What’s The Real Cause for Climate Change?

What’s The Real Cause for Climate Change?
"Wasted milk in the U.K. has the same carbon footprint as emissions from 20,000 cars"
- study by the University of Edinburgh, published in Nature Climate Change

We have a natural tendency to blame everything that goes wrong, first of all, on the behaviour of others. A look through human history at sacrifices and executions shows that if someone were not killed because others believed the person’s blame for something, people believed that the behaviour of actually sacrificing a life would solve the problem.

We want someone to blame. When weather patterns began to go screwy, with winters being cold enough to kill people and summers hot enough to cause others to expire, we looked around for someone to point the finger at.

In the case of climate change, as it came to be known after we gave up on "global warming" because some places got colder, the first cause was deemed to be "greenhouse gases" and the greatest emitters vehicles driven by us.

While generally speaking people know more about weather today than people before us did, what we know little about is the history of weather and how climate changes. We--many of us--assumed that climate and weather had never changed radically before in history.

Those of us who believed that were mistaken. Barely 160 years ago the northern hemisphere ended a period referred to in history as "the Little Ice Age." That had lasted for 400 years.

What would you expect to happen at the end of an ice age? Of course, the northern part of the planet warmed up. It’s still warming. Climatologists (the honest and older ones) will tell you that climate cycles back and forth over the years, it never remains the same.

We can blame the warming on vehicle emissions and the Industrial Revolution, but ice ages have always ended by themselves, without human intervention, including with tail pipes.

Vehicles that burn fossil fuels do emit greenhouse gases into the air. This accounts for about 10 percent of what we add. Car manufacturers work to improve the fuel consumption in their vehicles. But why? To satisfy regulations in places such as the state of California.

I recently bought aftermarket (and "exotic") air filters for two cars. I tested both and found dramatic improvements in fuel consumption, meaning I have to buy gasoline less often and the cars emit less greenhouse gases. Have such filters ever been found installed on stock vehicles right from the manufacturing plant? No.

Jet airplanes account for almost as much greenhouse gas in a year as all the cars (about 8%). No government has suggested grounding planes.

Among the worst contributors to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are power generating stations, many of which are owned by governments and all of which fall under government regulations. They add about 25% of all the gases. While there has been much talk of closing the coal-fired stations, the worst emitters, few have actually shut down.

In Japan, where most of the power used in the country before the tsunami came from nuclear generating stations, virtually every station has been closed since the tragedy at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear station. Nuclear power generation produces almost no greenhouse gas emissions.

Getting back to the wasted milk in our opening quote, that "wasted" means milk that was never used for anything to do with food consumption. Down the drain, so to speak. The study says that 360,000 tonnes of milk is wasted in the U.K. each year. Wasted.

Yet greenhouse gases resulted from use of fertilizers that produced the food to feed the cows and the cows themselves contributed a shocking amount of methane (far worse than carbon dioxide) into the air, plus there was fuel needed to transport the milk to the drains it eventually went down.

The study, titled "Global agriculture and nitrous oxide emissions," also claims that if the British were to reduce their consumption of chicken to the level of the Japanese (26 kg down to 12 kg per person per year), that would dramatically reduce nitrous oxide emissions (emitted by soil and fertilizers) by 20%.

"Eating less meat and wasting less food can play a big part in helping to keep a lid on greenhouse gas emissions as the world's population increases," according to study leader Dr. David Reay.

Meanwhile, as the effects of the Little Ice Age ending fade and those who know about it die off, we can expect to be blamed for climate change according to our behaviour.

We can also expect to hear very little about the 300,000 chemicals that industries pour into public waterways each year. And the nearly half a million chemicals that industries chuff into the air we breathe. Who would tell us? Not the industries themselves.

As we learn about dramatic increases in diabetes, COPD (and other lung diseases) and allergies in our children, we must remember that those industries provide jobs. They could provide even more jobs if they stopped putting poisons into our air and water, but we shouldn’t count on hearing much about that either.

We are told that greenhouse gas emissions are largely responsible for the warming of the planet by a tiny amount. We are not told that industries are poisoning our air and water, harming our health and causing drug manufacturers to make fortunes every day.

As individuals, we can’t do much about the rising temperature of our atmosphere. Industries know that. We could do something about the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink. They know that too. But they don’t want us to know.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents to help grow kids who will contribute to their communities instead of bringing them suffering and harm.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

What's In A Cloud? More Than You Think

What's In A Cloud? More Than You Think

"The amount of microbial life present in the cloud droplets that
make up a winter storm is amazing."- Gary Franc
<http://www.uwyo.edu/uw/news/2012/03/uw-professor-receives-attention-in-\
discover-magazine-cover-story-for-his-cloud-precipitation-research.html>
, microbiologist and plant pathologist at the University of Wyoming, in
The Clouds Are Alive
<http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/07-does-rain-come-from-life-in-the\
-clouds/?searchterm=%E2%80%9CThe%20Clouds%20Are%20Alive%E2%80%9D> by
Douglas Fox, Discover, April 2012

Here's an easy question. At what temperature does water freeze or
thaw?
If you answered zero Celsius (32 Fahrenheit) you would be with the
majority. If you are savvy enough to know about salt water, such as in
oceans, you will know that sea water may remain liquid down to -4C. And
salt on icy winter roads will melt down to -4C. That puts you in a
minority.
If you answered anywhere between -40 (C or F, they coincide at that
temperature) and +10C you would be technically
correct--"technically" because even though this is true in
nature it's not a fact you would want to argue in court, or even
with your mother. It's not simple.
Water in the stratosphere has been found still liquid at nearly -40 and
ice crystals have been seen forming at +10C in some clouds. No, I am not
lying to you. Keep reading so you will learn how these are possible.
First of all, what do you think clouds are made of
<http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jan-feb/20-things-you-didnt-know-about\
-clouds/?searchterm=%E2%80%9CThe%20Clouds%20Are%20Alive%E2%80%9D> ?
Water droplets, yes. (Not steam, which is water as a gas, and that is
technically invisible.) Water droplets tend to form around dust
particles in the air. Generally speaking, when you get smacked in the
face with rain drops each one has at least one particle of dust in it.
Who cares about the dust? Maybe you if you realize that the dust may
have travelled the world more than you have. A dust particle in a
droplet of water in a cloud in North America could well have come from
Africa's Sahara Desert. Or from China's Gobi Desert. Or, who
knows?
The well read among us will know that "foreign" dust could have
brought along with it microbes from its land or origin. These microbes,
blown in the wind, hitchhiking on dust, might deliver infectious disease
right to your nose without your ever owning a passport.
True, the likelihood of your dying of a disease blown from a different
continent than your own, on dust, is small. But microbes in the air are
far more prevalent that you may imagine. As our quote at the beginning
said, the air is full of microbial life.
Most of it will do you no harm. But so little study has been done on
this subject that we have no way to know today what diseases and
afflictions we and those we know may get that may have begun thousands
of kilometres away from our home. We may accept that SARS and swine flu
are delivered peer-to-peer by human travellers, but not that other
diseases might be brought to us in the air. From a distant continent.
Kimberley Prather <http://atofms.ucsd.edu/kprather> , an atmospheric
chemist who heads her own research group at University of California San
Diego, is not shy about getting up into the clouds (even rumbling ones)
to find out what is going on inside. What she has learned is enough to
make your jaw drop.
Think about it: what makes ice form from water, other than the obvious,
ambient temperature? Why do some clouds drop rain while others
don't? The answer in both cases is microbes.
Bacteria, algae and fungi get swept up by wind at ground level and make
their way into the air as high as jetliners. "There's a whole
ecosystem going on in the clouds that's largely undefined," says
Gary Franc.
Two million tons of bacteria, 55 million tons of fungal spores and an
unguessable (at this time) quantity of algae make their way into the
atmosphere each year. Never mind pollution in the air, this is nature in
action. A great deal of study will be needed to determine what effects
these have on our weather, on next year's harvest, even on our
personal health.
Ice will form by itself from water (so far as we know today), but this
happens very slowly (like ice cubes in your fridge freezer). How can
this happen so quickly in the atmosphere when ice crystals form and snow
falls to the ground?
Professor Prather and others have shown that the bacterium Pseudomonas
syringae has a gene in its DNA that prompts ice to form from water
droplets. You read that right. At least one variety of bacteria can
cause water to freeze into ice by activating a gene in its body.
Why is this important? Ice crystals are heavier than water droplets. Ice
falls, delivering water (as it melts) to the land below. If cloud
seeding silver iodide were loaded up with P. syringae bacteria when
sprayed into clouds, drought-dried land could be persuaded to become
fertile again.
That means more food to feed the seven billion (and growing) of us on
the planet today.
It also could mean new ways to control the spread of diseases that seem
mysterious and stubborn to us now.
Stay tuned, the most populous life form on the planet, bacteria, have
much to teach us.

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 raise well balanced children who can have good
lives, not just good jobs.Learn more at http://billallin.com
<http://billallin.com>

Why Cancer Deaths Have Dropped

Why Cancer Deaths Have Dropped

When you smoke you inhale up to 4000 chemicals [that do not naturally occur in tobacco].
- Canadian Cancer Society

Deaths in Canada from almost all kinds of cancer have decreased dramatically over the past decade or two. Both organizations that address cancer as their main mission and individual doctors with a direct interest in oncology attribute this drop to two main causes:
(1) a precipitous drop in the number of Canadians who smoke tobacco (except in the 16 to 24 year age range) in recent years;
(2) better testing, of more patients, that detects cancer in its early stages, making treatment and recovery highly likely.
A few years ago, the Canadian Cancer Society published a postcard sized handout that listed some of those 4000 chemicals that tobacco companies add to cigarettes. Some you would recognize, some may be new to you. You will likely wonder why it’s necessary for tobacco companies to add these to their products. You should. One thing for certain, we won’t learn the answers from the tobacco companies.
Please read the list carefully. Imagine anyone ingesting these chemicals every day of their life:
- acetone (paint stripper, poisonous, dangerous when inhaled)
- mercury
- lead
- benzene
- dimethylnitrosamine (a known carcinogen)
- nicotine (world’s most widely used addictive drug)
- cadmium (used in car batteries)
- carbon monoxide
- benzopyrene (carcinogen, even present in the cheapest forms of olive oil)
- vinyl chloride (makes PVC)
- hydrogen cyanide (used in chemical warfare, interferes with the body’s ability to utilize oxygen)
- aminobiphenyl (carcinogen)
- urethane (modern form of varnish)
- toluene (industrial solvent)
- arsenic (poison for white ants)
- dibenzacridine (listed as a hazardous material in workplaces)
- phenol (listed as a hazardous material in workplaces)
- DDT (insecticide)
Those who ingest these chemicals in effect are committing a slow form of suicide. Yet tobacco remains legal and little has been done by governments to force tobacco companies to remove these harmful additions from their products.
Along with earlier testing of patients for cancer, paid for in Canada by provincial health care programs, everyone in the medical community has actively encouraged patients to have the necessary tests.
In my personal case, my family doctor recommended a colonoscopy when I was in her examination room for another purpose. Subsequently, procedures by two gastroenterologists removed four slow growing tumours from my colon. My wife would have become a widow within a decade had the tumours not been removed.
I was informed that my tumours meant that my children should be examined similarly when they reach age 40. Colon cancer can run in families.
In turn, I encouraged my wife to have a colonoscopy. Over the past few months she has had two fast growing tumours removed from her colon. Without encouragement from me (and prior to that from my doctor to me), I would likely have become a widower within one year. One year.
My sister and parents all died years ago of cancer, almost certainly caused by smoking and in my mother’s case from inhaling second-hand smoke over many decades from my father, a heavy smoker. My sister became a heavy smoker during her failed marriage. Addictions of all kinds take hold in people who can’t cope with the constant stress and anxiety they experience.
My wife and I have encouraged her siblings to have colonoscopies soon. My wife’s father died of cancer many years ago. He did not smoke, but he did have a colon. At that time it was not considered wise for doctors to discuss cancer with the families of cancer patients (and victims), especially colon cancer because it happened in a part of the body nobody wanted to discuss openly.
We consider ourselves very lucky to have learned about this one kind of cancer in time.
A very close friend is dying of colon cancer as I write this. He didn’t know about getting tested in time. Even if he did, he likely would not have been tested because he believed that cancer hits others, but would not strike him down. It did.
This brings us to cancer prevention and cures. A cure is what a medical professional or other consultant does for you. Prevention is what you do for yourself. My mantra is: don’t concern yourself with fixing it after it’s broken, prevent it from happening in the first place.
Our bodies come already primed with up to 150 specific micro-locations in which cancer can grow. Most of them, in most of us, never blossom into full blown cancer. Why does it happen in some of us, but not all? As cancer takes many different forms in our bodies, we may assume that, like the common cold, it is almost impossible to stop. We may be wrong.
Most of us non-chemistry-loving folk have a clue about what acid is. Vinegar, for example, is an acid. So is the liquid in lead-acid batteries, as evidenced by clothing I have had to discard in the past because it developed acid holes from my careless handling of car batteries. We can consume some mild acids, while others will kill.
Ordinary drinking water is mildly acidic. Our bodies, being mostly composed of water, tend to be mildly acidic unless we undertake measures to counteract the acidic effects of water.
Cancer cells tend to develop and reproduce in an acidic environment.
Fruits and vegetables tend to be slightly alkaline, the opposite of acidic. We have been told to eat fruit and veggies for their nutrition and their anti-oxidant effect. Anti-oxidants float around our bloodstream corralling little buggers called free radicals, that left on their own will find cancer starting places and tickle them until they grow into cancer cells.
Cancer cells do not thrive in an alkaline environment. In fact, they tend to shrivel and die when our body is slightly alkaline. [The internet abounds with anecdotal examples of consuming alkaline substances curing cancer.]
In general, our bodies function in a more healthy manner when they are slightly alkaline. That is, when our pH level is slightly below the even or balance mark of 7 (on a scale from 0 to 14).
I will leave it to you to google the subject of pH (Potential Hydrogen, the way acidity or basicity is valued). As to possible alkaline therapies or body maintenance, only people in extreme need of immediate pH correction (“Help, I’m dying of cancer and don’t know what to do to save myself”) need to adopt unusual measures. Everyone should eat fresh fruit and veggies.
Hydrogen peroxide and baking soda (not baking powder) are known to be alkaline if you are looking for places to start searching.
In conclusion, I leave you with one thought about your health: if you are not in control of your own health by being fully informed about what you eat, drink and breathe in, you leave your health and your life in the control of large corporations that make pharmaceuticals that supposedly cure you and chemicals that poison the food you eat.
Ignorance is not pretty. It’s comforting for a while, but it never ends well if adopted as a lifestyle.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to raise children with enough life skills to help them survive a world filled with harmful influences.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Einstein’s Physics Crumbling Like An Old Building

Einstein’s Physics Crumbling Like An Old Building

If he had stuck with the Machian approach, Einstein might have attained the all-encompassing “theory of everything” that consumed the last decades of his life. He might have produced a version of his theory of gravity that would not conflict so fundamentally with quantum mechanics,” Barbour notes. But Einstein had lost his nerve.
- Zeeya Merali, in “Gravity off the Grid,” Discover, March 2012

Never has science been so devoted to praising a physicist as it has been over the past half century with Albert Einstein. Science’s love affair with Einstein was so pervasive that his philosophical thoughts about life were embraced as if heaven sent.
“e=mc2” may be quoted these days by everyone from school children to factory workers.
As everyone knows, “e” refers to energy, “m” to mass and “c” to the cosmological constant. That constant happens to be the same as the speed of light (in case we have trouble remembering, 186,000 miles per second or 300,000 kilometres per second). It was so easy to remember, only hard if you actually had to do the math for any calculation.
Here’s the catch. Light does not travel at exactly the same speed all the time. Therefore, the “constant” is not constant. Well, bear with me.
Who cares? The Bare Naked Ladies likely won’t change the lyrics of their song that is the theme for the TV series “The Big Bang Theory.” “Nearly 14 billion years ago” might not be accurate any more, but viewers will still keep watching as it’s (arguably) the best sitcom ever.
When Einstein devised his theories (special theory of relativity published first, then general theory of relativity) most people thought that space had nothing in it. It was even called a “vacuum.” The “ether” that was once considered to be out there, that accounted for the odd movement of planets in the earth-centred Newtonian universe, was more imagination than reality.
There was nothing out there, supposedly, between the planets and stars. But that didn’t work with the physics. Einstein’s theories wouldn’t work in nothingness. Then someone figured there must be dust from the original Big Bang, and neutrinos charging around as well. Still not enough.
Einstein must be right, so along came Dark Matter to patch up the theory. Still not enough. Cosmologists calculated that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, which didn’t fit with the theory. Let’s throw in Dark Energy. With the matter science knows exists, plug in Dark Matter, that left Dark Energy to make up 85 percent or more of the rest of the known universe, so that Einstein’s theory would work.
After all, as almost everyone agreed, Einstein was a genius--indeed “Einstein” and “genius” came to be synonyms--so any amount of creative imagination to make his theory work must be acceptable. Science hates it when religions tell people to “have faith” but it happily asked the same of people for its creations of imagination so that Einstein could continue to be the ideal of genius.
Here’s where it gets messy. Einstein’s theories depended on a fourth dimension, called space-time. Light--part of the “constant” remember--bends around large objects, just as river water bends around rocks in its way. Does light have to speed up to make up the extra distance required to divert around large objects, or does it slow down, thus throwing off calculations?
Time, as Einstein told us, is flexible. In relatively empty space, it speeds up, whereas in denser stuff such as galaxies it slows down. If light (the constant) travels at 186,000 miles per second and the length of a second can change depending on where it is being measured, what can be constant about the constant?
How accurate is the widely accepted belief that our universe is 13.7 billion years away from the Big Bang? That number was calculated based on the rate that supernovas great distances away were moving. The light from those supernovas bent around galaxies and changed speed as it travelled through larger ones. These were not considered in the calculations.
David Wiltshire, a New Zealand physicist at the University of Canterbury, claims that if the age of the universe were calculated based on light travelling through empty space, the age would be 18 billion years. If the light travelled at the speed it does passing through galaxies, the age would be 15 billion years.
Wiltshire’s “older” universe age results from his beginning from a different set of physical assumptions than those physicists who calculate it at 13.7 billion years.
Assumptions, you say? Exactly. Physical calculations change depending on which set of assumptions you begin with. What then should we believe?
To make things more awkward for Einstein’s legacy, CERN, the European Space Agency’s huge facility for studying super particles, recently reported that it had timed neutrinos travelling faster than light, a phenomenon that does not fit with Albert’s theories. While a few scientists search diligently for weaknesses in the CERN report, there is no doubt that many are still trying to find a way to travel faster than light. Like many other scientific marvels that came out of the original Star Trek classic TV series, time travel and faster-than-light space travel seem destined to come to pass some day.
I still believe in Albert Einstein, though his assumptions might have been inaccurate. I still believe in gravity, though no one at this point has any idea what it is or why objects attract each other--anyone who says he does is overconfident about his guess.
I am not certain what to believe about the age of our universe. Flexible time may be a problem. An undependable constant is troubling. Flexible space is still hard for me to wrap my head around.
Of one thing I have great faith. My wife has just called me to say that supper is ready and if I try to stretch time too much before completing this writing, my supper will be cold. I have confidence in that constant.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a book of big but simple ideas about how to change the material taught in our schools so we can all live longer, healthier and safer lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Truth, Lies and Real Life

Truth, Lies and Real Life

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist, lecturer, and poet (1803-1882)

Apart from a few notable twists of truth in my childhood, to avoid punishment (deserved) for my misdeeds (my lies never succeeded in fooling my parents), I have always been a great supporter of telling the truth.
That has had me facing trouble when it was revealed (some said I should have kept quiet). However, trouble inevitably follows lies as a bad smell follows a skunk. Telling the truth allowed me to work my way through unpleasant consequences, where necessary, to find clear sailing beyond. The consequences were of shorter duration, requiring less subterfuge, when I was able to face them and work through them.
That sometimes had its own downside. People I worked with, or for, found themselves having to cope with someone who told everything "as it is." I avoided exaggeration and meanness, but my truth made them uncomfortable. The reason is that my truth often brought to light their own misdeeds or avoidance of fulfilling their own responsibilities.
Sometimes that meant that workmates avoided me for some period of time. Sometimes it caused me to have to look for a new job. They covered their failures and inadequacies and expected me to do the same with my own. To them, pretending was preferable to bringing the cold hard truth to light and having to face others who were upset by it.
It avoided forcing them to change.
We have this nebulous term "white lies." One dictionary I consulted described the meaning of this term as "an unimportant lie (especially one told to be tactful or polite)." I question the value of the "unimportant lie."
A standard joke of comedians tells of the husband who, when asked by his wife if the dress she has just put on is too tight or looks good and will make her look fine at an event they are about to attend, replies (when he fears she might burst a seam) "Of course dear, you look great, as always." This, we are told, is an acceptable white lie.
Let’s lay this one out bare. The woman knows the dress is too tight or she would not have asked her husband for an opinion. The husband knows the dress is too tight but doesn’t want to make his wife feel bad. Problem solved, for the moment. Then the couple attends the event where every women who sees the wife can see she obviously is wearing a dress that is too tight--or simply that she has gained weight she doesn’t want to admit to.
That situation, we are asked to ignore, to claim that no one at the event will notice the too-tight dress. I submit that every woman at the evident would notice, and many men as well. Moreover, the penalty she will suffer for her social faux pas will be much greater than if she had simply faced the truth (or been told the truth by her husband) and changed to another garment before leaving home.
No one at an event wants to tell a woman that her cosmetics are smeared, as that might embarrass her. So she moves about advertising her messy face to everyone until she later sees herself in a mirror in the ladies’ room. Again, the embarrassment she feels when she realizes that so many others have seen her with messy makeup is far greater than what she would feel if someone had told her sooner.
By the same token, a man might emerge from a public washroom/restroom with his shirt tucked inside his boxers at the back and the waistband of the boxers advertised to the world until the next time he visits the washroom. Is a feeling of great shame in private any less significant than a slight embarrassment when something is revealed in public?
White lies and slight perversions of the truth to help someone avoid embarrassment "to be tactful or polite" always come out. The consequences are always worse later than they would have been at the time.
A white lie is simply a way to delay a worse consequence.
What is the attraction of a lie? Often a lie will produce exactly the results in a person that the person wants to have.
Lies are beautiful, in the short term.
An example that keeps thumping in my brain is the concept of the character of God. Every religion has a God (some, like Buddhism, are technically philosophies of life). Every religion admits that we have no way of knowing anything about God. Yet there are people in every religion who will happily tell you all manner of warm and comforting things they believe about God. Where did these things originate? In lies. Well meaning lies, I admit. Tell them what they want to hear.
Oddly, most religions grant a male gender to their God, yet the characteristics given by those with ready answers about their God almost inevitably fit better someone of female gender, a mother. Why? Those who do not feel personally secure want to feel that their God cares for them the way a mother would.
For some, it works. For a while.
Getting back to our original quotation by Emerson, I question just how beautiful most people find truth. Truth in nature, for sure. As the saying goes, truth is beauty and beauty truth. Even the truth of a natural disaster, when viewed after the fact and from a distance, can be seen as beautiful, in a way.
If we judged the truth of Emerson’s statement about truth and lies based on our own culture, we would have to say that we immerse ourselves in lies. Almost nothing we see on television or on the stage is true, the exception being documentaries (though some of them have political or social agendas with carefully edited "facts"). Virtually everything in every commercial or print advertising is a perversion of the truth (massaging truth to make it look better, making us want what we mostly don’t need).
We live in houses that convey a certain social status we may not have in reality, wear clothes that tell strangers we are something we may not be, drive cars or trucks to make others believe we can actually afford them.
Put simply, lies are more attractive than the truth. There are those among us who want to believe our lies so much that they actually come to believe them. Where is the truth? We expect others, even strangers, to "have faith" that the message we are trying to convey is the truth.
The hidden request is to "trust me."
No matter how many times we say a lie, it is still a lie. But we can believe the lie. That’s life. But is it really better than the truth?

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want their children to be able to cope, without fear and lies, with the world they will one day enter as adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

What Happens After Suicide

The title will evoke two entirely different, independent, even incompatible, lines of thinking. One will be about the survivors, their feelings of loss, their struggles to cope, even their guilt. The other would be about the person who died. We know what happens to the body, but what happens to the personality that inhabits the body once the body is gone?

Take a few moments to think about one or the other of these lines of thinking. I will take the unusual step of leaving a few lines blank to encourage you to mull over your own thoughts.

.................

.................

.................

When the body dies, it changes. As Albert Einstein said, everything is energy, though that energy may be in the form of matter sometimes (e=mc2). In nature, in every part of the universe we know anything about, nothing ever disappears. The matter that was the body of the one who died is conserved, by nature, either as energy or as a part of something else that is matter.

We bury the dead body, a ritual dating back to ancient times when it was believed the whole body might be resurrected in a future life. Nobody today believes that a dead body will return to life as a whole person, with the same unique characteristics and personality as it had in its original life. Who would want the decayed mess anyway? When we bury a dead body, we put away that body as we turn it back to nature to deal with as it will.

Did the person, while living, have a distinct personality? Not characteristics and features. A toaster has those. Did the person have something that clearly distinguished him or her, other than characteristics and features? Toasters may look and behave alike, but not people.

If so, then that personality--called by some the soul or spirit--must continue to exist. The natural law of conservation dictates that nothing disappears. That personality must continue to exist after the physical body is put away. We don’t know how it began, we don’t know where it goes after the body breaks down, we only know that something unique to an individual exists while we know that person.

We know nothing about the nature of that conserved personality. But then, we know very little--most of us know nothing--about energy. What do you know, for example, about the nature of electricity, of magnetism, of heat, or light, even of gravity? It doesn’t mean that something doesn’t exist because we can’t see it or touch it. Energy exists. Spirit can exist too. Science, through its own laws, says that the personality of a person who once lived must continue, even as the body transforms into something else.

The spirit has no need to transform because it is neither matter nor energy, the only two kinds of existence we can even slightly understand. To be truthful, even science knows very little about these two states of energy, though it claims to have great knowledge.

Conservation is not just faith, it’s the law, a law of nature. We don’t know where that conserved personality or soul goes, where it continues to exist. But we don’t know what happens to the energy that results when matter changes its form to energy either.

Does that personality hang around in the form of memory? Science might say that is a fictitious and unnecessary construct. But then, science has no explanation--not even a clue--about what memory is. Memory, like the continuation of personality or soul of a person who once lived in a human body, may be another form of energy, or something entirely beyond what science understands today.

Not long ago science taught us that our body consisted only of our cells. Now we know that we are a symbiotic collection of cells of our body and maybe 20 times as many bacteria (mostly on our skin and in our gut) that we can’t live without and that can’t live without us. Science has trouble distinguishing between fact and beliefs that scientists masquerade as "theory" (believe it because we said it) or fact.

Let’s return to the other line of thought, what continues in the minds of people who knew the dead person before death.

A person commits suicide because they can’t cope with the pain (usually emotional pain) that has become the main focus of their life. That person did not receive what he or she needed in order to be able to cope while alive. Didn’t receive what they needed from the very people who will regret the passing of that person.

As I write this, "sweet miracle" Whitney Houston’s funeral has taken place. The cause of death has not been revealed. The outpouring of grief and emotion about her passing matches that after the death of almost anyone in history. Her body was found under water in a bathtub. Police do not suspect foul play. Her death was likely some form of suicide, perhaps accidental from an overdose of something.

No one wants to spoil the outpouring of good wishes and goodwill in memories about Whitney. Before she died, the media portrayed her as a broken singer and actor, destroyed by twenty years of cocaine abuse. Now she is an icon of beauty in many forms. "Maybe the best singer ever in history" one of the speakers at her funeral said.

Unspoken at that funeral was that Whitney Houston needed something more than people who knew her were giving. The very same people who sat in the church at her funeral. Of course they would feel guilt as well as great regret.

Are they guilty? Under the law, you are considered guilty if you break a law even if you didn't know the law existed. There is no law about tuning into the needs of others. We know little about suicide, most of us, so we would not know what a person needed before they decided to end it all.

It’s not that no one knows what every person needs in order to feel useful, needed, worthy and secure. But very few do know. As societies, we don’t pay attention to those who know the answers because knowing would only add responsibilities to our lives. It’s easier to regret later than to commit now.

As important as these lessons are, we don’t teach them to our children, in general. We don’t teach them to each other. Most of us don’t want to know about these lessons because we don’t want the responsibility of knowing what we would need to do to help someone else who is emotionally at risk. It’s all we can do to look after ourselves.

Yet we have needs too, needs that are not satisfied. If we knew what our loved ones needed, we would also know what we need ourselves. If we knew what we should know to help others, we would be less needy ourselves.

The lesson we all need to learn is to listen to others. That’s what every one of us needs. We need to listen to others and we need others to listen to us. Of course there is more to it than that. Listening means caring. The other thing we all need, that is a basic need of our species, is touch by others. Touching means caring.

Very few people would commit suicide if they sincerely believed that someone cared about them. Those who care must show their care or the message will not get through.

Now you have a beginning. Listen. Hug. Care. Show you care.

Don’t wait to attend the funeral.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers about what children need to develop socially and emotionally as well as intellectually and physically as they grow. What they need to avoid becoming statistics.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

A Life Recovered: I Fought The Medical Establishment And Won

A Life Recovered: I Fought The Medical Establishment And Won

Many stories [of critical medical problems] are so complex that they demonstrate both positive and negative aspects of [health] care. Hopefully all will serve as inspiration for either what needs to be changed or what is possible.
- from Privileged Presence: Personal Stories of Connections in Health Care, p. 10, Liz Croker and Bev Johnson, Bull Publishing, 2006


My fight did not take place at a national level, with a medical college of physicians or a big pharmaceutical company, but with local doctors where most of us have to negotiate the welfare of our personal health. Standard blood test results, and the resulting drug prescription they suggested, made my life not worth living.
While I went along placidly with the prescription I had been given for nearly two decades, my pleas that "Something is wrong here" went unacknowledged. My blood test results were "normal" and that is what mattered.
When I committed to stop taking my prescription totally, and my test scores soared as a result, suddenly my personal welfare became of primary concern. The doctors thought I might die and they would be fingered for the blame (and expect litigation to follow). Only then would they refer me to a specialist.
My body is naturally hypothyroid (low production of thyroid hormone). A high TSH (Thyroid Stimulating Hormone) level on a blood test causes a doctor to prescribe thyroid hormone thyroxin (usually harvested from the thyroids of slaughtered pigs, as I understand it) to correct the level and bring it within standard bounds of acceptability. Fair enough, at one tiny pill per day it was not an inconvenience.
I was told to take the thyroxin pill first thing in the morning as taking it later in the day might affect my sleep. This increased metabolism effect is critical to the story. Eventually it became intolerable.
After several years at the same dose, with each blood test showing my TSH within acceptable bounds, I began to feel less and less comfortable in my own skin. In 2010 I realized that I was suffering from symptoms of hyperthyroidism, too much thyroid hormone. Not conditions I would wish on anyone.
The most disturbing change in my composure was a marked decrease in patience and tolerance of petty actions by my wife. I became hard to live with. Over a period of three years I saw two family doctors, two psychologists and one psychiatrist (to see if he could prescribe something more effective at settling me down than standard beta blockers and downers offered by my doctors).
When I self diagnosed myself as hyperthyroid, I went to a doctor to see if my thyroxin prescription could be lowered. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that it could not be changed because that would put my test results outside the normal range. "I could lose my licence," one doctor said, if she prescribed something that caused my test results to be outside the normal range.
Out of frustration and concern that I was putting a huge burden on my wife, making her life miserable in the process, I made the decision to stop taking the thyroxin altogether. For a couple of months, I felt better than I had for years. And I acted better.
Then I took another blood test. In a panic, the doctor got me an appointment with an endocrinologist. My TSH was so high that the doctor feared my organs would stop functioning.
Over the next year, the endocrinologist started me on a very low dose of thyroxin, then raised it until the dose was just below what the previous dose had been when I stopped taking it. When the blood test results showed my TSH still too high, she wanted to raise the dose again. I swore that I would stop taking the thyroxin again if she force me to the higher dose. Standoff.
While discussing the situation with a friend who had been hyperthyroid, whose thyroid was subsequently killed by medication and whose hypothyroidism was now under control with thyroxin, he happened to mention that when I took my thyroid pill on the day of a blood test greatly affected the TSH results. He said I should take thyroxin six hours before the test, instead of the usual three hours on a normal day. He had gotten this tip from a thyroid guru in one of the top hospitals in Toronto.
Next blood test I took the pill earlier and my TSH results dropped dramatically into the normal range. No change of prescription, just a change of when I took a single small pill on the day of a blood test. My family doctor and endocrinologist were ecstatic, judging by their physical reactions when they discussed the situation with me.
More than a year after my dispute with the doctors, I still suffer unpleasant symptoms associated with my body adjusting to a changed dose of thyroxin. I have reason to believe that the symptoms will vanish when my body eventually adjusts.
My previous dose of thyroxin, that was too high and resulted in symptoms of hyperthyroidism: 150mg. My new dose that makes my TSH test results come out normal and my doctors happy: 137mg.
That tiny difference made a family doctor refuse to change my prescription for fear of losing her licence to practice medicine (due to TSH test results that would have been too high).
Why could a lower TSH result on a blood test result from a lower thyroxin level (normally the two should change inversely)? All that changed was that I took my thyroxin pill two hours earlier on the day of my bloodwork.
Considering how common thyroid problems are among people today, you might think that doctors would be on top of such matters of fine tuning. They are not.
As always, I am ultimately responsible for my own health. You are responsible for your own. Doctors are in the middle trying to figure it all out. They don’t have enough information to work with to make decisions that will benefit us most.
We may pay a price to fight the medical establishment, but if we are right our lives will be better for it.
My wife is much happier living with a calmer and more tolerant husband.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to help their children develop in all ways, to live well balanced lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

We Assume Too Much And Pay Dearly For It

We Assume Too Much And Pay Dearly For It

All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.
- Abraham Maslow, American professor of psychology, creator of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (1908-1970)

We assume. We assume. We assume.
We can’t get through life without making assumptions that certain things will remain in order, that there is a structure of life and matter that won’t suddenly change on us, that someone won’t stab us in the back when we aren’t paying attention.
We require those assumptions in order that we can carry on our lives and concentrate on the business at hand. Of course life--indeed, existence--does not follow our need for assumptions that things won’t change on us too dramatically. Nature, like luck, can be brutal.
Japan studied its seismic history and since the 1970s built structures to last, based on earthquakes that had affected the country in the previous 400 years. For the most part, modern buildings survived the 9.0 quake of 2011. However, protective seawalls were overwhelmed and 20,000 people lost their lives in the tsunami that followed. The 9.0 earthquake, among the strongest in modern history, follows a pattern that only strikes about every 1000 years.
The Japanese government assumed that studying 400 years of history was enough. Not enough to account for a cycle of at least 1000 years.
We assume, those of us who marry, that "till death us do part" means forever, that our partner will never leave. We do not assume that the commitment means that both parties must work to maintain the relationship every single day or it will fall apart. We assume it’s a forever commitment, at least on the part of the other person in the relationship.
We assume that "for better or for worse" are only words, that the "worse" part won’t be any worse than it was before the wedding. When the relationship is required to endure a whole lot worse than that, trouble starts.
We assume that sex with our partner will be as gratifying and as fulfilling--maybe even improve with experience through the years--as it was before the wedding. The sex drive can be impacted for many reasons, both internal and external. The partner who is not affected--needing more--looks for satisfaction elsewhere. The partner who is affected assumes the relationship will continue, unaffected, because of a commitment of a few words spoken during a ceremony. The vows say nothing about sexual commitment.
We buy food at a market assuming that it will be tested safe. Chemical fertilizers, pesticides and preservatives in all foods have been shown to be unsafe for health over a long term. Fresh produce, advised by all health professionals to be the healthiest foods of all, are heavily laced with chemicals, even preservatives to keep them from spoiling.
We assume that preservatives that keep our food from spoiling are safe. They are, for food sitting on a shelf. Inside our bodies they also preserve our food from decay, which is exactly the opposite of what we want. Our body detects whole fats and automatically stores them in fat cells. Result: obesity in people with efficient digestive systems, even if they do not overeat.
We assume that by visiting a medical doctor when we are not well, or even for a regular checkup when we feel well, the doctor will provide us with the best care. Yet some doctors take money from drug companies when they prescribe drugs from one of them. Some of the drugs, such as statins to counteract cholesterol, become lifelong commitments when there are safer and healthier alternatives available (including common mineral niacin and exercise).
We assume that what we wear and our cosmetics will enhance our status among our workmates or acquaintances, as we have been taught by commercial interests. In general, virtually no one cares what we look like, except maybe a boss if we dress inappropriately. We just believe that others care.
We assume that the vehicle we drive will somehow deliver a message to others that we have a personal value greater than we know we have. Again, no one else cares.
We assume that people we associate with often are friends. As soon as we have a serious problem, they are nowhere to be found. Casual friendships exist when people have something to gain by associating with us, or us with them. True friendships are hard to make, take years to build, and true friends don’t care about trivial matters and will stand with you through your worst troubles. Simply assuming that someone is a good friend may be plain wrong.
We assume that those who mean the most to us will be with us forever, so we take less care with them than with acquaintances who can help us in the short term. When those loved ones die, we aren’t prepared for the loss and often suffer ourselves as a consequence. We assumed they would be with us forever.
We assume that our religious leaders teach us facts and truths beyond reproach. Most is just fantasy or wishful thinking, sometimes even an effort to control our mind. Just examine the "truths" taught from the pulpits of various Christian denominations to learn how greatly they vary, though they all claim to use the same holy book.
We make countless assumptions to get us through our lives. Some help us to get through the day, or night. Every assumption has a consequence if something does not work the way we had assumed. If we don’t consider the consequences of our assumptions, we pay a price later.
Children should be taught about consequences of their assumptions. Risky behaviour, for example, could result in early death. Unwise behaviour in their youth will inevitably result in bad health in later years.
Who should teach this Law of Consequences? Parents? Teachers? Relatives? Neighbours? Friends?
Yes. Children who do not understand the Law of Consequences, who make assumptions that are unwise, suffer huge setbacks later, if they survive. We pass laws to protect children, then ignore the laws. Many parents are not aware of the laws that should guide them through parenthood. No one taught them how to be parents. They figured out the conceiving part themselves. The rest they guess and learn by accident (sometimes).
Every adult has a responsibility to each child he or she knows. The degree of responsibility will vary from one child to another. The need for commitment will not.
There is an old saying: it takes a village to raise a child. Our ancestors knew that. Today’s kids don’t have that village. We need to help them avoid the deficit. They need to learn. We need to teach.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a book for parents, teachers, for all adults, who want to help children grow to be responsible, to lead well balanced lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Anne Frank’s Classmates Remember Holocaust and Days of Hiding

Anne Frank’s Classmates Remember Holocaust and Days of Hiding
"What we had was a ‘killing machine’--not just part of a normal war, but a killing machine. We shouldn't forget this past, and we must remain informed about what's happening today. What went on then should never happen again." Nanette Blitz Konig, best friend of Anne Frank (p. 127)

"By the end of the war, I looked like a skeleton. My hip bones were poking through my skin. They weighed me when I'd already been in the sanatorium for a while, and I was thirty-two kilos, barely seventy pounds. So I must have weighed a lot less before." Nanette Blitz Konig, who spent three years recovering in the sanatorium after her release in 1945 from Westerbork, a Nazi prison in The Netherlands (p. 132-3)

"The dates tell you that the children who arrived in Auschwitz and Sobibor [Nazi extermination camps] were gassed immediately." Nanette Blitz Konig, viewing the plaque with the names and death dates of Jewish children (including that of Anne Frank) of the Montessori School (now named Anne Frank School) where she and Anne and many of their classmates went to school before they went into hiding or were murdered by the Nazis (p. 160)

"My freedom." Nanette Blitz Konig, when asked by a twelve-year-old boy at the Anne Frank School, in 2008, what was the most cherished thing that had been taken from her as a Jew during the Second World War. (p. 163)

"The informers were paid [by the Nazis]; and sometimes it was a matter of carelessness on the part of those in hiding, or of those who were hiding them as well. In any event, many people were betrayed. One third seems to be the official figure, but I believe that half the Jews who went underground were betrayed." Lenie Duyzend, another female classmate of Anne Frank (p. 180-1)

(All quotes from We All Wore Stars, Memories of Anne Frank from Her Classmates, by Theo Coster--also an Anne Frank classmate--English translation published by Palgrave MacMillan, 2011)

Those few excerpts from the book may help to fix in your mind the conditions under which millions of Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe managed to avoid death during the Holocaust. I say "avoid death" because even the word "survive" fails to give sufficient impact. Death by disease or starvation was common, even while the Jews were "free," in hiding from the Nazi troops. Many did not manage to avoid death. Eighty percent of the Jews in The Netherlands before the war did not survive.
Of the ones who hid and were discovered, they were sent in railway freight cars to concentration camps. The cars were so crowded that individuals had no room to sit down. Some literally died en route, of disease or starvation. Those who were not fit to help the Nazis in some way, while in the camps, were told they were to take showers to clean up the lice and filth that most had accumulated. The showers emitted not water, but lethal gas.
Why, I wondered when I was younger, did so many go peacefully rather than fighting to the death after they were captured? They were starving, they believed that if they were sent to "work camps" they at least would be fed. They didn’t mind working if they would be fed. Most didn’t work. They didn’t live long enough to need to be fed.
They believed the "showers" would not only cleanse their skin, but they were told that a mild chemical would rid them of lice and parasites. The "showers" were to be a privilege.
They believed. They died. Six million of them. The number is doubted today only by Holocaust deniers and doubters.
Seventy years later, many of us have lost the message. Today we have more Jew haters than in past decades. Why? Because those who hated the Jews before and during the Holocaust continued to hate them after the war was over. And, like the Nazis who invented modern day propaganda methods, they continued to spread their word, relentlessly.
I recently defriended a man on Facebook. While he was a marvelous resource for anti-establishment "facts" and video materials, he was also rabidly anti-Jewish. Anything done in Palestine he could justify in some way, whereas anything done by Israel he could "prove" was evil. He posted between one and five anti-Israel or anti-Jew Facebook items every day. He had 4000 Facebook "friends." Read: followers of his propaganda.
Today we have the endless conflict between Israel and Palestine that tires many of us so much that we want to ignore it. What many don’t realize is that Palestinians, who wanted independence from their former masters Jordan and Egypt for at least a century, not only lost the war (they supported Germany), they also lost what they had hoped for so long would be a free Palestine.
When the state of Israel was created after the war, from land taken from countries that supported the losing side (Germany, home of the Holocaust), Palestinians refused to  give up their fight. Where previously Palestinians and Jews had lived peacefully, side by side, in Palestine, when the Jews succeeded in getting international support for the creation of Israel while the Arab Palestinians failed to get their own official homeland, the Palestinians vowed to never forget or give up their fight.
Palestinians, in general, may not be as well educated as the average Israeli. But they learned their lessons about propaganda from their German allies. They learned how to manipulate the media. They learned how to lie, repeatedly and consistently, until eventually enough people believe the lies. That’s what propaganda does, as demonstrated so well in the 1930s by Hitler’s buddy Goebbels, the master propagandist.
Israel learned too, but from the Roman empire, not from modern day militaries. Israel learned that when an enemy hurts you, you should hurt your enemy back ten times as hard as it hurt you. That’s how Israel has responded to attacks from Gaza and the West Bank.
Such principles of fighting back do not fit with modern morals and ethics. Hitting back with far more force than you were hit with makes you a bully today. Palestine tries to make Israel come off in the media like a powerful bully. It’s working. Blogs and social media give anti-Israeli propagandists free reign. White supremacists of the past have become anti-Israeli heroes of present day, in the eyes of some people.
The most important key to successful propaganda is to say your message with confidence. Truth is not important (in fact, lies are the preferred content of propaganda), so long as the message is delivered with confidence and determination. In propaganda, you never admit your own mistakes or weaknesses, you always blame your opponent for what you did wrong and you usually accuse your opponent of using the same dirty tactics as you use yourself. The whole US experience in Iraq is an excellent example.
Please, when you think about Israel today, remember that Jews have survived many extermination attempts over the past three millennia in which they have been denied a land of their own (the Holocaust was but one). How might you expect today’s Israelis to act when they finally got a country to call their own? How would you react if six million of your culture mates were gassed while millions of others were starved and abused?
Israel has acted badly, by modern standards, no doubt. Call it brutal. But is the answer to disenfranchise Israel? Bullying of other kinds has not been stopped by putting the bullies in jail. In fact, jail and punishment of other kinds of bullies have created more bullying than they have solved or prevented.
When enemies face each other as enemies, peace will never happen at the table. Only when they face each other as similar peoples with common interests is there any chance for peace.
Jews and Arabs are both Semitic peoples. Each is a collection of various tribes of the past. Wherever tribal customs, traditions and mores of the past continue today you will find conflict. Check out where conflict is happening in the world today and which maintain tribal values and you will find an almost perfect coincidence.
Not all Israelis subscribe to tribal values, but there are enough strong minded purists to influence their government. Not all Arabs, or even Palestinians, subscribe to the old tribal values, but there are enough that peace talks always mean enemy facing enemy across the negotiating table.
Whenever political representatives face each other as being "different" peace cannot be achieved. Only when they face each other as being the same people, only with different opinions that need to be resolved, will there be a viable possibility for peace.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a book for teachers and parents about how to raise children who can cope in today’s complicated modern world. It’s a book about commonalities, not about differences, which is why it works. Learn more at http://billallin.com

She’s A Stupid Old Fart

She’s A Stupid Old Fart

She’s an annoying old thing. She sleeps much of the day, but when she is awake she can’t be satisfied.
She seems to want only the basics of life that please her, satisfying both ends of her digestive system, getting constant attention while she’s awake, being left undisturbed when she is asleep. And treats, she loves her treats.
She has some problems with bowel movements, but she is somehow aware enough to eagerly take her laxative each day. Some part of her natural brain endowment is still working.
Sometimes she acts stunned, frozen in place in the middle of a room as if she can’t remember what she was doing or why or where she wants to go. Give her some food and she may begin to eat, turn away, then ask for more food without even looking at her plate to see that she hasn’t finished what she had just been given.
I get frustrated. I don’t know what to do to please her. I have a better understanding of elder abuse now that I have an elder with dementia to look after. It’s easy to let your emotions and thoughts go wild when you don’t know what is happening in the brain of another. I don’t strike out. I don’t shout, though I grumble my frustration sometimes. She doesn’t seem to care.
Her name is Lucy. Who names anyone Lucy? Well, in this case, my long deceased mother-in-law, but that’s another story.
At least I don’t have to physically feed Lucy. She feeds herself. Cats don’t use forks and spoons. Yes, Lucy is a senior feline with dementia. (A UK survey found that one in ten cats develops dementia as it gets well into its teen years.)
Though the lifespan of cats is normally much shorter than that of humans, their behaviour during their lives often matches that of humans to a shocking extent. Cats and humans do not speak the same verbal language, though both have had thousands of years to learn from the other.
Having studied cats intensively for the past two decades (my background is in sociology and education), I have observed only one marked difference between the behaviour of cats and people: when a kitten or cat wants something, it does everything within its power to get it. Human children, sadly, do not, so often miss out on much of the adult attention they desperately want.
OK, if you want to get technical, people don’t clean their behinds by licking, as cats do. But cats have almost germ-free mouths, while people can have billions of bacteria and viruses in theirs. There’s a lesson there, but I’m not sure what it is.

Every cat has a certain level of "talkativeness" some are always quiet and purring, some meow about everything. The change seen with senior dementia is one of increased or excessive vocalizations, and not just a simple meow. They may appear confused and not totally sure of their surroundings while vocalizing, and this behavior is more common at night, often waking up the household.
- Janet Tobiassen Crosby , DVM, veterinarian and author of materials about small animals

As in humans, dementia leaves [cats] confused and distressed...Researchers from the University of Edinburgh now believe half of all cats over the age of 15 and a quarter aged 11 to 14, are suffering from "geriatric onset behavioural problems".
-Laura Donnelly, Health Correspondent, The Telegraph

Feline dementia is very similar to dementia in humans. Here’s the killer: dementia is the most avoidable disease known in either species. Yes, dementia is avoidable, if those in charge of a cat or a child begin early enough.
Cats in the wild live about ten years. Indoor cats often live twice that long. The older they get, the more likely they are to get a disease of old age.
The difference between a cat or a person who will eventually get dementia and one who will not is curiosity or creativity in childhood. Both, in the early years of life, require lots of attention and opportunities to explore, to learn, to satisfy their natural curiosity.
Curiosity, so the old saw goes, killed the cat. But cats have nine lives, so another goes, so they have resources people don’t. When a cat lacks stimulation and inspiration for enough years, it becomes dull. When a child is denied sufficient stimulation and inspiration for its first few years, then again in the primary grades of school, it will stop being curious. As an adult, that child will join the legions of stupid people you see around you, almost everywhere you go.
Have you walked down the hallway of a nursing home that caters to the frail elderly? They sit outside their bedroom doors, staring blankly, hoping for something or someone to pass by to relieve the monotony. Dementia is the last stage of what began as a bored child, then developed into a stupid adult.
If dementia is avoidable, what can we do to help ourselves and others to avoid it? To begin with, you will not likely develop dementia because you were curious enough to read this article. Curiosity is the key. Curiosity doesn’t come out the end of a hypodermic needle or in table form.
Curiosity is, in effect, a desire to learn. A constant desire to learn. It doesn’t seem to matter what a child or even a middle aged adult wants to learn or to explore, so long as it’s new and requires learning. Try something new. Embrace change. Get used to something different. Explore, even if it’s only at your local library. You will never see a demented adult in a library.
Now you know something that could change lives. You, being curious yourself, will not likely suffer from dementia in your later years. But what you know now could prevent someone else from suffering that fate. You could change the life or your grandchild, or your child.
You could change the life of a complete stranger, if you care enough. Consider this: how might the life of a homeless person change if they had a drive to learn, to improve themselves, to change for the better? You might not be able to help that way directly, but you could join an organization with that as its primary objective.

Bill Allin in the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to ensure the kids they know continue to exercise their curiosity throughout their lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com 

Monogamy May Contribute to the Extinction of Humanity

Monogamy May Contribute to the Extinction of Humanity

“I’ve calculated that if we keep fixing the problem, in 10,000 years no men will be producing sperm.”
- Sherman Silber , urological surgeon, researcher who heads the Infertility Center of St. Louis, at St. Luke’s Hospital

It’s not as if the (distinctly male) Y chromosome is under attack by monogamous men. The claim is that due to monogamy, more correctly one man, one woman, no cheating, may be causing the sperm of some men to get lazy. It’s “use it or lose it,” make it work or it will suffer from atrophy.
Isn’t sperm a natural component of maleness, something that gets passed down from generation to generation like a treasured gold pocket watch? Not quite. Like anything related to DNA, deficient sperm, if allowed to procreate through a non-natural process such as in vitro fertilization, will pass from father to son to grandson, and so on. Once the genes responsible for producing sperm become deficient, their progeny (if any) will also be deficient for every succeeding generation.
A strictly monogamous relationship, especially if overwork, lack of sufficient sleep, fatigue from childcare, prescriptive drugs or many other causes come into the picture, results on long periods of sex drought. In effect, what happens with newly made sperm is similar to what happens to muscles that are not used for long periods of time. They don’t work so well. While atrophied muscle can be revived, defective sperm producers remain defective until death.
When it comes to sperm, working well is critically important. The World Health Organization (WHO, an agency of the United Nations) says that fewer than 15 million sperm per milliliter of semen will likely result in a healthy egg that will not be fertilized after coitus. Out of that number, only one (in most cases) will ever be successful. If the sperm don’t fight hard, if they have developed with a funny shape or if they swim poorly, they will die alone, along with the egg.
The original purpose of monogamy was to ensure that a baby grew with both a mother and a father--the old concept of “a family.” Monogamy originally meant devotion of one man to one woman for the purpose of raising a child. Religions, given legal charge of marrying men and women, dictated the “no cheating” rule. Even the term for “cheating” in a marriage is “unfaithful,” a word commonly associated with religion.
Today we have astronomical rates of divorce, often because the man has been “unfaithful” to the marriage vow. A shocking majority of single mothers live on social assistance (welfare), barely able to fulfill their role model as mother let alone act as a father as well.
One large study a couple of years ago, in the USA, found that 85 percent of husbands admitted (confidential survey) to being unfaithful to their wives (sex with at least one other partner). However, another study found that 65 percent of wives were unfaithful to their marriage vows as well. Both of these were “at least once.” That’s a clear majority on both sides.
Our insistence on sexual monogamy in marriage (or equivalent) is, therefore, in conflict with the realities. In other words, the partner who gets caught is the guilty one.
But who suffers from breakups resulting from sexual wandering of one or more spouses? More than anyone else, the children. We say that “Kids can adapt easily to changes in family makeup.” That kind of thinking may be seen in people who know nothing about children. They suffer, in ways that parents seldom understand, often for the rest of their lives.
“Bad food, bad genes and monogamy are sucking the life our of human sperm,” according to David H. Freedman, freelance journalist and author, in a column about the degradation of human sperm, in Discover, November 2011.
Several studies have confirmed that the viability of male sperm has slid downhill over the past century, going by standards of the World Health Organization. “We’re producing pretty poor sperm compared with those of [other] primates and other animals,” claims Gary Cherr, reproductive toxicologist at University of California, Davis. “Even in the most fertile men, there are quality issues.”
The facts stated above may seem to confuse the issue of the future of humanity. But they don’t really. Over time, Darwin’s concept of natural selection will prevail.
The total population of humans on our planet may decrease in the meantime. Who would dispute the value of that?
This article is not intended to support the concept of sex with partners outside of marriage. That part is up to you. What we need to keep in mind is the best interests of children, who are inevitably harmed by the breakup of their parents. Inevitably, in their minds, if not visibly by their behaviour at the time.
Let’s remember that the primary purpose of the marriage bond is to ensure a child has caring parents to raise him or her. Sexual monogamy of both parents, or lack thereof, matters little to a child.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to raise kids with a comfortable balance of skills and knowledge as adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

So You Think You Know Christianity (and Islam before the Prophet)

So You Think You Know Christianity (and Islam before the Prophet)

We casually refer to those who attend worship at a place called a "church" Christians, and their religion as Christianity. Not much to argue about there.

What about the origins of Christianity, recorded to some extent in the Bible, and followed to some extent by Muslims (for whom the Bible was the word of God before the writing of the Qur’an)? It only makes sense that those who lived closest to the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth, especially those who were contemporaries, such as the Apostles, would know the most about the origins of Christianity.

What we know today as Christianity and its Bible are more accurately a product of the Church of Rome, written or revised in the Fourth Century CE, not long before Roman emperor Constantine adopted Christianity as the official religion of Rome (aka the Eastern Roman Empire, or the Byzantine empire). The Apostles and St. Paul played significant parts in what became known as the Bible, but only so far as what they wrote conformed to what the church wanted the world to know.

Even the Bible books by the Apostles were written between 90 and 110 years (some say even more) after the death of Jesus on the cross. Think about your experience with elderly people, especially about how accurate their memories are. You probably don’t know people who have written anything at that age, let alone books that are followed to the letter by followers who believe they are transcribed words from God.
Religious books produced at the time of Jesus or shortly after his death (not necessarily on a cross, it turns out) differ markedly from the story passed along to us from the hallowed halls of head offices of Christian churches. In fact, the cross was not adopted as a Christian symbol for more than two centuries after Jesus. Before the change the accepted symbol was a fish, though some evidence exists that the cross (similar to the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet--thau, made in the shape of a cross--note the significance of that as "this is a far as you need to go, the Cross) was used by Christians who were persecuted by the Romans as a way to identify themselves to each other.

Religious books that were written shortly after the life of Jesus were widely read and believed by Followers of Jesus in the Holy Land. The fact that the Church of Rome (based in Greece and Rome) conducted what amounts to a genocide against the Followers of Jesus in the Holy Land after 150 CE is immaterial to this story. Except to note that followers of Jesus in the Holy Land did not have the same "history" of their religion as the Church of Rome, and they paid for that with their lives in most cases. They were exterminated by Rome, their greatest competitor.

Their holy books were, for the most part, not components of the Bible of today, as compiled by the church in the Fourth Century. They were too varied and heretical.

For example, Followers of Jesus--those who lived in the land that Jesus called home--believed there were two, 12, even as many as 30 gods, as recorded in their holy books. They did not believe in one God, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful. They did not necessarily even believe that one God created the world and everything else they knew. (Beyond the creation story in Genesis, Judaism dwells very little on beginnings as well.)

The death of Christ had nothing to do with salvation. The concept that "He died for your sins" never appears in those early books. Indeed, some believed that Jesus didn’t die on a cross at all. History records that Mary of Magdala lived in France for a while. Some even say she had children there, with Jesus as the father. Enough evidence exists in France today to support at least the Mary part of that claim. She may have fled to France to escape the Roman church, who wanted her dead as she was one of the leaders of the Followers of Jesus and women leading religious groups was forbidden by male-dominated Rome.

Some Christians adhere to the Bible as the only book worth reading and believing, just as Muslims believe that of their holiest book, the Qur’an. Is the Bible really no more accurate as a source for Christian doctrine than our daily newspapers today? That is, was the Bible edited and rewritten to say what its publisher wanted people to read and believe?

History records that some religious books were rewritten by Christian scholars at the time the Bible was first assembled, in the Fourth Century. The original books were destroyed. In fact, history records that the Church of Rome scoured the empire searching for the original versions of the books it adapted and rewrote, as well as books that did not conform to their new Bible, to have them destroyed. Some believe that the burning of the library at Alexandria--the greatest library of the ancient world--was set by Roman Christians because it held too many books written by the Followers of Jesus.

The ancient scrolls known as the Nag Hammadi, the name of the Egyptian city where the scrolls were discovered in 1945, bear witness to the deceptions carried out by the Church of Rome in order to formulate and consolidate its religion in the Fourth Century.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared "God is dead" in several of his books. He didn’t mean that a real God had died. He meant that the fictitious God perpetrated by religions had been revealed as unreal. In other words, the more educated people become, the more they realize the fiction of religion, and the more they will search for a true religion.

While untold numbers of people argue over whether God must exist because they have faith he does, or maybe not, almost no one pays attention to what a real God must be like, in accordance with science that even the most atheistic scientists can’t debate.

Most of those who have experienced God are quiet about it. They know it may not be good for their health to make declarations that go against the teachings of a great religion.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents who want to know when to teach their children the truth about life, instead of leaving much of the life education of their children to street chatter.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

When You Hurt From A Loss

When You Hurt From A Loss

"Forgetting you is not that hard to do I've done it a thousand times a day"
- lyric from "A Thousand Times A Day", by Patty Loveless

Almost everyone has gone through the pain of loss of a loved one, be it through death, divorce or the other just wanting to be out of the relationship. We all need to learn lessons from our experiences.
First of all, it’s important to realize that the hurt is our own. We impose it on ourselves. We don’t hurt for the other person, whether that person is still alive or not, we hurt for ourselves. It’s a form of self pity. The hurt is real, but no one else imposes it on us.
What if the one we love takes off and leaves us, doesn’t that mean the other person hurts us? No, it means we hurt ourselves because we regret our loss.
The love was unrequited, one-sided, at least at the point the one left the other. While we wanted the relationship to continue, the other person knew it wouldn’t work. We should ask ourselves, those of us in this situation, why we would want to continue to live with someone who knew the relationship was wrong, that it just plain wouldn’t work.
Often we feel, perhaps without admitting it to ourselves, that the loss was our own fault. We acted ourselves and it wasn’t good enough. "If only I had done things differently."
No, acting yourself is the only way you can depend on being comfortable in your own skin. The other person just didn’t want that. It’s much the same as your clearly preferring one car while disliking another. The reason doesn’t have to make sense, it just is.
How sensible is it to want someone who doesn’t want you? Isn’t that just beating yourself up?
The situation may be worse with divorce. As common as divorce is these days, it isn’t just a loss. Divorce is a signal to the world of failure. Or so many perceive it.
It may be a costly failure. That kind of mistake doesn’t come cheap in some cases. Courts and lawyers don’t help. They like records, especially when they stand to gain from record settlements.
In virtually every case of divorce, it was a bad match to start with. Something was wrong and at least one of the couple refused to admit it. "Love will conquer all" works in songs and poetry, but living it through makes for slogging that most people don’t care to endure.
Despite the fact that people living today will live almost twice as long as their recent ancestors, on average, we seem to live by the adage that "Life is short, eat the dessert first." Trouble is, many of us lose our appetite for the main course once dessert is over.
Albert Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. (That idea was around for centuries before Einstein.) Is that not what a couple on their way to eventual divorce do?
Unfortunately, when it comes to primary relationships such as marriage or common law, do-overs seldom work. The success rate for second and third tries is perishingly low. Trying again usually just postpones the inevitable.
As with any major life loss or tragedy, the solution to a broken relationship is usually to find another one that will work better. There is no perfect mate or soul mate for most of us. We need to find someone who is prepared to tolerate us while we accept their faults, follies and failures. Love comes much easier when you can overlook those things in your significant other.
Getting past the death of a loved one, especially an unexpected death, can play hard on some people for many years. What causes the hurt? It’s our loss, not the end of life of a loved one. It’s like stabbing yourself hard.
Why does it hurt so much? Most of us are not emotionally or psychologically prepared for a sudden loss. It’s a personal loss we had no control over. Nothing we could have done might have prevented the death, in most cases. It’s life playing its worst on our heart.
Is there a way to lessen the pain? We can be better prepared. We can understand that we could get a phone call any day to say that anyone in our life has died unexpectedly. We can formulate a plan of what we would do if that happened. We can figure out exactly what procedures we would go through if something tragic happened to someone we love.
Will that lessen the loss? No. But it will make the hurt less severe, maybe having it impact our life for a shorter period of time. That’s the best we can do. Hurt is survivable for most of us. Science has proven that it is possible to die of a "broken heart" but few of us actually do.
We can also remember that our loved one might get a similar phone call to say that we have died suddenly. We can prepare plans for that too.
Death and loss of relationships are part of life. It’s worth remembering that emotions work like a pendulum: the farther they swing one way, the farther they are able to swing the other way. Those who suffer little from downswings in life lack the ability to have great joy when life is at its best for them.
The positive side of tragedy is that life always turns around. Maybe not fast enough to suit us most of the time, but that’s life.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for people who want to learn how to cope with life before they need those coping skills. It’s about learning life lessons before they are needed.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

How Close Are We To Armageddon?

How Close Are We To Armageddon?

Nine specific prophecies in the Bible will occur within the final seven years prior to the Battle of Armageddon.
- Armageddon web site of EndTime Ministries

Let’s begin by putting Armageddon into perspective. People have been predicting the end of the world since shortly after the death of Jesus of Nazareth, supposedly based on Revelations 16: verse 16, in the final book of the Christian Bible (also shared by Islam, but seldom mentioned). That is, for 2000 years people have found evidence that the end of the world is imminent. Lots of predictions, not much evidence.
Revelations 16, verse 16, reads as follows: And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon. That is the only mention in the Bible of a place called Armageddon.
The name supposedly comes from the Hebrew place name Megiddo. The "them" (King James version) that will gather would be kings who will gather with their warriors on a mountain. They would fight the ultimate battle of the resurrected Jesus versus the Antichrist.
That’s all very well, but there are no mountains anywhere near Megiddo. Plains, maybe, but no mountains. The plains of the Megiddo valley, near Galilee, were the most common place for battles to be fought in ancient times. In all likelihood, Megiddo (or Armageddon) came to be used as a symbol of battle the way many people refer to all facial tissues as Kleenex, or Holocaust (there have been many throughout history) when they refer to the one perpetrated by Hitler.
Despite how often the name has been mentioned over the past 2000 years, there is no place on earth with the name Armageddon.
Who is the Antichrist? Some say Satan. Some insist the Antichrist is human, in particular any foreign leader who happens to be the enemy of the day. In the period following the death of Jesus, that would be the Caesar of the day. Today his name might be Putin or Ahmadinijad, possibly Bush, or even Obama, depending on your preferred prejudices.
Most people today who think about Armageddon, or the possibility of the world as we know it ending, have never read the book of Revelations. If you have read any other parts of the Bible, give Revelations a read. You will likely wonder what happened, why the Bible suddenly became different in its final book. In fact, scholars can’t agree on anything about Revelations, except its position as the last book of the Bible.
Some say it was written by many people, some by only one man, some say by someone who was insane, but it was included in the Bible at the time of sorting in the Fourth Century because it was powerful (scary) and prophetic.
Why should we take those who predict the end of the world seriously? One religious leader, Harold Camping, has predicted the end of the world three times in 2011. He had "evidence" to support each of his predictions. I am here to tell you his predictions were wrong.
Might it all end for us in 2012, specifically on December 12, as predicted by the ancient Maya? Let me say only that the Mayan calendar itself went well beyond that date. If they expected the world to end on that date, it would not make sense to have a calendar extend beyond that date. The Maya predicted a time of renewal in 2012, but not of permanent destruction. They didn’t even predict the end of their own empire, which should give us a clue as to the dependability of their predictions.
Surely all the violence and conflict happening around the world is evidence enough that life is getting worse on our planet. This would only be true if you knew nothing about history and if you believe the news media that have taken their modus operandi from supermarket tabloids. Violence sells advertising, just as we have come to accept that sex and scandal do as well.
The world is actually more peaceful today than it has ever been in human history. Far fewer wars or violent conflicts are happening today than has been the norm for millennia. Major crime is down in most large cities of the world. Though we have seen Occupy protests in many countries of the world, they have been--and they have stressed the importance of their being--peaceful demonstrations.
Even the Arab Spring demonstrations were relatively peaceful. If you know anything of Arab history, you will appreciate how significant that was. Arab peoples are still largely associated with tribes and tribes--anywhere in the world they still exist or did in the past--are notorious for their wars and violent conflicts. That includes the tribes of Israel who were responsible for writing the Bible. They were primitive, coarse, violent people.
Slavery, rampant in the 19th and early 20th centuries (and throughout history before that), exists only in relatively small pockets in tribal conditions today. Genocide, which accounted for something over 60 million deaths in the last century, has all but disappeared due to pressure from world powers.
We live in a time of transition. We live in a period of history when the "civilization" of humanity envisioned in the past could possibly happen in the near future, even in the lifetimes of some of us. It won’t happen quickly. It won’t happen easily. For example, many people today would like to see former U.S. President George W. Bush charged in the International Criminal Court with Crimes Against Humanity. Others see Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinijad leading the world into its first truly nuclear world war. Neither will happen.
We need to separate what is real from the propaganda that those with something to gain want us to believe. We need to understand that when someone, or some power, strongly urges us to believe something, they have something to gain and we have something to lose by believing.
We also need to teach this to our children. Unless they learn what we now understand to be true, what has been gained in our lifetimes could be lost.
As always, education is the key to our future.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a book of answers and solutions to problems our leaders want us to believe can never be solved. They can and the solutions are inexpensive and fairly easy to implement.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Vincent van Gogh: lifetime failure or immortal success?

Vincent van Gogh: lifetime failure or immortal success?

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
- Vincent van Gogh, Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

You may have heard of the author of this quote. To many--believe this or not--he is a failed painter. Famous, maybe, but a failure.
Why could anyone consider one of the greatest painters in history a failure? Because he never sold a painting during his lifetime. Well, maybe one, if you consider a purchase by his brother Theo, who supported him financially for the last years of his life.
He was a teacher, a parson (at least he aspired to be one), a missionary and an employee of an art dealer. He was very ill for many years, resulting in long pauses between his painting pieces. Illness, among those who are financially successful, is considered a life failure. (How many financially wealthy and powerful people do you know who have disabilities or chronic illnesses?)
His teeth became loose and painful from his poor diet. He spent much of the money Theo sent him on art supplies, not food. At one point he told his brother that he had only eaten about six hot meals in the previous year. And he bought absinthe, his primary alcoholic vice. He may have had syphilis, as he was treated by Dr. Amadeus Cavenaile, whose office was near the docklands and was well known for treating those with the disease.
Does this not sound much like the dropouts, losers and failures of today’s society? He only lived 37 years, which we might expect today of drug addicts and the homeless.
However, Vincent was different from most people. Despite his failures, disappointments and bad turns in life, and his poor health when he was supposed to be at his most productive time of life, he had confidence in himself.
Vincent van Gogh dared to take chances with his beloved art. He painted differently from the majority of painters who made their living by selling their art. Who are they and where are their paintings now? we might well ask.
Exactly. Van Gogh is remembered, respected, admired, praised and revered for using the talents he had to produce something worthwhile. Most of the others are forgotten.
Van Gogh has already been dead many times more years than he lived. Yet he is still considered among those at the top of the field.
He dared to be different. He dared to subject himself to ridicule--artists have been known to be cruel when critiquing each other’s work.
If you want to be remembered long after you have passed from this mortal coil, you must do something worth remembering. That doesn’t have to be artistic, athletic or economic. The founding librarian at my local library will be remembered for many years to come so long as her photo continues to be mounted on the wall in the main lobby.
What van Gogh produced benefited others long after his death. You can do something with the rest of your life so that you will be remembered as well. Do something to help others. I mean, to really help others, not to contribute cash so that others can help them.
That’s why we are here on this planet. That’s why we remember the helpful ones, those who benefit others, long aftger they are gone. True, we also remember the brutal killers, but they act as foils so that we know what is wrong and what people can do to go wrong. In their peculiar way, even the great perpetrators of genocide through history show us that we should not act like them, must prevent others like them from gaining power.
Help someone. Help someone up, not out. Those we consider failures today don’t want to be failures. Some desperately want to improve their lot in life, but don’t know how. They don’t have one person who really cares for their welfare and their future. Many have given up on their own future, which leads others to believe they like living their present lifestyle. No, they just quit fighting.
Theo van Gogh only gave his brother money, which allowed Vincent to paint. But if Vincent had been given care and help by someone with his life, what might he have accomplished during his lifetime?
We don’t have answers to these questions. All we can do is to look ahead to what we can accomplish with the rest of our own lives. We can help others.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a common sense guidebook, in common language, for parents, teachers and others who want to help children grow to be all they can be. It’s for people who care and want to make a difference in the world.
Learn more at http://billallin.com