My long missing daughter. Between blindness and computer ignorance, I am unable to get the images up, but if you click on the image links below, some of my images from a chessboard about a year ago should appear. Now that I have heard you are alive, we will find each other.
Picasa Web Albums - Anthropositor - Eureka Ideas Unlimited
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Some Medical Dissent
As time goes on and I approach blindness, I am regularly surprised at the new resources that can be brought to bear with a little imagination. I could have had my first operation a couple of years ago. Almost all people in the same position would have. And if the surgeon I ultimately chose had not been seriously deficient on several really important counts, I certainly would have had her do the right eye in February of 2007. A fuller exposition of the details may be found at
http://www.skincell.org/community/index.php/topic,21968.0.html
Now, this surgeon never actually treated the eye in any fashion. Nor did she fully examine and question the information presented to her. Nor did she ever respond to me by phone until, finally, the last working day before the operation, I cancelled it. Then she was on the phone within a quarter hour, wanting to know what was wrong.
Since that relatively useless conversation, I have tried further communications, in the hope that perhaps my expectations had been too high. But I have concluded that my perspective was justified about her, and am thankful to conclude with finality that she will not be my surgeon or provide me with any other services. In essence, I threw a lot of money down a rat hole.
Throughout this process, I have had little success in finding a good candidate to replace her. And I have come to understand that I am not likely to be able to get a surgeon whose track record can be examined, and who is more likely to be receptive to a patient actually wanting to discuss the various elements of the operation in detail. I know this because I have been fairly active for these past two years in trying to actually communicate with other physicians. One particularly interesting candidate never responded in any way to my Emails. One would think I have been “blackballed,” as a patient who actually expects to understand the details of what is going on, and even, heaven forbid, to have some input as to what sort of lens is implanted.
It appears that virtually all of these physicians simply expect patients to pay virtually no attention to anything, but simply to do whatever is ordered.. A cataract is now considered the most routine of surgeries. According to the industry, 19 out of 20 times, vision is improved. Sometimes vastly, sometimes just a bit. Sometimes there are glare and other night vision artifacts which were not expected by the patient If the physician is board certified, the patient has no right whatsoever to understand any of the details of the operation, or even to share in the decision of what characteristics the replacement lens should have. In the case of Dr. Baltz, she never discussed my particular needs from my perspective at all. In spite of the fact that I wrote her quite a few detailed questions and supplied input which was not considered at all.
Had I ignored this, I would have been guilty of patient malpractice. In the past two years, talking to a great many patients who have had cataract surgery, I have spoken to quite a few who did not feel that the outcome was as good as they had hoped.
In many of these cases of moderate to severe dissatisfaction, the fault was not entirely with the surgeon, but stemmed as well from the patient taking no interest in the details, before the operation. In many, if not in most of these operations, you have met the surgeon once. He or she has done all the mysterious and arcane things following up on measurements that his office staff or some optometrist may have made. And if Dr. Baltz is typical, the patient’s individual needs are not touched upon at all.
Now, I should say, my experience with physicians in the past two decades, other than Baltz and the optometrist who verified my own assessment that I was going to need a new lens, is nonexistent. The stroke of several years ago, pretty much took care of itself. When my blood pressure began to skyrocket more recently, I simply studied the subject and brought the pressure back down to the normal range, without beta-blockers or other mechanical aids. Had I gone to a physician, I can safely say, I would have been on the road to a lifetime of daily blood pressure meds, at a buck or two a day, above and beyond physician charges and the tab for frequent tests.
Getting back to the increasing blindness, I have gotten pretty motivated to get at least one of the eyes done, yet still, I cannot find a doctor with whom I would be comfortable. They have all the power. I have virtually none, except refusal to proceed. Not entirely out of the question, the way the profession runs. Next time perhaps I will talk about the industrial side of the business.
http://www.skincell.org/community/index.php/topic,21968.0.html
Now, this surgeon never actually treated the eye in any fashion. Nor did she fully examine and question the information presented to her. Nor did she ever respond to me by phone until, finally, the last working day before the operation, I cancelled it. Then she was on the phone within a quarter hour, wanting to know what was wrong.
Since that relatively useless conversation, I have tried further communications, in the hope that perhaps my expectations had been too high. But I have concluded that my perspective was justified about her, and am thankful to conclude with finality that she will not be my surgeon or provide me with any other services. In essence, I threw a lot of money down a rat hole.
Throughout this process, I have had little success in finding a good candidate to replace her. And I have come to understand that I am not likely to be able to get a surgeon whose track record can be examined, and who is more likely to be receptive to a patient actually wanting to discuss the various elements of the operation in detail. I know this because I have been fairly active for these past two years in trying to actually communicate with other physicians. One particularly interesting candidate never responded in any way to my Emails. One would think I have been “blackballed,” as a patient who actually expects to understand the details of what is going on, and even, heaven forbid, to have some input as to what sort of lens is implanted.
It appears that virtually all of these physicians simply expect patients to pay virtually no attention to anything, but simply to do whatever is ordered.. A cataract is now considered the most routine of surgeries. According to the industry, 19 out of 20 times, vision is improved. Sometimes vastly, sometimes just a bit. Sometimes there are glare and other night vision artifacts which were not expected by the patient If the physician is board certified, the patient has no right whatsoever to understand any of the details of the operation, or even to share in the decision of what characteristics the replacement lens should have. In the case of Dr. Baltz, she never discussed my particular needs from my perspective at all. In spite of the fact that I wrote her quite a few detailed questions and supplied input which was not considered at all.
Had I ignored this, I would have been guilty of patient malpractice. In the past two years, talking to a great many patients who have had cataract surgery, I have spoken to quite a few who did not feel that the outcome was as good as they had hoped.
In many of these cases of moderate to severe dissatisfaction, the fault was not entirely with the surgeon, but stemmed as well from the patient taking no interest in the details, before the operation. In many, if not in most of these operations, you have met the surgeon once. He or she has done all the mysterious and arcane things following up on measurements that his office staff or some optometrist may have made. And if Dr. Baltz is typical, the patient’s individual needs are not touched upon at all.
Now, I should say, my experience with physicians in the past two decades, other than Baltz and the optometrist who verified my own assessment that I was going to need a new lens, is nonexistent. The stroke of several years ago, pretty much took care of itself. When my blood pressure began to skyrocket more recently, I simply studied the subject and brought the pressure back down to the normal range, without beta-blockers or other mechanical aids. Had I gone to a physician, I can safely say, I would have been on the road to a lifetime of daily blood pressure meds, at a buck or two a day, above and beyond physician charges and the tab for frequent tests.
Getting back to the increasing blindness, I have gotten pretty motivated to get at least one of the eyes done, yet still, I cannot find a doctor with whom I would be comfortable. They have all the power. I have virtually none, except refusal to proceed. Not entirely out of the question, the way the profession runs. Next time perhaps I will talk about the industrial side of the business.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
This from a young lady in Malasia.
I'm mathematically challenged
Folks, it is confirmed. I CAN'T do maths to save my life.
I had a few questions thrown my way today and as I attempted them, I realize how much, or rather, how little I know or can remember solving mathematical questions. SIGH. Here are some samples. Can you solve them?
The total cost for five items of repair work on a car was $195. Overhaul of the carburetor cost twice as much as the tune-up, brake pads cost one-third as much as the carburetor overhaul, and alignment and wheel balancing each cost one-third as much as the tune–up. What did the tune-up cost?
A certain preparation consists of liquids x, y, and z in the proportion 5:2:1. How many gallons of the preparation can be made from a stock of materials consisting of 25 gallons of x, 20 gallons of y, and 8 gallons of z?
The normal selling price of a case of soap is $10.00. During a special sale, the price was reduced by 10%. (Note: 10% means 10 percent.) This sale price was 20% greater than the cost to produce a case of soap. How much did it cost to produce a case of soap?
Alice's Action Plan: Borrow younger brother's maths book, start revising and attempt questions! at 9:18 PM Folder(s): Ramblings, Reflection
10 commented:
cleomy said...
You are not alone... you know why? in fact majority of Msians are just like you CAUSE the Questions are all in ENGLISH!!!
If they're in BM like "Satu ayam jantan bersetubuh dengan dua ayam betina, berapakah ayam hampsum yang telah terlepas dari tangan si pencuri?"
See what I mean? suddenly all makes sense if the questions are in BM!!! So blame on our parents for sending us to Malay medium speaking school
Thursday, May 17, 2007 Alice Teh said...
Hmm... that's like blaming the system, Cleomy. However, it does seem like a reasonable explanation.
I don't, for some reason, remember the concept behind all these maths problems. I do, however, understand why most of your thinking, in this case the example you provided in Malay, is adult in nature. I will not put the blame on you for we, after all, are humans. Totally understandable. :P
Friday, May 18, 2007 Anonymous said...
1)$45
2)5
3)$7.50
Friday, May 18, 2007 anthropositor said...
Dear Alice,
I am an unschooled old man who escaped from home very young. While I got most of my education in libraries and used book stores I was, before my stroke unusualy bright. I was once in Mensa and I have taught competitive chess for fifty years.
I am sorry to say I am ignorant of your native language so I am not sure of everything cleomy had to say, but I expect that she is at least in part, wrong.
While Anonymous's answers were technically corect, he, she or it was being a show-off, and was actually destructive to you.
While I cannot tell you anything about the formulaic style your instructor may require, uschooled as I am, I can tell you how to sort these matters out logically and experimentally. To my mind, that is at least as useful as math.
In the first and most complicated problem find out what you know and put it in some sort of logical order. You know the
Total cost=$195.
Carb cost 2x Tune=? (Biggest).
You know the smallest things are the Wheel Bal. and Align. and they are equal to each other.
So the Brakes and the Tune come somewhere in the middle.
Pick some kind of reasonable number for Tune and try to work the problem. Using $40, Carb would be $80 BUT 1/3 of that would give weird numbers with decimals, so you know they are wrong. STOP.
Pick a larger number, say 45 for Tune. Now try it again.
If Tune is $45 Carb must be $90.
Brake is a third of Carb for $30.
And Wheel Bal and Align must be $15 each. And you solved it without any algebraic nonsense. Now it should be fairly easy to put the answer in whatever algebraic form your instrucor requires. But always double check your answer. 45+90+30+15+15=195.
Now we go to the easier ones. You want to know what quantity of a solution of known proportions can be made from known stocks of chemicals. Either X,Y, or Z is going to be the limiting factor and will supply your answer. With unlimited Y and Z you could make five gallons with your known X.
With unlimited X and Z you could make ten gallons with your Y supply.
With unlimited X and Y supply you could make eight gallons with the Z supply.
The smallest number is your limiting number so you can produce 5 galons with your supply on had and you have leftovers of Y and Z when you are done.
And in your last problem you are staring with 10, reducing it to 9 and then saying 1.2 times "what" equals 9.0. Fill in 7.0 for
"what" and the answer is too small. Fill in 8.0 and the answer is too big. Soon you will discover 7.5 hits it on the head.
Learning to think with a certain logical precision may be even more useful than learning the "rules" your math teacher is trying to pump into the class. But do your best to pretend you did it his way. Your grades will be better.
Good luck to you dear. I think you are going to do just fine.
Anthropositor
Alice Teh said...
Dear Anthropositor,
Thanks very much for your comprehensive and detailed answer. Reading it through gives me a much clearer picture, especially using logic to derive at the answers. I have never thought of solving them this way. Plus they were multiple-choice questions and the answers were staring back in one of the choices given! Great thinking! Thanks for sharing. I really, really appreciate your input.
Doing maths is a humbling experience for me but not all is lost because now I have gained a new way of looking at things. It may be there all along, but just wasn't consciously paying attention to it.
Thanks again! You're a great teacher.
I'm mathematically challenged
Folks, it is confirmed. I CAN'T do maths to save my life.
I had a few questions thrown my way today and as I attempted them, I realize how much, or rather, how little I know or can remember solving mathematical questions. SIGH. Here are some samples. Can you solve them?
The total cost for five items of repair work on a car was $195. Overhaul of the carburetor cost twice as much as the tune-up, brake pads cost one-third as much as the carburetor overhaul, and alignment and wheel balancing each cost one-third as much as the tune–up. What did the tune-up cost?
A certain preparation consists of liquids x, y, and z in the proportion 5:2:1. How many gallons of the preparation can be made from a stock of materials consisting of 25 gallons of x, 20 gallons of y, and 8 gallons of z?
The normal selling price of a case of soap is $10.00. During a special sale, the price was reduced by 10%. (Note: 10% means 10 percent.) This sale price was 20% greater than the cost to produce a case of soap. How much did it cost to produce a case of soap?
Alice's Action Plan: Borrow younger brother's maths book, start revising and attempt questions! at 9:18 PM Folder(s): Ramblings, Reflection
10 commented:
cleomy said...
You are not alone... you know why? in fact majority of Msians are just like you CAUSE the Questions are all in ENGLISH!!!
If they're in BM like "Satu ayam jantan bersetubuh dengan dua ayam betina, berapakah ayam hampsum yang telah terlepas dari tangan si pencuri?"
See what I mean? suddenly all makes sense if the questions are in BM!!! So blame on our parents for sending us to Malay medium speaking school
Thursday, May 17, 2007 Alice Teh said...
Hmm... that's like blaming the system, Cleomy. However, it does seem like a reasonable explanation.
I don't, for some reason, remember the concept behind all these maths problems. I do, however, understand why most of your thinking, in this case the example you provided in Malay, is adult in nature. I will not put the blame on you for we, after all, are humans. Totally understandable. :P
Friday, May 18, 2007 Anonymous said...
1)$45
2)5
3)$7.50
Friday, May 18, 2007 anthropositor said...
Dear Alice,
I am an unschooled old man who escaped from home very young. While I got most of my education in libraries and used book stores I was, before my stroke unusualy bright. I was once in Mensa and I have taught competitive chess for fifty years.
I am sorry to say I am ignorant of your native language so I am not sure of everything cleomy had to say, but I expect that she is at least in part, wrong.
While Anonymous's answers were technically corect, he, she or it was being a show-off, and was actually destructive to you.
While I cannot tell you anything about the formulaic style your instructor may require, uschooled as I am, I can tell you how to sort these matters out logically and experimentally. To my mind, that is at least as useful as math.
In the first and most complicated problem find out what you know and put it in some sort of logical order. You know the
Total cost=$195.
Carb cost 2x Tune=? (Biggest).
You know the smallest things are the Wheel Bal. and Align. and they are equal to each other.
So the Brakes and the Tune come somewhere in the middle.
Pick some kind of reasonable number for Tune and try to work the problem. Using $40, Carb would be $80 BUT 1/3 of that would give weird numbers with decimals, so you know they are wrong. STOP.
Pick a larger number, say 45 for Tune. Now try it again.
If Tune is $45 Carb must be $90.
Brake is a third of Carb for $30.
And Wheel Bal and Align must be $15 each. And you solved it without any algebraic nonsense. Now it should be fairly easy to put the answer in whatever algebraic form your instrucor requires. But always double check your answer. 45+90+30+15+15=195.
Now we go to the easier ones. You want to know what quantity of a solution of known proportions can be made from known stocks of chemicals. Either X,Y, or Z is going to be the limiting factor and will supply your answer. With unlimited Y and Z you could make five gallons with your known X.
With unlimited X and Z you could make ten gallons with your Y supply.
With unlimited X and Y supply you could make eight gallons with the Z supply.
The smallest number is your limiting number so you can produce 5 galons with your supply on had and you have leftovers of Y and Z when you are done.
And in your last problem you are staring with 10, reducing it to 9 and then saying 1.2 times "what" equals 9.0. Fill in 7.0 for
"what" and the answer is too small. Fill in 8.0 and the answer is too big. Soon you will discover 7.5 hits it on the head.
Learning to think with a certain logical precision may be even more useful than learning the "rules" your math teacher is trying to pump into the class. But do your best to pretend you did it his way. Your grades will be better.
Good luck to you dear. I think you are going to do just fine.
Anthropositor
Alice Teh said...
Dear Anthropositor,
Thanks very much for your comprehensive and detailed answer. Reading it through gives me a much clearer picture, especially using logic to derive at the answers. I have never thought of solving them this way. Plus they were multiple-choice questions and the answers were staring back in one of the choices given! Great thinking! Thanks for sharing. I really, really appreciate your input.
Doing maths is a humbling experience for me but not all is lost because now I have gained a new way of looking at things. It may be there all along, but just wasn't consciously paying attention to it.
Thanks again! You're a great teacher.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Food For Thought
Along with my No Till Farming pilot studies, utilizing exotic and wild plants, I am working on ecologically sound bioswale methods designed to capture rain more efficiently, reducing runoff which contributes to the potential for flooding.
The crop I have been most successful with, from virtually every perspective is Shmooo. The seeds have been harvested by native peoples for many centuries. There is also some evidence that a certain number of people have also eaten the foliage, both raw and cooked. Because of the ease with which the plant is grown, in the absence of conventional farming equipment and labor, this plant now takes up 2/3 of my research time and effort.
I have worked with other crops that have developed little real potential as a major food source, with only the advantage that they will grow well without painstaking cultivation. The wild Indian strawberries are bland small berries. And it would take an eighth of an acre to provide me with enough for my own household. Wild chives? They are fine, and I use them all the time, but certainly they are not an important main food source. The Taro root? Grows well and without effort, but not really a pleasant tasting vegetable from my perspective. All the other exotic crops I have experimented with have only marginal value from the standpoint of feeding the world.
Only Shmooo could provide excellent nutrition for vast numbers of people without industrial or skilled farming, with the only real labor in the harvesting. Only Shmooo has the culinary characteristics that could easily fit into a wide variety of multicultural diets. And of all the crops I have experimented with, only Shmooo contains such dense and well balanced nutrition that in times of emergency or famine, one could literally survive and thrive on it alone as a feed supply.
My first experiments (two years worth) were hydroponic, seeing how well it thrived grown in conjunction with a great variety of other plants grown with the extremely high overcrowding and density which would be required for a crop that could be grown in a space environment. I cannot think of a better crop with which to feed future space colonists, providing both grain and edible foliage, And although I have not done it yet, there is no doubt that the stalks could be fermented into cellulosic alcohol, a commodity that I expect space people will find useful.
I would not be at all surprised if Shmooo wound up being the main agricultural food crop in space.
But with the New Depression, our attention needs to turn for now to how to better feed the population of Earth. As a food grain, as a vegetable, as a spice, Shmooo has the right stuff to solve the biggest problem facing us all. The inevitability of widespread famine.
The crop I have been most successful with, from virtually every perspective is Shmooo. The seeds have been harvested by native peoples for many centuries. There is also some evidence that a certain number of people have also eaten the foliage, both raw and cooked. Because of the ease with which the plant is grown, in the absence of conventional farming equipment and labor, this plant now takes up 2/3 of my research time and effort.
I have worked with other crops that have developed little real potential as a major food source, with only the advantage that they will grow well without painstaking cultivation. The wild Indian strawberries are bland small berries. And it would take an eighth of an acre to provide me with enough for my own household. Wild chives? They are fine, and I use them all the time, but certainly they are not an important main food source. The Taro root? Grows well and without effort, but not really a pleasant tasting vegetable from my perspective. All the other exotic crops I have experimented with have only marginal value from the standpoint of feeding the world.
Only Shmooo could provide excellent nutrition for vast numbers of people without industrial or skilled farming, with the only real labor in the harvesting. Only Shmooo has the culinary characteristics that could easily fit into a wide variety of multicultural diets. And of all the crops I have experimented with, only Shmooo contains such dense and well balanced nutrition that in times of emergency or famine, one could literally survive and thrive on it alone as a feed supply.
My first experiments (two years worth) were hydroponic, seeing how well it thrived grown in conjunction with a great variety of other plants grown with the extremely high overcrowding and density which would be required for a crop that could be grown in a space environment. I cannot think of a better crop with which to feed future space colonists, providing both grain and edible foliage, And although I have not done it yet, there is no doubt that the stalks could be fermented into cellulosic alcohol, a commodity that I expect space people will find useful.
I would not be at all surprised if Shmooo wound up being the main agricultural food crop in space.
But with the New Depression, our attention needs to turn for now to how to better feed the population of Earth. As a food grain, as a vegetable, as a spice, Shmooo has the right stuff to solve the biggest problem facing us all. The inevitability of widespread famine.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Letter To A New Shmooo Eater
Hi Penny,
For the past week I have been trying to sort out why your reaction to the first use of the shmooo was confined to a private message, I hold you in high regard for a variety of reasons. I suppose that's a stuffy way of saying I like you. ...and trust you.
You were the only one who engaged in any appreciable effort to come to grips with my housing issue. I thought that the problems I posed for the readers in general were ones that could increase their skills in dealing with similar difficulties.
Such groundless evictions are happening to millions of people now, most often at the hands of banks, but the principles are very much the same. Taking advantage of the convolutions in the law which overbalance the law in favor of the more powerful party. This is not something that just takes place within the U.S. The details differ, but this sort of inequity goes on throughout the world.
I have come to the conclusion that you have received a certain amount of "guidance" about your participation with me which limited your options.
I note that your further speculations about the next probable events have apparently come to a close. This, and the private message comment about your first experience with shmooo lead me to believe that there are some politics going on that I know nothing about.
Otherwise I think your comments would have gone up on the thread which detailed my experiences with the shmooo, so that the single voice of the innovator would not be the only one heard.
That was why I was so pleased to send you your shmooo, and went to considerable effort with U.S. and Canadian Customs to assure the delivery without arbitrary and incorrect seizure and to prevent you having to pay any duty on the shipment to receive it.
And on the other subject we had had some conversations about, that was also why I shared with you my thoughts on the cuff link design ideas which fit in so nicely with what you are doing with jewelry.
All I was hoping for was the candid opinion of another person about this potentially extremely useful food crop. My pride over this highly nutritious vegetable/spice is frankly pretty boundless. That makes my lone voice not very compelling. I am the proud papa.
And my learning curve with shmooo is far from over. I know with a certainty that it is an unusually nutritious green food, and that a person could probably live well for extended periods of time with shmooo as the primary food. In my load testing of the shmooo, I even went for some days with shmooo as my sole food, with highly favorable results. That, and eating in excess of half a pound a day combined to convince me that there was no downside whatsoever to the use of this very healthy food..
But there is no data whatsoever about the exact nutritional makeup of the leafy greens and buds. The nutraceutical industry has only gone for the seeds, plowing the rest of the plant under.
When I started my agricultural experiments, my emphasis was on searching for nutritious crops which could be plantied without conventional farming practices. No fuel expenditure, no plowing, no weeding, no conventional irrigation, no daily watering, no pampering of any kind..
I was not searching for a perfect diet/energy food. (I still don't know if it is perfect, and perhaps I won't know with ironclad certainly for a few more years.) And though I have eliminated a great deal of the production cost on the growing side of the equation, I have not worked out the same labor saving for harvesting and inspection, assuring the perfection that I strive for in everything I do.
In terms of using it as a crop providing fresh produce, the fresh leaves may not be the best for the produce market, or may require some special methods to keep the fresh greens appealing for the same time as other fresh produce. I don't know.
I know that I like it best freshly picked. But my current emphasis is using the dried vegetable in my cooking.
And my loading experiments on myself indicate a virtual certainty that there are not cumulative toxic effects from eating too much. Had I done the same experiments with spinach, another very nutritious vegetable, I would have suffered the effects of excessive oxalic acid intake.
With certainty, there is no liability of this sort with shmooo. I have not been this excited this early in the development process of any idea I have ever generated. Even with the cold and flu prevention, I did not begin teaching others in a really active way for six years. Then, in the last eighteen years i have taught the procedure to many hundreds of people every year.
Since I first taught it on the Forum, only a couple of years ago, readers have viewed it more than 20,000 times. I have no idea how many of them do it or how many of them have taught others how to do it. This has been a donation to the world of health.
Compare that to what the medical industry has done. This year the tab for getting a flu shot is $35.00.
Five years ago, a flu shot was about $5.00. And now you can go into a drug store and find swabs with a special ingredient that has no particular additional value over the simple procedure I started a quarter of a century ago, so that the procedure I developed, and gave to anyone and everyone who would listen, could be sold at incredible and unconscionable profit.
Know what Penny? I once wrote to Nick to get his input about my writing some ideas and opinions about cancer and the cancer industry. This was after some other threads had generated some flack. I was not even given the courtesy of a response, and therefore did not write on the subject.
I have a second blog now with some selections from my several thousand posts from various places on the internet. If you have constraints on what you say here, or on how you go about saying it, I would make you welcome there.
Anthro
Update: Well, the dear lady Emailed me back to let me know that other matters had intervened to prevent her more public response. Pressures are so great on me right now, I'm afraid I was oversensitive.. Having to fight for my home against an unscrupulous seller has me pretty much on edge. The seller just hired a lawyer to go after me. I do not have the same luxury.
I think I will go wipe the egg off my face.
For the past week I have been trying to sort out why your reaction to the first use of the shmooo was confined to a private message, I hold you in high regard for a variety of reasons. I suppose that's a stuffy way of saying I like you. ...and trust you.
You were the only one who engaged in any appreciable effort to come to grips with my housing issue. I thought that the problems I posed for the readers in general were ones that could increase their skills in dealing with similar difficulties.
Such groundless evictions are happening to millions of people now, most often at the hands of banks, but the principles are very much the same. Taking advantage of the convolutions in the law which overbalance the law in favor of the more powerful party. This is not something that just takes place within the U.S. The details differ, but this sort of inequity goes on throughout the world.
I have come to the conclusion that you have received a certain amount of "guidance" about your participation with me which limited your options.
I note that your further speculations about the next probable events have apparently come to a close. This, and the private message comment about your first experience with shmooo lead me to believe that there are some politics going on that I know nothing about.
Otherwise I think your comments would have gone up on the thread which detailed my experiences with the shmooo, so that the single voice of the innovator would not be the only one heard.
That was why I was so pleased to send you your shmooo, and went to considerable effort with U.S. and Canadian Customs to assure the delivery without arbitrary and incorrect seizure and to prevent you having to pay any duty on the shipment to receive it.
And on the other subject we had had some conversations about, that was also why I shared with you my thoughts on the cuff link design ideas which fit in so nicely with what you are doing with jewelry.
All I was hoping for was the candid opinion of another person about this potentially extremely useful food crop. My pride over this highly nutritious vegetable/spice is frankly pretty boundless. That makes my lone voice not very compelling. I am the proud papa.
And my learning curve with shmooo is far from over. I know with a certainty that it is an unusually nutritious green food, and that a person could probably live well for extended periods of time with shmooo as the primary food. In my load testing of the shmooo, I even went for some days with shmooo as my sole food, with highly favorable results. That, and eating in excess of half a pound a day combined to convince me that there was no downside whatsoever to the use of this very healthy food..
But there is no data whatsoever about the exact nutritional makeup of the leafy greens and buds. The nutraceutical industry has only gone for the seeds, plowing the rest of the plant under.
When I started my agricultural experiments, my emphasis was on searching for nutritious crops which could be plantied without conventional farming practices. No fuel expenditure, no plowing, no weeding, no conventional irrigation, no daily watering, no pampering of any kind..
I was not searching for a perfect diet/energy food. (I still don't know if it is perfect, and perhaps I won't know with ironclad certainly for a few more years.) And though I have eliminated a great deal of the production cost on the growing side of the equation, I have not worked out the same labor saving for harvesting and inspection, assuring the perfection that I strive for in everything I do.
In terms of using it as a crop providing fresh produce, the fresh leaves may not be the best for the produce market, or may require some special methods to keep the fresh greens appealing for the same time as other fresh produce. I don't know.
I know that I like it best freshly picked. But my current emphasis is using the dried vegetable in my cooking.
And my loading experiments on myself indicate a virtual certainty that there are not cumulative toxic effects from eating too much. Had I done the same experiments with spinach, another very nutritious vegetable, I would have suffered the effects of excessive oxalic acid intake.
With certainty, there is no liability of this sort with shmooo. I have not been this excited this early in the development process of any idea I have ever generated. Even with the cold and flu prevention, I did not begin teaching others in a really active way for six years. Then, in the last eighteen years i have taught the procedure to many hundreds of people every year.
Since I first taught it on the Forum, only a couple of years ago, readers have viewed it more than 20,000 times. I have no idea how many of them do it or how many of them have taught others how to do it. This has been a donation to the world of health.
Compare that to what the medical industry has done. This year the tab for getting a flu shot is $35.00.
Five years ago, a flu shot was about $5.00. And now you can go into a drug store and find swabs with a special ingredient that has no particular additional value over the simple procedure I started a quarter of a century ago, so that the procedure I developed, and gave to anyone and everyone who would listen, could be sold at incredible and unconscionable profit.
Know what Penny? I once wrote to Nick to get his input about my writing some ideas and opinions about cancer and the cancer industry. This was after some other threads had generated some flack. I was not even given the courtesy of a response, and therefore did not write on the subject.
I have a second blog now with some selections from my several thousand posts from various places on the internet. If you have constraints on what you say here, or on how you go about saying it, I would make you welcome there.
Anthro
Update: Well, the dear lady Emailed me back to let me know that other matters had intervened to prevent her more public response. Pressures are so great on me right now, I'm afraid I was oversensitive.. Having to fight for my home against an unscrupulous seller has me pretty much on edge. The seller just hired a lawyer to go after me. I do not have the same luxury.
I think I will go wipe the egg off my face.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
The New Depression Is Not So New
I really do not like the word depression. I believe it is a catchword designed by the medical industry to rationalize and efficiently market drugs and services. The notion that depression or hyperactivity or attention deficit or manic depression is due to chemical imbalance of one kind or other is not sound.
In the 1600’s it would have been very difficult to find someone who didn’t believe in the existence of witchcraft, or in the pernicious evils of the practitioners. Those people who did not believe it pretty much kept their opinions to themselves, and for good reason. It was very easy to become a suspect, and very difficult, if not impossible, to prove you were not a devil worshiper. If, after sixteen hour days of strenuous farming and other survival related activities, someone was tempted to sleep in on the day of rest rather than attend church, that was often enough to cast initial suspicion.
And if you had an antagonist, frequently they could effortlessly trump up a case against you. It happened a lot.
But enough of that. Now let us flash forward to the mid twentieth century; my childhood. It was in that aftermath of two great world wars and the devastating hardships of inflation and economic collapse, not all that different than today. Both optimism and hysteria were in the air, a volatile mix, I was a confused and conflicted child, but no more so than my siblings or parents.
My father had just been honorably released from the Pastorship of his last Presbyterian congregation, Most of the members of his flock never learned of hs various “addictions” to sex, alcohol, amphetamines, barbiturates, and the control of those around him. One of my siblings came to believe that my father was the devil incarnate. I am inclined to believe otherwise. He was simply a tragic product of a great many complex circumstances, with which he was ultimately unable to totally come to grips. Sad to say, even in his final years, true resolution evaded his grasp.
It is typical of me that when in the course of writing, the subject turns to my father, I can only get a handful of paragraphs out before looking for reasons to stop and turn to something else. I used to think that it might be because there were still living people whose illusions about my father might be shattered because of my remarks. Not that I would be inconveniencing him, but them. Honor thy father and thy mother. I can honor him in no better way than trying as best I can to understand why he was as he was, and to approach a better idea of what might have made him that way.
From my earliest memory, my father dwelled on death, and toyed with suicide. He also liked life insurance. As far as I know, he always had some. And he spoke of it often. About how well protected we would all be when he was gone, and the hardships often endured to pay the premiums. It is perhaps why it never, ever occurred to me to buy any, and why I have never been able to discuss such things with my children.
A couple years ago I visited my youngest son in Texas, He had a theater room and encouraged me to watch a couple of movies. One was a truly violent, murderous thing called Sin City. I found it exciting and vivid and, today can remember only flashes of it.
The other was about a fellow who was into tracking down the history behind snapshots that he had been collecting. Second World War photographs. Some sort of quest to better come to grips with the holocaust in a deeper and more personal sense than what happened in the famous death camps. He had acquired an opportunistic youmg guide, and was driven by an old gent who was seemingly sight impaired, yet somehow managed not to kill them with his driving.
The blind driver was also, to all appearances, virulently anti-semitic. I particularly remember the oddity of that since my son feels there are not two sides to the intractable Palestinian/Israeli situation. He is whole-heartedy and unremittingly pro-Isreali.
But as it turns out, the blind driver was actually a Jew who had passed as a gentile after the war, in part because race hatred was still just as alive and well after the fall of the Nazi’s.
In any case, this movie affected me rather profoundly. At one particular moment, I saw a photo which just opened the gates, and tears more profuse than I ever remember without intense physical pain, flowed as spasms of anguish overcame me. I had remembered the pictures my father had shown me -- no, not showed, but compelled me to see when I was about five. News pictures of the death camps. For sixty years, I had been driving like the blind man in the movie, and had no idea.
Had I had this horrible epiphany when my father was alive, I am sure I would have tried to fathom why he had done that. But frankly, my father was never particularly forthcoming about anything related to my youth. I don’t think he was actually trying to withhold, but rather that he had just selectively forgotten, and that he had no intention of revisiting things long gone, particularly from a perspective other than his own.
I guess this all came up because my parents had gone through the Great Depression, and it certainly played a big role in making them who they were. There was not a lot of good cheer in the houshold of my childhood. And I was a prodigal son starting at the age of twelve. No matter how many times I escaped and was recaptured, my resolve remained strong.
Surely, one of the greatest playwrites America has produced was Eugene O’Neil. His work is extremely unpleasant and disturbing, at least to me. I find it difficult to sustain my resolve to see a full production intact. In pieces, I can deal with it.
I saw Long Days Journey Into Night, which, if memory serves me was set in the year 1912. It was actually written in the fifties, and I saw it in about 1961.
Although the story had taken place a half century earlier, it had a contemporary flavor. The pivotal character was a morphine addicted mother, but O’Neil never saw the need to spell that out in so many words, so I was thinking heroin.
But heroin had only been in commercial production for perhaps a decade or so, and Bayer had a monopoly on it at the time. It had not yet been around long enough to have been the likely cause of her addiction, which had apparently dated back to a difficult childbirth recovery a few decades earlier.
There were her sons, two brothers of considerable complexity. The considerably elder of the two was a lush and ne’er-do-well. The younger probably had tuberculosis, but everyone pretty much skipped around that as well. I don’t recall the word consumption ever being used.
As for the husband and father, he had been an actor of only middling success who dreamed of what might have been. He was frugal to a fault, from everyone’s perspective but his own.
What stands out for me most now, in retrospect, is considerably different than my first reactions, those of a twenty year old. I was then still in a much more fluid and fugitive state of being. Not being married, as prodigal a son as I could be, having hacked my roots off with a considerable vengeance, the only character with whom I could empathize was the younger son, And perhaps, like me, he was the least fully fleshed out character of them all. In spite of my years as a feral teen, and filled with bravado because of my luck at survival, I was still very much at loose ends.
Now I see things more from the vantage point of the father, for whom life had held some rude surprises, some of them brought upon himself. His sons had little use for him, but their disdain was more disguised than his for them. The eldest was determined to fail at anything his father would have held to be of value, and the younger was moving in a similar direction, although his illness portended that his failure would take less active effort than his older brother had employed. Suddenly the play holds new and deeper meaning, becoming more universally tragic. No winners or heroes here. No happy ending on the horizon. Just a Long Days Journey Into Night.
In the 1600’s it would have been very difficult to find someone who didn’t believe in the existence of witchcraft, or in the pernicious evils of the practitioners. Those people who did not believe it pretty much kept their opinions to themselves, and for good reason. It was very easy to become a suspect, and very difficult, if not impossible, to prove you were not a devil worshiper. If, after sixteen hour days of strenuous farming and other survival related activities, someone was tempted to sleep in on the day of rest rather than attend church, that was often enough to cast initial suspicion.
And if you had an antagonist, frequently they could effortlessly trump up a case against you. It happened a lot.
But enough of that. Now let us flash forward to the mid twentieth century; my childhood. It was in that aftermath of two great world wars and the devastating hardships of inflation and economic collapse, not all that different than today. Both optimism and hysteria were in the air, a volatile mix, I was a confused and conflicted child, but no more so than my siblings or parents.
My father had just been honorably released from the Pastorship of his last Presbyterian congregation, Most of the members of his flock never learned of hs various “addictions” to sex, alcohol, amphetamines, barbiturates, and the control of those around him. One of my siblings came to believe that my father was the devil incarnate. I am inclined to believe otherwise. He was simply a tragic product of a great many complex circumstances, with which he was ultimately unable to totally come to grips. Sad to say, even in his final years, true resolution evaded his grasp.
It is typical of me that when in the course of writing, the subject turns to my father, I can only get a handful of paragraphs out before looking for reasons to stop and turn to something else. I used to think that it might be because there were still living people whose illusions about my father might be shattered because of my remarks. Not that I would be inconveniencing him, but them. Honor thy father and thy mother. I can honor him in no better way than trying as best I can to understand why he was as he was, and to approach a better idea of what might have made him that way.
From my earliest memory, my father dwelled on death, and toyed with suicide. He also liked life insurance. As far as I know, he always had some. And he spoke of it often. About how well protected we would all be when he was gone, and the hardships often endured to pay the premiums. It is perhaps why it never, ever occurred to me to buy any, and why I have never been able to discuss such things with my children.
A couple years ago I visited my youngest son in Texas, He had a theater room and encouraged me to watch a couple of movies. One was a truly violent, murderous thing called Sin City. I found it exciting and vivid and, today can remember only flashes of it.
The other was about a fellow who was into tracking down the history behind snapshots that he had been collecting. Second World War photographs. Some sort of quest to better come to grips with the holocaust in a deeper and more personal sense than what happened in the famous death camps. He had acquired an opportunistic youmg guide, and was driven by an old gent who was seemingly sight impaired, yet somehow managed not to kill them with his driving.
The blind driver was also, to all appearances, virulently anti-semitic. I particularly remember the oddity of that since my son feels there are not two sides to the intractable Palestinian/Israeli situation. He is whole-heartedy and unremittingly pro-Isreali.
But as it turns out, the blind driver was actually a Jew who had passed as a gentile after the war, in part because race hatred was still just as alive and well after the fall of the Nazi’s.
In any case, this movie affected me rather profoundly. At one particular moment, I saw a photo which just opened the gates, and tears more profuse than I ever remember without intense physical pain, flowed as spasms of anguish overcame me. I had remembered the pictures my father had shown me -- no, not showed, but compelled me to see when I was about five. News pictures of the death camps. For sixty years, I had been driving like the blind man in the movie, and had no idea.
Had I had this horrible epiphany when my father was alive, I am sure I would have tried to fathom why he had done that. But frankly, my father was never particularly forthcoming about anything related to my youth. I don’t think he was actually trying to withhold, but rather that he had just selectively forgotten, and that he had no intention of revisiting things long gone, particularly from a perspective other than his own.
I guess this all came up because my parents had gone through the Great Depression, and it certainly played a big role in making them who they were. There was not a lot of good cheer in the houshold of my childhood. And I was a prodigal son starting at the age of twelve. No matter how many times I escaped and was recaptured, my resolve remained strong.
Surely, one of the greatest playwrites America has produced was Eugene O’Neil. His work is extremely unpleasant and disturbing, at least to me. I find it difficult to sustain my resolve to see a full production intact. In pieces, I can deal with it.
I saw Long Days Journey Into Night, which, if memory serves me was set in the year 1912. It was actually written in the fifties, and I saw it in about 1961.
Although the story had taken place a half century earlier, it had a contemporary flavor. The pivotal character was a morphine addicted mother, but O’Neil never saw the need to spell that out in so many words, so I was thinking heroin.
But heroin had only been in commercial production for perhaps a decade or so, and Bayer had a monopoly on it at the time. It had not yet been around long enough to have been the likely cause of her addiction, which had apparently dated back to a difficult childbirth recovery a few decades earlier.
There were her sons, two brothers of considerable complexity. The considerably elder of the two was a lush and ne’er-do-well. The younger probably had tuberculosis, but everyone pretty much skipped around that as well. I don’t recall the word consumption ever being used.
As for the husband and father, he had been an actor of only middling success who dreamed of what might have been. He was frugal to a fault, from everyone’s perspective but his own.
What stands out for me most now, in retrospect, is considerably different than my first reactions, those of a twenty year old. I was then still in a much more fluid and fugitive state of being. Not being married, as prodigal a son as I could be, having hacked my roots off with a considerable vengeance, the only character with whom I could empathize was the younger son, And perhaps, like me, he was the least fully fleshed out character of them all. In spite of my years as a feral teen, and filled with bravado because of my luck at survival, I was still very much at loose ends.
Now I see things more from the vantage point of the father, for whom life had held some rude surprises, some of them brought upon himself. His sons had little use for him, but their disdain was more disguised than his for them. The eldest was determined to fail at anything his father would have held to be of value, and the younger was moving in a similar direction, although his illness portended that his failure would take less active effort than his older brother had employed. Suddenly the play holds new and deeper meaning, becoming more universally tragic. No winners or heroes here. No happy ending on the horizon. Just a Long Days Journey Into Night.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Some First Steps For Peace
The New Depression has captured our attention to the extent that we no longer have the time or inclination to spend much effort on the larger picture. Let us try to keep in mind that this all did not come about because of bad luck. It came about because of our unreasoning [i]faith[/i] in our experts ultimately knowing what they are doing, even when it became clear that they did not.
Now we have a new man scheduled to be at the helm in a couple of months. This has caused a burst of some optimism in me which is certainly partly wishful thinking. So in spite of wishing him well, and fervently hoping that he can govern as well as he ran his campaign, I find myself looking for the ways he could easily paint himself into a corner, in the hope of adding my voice to prevention of such a disaster.
A couple of things come immediately to mind. He favors fairly rapid disengagement in Iraq. Disengagement which should have begun years ago. But at the same time we are disengaging, it is suggested that we increase our military involvement and commitment to the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, powder kegs by any definition.
And when we consider the volatility of the rest of the region, we simply do not have the option any more of behaving as the sole superpower on the planet as President-Elect Obama's predecessor has tried to do for these past eight years. To mire ourselves down in Afghanistan and Pakistan militarily is not any better than what has happened in Iraq.
The Soviets did not learn that lesson in Afghanistan, and we did not learn it in Vietnam. If our new President does not learn this lesson very quickly, and revise his campaign enthusiasm about this other theater of war, we could very easily get bogged down in exactly the same unending way again, and neither we nor the rest of the world can afford the consequences. This region is as volatile as it is, not in spite of all the military moves, dating back all the way to the British efforts to hold everything together and keep it all under control, but because of them. It did not work for them either.
The key here all along has not been a military one, but one of persuasion, and in this regard, we are way behind. We are so far behind because we have paid virtually no attention to this part of the problem. Even the Arab nations which are nominally our allies do little or nothing to stop the unending indoctrination and conditioning of boys of all ages in the Madrassa schools. This is an unending source of fanaticism/terrorism and it will not be easy to turn it around.
Our efforts should turn to the minds of the people of the region. For a decade, we were overconfident and turned a blind eye to the dedicated nationalism of the North Vietnamese. The consequences were worse than horrendous for ALL concerned.
And what was our rationale? We were preventing the ultimate fall of Asia to monolithic Communism. Yet when Vietnam fell, nothing horrendous happened.
Here in the west, we tend to think of Islam as monolithic as well. This is a measure of our ignorance. In truth, Islam is as diverse and fractured with schisms as the Christian world. If we start to respect those elements of Islam that produced some of the greatest advances in human history, peace might break out. We could then begin to turn our attention to the politics of cooperation rather than strife.
Now we have a new man scheduled to be at the helm in a couple of months. This has caused a burst of some optimism in me which is certainly partly wishful thinking. So in spite of wishing him well, and fervently hoping that he can govern as well as he ran his campaign, I find myself looking for the ways he could easily paint himself into a corner, in the hope of adding my voice to prevention of such a disaster.
A couple of things come immediately to mind. He favors fairly rapid disengagement in Iraq. Disengagement which should have begun years ago. But at the same time we are disengaging, it is suggested that we increase our military involvement and commitment to the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, powder kegs by any definition.
And when we consider the volatility of the rest of the region, we simply do not have the option any more of behaving as the sole superpower on the planet as President-Elect Obama's predecessor has tried to do for these past eight years. To mire ourselves down in Afghanistan and Pakistan militarily is not any better than what has happened in Iraq.
The Soviets did not learn that lesson in Afghanistan, and we did not learn it in Vietnam. If our new President does not learn this lesson very quickly, and revise his campaign enthusiasm about this other theater of war, we could very easily get bogged down in exactly the same unending way again, and neither we nor the rest of the world can afford the consequences. This region is as volatile as it is, not in spite of all the military moves, dating back all the way to the British efforts to hold everything together and keep it all under control, but because of them. It did not work for them either.
The key here all along has not been a military one, but one of persuasion, and in this regard, we are way behind. We are so far behind because we have paid virtually no attention to this part of the problem. Even the Arab nations which are nominally our allies do little or nothing to stop the unending indoctrination and conditioning of boys of all ages in the Madrassa schools. This is an unending source of fanaticism/terrorism and it will not be easy to turn it around.
Our efforts should turn to the minds of the people of the region. For a decade, we were overconfident and turned a blind eye to the dedicated nationalism of the North Vietnamese. The consequences were worse than horrendous for ALL concerned.
And what was our rationale? We were preventing the ultimate fall of Asia to monolithic Communism. Yet when Vietnam fell, nothing horrendous happened.
Here in the west, we tend to think of Islam as monolithic as well. This is a measure of our ignorance. In truth, Islam is as diverse and fractured with schisms as the Christian world. If we start to respect those elements of Islam that produced some of the greatest advances in human history, peace might break out. We could then begin to turn our attention to the politics of cooperation rather than strife.
Some Blues About The New Depression
I really do not like the word depression. I believe it is a catchword designed by the medical industry to rationalize and efficiently market drugs and services. The notion that depression or hyperactivity or attention deficit or manic depression is due to chemical imbalance of one kind or other is not sound.
In the 1600’s it would have been very difficult to find someone who didn’t believe in the existence of witchcraft, or in the pernicious evils of the practitioners. Those people who did not believe it pretty much kept their opinions to themselves, and for good reason. It was very easy to become a suspect, and very difficult, if not impossible, to prove you were not a devil worshiper. If, after twelve hour days of strenuous farming and other survival related activities, someone was tempted to sleep in on the day of rest rather than attend church, that was often enough to cast initial suspicion.
And if you had an antagonist, frequently they could effortlessly trump up a case against you. It happened a lot.
But enough of that. Now let us flash forward to the mid twentieth century; my childhood. It was in that aftermath of two great world wars and the devastating hardships of inflation and economic collapse, not all that different than today. Both optimism and hysteria were in the air, a volatile mix, I was a confused and conflicted child, but no more so than my siblings or parents.
My father had just been honorably released from the Pastorship of his last Presbyterian congregation, Most of the members of his flock never learned of hs various “addictions” to sex, alcohol, amphetamines, barbiturates, and the control of those around him. One of my siblings came to believe that my father was the devil incarnate. I am inclined to believe otherwise. He was simply a tragic product of a great many complex circumstances, with which he was ultimately unable to totally come to grips. Sad to say, even in his final years, true resolution evaded his grasp.
It is typical of me that when in the course of writing, the subject turns to my father, I can only get a handful of paragraphs out before looking for reasons to stop and turn to something else. I used to think that it might be because there were still living people whose illusions about my father might be shattered because of my remarks. Not that I would be inconveniencing him, but them. Honor thy father and thy mother. I can honor him in no better way than trying as best I can to understand why he was as he was, and to approach a better idea of what might have made him that way.
From my earliest memory, my father dwelled on death, and toyed with suicide. He also liked life insurance. As far as I know, he always had some. And he spoke of it often. About how well protected we would all be when he was gone, and the hardships often endured to pay the premiums. It is perhaps why it never, ever occurred to me to buy any, and why I have never been able to discuss such things with my children.
A couple years ago I visited my youngest son in Texas, He had a theater room and encouraged me to watch a couple of movies. One was a truly violent, murderous thing called Sin City. I found it exciting and vivid and, today can remember only flashes of it.
The other was about a fellow who was into tracking down the history behind snapshots that he had been collecting. Some sort of quest to better come to grips with the holocaust in a deeper and more personal sense than what happened in the famous death camps. He had acquired an opportunistic guide, and was driven by an old gent who was seemingly sight impaired, yet somehow managed not to kill them with his driving.
The blind driver was also, to all appearances, virulently anti-semitic. I particularly remember the oddity of that since my boy feels there are not two sides to the intractable Palestinian situation. He is whole-heartedy and unremittingly pro-Isreali.
But as it turns out, the blind driver was actually a Jew who had passed as a gentile after the war, in part because race hatred was still just as alive and well after the fall of the Nazi’s.
In any case, this movie affected me rather profoundly. At one particular moment, I saw a photo which just opened the gates, and tears more profuse than I ever remember without intense physical pain, flowed as spasms of anguish overcame me. I had remembered the pictures my father had shown me -- no, not showed, but compelled me to see when I was about five. News pictures of the death camps. For sixty years, I had been driving like the blind man in the movie, and had no idea.
Had I had this horrible epiphany when my father was alive, I am sure I would have tried to fathom why he had done that. But frankly, my father was never particularly forthcoming about anything related to my youth. I don’t think he was actually trying to withhold, but rather that he had just selectively forgotten, and that he had no intention of revisiting things long gone, particularly from a perspective other than his own.
I guess this all came up because my parents had gone through the Great Depression, and it certainly played a big role in making them who they were. There was not a lot of good cheer in the household of my childhood. And I was a prodigal son starting at the age of twelve. No matter how many times I escaped and was recaptured, my resolve remained strong.
In the 1600’s it would have been very difficult to find someone who didn’t believe in the existence of witchcraft, or in the pernicious evils of the practitioners. Those people who did not believe it pretty much kept their opinions to themselves, and for good reason. It was very easy to become a suspect, and very difficult, if not impossible, to prove you were not a devil worshiper. If, after twelve hour days of strenuous farming and other survival related activities, someone was tempted to sleep in on the day of rest rather than attend church, that was often enough to cast initial suspicion.
And if you had an antagonist, frequently they could effortlessly trump up a case against you. It happened a lot.
But enough of that. Now let us flash forward to the mid twentieth century; my childhood. It was in that aftermath of two great world wars and the devastating hardships of inflation and economic collapse, not all that different than today. Both optimism and hysteria were in the air, a volatile mix, I was a confused and conflicted child, but no more so than my siblings or parents.
My father had just been honorably released from the Pastorship of his last Presbyterian congregation, Most of the members of his flock never learned of hs various “addictions” to sex, alcohol, amphetamines, barbiturates, and the control of those around him. One of my siblings came to believe that my father was the devil incarnate. I am inclined to believe otherwise. He was simply a tragic product of a great many complex circumstances, with which he was ultimately unable to totally come to grips. Sad to say, even in his final years, true resolution evaded his grasp.
It is typical of me that when in the course of writing, the subject turns to my father, I can only get a handful of paragraphs out before looking for reasons to stop and turn to something else. I used to think that it might be because there were still living people whose illusions about my father might be shattered because of my remarks. Not that I would be inconveniencing him, but them. Honor thy father and thy mother. I can honor him in no better way than trying as best I can to understand why he was as he was, and to approach a better idea of what might have made him that way.
From my earliest memory, my father dwelled on death, and toyed with suicide. He also liked life insurance. As far as I know, he always had some. And he spoke of it often. About how well protected we would all be when he was gone, and the hardships often endured to pay the premiums. It is perhaps why it never, ever occurred to me to buy any, and why I have never been able to discuss such things with my children.
A couple years ago I visited my youngest son in Texas, He had a theater room and encouraged me to watch a couple of movies. One was a truly violent, murderous thing called Sin City. I found it exciting and vivid and, today can remember only flashes of it.
The other was about a fellow who was into tracking down the history behind snapshots that he had been collecting. Some sort of quest to better come to grips with the holocaust in a deeper and more personal sense than what happened in the famous death camps. He had acquired an opportunistic guide, and was driven by an old gent who was seemingly sight impaired, yet somehow managed not to kill them with his driving.
The blind driver was also, to all appearances, virulently anti-semitic. I particularly remember the oddity of that since my boy feels there are not two sides to the intractable Palestinian situation. He is whole-heartedy and unremittingly pro-Isreali.
But as it turns out, the blind driver was actually a Jew who had passed as a gentile after the war, in part because race hatred was still just as alive and well after the fall of the Nazi’s.
In any case, this movie affected me rather profoundly. At one particular moment, I saw a photo which just opened the gates, and tears more profuse than I ever remember without intense physical pain, flowed as spasms of anguish overcame me. I had remembered the pictures my father had shown me -- no, not showed, but compelled me to see when I was about five. News pictures of the death camps. For sixty years, I had been driving like the blind man in the movie, and had no idea.
Had I had this horrible epiphany when my father was alive, I am sure I would have tried to fathom why he had done that. But frankly, my father was never particularly forthcoming about anything related to my youth. I don’t think he was actually trying to withhold, but rather that he had just selectively forgotten, and that he had no intention of revisiting things long gone, particularly from a perspective other than his own.
I guess this all came up because my parents had gone through the Great Depression, and it certainly played a big role in making them who they were. There was not a lot of good cheer in the household of my childhood. And I was a prodigal son starting at the age of twelve. No matter how many times I escaped and was recaptured, my resolve remained strong.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Oxygen History in Medicine
Back in the 1880’s oxygen was in use by many unlicensed charlatans, as well as M.D.’s. In truth, it was what was referred to as “compound oxygen.” They were not molecular oxygen, two O atoms in stable union, the most common specie in nature. It was variable and vague, but generally meant a combination of N and O, with O in much larger proportion than the 4:1 ratio of air. The truth was that almost none of this had a much higher oxygen content than air.
By the 1890’s a common ratio N:O was often about 2:1.
In 1910, oxygen was bubbled through pure alcohol and administered in cardiac cases and thought to be an improvement over oxygen alone.
By World War I, there was intravenous injection of oxygen gas. It must have been extremely slowly administered to avoid embolism. Even so, embolisms may have happened and helped to end the practice by killing the patient..
But let us come to the current situation, It is now known that breathing pure oxygen increases the rate of respiration. Much more carbon dioxide is dumped in the exhalations. The blood vessels constrict, thereby reducing delivery of the oxygen to the rest of the body, in spite of the much higher intake.
There are also changes in pH, and in the hormone regulation in the brain.
Strangely, mixing in a small amount of CO2 (5%) eliminates the problem. Or actually one of the problems. Then there is the matter of the suicidal mitochondria. It turns out that inhaling pure oxygen tends to bring out that self-destructive impulse. Doctors refer to it as apoptosis.
Most of us think only of energy production when we think of the mitochondria. And we notice that, as we age, our energy and strength slowly seem to wane. Few of us realize that the mitochondria under certain conditions self-destruct, often taking the cell, and eventually us with them. Pure oxygen seems to jack them up too high. Then they crash.
By the 1890’s a common ratio N:O was often about 2:1.
In 1910, oxygen was bubbled through pure alcohol and administered in cardiac cases and thought to be an improvement over oxygen alone.
By World War I, there was intravenous injection of oxygen gas. It must have been extremely slowly administered to avoid embolism. Even so, embolisms may have happened and helped to end the practice by killing the patient..
But let us come to the current situation, It is now known that breathing pure oxygen increases the rate of respiration. Much more carbon dioxide is dumped in the exhalations. The blood vessels constrict, thereby reducing delivery of the oxygen to the rest of the body, in spite of the much higher intake.
There are also changes in pH, and in the hormone regulation in the brain.
Strangely, mixing in a small amount of CO2 (5%) eliminates the problem. Or actually one of the problems. Then there is the matter of the suicidal mitochondria. It turns out that inhaling pure oxygen tends to bring out that self-destructive impulse. Doctors refer to it as apoptosis.
Most of us think only of energy production when we think of the mitochondria. And we notice that, as we age, our energy and strength slowly seem to wane. Few of us realize that the mitochondria under certain conditions self-destruct, often taking the cell, and eventually us with them. Pure oxygen seems to jack them up too high. Then they crash.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Some Opinions Of Medical Care
Some of those who have read my 1600+ posts on Skin Cell Forum and the several hundred posts scattered widely on the rest of the net, and on my other blog, Eureka Ideas Unlimited, sometimes berate me for not being specific enough about the problems plaguing health care. Others think I am unfair to the medical profession, which they seem to regard as a pretty pristine industry with few real faults.
When I get such criticisms, particularly if they are thoughtful and well written, I tend to look back and see if I have been out of line. Comments about specific doctors or dentists -- two highly favorable -- two highly unfavorable. A tie score.
But it is true that the medical profession and the associated industries (hospitals, clinics, HMO's, private and government insurance providers, and pharmaceutical companies have been saturated with problems. Some of my remarks went back in history to the nineteenth century, and occasionally into the eighteenth. Here I am told that history is not relevant to today's issues. Of course it is.
I have even heard that I have not been comprehensive enough. This is the opposite side. It is true. Ninety percent of my exposure to doctors was prior to the age of forty. About eight percent between forty and forty five, and the last two percent in the remaining twenty-three years. Up until the 1980's my health had been pretty marginal. In spite of medical treatment, and the surgical removal of the lower lobe of my right lung (which I was later told might not have been necessary), long term survival seemed unlikely. It was actually when I started to take my health into my own hands, that my health started to improve. I am in my late sixties, Neither my wife or myself take any prescriptions. My wife had some serious medical issues when I met her. Two doctors recommended major surgery. We delayed while I did some innovative things to alleviate the problem. The problem went away. Of course it could always return. That was only twenty-three years ago.
Several years ago, my blood pressure started to really climb. At one point it spiked at 191/110 mm Hg. And since I had had a stroke previous to that (which only affected my thinking speed and depth) I almost went to a doctor. Had I done so, I would probably been ordered to take a beta-blocker like Toprol XL., a very common regime that might well have continued for the remainder of my life. I must admit that I was so concerned that I did go to Mexico and got some Metaprolol (the Mexican version of Toprol) but I used it only for about a month, tapering off as I employed non-pharmaceutical measures. Now, my blood pressure is almost always in the normal range or below; 116/76, and rarely gets to 130/90, usually with an identifiable crisis involved in the elevation.
How many people in their late sixties do you know who are not on a handful of daily pharmaceutical medications? My wife too is prescription free.
Even younger people can often wind up in the prescription trap. Nick, a genius by my measure, and my best friend had just gotten his degree from the local University, Married, and raising a young son, he was at the opposite end of the spectrum from me. He was under the regular care of two, and sometimes more physicians. His degree was in chemistry, and he was a true believer in pharmaceutical intervention. His doctors seemed quite in sync with his perspective. In most other things we were generally on the same wavelength.
Nick died last year. While there was an autopsy, the cause of his demise was not firmly established. Perhaps his reliance on his doctors played no part.
When I get such criticisms, particularly if they are thoughtful and well written, I tend to look back and see if I have been out of line. Comments about specific doctors or dentists -- two highly favorable -- two highly unfavorable. A tie score.
But it is true that the medical profession and the associated industries (hospitals, clinics, HMO's, private and government insurance providers, and pharmaceutical companies have been saturated with problems. Some of my remarks went back in history to the nineteenth century, and occasionally into the eighteenth. Here I am told that history is not relevant to today's issues. Of course it is.
I have even heard that I have not been comprehensive enough. This is the opposite side. It is true. Ninety percent of my exposure to doctors was prior to the age of forty. About eight percent between forty and forty five, and the last two percent in the remaining twenty-three years. Up until the 1980's my health had been pretty marginal. In spite of medical treatment, and the surgical removal of the lower lobe of my right lung (which I was later told might not have been necessary), long term survival seemed unlikely. It was actually when I started to take my health into my own hands, that my health started to improve. I am in my late sixties, Neither my wife or myself take any prescriptions. My wife had some serious medical issues when I met her. Two doctors recommended major surgery. We delayed while I did some innovative things to alleviate the problem. The problem went away. Of course it could always return. That was only twenty-three years ago.
Several years ago, my blood pressure started to really climb. At one point it spiked at 191/110 mm Hg. And since I had had a stroke previous to that (which only affected my thinking speed and depth) I almost went to a doctor. Had I done so, I would probably been ordered to take a beta-blocker like Toprol XL., a very common regime that might well have continued for the remainder of my life. I must admit that I was so concerned that I did go to Mexico and got some Metaprolol (the Mexican version of Toprol) but I used it only for about a month, tapering off as I employed non-pharmaceutical measures. Now, my blood pressure is almost always in the normal range or below; 116/76, and rarely gets to 130/90, usually with an identifiable crisis involved in the elevation.
How many people in their late sixties do you know who are not on a handful of daily pharmaceutical medications? My wife too is prescription free.
Even younger people can often wind up in the prescription trap. Nick, a genius by my measure, and my best friend had just gotten his degree from the local University, Married, and raising a young son, he was at the opposite end of the spectrum from me. He was under the regular care of two, and sometimes more physicians. His degree was in chemistry, and he was a true believer in pharmaceutical intervention. His doctors seemed quite in sync with his perspective. In most other things we were generally on the same wavelength.
Nick died last year. While there was an autopsy, the cause of his demise was not firmly established. Perhaps his reliance on his doctors played no part.
Friday, November 14, 2008
New Nutritional Discovery
This is about Shmooo, a vegetable/spice I have been growing with several other experimental crops, employing No-Till farming techniques of my own design. To condense what has already appeared in several of the Nutrition threads on Skin Cell Forum, my original idea was to find the most nutritious, healthful vegetable with which to make up for the shortfall of vegetables in my carnivorous diet.
Previously, I had been buying sufficient fresh vegetables. But that does little good if they do not actually get prepared and eaten. Most of the vegetables I was buying wilted and wound up on the compost heap because it was so easy for me to forget to eat it. This is complicated by the fact that most of my teeth are rippers and slicers, not grinders. So I needed a green vegetable, preferably in leaf form, that would be tender and tasty enough to eat raw in substantial amounts.
Not only that, it had to be a really appealing tasting food or it was a long shot that I would actually regularly consume it. And I wanted to be able to eat every part of the plant. And that turned out to be the case. I haven't tried to do anything with the adult root system, but other than that, the entire plant is not only edible, it is delicious and denser with the whole array of nutrients than any other vegetable I have compared it to.
In the past several months, I have done some diet-loading tests, seeing how much of it I could consume over a long period of time. I ate most of it raw and alive, just eating it fresh in the garden. I shredded and dried it under low temperature and used it alone or combined with every common spice in my kitchen. The Shmooo itself is not intense, but delicate in its' flavor. And yet, when mixed with other spices, seems to extend and enhance their flavor to good affect. And I could find no commercial sources for these greens. Never saw them in the produce section, the farmer's market, or the health food store. To put it another way, no one is selling it, and the general public has no notion that it is even edible, let alone tasty and nutritious.
I have eaten as much as a half a pound a day or more, both fresh and dried. This is really shocking to me. The seeds too are good, but my current emphasis in testing is the greens, raw or dry. They work better than lettuce in a sandwich or salad, or just eaten plain. And dry, I add to soups or sauces or gravies or puddings or gravies or breading for chicken or chops or steak or fish. Whether I used it totally alone or mixed it with all the other usual spices, it just seemed I could do no wrong with it.
My wife has been joining me in this quest to find the maximum amount of Shmooo intake. She recently decided not to eat any just before bedtime. Says she finds it harder to get to sleep. That is not something I would tend to notice. My sleep tends to be on the alert side. As far as the Shmooo goes, my wife likes it best at breakfast or actually brunch. We so often combine the two meals.
But that is when I realized that my metabolism also seemed to be higher throughout the day. The Shmooo is incredibly nutritious and I was consuming a very large amount of it, sometimes even before breakfast.. I often go out with my first mug of coffee and eat some wild Indian strawberries along with some Shmooo. A nice combination. But often, later, my other normal helpings of food, I wound up not being able to finish what was on my plate. Very unusual behavior for me. Now the question is: is it just excellent nutrient content of the Shmooo that is doing this, or is there some stimulant in the plant that I am eating so much of?
My opinion so far is that metabolic rate has increased significantly, but I don't see a corresponding period later of being down. This is the central characteristic of stimulants in general. If a stimulant like caffeine or some similar chemical were involved, this past several months would have seen a lot of "down" periods. I have to conclude that the most likely explanation is that the Shmooo is just exceptionally nutritious and nutrient dense, supplying a great many things which were probably at some deficit when I began.
So the net effect is energizing and invigorating. and tends to blunt the appetite. This may account for the fact that I have lost nearly fifteen pounds in the past three months while doing nothing to deliberately diet.
But since I am not obese, and am not inclined to diet, I guess my next step is to find some testers who do need to drop some substantial weight, perhaps fifty pounds or more, who are ready to add Shmooo to their diet in the same way that I have.
Other than adding the Shmooo, no formal diet would be involved. No counting calories or weighing portions. Just eat the Shmooo at the outset of each meal, and incorporate it into as many of your dishes that you can get it into. And weigh yourself once a week. You would only need to keep track of how much fresh Shmooo you consume at each meal, and how much dried Shmooo went into the various dishes consumed. So initially, I need at least a half dozen people who must lose fifty pounds or more to regain good health. And I don't much care if you have previously failed in your diets.
There are those who may have some identity issues with their weight. That is to say, no matter how much they might consciously wish to become trim and fit, some underlying issue is preventing them from actually following through on the weight loss.
As perfect a food as I have come to believe Shmooo is, this small group of obese people need to address the "attachment" they have developed for their weight. I doubt that this represents more than 5 or 10% of obese people
For the remainder, eating more than they need, eating junk food too much, not having a reasonable idea of good nutrition, eating for something to do; they will be helped by adding Shmooo to their diets both before and within their meals. Shmooo is ideally the first big step, And for those who have good, well balanced eating habits, or who will begin to cultivate them, it is the only step required. Not a fad. Not a diet. Just a better way to eat.
I just got an Email from a Canadian who used Shmooo for the first time. Here it is:
Previously, I had been buying sufficient fresh vegetables. But that does little good if they do not actually get prepared and eaten. Most of the vegetables I was buying wilted and wound up on the compost heap because it was so easy for me to forget to eat it. This is complicated by the fact that most of my teeth are rippers and slicers, not grinders. So I needed a green vegetable, preferably in leaf form, that would be tender and tasty enough to eat raw in substantial amounts.
Not only that, it had to be a really appealing tasting food or it was a long shot that I would actually regularly consume it. And I wanted to be able to eat every part of the plant. And that turned out to be the case. I haven't tried to do anything with the adult root system, but other than that, the entire plant is not only edible, it is delicious and denser with the whole array of nutrients than any other vegetable I have compared it to.
In the past several months, I have done some diet-loading tests, seeing how much of it I could consume over a long period of time. I ate most of it raw and alive, just eating it fresh in the garden. I shredded and dried it under low temperature and used it alone or combined with every common spice in my kitchen. The Shmooo itself is not intense, but delicate in its' flavor. And yet, when mixed with other spices, seems to extend and enhance their flavor to good affect. And I could find no commercial sources for these greens. Never saw them in the produce section, the farmer's market, or the health food store. To put it another way, no one is selling it, and the general public has no notion that it is even edible, let alone tasty and nutritious.
I have eaten as much as a half a pound a day or more, both fresh and dried. This is really shocking to me. The seeds too are good, but my current emphasis in testing is the greens, raw or dry. They work better than lettuce in a sandwich or salad, or just eaten plain. And dry, I add to soups or sauces or gravies or puddings or gravies or breading for chicken or chops or steak or fish. Whether I used it totally alone or mixed it with all the other usual spices, it just seemed I could do no wrong with it.
My wife has been joining me in this quest to find the maximum amount of Shmooo intake. She recently decided not to eat any just before bedtime. Says she finds it harder to get to sleep. That is not something I would tend to notice. My sleep tends to be on the alert side. As far as the Shmooo goes, my wife likes it best at breakfast or actually brunch. We so often combine the two meals.
But that is when I realized that my metabolism also seemed to be higher throughout the day. The Shmooo is incredibly nutritious and I was consuming a very large amount of it, sometimes even before breakfast.. I often go out with my first mug of coffee and eat some wild Indian strawberries along with some Shmooo. A nice combination. But often, later, my other normal helpings of food, I wound up not being able to finish what was on my plate. Very unusual behavior for me. Now the question is: is it just excellent nutrient content of the Shmooo that is doing this, or is there some stimulant in the plant that I am eating so much of?
My opinion so far is that metabolic rate has increased significantly, but I don't see a corresponding period later of being down. This is the central characteristic of stimulants in general. If a stimulant like caffeine or some similar chemical were involved, this past several months would have seen a lot of "down" periods. I have to conclude that the most likely explanation is that the Shmooo is just exceptionally nutritious and nutrient dense, supplying a great many things which were probably at some deficit when I began.
So the net effect is energizing and invigorating. and tends to blunt the appetite. This may account for the fact that I have lost nearly fifteen pounds in the past three months while doing nothing to deliberately diet.
But since I am not obese, and am not inclined to diet, I guess my next step is to find some testers who do need to drop some substantial weight, perhaps fifty pounds or more, who are ready to add Shmooo to their diet in the same way that I have.
Other than adding the Shmooo, no formal diet would be involved. No counting calories or weighing portions. Just eat the Shmooo at the outset of each meal, and incorporate it into as many of your dishes that you can get it into. And weigh yourself once a week. You would only need to keep track of how much fresh Shmooo you consume at each meal, and how much dried Shmooo went into the various dishes consumed. So initially, I need at least a half dozen people who must lose fifty pounds or more to regain good health. And I don't much care if you have previously failed in your diets.
There are those who may have some identity issues with their weight. That is to say, no matter how much they might consciously wish to become trim and fit, some underlying issue is preventing them from actually following through on the weight loss.
As perfect a food as I have come to believe Shmooo is, this small group of obese people need to address the "attachment" they have developed for their weight. I doubt that this represents more than 5 or 10% of obese people
For the remainder, eating more than they need, eating junk food too much, not having a reasonable idea of good nutrition, eating for something to do; they will be helped by adding Shmooo to their diets both before and within their meals. Shmooo is ideally the first big step, And for those who have good, well balanced eating habits, or who will begin to cultivate them, it is the only step required. Not a fad. Not a diet. Just a better way to eat.
I just got an Email from a Canadian who used Shmooo for the first time. Here it is:
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Tetra Ethyl Leaded Gasoline
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 tetraethyl 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.
Monday, November 10, 2008
The Best & The Worst
I am not an economist. I hold most of them in fairly low esteem. But these are times when we should give some thought to the unprecedented seismic quakes rumbling through the interdependent money markets of the planet. A lot of rapacious gouging has gone on in the banking, investment and real estate sector. And little can be done to bring those responsible to justice. We can only ineffectually blame them.
There is a sense of panic in the air right now, like nothing in my lifetime. As a matter of fact, it even eclipses the crash of 1929. The safety net most of us thought we had is gone, and our governments are going to be just as powerless to actually fix the disaster as they were in the Great Depression. That depression was of such magnitude that it ushered in the second historic world war on the heels of the first, and then escalated into the cold war which brought about the implosion of one of the superpowers.
But the cautionary note was not heard. The other remaining superpower was emboldened. They, and their allies, embarked on new wars in the name of peace. These were wars which, added to the century of the most gigantic wars the world has ever known, would bring down the entire economic house of cards. Only this time, it is not just an economic upheaval. This time the natural environment is complicating the disaster to an extent that dwarfs the dust bowl of the 1930's. I am afraid that we are in for some terrible times.
The religion of capitalism is very nearly as destructive as the other isms that were hailed by other fanatics as the ultimate answer. Even the most obtuse of us should be able to see that now. The world economy has hemorrhaged, in terms of actual value lost forever, nineteen trillion dollars in the last year. That is more than a trillion and a half dollars per month, up in smoke. The system is not just in need of more incremental adjustments. It is wrecked.
That immense lost value is not just some abstract economic statistic. When the pundits say that we must bail out these huge financial institutions or other dominoes will fall as well, this mild metaphor does not represent the facts. It means joblessness, homelessness, desperation and starvation for billions of people. And not just the people in the third world. Us. There are no national boundaries to this crisis. As a matter of fact, the impact extends beyond the planet Earth.
The two things that the superpowers can be proudest of is that, for just a little while, in the midst of the steadily escalating cold war, we turned our attention on the space race, and to that extent, reduced our emphasis on mutually assured destruction, which had been the linchpin of our geopolitical "reality."
And though this great endeavor was itself of great economic risk, and could very easily have failed, it ushered in the greatest renaissance in the sciences that the world has ever known. Unfortunately, these advances were not matched in the political realm, and after a handful of men walked on the moon, we lost our direction in space. Oh, that is not to say we did no useful or exciting things. We did. But certainly the really bold moves just came to an abrupt stop.
Why was this? Because, aside from the use of private enterprise as subcontractors, scrambling for government patronage and the lavish dispensation of tax dollars, the pioneers with the greatest potential to get things done and make a profitable venture out of this ultimate frontier were not in the game. And now that the value of nineteen trillion dollars has just evaporated forever, even without the government as gatekeeper, investors are running scared. Even the boldest are running for cover.
So instead of viable projects like the mining of Earth-approaching asteroids of the platinum family of metals and other precious strategic resources, an enterprise of great potential profit, with far less risk than attempting to establish a foothold colony on the moon or Mars, we will very likely languish on this prison of a rapidly deteriorating planet, in the throes of an unprecedented array of overwhelming disasters which too few of us recognize are even happening.
And meanwhile, what are our space scientists doing? Spending fortunes digging trenches on Mars which, oddly enough, hardly even make the headlines. Think of that! We have robots on another planet for the first time in all of history, making discoveries which will have a direct bearing on our entire future in space, and few of us are paying any real attention, or thinking in any depth about the implications of the discoveries being made. How shameful.
And at the other end of the spectrum, we have our space scientists and engineers in their ivory towers, speculating seriously about notions of "Terraforming" Mars, a project that under the best of circumstances, would have a duration of centuries, with little or no prospect of profit along the way. It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.
There is a sense of panic in the air right now, like nothing in my lifetime. As a matter of fact, it even eclipses the crash of 1929. The safety net most of us thought we had is gone, and our governments are going to be just as powerless to actually fix the disaster as they were in the Great Depression. That depression was of such magnitude that it ushered in the second historic world war on the heels of the first, and then escalated into the cold war which brought about the implosion of one of the superpowers.
But the cautionary note was not heard. The other remaining superpower was emboldened. They, and their allies, embarked on new wars in the name of peace. These were wars which, added to the century of the most gigantic wars the world has ever known, would bring down the entire economic house of cards. Only this time, it is not just an economic upheaval. This time the natural environment is complicating the disaster to an extent that dwarfs the dust bowl of the 1930's. I am afraid that we are in for some terrible times.
The religion of capitalism is very nearly as destructive as the other isms that were hailed by other fanatics as the ultimate answer. Even the most obtuse of us should be able to see that now. The world economy has hemorrhaged, in terms of actual value lost forever, nineteen trillion dollars in the last year. That is more than a trillion and a half dollars per month, up in smoke. The system is not just in need of more incremental adjustments. It is wrecked.
That immense lost value is not just some abstract economic statistic. When the pundits say that we must bail out these huge financial institutions or other dominoes will fall as well, this mild metaphor does not represent the facts. It means joblessness, homelessness, desperation and starvation for billions of people. And not just the people in the third world. Us. There are no national boundaries to this crisis. As a matter of fact, the impact extends beyond the planet Earth.
The two things that the superpowers can be proudest of is that, for just a little while, in the midst of the steadily escalating cold war, we turned our attention on the space race, and to that extent, reduced our emphasis on mutually assured destruction, which had been the linchpin of our geopolitical "reality."
And though this great endeavor was itself of great economic risk, and could very easily have failed, it ushered in the greatest renaissance in the sciences that the world has ever known. Unfortunately, these advances were not matched in the political realm, and after a handful of men walked on the moon, we lost our direction in space. Oh, that is not to say we did no useful or exciting things. We did. But certainly the really bold moves just came to an abrupt stop.
Why was this? Because, aside from the use of private enterprise as subcontractors, scrambling for government patronage and the lavish dispensation of tax dollars, the pioneers with the greatest potential to get things done and make a profitable venture out of this ultimate frontier were not in the game. And now that the value of nineteen trillion dollars has just evaporated forever, even without the government as gatekeeper, investors are running scared. Even the boldest are running for cover.
So instead of viable projects like the mining of Earth-approaching asteroids of the platinum family of metals and other precious strategic resources, an enterprise of great potential profit, with far less risk than attempting to establish a foothold colony on the moon or Mars, we will very likely languish on this prison of a rapidly deteriorating planet, in the throes of an unprecedented array of overwhelming disasters which too few of us recognize are even happening.
And meanwhile, what are our space scientists doing? Spending fortunes digging trenches on Mars which, oddly enough, hardly even make the headlines. Think of that! We have robots on another planet for the first time in all of history, making discoveries which will have a direct bearing on our entire future in space, and few of us are paying any real attention, or thinking in any depth about the implications of the discoveries being made. How shameful.
And at the other end of the spectrum, we have our space scientists and engineers in their ivory towers, speculating seriously about notions of "Terraforming" Mars, a project that under the best of circumstances, would have a duration of centuries, with little or no prospect of profit along the way. It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
A Revolution In Evolution
This is a response to an essay about out of control "mutant killer" seaweed.
I do a certain amount of experimentation with cross-breeding, mostly trying to remove defects that have ill advisedly been bred into pedigreed animals, especially cats, but sometimes dogs as well.
I cross bred some chickens as well, trying to get them to turkey size. Sometimes things don't go right. I did get some twelve to fifteen pound chickens, but it was a disaster from several different perspectives. The chickens were so big that they just couldn't dissipate the heat on an unusually hot day, and often spontaneously gave up the ghost.
And the amount of feed required to produce these sumo chickens was monumental. The chickens would be cost prohibitive. Not only that, but the skeletal structure of the chicken is not designed to carry that much weight. The chickens wind up painfully waddling around, and eventually, they just sit and eat. This results in the fat/meat ratio being skewed far toward fat.
But all was not lost. During this same time, I also began to experiment with foods that chickens are not usually thought to eat, and found many things that are now thrown away in vast quantities, that could be turned directly into chicken meat.
I would like to get a modest quantity of this offending seaweed, and perhaps the zebra mussels which are causing so much trouble in so many different places, to see if chickens would thrive with this sort of supplemental feed.
I would of course take special pains to render these foods impossible to propagate by heat or other reasonable means, before they went to the chickens.
I really think we should not be feeding chickens so very much corn and wheat and other very valuable grains when, with thought, so many other alternatives are available. Properly mixed with other things, I'll bet my chickens would consume this variety of seaweed in substantial quantity.
And another post of mine on the same thread:
I know virtualy nothing about seaweed. When I was a kid I nibbled on a little kelp. I don't remember spitting it out in disgust. I doubt that it was a delight either since it didn't become a staple of my diet. But it was really a nutritional mystery to me. I wasn't much into nutrition in those days in terms of the content of foods. While I was technically an omnivore, vegetables were well down the list from meat, which I would kill for, especially during the years of frequent escape. I saw nothing in the story about actual toxicity though. And to expand on the comment about goats eating anything, I have demonstrated for myself that chickens will too. Not to mention swine, which I have no plans to experiment with. But if they will accept this variety of seaweed as a reasonable portion of their rations, and if there are no actually toxic features of this seaweed, we could wind up saving a whole lot of the various grains they are now being fed that could be diverted to human consumption. My own personal experience in raising beef is pretty limited. When I was rehabilitating my father after his stroke, something my siblings would have no part of — (Not casting any blame. They were both damaged pretty severely in their youth, and could not have coped) I had to stay pretty close at hand, rarely leaving for more than a few hours. I had had to stop my customary traveling up and down the west coast and my income came to a virtual halt, dropping by about 90%. I patented one of my inventions and it helped me to stay caught up on my child support for about five years, but the funding to grow the company just was not going to happen. I had spread myself to thin. On the good side, I was able to get custody of one of my boys, and had kidnapped my current wife away from her date in a Chinese restaurant/bar/dancehall. One of the sidelines I got into which was very fruitful was because of these lean times. My Christmas budget had dropped by 90% as well, and it was pretty hard to take. To cover up my newfound poverty a little, I bought a lot of beef, hand cut it, designed a meat marinade that I thought was satisfactory, and smoked a lot of jerky which I could parcel out in various sized packages to the friends and acquaintances on my Christmas list. I told nobody that I had made the jerky. I was still pretending I wasn't too up against it. And I wasn't above going out at night to hunt a few tarantulas to sell the local pet store or a science teacher or anyone else who would cough up five or ten dollars for an exotic arthropod. I never felt too guilty about that because the tarantula had better chances of long term survival in comparative luxury. (If a tarantula is discovered by a particular kind of wasp, it is paralyzed alive and becomes the long-term food supply for the wasp hatchlings. But getting back to the jerky. Between Christmas and New Years, about a third of the people not only thanked me, they wanted to get more. So I was off and running with a second little business along with the product I had patented. I kept polishing the marinade and the smoking methods for another seven years, and came to the point that I couldn't figure out how to improve anything about it — at which point it became pure drudgery, so I gave it up as a business, though I still took care of my biggest most loyal patrons for some years to follow. At one point a local farmer got a taste of my jerky from someone, but couldn't afford the $25-30 a pound I was getting (at least $50+ in current money). He asked how much jerky he could get for a Black Angus bull calf. We haggled a bit and I presbyterianed him down to three pounds. So now I had a Black Angus calf and no idea what to do next. I would have grass fed him but I was living in rocky desert terrain and I kept him on a big hefty chain. I removed his family jewels so he wouldn't get cranky when he grew up. Early on, he was getting some grass, but mostly he (now it) was eating baled alfalfa and a multigrain mix with molasses in it. I was feeling very uneasy because I hadn't figured out anything really innovative to do to make this steer reasonably unique. But then I got my little eureka idea. I had read about Kobe beef, perhaps the most expensive beef on the planet, getting astronomical prices in Japan. I wasn't interested in confining and trussing up the steer to limit his exercise, for the same reason I don't eat veal or pâté de foie gras. But they also mixed beer into the rations. I didn't know the quantity. But when the steer was about six months old, I began adding a case of beer per week to his rations. Then, about a month before it was going to go to that big pasture in the sky, I added a gallon of rhine wine every three days. And on its' last day, a couple of gallons so it would not be too conscious of its' departure. And as for cattle — they are most naturally eaters of grass and other green vegetation. It is actually a digestive hardship of major proportions for them to be fed the vast quantities of grains they get, to artificially fatten them up, to marble the meat with fat so that it will be more "choice." Choice in this case certainly does not mean more nutritious to us, but less. So it is entirely possible that even cattle could consume a certain amount of this seaweed and perhaps wind up solving some of the serious digestive problems that they have developed since being switched to such a high grain diet. I've got to tell you, I have had Chateaubriand in some of the fanciest restaurants in America. I have been a steak chef myself, but never for longer than it took me to learn every meat skill I could absorb in the place. The next restaurant I work in I will own. Zebra mussels too are an ongoing ecological disaster in our lakes and waterways — until we come up with a way for them to be usefully utilized. I frankly have no idea what the eating habits of mussells are, but wouldn't it be nice if, being deprived of their normal food, they could be used to consume large volumes of this seaweed, even if it had to be killed and ground up and then harvested in some fashion as some proportion of the food for farmed fish like catfish or tilapia.
And my last comment:
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.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Now about this damn seaweed. We screwed up. Now we have to fix it. We can't irradicate it. We have to harvest it. We have to figure a way to feed it to chickens, to swine, to cattle, to replenish depleted soil, to make paper, to make building material. Now let us pull our heads out of our asses and get to work!
Good Times, Hard Times, Try For Balance...
...The good times last longer, and the bad times are easier to take. Moods are not reality, but they certainly affect it. You can govern them rather than them governing you.
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." originally penned as the opening line of a novel by Dickens, "Tail of Two Cities" caught me by the throat when I first read it.
It strikes me that both perspectives have a role to play. Perhaps they even need simultaneous attention. It is not so easy to do, much like trying to see both images in an optical illusion at the same time.
Our selfhood includes a tangible sense of being, and a sense of isolation, along with a yearning to belong. These traits are all in conflict.
If each of the five senses are all brought to mimimal perception one at a time, the remainder are all enhanced very quickly in response.
But if you were to manage to effectively damp all the senses at once, an unusual state of mind might occur. A sense of identitylessness. Of beinglessness. Of ex stasis. Nothingness. And at the same time, a sense of effortlessly being one with everything about you. I am not so sure this is an illusion.
But be careful what you wish for. For some, such feelings as these are bliss, nirvana, soothing, perhaps even joyful or at least content.
Others respond with fear and horror. Perhaps it has something to do with where you are in your own spectrum of being.
Moods and attentional maladjustments are now the central focus of the "mental health" industry. And the emphasis is more and more on adjusting chemical imbalances in the brain with medications. Much can be done without them. To a great extent it is possible to learn to control moods without pharmaceutical help. Worth a try. Cowards die a thousand deaths. The courageous die but once. Most of your troubles may disappear as soon as you stop dreaming them up.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Conversation with Khurd
anthropositor said...I stumbled in here in my quest for information dealing with the structure of the cells of the lens of the eye. How that got me here is an enigma. I am determined to stay focused on that because I need to do something about my developing cataract in order to avoid surgery and save my sight, whereas the debate between creationism and evolution has no practical impact on me at all.
Although cataract surgery has gone through some remarkable evolutions in the past few decades, I am of the perspective that some of the new techniques overlook some approaches which should be considered, and that the surgeons who are in the mainstream of surgical intervention are entrenched in some wrong approaches, and that perhaps the great wealth potential of current cataract surgical practices is retarding the development of other effective approaches which may have considerably less potential to generate profit to the industry.
But turning just for a moment to this question of Creationism and Evolution, I have had a considerable number of interminable and frankly tiresome discussions with fundamentalist Christian true believers on this subject.
It strikes me that the similarities of DNA accross the spectrum of life forms is pretty compelling in suggesting evolutionary relationships.
Going back to the question of the very first spark of life, and the conclusion that because we cannot reconstruct or currently replicate in their entirety the circumstances of that very first step, therefore evolution is somehow disproved, I don't think that holds water.
It is very much like saying that the existance of the universe itself, and all of its' complexities, provides the proof of god's existance: (If god did not exist, how could this have all come about?). But go back one further step; (If there was a god, how did it get started?). This is the First Cause fallacy. The fact that we can't give ultimate answers to these questions does not mean that we therefore must believe that god exists, just because everything else apparently does.
I note that the emotions on these questions are pretty raw. One poster has gotten so annoyed that he wiped out every post on his own blog.
The notion that god exists and has anthropomorphic characteristics, and pays detailed and partisan roles in the activities of man, taking sides in our disputes, favoring good over evil, rewarding for good behavior and punishing for evil certainly does not hold up to careful scrutiny.
Evolutionary theory is not entirely perfect. Most other scientific theories are works in progress as well. But certainly, in the bold strokes, evolution holds up quite well as a working theory.
There are stronger emotions on the religious side of this controversy than on the secular side. Emotions are the central source of faith. Faith is the antithesis of the investigative process. Faith is coming to a conclusion when there is insufficient evidence to prove an issue.
None of us, believers, agnostics, athiests alike can operate without any vestiges of faith at all.
But it does seem that the faith oriented people have been pretty beleagered by the so-called scientific community, which itself has some serious weak points which have become dogmatically entrenched.
It is interesting though, that while one can readily get a clergyman or a rank and file true believer to engage in interminable discussions about religion by expressing resistance to their perspectives, To get a high priest in medicine to actually engage in discussion, dialogue or debate, is almost impossible. If any medical procedures are debated, it is generally out of sight, in the closed circles of the medical hierarchy. In the area of improvements in the art, input from patients and other interested parties is virtually completely ignored. The cult of expertise wants nothing to do with us. Not even to point out our foolishness in taking on a subject that only experts could possibly fathom.
In the twentieth century the emphasis on the source of innovations in all fields did an abrupt about face. Individual invention by independent researchers was almost entirely obliterated by institutionally based researches and developments, funded by grants from government, industry, universities, and specialized foundations.
This turn events has done great harm to the discovery process. But it is a harm that is very difficult to prove because the speed of discovery itself has accellerated so much, and because the controlling institutions and agencies take much more of the credit for the advancement in the sciences than they truly deserve.
Almost all really great ideas still come from the individual innovator. But only those who have learned to take advantage of the current systems governing the invention process have a good opportunity to bring such an idea to fruition. That is why so much invention today is by committee.
Individual invention is orphaned by corporate think tanks and by those whose main skill is in first achieving the funding required for developing an idea.
Even so, I, an individual with nothing but several ideas of what is going wrong in current methods of cataract surgery, (and with a previous track record of success in several other areas of health) will continue to operate on the premise that it will, somewhere along the line, be possible to find a single surgeon with whom to collaborate. Surely there is a small contingent of dissenters in the group.
But in the meantime, my focus will be on continuing to do whatever I can to slow or reverse the existing cataract on my own. - anthropositor said...
Out of curiosity, I went to the blog of one of the other posters, called The End is Nigh. I was moved to make a comment there as well.
After typing it, I was informed that comments were confined to Team Members. Going to Naseem's profile I found no Email address, and no listed team members for his blog. Apparently he prefers only to talk to himself.
This is sort of a widespread characteristic of the fanatical perspective. So I came back here, where comment is not precluded in such a way, on the theory that he might get my perspective indirectly, should he choose to come back here. Here is what I said:
One does not need to accept every component of the theory of evolution to come to the conclusion that it hods water much better than creationism.
The sophistries of the Imam are not persuasive. Just flamboyant trickery. The other examples too hold little merit. They are parables suitable for convincing the simple minded.
Fourteen billion years is a very, very long time. None of us can really conceptualize it. Nor can we possibly conceptualize the trillions of events that have transpired in that time, even on this very tiny little flyspeck (relative to the vastness of the rest of the universe) that we call the earth.
To represent reality with parables about monkeys and keyboards is simply doing what the Imam did, "proving" his point with showmanship and persuasion, rather than observation and logic based on what has been observed.
Okay, once again I will return to dealing with the cataract. - khurd said...
Hello anthropositor, thanks for taking time to put down your cogent arguments on evolution and creationism. I am in total agreement with what you have written.
The problem with all fundamentalists or cultists is that their dogma doesn't let them see farther than their myopic thoughts. They live in a world of delusion and to defend their cause they use all possible ways other than using science and logic. Their postulate web they are stuck in comprises of hundred and thousands of false beliefs which if questioned causes in them cognitive dissonance which make them very uncomfortable. As a defence mechanism they bypass logic and jump to any illogical means they can find that would help further their cause.
I have debated with various people who in the end questioned logic itself. They live in a life of fallacies and no matter how hard you try they don't want to come out of it.
You and I can understand the fallacy of first cause but they don't. Their gods are above logic and realm of physical existence where nothing of this world applies so its usually fruitless in arguing with these people. The above discussion you have read would have shown you what exactly I am talking about.
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My own personal perspective about philanthropy is that it is not just about money and the organizations set up to collect it, convert it to other forms and distribute to those in need.
During this conversion, profit-takers step in for a big bite of the apple. A couple of examples:
Little packets of electrolytes and minerals are available to add to clean water to feed babies who are in the process of dying from diarrhia. Millions of babies die each year from this cause. One of the problems is, without the clean, potable water, these babies are still at high risk of dying.
Each of the packets is enough to provide a dying child with a liter of remineralizing fluid (presuming an available source of the clean water) for about a dime. It strikes me that the value of those packets is closer to perhaps a cent and a half. The other 85% is profit. You decide whether that is "excess" profit.
Starvation, also a very big issue involving millions upon millions of children, can also be prevented or reversed for about a dollar a day per child.
Foil packets of peanut butter mixed with powdered milk, other vegetable fats, minerals and vitamins really do the job of saving lives. They do it well. Reliably. The packets keep well, needing no refrigeration. I believe considerable cost savings can be had by tinkering with the design of the product, making it even more useful and effective.
If the costs for these two products were brought down substantially, a great many more children could be saved. But since philanthropic givers do not have too much say in how their money is actually spent and do not pay much attention to this element, there is considerable room for profit-takers to make money. What was originally philanthropy becomes capitalism.
Twenty four years ago, I developed a prophylaxis for viruses like influenza and rhinoviruses (the common cold)and some other airborne infectious and allergic agents. I tested it for six years on myself, my family and my friends. Then, since it worked well, I started to teach others.
Now thousands of people do the same thing. I would, of course, be happier it the numbers were in the millions. With the potential for SARS and Avian Flu pandemics, as well as other evolving and emerging infectious diseases always threatening, I count this as one of the most important successes of my life. I have personally spent many thousands of hours teaching this procedure to others
I personally write no checks to charities. I help the people who need it that are within my reach. Directly. And I help with ideas, which I have in much greater surplus than money.
Admittedly, that doesn't do too much for starving babies on the other side of the world, but at least I know that the bulk of the money I spend charitably is actually doing good rather than enriching profit-takers. Not only that, but actually seeing the results of what I do galvanizes me to further efforts.
I say, find something you can do to help which uses your efforts along with your money. And be prepared to be philanthropic with your ideas as well as with your money. And when you do give money, pay some close attention to what the recipient agency is actually doing with the resources.
Now I am going to return to my work on cataracts, the leading cause of blindess throughout the world.
If your vision is beginning to cloud a bit, you might want to take some prudent actions before surgery is the only remaining option.
With regard to my right eye, with my own diagnosis of cataracts confirmed by an optometrist as requiring surgical intervention, things have improved, at least up to now, with only my own measures. This is something I was told, in no uncertain terms, would not happen (by a surgeon who stood to make several thousands of dollars for a very short operation.)
What is the national annual cost? In the billions. One thing seems pretty clear. There is little apparent philanthropy on the part of the ophthalmic specialty in medicine. Nor is there much cooperation with patients who wish to know in any detail, each of the steps of the operation, and the rationale behind them. To my mind, this is part of real informed consent.
But from the doctors perspective, this is an indicator of an uncooperative patient with expectations which are unrealistic. I note too, that with respect to Dr. Baltz of Little Rock, a physician who I selected with virtually no information availabe about her skills, it was virtually impossible to get her even to return my calls. I got only one return call from her, and only after canceling the scheduled surgery. Then she was on the line in eleven minutes, but our association was by that time no longer repairable. I would not now employ her services.