists do not like to work too hard, they have never had to pick cotton for the fashionistas in the West to go around looking cool. They do not have to worry about the massive water shortages that cotton causes, leaving people to die in far away places.

So what happened to that pink change purse I was holding up in my hand whilst two thugs tried to get me to "mind my own business before I got hurt?" I finally got the woman's attention, yelling over the crowd as she was walking away unawares. Otherwise her keys, her money and her cards would have been gone.

Hopefully yelling over the crowd will work again, even if the thugs have trillions of dollars and lots of huffy journalists who would rather do an easy scoop on silly BS which sells so many papers.

DRESSED TO KILL

[Image right of author with Bobby Pugh of The Hemp Shop, hanging out at The Body Shop in Knightsbridge, just before picketing the Anya Hindmarch shop. Photo by Chris Sanders, whose posts on the subject can be found at www.schmoontherun.blogspot.com on March 23]

In Little Shop of Horrors, the main character is a plant who grows and grows and insists on being fed. "Feed me Seymour", it bleats to the young shop assistant. Nerdy young Seymour obeys.

Many in the world today are obeying the orders from an overgrown pest, the cotton industry. It uses 50% of the world's pesticides, and by growing Glossypium ubiquitously, creates a dangerous monocrop situation where pests thrive. But what may be worse, and what cannot be cured by ill-informed do-gooders trying to revamp cotton's image by offering us organic cotton (along with Kosher pork chops...), is the fact that cotton is thirsty and consumes vast amounts of water; the Aral Sea is now half the size it was in the 1960s, the Indus is in danger, and cotton crops in Australia simply fail, after selfishly using up all the water around.

On 25 April cotton bags, and not even organic cotton bags, will go on sale at Sainsburys all over the UK. The production of these bags has helped to kill many people, according to Katherine Hamnett, some 142,000 Indians die or fall prey to diseases brought on by cotton culture every year. But who cares when you have the press on your side? These people are as idealistic as the National Socialist Party, and they do not want facts. Make them look cool and they'll not care that they are fools, or that their cotton goods are brough in blood. At the Natural Products Show at London's Olympia this Monday, there were the preachers of cotton all over the place, all beaming with joy at the fact that they are feeding and watering this monster plant. They were as naked as the Emperor, and even the rather large cotton leaf could not hide their ignorance, or their greed.

Why are they not campaigning for hemp, jute, bamboo or ramie? Bags, for instance, do not need to be soft and tactile, they need to have the strong fibres of hemp or jute. But to answer the question, let's look at the money involved. The cotton industry can pump millions into the press whores who then go out and swoon for the crop that is turning the Aral Sea and the Indus into dry beds. They will write their articles about cotton and never go live anywhere near these waterways. High and dry they will be, but somewhere in New York or London.

Join us on April 25 at Camden Sainsburys to protest against the use of cotton for the Anya Hindmarch bags they are selling, for more info contact me at cotingas@hotmail.com

GEOMIO AND MINAWEAR PREPARE FOR EARTH DAY

Had a good talk yesterday with Edie Marrs of GeoMio, a natural fibres company in Los Angeles which has recently merged with Minawear Hemp Clothing. She is into hemp and all other natural fibres, with a large selection of bamboo articles in stock to choose from. A very interesting person she seems, telling me that happiness is being curled up with an academic tome about 5,000 year old fibres. Mention nettles, ramie, jute or kenaf to most people and they draw a blank, but to Edie, these are hot topics.

These are not, however, just niche fields for hobbyists, as the cultivation of cotton and the production of plastics threatens to destroy our way of life. Water is becoming more and more expensive, so much so that in the future wars may be waged over access to this simple compound, yet cotton is reducing major waterways to trickles, both in the East and in the West. In the former, the Aral Sea is reduced to half of its size since 1960, and in the West, waterways in California are becoming depleted, with migratory birds unable to find their way.

Edie and her new partner Mina Hegaard will be in Santa Barbara this Earth Day, so if you are able to swing by, say hi and, with a good ocean breeze to take copies of Hemp for Victory to the dock in LA, they will be in hand, the first shipment to America. If you miss them there, copies can be ordered at the links provided above.