Just Another Crackpot Idea About Flu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Chess Rant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Warning! Email Reply with Misspelled Bad Word

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love,
Dad

Oops, that's personal.

Chess Game With A Jester

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Answer to a post about the toxicity of alfalfa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intelligence and Happiness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Write Or Not To Write

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doing Creation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for the Email

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

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

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

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

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

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

Governmental Lead Poisoning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colonization of Near Space

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Casting Call

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

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

A Thread Locked On Skin Cell Forum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am Anthropositor and I approved this message.

A Thread llocked on Skin Cell Forum

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.