A Political Lament

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

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.
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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.
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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.
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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

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

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

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

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

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.