Stop It, Lazy Selfish Greedy Bastards!
"I love humanity. It's people I hate."
- Edna St. Vincent Millay, American poet and playwright (1892-1950) [also quoted in the Peanuts comic strip]
Farmers learn stuff that's down to earth. As I immerse myself in the deeply troublesome and awkward project of converting a lifelong city boy to struggling survival farmer (small variety, 8 acres), that has become my favourite saying--the "down to earth" one.
Before I continue with this article I must convey an important life lesson. There are two types of people: those who always put their own best interests first and those who frequently and comfortably put the best interests of others, individuals or groups or whole communities or societies, ahead of their own.
That may be the most important life lesson I have ever learned. It explains a huge amount about human behaviour. Personally, as a member of the latter group, it means that I can disregard any ideas of friendship or overtures of relationship of any kind with members of the former group.
Is that classification too harsh? Perhaps I can make it easier to understand by suggesting the behaviour of house cats as representative of what I will call the selfish group. If you have carefully observed the behaviour of cats, bells should begin to ring in your head now. Cats are the ultimate self-interested pets. Nature has programmed them to be survivors by putting themselves first.
That's not to say that cat owners are selfish or self-interested. On the contrary, they tend to be more altruistic kind of people. Dogs, on the other hand, better represent the altruistic group--again, that's not necessarily true of their owners. Dogs in the wild survive as individuals in an interdependent relationship with the pack. As the saying goes, dogs have owners while cats have staff.
People tend to behave much like one or the other of these two groups. No, I don't mean that they eat with their faces in bowls, let's leave that now.
Where I live, in eastern Canada, people with European heritage have lived for hundreds of years (First Nations people for over 3000 years in the oldest continuously occupied community in the New World). Only in recent decades has garbage been collected. Before that people took their trash to a dump, burned it or left it in a remote area of a field. Today I removed the last remnants of a burn barrel where previous (and oh so primitive) humanoids had tossed stuff that could never possibly burn.
Why would they put non-burnables in a burn barrel? Because they expected to move before they would have to deal with the consequences of their laziness. Much the same reasoning some people use when they toss beer bottles or cans out the windows of their cars as they drive down a road late at night rather than returning them to a recycling depot (the get their deposit back) at some later time.
My wife and I want to create a small farm that grows vegetables. You could call it a hobby farm except we don't plan to sell our veggies. We want to donate them to local foodbanks and shelters. Farming requires machines, ours needed a tractor with a plow. Lacking funding from a generous government or chemical manufacturer, we bought a used tractor, a classic model made in 1948. It worked beautifully, except the clutch would not disengage, which is decidedly awkward if you want to change gears.
For weeks I asked around but nobody knew how to adjust that clutch--"Take it to Bremner's (a local tractor dealer with an excellent reputation), they can fix any tractor problem." One day recently a man who usually functions with an oxygen hose at his nose (he didn't even get out of his car) stopped by our house as his wife left a fish her husband caught in one of his healthier moments. Even at our first meeting when it came out about my not being able to adjust the tractor clutch he offered to do it for me.
A few days later, without the oxygen, he hauled his 350 pound frame under the tractor, thrashed around for about an hour and came out with the clutch adjusted, something others had been unable to do. Despite needing his oxygen again, he stayed for tea then made his way home for pure O2. He wouldn't hear of taking a penny for his trouble. He was happy to help.
Everywhere you look you will find what some call the givers and the takers. Both may be easy enough to like until you need something, at which time the takers will vanish. Their lives are driven by self-interest, which is to say, greed.
The selfish ones are so easy to see around us that without evaluating life carefully you might get the impression that almost everyone is greedy and selfish. They aren't. The generous and altruistic people don't advertise themselves. They just are. The selfish ones make the news.
Believe it or not, despite the huge media efforts by industries to make us all into selfish, accumulative, consumer workaholics, more people today than ever before in history are giving to others, thinking of others, putting the best interests of others and the world ahead of their own. That's how civilization grows. That's how humanity progresses. That's how our planet will survive. We can't expect industries or the selfish to think of the welfare of everyone else.
Humanity could do with more selfless ones among us. People can change. What might help is if you are an altruistic person who is happy make this known to a selfish person who is unhappy. Selfish people are all basically unhappy, they seek thrills and gratification as substitutes for real happiness. It never makes them happy because they can never get enough. Greed is addictive.
Spread the word. Happiness is addictive as well. The more you give to the happiness and welfare of others, the happier you are. No one knows why. It seems, somehow, to be built into our genetic code to have the ability to be selfless while we retain the basic instinct to be greedy.
If we really want to beat nature, we can do it by helping each other. No other animal on the planet has the potential to do that the way we do. Birds and mammals are known to be nurturing and some are altruistic, but none can rise above what nature provided the way people can.
That's the only kind of defeating of nature that is win-win. That's the real potential of humanity.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want their children to grow healthy and strong in all developmental streams, not just a limited few.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Showing posts with label disease. Show all posts
Showing posts with label disease. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Friday, December 18, 2009
Big Business Manipulates the Climate Change Debate
Big Business Manipulates the Climate Change Debate
by Bill Allin, author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children who can think instead of simply accepting life as it imposes itself on them.
We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
- Maya Angelou, American educator, autobiographer and poet (b. 1928)
manufactroversy n. (neologism) A contrived or non-existent controversy, manufactured by political ideologues or interest groups who use deception and specious arguments to make their case.
Is the temperature of the planet really warming? No. The dirt and rock are not getting warmer.
Is the average temperature of the atmosphere above our planet warming? That's the core of the debate. Is climate change real and based solely on human activity or simply a cyclical feature of nature? That's the issue.
The arguments for climate change are based on computer models, which are based on sketchy facts from the past and questionable data from the present. Sketchy facts from the past because today's technology was not available more than a few years ago.
Questionable data? A Canadian blogger discovered a simple arithmetic error in the calculations by NASA based on its satellite readings, making the atmosphere seem a fraction of a degree warmer than it actually was. NASA satellite readings form the core of most computer climate model inputs.
Read that story here. But don't expect to find either the correction of NASA's data or conclusions on its web site or an admission that it made the error. You won't.
No one can doubt that the ice cap over the Arctic Ocean is thinning. Travelling by ship through the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific, through northern Canada, is possible now. That trip that caused the deaths of so many explorers and their shipmates over past centuries of our history has not been possible for over a thousand years. Yes, the Northwest Passage was open in the distant past.
No one can doubt that some countries that usually experience hot seasons are having it hotter than ever, with a few actually desertifying, especially in the Middle East and the Sahel around the Sahara in Africa.
However, ask the people who live in Edmonton, Canada, how much warmer they feel. One Saturday night in mid December 2009 their overnight low temperature was -46.1 degrees Celsius. (At that temperature Celsius and Fahrenheit have almost similar numbers.) That record cold was 10 degrees lower than the previous record cold night. Not one or two degrees colder, but 10.
Edmonton is the capital city of a Canadian province, not a northern territory. It's not sub-Arctic. It's province, Alberta, hit new power usage records in two successive weeks as Albertans tried to keep from freezing. The whole Canadian west was a deep freeze for the first part of the winter of 2009.
Eastern Canada was different. Maritimers had their summer in 2009, but it only lasted three days. The whole of spring, summer and autumn were cool and very wet. The previous two winters had old timers claiming they had never seen so much snow, so many storms, so much rainfall in a single season.
Cool and wet. Exactly what the climate models should predict when the air warms. Warm air collects more moisture from the oceans, which results in more cloud (less sun to warm the earth) and more rain.
In the 1970s the prediction was that we might have a new Ice Age based on the same data being used today, but different climate models. Canada's weather over the past two years would support that claim, though two years can never constitute a trend.
No one can doubt that those who believe in climate change feel strongly enough about it to fight for grants to study climate models and data more than their opponents. No one should doubt that some people, including a number of well respected scientists, believe that climate shift is natural and cyclical. Their work is available on the internet.
Why is there debate? The simplest conclusion is that there is money to be made. From scientific study of climate, not from climate change itself.
While few among us may know that industries puff out half a million different chemicals into the air, we all seem to know that carbon dioxide is the worst culprit for the greenhouse effect that eventually warms the atmosphere. We all know that breathing too much carbon dioxide is unhealthy, may even kill some of us.
We have not put together what we know, let alone figured out the debate most of us can't understand. While we argue over whether or not global temperatures are rising, whether or not our atmosphere is warming, whether human industries and habits directly affect that change or not, industries and government continue to pour extraordinary amounts of carbon dioxide into the air we breathe.
They have no need to spend on changing anything so long as we fight over whether the atmospheric temperature might change by a portion of one degree over a few decades.
We continue to breathe poisonous air. Industries and government owned power plants puff out obscene amounts of poisonous gases into our air. And nothing changes because we are arguing over whether global temperatures are rising or staying steady.
Who wins that scenario?
Those who believe that nothing should change in nature are wrong. History is full of examples. The Mediterranean Sea used to be a plain and the Sahara Desert used to be a giant lake. That's change. Tropical beasts used to roam what is now the north of Canada, Russia and Alaska until the last Ice Age arrived a few thousands years ago. That's change. Changes that happened not so long ago by historical standards.
History should teach us that nature changes by itself. It doesn't need our help. It will change with or without us.
Our own limited knowledge should tell us that we should not be arguing over whether climate is changing while we ignore manufacturing facilities putting millions of tons of poisonous gases into the air we breathe.
No one should doubt that life on earth today is different than it was before the Industrial Revolution. The main difference is not a small change in atmospheric temperature, but a huge increase in diseases that have never before been a problem on earth and the poisonous air we breathe that has caused them since the Industrial Revolution began.
While we debate a small change in atmospheric temperature, we continue to breathe poisonous air. Industries that are fundamentally sociopathic in their quest for profits benefit from our debate because they don't have to change anything.
We continue to get sick. We continue to die. We continue to argue over climate change when the issue is massive poisoning on a global scale.
Who wins? Who benefits while we argue?
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children who can think instead of simply accepting life as it imposes itself on them.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
by Bill Allin, author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children who can think instead of simply accepting life as it imposes itself on them.
We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
- Maya Angelou, American educator, autobiographer and poet (b. 1928)
manufactroversy n. (neologism) A contrived or non-existent controversy, manufactured by political ideologues or interest groups who use deception and specious arguments to make their case.
Is the temperature of the planet really warming? No. The dirt and rock are not getting warmer.
Is the average temperature of the atmosphere above our planet warming? That's the core of the debate. Is climate change real and based solely on human activity or simply a cyclical feature of nature? That's the issue.
The arguments for climate change are based on computer models, which are based on sketchy facts from the past and questionable data from the present. Sketchy facts from the past because today's technology was not available more than a few years ago.
Questionable data? A Canadian blogger discovered a simple arithmetic error in the calculations by NASA based on its satellite readings, making the atmosphere seem a fraction of a degree warmer than it actually was. NASA satellite readings form the core of most computer climate model inputs.
Read that story here. But don't expect to find either the correction of NASA's data or conclusions on its web site or an admission that it made the error. You won't.
No one can doubt that the ice cap over the Arctic Ocean is thinning. Travelling by ship through the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific, through northern Canada, is possible now. That trip that caused the deaths of so many explorers and their shipmates over past centuries of our history has not been possible for over a thousand years. Yes, the Northwest Passage was open in the distant past.
No one can doubt that some countries that usually experience hot seasons are having it hotter than ever, with a few actually desertifying, especially in the Middle East and the Sahel around the Sahara in Africa.
However, ask the people who live in Edmonton, Canada, how much warmer they feel. One Saturday night in mid December 2009 their overnight low temperature was -46.1 degrees Celsius. (At that temperature Celsius and Fahrenheit have almost similar numbers.) That record cold was 10 degrees lower than the previous record cold night. Not one or two degrees colder, but 10.
Edmonton is the capital city of a Canadian province, not a northern territory. It's not sub-Arctic. It's province, Alberta, hit new power usage records in two successive weeks as Albertans tried to keep from freezing. The whole Canadian west was a deep freeze for the first part of the winter of 2009.
Eastern Canada was different. Maritimers had their summer in 2009, but it only lasted three days. The whole of spring, summer and autumn were cool and very wet. The previous two winters had old timers claiming they had never seen so much snow, so many storms, so much rainfall in a single season.
Cool and wet. Exactly what the climate models should predict when the air warms. Warm air collects more moisture from the oceans, which results in more cloud (less sun to warm the earth) and more rain.
In the 1970s the prediction was that we might have a new Ice Age based on the same data being used today, but different climate models. Canada's weather over the past two years would support that claim, though two years can never constitute a trend.
No one can doubt that those who believe in climate change feel strongly enough about it to fight for grants to study climate models and data more than their opponents. No one should doubt that some people, including a number of well respected scientists, believe that climate shift is natural and cyclical. Their work is available on the internet.
Why is there debate? The simplest conclusion is that there is money to be made. From scientific study of climate, not from climate change itself.
While few among us may know that industries puff out half a million different chemicals into the air, we all seem to know that carbon dioxide is the worst culprit for the greenhouse effect that eventually warms the atmosphere. We all know that breathing too much carbon dioxide is unhealthy, may even kill some of us.
We have not put together what we know, let alone figured out the debate most of us can't understand. While we argue over whether or not global temperatures are rising, whether or not our atmosphere is warming, whether human industries and habits directly affect that change or not, industries and government continue to pour extraordinary amounts of carbon dioxide into the air we breathe.
They have no need to spend on changing anything so long as we fight over whether the atmospheric temperature might change by a portion of one degree over a few decades.
We continue to breathe poisonous air. Industries and government owned power plants puff out obscene amounts of poisonous gases into our air. And nothing changes because we are arguing over whether global temperatures are rising or staying steady.
Who wins that scenario?
Those who believe that nothing should change in nature are wrong. History is full of examples. The Mediterranean Sea used to be a plain and the Sahara Desert used to be a giant lake. That's change. Tropical beasts used to roam what is now the north of Canada, Russia and Alaska until the last Ice Age arrived a few thousands years ago. That's change. Changes that happened not so long ago by historical standards.
History should teach us that nature changes by itself. It doesn't need our help. It will change with or without us.
Our own limited knowledge should tell us that we should not be arguing over whether climate is changing while we ignore manufacturing facilities putting millions of tons of poisonous gases into the air we breathe.
No one should doubt that life on earth today is different than it was before the Industrial Revolution. The main difference is not a small change in atmospheric temperature, but a huge increase in diseases that have never before been a problem on earth and the poisonous air we breathe that has caused them since the Industrial Revolution began.
While we debate a small change in atmospheric temperature, we continue to breathe poisonous air. Industries that are fundamentally sociopathic in their quest for profits benefit from our debate because they don't have to change anything.
We continue to get sick. We continue to die. We continue to argue over climate change when the issue is massive poisoning on a global scale.
Who wins? Who benefits while we argue?
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children who can think instead of simply accepting life as it imposes itself on them.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Why Coughing Into Your Elbow Is Wrong
Why Coughing Into Your Elbow Is Wrong
You likely grew up, as I did, being told to cover your mouth and nose with your hand when you cough or sneeze. That has changed.
We are now told to cough or sneeze into the elbow of a sleeve. One commercial currently on television shows a woman carrying a laundry basket and coughing into her shoulder. All in the aid of avoiding the spread of "germs."
Here's the problem. Rather, a combination of them. Let's begin with the objective, confining germs that would normally be spread into the air by coughing or sneezing.
When you cover your mouth and nose with your hand, you prevent most of what comes out of them from reaching anyone else. Witness the fact that sometimes your hand got a bit wet. (I know, the subject is unpleasant, but the title should have warned you.) When you cough or sneeze into your sleeve elbow, a good deal of what comes out of your mouth or nose will miss the fabric.
When you cover your mouth with your hand to cough or sneeze, you can wash your hand. You should wash them anyway, several times a day, so that should not be an imposition. If you have a cold or cough, you can carry disposable tissues.
When you cough or sneeze into your sleeve, it's highly unlikely you will change your clothing until a much later time. What is highly likely is that you will cough or sneeze again and use the same sleeve. When you cough or sneeze, the immediate reflex is to inhale to replace the expelled air. You do that before turning away from your sleeve, which means that you then inhale your own germs.
The whole purpose of using disposable tissues rather than the old style handkerchief was so you could avoid breathing in the same germs you blew into the handkerchief last time. Most of us got that message: don't inhale the germs you sneezed or coughed out last time.
As the saying goes, do the math. Coughing or sneezing into your sleeve causes as much as 90 percent of germs that may exit your mouth or nose to escape into the air around you. Always at least 50 percent escapes.
If you have a colleague who smokes, ask that person to inhale from a cigarette then blow the smoke back out again into their sleeve, as a person would when sneezing or coughing. It may shock you how little smoke sticks to the fabric and how much makes its way into the air. The example isn't perfect, but it will serve its purpose.
People in North America were asked to switch from cloth handkerchiefs to disposable paper tissues a few decades ago to avoid having us breathe our own germs when we coughed or sneezed into handkerchiefs. The same thinking still applies.
The more often a person with a cold or cough expels air into their sleeve, believing that they are doing right by those around them, the more people will catch colds and coughs from them. And the more often those same people may re-infect themselves. The more people get colds and coughs, the more OTC (over the counter) medications the drug manufacturers will sell.
When we learn our health habits from the people who make medicines, we must understand that these companies have far less interest in our health than in our cash, their bottom lines.
We have good reason to believe that coughing or sneezing into our own sleeves may cause more disease than it avoids. Who wins with that scenario?
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, an easy to read guidebook for teachers and parents who want to teach the right lessons to their children at the best possible times to aid their development.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
You likely grew up, as I did, being told to cover your mouth and nose with your hand when you cough or sneeze. That has changed.
We are now told to cough or sneeze into the elbow of a sleeve. One commercial currently on television shows a woman carrying a laundry basket and coughing into her shoulder. All in the aid of avoiding the spread of "germs."
Here's the problem. Rather, a combination of them. Let's begin with the objective, confining germs that would normally be spread into the air by coughing or sneezing.
When you cover your mouth and nose with your hand, you prevent most of what comes out of them from reaching anyone else. Witness the fact that sometimes your hand got a bit wet. (I know, the subject is unpleasant, but the title should have warned you.) When you cough or sneeze into your sleeve elbow, a good deal of what comes out of your mouth or nose will miss the fabric.
When you cover your mouth with your hand to cough or sneeze, you can wash your hand. You should wash them anyway, several times a day, so that should not be an imposition. If you have a cold or cough, you can carry disposable tissues.
When you cough or sneeze into your sleeve, it's highly unlikely you will change your clothing until a much later time. What is highly likely is that you will cough or sneeze again and use the same sleeve. When you cough or sneeze, the immediate reflex is to inhale to replace the expelled air. You do that before turning away from your sleeve, which means that you then inhale your own germs.
The whole purpose of using disposable tissues rather than the old style handkerchief was so you could avoid breathing in the same germs you blew into the handkerchief last time. Most of us got that message: don't inhale the germs you sneezed or coughed out last time.
As the saying goes, do the math. Coughing or sneezing into your sleeve causes as much as 90 percent of germs that may exit your mouth or nose to escape into the air around you. Always at least 50 percent escapes.
If you have a colleague who smokes, ask that person to inhale from a cigarette then blow the smoke back out again into their sleeve, as a person would when sneezing or coughing. It may shock you how little smoke sticks to the fabric and how much makes its way into the air. The example isn't perfect, but it will serve its purpose.
People in North America were asked to switch from cloth handkerchiefs to disposable paper tissues a few decades ago to avoid having us breathe our own germs when we coughed or sneezed into handkerchiefs. The same thinking still applies.
The more often a person with a cold or cough expels air into their sleeve, believing that they are doing right by those around them, the more people will catch colds and coughs from them. And the more often those same people may re-infect themselves. The more people get colds and coughs, the more OTC (over the counter) medications the drug manufacturers will sell.
When we learn our health habits from the people who make medicines, we must understand that these companies have far less interest in our health than in our cash, their bottom lines.
We have good reason to believe that coughing or sneezing into our own sleeves may cause more disease than it avoids. Who wins with that scenario?
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, an easy to read guidebook for teachers and parents who want to teach the right lessons to their children at the best possible times to aid their development.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Friday, January 09, 2009
Fascinating Stuff You Didn't Know About Bacteria
The count of bacteria on our planet vastly outnumbers all other life forms combined. One scientific source pegs them around five million trillion trillion strong.
Placed end to end, earth's bacteria would stretch from here to the edge of the visible universe, about ten billion light years away.
You will find bacteria virtually everywhere you look. That includes in your body. You likely know bacteria as invaders, causers of disease. Pharmaceutical companies and television advertising promote that understanding. It's only partly true.
We couldn't live without bacteria--the good kind. Our bodies are really symbionts, part human cells and part bacteria. Our body cells provide the living environment and nutrition for the good bacteria, while they provide protection from many diseases for us.
Those television commercials where graphics show bacteria in the mouth, with actors in white coats making grimacing faces to show how ugly and dangerous the bacteria are deceive us. The mouth is the first line of defence against disease. Good bacteria in the mouth hunt down and kill the bad bacteria before they get any further and acquire a foothold. Those antibacterial mouthwashes kill bad bacteria, as advertised. They also kill far more good and beneficial bacteria whose primary function is to kill the bad ones. Good bacteria in the mouth always vastly outnumber the bad ones, except when both are killed off by antibacterial mouthwashes.
Most cases of bad breath--halitosis--result from dead bacteria and partly broken down food particles on the back of the tongue. Just as you blow your nose when you have a cold to remove the detritus of the battles in your body of good bacteria against bad, you should brush your tongue--especially the back of the tongue that gets little activity--to remove rotting matter.
Mints, gum and eating food either mask problems on the back of the tongue or delay their giving off a bad odour until the mouth is quiet during the night. Morning breath is usually caused by food and dead bacteria rotting away on the back of the tongue during the night. Brush the tongue before bed at night and your breath will likely be much fresher in the morning.
Removing bacteria in the mouth that have given their lives to save yours is like taking out the trash. What the trash was originally was good and beneficial, but there comes a time to get rid of what is no longer useful before it causes other problems. Do that with a brush or scraper, not with an antibacterial mouthwash weapon of mass destruction.
I used to get horrified reactions from readers when I wrote that there are likely more bacteria in our bodies than native cells. Recent estimates based on lab research suggest that bacteria in our bodies outnumber our body's cells by a factor of ten.
Bacteria are the oldest known life form. They have been on earth for 3.5 billion years, since shortly after the surface of our planet solidified.
They were the source of mystery, speculation and superstition until 1674 when Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek invented the first microscope and spotted the first "animacules." Some were microbes (including bacteria), some spermatozoa and some blood corpuscles.
Some varieties of bacteria are remarkably adept at reproduction. They can go from birth to being capable of reproduction themselves in ten minutes. A single bacterium could theoretically be the progenitor of more than one billion offspring within five hours. They don't reproduce sexually, so they don't require recovery time. They don't seem to require sleep or rest. They're just full time busy bodies.
There may be more varieties of bacteria as yet unidentified than we have listed of all other known species of life. In 2003, geneticist J. Craig Ventner travelled several oceans of the world scooping up water samples from the surfaces. On examination of his water samples he found more than one million bacterial genes never seen before.
Ventner is leading a team that plans to build a bacterium from scratch. His first created "life form" is under study now.
Why do we need to create more bacteria when we have so many we haven't even found? Remember how some bacteria live so well in our bodies, killing the bad guys that invade us? Some new bacteria could be designed to kill cancer cells, for example. Other researchers are genetically modifying viruses for similar purposes. Some day, curing your newly identified cancer or tuberculosis or cholera may require nothing more than getting a needle in the doctor's office.
Bacteria are fast. E. coli, one of the feared kind but also one of the varieties being genetically modified to help us, can travel 25 times it's own length in one second.That would be like a race horse galloping at 135 miles per hour (216 kph).
Bacteria have been with us and in us for so long that some have been incorporated into our bodies. Mitochondria, an organelle with enzymes that power every cell in our bodies, descended from bacteria. Stretches of our own DNA are virtually identical to the DNA of certain bacteria and viruses. Bacteria may be responsible for allowing our bodies to incorporate virus DNA into our own.
Science is totally rethinking the use of antibiotics to cure our problems. At one time given out freely by doctors to address patient problems they couldn't figure out, including viral infections that cannot be addressed by antibiotics, antibiotics are now recognized as having been abused and misused, resulting in the so-called superbug bacteria that no antibiotic can touch.
Clostridium difficile (better known as C. difficile or C. diff), the terror of some modern hospitals, moves in and takes over a body when its natural defences have been destroyed by antibiotics or immune system failure. It causes painful inflammation in the gut, diarrhea and even death.
Bacteria are so good at adapting to avoid the effects of antibiotics--thus gaining the title superbug--that one superbug bacteria known as MRSA killed 19,000 Americans in 2005 alone.
Floating bacteria have the unusual characteristic of being the "germ" around which moisture collects in the air. One theory, as yet unproven, recommends that bacteria be sprayed onto clouds to "seed" them, causing rain in areas of drought. The problem with testing the theory is that many people believe that all bacteria are bad, a belief they learned from deceptive television commercials.
Bacteria are amazingly resilient. They have been found two miles down in a South African gold mine, living off energy given off by radioactive rocks. Deinococcus radiodurans can survive 10,000 times as much radiation as humans, making it a prime subject for study about cleaning up nuclear waste. Other varieties have been found under two kilometres of ice in the Antarctic and revived, having laid under the ice for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Australian scientists have discovered that Ralstonia metallidurans can turn gold dissolved in a liquid into solid gold nuggets.
Bacteria may even one day not just power, but be the computer you use. As single-purposed and diligent as they are, they can follow directions without close supervision. E. coli has already been assembled as part of a computer, to produce a bull's-eye on command.
No word yet on whether the bacteria will run Windows or Linux.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to know what kids need while they are growing, not just what they should be taught to get good jobs as adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
[Primary source: Discover, December 2008]
Placed end to end, earth's bacteria would stretch from here to the edge of the visible universe, about ten billion light years away.
You will find bacteria virtually everywhere you look. That includes in your body. You likely know bacteria as invaders, causers of disease. Pharmaceutical companies and television advertising promote that understanding. It's only partly true.
We couldn't live without bacteria--the good kind. Our bodies are really symbionts, part human cells and part bacteria. Our body cells provide the living environment and nutrition for the good bacteria, while they provide protection from many diseases for us.
Those television commercials where graphics show bacteria in the mouth, with actors in white coats making grimacing faces to show how ugly and dangerous the bacteria are deceive us. The mouth is the first line of defence against disease. Good bacteria in the mouth hunt down and kill the bad bacteria before they get any further and acquire a foothold. Those antibacterial mouthwashes kill bad bacteria, as advertised. They also kill far more good and beneficial bacteria whose primary function is to kill the bad ones. Good bacteria in the mouth always vastly outnumber the bad ones, except when both are killed off by antibacterial mouthwashes.
Most cases of bad breath--halitosis--result from dead bacteria and partly broken down food particles on the back of the tongue. Just as you blow your nose when you have a cold to remove the detritus of the battles in your body of good bacteria against bad, you should brush your tongue--especially the back of the tongue that gets little activity--to remove rotting matter.
Mints, gum and eating food either mask problems on the back of the tongue or delay their giving off a bad odour until the mouth is quiet during the night. Morning breath is usually caused by food and dead bacteria rotting away on the back of the tongue during the night. Brush the tongue before bed at night and your breath will likely be much fresher in the morning.
Removing bacteria in the mouth that have given their lives to save yours is like taking out the trash. What the trash was originally was good and beneficial, but there comes a time to get rid of what is no longer useful before it causes other problems. Do that with a brush or scraper, not with an antibacterial mouthwash weapon of mass destruction.
I used to get horrified reactions from readers when I wrote that there are likely more bacteria in our bodies than native cells. Recent estimates based on lab research suggest that bacteria in our bodies outnumber our body's cells by a factor of ten.
Bacteria are the oldest known life form. They have been on earth for 3.5 billion years, since shortly after the surface of our planet solidified.
They were the source of mystery, speculation and superstition until 1674 when Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek invented the first microscope and spotted the first "animacules." Some were microbes (including bacteria), some spermatozoa and some blood corpuscles.
Some varieties of bacteria are remarkably adept at reproduction. They can go from birth to being capable of reproduction themselves in ten minutes. A single bacterium could theoretically be the progenitor of more than one billion offspring within five hours. They don't reproduce sexually, so they don't require recovery time. They don't seem to require sleep or rest. They're just full time busy bodies.
There may be more varieties of bacteria as yet unidentified than we have listed of all other known species of life. In 2003, geneticist J. Craig Ventner travelled several oceans of the world scooping up water samples from the surfaces. On examination of his water samples he found more than one million bacterial genes never seen before.
Ventner is leading a team that plans to build a bacterium from scratch. His first created "life form" is under study now.
Why do we need to create more bacteria when we have so many we haven't even found? Remember how some bacteria live so well in our bodies, killing the bad guys that invade us? Some new bacteria could be designed to kill cancer cells, for example. Other researchers are genetically modifying viruses for similar purposes. Some day, curing your newly identified cancer or tuberculosis or cholera may require nothing more than getting a needle in the doctor's office.
Bacteria are fast. E. coli, one of the feared kind but also one of the varieties being genetically modified to help us, can travel 25 times it's own length in one second.That would be like a race horse galloping at 135 miles per hour (216 kph).
Bacteria have been with us and in us for so long that some have been incorporated into our bodies. Mitochondria, an organelle with enzymes that power every cell in our bodies, descended from bacteria. Stretches of our own DNA are virtually identical to the DNA of certain bacteria and viruses. Bacteria may be responsible for allowing our bodies to incorporate virus DNA into our own.
Science is totally rethinking the use of antibiotics to cure our problems. At one time given out freely by doctors to address patient problems they couldn't figure out, including viral infections that cannot be addressed by antibiotics, antibiotics are now recognized as having been abused and misused, resulting in the so-called superbug bacteria that no antibiotic can touch.
Clostridium difficile (better known as C. difficile or C. diff), the terror of some modern hospitals, moves in and takes over a body when its natural defences have been destroyed by antibiotics or immune system failure. It causes painful inflammation in the gut, diarrhea and even death.
Bacteria are so good at adapting to avoid the effects of antibiotics--thus gaining the title superbug--that one superbug bacteria known as MRSA killed 19,000 Americans in 2005 alone.
Floating bacteria have the unusual characteristic of being the "germ" around which moisture collects in the air. One theory, as yet unproven, recommends that bacteria be sprayed onto clouds to "seed" them, causing rain in areas of drought. The problem with testing the theory is that many people believe that all bacteria are bad, a belief they learned from deceptive television commercials.
Bacteria are amazingly resilient. They have been found two miles down in a South African gold mine, living off energy given off by radioactive rocks. Deinococcus radiodurans can survive 10,000 times as much radiation as humans, making it a prime subject for study about cleaning up nuclear waste. Other varieties have been found under two kilometres of ice in the Antarctic and revived, having laid under the ice for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Australian scientists have discovered that Ralstonia metallidurans can turn gold dissolved in a liquid into solid gold nuggets.
Bacteria may even one day not just power, but be the computer you use. As single-purposed and diligent as they are, they can follow directions without close supervision. E. coli has already been assembled as part of a computer, to produce a bull's-eye on command.
No word yet on whether the bacteria will run Windows or Linux.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to know what kids need while they are growing, not just what they should be taught to get good jobs as adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
[Primary source: Discover, December 2008]
Friday, August 08, 2008
Why You Are No Longer Just You
Until now you have likely thought of yourself as "me," an individual human of the homo sapiens sapiens variety, a single being trying to make its way in the world. That will change before you reach the end of this article.
What's more, any thought or fear you may have had that you could be cloned will be removed from your list of possibilities forever. (That reminds me, why did the original of Dolly the sheep, the first large animal that was cloned, not receive any of the credit while Dolly took all the credit and glory? The original sheep that was cloned doesn't even warrant a name for us.)
Each of us is not just one organism, the way we usually think of ourselves. We are actually a symbiosis of billions of organisms, only one of which has the DNA pattern we associate with ourselves. Our DNA gives us the cells we think of as "us." Most of the rest are bacteria, good bacteria without which we could not survive. Each has its own DNA that is nothing like our own.
Let's begin with places that other living things we loosely call germs enter our bodies. The mouth is a very important place to begin because it's the location where the first battles against invaders that could harm us are fought. We don't just have saliva in our mouths when we're not eating. Saliva is the vehicle that carries good bacteria that are our first line of defence against disease. Invading viruses or bacteria could enter our bodies through our mouths at any time.
Okay, we know that if their are going to be battles, they must be fought somewhere. The mouth would be as good a place to fight some as any, right? Not so you'd notice judging by commercials we see on television. How about those mouthwash ads that promise to kill almost every living thing in our mouth if we use it a couple of times every day? That means that we would kill off millions of bacteria in our mouth that are prepared to fight to the death to prevent harmful bacteria and viruses from entering our body.
However much or little you know about military engagements, you would likely agree that it doesn't make sense to kill off the first companies of soldiers that go into battle on our behalf. That is exactly what those bacteria-killing mouthwashes do.
What do mouthwashes really do that is beneficial? They try to kill collections of fungi that grow on the top of the tongue at the back of the mouth. These fungi are the main causes of bad breath. That's what you wanted to avoid, right? Yes, but brushing the back of your tongue with your toothbrush just before you finish brushing your teeth and rinsing will do the same thing. The exact same thing. Only the brush will do it better because it can separate those little forests of tongue things and flick away the fungi, whereas the mouthwash may not be that successful.
If you want your first line of defence against disease caused by most kinds of bacteria and viruses to hold fast and keep you healthy, don't kill it off because you believe the commercials. Big corporations are in business to make money off ignorant people, not to help us maintain good health.
The nose is one of the vulnerable places where germs can enter. Lo and behold, the nose also harbours a boatload of good bacteria to fight disease on our behalf, as well as the mouth. When are the defences of the nose most vulnerable? When the nose gets cold, the bacteria that defend it tend to weaken, to lose their power to fight. They don't necessarily die, they just go kind of dormant. They are very subject to cold.
Along come the viruses (about 200 different kinds of them) that cause us to develop a "cold." Have you ever wondered where that word "cold" came from to describe the runny nose, watery eyes and the rest of the discomfort? It came from an event that lowers our defences against cold viruses, getting our nose cold. A cold nose event isn't the only way to get a cold, nor does having your nose get cold guarantee you will get a viral cold. It's just a common way for the attack of the cold viruses to begin in our body while its primary defences are weak.
The other common place where cold viruses enter our body is through the eyes. Viruses ride the fluid in our eyes as it swashes around the eyeball, then eventually makes its way into the back of the eye where they find body cells to invade or blood cells that will carry them farther inside. We don't have many natural defences against invasion through our eyes. But eye fluid is not exactly conducive to growing or transporting live viruses, so having dry eyes is a condition we want to avoid.
Kissing with the tongue, having an open wound and exchanging bodily fluids through sex are other methods by which germs enter our bodies, only in those cases from another person rather than from air, food or liquid. Those practices are not necessarily risky in terms of increasing our vulnerability to disease. In each case we have good bacteria to defend us against invasion by germs and microbes (two words which mean essentially the same thing). We are as apt to get good bacteria from another person as bad bacteria.
While we have bacteria at work in every organ of our bodies, the greatest proliferation of them is in the stomach and gut. Bacteria actually perform the work we call digestion. Without them we could starve to death even if we ate all day long.
Have you ever wondered why some people could eat a mountain of ice cream without gaining an ounce, while another person gains two pounds just from sniffing a cupcake? The one who easily gains weight is "blessed" with a very efficient digestive system, lots of good bacteria that digest as much as possible of the nutrition they eat. The glutton with the beanpole body style has a very inefficient digestive system, not nearly enough good bacteria to help digest the food that passes through. (I know, it ain't fair.)
Some biologists have estimated that we may have more bacteria in our bodies than we have of our own body cells. While that may sound absurd, remember that just a few years ago very few people believed that anything could live in our bodies other than our own cells. And some bad bacteria and viruses that somehow managed to survive and cause diseases.
That brings us--briefly--to good viruses in our bodies. Are there any? Can a virus be good. As odd as that sounds, remember that just a few years ago (or a couple of minutes ago) you believed that all bacteria were bad. DNA experts tell us that strings of gene patterns in some human chromosomes are identical to gene patterns in some viruses. At some point in our past, some humans have accommodated bad virus genes into their own chromosomes. Now we consider them "natural," part of our own line of defence.
Medical science isn't certain if the virus genes within our own chromosomes help to protect us against certain diseases or prevent our immune system from recognizing disease-causing germs because they have genetic material similar to our own. The odds are that both are true, with different people and different diseases. (Doesn't that confuse the issue!)
We are not subject to some kinds of diseases that other large animals are. And we get a few diseases that other mammals don't. The reason likely has something to do with those strings of virus genes within our own. Some of us can get HIV/AIDS, while others of us could never contract the disease. Heart disease, cancer and other diseases have difference between people, even of the same family. The difference may be who has what viral gene sequences within their own DNA. And that may depend on which viruses were accommodated and which rejected within each person's lifetime. It is possible for DNA to change slightly over a lifetime.
As this gene accommodation and rejection of competing genes from viruses is part of human evolution that is going on today, we can't be certain how it works. Our bodies are still works in progress. We occupy a small section along the production line called life.
As for cloning yourself or cloning anyone else, you can now see that a single organism of DNA could be replicated, but no two could ever have the same combinations of bacterial organisms as each other because their symbiosis would be different. As most of our learning is based on excruciatingly small details we each learn as babies and very young children, no two people with the same DNA could ever be the same either, just as no two identical twins have the same personalities.
Even two people that began life with the same DNA might not be identical as adults because of gene accommodations through their respective lifetimes--that is, they may have different susceptibilities to diseases, for example. Medical science may be able to help us to grow new body parts (we can even grow new brain cells), but the subject of whole body cloning must be left to science fiction writers.
If you take nothing else from this article, at least do yourself a favour and don't kill off the good bacteria that are helping you to live a healthy life. Without them, you can't be healthy and eventually you may die from your own misdeeds.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to raise children who know what is healthy for them and what is not, without using the old trial and error method that made so many people so very sick and even caused their deaths. This stuff is not taught in most schools or homes.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
What's more, any thought or fear you may have had that you could be cloned will be removed from your list of possibilities forever. (That reminds me, why did the original of Dolly the sheep, the first large animal that was cloned, not receive any of the credit while Dolly took all the credit and glory? The original sheep that was cloned doesn't even warrant a name for us.)
Each of us is not just one organism, the way we usually think of ourselves. We are actually a symbiosis of billions of organisms, only one of which has the DNA pattern we associate with ourselves. Our DNA gives us the cells we think of as "us." Most of the rest are bacteria, good bacteria without which we could not survive. Each has its own DNA that is nothing like our own.
Let's begin with places that other living things we loosely call germs enter our bodies. The mouth is a very important place to begin because it's the location where the first battles against invaders that could harm us are fought. We don't just have saliva in our mouths when we're not eating. Saliva is the vehicle that carries good bacteria that are our first line of defence against disease. Invading viruses or bacteria could enter our bodies through our mouths at any time.
Okay, we know that if their are going to be battles, they must be fought somewhere. The mouth would be as good a place to fight some as any, right? Not so you'd notice judging by commercials we see on television. How about those mouthwash ads that promise to kill almost every living thing in our mouth if we use it a couple of times every day? That means that we would kill off millions of bacteria in our mouth that are prepared to fight to the death to prevent harmful bacteria and viruses from entering our body.
However much or little you know about military engagements, you would likely agree that it doesn't make sense to kill off the first companies of soldiers that go into battle on our behalf. That is exactly what those bacteria-killing mouthwashes do.
What do mouthwashes really do that is beneficial? They try to kill collections of fungi that grow on the top of the tongue at the back of the mouth. These fungi are the main causes of bad breath. That's what you wanted to avoid, right? Yes, but brushing the back of your tongue with your toothbrush just before you finish brushing your teeth and rinsing will do the same thing. The exact same thing. Only the brush will do it better because it can separate those little forests of tongue things and flick away the fungi, whereas the mouthwash may not be that successful.
If you want your first line of defence against disease caused by most kinds of bacteria and viruses to hold fast and keep you healthy, don't kill it off because you believe the commercials. Big corporations are in business to make money off ignorant people, not to help us maintain good health.
The nose is one of the vulnerable places where germs can enter. Lo and behold, the nose also harbours a boatload of good bacteria to fight disease on our behalf, as well as the mouth. When are the defences of the nose most vulnerable? When the nose gets cold, the bacteria that defend it tend to weaken, to lose their power to fight. They don't necessarily die, they just go kind of dormant. They are very subject to cold.
Along come the viruses (about 200 different kinds of them) that cause us to develop a "cold." Have you ever wondered where that word "cold" came from to describe the runny nose, watery eyes and the rest of the discomfort? It came from an event that lowers our defences against cold viruses, getting our nose cold. A cold nose event isn't the only way to get a cold, nor does having your nose get cold guarantee you will get a viral cold. It's just a common way for the attack of the cold viruses to begin in our body while its primary defences are weak.
The other common place where cold viruses enter our body is through the eyes. Viruses ride the fluid in our eyes as it swashes around the eyeball, then eventually makes its way into the back of the eye where they find body cells to invade or blood cells that will carry them farther inside. We don't have many natural defences against invasion through our eyes. But eye fluid is not exactly conducive to growing or transporting live viruses, so having dry eyes is a condition we want to avoid.
Kissing with the tongue, having an open wound and exchanging bodily fluids through sex are other methods by which germs enter our bodies, only in those cases from another person rather than from air, food or liquid. Those practices are not necessarily risky in terms of increasing our vulnerability to disease. In each case we have good bacteria to defend us against invasion by germs and microbes (two words which mean essentially the same thing). We are as apt to get good bacteria from another person as bad bacteria.
While we have bacteria at work in every organ of our bodies, the greatest proliferation of them is in the stomach and gut. Bacteria actually perform the work we call digestion. Without them we could starve to death even if we ate all day long.
Have you ever wondered why some people could eat a mountain of ice cream without gaining an ounce, while another person gains two pounds just from sniffing a cupcake? The one who easily gains weight is "blessed" with a very efficient digestive system, lots of good bacteria that digest as much as possible of the nutrition they eat. The glutton with the beanpole body style has a very inefficient digestive system, not nearly enough good bacteria to help digest the food that passes through. (I know, it ain't fair.)
Some biologists have estimated that we may have more bacteria in our bodies than we have of our own body cells. While that may sound absurd, remember that just a few years ago very few people believed that anything could live in our bodies other than our own cells. And some bad bacteria and viruses that somehow managed to survive and cause diseases.
That brings us--briefly--to good viruses in our bodies. Are there any? Can a virus be good. As odd as that sounds, remember that just a few years ago (or a couple of minutes ago) you believed that all bacteria were bad. DNA experts tell us that strings of gene patterns in some human chromosomes are identical to gene patterns in some viruses. At some point in our past, some humans have accommodated bad virus genes into their own chromosomes. Now we consider them "natural," part of our own line of defence.
Medical science isn't certain if the virus genes within our own chromosomes help to protect us against certain diseases or prevent our immune system from recognizing disease-causing germs because they have genetic material similar to our own. The odds are that both are true, with different people and different diseases. (Doesn't that confuse the issue!)
We are not subject to some kinds of diseases that other large animals are. And we get a few diseases that other mammals don't. The reason likely has something to do with those strings of virus genes within our own. Some of us can get HIV/AIDS, while others of us could never contract the disease. Heart disease, cancer and other diseases have difference between people, even of the same family. The difference may be who has what viral gene sequences within their own DNA. And that may depend on which viruses were accommodated and which rejected within each person's lifetime. It is possible for DNA to change slightly over a lifetime.
As this gene accommodation and rejection of competing genes from viruses is part of human evolution that is going on today, we can't be certain how it works. Our bodies are still works in progress. We occupy a small section along the production line called life.
As for cloning yourself or cloning anyone else, you can now see that a single organism of DNA could be replicated, but no two could ever have the same combinations of bacterial organisms as each other because their symbiosis would be different. As most of our learning is based on excruciatingly small details we each learn as babies and very young children, no two people with the same DNA could ever be the same either, just as no two identical twins have the same personalities.
Even two people that began life with the same DNA might not be identical as adults because of gene accommodations through their respective lifetimes--that is, they may have different susceptibilities to diseases, for example. Medical science may be able to help us to grow new body parts (we can even grow new brain cells), but the subject of whole body cloning must be left to science fiction writers.
If you take nothing else from this article, at least do yourself a favour and don't kill off the good bacteria that are helping you to live a healthy life. Without them, you can't be healthy and eventually you may die from your own misdeeds.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to raise children who know what is healthy for them and what is not, without using the old trial and error method that made so many people so very sick and even caused their deaths. This stuff is not taught in most schools or homes.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
How Bad Will The Future Really Be?
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, nicknamed "the wise" Roman Emperor, (121 CE - 180 CE)
An emperor of Rome, indeed the leader of any country up to modern times, would need to be sanguine about the future because the chances of his having his head detached from the rest of his body before that body was worn out stood exceedingly high.
What about old Julius? He certainly couldn't have used all of his weapons of reason when he allowed his formerly trusted ally Brutus and his gang to slay him. Actually, he likely did. To the best of his ability.
Julius was a very ill man, suffering from a great deal of pain and loss of his abilities of perception due to disease at the time of his death. It's entirely possible that he did the equivalent of falling on his sword, just to put himself out of misery. He knew he was too sick to rule Rome, to give it his best. Yet his honour forbade him from committing suicide, even if it be for the good of Rome. It's highly likely that he knew what was about to happen when he met privately with his "enemies."
In other words, we now know that Julius Caesar likely used the best of his mental faculties to do what was best for both himself and for Rome. History hasn't recorded the event of his death that way, but history has a way of relating what its teller wants to the story to be.
Marcus Aurelius must also have used his abundant mental faculties during his almost two decades as emperor of Rome (actually king, as Rome did not call anyone an emperor). His reign was the ultimate example of Pax Romana and his death brought turmoil as to who should lead the greatest empire the world had known until then (later the British Empire was greatest in history, covering one-quarter of our planet's surface at one time).
Though Christians were still persecuted in his time in theory, in practice they seldom were. Rome (undoubtedly a brutal regime in many ways, though hardly the worst in history) really was fairly peaceful during Marcus's reign. It would have required considerable weapons of reason to make peace so effectively that the period was given its own name.
So we turn to ourselves. Every media outlet in the western world and most in other parts of the world report almost daily about how bad conditions are in the world. I have heard many young people from North America say that they don't plan to have children because the world is just getting worse and they couldn't in all good conscience bring children into such tragedy.
The world must be getting worse, just listen to our media tell us. But it's not so.
No point in history has ever been so peaceful, with such a great percentage of people living long lives, healthier than their ancestors, in human history. The media always tell us that the world is a terrible place and leave us to conclude that the future will surely be worse. Neither is true.
Even during the dreaded Holocaust, when millions of Jews, cripples, people with much lower than average intelligence and people who simply pissed off the Germans were being exterminated, good things were happening elsewhere in the world. In the west, women who worked necessary jobs in factories earned a decent living and started a movement for equal rights for women that is still going on today. The Jews that survived got a country of their own a few years after the war, something they had not been able to accomplish for themselves for the previous 3000 years. The powers of the world came together as never before to defeat evil.
Just as Marcus Aurelius said that we will face the future as it comes to us with the same weapons of reason that we use today, we must use the weapons of reason we have available to us today. Or we will make the world a worse place to live, unsafe, unhealthy, unlivable for our children and grandchildren.
Our weapons of reason that help us to cope with today must make us realize that good things are happening in the world each day, even we if don't read about them. We must reason that just because our media report almost exclusively bad news does not mean that the world itself is getting worse. They just report what many people want to hear. Paris Hilton makes the news when she sneezes (and maybe her dress has a "wardrobe malfunction"), but we hear nothing about the millions of good people around the world and in our own communities who are doing good deeds and making good things happen every day.
It's important that we heed Marcus Aurelius's advice about the future. It won't be as bad as the fear mongers want us to believe (they make their living scaring people, remember, rather than getting "real" jobs). And the present isn't as bad as almost every source of information we have make it out to be.
We need to use our weapons of reason every day of our life, not just about the future. The more we refuse to find out information about what is really going on in the world and decline to use our powers of reason when we learn it, the worse the world will become and the worse our own lives will become.
Not learning and not thinking is what will make the world really worse. Bad guys can easily manipulate the thinking and voting of people who are ignorant and who don't want to think for themselves, who depend on others to think and to tell them what to think and believe.
We have the power within us, even those of us with the poorest of education and the most dire of backgrounds. It doesn't cost a thing to use it. We just have to try.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can think for themselves about subjects other than the limited ones taught in schools.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, nicknamed "the wise" Roman Emperor, (121 CE - 180 CE)
An emperor of Rome, indeed the leader of any country up to modern times, would need to be sanguine about the future because the chances of his having his head detached from the rest of his body before that body was worn out stood exceedingly high.
What about old Julius? He certainly couldn't have used all of his weapons of reason when he allowed his formerly trusted ally Brutus and his gang to slay him. Actually, he likely did. To the best of his ability.
Julius was a very ill man, suffering from a great deal of pain and loss of his abilities of perception due to disease at the time of his death. It's entirely possible that he did the equivalent of falling on his sword, just to put himself out of misery. He knew he was too sick to rule Rome, to give it his best. Yet his honour forbade him from committing suicide, even if it be for the good of Rome. It's highly likely that he knew what was about to happen when he met privately with his "enemies."
In other words, we now know that Julius Caesar likely used the best of his mental faculties to do what was best for both himself and for Rome. History hasn't recorded the event of his death that way, but history has a way of relating what its teller wants to the story to be.
Marcus Aurelius must also have used his abundant mental faculties during his almost two decades as emperor of Rome (actually king, as Rome did not call anyone an emperor). His reign was the ultimate example of Pax Romana and his death brought turmoil as to who should lead the greatest empire the world had known until then (later the British Empire was greatest in history, covering one-quarter of our planet's surface at one time).
Though Christians were still persecuted in his time in theory, in practice they seldom were. Rome (undoubtedly a brutal regime in many ways, though hardly the worst in history) really was fairly peaceful during Marcus's reign. It would have required considerable weapons of reason to make peace so effectively that the period was given its own name.
So we turn to ourselves. Every media outlet in the western world and most in other parts of the world report almost daily about how bad conditions are in the world. I have heard many young people from North America say that they don't plan to have children because the world is just getting worse and they couldn't in all good conscience bring children into such tragedy.
The world must be getting worse, just listen to our media tell us. But it's not so.
No point in history has ever been so peaceful, with such a great percentage of people living long lives, healthier than their ancestors, in human history. The media always tell us that the world is a terrible place and leave us to conclude that the future will surely be worse. Neither is true.
Even during the dreaded Holocaust, when millions of Jews, cripples, people with much lower than average intelligence and people who simply pissed off the Germans were being exterminated, good things were happening elsewhere in the world. In the west, women who worked necessary jobs in factories earned a decent living and started a movement for equal rights for women that is still going on today. The Jews that survived got a country of their own a few years after the war, something they had not been able to accomplish for themselves for the previous 3000 years. The powers of the world came together as never before to defeat evil.
Just as Marcus Aurelius said that we will face the future as it comes to us with the same weapons of reason that we use today, we must use the weapons of reason we have available to us today. Or we will make the world a worse place to live, unsafe, unhealthy, unlivable for our children and grandchildren.
Our weapons of reason that help us to cope with today must make us realize that good things are happening in the world each day, even we if don't read about them. We must reason that just because our media report almost exclusively bad news does not mean that the world itself is getting worse. They just report what many people want to hear. Paris Hilton makes the news when she sneezes (and maybe her dress has a "wardrobe malfunction"), but we hear nothing about the millions of good people around the world and in our own communities who are doing good deeds and making good things happen every day.
It's important that we heed Marcus Aurelius's advice about the future. It won't be as bad as the fear mongers want us to believe (they make their living scaring people, remember, rather than getting "real" jobs). And the present isn't as bad as almost every source of information we have make it out to be.
We need to use our weapons of reason every day of our life, not just about the future. The more we refuse to find out information about what is really going on in the world and decline to use our powers of reason when we learn it, the worse the world will become and the worse our own lives will become.
Not learning and not thinking is what will make the world really worse. Bad guys can easily manipulate the thinking and voting of people who are ignorant and who don't want to think for themselves, who depend on others to think and to tell them what to think and believe.
We have the power within us, even those of us with the poorest of education and the most dire of backgrounds. It doesn't cost a thing to use it. We just have to try.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can think for themselves about subjects other than the limited ones taught in schools.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Why You Won't Likely Become Senile
"It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution. The reverse is true. As one grows older, one climbs with surprising strides."
- George Sand
We come to believe that most people who live long enough will become forgetful, absent minded, even confused about many things. We call it senility.
Isn't senility an inevitable disease for most people? No. It's the most preventable disease we know about. Senility is the direct result of mental inactivity for too long.
Most of us know that our muscles atrophy if they are not used. A person with a broken leg, for example, might find the muscle mass in the healed leg much reduced when the cast (or other device) comes off from what it was before the break. Senility is nothing more than atrophy of the brain.
The brain atrophys when it isn't used enough for problem solving and heavy thinking. Our brains, like the rest of our bodies, are built for heavy work. If they don't get enough work regularly, they lose the potential and strength they once had.
"Use it or lose it" applies as much to the brain as it does to the rest of our bodies.
Heavy brainwork even uses up a fair amount of energy, about 31 percent as much as heavy lifting. But we can think for longer than we can lift heavy weights, so thinking is good exercise.
Watching television is not brain exercise. The brain gets less exercise when we watch TV than it does when we dream.
A working brain solves problems, creates new work or considers the various factors that influence a given situation. Television does that work for us, which is why some programs for adults aim at a mental age of early adolescence. Our brain gets almost no work when we watch television.
Senility can be turned around if caught in time and if the person wants to change. However, it requires considerable dedication and determination for a person who is not used to using his brain to work it heavily for an extended period of time every day. Reading a newspaper is good if the person thinks about each item he reads. Reading books is another excellent form of exercise for the brain.
Nature provides that we can become something more than we ever were before as we age. When our bodies stop performing the way they used to when we were younger, our brain should be able to take over and turn us into a new and magnificent person.
Those who have accomplished this change know how dramatic it is and how much better they feel about themselves while their bodies get achy and creeky.
The biggest hurdle is to persuade a lazy brain to exercise when it has been so comfortably ensconced in lassitude for so long.
But it's worth the mental exercise to avoid becoming a breathing vegetable in a nursing home for the last years of our lives.
Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to make our senior years interesting and fulfilling.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- George Sand
We come to believe that most people who live long enough will become forgetful, absent minded, even confused about many things. We call it senility.
Isn't senility an inevitable disease for most people? No. It's the most preventable disease we know about. Senility is the direct result of mental inactivity for too long.
Most of us know that our muscles atrophy if they are not used. A person with a broken leg, for example, might find the muscle mass in the healed leg much reduced when the cast (or other device) comes off from what it was before the break. Senility is nothing more than atrophy of the brain.
The brain atrophys when it isn't used enough for problem solving and heavy thinking. Our brains, like the rest of our bodies, are built for heavy work. If they don't get enough work regularly, they lose the potential and strength they once had.
"Use it or lose it" applies as much to the brain as it does to the rest of our bodies.
Heavy brainwork even uses up a fair amount of energy, about 31 percent as much as heavy lifting. But we can think for longer than we can lift heavy weights, so thinking is good exercise.
Watching television is not brain exercise. The brain gets less exercise when we watch TV than it does when we dream.
A working brain solves problems, creates new work or considers the various factors that influence a given situation. Television does that work for us, which is why some programs for adults aim at a mental age of early adolescence. Our brain gets almost no work when we watch television.
Senility can be turned around if caught in time and if the person wants to change. However, it requires considerable dedication and determination for a person who is not used to using his brain to work it heavily for an extended period of time every day. Reading a newspaper is good if the person thinks about each item he reads. Reading books is another excellent form of exercise for the brain.
Nature provides that we can become something more than we ever were before as we age. When our bodies stop performing the way they used to when we were younger, our brain should be able to take over and turn us into a new and magnificent person.
Those who have accomplished this change know how dramatic it is and how much better they feel about themselves while their bodies get achy and creeky.
The biggest hurdle is to persuade a lazy brain to exercise when it has been so comfortably ensconced in lassitude for so long.
But it's worth the mental exercise to avoid becoming a breathing vegetable in a nursing home for the last years of our lives.
Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to make our senior years interesting and fulfilling.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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