Eureka Ideas Unlimited

Naomi Klein

2009-06-14T18:28:00.006-06:00

I didn't write the following. I got it off the blog of Huqul al Nakhl.

Naomi Klein shot to international fame eight years ago with her book No Logo, which has since sold 1 million copies.

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, published 15 months ago, has already sold 800,000 copies and been translated into 26 languages. Last week, a documentary based on the book was released at the Berlin Film Festival.

Her speaking engagements and political activism keep her on the road, around the world. Her newsletter goes to 30,000 subscribers.

No Logo charted the corporate commodification of youth pop culture and the casualization of labour (what’s sold in the West are expensive brands, not products, which can be manufactured cheaply in the East).

The Shock Doctrine is about the globalization of the neo-conservative ideas pioneered by Chicago economist Milton Friedman and popularized by Ronald Reagan. There was the massive privatization – not only of public services at home but wars abroad (private security forces and contractors galore in Iraq and Afghanistan) and even disaster relief (post-tsunami and Katrina). There was the deregulation of the markets, which led, inevitably, to the current economic meltdown.

Critics attack her for seeing corporate conspiracies. They particularly sneer at her hypothesis, announced in the book’s subtitle, that right-wing economic policies have faced such popular resistance that they can only be introduced in the jet stream of shock-and-awe wars and natural disasters (laying off tens of thousands of Iraqis in order to sell state enterprises; building tourist beach hotels in Southeast Asian fishing villages washed away by the tsunami).

Her admirers see the economic crisis as proof of her prescience.

The New Yorker magazine recently ran a 12-page profile: “She has become the most visible and influential figure on the American left – what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were 30 years ago.”

She has campaigned against the University of Chicago’s plan to build a $200 million Milton Friedman Institute to honour its former professor, who died in 2006. “The crash on Wall St. should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian communism, an indictment of an ideology,” she has said.

In a twist of fate, the economic crisis has dried up funding for the institute, and it has been put on hold – much to her delight.

In an interview Tuesday, Klein, 38, said she welcomes the election of Barack Obama. But she has two problems: his refusal to insist on accountability for recent American misdemeanours abroad and at home; and his “narrative that everything went wrong only eight years ago” with the election of George W. Bush.

It was Bill Clinton who periodically bombed Iraq and tightened the economic sanctions that killed 1 million Iraqis, including 500,000 children, according to UNICEF. It was he who axed the Depression-era restrictions that had prevented investment banks from also being commercial banks. He and Alan Greenspan resisted the regulation of the huge derivatives industry.

If you develop amnesia about all that, “then you do exactly what Obama is doing. You resurrect the Clinton economic and foreign policy apparatus, and you appoint Larry Summers, the key architect of the economic policy that has imploded at this moment.”

Obama’s economic recovery plan, especially the bank bailout, is a disaster.

It is “layering complexity over complexity. What got us into this mess in the first place were these complex financial instruments that nobody understood. Now they have a bailout that nobody understands.

“The facts are easy to understand, namely, that these banks are bankrupt and they should be allowed to go under or be nationalized because there also needs to be a workable financial sector.

“The amount of money that’s at stake in the bailout – if you include everything, the deposit guarantees, the loans, Fannie May and Freddie Mac and AIG – is now up to $9 trillion. The American GDP is only $14 trillion. So they’ve put more than half the American economy on the line to try to fix a mess that actually cannot be fixed in this way. Just look at what happened to Iceland. The debt that their three top banks held was 10 times their GDP. You can bankrupt the country this way.”

Obama’s stimulus package is not big enough. Almost 40 per cent goes to tax cuts. “And to pay for the cuts, they had to drastically scale back much more important and stimulative spending, on such things as public transit.”

Among the many parallels to the 1930s, the one Klein finds most useful is that president Franklin Roosevelt was under constant public pressure to improve the New Deal. That “history of resistance, struggle and community organizing” needs to be replicated to keep Obama honest.

“Obama is an important change from Bush, and the reason why he is important is that he is susceptible to pressure from everyone. He is susceptible to pressure from Wall Street, to pressure from the weapons companies, from the Washington establishment. But unlike Bush and (Dick) Cheney, I don’t think he’d ignore mass protest.

“The irony is that just at the very moment when that kind of grassroots organizing and mobilization could have an impact, we are demobilizing and waiting for the good acts to be handed down from on high, whether it is the withdrawal from Iraq or the perfect economic stimulus package.”

It is equally important that America come to terms with its recent past.

“So much of this moment for me comes down to whether there’s going to be any accountability for what happened – whether it’s the illegal occupation of Iraq or torture or the economic crimes that led to this disaster.

“The FBI believes that there’s a huge criminality at the heart of the economic meltdown but they’ve made a decision not to prosecute because they were afraid that might send panic through the market.

“All this argument for impunity, amnesia is really corrosive.”

Okay, that ends the blurb. Now it's me, Anthropositor talking. From my perspective, Naomi Klein's most recent book, THE SHOCK DOCTRINE The rise of disaster capitalism is a paradigm shifting book of great importance. I'm not going to comment further, except to encourage everyone to not only read the book, but to search out and listen to her various speeches. I hold her views in the highest esteem.

For Jennifer

2008-12-25T21:14:00.002-06:00

My long lost daughter,
I tried to post some pictures here for you but my eyes are almost useless at the moment and I don't know my way around the computer. The links to the pictures wound up on another of my blogs called Anthropositor's Posts. http://anthropositorsposts.blogspot.com
If I typed that right, you should be able to click the links and a couple of pictures of me at a chessboard about a year ago may pop up. I very much look forward to knowing you, and in three or four months I expect to be able to see again with at least one eye. If you know how to post pictures and can post a fairly large one, I would be delighted to get an idea what you look like. I am so glad to hear you are alive. Life certainly has a lot of bumps to it doesn't it? I'm sure we will have much to talk about. I lost track of your mom and your brothers and sisters in your very first year. I hope they are well but I realize that may not be the case.Although the other children were not actually mine, I have fond memories of them, particularly Spooky and Skippy. I do hope life has been good to them.
. I would very much like to see what you look like, but for a few months anyway, it would have to be a fairly large picture. Do you know how to post pictures on the internet and things of that sort?
Your prodigal father.

The Cataract Monocle

2008-11-06T10:44:00.004-06:00

A low vision product which I designed and tested on myself, is called the Cataract Monocle. I have had excellent improvement in acuity in an eye with a moderately advanced cataract. The eye with a more mature cataract was not improved.

But as the eye with the moderate cataract has continued to worsen, I have gotten almost two years of additional good use out of the eye, both for the purpose of reading fine print, and in driving (distance vision). Had I not produced this monocle, I would have curtailed my driving, even under the most ideal lighting conditions, over a year ago.

Although I have discussed the development and testing of this Cataract Monocle on Skin Cell Forum, in the General Health Section, and on my blog Eureka Ideas Unlimited eurekaideasunlimited.blogspot.com
little interest has been generated in the ophthalmological community or among cataract sufferrers.

As for me, I have been overwhelmingly satisfied with the additional time I have been able to put off cataract surgery. Great changes are still occurring in the field which may become available because of the extended time I have been able to delay the first cataract replacement, first scheduled for February, 2007.

It saddens me that there is, so far, so little interest among other cataract sufferers, or among their physicians. In the absence of testing on a wider spectrum of cataracts, little can be determined about the general efficacy of the optical aid, or the amount of additional time delaying surgery will be afforded other users. All I can say is that for me, the additional time is over two years.

Formal Answer To Notice to Vacate

2008-10-06T06:58:00.004-06:00

Formal Answer To Notice to Vacate 10-6-08

To: Danny Leon Duvall & Dana Duvall
c/o River Valley Furniture Store
2609 East Parkway,
Russellville, AR 72801

From: H. C. & Ellen Benson
Delete St.
Delete City, AR

Re: Eviction Order

Please be advised that this eviction order does not reflect the true facts.
Please be advised that there is no merit or foundation in any of the
causes you have alleged therein. The order is disputed in its entirety.

If this matter is not put to rest without court intervention, we will list
the various injuries we have suffered in our dealings with you, and will
countersue for damages.

This is not the time to list them all, or to list the serious losses we have
sustained due to your unscrupulous, negligent and willful actions, but
you may rest assured that we will comprehensively list them for the
court and for the public.

Most particularly, we are not tenants and never were. We are buyers.
We are not in breach of contract. Therefore, if you were successful in
evicting us and seizing our real and personal property we would take
vigorous legal action against you for our injuries.

This was a stealth action on your part, with no warning. No demand for
moneys alleged to be due has been presented. Not in writing. Not verbally.
There have been many, many harassment's made against us over these
eight years, in an attempt to get us to relinquish our home. I will list them
comprehensively during any legal action that you bring against us, in a
counter suit against you.

Although you have received several verbal requests over these eight years,
to inform the Tax Assessor of the purchase of this home on two acres of
land, you have, to date failed to do so. I can think of several motivations
for your ongoing delay in the proper recording of this sale. Reasons
resulting in profit to you and substantial loss to us.

Only the seller could do this. Therefore we, the buyers, are entirely
blameless. The assessor's office has informed us that there is no
delinquency in the tax liability on this property. I call upon you once
again, this time formally and in writing, to correct this wrongful and
injurious failure to inform the Tax Assessor of our purchase agreement
and get us properly listed as buyers.

If you do this, the Assessor will be able to determine the actual tax liability
due for the two acres and the dwelling. Until you do this, no correct and
accurate figure can be generated. Certainly you cannot believe that we
were responsible fir the taxes on the entire tract, of which this parcel is
only a part.

To sum up: You have never made any demand with any dollar amount
to us. Never. In over eight years. Our tax liability commences on the
date the Tax Assessor generates the proper precise amount due from
us for our proportion of the larger tract. And a debt cannot be due
before the debt has been properly computed and an actual bill has
been presented. You do not even know what figure you claim is due.
These are essential elements of a debt.

We did not empower or otherwise authorize any party to pay our taxes
without our knowledge or consent, and therefore cannot be held
responsible for any such donations made without our being made
aware of it.

Rest assured that we will pay all taxes on our two acre parcel with
dwelling, at such time as we receive a proper and correct bill from
the Tax Assessor showing precise figures for that parcel only, not the
larger tract that the parcel is on.

The other minor things you allege in your eviction papers are equally
without merit, and certainly don't constitute a cause for elderly
people to be put out on the street and their home wrongfully
stolen from them.

H. C. Benson

Okay, a little background for the blog reader. I bought this place over eight years ago on a private contract from a merchant family, though the calls I made to check on their honesty and integrity came back with -- extremely diversified and contrasting results. You might ask yourself why I would do business with such people. The reason of course is I needed a place to live, and I had the opportunity to buy these two acres with dwelling cheaper than rent, and the sellers were willing to also carry three years of paper on the down payment as well.

It seems clear to me that they figured that one kind of emergency or another was very likely to put me under and that they would reap great reward for the sale by regaining possession of the property. I had originally been led to expect that they would go down and show the sale at the tax assessors office. That did not happen. Not the first year, nor the fifth year, not even now, ober eight years into the contract. It has been a matter of concern to me because I know that they have been borrowing on the much larger tract of land that this property is on. I can't render a legal opinion as to whether this is actual fraud against the bank making them the loans, since they still had the property in their name during this entire time, but certainly it was unscrupulous and improper from an ethical standpoint.

Although the sale was on a private contract, and did not go through escrow, it was still a valid contractual sale. We have never been in default on our payments.

On the first day of this month a Sheriff deputy cane to our home to present us with a notice to vacate in 10 days for nonpayment of the property taxes. Now you have already seen my response in writing. But how else would you handle this? Of course the crux of it all is that even having paid a down payment and over eight years of monthly payments, if the seller went belly up after taking out loans on the property, no matter how fraudulently the Seller had behaved, the bank would have first claim, and I would have little effective recourse. So the question I would put to you is, how would you proceed? You have already seen my written response, but what else should I be doing?

I should also say that the seller alleges that I have not paid the property taxes, which I was obligated to pay by contract. The seller not having informed the assessor of the purchase, and having clandestinely paid the taxes without our knowledge authority or consent, was now claiming that this money was due them and was the basis of our eviction. No court action has been initiated in any court. Once again, what would you be doing if you were me, specifically to reduce the risks that I could wind up losing this property later? And some of you might want to speculate as to how I stopped the eviction action. Another hint: I have not retained an attorney I checked with one who, when asked the broad range of possible costs for legal fees, came up with $1,500 to $15,000. What do you think? Is it worthwhile to hire one crook to protect you from another crook?

2008-09-28T21:24:00.007-06:00

It is fitting that this new blog "Anthropositor's Posts" commences on this day, as the sun sets on the world as we knew it.The details are not clear, and won't be for a while, but the impending disaster that we face is completely unprecedented in scope, depth, and probable duration.

The American Taxpayer will almost certainly be forced to bail out, to the tune of $700,000,000,000, financial giants which have played fast and loose for decades on several deregulated fronts. Forced I say, because the alternative is the meltdown of the entire world economy. Forced I say, because whatever the final provisions hastily thumb tacked together, we will also elevate an appointed official to heights which, in terms of raw power, are greater than those of whatever new President takes office.

And the worst of it is, there is a vanishingly low likelihood that it will work. The only argument that it will work is this: It must. Sorry folks, that argument is not persuasive. The truth is that it is unlikely to work even for weeks or months. The security for this bailout is virtually entirely worthless. The notion that valueless securities and mortgages will somehow gain value when the panic subsides is ridiculous. The panic is well justified by the facts.

So that you will have some distractions from this disaster, I have put the archives of my previous blog up here to divert you to a certain extent while I reorganize and make this blog more effective. It remains to be seen if the changes I have planned will do the job, but they have a better chance than this economic bail out.

Let me be more succinct. This economic bail out cannot work. It will ultimately make matters much worse.

New Nutritional Discovery

2008-09-24T12:44:00.002-06:00

This is about Shmooo, a vegetable/spice I have been growing with several other experimental crops, employing No-Till farming techniques of my own design. To condense what has already appeared in several of the Nutrition threads on Skin Cell Forum, my original idea was to find the most nutritious, healthful vegetable with which to make up for the shortfall of vegetables in my carnivorous diet. Previously, I had been buying sufficient fresh vegetables. But that does little good if they do not actually get prepared and eaten. Most of the vegetables I was buying wilted and wound up on the compost heap because it was so easy for me to forget to eat it. This is complicated by the fact that most of my teeth are rippers and slicers, not grinders. So I needed a green vegetable, preferably in leaf form, that would be tender and tasty enough to eat raw in substantial amounts.

Not only that, it had to be a really appealing tasting food or it was a long shot that I would actually regularly consume it. And I wanted to be able to eat every part of the plant. And that turned out to be the case. I haven't tried to do anything with the adult root system, but other than that, the entire plant is not only edible, it is delicious and denser with the whole array of nutrients than any other vegetable I have compared it to.

In the past several months, I have done some diet-loading tests, seeing how much of it I could consume over a long period of time. I aye most of it raw and alive, just eating it fresh in the garden. I shredded and dried it under low temperature and used it alone or combined with every common spice in my kitchen. The Shmooo itself is not intense, but delicate in its' flavor. And yet, when mixed with other spices, seems to extend and enhance their affect. And I could find no commercial sources for these greens. Never saw them in the produce section, the farmer's market, or the health food store. To put it another way, no one is selling it, and the general public has no notion that it is even edible, let alone tasty and nutritious.

I have eaten as much as a half a pound a day or more, both fresh and dried. This is really shocking to me. The seeds too are good, but my current emphasis in testing is the greens, raw or dry. They work better than lettuce in a sandwich or salad, or just eaten plain. And dry, I add to soups or sauces or gravies or puddings or gravies or breading for chicken or chops or steak or fish. Whether I used it totally alone or mixed it with all the other usual spices, it just seemed I could do no wrong with it.

My wife has been joining me in this quest to find the maximum amount of Shmooo intake. She recently decided not to eat any just before bedtime. Says she finds it harder to get to sleep. That is not something I would tend to notice. My sleep tends to be on the alert side. As far as the Shmooo goes, my wife likes it best at breakfast or actually brunch. We so often combine the two meals.

But that is when I realized that my metabolism also seemed to be higher throughout the day. The Shmooo is incredibly nutritious and I was consuming a very large amount of it, sometimes even before breakfast.. I often go out with my first mug of coffee and eat some wild Indian strawberries along with some Shmooo. A nice combination. But often, later, my other normal helpings of food, I wound up not being able to finish what was on my plate. Very unusual behavior for me. Now the question is: is it just excellent nutrient content of the Shmooo that is doing this, or is there some stimulant in the plant that I am eating so much of?

My opinion so far is that metabolic rate has increased significantly, but I don't see a corresponding period later of being down. This is the central characteristic of stimulants in general. If a stimulant like caffeine or some similar chemical were involved, this past several months would have seen a lot of "down" periods. I have to conclude that the most likely explanation is that the Shmooo is just exceptionally nutritious and nutrient dense, supplying a great many things which were probably at some deficit when I began.

So the net effect is energizing and invigorating. and tends to blunt the appetite. This may account for the fact that I have lost nearly fifteen pounds in the past three months while doing nothing to deliberately diet.

But since I am not obese, and am not inclined to diet, I guess my next step is to find some testers who do need to drop some substantial weight, perhaps fifty pounds or more, who are ready to add Shmooo to their diet in the same way that I have. Other than adding the Shmooo, no formal diet would be involved. No counting calories or weighing portions. Just eat the Shmooo at the outset of each meal, and incorporate it into as many of your dishes that you can get it into. And weigh yourself once a week. You would only need to keep track of how much fresh Shmooo you consume at each meal, and how much dried Shmooo went into the various dishes consumed. So initially, I need at least a half dozen people who must lose fifty pounds or more to regain good health. And I don't much care if you have previously failed in your diets.

iN a fOG. lOVING THE fOG i'M iN

2008-08-21T15:00:00.003-06:00

All this interest in somehow quantifying the ephemeral essence of the mind. What a fog.
Everybody is interested in the numbers, and the curves and if this median value were reduced and so on. I too, transiently toy with these notions. But it really draws attention away from other qualities that count far more.

John Nash saw patterns that would never be apparent to me. He paid dearly.

What I often see are the mistakes or oddities, the anachronisms, or just sometimes things jarringly out of place, even when I am not conversant with the subject. I'm not searching for them. Often I'm not even paying attention. They just seem to jump out at me from nowhere. The movies will provide an example or two.

Before my encroaching blindness, I happened to see a fine movie, "O Brother, Where Art Thou," based substantially on Homer's great epic adventure of Ulysses. Who knows? Maybe a little Virgil slipped in there too. But now it is set in the deep and enduring Depression of the United States. A time of great adventure and tragedy. A time when eugenics and other forms of badly disguised hatreds were really growing like crabgrass.

But in this particular confection of a movie, there was never a pinch of despair, let alone the heaping cup put into The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck.

I remember having a bit of reverie about Shaw and Twain in each of their depictions of Joan of Arc, and how their sharp contrasts in style and content spoke volumes of the authors. I know not how these thoughts came at this time.

And the translations into the movies! How breathtaking, each for entirely different reasons. The Joans. Would anyone ever keep up with these Joans? Perhaps, but it certainly seems improbable while I am watching either one of them. Since these two black and white movies, I have perhaps seen half a dozen sumptuous productions with lavish sets, vivid color, and in several languages. But never has Widmark's Dauphin been surpassed.

I love it when I don't quite pay attention, when my mind wanders in six or eight different directions, but none of it is strenuous, like a dream, sometimes sensibly illogical.

Now we have our three boys -- no criminals here. No vicious desperadoes. No ghastly gangsters. Just Preening Pup with a great pelt of pride and counterfeit perspicacity, and his associates Pack Dog and Goofy.

They have just opportunistically absconded with some one's idling auto, care free as gamboling jackals. No pressing goals. No gut wrenching hunger. Just living, sniffing, scratching, being the beings they be.

Suddenly one detects the faintest musical scent wafting in the breeze. A scream of a bark bursts from him. The nominal leader of the pack stops the car, Pack Dog bursts into the woods, with the other two bringing up the rear, fully trusting Pack Dog's instincts, with no thought of why.

I too, in the darkness, in that theater of like-mindlessness am no longer in idle reverie. My attention is riveted on the Sirens. I am totally had. My main brain, in it's separate head, has taken full command. My eyes are glazed with the approaching blazing beauty.

Then suddenly, that earthen jug of moonshine, with it's little xxx's, erasing the universal XXX permeating the entire substance of my being, shattered the dream, like a clattering alarm with it's scintillating shards of reality, like Mom yelling the Hell to pay if breakfast gets cold in my slumber.

Angrily, I silently stormed to breakfast, deliberately obliterating the rest of the dream, refusing then to take it in little pieces. I said quietly to Mom, behind the counter,
"A tub please."
"YaWantButter?"
"Yes. Please slime it lightly with the lubricant."
"What?"
"Some butter will be fine."
I sat in the lobby, reading a book. Gum popping, teen-aged Mom, nothing to do, was uncharacteristically curious.
"Not going to watch the movie?"
"Next showing. Missed a scene."
"No shit?" she blurted without thinking, then looked worried. I put her at her ease,
"Yes shit. Some shit with little x's made me miss a scene."
It now dawned on her, I was perhaps more than a little weird.

It dawned on me too.
"Look. The movie is a work of art. One scene has a defect. I have to prepare not to notice it. Sort of like restoring a great masterpiece." I searched for a way to put it in language she would apprehend. "Pretend some idiot flicked some snot on your Marilyn Monroe Calendar. It would no longer be a work of art would it? You would have to carefully fix it before you could once again fully appreciate it."
"What's a Marilyn Monroe Calendar?"
"Sort of like a Madonna Poster, only better."
Now she knew I was nuts. I read.

Half a book later, I saw the scene intact, snot carefully ignored. What a dream! And the jug would have worked with only a glimmer of it in shot five of the scene, in some weeds by the bank of the river.

But how incredible! The pairing of the Sirens with our young dogs, each a dead match. And the culminating illusion!

I have asked several people how many kisses were in the end of that scene. No one I have asked ever got the right answer. There were no kisses. None. And that is as it should be. A kiss would have brought some sense of resolution, some tangible satisfaction. That is not what the Sirens were about.

True beauty is in our minds, and can't be erased if we don't let it. Trachtenberg invented a wonderful math for children amid the horrors of a death camp. It was his refuge. His salvation.

Within every hag or doddering homeless bum still resides the soul of a child. All the beauty that ever was is still there, right below the graffitti of age. You fight the dying of the light! If you don't the young will kill you a little at a time because you are so ready to go along with it. Let us not be lemmings. Even old life is a great gift. And as someone said a couple thousand years ago, Cut them some slack! They are clueless.

Just Another Crackpot Idea About Flu

2008-08-19T16:27:00.003-06:00

I want to talk a bit about the good news with H5N1, the strain we currently fear the most, the one that has now shown a clear ability to cross species barriers into humans in triple digit numbers now, and the present day analogue of the strain that caused the world pandemic killing unknown millions at the close of the First World War.

It turns out that there are a number of survivors still living, some of them living with ages in the triple digits, having been older children during the epidemic when they contracted the disease. Our astute and sophisticated medical establishment apparently was not particularly interested in this fact until very recently. A fact which fails to surprise me.

Now though, the interest is keen. These unusually healthy and robust elders in our midst are now the objects of considerable attention, and are being gleefully probed for their blood in the very real hope and prospect that antibodies can be mass produced that will afford real protection even before a new outbreak gets out of control.

But frankly, I wonder how good it is for these centenarians to be jabbed for these samples.

The current procedure throughout the world is, a chicken or two in an industrial chicken house is positive for the virus, wipe out the infected chicken and the whole damn chicken house, many thousands of apparently healthy chickens. Destroyed. Buried. Burned. Who takes these losses? The farmer. Sort of gives him some incentive to button his lip and hope for the best, doesn't it?

I wonder if it would not be a good idea, the next time their is an outbreak, to let it run its' course through a very, very, very quarantined chicken house. Actually take the very best care of those chickens! (No, I don't mean to treat the stricken ones in any way.) I just mean, feed them excellent rations and very good water, remove all corpses promptly, and see how many survivors there are.

Let us say that out of 10,000 chickens, 100 survived. Now you have a hundred chickens you could poke with needles to get some samples to make a vaccine with which a pharmaceutical company could them make billions of dollars. Ah, the wonders of private enterprise!

OR, you could even breed those survivor chickens, ultimately producing tens of thousands, even eventually millions or even billions of chickens, which were totally immune, not only to the deadly virulent strain, but also to a great variety of other common influenza's. Apparently these aged survivors have, more often than not , not subsequently been troubled by colds or flu that they noticed. In other words, the original infection seems to have made the survivors a LOT healthier. Would it not be nice if we could make the entire chicken population of the planet much, much hardier and less prone to disease in general.

Naw, couldn't work. Otherwise, one of those experts with all that formal training, all those diplomas and honors,in cooperation with all the high ranking health organization bureaucrats with their unique expertize om writing protocols and edicts and regulations... they would have already thought of it. Certainly, no self-taught bumpkin from the middle of nowhere could ever come up with anything valuable. What would people think?

A Chess Rant

2008-08-19T13:47:00.002-06:00

Brilliant people down through the centuries
have had a strong tendency to be unsound of
personality. They become a little bonkers. It is almost inevitable I think. I am not talking about run-of-the-mill Mensa members here. Those I speak of are really quite alone, surrounded by "normals" who live almost totally as they are conditioned by their social jungle.

These isolated wretches truly do see things that others do not see. And these things are not always hallucinations, although sometimes, in an attempt to make sense out of nonsense, some desparate wishful thinking will actually result in becoming a little delusional.
I could give countless examples throughout the centuries. And I could give countless examples just relating to me alone. It is frustrating to be alone. No, frustrating is not near strong enough a term. I don't know if there is a strong enough term. It is an aloneness that cannot be assuaged, only endured. I was attracted to this place because I got a sense that there was just a scintilla more sense in the comments than could be found in general in the blogosphere.

Mr. Bellows and his cadre are to be complimented on several counts.

First, the general quality and the effort and workmanship that has gone into the essays.

Second, the absolute patience with which they except the utter drivel that characterizes, unfortunately, the majority of the comments. But I can tell that they too are having some morale problems that are hard to overcome.

I can tell this because they regurgitate with the frequency of a bulemic. Something is telling them that they are not really taken seriously at all. That they are casting the best pearls they are able to produce, before mostly swine, metaphorically speaking.

They can tell, I am quite sure, that most of the readership are nothing more than jabbering dillitantes, amateurs, dabblers, in no sense connecting the thoughts and information they have so conveniently been provided, and with those thoughts, generating new and valuable ideas. I exclude a half dozen or so of you from these caustic remarks. I honor you and your efforts.

To the trolls among you, in spite of occasional vestiges of ability, you are quite unredeemable.

When I started my blog a few years ago, I envisioned a thinktank to attract really serious seminal thinkers who really wanted to address the most pressing problems for the species, and all life on the planet. A pretty tall order. And an abysmal failure.

I experimented. I put a lovely Siren in the foyer to attract intellects, because all the intellects I have met in my life, all ten of them that I have stumbled across and who made themselves visible to me, in almost seven decades, have been, down deep, pretty sexy, and lovers of beauty for the sake of beauty alone.

I no longer care that the blog is a failure. That it is now just a storage room, a filing cabinet for regurgitations of posts elsewhere which I have transferred, posts which I thought that perhaps a few of my grandchildren might enjoy, should they by luck or other chance event, turn out not to be aliens.

I do not wish to sound pessimistic here. It is my guess that at least half of them have an even chance, much above the chances for most. I cling to that and thank my very lucky stars that of the children and grandchildren I know of, I am at about that fifty-fifty rate or better. A blessing upon me, and my blessings upon them.

My Honey and I have many cats, and too many dogs as well. Uncritical children who will not grow up. We cannot afford them and cannot afford to part with them. My dogs are mostly brilliant, as dogs go. Our cats range from witless to incredibly sophisticated. These animals have provided us with what old people in general have least. Regular daily affection, touching, caring, dependence and need. We are useful to them when the rest of society has relegated us to the trash heap as obsolete.

My other pets are in my Dojo, where I teach chess. I do not do so to make strong chess players. It is just a vehicle to help young people become better people. I spend perhaps half my time talking about other subjects, and about life in general.

On Monday, after about four years of training, one of my most advanced students, who went to Russia and several other countries to test his new chess skills, clearly one of the strogest two or three players ever to have evolved out of my tutelage, was dishonorably discharged from my Dojo, failed in the course, and discharged from my life. I hold no hope that he is any more redeemable than was Bobby Fischer. An evil little twerp, with greatness in him which never saw the light of day. A stunted freak of a man, whose monumental talent ultimately did injury to the world of chess. There was in him, no honor. I will list no other Grandmaster whores and failures. But let me honor the greats for a moment. Spassky! Benko! Tal! Botvinnik! Korchnoi! Reshevsky! Larsen! And Waitzkin! What a well rounded young fellow. I have had the pleasure of watching all these greats in action except Botvinnik, whose games too were true art.

These men make me truly sorry I played no tournament chess until I was in my forties, and that I had been teaching all comers for a quarter century by then, and continued to do so even while competing. The kiss of death. But I wouldn't trade any of it. No take backs. No regrets. No blunders, without a new lesson learned. No if only's.

Chess. My refuge, my solace, my food, my dream. Thank you.

Warning! Email Reply with Misspelled Bad Word

2008-08-16T11:22:00.001-06:00

Hi Muggz,
Not good to use a work Email for personal use.
1. Not really private whatever the illusion.
2. Can be construed (any time an employer wishes to) as an improper use of employer property.

Feeling really blue right now. Not much fit to fight the good fight at the moment, so let me illustrate something related to the above.

In the evolution of cell phones, executives everywhere, (private institutions and corporations and even public institutions like colleges and universities), who have phones provided to them by their employers, have suddenly been descended upon by the rabid dogs of the IRS, who waited quietly without a bark or growl, just waiting and drooling, until the practice was virtually universal.

Now, thoroughly anonymous thugs within the bowels of this "service" have descended like the Sword of Damocles on everyone "guilty" of this practice, saying, if the individual cannot demonstrate that a call was business related on their business phone, paid for by their employer, that this call is personal, and that the value of the call is income and must be declared as such, and TAXED. A multi billion dollar windfall for the government. And entirely unassailable tax LAW.

We can't blame this on any of our carpetbagging, earmarking, trough snuffling swine in public office. This is internal administrative money generating "creativity." But do you think anyone in the IRS is going to check the phone records of IRS employees, going back ten years, as the IRS is allowed to do? I'll give odds that won't happen.

So now, billions of hours and billions of dollars will be squandered in a mountain of extra paperwork for everyone with a phone provided by an employer. Logging the nature of every call.

"Hi honey, how was Tommy's visit to the doctor?" Log it! It's taxable.

"Did you hear what those Mutherfuggers at the IRS just did?" Log it! It's taxable.

Now son, I want you to get a big logbook, and note the time and date of sending me this address. Make it the most expensive logbook you can find. And save the receipt. It is a logically a deductible expense.

But now let us confuse things a bit more. How are things going on the job? Okay now, did this response, have any effect on your sending me your work address? That was your entire message.

Love,
Dad

Oops, that's personal.

Chess Game With A Jester

2008-08-12T15:17:00.002-06:00

oldbogeydog said:
"ANTHROPOSITOR â€” OLDBOGEYDOG
1. d4____________ g6
2. Nf3___________Bg7
3. Bg5___________a
4. e3____________b5
5.Nbd2__________d6
6. b4____________Bb7
7. c3____________Nd7
You know waaaaay too much!

My greatest hope lies in a monumental blunder on your part. I used to play chess on pogo games a lot. You can set the game timer to get an edge for yourself. My favorite was 15/3 for 15 minutes per player and 3 seconds added for a move. The 3 seconds was my edge for the end game. I'd get down to a half a minute to go and the opponent would get complacent with a lead and make mistakes thinking the game was over while I'd move fast and get some ugly fork or pawn promotion.

I think I'm going to have a tough time making that happen here!"

Anthropositor said:
"O mischief, thou art swift to enter in the thoughts of desperate men.

I attend a great purge. My driver is gone. My key retainers, gone. But I stand now, feet solidly planted, with no retreat in them. My sword may be broken, but my dagger is dipped in venom.

Those who wish only for blunders from the besieged King, beset on all sides, serve themselves not.

If there is no Regent on this field but me, then sink to your knees, put your forehead in the bloody mud and retire from this battle. Then rise and be my jester when I return from my joust with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and gird myself to do battle with the god of Presbyteria.

ANTHROPOSITOR â€” OLDBOGEYDOG
1. d4____________ g6
2. Nf3___________Bg7
3. Bg5___________a6
4. e3____________b5
5.Nbd2__________d6
6. b4____________Bb7
7. c3____________Nd7
8. Be2___________Ngf6
9. Qc2

Answer to a post about the toxicity of alfalfa

2008-07-28T13:55:00.002-06:00

This is an answer posted on a blog called Winters Day about alfalfa toxicity.

A considerable amount of material, some of it perhaps misleading or incomplete. You can find something toxic about many seeds and plants which we have been eating for centuries.

I happen to eat a few plates of sprouts per day. Depending on my mood or the other food I am serving, there may be seven to eleven different varieties of
sprouts. I also blend them into a variety of herbal seasonings for red meats, seafoods, poultry, wild game, and eggs, as well as baked goods.

The point is, I have been eating alfalfa sprouts, constituting probably a third of all the sprouts I consume. In other words, about 2/3 plate per day.

I have known of these rumors of toxicity for some time. I have not reduced the proportions of alfalfa sprouts at all.

Another sprout which is avoided by some on the basis of toxicity is Red Clover, also a legume. Quite a bit of oxalic acid in them, which is regarded as toxic. But spinach and rhubarb also has substantial oxalic acid.

It is the AMOUNTS that make the difference. Clover sprouts are about one fifth of my sprout consumption.

With these sorts of proportions the oxalic acid is actually helpful. The intestinal tract senses the presence of oxalic acid and increases the speed of peristalsis, the rythmic constrictions which push the consumed food through with greater rapidity, thus reducing the time of transit, reducing putrifaction and other forms of decay.

I am 67. Aside from being close to blind and having a half dozen teeth I repair with superglue, I am disgustingly healthy. My blood pressure was once, at highest reading, 191/110. I did not go to the doctor. I fixed it.

I take no prescriptions whatsoever. Had I gone to see a doctor, I would have been started on a virtually lifetime regime of Toprol XL or some other useless chemical; this in spite of the fact that, while these medications WILL bring the blood pressure numbers down, there is statistically no effect on the actual death rates from stroke and heart attack, So while the NUMBERS have come down, the risk of death has not. That is idiocy.

I was able without "medication" to bring the numbers down to a systolic range of 115 to 125, and a diastolic range of 72 to 84. Very rarely do I exceed these numbers. How on earth was I able to do that without a physicians close ongoing supervision and a pill regime forever? Must be luck.

A last comment about the tests that are the basis for much of the fear contained in the assessment of the dangers of sprouts. Many of the tests were in vitro, or dealt with rats or other animals. This is the style of science, which always strives to limit variables, for obvious reasons. But you cannot always look at things in simplified form and come up with valid, useful conclusions. I may or may not have time to come back here, but I will post this on my blog as well, in case anyone wants to debate these points.

If you can't readilly find my blog by googling my name, you can find 1400/1500 of my posts on Skin Cell Forum, and perhaps another 30 or so on Damn Interesting. You can argue or agree with me on any of these sites.

Pardon any typos that got past me. I am unable to see the print in the response window, and I am unable to enlarge it.

Intelligence and Happiness

2008-06-08T14:59:00.004-06:00

The premise of the discussion on a different forum is that unusual intelligence tends to be fertile ground for almost inevitable unhappiness.

Chronic unhappiness is not held in high esteem anywhere that I know of. It is held to be highly destructive, and in the extreme, it is. I don't understand why it is of so little interest for those who find eugenic manipulations acceptable and appropriate. No one is trying to genetically engineer for happiness. It seems much more of a central issue to me.

I differ with the author of the two page essay in support of the position, a fellow named Bill Allin. And the other commenters seemed to find his essay comforting, the notion that a surplus of intelligence carried some inevitable baggage of misery.

So even though I did not agree, I chose not to join the little group to disagree. But being, or having once been, a little to the right of the right margin on the Gaussian Curve, I am loathe to internalize the inevitability of chronic unhappiness.

The point was supported with a single isolated example, Hemingway. In one sense that's okay, since one good opposing example is enough to draw Mr. Allin's conclusion into question.

His position is a widespread belief, and it is a notion that damages the prospects of increasing the development of unusual intelligence.

Hemingway had a singular talent. He certainly broke new ground in writing. When we hold him to be a genius, it is because his writing caught our attention, it pleased us, resonated with something within us, something very important. But the vibrations are more and more muted as time goes on. Hemingway was a product of his times. By mid-century he was already becoming an anachronism. And he was too sure of himself to change.

But times were changing explosively, and people were drawn to anyone who could supply a sense of coherence. A palpable certainty about the way things were. The style of thinking, the volatile social structure within which he lived, and with which he coped, was the crucible that made him what he was. The present time would be very alien to him. If anything, change and complexity have increased sharply since those turbulent times. And crisp, simple answers are harder to sustain.

Hemingway was not designed to be happy. He was not designed at all in that sense. He just became what he was in empirical fashion. Most of us do. But in that generation, there were some pretty serious challenges and people were pretty overwhelmed by it all.

Nothing like the Spanish Revolution and the first World War had ever been seen before. Oh, the carnage of war was not new. But the scope of it was far greater than anything in history, and even for those distant from the battles, it was shatteringly real. No longer was World War One naively justified as the "war to end all wars." And the reality of it was brought home vividly as never before. Just as the war was ending, and the victors were plundering and humiliating the vanquished, setting the stage for the next conflict, an influenza pandemic swept the globe.

The war had made it clear that politics by these other means had no real winners, and left us globally in such terrible shape as to set us up for the pandemic.

Hemingway exemplified an intense need for simple answers and a hope for an impossible return to simpler times. In essence he said, it is not about solving the problems besetting us. All we need is guts.

So at one and the same time, Hemingway was sensitive and empathic enough to brilliantly portray the dramatic turbulence of that world and those people, while exhibiting a toughness which was beyond normal human capacity. This was not a blueprint for happiness and contentment. It was a blueprint for intense turmoil, with peaks of triumph and elation, and chasms of despair.

I would not characterize Ernest Hemingway as a failure, as in, … "four wives and an unknown number of failed romantic relationships." Only one measure of a relationship is its’ length.

Even his suicide, which I personally have a certain tendency to disfavor, does not so much represent failure to me as much as, in this isolated case, … prudently leaving the field of battle before his thinking, style, and relevance were not just faded, distant memories, but forgotten.

Perish the thought that this was cowardice. It was not. Everyone presumes he was "clinically depressed" and therefore he committed suicide. I think it is more likely that he could not allow the ultimate anticlimax to his own story, of an eventual lingering, aging, decadent death, in a life known throughout for its’ adventure; a veritable dervish dance with death.

The Hemingway quote, "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know," was not a lament. Not a rueful admission of suffering from depression, today's epidemic disease. It was not seeking ministrations from some "expert" medical consciousness-manipulator or a change in brain chemistry with the taking of some daily pills.

No, it was just a statement reflecting his perspective, that of a man who could hunt wild game or the most dangerous drama with equal courage.

Drama is unresolved conflict. If it is happy and serene, it is not drama. Even the ending need not be joyful. When we vicariously experience the tragedy of others, if there is some sort of perceived moral or lesson for us at the end, that is enough. Even if the story has a tragic ending, we can still bask in our good fortune in being better off than the character in the story, particularly if that character came to realize something as a result of what happened.

And look at all the brilliant writers of the period whose muse and constant companion was distilled yeast pee. Considered by many at the time, to be an indispensable tool of the trade.

But Hemingway had an existential dilemma. Slow descent into further deterioration, and more loss of the sharp edge of his prime. Few of us can avoid a certain sadness about that. But most of us are not "larger than life" in the sense that Hemingway was. And it wasn't only physical infirmity that troubled him. He could see it in his writing as well. It was becoming — longer and slower paced.

No. What Hemingway did was more consistent with his life. I doubt he was jolly at the time. But he wasn’t depressed. The ending worked, except for the mystery of it. There had never been anything mysterious about Hemingway.

But his end was fitting. It worked. And it had the energy and vigor of his prime prose. Stark, spare, Spartan.

Another compelling writer of the period was Somerset Maugham, who poses quite a contrast. Also deeply involved in the wars and espionage, the Depression and the European devastation, the pandemic. But his focus was different. Hemingway's key characters knew what they were doing, even in chaotic circumstances. They were decisive and direct. They knew what they needed to do, and they did it.

With Maugham's central characters, there was at least some introspection, and maybe even an epic quest for meaning and wisdom. Hemingway's heroes thought they had all the answers already, if they thought about such things at all. He and his characters were confident and assured. They did what they had to do because that was the way they were built. We all tried to internalize that image, at least for a while, to whatever extent we could.

No meditative odyssey, no quest for the ultimate answer. Hemingway men knew what reality was all about and knew what they had to do.

Maugham was drawn to the idea that there were universal answers, accessible to those earnest, wise, and diligent few who could make sense of life's lessons. Hemingway never thought to look for contentment. I doubt that such a hope ever lurked in his mind.

But it certainly did with Maugham. My point is this. Comparing the two writers, I would be hard put to tell which was the more intelligent. Certainly Maugham was more sophisticated, more intellectual. So why do I have the distinct impression that Maugham was essentially serene and in good spirits most of the time, and was perhaps the smarter of the two writers. I certainly never got the sense that he was driven by a struggle to fit into his own idealized notion of manhood.

Someone may notice that I am essentially mixing apples and oranges here. Mailer would have been a better example. Tumultuous, aggressive, mercurial, always taking the challenge of life head-on. And adapting. And continuing to struggle. Even old, crippled enough to need a cane, he lived in a fourth floor walk-up apartment. He was a man who would ultimately let time catch him, as we all must. But he never let the future pass him up. And I think he too was happy a good part of the time.

To Write Or Not To Write

2008-06-06T08:49:00.004-06:00

I just came across a blog called Junk Food Science, run by a nurse with a lot of initials after her name, Sandy Szware. I was moved to comment on one of the stories and found that there was no provision for doing so, nor for even Emailing her. No Email address. Yet she clearly solicits sponsorship, and donations through PayPal. In spite of all the letters after her name, her reasoning does not seem entirely in lock-step with either the mainstream medical community or Big Pharma. I wonder why she chose not to allow comments or provide an Email address.

My blog has been up almost the same period of time. The number of comments has not been as great as I would have anticipated. I have gotten more Email about my perspectives than people posting comments to the blog. But sparse though this input is, particularly if you also consider new informational or theoretical value, rather than just acknowledgment or annoyance, the very possibility that people can say something if they wish, is a motivating force that draws me back to the keyboard.

Not only that, there are times when a comment points me in a direction I probably wouldn't have taken without the input. So I can only wonder how Ms. Szware keeps it going in the face of absolute dead silence. I don't know if I would continue in such a solitary pursuit. In earlier years, when I did some ghosting, editing, and script doctoring, I noticed there was never any writer's block. While I preferred to write my own material to editing or ghost writing other work, I definitely liked never staring at the blank page, even for fifteen or twenty minutes.

I guess I would have continued that work, if not for two exasperating celebrity clients in a row. I suppose I could do it again if my first focus was only the potential merit of the project.

Of course, writing on the net is a sloppier activity. It is much more unedited "stream of consciousness," conversational. The guidelines of style have taken a back seat to a casualness and spontaneity that is a small blessing and the great curse of the net.

My previous post was unedited, written in about twenty minutes. No doubt I should look at it in a few weeks to see how it may be polished or smoothed out. This was a regular habit in the old days. I must not miss it too much. I do little editing anymore. I have some intention to do it, but don't.

I think that we tend to be more literate than a generation ago, but the distractions continue to grow. I don't know if the quality of the writing, even in commercially published work, has improved. I would have thought that the sheer volume of writings available at our fingertips would improve over-all quality. Has quality been devalued? Will audio/visual eventually take over entirely? I don't know.

Doing Creation

2008-06-05T15:30:00.003-06:00

Before the Beginning was Nothing.
Since that is all there was, there was a lot.
And with no space yet, there was no room.
All this was very difficult for God,
Particularly with no light, even though
There was only nothing to see.

There was only the agony of aloneness.
A desire for a fracture in the sameness.
For something! It could not not be.

In a flash beyond Brilliance
Growing out of the Singular Suddenness
Came Light and Space,
In that first nick of Time.

God delighted in the newness of Now
Even though Then was in everlasting retreat
From that first moment
God was eager to see When, the child of
Now and Then.

How magical and playful was When!
Where all the possibilities are still hidden.
The surprises and solutions yet to come.

God did not just say Let it Be,
But Let it Do!
And God was well satisfied
Because it Did.

Thanks for the Email

2008-05-11T06:41:00.002-06:00

I appreciate those who have pointed out that I have not been adding to the blog recently. It is a clue to me that the stuff is being read now and then. I have a much clearer idea now than I did in the beginning, what to expect of a blog. My first notion was that some extended dialogues would form, and that new ideas would come about and be polished by group conversation. I had some faith that this would happen.

Not much evidence that it will though, based on the comments so far. There have been a few flames, some appreciative notes, and the most recent comment posted here, chiding me for the attractive greeter in the foyer. I suppose I could put her in a burka, but somehow, that is not the same. She was supposed to be sort of a siren, enticing those gifted with both imagination and a libido. Newton aside, the two are not mutually exclusive.

Still, the faith is not gone. It is just somewhat more subdued, as is the notion that really complex and worthwhile work would erupt from the interplay of these conversations.

The odds of that happening are clearly low, yet the faith persists. In my other travels, I have had productive dialogues which went on for perhaps a dozen comments. The only ones that went longer were flame wars which rarely stimulated anything other than irritation and further polarization. So, while I still have a vestige of faith in the possibilities of this medium, I no longer expect that really productive conversations that actually accomplish anything are likely to happen much. Even so, Like Diogenes, I shall continue to carry the lantern, looking for an honest (and curious and creative) individual. I know one will pop up sooner or later. It has happened to me a few dozen times in my life. I see no reason it couldn't happen in cyberspace as well.

In the next post, I will try to sum up what I have learned, and what I am currently thinking about cataracts and how to deal with them.

Cataracts are of almost universal importance. Presbyopia and cataracts go hand in hand. If you intend to extend your useful lifespan, this is as important as any other limiting disorder of age. It is not a disorder which should be the exclusive domain of surgeons. Those of us with cataracts need to do our homework and assess our options. The field of eye health is turbulent with change, particularly with regard to cataracts. In the next few days, I may be able to open your eyes to a few possibilities, some of them experimental.

Governmental Lead Poisoning

2008-04-11T09:34:00.002-06:00

I have found that, if you find a simple answer to something, it generally turns out to be wrong. Sometimes it is very wrong, but almost never is it totally wrong. The trouble is, we all are compellingly drawn to simplification. It is why we so frequently choose very simple, uncomplicated people as our leaders. People who inspire; who move us emotionally; people who exude utter certainty about their positions and courses of action. Fanatics.

Life, reality, the universe are all complex beyond any possible imagining. So what do we do? We imagine a creator who/which can embrace all of that; an all-knowing, omnipotent god.

Then, on top of that, we imbue our governments with ideal characteristics, with a “rightness” which cannot be easily challenged. It is obviously (at least to us) the best government there is. Maybe the best government there ever was. To suggest otherwise is a bit like bumping a beehive. It may be exciting for a short time, but soon becomes unremittingly unpleasant.

These remarks began as a preamble to some comments I wanted to make in response to an essay about the history of the use of tetra ethyl lead in vehicle fuel. The essay was written by one of perhaps a dozen or so skilled writers, writing on diverse subjects, which seemingly had little in common, other than being damn interesting.

One thing I noticed very early on, is that the essays, while they were not short, and treated their subject beyond the “sound bite” level, did not express strong opinions. And even if they were not exhaustively comprehensive, generally managed to be quite thought provoking, and yet, always refrained from coming to any firm conclusions. There was no obvious advocacy of a position. My hat is off to them for being able to manage that. It is something I find very difficult to do.

Another thing that I noticed was the sheer number of comments. Oh, they were often short and without much informational value. But sometimes they were longer, with good ideas and firmly held, sometimes acrimonious opinions. Collectively they were often more than ten times the length of the original essay. Remarkable.

And I repeat, the original essay was not written from the position of any sort of obvious advocacy. It did not matter to me that so many of the responses were blather or at least not well thought out. In terms of the average of posts on the internet, the batting average of these comments was still remarkably high.

Now a few observations about the tetra-ethyl lead story. What stands out to me is that, as early as the 1920’s there is persuasive evidence that the world at large, and specifically authorities in the U.S. government knew the grave dangers posed to the public by leaded gasoline. The authorities ignored it. As a result, we all absorbed this toxin, slowly but continuously for a half century. I find it really hard to be neutral about that.

Another point that really grabs me is that this irresponsibly creative chemist, Thomas Midgley also brought the world chlorofluorocarbons. It is perhaps a fitting irony that he was murdered by one of his own inventions.

Conspicuously absent in the article was any mention of any adverse consequences to the politicians, judges, and businessmen who contributed to the duration and severity of this disaster. As far as I can tell, none of them were inconvenienced in any way, other than breathing the same air that we all did.

This lack of consequences has consequences. Our leadership knows they can trump up reasons to wage war, for example, and will never be held accountable. Not just because of scandals of this sort, but more directly from history. Weapons of mass destruction: trumped up to wage war. Gulf of Tonkin: trumped up to wage war. The sinking of the Battleship Maine: trumped up to wage war. Was the “surprise” attack on Pearl Harbor truly a surprise to all elements of the American government? There is some evidence to the contrary.

Will the shrub or any of his weeds ever be made to account for their actions? Not likely.

Colonization of Near Space

2008-03-09T18:37:00.004-06:00

I posted this comment today on a blog called Damn Interesting. The thread was Transforming the Earth (December 2007). While the idea presented was not really feasible, I was most impressed with both the large quantity of comments and the serious thoughts that some of the contained. I have not looked at any of the other threads yet, but they are on my to do list.

Having worked as a production manager in an aerospace supply company during our original moon program, I was exposed to some compellingly idiotic actions increasing the costs and reducing the probabilities of success in our first efforts to land a man on the moon.

In spite of that, I feel great pride in having played a tiny part in the ultimate success in the first human departure from the Earth, landing on another astronomical body, albeit not even a quarter of a million miles away, and then returning the explorers safely back to Earth. That project took about a decade from start to finish. We sacrificed mightily and the rewards have certainly been commensurate with our efforts. Still, we skirted many disasters and had some as well along the way. Good luck outweighed the bad.

It is hubris in the extreme to consider such a fantasy project which would require such a long time frame and have so many insurmountable problems. We have not even shown the ability to sort out regional and political differences on the globe as it exists and a runaway extinction is underway.

There are solutions for mankind in space. We should be tackling short term projects like our original moon program. And we should do them in some sort of reasonable order. In spite of some notable exceptions, NASA set some priorities very well, particularly with the examination of the outer solar system.

Priorities are the issue. And costs. Each effort we make in space should not be a bottomless pit of expense, without fairly immediate potential for profits clearly in prospect. It is those potential profits which will drive a successful effort to colonize and utilize the solar system. The first step is the mining of the Amore (Earth approaching) asteroids. I will stop here and discuss this further with anyone who has a serious interest in such matters at
eurekaideasunlimited.blogspot.com.

Anyone with something interesting to say on the Colonization of near space may comment here.

Open Casting Call

2008-03-09T01:54:00.004-06:00

Auditions now being held for a one act, multi act improv for two to six actors. This is the film noir version. Bring your own props.

Edit: How silly of me. I forgot to mention that the name of the production is the final line of the comedic production... The Aristocrats. But we are looking for a better title, since this one gives away the punchline.

A Thread Locked On Skin Cell Forum

2008-03-06T12:20:00.002-06:00

My feelings are not as strong as the usually are when a thread is locked. I believe that there are other effective ways of dealing with differences. I went to the Rant and Rave section to express my opinion. But Rant and Rave is a section only open to the membership, not to guests of the forum. So readership is limited. The original thread which was locked is open to all and is worth a look. It is called "Wild Kingdom." For now, I will post here only my comment on the locking of the thread:

A thread has been locked, with a certain apparent justification. It may be that when things cool a bit, it will re-open under the watchful eye of the sheriff and his able deputies.

Allow me to just say this, with all respect, and without addressing directly the issues that the thread was examining. It is a useful thread on an important subject. And in spite of the rather surprising heat that has been generated it is worth eventually reopening when it is not at a rolling boil.

My blog, on the other hand, is more of a rough and tumble place, and anyone who wishes is certainly welcome to express themselves there, even if that expression is that I am a hate monger, or that I am wrong, or that I am an idiot, or that I stick oil up my nose, or drink beverages and eat foods replete with wild yeasts and bacterias as I do, or am goofy in any other way.

I cannot say that I will get around to this subject right away, due to my current schedule. However, if anyone is impatient to get started without me getting the ball rolling, they are invited to post their comment on any of my current threads or any thread in the archives, and I will figure out a way to start a new thread with the comment.

Viva la free exchange of ideas! ...even if some of them are wrong or hateful. Being wrong is nothing more than a stepping stone to being right, once the wrong is recognized. I suspect that cooler heads will prevail. I would sooner that a person who disagrees with me or hates me, expresses that, rather than use an ignore button, or to have the thread permanently locked because of a certain "rudeness" or even more extreme hostility.

Democracy is untidy. It is cumbersome. Participation is the magic component. Not politeness. The Challenger explosion was caused by politeness! The politeness of several engineers in NASA and employed by several different contractors that prevented them from "rocking the boat." Tragedy which could have been averted was the result.

Our deeply felt differences generate enthusiasms that get us involved. We are seeing the best of that today in American politics. For the first time in decades people are coming out in record numbers and getting deeply involved. Young, old and in the middle. How exciting! If we revile a Shrub and some Weeds and the effects that they have unskillfully wrought, let us not get so overwrought that we pick our next leaders as unskillfully as we have done on some previous occasions.

I am Anthropositor and I approved this message.

A Thread llocked on Skin Cell Forum

2008-03-06T12:18:00.000-06:00

A Political Lament

2008-02-29T14:45:00.002-06:00

Life is complex beyond understanding. Each of us has a notion of reality. An illusion of course, but a pretty compelling one. The contradictions within our own mindsets, these are our disturbances. There is no contentment within paradox. Only in illusion. In fantasy. In our dreams. When these things seem consistent, we are happy.

There are so many ways to illustrate this point, I don’t know were to begin. So let us talk about some political “realities.” Take for example, our current political drama. It doesn’t really matter which party we look at. The differences are largely imaginary.

Some time back, I posted a picture of Ron Paul on the blog with a half-hearted complement. It wasn’t really that I liked him. His voice grates on my ears a bit, and his appearance is a little reminiscent of Pat Paulson. It was rather that I liked the sign on his desk, “Don’t steal -- the government hates the competition.” Why did I like the sign? Because the government had stolen from me, or defrauded me, or failed to act on my behalf when they should have, in a variety of different ways, at a variety of different times. The tax court, the IRS, the Army, law enforcement. And every time I say me, I really mean us, because what has happened to me has happened to many, and continues to do so.

In neither party is there a single notable leader who would be likely to extricate us from the extremely serious difficulties we are in. I know people who are rather fanatically in favor of Obama. He is facile with words. He is inspirational in ways that haven’t been seen since JFK.

He has won their hearts. But their minds are disengaged. I know this in part because I have seen it before. And it happened to me. I experienced the same sort of fanatical phenomenon during the Kennedy campaign, and during his presidency. I just liked him!

I liked his attitude. I liked his style. I liked his confidence, his apparent certitude that he and his team could put us back on the right path into the future. And he did inspire us. He had us believing in his Camelot. He told us we could go to the moon. And though he was cut down by a cabal of diverse enemies who had only one thing in common -- the intense desire to kill him -- we actually did go to the moon. And we did it within the time frame of ten years. I can hardly contain the pride over that, since I had a small part in it. Then our space program lost its’ direction and got bogged down. The rate of our progress slowed sharply. One administration focused on the idea of taking the high ground militarily. It was the “Star Wars” mentality. Now that I have brought it up, I am going to digress for a few moments because of a recent event: the destruction of a satellite in decaying orbit by missile.

Since the beginning of the space effort, we have managed to clutter near-earth space with an incredible amount of debris. Big chunks, little chunks, loose screws, paint chips, all traveling at terrific speeds in orbit. Most of it was accidental. We don’t know what to do about it. And it increases the danger of everything we do up there. A billion dollar satellite can be taken out by the high speed impact of a screw that may have been orbiting for decades.

But in spite of our being fully aware of this ongoing problem, which promises only to worsen for the foreseeable future, we just impacted a satellite the size of a bus that was getting close to re-entry. True, we resisted the impulse to do it with a nuclear warhead. But the combined speeds of the missile and the satellite at the point of impact were many, many thousands of miles per hour. (The exact speed is, of course, classified.) But it has been likened to hitting a speeding bullet with another speeding bullet, head on.

Most of us have seen photographs of cars after head-on collisions at the comparative snails-pace of sixty or seventy miles each. We know from our study of physics that even an additional increment of speed of ten or twenty miles an hour multiplies the carnage many times over.

But this was all in the name of saber-rattling, and scientific curiosity, and showing military muscle. Oh, we said it was necessary. Hydrazine is dangerous stuff. Do the math! But it was not so. Even though it was frozen solid, the re-enty heat would have blown it up with a virtual certainty. You won't be able to find a NASA engineer who will argue against this point. There are no heat resistant tiles on the satellite. The idea that this satellite's hydrazine posed a danger on the ground is an absolute fiction. A spurious excuse to do what we wanted to do for other reasons.

If we keep doing this sort of thing, it may not be much longer before we have shrouded the planet with so much high velocity debris that it will be impossible to even consider the ultimate colonization of the rest of the solar system.

So, what we have done, not accidentally, but with full knowledge of what we were doing, was to perhaps double the debris in the orbital zone, with one deliberate and premeditated act. An act we can’t take back.

But let us get back to politics, which by comparison seems like it could even have some reason involved. (This is largely illusion.)

I am a fairly observant fellow, and I like to think fairly deeply about what I observe. But with Kennedy, I too threw caution to the winds. I just wanted him to be bigger than life. It was hero worship, pure and simple. I didn’t consider the fact that his father was among the crime Lords who made is fortune during, and because of the Prohibition era.

Nor did I consider his relative youth and inexperience, and how that would be perceived by his enemies, both here and abroad. In other words, I was feeling a lot more than I was thinking. It wasn’t until the attempted assassination of Castro, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and the near destruction of the entire planet during the Cuban Missile Crisis that I truly realized the error. An error that pervades democracies and dictatorships alike.

Part of all this was his contrast with Nixon, who was running against him, and who I really reviled. I had been watching him with varying degrees of disgust and revulsion, all the way back to the McCarthy witch hunts, which tore the country apart for four years. Nixon was cut from the same cloth as that junior Senator from Wisconsin. He was also Eisenhower’s vice-president.

I was not yet old enough to vote, but I liked Ike pretty well. About the only thing that I really didn’t like about Eisenhower was that he had chosen Nixon to be on the ticket. I was even ready to overlook the fact that he was a Republican. I still remember two of his speeches; his Farewell to the Nation (which is in my archives, and is still worth reading) and a very short one he gave after the weasel from Wisconsin had been neutralized by a very few other courageous men. The most notable of them was Edward R. Murrow, a radio and TV journalist without peer. A true American hero.

Senator John McCain too is an American patriot and a hero. And he certainly has staying power. Only a few months ago McCain was considered by all the pundits to have no chance at the nomination. What happened? He is, or very likely will be, the Republican nominee. Now, some of those same pundits, who you might have bet, at long odds, would be staunch supporters of his, are showing dissatisfaction in the extreme.

Now I personally like his stance opposing “earmarks,” the practice of squandering vast amounts of taxpayer dollars on pork barrel projects without substantial real value and without the direct approval of their fellow legislators. The projects are embedded in laws which often have no connection to the pork barrel project at all.

That having been said, it appears that McCain gets a whole lot of financial support, in the form of campaign contributions from major lobbyists. He has even been accused, by the New Your Times of having an affair with one attractive lobbyist. The point is, earmarking is only one way a politician can enrich himself or his district. And it is very visible when the earmarking makes no sense. So why is it such an entrenched, even traditional practice? But to go on.

I have a bit of a prejudice against Hillary. She is a lawyer. But she also has a certain grace and charm. I do like the fact that she didn’t visibly fly off the handle when Monica polished Bill’s knob. And I liked Bill. I feel that, on balance, our nation was stronger at the end of his leadership than before or, certainly, since. He seemed to me to be the smartest president in recent history. And lucky to boot. When he left office, employment was in good shape, there was a surplus, not a deficit, and the only thing clearly looming on our horizon was the shrub about to take office.

In the recent debates, there has been an incredible amount of nonsense. NAFTA is one example. Senators Clinton and Obama have both said they would strongly oppose the continuation of NAFTA in its’ “present form.” This was pandering to voters who had felt the impact directly. I doubt that will happen.

I think they are just telling people what the want to hear. The states they are campaigning in have taken some heavy hits due to NAFTA, and the hits are very visible. Closed factories. High unemployment. Dying cities.

The truth is, the economies of the US, Canada, and Mexico have all benefited in less visible and tangible ways by NAFTA. We can't blame NAFTA for what the war profiteers and the Real Estate lenders and speculators have done. But there is just no good way to say that to the people who are suffering in the more highly impacted states. The companies that sent the jobs to Mexico or to other more distant lands, the municipalities and states that were impacted, and the Federal Government as well, could perhaps have done a great deal more to make a coordinated effort to provide retraining and other alternative employment programs to soften the blow. They apparently didn’t do much in a timely way, and now the candidates are indicating that Canada and Mexico can anticipate some heat that perhaps they don’t deserve.

Another catchword in the campaigns was “change.” Meaningless. But both parties have embraced it. The war in Iraq, the trillions it has cost, the hundreds of billions which have just evaporated, without anyone having a clue where the money went, the devastation of our economy, the sharp debasing of our currency, the sub prime mortgage disaster, these things are change. Do we really want more of that?

If you look over my archives, you will see that I am not obsessed with politics. I have written much more about creativity, innovation, ideas. I had really expected some substantial dialogues to evolve. The didn’t, or at least they haven’t yet. It will be interesting to see what response I will get from this. We seem to be in a time of thoughtless political frenzy once more.

Bell's Palsy & Medical Controversy

2008-02-20T13:01:00.002-06:00

There is a thread on Skin Cell Forum about Bell’s Palsy, a facial paralysis which looks very much like what often happens during a stroke. I am only going to include my own comments here. Those who are curious may see what I am responding to on Skin Cell Forum.

Bell's Palsy looks very much like a stroke. One half of the face becomes entirely immobile due to a cranial nerve getting infected with a virus. Some think it's a variety of herpes like zoster and perhaps it is, sometimes. Whatever the virus, the infection swells a cranial nerve that governs the face. It almost invariably only affects one side of the face. The nerve swells and pinches itself off from the swelling in a tight spot which does not allow enough room for the swelling. I am conversant with the disease because I am one of the very few people who have had it twice. It is important to put a pad over the affected eye and keep it closed. If he does this he is very likely not to have much difficulty. There are some who have residual effects well beyond two or three months, but they do not comprise many of those afflicted. I chose to get some crude liver and B-12 injections.

My two episodes were at least a decade apart. Both occurred during times of heavy stress. I definitely think stress plays a role in helping set up the conditions for the illness. Adequate rest (and by this I mean sleep), a positive attitude, and good nutrition will increase his chances of a speedy recovery without complications.

In my two cases, recovery was swift and there were no residual problems. I would supplement vitamins and minerals with emphasis on C, B complex, with extra B-12, eat lots of fruits and vegetables, drink adequate fluids, and refrain from substances of abuse like tobacco, alcohol, etc.

I never used ointments or drops. I jut kept the eye patched closed until it began blinking properly again. I took no steroids of any sort. Since my recovery was very quick, I have concluded that steroidal medication is probably usually not indicated or advisable. If the boy is under the care of a physician, he might want to chat with the doctor about the pros and cons of steroid use.
***
It wouldn't hurt to gently massage the affected side of the face, and even add a warm wet cloth (not HOT) Remember there is a loss of sensation. You need to be really careful about that. Gentle massage will increase circulation. Using a vibrator on the area is not bad either.
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Ralph Nader, many years ago, also had Bell's Palsy, a case that went on for the better part of a year, if memory serves. The viewpoint back then was "let's just observe it for a while and see how it goes." I expect Ralph did what his doctor told him. With many things I would agree with the "wait and see" perspective. But with half a face paralyzed, I'm inclined to be a bit more proactive. There is no downside to using B-Complex and B-12.
***
The downside of taking supplements (I mostly refer to vitamins, macro and trace minerals in reasonable and studied proportions) under the typical allopathic physician's advice is that so few of them have gone deeply into the subject of nutrition. Nutrition really gets short shrift in medical schools.

"There is no downside" is a sweeping generality. With all such generalities there are exceptions. Leber's is one of these, a disease so rare perhaps orphan disease is not quite sufficient to describe it. And if you have Leber's disease perhaps B-12 is not going to be near the top of the list of things to worry about. This disease is so rare that most doctors have never even seen a case. As with vitamin C, scientific and medical opinion is hardly uniform.

Your first snippet from the NIH points out that the elderly are the most at risk (of B-12 deficiency). Bell's Palsy strikes old people more often than young people. Being old is not an orphan condition. The population of the aged is growing fast.The second snippet implies that medical and scientific opinion is universal, and may be referring to "minimun adult daily requirement," (the amount which will prevent the appearance of clinical deficiency disease). The third snippet is vague and very self-serving of the medical profession. We hear the same sorts of propaganda in the myriad commercials for pharmaceutical products every day if we turn on the TV. I have had a stroke. I took all the B vitamins including B-12 in substantial quantity, before, during and after the stroke. Oh Gawd! I supplement my folic acid too! I'm going to croak! Am I going to cut my intake of these offending substances? Not at this time, and not without considerably more concretely persuasive information than I have seen so far.

Fifth snippet. PEOPLE WITH LEBER'S DISEASE! IF YOU HAPPEN TO HAVE A DOCTOR WHO HAS NOT INFORMED YOU OF YOUR PARTICULAR AND ISOLATED RISKS IN USING THE VARIOUS B VITAMINS, YOU MIGHT WANT TO START SHOPPING FOR A NEW DOCTOR.

Sixth snippet. See snippet #3 and multiply by two. This is the most standard of the disclaimers. The first sentence is the meat of it all. It says the FDA plays almost no role. The rest of it says to get the help of a "healthcare provider" if some sort of "side effect" should occur. Hard to find fault with such a vague and all-embracing statement There is a grain of truth in there somewhere. I just know it.
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The likelihood of our finding common ground on the issue of exactly how much dependence to have on doctors and how much we should work at a more self reliant approach is slim. My perspective is in the extreme minority. You hold the majority opinion.
Quote from: anthropositor on Tuesday December 11, 2007, 11:24:02 AM (I think if you click on this quote line it may take you directly to the thread on the Forum.)
"What all men speak well of, look critically into; what all men condemn examine first before you decide"-- Confucius

More than half the world population do not have the luxury of access to medical treatment of any sort. Nor do they have resources for acquiring sufficient knowledge and understanding to be able to make reasoned and educated health decisions. They are by our standards, abjectly poor and may be illiterate and unschooled in any meaningful way. Yet they are FORCED by their circumstances to fend for themselves when it comes to health care, even though they are the least capable of doing so. Virtually no one is addressing this crisis. It is pivotally important to us all.
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I add plenty of caveats about being fully informed, to study with great care, and to REASON OUT one's possible options with care, NOT jumping to unfounded conclusions and trying every flakey idea promulgated by some airhead or spammer.

Quackery is NOT confined to naturopaths, homeopaths, crackpots, sociopaths and psychopaths. Mainstream doctors too, contribute SUBSTANTIAL amounts. And mainstream medicine and science in general back an INCREDIBLE number of really faulty and extremely dangerous notions and procedures. The incredible OVERUSE of antibiotics and steroids for many decades is the result and responsibility of mainstream doctors.And all these highly praised facilities and treatments that pervade our health environment are NOT an unalloyed blessing. I have written about the INCREDIBLE OVERUSE of CT scans and CAT scans. VERY expensive. VERY easy. VERY profitable. (Almost) none of the people for whom these tests are ORDERED are advised that these scans EACH dose us with the radiation dosage of ONE TO TWO HUNDRED chest X-rays.

MANY, MANY other medical procedures which were once MAINSTREAM are now recognized as dangerous, not advisable, efficacious or prudent, AND are no longer in fashion.

But doctors themselves cling to these long held assumptions more tenaciously than any segment of our society than perhaps ultraconservative politicians, and it often takes many years and overwhelming and utterly incontrovertible evidence to get mainstream medicine to turn around.

The notion that standard bloodwork will identify a deviation from OPTIMUM intake of vitamins, minerals and trace nutrients is not supportable with logic. The fact is that most doctors have a knee-jerk, thoroughly unfounded notion that most of us who eat "normally" (whatever that means) get ALL the nutrients we need in something approaching the correct proportions is just patent nonsense. When clinically apparent deficiencies show up on the standard tests the doctor employs, much of the damage has already been going on for a considerable time.

In my trips to the supermarket, I an constantly amazed and dumbfounded by the choices of imitation food the typical consumer DECIDES to buy for the family.

I am not saying that I never eat food that is not good for me. I do. But at worst, my junk-food consumpion amounts to 10% or less of that of the typical consumer. And it IS advisable to counsel the general population that they can do MUCH more to take a hand in their own health and wellbeing, and REDUCE their fawning worship of the medical establishment. I notice that you yourself supplement an extreme level of belief in your doctors with a considerable amount of effort, research and thought. That is an enigma to me. You have a deep abiding trust in them (while noting for the record that they are sometimes wrong and nobody is perfect.) But then you spend hundreds and hundreds of hours studying and double checking every aspect of the healthcare options you are presented with. There seems to be a contradiction.

Yet I am frequently roundly castigated and otherwise faulted for the general advice that people can do much more for themselves to govern their health, and need not be so slavishly dependent on their medical "authority figures."The truth is, the most difficult segment of society to assist in their health are the dabblers and those who who are not overly equipped or motivated to sort between the wheat and the chaff. They will always be with us. I have spoken frankly, sometimes even sharply to people with... problems other than only those they thought they had. But I never started out with sharpness (clearcut spammers excepted).

And in at least a couple I first offered to withdraw because what I had to say might not be... entirely comfortable. I advocate more self-reliance, more attention, more effort, more PREVENTION, more questions, more precision, more reason and logic, more innovation (with caution and care). A fairly holistic approach.

Try the simplest things first, those with the least prospect of unforeseen problems. Develop some notion of the variety of different emergencies that might befall you and design some sort of gameplan for the more likely ones that could occur.

I advocate less recourse to doctors. I admit it. We are inundated in our society with advice to see the doctor. The health sciences, biology, chemistry, these can be daunting, and even at the high school or college level, innaccessible to many. So much, in a concentrated time, with insufficient grounding in the sciences in the earlier grades.

It is not just commercial advertising of doctors, hospitals, drugs, medical supplies, procedures and services. Society as a whole has become deeply, almost hypnotically conditioned to consume medical services and products. We are all affected. We must collectively be more self-reliant. The ramifications go well beyond medical issues. Anybody know how much electrical power goes into nuclear magnetic resonance tests? That power is generated somewhere.

Come to think of it, I could probably establish that many, if not most health products have environmental consequences that are not easy to predict in their complexity.

Regardless of all the miracles, medicine is in a state of megacrisis. And widespread over-dependency on titled experts is not part of the answer. It is part of the problem.
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I think even the experts are with you on that. "Take two placebos and call me in the morning." The power of positive thinking. I am a firm believer in positive thinking, but I do think that positive thinking works much better and most reliably when it is on a foundation of demonstrable truths and good sense.

Feeling lucky, optimistic, happy and content even in the face of obstacles and adversity improves your likelihood of success. Depression on the other hand, has a whole cascade of negative effects which reduce successful possibilities.
***
I know that I never said that B-12 or the other B vitamins would prevent stroke. Bell's Palsy, more often than not LOOKS like it could be a stroke. There the similarity ends. Some of the experts opine that B-12 may be helpful in viral infections. I GOT the advice from a doctor over twenty years ago, a fully licensed and practicing physician. I took the advice. I got better unusually quickly. I got Bell's Palsy again, years and years later. I didn't go to the doctor. I took B-12 once again in larger than usual amounts. Once again, my recovery was unusually swift.

But from your perspective I was right the first time because a doctor told me to, and the second time I was wrong because I did it on my own. You say, "Why take it if you don't need it? That surely is wasting money." That is not at all the case. B-12 and the B complex vitamins cost perhaps a dime a day. One visit to a doctor costs what?... a few hundred to a thousand times that? It doesn't make the slightest sense to me. I call it being penny wise and pound foolish.

I have often lamented that so many people ask for advice and information without including various pertinant details of their background and history. Even gender, approximate location and age are conspicuously absent.

The truth is we can do nothing about that. And when I speak to a specific problem, my true message is to a larger audience which might benefit by the general advice, not just to the flighty individual who has left out singularly important information.

But if my last visit to the ophthalmologist is any example, it provides a concrete case of a doctor who did not fully read or comprehend the history I provided. An isolated instance? Probably not.

As to the tests. They are often exceedingly expensive, often provide false positives, false negatives, or are in other ways faulty, overused, or pose dangers to the patient which are NOT mentioned, and which are ROUTINELY done, because they are CONVENIENT and HIGHLY LUCRATIVE. CAT and CT Scans and NMR images are wonderfully interesting. Compelling. Sometimes they are useful. Many times they are not. My wife had a CAT scan about ten years ago. $1700+. A lot of money! Know what? The test provided no reason for the abdominal pain she sufferred. Turns out the GP, according to the radiologist, made a minor mistake in the parameters of the test which he ordered. He didn't actually call it a mistake. He just said he did the test the doctor ordered and that was all he could do. So we never did find out what was causing my wife's pain, and more than $1700 went down a rathole.

The good news is, my wife got better. Not because of any treatment she got. She didn't get any. The doctor who ordered the test? He died. He looked to be maybe fifty. At one and the same time, you castigate me for a general recommendation that even without "expert" opinions weighing in, all the B vitamins, prudently and judiciously used, have an absolutely excellent track record of safety, even at doses many, many multiples of the MDAR. You jumped on the possibilities of problems with Leber's disease, an incredibly unusual condition, and one which would very likely have a very specialized doctor in attendance, at least in the affluent world. Steroids are very, very overprescribed by doctors, most notably to professional athletes, but even at the high school level our youngsters in sports are using them like candy, often with recommendations as vague and insubstantial and without foundation as your own on this subject.

The scandals abound across the whole spectrum of the sporting world. Doctors play a central role in these disasters. You have the firm faith that as long as the doctor-gods are making the educated decisions, that steroids are fine. I am of the opinion that they have their uses and that sometimes their prudent use may be a lesser evil than what they are treating. But they have serious inherent dangers and should be avoided if at all possible.

I believe your remarks on this particular subject inspire a dangerous complacency which by far, outstrips the trivial potential dangers that might attend the prudent and thoughtful use of the B vitamins.

Heroin was, early on, used to treat and cure morphine addiction BY DOCTORS. Then a few decades later it was realized that heroin addiction was at least as serious a problem as morphine or opium. But now we had a whole new, and much larger, population of addicts. Guess what? The cure was found! Methadone CURED heroin addiction. Oops. Now we have a whole generation of methadone addicts going to the clinics and getting their maintenance dose. You see, methadone too is highly addictive. Of course they are not going out and committing as many crimes of profit to pay for their desperately needed drugs. Because the drugs are FREE. Totally subsidized by the general taxation.Now as it happens, there IS a drug that is NOT addictive, which WILL cure the addict who has reached the bottom and who wishes to survive. It WILL cure morphine addiction, it WILL cure heroin addiction, it WILL cure methadone addiction. And it WILL do so comfortably, relatively speaking, and with NO new addiction. THAT will NEVER do! Coddling these rotten addicts! They should all be languishing for years and years living in cells with the other obvious dregs and criminals of society (largely blacks and Latinos).

Why not force them to quit "cold turkey!" A form of extreme torture right up there with "waterboarding" interrogations. Then after the torture of days and days of cold turkey withdrawal, we let them languish in a hellhole for years at a cost of over $30,000 a year per inmate. These are LONG MANDATORY SENTENCES. That'll teach them!

We have MILLIONS of convicts behind bars, most for drug related violations of the law. What kind of idiocy is that? Why are none of your highly praised experts weighing in on this important issue?

There is a problem with the curative drug I mentioned, and it is of legislative origin. In spite of apomorphine having no addictive properties, it has been made as illegal as heroin or morphine.

Any doctor who prescribed it would probably have to explain his actions to the Feds and might lose his license to practice. He could conceivably even go to prison. Know why? The NAME of the drug. APOMORPHINE. Duh, that stuff can't be good! There's morphine in there! See? Look at the word. Do the math.

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Uh, to prevent opening up another can of worms, I guess I should mention that the doctors who wish to treat addiction to the whole range of opiates can lawfully do so. He need only LIE about what he is doing. He needs to prescribe it for one of its' clearly useful medical purposes, like CURING HOMOSEXUALITY. Of course that was back when homosexuality was a serious medical problem. A disease! Now of course, it is just a life style. Ah, the miraculous advances of medical science!

Oh yeah, apomorphine has also been used to treat "erectile disfunction." So an addict who can't wank successfully can get treated and get over his addiction as a side effect. Sort of unfair for the female addicts and the males who can get it up. (I wonder if the doctors perform a simple diagnostic test to determine if the erectile disfunction actually exists, to be sure that no dastardly addicts are underhandedly curing their own heroin. addiction by deceit. That would never do!

Did I use the word wank correctly? Foreign languages can be so difficult. Wank seems so much more discreet that the various American euphemisms. On the other hand medical words are sometimes not precise in their implications. The first portion of the word for it, "master" indicates some one quite skilled at bation. Apparently most people are highly skilled. Otherwise wouldn't we have the word amateurbation?
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It is possible for some residual damage to remain for a considerable time, but it is not likely. I believe it is still a fairly typical medical stance just to watch it for a number of weeks with no intervention. Certainly that is better than immediately giving antibiotics, but from my own personal experience, B-12 in one form or another and the other B-complex vitamins are helpful. I doubt that his doctor will object to their use, and may even "order" a "free" B-12 injection. In this case I don't think he would be squandering the publics money. I would hate to see him still with residual effects after many months. This does happen to some people. Perhaps other factors in their lives are playing a role.
It has been about two and a half months since the lady began the thread, asking for advice on behalf of her brother with Bell’s Palsy. I suspect that she did not absorb much of importance from the thread. The following is her report:
Latest update my bros been to the hospital and theyve said theres a very small chance of improvement basically they rnt holding much hope. they r refering him for a scan and then they will see him in 4 months if the scan shows nothing and then talk about operations to make his face less droppy. i have tried everything everyone has suggested if anyone thinks of anything could u please let me know.

Frankly I cannot fathom the notion that the doctors would even be speculating about surgical intervention, or that they would tell her that there is little chance for improvement at this stage. She gives no clue what sort of “scan” they were talking about. I feel no urge to contribute to this thread further.

Apathy and Genocide

2008-01-14T10:28:00.001-06:00

When I brought this subject up on Skin Cell Forum, the only input I received was negative. It was during the Christmas season and it was just not in the spirit of the holidays to bring up such an unpleasant subject. Shortly thereafter, the thread, which had already been sequestered in a closet which can only be seen by registered members, was locked by the owner of the forum. This was no service to humanity.

Now, here, my remarks cannot be censored. But the apathy continues. Not a single comment or constructive idea has been posted in response. Such apathy is an encouragement to the murderers to continue. Perhaps the Armenian Genocide and the monumental slaughter of the Jews by the Nazi's are thought to be too far back in history to be relevant. And we have been hearing of the situation in the Sudan (Darfur) for years now. It too seems to many just to be old news now.

Another hot spot which receives virtually no public attention is the Congo, in which the systematic rape of tens of thousands of women and girls of all ages continues without any effective impediment at all. These victims are then ostracized by their own husbands and neighbors.

Here in the U.S. we are involved in an epic political campaign in which a great deal of rhetoric is generated, but little is actually said. At the moment, the buzzword is "change." All the candidates have embraced this word as if it were their own, and as if it really meant something.

I have watched most of the debates and listened to many of the interviews of virtually all the candidates. It seems they have all concluded that this is a non-starter with the electorate. In other words, they will not get votes by addressing the issue. A sad commentary on the politicians, and on the electorate as well.

Genocide Continues

2008-01-12T09:37:00.000-06:00

Anybody up for some patter on the Armenian Genocide? Or if nobody remembers because it was so long ago, and nobody paid any attention at the time, maybe Darfur? People will continue to be murdered there day after day, week in week out, month after month, perhaps many additional years into the future.

No one did anything in Rwanda recently while millions were slaughtered. Will we be looking back on Darfur, which has already been going on for years, and saying "Isn't there something we could have done if we had really wanted to?"

And isn't this particular genocide really relevant to us in one respect? This is not just a civil war between tribes we do not recognize and could not easily differentiate from each other. It is the systematic and continuous murder of blacks by the ISLAMIC power elite. Why wouldn't we be doing something about that? I mean, isn't it sort of... TERRORISM? Isn't that what we are all supposed to be fighting right now? Any Imam's or Mullah's out there who could explain the rationale for mass murder to me? I still can't quite get it. I promise not to crack wise about Allah, his name be blessed.

So refreshing to be on a subject in which we might be able to do some good, while we can still do it.

Hitler, insane though he was, made one valid observation. Or perhaps it was Stalin. I don't remember which. Actually maybe both. They were like two peas in a pod. But the observation was with relation to genocide, and it was, "Who remembers the Armenians?"

The meaning of course is clear. There was a lack of outcry in a remarkable and recent previous large scale obliteration of a people. It was pretty totally ignored by the world at large. And these two dictators were not the only ones who noticed this widespread apathy. They took it to be a license for mass murder.

There are a few dozen other hot spots of racial or ethnic cleansing that come to mind in current events. Bear in mind, the Armenian Massacre was a current event for Hitler, not many years before his rise to power. Today's Republic of Turkey is as revisionist as they can be. It wasn't us, they say. It was the Ottoman Empire.

And it wasn't a million and a half people slaughtered they say. It might have been only 900.000 or even less. And there was nothing systematic about it. It was just sort of... spontaneous. A fluke. No one is responsible. And it is just an unfair exaggeration to imply that they were all murdered. Some of those deaths were purely natural causes, during deportation of Armenian terrorists who were collaborating with the Russian Empire. They weren't exterminated. Some of them just "expired" during the lengthy deportation process.

And the deportees were not very cooperative. They often refused to watch until forced, their children being slaughtered, or their wives, mothers. grandmothers, sisters, daughters being gang raped and murdered before their eyes. Terroristic babies impaled on bayonets or their little heads bashed on the rocks.

The truth is that the Turkey of today is comparatively speaking, within the region, quite a forward looking and moderate regime trying to cope with some really serious complexities in their geopolitical situation. So it is a little hard to understand why they would expend so much energy on the denial of history. There could be a consistency of sorts in the long run though. If they succeed in their denial, then a future "solution" of the Kurdish "problem" becomes... more feasible.

The aftermath of the Rwandan tragedy showed everybody who is interested in genocide as an instrument of policy, much more recently, that it is still possible to kill millions of people at a rate of perhaps 10,000 per day for many months, with hardly a ripple of practical response from the world at large. Apparently it was just an outpouring of Rwandan national spirit.

And after it was over, because there had to be some healing, almost none of the actual participants were actually tried or punished. It was more important to "put it all behind us." It doesn't appear to be all behind us. I think there will be a lot more ahead of us. I think it's going to keep going on continuously.

Currently, genocidal incidents are going on in so many different places in the world it is hard to accurately enumerate them. And here I am, a bit like an Ottoman Empire soldier, saying "No, you can't close your eyes. You have to see this! Open your eyes!"

But history is not entirely cyclic. If we start paying attention, we really do often learn from our mistakes. One of the ways history is not repeating itself is in the information explosion. There have been many slaughters in the world throughout history. We know of a fraction of them.

But at the same time, many more of us do know of them, and we have available many more of the real details of what went on, with something approaching forensic precision. It is just so appalling that one can hardly contain it.

But we must face it. and we must continue to be vigilant for the signs that the horrors will again erupt, and may well do so in our own towns and villages.We all tend to look at the governments, as somehow quite central either in fomenting genocides, or in tacitly allowing them by inaction.

But each citizen bears some responsibility. That is where to start. It needs to be socially acceptable to deal with the subject. And each culture needs to realize that the roots of the problem are not far beneath their own social soil.

Regardless of history suggesting that we are powerless to stop these sorts of things, rather than be pessimistic, we need to search for the solutions, not only privately in our hearts and private prejudices, but with one another.

There is no one beyond the reach of a purge. No one. That is the razors edge of reality. First we must really pay attention, to the best of our ability. We must ask the right questions. We need to try to find ways of identifying the various social pressures which build up to the point where one group feels justified to exterminate another.

There is no one cut-and-dried answer. The number of social crises and their severity are increasing, not decreasing, and each has unique characteristics. Even so, we should be looking for the principles. For the things all genocidal hatreds have in common. If we do this we will find the clues which will help us succeed in prevention. If there are no evident pat answers, let us look harder. And let us look within ourselves as well. It is not just "those others" who are doing it. Everyone who ignores it is complicit.

Roadkill and Me

2008-01-11T11:12:00.000-06:00

This seems to be my year for roadkill. A few months ago someone rammed a doe out in front of my place in the middle of the night. I went out when I heard the car leave, took the opportunity to remove the eyes because of my current interest in eye anatomy, and later in the morning, took the doe to a meat packer to cut up and wrap for the freezer. (Graphic details of the eye dissections in the archives.)

Last night, as I was driving home from the group chess lessons I teach, a young prong buck challenged my van for right of way. Although I did my best to defer to the buck, and probably avoided a thousand dollar collision, I nipped him on a hind quarter.

I got out, saw that the buck was conscious and had no apparent broken legs but he was unable to run very well and had little prospect for survival. I was in my tux and had only my hunting knife on my hip. Not a very humane way to do the buck in, and likely to splatter blood all over me. So I went the half mile to my home, shucked the tux for other clothing, grabbed a wrench and went back. Meanwhile the police had gotten a call on a hit and run and were speedily blue lighting as I was headed back. They were of course, looking for me. I proceeded back to the point of impact, parked, tracked the injured buck and nudged it into the hereafter with the wrench. The police logged the kill and hit the road as soon as they realized I was going to harvest the buck myself.

The temperature was just in the high thirties, nice weather for chilling the meat down. I dragged the dead deer onto the back of my wife's truck, took it home and bled it off into a big shallow pan. (Nice treat for the dogs and the cat colony. I try to waste nothing if I can help it.) Later in the morning I would take the deer to my meat packer and get it cut up for $70.

Well it didn't work out that way. The meat packer was closed until the 14th to go hunting. I went thirty miles to another packer. They were closed too. Everyone was off hunting deer. I don't know why everyone thinks they have to hunt early in the season when the most hunters are out. We haven't had a really hard freeze yet that I have noticed, so the deer were not really in rut to the extent that they get crazy stupid.

Anyway, now I have a hundred plus pound carcass. The local idiot butcher would not touch it. Even though I bled it within twenty minutes of its' demise, the abdominal cavity was in good shape and I saw no reason to gut it in the middle of the night, cold as it was.

But from the butcher's perspective, "If you don't gut it in the first two hours, the meat will sour!" What nonsense. He said he could lose his license if he was caught. He might have been right about that. It is very hard to fight arbitrary rules put in place for public safety.

So what would you do?

I'm really starting to grit my teeth now. I had other stuff on my agenda. Skinning a rabbit or a squirrel or a rattlesnake for dinner, or getting a chicken ready to roast takes twenty minutes or so. Chopping up a buck under field conditions, doing it nicely, and packaging it well for the freezer, is going to take all day. I was in no mood for this, but I was not going to throw away at least thirty pounds of good meat.

My wife also was in no mood to have the carcass in the kitchen. So here I am, a relatively sedentary sixty-seven year old man, preparing for an all day, reasonably strenuous job out in the cold. I gathered my wits about me, got the frame mattress support from a child's bed from the barn, and flopped the carcass on it. This would keep it elevated about five inches off the lawn and allow me to flip the carcass over with ease without getting any meat on the ground after skinning.

Then I went and gathered miscellaneous tools for the job and an old hassock to sit on so I would not be hunkering down on my heels for hours. I had my hunting knife, a keyhole saw, some tin snips and kitchen shears, a number 22 scalpel, and a Chinese claw hammer.

It was nice and windy and cold. Good for the carcass but less good for my hands and joints. I would have to take a break every half hour or so just to rewarm my knuckles.

Now ask yourself again, what would you do? What would be your order of procedure? Your methods? Just bleeding was easy. Even without stringing up the animal by its' hindquarters (I didn't have a rope). I just slanted the head down off the back of the truck, using the spare tire and a bungee cord to keep the animal from falling off. It was just a matter of punching the hunting knife in below the ear, right behind the jaw bone and pulling the knife out, letting the blood fan out into the pan. Of course, it goes without saying, you do this with the down side first. That way, while you are doing the top side the first side isn't bleeding all over you while you work to spring a leak in the second juggler vein.

Now, in my large outdoor colony of cats, I have a pair of very aggressive Siamese kittens named Powder and Puff who always get underfoot anytime anything smelling edible is around. They immediately came and started drinking the blood. Very funny in a way. They were trying to lap and growling at each other at the same time, as if there were not enough blood to go around. Lap, lap, lap, growl....

Pip, my Blue Heeler\Rottweiler bitch is barking nonstop about this unfairness. But over a pint of blood will go a long way. There will be plenty left. When the kittens were tight as a drum and could not lap another lap, I put the pan between the dogs to finish up. Then I went to bed.

Now, after my failure to find someone to do the work in the morning, I backed the truck over to the bed springs I had found. and flopped the deer onto it.

What would you do next? Hint: My dogs had long since finished up the blood and hadn't had anything to eat for many hours. Unlike the kittens, they are not full. They are voluble in making their wishes known. It is going to take me a while to skin the animal. Do I want to have all this noise? Of course not. So I remove the head and give it to the dogs, allowing each to grab an ear for a bit of a tug of war. Hard to bark with a mouth full of deer ear, Then I removed a foreleg right below the meaty part, tossing it to Cloud, who immediately let go of the ear he was tugging on, sending Pip tumbling triumphantly with the whole head to herself. Now, with both dogs happy, I can proceed with just the wind whistling in my ears.

Now I wanted to skin it out efficiently leaving little meat on the pelt so it will cure without much scraping and not get to smelling. It will make a nice cat bed for the colony. Our winter nights sometimes get down to the teens. The whole key here is to get it started right. I chose to start at the esophagus where there is virtually no meat under the leather. The tin snips worked best. My hunting knife was not at its' sharpest and I couldn't find my sharpening stone. In a few minutes, I had liberated about eight inches of esophagus, which I chopped off and threw to the dogs, who were now entirely silent and content.

Now I simply worked my fingers between the membrane and the pelt, slowly liberating it. Occasionally I used the scalpel to free up a section which was holding too tenaciously for my fingers. I took it slow and went in for a cup of coffee and to get my hands warm again. With this break, it took maybe an hour to skin it out.

While I was warming my hands, my son called to chat from California. Now he is quite an innovative and bright fellow. So it was odd to me when he suggested I get on the internet to get some directions on how to carve up a deer. Certainly this could provide me with some guidance and might cut my labor in some ways. But would I not just be following directions? And how likely is it anyway that I will find good directions on how to do it with a hunting knife, a keyhole saw, shears, tin snips and a Chinese claw hammer?

There is something to be said for discovery; the process of learning by doing. It is usually much more valuable than cooking by some recipe or getting the "how to" directions. Not only that, in following the directions of others, you may, uncritically, do silly things, just because this is the way everyone else is currently doing it.

Let me give you an example: the idiot butcher was absolutely convinced that under all circumstances, if a deer was not gutted within two hours, that deer was irreparably tainted and should simply be thrown away. The meat was "soured" as he put it. What nonsense.

Someone else, having gone to see him under exactly the same circumstances that I did, very probably would have been convinced just to throw away the carcass. There are no experts, folks. Just people who think they know more about something than most of those around them. And sometimes thinking he knows more than everyone, results in the "expert" whether he be a butcher or a doctor, knowing less and less. I will be saying much more about the "culture" of expertise in the future. I would call it a cult, but cults are all in the extreme minority. As soon as a cult attains sufficient numbers, it becomes an established faith.

The people who believe in the experts with little or no critical thought are certainly in the great majority and it is certainly a worldwide phenomenon. It does not bode well for our future. And I submit that expert nonsense is far more dangerous than amateur nonsense.

When I skinned the deer, the abdominal cavity stayed quite intact. I saw no evidence of internal rupture of the organs. I even made a little slit letting the bladder extrude a bit, but not puncturing anything. No bad smells. I stuck my hand in. and felt around the organs. No big clots. Nothing ruptured. everything pretty much where it was expected to be. I pull my hand back out. It smells just fine. So I am just going to go on with the harvesting of the meat without gutting the animal first.

As far as I know, no one ever does it this way. And maybe, as a general rule, there is good reason for this. After all, whether it is road kill or an animal which has been shot down, more often than not, there has been some damage to the internal visceral organs. And in warm weather, spoilage could start fairly quickly.

But that butcher had not really reasoned anything out. He did things the way he was taught, by rote. That was the only way to do it as far as he was concerned. And frankly, that is the way most "experts" learn their trade as well. They have not learned. They have been conditioned to be comfortable in their indoctrination. I would rather know two people who can think for themselves, and do it clearly, than a hundred experts who mindlessly adhere to the prevailing perspectives of their field.

Now as to the tools I used. It was just what was on hand. The hammer was Chinese as I mentioned. in breaking joints like the neck and the legs, both of the claws of the hammer got broken. I was left with nothing but the hammer head. It was closer to pig metal than steel. Another sad commentary in a bad year for Chinese products.

But getting back to the road kill. In this case, the gutting of the animal will be the last thing I do. In an abundance of caution, I will not harvest the liver and heart for my table. I will feed them to the dogs and cats. (Actually, if it smells good, I may still eat the heart. I like heart a lot.)

Anyway, by dark, I had removed and sliced and packaged about twenty five pounds of meat. It was really getting bitingly cold and the wind was picking up, so I wrapped the remainder of the carcass in a green tarp and went in to eat some venison Slum Gullion.

A Slum Gullion is like a Hobo Jungle coffee-can stew. A one pot meal with everything you can find, scrounge, borrow or otherwise hustle. Those who are to partake who have nothing to add need to have a few coins in their pocket for the chef, or need to be able to sing or tell a compelling story for their meal. When I was a youth on the move, I always carried a Bull Durham tobacco sack full of mixed herbs, coarse salt and cracked pepper. I learned very young, if you don't eat well, you can't live well.

But this particular Slum Gullion was not exactly Spartan fare. Venison, onions, carrots, celery, jasmati rice, wild rice, Shitaake mushrooms, a dollop of chili, half a chicken, some left over home fries, cracked pepper, various herbs, a dash of coarse salt, some potassium chloride for balance, a glug of Cabernet and a plop of steak sauce. Serve with a garnish of bone-dry cranberries and crusty multi-grain bread.

Preemptive censorship Conclusion

2007-12-29T09:50:00.000-06:00

As we can see from the first part of this story, to be comprehensive in the description of the variety of ways people can choose to be wrong in their assessment of what is true and reasonable is really difficult.

In this case, what started as a study of real life quasi-belief in a historical pseudo-science is very strong. The adherents feel no necessity for consistency. In the same breath, they can contradict themselves and defend the value of the contradictions.

The absolute totality of their illogic is lost even on otherwise normally intelligent people, representative of three or four major industrial cultures, in which "formal" education is widespread. This is certainly an indictment of the educational processes of the UK, the USA, and Canada. What is most shocking is how tenaciously this group clung to their notions in the face of logic and reason.

One could easily argue that I too am a product of this industrial institutional education, but that is not really a valid observation. The truth is, since I began leaving home with considerable regularity, beginning at the age of twelve, my exposure to the classrooms was quite abbreviated. I do not mean to suggest that I was unaffected by the pervasive propaganda of mid century America, but I had a much greater opportunity to examine what was happening without the unremitting guidance of a not very astute teacher population and the troubling national educational system which governs them.

The conversation in the thread ultimately got off astrology, going seamlessly to the relative merits of religious factions. I did my best to turn to an important subject, ongoing present day genocide. The owner of the forum decided to padlock the conversation.

One of the members asked where is my holiday joy. It is apparently not appropriate to speak of ongoing genocides during this celebration of the birth of a man who advocated love and mercy. I really think this played a part in the action of the forum owner in locking the thread. I can't call it a decision because that implies deep consideration of the issues. I have not seen any evidence of that. I believe it was more of a knee-jerk reaction.

In a couple of years of following this forum pretty closely, I frankly cannot summon to mind a single thing that he has said that seemed to stand out with importance. He seems to be an administrator, nothing more. I once dropped him a note saying that I was interested in discussing cancer from a different perspective, but that I had no wish to start any brush fires with any extremists. I was soliciting his input. He never answered.

I believe he did a good thing in starting the forum. I believe the forum would be considerably better without the chilling and arbitrary preemptive censorship. I have not lost hope for the group, but it is very, very difficult for me to continue my active participation.

In terms of numbers of people on at the same time, the forum substantially broke their previous record in viewership. By substantially, I mean they got a jump of a couple hundred more that their previous numbers. The record was broken by about thirty percent at a point in time when I was posting at a high volume.

One of the moderators, for whom I have respect and friendly feelings, dropped me a note saying she had previously also said some cautionary things about drinking colloidal silver "health food" liquids. I had previously been unaware of it. I am glad I was not the only one to attack the use of colloidal silver in the diet. I have no way of knowing exactly what she said without reviewing thousands of her posts. I doubt she was as vigorous about it as I was.

I have recommended this forum to a great many people. While my enthusiasm has been damped for the above mentioned reasons, I still believe they serve an important function. I wish them well and will continue to support their positive efforts to help people with skin problems to help themselves collectively, even as I oppose arbitrary censorship when it appears. While I doubt very much that I will be adding my own input to the mix with any frequency in the future, I will still be reading and responding to my mail, and those who have found my comments to be of interest there may still find my comments here.

Preemptive Censorship Part One

2007-12-23T12:32:00.000-06:00

A couple of years ago I ran across a forum which dealt with a problem I had been coping with, some assorted skin problems on hands and arms. Nothing serious enough to require a physician. Just some itching, scaling, drying, flaking, bleeding from small lesions. Since the rest of my health was robust, I had decided to just keep it under observation without doing much at all.

I was getting pretty tired of wearing long sleeved burgundy shirts to de-emphasise the blood stains. Now, the forum did not help me in the sense of supplying me with the answers to fix my skin. But reading the various posts did make several things much more clear to me. That the typical individual is fairly clueless about such things as skin problems.

Oh, there was good advice fairly frequently, but more often than not, it was mixed with other materials of dubious distinction. I suppose one of the main virtues, perhaps the only real virtue of the place, was that there where were others with assorted chronic skin conditions to share feelings and frustrations with with.

An incredible number of posts were nothing more than simple greetings and smiley faces and jabber of one kind or another. And even when information was imparted, it was often in link form or anecdotal or speculative in nature. Opinions rather than real, experimentally demonstrable curative actions. What was most singularly absent was authoritative, responsible, reliable, practical advice which was not mixed with all these other adulterants. Never once did a doctor ever show up and say anything useful. Someone claiming to be a Portuguese doctor showed up, but sadly, his English was not sufficient to demonstrate his skills.

So I was often both charmed and exasperated, and did my utmost to make the best of it and make the place as useful as I could. While I was at it, I learned a great deal, by many examples, about what not to do to my skin. I used the mistakes I saw to trigger my creativity. In this, some of the forum members were extremely helpful.

There were even a few people obsessively and compulsively hurting themselves who could not face the situation even when it was demonstrated with crystal clarity. Simple tests were suggested which would demonstrate the facts and set them on the sometimes hard road to recovery.

In these few cases, I was the sole voice saying that they ought to look at the possibility that they were dealing with a serious compulsive problem. A chorus of voices angrily enabled the compulsive people in denial. I pretty much stuck to my position. Those others were the "enablers." The forum has quite a lot of them.

I liken this situation to the lovely and notable famous singer who starved herself to death with anorexia, while everyone made excuses for her behavior and expected that she would get over it. She did, permanently. While under the care of physicians and hospitalized for starvation, which was entirely self-induced, she died.

Another controversy was when a new member recommended that people ingest liquids containing colloidal silver. The advice was given to a woman who was about midterm in a pregnancy. I could not in good conscience let such dangerous advice go unchallenged. In spite of the flak, the enablers who said a lot of people were doing it, and this is all a matter of personal opinion and who am I to make such pronouncements, and what could it hurt? You can buy these colloidal mineral products in the "health" food stores. Therefore they have to be alright.

So we wound up having a little seminar about the dangers of silver poisoning. Let me sum it up. If you ingest colloidal silver on a daily basis in normal dosages and do it for long enough, your skin will eventually turn a grayish blue. The worst of it is, this change is not reversible. It will not fade. It will remain for life.

No one but me was aware of this, on a forum which gets hundreds of hits a day and has thousands of members. Mine was the sole voice for this perspective.

As it happens, yesterday there was a national news story about an aficionado of ingesting colloidal silver, who refused to stop even after he began to turn blue. The before and after photographs of this fellow were absolutely shocking. True, this was an unusually extreme case.

Closely analogous to this are the many people who drink carrot juice incessantly in large amounts, because if carrot juice is so good for you (and it is) a lot of it must be even better. (It depends on what is meant by "a lot.") While I have not personally seen one of the blue people I have known several of the orange people. I am not much concerned by the orange people. If they stop drinking carrot juice in substantial quantities, They will return to their previous skin color in a few months. I do think it is better not to have gone overboard in the first place.

But getting back to the theme, censorship. On December 13, a recent arrival to the forum with a substantial amount of empty space in her cranium started a new thread in General Health which she titled "Hi Anthropositor!"

I decided to try to turn this situation into something positive if at all possible. She had somehow taken the notion that I was the leader of the pack. This is what I said:

Actually Nick is the Alpha Leader who keeps my muzzle on his bureau. If you want to spar, or for that matter, work collaboratively on some important issue, Eureka Ideas Unlimited could be a good venue.
eurekaideasunlimited.blogspot.com
(This next portion is my diplomatic way of discouraging the saccharine use of Blessings to end each of her posts, although she is a self-professed pagan. I go on:)
Uh, over there we sort of try to mix the blessings right into the ideas themselves. Otherwise it's sort of like putting powdered sugar on a lollipop.

Of course the Chri... uh... well it is the multi-religious holiday season. In view of that, (and now I close with a little agnostic invocation) May Peace be upon us all. And may we have the skills and strength to bless ourselves and one another with effective solutions to the survival dilemmas we all face, and may we get to it without delay, with energy and all the skill we can muster.

(Now she comes on, referring to me for some inexplicable reason as Der. Hoping she did not mean Dear, a disarming and friendly term I use myself, I said nothing. Now a handful of empty c(s)hitchat posts in which I did not participate). Then I see something about posts and links and I say:

I quote very sparingly, use links even less. If I do use a link, I am usually pretty careful that I would be prepared to argue in favor of the central points of view within that link. Or I will do it to preface my vigorous disagreement.

To do otherwise is often to be advertising nonsense or misinformation. I dismiss fairly rapidly, any site that supports the value of reiki or homeopathy or $1500 d0llar water ionizers or dead sea mud or palmistry or astrology (this in response to a previous mention by this almost entirely vacuous individual about astrology and some other assorted mental misadventures seen on the forum. This rather opened the floodgates which I was trying to close). ...or fortune cookies or the tooth fairy.

(So you can track what the others have decided to say I will put all the comments of others in sort of a fungal green).

that Hurts Anthro!
I prefer to use astrology not for fortunetelling, but to analyze interpersonal relationships. It's a point of reference for me, but I still make my own decisions about what I'm going to do. I'm still a student but do believe it has potential for insight into people. There is alot of truth in the charts I've been exposed to.Most of the time, they seem about 70% accurate. Free will and environment can affect the psychology of people as well.
Blessings,
maureen
I responded,
On numerous occasions in my life I have given several people who were deeply committed true believers in astrology, the chance to guess my sign, based only on the traits and characteristics that I had exhibited.

No one has EVER guessed my sign on the first guess. More than once, my sign was the LAST sign remaining after all the other signs had been tried. The usual was four or five signs before mine was guessed. We can no longer validly perform this test because the Blogger people in their minuscule wisdom, automatically put it on my profile and I have been unable to remove it.

I would sooner be a Reform Druid, or something even more far-fetched, a Republican, than expend the tiniest quantum particle of my belief on astrology.
(It is worthy of note here, that there was not a single scintilla of curiosity from anyone about what a Reform Druid might be).

Hey der,
That wouldn't work anyway. Need birth time/date/place to learn about a person. Newspaper horoscopes are definitely crap. Millions have same sun sign. Doesn't mean much. Your ascendant is a better read than your sun sign. I do agree tho' that I can't get into palmistry, or other forms of fortunetelling. Numerology means nothing to me, but I'm sure someone knows how to use these properly. I've been interested in Astrology since my June Cleaver mom took the study up in the 70's. It's very interesting when done properly Like I said before 70% is pretty standard for a chart. More for some less for some, but an average.
blessings
maureen

(Now I am just beginning to simmer. Another regular member comes on who as you will see, also likes to end her posts with saccharine platitudes.)

Okay, who the heck is "Der"? I am going to guess here. You are calling Anthropositor "Der" ? Hey, Der, when did you take that nickname on?
Have fun,and as always,best wishes for your good fortune, good health and happiness

(When I am starting to steam I try to lighten everything up, so I make a little joke).

Well that surprised me too! Many years ago I lived in a nieghborhood populated by a small colony of German emegres. Although we differred in our political reasoning (my politics was informed by thought, theirs by fanatical wishful thinking) they were very cordial and even honored me with a German nickname. Soon because of the frequency with which they referred to me or addressed me, It got shortenned to the single syllable Der. Of course since I don't voluntarily speak any language which requires sentence-long words, I never did find out what the whole word "Dermudderfugger" meant in English. Anybody know German?

Several chuckling comments deleted. Then it went back to astrology. I am now at a low boil. But I hide it well by remaining mute for now.

Anthro, as my first guess, could you possibly be Scorpio? Answer truthfully now!Maureen, I have studied astrology a bit, and I do think you can see traits in people's characters of their sign. It is very interesting , and I fully agree that the time place etc of birth is required for accuracy. Was it blue-sky who posted with a link, which asked questions on this, and mine was bang on! I had friends in for coffee that day and they all agreed it was exactly me! Linda Goodman did an excellent series of books on the subject, very in depth and very interesting.
bunnie

(...and one of the moderators...)

One of my favorite undergrad classes was phychology 101... the teacher was new and didn't yet realize that 99% of her students weren't going to be up to college material. (There were 4 people who passed the midterm. One of them was me. I got a 96.)The teacher did a fascinating demonstration on astorology. She asked everyone in the class to raise their hands if they ever read the horoscope just for fun. My hand went up, I'll admit it. Then she gave us all a little quiz to see how close we were to our sun sign. Everyone who read the horoscope just for fun was dead on to the "typical" sun sign description. Everyone who didn't was not. People who only did on occasion were close. The correlations were crazy. Yes, I'm as typical a Pices as you can get! Just for fun, I'm going to say that Antrho was born Mar. 1, making him a pices, too.
No Bunny! No Bama! We aren't going to go through all the signs I hope. Astrology is like stale traditional German pastry or political thought. flaky, hard to digest and fattening of the head.

My mother was able to incorporate, fairly seamlessly, Christianity, astrology, the occult and several other odd beliefs. I never discussed such matters seriously with her. I loved her and knew she needed what few toys she had.But I am a firm believer that even in spite of the prevalence of nonsense, people can, and sometimes do, add substantially to their mental skills. As an example, Maureen after only three hints, has stopped with the mantra Blessings. Now that IS a blessing. (Whereupon she immediately went back to it without letup.)
Remember, Isaac Newton was more of an alchemist than a scientist. and he kept several of his beliefs quite confidential. They could have made things extremely difficult for him. And then there was Kellogg, a man who changed breakfast forever. Success never eluded him no matter how skillfully he tried to outrun it. Did you know that he even advocated corn flake enemas? Idiocy, wealth and power are not mutually exclusive. Look at Howard Hughes. Look at George... oh nevermind. I need not enumerate the shrubs. (Note how even handed I am).

Capricorn.

totalfolly (This from a moderater who was in an excellent position to sense the growing storm. She didn't).

Hmmm......If memory serves, Mr. Positor once described himself as an "old goat" on his blog...Capricorn

Matt (This from yet another moderator. Now we have the following interminable piece of utterly useless garbage, even including links. She is still in hopes of roping me into this asinine game, totally regardless of any hints at all).

Astrological birth signs are a lot of fun and great for entertainment purposes, but it doesn't really describe me and I really do not fit into my zodiac sign.I think the
Quote from: bunnie on Sunday December 16, 2007, 04:54:11 AM
Anthro, as my first guess, could you possibly be Scorpio? Answer truthfully now!Moeim, I have studied astrology a bit, and I do think you can see traits in people's characters of their sign. It is very interesting , and I fully agree that the time place etc of birth is required for accuracy. Was it blue-sky who posted with a link, which asked questions on this, and mine was bang on! I had friends in for coffee that day and they all agreed it was exactly me! Linda Goodman did an excellent series of books on the subject, very in depth and very interesting. bunnieis more accurate, at least it was for me. Yes, Bunnie it was me, good memory, I went and found the post.Everyone should try this site out, and see if they are described accuratelyby giving their year, time and place of birth. You might be surprised at what you discover, especially, you, Anthropositor. Let me know what you think.I once had my natology report done. The natology report includes not only your date of birth, but also the longitude and latitude of your birthplace. What is a natal chart? In astrology, your natal chart (sometimes called birth chart) is a graph that shows the positions of the planets and astrological houses in the sky at the moment of your birth. How is my natal chart different from my horoscope? Your natal chart is much more detailed and accurate than your horoscope. A popular horoscope considers only the position of the Sun, whereas your natal chart includes hundreds of pieces of dataI have to admit, the natology report was very introspective and interesting, and I did find my own characteristics to be true to the natal or birth chart reading.Has anyone else done a natal/birth chart reading? I think you will find it to be surprisingly accurate and enjoyably fun.Here is a website I just found, go try it and see for your self: http://alabe.com/freechart/With hopes for everyone's well being and happiness

(It is time for sterner stuff, obviously. My words fall on totally deaf ears. Even so, I remain restrained).

I want to thank the clever TotalFolly for going to my Blogger Profile, microfilming the evidence of my (burp, gag, barf) astrological (urp) heritage, bringing it back here, and trying to stop this maddening cacophony of nonsense.

Candy can be so much fun. It rots your teeth so slowly, so insidiously that soon you are losing your teeth. Add fun, well mixed with superstition, and you have a kind of candy for the intellect, slowly bursting gaping caverns in the mind; little improvised explosive devices popping like party favors in the cerebral cortex. Little cherry bombs wrapped festively like pinatas or party poppers.

Just remember, every time you pop a popper, your brain smells more and more like dirty socks and becomes less and less capable of coherent thought. Before you know it, you are addicted to what only seemed a harmless game, and the fungal growth of nonsense sends tendrils of mycelium into every little bud of reason which tries to re-establish itself. Now it is possible to simulate coherency, but the core of reason is but a corpse.

Rest In Peace intellect! May you return from the dead. Soon!

Now collectively more air from several moderators, one of whom admits the inside information she used to identify my sign. Another opines that candy is good for you, another ridiculous opinion, but one with more merit than astrology. Bear in mind these are all typical, normal people. My above comment too, fell on deaf ears. The originator of all this bilge comes on again to say:

Palmistry is very interesting, but scary. I'm always looking at my life line thank goodness it seems pretty long......I can't imagine how I'd feel if it was short... SCARY!!!! Probably why I'm terrified to study Palmistry. That life line deal pretty much sums up my fear factor....I'm glad to hear some of you don't totally dismiss Astrology. I think it's interesting...

Anthro, I'd love to take a look at your Chart Wheel sometime... could be very enlightening. But heck, if addresses are TABOO around here, I suppose birthtime/date/place is probably not an option either....darn it! I'd like to take credit for disturbing the pot with Astro here, but Anthro... I have you to thank for these totally entertaining posts!Bunnie, I think it's great you've studied Astrology some, it is interesting...I agree.

However, as much I'd like to spar with Anthro about it, his verbal skills make me look retarded... Blessings,

maureen

(This lady does not only look retarded. I am pretty well on my way to eruption now. The ground is trembling. No one apparently has any notion. Still the volcanic dome holds). This next is in response to a silly statement that candy is good for you.

Aside from traces of antioxidants in some chocolate which is far outweighed by the gigantic levels of refined sugar, there is NO credible evidence that commercial candy is a healthful food even in moderation. It would certainly be POSSIBLE to make a healthful candy. Comparatively speaking it would be prohibitively expensive, and would certainly not compete well in the marketplace.

Our children did not become sugar addicts on their own. Our obese and morbidly obese populations got that way because of the widespread acceptance of just such widespread unfounded notions. Just so, most of us regard things like astrology and palmistry and the occult to be a parlor game. Our casual and light hearted attitude is exactly what allows so many of these utterly valueless notions to gain acceptance in the world of -- general opinion.

How are we to deal with the emerging and accelerating problems we face with this sort of -- playthink? It is not necessary to forego a sense of humor. We will need all our humor and wit. But if we don't get some sort of handle on thoughtless goofiness, our prospects for a good future for all the species and the globe are dim.

Mixed in with the nonsense is a valid observation. MANY people DO literally take these superstitions very seriously. To that extent, their ability to reason is DEEPLY flawed. We don't all need to be intellectuals or innovators or indepenent of the authority figures that other people think are required for existence.

It is difficult to express how utterly disappointing this post, and this thread are. I see no evidence that anyone at all has been helped by it. It is not a rational thread, but an irrationalization thread.

(Now that is pretty clear in its' message don't you think? No such luck).

Anthro> Geez-Just try the natal chart. It is NOT your zodiac.I don't buy into the zodiac signs, either. But, the zodiac signs are just yoursun signs, that means the zodiac that everyone reads in the paper, is the position of the sun when you were born. What do you possibly have to lose by trying it? Since this was posted elsewhere,and others have already tried it, you might be the only one not to have entered your birth date and the location of your birth into the natal chart. Did you not read Bunnie's post telling how accurate it was for her? It was very accurate for me also. Again, I do not relate to my Zodiac sign, and once again, this is not the zodiac. Anyway, I always wondered about protestant ministers, it's really just another job for most of them, I suppose. Thanks, Anthro, for sharing that information about your father with us. (She is crossing threads here.) I was able to decipher your writing and determine that it was your father, because you very indirectly attempted not to just state that. I'm glad you confirmed my suspisions,after I read your post. It was very honest of you to come out and state that although he was a minister, he had no core. Very interesting. Try the natal chart, and see if the planets that lined up when you were born,made any difference in your whole lifelong stay on earth. ONe thing I have noticed: Anyone born during the time of Leo, will brag about it.If you ever read anything about Leo on the zodiacs, they have all the best virtues,they are the best this and the best that. It is all just made up fantasy. The whole zodiac thing is over done. So, I am always amused when a person who possesses none of the great qualities that are expounded on about Leos in the zodiac, tells you right out that they are a Leo, well, why wouldn't they? They wish they were everything attributed to a Leo, and who wouldn't? In fact, most Leos are nothing like whatever a Leo is supposed to be and yet, because it is so favorable, most Leos put it in their email address, put it on their license plates, put it on their bodies as tattoos. It's ridiculous. Next time you see a Leo boring you about how they are a true Leo, just laugh and remember, I told you, they're totatlly brainwashed by twhatever they read about their zodiac's sun sign. *laughs* Watch out for those Leos. (I have a sister who is one of them) Otherwise, zodiac reading can be fun or entertaining, especially if you read the magazine Vanity Fair, they have the most outrageous and hilarious horoscopes ever. So, If you want to see if the date and time and place you were born, had any effecton your life, go to: http://idiot link removed/freechart/ I am sure you will be surprised.

Then,

Anthro, must everything be disected? It would be a very boring world if we were all the same, Lighten up!

Blue-sky

And a crossthreaded piece of religious prejudice by an intolerant religiously zealous person. To illustrate, I can't insert the signature paragraph she uses, because she has repaced it with a long Latin phrase for the Christmas Holidays: Gaudete! Gaudete! Christus es natus, ex Maria, Virginae, Gaudete! 12th century.

She goes on:
Anyway, I always wondered about protestant ministers, it's really just another job for most of them, I suppose. As it is for many priests and other religious "leaders". There are good dedicated ministers and bad, and so with priests too. One huge difference lies within the celibacy requirement for priests, and we all know where that can lead! You can also include Doctors, Nurses, Specialists, etc. To many of them it is not a vocation either, but just a job.

Bunnie

(A few grains of truth slipped in there. But here I begin to get heavy handed.)

In the time we have spent on this absolute drivel we could have actually accomplished something.

I CAN'T AND WON'T WASTE MY TIME IN THIS FASHION. NATAL CHARTS ARE NOT SOMEHOW MORE REASONABLE NONSENSE THAN THE REST OF ASTROLOGY. IT IS SHOCKING THAT ANYONE COULD ACTUALLY BE CONVINCED THAT THERE IS ANY MERIT IN IT WHATSOEVER.

IT IS MIND POLLUTION! NOTHING MORE. THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SHRED OF TRUTH IN ANY OF IT. SOMETIMES EVEN FORTUNE COOKIES CAN SOUND PRESCIENT. IT IS JUST COINCIDENCE WHEN IT HAPPENS. AND NO, I AM NOT TAKING THIS TOO SERIOUSLY. THERE ARE GRAVE COSEQUENCES TO SUCH DEEP-SEATED SUPERSTITIONS, ABOVE AND BEYOND THE WASTE OF TIME.

THEY TRULY ROT THE MIND.I AM ABSOLUTELY DUMBFOUNDED THAT SO MANY OF YOU GIVE WEIGHT TO THESE INCREDIBLY FOOLISH NOTIONS. OTHERWISE SEEMINGLY RATIONAL PEOPLE!

IT IS NOT JUST FUN. IT IS INCREDIBLY DESTRUCTIVE. DOWN THROUGH HISTORY TERRIBLE THINGS HAVE HAPPENNED IN THE NAME OF THE OCCULT AND ASTROLOGY AND ASSURING THAT THERE ARE NOT WITCHES AMONG US. WHEN I WAS JUST A CHILD I HEARD PHRASES LIKE "BETTER DEAD THAN RED." THAT IS FANATICISM.

NO ONE SPOKE UP. DID ANY OF YOU HAVE ANY NOTION THAT AT THE END OF THE FIRST WORlD WAR, ALL SIDES AGREED THAT THERE WOULD BE A SPECIFIC TIME FOR THE ACTUAL CEASE FIRE. THE WAR WAS OVER, BUT COLLECTIVELY WE ALL KILLED ANOTHER TEN THOUSAND MEN AFTER THE WAR WAS OVER! THAT WAS "THE WAR TO END ALL WARS."

TWO DECADES LATER WE DWARFED THE GREAT WAR WITH WORLD WAR II. DID YOU KNOW THAT HITLER AND HIS HENCHMEN BELIEVED REALLY SERIOUSLY IN ASTROLOGY AND THE OCCULT? THERE ARE CONSEQUENCES TO THIS DRIVEL!

Now a little slippery drivel from Bunnie, pretending apology and reason, not worth the print here. Then a moderator comes on with some attempt to moderate what she herself has been so actively contributing to:

Anthro,

nobody is arguing that superstitions taken too seriously may lead to harm. Hell, many things taken too seriously, particularly by an unsound mind such as Hitler's, can lead to harm. I'm terribly sorry you've been so angered by the turn this thread has taken. I'm sure it wasn't intended to be anything but lighthearted.It always troubles me to lock a thread.

I feel that should be a last resort when things have gotten irrevocably out of hand. I'm not convinced this thread has reached that point, but I'd like to suggest that we all take some time to let the heat subside before adding anything further to this discussion.

totalfolly

And I said,

Hitler was not even the most notable of the unsound minds. And a whole nation followed him down the primrose path to utter ruin.

Stalin killed more of his people than anyone in history. And half a century after his totalitarian reign, fanatically abbetted by many millions of mindless zealots, his whole empire imploded catastrophically, all because of the superstition Communism.

Somehow, we have taken the notion to heart that Capitalism is working because the capitalistic systems did not collapse as quickly as Communism did, but it is crystal clear that the ultimate collapse is headed this way.

Communist China is still nominally a Communist state, but in practice, they are now as capitalistic or more so than any western country. They still pose the gravest possible danger to the rest of the world. It is unevaluated superstition which makes it so.

Since the collapse of the Soviet, with their populations starving and in utter ruin, more billionairs have sprouted than in any other place in the world. China too has its' stinking rich. And the utter hatred inspired by generations of mindless political dogma and superstition IS still quite operational. I believe it plays a central role in such things as the poisonous pet foods and the children's toys coated with lead paint. And the other crap they send us.

Japan after their crushing defeat, began their recovery by taking our scrap metals and making the cheapest trashiest junk that they could out of it, and selling it back to us at a profit. They were then, and down deep, they are still, as a culture, one of the most virulently prejudiced on the planet. They hide it quite effectively.

Back then, the soldiers, including high ranking officers, were still quite able to consider themselves honorable even during the genocidal Rape of Nanking and the Bataan Death March and the "Medical" experiments of infamy. The same sorts of experiments were done in the USSR, and yes, albeit on a smaller scale, in the United States as well. The Tuskegee Study went on for four decades, not ending until the 1970's if memory serves!

Over six hundred abjectly poor and illiterate black men were victims. Otherwise reasonable sounding American doctors, who thought they were ethical, WILLINGLY ran the program. To my knowledge, none of them were prosecuted for PRETENDING to treat black men with syphilis, while in fact DELIBERATELY and CLANDESTINELY withholding all treatment to study the course of the disease. None of them went to jail

In the 1920's you could routinely go into a shop in America and buy a photo postcard showing the LYNCHING of a black man. This too was acceptable. Perfectly normal.

When I was a boy, I was beaten by a deputy Sheriff in Del Norte County, California because of my refusal to speak my identity. The right to remain silent did not exist then. I had broken no law. It was a roust. I was fifteen. He was able to hurt me badly and never left a mark! That kind of skill does not come without practice. His behavior was acceptable and ROUTINE.

Today our great nation is debating at some length, the merits of torture during interrogation. Habeas Corpus is dead. Maybe it will come back to life. maybe not. All in aid of defending DEMOCRACY.

Waterboarding and the utter gratuitous humiliation of prisoners of war, is done in the name of freedom. We blamed a few low ranking individuals for these excesses.

Who do we blame when the CIA deliberately destroys tapes of torture, rather than properly turn them over to the investigating committees who have demanded them? I suppose a file clerk will ultimately take the heat.

The CIA has a black ops budget. What they do cannot be efficiently monitored at all. And even in such areas as military spending, where there is some level of visible accounting and oversight, HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE DISAPPEARED WITHOUT A TRACE!

That is not counting the billions lost in no bid contracts with predators like Halliburton and Blackwell. Between that and the generations-long habit of Congressional EARMARKING, the adding of BILLIONS in regional pork barrel spending because of the influence of a single powerful politician. Virtually all major politicians in both parties engage in this rape of the taxpayers. There is no effective oversight of these Earmarked funds at all. And politicians who do not earmark are rare indeed. Find them! Give them your support.

And here on this forum, if truth or debate makes too many people a little uneasy, let's consider just removing and locking the thread. It just can't be useful to have any friction or strife.

Let's just gag the people who feel strongly about anything! They are the ones making everyone uncomfortable. Let's just shut them off, right along with the obviously dangerous airheads and hucksters. Better to stand up for what you believe and fight it out. Actually participate in something other than dabbling and purely social c(s)hitchat.Sir George Bernard Shaw said something to the effect that the British are a free people... free to do anything that the government and popular public opinion allows. It is widespread public opinion that British medical treatment is free because it is largely paid for out of the public coffers.

The public revenues only seem to be a bottomless purse.The American dollar is undergoing an immense devaluation, plundered by all of the above mentioned things and a really badly thought out war. We have all been intercoursed against our will. That is no reason to outlaw intercourse itself. Just the forced part.

Now the Moderator comes back on in something of a total snit, but hides it well.

Truth and debate do not make me uneasy, Anthro. I may not be either as intelligent or as articulate as you, but I've participated in my share of debate when I've had strong feelings about the topic.Obviously, I've done the wrong thing by suggesting that this topic be shelved for the moment. I have, therefore, moved it to Rant and Rave, so you can feel free to debate as you wish.

totalfolly

Now this was, in one way, a good move. I didn't nitpick. But this too is serious censorship. You see, the Rant and Rave section is not accessible to the general public. It is a "behind closed doors" place, cutting the exposure of ideas very sharply.

This moment is a good time to point out one other significant thing. In the short nine days that this thread was open to the public, and the even shorter time that it was only in a smoke filled room, the thread existed for eight days.

I want to also say that my thread dealing with Prevention of Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses, which I personally developed in the 1980's has been viewed by over 11,000 people and that number continues to rise.

In spite of the asinine turn of the subject matter, in that eight days, it was viewed well over five hundred times. I can think of no other thread which has gained viewership anywhere near that size in such a short time, or even came close. Do I point out these things? No, I only say: What a good move. Another moderator who has been involved in all this comes on trying to chill everything out, but it is far too little, and far too full of convenient rationalizations to do much good at this point. She says,

Anthro...I would give you a hug, but I'm not sure if you do hugs. If you do, please accept my hug. Otherwise, know that I am thinking of you.

My high school creative writing class taught me more about life than any other high school class, and most college classes I've taken! (Well, most undergrad classes, anyway.) One thing that we discussed - in full - was the difference between being shock and pain.

It's OK to shock people. Sometimes it's frowned upon... and usually that's when it's the most necessary. But it's never OK to hurt people. (Nonsense on the face of it. We have wars, prisons, sports that maim and even kill. But she speaks in the social sense. Exactly how much idiocy must we accept in the name of the social contract to never speak up, to never be indiscreet enough to make a response against idiocy.)

I think this is something that you would agree with - I don't think you ever intend to hurt anyone. You care so much about humanity. You're not "downright mean" at all.The problem is trying to find that thin line between shocking someone and hurting them. Attacking other members is against forum rules, and for good reason. But it's sometimes hard to tell when you stop attacking someone's point of view and start attacking the person themself.

I mean, there's not a lot of difference between saying "that's stupid" and "you're stupid for thinking that." But the first is shocking. The second can be emotional abuse if you take it far enough.When TF suggested we calm down and refrain from posting for a little while, this was what she was trying to avoid. We don't mind controversy. (Oh, of course you do. You hate it like the plague. I don't need to argue the point. You are demonstating it fully right now, and will continue to do so. Where did the fighting spirit of the British go? Difficult to recognize you as the same courageous folks who fought so valiantly in the Second World War.)

We just don't want people to get hurt.Interestingly, the person I am most concerned will get hurt is you. I don't know if that's why TF posted what she did; we have not discussed it. But that is the reason I agreed with her, and agree with her still. I mean it. I'm concerned for your blood pressure. You're getting riled, and you seem to be more angry and frustrated than anything else...(she's right on this point, but it has little to do with my blood pressure, as one of my next comments will illustrate). that's not what this was supposed to be about.

I know that your blood pressure is none of my business, but dangit, I like you, Anthro! I care about you and I worry. From the way you're talking, it sounds like you're terrified for some of us... (Yes!) and terrified of some of us. (No.) It's your love of humanity that makes you so passionate. I appreciate that. But seriously, this stress that you're putting on yourself can't be good for you. I care about you and I don't like to see you terrified. I can promise you I'm not going to go on any genocidal rampages, and I'm pretty sure nobody else on here will either.As for the move to R&R... In my mind, R&R has two purposes.

One is to go and gripe. (I use it for that a lot.) But the other is for debate and controversy, and that being the case, I think this thread is exactly where it needs to be.Heh... if you want, I would not be opposed to a debate hall next to the grumpy lounge... it seems appropriate. If you like, we can start with the free speach vs. hurt feelings debate. (I know that it sounds awful to say that I'm more worried about someone's feelings than someone's right to speak. (@#$%&^! I can scarcely believe that statement came from an adult mouth!) I know that sounds bad. But I do feel that way, and I'll stand by it best I can. No, I'm not exactly dropping the gauntlet, but I am holding it out at arm's length like it was a dead cockroach. Lemme know if you're interested.)Strong opinions are good, and I feel confident that my fellow mods would agree with me when I say that we are not trying to supress them. We're just trying to keep people from hurting each other. That's all. (In actual fact, this post holds the tie for how much nonsense can be packed into a given number of words.) Bama.

(Four more paragraphs of absolute drivel)

Blessings

maureen

Now I respond, quite reasonably I think,

I am a strong advocate of hugs. Of simple touching really. We Americans, and I expect Brits and Canadians as well, have a pretty big "territorial imperative." That is to say that in general, we are more comfortable socially when people don't get too close. There is an imaginary boundary encircling us and we can become edgy if people "invade our space."

This is a cultural artifact which really may not be good for us at all. There are a variety of cultures, even in industrially advanced countries in which a conversation takes place between individuals who are comfortable at half the distance we require.Two American men might hug at a wedding or a funeral or something like that, but you can be pretty confident that it will be the hug of perhaps three seconds. They will conclude by patting each other on the back,silently mutually affirming that these are manly hugs with nothing deeper going on, then each backing up to the point at which the perimeters of their mutual safety zones barely touch.

My theory is that we all need more actual contact than we ourselves are really likely to allow in the typical social setting. We may be running at the same sort of deficit of touching as we are with sleep. Many of us are a couple hours short in our sleep cycle, and yet we resist lengthening our sleep time.

If touching is therapeutic, its' opposite clearly leads to failure to thrive manifested in a whole array of ways. My one-eyed cat Felice is quite territorial about my lap. Only Butchie, Felice's most remarkable son, can take over the lap space without Felice showing some irritation. These cats have pillows and blankets. Perfectly comfortable. But the pillows and blankets don't do much petting or touching.

Butchie had a hard time of it for the first half year of his life. He was handled a lot during this time. He recovered his health and thrived. I never wanted him to go outdoors and become King of the Colony. Too dangerous. He is now almost two years old, well muscled with big paws, about 15 pounds. I guess in British weight that would be a tad more than a stone.

My point is, his most important medicine was all the handling and touching he got. His less remarkable siblings are each prized by their owners. I am often regaled by stories of their personalities and so on but, though they all got considerable attention, they got half the physical attention that Butchie got because of his special needs.

Now as to helping and hurting. Let us say completely hypothetically that someone somewhere were to say something in a public venue about east and west and left and right that was not the slightest representation of the true facts as they are known to science, particularly that of ASTRONOMY and PHYSICS. (This was in response to some of Maureen's least understandable twaddle, which I cut because it was mind numbingly silly.)

Fortunately I do not need to go into hurtful detail. I can just say that putting something in reasonable sounding language does not make the details presented correct, or in the rising ascending thingamabob. We've got some initiators, planets moving east and west. There are some left and right sides, and if the planets are balanced, so are you! Wow! Seems so obvious! Do the math! All this time I actually thought that east and west actually designated directions which were perpendicular to a planets axis. It could also represent the orbit of the planets around the sun, because they too travel, roughly speaking, in a direction largely perpendicular to the polar axis of the sun. No mention of the deviations from the ecliptic of some of those planetary orbits. Now, with this new information, I must go back to the beginning and relearn what I thought I always knew about the solar system and the Universe. Hmmm, Black Holes and Supernovas. They must affect things in a big way. Some supernovas have masses and energies of a billion suns, released cataclysmically in a matter of weeks. Ah! Maybe that's what caused these charts to flip everthing upside down, making North down and South up, when the whole scientific world thought it was the other way around.

Let us all flip our map of the world upside down and learn to read the words backwards and upside down. And the balancing if the planets... I never tried to do that. And I never realized that astrology even casts light on the great philosophical mysteries of life. Purpose. Death. The existential verities. Boy, gotta have some of that! Do the math! It does hurt to find out that something you lent credence to turns out to be valueless and and irredeemable waste of valuable time and effort. Take it from an inventor who does not always get it right. But it is no aid to the starving anorexic when everybody politely lets her starve to death because she simply cannot come to grips with her faulty self image and aberrations on reality, the obsessive compulsive who cannot turn the condition around though it is destroying health and well being. To actually help her would be too rude! Where would we be if we just gently reminded the addict, the alcoholic, the smoker, that maybe it might be a good idea to consider quiting some day in the hypothetical future. Come to think of it, we would be right were we are right now.

And sometimes the law steps in and Boy! are they impolite about it. Or death makes a premature appearance. Now that is carrying impoliteness to an extreme. Talk about hurtful! It is virtually always painful for the addict to stop, or someone with a deep mental abberation to face it.

Would you force your child to take a medicine you knew would help him recover if he took it? Oh, how cruel!

Now as to my blood pressure. I had something of a crisis in morale. I dealt with it by expressing myself, rather candidly and perhaps even sharply, when it became more and more apparent that I was accomplishing almost nothing.

I have been known to get a little impatient with one of my chess students as well. Not often, but at strategic points when I can see the error of the thought process has frozen the development the student was otherwise capable of making.

Was Christ a hurtful fellow? Did he not go into the temple, this gentle loving man, perfect I hear, and ask the moneychangers to please find another place than a temple of worship for them to conduct their commerce? That would have been the nice, the loving thing to do.

Maybe I read the story wrong, but did he not TRASH their businesses in an overt act of lawless vandalism? Did he not SCREAM at them in something approaching TRUE anger?

How is it possible that this perfect fellow did not do the nice thing? Is it possible that his truth required a more vigorous exposition than niceness would allow? I am quite sure the moneychangers found these behaviors quite hurtful. But some of them may have stopped setting up business in the temple permanently.

As a matter of fact this one example changed things right up to the present day. No moneychanging in the churches. Tell you what. Next time you go to church, throw a fifty in the collection plate and take out thirty in change. See if you don't get some dirty looks from the ushers.

Dental Horror Stories

2007-12-22T10:41:00.000-06:00

In the guise of news, this was one of the cover features that first popped up on Internet Explorer today. We see a picture of a perfectly reasonable looking fellow of perhaps sixty. It's only purpose, as far as I can tell is to get the viewer to go to AOL Business and Finance. But we don't know it yet. It is labeled Lifestyle, and we get the notion that there might be some real information in there somewhere. No such luck. This is all there is to the story.

Cheapest Ex I Know
Submitted by: LadyCroibhriste
I happened to notice when I was visiting my ex-mother-in-law that it appeared my ex-husband was wearing some sort of dental thing in his mouth. I asked my her and she said no ... it was Super Glue. His top teeth had so many pinhole cavities, chips and cracks that he kept "resurfacing" his top teeth until it built up. It looked like one of those teeth protectors that kids wear when they play football except it tobacco-brown. Reason no. 1758 why I'm not married to that man.

Okay, so now we have it. Now, anyone who is divorced is entitled to have, and even voice their perspectives on the trauma of the experience. It can even be said to be a part of the healing process. Since I have been divorced for a very long time, the sensitive aspects of it all are really only a distant memory. This is sort of a public service for those who think of marriage as a permanent bonding, as I did. For the record, my first marriage lasted a decade.

Even so, once in a while, one hears a bit of news that is startling almost to the point of boggling the mind. The ex of ancient history, with whom the only thing I have in common, as far as I can tell, is two adult boys now reaching middle age, and in whom I have ordinate pride. The ex would be sixty some odd years old. I shall not editorialize here. She is the mother of my sons. I shall simply state what I heard, that she was preparing to spend about $50.000 to get a mouthfull of implanted teeth. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that. I am told that one can get an entire set of dentures for something like a thousand or so. Okay I won't pursue that line of thinking further.

Now as it happens, I don't go to the dentist much, and I am more and more glad that my contact with dentists in general has been kept to a minimum. I will soon be much more explicit about why, in my dialogue-essays called Biting the Dentist in the General Health section of a Health oriented forum. Actually, I should do that now, since I have become less and less thrilled about my participation there. But that is another story.

A little of this material is already published here under the same title Biting the Dentist, something of a horror story, but here are some more of the relevant details, which support my contention that we are under the control of a medical system which plunders us to the point of ruin, in the name of good health, which more often than not does not result from the procedures we have been subjected to. So here is the series in which I turn my attention to super glue as a dental reconstructive material. Here are my comments on the thread so far. I have condensed it, cutting repetitions for those who apparently can't read with comprehension.

Cavities can be serious problems. Their impact goes well beyond the hole in the enamel and the pain that ultimately results when the tooth nerve suffers damage. Cavities can be on exposed portions of the tooth or under bridges or beneath the gum line. I am not concerning myself here with simple, easy to reach cavities. Just get the cavity filled and brush and floss more to reduce future problems. The economic consequences of simple cavities are a minor unpleasantness, but bearable.

My current problem, which extends over many years, apparently can not be reached by conventional methods of dentistry without first destroying the entire bridge (according to the dentist). I question that. I'm not going to get on a rant here. But in this case, I have spent almost $300 (a discount dental program, X-ray, and a minor (15 second) limited exam consisting of touching the offending tooth with a latex covered finger. Now I need to come up with $1100 and change (half) for work to commence, and another like amount, two weeks later. So, about $2500 total.

Deep in the throes of pain, I was considering doing it. But even if I did, it would just be the beginning . Although I explicitly invited the dentist to consider various options, including possibly experimental ones, he came back with one single option; the replacement of the offending tooth with a titanium post and a new bridge. But the bridge is being held by TWO anchoring teeth. What the dentist suggested did nothing to address the very real likelihood that soon, or perhaps four or five years downstream, this second tooth would have to be replaced, requiring the same sort of procedure (and another two and a half grand). Whereas to replace both post teeth with titanium now might cost three grand now, but might last me twenty or thirty years or more. The dentist did not mention this option.

The following is experimental. I'm doing it for myself. I am finding it effective so far. It may have problems I don't see. ANY dentist, including mine, is invited to post any dissent or other objection to what I am doing to attempt to stave off the work that has been proposed as my only option.

One step which I might employ may be technically illegal. I would not knowingly advise anyone to break the law. It is probably not legal to use any antibiotic for any purpose other than that for which it is prescribed. It is probably not legal to retain any remainder of an antibiotic for use after the expiration date. It is certainly not legal to use anyone else's prescription. So I explicitly do NOT advise anyone to open any such antibiotic capsule and pour a bit of it into a spoon. I do NOT advise anyone to dampen a cotton swab, coat it with some of the hypothetical antibiotic and apply it to the affected cavity itself if possible, or apply it to the gumline area of the effected tooth.So after you have NOT done this, press gently up and down on the tooth repeatedly so that the imaginary and unspecified antibiotic will have a chance to work its way slowly down under the gum, ultimately getting down to the diseased pocket of periodontal disease where the bacteria are munching on the tooth and nerve.

Now, I have (NOT) done this perhaps two or three times a day. And of course, before I didn't do this, I did clean my teeth, and floss, and I even got under the bridge with one of those very useful tiny conical brushes designed to clean under permanent dental appliances. You might ask "How do you know that the antibiotic gets way down into the area where it is needed to fight the infection?" Simple. The bacteria that is down in there got down in there. The bacteria did not spontaneously appear by immaculate conception. A whole zoo of bacteria are all swimming around in the saliva. When you chew, the subtle imperceptible movement of the tooth in its socket eventually allows the bacteria-laden saliva to get down to the site of the damage to continue the destruction.

So, after we have not done this part of the procedure, we can proceed to the part of the procedure involving hydrogen peroxide. It is legal to wash your mouth out with hydrogen peroxide. This oxidant is not good for you or your intestinal tract. You do not want to be sloshing around a whole mouthful of hydrogen peroxide in your mouth. You want to work very hard to minimize even the traces that ultimately go down your throat. So you apply it with a cotton swab only at the gum line of the teeth you want to treat, squish the teeth up and down for a few minutes, getting that peroxided saliva mix down to the deep infected areas. Now after doing this for a while, without squishing your teeth any more, you rinse the mouth several times with clear water to clear out the hydrogen peroxide in the rest of the mouth that would otherwise wind up going down your throat and have to be processed and broken down by your body. Do you do this right before you go to a banquet? No. You do it when you are not planning on eating for several hours. Do you drink soda pop or other beverages high in sugar? No. You do it when you intend only to drink water with some lemon or lime juice (but no sugar) or dry wine or (black) coffee or very Hard Cider or tea without sugar. You do it when you do not intend to snack for a considerable time on snack foods of any kind which contain carbohydrates. This procedure is not going to work for continuous snackers. It will, if I am any example, work well for those who eat one, two or three meals a day, who do this immediately after each feeding.

(Someone asked if I intended to find a new dentist.)

Aloha, the truth is, I don't know. It is very unlikely that this particular dentist will get the work. I do believe that it would be possible to salvage the existing bridge. That option was not presented. The removal of both teeth acting as posts might have been required, but the additional charge for a second implanted titanium post would have compensated the merchant handsomely for his efforts.

The straws that broke the camels back in this case were the fifteen-second minor exam, and the failure to provide a refill of pain medication it a timely way. These two clues suggested that this particular person's main interest was pecuniary. I do not believe he is an isolated example in his industry. But neither do I believe that most dentists should be painted with this same brush. Just many.

I have already gotten seven additional years out of this bridge after another dentist said it was on it's last legs. This other dentist also referred me to an oral surgeon for a full-mouth of surgical gum-stripping, ("or I would be losing all my teeth"). I did not elect to go to the oral surgeon. This dentist also requested that he be allowed to pull two molars "which were not doing me any good," just because he was extracting another tooth near the two molars. These two molars are still functioning all these years later, without trouble.

Ultimately, this dentist was explicitly fired and I have expressed my opinion of him several hundred times. But I really have no clue how long I can make this tooth work. The method I am using, which I have outlined in this thread, has evolved considerably in the past seven years, both in detail and in frequency of use. Only time will tell.
It has now been slightly more than three months since my one visit to this dentist. During that visit I received no treatment what-so-ever. Just a small quantity of pain pills (a few days supply). Although I made them last for over two weeks, the dentist fought me on the renewal of the perscription. It was his stated perspective that it would do me no good to delay the "inevitable" extremely lucrative repair work. As time goes on I grow angrier with this seeming predator. I am more and more inclined to determine how often dentists actually DO remove bridges such as mine intact and return it to its position in the mouth rather than destroying and replacing it. His representation that this could not be done may be entirely fraudulent. If so, he does not serve his profession any better than he served his patient and he deserves to be exposed and punished. We need to keep the healing professions honest if we can.

(Answers to several questions. This thread has recieved about 4000 views so far.)

These are the things that formed my resolve to attempt to find an alternative to the ministrations of this rapacious individual. So what came out of it? New knowledge. I never would have been moved to devise new ways to help myself, had this dentist not abused his power over me. I thought I had reached the limit. I had already made this bridge work for seven years since the previous scoundrel. This new dentist really did have me over a barrel. I was convinced at the time that there was no hope of staving off the work. What I was NOT convinced about was that this new plan of what must be done was the sole option available. I specifically asked him to present all options, even including those which might not be standard practice. If I am correct, this fellow is a criminal preying on people who can't defend themselves. I doubt that he can be stopped. He has the required license to do it. The other one from seven or eight years ago has built himself a fancy new office and he clearly prospers in spite of my word of mouth costing him perhaps a few dozen customers. But I had several visits with him. His "mistakes" were made over an extended period of time and were made with greater care. I am pleased now that although I fired him, I did it without venom or rancor or even sarcasm. I simply said "Your services are no longer required." This one deserves more than that, but I don't yet know exactly what.As to pain. When I went to the dentist, I could not put the slightest pressure on that bridge. I could not have chewed a stewed prune. I just finished GNAWING on a big slab of beef jerky made by my own efforts. (Ichabod can not even be in the same room when I start slicing beef.) No pain. I am now not thinking of staving things off for days or weeks. It is now back to months or years perhaps. I believe your dentist is right in what he says about alcoholic beverages being of some benefit to the oral environment. I don't know if he has stated it with enough precision though. I am sure he doesn't intend for you to frequently slosh straight Ronrico 151 around your mouth. This is about 3/4 straight pure alcohol. 80 proof is only 4/10 pure alcohol. I feel sure this is what your dentist had in mind. 151 or PGA (196) are much too strong for the oral environment. And even with 80 proof, a scant teaspoon once or twice a day would be sufficient. For a comparison, many mouthwashes are about 50 proof. I would also advise that you only do this immediately after brushing and flossing well. Make sure you clean up the tongue as well. Easy to forget, but very worthwhile. If you show this to your dentist, I anticipate he will revise and extend his remarks. While he is at it, he may even review my other remarks to determine if I am off the mark in any particular. I would welcome his input.The pain I had when I went to this dentist incorporated the right ear. It has not returned. Yet.

It is worthy of note that it has been half a year since I saw the dentist, and that I was not treated in any way. The visit was diagnostic. Other than giving the estimate (more than two thousand dollars) the dentist did nothing whatsoever. In the intervening time, applying my own methods, the pain, which was substantial, has entirely disappeared.

The underlying infection has entirely disappeared. And more than two grand of my money has NOT disappeared. (I am about $300 lighter due to this dental incident. No actual repair of any sort was done.) I can grit my teeth now. I know that because when I think of this dentist, that is what I do.

It has now been a little more than half a year since my little experiment that has allowed me to keep more than two thousand dollars of my money in my pocket rather than put it in my dentists pocket for a half days work. A few weeks ago I reviewed my progress. What I still wanted to know was, exactly how much of what I was doing was really necessary to the procedure?

As an example, how regularly did the topical antibiotic need to be used? How small an amount of H2O2 would suffice to keep the infection totally in remission? How little alcohol would satisfactorily do the job? Each of these things has some downside, so it was important to find the minimums which would get the job done.

There was also some small possibility that the infected nerve had actually had the time to fully heal. My guess was that this was not very likely. Of course the way to test this is just to withdraw the treatment(s) selectively and see what happens.

The topical application of the antibiotics were the least regularly used portion of the program. When the original crisis was over, I was only applying a drop or two of liquid multi-component broad-spectrum antibiotic to the affected post tooth, or a few mg of specific single antibiotic powder.

The alcohol was applied three times a week in the routine.And the H2O2 (3%) was applied in very small amounts by cotton swab or a very tiny conical brush designed to get under a permanently affixed bridge.I suspended these treatments and just brushed and flossed normally after each meal. At the end of four days, the infection was returning. Pain which had pretty entirely abated for about five months was beginning to return. When it reached about 20% of what it had been at its' worst, I started the treatments again.

It was very clear that in another week or less I would have a full-blown emergency.It took me about another week to get rid of the problem. Now I have a much clearer idea of just what level of treatment is required to get the job done. I can only wonder why, of the many thousands of dentists practicing, to my knowledge, no one is using such a program to bring relief to their patients that costs only pennies instead of thousands of dollars. We can't really expect them to take such a big slice out of their expected income, can we?

If you happen to be a dentist who takes exception to my remarks, I renew my invitation to stop lurking and show me the error of my ways, either here on this forum or on my blog. I promise to play nice.

It has now been SEVEN months since the diagnosis by this dentist/merchant/conman/crook. (For details, just go to the beginning of this thread and read until you get caught up.) My current regime has resolved down to; brushing and flossing after dining, followed by the application of a single cotton swab worth of 3% Hydrogen Peroxide, a total volume of perhaps four drops. That is to say, the more aggressive steps I originally used do not appear to be necessary on any sort of regular basis.

Actually, if I were not involved in a pitched battle in California involving several enforcement agencies and private companies and various private individuals and conspirators not fully identified due to negligence and/or design, I would already be seeking an official review of this dentist. As to the California matter, I doubt that it has broken the surface of public awareness yet. I expect that some of my good friends who have the skills, and who like to occasionally root around on the Internet to see what I am up to, will let me know by private message when the ripples I am currently making become bigger waves, detectable by those with more Internet savvy than I.

I only regret that, because I am busy, this particular dentist is free to continue to prey upon an unsuspecting public for some time into the future. But the longer I go without the costly emergency repairs he ordered, the worse his advice is demonstrated to be. Eventually, it should be obvious even to a State Dental Review Board.

I want to emphasize that I do not want to tar and feather the profession of dentistry. Certainly the state of people's mouths today is far better than it was a generation or two ago. And I know with certainty that there are wonderful, ethical, hard working conscientious dentists out there because I stumbled across one a number of years ago. I was so delighted with him that I never miss any opportunity to reccomend him to the people in his area. For the record, Anthropositor has the highest esteem for Don Simmons, dentist par excellence, an exemplary human being, accessible to ideas which differ from his own, and a credit to his profession and his species.

And certainly, if he was a member of the discount dental program to which I ill-advisedly subscribed, he would have been my ONLY choice as a dental service provider.The dentist whose actions I deplore and whose services I would not use again CONTRASTS in every important particular with Don Simmons. The dentist who is the central subject of this thread has a last name which begins with the letter K, who operates more than one location. And since I don't want any other dentist who has a last name beginning with K to be misidentified, I will even say that the second letter in his last name is not a vowel and can be found in the first ten letters of the alphabet.

I specifically and pointedly asked him to give me all the various options available to me, even if they were not mainstream ideas. He gave one single option only. I am not a dentist and I can think of several mainstream options. The methods I have used in all this intervening time are not mainstream, but devised empirically by myself in response to an emergency. It is a surprise to me that they have worked so well, for so long a time. This dentist provided me with no useful service whatsoever. He did not even detail what supported his proposed repair rationale, based on an exam which was beyond brief. It was virtually instantaneous. The touch of a single latex covered finger and a glance at a bite-wing X-ray. I spent more time writing the check to pay him than he spent on my mouth. No sense rehashing these details. They are all at the beginning of this thread.

I would prefer never to have met this dentist. Before all this is over, perhaps he will feel the same about me. But I certainly look forward to any insights your dentists might have for me and I thank you for your interest.

New news with regard to the bridge damage which started this thread over a year ago. The initial details are all at the top of the thread.

About ten days ago I bit into a hard pretzel. Got a sharp stabbing pain in the front post tooth of the bridge, the one that the dentist was not planning to do any real work on. Then over the rest of the day there were perhaps another half dozen incidents. This differed considerably from the original pain, which was not intermittant, not stabbing and continuous, and varied directly proportionally to the amount of pressure applied to the back portion of the bridge, affected by the back tooth.This recent event seemed to involve the other tooth to which the bridge was attached. The front tooth. A tooth which was never mentioned by the dentist and which was not involved in his $2200+ planned repair.

Since there is such a thing as referred pain, that is pain that seems to emanate from a point other than where it actually occurred, I cannot say with absolute certainty that the whole problem is with the front tooth.I could not replicate the pain by manipulating the direction of pressure applied to the bridge. But periodically during the next few days, it would recur while I was chewing something challenging.I had not previously directly treated that front anchor tooth to the bridge since I had not been informed that there might be a problem with it.

It got, at most, only a residual fraction of the treatments which I applied to the back post tooth. The dentist had been prepared only to destroy the bridge (not salvage it), pull the back tooth, replace it with a titanium post, and create an entirely new bridge which would continue to use that front tooth as the other anchor. It strikes me that if I had accepted his diagnosis and his plan of repair, I could be in exactly the same position now, a bit more than a year later, and potentially pour another couple of grand down a rathole.

In any case, I began intensively treating the front tooth, using the same methods I had originally applied to the back tooth, plus two new and very interesting experimental modalities. The pains which were happenning with some frequency while chewing, have not recurred in the past three days at all. A good sign.I have, however, developed an extreme superstition about being treated by a dentist whose name begins with the letters Kh. Perhaps the single bite-wing X-ray he took did not include the front tooth. I do not know since he never showed me the X-ray. I do not know if he is a crook, a fool, or just occasionally incompetent, or a combination of these things, but there are plenty of impediments to finding out. I do not have any confidence that there is a dental board of review which would take any interest in investigating the matter.

It's been about three weeks since the trouble with the front anchor tooth in the bridge. The pain was intense and stabbing but only occurred transiently once in a while when I bit something wrong.

This was quite different than the ongoing pain of the rear tooth thirteen or fourteen months ago, which was more steady and increased greatly with every pressure applied to the tooth. I favored the bridge when I ate for a period of weeks. On the second tooth, the stabbing pain seemed to abate maybe 90% in a week or so. Then in the following week I got a few signals that the tooth would zap me again if I wasn't careful. Then in this past few days, there have been no indicators of problems.

I hardly used any topical antibiotic after the first week. The central part of the treatment was just an H2O2 swab right after I cleansed the mouth after eating. Aside from the recent pains in the tooth, there have been no other signs of periodontal disease at all. No halitosis. No bleeding gums ever, for years. The referral to an oral surgeon more than ten years ago, that I never listened to? So much for that nonsense.

I have a lot of curiosity about what is happenning with the front post tooth. The major sharp stabbing pain that I had for some days every once in a while has not returned, but I still get a small indicator of it, maybe 1/20 of the pain might happen every couple of days if I'm gnawing on something hard.It also occurred to me that the occasional indicator might be occurring because the bridge is solidly bonded to that tooth and has no give to it, no shock absorbtion as it were.Another factor here is that the dentist said the bridge could not be removed without destroying it. He was quite clear and unequivocal in this assessment. The bridge could not be reused.

So if I take it off intact, what does that say about Dr. Kh-----?Well, I guess I'll go remove some teeth. Always fun to do some real research. I'm hoping to get the bridge off without pulling or weakening the post teeth too much.Uh, I think I should say something here about maybe you shouldn't try this sort of thing without a pretty good grounding in anatomy. I anticipate a certain amount of... unpleasantness.

Actually, even the transient pains of the front post tooth have disappeared. Trouble is if I leave those two post teeth in their current unreinforced, unsealed condition, one or both are just going to break off. For that matter, the breakage is likely to happen anyway eventually. Probably sooner than later. Probably both posts. Without both anchors the bridge can't chew.But for now, I'm chewing. Not gnawing. Just chewing. If the chewing fails, that's an opportunity to figure out how to grow a strong stalagmite on whatever fragment of tooth may remain. Let me see. I want to avoid drilling and tapping and putting in a screw. Even though that would be about as strong as the jawbone. I know! I'll experiment with the stalactite that I talk about over on Broken Fang. Making it very strong before it breaks laterally will be very helpful whatever the ultimate status of the bridge on the lower jaw.

Okay, that's enough for now. I will get into some of the details of how to use super glue to do dental repairs next time. If yu are in a hurry, you can go over to the other forum and read the thread Broken Fang.

Biting The Dentist

2007-12-03T00:04:00.000-06:00

On Skin Cell Forum I have a thread called Biting The Dentist. Sort of an indictment of a dentist. I don't do links much but if you want the backstory go to
http://www.skincell.org/community/index.php/topic,21164.0.html

I have a lot of curiosity about what is happenning with the front post tooth. The major sharp stabbing pain that I had for some days every once in a while has not returned, but I still get a small indicator of it, maybe 1/20 of the pain might happen every couple of days if I'm gnawing on something hard.

It also occurred to me that the occasional indicator might be occurring because the bridge is solidly bonded to that tooth and has no give to it, no shock absorbtion as it were. Another factor here is that the dentist said the bridge could not be removed without destroying it. He was quite clear and unequivocal in this assessment. The bridge could not be reused. So if I take it off intact, what does that say about Dr. Kh-----?

Well, I guess I'll go remove some teeth. Always fun to do some real research. I'm hoping to get the bridge off without pulling or weakening the post teeth too much.

Uh, I think I should say something here about maybe you shouldn't try this sort of thing without a pretty good grounding in anatomy. I anticipate a certain amount of... unpleasantness.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Well, I removed the bridge last night. Pretty nice bridge. I don't know how long I have had it, but I doubt it cost me more than $500 for the three units. Otherwise I would have remembered. So maybe forty years or so. But whoever or where ever that dentist was, I guess he was one of the good guys, or he had a good toothmaking subcontractor working for him.

I took my time and had a few timeouts so that I wouldn't get impatient and overly aggressive. I guess it took about an hour. The bridge itself was absolutely pristine. As pretty as when it was new.

I can't say the same for the posts though. I don't think they will be doing a lot more gnawing before one or the other gives up the ghost. Anyway, I did a deep sterilization (H2O2 3% soak followed by virtually pure C2H5OH).

Next, I inserted about a 2mm ball of the better of the two temporary filling materials I was talking about over on the thread Broken Fang. Then I pressed it back into position after I scrubbed the posts in the same way.

If I were to bet on it, I would be betting that one or the other of those posts will give out in a matter of days, even with the give of the filling material, since I chew as aggressively as I do.

So I guess all I got out of this little exercise is that the bridge COULD be removed intact, contrary to what the dentist told me. That and the ability to carefully examine the underlying anchor teeth. At least, for now, I will be able to remove the bridge with virtually no trouble if I feel the need to.

An Imperfect End

2007-11-28T01:48:00.000-06:00

This is a post of an Emergency Room Doctor
An imperfect end
Posted by GruntDoc on August 4th, 2007
Frankly, this is a bit gross. I’ll put the post below the fold, and read at your own risk. You’ve been warned.

Removal of a rectal foreign body is simple, really: Locate it, grasp it firmly, break the ’suction’, and pull. Seems simple, and like most seemingly simple tasks it’s harder to accomplish in real life.

The patient of a colleague had just such a complaint, and I willingly agreed to help remove the object, which we had an x-ray of, a common vibrator. On delegation of tasks my colleague would be in charge of the patients’ sedation, and I was on removal duty.
I had all I needed, a plastic and lit vaginal speculum, ring forceps, some nice plastic tubing (for suction relief), and lube.
The patient was suitably sedated, and it was time to proceed. The speculum was inserted, and no foreign body was visible until the anterior abdomen was compressed, and !viola!, it appeared. I saw a small area of man made black color, and the unmistakable edge of a condom on its edge. I carefully grabbed the rim of the condom (at the near-limit of the reach of the ring forceps, probably 8 inches in) and began to hopefully tug.

Hope may well float but condoms just break, and when they do they recoil in both directions with fervor and throw-off anything attached. In this case I protected the team by taking the hit squarely in the face. (This has become something of a topic of conversation in my ED).
No, I wasn’t wearing protection beyond beyond my usual spectacles. I did try another two times to grasp the end of the vibrator with the ring forceps, but could never get enough of a hold to even attempt to break the suction (due to the tapered design of the end of the vibrator) (which design I learned from reading the Internet).

In retrospect, a tenaculum might have allowed a better grip on the vibrator, but given our thorough attempts the surgeon on call took the patient in and the object out.
I washed my face at the sink for a nice, long time, and have thought about getting a tenaculum prior to the next time. Oh, and one of those face mask-shield things.

My comment:
Was the patient in some sort of serious pain? Was there some sort of impaction of feces, immovable obstruction, or other circumstance that posed some dangers? If not, I'm wondering if perhaps giving her instructions to try eating three or four bananas with a few bowls of all bran or oatmeal might be worth a try. From your description of the rambling device, there was no real impediment to it making a normal exit on its' own, particularly if you could apply some lubrication and perhaps even turn the device on.

And I ended it there. Did I play nice or what? Know what happened? My comment got stuck in a spam filter. Is that strange?

Anybody have any notion what the costs might have been? Must be a few grand anyway. Ooops. No, a lot more. They brought in the surgeon. It would have been a few grand if she had expelled it while the ER doctor watched and grabbed it at the end. Sure wish I knew what sort of surgery was performed. I do hope the poor lady is all right. With any luck at all it's just an unobtrusive scar, like an epesiotomy. Who knows? Maybe the surgeon did a tiny tune up while he was at it. What's the tab on that? Let's say in round numbers, $5000. I really don't have any idea. Leave that aside. A trifle.

What about the risk of post-operative infection? There must be some logical reason, some piece of essential information I have missed, that absolutely forced these doctors to cut her open right away in the area with the highest number of potentially pathogenic organisms in the body, instead of allowing nature to take its' course. Here is another question. That Xray. Is it possible that this young lady was unaware that it was a vibrator up there? Was she somehow incapable of describing it? And if so, why on Earth was the Xray needed? Ah, medicine is such a mystery.

Broken Fang

2007-11-18T16:51:00.000-06:00

This post is about the upper right canine tooth. The thread "Biting the Dentist" is about a bridge on the lower jaw on the same side. The front tooth on the bridge which recently gave me some trouble that I have included in that thread is the lower canine, right below the tooth which is the subject of this thread.

About three weeks ago, about half of the posterior face of this tooth broke off, a ^ shaped segment which extended up to the gum line. No pain whatsoever attended this incident.

My sole concern was that this tooth takes a lot of ripping and chewing action, and that the structural integrity, the strength of the tooth, was probably sharply reduced, increasing the likelyhood of further breakage.

Perhaps a simple mercury amalgam filling could restore much of the strength of the tooth. I suppose that would cost 1 or 2 hundred dollars in total. Or even a plastic filling which would be more aesthetically pleasing, might also provide some additional structural support. Such a plastic filling would be a two component material, the plastic ingredients and a catalyst.

If I was guessing, I would say that the catalyst might be very similar to that used for an ordinary polyester resin; methyl ethyl ketone peroxide (MEKP) in some reduced strength form.

The trouble is, this dental material is entirely unavailable to me. I not only can't find it, it may be illegal for me to purchase it or use it myself. If I were able to acquire it, I could very likely make a filling that might last six months to ten years, or even for life.

What IS available to me are "temporary" fillings, specifically designed to self-destruct in a very short period of time. They are a one-component product. By comparison to a dentist, they are quite economical. Almost 2g for about three dollars. And if I am not too wasteful, this is enough for four or five fillings. Now, less than $1 per filling is not bad, unless you factor in that these fillings are DESIGNED with deliberately "planned obsolescence" in mind. They WILL begin eroding on the very first day applied.

Let us look at the ingredients of the first one I tried. Zinc Oxide Powder, Calcium Sulfate, Petroleum Jelly, Potassium Alum, Paraffin,Aluminum Sulphate, Aluminum Phosphate, Menthol Crystals, Eugenol, Yellow Iron Oxide.

By weight, the third and fifth most abundant ingredient, PETROLEUM JELLY and PARAFFIN are an oil and a wax. Given several hours to set, this material gives the impression that it is a solid, but in no sense does it confer any structural integrity or strength to the tooth. The engineers of this tooth repair material WANT IT TO BREAK DOWN in less than a week in a typical cavity. In my particular case, the broken portion of the tooth is a load-bearing surface. I can expect to get a day or two out of it, or three if I don't chew. I am fond of chewing.

Even the eugenol is from Oil of Clove, but at least it has an anesthetic purpose.

Now let's look at the other product I found. This one costs an extra thirty cents and is perhaps a smidgen better.
Ingredients: Zinc Oxide B.P., Calcium Sulphate, Synthetic Plasticizer, Potassium Sulphate, Glass Ionomer.

You might get an extra day or two of use out of this one, but it too is DESIGNED TO BREAK DOWN VERY QUICKLY. (This package reads "10x Longer Lasting." Perhaps they mean compared to using chewing gum.)

Now here is the punchline. Both of these products are have the same Brand Name on them. The first one is made in Italy. The second one is made in the USA and packaged in Vietnam. Both carry the same Information phone number. I am not even going to go into the absolute silliness in their directions for use (both products).

Both fillings are complete crap. I will have to make my own, but I will wait until I use these up. (Probably less than a month, even though I will tinker with them a bit to try to extend the product life a bit.)

Lurkers, Whores and Dunces

2007-11-13T16:08:00.000-06:00

A few observations. Down through history writing has been a solitary activity. Occasionally you will see a book with two authors. Probably, for every one of these that makes it to print, a dozen fail to make it as far as chapter three.

I have done a certain amount of ghost writing and editing of the works of others over the decades. I have never allowed my name to be coupled to the originator of the work; not on the book jacket, not in the preface, introduction or the acknowledgement. The credit or blame for the work belong to the author. I have done nothing more than landscape the intellectual garden.

I don’t often pair up with the author and help hammer out the lines as they form. It is not because I don’t like the idea of writing cooperatively. I like it very much. It just doesn’t usually turn out to be a painless experience.

When I first started looking at the internet forums I had considerable hope that some dialogues and multi-logues would develop in which the various participants would contribute meaningfully to further understanding. I had not anticipated so much jibber and jabber, so little real structure and meaning.

That is not to say that on a health related forum for example, you can not get useful and practical information. You are just going to have to search through a great deal of material of no value whatsoever. Social chat. Illogic of substantial proportions. And things that are just patently irrefutably wrong.

Of the forums I visited, only one prompted me to stick around for more than a few weeks. Skin Cell Forum. In the past 600 days, I have posted on a wide variety of different subjects in some depth. Close to 1300 posts so far, mostly on general health , treatment and nutrition. Few of my posts were just chat.

Then early this year I thought that maybe if I put up Eureka Ideas Unlimited as a blog, I would increase the scope of the previously local think-tank of collegiate level intellectuals and innovators discussing pressing problems and potential solutions. Almost a year has gone by. Not a single meaningful extended dialogue has developed.

My early notion that forums and blogs might to some extent remedy the solitary element of writing did not pan out. That is probably in part due to my lack of internet skills with tags, meta-tags, attracting search engine spiders, and so on.

Another thing may contribute to the lack of participation, and this is my fault for sure. Although I deal with ideas, problems needing solution, invention or innovation and creativity, and other notions for which the facts are still not entirely known, my opinions are sometimes strongly held, and rather sharply expressed.

I am not always successful in toning this down. For me, a certain amount of debate sharpens the wits and keeps us on our toes. I will sometimes even defend a working hypothesis almost as if it were an entirely self-evident proven fact. My opponent/colleague should go for the throat anytime I do this.

On the good side, the blog is a good place for me to further polish some of the ideas I am currently working on , and is also a convenient place for me to expose the ideas and discoveries that no longer seem speculative, in which the potential for harm is nil. One such solution is the prevention of airborne viral infections like colds and flu, and the reduction of allergic symptoms of exposure to airborne allergens. I could just put the link to it right here. It has a thread on Skin Cell and an essay here as well. But if you are not motivated to look through my archives here, or find the thread in the General Health section on Skin Cell Forum, you would not actually engage in the two minutes or less per day that it would take to protect yourself.

My most active work these days is in less well developed and long standing form. My ideas on alternatives to surgical intervention for cataracts, and in the alternative treatment of periodontal disease and other issues such as immunology and ageing are still in development.

In cataracts, my ideas show early indicators of success. My enthusiasm has grown with these subtle improvements, but not to the point that I am ready to shout from the rooftops that I have the answer. I am simply very encouraged about how things are going.

In immunology and ageing, my ideas also seem to be working well, but my activities in this field have only accelerated recently. The results I have already experienced seem quite favorable. But it is easy to jump to conclusions. I might conceivably have been just as robustly healthy at the age of 66 without the variety of interventions I have been employing. No way to know. Could be just placebo effect or the power of positive thinking. I have deep suspicion and caution about the medical/pharmaceutical/governmental structures which damage our health as often as they enhance it. These things all muddy up the water.

I will only talk about these working solutions to problems when I am confident that their value is unambiguous, and have considered the unexpected social consequences of their use on a large scale.

Almost half a century ago President Eisenhower gave a dire warning about the “military-industrial complex.” (This speech is in my archives here.) It was a notably prescient warning And considering his political party, even though Eisenhower was leaving the Presidency and seemingly had nothing more to lose, considering those volatile political times, the speech was a very courageous one, and deserves another look, particularly in view of present events.

But I would like to paraphrase that one term, military-industrial complex, broadening it to encompass the real scope of the enemy. It should be called the Regulatory-Industrial Complex. The evils go well beyond the military.

The tentacles of this cancer are strangling us just as effectively in the fields of medicine, the pharmaceutical industry, and the insurance business as well. Our legislators pay “lip service” to these industries and are paid for their efforts far better than our ladies of the evening get for oral ministrations to their clients.

Dissection Notes - Eye #2

2007-10-15T08:19:00.000-06:00

This eye, stored a day and a half longer than the first eye, had lost some interior pressure. Puzzling because it had been immersed in cool coconut oil and there was no sign of leakage into the oil that I could find.

This time I made an incision at the limb of the iris. Here too, I couldn't detect the capsular membrane of the lens. The lens was clear and had held it's shape. I suspended it in cool water for a couple of days.

After a day, it developed some filamentous appearing debris at the equator. Other than that, it was still clear. By the next day, it had clouded and developed a spontaneous fracture. I had expected it to swell during this time. It did not swell much but the opacity indicated two things. There had been water absorbed, and paradoxically this had apparently clouded the lens. This implied that the aqueous humour was buffered in some way or that the capsular membrane or some other mechanism prevented excess absorption of moisture while the eye was living.

I had something lined up for the aqueous and vitreous humours, but unexpected guests showed up. What is the opposite of serendipity?

Dissection notes - Eye #1

2007-10-12T08:35:00.000-06:00

Upon dissection this eye had been immersed in coconut oil and brought to about 50F for a day. My objective was to examine the eye from the rear after quartering the retina into four quadrants and laying the flaps back to expose the interior. I used a standard scalpel with a #21 blade.

Prior to the incisions, the eyeball was still quite firm. There was no cloudiness in any portion of the interior. I laid back the flaps exposing the vitreous humour. I was holding the eyeball in a cutaway ping pong ball so that it would hold its' shape when the cuts were made. This worked very nicely.

The vitreous humour, the lens, and the aqueous humour were still quite crystal clear. However, there was a bit of leakage of black pigment smearing into the vitreous humour from the interior surface of the eyeball adjacent to the cuts I had made. I had not noticed this pigment in the eyes of other animals. Interesting, but not enough so that I was going to be distracted for long from the lens, my central interest.

I swabbed these darkenings away with some cotton swabs, trying not to disturb the integrity of the rest of the vitreous humour. It was about of the consistency of the stiffer portion of the white of a very fresh chicken egg. I lifted the eye out of the ping pong ball and examined the image that came through. It was not appreciably out of focus and would have probably cleared up entirely if I had smoothed the surface of the exposed vitreous humour with a microscope slide cover and then laid it on the surface, but I didn't have one handy.

Most of the structures of the eye are tougher and more durable than you would guess. Eventually I removed a large portion of the vitreous humor with a plastic spoon. It really held its' form pretty well, but probing and prodding caused some liquefaction due to the mechanical breakdown of some of the invisible microfibers within. I had expected the capsular membrane to be tougher than it was.

I was particularly interested in observing the interface between the zonules and the membrane of the lens capsule. No such luck. The membrane had apparently spontaneously ruptured. I did not think that I had done anything severe enough to cause that during the dissection. I can only guess that it must have occurred during the time that I was removing the eye from the skull, or at the rather traumatic moment of the death of the buck.

I was a bit disappointed about the membrane, but my central interest was the lens. In its' totally relaxed state, it was quite globular, slightly flatter on the posterior face, much thicker in cross section than one would imagine. It was closer to marble shaped than lens shaped. Clearly, without the influence of the zonules and capsular membrane, the lens was not really what we usually think of as lens shaped. I put it aside, immersed in some tepid coconut oil. I wanted to play with the iris, which was quite durable and resilient.

I should mention that the pupil opening is very round, but the periphery of the iris is oval. This is why you see no white of the eye even when the deer's eye is wide open.

The next thing I wanted to do was to try to drill a hole in the lens using a conventional drillbit (1/16") by hand. It went through the lens nicely but when I removed the drill, the hole filled in. Mechanically drilling a hole in a gel was a long-shot, but I still needed to give it a try. I then did some other destructive testing of the lens until there was little left to play with.

That's about it. I decided to think a while before doing the other eye. No sense in repeating the same procedures. Not much learning in that. More later.

Brief Notes On Eyeball Dissections

2007-10-10T23:21:00.000-06:00

These are some notes on the dissection of a pair of fresh eyeballs removed under field conditions from a yearling buck which died in my front yard early yesterday morning.

The first step of course, was to remove the eyeballs from the skull. The objective was to get the eyeballs out of the orbits of the skull without doing damage to the integrity of the entire eyeball. I wanted the vitreous humour, the aquous humour and the lens, capsule, iris and zonules to remain intact and undisturbed.

It was quite dark so I was working with a headlamp and a flashlight. I wanted to work quite quickly because I live within the city limits technically and cars were going by now and then. I was in no mood for the local police to come out amid flashing blue lights and so on. I figured I had about a half hour to finish the task and move the deer to a more discreet location. I was working alone, my wife and my manservant Ichabod being sound asleep and pretty well useless for this kind of thing anyway. Ichabod particularly, has for several years had an extreme aversion to blood. Otherwise he could have been quite useful and I could have hung the deer over a branch by his hindquarters, gutted the animal and slit it's throat.

But that was lower priority than the eyes. I would salvage the rest of the deer after the sun came up. I also was not partial to the notion of having a big pile of organs and guts and puddles of thickening blood in the front yard anyway. My tool were few; My hunting knife, some spoons, some small paper cups of coconut oil, and a pair of pliers. I would let the local meat packer do the rest with the buck when they opened up later in the morning.

I poured some eyewash on the first eye, followed by a bit of coconut oil. I oiled up one of the spoons, slid it under the top lid of one of the eyes, forcing the conjunctiva back with the leading edge of the spoon until I could feel it hit the optic nerve bundle. If I had had some time, I would have simply sharpened the spoon edge with a file or a sharpening stone. I could then have simply slid the sharpened edge back and forth against the nerve bundle until it was severed. Then it would be a simple matter of slicing away the various rectus and oblique muscles to release the eyes from the sockets.

Now that the spoon tip was up against the nerve bundle, quite a tough rope-like nerve cluster of about 1/8 inch diameter, I needed to slide my knife behind the spoon to get the point to the nerve cluster. It is quite resistant to being cut, even though I keep my hunting knife pretty sharp. The cluster was pierced by the knife point perhaps eight times before I could get the pliers on the bundle and tear it loose. The eye now came out of the socket very nicely. I repeated the same procedure with the second eye. One interesting feature I noticed was that, unlike the human eye, these irises were not round. They were quite oval shaped.

I immersed each eye in its' own oil bath. I then dragged the buck onto my truck and parked it back by the barn and went to bed. Which is what I am going to do now. If anyone is interested, I will include notes on the further dissection of the eyes themselves tomorrow or the next day.

War & Conflict

2007-10-10T11:38:00.000-06:00

This was something I said on Modern War and Conflict, a blog that I randomly fell into.

I am in substantial agreement with your comments. I am concerned that we look too hard for cyclic patterns in history though. It is of course very useful to examine patterns, in science, and in life and human affairs. But we should not lose sight of the fact that patterns stop.
The old popular notion of the dialectic nature of history led us in some very self-deluding directions. There was no protection back in 1962 in having a bomb shelter in the back yard, or a six month supply of water and dehydrated food.

We still came within a hair's breadth of destroying the planet and 99+% of all terrestrial life on it.

When that was avoided, we all heaved a sigh of relief. Or at least it seemed so. In truth though, the world stayed just as dangerous. And erroneous propaganda on all sides made matters much worse.

Otherwise intelligent people generated such notions as "duck and cover" to give our school children the feeling that they could defend themselves in some fashion against the nuclear war that seemed quite inevitable.

Nuclear war may indeed be inevitable, but it is unlikely to be of the same sort as we envisioned then. For example, we comfort ourselves that we have not had active use of nuclear weapons since Japan. Not exactly so. I am going to leave this one up in the air... What am I talking about? Any ideas?

We now concern ourselves with the emergency represented by global warming, the rather paradoxical possibilities of the North Atlantic Climate switch affecting the ocean currents, which are central to driving the global climate.

A variety of other systems are very much out of whack as well, causing an unparalleled global runaway extinction. These various influences are NOT cyclic in the sense we think we can see.

It is useful to see patterns when they are there. But it is very dangerous to imagine patterns to be there which are not. I will expand on this further if engaged.

Although I have some interest in tactics and strategy, my focus is on problem recognition and solution accross a wide spectrum of systems in the ecostructure.

The enemy is not opposing geopolitical views and interests. The enemy is ignorance masquerading as intelligence, dogma and fanaticism masquerading as truth.

My blog deals with ideas as diverse as influenza, cataracts, longevity, but more importantly, looking at the inter-relationships between problems which may not even seem to be related.

You are welcome to come over and see what you think. We can even talk about war or politics by other means if you want, but let's do our best not to get too carried away.

I have research and development going on a variety of different fronts, but I do look forward to looking through your archives as time permits. Perhaps you are a chess player?

Lamentations

2007-10-07T19:56:00.000-06:00

Innovation does not run smoothly. It is a jumpy, lurching kind of activity. What is more, success, continuously sought, is often the enemy. Let me see if I can demonstrate what I am saying.

Over the past couple of decades, great changes have occurred in surgical cataract correction. These changes have resulted in considerable improvement in outcomes. As a result, other options are not considered. If there are other reasonable means of stabilizing or reversing cataracts, they are not means that are attractive to eye surgeons.

An eye surgeon is not going to get wealthier by telling us that we should pay more attention to what we eat and drink, that more of what we drink should be water and less should be alcohol.

I am told that most of us are seriously sleep deprived, often getting hours less than we need. Sleep “medications” are ubiquitous, both over the counter and by prescription. Then, when we awaken, we use stimulants like coffee, tea, and energizing chemicals to get us through the day.

Even our children are in the same sort of mess. They are very often drugged for attention deficit and hyperactivity, or labeled autistic and put into special education programs. What are some of the results? We now have a whole class of new “patients.” The children who were given Ritalin (a cocaine-like stimulant) to help them behaviorally in school, have become ADHD adults, and the “medication” continues.

But let us return to the subject of eyes. About four decades ago, I invented a useful device to discover monocular visual behavior in young children in groups. In other words, you could screen a lot of children all at the same time. This seemed to me to be the most useful feature of the device.

Yet, when I presented it to a variety of optometrists, it was this element which was most troubling to them. They were set up in business to deal with one patient at a time. Of the several optometrists that I demonstrated the device to, none was enthusiastic about changing their niche of dealing with only one patient at a time.

As an inventor, I was mystified by this negative reaction, and eventually disgusted by the optometrists, at least by those I talked to. Of course, one can’t judge an entire profession by the responses of a random handful. Even so, they were exhibiting a very self-serving perspective.

The point is, the device worked very well. No one denied that. The problem was that no one was interested in screening groups of children. And of course other existing equipment was already on hand in the doctor’s office which could identify monocular traits one on one. And that is how the business of medicine has always been set up.

Problems with the outrageous costs of medical care, or services simply being unavailable for vast numbers of people, is not just confined to the United States. And it is not just the fault of the doctors. They just benefit much more visibly than the other complicit components in the system; hospitals, insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry.

Maybe you are one of the many who feel that the health industry is honest and above-board. Perhaps you missed the story in the news just this past week , in which Bristol-Myers Squibb (a Fortune 500 company) was fined five hundred and fifteen million dollars for their misdeeds. More than a half BILLION dollars. As far as I can tell, none of this money is going back to any of the consumers who were damaged by the practices of the company. It is very hard to track what state and federal authorities are going to get this money and in what amounts, but the total amount that they have paid or agreed to pay in the past few years is actually more than 1.25 billion dollars. Surely some of that total amount has been restitution to stockholders and class action settlements. But a lot of this penalty had to do with unlawful marketing and pricing practices. Marketing practices in which large numbers of physicians played an active role, profiting substantially in a variety of ways.

It has been suggested that I have it in for doctors. Not true. But the conditioned reflexes that we have been programmed with; that we must go for a regular check-up every year, and that by the time we are fifty, we should have a doctor jam a camera up our rectum to see if everything is all right. Or that by the time women are fifty, they should already have had a couple of mammograms and several cervical smears. There is no argument. Lives are saved by these diagnostic procedures.

There is also no argument that lives are lost because these procedures are, one way or another, far more expensive than they need to be, making them financially impossible for many people who could benefit.

I went to a Health Fair a number of years ago. One of the services they provided was a comprehensive blood analysis for $10. Since I had not been to the doctor for two decades, I thought that was a good idea. I got the blood work. And although nothing was wrong, I was glad that I did it. But if I had gone to a private physician and been tested in the same fashion, the bill would have exceeded ten times that figure. What made the difference? Economies of scale and mass production techniques, and the fact that the Health Fair was designed to reach people who could not afford or were otherwise resistant to the extreme expense of conventional medical services.

Now, because my eyesight is going downhill, I have taken an interest in cataracts. Depending on whose figures you want to believe, the typical surgical intervention to deal with a cataract costs $3500 to $5000.

Now contrast this with the work of Dr. Sandik Ruit, an ophthalmologist from Nepal. A few years ago he went to North Korea and in the course of less than two weeks, performed in excess of a thousand cataract operations. He did it with a very small staff of helpers and trained some North Korean doctors while he was at it. The net cost for these operations even when the prorated cost of his portable medical equipment is taken into account, was well under $40 per eye. Now Dr. Ruit practices in the high countries like Nepal and Tibet and charges a sliding scale of $10 to $100 for the operation, depending on ability to pay. The point is, the actual cost for the operation and all materials needed is actually very, very low.

Okay, now compare: I went to an optometrist in Texas. He charged me and my insurance something in excess of two hundred dollars for his half hour of testing. Then I went to an ophthalmologist, whose staff did some additional testing. Her office workers took about forty minutes with me, screwing up a bit along the way. Then the ophthalmologist popped in and had a quick look, ignored some important details on my intake form, and scheduled me for cataract surgery.

The total cost for this one hour of services? Something over $400. And the operation itself? That will be another $3500+. Now I suspect that I would ultimately get a better lens, perhaps slightly better matched to my individual needs than those that the Korean patients got, but really, there is no way to check that. I will get the result that I get. I have about 19 chances out of 20 to have better eyesight without too many complications. But that means I have 1 chance in 20 of being blinder than I was, or even totally blind in that eye.

Meanwhile, the prevailing opinion among the ophthalmologists is that these odds are very good. I am inclined to agree, unless I am the one in twenty for whom things don’t work out.

It is claimed almost universally that only surgery can deal with cataracts. For me, the jury is still out on that. From my perspective, ophthalmologists have too much to gain and too little to lose, to consider the less invasive options. These would include changes in nutrition, changes in eye behavior (exercises), changes in hydration, changes in the amount of sleep we get, and other lifestyle considerations. From the physicians perspective, the patient can not really be trusted to do much to help himself. Otherwise he would have already done it.

We have only to look around us to find evidence that this is so. Obesity is of epidemic proportions. Alcohol and drug use is widespread. Tobacco addiction is not as universal as it once was, but it is still a very serious problem. Our food supply is far from healthful.

Just this week, an American meat packer recalled 22 million pounds of ground meat patties, then promptly went out of business. There were not enough assets to pay for the recall. So who pays? And what is the ultimate fate of over twenty million pounds of (possibly) tainted meat? It seems like only a month or so since there was a nationwide recall of American spinach greens.

Many of us have taken losses because of the Chinese adulteration of pet foods with a poisonous substance added to increase the protein content. Other Chinese products, like toothpaste adulterated with antifreeze, children’s toys painted with lead-based paint, cribs that have killed babies because of design and assembly defects, are probably the tip of the iceberg.

So what could possibly have caused this mess, in which we have somehow become so dependent on Chinese labor and products that we cannot do without them? In the course of my lifetime, we have gone from total isolationism, fear and hatred on both sides, to mutual economic exploitation in trade. But the fear and hatred are still right under the surface. At the moment, we are probably one of China’s biggest customers. This reverse in policy took only a few decades. Few of us even noticed it happening. All those years we were castigating the Chinese for rampant human rights abuses, we were consuming the cheap products that those abuses produced. With each passing year, we become more entangled in this international trade with partners we cannot trust, but can no longer do without.

We are really in the same situation with our medical-pharmaceutical-insurance industries as well, aren’t we? They are plundering us and have been for so long that most of us cannot even see that it is happenning. What is the solution? Perhaps there isn't a perfect solution. But perhaps it would be a start if we each took a whole lot more responsibility for understanding how our bodies work, and took a whole lot more responsibility for dealing with our own ailments, rather than putting ourselves so entirely in the hands of this group of self-proclaimed experts.

Cataract Correction Part Two

2007-09-18T16:18:00.001-06:00

The goal is to rehabilitate the lens of the eye and recover visual acuity and the accommodative function of earlier years.Whatever the substances are that are producing the cloudy lens, there needs to be some sort of circulation going on within it, exchange of fluids in both directions across cellular membranes.

Those cells in the nucleus of the lens may be reacting to ionic transport pumping. I have a theory that a persons first and more advanced cataract is generally in the eye which was the weaker of the two even prior to the cataract. I have not seen any data on this. The idea may have no merit at all.

But back to fluid exchange. Can cataracts be forming due to a failure or diminution of the normal circulatory process? Due to a change in viscosity of the fluids? From dehydration due to failure to drink sufficient water? What other kinds of fluidic transfer could be playing a part? What about the flexure of the lens itself? Could there be a relationship between the reduction of the ability to flex the lens and a reduction of fluid exchange? Are the inclusions causing the reductions of clarity of vision within the cells of the lens or between them? The answers to these questions will bear on how to solve the problem.

Cataract Correction Part one.

2007-09-13T10:45:00.000-06:00

We ought to take a look at the various things that contribute to the loss of vision in age-related nuclear cataracts. At the top of the list, and most obvious, is a reduction of the transparency of the lens. The prevailing medical opinion is that this is an inevitable consequence of ageing, that once the opacity has developed, little can be done except the eventual removal of the offending lens, and replacement with a prosthetic lens of one variety or another.

We commonly refer to these cataracts as "senile." The currently prevailing view is that only surgery is a reasonable course of action. I am not at all confident that this is the case. Opposition to this perspective is not strong and is also suspect because of the potential for profits generated by sales of nutritional products, vitamins and minerals. There are several large pharmaceutical companies selling vitamin-mineral products based on the results of the ARREDS study. The pills are high in price, and the claims made for them are vague and insubstantial, referring to general eye health rather than stabilization or reversal of cataracts.

One smaller company uses the audio presentation of a maverick ophthalmologist (now dead) who makes some plausible claims that give cataract sufferers enough hope to try a product with some additional ingredients to the ones indicated in the ARREDS study, but the owner of the company is not inclined to actually discuss his product in detail and deal with the actual mechanisms of action. It never impresses me when a CEO does not respond to specific questions about his product or services.

But returning to cataracts, what are some of the elements of the formation of cataracts, and which of those contributing causative factors can be reduced or reversed? Current treatment of choice is surgical. Worldwide, there is probably no more commonly performed surgery. Odds of success are high. But there are risks as well, and some of them are substantial. This is reason enough to return to the subject of prevention and delay.

From my perspective, "senile" cataracts involve more than the developing cloudiness of the lens. The ability of the lens itself to be flexed into focus is also reduced with aging. The main contributor to this is probably the ongoing thickening of the lens. The actively replicating cells of the lens are in the cortex (outermost) layer. I have, as yet, been able to find little information about the metabolic activities of the nuclear (interior) layers of the lens. Certainly those deeper lens tissues are still metabolically supported in some ways. That implies that defects in the support process play a part in the development of the loss of clarity.

We also know that these deeper cells have no direct vascular support, and that they have no nuclei and no mitochondria. But certainly there is some sort of ongoing passive fluid exchange. These lenses are quite flexible and deformable. If some sort of fluid exchange were not going on, this sort of stasis would be unlikely to go on for decades.

So assuming a certain fluid exchange, understanding that mechanism might well provide a means of altering the fluid environment of the interior of the cell in such a way as to increase the transparency of those interior cells.

Going back to the flexibility of the lens, the musculature which accomplishes the focusing of the lens is attached to the outer edge. These strands of muscle are collectively known as "Zonules of Zinn." I would like to have a deeper understanding of the interface of these muscle cells and the cells of the lens cortex.

I'm feeling my way along with this, but at the moment my emphasis is on anti-oxidants and phytochemicals, as well as various means for increasing fluid transfer in the nuclear portion of the lens. Bear in mind that these lens cells are not vascularized and contain no mitochondria, so only passive and ionic circulation of fluids can be involved.

So to sum up, I believe that it is significant that in nuclear cataracts, these characteristics are most often present; there is a direct relationship with age, there is a thickening of the lens and a corresponding reduction of efficiency of accommodation (the ability to flex the lens to resolve images), there may also be some reduction of moisture content of the lens as well. This would certainly make the lens less pliable and make it far more likely that opaque substances accumulate in the tissues.
I suspect that there is also an age-related reduction in the strength of the zonule musculature. The efficient flexure of the lens is certainly an element affecting the passive movement of fluids through the lens.

So without regard to the exact nature of the opaque inclusions in the lens, it seems reasonable to pay close attention to the level of hydration (old people have a tendency to sometimes drink too little water), to increase the intake of anti-oxidants and phytochemicals, to review the nature of the lipids in the diet, and to do a variety of lens calisthenics (changing focal distance with increased frequency).

In my particular case, I suspect that my low intake of vegetables, particularly the dark leafy ones and the yellow and orange ones, has played a role in the cataract development. This is very difficult for me to correct. I buy enough vegetables, and have all kinds of good intentions, but then often forget to eat them before they spoil. I try to make up for it by eating more fresh fruits, but I do not know how effective this substitution is.

Trolling the Blogs

2007-08-31T13:01:00.000-06:00

I have been trying to sort out why I randomly surf the blogs. Often I am looking for specific information about a given subject like cataracts or virology or nutrition or chemistry or physics. Surfing the blogs is of no help in that regard. So the question of why I spend a few hours a week looking over chance blogs still remains unanswered, when I could be using search engines in a more focused and directed way.

I guess it has to be the novelty and element of occasional surprise. You just really never know where you are going to wind up. Yesterday I came upon a blog about spanking. Having been spanked frequently and very hard as a young child, it is not a subject which I take to with great enthusiasm. My sons got very few spankings. Even fewer were hard. And each of those give me lasting regret.

So it was a surprise to see this particular blog, which was extolling a variety of benefits to adults spanking adults. There wer a considerable number of pictures. There are even professional spankers who perform for a fee. Apparently there is a significant subculture who engage in the practice. Contrary to what I would have guessed, I don't recall more than a picture or two of women being the recipient. Most were of women administering the spanking to their spouse or boyfriend.

But I think what surprised me the most is how many comments were made on the postings, how favorable virtually all the posts were about the practice, and how basically happy the people involved were with the activity.

A few years ago I saw a movie which rather disturbed and impressed me. It was called "The Secretary" with Maggie Gyllenthaal and James Spader. When I rented the movie, it was on the basis of the stars, not the plot blurb. So I had no idea of the content having elements of sado-masochism. The oddest thing of all is that it was such a happy movie. I went from my initial reaction that this was a disturbed and troubling relationship, to what a happy couple.

Anyway, I thought I would get away from my practice of dealing with things like cataracts, which according to the experts will affect virtually all of us if we survive long enough, but about which practically none of us have any real interest. The same with prevention of viral infections, which affect almost everyone almost every year. Yet these and other scientific subjects of importance to our comfort and survival, do not inspire much interest in the general public.

The other day, one of my chess opponents said that he had taken a look at my blog. He said I talked about too many subjects and used too many words. I had to chuckle over that.

There is some validity to the using too many words criticism. Hemingway believed in brevity, and achieved it in spades with "The Old Man and the Sea." But as his career went on, he found such perfect brevity very elusive. I have a feeling that this might have played some part in his ultimate demise. Writers perhaps take their craft too seriously.

But the other thing that came to mind was what a regent once said to Mozart when straining to find some intelligent critical comment to Mozart about a piece of his music that had just been performed.

"Too many notes." he said.

Posted on Another Blog, "After Gutenberg"

2007-08-26T19:22:00.000-06:00

I stumbled upon "After Gutenberg" this afternoon. I have so far found the various entries informative and thought provoking. This is my reaction to less than 1% of the blogs I view.

Focus is as important as creativity and imagination in the generation of new concepts and techniques in dealing with problems. My central focus at the moment is supposed to be on reversal of cataracts by the application of better surgical procedures, or by the prevention/reversal of cataracts by nonsurgical means. Instead, I found myself taking the tour of some of the wealth of ideas I found here in other areas.

But I noticed that some of the very same impediments to progress in solving many problems that I have seen described here, have some of the same characteristics that I have encountered in trying to gain the interest and attention of the central players in the eye-care industry, ophthalmologists.

Only a few years ago, I was lamenting the short sighted perspectives of the associated industries (big oil and big auto) in downplaying the complex problems of global warming, population pressure and uncoordinated, unsustainable water policies.

But it is clear that the special interests involved in slowing the potential progress that could be made, have not really made an intrinsic change in course. They have made virtually no actual changes in policy or emphasis. Only cosmetic ones designed to maintain the profit status quo in the present, lulling us into a sense of complacency, no matter what the consequences in the future.

Now, I must admit that I have not used "meta tags" and other means of attracting attention to eurekaideasunlimited.blogspot.com
I think in the past half year it has only received about 2000 hits. And from those hits, there has been a miniscule handful of thoughtful and relevant responses. I really did want to see that good ideas would provide their own attraction and it would be self-sustaining. Clearly that is not the case.

This blog, After Gutenberg, seems to be suffering from the same sort of problem, although clearly, it is polished, and uses skills and techniques which I have not yet employed, and has been around for a number of years.

In cataracts, the vested interests are different. They are the Ophthalmologists, the industry that produces the equipment and IOL's, and the medical installations that profit by the operations. They have considerable incentive to maintain the status quo, and to provide even more expensive services. (To use an accomodating multifocal lens will cost more than $2000 on top of the basic surgical fees.) There is no incentive for any ophthalmologist to buck this trend, particularly if the new innovation(s) delay surgery for an appreciable time, or even eliminate it entirely in many cases. The doctors are making too much money to rock the boat.

Now our corn farmers are very much in favor of producing ethanol. It makes the crop more valuable. But is it a wise course to be thinking of using the central staple grain in our food chain? The corn farmer thinks it's a wonderful idea. He is a special interest, and one who has sometimes gotten a raw deal in the marketplace.

But step back and see the bigger picture. With massive amounts of corn diverted to ethanol production, pet food, livestock feed, and the chickens, turkeys and beef and pork for which corn is an essential feed component,not to mention the ubiquitous corn sweetener business will also increase in product cost.

What is the solution? The truth is that cellulosic production of ethanol will work just fine. In otherwords, we need not depend on corn or any other food crop for energy production. We can use sawdust, plant stalks, lawn clippings, weeds and brush. Why on earth would we use food to make alcohol? It just makes no sense at all if you are not one of the vested interests for whom it affects the bottom line.

Getting Better

2007-08-18T14:34:00.000-06:00

One of my friends supplied me with somelinks that in essence said I was barking up a wrong tree. The links were useful in a variety of ways and I appreciated them, but still had some caveats. This was my response:

Hello Bunnie, These links are interesting and useful. I notice, though that the first link only devotes a paragraph to the lens. The other major components of the eye get much more attention.

I think this is a significant indicator of the mindset that prevails in the cataract removal industry. And it is not just this link that does this. You can get a lot more detail about every other significant eye part, with a lot less hunting.

Could this be because it is the only "routine" for cataracts, to just "amputate" the lens and insert a prosthetic lens? If it is going to just be chopped out and replaced, there is little to be gained by knowing a lot about it's structure.

And one of the other links calls it a "myth" that interventions such as eyedrops or nutritional supplements or dietary changes, or for that matter, any intervention at all, short of surgery will do any good at all.

To me the word myth is quite a strong one. I do not think it applies when it simply has not been established that the variety of other interventions are of incontrovertable value.

Without opening another can of worms in another branch of surgical intervention, cardiology, findings were recently published that perhaps half of one variety of procedure were next to useless or completely useless. This procedure has been done hundreds of thousands of times every year in the Unites States alone. I doubt that refunds will be offerred.

Getting back to cataracts, a number of months ago, I was attempting to use some nonsurgical interventions to at least stabilize or perhaps reverse the effects of a cataract on vision. After several weeks, I couldn't see any obvious improvement. I was doing several different things at the same time. When I didn't see evidence of improvement over a period of a month or so, I became less and less interested in continuing. But in retrospect, I do not really think I gave the things I was doing enough of a trial.

The cataract took years and years to develop, without my even noticing it until it was pretty well advanced. So the deterioration from month to month was exceedingly subtle. Not only that, I had not calibrated a measurement system, with which I could make a baseline measurement which would later help me to assess changes. I set about doing that.

Furthermore, I wanted to produce a device with which I could assess some of the glare affects of the cataract on night vision with some precision. So I set about doing that as well. That is pretty technical and hard to discuss, so I will leave the glare issue aside.

So let us look at both clarity of vision and the ability to percieve different colors. I additionally decided that it was better to have a measurement that used images produced by emitted light rather than reflected light. So a TV screen or a computer screen were the obvious choices. But of course, one can't easily control what is going to occur on the TV screen and repeatability, to be able to replicate with great precision, the image that was going to be used for the testing purposes was absolutely essential.

So I began casting about for an image on the computer screen which I could reliably replicate at will, which would be absolutely replicatible down to the finest detail every time I wanted it, which also included a variety of colors and sizes of print, highly contrasting from the background.
When I first turn on the computer, I get a blue screen. It is replaced by the Windows XP symbol and lettering on a black screen which is too large for my purposes and quickly spontaneously disappears as the computer finishes booting up.

But later on, if I get distracted by anything, and do nothing with the computer or touch the mouse, a much smaller version of this logo becomes a screensaver, with three very different sizes of white lettering on a black background "Windows" the largest, with an orange XP; underneath that, "Home Edition" in medium print, and the smallest, above windows, "Microsoft."
Now I needed to make a precise distance measurement. One which would allow me to see the large and the medium copy pretty well, but would only allow me to nearly resolve the smallest word. Measuring from my forhead to the screen with a seven inch spacer, I was able to easily read Windows XP and Home Edition, but Microsoft was just a blur in which I could resove none of the letters clearly. The M looked to me more like a V. The ft at the other end, I could make out that they were taller letters than those of the interior of the word, but couldn't see what they were, and the short interior letters were just a line of fog. Perfect.

I didn't note the date, but it was right after my computer crash. Now it has been several weeks. Not a long time, but not a short time either. Only now, I am quite prepared to be more patient. I now have a pretty clear baseline measurement. It has already been demonstrably important.

You see, now when I put my face a measured seven inches from the screen, I can resolve the M clearly and the ft only slightly less clearly. Sorry to say that the interior of the word is still not legible to me, but this is progress over a very short timespan.
Now it is true, I have also been working on my blood pressure and the aftermath of my stroke, so I have been doing a great variety of things for my health. And although some of those things were specifically designed to deal with the cataract, there is no way I can isolate them out and say "these are the things that helped my eyes." So, from a medical or scientific point of view, this is just anecdotal nonsense.

Just as nonsensical I suppose as only respecting the results of "double blind" studies in which neither the doctors nor the subjects know during the study who is actually getting the study drug and who is getting the placebo. This is of statistical value, but your chance of getting better is cut to 50% even before the use of the study drug. All in the name of the great god science.

I think I will just settle for getting better.
Anthro

None So Blind As Those Who Will Not See

2007-08-11T13:07:00.000-06:00

Alright, since I am entirely alone, and this is in effect a diary, I might as well knuckle down and try to sort out the mumbo jumbo of current ophthalmologic theory.

My focus is on cataracts. The reason for this is simple. A presumably “nuclear” cataract has seriously affected the vision of my right eye, and threatens to eventually do the same sort of thing with the left eye as well.
Having first gone to see an optometrist and shortly thereafter an ophthalmologic surgeon, I was left with considerably more questions than I was comfortable with, and the answers I did receive had to be extracted almost by force, and were simplistic and routinely condescending.

Throughout this whole time, I have sought real dialogue and counsel from people in the field. I have had no success in this regard at all. The closest I came was to finally have a ten minute follow-up conversation with the surgeon with whom I had scheduled the surgery. I achieved this small victory only by canceling the operation.

During that telephone conversation, the answers I got were vague, statistical, and dumbed-down to be suitably understood by someone of plebeian patient mentality. The doctor was clearly surprised that I did not just leave her to do what she does. There are protocols in place, presumably to assure that patients are given enough facts to be able to give “informed consent.”

You are told that more than 9 out of 10 cataract operations have a good result, meaning that there is some improvement or great improvement in the sight of the eye. In the remaining ten percent, there is a range of unfortunate outcomes from no appreciable improvement to various complications secondary to the surgery, to blindness.

What is glossed over with these simplistic statistics, and what you will not hear at all if you do not dig in and ask the doctor for some specifics about some of the complications by type, is that certain complications happen to the majority of those having cataract surgeries. There is a secondary cataract which develops, much more often than not in the capsular membrane, and which is corrected by subsequently burning a laser hole in the membrane. (This is an additional procedure, done at a later time and billed separately). There are also some post surgical problems of other sorts that relate to the kind of surgical procedure performed.

What I am saying is that much of what the doctor tells you to elicit your informed consent, amounts more to salesmanship in the guise of information. And the worst of it is, I do not believe the doctor even realizes it. It is simply an artifact of how the system has evolved. It is the “routine” way they have developed as an industry to sell to their customers.

Now I want to turn to another element of cataract treatment. From the perspective of the industry, the treatment of choice for the entire range of cataracts which interfere with vision is surgical. An extremely tiny segment of the medical community thinks that any other method of reversal or stabilization of a developing cataract is worth consideration.
Surgery is the gold standard, and it is worth many billions of dollars every year.

The consensus is, if you get old enough, you will get cataracts, and will require surgical intervention. The surgery is often less than an hour and can range in price from three to five thousand dollars.

Soon I will be talking about some of the elements of the evolution of cataract surgery over the past three or four decades, some things which may be serious blunder in the field, and some possibilities which have not yet been explored. I realize that my remarks are less and less diplomatic, and will find physicians even less receptive to a conversation on this subject.

But what about the rest of you? Are you really receptive to the notion that eventually you will have to make the same sorts of decisions with which I am faced now? One would think that some of you would be moved to comment or ask some hard questions.

Inner and Outer Space

2007-08-08T14:40:00.000-06:00

The people who are capable of effectively navigating the bureaucratic red tape of writing grant requests and running the governmental gauntlet are not the ones who can best get to the bottom of the mysteries of discovery.

To even be able to conform to the pedestrian mentalities of the officials who make the ultimate decisions on the allocation of funds require skills that are the antithesis of those which best achieve true innovation and discovery.

Let us take our efforts in space. We accomplished great, even astonishing things in the space effort, which did not just propel us into space, but sharply changed our environment here on Earth. Many sciences were accelerated due to the space effort. But the disasters and blunders have also been great. Just to name a few, we put up a telescope which had a rudimentary mistake in its’ construction, wasting billions of dollars with a single measurement conversion error. Yet we went to fix it, at great additional cost, and Hubble went on to achieve many of the great things originally intended.

We even, against all odds, landed on the moon several times.
But after a few landings, we largely turned our backs on space. We dithered. Our great motivation and resolve dissolved.

Our leadership thought it was more important to stop the menace of monolithic communism taking over the world, by interfering in the civil war of a small agrarian culture, squandering our youth and treasure for a decade. This, and other misadventures in geopolitics became the obsession of our leadership. It was a disaster of great proportions. Today we are embarked on a path of folly that promises to go on longer and bring in its' wake even greater carnage and destruction

NASA, for whatever reasons, became less and less effective in setting appropriate goals. We should have found other solutions than using the Shuttle as long as we have, for example.

Our priorities still need quite a bit of fine tuning. The Mars Phoenix Program has a lot of merit, which is encouraging. We have had some serious setbacks in our efforts to advance on the Mars front. No sense casting blame or nitpicking. The likelihood of everything going smoothly in even the best designed program is not great. And our successes have been brilliant. So our Mars effort is not going to elicit any sour grapes from me. The mistakes and disasters which have happenned can help us if we learn from them. It is only when we stubbornly institutionalize them that they defeat us.

But let us turn to some of the more interesting features of our efforts with the moon, and make some comparisons to alternative goals we might pursue. But before I continue, I would like to open the floor to ideas and opinions from elsewhere. I have noticed that since this blog got started, not much dialogue has been generated on any subject. No curiosity. No opposition. No alternative possibilities presented. What an enigma to me.

There is room for a great diversity of ideas in the exploration of space. We should also be discussing our priorities with regard to how we divide our collective resources between this and our other critical opportunities like slowing the damage to our atmosphere and its weather systems and how to deal with our ocean resources without upsetting them to the point of total destruction.

These two areas are far too complex certainly to be left to our politicians, or for that matter, exclusively to our industrial interests either, given their unbroken record of rapacious profiteering. In truth, the problems cross all ideological divides. It matters little if we are looking at a capitalistic, communistic, socialistic, or other mixtures of systems. But I only digress to illustrate the scope of the problems we must address if we are to survive and thrive as a species, without taking the entire ecostructure to irrevocable ruin.

The central theme of this discussion, going to the moon and exploring the other space frontiers, should all be considered carefully before we consider our multibillion dollar moves.

Please, someone with talent, creativity, and fresh ideas, join in. Or, short of that, if you know someone who would be of value in such a roundtable discussion, let them know that we are here. Or, rather, at the moment, that I am here.

Have we collectively become such a species of spectators, that nothing can induce us to stop lurking, and rise out of our lethargy enough to do something? Surely, some of you know someone of remarkable and unspecialized talent. Please point that person in this direction. I sure get sick of talking to myself.

You need no credentials here except your carefully reasoned ideas, communicated with a certain amount of care.
The subject is Inner and Outer Space. Certainly, given the events of recent decades, it is interesting enough to gather a group of motivated people.

I Was Going To Talk About Eye Surgery..

2007-07-28T12:48:00.000-06:00

In eye surgery, as in the other specialties in medicine, several languages and idioms are used. Doctors spend a great deal of time learning the esoteric terminology that allows them to communicate with one another and with other “experts” in the medical and pharmaceutical and insurance industries and to the exclusion and detriment of all but a small number of their patients.

For centuries, doctors have been using special abbreviations and Latin phrases not in common parlance, to keep their patients in the dark about what was going on. These were the secret codes to the pharmacists, chemists and barbers with whom the doctors were communicating.

Yes, barbers too. They used to be intimately involved with several important medical procedures, like bleeding patients. Somewhere along the line, the barbers were demoted out of their part of the medical profession. Now they are pretty much confined to cutting hair, the safety razor having pretty much taken care of the need for a barber to shave clients.

Throughout the centuries, doctors pretty successfully went after the white witches, who engaged in a great many of the medical activities not well handled by the medical profession, like taking care of people without the monetary resources the doctors preferred in their clientele, and the midwives, who were generally pretty expert in assisting women during childbirth, but who were seen during many periods, including recent times, as encroaching too deeply in the terrain of physicians.

The doctors had membership in very powerful “guilds,” which were in essence, unions with extremely powerful political lobbying skills. They are at their most powerful today, encompassing the government, insurance industries, and the international pharmaceutical industries seamlessly. Only the “defense industrial establishments and the military have more clout.

When I was a boy, doctors still made "housecalls" now and then. One could speak privately to one's doctor without an insurance company having the right to demand charted information. A few months ago I wrote my (potential) eye surgeon a letter. My printer was not functional. I called her office, wanting her Email address. It turns out that all E-mail goes through an office employee, that the doctor recieves no private E-mail. Exactly when did patient/doctor confidentaility, and the ability to speak frankly to the doctor directly, go out the window?

A lot of lip service is paid to "informed consent." What this means in practical terms is that the doctor needs to tell you somewhere along the line that bad things can happen and that operations don't always work out favorably for the patient. The doctor might cite a statistic like, nine out of ten people have an improvement in their eyesight after a cataract operation. But you really have to probe to find out that two out of three people will need another procedure later to deal with a second cataract in the posterior membrane of the lens cavity, and that procedure too has its' own complications. In my opinion, this does not amount to informed consent. It amounts to a sales job to convince you, that at least statisically speaking, you will probably be better off with the operation than if you do not have it.

As time goes on, and as I see some of the procedures, performed by various surgeons, using different tools and methodologies, I am less and less convinced as time goes on. The patient is kept in a position of ignorance of enough detail that he cannot make really informed decision. He must simply decide to have faith in a physician he may have known for all of twenty minutes, or not.

Well, I was going to talk about some of the things that are currently in vogue in eye surgery, and detail my concerns in greater detail. These operations net the surgery industry about seven billion dollars a year in the US.

Several of the procedural events don’t make a lot of sense to me. But, in spite of the millions of people who have cataract surgery every year, I do not currently see any evidence that the public is particularly interested. I guess I’ll go read a book.

Letter To Owner of Cambridge Institute

2007-07-06T13:34:00.000-06:00

Mr. Martin Sussman
Cambridge Institute For Better Vision

Hello Mr. Sussman,

A number of months ago, I wrote a rather detailed letter to you expressing interest in sharing some of my ideas with you. I never got a direct response, but I did get some advertisements for Eye Max Plus from your company.

As it happens, aside from my blog, Eureka Ideas Unlimited at eurekaideasunlimited.blogspot.com I have also made more than 1100 posts on Skin Cell forum, some of them quite detailed and comprehensive on health issues, including cataracts and the state of the medical arts concerning them.

I have also read your book, The Program For Better vision. It is no longer a surprise to me that I have not yet gained an audience with an ophthalmologist on the breaking edge of current surgical procedures. They do, after all, keep themselves quite well insulated from those not initiated in their closed fraternity.

I expect that one day soon, I shall be reviewing your book, both on my blog and on Skin Cell Forum. Unlike my relatively new blog, the forum has a pretty large readership and I am certainly one of the most serious regular contributors there.I am known as Anthropositor.

Once again, I extend you the invitation to contact me, and/or to invite any surgeons you may know to review my various posts, and to contact me for a dialogue which could be of benefit to a great many people.

You sir, are not a member of the closed medical society. You have even shown some indication that you were prepared to break new ground here and there. Was it just to make some money? Or do your motivations run deeper? Please advise.

This invitation is also extended to anyone in or out of medicine with an interest in innovation in the field of cataracts. This medical problem is growing exponentially, and should not be left exclusively in the hands of complacent "experts."

H. C. Benson

Innovative Eye Surgery For Cataracts

2007-07-05T21:05:00.000-06:00

Those who have read some of my previous posts here at Eureka Ideas Unlimited and on Skin Cell Forum are already aware that I have an advanced nuclear cataract in my right eye and a developing one perhaps two years behind in my left eye.

Although I hadn’t been to a doctor for a few decades, this year I went first to an optometrist and then to an ophthalmologist and scheduled the removal of the right lens and surgical implantation of an intraocular lens.
I ultimately cancelled the surgery for a variety of reasons which I have already written about. Central among these reasons was the fact that I saw several of the procedures involving phaco emulsification of the opaque lens, the chopping of the lens into small pieces, and the removal of the pieces by suction, and the insertion and placement of the intraocular lens in the cavity left vacant.

I saw a variety of things in these procedures which gave me food for thought. To put it more succinctly, I thought better of the procedure. But one has a responsibility, if being critical of the way things are done, to give some notion how they should be done instead. So, for each part of the procedure that I thought could be improved on, I worked out some possible ways in which it could be done better.

For several months I talked about these possibilities on Skin Cell Forum. (some of the people on the forum are effectively blind, a few with exceedingly rare eye conditions requiring experimental surgery.) I am pretty confident that some of these experimental surgeons of these patients have heard about me. None, to date, has shown the slightest curiosity as to whether any of my ideas have merit. This points up, with great clarity, the ivory tower nature of the medical "community."

The surgeon who I went to, was not a “breaking edge” sort of girl. She wanted only “routine” cataract surgeries on her agenda. If any unusual incident arose, she would call in someone who could handle it. The last thing in her mind is to try anything new. And it became the last thing in mine to use her.

So, I haven’t been able to attract the attention of the pioneers, and I don’t want the journeymen surgeons. Quite a quandary. I have only personally performed one serious eye operation. The eye had been seriously damaged and was in front of the orbit, and therefore unblinkable. The patient was nearly dead, so the other traumatic injuries needed to be stabilized.

It was about a week before I was able to remove the eye safely. The only complication was some secondary infection, which I got under control in another few days. The patient made a full and uneventful recovery. I have had no training as a surgeon. Just emergencies in the field.

I really did have some hopes of finding an experienced surgeon with whom to discuss my ideas about changing the nature of cataract surgery. But the group is such an insular bunch that it is not really even a remotely likely prospect. and I won’t be engaging in the usual bureaucratic gauntlet of the hospitals and government agencies either. I’m also treating my blood pressure. Going through “channels” would not be productive in that regard. Currently my blood pressure is in better shape than my eye.

The good side is, I am learning a great deal more about eyes and vision and blood pressure as well. These are not inconsequential benefits from being more self-reliant. And if I can’t find a surgeon with whom to work out the new procedure, I’ll eventually sort out another means to restore my sight.

Irish Potato Famine and Today

2007-07-05T11:59:00.000-06:00

This post was inspired by an essay on the Irish Potato Famine of the nineteenth century on http://aradicalwrites.blogspot.com/

I must say Sir, that this is quite a fine piece of scholarship! It is inexplicable to me that it would have received no comments.

A sad commentary on the oblivious lurkers that make up the vast majority of those on the web. One must hunt for a considerable time before finding a work written with as much care as this one was.

As an American of Anglo-Saxon and perhaps Irish lineage as well, I don't have a particular side to take in this debate. Yet, one thing has always seemed pretty clear to me; there is quite enough fault to go around.
I will comment on two things that I think were of paramount importance in exacerbating the disaster.

There was great reliance on the skills of the "experts" both governmental and scientific. This was clearly unwarranted by the facts. I mention this only because in many ways, history is now repeating itself.

(Global Warming, and the current ongoing mass extinction, previously never seen without a cataclysmic asteroid impact or similar disaster.)

But whatever the detailed reasons, it seems to me that the central issue here was dependence on a monoculture crop. A single staple food.
The emphasis was overwhelmingly on the potato, and not even a diverse variety of different tubers. When the blight struck, even with excellence in science and government (which was clearly lacking) the disaster could not have been diverted.

In most of the world today, we rely on very few food crops. But worse, we are DELIBERATELY REDUCING the genetic diversity of many of these important crops, for purely, industrial and profit oriented reasons.

I think I will transfer this comment to my blog as well, a fairly new blog which has not, as yet, generated too much dialogue. I have apparently, largely been talking to myself.

You are welcome to attend.

Trying to Supply Some Common Sense

2007-06-27T10:27:00.000-06:00

This is a post today elsewhere, trying to help a couple of clueless guys who are far from being able to help themselves. They are so conspicuously and consistantly obtuse that I had avoided the thread as a lost cause. I won't say "casting pearls before swine." Pigs are actually very smart creatures. ...and if I had not been taught to eat the bellies of pigs very young, I would probably never do it. As it is, my consumption of swine is way down, and I may eventually get it down to zero. At that point I will confine myself to hunting and exposing human swine only.

The post:

I bit my knuckles and stayed away from this thread. Then two friends showed up, (treesandflowers and bunnie) and I'm tempted to remark "What are two nice girls like you doing in a place like this?" But of course the answer is, you are both trying to help.

Let's take a look at what we know. Both of you are in the category of what I will refer to as "long posters." That is to say, if you feel you have something worthwhile to say, you will go to some effort and care to say it well. Judging by the lengths of your short responses here on this thread, your instincts like mine are kicking in and saying, these people need professional help, or a small helping of good old fashioned common sense.

If I am not mistaken, one of the other posters was elsewhere recommending the ingestion of colloidal silver by a pregnant woman. (This by a fellow who calls himself a science teacher). This sort of "science" is perhaps part of what is wrong in the teaching in some of our schools. Another example would be the attempt to add "creationism science" to the curriculum to "balance" the "unreasonable scientism" we have been forcing down the gullets of our young ones.

My younger son had a science teacher who one day taught the class that it was acceptable and safe to shine dimes with a bit of mercury by rubbing it on them with your fingers.My son jumps up and challenges this concept before the whole class, pointing out that if you shine a dime in this way, as the dime gets shiny, the mercury on your fingers gets black. He pointed to the teacher's fingers to illustrate. I believe the teacher was actually going to let some of the children try shining some dimes.

My kid told me about the incident at the end of the day. I frowned. He said "Was I wrong?" I told him that sometimes being right is not all that counts. He was puzzled by that. I went on to explain that he did the right thing in the wrong way and it will come back to haunt him.

Here is the point. My son, clever little tyke that he was, wanted his classmates to know about the danger: That the black on the teacher's fingers was mercury that had so finely divided that it was no longer in shiny little globules, so finely divided that some of it could even get absorbed right through the skin and into bloodstream, or get residues on the sandwich the teacher would be eating for lunch.

My boy was right to want to be sure the rest of the class knew this. But he was also "showing off." (I have never been able to figure out where he got that from. His mom I expect. She was always a rather flamboyant character.)

Better would have been if he had asked the teacher for a private moment, discussed it with him, and then gave the teacher the opportunity to revise and extend his remarks. It wasn't until the end of the year that the payback came.

My son was flunked with a B+ instead of an A. He was really steamed up about it. He KNEW he deserved an A! I asked if he still wanted the A. His answer was a vehement YES. Ready to fight for it? He blurted out the military vernacular equivalent for affirmative which he was not usually allowed to say, but which he had heard me use on numerous occasions when emphasis was required.

So I helped him plan his strategy and acted as his Second in a conference with the teacher and the Principal. And in the process, my son learned a bit about how to win by other means than direct attack. He did not entirely win his fight for the A. He just got the A- that he deserved (lack of diplomacy and consideration).

(And his failure in that regard is probably due in large part to a certain enthusiasm for confrontation and lively discussion that he may have gotten from one of his close relatives.)

But getting back to what is so conspicuously absent in this thread. There is not the slightest thought that maybe the whole spectrum of general health considerations, like good nutrition or adequate rest or even the emotions might be playing a role in the problem.

Instead, just glob on some coal tar or dozens of other topical substances, many of which have serious and unpredictable side-effects. And in this, doctors are, as often as not, a part of the problem. Try using some careful reasoning and thought about your general health, making your whole body better. Your skin is integral to your body. The first healing must be from within. So look at all the features of your general health and correct as many of them as you can. If that hasn't helped after six months or so, then consider going to someone for additional help.

Adamlp How and Why To Learn

2007-06-25T23:52:00.000-06:00

You posted a question about how I go about learning. I have thought some about learning and thinking, but never in the terms you posed. Let me give you an example. I really don't know what I am doing on this blog. I read your comment and published it, but did not have a clue what essay you were posting to. A computer conversant person would have found it without searching for more than minutes. I searched through All of the comments and never did find it. Yet I didn't want to leave a valid question unanswered if I could help it. It is not in my nature.

Since I could not find the question attached to any of my posts, the only way to address it in a way you are likely to find is to title a post with your name. Particularly since you have no blog, nor an Email address in your profile. The point is, where there is a will there is a way. How does one prioritize what one learns? Learn what is most important to you first. If you don't know, figure it out.

In typical schooling, you are pretty much fed what the school administration wants you to learn in the order they want you to learn it. There are many problems with this. It is more akin to conditioning than to education.

There is no real direct motivation. Real learning is goal oriented. It is problem solving. It is finding out, or working out, what you need to know because you need to know it. That differs from our standard institutional education which is all about learning things because others require it of you so that you will obtain some sort of advantage from complying with the requirements set out for you by the educational authorities.

A diploma. An acceptable grade. An opportunity to get a better paying job. This is all nonsense! But it is nonsense which governs most of the people in school, and which has more to do with conforming to requirements, being conditioned in doing what you are told. Being a suitable and obedient industrial employee.

You learn really important stuff, like how not to be tardy and how to get your homework in on schedule. You have undoubtedly been "schooled" in this way. Otherwise, you would know these things by instinct. I was fortunate. I was a feral child with very little institutional education. Therefore my criterion was curiosity and solving specific needs.

Many of my students come to chess class more to learn other things than to learn chess.

For true learning to occur, the actual ideas you are working on must be exciting. Otherwise, why bother? So you can get some kind of diploma? What nonsense! You learn because you really want to know something! You want to solve a problem.

Not because it was assigned to you. Not because someone requires it of you. You are having trouble even setting your priorities, largely because they are not your priorities. You have accepted as priorities what you think others expect you to learn. Stop it. Learn what excites you. what presses your buttons.

THERE IS NO THOUGHT WITHOUT A FELT NEED!

Okay, that"s enough for tonight. Future questions will not get lost if You include the title of the original post in your opening line or post on this thread. Or go ahead and post to this thread. It has your name on it. The fact that I never did find your post after I published it could mean that I screwed up, and didn't publish it as I thought I did, or that there was some kind of Blogger delay that I did not anticipate, or something else happened that I don't understand.

So I found another way to get the job done. That is learning See what I mean? I don't neet the Computer Professor to send me a DVD to make it simple. I'll work it out.

Some More Medical Heresy

2007-06-24T13:33:00.000-06:00

This is a response to a lovely and helpful lady on Skin Cell Forum with whom I have an ongoing lively and beneficial dialogue. Her name is Bunnie. You can find the rest of the thread in her profile or mine.

Have we diverged from the subject? I don't know that we have. I am definitely not within a(n expert patient) programme. But I have taken considerably greater interest in the subject of eyes than all but perhaps 1/10000 of the patients out there.

I would certainly have stayed to view the introductory tape on cataract surgery if the doctor's (a cataract surgeon I was going to employ) player had not been broken. I was invited to come back to watch it on a later (unspecified) date, a 140 mile trip for me. I was not offered the chance to play the tape on my working machine and mail it back to her.

I am the only patient who has ever done an eye removal successfully under field conditions on a patient initially so close to death that I thought there was virtually no chance he would survive. (Fractured skull, eye in front of the orbit, clearly sightless and unrecoverable). I had to wait many days before removal of the eye for the patient to gain enough strength to survive the operation, forcing fluids and other nutrition. The patient clearly was just ready to die. I would not have it.

All of this, with more detail, is in a rarely read old thread in General Nutrition, titled Kombucha and Kefir, perhaps a half year back. The patient survived and is currently purring in my lap looking up at me with one very large Exotic Persian Cat eye.

This is some small qualification as an "expert patient." Here is more. I invented a very simple device about forty five years ago with which to easily screen groups of children simultaneously for monocularity. The earlier the diagnosis the more successful the intervention, generally speaking. It worked fine. The optometrists I showed it to agreed that it worked well, but were disinterested because they already had equipment in their offices that could do this quite satisfactorily, one patient at a time. They did not see a need for group screening. Go figure.

Why do you think I am so unenthusiastic about even approaching doctors of unknown calibre? It is NOT that I have never done it before. If I want to whack my head against a brick wall a half dozen times, I think I will just go find the nearest brick wall.

I am reminded of Carlson, inventor of the copy machine. Admittedly, it had some serious, difficult to resolve problems, and he went into major debt while he was perfecting it and trying to interest industry. Know what the typical response was of the CEO's that he presented it to? "What do we need that big thing for? We've got carbon paper!"

But there is a Happy ending. After all those years of struggle, Haloid Corporation picked up the machine and ran with it. They gave Carlson 1/10 of one percent royalty, insightful robber barons that they were. They eventually evolved into Xerox. And as for Carlson, he eventually got back on his feet and philanthropically gave away more than $100,000,000. My hat is off to him.

But as for me, I will not spend the rest of my life, hat in hand, struggling to find the right doctor. My eyes are not good enough to find a needle in a haystack. Total cost of rejecting my current surgeon candidate after one visit? About $400. I am also dealing quite effectively with slowly elevating blood pressure, and with the stroke I had two years ago, all without outside medical intervention. My extensive variety of skin lesions (of several years duration) have disappeared, also without medical supervision, with only my ministrations.

I guess the thing that disqualifies me to be an expert patient is that I am almost never a patient, and that I have become rather impatient with the general state of the art, in spite of the strides that have been made. Doctors NEED patients like me and generally have no notion that that is the case.

Why is it that no doctor has ever shown up here, or on my blog to tell me what a fathead I am and list the variety of ways I am full of **it. It is a complete enigma to me. EVERYONE is invited to go tell their doctors on me and give them copies of my relevant posts. The dentist of Biting the Dentist infamy knows my screen name and that I post regularly on Skin Cell Forum and on the blog Eureka Ideas Unlimited at eurekaideasunlimited.blogspot.com So does the ophthalmologist I visited once.

The silence is CONSPICUOUS. I am NOT trying to pick a fight. A constructive dialogue will be just fine, and it will serve the interests of all concerned. I am not out to get anybody or sue anybody. I went on a forum which was medically attended and asked a question dealing with their guideline that questions needed to be confined to two thousand characters (about 400 words). The question was deleted.

I have said very complimentary things about several doctors and at least one dentist, and have NAMED them. Those who have inspired my lack of confidence or disdain have been kept anonymous. I do not know how much more considerate I could be.

Let me close by once again quoting a doctor I respect and admire. This is a short portion of one of his books, permissable in a review, and not a violation of his rights at law. The author is Lewis Thomas. I commend all of his books. In this excerpt he is talking about the state of medicine beginning in 1776 and up into the twentieth century, but the focus is 1830 on into modern times.

"Beginning around the 1830s, medicine looked at itself critically, and began to change. Groups of doctors in Boston, Paris, and Edinburgh raised new questions, regarded as heretical by most of their colleagues, concerning the real efficacy of the standard treatments of the day. Gradually, the first example of science applied to clinical practice came somewhat informally into existence. Patients with typhoid fever and delirium tremens, two of the most uniformly fatal illnesses of the time, were divided into two groups. One was treated by bleeding, cupping, purging and other athletic feats of therapy, while the other group received nothing more than bed rest, nutrition and observation.The results were unequivocal and appalling, and by the mid-nineteenth century medical treatment began to fall out of fashion and the era known as "therapeutic nihilism" was well launched.

The great illumination from this, the first revolution in medical practice in centuries, was the news that there were many diseases that are essentially self-limited. They will run their predictable course, if left to run that course without meddling, and, once run, they would come to an end and certain patients would recover by themselves. Typhoid fever, for example, although an extremely dangerous and potentially fatal illness, would last for five or six weeks of fever and debilitation, but at the end about seventy percent of the patients would get well again. Lobar pneumonia would run for ten to fourteen days and then, in lucky, previously healthy patients, the famous "crisis" would take place and the patient would recover overnight. Patients with the frightening manifestations of delirium tremens only needed to be confined to a dark room for a few days, and then were ready to come out into the world and drink again. Some were doomed at the outset of course, but not all. The new lesson was that treating them made the outcome worse rather than better.

It is difficult to imagine, from this distance, how overwhelming this news was for most physicians. The traditional certainty had been that every disease was aimed toward a fatal termination, and without a doctor and his energetic ministrations, or barring miraculous intervention by a higher force, all sick people would die of their disease. To recognize that this was not so, and that with rare exceptions (rabies the most notable one) may sick people could get well by themselves, went against the accepted belief of the time. It took courage and determination, and time, to shake off the old idea.
Looking back over the whole embarrassing record, the historians of that period must be hard put to it for explanations of the steadily increasing demand, decade after decade, for more doctors, more clinics and hospitals, more health care. You might think that people would have turned away from the medical profession, or abandoned it. Especially since,throughout the last half of the nineteenth century and the full first third of this one, there was so conspicuously little that medicine had to offer in the way of effective drugs or indeed any kind of technology."

Okay, I'm going to stop there. I do not disparage the many advances of medicine. But many of the advances are not true advances. They are widely accepted bullsh**!

Failure and Success

2007-06-20T12:24:00.000-06:00

we are ALL misguided to one extent or another. The medical ideas of Galen held sway for many centuries, and were largely worthless, dangerous, or deadly.

Our mistakes are important to our ultimate progress, but only if and when we recognize them. If instead we embrace the mistakes as we so often seem to do, disasters proliferate.

Politics IS bewildering! But it is because so many of its' participants are extremely bewildered in contrasting ways. And they often believe fervently that their perspectives are the only rational ones, and that those on the other sides of the question are completely wrong. Things are rarely that simple.

I have stopped trying to characterize myself as a liberal or a conservative. I have come to believe that the two party system falls short of the needs of the country. But our politics are formed by complex issues and our responses to them.

We have many different crises to deal with, not just politically, but environmentally and across the spectrum of human needs. In the larger scheme of things, within our very disasters lay the potential keys to our future.

The immensity of the World Wars of the twentieth century, the incredible carnage and waste, the suffering, the direct devolution into our present strife, the roots of our eventual (possible) success(es) are within these disasters.

Before I go on with this thought, it just occurred to me that, just as numbers of readers are sharply reduced once posts are scrolled off into archives, the same sort of reductions occur with regard to comments and replies. So before continuing I'm going to copy this and put it in the main body of the blog.

In my view, the single most remarkable thing of our time is the fact that we have gone into space. Humans have gone to the moon. We have landed robots on other planets and made close approaches to the most distant planets and their satellites.

These things most assuredly would not have happened, but for the frictions generated because of the wars and the potential for even more disastrous, even final conflagrations. This is so obvious I won't even prove the point.

The efforts of the two Superpowers both in the Space Race and the mad dash toward nuclear oblivion resulted in one of the superpowers failing economically, with the other trailing perhaps only a few decades behind.

And with the downfall of the one and the multiple and ongoing disasters in international diplomacy of the other, we took our eye off the ball and allowed our space efforts to stagnate. Why is this so important? Specifically because of all the problems that we MUST deal with. Global warming and all the associated problems. Overpopulation, famine, disease, pollution, and last but not least, fanaticism in all its' many guises.

Today there are three main schools of thought about how to proceed with the space program. Only two of them have much prospect to happen. I favor the third, which unfortunately has little likelihood of happening.

The first is to establish a permanent colony on the moon. There are a plethora of problems with this, but also some very attractive possibilities. Very costly, with the potential profits, far, far off in time.

The second is to land on, explore, and ultimately set up some communities on Mars. This is considerably more ambitious, much, much more costly, and with the potential profits for humankind far further in the distant future. In other words, these two options are likely to stall and stagnate because the require such sustained sacrifice, in exactly the same way that the space effort has stagnated over the past few decades. I am not forgetting our great strides on this frontier, but in the seventies the prevailing view was that we would be much further along in space exploration, and might even have had a lunar colony by now.

Of course all of the accomplishments in space are inspiring! And the profits, in terms of advances in many of the sciences and the practical advances that have been made possible, indirectly due to the space effort are too numerous to list. But it is not obvious to the politicians and their constituents. And the space effort has been enormously more expensive than expected, or than it should have been. And since all the spin offs do not seem at first glance to be space related, and because so much of the funding has been squandered, and there is little prospect for immediate profit, we are stuck financially between a rock and a hard place.

Let us go to the third option, the one I favor. It is getting virtually no attention in the debate. I favor missions to the Amore (earth approaching) asteroids. The mining of said asteroids, and the ultimate hollowing out of the asteroids providing space for human habitation, space for industrial production too potentially polluting on Earth, and ultimately, even farming on a large scale.

Just touching on a few of the positives of this option which are really important: These asteroids, by comparison to Mars or the Moon have virtually NO gravity, comparatively speaking. That is not an inconsequential thing. To get a single kilogram off the Moon or Mars costs many thousands of dollars. We must live with the extremely deep gravity well of the Earth. We have no choice. It is where we are. The gravity wells of the Moon and even Mars are far more shallow but are still far (by thousands of times) greater than the minuscule gravities presented by the Earth-approaching asteroids. So getting there from Earth is expensive. Sending cargo back from them is VERY cheap by comparison to the Moon or Mars.

Now let us look at the cargo value. Many, if not most of these asteroids are very high in metals of the Platinum family. The fact is that in terms of near term payoff for our investment, this is the only real viable option. Instead of going into more detail, The floor is open for debate and discussion.

Others Need Not Apply

2007-06-19T06:15:00.000-06:00

I just came across Sermo, a site which excludes all healers and innovators without an MD or DO after their name. They did, in all fairness, extend an invitation to non physicians to check with them about being a "client" or a "research partner."

I am looking for an innovative eye surgeon to collaborate with. I am doubtful that a contact is likely to be made through this group, but it couldn't hurt to make contact. This is what I said:

Among my posts on Skin Cell Forum are the threads Preventing Viral Infections and several others which deal with such subjects as dentistry, the state of cataract surgery and disorders of the skin.

On my blog, Eureka Ideas Unlimited, you can see much of the same subject matter without as many distracting posts of ordinary mortals, often referred to as patients.
eurekaideasunlimited.blogspot.com

My name is Anthropositor. I would particularly like to have a dialogue with a surgeon who would like to break new ground in cataract surgery. Odds that such a contact will be made here are slim though, aren't they?

It would be of immense value to physicians to be less insular and full of themselves as a group.

Collective Idiocy

2007-06-11T10:25:00.000-06:00

(This was my reply on another blog which featured in its' header an overly optimistic quote of the great Mohandas Gandhi.)

Sometimes it is inspiring quotes, soundbites from notable, even heroic and inspiring people like the Mahatma that can lead us astray.
Genocidal monsters do indeed die of old age without ever being brought to justice. One could argue that it has happened more in the twentieth century than any previous time.

And this new century shows every indicator of outstripping the last, not only in terms of genocide, but in the multiple ecological disasters which now threaten ALL life on the planet.

Mr. Greenwell is certainly correct in his one phrase comment that the world's amphibians are endangered. A quarter of the beehives on the planet have also disappeared recently and we are still clueless as to why. Bird populations too are being decimated. I could go on in this vein for a chapter or two and just scratch the surface.

The blogosphere has the potential for being a great tool for dialogues which could address many of these issues. It is currently being used mostly for asinine one-way chit-chat.

The forums too propagate volumes of nonsense. All the jabbering just drowns out reason and sense. In the half year that my blog has been in existence, not one single ongoing dialogue of any importance has developed. Lamentable. We had better start using these marvelous Internet tools more effectively folks. We are running out of time.

A Medical Comment

2007-06-09T11:49:00.000-06:00

A number of months ago I had an uncharacteristic spike in my blood pressure of 191/110 mm hg. Although my life is sometimes blessed with an abundance of stress, I was unable to identify a triggering event or cluster of problems which could account for the reading. But bear in mind that we are not always conscious of all the stresses that might be having an effect on us.

Since then, I have paid almost daily attention to what my blood pressure is doing. (It is worthwhile to note that it is the "resting" blood pressure that is indicative of what is going on with your vascular system.) As an example, it could have been quite a hot day and I was driving a car and got quite overheated because the air conditioner was not functional. If I was just short if heat stroke for example, this could have some substantial impact on my blood pressure.

Paradoxically, I have, since that high spike, virtually eliminated the occasional use of the beta-blocker Metaprolol, a Mexican drug equivalent to Toprol XL. My blood pressure has reduced to my target values (116/76) with only dietary changes, (a sharp increase in ingested potassium bearing foods, supplementation of potassium chloride and potassium gluconate, and some reduction of sodium chloride), and a moderate increase in daily exercise.

On Monday nights, when I competitively teach chess to a group of students, the blood pressure generally climbs to about 135/88, but that is, after all, a rather challenging sporting event, with more than five hours of continuous rapid chess. By Tuesday the blood pressure is back to normal, or actually better than normal for a sixty-six year old unmedicated male.

(This post was first inspired by questions put by a woman on Skin Cell Forum earlier today who is scheduled for a surgery on her knee. This woman has had so many surgeries for so many different things, that I doubt she could even count them all with any sort of accuracy. One could refer to her as a surgery addict. Of course I didn't do that.)

Certainly the risks of laparoscopic and arthroscopic surgery are lower than conventional surgeries. Perhaps one of the unfortunate consequences of this is that they are often done as the first resort rather than the last.

Doctors could not maintain their lavish incomes and lifestyles with just good advice. They MUST do surgeries and prescribe fancy expensive new stuff. And they do so on a massive scale. I'm not going to get on a rant here. But I expect I will have more to say on this subject shortly in the thread on my blog titled A Letter To the Eye Surgeon. If memory serves it is in the March Archives.

In the meantime, the two threads in General Health here, (on the forum) one of the same name, and Biting the Dentist are relevant to the subject. It is a fact of life that there are a great many avoidable surgeries and other medical procedures. We place ourselves too readily in the hands of these experts and trust them far more than is warranted by the facts.

Doctors as a group are no more trustworthy than politicians, lawyers, or used car salesmen; all about equally rapacious and opportunistic. I stand ready to defend my remarks.

Meanwhile, since experience tells me that no doctor is going to show up and actually defend his profession, don't just listen to me. Read the various books of Lewis Thomas, a physician who does not even bother to append M.D. after his name on his works.

A Paris Hilton Can of Worms

2007-06-08T10:08:00.000-06:00

As I write this, Paris Hilton is still at home although the Sheriff's Dept. arrived some time ago to take her to court (presumably to be properly returned to custody). The judge is in a very ticklish position. There is infighting between the prosecutor's office, the court, and the Sheriff.

I am of the strong opinion that the legal system is broken, and I am engaged in a battle in another part of California over issues which involve refusal to apprehend criminals in the process of committing crimes. There is even evidence of a conspiracy. But it is a matter is yet to be tried by the courts.

Now I am currently a couple of thousand miles from California and do not have a California Penal Code on hand. But the Penal Code Section that seems to apply is 1203, having to do with custodial authority. It strikes me that this Penal Code Section is quite likely to be used by the Sheriff to confer the final authority on him due to the ostensible overcrowding of the system, which severely affects the male inmate population.

I know what I would do as a judge, to retake judicial control in the face of this clear contempt, made possible by Federal orders to reduce overcrowding which give the Sheriff wide latitude to thumb his nose at the State Court.

If I were the judge, and I determined that this Sheriff had made an end-run around my sentence, I would preclude the possibility that it would happen again. I would use a provision of this same statute PC1203(.03). This allows the judge to order her to the Intake Center of the California Prison System for a ninety day evaluation period to determine if she is in fact an incorrigible criminal, and then decide her appropriate punishment. She would not ever get as far as State Prison. She is too rich and powerful and she is not a convicted felon. It would cost her many thousands of extra dollars to fight it though. And meanwhile, she would be in a very privileged enclave of the the Sheriff's County Jail.

Of course, some of what I have said is a bit on the whimsical side. This is not exactly how this statute was originally intended to be used, but it would not be the first time that it was used in such a creative way. Other judges have deliberately used this particular law for the very practical purpose of simply adding three months of "dead time" which would not be counted as time served. It is actually "prior" to the ultimate sentence. Something on the order of 98% of inmates who are evaluated under this program are returned to State Prison afterwards with the full sentence prescribed by law. Rarely do they get an abbreviated sentence and do county time instead of prison time.

But in Paris Hilton's case, let's see how this could work. She would be ordered immediately back into custody and held for several weeks while the Prison System determined if she fit their guidelines. She could not be released just to free up a cell for more important prisoners. (I think even Paris Hilton herself would agree, there are no more important prisoners.) Under these conditions, she could not be released without the judge himself playing the decisive role.

For poor people, the result is almost automatic. 95+% are accepted for the program. Virtually all the prospective candidates wait for such acceptance while in custody. But even in this case, where she would clearly have a large chance of being ultimately rejected by the prison system, she could not be released in the same fashion by the Sheriff. She would at the very least do a few weeks in custody waiting for the prison system's decision.

But let us say, just for argument, that she is accepted in this evaluation program. Okay, now she does the ninety days (which for a poor person) is all "dead time." That is to say, it does not need to be counted at all in the imposition of the ultimate sentencing when she is returned to appear before the judge. Of course, that is just for the poor criminals. The ones with no resources to defend themselves.

I do hope someone E-mails this to the judge and the prosecutor, and maybe even His Honor the Governor. I have it on good authority, he has some huevos grande.

I would do it myself but I am already involved in a battle in another part of the State. A battle which I am economically ill-equipped to fight. A battle brought about by another County Sheriff's Department and the collective gross dereliction of duty of five Watch Commanders and assorted Deputies and other Sheriff's personnel, as well as the workers in other enforcement agencies.

Any gutsy, skillful, crusading lawyer practicing in Riverside County, California may contact me to discuss my case. I realize that this is not a matter which is likely to have great impact in the larger scheme of things, and therefore not well placed here. But since this blog has so far accomplished not even the development of some interesting conversations, I see no good reason not to, while discussing someone as noteworthy as Paris Hilton, bring up other lawbreaking by other California Law Enforcement Agents sworn to uphold the law.

I think it is important to point out that most such breaches of the law by law enforcement do not directly challenge the courts authority because they occur at the street level before the courts have become involved. It is "street justice" performed by individual deputies with scant supervision by, in this case, five different Watch Commanders with whom I was in continuous contact or attempted contact while the crimes were ongoing with no arrests or other effective intervention.

It would also appear that the courts exercise considerable latitude to avoid inconvenient involvements, even when there are clear-cut crimes committed against citizens and complete failure of enforcement officers to do the duties they are sworn to perform.

Today I saw a judge in Tennessee drone on for what seemed like a half hour to justify giving the wife of a minister three years after she was convicted of killing him by shooting him in the back. Among other things, he cited such mitigating circumstances as how well behaved she was with her investigating probation officer and that she had no prior criminal record.

Look, I'm sort of reaching here. I have no idea what will catch the thoughts of the readers enough to get them to actually participate and contribute to improving our world. Take a look at my archives. Many of my posts have something concrete to say about a specific problem. Some, like this one, range more widely.

The widespread cynicism affecting our institutions from top to bottom is caused in part by our widespread ongoing apathy. It is not just the widespread corruption of public officials. It is not just incredible illogic. We are not paying attention. We elect idiots and then pay no attention to what they are doing until the disasters they produce are almost beyond repair.

Maybe the new piece of cheesecake will get someone's juices going. This is a good place to stop and give others a chance to express themselves.

If you would prefer to talk about Pandemics or Germs or War, Chess or Medicine, instead of something really important like Paris Hilton, go to the January archive.

In February there is an idea about Taxes, a little poetry and some more thoughts on medicine.

In March is a big post that will enable you to prevent viral infections like colds and influenza. There is also an interesting letter to an eye surgeon. Somewhere in March is also something or other on Heresy.

Then in April there is an eye-opener about more unpunished Genocide, and some encouragement to do something for Mother Earth throughout the year, instead of just on Earth day.

If you have anything to say about any of these subjects, let's hear it.

Cleanliness and Coincidence

2007-06-07T10:21:00.000-06:00

Back before the United States largely lost its' way in the space program, I was periodically called upon to assemble equipment for use with liquid oxygen.

Of course such equipment needs to be manufactured in an ultra-clean environment, a super cleanroom in which even the air is filtered multiple times. You wear a hooded nylon suit and boots, surgical gloves and mask.

Under such conditions, what would be a short bathroom break is suddenly a procedure that takes the better part of an hour and costs a few hundred dollars in down time. Unlike the government and source inspectors whose job it was to observe every move I made as I built the device, even in a six or eight hour period of assembly, I never took a break.

Fortunately, there were always at least two such inspectors, so they could spell each other as I went on working. They never could understand how I could go for such an extended period of time without stopping. Then, even when the job was done, and we were changing back into our own comfortably comparatively filthy clothing, I would simply dress and leave, without ever going to the restroom.

I was anxious to get back out into the smog and other smells of the city. In a cleanroom, the only aromas available are the occasional whiff of alcohol or acetone or MEK or the bad breath or other scent of a government inspector.

One would not think that under such conditions, you would actually welcome the assault of the myriad urban odors that we ordinarily take little notice of. Even the sense of taste is heightened after a day of assembly in an ultra-cleanroom.

Afterwards, I generally treated myself to steak and lobster in a very dark restaurant, being served by a waiter whose intellect surpassed the combined smarts of the inspectors who had watched my every move throughout the day. (It was actually in such a restaurant, reputedly operated by the mob that J. Edgar Hoover insisted did not exist, that I first came across Ichabod. The restaurant was named after a bird other than a canary, whose name also begins with C, in Hawthorne, California.)

It was quite a few years before I saw him again. He sat down across from me at one of the $10-$20 poker tables at the Horseshoe Club in Gardena. I remember thinking how incongrous that was. Now I am less troubled by incongruity or coincidence than I used to be. I certainly never would have guessed that Ichabod would eventually become my butler. But I digress.

The point is, some of the best things in life are not particularly antiseptic.

Germ Prejudice

2007-06-06T10:05:00.000-06:00

http://www.med.nyu.edu/communications/news/pr_219.html

This study lends greater specificity to what we have known for a long time; that most of us is not us, and that most germs are not only not harmful to our health but of benefit and essential to good health.

It also gives weight to the idea that perhaps we should not be so ready to "clear cut" bacteria indiscriminately with antibacterial products and antibiotics.

This tendency has been fed by two huge influences; the medical profession, and the makers and purveyors of hygiene products and pharmaceuticals.

They have wrongly and wrongfully, even criminally spread the notion that we can indiscriminately kill "germs" without harm to the complex ecosystem. Sort of like burning and clearing vast sections of rain forests so that we can grow corn and beans and other "useful" crops, and provide more territory for human habitation.

Only the varieties of the stupidities exhibited by our governments in international relations increase more greatly. We all need to pay much more attention, generate much more effective solutions, and stop buying into simplistic doctrinaire sound-bite answers.

The widespread desire to put a specific name to every skin condition, as one example, may be a gross oversimplification of the sort that we are collectively prone to, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. We want to label and categorize everything. And we want all our answers to be simple and short.

As extinction overtakes more and more species of life, we will see how much more complicated oversimplification has made things.

2007-06-03T23:13:00.000-06:00

I Hold These Truths

2007-05-28T16:14:00.000-06:00

I hold these truths to be self evident.
That the seeds of disaster are sown with success.
That sentient beings are equal to the measure of
Their wisdom.

It is not made so by law, not of man or god.
It is not evil that is the enemy, though the enemy
Makes evil.

It is error. Error in fact. Error in perception.
Error in judgment. Error in desire.
Error in belief. Yet we certainly cannot live
Without error.

As food is poison to the glutton,
Undigested, undiscovered , unexamined error
Is poison to the mind.

When we embrace error with great faith
It gets all over us. Eventually it propagates itself
So much that it permeates our very beings.

But the rare soul who can keep wiping off
The error as often as it builds up
And point out the truths that remain,
That soul is our hope, if not our destiny.

The Birds and the Bees

2007-05-25T08:18:00.000-06:00

Okay. This is the red light district. Now that I have your full attention, let us talk about two problems. In recent years honeybees have had serious problems with a variety of mite. It damaged a great many colonies but it was a containable problem. It was matter of finding a chemical that would kill the mites but leave the bees unharmed and not contaminate the honey, or at least not enough to be noticed. Well that problem, for whatever reason, pretty much ran out of steam.

Bees are an absolutely essential component in the agriculture which feeds us all. A linchpin of our survival. So there was a collective sigh of relief when that problem abated. But it was premature. We now have a new problem, and it is MUCH more dangerous. The reason it is such an emergency is that we really have no solid clues as to the cause. Therefore we are currently helpless to stop it.

Bees are disappearing. Not just dying in large numbers because of a parasitic infection. Literally disappearing. Whole hives are winding up entirely empty of adult bees. Lots and lots of hives. In periods of a week to a month the adult bees fly off and don't come back. That leaves the eggs and baby bees who can't yet survive in an empty orphanage. The hive is dead. Or I should say, at this time more than one quarter of all hives on the planet have been wiped out.

Now, we have made some progress. We have named the problem. And a really nice name it is. Very professional sounding. Reassuring in a sense. It is called COLONY COLLAPSE DISORDER. Much better than IMPENDING WORLDWIDE STARVATION. But the fact remains that worldwide industrial agriculture has roughly ninety or a hundred crops across the entire spectrum of human and animal feedstocks that are absolutely dependent on bee pollination. This is not a problem that just affects beekeepers and honey production.

I should also say that the bees are also responsible for the bulk of the pollination in the rest of the entire ecosystem. So nature herself is threatened further in the ongoing runaway extinction now proceeding at a faster rate than ever in recorded history.

But back to the bees. These communal insects are fiercely protective of the babies in the hive. What would make them just fly away? Some sort of virus that drove them mad? A side effect of some herbicide or insecticide that does them no observable harm? A combination of the two? So far we have spent trivial amounts to find out. Meanwhile, to date we have spent half a TRILLION dollars on a fanatical war against fanatics. And that amount increases astronomically each day. We are getting massively stung, and it is not bees that are doing it. It is the Military Industrial Complex and their pet politicians.

Read here on another thread what President Eisenhower said about this danger in his Farewell to the Nation when he left office FORTY SEVEN YEARS AGO! Bear in mind also that this warning came from a man who was totally immersed in the military for his entire career. He was the highest ranking of all the Generals before he became President. That makes his final words to the nation that much more significant.

Time now to turn our attention to the birds. Birds too are quite important. Chickens provide one of our main meat supplies. There has been a lot of concern over the potential for a global pandemic of Avian Flu (H5N1). That concern is waning now, not because the danger is reduced. It is not.

But we can only pay attention for just so long. We have dodged the bullet for the past few years, so our confidence in our "experts" is increasing. That confidence is not at all well founded. The urgency and numbers of problems continue to proliferate. Most of us are entirely oblivious.

Let us turn our attention to West Nile Fever, another virus of worldwide impact which, like H5N1 affects a wide spectrum of the bird population. And like H5N1 it has already crossed the species barrier into the human population. As a matter of fact West Nile has killed many, many more people than H5N1 (so far). Now, is there any evidence that H5N1 or West Nile may be infecting insects (like bees) as well? Is anyone looking into this possibility? We DO know that West Nile is mosquito borne. Gosh, last I heard, mosquitoes were insects! But there is no evidence that any mosquitoes are getting sick with West Nile fever. They are just carriers. Boy, that IS a relief. I guess it can't have anything to do with the bee crisis. Because otherwise the experts would have already found out about it, wouldn't they?

Oh, a final word about wild birds. Half a dozen major large populations of wild species of birds have had their populations decimated by up to half in the past few years by West Nile Virus. It is not a stretch to think it might jump into our industrial chicken farms. We still don't know exactly how H5N1 is making it into the chicken and hog populations from the wild bird reservoirs. We just know that it is. Any ideas anybody? Hello? Anybody out there? Hello... Hello... Anybody?

Playing Around With Art

2007-05-23T12:58:00.000-06:00

Clearly art is ephemeral. I cannot now show you the picture that this post is about.

I think play is the central thing in creativity. In my scientific endeavors I restrain myself from being too goal oriented. There are times when a certain lack of experience in what you are doing is an asset, not a liability. Discoveries are rarely made by people who know for sure exactly what they are doing.

Added:
This picture has now disappeared three times, after it was successfully up. Sort of spooky. I am clueless as to why. Something wrong with my various tinkerings I guess. If it keeps up I could get a little superstitious. (Just kidding.)

Added:
Okay, I have tried repeatedly to post the original, did it on a different browser, (which modified the picture trying to bring it back to something approaching a photograph.) The above is an example. It no longer looks like Andy Warhol was toying around with impressionism. When I went back to my original browser, the new browser jumped back on. So I deleted it from my system.

The original browser originally posted my picture exactly the way I wanted it, but the picture disappeared in an hour or so. Now the remaining browser is correcting in the fashoin of the browser I deleted.

Sometimes I like not knowing what I'm doing, and all the discovery that goes with that. Other times it is just a reminder that my lack of understanding is profound. Maybe I should get a printer that works. I think I have lost the original print which I really liked. I think I will stop and think about the birds and the bees for a while. Keep an eye out for my next post, in which I will say something about the birds and the bees. I promise.

Ron Paul Picture

2007-05-22T23:44:00.000-06:00

This is Ron Paul at his desk. It is hard

not to like a guy with this sign on his desk.

Picture of an Old Goat

2007-05-19T12:00:00.000-06:00

I just figured out how to post pictures. Now I have to find some pictures that people will look at.

Who is This?

2007-05-19T11:57:00.000-06:00

Ron Paul

2007-05-19T03:13:00.000-06:00

Nominally a Republican, Ron Paul has a variety of traits which make him of greater interest as a nominee than his fellow candidates. While I am an independent who finds both parties wanting in a variety of ways, I must admit I can only find a few details of his history that give me pause. I know that is faint praise. But so far he seems to be a pretty appealing fellow compared to the other Republican candidates.

A Skeleton Comes Out Of The Closet

2007-05-13T10:18:00.000-06:00

Below is a post on Skin Cell Forum made simultaneously here. I was responding to a post quite horrified about terrible abuse of human rights in another culture.

Sometimes it seems that double standards abound. It is easy to think we are the enlightened ones. The truth is, we have a natural tendency to notice the behaviors of cultures or faiths or ideologies which differ from ours and to ignore the horrors right under our noses within our own society.

We should be cleaning our own houses with the same thoroughness that we are prepared to employ on "those others." I am sensitive to the plight of children and of women, and am acutely conscious of having contributed to the problem by my previous inactions. Much of what I do today addresses issues that most others give no thought to at all.

I have spoken frequently here about our broken medical institutions, the pharmaceutical and chemical industries and the criminal (international) government cooperation with these conspiracies, both tacit and active. That is most appropriate for me to do here. This is a health oriented forum.

The rest is perhaps best dealt with on my website in spite of the fact that few people have found it. That is partly my fault. I don't seek dabblers and lurkers.

An isolated example. In recent years we have all seen the damage to the Catholic Church because of the exposure of priestly misbehavior with children, which was repeatedly swept under the rug until it could no longer be contained.

My father was a Presbyterian Minister. Many years ago I wrote a book which dealt with a multitude of crimes that were dealt with by the Presbyterian Church hierarchy in exactly the same way that the Catholics did, by transferring him to new congregations in new churches, with fresh opportunities to prey upon innocents. Law enforcement too had other priorities, perhaps in part because of the influence of the church.

When I originally wrote the book, a number of the people involved were still alive. If any still are, they are probably drooling in their gruel in some rest home. But I did not write it originally for the purpose of publication. It was simply a cathartic effort with which I could exorcise some of my demons.

But I did show it to an agent who had previously provided me with several ghostwriting clients. Without my authorization, he showed it to a publisher who expressed interest. I burned the manuscript on the barbecue.

I had pretty well forgotten about it for over twenty years. Then wave after wave of Catholic scandals kept coming along, and my perspective became, why should they be the only ones on the carpet for what I KNEW was a problem in the Presbyterian church, and which I learned secondhand was also occurring in other churches as well.

About eight years ago I discussed the book with a local Presbyterian Minister. Although it no longer existed, it had taken me about a year to write while I was working on several other projects. To rewrite it would take three or four months.

The Minister was a very skillful fellow. He talked of possible "ramifications" and "cans of worms" and letting "sleeping dogs lie." And of course he made no threats. He only said very vaguely that there were legal considerations that could pose some problems. And of course, since I was agnostic and not even a practicing Presbyterian, what did all this ancient history even matter to me anyway?

That fellow did some very effective sweeping that day, but the dirt still creeps up through the carpet. I am ashamed of him and of the Presbyterian Church and you can quote me. They hypocritically left a lot of victims twisting in the wind.

If you were victimized by a preacher of any denomination, including imam, rabbi, guru, auditor or psychiatrist, who used the position of great power and trust to prey upon you, you need not carry that burden alone.

Farewell by a Great Statesman

2007-05-10T16:06:00.000-06:00

My apologies to those who are incurably addicted to sound bites. By your standards, this speech is long, and sound-bites are absent. In spite of our collective attention deficit, here is the entire Farewell Address by President Dwight David Eisenhower. Although this president was not known for his eloquence, neither did people hold their breath in anticipation of his next verbal blunder. Keep your eye on the worry about the military industrial complex becoming an uncontrollable force.

(I have periodically changed copy color in the hope that a few of you will be assisted to persist in your reading and to further draw your attention to the key elements of the message. I wish also to point out, for those of you who did not hear this broadcast as it was given, live, that this was a time of great turbulance and paranoia, as profound for the American citizen and our institutions as any of the purges in distant lands, with many devastating, severe and irrevocable consequences, and well beyond the control of even as great a leader as Eisenhower.) --Anthropositor

President Eisenhower's Farewell Address;

Good evening, my fellow Americans.

First, I should like to express my gratitude to the radio and television networks for the opportunity they have given me over the years to bring reports and messages to our nation. My special thanks go to them for the opportunity of addressing you this evening.

Three days from now, after a half century of service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor.

This evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen.
Like every other citizen, I wish the new President, and all who will labor with him, Godspeed. I pray that the coming years will be blessed with peace and prosperity for all.

Our people expect their President and the Congress to find essential agreement on questions of great moment, the wise resolution of which will better shape the future of the nation.

My own relations with Congress, which began on a remote and tenuous basis when, long ago, a member of the Senate appointed me to West Point, have since ranged to the intimate during the war and immediate post-war period, and finally to the mutually interdependent during these past eight years.

In this final relationship, the Congress and the Administration have, on most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the nation well rather than mere partisanship, and so have assured that the business of the nation should go forward. So my official relationship with Congress ends in a feeling on my part, of gratitude that we have been able to do so much together.

We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world.

Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.

Throughout America's adventure in free government, such basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among peoples and among nations.

To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people.
Any failure traceable to arrogance or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us a grievous hurt, both at home and abroad.

Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method.

Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle – with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.

Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in the newer elements of our defenses; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research – these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

But each proposal must be weighed in light of a broader consideration; the need to maintain balance in and among national programs – balance between the private and the public economy, balance between the cost and hoped for advantages – balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between the actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.

The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their Government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well in the face of threat and stress.
But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise.
Of these, I mention two only.

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well.

But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.

Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields.

In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system – ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.

Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.

Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war – as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years – I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.

Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road.

So – in this my last good night to you as your President – I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find some things worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.
You and I – my fellow citizens – need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nations' great goals.

To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America's prayerful and continuing aspiration:

We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.

Now, on Friday noon, I am to become a private citizen. I am proud to do so. I look forward to it.
Thank you, and good night.

Some Thoughts On a Medically Supervised Forum and Some Wider Implications

2007-05-09T11:28:00.000-06:00

Last night I posed questions that had to do with structuring of the Med Help Forum. They weren't spam or other such nonsense. They pointed out that the problems I wanted to address could not easily be put into 2000 character sound bites. The questions never made it to the public area of the forum, although they were certainly relevant.

What have I found out? That although doctors are present here, or perhaps because doctors are present here, the way the system is set up only simple questions can be addressed and they can only deal with the health issue at hand, and not with a possible difficulty with the forum format and structure.

Your time is clearly too valuable, your services too greatly in need to have any consideration of such matters from ordinary plebeian individuals.
I understand your need to keep the chatty masses at bay. I really do. And your charitable efforts are to be commended.

Oops, once again my allowable word limit is almost at an end, and clearly I have wasted your time and mine. Guess I'll just write about my experience here on another forum and on my blog.

I had no expectation of censorship of my initial remarks, which were certainly in the public interest. I now regret that I didn't save a copy of them so that I could illustrate with precision what you elected to simply delete without comment.

I no longer have the expectation that you will not delete a thoughtful relevant post. If I err in this perspective I will listen to, and even publish your perspective. Know why? Because censorship is a malignant cancer in the social body.

I have written this with considerable dismay.
Anthropositor

Addition:
Now, a couple of days later, I am still trying to put this in the appropriate perspective. First, why am I even upset? It certainly comes as no surprise to me that this could happen. And certainly, in the name of efficiency, and being able to help the maximum number of people, a certain encouragement of brevity is not really out of line. But the truth is, proper assessment of medical problems does not lend itself to short questions or answers.

Having seen a years worth of comments about intractable health problems on a forum with no doctors ever participating, and read hundreds of comments concluding that doctors made misdiagnoses based on instant assessments of information provided by patients who were not uniformly well equipped to communicate in the first place, I found myself sometimes giving the doctor the benefit of the doubt.

It is really very difficult not to, because we are daily inundated with messages in our commercial media with phrases like "remember, only your doctor can diagnose..." or other such indoctrinations. We consumers collectively, are really incredibly gullible and largely incapable of making our own informed medical assessments and decisions.

So although this started out because of some routine censorship, the real issue is our mindless hero worship of medical professionals, and an unquestioning dependence on them which does not serve us well at all.

Even the smartest, most successful and best educated of us are pervasively inundated in doctrines which we are literally incapable of effectively evaluating or even recognizing. Why would I be so surprised and shocked at the routine censorship on that medical forum? And the doctors themselves and/or their staff, undoubtedly think of themselves as good guys doing good things.

Strange Report

2007-05-08T23:56:00.000-06:00

Today the top story was the arrest of a half dozen young conspirators who, over a considerable span of time had been planning and preparing to commit suicidal armed assault against members of our military at Ft. Dix. Now, there are a variety of important and interesting elements of this story but at the moment I am moved to write about one.

I was totally mystified by one thing in three different network reports. I believe that these were pretty representative of news reports across the American spectrum. It was referred to as HOMEGROWN TERROR.

Apparently this phrase came from responsible government officials in response to questions, and there were apparently not too many reporters who read between the lines here. Instead, each commentator lent his own emphasis to this phrase. Lets look at the details.

Six young men. One, a U.S. citizen whose country of origin was Jordan. Four of them were illegal aliens from the former Yugoslavia. And a fellow from Turkey. The common denominator? They were all militant suicidal fanatical Islamic jihadists who got their conditioning and indoctrination from Internet Jihadist evangelical recruiters. I heard nothing in the reports that indicated there was previous exposure to Madrassa schools during the formative years of these young men, but I wouldn't be surprised.

I'll just say this. By no stretch of the imagination would an intelligent perceptive person characterize this as Homegrown Terror. Am I the only one who noticed this?