For an entire year I’ve been patiently waiting for the months to pass in the hope that the Washington DC Metropolitan Police would have a little less to do after June and September of last year.

The reason for this audacious hope had to do with two Peace Intention Experiments we carried out last year  via fairly unusual means:  one of the largest radio shows in the US and then via one of the largest web TV news broadcasters.

Lately I’ve been thinking a heretical thought:  What if what you eat and how much you go to the gym have nothing to do with whether you stay healthy?  

Take the Japanese, for instance. As a people, the Japanese fascinate medical scientists because they are such an apparent paradox: they have the lowest rate of heart disease in the world, despite the fact that smoking, one of the strongest risk factors, is virtually universal among Japanese men. 

Recently European scientists finally isolated the reason for the sudden, puzzling disappearance of entire colonies of bees. Although parasitic mites, deadly viruses and bacterial disease have been variously blamed for the phenomenon, study after study fingers the pesticides sprayed on plants and crops, which affect the ability of the bees to navigate and ultimately damages DNA.

There’s a Leonard Cohen track called The Stranger Song, and one of my favorite lines of it goes: ‘Like any dealer he was watching for the card that is so high and wild he'll never need to deal another.’

Every so often I marvel at the fact that my occupation is itself a spiritual activity because it rests so entirely upon a daily act of faith. Our mortgage, my children’s education and upkeep, our entire lives depend upon on the quiet certainty that if I sit long enough in front of a blank computer screen, at some point it will get filled with sentences that people will pay good money to read.

Something fundamental is shifting in the zeitgeist of the corporate world. Not long ago, I got contacted by a British management consultant who, inspired by a presentation I gave about The Bond, proposed that we work together to bring the Bond into corporations. 

My heart sank when actress Angelina Jolie announced her decision last week to have a double mastectomy as a pre-emptive strike against what doctors told her was a whopping 87 per cent risk of developing breast cancer and a 50 per cent chance of developing ovarian cancer because of the a mutation in her BRCA1 DNA-repairing gene on top of a family history of breast and ovarian cancer.

Last January after sustaining an injury to one knee during a particularly heated hockey match, our 16-year-old daughter Anya, a sports scholar, was handed the diagnosis most dreaded by athletes of any age: complete rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament of the knee. The ACL, one of the crisscross ligaments attaching the knee cap to leg bones, is pivotal to any movement of the knee, and a complete tear such as Anya sustained can spell a death sentence for any future sports.

Is anyone else out there staggered by the revelations that emerged from the recent Citizen Committee on Disclosure hearings, but even more staggered by the fact that the conventional press, in the main, are ignoring or belittling what has to be one of the biggest stories of all time?

 

We have another outbreak of measles over here in the British Isles, this time in Wales, and this time the press is backpedalling furiously to distance itself from its own headlines of a decade ago warning parents that measles-mumps-rubella (MMR ) triple shot may cause autism.

Even Jeremy Paxman, the acerbic, takes-no-prisoners host of the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme Newsnight, has silenced any voices of dissent. On two programs, he featured a panel entirely composed of pro-vaccine ‘experts’ and spent most of the time ranting about why we ought to have compulsory vaccination.