My mom once told a story about the one time that my cousin was helping her with some baking. She was like, "Q, read off the recipe to me", and he said, "blah blah blah, Pecans, blah blah". My mom was like, "pecans? This recipe doesn't call for Pecans. ???"
So she went and looked at the recipe herself, and it called for walnuts. She was like, "Q, this says 'Walnuts', not 'Pecans'." Cousin Q responded that they were both nuts, and didn't get why it was important.
My mom talked to her mother in law, who got Q on a phonics program.
Gatto says that the switcheroo took place during WWII, and parents who were getting on with their lives post-war didn't notice that their kids weren't learning to read with the Whole Language Learning scam.
All the administrations have been lockstep since Reagan fell to Tecumseh's Curse in 1981 (while he didn't die like all the other presidents elected at the decade mark, the rogue elements of his administration [led by V.P. George H.W. Bush] took over while he was recovering from the coup attempt).
George H.W. Bush had his speech about the New World Order and negotiated NAFTA. Clinton pushed NAFTA implementation through the congress.
I never really learned to read at teh government schools, and do much better listening to Chomsky's talks. Found Class War via bittorrent, and have borrowed a couple other cds from the local library. Definitely recommended listening.
I think you might be thinking of COSCO - China Ocean Shipping COmpany.
As for this thing about objections to lenovo wanting to buy seagate: nothing like closing the barn door after the horses have all left. Whoops. Should've thought about these things when our government was printing money to bomb the vietnamese back in the 60's and 70's, or when Reagan was printing money to beat the soviets in the cold war, or when Clinton let the Fed cut loose the money hose to spark the tech bubble circa 1995, or when GWB let the Feral Reserve Bank turn up the money hose even higher to spark the housing bubble of 2003-2006.
Probably should have turned the fan off before the shit hit it. Now We the People have a big mess to clean up, and some politicians to turn into Neo-Convicts.
hydrogen peroxide (thought to be overproduced in trace amounts in the early stages of most diseases that involve some sort of chronic inflammation in the body) I wouldn't say that it's "overproduced". Seems that the body creates hydrogen peroxide as a way to deal with certain problems. See The Many Benefits of Hydrogen Peroxide, or Intravenous Hydrogen Peroxide Therapy.
Most the military takes what it does very seriously. Then there are the political officers. In the months before 9/11, the Cheney administration changed the procedure so that NORAD had to get permission from the Secretary of Defense before they could intercept an off-course airplane. Before the civilian air traffic controllers & NORAD did the intercept thing on a regular basis.
But wait, we don't believe in conspiracies here. Hmm.
Not everyone can be rich, that is just the way capitalism works. Yes, "capitalism" as we know it is for concentrating wealth in the pockets of people who are already wealthy.
The answer is not to raise the standard of living elsewhere in the world to match ours (which simply is not possible anyway) but is to lower ours to a realistic and sustainable level, The current petroleum-based usage trends are unsustainable, of course. Consider the possibility that Energy became so cheap that it's essentially 'free' - suppose science finally figures out fusion, and every home has its own "Mr. Fusion" that runs off tap water. I have the hope of raising living standards everywhere.
but as history has shown this will not happen voluntarily, we'll just ride it out to its inevitable and tragic conclusion, only this time recovery may not be possible. The housing bubble 'shit' has recently hit the fan, and is starting to spread across the entire world's economy. Bear Stearns had a pair of hedge funds fail in June, subprime mortgage lenders are imploding left and right (117 since late 2006), and now corporate bonds aren't finding buyers at the cheap interest rates they used to get. The HousingPanic blog commemorated this recent turn of events with a video from a noted historical catastrophe.
It is time for corporations to assume control of government and stop abdicating their social responsibility to puppet governments, especially in this time of globalisation more so than ever. I think it's time to dissolve the corporations, and replace them with worker-owned and run cooperatives. Workers working for themselves, imagine that! The corporate class won't like this economic transformation much, but they'll have to get used to living on salaries of less than $10 million/year.
China and Europe should emerge just fine. We in the United States have a great deal of housecleaning to do.
What's interesting is when you get down into the comments (#18), you mentioned that the condition snowballed after a surgery when you were 28.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the fight or flight response is governed by the Triple Warmer (TW) meridian. When one's TW meridian is overactive, it takes energy from all the other meridians (save Heart meridian), but especially from the Spleen Meridian, which is opposite TW on the flow wheel. The Spleen meridian controls the pancreas and insulin production. Your surgery likely caused the TW to go into overdrive, and if you get your TW/Spleen meridians balanced, you could drink fine meads and ales again.:)
A. For the blood sugar to stay balanced, it is crucial that spleen meridian be kept strong. This is done primarily by sedating triple warmer--which drains energy from spleen--and then by directly strengthening spleen. In Energy Medicine, you'll note that there are several ways to do this, and I'd have your daughter use every way possible since what is required with this illness is to literally retrain a deeply held energy habit in her body. To strengthen spleen meridian:
[list of exercises]
Changing the deep habit of a spleen/triple warmer imbalance will not only help keep her blood sugar in better balance, it can help create a new pattern of insulin production in her pancreas. The type of diabetes determines how much the illness can be turned around. If she was born without the ability to create insulin, she will probably always need to have it supplied externally, but even in that situation, the procedures described here will help her pancreas to function more optimally.
Donna Eden is a modern mystic who, like the chinese sages of old, can 'see' the bodies energies. She's famous in her hometown of Ashland, Oregon, and had to move away because whenever someone saw her on the street they'd ask about their particular health problem, and she can't turn someone down. I haven't met her myself, but I had a few sessions with one of her long-time teaching assistants some 3 years ago (who can also see the body's subtle energies quite well, though not as well as Mrs. Eden), and I've been doing much better ever since.
The book is a good introduction - most libraries have a copy.
FYI, the medicare amendment to the Social Security Act was signed into law on July 30th, 1965. The 1973 book, 'The Screwing of the Average Man', talks about how Medicare's costs went out of control from the very beginning.
The government's bonds are worthless, as they're IOUs to itself. If you or I did what the government's done with the taxes collected for Social Security and Medicare, it'd be considered fraud.
You are correct that doctors order all these tests because they're scared of getting sued. I know - my father does this too. But they're only able to do it because someone else is usually paying for the patient's care. So even if they know the test is going to be inconclusive, they order it anyways.
Then there are all the other procedures which, under objective evaluation, are worthless. One researcher concluded that "bypass surgery belongs in the medical archives", because it didn't make a difference in the patient's outcome. Same thing with arthroscopic knee surgery - no better than a placebo.
There are plenty of dissenters in the medical community - Robert Zieve, M.D. helped me find the right modality with his book, Healthy Medicine. Andrew Weil also advocates more effective medicine.
Do you know what the Medical Establishment's initial reaction to having the government pick up their patient's tabs (via medicare) was? "Now we can do whatever we want." Medicare's budget was out of control within a decade, and has been on constant 'cost cutting' measures ever since.
While universal care will take care of part of the profiteering, it will encourage other forms of profiteering - doctors who order every test in the book to cover their ass, for example. I went to a doctor who did a regular x-ray of my TMJ (jaw joint) in-house, because he had an x-ray machine. Then he wrote for me to get a CT-Scan, 'cause the x-ray didn't show anything. I eventually saw an osteopath who specialized in osteopathic manipulation, and my jaw got better - without a CT scan, mouthguards (theory: to prevent night teeth grinding), or surgery.
I think you missed the point of my post: the problem with medicine is that costs are out of control because the dominant medical philosophy does not facilitate wellness. Nothing will improve in the healthcare system until we replace allopathy (treating symptoms with drugs) with something that addresses the causes behind illnesses.
Scientific method selectively applied, you mean. Drugs & surgery are the domain of the allopathic practitioner. My grandmother's oncologist sent her to a nutritionist at the start of her cancer treatment, where she was told to eat 5 servings of vegetables a day. Grandma later laughed and said, "she's crazy!". The oncologist never asked about nutrition again, perscribed lots of drugs (there was the $1000 weekly shot, and the $2000/month thalidomide) and grandma died anyways after six months.
I've tested these theories myself, and they work where nothing 'conventional' did.
'Toxin' is generic for substances that are not life-enhancing. Mercury and lead are toxins, as are the results of waste putrefying in a chronically constipated colon.
I took off my blinders because it was the only way for me to become well. It hasn't been easy, but it's been entirely worthwhile.
I never get colds anymore. The last time I felt 'sick' was when I mixed some raw poultry with other non-compatible foods (starches) - I switched to a liquified vegetable diet for a few days, and promptly recovered.
I used to catch the usual bugs, when I was growing up, living a mostly-normal lifestyle. I haven't had a problem since I took charge of my own health. I lived in a fraternity house for three years, and every year the bug would make its rounds around the floors. The heavy drinker caught it at least twice, iirc. But it always skipped my half of the room, even when my roommates were feeling under the weather.
There is no magic way to boost an immune system to repel any disease, Yeah, that really sucks. If I were you, I'd be constantly watching over my shoulder for a sick person who might infect me with their potentially deadly virus or bacteria.
As for me, I trust that 'G-D' has given me a genetically superior immune system, and I have nothing to worry about.
I also respect the Cayce material. I figured out what he would have said for me, and I'm much better as a result. Discovery of Osteopathic Manipulation was my big breakthrough - search for my nick and 'osteopathy' or 'osteopathic' on slashdot via teh google ('nido osteopathy site:slashdot.org') to read my previous posts here on the topic.
But you can trust your scientific medicine. Don't worry about the research being biased towards treatments that are extremely profitable for their sellers. Or that many of the research studies into non-pharmaceutical approaches are fatally flawed (Cayce always said it was much more desirable to get one's vitamins from food than from a pill, for example). Or that positive research into non-massifiable (i.e., not profitable for anyone except the doctor/person administering the treatment) therapies is routinely ignored - the effectiveness of osteopathic manipulation on childhood ear infections or carpal tunnel, for example. Or the effectiveness of Bowen Therapy/massage/etc at relieving pain and improving well being.
The 'food pyramid' is fatally flawed. See http://www.mercola.com/2001/jan/21/weston_price.ht m">neglected nutrition research. Or Cayce's statements on ideal diets and menus. Recall that the 'diet dictocrats' originally said that trans-fat rich margarine was superior to butter, and that eggs were bad. Research has since proven both statements false...
I guess the main thing is to do your own research and experimentation. I've adopted habits and practices that help me feel better - ymmv, hand.
All good points, but I do take issue with your conclusion:
and the political pressure would quickly build to switch this country over to government-backed health plans like every other developed country on this planet. The problem with health care in the United States today is that costs are out of control. This is by design - see 100 Years of Medical Robbery or How The Cost-Plus System Evolved for more on how the AMA lobbied to exterminate the competitors to allopathic medicine.
Someone asked me about Michael Moore's Sicko today, and I said that while he had some good points, he missed the problem entirely. If the medical industry was like the auto industry, it'd be like ignoring your car until the brakes failed and you ran into a brick wall, or never changing the oil until the engine needed replacing. Auto bodywork == expensive, brakes == cheap; replacing the engine == expensive, regular oil changes == cheap.
Americans would be a whole lot healthier (and health care expenses a whole lot lower) if health care was about prevention. (Mammograms & prostate exams, et al, are NOT prevention - they're screening for conventional treatments). The basics of human health haven't changed in thousands of years. The body requires certain levels of essential nutrients (some bodies need more of a nutrient than others due to genetic variation - some sailors were resistant to scurvy, for example). These nutrients need to be effectively assimilated through the digestive system, and the waste products of the body's metabolic processes need to be efficiently disposed of. The body requires clear air, clean water, sunlight (to synthesize Vitamin D), essential fatty acids, etc. If any of these are missing, or are not available in the required amounts, illness will invariably result.
Tunnel vision keeps people from seeing the whole picture.
but we have not had a stock market run-up like in 1999-2000. So no, the impact of a forthcoming "burst" won't be nearly as bad. In the last 4+ years the U.S. has had something much worse than a stock market run-up: a giant housing bubble. Many regions saw rises of 100% or more in the selling price of a house. This bubble has already peaked, and is now collapsing in slow motion. People bought houses/condos/etc as an 'investment' in the bubble years with the belief that real estate always goes up.
Mike Sheldrake's blog is like a play-by-play tracking the demise of the real estate industry. The action has been fast and furious of late: collapse of two (er, now three) Bear Stearns hedge funds which invested in subprime mortgage debt and the sudden collapse of a non-subprime mortgage lender, American Home Mortgage.
This is more than a 'web 2.0' bubble: this is the final stages of the America bubble. The bubble started with the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913, grew through the first and second world wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, Gulf War I. Gulf War II and the "War of Terror" is the pin that popped the invincible American Military Machine - the military-industrial complex is trying to fight a 4th-generation war with 2nd-generation (superpower vs. superpower) tactics, according to one Iraq veteran.
I'm actually really optomistic about our future. The America Bubble has turned milions of Americans into miserable wage-slaves, or worse. There is an incredible amount of poverty here, in this land of plenty. The present economic restrutcturing is necessary, and so is the eventual politcal house cleaning. I look forward to the day that the Neo-Cons become Neo-Convicts. Hopefully GWB will get frog-hopped out of the whitehouse (that is, with feet and hands cuffed together)...
The 'mouth-breather == stupid' meme always bothers me when it comes up, because I was a mouth breather for a very long time. And I always did very well on all the standardized tests. I had some reminder stickers: 'lips closed, teeth together', but they didn't help much at all.
I learned about Donna's work about 5 years ago, from a Martial Artist who'd reverse-engineered Donna's techniques to make him a better fighter. I got the book first (many libraries and most large bookstores should have a copy), and did the exercises as best I could. But things didn't really start to come together for me until I had a couple sessions with one Donna's senior TAs, someone who'd been learning with her since the 1980's, and who can also see the body's energies quite well (not as well as Donna herself, but better than all but a handful of the rest of the people on the planet). And the first thing she did with me was hold the bellybutton/third eye hookup for quite a few minutes, before moving on to other things. And now, three years later, my tongue is almost always planted at the roof of my mouth.
I've seen the video you linked to before - while it's a good overview of the daily routine, it barely scratches the surface of why the exercises are important, and when they're called for. The book covers a lot of ground, and is quite a bargain for $17. Some people really need to see the exercises performed, and for them, the energy medicine kit is a better introduction.
Glad I helped you find something interesting today.
I was just fine until I got my '99 IBM Thinkpad 600E. I had shooting pains up & down the one arm within a couple months. So I switched to the other hand for operating the trackpoint, and before long I had shooting pains up and down that arm too. So I switched back & forth. Then I spent a day working on my cs2 final project. By evening I had a burning sensation across my shoulders and up the neck, and I was miserable for the rest of my college career.
Later I learned that it wasn't so much the trackpoint that did me in, but a bump on the chin the year before, that left me without memories of a two week period (in addition to other traumas I've sustained over the years). After a year and a half of treatments, my osteopath has me straightened out pretty well, and I can use the keyboard with only a little discomfort. I'd be well, if only I could relax my body - there's an old, forgotten osteopathic technique for a 'relaxing treatment', it's just a matter of finding someone who's willing to try something different.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM, 5000 year history), mouth breathing is considered indicative of the central & governing meridians being 'unhooked'. The Central Meridian runs from the pubic bone up the front of the body, while the Governing Meridian runs from the tailbone up the spine and over the top of the head. They meet where the tip of the tongue touches the roof of the mouth.
Mouth breathing is something that needs to be fixed. Donna Eden (who can 'see' the body's subtle energies, as the ancient TCM practitioners could) gives several routines: hooking up the belly button & forehead, sucking on the thumb (children do many of her exercises instinctively), etc.
My '94 Civic VX was rated for, and fully capable of, 56mpg highway. It has 140,000 miles, and I've been ironing out some 'bugs' in the systems over my 7500 miles in the car (sticking brakes, bad lean air fuel sensor, poorly-gapped spark plugs, etc), but I've still averaged 46-47mpg since I got the car in early May. I recently had two 420-mile tanks, 200 miles hwy/220 miles city that averaged 50.5 and 51.2mpg. Then I screwed up the brakes, and the following two 320-mile tanks averaged 42mpg. Fixed the brakes, and the next tank popped up to 50mpg.
Maybe Honda should bring back their '80s CRX. A version of the sucker got easy 40miles/gallon with straight gas engine, and plenty peppy. My '94 Civic VX (heir to the CRX HF) can get over 50 mpg on the highway. Over the last 7500 miles (I recently got the car at 133,300), I've averaged 46mpg. If I correct for the slightly larger tires, I think the actual fuel economy is 47mpg.
These numbers include the 1,000 miles I went with a bad lean-air fuel sensor, knocking my mileage from 50+mpg to <40mpg, and the sticking brake caliper that knocked 700 miles down to 42mpg (from the previous 51mpg). I've gotten better than 100mpg going downhill, and maybe 50mpg coming back (for a round-trip of 74 mpg). Still trying to figure out what's hindering my city mileage - I think the one brake caliper is still sticking, as I did my own caliper rebuilds, and the one seal came in a box that looked like it had been sitting on the shelf for 10 years.
The '92-'95 used lean burn to achieve such high mileage figures. The one drawback is that lean-burning engines emit more nitrous oxides... I suspect that the U.S. spec '96-'00 Civic HX did not use lean-burn, as the fuel economy tanked to 43mpg hwy. But the Japanese Civic HX did, and in combination with an infinitely-variable CVT transmission, allegedly got 70mpg.
The '99 Insight 5-spd had lean burn, and was rated for (and fully capable of) 70mpg highway. The '99 Insight CVT did NOT have lean burn and was rated for 56mpg hwy. Later, the Honda Civic Hybrid came equiped with catalytic converters for the nitrous oxides, allowing it to be a super-duper-low-emission vehicle (unlike the Insight 5-spd)... But the 2003 civic was only rated for 51mpg. ?
There ought to be several non-hybrid 60-70mpg cars available today. IMHO, the automakers would rather work with the oil companies to screw us all, than lighten our dependence on teh petroleum.
Tried inverting the default colors in Firefox a while back - black background, white text, dark skins, etc. I wanted to reduce the strain on my eyes from reading the screen with the room lights off. I was somewhat successful - with certain sites. Other sites didn't respond well to my browser alterations, and I eventually gave up. If that computer was a mac I'd've tried Black Light, but, alas...
Black backgrounds are easier to read - white backgrounds emit a lot of photons, whereas black backgrounds with white/gray/yellow text emit photons at a rate orders of magnitude lower.
I like reading the about page on Blackle.com - except for the light grey bars above and below make it a strain. Perhaps I should find that black skin again...
That said, the artificial limits (largely circumvented by foreign medical schools but still limited by residency slots) do keep the quality of MDs up as it is fairly competitive to get into med school The Osteopathic profession is also helping to meet the (artificial) doctor shortage. As you might be aware, Allopaths organized in the mid-1800's to exterminate their competition. The problem was that they were getting their clock cleaned by health care providers who used more effective modalities than bleeding, mercury and surgery. 100 Years of Medical Robbery covers how the AMA managed to shut down 1/2 the country's medical schools between 1910 and the 1960's (also read the followup, 'Real Medical Freedom'). How the Cost-Plus System Evolved also mentions the Flexner Report in a discussion of how the system is set up to fleece patients.
Osteopathy was able to survive the great purges of the late 19th and early 20th centuries not only because the philosophy is superior to Allopathy, but also because it was organized enough to resist the American Medical Association's onslaught. Andrew Taylor Still, founder of Osteopathy, didn't care much for the Materia Medica, but pharmacology was added to the Osteopathic curiculum early in the 20th century in order to keep the profession from being exterminated.
Today most Doctors of Osteopathy's practice is identical to a Medical Doctor's, but some do utilize their manipulation training, and a handful specialize in manipulation. My D.O.'s work would seem like magic to the uninitiated - some light touches here & there, and with some patients, *poof*, all better (other patients, including myself, take a bit longer to receive all the benefit they can from his techniques). There's quite a science to what he does, but he never tries to explain much of the detail about his findings/diagnosis to me (I get the layman's explanation when I ask).
I don't mean to be inflammatory - it's just that I wasn't helped by the 'regular' doctors I visited, went somewhere else, and am satisfied with the results I've obtained. Drugs and surgery do have their place, of course, but most health complaints are better treated with gentler methods that better address the cause.
I don't want to sound sour but everytime I see a cancer story on/. I hope it will eventually help someone to not go through the hell that is cancer treatment because it doesn't do anything for me The "normal" way of treating cancer (and heart disease, and diabetes, and arthritis, and...) is way too profitable to make it anything but losing proposition for the patient. First they fleece the patient for all they're worth (even better if they've good insurance or Medicare), then the patient frequently dies anyways. The medical-industrial complex likes this state of affairs because it's good for their bottom line.
Effective cancer therapies are unprofitable because the patent has expired, or is by its very nature unpatentable. DCA's patent expired years ago, Vitamin D is just a regular vitamin especially concentrated in Cod liver oil, and Ozone and Hydrogen Peroxide are just ways of getting extra oxygen into an mass of anaerobic rogue cells.
Some of the things Edgar Cayce (early proponent of holistic medicine) recomended for lung cancer were Castor oil packs and brandy fumes inhaled from a charred oak barrel...
The main thing is to take charge of your own health. Dr. Zieve's book, Healthy Medicine has a good overview of a medical system that is patient-oriented, rather than organized for the benefit of teh profiteers.
2000 was about the time that manufacturers really began the rush to fire all their expensive Americans and replace them with displaced chinese farmers.
The American electronics manufacturing services industry has joined its Taiwanese rivals as an engine that offshores technology hardware production to China -- on a scale that dwarfs the highly publicized offshoring of software jobs to India.
Sanmina-SCI has moved about 12,000 jobs from the United States to Mexico, but its clients are asking it to trade off the advantages of the proximity to the U.S. market for the advantage of much lower labor rates in China.
"We don't necessarily want to do this, because there's a huge cost to us in shutting down a plant here and starting one up over there," said Randy Furr, Sanmina-SCI's president and chief operating officer. "But if we don't do this, they'll go to another competitor. If your client is competing against Dell, you have to take advantage of the low-cost environment."...
"But since then there's been a scramble to move from the high-cost sites to the low-cost sites in China," said Pulskamp. "In the late 1990s, Solectron used to make motherboards for Intel right here in Milpitas, in the heart of Silicon Valley. That's unthinkable now."
What is a faster processor really needed for anymore? I have a pair of 1.1ghz Athlons from 2000 or 2001, and they serve me just fine. The coming recession (caused by the housing bubble, deficits, cost of perpetual war, etc) won't help Moore's prediction out much either.
School was a big part of the problem, because they led me to believe that I knew how to read, when that certainly wasn't the case. When I started to examine criticisms of the system, I realized that government schools are not supposed to 'educate' - they exist for the purpose of making 'teh masses' manageable.
Look up Gatto's essay, 'The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher', or read his 'Underground History of American Education' (available for free at his website, linked above). Or look up some books by John Holt, whose message was very similar to Gatto's, but 30 years earlier.
Slashdot Mirror
My mom once told a story about the one time that my cousin was helping her with some baking. She was like, "Q, read off the recipe to me", and he said, "blah blah blah, Pecans, blah blah". My mom was like, "pecans? This recipe doesn't call for Pecans. ???"
So she went and looked at the recipe herself, and it called for walnuts. She was like, "Q, this says 'Walnuts', not 'Pecans'." Cousin Q responded that they were both nuts, and didn't get why it was important.
My mom talked to her mother in law, who got Q on a phonics program.
Gatto says that the switcheroo took place during WWII, and parents who were getting on with their lives post-war didn't notice that their kids weren't learning to read with the Whole Language Learning scam.
All the administrations have been lockstep since Reagan fell to Tecumseh's Curse in 1981 (while he didn't die like all the other presidents elected at the decade mark, the rogue elements of his administration [led by V.P. George H.W. Bush] took over while he was recovering from the coup attempt).
George H.W. Bush had his speech about the New World Order and negotiated NAFTA. Clinton pushed NAFTA implementation through the congress.
I never really learned to read at teh government schools, and do much better listening to Chomsky's talks. Found Class War via bittorrent, and have borrowed a couple other cds from the local library. Definitely recommended listening.
I think you might be thinking of COSCO - China Ocean Shipping COmpany.
As for this thing about objections to lenovo wanting to buy seagate: nothing like closing the barn door after the horses have all left. Whoops. Should've thought about these things when our government was printing money to bomb the vietnamese back in the 60's and 70's, or when Reagan was printing money to beat the soviets in the cold war, or when Clinton let the Fed cut loose the money hose to spark the tech bubble circa 1995, or when GWB let the Feral Reserve Bank turn up the money hose even higher to spark the housing bubble of 2003-2006.
Probably should have turned the fan off before the shit hit it. Now We the People have a big mess to clean up, and some politicians to turn into Neo-Convicts.
Most the military takes what it does very seriously. Then there are the political officers. In the months before 9/11, the Cheney administration changed the procedure so that NORAD had to get permission from the Secretary of Defense before they could intercept an off-course airplane. Before the civilian air traffic controllers & NORAD did the intercept thing on a regular basis.
But wait, we don't believe in conspiracies here. Hmm.
China and Europe should emerge just fine. We in the United States have a great deal of housecleaning to do.
What's interesting is when you get down into the comments (#18), you mentioned that the condition snowballed after a surgery when you were 28.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the fight or flight response is governed by the Triple Warmer (TW) meridian. When one's TW meridian is overactive, it takes energy from all the other meridians (save Heart meridian), but especially from the Spleen Meridian, which is opposite TW on the flow wheel. The Spleen meridian controls the pancreas and insulin production. Your surgery likely caused the TW to go into overdrive, and if you get your TW/Spleen meridians balanced, you could drink fine meads and ales again.
Donna Eden is a modern mystic who, like the chinese sages of old, can 'see' the bodies energies. She's famous in her hometown of Ashland, Oregon, and had to move away because whenever someone saw her on the street they'd ask about their particular health problem, and she can't turn someone down. I haven't met her myself, but I had a few sessions with one of her long-time teaching assistants some 3 years ago (who can also see the body's subtle energies quite well, though not as well as Mrs. Eden), and I've been doing much better ever since.
The book is a good introduction - most libraries have a copy.
Some more Moon Facts for you.
FYI, the medicare amendment to the Social Security Act was signed into law on July 30th, 1965. The 1973 book, 'The Screwing of the Average Man', talks about how Medicare's costs went out of control from the very beginning.
The government's bonds are worthless, as they're IOUs to itself. If you or I did what the government's done with the taxes collected for Social Security and Medicare, it'd be considered fraud.
You are correct that doctors order all these tests because they're scared of getting sued. I know - my father does this too. But they're only able to do it because someone else is usually paying for the patient's care. So even if they know the test is going to be inconclusive, they order it anyways.
Then there are all the other procedures which, under objective evaluation, are worthless. One researcher concluded that "bypass surgery belongs in the medical archives", because it didn't make a difference in the patient's outcome. Same thing with arthroscopic knee surgery - no better than a placebo.
There are plenty of dissenters in the medical community - Robert Zieve, M.D. helped me find the right modality with his book, Healthy Medicine. Andrew Weil also advocates more effective medicine.
Do you know what the Medical Establishment's initial reaction to having the government pick up their patient's tabs (via medicare) was? "Now we can do whatever we want." Medicare's budget was out of control within a decade, and has been on constant 'cost cutting' measures ever since.
While universal care will take care of part of the profiteering, it will encourage other forms of profiteering - doctors who order every test in the book to cover their ass, for example. I went to a doctor who did a regular x-ray of my TMJ (jaw joint) in-house, because he had an x-ray machine. Then he wrote for me to get a CT-Scan, 'cause the x-ray didn't show anything. I eventually saw an osteopath who specialized in osteopathic manipulation, and my jaw got better - without a CT scan, mouthguards (theory: to prevent night teeth grinding), or surgery.
I think you missed the point of my post: the problem with medicine is that costs are out of control because the dominant medical philosophy does not facilitate wellness. Nothing will improve in the healthcare system until we replace allopathy (treating symptoms with drugs) with something that addresses the causes behind illnesses.
Scientific method selectively applied, you mean. Drugs & surgery are the domain of the allopathic practitioner. My grandmother's oncologist sent her to a nutritionist at the start of her cancer treatment, where she was told to eat 5 servings of vegetables a day. Grandma later laughed and said, "she's crazy!". The oncologist never asked about nutrition again, perscribed lots of drugs (there was the $1000 weekly shot, and the $2000/month thalidomide) and grandma died anyways after six months.
I've tested these theories myself, and they work where nothing 'conventional' did.
'Toxin' is generic for substances that are not life-enhancing. Mercury and lead are toxins, as are the results of waste putrefying in a chronically constipated colon.
I took off my blinders because it was the only way for me to become well. It hasn't been easy, but it's been entirely worthwhile.
I used to catch the usual bugs, when I was growing up, living a mostly-normal lifestyle. I haven't had a problem since I took charge of my own health. I lived in a fraternity house for three years, and every year the bug would make its rounds around the floors. The heavy drinker caught it at least twice, iirc. But it always skipped my half of the room, even when my roommates were feeling under the weather. There is no magic way to boost an immune system to repel any disease, Yeah, that really sucks. If I were you, I'd be constantly watching over my shoulder for a sick person who might infect me with their potentially deadly virus or bacteria.
As for me, I trust that 'G-D' has given me a genetically superior immune system, and I have nothing to worry about.
I also respect the Cayce material. I figured out what he would have said for me, and I'm much better as a result. Discovery of Osteopathic Manipulation was my big breakthrough - search for my nick and 'osteopathy' or 'osteopathic' on slashdot via teh google ('nido osteopathy site:slashdot.org') to read my previous posts here on the topic.
But you can trust your scientific medicine. Don't worry about the research being biased towards treatments that are extremely profitable for their sellers. Or that many of the research studies into non-pharmaceutical approaches are fatally flawed (Cayce always said it was much more desirable to get one's vitamins from food than from a pill, for example). Or that positive research into non-massifiable (i.e., not profitable for anyone except the doctor/person administering the treatment) therapies is routinely ignored - the effectiveness of osteopathic manipulation on childhood ear infections or carpal tunnel, for example. Or the effectiveness of Bowen Therapy/massage/etc at relieving pain and improving well being.
The 'food pyramid' is fatally flawed. See http://www.mercola.com/2001/jan/21/weston_price.h
I guess the main thing is to do your own research and experimentation. I've adopted habits and practices that help me feel better - ymmv, hand.
Someone asked me about Michael Moore's Sicko today, and I said that while he had some good points, he missed the problem entirely. If the medical industry was like the auto industry, it'd be like ignoring your car until the brakes failed and you ran into a brick wall, or never changing the oil until the engine needed replacing. Auto bodywork == expensive, brakes == cheap; replacing the engine == expensive, regular oil changes == cheap.
Americans would be a whole lot healthier (and health care expenses a whole lot lower) if health care was about prevention. (Mammograms & prostate exams, et al, are NOT prevention - they're screening for conventional treatments). The basics of human health haven't changed in thousands of years. The body requires certain levels of essential nutrients (some bodies need more of a nutrient than others due to genetic variation - some sailors were resistant to scurvy, for example). These nutrients need to be effectively assimilated through the digestive system, and the waste products of the body's metabolic processes need to be efficiently disposed of. The body requires clear air, clean water, sunlight (to synthesize Vitamin D), essential fatty acids, etc. If any of these are missing, or are not available in the required amounts, illness will invariably result.
Dr. Harold Reilly's Handbook for Health Through Drugless Therapy covers the basics pretty well.
(it's not 'health care' because the system waits until a person gets sick, then it performs highly profitable 'disease-care'.)
Mike Sheldrake's blog is like a play-by-play tracking the demise of the real estate industry. The action has been fast and furious of late: collapse of two (er, now three) Bear Stearns hedge funds which invested in subprime mortgage debt and the sudden collapse of a non-subprime mortgage lender, American Home Mortgage.
This is more than a 'web 2.0' bubble: this is the final stages of the America bubble. The bubble started with the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913, grew through the first and second world wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, Gulf War I. Gulf War II and the "War of Terror" is the pin that popped the invincible American Military Machine - the military-industrial complex is trying to fight a 4th-generation war with 2nd-generation (superpower vs. superpower) tactics, according to one Iraq veteran.
I'm actually really optomistic about our future. The America Bubble has turned milions of Americans into miserable wage-slaves, or worse. There is an incredible amount of poverty here, in this land of plenty. The present economic restrutcturing is necessary, and so is the eventual politcal house cleaning. I look forward to the day that the Neo-Cons become Neo-Convicts. Hopefully GWB will get frog-hopped out of the whitehouse (that is, with feet and hands cuffed together)...
The 'mouth-breather == stupid' meme always bothers me when it comes up, because I was a mouth breather for a very long time. And I always did very well on all the standardized tests. I had some reminder stickers: 'lips closed, teeth together', but they didn't help much at all.
I learned about Donna's work about 5 years ago, from a Martial Artist who'd reverse-engineered Donna's techniques to make him a better fighter. I got the book first (many libraries and most large bookstores should have a copy), and did the exercises as best I could. But things didn't really start to come together for me until I had a couple sessions with one Donna's senior TAs, someone who'd been learning with her since the 1980's, and who can also see the body's energies quite well (not as well as Donna herself, but better than all but a handful of the rest of the people on the planet). And the first thing she did with me was hold the bellybutton/third eye hookup for quite a few minutes, before moving on to other things. And now, three years later, my tongue is almost always planted at the roof of my mouth.
I've seen the video you linked to before - while it's a good overview of the daily routine, it barely scratches the surface of why the exercises are important, and when they're called for. The book covers a lot of ground, and is quite a bargain for $17. Some people really need to see the exercises performed, and for them, the energy medicine kit is a better introduction.
Glad I helped you find something interesting today.
I was just fine until I got my '99 IBM Thinkpad 600E. I had shooting pains up & down the one arm within a couple months. So I switched to the other hand for operating the trackpoint, and before long I had shooting pains up and down that arm too. So I switched back & forth. Then I spent a day working on my cs2 final project. By evening I had a burning sensation across my shoulders and up the neck, and I was miserable for the rest of my college career.
Later I learned that it wasn't so much the trackpoint that did me in, but a bump on the chin the year before, that left me without memories of a two week period (in addition to other traumas I've sustained over the years). After a year and a half of treatments, my osteopath has me straightened out pretty well, and I can use the keyboard with only a little discomfort. I'd be well, if only I could relax my body - there's an old, forgotten osteopathic technique for a 'relaxing treatment', it's just a matter of finding someone who's willing to try something different.
That explains the mouth-breathing 14 year olds...
In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM, 5000 year history), mouth breathing is considered indicative of the central & governing meridians being 'unhooked'. The Central Meridian runs from the pubic bone up the front of the body, while the Governing Meridian runs from the tailbone up the spine and over the top of the head. They meet where the tip of the tongue touches the roof of the mouth.
Mouth breathing is something that needs to be fixed. Donna Eden (who can 'see' the body's subtle energies, as the ancient TCM practitioners could) gives several routines: hooking up the belly button & forehead, sucking on the thumb (children do many of her exercises instinctively), etc.
Good point. I see lots of old Metros around - too bad that it got discontinued. All part of the war on poor people, I guess.
My '94 Civic VX was rated for, and fully capable of, 56mpg highway. It has 140,000 miles, and I've been ironing out some 'bugs' in the systems over my 7500 miles in the car (sticking brakes, bad lean air fuel sensor, poorly-gapped spark plugs, etc), but I've still averaged 46-47mpg since I got the car in early May. I recently had two 420-mile tanks, 200 miles hwy/220 miles city that averaged 50.5 and 51.2mpg. Then I screwed up the brakes, and the following two 320-mile tanks averaged 42mpg. Fixed the brakes, and the next tank popped up to 50mpg.
See my other post on the Civic VX/HX/Hybrid and Insight
These numbers include the 1,000 miles I went with a bad lean-air fuel sensor, knocking my mileage from 50+mpg to <40mpg, and the sticking brake caliper that knocked 700 miles down to 42mpg (from the previous 51mpg). I've gotten better than 100mpg going downhill, and maybe 50mpg coming back (for a round-trip of 74 mpg). Still trying to figure out what's hindering my city mileage - I think the one brake caliper is still sticking, as I did my own caliper rebuilds, and the one seal came in a box that looked like it had been sitting on the shelf for 10 years.
The '92-'95 used lean burn to achieve such high mileage figures. The one drawback is that lean-burning engines emit more nitrous oxides... I suspect that the U.S. spec '96-'00 Civic HX did not use lean-burn, as the fuel economy tanked to 43mpg hwy. But the Japanese Civic HX did, and in combination with an infinitely-variable CVT transmission, allegedly got 70mpg.
The '99 Insight 5-spd had lean burn, and was rated for (and fully capable of) 70mpg highway. The '99 Insight CVT did NOT have lean burn and was rated for 56mpg hwy. Later, the Honda Civic Hybrid came equiped with catalytic converters for the nitrous oxides, allowing it to be a super-duper-low-emission vehicle (unlike the Insight 5-spd)... But the 2003 civic was only rated for 51mpg. ?
There ought to be several non-hybrid 60-70mpg cars available today. IMHO, the automakers would rather work with the oil companies to screw us all, than lighten our dependence on teh petroleum.
Tried inverting the default colors in Firefox a while back - black background, white text, dark skins, etc. I wanted to reduce the strain on my eyes from reading the screen with the room lights off. I was somewhat successful - with certain sites. Other sites didn't respond well to my browser alterations, and I eventually gave up. If that computer was a mac I'd've tried Black Light, but, alas...
Black backgrounds are easier to read - white backgrounds emit a lot of photons, whereas black backgrounds with white/gray/yellow text emit photons at a rate orders of magnitude lower.
I like reading the about page on Blackle.com - except for the light grey bars above and below make it a strain. Perhaps I should find that black skin again...
Osteopathy was able to survive the great purges of the late 19th and early 20th centuries not only because the philosophy is superior to Allopathy, but also because it was organized enough to resist the American Medical Association's onslaught. Andrew Taylor Still, founder of Osteopathy, didn't care much for the Materia Medica, but pharmacology was added to the Osteopathic curiculum early in the 20th century in order to keep the profession from being exterminated.
Today most Doctors of Osteopathy's practice is identical to a Medical Doctor's, but some do utilize their manipulation training, and a handful specialize in manipulation. My D.O.'s work would seem like magic to the uninitiated - some light touches here & there, and with some patients, *poof*, all better (other patients, including myself, take a bit longer to receive all the benefit they can from his techniques). There's quite a science to what he does, but he never tries to explain much of the detail about his findings/diagnosis to me (I get the layman's explanation when I ask).
I don't mean to be inflammatory - it's just that I wasn't helped by the 'regular' doctors I visited, went somewhere else, and am satisfied with the results I've obtained. Drugs and surgery do have their place, of course, but most health complaints are better treated with gentler methods that better address the cause.
Robert Zieve is also an M.D. - you might like his book, Healthy Medicine: A Guide to the Emergence of Sensible Comprehensive Care.
Effective cancer therapies are unprofitable because the patent has expired, or is by its very nature unpatentable. DCA's patent expired years ago, Vitamin D is just a regular vitamin especially concentrated in Cod liver oil, and Ozone and Hydrogen Peroxide are just ways of getting extra oxygen into an mass of anaerobic rogue cells.
Some of the things Edgar Cayce (early proponent of holistic medicine) recomended for lung cancer were Castor oil packs and brandy fumes inhaled from a charred oak barrel...
The main thing is to take charge of your own health. Dr. Zieve's book, Healthy Medicine has a good overview of a medical system that is patient-oriented, rather than organized for the benefit of teh profiteers.
What is a faster processor really needed for anymore? I have a pair of 1.1ghz Athlons from 2000 or 2001, and they serve me just fine. The coming recession (caused by the housing bubble, deficits, cost of perpetual war, etc) won't help Moore's prediction out much either.
School was a big part of the problem, because they led me to believe that I knew how to read, when that certainly wasn't the case. When I started to examine criticisms of the system, I realized that government schools are not supposed to 'educate' - they exist for the purpose of making 'teh masses' manageable.
Look up Gatto's essay, 'The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher', or read his 'Underground History of American Education' (available for free at his website, linked above). Or look up some books by John Holt, whose message was very similar to Gatto's, but 30 years earlier.