permaculture

["keller" <ak.and.ak@on-line.de>]

> Andreas, I'm currently taking the Biodyanmic course in N.Y - The Steiner
> people get this thrown at them even more than we do. Steiner's philosophy
> that there is "no matter without spirit" is ripe for scientific bashing,
> let's be honest. Mind you, they have all kinds of numbers/stas on the
> success of their homopathic field sprays....

Well, Steiner pioneered organic farming 70 years ago, when everybody else
ran into the direction of artificial fertilizer, mechanization etc. These
people have developed a lot of usefull things, and probably they have saved
some heirloom varieties of plants from extinction. So they have their
merrits. Their Demeter products are also quite good, although I don't think
it makes a difference to the quality at which day the juice or the body oil
got filled into the bottle.

The down side is that they have also introduced a lot of bogus concepts into
the environmental movement, which are arround since then, waste people's
energy and guide it in the wrong direction and make the whole movement
easily attackable. Any irreproducability is always argued away (e.g. if the
effect does not show up on your property, that is because on the other
property, where it was originally found, 7 mountains amplified the cosmic
effects of the planets - that kind of thinking) so whatever you try, it is
impossible to reach them with arguments. I just find it annoing. Sorry if I
also annoy some other people here with my oppinion about this. There is
probably no common ground for a good discussion.

>
> Furthermore, double blind tests of conventional drugs also show about the
> same rates of success as the placebo, does that therefore "prove" that
those
> drugs don't work ?

Exactly. Many drugs on the market do not work (at least here in Germany - a
couple of years ago a book was published here with the title "Bittere
Pillen" (bitter pills), showing exactly that: most drugs on the market have
no effect or are even harmfull. The drug companies want to sell the stuff
(the same with the ones making the homeopathic stuff). They don't want to
help us sick people, they want our money. I am not defending them here.
>
> Does my not being able to "prove" that I have intuition mean I don't have
> intuition?

In my opinion, intuition and creativity is the very core of intelligence
(thats why decades of attempts to create "artificial intelligence" based on
computer programs have failed - human thinking cannot be desribed completely
by any formal theory, the working of a computer can).

Andreas