Connie's Perspective

April 13, 2014

Some of you are aware that I have been involved the Bundy/BLM issue here in Nevada. I don't know why I get so lucky by moving to places that have huge issues going on, but my home is less than 10 miles from the Bundy Ranch. So, I want to relate the story from my perspective having been there and seen it.

Monday morning, I received a call from a gal here in Mesquite, who is aware of my previous border work. She had driven out to the Bundy Ranch to see how she could help. She personally observed snipers in camo on the hill right across from the rally area, they were BLM law enforcement. They had their rifles trained on little old ladies and men sitting in lawn chairs, who had arrived to lend their support.

After that call, I drove out to the Bundy ranch immediately to see for myself. I did not see the snipers, though they were there, it was only because I was not at that time familiar with the terrain and was looking for them in another area. But indeed while I was there, guns were trained on me. So we had government officials ready to shoot American citizens if they crossed onto posted land.
The BLM had set up "free speech" zones at each end of Hwy 170. This was where people were instructed to gather. The Bundy's defied that and set up right on the highway, close to the ranch house. The idea of a free speech zone is so un-American.

By now the militia was there and I did see one carrying an AR15. Since it was evident this story was going national, I called the Bundy's and asked to meet with them at their home. Having learned lessons from work on the border, I felt they really needed to understand how the media would use them in a negative way and how this could really work against all they had been fighting for.

The Bundy's were very receptive to having me come in and talk about this because even though the fight had been going on for years, they had never been at a national level before. This was on Tuesday morning.

At any rate, some Montana militia had shown up on Monday and convinced the Bundy's they were there to protect them.

I advised the Bundy's that if they allowed the militia to be there, then have them put away the rifles and get out of the camo.
I visited with the head of the Montana militia group and he said he would never put his rifles away. I truly felt he wasn't there for the Bundy's, but there to agitate.

Anyway by Wednesday the Bundy's made a statement requesting the militia not wear camo and put the long arms in their vehicles. They were still wearing sidearms and several had knives strapped on.

This was such a tense situation that the militia was creating fear within the BLM agents. This statement is not to condone the BLM agents; it is just to give a view of how it was out there.

Wednesday afternoon came the confrontation with the BLM, who had gone onto the grazing area and torn out the watering tanks the cattle used to get water. The idea was to get them to come out of the hills and down to the river. The high temps were around 90 degrees and it is calving season, so the cows need that water to nurse. I want to add also the BLM shot 2 bulls that were hard to herd up.

At any rate the confrontation took place and one son, Ammon, was tasered three times. He showed me where one had hit him in the chest, just above his heart and there was a 6 inch diameter blood stain on his tee-shirt. His aunt, who weighs about 120 lbs. soaking wet was pushed to the ground from behind by a BLM agent. She showed me her injuries. When I watched the video closely, what she said was true. He pushed her from behind, very hard and it put her on the ground. The BLM agents had two German Shepherds on leashes and all had Tasers. It was unbelievable this was happening in our country right in front of my eyes.

Wednesday, we started to put together a protest that was held in Las Vegas in front of the office of Sheriff Gillespie. Sheriff Gillespie had told the Bundy's there was nothing he could do. Three Tea Parties came together to organize, The Virgin Valley Tea Party, the Las Vegas Valley Tea Party and the Pahrump Tea Party.

On Friday we held the protest, I spoke for all. We have a conservative Republican, Niger Innis, who also spoke and various members of the crowd spoke. Innis is running for CD 4, and if elected will represent those of us who are in this area of Clark County. We simply demanded the sheriff do his job and remove the BLM from the area. At the same time the story was breaking about dirty Harry Reid and his connections to the Chinese and solar. This is only one part of why this is happening. The other part of the story that is not reported on is that Mr. Bundy's place is on Gold Butte Road. Gold Butte has been designated a conservation area and Reid is going to try to push through a bill that will designate it a wilderness area. Well, with that, the cows have to be removed. So Reid is in this on all sides. What a slimy little SOB he is.

During all of this time the protesters kept arriving at the ranch and by Saturday morning, there were over 1500 people there, from all over the country.

Sheriff Gillespie came to the Saturday protest, heavily guarded with deputies with long arms and I understand but did not see an entire SWAT team. He then announced the BLM would be pulling out immediately and they would return the cattle to the Bundy's.
So, is the story over? I don't think so. I think that many of us who demonstrated and stepped up for our country will be audited by the IRS, we have been photographed by drones, the government has a clearer picture of who we are and we are most likely on a watch list. I probably made that list some years ago.

I will add that on Monday I did stop to video the BLM compound, where they had their communications and received a citation from the Nevada HP for improperly parking my vehicle. I will be fighting that tomorrow in Bunkerville. At least they did not arrest me as they did others who went into areas they had declared off limits.

One last item of note, during this entire past week, there were dot com news people there. They also in many cases did not report the story honestly. It is in their best interest to gin it up to keep the extreme radicals in the story.

In no way do I think this is over; but we made a very small step forward, only because the politics involved were exposed.
One item I brought up at the demonstration in Vegas was, why is Obama disarming our military and why do other government agencies have law enforcement people who are weaponized. Even NOAH, has 62 law enforcement people and NOAH is the weather service for God’s sake. Why is Homeland Security buying up billions of rounds of ammo?

And to close, why do supposedly patriotic American's not give a damn about their freedom and the Constitution? I have a level of disgust within my soul towards those who want to bitch, but will find any reason in the world to stay out of the fray.

In Liberty,

Bordergranny
Connie Foust, President
Virgin Valley Tea Party

The War on Raw Milk

Nelson Hultberg

Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY) and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers have recently introduced legislation to allow for the sale of raw milk, i.e., unpasteurized milk. Their Milk Freedom Act of 2014 would make it legal for "certified dairy farmers" to sell unpasteurized milk products without harassment and criminal prosecution on the part of the FDA. If enacted, this would be a major victory for those who are health conscious and understand the grievous misperception by our medical establishment regarding the safety of raw milk.

The distribution of raw milk has been banned in the U.S. since inception of the pasteurization laws in the 1920s. The American Medical Association together with the FDA brought about this ban of raw milk because of its susceptibility to being a carrier for certain infectious microbes such as salmonella.

The error here is that it was never "raw milk" that was a problem. It was "warm raw milk" produced in crowded, unsanitary conditions from grain-fed cows instead of grass-fed that was prone to an unhealthy level of microbes. Grass-fed cows produce a milk with natural "inhibins," anti-microbial agents that keep pathogens low, while grain-fed cows do not produce high "inhibin" levels in their milk.

Therefore if milk is produced in clean, uncrowded conditions from grass-fed cows, and kept cold, it remains as safe as any other food. The farmers of America produced milk under these conditions for their own consumption throughout the nineteenth century. They stored the milk from their grass-fed cows in metal cans immersed in cold water in shaded "milk houses" to keep it cool. It was relatively clean and safe and did not lead to outbreaks of disease.

It was when our economy became urbanized and industrialized after the turn of the century that milk became a problem. This was because it was now produced in large, crowded, unsanitary, dairy farms and transported into city areas for sale in warm trucks.

So there was a need for legislation to prohibit the sale and distribution of "raw" milk products between 1920 and 1960. But by the mid-1960s, the transport industry had developed refrigerated trucks to keep milk cold while in transit. Dairy farms now had refrigerated storage vats that were superior to the traditional "milk houses" of private farmers giving the milk up to 14 days before souring. The need for grass-fed cows in spatial pastures instead of grain-fed cows in crowded quarters was now understood. Cleanliness of conditions was mandated and prevalent. When the milk was delivered to retail stores, it was now placed in refrigerators for sale. Consequently pathogens did not build up in the milk from the time it left the cow to when the consumer drank it. Thus it was no longer necessary to prohibit the sale of raw milk.

Unfortunately the FDA and the consumer protection bureaucracies of Washington had grown to monstrous size by then; and they were not about to relinquish the power they wielded over dairy farmers, transporters, and retailers. They remained oblivious to the real issue involved: Raw milk is not dangerous as long as it comes from clean, disease-free, grass-fed cows and is properly refrigerated throughout the production and sale process. This creates what is termed today "certified raw milk," i.e., safe milk.

So the legislation being introduced by Congressman Massie and his colleagues is great news to those of us in the freedom movement who are aware of the spectacular health properties of raw milk and its superiority over pasteurized milk. We see the problem from a much different perspective than the medical establishment and its henchmen at the FDA. We understand that degenerative diseases (such as cancer, diabetes, arthritis, etc.) are, to a large degree, brought about because of our modern corrupted diet with its low nutrient value. Raw milk is the summum bonum of nutrition and it can help man achieve a far superior level of health to what he presently experiences.

But in order to bring about this improvement of mankind's health, the ignorance that prevails in today's medical establishment must be overcome. Our medical doctors and scientists are certainly very smart people. But they are ignorant of the truth.

As comparison consider our former Fed chief, Ben Bernanke. He is a brilliant intellect. But unfortunately he is ignorant of the truth in the field of economics. He doesn't grasp the immense fallacies in the Keynesian paradigm he has espoused throughout his career. As a consequence our country suffers greatly.

This is the intellectual history of man. Brilliance in our intellectual class does not guarantee possession of the truth. The sages of every era are so often wracked with ignorance of the truth that one wonders how did we ever climb from the cave and produce a free civilization. The priests of the Middle Ages, the political thinkers of monarchical Europe, the bloodletters of the nineteenth century were all brilliant minds, but "ignorant of the truth." Our era today is equally wracked with brilliant economists, political philosophers, and medical scientists who are ignorant of the truth.

Why Raw Milk Is Superior

The reason why raw milk is so superior lies in what happens to the protein molecule when it is cooked, i.e., pasteurized in the case of milk. The famous scientist, Dr. Francis M. Pottenger, Jr., showed the danger of cooking protein in his experiments in the 1930s. Over a ten year period between 1932 and 1942, he and his colleagues conducted clinical studies on over 600 cats. [1] The cats remained in excellent health on a diet of raw protein alone. All the feeding was supervised by Pottenger's medical group, and all experiments were carefully controlled. The results, writes a contemporary, Dr. Henry G. Bieler, "proved beyond question the unhealthy nature of cooked animal protein....No cats in the entire experiment - often siblings of the same litter - developed disease as long as they remained on a raw protein diet. In fact, they lived to a ripe old age." [2]

But those cats fed on cooked protein all contracted diseases commonly seen in man: arthritis, heart trouble, cancer, liver and kidney degeneration, lung diseases, meningitis, osteoporosis, immune system collapse, pyorrhea, loss of teeth and hair, gastritis, nearsightedness, degenerative processes of the brain, extreme irritability, pneumonia, lack of sexual interest, sterility, infertility, ovarian atrophy, physiological exhaustion, skin disorders, allergies of all kinds, and hypothyroidism, etc. [3]

Dr. Pottenger's nutritional / pathological findings were supervised in consultation with Alvin G. Foord, M.D., professor of pathology at the University of Southern California and pathologist at the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena. [4] Their work met the most rigorous scientific standards of the day. Their results are so convincingly obvious that there is no room for doubt of their accuracy. The fact that the world chooses to ignore the Pottenger-Foord findings is attributable to humanity's desire to flee from reality and avoid facing the tough truths of life.

Man has been on this planet for approximately 5 million years. But he discovered fire only about 400,000 years ago. So the bulk of his evolutionary development (4.6 million years) took place on raw protein. This is why he needs it. Milk is a perfect source for it. The fact that our government prohibits us from purchasing raw milk is inexcusable.

Detractors to the Pottenger-Bieler thesis on raw protein and its connection to health claim that cats are not humans, and that it is wrong to extrapolate from one to the other. But their claim is in error, for it ignores the fundamental premise that certain natural laws of existence are applicable to all forms of life. For instance, the law of gravity affects cats and humans equally. And the same goes for certain physiological laws such as the necessity of raw protein for long term, disease-free health among mammals. Both cats and humans are mammals.


Cooking protein alters it molecularly. The protein molecules are changed from the "hydrophile colloid" form to the "hydrophobe colloid" form. According to Bieler, they then cannot fulfill protein's role adequately, which is to produce growth, rebuild tissue, and restore the body's integrity every 24 hours from the wear and tear of stressful life. [5]

The Safety of Raw Milk

How does raw milk compare safety-wise to other foods we eat? In a study between 1971 and 1982, figures from the California Department of Health and the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta show that there were 3.6 million cases of illness from salmonella in the state of California. The sources of the infections were: meat - 468,000; poultry - 612,000; restaurants - 1,486,000; human to human - 360,000; certified raw milk - 103. [6]

Raw milk consumers represent only 3 percent of the population, so its 103 figure has to be multiplied by a factor of 33.3 to make it statistically meaningful. When this is done, the illnesses from raw certified milk are 3,430 as compared to 468,000 from meat and 612,000 from poultry.

The FDA estimates that in the ten year period between 1996 and 2005, fresh produce was responsible for over 8,000 E. coli infections in the U.S, and eggs were responsible for over 6,500 infections. The FDA also cites several outbreaks of E. coli traceable to raw milk over a five year period that produced less than 50 infections. [7] To make these figures statistically comparable, we need to multiply raw milk's five year figure by 2 and also by 33.3. The total for raw milk becomes 3,330. Certified raw milk is, thus, safer than the fresh produce and eggs that we eat every day. There is no need to prohibit its sale.

Life is filled with various degrees of risk that free men and women are willing to take. We don't stop eating produce and eggs because occasionally illness results. We don't stop flying in airplanes because crashes occur. Things must be kept in perspective, which is not something that government wants to do.

It is quite exasperating to be aware of all this and try to convey it to the public. The demonizing of raw milk by the FDA and the medical establishment overpower even strong, independent people who have no problem challenging establishment fallacies in the fields of economics and politics. But when health and medicine are involved, they suspend their power of judgment and obediently agree to whatever their doctor says no matter how much in conflict it is with reason and science. They think of doctors as some kind of gods, when they're nothing but smart humans just as capable of being corrupted by a false paradigm as our economists and political philosophers. Today's doctors are "ignorant of the truth," but sadly their patients continue to obey them with an undeserved reverence for irrational prescriptive advice regarding the consumption of raw milk.

The Tough Truth

The scientific work of Francis M. Pottenger, M.D. and Alvin G. Foord, M.D. can be found in their book, Pottenger's Cats: A Study in Nutrition. The work of Henry G. Bieler, M.D. on health and nutritional issues can be found in his book, Food Is Your Best Medicine. In addition, Dr. Ron Schmid's magisterial work, The Untold Story of Milk: The History, Politics and Science of Nature's Perfect Food, brilliantly sums up the the case for raw milk. All three of these books are in print at Amazon. For more information on this controversial issue, hundreds of questions are answered at: www.realmilk.com.

The experiments of Pottenger, Foord, and Bieler are irrefutable. They demonstrate to any objective person that cooked protein will not maintain a healthy or long-lived existence. The fact that such a monumental truth is not common knowledge today in medical schools is a testament to the ignorance and dogma that control so much of the scientific endeavors of man. Only when our medical / nutritional experts begin to apply this truth to the human diet will we start to achieve the true level of health that is our birthright.

Notes

1. Francis M. Pottenger, Jr., M.D., Pottenger's Cats: A Study in Nutrition (La Mesa, CA:
Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, 1983), p. 1 and p. 6.
2. Henry G. Bieler, M.D., Food Is Your Best Medicine (New York: Random House, 1965),
p.191.
3. Pottenger, op.cit., pp. 10-11, 22, 31-32, 40-41.
4. Pottenger, Ibid., p. 2.
5. Bieler, op.cit., p. 191.
6. California Department of Health, Werner, Humphrey, Chin; and the Center for Disease
Control, Atlanta, GA, from a study done by Alta-Dena Dairy, Los Angeles, CA, 1983.
7. Rebuttal to the FDA's article: "Raw Milk Misconceptions and the Danger of Raw
Milk Consumption," www.realmilk.com.

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Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.afr.org. His articles have appeared over the past 20 years in such publications as The Dallas Morning News, American Conservative, Insight, Liberty, The Freeman, and The Social Critic, as well as on numerous Internet sites such as Capitol Hill Outsider, Conservative Action Alerts, Daily Paul, Canada Free Press, and The Daily Bell. He is the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email him at: hultberg@afr.org