Comic Conspiracy

Sometimes I wonder if the people that write comics have some kind of meetings where they all get together and decide to write about the same thing on the same day.

Actually, this has happened in the past, for certain causes. Veterans, Earth Day, and other causes sometimes get the concerted treatment by our Comic Authors.

Today was and example of when many of the writers come up with a similar idea, maybe not by agreement.

Today's comics had a common theme that nobody stays up until midnight for New Year's Eve.

Sometimes, it was the kids being allowed to celebrate at 8pm or 9pm, like little Billy from Family Circus, who thinks celebration is having a second chocolate milk. Other times, it was adults sheepishly admiting that they didn't even try to stay up.

This theme was as lame as Cathy's fake embarassment marks on her little comic face.

Weekends at Bellview

I heard a book review recently on Science Friday. The author was Dr. Julie Holland who wrote Weekends at Bellevue, Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psyche ER.

Somehow, this doctor lasted for a long time working one of the most bizarre environments a Psychologist or Psychiatrist could ever see.

I'm sure the book is full of specific strange and wacky stories, titillating anecdotes that fascinate the average "sane" person. However, the interesting part of the interview was the conclusions that she drew from her experience.

They discussed how some people would fake mental illness in order to get off the street. I've always heard that most of the homeless people you see out there are mentally ill.

She talked about how to maintain your personal mental health. There are three things she recommends to stay sane:
Go outside
Exercise
Meditate

This seems so common sense to me, that it makes mental health sound easy.

What was really interesting was when she started talking about drugs that could be used to enhance therapy. She just mentioned that she was interested in Medical Marijuana, but she did not really say what she thought the benefit to marijuana could be. She just talked about how the legal environment does not allow for any research.

She said that low levels of the drug MDMA (which is usually known as ecstasy) can be used to enhance psychotherapy. I found this very interesting, as you don't think of ecstasy as a drug with any medical purposes, given its club drug reputation. I have heard that it burns out the pleasure centers of the brain. She seemed to think that low levels of the drug lowered people's resistance to change and allowed them to be more receptive to suggestions.

She also said something else very interesting. She recommended that psychedelic mushrooms be used for people facing death. You always hear people say that if they knew they had a few days to live, they would take drugs or get really drunk or start smoking again, mainly because at that point, it just wouldn't matter. You don't think of the drugs as having any therapeutic effect.

All in all, it was a very interesting interview, but I have not yet checked into getting the book to read.

Ignorant Ignorance

I was talking to my wife the other day and complaining about people that I believed were being deliberately ignorant. My complaint was that people were proud of their lack of knowledge, they were bragging about not knowing anything about subjects. And when they were not, they seemed so self-assured and certain when they spouted off about subjects that they were not at all well-informed on. This did not seem to stop them from talking at length about it.

My wife's idea was that people that are stupid don't know it. She thinks that the people that you hear spouting ridiculous ideas (some of which are syndicated talk show hosts) have no idea how stupid they sound. She cited the often repeated idea that people liked George W. Bush because they thought he was a guy they could drink a beer with.

I see people being fed things that sound smart by talk radio, then parrot them back without checking to see if there is any basis of fact. They love to have sayings that sound like argument stoppers, something you couldn't possibly refute or contradict. Then they strut away like they just won a boxing match.

The problem with people with completely foolish ideas is that they can't be convinced otherwise. It does not good to argue or try to reason with someone when they have an idea in their head wrong. One of my favorite quotes is from Orson Scott Card's book Speaker for the Dead, "This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question."

The problem with realizing this problem of blindness is that it virtually assures you of being blind to your own stupidities as well as frustrated with others.

Liberal Bias

I get really tired of hearing people say that the news media has a liberal bias. These are usually people that watch Fox News. If they can't see that this news is so biased as to be inaccurate, you aren't going to convince them that news that they don't agree with or don't like to hear isn't "biased" as opposed to wrong. Actually, they aren't saying that news they don't like is wrong, they are saying it's being presented in an unfair way. So if it's correct, but we don't present it delicately, that's not a good thing?

In the "old days" newscasters worked by pulling information directly off the AP or UPI wire. I remember reading Bob Schieffer's autobiography, This Just In, and noting how he would read the AP and UPI wire for newscast material. They were directly wired in to the news at that time, reading the raw feed prior to reporting the news on the air. This is similar to what Walter Kronkite reported about his early career. I think that journalists as a group closer were to the source of knowledge back then. That they could easily study the raw material of news close to when it happened. I think this is something that has leaked out of news coverage over the years. I think what most newscasters are analyzing is opinion or speculation by the time they see it. That, plus the phenomenon of a short attention span means that no one really digs in depth to an event to the point where they can really understand it.

When you are closer to the source of information, you can't hide from reality. Raw data, without filtering or editing, will give a confused, yet complete picture of events. Sort of like looking at something giant from a few feet away, you can't see it clearly. A good newsperson crawls all over the giant subject, then puts it together in their mind by mentally stepping back from it. It takes time, and it's not easy, but you have to be hard working, persistent, and thorough.

Conservative talk radio and talk shows have always struck me as being fiery, but empty of real substance. Here, the goal is not to explain the truth with all its nuance and complexity, but to inflame passions and invoke a reaction. They are often deliberately ignorant, deliberately ignoring reality, both because they don't prefer it and because the truth is rarely satisfying in a simple, easy to swallow manner. The truth has contradictions and conflicting interests in it. People are not one dimensional, and neither are most news subjects. However, it is easier to pick a viewpoint, and crop the truth down until it fits neatly into this viewpoint.

It's not unlike recent interviews about how Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were said to come up with the justification to go to war in Iraq. They started with the idea that this is what they wanted to do. All of their efforts were to try to make reality bend to their ideals.

We're not asking individual newscasters to give up their viewpoints. Most people have opinions on everything from the big subjects of the day to the trivial news fillers like celebrity gossip. The real trick of a good newscaster is to explore a subject fully in a way that exposes the most relevant information about a subject, but leaves you ignorant of that newscaster's own opinion. Interestingly, Slate.com recently polled their reporters, around the time of the 2008 election and found that 90% of their reporters had liberal leanings. Yet I hear them criticizing Obama and other liberal politicians all the time and have heard defenses of everyone from Sarah Palin to most Israel supporters.

I don't think bias is the problem, I think it's reporting the facts that is the problem. When Stephen Colbert started the Colbert report, he admitted that he was spoofing conservative pundits in order to make fun of them. One of his most often repeated saying in his conservative Colbert Report persona is that reality has a liberal bias. If the facts don't fit your own pre-conceived ideas, they must have a liberal bias.

The Sinister Side of American's Boy Scout Ranger

I've always read the comic strip Mark Trail.

I'm not saying it's a high quality endeavor, and I'm not recommending it, I'm just saying it's funny because he tends to recycle plots and you can almost predict what's going to happen next.

My little brother used to be amused because I would deadpan very serious reports of what was going on with Mark, as if he was a real person of universal interest and appeal, meriting all of our respect and adoration. For some reason, he acted as if he rarely picked up on the irony of my little reports, which is what made them fun.

Now Mark has taken a serious turn to the dark side. It appears that Rusty, the orphaned son of an abusive alcoholic father that Mark adopted, has become stuck under their broken down station wagon (from 1973) on the beach with the tide coming in. That little dumbshit dog of Rusty's, named (appropriately) Sassy (or maybe it should be Sissy), managed to knock the massive station wagon off the jack, break the jack, trap Rusty, and not get squished himself. There is no justice in cartoon land.

With the tide coming in, Mark is racing against time to free Rusty and failing. This is a dark and disturbing storyline for the Mark Trail strip, especially with Christmas right around the corner.

Not interested in keeping things dark and dismal, he makes them more frustrating and forlorn when Mark breaks into a nearby building to get a jack to jack the station wagon off his poor soon to drown formerly abused adopted son. While breaking in, and promising out loud to come back and make the break-in right, the owner sneaks up on Mark and knocks him out with a massive cartoon wrench. Rusty is truly screwed, now. Sassy will probably run around in circles and yap annoyingly while Rusty desperately struggles to keep his mouth above water.

The strip at this time is moving toward a Cool Hand Luke kind of vibe where the hard core Sheriff can't wait to abuse Mark in prison. You just know that they will not believe Mark when he desperately tells them that his abused adopted son is going to die a horrible death, thus justifying his criminal endeavors.

How will it all turn out? That's easy, Mark, Rusty, Cherry, and Doc will be sitting around the cabin with happy smiles on their faces, eating a big Christmas turkey and shrugging off the intense danger they have just been in. No Post Traumatic Shock Disorders allowed! I would like to step in at this point and ghost write for them. I'm thinking that the dark and sinister vane could very well continue into the new year and beyond. Bwwwaaa Haaa Haaa!

Merry Christmas Mark Trail.

AGW "Scandal"

AGW is the acronym for Anthropogenic Global Warming, which means man-made global warming. Human induced climate change.

This is yet another scientifically observable phenomenon that is being disputed by people with no scientific background, but a lot of faith. In this case, it's faith in politics and the capitalistic system, but usually, it's religious faith that causes people to discount and disregard science.

This religious opposition to science has been going on for a long time. Galileo, after showing humanity the heavens with his spyglass, was rewarded with an investigation by the inquisition from the Catholic Church and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. This was because he proved that the Earth goes around the sun. The church may not have liked it, because they felt it contradicted the bible and would erode faith in religion, but their not liking it doesn't change the fact that the Earth goes around the sun.

The age of the Earth, Evolution, and the use of stem cells are other forms of science which have been under attack, (stem cells not so much because they didn't believe in them, but because they didn't like where they were getting them from).

There are many other examples of people disbelieving the science, such as when they first starting understanding germ theory and simply asked people to wash their hands before surgery and not use the streets as sewers. People believed that this could not possibly be true, and yet it was. In the case of sanitation, you wonder why people didn't just practice it for aesthetic reasons, and then find out by accident that it prevented disease. People were being willfully filthy as well as willfully ignorant.

Humans are influencing the climate. Of that, there is no doubt. Sometimes it's subtle, and some times it's profound, but our fingerprints are there to see. This time, it's political. In the name of protecting big business, while thinking they are protecting their "way of life" people are dragging their feet on making changes that we should be making for other reasons anyway.

Part of this movement to keep things the way they are is to try to discredit the scientists that are studying climate change. And in that vein, someone has hacked into the emails of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit. Out of the billions of bytes of information pilfered from the accounts, they are holding up perhaps 3 or 4 emails and pointing to them and saying "See! They hold professional grudges and jealousies! They cannot be trusted! Every word they say is a lie and their entire professional body of work is in question!"

It just doesn't follow. First of all, what the hell is the University of East Anglia? I've never heard of them before, and if I was ever to walk around defending global warming, I wouldn't be quoting from the book of East Anglia. When chunks of ice the size of states are breaking off of Antarctica for the first time in recorded history, when the ice on Greenland is melting so fast that they project it will be gone in a few years, when the Glaciers in Glacier National Park disappear, I don't need some guy in England to tell me something's not right.

Go ahead and have a debate about the science, if you must. The Earth's climate is a huge system with many parts. How are we effecting it? What will be the magnitude of the impact? Is Methane more important than CO2? Go ahead and have that debate, but you better have a hard core science degree in your resume before I pay any attention to your arguments. We need oil is not the counter to increased CO2 emissions are warming the globe. Being a nationally syndicated radio host or television show host is not equal to even a 4 year degree in geology. The vast majority of scientists agree that we having an adverse effect on climate. That's somewhere around 99%, not 60% or 70%. The numbers are so overwhelming that it's no stretch to say "THERE IS NO DOUBT".

What's confusing is where this is going and what we are going to do about it. But if we can't get over listening to some ignorant crackpot defending capitalism and unable to see that his emperor has no clothes, we are truly in trouble.

Mensational

Now that some time has passed, it's not clear to me how I got into this mess.

My wife remembers it differently than I do. I thought she brought it up, she thinks I did. In any case, I was curious about what the test getting into Mensa entailed. I looked into it and got an email from the local chapter.

There are two parts to the test, the Wonderlic Personality test, which is used by recruiters and others screening job seekers. The NFL uses it extensively, apparently. They give you 12 minutes to answer 50 questions. Do the math (which I can't help but do) and you see that you have just over 14 seconds per question. It's a speed test, basically. The other half of the test is something that Mensa cooked up itself that is similar to the Standford Binet test that most people have heard about.

The top 2% are eligible for Mensa.

I put off doing anything for a long time. I thought that nothing good could come of this. If you fail, you feel like a failure, if you succeed, what if you get a big head and become arrogant? It seems like it would be better not to know. But I got very curious and the thought of taking the test would not go away.

I signed up and showed up for testing, paid my $40 and sat in the room at the local Junior College. There were two other people taking the test. It had occurred to me that if only 2% of the people taking the test are eligible, then my chances were 1 in 50 - not too good.

The people running the test were friendly and not as intimidating as I expected. They asked if we had any questions, and I asked mine about the 2%. They said that it's not 2% of the people taking the test, it's 2% of the general public. They said that 2 out of 3 people that take the test pass it. The comment was that you don't go take the test unless you already have a pretty good idea that you are qualified.

I took the test. The Wonderlic part was grueling. I only got about 35 or 40 questions done, and at one point, aware of the time on the clock, I kind of started to despair. It was a brief feeling, and passed quickly, but when they called time and I saw how much I did not finish, I figured that was it.

The rest of the test was interesting. He started by reading a story with no explanation as to why or what, then went into the test that was not related to the story. It ended up that the questions about the story came after the rest of the test. I had just heard something about this on a podcast, the test being how well you hold something in your mind after there is a stream of interrupting information that comes afterwards. Fortunately, I had just been reading about the subject of the story, so it was already fresh in my mind. Every time they threw a name into the story, I would flash a visual picture of it, sort of as a memory marker. I knew what was coming, so I almost feel like I was cheating. I knew all the questions an hour later when that part of the test came around.

The rest of the test consisted of a lot of comparison contrasts where you have a series of pictures and you have to pick the one that's best or doesn't fit with the others. The pictures were like illustrations taken from 1950's advertisements. Sometimes, you'd look at them and go "what the hell?" Other times it wasn't that hard.

After the test, they talked about what it was like to be in Mensa and go to the meetings. I wondered how political the people would be. Would they tend to think similarly, because they were too smart to be fooled by the spin? Politics comes and goes: are smart people just as divisive as the rest? I wasn't sure I wanted to know. They said they preferred to discuss books and movies and restaurants. That seems pretty smart to me.

It was a fun experience, taking the test, and I'm glad I did.

Did I pass? I told myself before I ever went that if I failed I would be too embarrassed to admit it, and if I passed I didn't want to brag. So I can't tell you. Sorry.

Live & Let Die

I've been thinking a lot lately about how death is a natural process.

It's one of those things that seems perfectly clear when you look dispassionately at people that you are not connected to, people that you do not know personally. We get very callous about death when it happens somewhere else to someone else.

But it's everybody's lot in life.

I've often thought that death is one of the things that makes life worth living. Knowing that your life is temporary makes it more precious and sweet. The only problem is that you appreciate this fact the most only when you are getting close to the time for yourself. If you're lucky, that will be because you're getting old. I've listened to older people complain about getting older and how bad it is, and I understand what they are saying, I just think there's something to be said for the alternative - it's much worse. Actually, I can't help but think that if you took care of your health, exercised your body and mind, and took the time to find pleasures in life and have some accomplishments you are proud of, then age isn't so much a time of defeat. Who isn't going to long for their bodies when they were at their peak of beauty and resilience in their youth?

I have ofter realized that while death is always mourned, it's also necessary to clear the population, make way for people born into the current age. Give the youth their chance. We humans have searched for the fountain of youth since the earliest records, back to the days of early pyramid builders. Perpetual youth is a bit of an oxymoron. What people want is a youthful body and a fresh perspective. With science, we might be able to give them the youthful bodies, but how do you restore innocence? After all, isn't innocence just another word for ignorance? Would you trade in all your experience for youth? I'm sure some people would. In a way, we do become more innocent as we age, for it seems certain that we don't store all our memories, some are destroyed or overwritten as more things happen to us. If you live long enough, you can read the books you read years ago, and it's almost as if you never read them before. Old acquaintances are that way too. Try going to your 20 year high school reunion and see how many people you don't remember at all.

Immortality would bring it's own problems. Would wealth concentrate into the oldest people's hands? Would they tend to get into positions of authority and never give them up? Would the population truly explode if people weren't dying? This would tend to make life cheap. If no one ever died naturally, you'd have to either stop having babies (a biological drive so strong, that I can't see how you could eradicate it) or let people murder without penalty.

I sometimes think that people feel that their life gets stale after a while. We don't seem as sharp, our senses are dulled and we become emotionally jaded. That might be natures way of making us want to die. In biology, there is a phenomenon called apotosis. Cellular suicide. It's used as a way to take a cell that is misbehaving, badly damaged, or developing incorrectly out of the game. The body or the cell itself sends a signal that makes the cell kill itself. You see parallels in human life. Some people commit suicide. It makes you wonder if some of them somehow know that they aren't met for life. If you knew that the people that commit suicide were destined for a horrible life of pain, you could understand why death might seem like a better alternative. Or, if you look at society as a body and people as individual cells in the body, it seems quite clear that society benefits from the removal of some individuals.

On an individual level, when it's someone you care about, it's a tragedy for a person to die. I wonder what it would have been like to live in an era where death was very common, like during the Civil War or the Bubonic Plague. Do you just get numb to all the death? If we lived in a world where people rarely died, would the occasional death seem that much worse?

Conflict Irresolution

Watching the news of the day and reading about history, you learn a few things about war and conflict.

Man seems to be an irredeemably warlike creature. If you look at it from a Darwinian standpoint, the group that is willing to be stronger and more aggressive will naturally win out over groups that want to be peaceful or be left alone. Evolutionary biologists would probably disagree with me, but natural selection and survival of the fittest seems to dictate that the most warlike people will probably prevail and pass on their genes. This is the thought that leads me to not be surprised that man can't seem to evolve past war.

History's examples of invasions and wars often follow a pattern. The winner tends to completely dominate or expel and sometimes wipe out the loser. The winner often moves in and occupies the territory of the loser. While history has many examples of the loser regrouping and rebuilding and challenging the winner again, there are also many examples of the loser being utterly destroyed. My favorite example is what the Romans did to the Carthaginians after the third Punic war. Although it is probably just a myth, it was said that the Romans sowed the ground with salt after defeating Carthage so that they could never even farm and support themselves in the future - they could never rise again. Another great example is what happened to the biblical era Assyrians. They had a brutal empire that wiped out anyone that opposed them. They made examples of their rivals in order to terrorize any other groups that might be thinking of rebellion. In the end, when they were finally defeated, the rebels wiped out all the Assyrians to a degree that 200 years later, the locals did not even know who used to live there. The Greek warrior Xenophon moved through and asked who used to live in the huge empty cities that were abandoned when the Assyrians were destroyed. The locals thought that it was the Meads, the memory of the Assyrians was so well destroyed. See Dan Carlin's Hardcore History about the fall of Ninevah.

The average defeated minor group could resent their losses all they wanted, but they were powerless to do anything about it. If they weren't killed, they were usually stripped of all their possessions, and often forced out of their homeland.

If you look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you see that this pattern was disrupted. The Palestinians were not allowed to lose completely. The peace plans after the various wars and armed conflicts usually ended in a "civilized" system that let the civilian population keep their lives and stay in their land. The problem with this is that the Palestinians are still around and still want to keep the conflict open. They will never be happy until the Jews are gone. The hatred has only grown through their defeat, giving a face to the cause and a people to be championed by other enemies of Israel.

Ironically, if the Israelis had been less civilized and more brutal, and wiped out or displaced the Palestinians completely, they would not have the population of people that sit in their midst, sowing discontent.

If you look at other examples, actually, I'm thinking of Germany and Japan after WWII. In that case, the central government was defeated completely and replaced with a foreign government to rule over them. So in a sense, what we Americans fought during the war, ceased to exist when the war was over. What was left was the people, and they were governed in a manner that let them understand and believe that their welfare was important to them. I wonder if that could have ever worked in the Arab-Israeli conflict?

Crystalline Memories

I was talking to a friend about memories. I find it interesting to think about how memory works, because it varies so much from person to person, and from memory to memory within one person.

I find that I access memory different that most people. Sometimes, when my brother asks me if I remember something, he describes it a certain way and it makes no sense to me. I find that he was focused on some aspect of what we were doing, and I was focused on something else. Often, if I can get a handle on how I would have looked at it, maybe where we were, when it was, or what happened before or after it, I can get a handle on the memory and draw it out.

Often, at that point, it still does not match my brother's memories, but I find that to be a separate issue. I believe that people often alter their memories, either from repeated retelling and embellishing, or from wishful thinking. We're all guilty of it.

I find that memories behave a little like an imperfection in a crystal. If you've ever held a natural crystal up to the light, you've noticed the internal fractures and imperfections in the crystal that are invisible from some directions and very clear from others. I think memories are like that, sometimes. They become clear if you approach them from one direction only, just like seeing those imperfections in a crystal.

I heard when I was little that all of your memories of everything you've ever done were still in your head. This begged the question of why you can't remember anything from the first 3 to 4 years of your life. Recently, I've heard that new memories overwrite the older memories, but I wonder if this is completely true. The science report I heard that said this also said that the brain is making new neurons throughout your life, which is something else that they did not used to believe, up until recently. I've also heard theories that memories are stored in a distributed fashion in the brain, like a holograph, which is an interesting notion. This means that individual neurons could be responsible for helping to build the image of many memories - a redundancy. It also means that a portion of the brain could be injured, but not knock out whole chunks of the memory, but just weaken the memories.

Regardless of how it physically works, I believe that sometimes capturing memories can only be done from a specific direction. I used to dabble in self-hypnosis when I was younger. I remember reading that you could use hypnosis to retrieve memories and to do age regression. Besides that, the books said that hypnosis could relax you and relieve stress. I think maybe there is a connection here. If you think of the memory as being most visible from one direction, the hypnosis acts as a way of shaking up your viewpoint. If you are not rigidly fixed in your viewpoint, if you relax and float around, you can let the memory matrix rotate until it lines up and lets you in. I think of it as freeing you up to see in all directions.

Another think I find to be interesting is the scope of memories. Sometimes we remember what we were doing or where we were over a long period of time. Then you get to zoom in to a particular event within that context, then looking closer, you may remember a particular instance. This is a nesting of memories. You have big groups of memories that are each loaded with many little memories. Going back to the crystal analogy, are you looking for a tiny fleck embedded in the crystal or a fracture that spans the entire crystal. Does it help to frame the memory in the bigger part it is embedded in, then zoom in and focus on a narrower and sharper portion of that megaevent?

I think this is a useful construct in thinking about how your memories are stored in order to help you recall things. I remember when I realized that memory could be as good or as bad as you wanted it to be. You can attempt to remember something and if it doesn't come immediately, you can say "I can't remember". This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you say you can't remember, you stop looking and it's true - you can't remember. If you say instead, "I can't think of it right now, wait a minute, it will come to me," that often works. I find that the memory is often there, I can feel its presence. Sometimes, it's a little like taming a skittish animal, when you relax or back away, it comes out and comes to you.

Devil in the White City

This book was recommended to me by my brother & wife. I must admit that their description was not what compelled me to read the book. It sounds like it would be boring.

The book is about how the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago was built and run with a concurrent thread about a serial killer that lived nearby.

There were not a whole lot of grisley details about how Dr. H. H. Holmes lured and killed young women into his strange hotel. There were enough to make it pretty clear what happened, but no gratuituous violence. It was not clear to me why he was doing the killings, but that's something I could say for most serial killers or sadists. The author speculates that the doctor simply enjoyed wielding power over his victims.

The more compelling story was the World's Fair itself. The strange mix of geniuses and hard driven individuals that worked on the design and oversaw the building of the fair was a compelling picture. On one hand, they struggled against a desire by government and the public to have an amazing fair, rivaling the recent one in Paris where the Eiffel tower was built. On the other hand, they could not get approvals and decisions from most of the major players until it was almost too late. An ambitious scope of building, coupled with a shortened time scale to get it done meant the project was a pressure cooker of stress for those responsible to get it built.

My favorite part of the story was the construction of the first Ferris Wheel, which was a real monster. It was so tall, it must have been horrifying to ride. Instead of chairs, the passengers were in cars the size of railroad freight cars.

The thought I'm left with, when I finished the book is that the Fair was kind of sad. Many of the people involved were ruined by it, and the country slipped into a depression by the time it launched. The entire site was burned down shortly afterward, and even the Ferris Wheel was cut up for scrap after a few years.

Most people don't even remember much about the 1893 World's Fair, but the book is peppered with all kinds of little details about firsts that the Fair brought on. This is the place that AC power finally beat out DC power, directly shaping the world we live in today. Smaller details, like the introduction of Juicy Fruit, Cracker Jacks, Quaker Oats, Cream of Wheat, and the hamburger are sprinkled through the book.

Mostly, there is the ghostlike picture in your mind of an entire artificial city painted white, with the knowledge that it was not going to last very long that makes the fairgrounds seem like a dream.

Camouflage by Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman wrote one of my most favorite books, The Forever War. This was one of the books that I borrowed from my Dad's stack of paperbacks when I was in Junior High or High School. He was a big science fiction fan, subscribing to Analog magazine in addition to reading lots of paperbacks. The Forever War was one of those books that really sticks in your mind.

When I saw the book Camouflage in the library, I picked it up without considering anything beyond the author's name. I started to read it and kept thinking that it was familiar. After the second chapter, I knew I had read it before, but it was vaguely different. I stopped worrying about the deja vu feeling and just enjoyed the reading.

The book is about two aliens that have been on earth for thousands of years. They were both shapeshifters. They could change their shape and appearance. The main character was followed from his background. Haldeman painted an image of a portion of a small cluster galaxy where the stars were close and orbits of planets were continuously disrupted. His speculation was that anything that survived and evolved in this environment would have to be supremely adaptable. They would have to be almost impervious to damage, able to survive on almost any kind of food, able to regenerate their bodies, and as such, immortal. In addition to all that, they would have to be able to go dormant for long periods of time. The main character had travelled through space for millenia and crashed into the earth a couple of million years ago. His ship was embedded under a volcanic flow on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and he had assumed the shape of a Great White Shark for most of that time. He emerged onto land right before WWII and took the shape of a man that he killed on the beach. While learning to be human, he acted very un-human. Eventually, he learned how to mimic human behavior and had some adventures, including being beheaded on the Baatan Death March.

While all this is going on, there is another shapeshifter who has been playing at being human much longer. He perpetually picks a bloodthirsty and powerful character to become, like a death camp guard in WWII. He suspects that there must be another being like him somewhere and sets out to find him so he can kill the competition.

The story comes to a strange climax, and I won't spoil it more than I already have. I liked the whole concept of how to sneak through society with the increasing use of fingerprints and retinal scans. It was also interesting how the main character had to follow to a certain extent the principle of conservation of mass. To be something bigger than he was, he had to absorb mass. To be something smaller, he had to shed mass.

Where did his consciousness reside? How do you retain memories over such a long period of time? These were questions that were not answered by the novel, but the fact that I am questioning the novel as if it was an actual account tells you something about the completeness of the worlds Joe Haldeman creates.

Flu Conspiracy Theory

Anti-Government paranoia and conspiracy theories are very common right now.

I got an email from a business acquaintence as follows:

Subj: Fw: Swine Flu Vaccine

[added message]
I have no intention of taking this crap. I don't like the idea of the gov't using me as a guinea pig to test out a totally unproven and untested vaccine.

[added message]
Hello Everyone,

This came to me from a co-worker of mine ...

The note below is from a nurse friend of mine -

[added message]
Hi Everyone,
I also know Dr. Llorente, and I respect her opinion and research. If you have any doubts about whether to get a Swine Flu shot or not, please take this to your own doctor and ask them about it. Be sure to read the preventative measures that you can take on your own to prevent or protect yourself from getting the flu.

Dear Friends,

The World Health Administration is planning to administer a new swine flu vaccination on. The vaccine is to be given by a series of three injections. The first injection will be for the purpose of turning off the recipient’s immune system. The second injection will be for the purpose of loading the subject’s bodies up with the re-conditioned deadly virus organisms. And the third injection will be to turn the immune system back on for the purpose of creating a cytokine storm, which unfortunately could lead to a likely lethal blow to some of the person’s bodies.

In 1915 the pertussis vaccine became available and was widely distributed. This bacterial poison from whopping cough, called pertussis coxon, so depresses the immune system that it is used in laboratories today to turn off nutrafils and reduce white blood cell counts. Then, in 1918, US soldiers who had received the pertussis vaccine were deployed to Europe, where they were given another publically unknown vaccine. And were then exposed to a Lucite gas, which is an arsenic compound, and phosgenegas, a chlorine compound. As a result, their immune systems kicked in with an expected cytokine storm, which unexpectedly killed many of the otherwise healthy young men. This is the 1,2,3 punch that may likely come again with the “swine flu” vaccinations.

We have been conditioned on a global level to think, during a time of influenza, external microbes are our enemy. But on the overall, we are not informed that our own immune systems are potentially more lethal than the flu itself. When the body detects foreign microorganisms indicating the presence of an infection, it can respond by overprotecting the site of that infection. In its hurry to get antibodies to the infection site, the body may release and manufacture too many cytokines, creating a cytokine storm that can be fatal. For example: during a lung infection, a cytokine storm can potentially block airways and result in suffocation. This is what is often referred to as a complications in a flu. Unfortunately this is rarely made clear to the unsuspecting public. In other words, it is not the flu that may be the killer, but complications that come about through the activation of a healthy immune system.

Virus infections make antibody and antigen complexes that the body uses to protect itself. Unfortunately these complexes can clog blood vessels or overload tissue, turning the body’s immune system against itself. In the past, during a W.H.O. Study, animals with immune system’s that had been turned off were infected with lethal viruses until every single cell in their bodies were in pregnated with the virus. These animals functioned like there was nothing wrong with them because their immune system’s were so depressed that they made no effort to fight the disease. In other words, there was no immune response. The W.H.O experimenters then took their lab animals and stimulated a cell-mediated immune response, and the animals died immediately from their bodies attacking themselves in the kind of cytokine storm associated with the 1918 Spanish flu. It should be noted, that the last time the flu vaccine was distributed for the swine flu, more people died of the vaccine response that from the actual flu.

Even if this described scenario isn’t fully copied in the current “swine flu”, the new vaccine is nevertheless made with an adjuvant that may contain a material poison, salmonella, or typhoid fever toxin, along with squalene. Squalene produces auto-immunity and eventually death or severe illness in a large number of people who take 20 it.

Squalene contributed to the cascade reactions known as Gulf War Syndrome that left many soldiers with severe arthritis, fibromyalgia, lymphadenopathy, photosensitive rashes, chronic fatigue, chronic headaches, ulcers, dizziness, weakness, memory loss, seizures, severe mood changes, psychiatric problems, multiple sclerosis, and lupus.

One has to ask the obvious question: Why would our world health organization (W.H.O) be willing to risk these potential conditions on the peoples of this world? This August over 12,000 children and pregnant women will become the first to receive this untested vaccine. It should be noted, that this is not even a test for safety, but a test for dose sizes. Directly thereafter the rest of the world will receive their intended doses. Unfortunately starting with the health care givers and the most vulnerable in our societies: the children in school. Already in the US, the governments have gone so far as to mandate a fund that will allow each state to go from home to home to distribute the vaccine if needed. This depending upon the degree of the outbreak.

It is vital that you are made aware, that it has been well documented that it is often that the virus is relatively benign in our populations until the flu vaccines come out. There seems to be growing evidence that the vaccines somehow contribute to the onset of our world pandemics. Could this be because not all of the virus is quelled in the vaccines. And that once it takes up residence in some bodies, it is to some extent contagious to others. In other world, the vaccine may actually responsible for creating a widespread exposure that would other wise have been minimal. This certainly conjures up suspicions of integrity, perhaps even indicating a premeditation of intent to expose the public. Perhaps the real issue we are all facing is; will we continue to allow the big Pharma industries and the health profiteers to inspire these kinds of illnesses, for what is obviously one of the largest financial boons of any known industry in the world today.

Perhaps the best thing for all of us to do is to simply stay steady with taking Vitamin C; at least 1000 mgs with every meal. Make sure this is a buffered form of C so not to disturb the digestive system. More than than !000 mgs of the more common forms of Vitamin C could cause digestive upsets. In addition, you should consider taking at least 5000iu of Vitamin D3 every day; D3 may be your best overall defense against the flu season. If you catch the flu you can even I crease your D3 inta ke to 12,0000 ius. Also, be sure to increase your omega 3, (1200 twice a day), through a high quality fish oil or krill oil. It is possible to take a flax omega oil, but it will effect your hormones, whaihc may not be as desireable in the overall influence of your bodies health maintanence as the other forms of omega 3. Avoid all other forms of oil as much as possible. It’s not possible to illiminat all other oils, just be careful to reduce them as much as needed for your boy to stay in balance. Selenium is also very helpful in fighting back viruses, and is oftn a primary deficiency in most people’s diets. Avoid refined carbohydrates and sugar as much as possible. Trans - Resveratrol (2000 Mgs) makes it very nearly impossible for flu cells to divide and replicate themselves in your bodies, so find a good source, from outside of Germany ay be best for those of y ou in Europe: take it daily. Green tea extracts are very helpful.

Wash your hands before eating, avoid contact with sick people and wash your foods. Keep your children at home during a flu outbreak and get plenty of rest. Avoid crowds during a flu outbreak as well. And stay away from other people if you have the flu.

So.. Once again...The main reason people die from the swine flu is not from the flu itself. It is from a cytokine storm that the body creates in defense its against the flu. Cytokines inflammations, known as storms or rushes, kill by filling the lungs with excessive fluids. Cytokines are the inflammatory defense messengers that may overwhelm healthy lung tissue. If it weren’t for this immune system response to the wine flu, it would be no more dangerous than any other ordinary flu.

If you feel you a re already exposed to the flu, then you should take curcumin, (2000 mgs) right away to avoid the cytokine storm, along with Quercetin, Resveratrol and Cat’s Claw (Uncaria tomentosa) All of which are both helpful in combating the flu, and decreasing the production of the cytokine

Avoid!!! - Elederberry, Kimchi, Kambucha, and Echenacia. Sweet cold lozenges may actually contribute in worsening the flu, because of the sweets or other ingredients. These my be helpful for ordinary low level flu’s but not for the swine flu, because they increase the chance of a cytokine storm.

Please be aware an pass this information on to others,
Love and light Aaravindha

Some of this information above can be also be researched for yourself in the internet. The above information is a co mbination of research from other articles written by aware health officials, as well as some of my own insights confirmed by my Saumedika practices. I have omitted actual sources because I have edited much of the information.

Elisa Zielinski
Regional Human Resources Manager
West Coast and Pacific Northwest Region
Mohawk Industries

Notice how the entry gets really wacky at the end, with the herbal remedy rift and the "Love & Light" reference. Here's my reply:

Here are the facts on the Swine Flu

This whole email about the troop vaccine from 1918 is bogus. Over 15 million people worldwide died of the flu, and only a small percentage were troops. Troops helped spread it through their travel, as WWI was ending and everyone was being shipped home.

They are only going to have enough vaccine for about 12% of the population. It won't be a matter of being forced to take the shot, most people won't have access to it. It will go to school aged kids mostly.

This strain is one of the most easily transmissible influenza strains there are. It takes very little to get it, mostly from hand contact. Mostly school children are getting it.

It's pretty mild, only kills about 1 in 10,000 (compared to 1 in 100 of the 1918 flu). They say it should kill about as many people as the annual flu kills. It seems to be displacing the annual flu for some reason. That is, people are getting this flu rather than the seasonal flu.

It doesn't mutate much, so far. The problem is that it's a completely new strain, so people have no immunity to it. They say it should be around for the next 10 years, and the scientists speculate that it should start mutating in the 2nd or 3rd year. Hopefully, by then, if it is nasty, a significant portion of the population will be immune. If they have already had it, that should render them at least partially immune. Some will already be vaccinated. By then production of the vaccines should be such that anyone that wants a shot can get one. Non-school aged children will probably never be forced to get it, but I could see them making it mandatory for school children, like the other inoculations. They say that if only half the school children get inoculated it really makes the flu harder to spread.

There are 2 shots. A second booster shot after a couple of weeks to give full immunity. There are no extra shots to shut down the immune system.

I figure if people believe immunizations are some kind of government conspiracy, they just don't take the shots. I wouldn't be against schools requiring parents to immunize their children, as the failure to do so puts everyone else's children at risk. My advice to people that are against childhood vaccines is to home school their children in their bunker.

Gulf War Syndrome was thought to be exposure to some stored nerve agent that was blown up in bomber raids that the troops were downwind from.

I rattled all this off the top of my head simply from listening to recent Nature and Science podcasts on the Flu. It’s not hard to stay informed, but it’s also easy to listen to nonsense and not double-check the facts.

When you get down to the point where the person is telling you to take herbal supplements, that should be a big red flag about the veracity of the rest of the information. Just remember that we never did really land on the moon, the mob assassinated JFK, the holocaust never happened, global warming is a government hoax, and there are aliens in area 54. Then crawl back into your bunker or leave incoherent comments on blogs and news postings. You are a proud patriotic American!

Taliban Office

Here's my idea for a new movie or TV show.

What would it look like if the terrorists were plagued with as much incompetence as an American Corporation.

Every time they tried to set up a hit, they'd end up in the wrong place without any bombs or explosives. There would be a leader that everyone secretly despised and a boot-licking jackass that everyone could barely put up with.

When their plots failed, they would put graffiti on a wall or something minimally destructive and equally lame and call it a major victory.

Feel free to use the idea, I just want to see it in video.

War of Gifts

I sometimes bookmark ideas that I'd like to write about on my blog, saving the post but not publishing it, waiting for the time to spend to write the piece.

I'm sitting down to write this in December, but I bookmarked it at the end of August.

This is a book review of A War of Gifts, which is another book backfilling the Ender's Game series.

In this book, the story details a sideline of the time that Ender was in Battle School. It focuses on a child that was the son of a religious zeolot. He was in brought to the school, but wasn't part of the group. He refused to fight or make friends.

The boys start giving each other gifts in conjunction with Christmas. The gifts are forbidden, and the children get in trouble when the new son of a zealot rats them out.

I don't remember what I was thinking at the time I finished reading this story, but now it strikes me as unremarkable story. What would happen if religious views were surpressed? I'm not sure I remember how they reacted themselves.

It was in the Ender's Game series, so if you read them and liked them, it's more of the story, backfilling in the time of Battle School.

Paul of Dune

I read Dune by Frank Herbert sometime around the 7th grade. This classic science fiction is about a galactic empire in the far future, when man has long since stopped using computers, but has the ability to jump from planetary system to planetary system in the blink of an eye with huge Guild ships. The empire is brought to its knees by a young man that is the product of a 30 generation long breeding program that culminates in his ability to see the future. He comes to power from a desert planet named Dune, where the people are oppressed and the planet provides The Spice, a unique substance that extends life, helps Reverend Mother's connect with their past lives and sense the truth, and allows Guild Navigators to see through spacetime and move their massive ships into safe destinations in the blink of an eye. It also transforms the main character, Paul Atreides, into his full potential of being able to see the future.

Frank Herbert wrote the original series, which followed the life of Paul, and then his son and his favorite swordmaster Duncan Idaho (actually, a series of clones of Duncan, with memories of his past life) up to an confusing and incomplete fate.

After Frank Herbert died, his son Brian in a collaboration with Kevin Anderson, started writing more to the series. He completed prequels and a conclusion to the original series, as well as fill-in novels of the various main characters.

This book fills in a time gap between the original book Dune and the second book Dune Messiah. It answers questions about what he was thinking, how much of the future he saw, and how did he consolidate his power and direct his empire. Each backfilling novel answers more of the mysteries the original series was almost proud to leave behind.

As a young boy, I found Paul a compelling main character, because he was about my age, yet superior to most of the people around him in intellect and ability. As an older man, I still find the character compelling, as a conflicted man struggling to do what is right in a world that compromises his morals as well as his hopes and desires.

Oral History and The Lost City of Z

I just finished reading a book called Lost City of Z. This is a fascinating tale about an explorer named Percy Fawcett that disappeared into the Amazon in the late 1920s looking for a lost city that he believed was in the unexplored regions of the upper Amazon River.

The author attempts to find the trail and determine what happened to Fawcett. In the course of tracking his last known locations, he talked to an Indian that remembered a story about the explorer travelling through their village. His story was from three generations before and he remembered it because his parents and grandparents had come up with a story that sounded like a poem or a song.

In another part of the book, there is an account of another explorer's story of his travels. This story changed with each retelling. It makes you wonder how accurate stories are. We are conditioned to believe that true human history started when man started writing things down. Before that time, there was only oral history, which was subject to change and erosion as the generations passed.

However, it occurs to me that oral history must be good for some learning and provide a measure of continuity. Otherwise we'd all be stupid, inexperienced primitives trying to figure out basic survival skills with each new generation.

If you think about how older people tell their stories over and over, you realize that eventually you remember them yourselves. How many times have you heard the same story from your parents or grandparents until you think you could tell it yourself? This must be an ingrained way that humans pass on their history.

Religious history is the same way. It starts as an oral tradition, changing over time with each generation retelling the story. Still, something of the original story remains, only the exact details and origin of the story fade into history until the story becomes purely mythical, with it's factual origins lost in obscurity. The trick is to see if you can figure out what kernel of truth remains in the story after so many retellings, and what you can really learn from it.

The book had an interesting ending. Our poor lost explorer remained a mystery, but what he was looking for was found by a modern explorer that the author found in the jungle. The cities may not have been the huge sprawling metropolises that Fawcett imagined, and they were not from the 1600s or 1700s, as he hoped, but the true solved mystery is even more important and fascinating than what he imagined.

Historical Outlook

I recently completed listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History episodes called Ghosts of the Ostfront. This was a series of stories about the little known battles on the German Eastern Front against the Russians during WWII. I highly recommend the episodes, which depict brutal atrocities, describe unimaginable devastation, and fill in a whole previously unheard of chapter of an already colossal war.

While I was thinking about this and wondering what it would have been like to live through it. While talking about what it would have been like to be there with a friend, I made the comment that when you study history, you have the advantage of knowing how it is going to turn out. We often critize people in historical situations for not knowing better. You forget that they were living in their time and had no idea what their future was going to bring.

That is true for this time. We divide up our society along idealogical lines, convinced that we know what the future holds. We make decisions about climate change, the economy, politics, all controlled by people in the current time that think they can figure the future out.

I recently was surprised to learn that the saying "Those that do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" was made by Santayana. OK, wait, I was surprised to learn that it was the Mexican General Santa Anna who captured the Alamo. When I found out that it was actually George Santayana, who I've never heard of, I was no longer surprised, just prized.

Fallen Founder

I just finished a book about Aaron Burr called Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr by Nancy Isenberg

I remembered that Aaron Burr had been Thomas Jefferson's Vice President, had run for President, and that he was discredited for trying to break off the Western U.S. to start a new nation. This was before I read the book, just the remnants of school and who knows where else we learn the little details that are in our head.

What really happened? Isenberg's book is written around the premise that there were different stories going around about Burr. The book is a staunch defense of Aaron Burr as a misunderstood figure from history who was smeared in the press by his opponents. Isenberg contends that this misrepresentation of the facts spread by Burr's enemy's has persisted until today.

Isenberg paints many of the politicians of the founders era as self interested, self promoting, and brutal at infighting. She describes the Federalist/Republican politicians attacking each other through the press and with backroom deals. She spends a great deal of time going over research she turned up that paints a completely different story.

For one thing, the common story about Alexander Hamilton is that he fought in a duel against Aaron Burr, who shot and killed him, thus ruining Burr's reputation. Isenberg's version is that Hamilton had some kind of obsession about Burr and would not leave him alone. She makes it sound as if Burr tried to avoid the confrontation as long as he could, but finally couldn't put it off. The other commonly held belief is that Hamilton honorably shot in the air, while Burr deliberately took aim. She claims that Hamilton couldn't see well and had the wrong eye glasses, which is why he missed. Another aspect she brings out is that both parties had written letters prior to the duel that would have been released had they lost. Burr's was supposedly noble and gracious and expressed regret about the disagreement with Hamilton and respect for Hamilton. Hamilton's supposedly continued to cast dispersions about Burr, basically continuing his taunts from beyond the grave.

Isenberg says that they continued to try to prosecute Burr, even though the duel took place in New Jersey, and there was no law against dueling in New Jersey, just in New York. They supposedly took row boats across the Hudson just to have the duel in a location where it was legal.

The next chapter in the history that is turned around and debunked in this book is the events leading up to and surrounding his treason trial. In this version of history, Burr is duped by a double agent named General James Wilkinson and painted as the force behind a movement to secede the western Louisiana territory away from the U.S. and set himself up as King. I'm still confused after reading the book exactly what happened. It sounds to me that Burr was interested in trying to get parts of Mexico to break off and form an independent territory (which later happened with Texas, and also is reminiscent of how the U.S. got into the Mexican-American War). It seems that Wilkinson was trying to frame Burr on the Louisiana conspiracy and was not able to make this charge stick.

However, while not convicted of treason, Burr was thoroughly discredited in the public eye. Thomas Jefferson apparently wanted to find some way of prosecuting Burr, to the point that he eventually left the country.

Sadly, Burr never did regain his reputation, and lost his family as well. It's a tragic story that paints a sympathetic picture of the man. The subtitle of the book could have been, "Why could they not just leave this man alone!?"

There were some other details in the book that I found interesting. Burr apparently was an advocate for women's rights and equality about a hundred years early. He also fought in the American Revolution, but was not on the Washington side of the Army and therefore, did not prevail politically when Washington later came to power. He supposedly assured that Jefferson won the 1800 election by stepping down and giving the election to Jefferson, even though he had as many electoral votes (supposedly, by the rules of that time, the Federalists would have been able to appoint their own man as President in the event of a tie). The last detail that I found to be very interesting is that Burr owned an estate called Richmond Hill in Manhattan that he was forced to sell to John Jacob Aster for $32,000. This was divided up into lots and became Greenwich Village in New York City, making Aster incredibly rich in the process.

I suppose that Isenberg did not convince me that everything said about Burr was false, but she did make me wonder how much of what we've been taught is history being written by the victors.

Magic Repair

I was walking down the road the other day, having just heard about people with heavy metal contamination, and thinking about how it would be great if you could figure out a way to remove the metals embedded deep in the flesh. I was thinking about how there were Star Trek next generation scenes where they used a medical tricorder to cure broken bones or heal scars.

If you're a Star Trek fanatic, you know how the original series showed people using transporters, and then the Next Generation series explained how transporter technology would be used in other ways. The transporter is supposed to break down matter and reassemble it in an identical pattern in another place. Replicator technology takes a lump of matter (I envision this would be the crew members waste products - you never hear them talking about going to the bathroom, but you figure they must) and reassembling it, but not in the same shape or configuration, but in a new configuration - say a cheeseburger. The holodeck supposedly creates scenes and characters using transporter technology. They had a group of small robots that used this trick to make whatever tool or gripping device they needed to perform maintenance tasks. What I am talking about mainly is the little devices that the doctor used to heal things. This is like a little wand, and you point it toward something on the body that's wrong and you rearrange the matter so that it's right.

I want on of these.

I was thinking about the scene in Star Man where Jeff Bridges plays an alien that brings a dead deer back to life on the hood of the hunter's car. That would be a huge job, because you'd have to reverse the decay that had set in as well as repair all the damage, restore the blood volume, and restart the heart and respiration. I was thinking about the limping deer and turkeys we have around our yard. With the special medical matter rearranging device, it would not be that hard to reach in and repair the bones and sinews to make them whole again. I saw a turtle that was hit by a car, and I thought that would be a nice project, too, putting the shell back together, closing all the ruptured blood vessels and reconnecting them and repairing all the muscles. I was also thinking about pollution contamination, how easy it would be to extract them or convert them. I also thought it would be good to remove mites, viruses, and bacteria that are infecting an animal (like a honeybee, for example).

While I was looking at the turtle with the crushed shell, I saw some eggs inside it. They were bright yellow. I remembered that you see yellow eggs in fish and grasshoppers, too. Why are eggs yellow? Maybe the yellow substance can be made into just about anything the organism needs, like the lump of matter they use in the Star Trek replicator as a base stock for whatever they need. Really, when you think about it, nature already does this transporter magic repair, it just does it really slowly. That's man for you, trying to hurry up a good thing.

40 Years Later

Since I discovered that the complete 60's Star Trek is available for free on YouTube, I've been watching them in order from the first season. I used to watch them in reruns at various times in my life and assumed I had seen them all. I discovered that around 17 (I didn't go back and do an exact count) of the 29 episodes of the first season were ones I had never seen before. By the way, for a real laugh at the strange psychedelic flavor that was available, see "The Alternative Factor." It was pure mindless psychedelic 60's.

Watching these old episodes has been a lot of fun, not just because of the campiness of the acting or the poor quality of some of the sets and special effects, but the interesting concept of what life would be like in the future from the standpoint of the 60's proves to be a reflection of what the 60's were like.

I was thinking about that time, which was after the birth control pill was introduced and before AIDS struck. This was a brief period when sexuality could be expressed without the consequences of unwanted pregnancy or incurable disease. Star Trek kind of reflects that, at least the hemlines and some of the sexual innuendo does. They expected that people of the future would have been more sexually active with less fuss about it. It's also strange that women and all races and cultures are fully integrated into the rank structure of the Federation, but they still show women only in lower ranks, mostly subservient to men.

Then this week, there was all the media coverage and reminiscences over the 40th anniversary of the lunar landing. I was 6 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon and I watched it live on TV. I didn't realize that the work up to the moon missions were the societal backdrop when Star Trek was being shown on the air.

It makes perfect sense now. If you look at Star Trek, it captures the hope and drive that Kennedy expressed setting us on the path to the moon. If you look at some of the episodes, there is plenty of commentary on the cold war and our Russian adversaries.

It seems so recent and at the same time so long ago.

Human Oleo

I recently listened to a recording of the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead on the program This I Believe. She was ahead of her time, and very open minded for a woman of her era when she went out and visited the remote tribes and backwoods cultures during the 50s. She believed that while people are individuals, they are also a product of their society. To a certain degree, individualism gets buried under the blending together of people to make a common culture. On one hand, it's distressing to think that you might be a puppet of the greater culture, on the other hand, it's comforting to know that you are nestled firmly within that society and culture.

I read a novel called Time Pressure by Spider Robinson a long time ago. The thing I remember about the novel is that one of the main characters had come back in time to capture individuals' minds to add to a future group mind of all humanity. She described a particularly quirky and offbeat man as a unique spice in the mixture of humanity. I always thought this was cool, the concept that you could be both a unique individual and a part of greater society.

In all, when you think about it diversity isn't just a buzz word that most people have a vague agreement is a good thing. Diversity is essential because it makes us strong by providing unique individuals with special contributions. We hear stories about how the Nazis were stupid for driving out or killing the Jews when they lost such amazing people as Albert Einstein. There are few examples that extreme, but everyone that is different or not accepted has something to contribute to humanity.

Japanese Princess falls to the moon

This is a cool video of the Japanese Spacecraft hitting the moon.

Consumption

I've often thought about overpopulation, since I was little. That was during the time of the first energy crisis and people were seriously concerned about whether we would be able to feed and provide energy for everyone. Part of the equation, besides the fact that there is this much oil reserves and this many tons of coal mined annually, and this many kilowatts used every year, is that there are x number of people in the world doing this consumption. On top of all projections was a factor of increased use due to an increasing number of people using. That is sometimes multiplied by the fact that each person uses more than their parents do, in fact more than they themselves did earlier in their life.

The projections showed that this was not sustainable. Those projections that I remember were centered around energy use, but they could have been food used or trash produced.

The problem is that people have a certain degree of greed, selfishness, gluttony, and entitlement. They want, they want for themselves, they want a lot, and they feel that no one can tell them no.

Conservation is never discussed when we talk about energy use. Over consumption is not regulated at all. You have the right to use as much as you want to.

Energy is not the only commodity that is overused. People habitually eat more food, smoke more cigarettes, drink more alcohol, or take more drugs than what is good for you, and they don't want to be told by anyone to stop. Thing about if you lived on a space station and you got a kick out of venting the atmosphere a little bit at a time through an interesting device out into space. You're on the station with other astronauts and they all agree that this is a bad thing and that the space station is going to be in deep trouble if you continue to do this, but they have no right to tell you not to. Since you are too short sighted to realize that you have to forego the pleasure you get from venting the atmosphere in order to survive indefinitely, you will quickly vent enough atmosphere to start hurting or killing the people on the space station. Can you imagine a situation where the other people in the space station would not stop the idiot from venting their air?

We often talk about the fact that a new health care plan would not be truly useful in cutting costs without a preventative component that would encourage and monitor people to lose weight, stop smoking, and reduce their consumption of drugs and alcohol. People would scream about the violation of their basic rights, and I must admit that I feel that way, too. However, if you could successfully limit people's self destructive behavior, there would be great savings in the amount of car you would have to provide for people. Consume less vices and you could manage to consume less resources in providing health care for all.

This over consumption is mainly noticed in things like oil, minerals and metals, plastics, wood, and other natural resources. Many things, some simple things, like glass, could easily be recycled at a fraction of the price it takes to mine new materials and create them from scratch. On a global scale on a long enough time scale, everything is recycled. It makes sense to think of the things that we use as needing to be recycled and reused. We should not be using land for landfills, ever. The thought of locking things up under the earth in order to dispose of them makes no sense in the long run. I like the way they do it in Star Trek Next Generation where everything is ran through a replicator, which is basically no different than a transporter that rearranges the molecules as it reconstructs them.

We even consume information at an all time high rate, although I would argue that we consume more worthless information than useful information. Look at the media frenzy surrounding Michael Jackson. Before that it was OJ Simpson, Anna Nicole Smith, Jean Benet Ramsey, the college student that disappeared while in Aruba for spring break, or the arrest of a black college professor by a white cop. None of these circus events matter in the long run to society, but we suck up precious air time and people's short attentions and scarce personal time absorbed in these non-events.

I think that if you want to consume something without limits, you should consume knowledge. We should encourage people to go to their public libraries and read as many books as they want. We should encourage people to utilize their public parks. They can go out and run or walk as much as they want. It's an unrealistic dream, but who knows, maybe people will come around, eventually.

Sliding Out

Watching the news lately, I am developing even less respect for former Bush administration officials, but most of all for former Vice President Cheney.

All during the previous administration, he did nothing but hide information from the public. From the energy task force, WMD searches in Iraq and the outing of Valerie Plame, memos on torture, to the firing of attorneys for political reasons, the administration had an impenetrable wall that they tried to erect to keep information from leaking out.

Now that they are out of power, many would love to see them prosecuted for their crimes, or at least have their actions and misdeeds exposed to the public. While these former officials wouldn't dare want to go through the ordeal of an actual trial, they are more than eager for a trial of opinion on their doings during the Bush Era. Hardly a new cycle goes by where we don't have to listen to them spinning their actions and trying to politicize the decisions of the current administration. Their cowardly approach means that they don't have to be questioned officially or present actual evidence proving their assertions, they just have to cast doubt in the public's mind.

I have no respect for this approach. I would say to them to submit themselves to a real trial if they really want to be validated by history. Since I believe they are criminals, I don't expect them to ever actually take this course.

Irrational Decisions

There was a story I was listening to about how people do not usually make decisions with a rational process. They specifically sited that people often put a great deal of emphasis on very rare events. This sensitivity toward uncommon occurrences can be seen in everything from the response to 9/11 to the fact that many parents do not want to inoculate their children because they think it could cause autism. The problem with human decision making is that we often choose based on erroneous perceptions and exaggerated concerns. We often make decisions that are not rational.

It is easy to see this behavior in others, but not so easy to recognize it in ourselves. While they were talking about financial decisions effecting retirement and diet decisions effecting your health and weight, the decisions we make run the gambit from trivial to vital. We are often not aware of this short-circuit in our decision making process, meaning that it can go unchecked and can quickly get out of control. The effect they were describing almost made me think that you could say that people are not even able to exercise free will in making their own choices.

Sometimes, when I listen to the debates about health care in this country, I think about how free will sometimes leads to individual and societal excesses and self-destructive behavior. How do you balance a desire to exercise the right of free will versus trying to make people do what you know is "right" or better for their long term health and happiness.

Can you even imagine a life where you made all the right decisions? Always ate exactly what your body needed, only spent money in a way that was not wasteful and maximized your future gains? Never hooked up with the wrong person or treated the right person in a way to drive them away? Took every route when driving that avoided accidents and delays? Stayed home instead of going out and getting into trouble? It's so strange, because I think the average person would like the benefit of having made every decision correctly, but not the boredom of having to be so disciplined. Spontaneity and impulsiveness are treasured by us, even when they lead to missteps, antics, or tragedies.

Around Father's Day I thought about and how you try to keep your children safe and healthy by restricting their impulses and protecting them from an incompletely formed decision making process. I was thinking about how much older I am than the usual father, and the probability that I would not live long enough to see my son get very old. I wonder what my son's feelings would be if he ever considers that I might die early. Would he think that it was his job to keep me healthy? Why not? I remember thinking that I should try to get my parents to quit smoking. Maybe we could form some kind of mutual pact to stay in good health. He needs to learn to hike and run and exercise, and I need to learn to eat right and do the same so I can stay healthy.

Easy to declare such things. Hard to decide to actually do it on a day to day basis.

Cleaning Yourself Out

I was listening to a Naked Scientist Podcast where they were doing an demonstration about bilirubin. This is a compound that the body makes when it breaks down old red blood cells. Normally, this compound is fat soluble, and your body produces and enzyme that makes it water soluble so that you can get rid of it by excreting it through your urine. Newborns never had to do this before, it was taken care of in the womb by the mother. So sometimes it's a problem for newborns, who build up bilirubin and turn yellow, or jaundiced. A nurse serving in a maternity ward found out years ago that exposing babies to sunlight cures this problem. The sunlight makes the molecule flip around into a different configuration, a water soluble one, just like what the enzyme does. The naked scientists did an experiment where they showed how the yellow bilirubin got converted and could be expelled with a transparent baby doll with the liquids inside.

This made me think about how these kinds of problems would be handled by future space travellers. What if the men on the first Mars or Lunar colonies get contaminated by the mining operations they will be working on? How would they get lead or other contaminants out of the bodies of astronauts. I thought about the line in Black Sabbath/Ozzy Osborne's Iron Man. I guess he was turned to steel and only had boots of lead, but you can see that they are clearly referring to an industrial accident that caused contamination. Will we learn tricks similar to the sunlight trick where toxic chemicals like lead and mercury will bind to something and be expelled from the body?

Scientists have a name for the process, it's called kelation, also spelled chelation. This is defined as the process where a molecule binds to and surrounds a metal to remove it from tissue. We currently already use this therapy on earth for mercury, lead, and arsenic. This is different from the use of activated charcoal to remove poisons, those are adsorbed by the charcoal, not chemically bound to it.

In another podcast I was listening to, they were studying a cinnamon tea that a native tribe had used for centuries to relieve back pain. The scientists examining the tea were initially mystified, because they found that the cinnamon had toxins in it that should be poisoning the natives. They discovered that it was converted to a non-toxic form by the gentle heating used in brewing it into a tea. In fact, the non-toxic form had medicinal properties that the tribe had stumbled onto years ago.

How much of the technology to cure, treat, or maintain the health of people will come from ancient practices and how many treatments will have to come from future developments?