What If God Is A Scientist?
“Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous.”
- Albert Einstein, The World As I See It
“The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
- C.S. Lewis, British novelist, poet, academic (1898-1963)
One of the most asked questions among people around the world is "Is God real?" Or some variation of it, such as "What is God?", "Why does God allow evil?" or even "Why am I here?" They are all essentially the same question. Feed me because I want answers.
Answers to the unknown. Or the unknowable. Yet we still ask. Not surprisingly, many have devised answers over the years, answers that insult the intelligence of some, but that others cling to so dearly they are prepared to make regular donations to support, even to give their lives for. Or take the lives of others.
First of all, note that in the questions above, the background motivation for them is to learn "How does or can God serve me and my purpose and needs?" One famous quote from US President John F. Kennedy goes "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." Yet we still want to know what our country and what God can do for us.
"Where does God fit into my life?" not "What can I do to justify my being here in the first place?" Our questions are self-centred. The answers provided by others all tend to sell a product that satisfies that need, then collect proceeds for the answers.
Note that every answer is designed to satisfy personal needs. The answers are custom designed to serve that customer need, not to provide a universal truth. Religions gain followers by offering up a god that will supposedly satisfy those needs.
Inevitably others, often scientists, claim there is no God. Or at least there is no God like that. Atheists and skeptics are so busy debunking false gods they don't have time to address the question of what a real God might be. How, given what we know and what science knows today, can there be any kind of God?
Every concept of God is based on assumptions or premises. Should we be surprised if an invented God meets the needs of someone who is prepared to pay for the services of that God? Should we be surprised if those invented gods fail to meet minimum standards of logic or questions based on common sense?
Everything you believe about God, or everything you disbelieve, is likely based on a concept of God somebody taught you. It is based on assumptions that satisfy personal needs. Do you need a manly God? God is all-powerful and vengeful. Christianity's Old Testament has that kind of God. Do you need a God with maternal qualities? God loves you, will always look out for you, will hold you in the palm of his hand, will look after you when you die. God has those qualities in the Bible's New Testament.
God can be whatever you need. Whatever you are prepared to pay for.
Does that mean there is no God? No. It means that any concept of God based on satisfying the needs of people for a deity that will serve them so long as they keep paying will ultimately fail. They are all based on faulty assumptions. Like effective advertising. It doesn't have to be true, it only has to sell.
And it does. Every concept of God, no matter how absurd to the rest of us, will find some followers, who will pay. The best way to be remembered through history is to tell others that God has spoken to you. There are shrines around the world where people claim that God has spoken to them. The shrines are named after the individuals who received the messages. Or believed and publicly claimed they did.
Science, in general, insists there is no God because God can neither be proven by argument or sensed in any way through sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell. At its base, science uses these as basic premises for existence.
Some use the argument that because there are and have been thousands of different gods over past millennia, it is obvious that they have all been invented by their users/followers. That does not meet the criteria of logic because it denies that one could be real and valid. It also does not recognize that all have one characteristic in common, a strong belief in a supernatural being. Why is this belief so universal no matter what the culture, history or geographical location?
It's worth remembering that "supernatural" does not mean "extra" as in "super fries". It means more like "outside of nature", a force or kind of energy unlike anything we have previously contemplated. Just because something has not previously been contemplated by a human does not mean it does not exist or that it is impossible. Air flight was long believed to be impossible. Then someone contemplated it and made it possible.
Rarely in these debates does anyone raise the fact that there are phenomena that exist for which no one has an adequate explanation, or even a reasonable guess. Ghosts and UFOs that the US military, science or governments have no explanation for would be some examples. There are better examples that would require more space than we have here to explain. TV shows often put these down to examples of early visits to earth by extraterrestrials. Are these any better than religions based on emotions and faulty guesses? I would say no. Their hypotheses are as full of holes as the religions they propose to replace.
One fundamental part of the God debate involves how earth and the universe began. The Bible says that God created everything in six days, then rested on the seventh. No one ever attempts to explain whether the days are earth days, Jupiter days or some kind of God-days. Nor does anyone ever explain why a supernatural being would require rest. We humans require rest to refresh our bodies and set memories and clear trash from our brains. As God has neither physical body nor brain, why would he require rest?
Religions claim that God or gods are supernatural, not subject to natural laws or explanations. Then they set about making up claims for God, what God does, who God cares for, as if their God were a physical being. No matter how much their followers are devoted to these beliefs, their arguments inevitably fail.
Science claims that evolution and fossils destroy the Bible's explanation that God created everything 6,200 or so years ago. Would those be earth years or God-years? Don't laugh about the concept of God-years as it is not even one you can contemplate.
More importantly (to me, perhaps soon to you) should be the question of why a creator, essentially a scientist of unusual skill, would work for a week then stop. Forever. No human creator, artist or scientist would ever stop work after one success. I find it hard to imagine a creator who would work for a bit, then stop forever.
Progress or development, the top argument for evolution, is undisputable. It happens and it can be proven. But the whole concept of evolution itself is full of holes. Unexplainable gaps, for one thing.
Zoologists claim that for a species to be viable, to survive, it must have a minimum base of 30 members. With fewer than that there could be mating, but inbreeding would force the species out of existence within a few generations.
Evolution claims that a new species begins with a single genetic mutation. Even assuming that the newly evolved creature could mate with some other genetically close species, science today has shown that the possibility of the offspring of such inter-species mating being fertile is extremely low. With species survival possibilities near zero, how could so many have survived and thrived to this day?
Imagine yourself as a creator. You try many possibilities, they fail. Then you get one that works. You make more. Then you move on to another creation project. Same routine. Many failures, then eventually a success. If your creations are natural they need instincts for survival and reproduction. And they need to eat. So you have more creating to do. You develop a food chain.
Eventually and inevitably your food chain life web becomes extremely complex. Then what? More work. More planning. More creating. Gaps in your development could be explained by the fact that you created different species at different times. These species, with reproductive instincts, evolve their DNA and in the process create other close species. So new species originate from two very different sources.
Would it not work that way if God were a scientist?
Neither science nor religion would need to modify their beliefs much to accommodate such a radical concept.
I did not set out in this article to prove anything. I hope I have planted a seed of thought in some people. The "God argument" to date has been more like a war with neither side wanting to give a point to the other than a discussion. The argument has been as productive as one that might be fought over the existence of purple elephants. (You can paint an elephant purple, but does that make it real?)
Science denies that anything exists that its members are unable to contemplate, let alone explain. Religion has invented deities and whole spiritual environments around a few experiences that defy explanation. Both have limited their own credibility. A real God would have to be an unlimited concept. Those who debate the topic build walls of limitation around themselves. Then they battle it out with anyone whose opinion differs from theirs.
Let's get serious about coming together. We will never reach any reasonable understanding until we accept that there could be other explanations for the unknown and the unexplainable that we have not considered.
In the final analysis does it matter? Why would God care about atheists or those who have different beliefs from each other? God would stand apart from such trivial debate. No God worth respect would do trivia.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems and hundreds of articles that are available free on the internet. Search for them using the author's name.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Sunday, April 17, 2016
Sunday, March 20, 2016
Why You Desperately Need Your Sleep
Why You Desperately Need Your Sleep
How about those people who don't need sleep? What are they called again? Successful? What a bunch of dicks they are.
Jim Gaffigan, American comedian
The significance of that quote goes far deeper than the joke Jim intended. "Successful" tends to refer to people who make a lot of money. They are usually workaholics, they neglect their families (if they have families that are still together), they are first in line for divorce, many commit "white collar" crimes that make us wonder "What were they thinking?" Most of them die wondering what their lives might have been like if they had not idolized money.
One characteristic they all have in common--all people self described as "successful"--is they get only a few hours of sleep each night. The payoff for them is their feeling of success and the size of their investment portfolio.
Most are narcissistic, even to the point of being borderline (or actually) psychopathic. They are the ones that those they consider "unsuccessful" think of as slaves to a system with money as its god. If they are not actually in the "1%" they are strong supporters of those who are. Any support for those who are desperately in need through no fault of their own comes with a catch--tax deduction, social status, self-aggrandizement.
In my experience (anecdotal evidence only) these self described "successful" people all believe that they can get along with only a minimum of sleep. To them, sleep is the equivalent of a long coffee break.
That is patently false, which is why so many of them lead single purpose lives, like monks, and why most of them die far younger than they believed they should, having suffered for too many years before their death with unexplained health problems.
As they lie dying they will be visited by family members and other individuals whose names appear in their will. They bought that devotion.
The above is but one consequence of sleep deprivation. As always, no generalization is 100% accurate for everyone. And it may be argued which came first, the dedication to 'success' or sleep deprivation--chicken and egg. Here are more consequences: http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/important-sleep-habits
So what else does your brain do while you sleep? First you should know that your brain may be busier when you sleep than when you are awake. It's that busy. Not dreaming necessarily as that is more of a side effect. Yes, you read that right.
The most important activity your brain does when you sleep is house cleaning. Blood vessels that are so tiny they can hardly be detected in daytime enlarge greatly inside the brain when you sleep. They carry away amyloid beta among other things. The brain makes amyloid beta and needs it when you are awake, though the reasons are unclear. It is cleared away by those blood vessels when you sleep. Too much retained in the brain may be a primary cause for Alzheimer's. Lack of sufficient sleep would mean amyloid beta would stay in the brain. Almost every brain analyzed of Alzheimer's sufferers contained plaque of amyloid beta.
Also during sleep the clutter of what accumulated while you were awake is cleaned out. Everything you see, hear, taste, touch, smell and think during the daytime is too much to commit to memory. So priorities are made and the necessary stuff is committed to memory. The rest is cleared away.
The brain actually does some problem solving while you sleep. Have you ever wrestled with a problem you could not solve during the day, then wakened at night or in the morning with the solution ready at hand? The brain does figuring like that, sorting through data, prioritizing it, then working out a solution while you sleep. A sleep deprived brain can't do that.
Dreaming helps people to make sense of what they experienced during their waking hours. Sometimes, not always. Often daytime experiences are assembled in an incorrect order and they emerge at night as dreams. Science is not certain what causes nightmares, though there are many theories. Dreams tend to be refashioned assemblies of experiences and thoughts of the previous few days.
What about naps during the daytime? Do they do good or harm? A nap may give rest to a tired physical body. It may also give the brain time to consolidate what has been learned over the previous few hours. Consolidating new learning is one critically important function of sleep. Science has proven that staying up late to cram for an exam often results in confusion and forgetfulness during the exam itself.
Better to learn a bit at a time, then sleep or nap to consolidate it and commit it to memory. You can't draw on information that is not already in your memory.
Why do you desperately need your sleep? Because you desperately need your brain to help you avoid being a boring drone with a limited future and a lifespan that is shorter than it should be.
The human brain has been under intense scrutiny for studies in recent years. Brain transplants, uploading data to the brain and artificial electronic brains are under study, but are many years away from any kind of conclusion, let alone approval.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems and hundreds of articles which are available on the internet by searching his name.
Learn more at billallin.com
How about those people who don't need sleep? What are they called again? Successful? What a bunch of dicks they are.
Jim Gaffigan, American comedian
The significance of that quote goes far deeper than the joke Jim intended. "Successful" tends to refer to people who make a lot of money. They are usually workaholics, they neglect their families (if they have families that are still together), they are first in line for divorce, many commit "white collar" crimes that make us wonder "What were they thinking?" Most of them die wondering what their lives might have been like if they had not idolized money.
One characteristic they all have in common--all people self described as "successful"--is they get only a few hours of sleep each night. The payoff for them is their feeling of success and the size of their investment portfolio.
Most are narcissistic, even to the point of being borderline (or actually) psychopathic. They are the ones that those they consider "unsuccessful" think of as slaves to a system with money as its god. If they are not actually in the "1%" they are strong supporters of those who are. Any support for those who are desperately in need through no fault of their own comes with a catch--tax deduction, social status, self-aggrandizement.
In my experience (anecdotal evidence only) these self described "successful" people all believe that they can get along with only a minimum of sleep. To them, sleep is the equivalent of a long coffee break.
That is patently false, which is why so many of them lead single purpose lives, like monks, and why most of them die far younger than they believed they should, having suffered for too many years before their death with unexplained health problems.
As they lie dying they will be visited by family members and other individuals whose names appear in their will. They bought that devotion.
The above is but one consequence of sleep deprivation. As always, no generalization is 100% accurate for everyone. And it may be argued which came first, the dedication to 'success' or sleep deprivation--chicken and egg. Here are more consequences: http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/important-sleep-habits
So what else does your brain do while you sleep? First you should know that your brain may be busier when you sleep than when you are awake. It's that busy. Not dreaming necessarily as that is more of a side effect. Yes, you read that right.
The most important activity your brain does when you sleep is house cleaning. Blood vessels that are so tiny they can hardly be detected in daytime enlarge greatly inside the brain when you sleep. They carry away amyloid beta among other things. The brain makes amyloid beta and needs it when you are awake, though the reasons are unclear. It is cleared away by those blood vessels when you sleep. Too much retained in the brain may be a primary cause for Alzheimer's. Lack of sufficient sleep would mean amyloid beta would stay in the brain. Almost every brain analyzed of Alzheimer's sufferers contained plaque of amyloid beta.
Also during sleep the clutter of what accumulated while you were awake is cleaned out. Everything you see, hear, taste, touch, smell and think during the daytime is too much to commit to memory. So priorities are made and the necessary stuff is committed to memory. The rest is cleared away.
The brain actually does some problem solving while you sleep. Have you ever wrestled with a problem you could not solve during the day, then wakened at night or in the morning with the solution ready at hand? The brain does figuring like that, sorting through data, prioritizing it, then working out a solution while you sleep. A sleep deprived brain can't do that.
Dreaming helps people to make sense of what they experienced during their waking hours. Sometimes, not always. Often daytime experiences are assembled in an incorrect order and they emerge at night as dreams. Science is not certain what causes nightmares, though there are many theories. Dreams tend to be refashioned assemblies of experiences and thoughts of the previous few days.
What about naps during the daytime? Do they do good or harm? A nap may give rest to a tired physical body. It may also give the brain time to consolidate what has been learned over the previous few hours. Consolidating new learning is one critically important function of sleep. Science has proven that staying up late to cram for an exam often results in confusion and forgetfulness during the exam itself.
Better to learn a bit at a time, then sleep or nap to consolidate it and commit it to memory. You can't draw on information that is not already in your memory.
Why do you desperately need your sleep? Because you desperately need your brain to help you avoid being a boring drone with a limited future and a lifespan that is shorter than it should be.
The human brain has been under intense scrutiny for studies in recent years. Brain transplants, uploading data to the brain and artificial electronic brains are under study, but are many years away from any kind of conclusion, let alone approval.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems and hundreds of articles which are available on the internet by searching his name.
Learn more at billallin.com
Sunday, February 14, 2016
Who Lied to You Today? Your Immune System
Who Lied to You Today? Your Immune System
Nature is a numbers game. We need all the support we can get as our immune systems and health are under assault from pollution, stress, contaminated food and age-related diseases as our lifespans increase.
- Paul Stamets, world's preeminent expert on mushrooms--he has more viable ways to save our planet and our health than most people can imagine
I struggled with the title for this article. You will soon see why. No physicians, no government health "experts," no journalists and very few researchers will dare to tell you what you are about to read about your immune system. I mean that sincerely. They are afraid to tell you. So be prepared to be shocked.
Your grandparents knew nothing about immune systems. Your parents' generation knew very little because the whole concept was new to the medical community they learned from. Good health was still more good luck than good management.
You probably know far more than any generation before you. Yet what you think you know is likely wrong, at least inaccurate. Bear with me as this may be uncomfortable, even ugly, for you.
What you know as YOU, the living entity with your name, is not just one being. The only part that is distinctly YOU is your personality or, as some might say, your soul. Are your own body cells not YOU? Maybe, but maybe not. Read on.
The biggest part of what you think of as YOU is comprised of the cells of your body. They, even together, are only a small minority of the living entities that live together inside your skin. A majority of the rest is bacteria, though some are actually beneficial viruses. A large majority of them--about 80%--live in your gut. Specifically in your colon, your large intestine. Yes, the place where you store your poop before you excrete it from your body.
Uncomfortable yet? These microbiota, along with those on your skin, in your mouth, around or in every organ of your body and in every orifice are what mot people think of as their immune system. That's right, your immune system is NOT part of the cells of your body. It works in coordination with the cells of your body.
These microbiota, what advertisements seem to call germs to be gotten rid of, and what antibiotics and other contaminants kill freely, live in symbiosis with the cells of your body. There are trillions of them. At least as many as you have cells, most scientists say ten times as many as you have cells, some say as much as 100 times as many as you have cells.
Why the apparent differences in number? Because so often what you eat or take as medical prescriptions kills so many of them, all at once. You can't live without them. I mean you would die without them. Not just from infection due to lack of ability to fight off disease.
Upset these little guys with a bad diet and they react as if they are under attack. They can actually allow disease (such as cancer) to spread in a desperate attempt to get rid of what they don't like, what does not allow them to thrive.
Science now considers these microbiota so important that it considers them, collectively, as a second brain. You read that right. Just recently the link between the microbiota in the gut (yes, found in your poop as well as around it) and your brain was discovered. Your two brains work together.
I should emphasize here that your brain is yours, comprised of your own cells. Your other brain is not. Is your head brain all you? Your DNA is composed of genetic material that comes largely from bacteria, in our distant human past. Some strands of DNA have come from viruses. Since your DNA produces the cells of your body, are your own body cells all YOU or just another part of a composite mega-organism comprised of trillions of parts that live in interdependent symbiosis?
Should your second brain not protect you against cancer? Usually it does. Research on this is still in early stages, but it seems that your second brain allows cancer cells to grow and spread as a kind of defence against other invasions, other health problems. Cancer cells and other diseases, it seems, can kill other body invaders. But, like allergies, sometimes the defenders take over and kill the main body itself. The military calls that collateral damage.
Why can't the protectors be stopped? Maybe they can. The protectors are powerful. What would you do to try to stop a powerful killing machine such as the US military if the US military were attacking you and your people? The problem is no less complicated than that.
We know very little about how our own brain, the one that is comprised of our own body cells, works. What we know about how our second brain, the one in our gut, is almost nothing. We do know that when we feed it a diet it doesn't like it becomes our enemy. A deadly enemy.
That second brain also has a great deal to do with mood, our feeling of well-being, even our attitude toward life. It likely is more powerful than our own brain (the head one) in the sense that it can affect decisions we make, including those that risk our life, whether or not we break laws, how we make choices between right and wrong, even about addictive behaviours and suicide.
We know that our second brain is supposed to be an ally. That should cause us to want to support it, to strengthen it, not to kill it or weaken it.
I am not able to present evidence to support all of these claims here due to space requirements. You have starting places if you want to search to learn more yourself.
If you have comments or questions please feel free to write them. I will do my best to address them.
Bill Allin is the author of the book Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems and hundreds of articles which are available on the internet. Search for them using the author's name.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Nature is a numbers game. We need all the support we can get as our immune systems and health are under assault from pollution, stress, contaminated food and age-related diseases as our lifespans increase.
- Paul Stamets, world's preeminent expert on mushrooms--he has more viable ways to save our planet and our health than most people can imagine
I struggled with the title for this article. You will soon see why. No physicians, no government health "experts," no journalists and very few researchers will dare to tell you what you are about to read about your immune system. I mean that sincerely. They are afraid to tell you. So be prepared to be shocked.
Your grandparents knew nothing about immune systems. Your parents' generation knew very little because the whole concept was new to the medical community they learned from. Good health was still more good luck than good management.
You probably know far more than any generation before you. Yet what you think you know is likely wrong, at least inaccurate. Bear with me as this may be uncomfortable, even ugly, for you.
What you know as YOU, the living entity with your name, is not just one being. The only part that is distinctly YOU is your personality or, as some might say, your soul. Are your own body cells not YOU? Maybe, but maybe not. Read on.
The biggest part of what you think of as YOU is comprised of the cells of your body. They, even together, are only a small minority of the living entities that live together inside your skin. A majority of the rest is bacteria, though some are actually beneficial viruses. A large majority of them--about 80%--live in your gut. Specifically in your colon, your large intestine. Yes, the place where you store your poop before you excrete it from your body.
Uncomfortable yet? These microbiota, along with those on your skin, in your mouth, around or in every organ of your body and in every orifice are what mot people think of as their immune system. That's right, your immune system is NOT part of the cells of your body. It works in coordination with the cells of your body.
These microbiota, what advertisements seem to call germs to be gotten rid of, and what antibiotics and other contaminants kill freely, live in symbiosis with the cells of your body. There are trillions of them. At least as many as you have cells, most scientists say ten times as many as you have cells, some say as much as 100 times as many as you have cells.
Why the apparent differences in number? Because so often what you eat or take as medical prescriptions kills so many of them, all at once. You can't live without them. I mean you would die without them. Not just from infection due to lack of ability to fight off disease.
Upset these little guys with a bad diet and they react as if they are under attack. They can actually allow disease (such as cancer) to spread in a desperate attempt to get rid of what they don't like, what does not allow them to thrive.
Science now considers these microbiota so important that it considers them, collectively, as a second brain. You read that right. Just recently the link between the microbiota in the gut (yes, found in your poop as well as around it) and your brain was discovered. Your two brains work together.
I should emphasize here that your brain is yours, comprised of your own cells. Your other brain is not. Is your head brain all you? Your DNA is composed of genetic material that comes largely from bacteria, in our distant human past. Some strands of DNA have come from viruses. Since your DNA produces the cells of your body, are your own body cells all YOU or just another part of a composite mega-organism comprised of trillions of parts that live in interdependent symbiosis?
Should your second brain not protect you against cancer? Usually it does. Research on this is still in early stages, but it seems that your second brain allows cancer cells to grow and spread as a kind of defence against other invasions, other health problems. Cancer cells and other diseases, it seems, can kill other body invaders. But, like allergies, sometimes the defenders take over and kill the main body itself. The military calls that collateral damage.
Why can't the protectors be stopped? Maybe they can. The protectors are powerful. What would you do to try to stop a powerful killing machine such as the US military if the US military were attacking you and your people? The problem is no less complicated than that.
We know very little about how our own brain, the one that is comprised of our own body cells, works. What we know about how our second brain, the one in our gut, is almost nothing. We do know that when we feed it a diet it doesn't like it becomes our enemy. A deadly enemy.
That second brain also has a great deal to do with mood, our feeling of well-being, even our attitude toward life. It likely is more powerful than our own brain (the head one) in the sense that it can affect decisions we make, including those that risk our life, whether or not we break laws, how we make choices between right and wrong, even about addictive behaviours and suicide.
We know that our second brain is supposed to be an ally. That should cause us to want to support it, to strengthen it, not to kill it or weaken it.
I am not able to present evidence to support all of these claims here due to space requirements. You have starting places if you want to search to learn more yourself.
If you have comments or questions please feel free to write them. I will do my best to address them.
Bill Allin is the author of the book Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems and hundreds of articles which are available on the internet. Search for them using the author's name.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Sunday, November 01, 2015
Who-Lied-to-You-Today-Advertising-about-your-Head
Who Lied to You Today? Advertising about your Head
Beneath the makeup and behind the smile I am just a girl who wishes for the world.
- Marilyn Monroe
Most of what we learn about our head and parts of it that require our personal care we learn from our parents, our peers or from advertising. Most of what we learn from parents and peers can be directed back to advertising. Most of that is misleading, distorted or clearly wrong. Some is even harmful.
But we believe it, which is why industries that create the advertising keep it going. To them, what is important is not the truth or your health or best interests, but the fact that you keeping buying their products.
A smile makes anyone beautiful. Cosmetics (and a smile) can make the proverbial silk purse out of the sow's ear. What we know as the cosmetics industry today began with the rise of Hollywood and Bollywood. Cosmetics were intended to attract attention to a character for a couple of hours. But life is longer than that.
Eventually the smile drops and the makeup comes off. Then two people who were attracted to one another in that artificial state must deal with real life. With "just a girl" as Marilyn said it. Cosmetics of one sort or another can be as important to a man wanting to influence others as to a woman.
No one can be certain how many breakups and divorces result from the realization that the real people involved in a relationship do not match with the artificial character behind or beneath the cosmetics. Cosmetics hide the real person only temporarily.
Teeth whitening began in Hollywood when actors and actresses wanted to be seen on screen and noted while those with real teeth colour were not. Off screen, whitened teeth look fake to anyone paying attention for more than a few seconds. Note that many teeth whiteners are composed of hydrogen peroxide, which used to be known as oxygen bleach. Yes, bleach.
Two grades of hydrogen peroxide are available on the market. The kind you buy in a dollar store or most pharmacies will say 3% on it. That is not food grade peroxide. Food grade is much harder to find and is about 35%. As the tissue (skin) inside your mouth is very porous and easily absorbs anything, you want to be certain that you do not put a chemical that is not food grade in there.
Mouthwashes promise to remove millions of vile and supposedly dangerous "germs" from your mouth. Yet saliva does that. A large majority of what advertising claims as "germs" are really microbes that are part of your immune system. Your body protects itself from stuff it doesn't want to hurt you by killing it as you are eating. Kill those microbes and you destroy part of your immune system. Mouthwashes that claim to kill 99% of mouth germs never tell you in their advertising about the fact that they also kill part of your immune system, your body's first line of defence. "Clean" your mouth, destroy your immune system.
Tooth brushing you see in commercials is all wrong and will do nothing to prevent caries (the proper dental term for what the rest of us call cavities). Mostly the brushes swipe the broad sides of teeth, which are kept clean by the foods you eat anyway. Nobody gets cavities there. Eating an apple will do that.
We get cavities, if at all, between our teeth and at their base where the gumline is. Brushes do not get there easily, no matter what the commercials say. Only floss can do that. You can buy a pick at a pharmacy that will allow you to remove anything that has built up at the base of your teeth or between them. That is what a dental hygienist uses.
If you use a brush on the flat surface of your teeth, don't spend more time doing it than a hygienist does. A few seconds per tooth. More than that and you will grind away at the enamel and dentin that protect your teeth from attack. That would result in tooth sensitivity, meaning pain, which would cause you to have to spend more money on toothpaste that is specially made to be gentle.
All toothpastes are designed to grind the teeth. Almost all contain fluoride, which is a poison. The advertising never mentions that. Poison. Read ingredient lists on stuff you put into your mouth to see how many end with "...ide". They are all poisons. Try to dispose of fluoride in the USA and you will find it is declared a hazardous waste and must be disposed of in an environmentally safe way.
If you must brush, understand that toothpaste accomplishes nothing. You don't need it at all. Brush, using water only, horizontally along the gumline, not vertically across your teeth. Cavities grow out of plaque, which is composed of harmful microbes that eat through the enamel and dentin. Remove that and you eliminate the cause of cavities. Those harmful microbes hide where you don't normally brush.
Any over the counter medication you buy at a pharmacy when you have an ache in a tooth or an ear will be mild and only act temporarily, if at all. If they work, you may be experiencing the placebo effect. Not bad considering that the placebo effect works in up to 30 percent of people who believe they are being helped. A doctor or dentist can prescribe something stronger, or cure your problem by eliminating the cause.
Shampoos that "clean" your hair while leaving something beneficial in it don't really clean. Yes, the take away protective oil from your hair, then leave deposits of other stuff that does nothing to add to your hair's health. Only pure soap, such as from a bar, will wash your hair clean. For a conditioner (to keep your hair shiny and deter tangles, use a mixture of one part apple cider vinegar and two parts water.
If you wash your hair with city water, remember that most city water contains chlorine, another poison. Chlorine kills microbes in water cities take from rivers or lakes. Inevitably it will also kill healthy bacteria on your skin, another way your body protects itself from attack with its own immune system.
Does it seem as if advertising presents you with a favourable impression about products that will or could do you more harm than good? Now you understand why it is important for you to know about them.
Cosmetics industries create repeat customers the way pharmaceutical companies create lifetime patients, by causing problems that keep you coming back for more.
The above is intended to cause you to think carefully about the chemicals you use on your body. It is not intended to be conclusive or persuasive, or medical advice. It is intended to make sense. Each point is backed by science. Advertising does not have to make sense to be effective at persuading people to buy a product. It just has to make money for the manufacturer. And it does, which is why you see so much of it.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book or inexpensive solutions parents and teachers can use to help grow healthy children. He has also authored hundreds of articles.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Beneath the makeup and behind the smile I am just a girl who wishes for the world.
- Marilyn Monroe
Most of what we learn about our head and parts of it that require our personal care we learn from our parents, our peers or from advertising. Most of what we learn from parents and peers can be directed back to advertising. Most of that is misleading, distorted or clearly wrong. Some is even harmful.
But we believe it, which is why industries that create the advertising keep it going. To them, what is important is not the truth or your health or best interests, but the fact that you keeping buying their products.
A smile makes anyone beautiful. Cosmetics (and a smile) can make the proverbial silk purse out of the sow's ear. What we know as the cosmetics industry today began with the rise of Hollywood and Bollywood. Cosmetics were intended to attract attention to a character for a couple of hours. But life is longer than that.
Eventually the smile drops and the makeup comes off. Then two people who were attracted to one another in that artificial state must deal with real life. With "just a girl" as Marilyn said it. Cosmetics of one sort or another can be as important to a man wanting to influence others as to a woman.
No one can be certain how many breakups and divorces result from the realization that the real people involved in a relationship do not match with the artificial character behind or beneath the cosmetics. Cosmetics hide the real person only temporarily.
Teeth whitening began in Hollywood when actors and actresses wanted to be seen on screen and noted while those with real teeth colour were not. Off screen, whitened teeth look fake to anyone paying attention for more than a few seconds. Note that many teeth whiteners are composed of hydrogen peroxide, which used to be known as oxygen bleach. Yes, bleach.
Two grades of hydrogen peroxide are available on the market. The kind you buy in a dollar store or most pharmacies will say 3% on it. That is not food grade peroxide. Food grade is much harder to find and is about 35%. As the tissue (skin) inside your mouth is very porous and easily absorbs anything, you want to be certain that you do not put a chemical that is not food grade in there.
Mouthwashes promise to remove millions of vile and supposedly dangerous "germs" from your mouth. Yet saliva does that. A large majority of what advertising claims as "germs" are really microbes that are part of your immune system. Your body protects itself from stuff it doesn't want to hurt you by killing it as you are eating. Kill those microbes and you destroy part of your immune system. Mouthwashes that claim to kill 99% of mouth germs never tell you in their advertising about the fact that they also kill part of your immune system, your body's first line of defence. "Clean" your mouth, destroy your immune system.
Tooth brushing you see in commercials is all wrong and will do nothing to prevent caries (the proper dental term for what the rest of us call cavities). Mostly the brushes swipe the broad sides of teeth, which are kept clean by the foods you eat anyway. Nobody gets cavities there. Eating an apple will do that.
We get cavities, if at all, between our teeth and at their base where the gumline is. Brushes do not get there easily, no matter what the commercials say. Only floss can do that. You can buy a pick at a pharmacy that will allow you to remove anything that has built up at the base of your teeth or between them. That is what a dental hygienist uses.
If you use a brush on the flat surface of your teeth, don't spend more time doing it than a hygienist does. A few seconds per tooth. More than that and you will grind away at the enamel and dentin that protect your teeth from attack. That would result in tooth sensitivity, meaning pain, which would cause you to have to spend more money on toothpaste that is specially made to be gentle.
All toothpastes are designed to grind the teeth. Almost all contain fluoride, which is a poison. The advertising never mentions that. Poison. Read ingredient lists on stuff you put into your mouth to see how many end with "...ide". They are all poisons. Try to dispose of fluoride in the USA and you will find it is declared a hazardous waste and must be disposed of in an environmentally safe way.
If you must brush, understand that toothpaste accomplishes nothing. You don't need it at all. Brush, using water only, horizontally along the gumline, not vertically across your teeth. Cavities grow out of plaque, which is composed of harmful microbes that eat through the enamel and dentin. Remove that and you eliminate the cause of cavities. Those harmful microbes hide where you don't normally brush.
Any over the counter medication you buy at a pharmacy when you have an ache in a tooth or an ear will be mild and only act temporarily, if at all. If they work, you may be experiencing the placebo effect. Not bad considering that the placebo effect works in up to 30 percent of people who believe they are being helped. A doctor or dentist can prescribe something stronger, or cure your problem by eliminating the cause.
Shampoos that "clean" your hair while leaving something beneficial in it don't really clean. Yes, the take away protective oil from your hair, then leave deposits of other stuff that does nothing to add to your hair's health. Only pure soap, such as from a bar, will wash your hair clean. For a conditioner (to keep your hair shiny and deter tangles, use a mixture of one part apple cider vinegar and two parts water.
If you wash your hair with city water, remember that most city water contains chlorine, another poison. Chlorine kills microbes in water cities take from rivers or lakes. Inevitably it will also kill healthy bacteria on your skin, another way your body protects itself from attack with its own immune system.
Does it seem as if advertising presents you with a favourable impression about products that will or could do you more harm than good? Now you understand why it is important for you to know about them.
Cosmetics industries create repeat customers the way pharmaceutical companies create lifetime patients, by causing problems that keep you coming back for more.
The above is intended to cause you to think carefully about the chemicals you use on your body. It is not intended to be conclusive or persuasive, or medical advice. It is intended to make sense. Each point is backed by science. Advertising does not have to make sense to be effective at persuading people to buy a product. It just has to make money for the manufacturer. And it does, which is why you see so much of it.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book or inexpensive solutions parents and teachers can use to help grow healthy children. He has also authored hundreds of articles.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Who Lied To You Today? Fracking
Who Lied To You Today? Fracking
Almost all of what we are taught--we think of it as news--by television and other media, by politicians and by religious leaders is either false, misleading, misstatement of facts or plain deception. To them it's all part of the game of life.
Take the following for what it's worth, or leave it. It is not based on scientific research which, like statistics, can be manipulated to say anything the writer or sponsor wants. It is based on logic, what makes sense and what does not.
Hydraulic fracturing (also known as fracking) involves forcing toxic chemicals into permeable rock underground. Resource companies claim the process is safe, though they will not reveal what chemicals are used. The poisons remain within the rock forever, or until they are released into groundwater that people drink. In some cases fracking has been proven to cause minor earthquakes.
Chemicals are governed by law in the USA and available to public scrutiny in the Environmetnal Protection Agency's data base of toxic chemicals. Except for those that were in use before the law--Toxic Substances Control Act--came into effect in 1976. They were grandfathered and assumed to be safe, were never studied. Tens of thousands of chemicals in use today are not listed and need not be revealed by companies engaging in hydraulic fracturing.
That's why fracking companies need not reveal the chemicals used in their underground explosions. Chemicals that could leak into drinking water that would not even be tested by municipalities. Other countries depend on the EPA list of toxic chemicals as if it was exhaustive, which it certainly is not.
Why don't governments take action against the perpetrators of these crimes? The natural resource companies always claim that they offer jobs. To politicians, the offer of jobs may even been more attractive than a good bribe because more jobs mean a better chance of being elected next term.
When the resource companies--never ones to be inconvenienced by possible damage to the planet or to human health of its workers--feel threatened by politicians, they warn that closing down will mean loss of jobs. That tends to silence political interference.
As of 2015, the government of Canada has sole possession of and responsibility for 22,000 former mines contaminated with poisons in the area. In one former mine area alone, the Giant Mine in Yellowknife, once a few billion dollars of taxpayer money has been spent cleaning up the area, it will cost two million per year just to maintain the frozen ground where arsenic is stored. Residents around these areas fervently hope that flooding does not contaminate the soil of the land where they live, and their bodies in the process. All of those mining companies went "bankrupt" leaving taxpayers to clean up after them indefinitely.
Ironically, when the companies negotiate with the governments and find themselves forced to take measures to protect the health of workers and the environment, they tend to become more efficient and garner greater profits. However, this evidence has little impact on their drive to make profit as quickly as possible.
Our planet is not short of energy resources, no matter what you may hear. Big oil companies, who receive the most flack from the public, are the biggest investors in alternative energy sources such as solar energy and wind power.
The claim is that solar and wind are not dependable because they are not consistent and dependable sources of power when people need it most. For that reason, resource companies claim, taking resources from the ground is and always will be necessary.
But they never mention the most plentiful and dependable sources of all. Our planet is always warmer one kilometer and more beneath the surface--a common depth to dig for other resources--than it is higher up. Difference in temperature means a dependable source of power.
The oceans almost always have waves, even if they don't have much wind blowing above them. Waves have energy. Tides have energy so long as we have a moon.
More importantly, water temperature varies a great deal from the surface to a short distance below. That never varies, just as the heat from the interior of our planet never varies. Both are infinite for our purposes.
Even water itself is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, both sources of energy.
Could we run out of water to convert to power? Recent study has shown that there is at least as much water locked in rock in earth's mantel as there is in all the water on the surface of the planet.
What about desertification? Are not droughts causing fertile land to become deserts, as happened in the Levant, the land east of the Mediterranean that most westerners call the Holy Land? It is true that the Levant was once as fertile as the Garden of Eden--human agriculture began there--until climate change made it into mostly desert.
Even in Israel, Syria and Lebanon, farming takes place. It's all a matter of growing crops appropriate for the climate. Under the world's largest desert, the Sahara, lies the world's largest underground freshwater lake.
Fracking is not necessary to get cheap energy when free and sustainable sources that will last forever are available. We should not expect resource companies to be open about offering to do what is right by its employees or the planet. They have never behaved that way.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about do-able and inexpensive solutions to our worst problems. Fracking is a social problem when it affects the lives of many people.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Additional material about hydraulic fracturing
There are many, and I mean MANY, examples of fracking problems in the USA. Most of them involve leaking of chemicals into ground water that is later used as drinking water. Hydraulic fracturing involves having a soup of chemicals (no company will ever reveal the mixture because it would shock everyone and cause the practice to be stopped--they claim their mixture is an industry secret, a coverup) explode deep under ground. The purpose is to crack the rock (the explosions are that great) that natural gas that is trapped within the rock will seep out.
As you think about that and the nature of natural gas, being as gas that can seep anywhere, you can see that, unlike with liquids, natural gas is extremely difficult to control and contain. The chemical soup itself is easier to control if it is inside of a container on the surface of the ground. But underground, after an explosion of rock that no one can tell how much crack will happen (it is usually shale rock, not granite that would be easier to estimate and control) the liquid could go anywhere. In many cases in the US, it has gone into drinking water sources.
Many countries have banned fracking entirely, deeming it too risky. The USA and Canada, being essentially job whores, have made fracking legal and licensed in many places. (I use the term "job whores" as a derogatory condemnation, without meaning any reference to prostitution--which I do not condemn.)
The most attractive lure of fracking is jobs. That is what gets the attention of politicians and they in turn get votes based on their perceived creation of "new jobs."
In fact, fracking requires few workers. Some highly trained people are brought in from their last jobs (never from the untrained local labour group), plus truck drivers. I feel safe in saying that there is no community in existence where fracking has been used that is entirely satisfied with the industry. Most residents anywhere near the mines are afraid they or their children will die one day from contamination of their drinking water by the poisons from fracking.
Like virtually every natural resource company, when they have a financial problem they declare bankruptcy and vanish into the night. One Canadian mine will cost Canadian taxpayers $2 million every year, forever, to contain poisons that if let out would kill every person in the nearby town.
Two additional points are worth making about fracking.
First is that it uses an enormous amount of fresh water, which is then contaminated by its chemicals. In Saskatchewan, for example, where fracking is taking place full bore, fracking is taking away fresh water needed by the Canadian province's most important industry, agriculture. Farms cannot risk using water that could possibly be contaminated by fracking chemicals because produce from the farms is all used for food. Already a province that is usually not blessed with an abundance of clean water, Saskatchewan now does not have enough water to service its food-growing agriculture needs.
Second is that while the waste water from fracking can be reused--fracking companies would rather not reuse its own water because its used water has pulled heavy metals out of the ground it fractured--it must be stored in the meantime. Who wants contaminated water stored near their home? Where can you imagine it would be safe to store contaminated water indefinitely? My country, Canada, has water all over its surface, perhaps more than any other country in the world, and we are concerned about leakage that would contaminate our fresh water. Contaminated water in surface water could be used for drinking, but it is also used by countless animals, plants and beneficial microbes that allow food to be grown in the soil.
Even if the waste water from fracking were safe (bear with me, I know it is not), the heavy metals drawn from the ground would make it unsafe. When it comes to water, fracking is a lose-lose situation.
While Nova Scotia has put a moratorium on fracking, waste water from fracking exploration mines in NS still needs to be disposed of. No community in Nova Scotia would allow it to be put into their sewer system. No community in neighbouring New Brunswick would allow it to be put into their sewer system, even when large amounts of money were offered for doing just that by the company involved. International law forbids it from being dumped into the oceans.
How safe can a liquid be if it can't even be dumped into the ocean? Our oceans have two huge garbage patches each larger than small countries, but fracking waste water is not allowed.
Fracking companies, like every mining operation that ever existed in history, will lie through its teeth, swearing it is telling the truth on the grave of its mother. Not a single one of them could ever be trusted. They have done more damage to our planet and its (former, often now extinct) life forms than any other cause.
The University of Toronto Magazine online has an article in its Winter 2015 edition that will explain more about fracking from a political science professor who is as much of an expert on the subject as anyone (given the secrecy that surrounds fracking operations at all levels).
On Shaky Ground | Dale Sproule | Winter 2015 | University of Toronto Magazine
image
http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/leading-edge/on-shaky-ground-dale-sproule-andrea-olive/
Almost all of what we are taught--we think of it as news--by television and other media, by politicians and by religious leaders is either false, misleading, misstatement of facts or plain deception. To them it's all part of the game of life.
Take the following for what it's worth, or leave it. It is not based on scientific research which, like statistics, can be manipulated to say anything the writer or sponsor wants. It is based on logic, what makes sense and what does not.
Hydraulic fracturing (also known as fracking) involves forcing toxic chemicals into permeable rock underground. Resource companies claim the process is safe, though they will not reveal what chemicals are used. The poisons remain within the rock forever, or until they are released into groundwater that people drink. In some cases fracking has been proven to cause minor earthquakes.
Chemicals are governed by law in the USA and available to public scrutiny in the Environmetnal Protection Agency's data base of toxic chemicals. Except for those that were in use before the law--Toxic Substances Control Act--came into effect in 1976. They were grandfathered and assumed to be safe, were never studied. Tens of thousands of chemicals in use today are not listed and need not be revealed by companies engaging in hydraulic fracturing.
That's why fracking companies need not reveal the chemicals used in their underground explosions. Chemicals that could leak into drinking water that would not even be tested by municipalities. Other countries depend on the EPA list of toxic chemicals as if it was exhaustive, which it certainly is not.
Why don't governments take action against the perpetrators of these crimes? The natural resource companies always claim that they offer jobs. To politicians, the offer of jobs may even been more attractive than a good bribe because more jobs mean a better chance of being elected next term.
When the resource companies--never ones to be inconvenienced by possible damage to the planet or to human health of its workers--feel threatened by politicians, they warn that closing down will mean loss of jobs. That tends to silence political interference.
As of 2015, the government of Canada has sole possession of and responsibility for 22,000 former mines contaminated with poisons in the area. In one former mine area alone, the Giant Mine in Yellowknife, once a few billion dollars of taxpayer money has been spent cleaning up the area, it will cost two million per year just to maintain the frozen ground where arsenic is stored. Residents around these areas fervently hope that flooding does not contaminate the soil of the land where they live, and their bodies in the process. All of those mining companies went "bankrupt" leaving taxpayers to clean up after them indefinitely.
Ironically, when the companies negotiate with the governments and find themselves forced to take measures to protect the health of workers and the environment, they tend to become more efficient and garner greater profits. However, this evidence has little impact on their drive to make profit as quickly as possible.
Our planet is not short of energy resources, no matter what you may hear. Big oil companies, who receive the most flack from the public, are the biggest investors in alternative energy sources such as solar energy and wind power.
The claim is that solar and wind are not dependable because they are not consistent and dependable sources of power when people need it most. For that reason, resource companies claim, taking resources from the ground is and always will be necessary.
But they never mention the most plentiful and dependable sources of all. Our planet is always warmer one kilometer and more beneath the surface--a common depth to dig for other resources--than it is higher up. Difference in temperature means a dependable source of power.
The oceans almost always have waves, even if they don't have much wind blowing above them. Waves have energy. Tides have energy so long as we have a moon.
More importantly, water temperature varies a great deal from the surface to a short distance below. That never varies, just as the heat from the interior of our planet never varies. Both are infinite for our purposes.
Even water itself is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, both sources of energy.
Could we run out of water to convert to power? Recent study has shown that there is at least as much water locked in rock in earth's mantel as there is in all the water on the surface of the planet.
What about desertification? Are not droughts causing fertile land to become deserts, as happened in the Levant, the land east of the Mediterranean that most westerners call the Holy Land? It is true that the Levant was once as fertile as the Garden of Eden--human agriculture began there--until climate change made it into mostly desert.
Even in Israel, Syria and Lebanon, farming takes place. It's all a matter of growing crops appropriate for the climate. Under the world's largest desert, the Sahara, lies the world's largest underground freshwater lake.
Fracking is not necessary to get cheap energy when free and sustainable sources that will last forever are available. We should not expect resource companies to be open about offering to do what is right by its employees or the planet. They have never behaved that way.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about do-able and inexpensive solutions to our worst problems. Fracking is a social problem when it affects the lives of many people.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Additional material about hydraulic fracturing
There are many, and I mean MANY, examples of fracking problems in the USA. Most of them involve leaking of chemicals into ground water that is later used as drinking water. Hydraulic fracturing involves having a soup of chemicals (no company will ever reveal the mixture because it would shock everyone and cause the practice to be stopped--they claim their mixture is an industry secret, a coverup) explode deep under ground. The purpose is to crack the rock (the explosions are that great) that natural gas that is trapped within the rock will seep out.
As you think about that and the nature of natural gas, being as gas that can seep anywhere, you can see that, unlike with liquids, natural gas is extremely difficult to control and contain. The chemical soup itself is easier to control if it is inside of a container on the surface of the ground. But underground, after an explosion of rock that no one can tell how much crack will happen (it is usually shale rock, not granite that would be easier to estimate and control) the liquid could go anywhere. In many cases in the US, it has gone into drinking water sources.
Many countries have banned fracking entirely, deeming it too risky. The USA and Canada, being essentially job whores, have made fracking legal and licensed in many places. (I use the term "job whores" as a derogatory condemnation, without meaning any reference to prostitution--which I do not condemn.)
The most attractive lure of fracking is jobs. That is what gets the attention of politicians and they in turn get votes based on their perceived creation of "new jobs."
In fact, fracking requires few workers. Some highly trained people are brought in from their last jobs (never from the untrained local labour group), plus truck drivers. I feel safe in saying that there is no community in existence where fracking has been used that is entirely satisfied with the industry. Most residents anywhere near the mines are afraid they or their children will die one day from contamination of their drinking water by the poisons from fracking.
Like virtually every natural resource company, when they have a financial problem they declare bankruptcy and vanish into the night. One Canadian mine will cost Canadian taxpayers $2 million every year, forever, to contain poisons that if let out would kill every person in the nearby town.
Two additional points are worth making about fracking.
First is that it uses an enormous amount of fresh water, which is then contaminated by its chemicals. In Saskatchewan, for example, where fracking is taking place full bore, fracking is taking away fresh water needed by the Canadian province's most important industry, agriculture. Farms cannot risk using water that could possibly be contaminated by fracking chemicals because produce from the farms is all used for food. Already a province that is usually not blessed with an abundance of clean water, Saskatchewan now does not have enough water to service its food-growing agriculture needs.
Second is that while the waste water from fracking can be reused--fracking companies would rather not reuse its own water because its used water has pulled heavy metals out of the ground it fractured--it must be stored in the meantime. Who wants contaminated water stored near their home? Where can you imagine it would be safe to store contaminated water indefinitely? My country, Canada, has water all over its surface, perhaps more than any other country in the world, and we are concerned about leakage that would contaminate our fresh water. Contaminated water in surface water could be used for drinking, but it is also used by countless animals, plants and beneficial microbes that allow food to be grown in the soil.
Even if the waste water from fracking were safe (bear with me, I know it is not), the heavy metals drawn from the ground would make it unsafe. When it comes to water, fracking is a lose-lose situation.
While Nova Scotia has put a moratorium on fracking, waste water from fracking exploration mines in NS still needs to be disposed of. No community in Nova Scotia would allow it to be put into their sewer system. No community in neighbouring New Brunswick would allow it to be put into their sewer system, even when large amounts of money were offered for doing just that by the company involved. International law forbids it from being dumped into the oceans.
How safe can a liquid be if it can't even be dumped into the ocean? Our oceans have two huge garbage patches each larger than small countries, but fracking waste water is not allowed.
Fracking companies, like every mining operation that ever existed in history, will lie through its teeth, swearing it is telling the truth on the grave of its mother. Not a single one of them could ever be trusted. They have done more damage to our planet and its (former, often now extinct) life forms than any other cause.
The University of Toronto Magazine online has an article in its Winter 2015 edition that will explain more about fracking from a political science professor who is as much of an expert on the subject as anyone (given the secrecy that surrounds fracking operations at all levels).
On Shaky Ground | Dale Sproule | Winter 2015 | University of Toronto Magazine
image
http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/leading-edge/on-shaky-ground-dale-sproule-andrea-olive/
Saturday, April 04, 2015
How Vaccines Cripple Your Immune System
How Vaccines Cripple Your Immune System
During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, researchers at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control originally thought seasonal flu shots from 2008 might offer extra protection against the new pandemic strain. They were puzzled to find instead, seasonal flu vaccination almost doubled the risk of infection with pandemic flu.
- British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, http://tinyurl.com/kn2u4j4
One sad but undeniable characteristic of human nature is that most of us trust those in authority, follow what they say as truth, obey their rules and laws as if they were commandments dictated by God.
The good people of Germany, in a free and democratic election, elected Hitler and the Nazi (National Socialist) party to power in 1933.
Though a huge majority of medical doctors in Canada (two surveys said 92% and 100%) would refuse chemotherapy if they got cancer, it is still the #1 recommended therapy for newly diagnosed cancer patients. The "success" rate for chemotherapy is five years because doctors don't dare to look beyond that to see a failure rate close to 92%. Chemo is still the therapy accepted as first choice by people diagnosed with cancer.
We are so addicted to following what we are told that thinking people refer to mindless followers as sheeple [sheep + people]. It is in our nature as members of a social species to follow a leader, especially so if the leader shows confidence or is powerful. However, nothing in our nature demands that we accept everything we are told without question, especially when it comes to our own personal health.
Louis Pasteur was hailed as a hero when he discovered that heating would kill "germs" in our foods and beverages. At the time, every form of microscopic life was considered to be a germ by most people. The process of pasteurizing milk was named after him by a grateful world.
Even today we can watch many commercials on TV that promise to kill almost 100% of "germs" on whatever the product touches. The trouble is, most of what these products kill are beneficial bacteria.
Our immune system is comprised almost entirely of beneficial bacteria. In fact, we have 10 to 20 times (some estimates go as high as 100 times) as many good and healthful bacteria that comprise our immune system as we have cells of our own body. We are truly, as Star Trek called them, symbionts. We can't even survive without them and they can't live without us.
When we get sick we dutifully take antibiotics our doctor prescribes to kill the evil bacteria. Even when we suffer from a virus (which antibiotics do nothing to kill), we may be prescribed an antibiotic "just in case of attack by bacteria while you are vulnerable." Antibiotics, especially broad spectrum ones, kill the very bacteria that comprise our immune system. So, kill 10% bad and 90% good.
Vaccines and antibiotics were hailed as health saviours when they first came out. Both were intended to help our immune system defeat the dastardly microscopic pathogens.
While antibiotics kill a good percentage of the bacteria that comprise our immune system, vaccines do assist. Annual vaccine shots against influenza were considered to be so beneficial that many governments offered them free to citizens. So, because they were free and government said vaccines would protect them, people took the shot annually.
Now one study (see the top of this article) shows that the annual flu shot actually impairs the immune system so much that it increases the incidence of flu. Increases. Immune systems got so used to the vaccine doing their job for them that they got lazy.
Does that matter? Many children are required to have a minimum of 48 vaccines before they can enter school. Some kids get their first vaccine two months after they are born.
Please think about this. Before a child's immune system has had a chance to develop, it is already being encouraged to be lazy. Remember "childhood diseases" in years past? They helped to develop the immune system. Vaccines impair the immune system. Vaccines make the immune system lazy. Lazy things don't work.
What happens when we don't exercise enough? We gain weight and lose muscle mass (get weak). What happens when we don't think enough? We develop dementia, even Alzheimer's, when we get older. We know these things, yet people persist in not exercising either their bodies or their brains. We have epidemics because we are lazy.
Now we have chemical and drug companies intending to make permanent patients out of us until we die by impairing our health by depressing our immune system through chemical pesticides (they kill small creatures--including bees--then larger ones that eat the smaller ones), herbicides (they kill the food that small animals that benefit our food plants eat), antibiotics and vaccines.
Our medical systems fully support vaccines. Doctors never mention that at least some of them are rewarded financially and with gifts for prescribing certain drugs (that tend to be the most popular drugs prescribed).
Despite vigorous campaigns to get people to stop smoking (tobacco accounts for over half the diseases and a majority of deaths from health problems each year), an estimated 25 percent of adults in North America still smoke. Smokers know how to kill themselves, but not how to live.
People are knowingly harming their health, causing their own early deaths and making themselves dependent on others for the latter decades of their lives. Most don't yet know what they are doing to their own immune systems with the vaccines they willingly accept from their doctors.
You know. Think about it. How willing are you to harm your own health and limit your own future?
All you need to do to stay healthy is get some exercise, eat clean food and stay away from things that will harm your immune system. Think now while you still have time.
Bill Allin is the author of the book Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems and hundreds of published articles. It is a massive social problem when people knowingly and willingly harm their own health.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, researchers at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control originally thought seasonal flu shots from 2008 might offer extra protection against the new pandemic strain. They were puzzled to find instead, seasonal flu vaccination almost doubled the risk of infection with pandemic flu.
- British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, http://tinyurl.com/kn2u4j4
One sad but undeniable characteristic of human nature is that most of us trust those in authority, follow what they say as truth, obey their rules and laws as if they were commandments dictated by God.
The good people of Germany, in a free and democratic election, elected Hitler and the Nazi (National Socialist) party to power in 1933.
Though a huge majority of medical doctors in Canada (two surveys said 92% and 100%) would refuse chemotherapy if they got cancer, it is still the #1 recommended therapy for newly diagnosed cancer patients. The "success" rate for chemotherapy is five years because doctors don't dare to look beyond that to see a failure rate close to 92%. Chemo is still the therapy accepted as first choice by people diagnosed with cancer.
We are so addicted to following what we are told that thinking people refer to mindless followers as sheeple [sheep + people]. It is in our nature as members of a social species to follow a leader, especially so if the leader shows confidence or is powerful. However, nothing in our nature demands that we accept everything we are told without question, especially when it comes to our own personal health.
Louis Pasteur was hailed as a hero when he discovered that heating would kill "germs" in our foods and beverages. At the time, every form of microscopic life was considered to be a germ by most people. The process of pasteurizing milk was named after him by a grateful world.
Even today we can watch many commercials on TV that promise to kill almost 100% of "germs" on whatever the product touches. The trouble is, most of what these products kill are beneficial bacteria.
Our immune system is comprised almost entirely of beneficial bacteria. In fact, we have 10 to 20 times (some estimates go as high as 100 times) as many good and healthful bacteria that comprise our immune system as we have cells of our own body. We are truly, as Star Trek called them, symbionts. We can't even survive without them and they can't live without us.
When we get sick we dutifully take antibiotics our doctor prescribes to kill the evil bacteria. Even when we suffer from a virus (which antibiotics do nothing to kill), we may be prescribed an antibiotic "just in case of attack by bacteria while you are vulnerable." Antibiotics, especially broad spectrum ones, kill the very bacteria that comprise our immune system. So, kill 10% bad and 90% good.
Vaccines and antibiotics were hailed as health saviours when they first came out. Both were intended to help our immune system defeat the dastardly microscopic pathogens.
While antibiotics kill a good percentage of the bacteria that comprise our immune system, vaccines do assist. Annual vaccine shots against influenza were considered to be so beneficial that many governments offered them free to citizens. So, because they were free and government said vaccines would protect them, people took the shot annually.
Now one study (see the top of this article) shows that the annual flu shot actually impairs the immune system so much that it increases the incidence of flu. Increases. Immune systems got so used to the vaccine doing their job for them that they got lazy.
Does that matter? Many children are required to have a minimum of 48 vaccines before they can enter school. Some kids get their first vaccine two months after they are born.
Please think about this. Before a child's immune system has had a chance to develop, it is already being encouraged to be lazy. Remember "childhood diseases" in years past? They helped to develop the immune system. Vaccines impair the immune system. Vaccines make the immune system lazy. Lazy things don't work.
What happens when we don't exercise enough? We gain weight and lose muscle mass (get weak). What happens when we don't think enough? We develop dementia, even Alzheimer's, when we get older. We know these things, yet people persist in not exercising either their bodies or their brains. We have epidemics because we are lazy.
Now we have chemical and drug companies intending to make permanent patients out of us until we die by impairing our health by depressing our immune system through chemical pesticides (they kill small creatures--including bees--then larger ones that eat the smaller ones), herbicides (they kill the food that small animals that benefit our food plants eat), antibiotics and vaccines.
Our medical systems fully support vaccines. Doctors never mention that at least some of them are rewarded financially and with gifts for prescribing certain drugs (that tend to be the most popular drugs prescribed).
Despite vigorous campaigns to get people to stop smoking (tobacco accounts for over half the diseases and a majority of deaths from health problems each year), an estimated 25 percent of adults in North America still smoke. Smokers know how to kill themselves, but not how to live.
People are knowingly harming their health, causing their own early deaths and making themselves dependent on others for the latter decades of their lives. Most don't yet know what they are doing to their own immune systems with the vaccines they willingly accept from their doctors.
You know. Think about it. How willing are you to harm your own health and limit your own future?
All you need to do to stay healthy is get some exercise, eat clean food and stay away from things that will harm your immune system. Think now while you still have time.
Bill Allin is the author of the book Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems and hundreds of published articles. It is a massive social problem when people knowingly and willingly harm their own health.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Saturday, January 17, 2015
Why The World Needs Stupid People
Why The World Needs Stupid People
I'm not sure if you can blame everything on the American way of life, but the United States are big. So, if you have a lot of people there, the percentage of stupid people is bound to be higher.
- Stephen Malkmus, American musician (b. 1966)
[WARNING: This article does not encourage the development of stupid people or advocate that we keep stupid people stupid. We need some stupid people, some argue, but we have far too many and are developing more too quickly.]
First, an apology for the errors and misinformation in the quote above. While the United States has the third largest population on the planet, that means that--all other factors being equal--the US should have a greater number of stupid people, not a greater percentage. The United States is one country, so the verb should be in the singular form. Decide for yourself if that says anything about the author of the quote.
Despite the fact that the US is a highly developed nation in many ways--it even calls itself First World--it excels in turning bright children into stupid adults.
A redefinition of "stupid" is needed. The word originally referred to a range of IQ scores well below the "normal" of 100 (average being between 90 and 110). Some experts claim the average IQ score across the globe is now between 80 and 85. It is now generally accepted that IQ scores are not just flawed and skewed culturally, but that there are many kinds of intelligence other than that tested by Intelligence Quotient tests.
One key problem in defining intelligence is that the definitions are invariably made by people of high intelligence. Even the name of our species, homo sapiens sapiens (thinking man), was devised by highly intelligent thinking people. Those who came up with the name in fact described themselves, not the species in general. Even Albert Einstein said that if you define intelligence as the ability to climb a tree, a fish will not do well on such an intelligence test.
I prefer to use what is generally called the Law of Consequences in defining intelligence. As with Newton's Third Law of Motion (every action has an equal and opposite reaction), the Law of Consequences states that every action has a consequence, sometimes more than one consequence.
If you hit your finger with a hammer, the finger will hurt. If you drive your car off a bridge, you will likely die. Those are consequences. No one intentionally does either. But people do these things regularly because they do other behaviours the consequences of which are hurt fingers or death from crashing a car below a bridge.
Holding a nail with one hand while swinging a hammer at the nail with the other hand requires intense concentration, on the nail and the hammer. The person who swings the hammer thinking only of the satisfying result of having the nail permanently in place will not be thinking of the necessity for intense concentration. Concentration requires a second level of thinking.
Someone who drives too fast is careless. Driving too fast is exciting, evokes thrills. A driver who focuses on the thrill but not on the danger of a slippery bridge surface may cause the car to career off the bridge, resulting in the death of the driver and likely of passengers as well. Focusing on the safety issue when driving (at all times) requires a second level of thinking that few people indulge in once they become familiar with driving.
Anyone who has played chess with a good player knows that the good chess player thinks ahead. Expert level chess players think ahead not just one move or two, but many moves in many different possible scenarios. Being able to hold these multiple scenarios in your head while assessing each to decide what move you should make next requires levels of thinking that few people ever use.
Stupid people think only of one consequence--having the nail in place, the thrill of driving too fast, or whatever. They think only of what is immediate, of one goal. They react to present circumstances, rather than initiating new actions or thinking.
To a scientist who studies the brain, that is using the unconscious, not the conscious mind. Basically, the unconscious mind reacts to stimuli. The stimulus might be having the nail in place or experiencing a thrill. Real thinking takes place with the conscious mind. The conscious mind considers possibilities beyond the immediate, including smashing a finger or driving off a bridge. It considers consequences. It thinks beyond the immediate.
Over a long term, people use their unconscious mind so much that they become used to it, rarely moving to the stage of using their conscious mind. With practice of using only the unconscious mind all the time, people become stupid. Consciousness researchers claim that we use our unconscious mind about 95 percent of the time, our conscious mind only 5 percent. I would maintain that many people nudge the use of their unconscious mind closer to 100%.
If you have ever watched someone do something and wondered "Why did that person do something so stupid?" you have seen someone who probably is stupid by this new definition. As evidence, watch what people do with their shopping carts in a supermarket (turning them sideways to block the aisle while they look at something on a shelf) or check out many examples of thrill-seeking but stupid and risky behaviour on YouTube.com Stupid behaviour is so common today that several shows focus on videos of it. One show is even called The Science of Stupid.
The argument is often made that we need stupid people to make pizzas, work on assembly lines, drive taxis, and so on. In a sense, that is true. But there are also highly intelligent Mensa members who do these jobs as well. Nothing about these jobs demands that the worker must not think. That part is voluntary, a commitment to laziness.
Where do we develop people to be stupid in our societies? At home and in schools when they are children. We don't stimulate kids enough, challenge their brains, give them enough stimulating activities to do, teach them the Law of Consequences.
Many people become uncomfortable or edgy when I speak of deficits in parenting skills or education systems. Fair enough. Look at our dog and cat pets. Most would agree that they become more docile, more cooperative, more friendly, more loving of cuddles as our pets get older. Ask yourself why. It's not age. The reason is that they have been dumbed-down, their natural intelligence and curiosity suppressed until they eventually just look for simple gratification from humans.
We make our children dumb in the same way we make our pets dumb.
Do we need stupid people for our society to function? Leaders of industry and natural resources companies say yes. They need employees to do a job, work on an assembly line or dig mines deep underground, without thinking about what they are doing to themselves or about what their activities are doing to the long term survival of our planet.
Should we maintain our present course of developing intelligent and naturally curious children into dumb adults? That depends on how much you want to encourage and support leaders of industry and natural resource companies who get obscenely rich from the labour of their dumbed employees. Please note that the rich never do these activities.
The system will remain the way it is until we bravely step forward and insist that our education systems teach kids what they really need to survive and thrive instead of what they need to be dumbed-down. And until we insist that every young adult who becomes a parent knows what their children will need in the way of developmental skills, before those skills are needed.
Are you tempted to wonder if you might be stupid? The answer is: you read, stupid people don't read. By reading to the end of this article you have already exercised your conscious brain more today than a majority of people in your country.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about easy and inexpensive solutions to our world's seemingly intractable problems. Stupidity is a highly fixable social problem.
Learn more at http://billallin.com Find the link there to join the TIA group to receive daily delivery of tips for teaching kids who seem to not want to learn from their parents, tips that all adults seem to enjoy as well.
I'm not sure if you can blame everything on the American way of life, but the United States are big. So, if you have a lot of people there, the percentage of stupid people is bound to be higher.
- Stephen Malkmus, American musician (b. 1966)
[WARNING: This article does not encourage the development of stupid people or advocate that we keep stupid people stupid. We need some stupid people, some argue, but we have far too many and are developing more too quickly.]
First, an apology for the errors and misinformation in the quote above. While the United States has the third largest population on the planet, that means that--all other factors being equal--the US should have a greater number of stupid people, not a greater percentage. The United States is one country, so the verb should be in the singular form. Decide for yourself if that says anything about the author of the quote.
Despite the fact that the US is a highly developed nation in many ways--it even calls itself First World--it excels in turning bright children into stupid adults.
A redefinition of "stupid" is needed. The word originally referred to a range of IQ scores well below the "normal" of 100 (average being between 90 and 110). Some experts claim the average IQ score across the globe is now between 80 and 85. It is now generally accepted that IQ scores are not just flawed and skewed culturally, but that there are many kinds of intelligence other than that tested by Intelligence Quotient tests.
One key problem in defining intelligence is that the definitions are invariably made by people of high intelligence. Even the name of our species, homo sapiens sapiens (thinking man), was devised by highly intelligent thinking people. Those who came up with the name in fact described themselves, not the species in general. Even Albert Einstein said that if you define intelligence as the ability to climb a tree, a fish will not do well on such an intelligence test.
I prefer to use what is generally called the Law of Consequences in defining intelligence. As with Newton's Third Law of Motion (every action has an equal and opposite reaction), the Law of Consequences states that every action has a consequence, sometimes more than one consequence.
If you hit your finger with a hammer, the finger will hurt. If you drive your car off a bridge, you will likely die. Those are consequences. No one intentionally does either. But people do these things regularly because they do other behaviours the consequences of which are hurt fingers or death from crashing a car below a bridge.
Holding a nail with one hand while swinging a hammer at the nail with the other hand requires intense concentration, on the nail and the hammer. The person who swings the hammer thinking only of the satisfying result of having the nail permanently in place will not be thinking of the necessity for intense concentration. Concentration requires a second level of thinking.
Someone who drives too fast is careless. Driving too fast is exciting, evokes thrills. A driver who focuses on the thrill but not on the danger of a slippery bridge surface may cause the car to career off the bridge, resulting in the death of the driver and likely of passengers as well. Focusing on the safety issue when driving (at all times) requires a second level of thinking that few people indulge in once they become familiar with driving.
Anyone who has played chess with a good player knows that the good chess player thinks ahead. Expert level chess players think ahead not just one move or two, but many moves in many different possible scenarios. Being able to hold these multiple scenarios in your head while assessing each to decide what move you should make next requires levels of thinking that few people ever use.
Stupid people think only of one consequence--having the nail in place, the thrill of driving too fast, or whatever. They think only of what is immediate, of one goal. They react to present circumstances, rather than initiating new actions or thinking.
To a scientist who studies the brain, that is using the unconscious, not the conscious mind. Basically, the unconscious mind reacts to stimuli. The stimulus might be having the nail in place or experiencing a thrill. Real thinking takes place with the conscious mind. The conscious mind considers possibilities beyond the immediate, including smashing a finger or driving off a bridge. It considers consequences. It thinks beyond the immediate.
Over a long term, people use their unconscious mind so much that they become used to it, rarely moving to the stage of using their conscious mind. With practice of using only the unconscious mind all the time, people become stupid. Consciousness researchers claim that we use our unconscious mind about 95 percent of the time, our conscious mind only 5 percent. I would maintain that many people nudge the use of their unconscious mind closer to 100%.
If you have ever watched someone do something and wondered "Why did that person do something so stupid?" you have seen someone who probably is stupid by this new definition. As evidence, watch what people do with their shopping carts in a supermarket (turning them sideways to block the aisle while they look at something on a shelf) or check out many examples of thrill-seeking but stupid and risky behaviour on YouTube.com Stupid behaviour is so common today that several shows focus on videos of it. One show is even called The Science of Stupid.
The argument is often made that we need stupid people to make pizzas, work on assembly lines, drive taxis, and so on. In a sense, that is true. But there are also highly intelligent Mensa members who do these jobs as well. Nothing about these jobs demands that the worker must not think. That part is voluntary, a commitment to laziness.
Where do we develop people to be stupid in our societies? At home and in schools when they are children. We don't stimulate kids enough, challenge their brains, give them enough stimulating activities to do, teach them the Law of Consequences.
Many people become uncomfortable or edgy when I speak of deficits in parenting skills or education systems. Fair enough. Look at our dog and cat pets. Most would agree that they become more docile, more cooperative, more friendly, more loving of cuddles as our pets get older. Ask yourself why. It's not age. The reason is that they have been dumbed-down, their natural intelligence and curiosity suppressed until they eventually just look for simple gratification from humans.
We make our children dumb in the same way we make our pets dumb.
Do we need stupid people for our society to function? Leaders of industry and natural resources companies say yes. They need employees to do a job, work on an assembly line or dig mines deep underground, without thinking about what they are doing to themselves or about what their activities are doing to the long term survival of our planet.
Should we maintain our present course of developing intelligent and naturally curious children into dumb adults? That depends on how much you want to encourage and support leaders of industry and natural resource companies who get obscenely rich from the labour of their dumbed employees. Please note that the rich never do these activities.
The system will remain the way it is until we bravely step forward and insist that our education systems teach kids what they really need to survive and thrive instead of what they need to be dumbed-down. And until we insist that every young adult who becomes a parent knows what their children will need in the way of developmental skills, before those skills are needed.
Are you tempted to wonder if you might be stupid? The answer is: you read, stupid people don't read. By reading to the end of this article you have already exercised your conscious brain more today than a majority of people in your country.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about easy and inexpensive solutions to our world's seemingly intractable problems. Stupidity is a highly fixable social problem.
Learn more at http://billallin.com Find the link there to join the TIA group to receive daily delivery of tips for teaching kids who seem to not want to learn from their parents, tips that all adults seem to enjoy as well.
Thursday, December 11, 2014
Don't Fear Microbes, They Keep You Alive
Don't Fear Microbes, They Keep You Alive
When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?
- Jeremy Rifkin, American writer and social theorist (b. 1945)
Rifkin refers to plants and seeds that have been genetically modified or sprayed with poisons (herbicides, pesticides--any chemical that ends with -ide is a poison). What this quote fails to include is how repeated ingestion of plants and animals that have been poisoned by our agricultural sprays and fertilizers will affect us.
Read any old detective series such as those of Agatha Christie or Arthur Conyn Doyle to see how clever killers of the past killed their victims by feeding them small amounts of poison over long periods of time. Poisons are not easily eliminated from our body system, so they accumulate until they harm, often irretrievably, one or more of our organs. Poisons are effective killers over long periods of time.
Not only do industrial agriculture giants poison animals and microbial organisms, we eat the same stuff that has killed the animals and microbes. Our health authorities, chemical companies and food distributors claim it will do us no harm. Anyone who believes that is dangerously simple-minded.
Chemicals (including drugs) are tested only over a short term before being approved for agricultural applications, on plants or animals people will eat. The danger is not in the short term, but over decades. We have middle aged and elderly people dying decades before they should as a consequence. Worse, many of them suffer for decades in hospitals and nursing homes before they die. This costs them dearly with loss of livable years and we all pay through our taxes and insurance premiums.
Why not fear microbes? Didn't Louis Pasteur prove that they are dangerous? No. In fact, what Pasteur proved is that some dangerous microbes (the bad guys) can be killed, such as by pasteurizing milk, before the food is consumed.
What Pasteur did not show and what our media and medical professionals since have failed to speak openly about is the fact that useful and helpful microbes are killed, billions of them, along with the few bad guys with pasteurization.
Our immune systems, the feature of our body that prevents us from dying from the first pathogen that comes along and that heals us naturally when we do get sick, are composed mainly of microbes. About 80% of our immune system is made up of good microbes (good guys) that are not even part of our body cells. They live in a symbiotic relationship with the cells of our body.
How significant are their numbers? Estimates by professionals of the numbers of microbes in our immune systems as compared with the number of cells in our body range from ten times to 100 times as many. That makes them really important to our health and our life.
Here is the critically important part. When these microbes (mostly bacteria, but they may include some viruses that actually help us) are killed, we die. Or we get very sick. Or our organs are damaged so badly that we eventually die, such as through cancer. We can't live without those good guys.
So what's the problem? We eat food that contain chemicals designed to kill microbes. When we get sick, doctors give us antibiotics. Antibiotics, by definition, are designed to kill microbes. Antibiotics kill the good microbes that comprise the majority of our immune system. No wonder so many people get tragic diseases months after taking antibiotics.
If we get cancer, they give us chemotherapy drugs, which are poisons. Please understand this, chemo drugs are poisons. No one disputes this. Radiation is not a poison, but it can damage healthy body cells around a cancer site so that surviving cancer cells can spread more easily. Radiation does not come with 100% guarantees of effectively killing all cancer cells.
Check survival rates for cancer victims beyond five years. Why five years? Because chemo and radiation tends to slow cancer development enough for most people to live that long. But not much longer. If I were "cured" of cancer I would hope to live many more than five years. If I had chemo treatments or radiation, even "successful" ones, I should not make long term plans.
How about surgery? Same problem as radiation, a surgeon with human eyes can't see something as small as a cancer cell. Surgeons do not use microscopes while they operate. Miss one or a few active cancer cells and cancer is just delayed, not cured.
Prevention, then. Mammograms squash the female breast so much that if there is a cancer site in one, the cancer cells may be physically pushed elsewhere so they can spread. It's called metastasizing when cancer cells are spread through the body, often through the bloodstream. If you have any cancer cells in your breast when you have a mammogram (to detect cancer), your cancer may spread by the very means doctors use to detect cancer. Clever, huh? Guess who gets more work when you have more cancer.
Vaccines? Vaccines were originally intended to boost the body's natural defence against disease and degradation, the immune system. For many years, vaccines have migrated (with the guidance of Big Pharma chemists) to the point where they actually harm the immune system. These medical "professionals" believe their chemicals can effectively replace the immune system instead of boosting it. These chemists and their pharmaceutical employers are not smarter than nature.
Follow the link below to view a video and read a short article about how the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be directly responsible for untold number of children becoming autistic because of a vaccine widely accepted to be applied to young children. It still is injected. Even when its fraud has been made public, it has done nothing to prevent young and helpless children from becoming autistic.
http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/breaking-whistleblower-names-cdc-scientists-covering-vaccine-autism-link
I can't overstress the importance to supporting, not killing, your immune system microbes. Pay attention to television commercials that promise to kill microbes in your mouth, on your skin, even to quell disturbances in your belly. These are all places where microbes that form the majority of your immune system are located. Are these manufacturers trying to kill you? Not intentionally. They are just trying to sell you as much product as possible before you learn the truth.
Now you know what to look for. Make wise choices. Practice wise habits.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of cheap and easily implemented solutions to problems that plague every culture, every city, most families.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?
- Jeremy Rifkin, American writer and social theorist (b. 1945)
Rifkin refers to plants and seeds that have been genetically modified or sprayed with poisons (herbicides, pesticides--any chemical that ends with -ide is a poison). What this quote fails to include is how repeated ingestion of plants and animals that have been poisoned by our agricultural sprays and fertilizers will affect us.
Read any old detective series such as those of Agatha Christie or Arthur Conyn Doyle to see how clever killers of the past killed their victims by feeding them small amounts of poison over long periods of time. Poisons are not easily eliminated from our body system, so they accumulate until they harm, often irretrievably, one or more of our organs. Poisons are effective killers over long periods of time.
Not only do industrial agriculture giants poison animals and microbial organisms, we eat the same stuff that has killed the animals and microbes. Our health authorities, chemical companies and food distributors claim it will do us no harm. Anyone who believes that is dangerously simple-minded.
Chemicals (including drugs) are tested only over a short term before being approved for agricultural applications, on plants or animals people will eat. The danger is not in the short term, but over decades. We have middle aged and elderly people dying decades before they should as a consequence. Worse, many of them suffer for decades in hospitals and nursing homes before they die. This costs them dearly with loss of livable years and we all pay through our taxes and insurance premiums.
Why not fear microbes? Didn't Louis Pasteur prove that they are dangerous? No. In fact, what Pasteur proved is that some dangerous microbes (the bad guys) can be killed, such as by pasteurizing milk, before the food is consumed.
What Pasteur did not show and what our media and medical professionals since have failed to speak openly about is the fact that useful and helpful microbes are killed, billions of them, along with the few bad guys with pasteurization.
Our immune systems, the feature of our body that prevents us from dying from the first pathogen that comes along and that heals us naturally when we do get sick, are composed mainly of microbes. About 80% of our immune system is made up of good microbes (good guys) that are not even part of our body cells. They live in a symbiotic relationship with the cells of our body.
How significant are their numbers? Estimates by professionals of the numbers of microbes in our immune systems as compared with the number of cells in our body range from ten times to 100 times as many. That makes them really important to our health and our life.
Here is the critically important part. When these microbes (mostly bacteria, but they may include some viruses that actually help us) are killed, we die. Or we get very sick. Or our organs are damaged so badly that we eventually die, such as through cancer. We can't live without those good guys.
So what's the problem? We eat food that contain chemicals designed to kill microbes. When we get sick, doctors give us antibiotics. Antibiotics, by definition, are designed to kill microbes. Antibiotics kill the good microbes that comprise the majority of our immune system. No wonder so many people get tragic diseases months after taking antibiotics.
If we get cancer, they give us chemotherapy drugs, which are poisons. Please understand this, chemo drugs are poisons. No one disputes this. Radiation is not a poison, but it can damage healthy body cells around a cancer site so that surviving cancer cells can spread more easily. Radiation does not come with 100% guarantees of effectively killing all cancer cells.
Check survival rates for cancer victims beyond five years. Why five years? Because chemo and radiation tends to slow cancer development enough for most people to live that long. But not much longer. If I were "cured" of cancer I would hope to live many more than five years. If I had chemo treatments or radiation, even "successful" ones, I should not make long term plans.
How about surgery? Same problem as radiation, a surgeon with human eyes can't see something as small as a cancer cell. Surgeons do not use microscopes while they operate. Miss one or a few active cancer cells and cancer is just delayed, not cured.
Prevention, then. Mammograms squash the female breast so much that if there is a cancer site in one, the cancer cells may be physically pushed elsewhere so they can spread. It's called metastasizing when cancer cells are spread through the body, often through the bloodstream. If you have any cancer cells in your breast when you have a mammogram (to detect cancer), your cancer may spread by the very means doctors use to detect cancer. Clever, huh? Guess who gets more work when you have more cancer.
Vaccines? Vaccines were originally intended to boost the body's natural defence against disease and degradation, the immune system. For many years, vaccines have migrated (with the guidance of Big Pharma chemists) to the point where they actually harm the immune system. These medical "professionals" believe their chemicals can effectively replace the immune system instead of boosting it. These chemists and their pharmaceutical employers are not smarter than nature.
Follow the link below to view a video and read a short article about how the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be directly responsible for untold number of children becoming autistic because of a vaccine widely accepted to be applied to young children. It still is injected. Even when its fraud has been made public, it has done nothing to prevent young and helpless children from becoming autistic.
http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/breaking-whistleblower-names-cdc-scientists-covering-vaccine-autism-link
I can't overstress the importance to supporting, not killing, your immune system microbes. Pay attention to television commercials that promise to kill microbes in your mouth, on your skin, even to quell disturbances in your belly. These are all places where microbes that form the majority of your immune system are located. Are these manufacturers trying to kill you? Not intentionally. They are just trying to sell you as much product as possible before you learn the truth.
Now you know what to look for. Make wise choices. Practice wise habits.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of cheap and easily implemented solutions to problems that plague every culture, every city, most families.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Monday, October 27, 2014
Your body Will Heal Itself If You Give It A Chance
Your body Will Heal Itself If You Give It A Chance
Your body has natural healing capacities that nobody in the field of medicine can pretend ultimately to understand. If you break a bone it will heal itself. All the doctor does is make sure the pieces of the bone are properly set back together.
- Wayne Dyer, American counseling psychotherapist and motivational speaker (born 1940)
The human species has not lasted as long as it has by pumping itself full of chemicals and vaccines. Yet that is exactly what we are doing at present. Another human species, Neanderthals, lived many times longer than homo sapiens has been around and never had vaccines or even much in the way of diseases (other than what they may have caught from eating diseased animals or spoiled food).
When I was a child every kid in every family had what was called childhood diseases. In fact, often mothers would closet all the children in her family together in a room with a sick sibling so that all the kids would get the same disease at once, getting the inconvenience of one childhood disease over in one big session.
It was called building an immune system. Today we have doctors pumping kids with vaccines, sometimes over 60 of them before the child goes to school, all in the name of helping the child's immune system. In some jurisdictions, laws force this before children are allowed to enter school. What nature used to do free, now parents and their insurance plans pay for. Yet the kids have more problems than ever before in history.
Asthma and allergies at rates unheard of in the past. Autism many times greater than even 20 years ago. When I was a child I never experienced one other child who was autistic. The odd one had allergies, primarily in spring or fall. Nothing that held back his or her education.
Today we have schools that demand all kids' lunches must be made at home with allergen-free products. Other schools demand that all lunches must be prepackaged with allergen-free products--nothing may be made at home. Some children, it is feared, could breathe the aroma of peanuts and die. These kids have immune systems that actually attack themselves.
Medical science now helps almost all children survive childhood. But the food they eat has poisons and unneeded antibiotics added before it leaves the farm. The apple, one of the naturally healthiest foods we can eat, is sprayed with poisons at the blossom stage, before the fruit even forms around the seed. Then it is sprayed with more poisons every two weeks until it is picked. Potatoes, the most common vegetable in the western diet, endures almost as much spraying with poisons before it is dug from the ground.
For those who care enough to buy foods that are clean of chemicals and poisons (herbicides, pesticides, chemical fertilizers--all poisons, as anything that ends in "ide" is) there are vegetables and fruits that are grown organically (without poisons or chemicals). Yet these cost more than the produce sprayed with poisons because the farmer must pay to prove that poisons have not been added to his or her product--certification is necessary before the producer can call the product organic. The farmer has to prove he has not added poisons to the food he sells, and pay to certify that proof.
Meat, poultry and their associated food products have been proven through many studies to cause weakness and failure of certain body organs, cancer and many other diseases that left untreated would cause death.
Not everyone is prepared to eat healthy. Eventually, over a few decades of ingesting poisons and unnatural chemicals, the body succumbs to one or more of a variety of syndromes (diseases doctors know nothing about), diseases and general weaknesses of health. We have more incidents of dementia, Alzheimer's, diabetes and other afflictions common among older people than ever before in history.
Big pharmaceutical companies pay or bribe many doctors to prescribe antibiotics and other medicines that destroy the immune system, thus keeping people weak and depending on more chemicals for the last few decades of their lives. What their vaccines did not destroy in children, their prescription drugs will finish off in the middle ages and the elderly.
One of the "forever" drugs most commonly prescribed for people is statins to lower cholesterol. Older people need more cholesterol to carry poisons from their body cells. Statins, themselves proven to be health hazards (though approved by governments and doctors associations who are well paid for their endorsements) limit the ability of the body to remove poisons from cells by lowering cholesterol. Your doctor won't tell you that if he or she is paid to prescribe statins.
Governments refuse to pass laws to prevent agriculture giants, pharmaceutical internationals and chemical corporates from harming our health so that they can extract greater profits from us. People who are sick, weak and have no significant immune systems left by the age of retirement are a vibrant and dependable source of profits for these companies. Sick old people are the proverbial cash cow.
Does the situation seem hopeless? It's not. We need to use our bodies to get exercise so they do not atrophy from lack of use. And we need to find clean sources of food from organic farmers. With those two, we have little need for doctors because our bodies will heal themselves so long as we have an immune system left. Self healing is how nature works. This is not to say that doctors have no place, only that they must not be allowed to dominate the health of the elderly.
The future is not bleak. Things are changing as more and more people learn the truth about health and the lies they have been told for many years. Every region has a core of people who are actively working toward good health and clean sources of food. Find them. A variety of clean and nutritious food is the best preventative medicine you can buy.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of simple and cheap solutions for expensive problems. Bad health is a social problem because it affects so many people and adds huge costs to tax dollars.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Your body has natural healing capacities that nobody in the field of medicine can pretend ultimately to understand. If you break a bone it will heal itself. All the doctor does is make sure the pieces of the bone are properly set back together.
- Wayne Dyer, American counseling psychotherapist and motivational speaker (born 1940)
The human species has not lasted as long as it has by pumping itself full of chemicals and vaccines. Yet that is exactly what we are doing at present. Another human species, Neanderthals, lived many times longer than homo sapiens has been around and never had vaccines or even much in the way of diseases (other than what they may have caught from eating diseased animals or spoiled food).
When I was a child every kid in every family had what was called childhood diseases. In fact, often mothers would closet all the children in her family together in a room with a sick sibling so that all the kids would get the same disease at once, getting the inconvenience of one childhood disease over in one big session.
It was called building an immune system. Today we have doctors pumping kids with vaccines, sometimes over 60 of them before the child goes to school, all in the name of helping the child's immune system. In some jurisdictions, laws force this before children are allowed to enter school. What nature used to do free, now parents and their insurance plans pay for. Yet the kids have more problems than ever before in history.
Asthma and allergies at rates unheard of in the past. Autism many times greater than even 20 years ago. When I was a child I never experienced one other child who was autistic. The odd one had allergies, primarily in spring or fall. Nothing that held back his or her education.
Today we have schools that demand all kids' lunches must be made at home with allergen-free products. Other schools demand that all lunches must be prepackaged with allergen-free products--nothing may be made at home. Some children, it is feared, could breathe the aroma of peanuts and die. These kids have immune systems that actually attack themselves.
Medical science now helps almost all children survive childhood. But the food they eat has poisons and unneeded antibiotics added before it leaves the farm. The apple, one of the naturally healthiest foods we can eat, is sprayed with poisons at the blossom stage, before the fruit even forms around the seed. Then it is sprayed with more poisons every two weeks until it is picked. Potatoes, the most common vegetable in the western diet, endures almost as much spraying with poisons before it is dug from the ground.
For those who care enough to buy foods that are clean of chemicals and poisons (herbicides, pesticides, chemical fertilizers--all poisons, as anything that ends in "ide" is) there are vegetables and fruits that are grown organically (without poisons or chemicals). Yet these cost more than the produce sprayed with poisons because the farmer must pay to prove that poisons have not been added to his or her product--certification is necessary before the producer can call the product organic. The farmer has to prove he has not added poisons to the food he sells, and pay to certify that proof.
Meat, poultry and their associated food products have been proven through many studies to cause weakness and failure of certain body organs, cancer and many other diseases that left untreated would cause death.
Not everyone is prepared to eat healthy. Eventually, over a few decades of ingesting poisons and unnatural chemicals, the body succumbs to one or more of a variety of syndromes (diseases doctors know nothing about), diseases and general weaknesses of health. We have more incidents of dementia, Alzheimer's, diabetes and other afflictions common among older people than ever before in history.
Big pharmaceutical companies pay or bribe many doctors to prescribe antibiotics and other medicines that destroy the immune system, thus keeping people weak and depending on more chemicals for the last few decades of their lives. What their vaccines did not destroy in children, their prescription drugs will finish off in the middle ages and the elderly.
One of the "forever" drugs most commonly prescribed for people is statins to lower cholesterol. Older people need more cholesterol to carry poisons from their body cells. Statins, themselves proven to be health hazards (though approved by governments and doctors associations who are well paid for their endorsements) limit the ability of the body to remove poisons from cells by lowering cholesterol. Your doctor won't tell you that if he or she is paid to prescribe statins.
Governments refuse to pass laws to prevent agriculture giants, pharmaceutical internationals and chemical corporates from harming our health so that they can extract greater profits from us. People who are sick, weak and have no significant immune systems left by the age of retirement are a vibrant and dependable source of profits for these companies. Sick old people are the proverbial cash cow.
Does the situation seem hopeless? It's not. We need to use our bodies to get exercise so they do not atrophy from lack of use. And we need to find clean sources of food from organic farmers. With those two, we have little need for doctors because our bodies will heal themselves so long as we have an immune system left. Self healing is how nature works. This is not to say that doctors have no place, only that they must not be allowed to dominate the health of the elderly.
The future is not bleak. Things are changing as more and more people learn the truth about health and the lies they have been told for many years. Every region has a core of people who are actively working toward good health and clean sources of food. Find them. A variety of clean and nutritious food is the best preventative medicine you can buy.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of simple and cheap solutions for expensive problems. Bad health is a social problem because it affects so many people and adds huge costs to tax dollars.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Sunday, August 24, 2014
What Makes People Want to End Their Own Life
What Killed Robin Williams And Other Suicide Victims?
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows, their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
- David Foster Wallace, American writer and professor (1962-2008)
[Wallace hanged himself, at home, alone, on September 12, 2008]
This is easily the most difficult article I have ever written. It has taken me months to commit it to written text. It takes me somewhere I never wanted to visit again.
I hope to take you today somewhere you have never been. To have a shallow experience of something tragically deep so that you can better understand why suicide has been a taboo subject for so long. Then leave quickly, never to return.
Most of what you have likely read about suicide is wrong. The reason, simply, is that most writers about suicide consider that because anyone can kill themselves, anyone can write about it with authority. The reasoning is similar to that used by people who write about heaven. If you haven't been there, you just don't know.
The topic of suicide can be separated roughly into three categories. One is the kind where the victim is distraught, has great difficulty finding a secure place in life, makes what he or she knows is generally accepted as a means of killing yourself, but never intends to die. Such attempts usually attract the attention, or some attention, the person desperately needs but can't get otherwise and rarely end in death.
This category is the one most people think of when they claim that depression is the mental illness that drove someone to end their life. This is the one where people say "Depression will end" and "Life will get better" and "Find someone who can help." It's a call for help that often goes unanswered once the emergency of the moment has passed.
This category is the one most people think causes people to end their lives, when what these people want most is to find someone who will help them to build a life. It is, in its simplest terms, a cry for help. A desperate cry.
These people can be talked out of their suicide attempt. They are most persuaded by the help line "Somebody does care about you, somebody does love you, somebody will miss you terribly if you die." Later, when they recover and the attention has passed, they find that no one did care that much. So they make another attempt. Sometimes several attempts over a period of years. They seldom succeed because that is not their objective.
They lack the social and emotional/psychological skills that should be taught in schools, but aren't. Even under care they are more likely to be given drugs than the skills they need to survive and build new lives.
A second category might be called failed attempts at coming close to death without actually dying. In a sense, thrill seeking. People indulging in this may overdose on drugs, even engage in a game where they intentionally asphyxiate themselves. They hope to "see the light" without having to walk into it, to experience coming dangerously close to death without having the inconvenience of dying. Inconvenience for others, of course, if they die, not for themeslves.
People who engage in this also lack social and/or emotional coping skills. Again, despite how basic these developmental streams are to life (the other two being physical and intellectual development), they are not taught in schools. Most parents know very little about these developmental streams, so can't teach their own children.
Social and emotional skills are surprisingly easy to teach if a teacher knows what to teach and has permission to teach them. If you remember a couple of important life lessons you learned from someone as a kid and remember how easy they were to learn and how simple they were to convey by someone who knew, you understand how easy and devastatingly cheap these would be to add to a school curriculum.
For some reason that is hard to rationalize, some parents object to teachers teaching these skills, claiming that it should be the responsibility of the parents. It is, of course, but so few parents know what to teach, and when. So most parents miss the lessons entirely.
The third category of suicide is the one that has impacted so many of us recently with the death of Robin Williams. Robin intended to die that day. For him, life was over. He tried to slit his wrists, failed, likely because he realized how messy it would be for someone who would find him, then chose to hang himself with his belt. He did not intend to fail.
Though many people in this third category who end their lives leave notes of apology, explanation or (rarely) of accusation, Robin did not. Leaving a note is common, but nowhere near universal for type three.
Why did he do it? we ask ourselves and anyone else who will listen. Was it depression, as many claim, something he was known to suffer from? Was it severe financial difficulty or fear of bankruptcy and the shame of failure society visits on those who fail, as he was known to be obsessed with this struggle? Or the future struggles with Parkinson's Disease with which he had been diagnosed?
Was it his continuing struggle with substance abuse? Not long before he died he had checked himself voluntarily into the rehab facility he has used previously. Were the mind altering substance the cause or effect of depression? No one can be sure.
Individually, these are each reasons or problems which can be solved, that may be overcome. Collectively? No one can be certain.
There is still another cause for depression, suicide, mental illness, even murder and other forms of criminal activity. Continual and unrelenting stress. The push to succeed, to get even better, to make even more money, to be even more successful. That stress, the driving force of capitalism, never ends.
Is there a pinnacle, a platform at the top for those who have reached the ultimate success, a place to rest when you have finally made it? No. The drive to improve never stops. Most people adjust their lives, recognizing that they have had enough, that it is time to ease back before they crack. Given the shocking number of suicides in the entertainment industry and among other leaders of industries, it's obvious that too many do not make that adjustment.
We read about the suicides among leaders. Rarely do we read about suicides in the military, among teenagers, among the poor, in aboriginal communities. Suicide rates in these groups are nothing short of shocking. Many times the national average in every case.
Robin Williams was not drugged, drunk or likely depressed enough to want enough to die that he would be willing to resort to suicide. So, why?
Suicide is not an act of selfishness. It's not a matter of thinking only of themselves, nor an act of cowardice or an easy way out of problems, excuses those who know little attribute as causes. The kind of suicide where the person fully intends to die is completely different, something beyond human life experience.
Have you ever been so wrapped up in music you are enjoying that there is no other world around you but you and that music? If you write or think deeply, the rest of the world disappears, there is nothing around you but your thought. You may attach yourself to a character in a movie so much that you live the role in the movie right along with the character. An actor or performer may be so into a performance that there is nothing else to life but that moment, at that moment. You are no longer an observer, but now an integral part of the action.
Would science call that depression, as it does the cause for suicide? Science either totally denies the existence or has trouble diagnosing or explaining anything that isn't broad enough to shoot a gun at from a short distance. I would call it the human spirit separated from the confines of the corporeal body. With suicide--real suicide--the spirit seeks to make that separation permanent. Whether that may be considered a mental illness or something different may depend on whether or not you have had such an experience.
For a person about to end his life (males end their lives much more often than females--there's an important lesson there), there is no one else in the world. No family, no friends, no neighbours. No one exists but them and "now" at that time. There is no world other than the room the person is in. Most suicides happen indoors, usually at night, in a closed room, where it is quiet, when they are alone. Their whole world is inside their body.
Isn't that strange? Yes, may it always seem strange to you.
What could you do to prevent a person in this third category from ending their life? That's a burning question. Intervention is possible with the first two categories as has been demonstrated many times. But the third?
My theory is that a person in the third category can be forced to postpone suicide, but not to avoid it completely. At least not easily. Anyone who can be talked out of it would be in the first category. Short term intervention for someone committed to killing himself will not work. It will only delay the event.
Consider this: if you are in a position to think about ending your life, or even to consider the pain you will suffer in doing so or the mess and distress you will leave for others if you die, you are not a candidate for category three. You may be depressed or you may be normal as almost everyone thinks about ending their life at some point. They don't do it for a reason. Category three people don't consider reasons or consequences. They are alone in their world. There is no "other," "else," "later" or "future."
Isn't it cruel to end an article on such a depressing note (pun unintended)? Let me throw you a rope of hope. Successful suicides in the third category almost always have the person being alone. Never leave a person who may be at risk alone in a room. Never without another person who is awake and paying attention. All the time, 24/7.
A person who is at risk of suicide in this third category will tell you of his intentions, if asked. Most category threes have hinted or told others outright of their intent to end their life. What if he says no, he does not intend to kill himself? No one says you have to believe him. It may seem surprising, but few category threes will lie about their intent.
If you get the person out of his normal environment, away from the usual stresses of his life, for long enough (it may take at least a year), you may be able to cause something in his brain to change enough to alter his life course.
The other alternative would be akin to brainwashing. This would have to be done by a professional, over several successive long days of intensive therapy, non-stop over those days. A regular psychologist or psychiatrist would not know what to do or how to do it. Drugs would not be used because they would prevent voluntary changes within the brain. Finding a person who could do that would be harder than finding a needle in a haystack. But they exist.
I wish I had positive or encouraging suggestions for you if you know or learn of someone in category three. Let me make it even more complicated.
If a person wants to end his life because he can't get whatever he needs, may not even know what he needs, what are the ethical questions surrounding denying him that right? A person who is "saved" from suicide by persuasion may not get the help and personal care he needs later. Is that ethical?
What is society's obligation, if any, to someone who wants to end his life? What would your own obligation be? What is right? Each of us must make that decision, if the time comes, and live with the consequences of that choice.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of easily implemented and relatively cheap solutions to problems that plague every community. Suicide is a social problem, likely more of a problem than you are aware of in your own home area.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows, their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
- David Foster Wallace, American writer and professor (1962-2008)
[Wallace hanged himself, at home, alone, on September 12, 2008]
This is easily the most difficult article I have ever written. It has taken me months to commit it to written text. It takes me somewhere I never wanted to visit again.
I hope to take you today somewhere you have never been. To have a shallow experience of something tragically deep so that you can better understand why suicide has been a taboo subject for so long. Then leave quickly, never to return.
Most of what you have likely read about suicide is wrong. The reason, simply, is that most writers about suicide consider that because anyone can kill themselves, anyone can write about it with authority. The reasoning is similar to that used by people who write about heaven. If you haven't been there, you just don't know.
The topic of suicide can be separated roughly into three categories. One is the kind where the victim is distraught, has great difficulty finding a secure place in life, makes what he or she knows is generally accepted as a means of killing yourself, but never intends to die. Such attempts usually attract the attention, or some attention, the person desperately needs but can't get otherwise and rarely end in death.
This category is the one most people think of when they claim that depression is the mental illness that drove someone to end their life. This is the one where people say "Depression will end" and "Life will get better" and "Find someone who can help." It's a call for help that often goes unanswered once the emergency of the moment has passed.
This category is the one most people think causes people to end their lives, when what these people want most is to find someone who will help them to build a life. It is, in its simplest terms, a cry for help. A desperate cry.
These people can be talked out of their suicide attempt. They are most persuaded by the help line "Somebody does care about you, somebody does love you, somebody will miss you terribly if you die." Later, when they recover and the attention has passed, they find that no one did care that much. So they make another attempt. Sometimes several attempts over a period of years. They seldom succeed because that is not their objective.
They lack the social and emotional/psychological skills that should be taught in schools, but aren't. Even under care they are more likely to be given drugs than the skills they need to survive and build new lives.
A second category might be called failed attempts at coming close to death without actually dying. In a sense, thrill seeking. People indulging in this may overdose on drugs, even engage in a game where they intentionally asphyxiate themselves. They hope to "see the light" without having to walk into it, to experience coming dangerously close to death without having the inconvenience of dying. Inconvenience for others, of course, if they die, not for themeslves.
People who engage in this also lack social and/or emotional coping skills. Again, despite how basic these developmental streams are to life (the other two being physical and intellectual development), they are not taught in schools. Most parents know very little about these developmental streams, so can't teach their own children.
Social and emotional skills are surprisingly easy to teach if a teacher knows what to teach and has permission to teach them. If you remember a couple of important life lessons you learned from someone as a kid and remember how easy they were to learn and how simple they were to convey by someone who knew, you understand how easy and devastatingly cheap these would be to add to a school curriculum.
For some reason that is hard to rationalize, some parents object to teachers teaching these skills, claiming that it should be the responsibility of the parents. It is, of course, but so few parents know what to teach, and when. So most parents miss the lessons entirely.
The third category of suicide is the one that has impacted so many of us recently with the death of Robin Williams. Robin intended to die that day. For him, life was over. He tried to slit his wrists, failed, likely because he realized how messy it would be for someone who would find him, then chose to hang himself with his belt. He did not intend to fail.
Though many people in this third category who end their lives leave notes of apology, explanation or (rarely) of accusation, Robin did not. Leaving a note is common, but nowhere near universal for type three.
Why did he do it? we ask ourselves and anyone else who will listen. Was it depression, as many claim, something he was known to suffer from? Was it severe financial difficulty or fear of bankruptcy and the shame of failure society visits on those who fail, as he was known to be obsessed with this struggle? Or the future struggles with Parkinson's Disease with which he had been diagnosed?
Was it his continuing struggle with substance abuse? Not long before he died he had checked himself voluntarily into the rehab facility he has used previously. Were the mind altering substance the cause or effect of depression? No one can be sure.
Individually, these are each reasons or problems which can be solved, that may be overcome. Collectively? No one can be certain.
There is still another cause for depression, suicide, mental illness, even murder and other forms of criminal activity. Continual and unrelenting stress. The push to succeed, to get even better, to make even more money, to be even more successful. That stress, the driving force of capitalism, never ends.
Is there a pinnacle, a platform at the top for those who have reached the ultimate success, a place to rest when you have finally made it? No. The drive to improve never stops. Most people adjust their lives, recognizing that they have had enough, that it is time to ease back before they crack. Given the shocking number of suicides in the entertainment industry and among other leaders of industries, it's obvious that too many do not make that adjustment.
We read about the suicides among leaders. Rarely do we read about suicides in the military, among teenagers, among the poor, in aboriginal communities. Suicide rates in these groups are nothing short of shocking. Many times the national average in every case.
Robin Williams was not drugged, drunk or likely depressed enough to want enough to die that he would be willing to resort to suicide. So, why?
Suicide is not an act of selfishness. It's not a matter of thinking only of themselves, nor an act of cowardice or an easy way out of problems, excuses those who know little attribute as causes. The kind of suicide where the person fully intends to die is completely different, something beyond human life experience.
Have you ever been so wrapped up in music you are enjoying that there is no other world around you but you and that music? If you write or think deeply, the rest of the world disappears, there is nothing around you but your thought. You may attach yourself to a character in a movie so much that you live the role in the movie right along with the character. An actor or performer may be so into a performance that there is nothing else to life but that moment, at that moment. You are no longer an observer, but now an integral part of the action.
Would science call that depression, as it does the cause for suicide? Science either totally denies the existence or has trouble diagnosing or explaining anything that isn't broad enough to shoot a gun at from a short distance. I would call it the human spirit separated from the confines of the corporeal body. With suicide--real suicide--the spirit seeks to make that separation permanent. Whether that may be considered a mental illness or something different may depend on whether or not you have had such an experience.
For a person about to end his life (males end their lives much more often than females--there's an important lesson there), there is no one else in the world. No family, no friends, no neighbours. No one exists but them and "now" at that time. There is no world other than the room the person is in. Most suicides happen indoors, usually at night, in a closed room, where it is quiet, when they are alone. Their whole world is inside their body.
Isn't that strange? Yes, may it always seem strange to you.
What could you do to prevent a person in this third category from ending their life? That's a burning question. Intervention is possible with the first two categories as has been demonstrated many times. But the third?
My theory is that a person in the third category can be forced to postpone suicide, but not to avoid it completely. At least not easily. Anyone who can be talked out of it would be in the first category. Short term intervention for someone committed to killing himself will not work. It will only delay the event.
Consider this: if you are in a position to think about ending your life, or even to consider the pain you will suffer in doing so or the mess and distress you will leave for others if you die, you are not a candidate for category three. You may be depressed or you may be normal as almost everyone thinks about ending their life at some point. They don't do it for a reason. Category three people don't consider reasons or consequences. They are alone in their world. There is no "other," "else," "later" or "future."
Isn't it cruel to end an article on such a depressing note (pun unintended)? Let me throw you a rope of hope. Successful suicides in the third category almost always have the person being alone. Never leave a person who may be at risk alone in a room. Never without another person who is awake and paying attention. All the time, 24/7.
A person who is at risk of suicide in this third category will tell you of his intentions, if asked. Most category threes have hinted or told others outright of their intent to end their life. What if he says no, he does not intend to kill himself? No one says you have to believe him. It may seem surprising, but few category threes will lie about their intent.
If you get the person out of his normal environment, away from the usual stresses of his life, for long enough (it may take at least a year), you may be able to cause something in his brain to change enough to alter his life course.
The other alternative would be akin to brainwashing. This would have to be done by a professional, over several successive long days of intensive therapy, non-stop over those days. A regular psychologist or psychiatrist would not know what to do or how to do it. Drugs would not be used because they would prevent voluntary changes within the brain. Finding a person who could do that would be harder than finding a needle in a haystack. But they exist.
I wish I had positive or encouraging suggestions for you if you know or learn of someone in category three. Let me make it even more complicated.
If a person wants to end his life because he can't get whatever he needs, may not even know what he needs, what are the ethical questions surrounding denying him that right? A person who is "saved" from suicide by persuasion may not get the help and personal care he needs later. Is that ethical?
What is society's obligation, if any, to someone who wants to end his life? What would your own obligation be? What is right? Each of us must make that decision, if the time comes, and live with the consequences of that choice.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of easily implemented and relatively cheap solutions to problems that plague every community. Suicide is a social problem, likely more of a problem than you are aware of in your own home area.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Friday, August 15, 2014
Keeping Kids "Innocent" Is Wrong, Ultimately Harmful
Keeping Kids "Innocent" Is Wrong, Ultimately Harmful
"Now I really suspect that Grandma is hiding [the newspapers with news about the Great War]. That would mean the news was so bad she did not want me to read it. But knowing the truth is better than imagining the worst."
- Jean Little, If I Die Before I Wake: The Flu Epidemic Diary of Fiona Macgregor, part of the Dear Canada series that teaches history and culture to children through story telling
They grow up so quickly, don't they? How often have you heard that? Or maybe you have said it yourself.
Too many parents try to protect their children from the "cruel world out there" by hiding truth and reality from them. "There will be time for them to learn that later, when they are old enough and mature enough to handle it."
The trouble is, by the time the parents believe their kids are old enough to handle the bad news about life, the kids have usually already experienced the bad part. They are past the time when they needed the input. The parents failed in their most important function, to raise their children to know how to handle what they face in their lives.
Compared with most mammals and primates, humans have an extremely long period of childhood. Nature has accommodated this by allowing for the slow development of a child's body. Girls don't begin to become fertile (able to procreate) until they are old enough that their prehistoric female ancestors were ready to be mothers. Similarly with boys becoming sexually mature.
The frontal lobes of the brain, the parts that help us tell right from wrong, good from bad, and that help us to think our way through serious problems do not fully develop until well on into the teen years.
By the age that adolescents become sexually mature, most of them know almost nothing about what is happening inside their bodies (how the hormones will affect them, not just the mechanics of reproduction as studied in school), how the same is affecting those of the opposite sex and how they can and should manage their strong feelings of sexual attraction toward others.
A recent study in the United States showed that fully half the college students surveyed knew almost nothing about how to avoid pregnancy. Does that seem unbelievable? It isn't to those college students.
At the adolescent age of their kids, many parents are saying to other parents that "Kids are interested in sex too young these days," and "I don't want my kid to be having sex until he (or she) is much older and can handle the responsibility." That age is not 12 years. But kids (about 15%) have their first sexual experiences by that age. By age 14 or 15, virtually half of them have had sex at least once. Parents are in denial, unless a daughter becomes pregnant. Then they blame the daughter, or TV, or movies, or their family doctor, just about anyone.
There is no such thing as an age when a child is too young to learn about matters of adulthood. That's the whole purpose of childhood, for them to learn about being adults before they actually get there and have to live it.
However, there is a secret about conveying adult information and knowledge to children. It's not what you tell them so much as how you tell them. Like any kind of communication, the message must be formed in such as way that the receiver understands it and can absorb it. Preferably that the young person has understood the message enough that he or she can process how to incorporate it somehow into his or her life.
A child can know the intricacies of sex without actually feeling the need to have it with another person. There are consequences. One is pregnancy and that includes becoming a parent long before the adolescent is ready to become a parent, to raise, provide for and protect a child.
Teens have learned how to avoid having intercourse by having sex in such a way that pregnancy is not possible. One method for each gender is cunnilingus (for the female) or fellatio (for the male). These do open the possibilities for STDs (Sexually Transmitted Diseases), including HPV infection, even throat cancer or HIV. The answer is not to hide these possibilities, but to discuss them so the adolescent has a chance to understand the risks.
Those who do not know make the most mistakes. The consequences of those mistakes often affect a person for the rest of his or her life. The knowledge young people need is not just about sex. It's about everything they may be exposed to in their lives, including at school, on the streets, on televison and on the internet.
Innocence in childhood becomes ignorance in adulthood. Innocent children suffer great disadvantages. Ignorant adults become victims of all kinds of problems. To make life worse, ignorant adults who received little help from their parents tend to be shy about asking for help from others when they are adults. In other words, ignorant adults tend to remain ignorant, often to the extent of refusing to learn when they have the opportunity.
There are no advantages for a child to remain innocent. There are huge and harmful disadvantages for an adult to be ignorant about the realities of life. One of those disadvantages is that ignorant adults tend to be more fearful of more different things than those who are knowledgeable. They also tend to lack empathy and often find it hard to be sympathetic. These are critically important characteristics we want in the generation that will soon run our country.
If you want a child who never grows up, get a dog or cat. If you are the parent of a child, help that child become a well balanced and responsible adult. It's the primary life responsibility of every parent. Talk about it.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of easy and inexpensive solutions to seemingly impossible problems. He gives advice through his web site and his internet group. To learn more about these go to http://billallin.com
"Now I really suspect that Grandma is hiding [the newspapers with news about the Great War]. That would mean the news was so bad she did not want me to read it. But knowing the truth is better than imagining the worst."
- Jean Little, If I Die Before I Wake: The Flu Epidemic Diary of Fiona Macgregor, part of the Dear Canada series that teaches history and culture to children through story telling
They grow up so quickly, don't they? How often have you heard that? Or maybe you have said it yourself.
Too many parents try to protect their children from the "cruel world out there" by hiding truth and reality from them. "There will be time for them to learn that later, when they are old enough and mature enough to handle it."
The trouble is, by the time the parents believe their kids are old enough to handle the bad news about life, the kids have usually already experienced the bad part. They are past the time when they needed the input. The parents failed in their most important function, to raise their children to know how to handle what they face in their lives.
Compared with most mammals and primates, humans have an extremely long period of childhood. Nature has accommodated this by allowing for the slow development of a child's body. Girls don't begin to become fertile (able to procreate) until they are old enough that their prehistoric female ancestors were ready to be mothers. Similarly with boys becoming sexually mature.
The frontal lobes of the brain, the parts that help us tell right from wrong, good from bad, and that help us to think our way through serious problems do not fully develop until well on into the teen years.
By the age that adolescents become sexually mature, most of them know almost nothing about what is happening inside their bodies (how the hormones will affect them, not just the mechanics of reproduction as studied in school), how the same is affecting those of the opposite sex and how they can and should manage their strong feelings of sexual attraction toward others.
A recent study in the United States showed that fully half the college students surveyed knew almost nothing about how to avoid pregnancy. Does that seem unbelievable? It isn't to those college students.
At the adolescent age of their kids, many parents are saying to other parents that "Kids are interested in sex too young these days," and "I don't want my kid to be having sex until he (or she) is much older and can handle the responsibility." That age is not 12 years. But kids (about 15%) have their first sexual experiences by that age. By age 14 or 15, virtually half of them have had sex at least once. Parents are in denial, unless a daughter becomes pregnant. Then they blame the daughter, or TV, or movies, or their family doctor, just about anyone.
There is no such thing as an age when a child is too young to learn about matters of adulthood. That's the whole purpose of childhood, for them to learn about being adults before they actually get there and have to live it.
However, there is a secret about conveying adult information and knowledge to children. It's not what you tell them so much as how you tell them. Like any kind of communication, the message must be formed in such as way that the receiver understands it and can absorb it. Preferably that the young person has understood the message enough that he or she can process how to incorporate it somehow into his or her life.
A child can know the intricacies of sex without actually feeling the need to have it with another person. There are consequences. One is pregnancy and that includes becoming a parent long before the adolescent is ready to become a parent, to raise, provide for and protect a child.
Teens have learned how to avoid having intercourse by having sex in such a way that pregnancy is not possible. One method for each gender is cunnilingus (for the female) or fellatio (for the male). These do open the possibilities for STDs (Sexually Transmitted Diseases), including HPV infection, even throat cancer or HIV. The answer is not to hide these possibilities, but to discuss them so the adolescent has a chance to understand the risks.
Those who do not know make the most mistakes. The consequences of those mistakes often affect a person for the rest of his or her life. The knowledge young people need is not just about sex. It's about everything they may be exposed to in their lives, including at school, on the streets, on televison and on the internet.
Innocence in childhood becomes ignorance in adulthood. Innocent children suffer great disadvantages. Ignorant adults become victims of all kinds of problems. To make life worse, ignorant adults who received little help from their parents tend to be shy about asking for help from others when they are adults. In other words, ignorant adults tend to remain ignorant, often to the extent of refusing to learn when they have the opportunity.
There are no advantages for a child to remain innocent. There are huge and harmful disadvantages for an adult to be ignorant about the realities of life. One of those disadvantages is that ignorant adults tend to be more fearful of more different things than those who are knowledgeable. They also tend to lack empathy and often find it hard to be sympathetic. These are critically important characteristics we want in the generation that will soon run our country.
If you want a child who never grows up, get a dog or cat. If you are the parent of a child, help that child become a well balanced and responsible adult. It's the primary life responsibility of every parent. Talk about it.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of easy and inexpensive solutions to seemingly impossible problems. He gives advice through his web site and his internet group. To learn more about these go to http://billallin.com
Monday, March 24, 2014
Why GMO (GE) Foods Are Dangerous
Why GMO (GE) Foods Are Dangerous
The safety of GMO foods is unproven and a growing body of research connects these foods with health concerns and environmental damage. For this reason, most developed nations have policies requiring mandatory labeling of GMO foods at the very least, and some have issued bans on GMO food production and imports.
In Canada we do not.
- David Suzuki Foundation Dr. David Suzuki is a Canadian environmentalist.
GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) and GE (Genetically Engineered) are, for all intents and purposes, identical and interchangeable. North America tends to use GMO, Europe GE, usage varies in the rest of the world.
Simply put, the process involves taking genetic material from the DNA of one organism and inserting it into the DNA of another organism. The idea is to confer the benefit of the genetic material of the donor organism onto the receiving organism, thereby "improving" the recipient organism.
Opponents of GMOs call it "playing God." This seems excessive. Playing the Devil might be a more appropriate label. We will return to the labeling idea later.
The governments of the USA, Canada and a few other countries that tend to go along with whatever the US says are either supremely stupid or unspeakably corrupt. While both are highly negative, the shocking possibility exists that those same governments are both stupid and corrupt. That is shocking because, given the present staggering power of chemical giants such as Monsanto, little short of physical revolution may be considered to cause committed countries to back away from decisions that have harmed and will harm their own people.
This article will not attribute opinion to the results of scientific research. That has been done too often. The research has been done, the conclusions are public, but the chemical giants have managed to cover it up so successfully that the majority of people know little about them. Governments who have committed to allow GMOs are too embarrassed to admit their grievous mistakes, so remain silent. They fear litigation as a consequence of allowing harmful foods on the market. Millions of people are now in the process of destroying their health as a result.
This article will instead appeal to logic, to your sense of right and wrong, to what used to be known as common sense. GMOs are purely destructive over the long term, covertly destructive in the short term. Here's why.
Genetically modified seeds are engineered to withstand poisons. These poisons are spread over the land in which the seeds will grow, ostensibly to kill off pests and plants that would compete with the seed during the growing season.
You need to understand that these poisons are not selective. They are broad spectrum. That is, they kill everything, every living organism, every plant, every animal, every bacterium and other microbe in the soil they touch. As there are literally millions of microscopic organisms in every teaspoon of fertile soil, that is a massive amount of destruction.
Then the genetically modified seeds are planted. They sprout, they grow, they eventually produce food-like products you will find in your food market. The chemical companies claim the seeds carry none of the poisons with them to maturity. Research proves this is a lie. More recent research has found these poisons in the air people breathe and the water they drink.
So, prove it, you say, give us the research. No, I won't do that. Articles that provide support for their arguments based on "scientific research" can and often are embarrassingly biased, edited not to give all available evidence but to provide evidence to support the opinion expressed. The internet will give you the evidence if you search. This article will not give you one-sided evidence to support its claims.
Search "organic foods pros and cons." And "gmo foods" to start. Then "gmo damage."
Now to the logic or common sense part. It has been well known and documented for centuries, even millennia, that very small amounts of poison ingested over an extended period of time will eventually cause ill health, then death. Kings and emperors used to have tasters (or the chefs who prepared their meals) eat some of the food intended for the leaders before they indulged.
Some fine mysteries, such as by Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, showed how murderers killed their victims by giving them small amounts of poison over weeks, months, even years. Court records show how some people murdered others in similar ways today.
The very same companies that produce the seeds that can survive the assaults of poisons on fields in which they grow also produce the poisons themselves. Even today some governments are approving GMO seeds on which DDT (an insecticide banned in most countries decades ago) and components of Agent Orange (best known for killing countless innocent people in SE Asia during the Vietnam war, though people are still suffering and dying from it today) may be sprayed. Yes, you read that right.
Not only do they give permission for farm fields to be poisoned lifeless before seeds are planted, they are now giving permission for industrial farmers to spray poisons directly on the crops.
You decide, is that stupidity or corruption? Or both.
Ask yourself how much sense it makes for a human to take as a blood thinner a poison (warfarin) that in stronger doses kills rats, a fellow mammal. With all of the advice we receive about the importance of eating green leafy vegetables to keep us healthy and extend our lives, warfarin users must be careful of them because the vitamin K1 they contain interferes with warfarin's effectiveness as a blood thinner. Eating an extremely healthy food can harm a warfarin user.
At a time when health care costs soar dramatically to previously unimagined heights, governments are knowingly making more of their own citizens sick. It is known that those living today will be the first generation in centuries to live shorter lifespans than their parents. That prediction was made because of widespread obesity.
We may also expect it because of widespread poisoning of the foods we eat. Yet government food and drug agencies still call GMO foods safe in some countries.
Many of these same governments are refusing to allow food products with GMO ingredients to have labels clearly stating their GMO content. What would you call it? Consumers are not allowed to know if the food they buy and eat and feed to their children is unhealthy or toxic.
You have a choice about what you eat. Learn about it first or suffer the consequences. Those consequences could include not only a shorter lifespan, but years of ill health before you die. Nobody wants that.
Final note: chemical giant and the world's most powerful advocate of GMO seeds (it sells both single year seeds and Roundup, the poison that kills everything before its seeds are planted) Monsanto refuses to allow any GMO products or food components in its own staff canteen.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about cheap and easily implemented solutions to pervasive social problems. Yes, ill health from GMO food consumption is a serious social problem.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
The safety of GMO foods is unproven and a growing body of research connects these foods with health concerns and environmental damage. For this reason, most developed nations have policies requiring mandatory labeling of GMO foods at the very least, and some have issued bans on GMO food production and imports.
In Canada we do not.
- David Suzuki Foundation Dr. David Suzuki is a Canadian environmentalist.
GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) and GE (Genetically Engineered) are, for all intents and purposes, identical and interchangeable. North America tends to use GMO, Europe GE, usage varies in the rest of the world.
Simply put, the process involves taking genetic material from the DNA of one organism and inserting it into the DNA of another organism. The idea is to confer the benefit of the genetic material of the donor organism onto the receiving organism, thereby "improving" the recipient organism.
Opponents of GMOs call it "playing God." This seems excessive. Playing the Devil might be a more appropriate label. We will return to the labeling idea later.
The governments of the USA, Canada and a few other countries that tend to go along with whatever the US says are either supremely stupid or unspeakably corrupt. While both are highly negative, the shocking possibility exists that those same governments are both stupid and corrupt. That is shocking because, given the present staggering power of chemical giants such as Monsanto, little short of physical revolution may be considered to cause committed countries to back away from decisions that have harmed and will harm their own people.
This article will not attribute opinion to the results of scientific research. That has been done too often. The research has been done, the conclusions are public, but the chemical giants have managed to cover it up so successfully that the majority of people know little about them. Governments who have committed to allow GMOs are too embarrassed to admit their grievous mistakes, so remain silent. They fear litigation as a consequence of allowing harmful foods on the market. Millions of people are now in the process of destroying their health as a result.
This article will instead appeal to logic, to your sense of right and wrong, to what used to be known as common sense. GMOs are purely destructive over the long term, covertly destructive in the short term. Here's why.
Genetically modified seeds are engineered to withstand poisons. These poisons are spread over the land in which the seeds will grow, ostensibly to kill off pests and plants that would compete with the seed during the growing season.
You need to understand that these poisons are not selective. They are broad spectrum. That is, they kill everything, every living organism, every plant, every animal, every bacterium and other microbe in the soil they touch. As there are literally millions of microscopic organisms in every teaspoon of fertile soil, that is a massive amount of destruction.
Then the genetically modified seeds are planted. They sprout, they grow, they eventually produce food-like products you will find in your food market. The chemical companies claim the seeds carry none of the poisons with them to maturity. Research proves this is a lie. More recent research has found these poisons in the air people breathe and the water they drink.
So, prove it, you say, give us the research. No, I won't do that. Articles that provide support for their arguments based on "scientific research" can and often are embarrassingly biased, edited not to give all available evidence but to provide evidence to support the opinion expressed. The internet will give you the evidence if you search. This article will not give you one-sided evidence to support its claims.
Search "organic foods pros and cons." And "gmo foods" to start. Then "gmo damage."
Now to the logic or common sense part. It has been well known and documented for centuries, even millennia, that very small amounts of poison ingested over an extended period of time will eventually cause ill health, then death. Kings and emperors used to have tasters (or the chefs who prepared their meals) eat some of the food intended for the leaders before they indulged.
Some fine mysteries, such as by Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, showed how murderers killed their victims by giving them small amounts of poison over weeks, months, even years. Court records show how some people murdered others in similar ways today.
The very same companies that produce the seeds that can survive the assaults of poisons on fields in which they grow also produce the poisons themselves. Even today some governments are approving GMO seeds on which DDT (an insecticide banned in most countries decades ago) and components of Agent Orange (best known for killing countless innocent people in SE Asia during the Vietnam war, though people are still suffering and dying from it today) may be sprayed. Yes, you read that right.
Not only do they give permission for farm fields to be poisoned lifeless before seeds are planted, they are now giving permission for industrial farmers to spray poisons directly on the crops.
You decide, is that stupidity or corruption? Or both.
Ask yourself how much sense it makes for a human to take as a blood thinner a poison (warfarin) that in stronger doses kills rats, a fellow mammal. With all of the advice we receive about the importance of eating green leafy vegetables to keep us healthy and extend our lives, warfarin users must be careful of them because the vitamin K1 they contain interferes with warfarin's effectiveness as a blood thinner. Eating an extremely healthy food can harm a warfarin user.
At a time when health care costs soar dramatically to previously unimagined heights, governments are knowingly making more of their own citizens sick. It is known that those living today will be the first generation in centuries to live shorter lifespans than their parents. That prediction was made because of widespread obesity.
We may also expect it because of widespread poisoning of the foods we eat. Yet government food and drug agencies still call GMO foods safe in some countries.
Many of these same governments are refusing to allow food products with GMO ingredients to have labels clearly stating their GMO content. What would you call it? Consumers are not allowed to know if the food they buy and eat and feed to their children is unhealthy or toxic.
You have a choice about what you eat. Learn about it first or suffer the consequences. Those consequences could include not only a shorter lifespan, but years of ill health before you die. Nobody wants that.
Final note: chemical giant and the world's most powerful advocate of GMO seeds (it sells both single year seeds and Roundup, the poison that kills everything before its seeds are planted) Monsanto refuses to allow any GMO products or food components in its own staff canteen.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about cheap and easily implemented solutions to pervasive social problems. Yes, ill health from GMO food consumption is a serious social problem.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Nutrition vs. Big Pharma
Nutrition vs. Big Pharma
It's all in what we eat. Just as inadequate nutrition will cause our chromosomes to get shorter faster and younger, good nutrition can help us to boost our DNA to help us live longer and stronger and more active lives as we get older.
- "Why I Take Vitamin and Mineral Supplements"
There is no doubt, health is a very personal and controversial subject. Very personal because each person makes his or her own decision and choices about what to eat and what to avoid.
Controversial because those who take an interest in learning about health matters are battered from all sides with information, often conflicting with other information on the same subject.
The term "Big Pharma" is itself derogatory, used by those (especially by conspiracy theorists who believe pharmaceutical companies plan to keep everyone sick to maintain their profit margins) who advocate good nutrition over running to the doctor with each runny nose.
Many studies have shown that taking vitamin and mineral supplements does little or no good for health. Some even claim supplements can harm health. It should be noted that pharmaceutical companies (the international corporations that make drugs prescribed by doctors) have become skilled at hiding their sponsorship of supposedly independent scientific studies.
It has been said that producers of "real food" and food supplements of value can't afford to conduct the kinds of studies that big pharmaceutical companies can, which explains why they have so little support from scientific studies. Yet studies exist supposedly "proving" that supplements are useless and foods not enhanced by chemicals from big corporations such as Monsanto and Dow don't offer dependable product. If producers of 'real food' can't afford to conduct studies but Big Pharma and the chemical giants can, does that give you a clue about who is behind the negative studies?
The claim that advocates of good nutrition and big pharmaceutical companies are at war over health information you receive has merit. They are at war.
When a pharmaceutical company (or a study sponsored by one or more of them) claims that nutritional or vitamin supplements are not covered by law (technically they are not drugs, which are covered), thus their contents cannot be verified by their manufacturers, you have to think "conflict of interest." They have profit in mind at all times and the money to make the competition look weak or harmful through studies they sponsor covertly.
Nutritional supplements and vitamin supplements derive from nature, from plants that have grown and developed since long before humans inhabited the planet. Have you ever challenged a farmer to prove that each carrot he sells has the same nutritional value as each other carrot? Of course not.
Farmers are not the ones who claim the nutritional value of eating carrots. They leave that to health authorities who have studied the chemical components of carrots and how they affect the health of people. Nature is not consistent. The nutritional value of a carrot grown in one field may differ markedly from that of a carrot of similar size grown in an adjacent field.
No respectable health authority has ever advised people to eat only carrots. They advise people to eat a wide selection of fresh fruits and vegetables, including carrots and plants of other varieties, especially those with strong colours (they tend to have greater health benefits). Yet food and supplement "studies" take these out of context of the normal consumption and digestive systems and find results that make them look bad.
A person who paid attention only to the results of studies that in effect say it doesn't matter what you eat, it only matters whether or not you are sick, may believe that they can eat anything. If they do get sick, it's bad luck and drugs or (in extreme cases) a stay in a hospital will fix them up.
Now we can make the distinction between a healthy body and an unhealthy body. Note that you will likely not be able to tell by looking at someone whether their body is healthy or unhealthy. Nature has made us strong and fairly resistant to attacks by pathogens in our young (and therefore reproductive) years.
Once our reproductive years have passed, the effects of an unhealthy lifestyle and unhealthy eating habits begin to show. People don't get sick by accident or bad luck. Generally speaking, they get sick for a very good reason.
Unhealthy eating practices over several years result in an unhealthy body. An unhealthy body is vulnerable to attack by disease bacteria and viruses. The immune system of a healthy body will fight off these pathogens. The immune system of a healthy person will kill those bad guys.
But won't doctor-prescribed drugs do the same thing if you get sick? Yes, sort of. The number of drugs that will defeat viruses can be counted on your thumbs. The number of viruses that may attack your body is so large that it can't be counted. The common cold alone has about 200 viruses that cause you to "have a cold."
As to fighting bacteria, doctors have many drugs they can prescribe. If a doctor doesn't know exactly which bacterium has caused a disease you have, he will likely prescribe a broad spectrum antibiotic. That should get rid of the worst of the bacteria that are attacking you.
The trouble with that is that the antibiotic will also likely destroy most of your immune system. Your immune system, after all, depends almost entirely on its own collection of microbes in your gut, in your mouth and on every organ of your body. Antibiotics kill far more good bacteria--the ones that form the core of your immune system--then they kill harmful bacteria. The doctor takes credit only for killing the bad ones.
Pharmaceutical companies don't tell you that. They want you to believe that their drugs will kill the bad bacteria. After that, forget about other consequences. If you contract some other illness because you have no immune system to fight it off, the companies want you to believe that you simply have bad luck (take more drugs). But that's not true. You may simply have a knowledge deficit. And a naïve belief in the ability of your doctor and drugs to cure you of anything.
But drugs don't cure you. More often than not, they do you more harm than good.
Cancer, for example, is now considered by many outside the medical establishment to be a voluntary disease. That is, you have a choice to avoid cancer. If you eat properly. Same with heart disease and most of the other ailments people suffer from before they reach 90 years of age.
The purpose of this article is not to give you medical or nutritional advise. Its purpose is to get you to give direction to your thoughts about your ability to control your own health.
You make the choice to be healthy, especially past middle age (though ideally you should begin before that), or to be a medical patient and regular customer of Big Pharma. If you choose the latter, the companies will love you for it. They won't respect you, but they will love you because you will be one of the geese that lays golden eggs for them.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of solutions that are cheap but effective, as well as hundreds of articles that are available on the internet. Yes, health is a big social problem in the world, not just in the west, but everywhere.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
It's all in what we eat. Just as inadequate nutrition will cause our chromosomes to get shorter faster and younger, good nutrition can help us to boost our DNA to help us live longer and stronger and more active lives as we get older.
- "Why I Take Vitamin and Mineral Supplements"
There is no doubt, health is a very personal and controversial subject. Very personal because each person makes his or her own decision and choices about what to eat and what to avoid.
Controversial because those who take an interest in learning about health matters are battered from all sides with information, often conflicting with other information on the same subject.
The term "Big Pharma" is itself derogatory, used by those (especially by conspiracy theorists who believe pharmaceutical companies plan to keep everyone sick to maintain their profit margins) who advocate good nutrition over running to the doctor with each runny nose.
Many studies have shown that taking vitamin and mineral supplements does little or no good for health. Some even claim supplements can harm health. It should be noted that pharmaceutical companies (the international corporations that make drugs prescribed by doctors) have become skilled at hiding their sponsorship of supposedly independent scientific studies.
It has been said that producers of "real food" and food supplements of value can't afford to conduct the kinds of studies that big pharmaceutical companies can, which explains why they have so little support from scientific studies. Yet studies exist supposedly "proving" that supplements are useless and foods not enhanced by chemicals from big corporations such as Monsanto and Dow don't offer dependable product. If producers of 'real food' can't afford to conduct studies but Big Pharma and the chemical giants can, does that give you a clue about who is behind the negative studies?
The claim that advocates of good nutrition and big pharmaceutical companies are at war over health information you receive has merit. They are at war.
When a pharmaceutical company (or a study sponsored by one or more of them) claims that nutritional or vitamin supplements are not covered by law (technically they are not drugs, which are covered), thus their contents cannot be verified by their manufacturers, you have to think "conflict of interest." They have profit in mind at all times and the money to make the competition look weak or harmful through studies they sponsor covertly.
Nutritional supplements and vitamin supplements derive from nature, from plants that have grown and developed since long before humans inhabited the planet. Have you ever challenged a farmer to prove that each carrot he sells has the same nutritional value as each other carrot? Of course not.
Farmers are not the ones who claim the nutritional value of eating carrots. They leave that to health authorities who have studied the chemical components of carrots and how they affect the health of people. Nature is not consistent. The nutritional value of a carrot grown in one field may differ markedly from that of a carrot of similar size grown in an adjacent field.
No respectable health authority has ever advised people to eat only carrots. They advise people to eat a wide selection of fresh fruits and vegetables, including carrots and plants of other varieties, especially those with strong colours (they tend to have greater health benefits). Yet food and supplement "studies" take these out of context of the normal consumption and digestive systems and find results that make them look bad.
A person who paid attention only to the results of studies that in effect say it doesn't matter what you eat, it only matters whether or not you are sick, may believe that they can eat anything. If they do get sick, it's bad luck and drugs or (in extreme cases) a stay in a hospital will fix them up.
Now we can make the distinction between a healthy body and an unhealthy body. Note that you will likely not be able to tell by looking at someone whether their body is healthy or unhealthy. Nature has made us strong and fairly resistant to attacks by pathogens in our young (and therefore reproductive) years.
Once our reproductive years have passed, the effects of an unhealthy lifestyle and unhealthy eating habits begin to show. People don't get sick by accident or bad luck. Generally speaking, they get sick for a very good reason.
Unhealthy eating practices over several years result in an unhealthy body. An unhealthy body is vulnerable to attack by disease bacteria and viruses. The immune system of a healthy body will fight off these pathogens. The immune system of a healthy person will kill those bad guys.
But won't doctor-prescribed drugs do the same thing if you get sick? Yes, sort of. The number of drugs that will defeat viruses can be counted on your thumbs. The number of viruses that may attack your body is so large that it can't be counted. The common cold alone has about 200 viruses that cause you to "have a cold."
As to fighting bacteria, doctors have many drugs they can prescribe. If a doctor doesn't know exactly which bacterium has caused a disease you have, he will likely prescribe a broad spectrum antibiotic. That should get rid of the worst of the bacteria that are attacking you.
The trouble with that is that the antibiotic will also likely destroy most of your immune system. Your immune system, after all, depends almost entirely on its own collection of microbes in your gut, in your mouth and on every organ of your body. Antibiotics kill far more good bacteria--the ones that form the core of your immune system--then they kill harmful bacteria. The doctor takes credit only for killing the bad ones.
Pharmaceutical companies don't tell you that. They want you to believe that their drugs will kill the bad bacteria. After that, forget about other consequences. If you contract some other illness because you have no immune system to fight it off, the companies want you to believe that you simply have bad luck (take more drugs). But that's not true. You may simply have a knowledge deficit. And a naïve belief in the ability of your doctor and drugs to cure you of anything.
But drugs don't cure you. More often than not, they do you more harm than good.
Cancer, for example, is now considered by many outside the medical establishment to be a voluntary disease. That is, you have a choice to avoid cancer. If you eat properly. Same with heart disease and most of the other ailments people suffer from before they reach 90 years of age.
The purpose of this article is not to give you medical or nutritional advise. Its purpose is to get you to give direction to your thoughts about your ability to control your own health.
You make the choice to be healthy, especially past middle age (though ideally you should begin before that), or to be a medical patient and regular customer of Big Pharma. If you choose the latter, the companies will love you for it. They won't respect you, but they will love you because you will be one of the geese that lays golden eggs for them.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book of solutions that are cheap but effective, as well as hundreds of articles that are available on the internet. Yes, health is a big social problem in the world, not just in the west, but everywhere.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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