The content at Newswyrdy is generated by a team of writers and editors. Our goal is to present articles that make a difference.
We aim to be as independent as possible, which explains why there are no advertisements on the site.
Much of the content is centered on health and the environment, but all subjects are welcome — in fact, you are welcome to join us and write about any subject you feel we have neglected.
Our goal is to write articles that dig up or expose truths that are normally kept in the dark for commercial, political or other reasons and to provide an alternative to disinformation, lies and oversimplification in the media.
The reason for focusing on health issues is that misinformation in this area can have disastrous consequences. Unfortunately, health-related articles in the mainstream media tend to downplay the enormous potential that exists for preventing disease through nutrition.
What is the result? A very high number of deaths from preventable chronic diseases and huge profits for the pharmaceutical companies.
There is a need for reliable science-based health information free from commercial influence. Free not only from influence from the pharmaceutical industry, but also from the supplement industry, the food industry and the agricultural and chemical industries.
Prestige and a very conservative mindset in mainstream medicine and academic research are other factors that delay the inevitable developments that already are set in motion: Nutrigenomics, functional medicine and innovative healthcare IT solutions will bring about a revolution in health, centered around the optimization of individual health, preventing disease instead of waiting for diffuse symptoms to manifest themselves as hard-to-cure diseases.
You could say that a new age of medicine is about to emerge. It is an age that will be more concerned with understanding the processes that define individual health, concentrating on maintaining and optimizing individual health rather than diagnosing discrete diseases that prompt one-size-fits-all pharmaceutical treatments. This will lead to efficient personal therapies based on nutrition rather then synthetic drugs. It is a simple but wonderful notion: maximizing health.
WE NEED YOUR HELP
We invite everyone who wants to contribute as a writer to join us, and help build a site filled with a mix of serious, positive, funny and empowering articles.
“There is no such thing, at this date in the world’s history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it.
There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street looking for another job.
If I allowed my honest opinion to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. You know it and I know it. And what folly is this — toasting an independent press?
The business of a journalist now is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, fall at the feet of Mammon and sell himself for his daily bread. We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance.
Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”— John Swainton, Chief of Staff of the New York Times, in a reprimand to his colleagues.
It is no great secret that a large part of the information we are exposed to serves a marketing purpose. The powers that create this content are mostly interested in one key aspect of the future — to what degree the message bolsters company profits. Truth is a hard thing to find under these circumstances.
The most efficient marketing is the kind that is snuck into regular content. Powerful influences need to get in under our radar, disguised as something else. Changes to our opinions and values that we would normally be opposed to can be achieved by using imperceptible small changes over time.
News has to a large degree been turned into a form of entertainment and when it does contain a message, it is made up of distortions of the truth that serve someone’s agenda. Most communication of ideas on television is done through the use of short sound bites that are so far removed from the complexities of real life that they are mostly meaningless.
Is that really a problem?
CONSEQUENCES
It is an immediate problem that hundreds of millions of people are needlessly dying from chronic disease because they have been lied to by the pharmaceutical industry, the food industry and agrochemical businesses. These deaths are hard to reverse.
It is an immediate problem if the planet is going down the drain.
It is a problem if large corporations are able to hijack our democracy by the use of lobbyism, bribes and media manipulation.
But things can be turned around. How? If media consumption patterns are changed, if lobbyism, corruption and fraud are exposed and made to lose ground. There is something to be said for good old-fashioned values like truth, honor and compassion.
A SLIPPERY SLOPE
Isn’t it strange that we have come to accept that naked unchecked aggression is promoted as a good thing on television and that the willingness to employ lies and deceit is portrayed as an accepted requisite for success?
Anyone claiming that this is only a mirror of society and that we are not influenced by it is unfortunately dead wrong. In the United States, 99% of homes have a TV-set and the average person watches about four hours a day. Most of our learning is automatic and beyond our control. TV is sufficiently close to reality for us to assimilate what we see as reality although we know on an intellectual level it is not.
In the United States, divorce rates have doubled, teen suicide rates have tripled, and some crime rates have quadrupled since the last generation. The Jerry Springer Show might not be the single cause of all of that, but it sure isn’t helping.
Parents spend an average of 38 minutes per week in meaningful conversation with their children. The average child spends 1,680 minutes per week watching television. The number of violent acts seen on TV by age 18 is roughly 200,000.
Whether we like it or not, these values shape our collective mind and our future.
And this will not be a future shaped according to the interests of parents. It will be dominated by disease, fast foods, quick emotional fixes, violence, war and conflict.
If you have children, you might want to send them into a future that is a little brighter.
How is that possible? One thing we can do is take control of the flow of information and create alternatives to corporate-controlled mainstream media. Exposing lies and corruption.
We can choose to live a worthy life and set an example to our children, making them subscribe to values other than what they would get from watching violent and degrading TV shows.
Our children learn by our example. How we treat them and others. If we as parents bring them up using intimidation, violence and verbal abuse, all we do is break their spirit, telling them that, when they grow up, it is OK to get what you want using the same methods; you don’t have to care about the effects on other people. This is a perfect recipe for a society that lacks respect for basic human values, where violent crime will be a normal part of life.
Perhaps the key component for creating a better future is very close at hand, sleeping peacefully in the next room, dressed in pajamas covered with giraffes and elephants.
WHY “WYRDY” AND “NEWSWYRDY”?
To what degree do we critically assess the worth of what we contribute to the world?
Do we feel that there is no moral obligation for us to reflect upon how our life influences other people’s lives, now and in the future? We accept and support ideals such as the respect for human rights and other similar values, but isn’t it true that these ideals stay in our mind mostly as abstract ideas that we subscribe to by default, only rarely to enter into our everyday lives to guide us in our decision-making?
Maybe they should. Throughout history, many religions and cultures have upheld the importance of conscious self-improvement and the acquisition of wisdom and character traits that improve the life of all inhabitants of the world.
There is the golden rule of Christianity; “Do to others what you would have them do to you”; the “Four Noble Truths”, the “Noble Eightfold Path” and the “Five Precepts” in Buddhism.
In Northern belief systems, Asatru, there is the concept of Wyrd, that all is connected and that the notion of worth and pride of worthy achievements in relation to the Wyrd is a central guiding principle. There is also the importance of a set of twelve culture and character traits that help shape a worthy society:
- Boldness - Boldness, bravery and courage.
- Steadfastness - Endurance and tenacity, the enduring of one’s Wyrd.
- Troth - Troth, faith, fealty, or loyalty to one’s friends, kindred, lord, or gods.
- Givefullness - Givefullness, generosity
- Gestening, Guestliness - Hospitality
- Sooth - Truth and honesty.
- Wrake - Vengeance for the murder or harming of one’s kinsmen.
- Evenhead - Equality. Men and women were treated the same under the law. According to the Roman historian Tacitus:, “They think that there is something sacred and provident about women. They neither fail to consult them nor do they scoff at their counsel.”
- Friendship - Friendship and loyalty.
- Freedom - Freedom, or self-reliance was important. Self reliance is still an important cultural trait in Scandinavian countries.
- Wisdom - Knowledge and wisdom.
- Busyship/Workhardiness
WYRD
Wyrd is a concept in Anglo-Saxon and Nordic culture that refers to how past actions continually influence the future, but also how the future affects the past. This can be a little difficult to grasp.
Indeed, for a true comprehension it is key for the Wyrd to be embraced as a conceptual mystery, wherein the tides and tidings of time and timelessness flow and weave always, entwining the reticulum of the fabric of being and non-being.
— Wikipedia
It stresses the interconnected nature of all actions, how they influence each other. The concept has some relation to the ideal of predestination, but unlike predestination, the concept of wyrd allows for and encourages actions and great deeds that, although they are constrained by past events, are able to shape reality.
One element in the meaning of “Wyrd” is “worth”. It suggests some form of judgment based upon what we do in life and how this affects others. All things are linked and interconnected. If we damage a part we damage the whole. The smallest things we do have an effect somewhere else.
Wyrd is not about inexorable destiny or doom; it is about conscious choice — choosing a better future in the context of your Wyrd. Your Worth. The promise within you — that which you can become. To choose a path that has heart.
It is about the concept of improving yourself and improving the world by identifying the important forces in your life that influence or control your decisions, and then take control, using that control to achieve goals that have a real innate worth.
It is very simple. A child could tell us. We must strive to do good things.
It is about respect, truth and understanding but is also about taking a non-flinching straightforward honest stance against those who corrupt these principles. We cannot idly stand by and let evildoers go about their business.
We can, and we must do something.
Join us, become a writer for Newswyrdy.
You can make a difference.
