I really appreciate you taking the time to keep my message from getting buried.
Thanks a million!
p.s. If all it took was a placebo, don't you think the CPAP machine would have worked? Or any of the other treatments, for that matter? I suppose you could argue that specific placebos work better than non-specific placebos, but then you've opened up a can of worms, and I don't think you mean to go there.
But the difference is that I enjoy the quiet and alone time during night and hence would stay away from sites like Facebook.
I think the author of the fine article is an insomniac who would like to fall asleep but can't. This was the case for me, when I was a kid.
Sometimes I wonder if I became a night owl because of insomnia. I'm still a night-owl, even though I've figured out how to fall asleep quickly & easily, and I agree that this time of day can be a very productive period.
As a child, I tossed and turned in bed until I finally passed out. I was 5 when we moved from the house with the swimming pool, and I remember being an insomniac then.
When I was seventeen I learned that normal people are able to "relax" their bodies, while keeping their mind awake. This is something like when you sit awkwardly and pinch a nerve, so that a leg falls asleep. When you stand up again, you know your leg is supporting you, but you can't feel any of the normal sensations. Relaxation was said to be something like that (before the pins and needles start).
Thenceforth, I tried to relax every night in bed while trying to go to sleep. I was never successful because I usually passed out first. I didn't complain - 'tis better to pass out quickly than toss and turn for hours.
Sometimes people can't relax because their body doesn't have enough of the "relaxation mineral", Magnesium. Being magnesium deficient (61% of the population, according to the link) makes it difficult to relax, no matter what you do. Magnesium didn't help me fall asleep, but it was worth trying.
Sometimes people have trouble sleeping because the sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight response) is over stimulated. Many different conditions can trigger the fight-or-flight response, and for some people, this state of "red alert" becomes a habit.
I build a stress-relieving device that can potentially help balance the two aspects of the autonomic nervous system (fight-or-flight and rest-and-digest). This was mentioned in a comment to the recent slashdot story on Dr. Nakamats, who has his own way of balancing the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.
I have a client who was an insomniac, and is definitely NOT a night owl. On a bad day, he passed out in his recliner around 7:30pm. He stumbled off to bed at 9pm, and woke every morning at 1am or 3am. He was tired, but incapable of going back to sleep.
He went to the doctor, who gave him a sleeping pill. The side effects were not acceptable for someone of his profession (doctor/surgeon). He went to a sleep specialist, who ordered a sleep study. The study showed that my client stopped breathing frequently, and he was diagnosed with sleep apnea. The CPAP machine helped a little, but did not provide a satisfactory sleep experience.
First I helped the client deal with some old emotional traumas. A few weeks later I supplied the Radial Appliance. He uses it every night - if he wakes up at 1am (sometimes the dog wakes him up), he'll move, re-attach the wires, and go right back to sleep.
I talked to his wife recently, and she said the most amazing thing happened last week: she woke up at 6:30am, and her husband (my client) was still asleep. It was the first time that she'd woken first in the 7+ years that they've shared a bed.
but as long as you don't need to go anywhere in the morning it doesn't really matter anymore.
Agreed - I ditched my 8am-5pm job recently, and am much happier sleeping on my own schedule.
One reasonable post amongst a hundred scoffers. I salute you, good sir.:)
I wonder how the technology worshipers among us would scientifically study this issue. You'd have to isolate the influence of radio waves on a human body-system. The problem is, of course, finding controls in a radio-free, transient electromagnetic field-free, man-made-chemical-free world...
Science is hard to do when your experiment has a billion variables.
That's a very interesting article - thanks for sharing.
There were two parts that I think are very important. The first is about his inventive process:
Inventing is a Dangerous Business
What really sold me on Dr. Nakamats was when I came across the following passage from some German interview. The question was one the author has probably asked hundreds of times--"so, where do you get your ideas?"--and Nakamatsu has the last answer anyone but him would ever suspect:
(picture of person holding their breath underwater) Is there a secret to becoming an inventor? How do you come up with new ideas?
I am teaching philosophy at the University of Tokyo. The base for everything is a strong spirit, followed by a strong body, hard studies, experience and finally leads to a "trigger" experience. You "trigger" a bullet which contains spirit, body, study and experience - and finally that releases the actual invention.
How do you "trigger" an invention?
A lack of oxygen is very important.
A lack? Isn't that dangerous?
It's very dangerous. I get that Flash just 0.5 sec before death. I remain under the surface until this trigger comes up and I write it down with a special waterproof plexiglas writing pad I invented.
Do you do that a lot? Putting yourself in that kind of situation to come up with a new invention?
Of course. This is the Dr. Nakamatsu method.
U.S. Creativity expert Win Wenger, PhD talks about the mammalian diving response as a way for anyone to increase blood flow to the brain, thereby increasing one's intelligence. When the Co2 concentration in a mammal's blood rises, arteries to the brain open up so that the brain doesn't starve to death. With repetition, the arteries become permanently enlarged.
I myself have spent some time holding my breath underwater at the pool. I haven't done the full 30-day protocol, but at one point I built up to over 2 minutes underwater. This is not a lot (the record for free diving is over 19 minutes), but many people can only hold their breath for 15 seconds...
Furthermore, we had a pool in our backyard when I was a kid (before I turned 5), and I remember doing held-breath underwater swimming then. I'd dive down to pick stuff up off the bottom of the pool, and swim through underwater rings.
Furthermore, I had a VHS copy of Star Trek IV, and I repeatedly tried to hold my breath for the entire time that Captain Kirk (or was it Mr. Spock?) held his breath to release the whales, after the bird of prey crashed into San Francisco Bay... I was never able to do it, but I now think the effort was good for something.
I don't know that I'm a genius now, but I think I do pretty well.
According to Dr. NakaMats' research, the unhealthy body has a poor blood circulation to extremities resulting cold feet. This is the same state with the stressed body in which your sympathetic nervous system took over parasympathetic nervous system. Sympathetic nervous system anticipates your body for "fight-or-flight" situation.
My hands were cold as ice for a long time... Then I built a "radial appliance", which is said to balance the body's parasympathetic nervous system. My hands are now warm.
I think my website (above) links to the radial appliance stuff... This is kooky esoteric shit, so don't bother clicking if you just want to scoff...
While I could imagine a subterranean nuclear explosion triggering an earthquake, I think there are other, more effective ways to create megaquakes.
For example, we could pump out all the lubricating fluid from the earth's crust. With the lube, the plates slide along somewhat smoothly. Without the lubricant, friction would build up until a catastrophic release (9.9 on the scale).
I don't remember exactly where I read this idea, but crude oil certainly has functions beyond just sitting there, I'm sure. (abiogenic theory of oil, super-deep oil wells [oil struck at 5 miles below the surface], old fields refilling with oil, etc)
The U.S. hardly manufactures anything that requires lots of human labor. If the manufacturing process can be automated, companies will keep the manufacturing here.
Look at the tags on your clothes. I bet you have at least one item that says "made in Honduras/Mexico/etc of U.S. Material". Stitching is labor intensive, whereas turning raw materials into fabric is mostly done by machine.
With that said, there's still a ton of manufacturing in the U.S. - computers and robots have just replaced humans as the machine operators.
The problem for the U.S. working class is that it's expensive to employ them - wages, social security tax, medicare tax, benefits, unemployment tax, worker's compensation insurance, etc. It's much more profitable for Wall Street to hire foreigners and pocket the difference.
Here's a recent article on the hazards of transient electromagnetic fields, such as those created by compact fluorescent light bulbs:
More recently, the new findings on transients — particularly those crawling along utility wiring — are causing some scientists to rethink that part of the EMF debate pertaining to the hazards of power lines. Could they have been focusing on the wrong part of the EMF spectrum?
Transients: the post-modern carcinogen Some earlier, noteable — albeit aborted — research suggests this may be the case. In 1988, Hydro-Québec, a Canadian electric utility, contracted researchers from McGill University to study the health effects of power line EMFs on its employees. Gilles Theriault, MD, DrPH, who led the research and was chair of the department of occupational health at the university, decided to expand his focus to include high-frequency transients and found, even after controlling for smoking, that workers exposed to them had up to a 15-fold risk of developing lung cancer. After the results were published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, the utility decided to put an end to the study.
That research commenced at a time when energy-efficient devices — the major generators of transients — were beginning to saturate North American homes and clutter up power lines. A telltale sign of an energy-efficient device is the ballast, or transformer, that you see near the end of a power cord on a laptop computer, printer, or cell phone charger (although not all devices have them). When plugged in, it's warm to the touch, an indication that it's tamping down current and throwing off transient pollution. Two of the worst creators of transient radiation: light dimmer switches and compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs). Transients are created when current is repeatedly interrupted. A CFL, for instance, saves energy by turning itself on and off repeatedly, as many as 100,000 times per second.
There were a pair of shows on This American Life last fall about the health industry clusterfuck. The first one was called "More is Less", the second "Someone Else's Money".
Wealthy americans get much more medical care, but the outcomes are the same or worse. The problem is, essentially, that American medicine is philosophically bankrupt.
American doctors don't care about nutrition, or psycho-somatic medicine, etc. American doctors are trained in how to pick a drug or surgery to perform.... But at the same time, some of the "Alternative Health" practitioners in the U.S. are the very best in the world.
The graph was on the first page of results for the search term I used - 'federal budget graph', iirc. I agree that it's misleading - where are the figures for off-budget items?
There is no difference between most democrats and republican. They tow the party line and beat their drums about change, but the railroad tracks still go in the same direction.
There are two exceptions (and maybe a few others): Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. The rest are clueless, stupid, or deluded with 'false power' (that is, they think they're a bull, but they really just get led around by the party-installed nose ring).
The Flexner Report is the reason why "modern medicine" costs so much. To quote the article:
One of the consequences of Flexner's advocacy of university-based medical education was that medical education became much more expensive, putting such education out of reach of all but upper class white males. The small "proprietary" schools Flexner condemned, which were contended to be have been based in generations-old folk traditions rather than relatively recent western science, did admit African-Americans, women, and students of limited financial means. These students usually could not afford six to eight years of university education, and were often simply denied admission to medical schools affiliated with universities. At the same time, the Report tended to delegitimize existing women doctors and doctors of color. While many such doctors continued to practice, usually within underserviced clienteles, they did so under proscribed circumstances and for less pay. In general, the standardization of medical education advocated in the Report led to the domination of American medicine by well-off white males. It also made it more difficult for people of color, residents of rural areas, and for those of limited means generally to obtain medical care in any form. The Flexner report recommended the closure of several African American medical schools, including the Leonard Medical Center, the oldest four-year medical school in the country for African-Americans.
Today's health care systems sucks because an artificial monopoly has been given to a certain kind of "healer". End the monopoly, and things will improve.
To get back on-topic, the Pentagon surely has something better than rockets in their toolchest... I'd bet they have a SSTO spaceplane buried in the western deserts somewhere.:)
I didn't mean to imply that I approve of Medicare or any of the other medical-based wealth transfer schemes. I'm just saying that the Pentagon's budget is disproportionately huge, compared to everything else.
When you're to balance your budget, it helps to look at the big items first.
I wish there was more money for space, but for heaven's sake - if it really was a choice between socialised healthcare for people, or socialised manned space travel, I'd still put the former first.
To make things even more clear, hit the button at the top that says 'Hide Mandatory Spending'.
To save NASA's Constellation program, methinks the military-industrial complex should take a haircut. I've read that the pentagon's off-budget items dwarf what's officially spent...
... A few years ago I heard about Tom Kasmer's hydraulic transmission. He calls it the Hydristor (also: wikipedia entry).
Basically, an invention like Kasmer's could be used to turn any car into a hybrid by replacing the transmission. Braking energy is stored in a hydraulic pressure system (the proper name escapes me at the moment).
While this system from Porsche is interesting, it is not revolutionary.
The next automotive revolution will be some form of retrofit.
The book you're referring to is 2x Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling's Cancer and Vitamin C. I believe Pauling called for either intravenous infusions of sodium ascorbate, or oral consumption of ascorbic acid.
Little followup research has been done, because there's no money in a simple vitamin that has no patent protection.
My grandmother was 87 years old when she passed away. Her only regret was not living long enough to see any great-grand-babies.
I was the driver for her weekly injection, and saw that she was "just going through the motions" of treatment for her husband and children. She didn't really care whether she finished out the year or not.
I went to the pharmacy for a prescription of... thalidomide towards the end of her treatment experience. Thalidomide was banned for many years because it caused birth defects. Then someone found out that it extends the life of MM patients by "2 months", and now some company has a patent on methods to keep fertile women from getting it. The pharmacy charged $2309.99 for a one-month supply. If she survived a month, she would have gotten another prescription for $2309.99. That's $4819.98 for $2 worth of pills.
Don't be sorry about my grandmother - I would have encouraged hospice care as soon as she got her diagnosis. The funny thing about hospice is that some people get better as soon as they start. My grandfather loved hospice care, and lived for about 2.5 years before he finally passed away. Grandma was already dead, and Grandpa had never gotten so much attention...
Consider: someone is profiteering off your father, and there are other aspects of his condition that should be addressed. Linus Pauling (2x Nobel Laureate) wrote a book on Cancer & Vitamin C. Other researchers now advocate large doses of Vitamin D as an effective, gentle and safe cancer treatment.
There are also significant psycho-somatic aspects of any treatment program. Pharmaceutical-based medicine treats bodies, and mostly ignores the mind's role in treatment.
Read the quote again: while your dad's doctors might care about him, the medical-industrial complex does not. All they care about is how much they can make off him. The complex ignores the cheap, effective treatments in favor of the flashy, expensive, experimental treatments, that don't really work anyways.
The Medical Industry has an agenda too: charge insurance for as much as they can get away with.
My grandmother developed multiple myeloma, which is a type of bone cancer. Her Mayo Clinic, Scottsdale doctors told her in December 2004 that, without treatment, she'd have 6 months to live. Her treatment consisted of some pills and a weekly injection to boost her red blood cell counts. After 6 months of treatment, they did another bone biopsy, and found that the cancer had advanced and that there wasn't much else they could do. She started hospice care on a Saturday, and died a week later.
I later learned that they were billing Medicare $1000 for each injection.
Basically, they subjected my grandmother to the most expensive treatment plan they could devise and handed her off to hospice when they couldn't justify it anymore.
If your doctor recommends getting an angiogram, coronary bypass surgery, balloon angioplasty, or taking cholesterol-lowering drugs your best course of action may be to run out the door. For most people these procedures/treatments are not effective and are completely unnecessary. The most popular medical procedures are the most profitable for the health care industry but are often the least effective. Hundreds of thousands of people each year are deceived in undergoing expensive medical treatments that do no good and may even do a great deal of harm. Highly effective procedures that are low-risk and inexpensive are ignored or even ridiculed. Recommending expensive, high-risk procedures over the cheaper, more effective ones amounts to nothing more than fraud. If you had the choice of going through a risky $20,000 surgical procedure or simply taking a daily vitamin supplement which one would you choose? Most patients aren't given the choice.
These facts, and more, led Charles T. McGee, M.D. to write this hard hitting, expose of the health care system. In it you will learn which procedures and treatments to avoid and which ones offer the most hope. If you are concerned about heart disease, and everyone should be, you need to read this book!
I think I'm supposed to adopt your point of view somewhat. The wise man said to only spend a max of an hour a day on "bullshit conspiracy theories". When I asked for clarification, he confirmed that the conspiracy is bullshit because it doesn't matter for what I'm working on. My posts in this thread are rather "disempowered", and I need to change that outlook.
As soon as I finish fixing my printer (just cleaned the ink jet heads with water and windex, need to buy fresh ink), I think I'm going to print your comment out.
I will let you in on a little "secret:" if you have 100% automation, nobody has to do any work!
In the modern world, the upper class owns the machines, and the underclass collects unemployment.
As for the debt problem, it will only be solved when spoiled people learn to live within their means.
You obviously didn't read the link about the debt-based nature of our economy/money supply. There's another good article: "I Want the Earth plus 5%". Look it up.
Psychopaths in major leadership positions of government and companies seems to be the second one.
You're exactly right here. Psychopaths have designed a system to concentrate wealth in their own pockets.
NAFTA and treaties with various third-world countries have destroyed the American manufacturing base.
You're surely talking about the massive loss in manufacturing jobs in the U.S. over the past 30+ years. While many of these job losses are due to so-called "free trade" treaties, automation via computers has also taken many jobs. Cool stuff is still made in the U.S., just not a whole lot of consumer-grade stuff.
For example, I met a man about 6 months ago who has a machine shop that makes tubes for telescopes and other similar projects. IIRC, he employed himself and his wife. 25 years ago, he would have needed a machinist for each machine in his shop...
The American economy will not recover until those treaties are abandoned and manufacturing comes back to America.
I think the problem is debt. The American economy will not recover until the debt problem is resolved. Once that's accomplished (possibly via state-owned banks), the economy will quickly take care of itself.
... I knocked myself out for two weeks, and slowly faded back over a period of about 6 months.
About a year after my TBI, I developed a repetitive strain injury. This was not due to "repetitive motion", but the "trauma" (injuries) I'd accumulated over my entire life.
Years later I found a doctor who specialized in releasing trauma from the body. After a half-dozen visits, he said that my head was starting to work properly again. When he first started working with me, "[my] head was like a disorganized bag of sand." He said the body has a carrying capacity for trauma, and once that capacity is reached the owner quickly becomes much more dysfunctional than he had been before.
Pay no attention to the commercial link above - I recently launched the site, and need to increase my google-foo. I really ought to write something for soldiers with traumatic brain injuries, because there are some very good treatment options to quickly "undo" the damage. If you don't want to buy my book, but need help dealing with stored trauma, look into Andrew Taylor Still's body of work.
where you can only charge on a PC if the Motorola Charger is installed.
You mean driver, right? My Motorola phone charges on Windows just fine with the driver and a standard mini-usb cable, and it charges on FreeBSD 7.x without any special software.
They are in our past. Nikola Tesla was working on some interesting inventions, before his financiers pulled the plug. Jeane Manning covers the history of innovative energy in her book, The Coming Energy Revolution. Work on the present state-of-the-art is covered in the followup book, Breakthrough Power
These stories are the smoke that should alert us to barely-contained fires burning all around. Steorn might be onto something, and they might not - but it does us no good to scoff and laugh at them when there are huge clouds of proverbial 'smoke' telling of other types of clean, free energy technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi,
I really appreciate you taking the time to keep my message from getting buried.
Thanks a million!
p.s. If all it took was a placebo, don't you think the CPAP machine would have worked? Or any of the other treatments, for that matter? I suppose you could argue that specific placebos work better than non-specific placebos, but then you've opened up a can of worms, and I don't think you mean to go there.
HTH, HAND.
But the difference is that I enjoy the quiet and alone time during night and hence would stay away from sites like Facebook.
I think the author of the fine article is an insomniac who would like to fall asleep but can't. This was the case for me, when I was a kid.
Sometimes I wonder if I became a night owl because of insomnia. I'm still a night-owl, even though I've figured out how to fall asleep quickly & easily, and I agree that this time of day can be a very productive period.
As a child, I tossed and turned in bed until I finally passed out. I was 5 when we moved from the house with the swimming pool, and I remember being an insomniac then.
When I was seventeen I learned that normal people are able to "relax" their bodies, while keeping their mind awake. This is something like when you sit awkwardly and pinch a nerve, so that a leg falls asleep. When you stand up again, you know your leg is supporting you, but you can't feel any of the normal sensations. Relaxation was said to be something like that (before the pins and needles start).
Thenceforth, I tried to relax every night in bed while trying to go to sleep. I was never successful because I usually passed out first. I didn't complain - 'tis better to pass out quickly than toss and turn for hours.
Sometimes people can't relax because their body doesn't have enough of the "relaxation mineral", Magnesium. Being magnesium deficient (61% of the population, according to the link) makes it difficult to relax, no matter what you do. Magnesium didn't help me fall asleep, but it was worth trying.
Sometimes people have trouble sleeping because the sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight response) is over stimulated. Many different conditions can trigger the fight-or-flight response, and for some people, this state of "red alert" becomes a habit.
I build a stress-relieving device that can potentially help balance the two aspects of the autonomic nervous system (fight-or-flight and rest-and-digest). This was mentioned in a comment to the recent slashdot story on Dr. Nakamats, who has his own way of balancing the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.
I have a client who was an insomniac, and is definitely NOT a night owl. On a bad day, he passed out in his recliner around 7:30pm. He stumbled off to bed at 9pm, and woke every morning at 1am or 3am. He was tired, but incapable of going back to sleep.
He went to the doctor, who gave him a sleeping pill. The side effects were not acceptable for someone of his profession (doctor/surgeon). He went to a sleep specialist, who ordered a sleep study. The study showed that my client stopped breathing frequently, and he was diagnosed with sleep apnea. The CPAP machine helped a little, but did not provide a satisfactory sleep experience.
First I helped the client deal with some old emotional traumas. A few weeks later I supplied the Radial Appliance. He uses it every night - if he wakes up at 1am (sometimes the dog wakes him up), he'll move, re-attach the wires, and go right back to sleep.
I talked to his wife recently, and she said the most amazing thing happened last week: she woke up at 6:30am, and her husband (my client) was still asleep. It was the first time that she'd woken first in the 7+ years that they've shared a bed.
but as long as you don't need to go anywhere in the morning it doesn't really matter anymore.
Agreed - I ditched my 8am-5pm job recently, and am much happier sleeping on my own schedule.
One reasonable post amongst a hundred scoffers. I salute you, good sir. :)
I wonder how the technology worshipers among us would scientifically study this issue. You'd have to isolate the influence of radio waves on a human body-system. The problem is, of course, finding controls in a radio-free, transient electromagnetic field-free, man-made-chemical-free world...
Science is hard to do when your experiment has a billion variables.
That's a very interesting article - thanks for sharing.
There were two parts that I think are very important. The first is about his inventive process:
U.S. Creativity expert Win Wenger, PhD talks about the mammalian diving response as a way for anyone to increase blood flow to the brain, thereby increasing one's intelligence. When the Co2 concentration in a mammal's blood rises, arteries to the brain open up so that the brain doesn't starve to death. With repetition, the arteries become permanently enlarged.
I myself have spent some time holding my breath underwater at the pool. I haven't done the full 30-day protocol, but at one point I built up to over 2 minutes underwater. This is not a lot (the record for free diving is over 19 minutes), but many people can only hold their breath for 15 seconds...
Furthermore, we had a pool in our backyard when I was a kid (before I turned 5), and I remember doing held-breath underwater swimming then. I'd dive down to pick stuff up off the bottom of the pool, and swim through underwater rings.
Furthermore, I had a VHS copy of Star Trek IV, and I repeatedly tried to hold my breath for the entire time that Captain Kirk (or was it Mr. Spock?) held his breath to release the whales, after the bird of prey crashed into San Francisco Bay... I was never able to do it, but I now think the effort was good for something.
I don't know that I'm a genius now, but I think I do pretty well.
My hands were cold as ice for a long time... Then I built a "radial appliance", which is said to balance the body's parasympathetic nervous system. My hands are now warm.
I think my website (above) links to the radial appliance stuff... This is kooky esoteric shit, so don't bother clicking if you just want to scoff...
Anyways, thanks again for the link!
While I could imagine a subterranean nuclear explosion triggering an earthquake, I think there are other, more effective ways to create megaquakes.
For example, we could pump out all the lubricating fluid from the earth's crust. With the lube, the plates slide along somewhat smoothly. Without the lubricant, friction would build up until a catastrophic release (9.9 on the scale).
I don't remember exactly where I read this idea, but crude oil certainly has functions beyond just sitting there, I'm sure. (abiogenic theory of oil, super-deep oil wells [oil struck at 5 miles below the surface], old fields refilling with oil, etc)
We hardly manufacture anything anymore.
The U.S. hardly manufactures anything that requires lots of human labor. If the manufacturing process can be automated, companies will keep the manufacturing here.
Look at the tags on your clothes. I bet you have at least one item that says "made in Honduras/Mexico/etc of U.S. Material". Stitching is labor intensive, whereas turning raw materials into fabric is mostly done by machine.
With that said, there's still a ton of manufacturing in the U.S. - computers and robots have just replaced humans as the machine operators.
The problem for the U.S. working class is that it's expensive to employ them - wages, social security tax, medicare tax, benefits, unemployment tax, worker's compensation insurance, etc. It's much more profitable for Wall Street to hire foreigners and pocket the difference.
And if the results were unfavorable, what then?
Here's a recent article on the hazards of transient electromagnetic fields, such as those created by compact fluorescent light bulbs:
While I'm posting, here's a neat little website that plots FCC-registered antennas on a google map:
http://www.antennasearch.com/default.asp
There were a pair of shows on This American Life last fall about the health industry clusterfuck. The first one was called "More is Less", the second "Someone Else's Money".
Wealthy americans get much more medical care, but the outcomes are the same or worse. The problem is, essentially, that American medicine is philosophically bankrupt.
American doctors don't care about nutrition, or psycho-somatic medicine, etc. American doctors are trained in how to pick a drug or surgery to perform. ... But at the same time, some of the "Alternative Health" practitioners in the U.S. are the very best in the world.
The graph was on the first page of results for the search term I used - 'federal budget graph', iirc. I agree that it's misleading - where are the figures for off-budget items?
There is no difference between most democrats and republican. They tow the party line and beat their drums about change, but the railroad tracks still go in the same direction.
There are two exceptions (and maybe a few others): Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. The rest are clueless, stupid, or deluded with 'false power' (that is, they think they're a bull, but they really just get led around by the party-installed nose ring).
I choose to get off the train, and go my own way.
The Flexner Report is the reason why "modern medicine" costs so much. To quote the article:
I don't know that there is a single politician in Washington who really groks the health care clusterfuck. 100 Years of Medical Robbery is required reading, as is the followup, Real Medical Freedom.
Today's health care systems sucks because an artificial monopoly has been given to a certain kind of "healer". End the monopoly, and things will improve.
To get back on-topic, the Pentagon surely has something better than rockets in their toolchest... I'd bet they have a SSTO spaceplane buried in the western deserts somewhere. :)
I didn't mean to imply that I approve of Medicare or any of the other medical-based wealth transfer schemes. I'm just saying that the Pentagon's budget is disproportionately huge, compared to everything else.
When you're to balance your budget, it helps to look at the big items first.
I wish there was more money for space, but for heaven's sake - if it really was a choice between socialised healthcare for people, or socialised manned space travel, I'd still put the former first.
Here's a nice graphic that puts the budget in perspective:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html
To make things even more clear, hit the button at the top that says 'Hide Mandatory Spending'.
To save NASA's Constellation program, methinks the military-industrial complex should take a haircut. I've read that the pentagon's off-budget items dwarf what's officially spent...
I have a copy of Future Memory, which posits that events can be pre-experienced (mostly non-volitionally, similar to a 'near death experience').
This does not imply that the future is ordained. By knowing what's going to happen in advance, we have the ability to choose a better outcome.
Is it a hydraulic accumulator you mean?
That's it - thanks!
... A few years ago I heard about Tom Kasmer's hydraulic transmission. He calls it the Hydristor (also: wikipedia entry).
Basically, an invention like Kasmer's could be used to turn any car into a hybrid by replacing the transmission. Braking energy is stored in a hydraulic pressure system (the proper name escapes me at the moment).
While this system from Porsche is interesting, it is not revolutionary.
The next automotive revolution will be some form of retrofit.
The book you're referring to is 2x Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling's Cancer and Vitamin C. I believe Pauling called for either intravenous infusions of sodium ascorbate, or oral consumption of ascorbic acid.
Little followup research has been done, because there's no money in a simple vitamin that has no patent protection.
My grandmother was 87 years old when she passed away. Her only regret was not living long enough to see any great-grand-babies.
I was the driver for her weekly injection, and saw that she was "just going through the motions" of treatment for her husband and children. She didn't really care whether she finished out the year or not.
I went to the pharmacy for a prescription of ... thalidomide towards the end of her treatment experience. Thalidomide was banned for many years because it caused birth defects. Then someone found out that it extends the life of MM patients by "2 months", and now some company has a patent on methods to keep fertile women from getting it. The pharmacy charged $2309.99 for a one-month supply. If she survived a month, she would have gotten another prescription for $2309.99. That's $4819.98 for $2 worth of pills.
Don't be sorry about my grandmother - I would have encouraged hospice care as soon as she got her diagnosis. The funny thing about hospice is that some people get better as soon as they start. My grandfather loved hospice care, and lived for about 2.5 years before he finally passed away. Grandma was already dead, and Grandpa had never gotten so much attention...
Consider: someone is profiteering off your father, and there are other aspects of his condition that should be addressed. Linus Pauling (2x Nobel Laureate) wrote a book on Cancer & Vitamin C. Other researchers now advocate large doses of Vitamin D as an effective, gentle
and safe cancer treatment.
There are also significant psycho-somatic aspects of any treatment program. Pharmaceutical-based medicine treats bodies, and mostly ignores the mind's role in treatment.
Read the quote again: while your dad's doctors might care about him, the medical-industrial complex does not. All they care about is how much they can make off him. The complex ignores the cheap, effective treatments in favor of the flashy, expensive, experimental treatments, that don't really work anyways.
a lot of people out [there] have agendas
The Medical Industry has an agenda too: charge insurance for as much as they can get away with.
My grandmother developed multiple myeloma, which is a type of bone cancer. Her Mayo Clinic, Scottsdale doctors told her in December 2004 that, without treatment, she'd have 6 months to live. Her treatment consisted of some pills and a weekly injection to boost her red blood cell counts. After 6 months of treatment, they did another bone biopsy, and found that the cancer had advanced and that there wasn't much else they could do. She started hospice care on a Saturday, and died a week later.
I later learned that they were billing Medicare $1000 for each injection.
Basically, they subjected my grandmother to the most expensive treatment plan they could devise and handed her off to hospice when they couldn't justify it anymore.
This was my grandmother's experience, but with cancer instead of heart disease.
Well that's a nice post. Thanks.
I think I'm supposed to adopt your point of view somewhat. The wise man said to only spend a max of an hour a day on "bullshit conspiracy theories". When I asked for clarification, he confirmed that the conspiracy is bullshit because it doesn't matter for what I'm working on. My posts in this thread are rather "disempowered", and I need to change that outlook.
As soon as I finish fixing my printer (just cleaned the ink jet heads with water and windex, need to buy fresh ink), I think I'm going to print your comment out.
Thanks again.
I will let you in on a little "secret:" if you have 100% automation, nobody has to do any work!
In the modern world, the upper class owns the machines, and the underclass collects unemployment.
As for the debt problem, it will only be solved when spoiled people learn to live within their means.
You obviously didn't read the link about the debt-based nature of our economy/money supply. There's another good article: "I Want the Earth plus 5%". Look it up.
Psychopaths in major leadership positions of government and companies seems to be the second one.
You're exactly right here. Psychopaths have designed a system to concentrate wealth in their own pockets.
Good points, all. I just have a short comment.
NAFTA and treaties with various third-world countries have destroyed the American manufacturing base.
You're surely talking about the massive loss in manufacturing jobs in the U.S. over the past 30+ years. While many of these job losses are due to so-called "free trade" treaties, automation via computers has also taken many jobs. Cool stuff is still made in the U.S., just not a whole lot of consumer-grade stuff.
For example, I met a man about 6 months ago who has a machine shop that makes tubes for telescopes and other similar projects. IIRC, he employed himself and his wife. 25 years ago, he would have needed a machinist for each machine in his shop...
The American economy will not recover until those treaties are abandoned and manufacturing comes back to America.
I think the problem is debt. The American economy will not recover until the debt problem is resolved. Once that's accomplished (possibly via state-owned banks), the economy will quickly take care of itself.
... I knocked myself out for two weeks, and slowly faded back over a period of about 6 months.
About a year after my TBI, I developed a repetitive strain injury. This was not due to "repetitive motion", but the "trauma" (injuries) I'd accumulated over my entire life.
Years later I found a doctor who specialized in releasing trauma from the body. After a half-dozen visits, he said that my head was starting to work properly again. When he first started working with me, "[my] head was like a disorganized bag of sand." He said the body has a carrying capacity for trauma, and once that capacity is reached the owner quickly becomes much more dysfunctional than he had been before.
Pay no attention to the commercial link above - I recently launched the site, and need to increase my google-foo. I really ought to write something for soldiers with traumatic brain injuries, because there are some very good treatment options to quickly "undo" the damage. If you don't want to buy my book, but need help dealing with stored trauma, look into Andrew Taylor Still's body of work.
where you can only charge on a PC if the Motorola Charger is installed.
You mean driver, right? My Motorola phone charges on Windows just fine with the driver and a standard mini-usb cable, and it charges on FreeBSD 7.x without any special software.
They are in our past. Nikola Tesla was working on some interesting inventions, before his financiers pulled the plug. Jeane Manning covers the history of innovative energy in her book, The Coming Energy Revolution. Work on the present state-of-the-art is covered in the followup book, Breakthrough Power
These stories are the smoke that should alert us to barely-contained fires burning all around. Steorn might be onto something, and they might not - but it does us no good to scoff and laugh at them when there are huge clouds of proverbial 'smoke' telling of other types of clean, free energy technology.
You must've missed last year's story: Successful Cold Fusion Experiment?
There was a followup this March, from another group: 20 Years After Cold Fusion Debut, Another Team Claims Success
There is something important going on here. Mr. Fusion-powered flying DeLoreans are in our future, for sure.