From Dr. Joel Fuhrman, MD: http://www.drfuhrman.com/faq/question.aspx?sid=16&qindex=0 """ What about Coffee?
One cup of coffee per day is not likely to cause significant risks, but the more you drink over this one cup maximum, the more likely it will interfere with your health. Research has clearly shown that excessive consumption of caffeinated beverages is dangerous. Heavy caffeine users are at higher risk of cardiac arrhythmias, which can precipitate sudden death.(1) Coffee raises blood pressure(2) and it raises both cholesterol and homocystene,(3) two risk factors for heart disease.
Besides the slightly increased risk of heart disease, there are other problems. Caffeine is a stimulant. The consumption of caffeine enables you to more comfortably get by on less sleep. Inadequate sleep promotes disease and premature aging.(4) There is no substitute for adequate sleep. Drinking coffee also boosts estrogen levels. Higher levels of estrogen worsen problems like endometriosis, breast pain and menstrual disorders. Increased estrogen levels are also linked to higher risk of breast cancer.(5)
If you are overweight, there is another compelling reason to abstain from coffee. Eliminating your caffeine intake can help you lose weight. Coffee drinkers (tea and cola users too) are drawn to eat more frequently then necessary. They eat extra meals and snacks because they mistake unpleasant caffeine withdrawal symptoms with hunger. They can't tell the difference between true hunger and the discomfort that accompanies caffeine withdrawal.
Decaffeinated coffee also has potentially harmful side effects. It has been found that drinking even moderate amounts of decaffeinated coffee can quadruple a person's risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis.(6) Researchers speculate that organic solvents in the decaf coffee might be the culprit.
In summary, coffee is most like a drug, not a food. Like most drugs it may have some minor benefits, but its toxic effects and resultant risks overwhelm those minor advantages. Caffeine is a stimulant and a healthy later life and long life is most consistently achieved when stimulants and drugs are avoided, meeting our nutritional needs, with as little exposure to toxicity as possible. [The numbers in () refer to references in the original.] """
He mentions elsewhere that coffee does have some health promoting antioxidants etc., but those are better obtained through a diet heavy in vegetables, fruits, beans, along with some nuts, seeds, and whole grains.
We all have values of some sort (as well as things like assumptions, goals, and aesthetics) that guide our choices in life, and those can't come directly from science, even if science can interact with them. On how science and religion should interrelate, from a 1930 essay by Albert Einstein: http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm """ For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capable, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. """
This is a good video about the future of medicine based on nutrition, including teaching people how to shop at the grocery store, how to cook at home, and how to order in restaurants to stay healthy: http://www.drmcdougall.com/health_10_day_program_video.html
Someone (not a doctor) who puts a lot of these ideas together into cooking advice: http://www.andreabeaman.com/ "Read Andrea's inspiring story, The Whole Truth - How I Naturally Reclaimed My Health, and You Can Too! A story you can relate to as you make diet and lifestyle changes in your own life. Learn how to make health-promoting food taste absolutely scrumptious with the Eating and Recipe Guide. Infused with humor, in depth knowledge about food, and over 120 easy recipes, this is a wise tool to have in your kitchen."
Anyway, most disease in the USA could be prevented by better nutrition, moderate exercise, less stress (like through meditation), good sleep, adequate vitamin D from sunlight, more and better community interactions, more positive thinking, and a few other similar basic things.
"Phage Therapy: Where Communism Succeeded and Capitalism Failed" http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL9910/S00096.htm """ While there are some genuine reasons why phage treatments of bacterial diseases were overlooked in the 1930s and 1940s, the failure to develop a western research program into bacteriophage treatment in the 1980s and 1990s represents an inexcusable failure of western capitalism. By the 1980s, there could be no denial that antibiotic resistance was going to be a major problem in (if not before) the twenty-first century. Yet, we just didn't want to know about what will probably turn out to be the most important medical breakthrough in the twentieth century; a breakthrough made in communist Georgia, in Stalin's Soviet Union.
It is embarrassing when western science is out-trumped, especially by the "communists". Usually, when out-trumped, we don't tell anyone. That's what happened here. Not only did we not have the nous to start a western programme in bacteriophage research; we looked the other way when the files of phials threatened to be destroyed following the breakup of the Soviet Union, and during the little reported civil war that engulfed Georgia a few years ago. So much for the knowledge economies of the west. How can such valuable knowledge be so cheap?
It's not too late for western medicine to enter the post-antibiotic bacteriophage era. Our grandchildren will hardly thank us if we persevere with our corporate-profit-motivated conservatism.
The Soviets were able, eventually, to admit that they were wrong to follow Lysenko. Will we in the west be equally able to admit that we were wrong to put all our medical eggs into the one antibiotic basket, in the process ignoring the most basic tenets of the theory of evolution? """
Within limits, the human body can repair itself, and even repair DNA damage to some extent. Sorry to hear you have been exposed to environmental mutagens like excessive radon; that would certainly challenge anyone's body, on top of genetic issues. So, while certainly what happens to people in life is in good part chance, for many people with cancer (not saying yours), either they exceeded the body's ability to repair itself by exposure to mutagens, or the body's capacity to repair itself was diminished somehow by lack of vital nutrients or other issues (including, as you suggest, underlying genetic issues from conception). For example, all people are continually having cells go rogue but normally the immune system destroys such cells before they can proliferate, but it takes good nutrition including vitamin D for the immune system to do that -- which is why the dermatological profession may have caused 30 internal cancers for every external skin cancer they prevented by the advice to fear the sun without suggesting adequate vitamin D replacement).
By the way, because you mentioned a specific cancer, Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, a quick Google on that and diet produces:
"Maternal Diet and Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia in Young Children" http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/14/8/1935.abstract """ Because leukemia clone-specific chromosomal abnormalities are present at birth in children who later develop leukemia, it has been hypothesized that maternal factors, including nutrition during pregnancy, might affect the risk of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) among young children. We have evaluated this hypothesis in a nationwide case-control study of ALL among children ages 12 to 59 months in Greece. Children (n = 131) with ALL were gender and age matched to control children (n = 131) hospitalized for minor conditions between 1999 and 2003. The mothers of the children were interviewed in person by trained interviewers who used an extensive food frequency questionnaire addressing diet during the index pregnancy. The analysis was done by modeling the data through conditional logistic regression, also controlling for total energy intake and possible confounding factors. Odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) were expressed per quintile increase of maternal intake during pregnancy of the specified food group. The risk of ALL in the offspring was lower with increased maternal intake of fruits (OR, 0.72; 95% CI, 0.57-0.91), vegetables (OR, 0.76; 95% CI, 0.60-0.95), and fish and seafood (OR, 0.72; 95% CI, 0.59-0.89) and higher with increased maternal intake of sugars and syrups (OR, 1.32; 95% CI, 1.05-1.67) and meat and meat products (OR, 1.25; 95% CI, 1.00-1.57). Children of women who tend to consume during their pregnancies what is currently considered to be a healthy diet maybe at lower risk of ALL. """
So, clearly this is suggestive of a dietary link to some extent.
If you have had 14 surgeries and lots of radiation, obviously the medical system has failed you in the sense of helping you treat the underlying issues causing cancers to recur. They may have treated the symptoms, but what about addressing the underlying causes, whatever they are? Sure you may need some forms of medication given everything you said, but still, why not try to get the rest of your body to work as well as it can and have the most energy you can have?
I have no connection with Dr. Joel Fuhrman other than buying a few of his books and a DVD and liking what I've seen and trying to put his advice into practice in my own family (and he says little that many others have not said for decades, although he synthesizes it well). To me, he makes a lot of sense. Even now, you might find your health may benefit from following his dietary advice (after discussion with your doctors); he is a bona-fide MD; you might even want to just give him a call if he does consultations (and if your insurance covers it and ca
Just for reference, it seems most cancer can be prevented (and sometimes cured) by a healthy diet (heavy on the vegetables, and perhaps including occasional fasting), enough vitamin D3 from sunlight, moderate exercise (helps keep the lymph system working among other things), avoiding pollution (like in water), some positive thinking and positive relationships, and the ususal lifestyle choices (like avoiding smoking).
Joel Fuhrman is an MD who talks a lot about this sort of stuff: http://www.drfuhrman.com/ """ Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to live the rest of your life in pain or on medication.
You can reverse disease, reduce high blood pressure, lose unwanted weight, lower your cholesterol levels, prevent heart disease and cancer, and improve your health - all without relying on drugs and fad diets. The importance of good nutrition is emphasized in Dr. Fuhrman's dietary program, Eat To Live.
Reduce high blood pressure, reverse diabetes and dramatically lower cholesterol without drugs. Dr. Fuhrman offers advanced nutritional advice based on scientific research. """
On the right amount of vitamin D: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml """ We predict that treatment with physiological doses of vitamin D3 (between 4,000-10,000 IU/day from all sources, including sun, food and supplements) along with periodic monitoring of blood calcidiol and calcium levels will become routine. [Zittermann A. Vitamin D in preventive medicine: are we ignoring the evidence? Br J of Nutr. 2003;89:552-572. Holick M. Vitamin D: A Millennium Perspective. J Cell Biochem. 2003;88:296-307.] Research indicates it will help several vitamin D deficiency-associated diseases such as: autism, autoimmune illness, cancer, chronic pain, depression, diabetes, heart disease, hyperparathyroidism, hypertension, influenza, myopathy (neuromuscular disorders), and osteoporosis. """
Bluezones is a community-wide effort that does similar things but at the community (not individual) level, as many things like having healthier menus in restaurants, building sidewalks, creating walking trails, making parks, and fostering a sense of community are more than any one individual can do alone. http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about """ The AARP/Blue Zones Vitality Project will focus on four areas that are crucial to health and longevity: Community Environment, Social Networks, Habitat and Individual Sense of Purpose. """
Anyway, these cheap things -- sunlight, clean water, fresh air, more vegetables (and fruits, pulses like beans, and nuts and seeds), avoiding processed foods, walking and swimming, healthy relationshiips and attitudes, and not smoking etc. -- are not going to be promoted by most of our profit-oriented industrial system (even if many individuals have written books on these or sell some related products like good blenders for making green smoothies).
Many dedicated hackers don't get enough sunlight, which can cause vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D defiency, now widespread in the USA, is a seriously deadly situation, which can cause depression, schizophrenia (Hans Reiser?), cancer, heart disease, autism, and other things. Almost all indoor professionals in the USA should probably be taking 5000 IU D3 in gelcaps daily (except days when they get a lot of sun) as well as eat right to get the other co-nutrients needed for vitamin D to work optimally (a very tiny fraction of people may have health issues that contraindicated vitamin D supplementation). See: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml RMS, I hope you read this; I'd miss you if you were not around.
Fossil fuel costs for defense and pollution easily rack up into hundreds of billions of dollars per year. As suggested in the book Brittle Power in 1982, renewable energy has been cheaper for decades than fossil fuels (or nuclear) when you include *all* the externalities. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
We just pay for fossil fuel use through our taxes and national debt for the military, and through health costs from mercury pollution and other forms of pollution that lead to health problems (even wonder why much fish is now unsafe to eat from mercury?), systemic risk like of economic disruption or global war over oil, and so on. http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
By the way, it takes more electricity and natural gas to refine a gallon of gasoline from oil than an electric car would need to go the same distance, so all that oil is completely wasted -- except it is profitable for some to fleece the public treasury. http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
GE had a cost-competetive production ready electric vehicle built from off-the-shelf parts built in the late 1970s -- you can see it in the Schenectady, NY science museum.
That our elected officials have allowed this public fleecing using fossil fuels, including the destruction of the health of our rivers, oceans, and humanity through smog and mercury, to go on since the Reagan years is an unspeakable tragedy of widespread corruption and ignorance which wider access to pubic records might help some with.
As Jimmy Carter said in 1979: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_crisis.html """ We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem. """
Automation, better design, voluntary social networks and limited demand mean that the value of most human labor is rapidly decreasing. Implicit in your comments is the assumption we need everyone to be working to produce all the goods and services we need (or want). But, that assumption is less and less true. Depending on who you believe and how you define unemployment, unemployment in the USA right now is somewhere between 10% and about 25%. Further, compared to a century or two ago, when children worked in factories and mines, and practically no one "retired", and practically no one went to college or graduate school, and people worked 70 hour work week (in factories or on farms), unemployment now could be thought of as 50% to 75% or higher compared to a century ago. The fact is, compared to then, essentially nobody in the USA is working, and those who work are not doing very much of it. It's true that if you go back to hunter/gatherer times (see Marshall Sahlins), you'll find a similar pattern (only some worked, and then it was not very hard).
Anyway, so I think current trends show that work has long been going away (even as demand has increased greatly up to a point). Further, in the USA, most people have long gone past the point of diminishing returns for more stuff and bigger homes to the point of negative returns (due to the destruction of community and family) -- even as some 10% to 20% of the US population has been left out of that and is relatively impoverished and would benefit greatly from more stuff.
"The Culture of Affluence: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/
"Children of the Affluent: Challenges to Well-Being" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1948879/
The happiest places in the world usually have both material abundance and strong social programs: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Economy/story?id=7585729&page=1 "According to a 2005 editorial, published in the British Medical Journal and authored by Dr. Tony Delamothe, research done in Mexico, Ghana, Sweden, the U.S. and the U.K. shows that individuals typically get richer during their lifetimes, but not happier. It is family, social and community networks that bring joy to one's life, according to Delamothe. "
Thanks. The main issue that matters with a "basic income" is that enough is produced and distributed for most everyone to be fairly happy. You are right that GDP might fall if people no longer were trying to achieve happiness through stuff instead of relationships and experiences. But overall, that might not be a bad thing. Still, as you point out, any system would need to adjust for that over time. Consider that the US GDP has grown 50% since around 1995. So, even if it dropped in half, we'd be back to an economy that was the size of 1995, but with most people enjoying life a lot more. Is that such a terrible thing?
Living off the land in space is the big issue. It's sad NASA still seems obsessed with bigger rockets and Cheap Access to Space (CATS). In 1980, NASA had a great plan, outlined here, which would lead to the Design of Great Settlements (DOGS): http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/ """ What follows is a portion of the final report of a NASA summer study, conducted in 1980 by request of newly- elected President Jimmy Carter at a cost of 11.7 million dollars. The result of the study was a realistic proposal for a self-replicating automated lunar factory system, capable of exponentially increasing productive capacity and, in the long run, exploration of the entire galaxy within a reasonable timeframe. Unfortunately, the proposal was quietly declined with barely a ripple in the press. What was once concievable with 1980's technology is now even more practical today. """
See also my comments here:
"Jeff Bezos' Shot At Space: Both CATS and DOGS are needed... " http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=62113&cid=5821178 http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/f65a889ca9a6b2c1 """ So where is a key area of research that should be a priority among NASA and Billionaires, but is not heavily pursued? The issue is what to do in space once you have gotten there. Because if there is a reason to be in space, then people and collectives will work to get there. And the reality is, that right now, if we could get there, there is nothing to do there short of look around and come back. And if that were the case, Space would not deserve much more investment than say tourism to Mt. Everest. The reality is that we don't know how to support human life in space -- in large part because we have only spent a pittance on thinking about that issue systematically compared to the issues of CATS and Planetary Exploration. Frankly, while we support human life on earth, we have very little meta-knowledge formally about how to do even that. And, most of figuring out how to support human life in space at a nuts and bolts level requires non-sexy activities like sitting around and staring out the window, talking, sending emails, building databases, building software tools, building some small physical protypes on tabletops and outdoors, and just plain thinking (the hard stuff). This is all the preparation needed for the spiritual voyage into the (physical) heavens. Biosphere II was an excellent start in some ways, although the science mission was a bit dodgy at first and it seems Columbia (the recipient) seems about to abandon that effort for cost reasons --- and in any case, Biosphere II focuses on the wrong question -- we know biospheres can work and replicate (although scale is an issue) -- what we don't know is how to replicate the mechanical infrastructure (e.g. glass pane making machinery) behind them. A lot more money has gone into studying ecosystem food webs than industrial ecologies of pipe webs and assembly line webs (and frankly, a lot of people don't want their "proprietary" manufacturing processes studied or gossipped about by academics.)
Almost everything proposed as a reason to launch into space doesn't make sense, as much as people have touted various suggestions. The closest might be He3 mining for aneutronic fusion if we otherwise had that technology, but even that issues (energy) is probably more easily solved through conservation, energy efficiency (e.g. R60+ home insulation), and photovoltaic and wind etc. alternate energy modes (which are rapidly proving cost effective for many applications, and will be only more so with new processes and materials over the next twenty years). Asteroid mining turns out to not be that useful, since recycling is a much better idea. Zero gravity turns out to not be so valuable after all for
Re:Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces
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Thanks for the great link. And here is another that relates to that: http://www.disciplined-minds.com/ """ [Schmidt] argues in Disciplined Minds that work is an inherently political activity and that hiring therefore involves political screening....
Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job. """
Those indexes are biased since they neglect key aspects of human happiness like community; health; external costs like pollution, systemic risk, and defense that businesses often pass on to society; and the corrupting effects of the concentraation of wealth in a few hands as the rich get richer -- things implicit in the original poster's comment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
From: http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/ """ The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon's wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments. """
Like many conservatives, they leave out community and health as part of a good life, but otherwise it's a great essay.
As the value of human labor continues to fall from automation, better design, and voluntary social netwoks, we will need new models of prosperity that are not mainly about "every person for themselves". Freedom is also not very secure or meaningful without face-to-face community, which is often just assumed, but seems rarer these days as our individualized consumer-oriented society fails in so many ways.
I agree most of the world's problems are social problems (even if better technology can make some social problems easier to solve through increasing abundance).
Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces
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What a great post. Here is an excerpt from an essay by Manuel De Landa that amplifies on your theme:
"Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces" http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm """ To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us. """
Sure, we have neat iPads now. What does it matter if the kids are all obese and depressed?
The mainstream USA is in a death spiral as a society because it refuses to acknowledge things like the irony of using the tools of abundance like robotics, AI, material science, and so on to build weapons of destruction like nuclear millsiles and killer robot drones, rather than use the same tech to create abundance for all and have a basic income. Likewise, our society is unable to admit the declining value fo most human labor and the need for a rethink of our economics like a basic income. Renewable energy like solar thermal, geothermal, and wind have been cheaper than fossil fuels or nuclear for decades when you factor in the external costs of war, pollution, health costs, and risks, but our society refuses to price those costs in. I could go on about many other issues (like how organic agriculture is cheaper when looking at all the costs including soil depletion and oil, singple payer health care being way cheaper, and so on). Still, there are hopeful signs here and there, so our society may yet heal itself -- but such a society might not be recognizable to many in the USA today.
So, while you have some points, the poster you are replying too makes many good ones too. As Albert Einstein says in the link at the top, science can tell us what is, maybe some of what was, and matbe even some of what could be, but science can't tell us what *should* be. That is a realm beyond science, to set our goals and the patterns we choose to preserve or strive for. Unfortunately, too often science gets misused to claim it is telling what should be. (Economists often do that with claimed mathematical precision.)
To understand another aspect of how academic science is a cult in a sense, with conservative politics woven throughout is, see Jeff Schmidt on how all professio
Except for the point that if families had that much money, the parents would not have to work that much (not even one job), and so would have time to homeschool. If you had three kids, and lived in NYS where US$20,000 is spent per kid per year, a working class family with three kids would have US$60,000 a year just to stay home with the kids and homeschool. And, at this point, there are lots of free educational materials on the internet; examples: http://www.khanacademy.org/ http://www.learner.org/resources/browse.html
Maybe I'm presenting "puppies and rainbows", but it is a lot better than the dystopia outlined here (given that the value of all human labor is rapidly declining from automation, better design, and voluntary social networks): http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
I'd suggest it is possible that vitamin D deficiency is the leading cause of death of computer users including most slashdotters. See also:
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade; Would Save $1346 Per Person Per Annum" http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html
If you trust kids to learn, and trust parents to usually have their kids' best interests at heart, then you can see that parents of older children can hire tutors, acquire learning materials, visit homeschool resources centers, and so on, to create good learning experiences. Here is a labor of love by Salman Khan over the past few years to create 1000 educational videos that step-by-step cover most of the information about math and science most kids would ever learn in high school: http://www.khanacademy.org/
The fact is, as John Holt or John Taylor Gatto have said (both celebrated teachers with decades of classroom experience), most of what teachers know is how to manage a classroom of twenty children of roughly the same age and background and how to maintain discipline in the room. That's it. That is 90% of what most teachers have been taught. And they do it in all sorts of ways (including things like cutting sarcasm). Some teachers know more, like Jaime Escalante. Most do no.
Kids should be learning because they want to, not because they are forced to. For example, a person of any age can learn to read in about 50 contact hours if they really want to, or a school system can spend thousands of hours trying to pound literacy into a child and still produce functional illiterates (as is the case with many US high school graduates). The same goes for many other subjects.
The fact is, when someone learns math or chemistry, especially today with so many great video resources, http://www.learner.org/resources/browse.html almost all of the learning is done by kids themselves. Plus, parents can learn together with kids. And kids can learn together with other kids at the local library or through the internet. And old school buildings could be repurposed as learning centers.
Can this all be better? Sure. Let's put learning resource centers (or just better libraries) on every street corner, where anyone can go there at any time to get help learning whatever they want to learn about, whether reading, chemistry, carpentry, or cooking.
So, let's say that some parents send their kids to the cheapest private school and "keep the change". Are most kids going to be much worse off than they are now? About half of all kids in the USA can't even graduate from high school for one reason or another. Could it be that much worse?
Also, see my other comment in this thread.
One thing to watch out for. Like most people in the USA (myself included), you've been exposed to decades of propaganda by schools that schools are the solution (and the only solution) to making society work. What if some of that was self-serving?
Also, even assuming what you said was true, that you need some "specialist" to teach you chemistry (my kid and I just watched entire "The World of Chemistry" series at Learner.org, essentially with a Nobel Prize winning society as our chemistry "teacher"), what other lessons are teachers teaching that you don't want your kid to learn?
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher" http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt """ Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training fo
Thanks for the friending. No doubt some small percentage of parents are "bad people". Still, as is suggested here by Raymond and Dorothy Moore who studied this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling """ Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results that were cut short by enrollment in schools, and could neither be replaced nor afterward corrected in an institutional setting. Recognizing a necessity for early out-of-home care for some children - particularly special needs and starkly impoverished children, and children from exceptionally inferior homes- they maintained that the vast majority of children are far better situated at home, even with mediocre parents, than with the most gifted and motivated teachers in a school setting (assuming that the child has a gifted and motivated teacher). They described the difference as follows: "This is like saying, if you can help a child by taking him off the cold street and housing him in a warm tent, then warm tents should be provided for all children - when obviously most children already have even more secure housing." """
Also, let's assume there are some bad parents around. There kids are going to get messed up really bad whether their children go to public school or not. But, consider if all their neighbors are at home and taking good care of their kids, with lower stress from not having financial worries. Then at least there are a lot of healthy families around to help out with the kids from the totally dysfunctional families just to be neighborly.
The current system says, all children need to be in prison during the day because some few parents are bad people. Is that fair to everyone else? By that logic, maybe the entire USA population should be sent to prison just to prevent some crimes... Of course, a lot of crimes happen in prisons, too; strangely enough, for all the guards...
If parents are unable to make good decisions, why let them pick the school district they will live in? Why let them pick the jobs they work in? Why let the pick the foods their family will eat? (Food probably has a bigger impact on a child's mental development and behavior than school.) Why let the parents pick the care they drive? Why let the parents pick if they should have a TV or access to the internet? And so on...
Also, consider, these parents who can't make good decision. Aren't most of them the product of compulsory schooling? What does that say about the ultimate value of compulsory schooling?
But with that said, we can try to create a society that helps people make better choices (like by regulating deceptive advertising or subsidizing healthy activities), rather than forcing people into prison to "protect" them from themselves.
Anyway, as for money, ultimately, giving school funds to parents is just a stepping stone. I'd suggest the better approach in the long term in the USA would be one-half the US GDP spent on a "basic income" (so
Let's just give the school money directly to the parents instead of schools, as I suggest here in some detail:
"Towards a Post-Scarcity New York State of Mind (through homeschooling)" http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html """ New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators:-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. """
We should also implement a basic income (social security and medicare for all, without age limits or a means test) for everyone as a human right, while we are at it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income If every person got a basic income, everyone could afford to purchase the education they wanted from the market.
Be careful not to make a classical mistake of confusing the intentions of the parts (teachers, who I agree mostly mean well and want to help kids grow), with the intentions of the whole system (to dumb kids down so they fit into a 19th century militaristic industrial society, like NYS teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto writes about). http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm """ Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency. Ours was to be an improvement on the British system, which once depended on a shared upper-class culture for its coherence. Ours would be subject to a rational framework of science, law, instruction, and mathematically derived merit. When Morgan reorganized the American marketplace into a world of cooperating trusts at the end of the nineteenth century, he created a business and financial subsystem to interlink with the subsystem of government, the subsystem of schooling, and other subsystems to regulate every other aspect of national life. None of this was conspiratorial. Each increment was rationally defensible. But the net effect was the destruction of small-town, small-government America, strong families, individual liberty, and a lot of other things people weren't aware they were trading for a regular corporate paycheck.
A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men--but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling. """
While you have a point, by your own logic, you'll never know how much happier your life or our society might have been if you had not been drilled for thirteen or more years in: * only doing what someone in authority tells you to do; * only socializing with people of a similar age, similar mental abilities, and similar social class; * doing stuff no matter how stupid or pointless you thought it was just because some authority told you to do it or else; * had more chances to think up your own things to do with people you picked; * had more chances to work with both your hands and brain; http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?_r=1 * and so on.
See New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto:
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher" http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt """ Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes. """
See also his:
"State Controlled Consciousness" http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html """ If your kids do badly, it does not mean that they're bad readers or anything else. It means they haven't been obedient to the drills the state set down and they're marked for further treatment later on with a mark to be excluded from responsible jobs. Perhaps some way is to be excluded from the colleges that lead to responsible jobs, in other ways from the licenses that lead to responsible jobs.
This was ALL worked out. It didn't evolve by a lot of rational people saying we'll take this this and this from the past, then the next generation says we'll take this this and this. This was set down largely in a handful of places. Prussia was perhaps the most prominent of those places. The Prussian experiment leapt into the United States almost immediately in the 1840's. Leapt into the United States; its propagandists covered the country here. Its backers, its financial backers set up the most important teacher training institutes and then financed those institutes and then no one was allowed to become a teacher who didn't more or less subscribe to the fact that experts could create a curriculum and pedagogues could administer it.
Well, that's exactly what Horace, the Roman essayist, talked about in several of his essays. He said, "the master creates the lessons, the pedagogue (the teacher) administers the lessons." But if you find the teacher creating the lessons or deviating from the direction the lessons are headed in, you get rid of the pedagogue. """
And that last is part of what happened to Jaime Escalante. While he may not have understood the bigger picture, he deviated from the lessons, and was ultimately replaced, whatever the results.
As Gatto says at the end there: """ A lot of the constraints on us, a lot of the ah, ah - strings that hold us like puppets are really inventions of our own mind. I'm not saying that there aren't armies and police and various ways to punish deviants. But there isn't any way to punish a LARGE NUMBER of deviants. There isn't any way to do that. It's too expensive to even try to do that, unless you can colonize the minds of children
So true. And it's sad your post got modded down as Troll, since you are 100% right on, and whoever did that is probably caught up in the ideology behind monstrosity that is modern schooling (of course, most private schools are little better). Escalante failed to make large changes and was taken down by the institution because, ultimately, he was doing what should not be done in schools -- get poor people to think and climb out of their assigned class in life. More supportive links:
Gatto:
"Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Schooling/dp/086571231X http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm """ Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there. """
I wrote on this elsewhere: "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism" http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/1937-unnatural-acts-breaking-the-fever-of-militarism.html#comment-2450 and:
"It's the unrecognized irony that kills you..." http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1590182&cid=31561028 """ It is ironic that the technology that goes into such a missile, from the computers and materials to the social networks that plan and test such things could instead bring abundance to everyone in the world. Yet people still build such things from a scarcity-based mindset, not recognizing the total irony. The tools of abundance all around us now (robotics, computers, networks, biotech, chemistry, nanontech, nuclear technology, and so on) are so powerful -- we will destroy ourselves if we use them from a scarcity mindset. If used from an abundance mindset, we could instead make the world into a much happier place.
As Albert Einstein said, "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind."
We need to change our hearts towards providing abundance for all, before we all die of the unrecognized irony. """
Slashdot Mirror
From Dr. Joel Fuhrman, MD:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/faq/question.aspx?sid=16&qindex=0
"""
What about Coffee?
One cup of coffee per day is not likely to cause significant risks, but the more you drink over this one cup maximum, the more likely it will interfere with your health. Research has clearly shown that excessive consumption of caffeinated beverages is dangerous. Heavy caffeine users are at higher risk of cardiac arrhythmias, which can precipitate sudden death.(1) Coffee raises blood pressure(2) and it raises both cholesterol and homocystene,(3) two risk factors for heart disease.
Besides the slightly increased risk of heart disease, there are other problems. Caffeine is a stimulant. The consumption of caffeine enables you to more comfortably get by on less sleep. Inadequate sleep promotes disease and premature aging.(4) There is no substitute for adequate sleep. Drinking coffee also boosts estrogen levels. Higher levels of estrogen worsen problems like endometriosis, breast pain and menstrual disorders. Increased estrogen levels are also linked to higher risk of breast cancer.(5)
If you are overweight, there is another compelling reason to abstain from coffee. Eliminating your caffeine intake can help you lose weight. Coffee drinkers (tea and cola users too) are drawn to eat more frequently then necessary. They eat extra meals and snacks because they mistake unpleasant caffeine withdrawal symptoms with hunger. They can't tell the difference between true hunger and the discomfort that accompanies caffeine withdrawal.
Decaffeinated coffee also has potentially harmful side effects. It has been found that drinking even moderate amounts of decaffeinated coffee can quadruple a person's risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis.(6) Researchers speculate that organic solvents in the decaf coffee might be the culprit.
In summary, coffee is most like a drug, not a food. Like most drugs it may have some minor benefits, but its toxic effects and resultant risks overwhelm those minor advantages. Caffeine is a stimulant and a healthy later life and long life is most consistently achieved when stimulants and drugs are avoided, meeting our nutritional needs, with as little exposure to toxicity as possible. [The numbers in () refer to references in the original.]
"""
He mentions elsewhere that coffee does have some health promoting antioxidants etc., but those are better obtained through a diet heavy in vegetables, fruits, beans, along with some nuts, seeds, and whole grains.
We all have values of some sort (as well as things like assumptions, goals, and aesthetics) that guide our choices in life, and those can't come directly from science, even if science can interact with them. On how science and religion should interrelate, from a 1930 essay by Albert Einstein: http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"""
For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capable, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.
"""
"The Food Pyramid of the Insane"
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/debunking-diet-myths-the-food-pyramid-of-the-insane.html
Not that these doctors all agree, but there is a lot of overlap and they cover the essentials (typically lots of organic veggies, fruits, beans, nuts, seeds, maybe fish, vitamin D, and very little processed foods or factory farmed meats):
http://www.drfuhrman.com/
http://www.drmcdougall.com/
http://www.drweil.com/
http://www.mercola.com/
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
Occasional fasting may help some conditions, too:
http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm
This is a good video about the future of medicine based on nutrition, including teaching people how to shop at the grocery store, how to cook at home, and how to order in restaurants to stay healthy:
http://www.drmcdougall.com/health_10_day_program_video.html
Another video on curing disease by better nutrition:
"Eat For Health - Joel Fuhrman, M.D."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPiR9VcuVWw
Someone (not a doctor) who puts a lot of these ideas together into cooking advice:
http://www.andreabeaman.com/
"Read Andrea's inspiring story, The Whole Truth - How I Naturally Reclaimed My Health, and You Can Too! A story you can relate to as you make diet and lifestyle changes in your own life. Learn how to make health-promoting food taste absolutely scrumptious with the Eating and Recipe Guide. Infused with humor, in depth knowledge about food, and over 120 easy recipes, this is a wise tool to have in your kitchen."
A group helping communities be healthier by changing their public infrastructure:
http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about
Anyway, most disease in the USA could be prevented by better nutrition, moderate exercise, less stress (like through meditation), good sleep, adequate vitamin D from sunlight, more and better community interactions, more positive thinking, and a few other similar basic things.
"Phage Therapy: Where Communism Succeeded and Capitalism Failed"
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL9910/S00096.htm
"""
While there are some genuine reasons why phage treatments of bacterial diseases were overlooked in the 1930s and 1940s, the failure to develop a western research program into bacteriophage treatment in the 1980s and 1990s represents an inexcusable failure of western capitalism. By the 1980s, there could be no denial that antibiotic resistance was going to be a major problem in (if not before) the twenty-first century. Yet, we just didn't want to know about what will probably turn out to be the most important medical breakthrough in the twentieth century; a breakthrough made in communist Georgia, in Stalin's Soviet Union.
It is embarrassing when western science is out-trumped, especially by the "communists". Usually, when out-trumped, we don't tell anyone. That's what happened here. Not only did we not have the nous to start a western programme in bacteriophage research; we looked the other way when the files of phials threatened to be destroyed following the breakup of the Soviet Union, and during the little reported civil war that engulfed Georgia a few years ago. So much for the knowledge economies of the west. How can such valuable knowledge be so cheap?
It's not too late for western medicine to enter the post-antibiotic bacteriophage era. Our grandchildren will hardly thank us if we persevere with our corporate-profit-motivated conservatism.
The Soviets were able, eventually, to admit that they were wrong to follow Lysenko. Will we in the west be equally able to admit that we were wrong to put all our medical eggs into the one antibiotic basket, in the process ignoring the most basic tenets of the theory of evolution?
"""
So, with this as an example, what else has capitalism ignored as it relates to cancer?
Nutrition?
http://www.drfuhrman.com/
Vitamin D?
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
Fasting?
http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/shelton.bio.bidwell.htm
http://www.healingcancernaturally.com/fasting-cure-for-health.html
Within limits, the human body can repair itself, and even repair DNA damage to some extent. Sorry to hear you have been exposed to environmental mutagens like excessive radon; that would certainly challenge anyone's body, on top of genetic issues. So, while certainly what happens to people in life is in good part chance, for many people with cancer (not saying yours), either they exceeded the body's ability to repair itself by exposure to mutagens, or the body's capacity to repair itself was diminished somehow by lack of vital nutrients or other issues (including, as you suggest, underlying genetic issues from conception). For example, all people are continually having cells go rogue but normally the immune system destroys such cells before they can proliferate, but it takes good nutrition including vitamin D for the immune system to do that -- which is why the dermatological profession may have caused 30 internal cancers for every external skin cancer they prevented by the advice to fear the sun without suggesting adequate vitamin D replacement).
By the way, because you mentioned a specific cancer, Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, a quick Google on that and diet produces:
"Maternal Diet and Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia in Young Children"
http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/14/8/1935.abstract
"""
Because leukemia clone-specific chromosomal abnormalities are present at birth in children who later develop leukemia, it has been hypothesized that maternal factors, including nutrition during pregnancy, might affect the risk of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) among young children. We have evaluated this hypothesis in a nationwide case-control study of ALL among children ages 12 to 59 months in Greece. Children (n = 131) with ALL were gender and age matched to control children (n = 131) hospitalized for minor conditions between 1999 and 2003. The mothers of the children were interviewed in person by trained interviewers who used an extensive food frequency questionnaire addressing diet during the index pregnancy. The analysis was done by modeling the data through conditional logistic regression, also controlling for total energy intake and possible confounding factors. Odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) were expressed per quintile increase of maternal intake during pregnancy of the specified food group. The risk of ALL in the offspring was lower with increased maternal intake of fruits (OR, 0.72; 95% CI, 0.57-0.91), vegetables (OR, 0.76; 95% CI, 0.60-0.95), and fish and seafood (OR, 0.72; 95% CI, 0.59-0.89) and higher with increased maternal intake of sugars and syrups (OR, 1.32; 95% CI, 1.05-1.67) and meat and meat products (OR, 1.25; 95% CI, 1.00-1.57). Children of women who tend to consume during their pregnancies what is currently considered to be a healthy diet maybe at lower risk of ALL.
"""
So, clearly this is suggestive of a dietary link to some extent.
If you have had 14 surgeries and lots of radiation, obviously the medical system has failed you in the sense of helping you treat the underlying issues causing cancers to recur. They may have treated the symptoms, but what about addressing the underlying causes, whatever they are? Sure you may need some forms of medication given everything you said, but still, why not try to get the rest of your body to work as well as it can and have the most energy you can have?
I have no connection with Dr. Joel Fuhrman other than buying a few of his books and a DVD and liking what I've seen and trying to put his advice into practice in my own family (and he says little that many others have not said for decades, although he synthesizes it well). To me, he makes a lot of sense. Even now, you might find your health may benefit from following his dietary advice (after discussion with your doctors); he is a bona-fide MD; you might even want to just give him a call if he does consultations (and if your insurance covers it and ca
Just for reference, it seems most cancer can be prevented (and sometimes cured) by a healthy diet (heavy on the vegetables, and perhaps including occasional fasting), enough vitamin D3 from sunlight, moderate exercise (helps keep the lymph system working among other things), avoiding pollution (like in water), some positive thinking and positive relationships, and the ususal lifestyle choices (like avoiding smoking).
Joel Fuhrman is an MD who talks a lot about this sort of stuff:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/
"""
Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to live the rest of your life in pain or on medication.
You can reverse disease, reduce high blood pressure, lose unwanted weight, lower your cholesterol levels, prevent heart disease and cancer, and improve your health - all without relying on drugs and fad diets. The importance of good nutrition is emphasized in Dr. Fuhrman's dietary program, Eat To Live.
Reduce high blood pressure, reverse diabetes and dramatically lower cholesterol without drugs. Dr. Fuhrman offers advanced nutritional advice based on scientific research.
"""
On the right amount of vitamin D:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
"""
We predict that treatment with physiological doses of vitamin D3 (between 4,000-10,000 IU/day from all sources, including sun, food and supplements) along with periodic monitoring of blood calcidiol and calcium levels will become routine. [Zittermann A. Vitamin D in preventive medicine: are we ignoring the evidence? Br J of Nutr. 2003;89:552-572. Holick M. Vitamin D: A Millennium Perspective. J Cell Biochem. 2003;88:296-307.] Research indicates it will help several vitamin D deficiency-associated diseases such as: autism, autoimmune illness, cancer, chronic pain, depression, diabetes, heart disease, hyperparathyroidism, hypertension, influenza, myopathy (neuromuscular disorders), and osteoporosis.
"""
Bluezones is a community-wide effort that does similar things but at the community (not individual) level, as many things like having healthier menus in restaurants, building sidewalks, creating walking trails, making parks, and fostering a sense of community are more than any one individual can do alone.
http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about
"""
The AARP/Blue Zones Vitality Project will focus on four areas that are crucial to health and longevity: Community Environment, Social Networks, Habitat and Individual Sense of Purpose.
"""
Anyway, these cheap things -- sunlight, clean water, fresh air, more vegetables (and fruits, pulses like beans, and nuts and seeds), avoiding processed foods, walking and swimming, healthy relationshiips and attitudes, and not smoking etc. -- are not going to be promoted by most of our profit-oriented industrial system (even if many individuals have written books on these or sell some related products like good blenders for making green smoothies).
Best wishes for staying well.
Many dedicated hackers don't get enough sunlight, which can cause vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D defiency, now widespread in the USA, is a seriously deadly situation, which can cause depression, schizophrenia (Hans Reiser?), cancer, heart disease, autism, and other things. Almost all indoor professionals in the USA should probably be taking 5000 IU D3 in gelcaps daily (except days when they get a lot of sun) as well as eat right to get the other co-nutrients needed for vitamin D to work optimally (a very tiny fraction of people may have health issues that contraindicated vitamin D supplementation). See:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
RMS, I hope you read this; I'd miss you if you were not around.
The US RDA for vitamin D was set decades ago for healthy bones, not a healthy brain, healthy heart, healthy immune system, or healthy weight. It is probably more than ten times too low. The toxicity worries for vitamin D have also been overblown, epsecially if you supplement with D3 (not D2). All this is according to Dr. John Cannell, M.D., of the Vitamin D Council website:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDPhysiology.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDToxicity.shtml
A blood test is the only way to know for sure on your vitamin D levels.
http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-rda-for-vitamin-d.html
Fossil fuel costs for defense and pollution easily rack up into hundreds of billions of dollars per year. As suggested in the book Brittle Power in 1982, renewable energy has been cheaper for decades than fossil fuels (or nuclear) when you include *all* the externalities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
We just pay for fossil fuel use through our taxes and national debt for the military, and through health costs from mercury pollution and other forms of pollution that lead to health problems (even wonder why much fish is now unsafe to eat from mercury?), systemic risk like of economic disruption or global war over oil, and so on.
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
By the way, it takes more electricity and natural gas to refine a gallon of gasoline from oil than an electric car would need to go the same distance, so all that oil is completely wasted -- except it is profitable for some to fleece the public treasury.
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
GE had a cost-competetive production ready electric vehicle built from off-the-shelf parts built in the late 1970s -- you can see it in the Schenectady, NY science museum.
That our elected officials have allowed this public fleecing using fossil fuels, including the destruction of the health of our rivers, oceans, and humanity through smog and mercury, to go on since the Reagan years is an unspeakable tragedy of widespread corruption and ignorance which wider access to pubic records might help some with.
For the cost of less than one half-year of US defense spending the USA could shift to all renewables, eliminating the need for much of the defense budget.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
As Jimmy Carter said in 1979:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_crisis.html
"""
We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.
"""
Automation, better design, voluntary social networks and limited demand mean that the value of most human labor is rapidly decreasing. Implicit in your comments is the assumption we need everyone to be working to produce all the goods and services we need (or want). But, that assumption is less and less true. Depending on who you believe and how you define unemployment, unemployment in the USA right now is somewhere between 10% and about 25%. Further, compared to a century or two ago, when children worked in factories and mines, and practically no one "retired", and practically no one went to college or graduate school, and people worked 70 hour work week (in factories or on farms), unemployment now could be thought of as 50% to 75% or higher compared to a century ago. The fact is, compared to then, essentially nobody in the USA is working, and those who work are not doing very much of it. It's true that if you go back to hunter/gatherer times (see Marshall Sahlins), you'll find a similar pattern (only some worked, and then it was not very hard).
For example, look at this video of a robot arm throwing a cell phone into the air and catching it, and tell me that most human labor will be needed in manufacturing in twenty years:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
Even China is starting to have issues with manufacturing unemployment. How long before many services go the same way as agriculture and manufacturing? Yet our entire schooling system is still oriented around turning out mostly factory workers and soldiers.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
Anyway, so I think current trends show that work has long been going away (even as demand has increased greatly up to a point). Further, in the USA, most people have long gone past the point of diminishing returns for more stuff and bigger homes to the point of negative returns (due to the destruction of community and family) -- even as some 10% to 20% of the US population has been left out of that and is relatively impoverished and would benefit greatly from more stuff.
"The Culture of Affluence: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/
"Children of the Affluent: Challenges to Well-Being"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1948879/
The happiest places in the world usually have both material abundance and strong social programs:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Economy/story?id=7585729&page=1
"According to a 2005 editorial, published in the British Medical Journal and authored by Dr. Tony Delamothe, research done in Mexico, Ghana, Sweden, the U.S. and the U.K. shows that individuals typically get richer during their lifetimes, but not happier. It is family, social and community networks that bring joy to one's life, according to Delamothe. "
Some related links:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://users.ipfw.edu/ruflethe/american.html
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
Thanks. The main issue that matters with a "basic income" is that enough is produced and distributed for most everyone to be fairly happy. You are right that GDP might fall if people no longer were trying to achieve happiness through stuff instead of relationships and experiences. But overall, that might not be a bad thing. Still, as you point out, any system would need to adjust for that over time. Consider that the US GDP has grown 50% since around 1995. So, even if it dropped in half, we'd be back to an economy that was the size of 1995, but with most people enjoying life a lot more. Is that such a terrible thing?
Living off the land in space is the big issue. It's sad NASA still seems obsessed with bigger rockets and Cheap Access to Space (CATS). In 1980, NASA had a great plan, outlined here, which would lead to the Design of Great Settlements (DOGS):
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
"""
What follows is a portion of the final report of a NASA summer study, conducted in 1980 by request of newly- elected President Jimmy Carter at a cost of 11.7 million dollars. The result of the study was a realistic proposal for a self-replicating automated lunar factory system, capable of exponentially increasing productive capacity and, in the long run, exploration of the entire galaxy within a reasonable timeframe. Unfortunately, the proposal was quietly declined with barely a ripple in the press. What was once concievable with 1980's technology is now even more practical today.
"""
See also my comments here:
"Jeff Bezos' Shot At Space: Both CATS and DOGS are needed... "
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=62113&cid=5821178
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/f65a889ca9a6b2c1
"""
So where is a key area of research that should be a priority among NASA and Billionaires, but is not heavily pursued? The issue is what to do in space once you have gotten there. Because if there is a reason to be in space, then people and collectives will work to get there. And the reality is, that right now, if we could get there, there is nothing to do there short of look around and come back. And if that were the case, Space would not deserve much more investment than say tourism to Mt. Everest. The reality is that we don't know how to support human life in space -- in large part because we have only spent a pittance on thinking about that issue systematically compared to the issues of CATS and Planetary Exploration. Frankly, while we support human life on earth, we have very little meta-knowledge formally about how to do even that. And, most of figuring out how to support human life in space at a nuts and bolts level requires non-sexy activities like sitting around and staring out the window, talking, sending emails, building databases, building software tools, building some small physical protypes on tabletops and outdoors, and just plain thinking (the hard stuff). This is all the preparation needed for the spiritual voyage into the (physical) heavens. Biosphere II was an excellent start in some ways, although the science mission was a bit dodgy at first and it seems Columbia (the recipient) seems about to abandon that effort for cost reasons --- and in any case, Biosphere II focuses on the wrong question -- we know biospheres can work and replicate (although scale is an issue) -- what we don't know is how to replicate the mechanical infrastructure (e.g. glass pane making machinery) behind them. A lot more money has gone into studying ecosystem food webs than industrial ecologies of pipe webs and assembly line webs (and frankly, a lot of people don't want their "proprietary" manufacturing processes studied or gossipped about by academics.)
Almost everything proposed as a reason to launch into space doesn't make sense, as much as people have touted various suggestions. The closest might be He3 mining for aneutronic fusion if we otherwise had that technology, but even that issues (energy) is probably more easily solved through conservation, energy efficiency (e.g. R60+ home insulation), and photovoltaic and wind etc. alternate energy modes (which are rapidly proving cost effective for many applications, and will be only more so with new processes and materials over the next twenty years). Asteroid mining turns out to not be that useful, since recycling is a much better idea. Zero gravity turns out to not be so valuable after all for
Thanks for the great link. And here is another that relates to that: ...
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"""
[Schmidt] argues in Disciplined Minds that work is an inherently political activity and that hiring therefore involves political screening.
Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job.
"""
Example review:
http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/01BRrt.html
And in some ways, that is not too different from Noam Chomsky's argument here:
"What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream"
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199710--.htm
Those indexes are biased since they neglect key aspects of human happiness like community; health; external costs like pollution, systemic risk, and defense that businesses often pass on to society; and the corrupting effects of the concentraation of wealth in a few hands as the rich get richer -- things implicit in the original poster's comment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
From:
http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/mar/14/00017/
"""
The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon's wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments.
"""
Like many conservatives, they leave out community and health as part of a good life, but otherwise it's a great essay.
Hans Rosling has shown that many materially poor countries have made great progress towards building prosperous and healthy societies under a variety of political assumptions (often ones that emphasize social welfare).
http://www.gapminder.org/
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html
Another index:
http://www.rprogress.org/sustainability_indicators/genuine_progress_indicator.htm
As the value of human labor continues to fall from automation, better design, and voluntary social netwoks, we will need new models of prosperity that are not mainly about "every person for themselves". Freedom is also not very secure or meaningful without face-to-face community, which is often just assumed, but seems rarer these days as our individualized consumer-oriented society fails in so many ways.
I agree most of the world's problems are social problems (even if better technology can make some social problems easier to solve through increasing abundance).
What a great post. Here is an excerpt from an essay by Manuel De Landa that amplifies on your theme:
"Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces"
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"""
To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us.
"""
A basic income would eliminate poverty (and was endorsed by Nobel Prize winners):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
http://www.usbig.net/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basic-income-from-a-millionaires-perspective.html
The right amount of vitamin D would reduce sick care costs by maybe a third in industrialized countries:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
A good diet, occasional fasting, and moderate exercise would reduce another third or so of sick care expenses by helping people break out of a pleasure trap from supernormal stimuli:
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
Single payer health care in the USA would reduce expenses (for paperwork) by a third as well (these are not all additive, of course):
http://www.pnhp.org/facts/what-is-single-payer
Reinstating regulation on children's TV might help prevent damage to kids:
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077
A more vegetarian diet would also free up three-quarters of agricultural lands in the USA:
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
Renewable energy has been cheaper than fossil fuels and nuclear, when you factor in the externalities, like pollution, defense spending, and risk:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
Switching to electric cars would probably reduce our electricity use, and eliminate the need for much oil (since it takes more electricity to refine the oil into gas than it would to run electric cars the same distance as a gallon of gas in an ICE car):
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
We can develop the technology of being able to produce almost anything from commonly found raw materials:
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
We know how to make healthier communities:
http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about
http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Americas-Depression-Epidemic-Community/dp/1933392711
Nuclear weapons and military robots are ironic because the same technology could produce abundanc
Albert Eintsein on the need for *both* science and religion:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
Also, while you would be right to say some things are better than in the past, many things are not. Rampant vitamin D deficiency from too much time indoors (and listening to dermatologists) is contributing to all sorts of health problems like cancer, heart disease, and even increasing autism.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
Depression from lack of community (something not valued by modern economists) is widespread.
http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Americas-Depression-Epidemic-Community/dp/1933392711
Herbert Shelton, who from the 1920s advocated sunlight, better diet, and occasional fasting as proven ways for good health, was hit with endless lawsuits and harrasment from medical professionals:
http://www.soilandhealth.org/02/0201hyglibcat/shelton.bio.bidwell.htm
Our entire society has become locked in pleasure traps associated with supernomal stimuli, manipulated by advertisers to destroy children for profit:
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077
Sure, we have neat iPads now. What does it matter if the kids are all obese and depressed?
The mainstream USA is in a death spiral as a society because it refuses to acknowledge things like the irony of using the tools of abundance like robotics, AI, material science, and so on to build weapons of destruction like nuclear millsiles and killer robot drones, rather than use the same tech to create abundance for all and have a basic income. Likewise, our society is unable to admit the declining value fo most human labor and the need for a rethink of our economics like a basic income. Renewable energy like solar thermal, geothermal, and wind have been cheaper than fossil fuels or nuclear for decades when you factor in the external costs of war, pollution, health costs, and risks, but our society refuses to price those costs in. I could go on about many other issues (like how organic agriculture is cheaper when looking at all the costs including soil depletion and oil, singple payer health care being way cheaper, and so on). Still, there are hopeful signs here and there, so our society may yet heal itself -- but such a society might not be recognizable to many in the USA today.
So, while you have some points, the poster you are replying too makes many good ones too. As Albert Einstein says in the link at the top, science can tell us what is, maybe some of what was, and matbe even some of what could be, but science can't tell us what *should* be. That is a realm beyond science, to set our goals and the patterns we choose to preserve or strive for. Unfortunately, too often science gets misused to claim it is telling what should be. (Economists often do that with claimed mathematical precision.)
To understand another aspect of how academic science is a cult in a sense, with conservative politics woven throughout is, see Jeff Schmidt on how all professio
Except for the point that if families had that much money, the parents would not have to work that much (not even one job), and so would have time to homeschool. If you had three kids, and lived in NYS where US$20,000 is spent per kid per year, a working class family with three kids would have US$60,000 a year just to stay home with the kids and homeschool. And, at this point, there are lots of free educational materials on the internet; examples:
http://www.khanacademy.org/
http://www.learner.org/resources/browse.html
Maybe I'm presenting "puppies and rainbows", but it is a lot better than the dystopia outlined here (given that the value of all human labor is rapidly declining from automation, better design, and voluntary social networks):
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Adequate vitamin D (the sunlight vitamin) helps prevent pneumonia:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pneumonia+vitamin+d
At the end of the winter, Ed Roberts' vitamin D supplies would have been depleted.
The right amount of vitamin D also helps prevent influenza, cancer, heart disease, and a variety of other illnesses:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
All computers should come with a warning label about this, IMHO. :-)
http://blogs.intel.com/csr/2010/02/with_all_of_the_debate.php
I'd suggest it is possible that vitamin D deficiency is the leading cause of death of computer users including most slashdotters. See also:
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade; Would Save $1346 Per Person Per Annum"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html
If you trust kids to learn, and trust parents to usually have their kids' best interests at heart, then you can see that parents of older children can hire tutors, acquire learning materials, visit homeschool resources centers, and so on, to create good learning experiences. Here is a labor of love by Salman Khan over the past few years to create 1000 educational videos that step-by-step cover most of the information about math and science most kids would ever learn in high school:
http://www.khanacademy.org/
The fact is, as John Holt or John Taylor Gatto have said (both celebrated teachers with decades of classroom experience), most of what teachers know is how to manage a classroom of twenty children of roughly the same age and background and how to maintain discipline in the room. That's it. That is 90% of what most teachers have been taught. And they do it in all sorts of ways (including things like cutting sarcasm). Some teachers know more, like Jaime Escalante. Most do no.
Here is a study that shows that not only do most elementary school teachers know next-to-nothing about math, but the less math kids are taught in school, the better they are at it:
"When Less is More: The Case for Teaching Less Math in Schools"
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools
Kids should be learning because they want to, not because they are forced to. For example, a person of any age can learn to read in about 50 contact hours if they really want to, or a school system can spend thousands of hours trying to pound literacy into a child and still produce functional illiterates (as is the case with many US high school graduates). The same goes for many other subjects.
The fact is, when someone learns math or chemistry, especially today with so many great video resources,
http://www.learner.org/resources/browse.html
almost all of the learning is done by kids themselves. Plus, parents can learn together with kids. And kids can learn together with other kids at the local library or through the internet. And old school buildings could be repurposed as learning centers.
Can this all be better? Sure. Let's put learning resource centers (or just better libraries) on every street corner, where anyone can go there at any time to get help learning whatever they want to learn about, whether reading, chemistry, carpentry, or cooking.
So, let's say that some parents send their kids to the cheapest private school and "keep the change". Are most kids going to be much worse off than they are now? About half of all kids in the USA can't even graduate from high school for one reason or another. Could it be that much worse?
Also, see my other comment in this thread.
One thing to watch out for. Like most people in the USA (myself included), you've been exposed to decades of propaganda by schools that schools are the solution (and the only solution) to making society work. What if some of that was self-serving?
Also, even assuming what you said was true, that you need some "specialist" to teach you chemistry (my kid and I just watched entire "The World of Chemistry" series at Learner.org, essentially with a Nobel Prize winning society as our chemistry "teacher"), what other lessons are teachers teaching that you don't want your kid to learn?
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"""
Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training fo
Thanks for the friending. No doubt some small percentage of parents are "bad people". Still, as is suggested here by Raymond and Dorothy Moore who studied this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
"""
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results that were cut short by enrollment in schools, and could neither be replaced nor afterward corrected in an institutional setting. Recognizing a necessity for early out-of-home care for some children - particularly special needs and starkly impoverished children, and children from exceptionally inferior homes- they maintained that the vast majority of children are far better situated at home, even with mediocre parents, than with the most gifted and motivated teachers in a school setting (assuming that the child has a gifted and motivated teacher). They described the difference as follows: "This is like saying, if you can help a child by taking him off the cold street and housing him in a warm tent, then warm tents should be provided for all children - when obviously most children already have even more secure housing."
"""
Also, let's assume there are some bad parents around. There kids are going to get messed up really bad whether their children go to public school or not. But, consider if all their neighbors are at home and taking good care of their kids, with lower stress from not having financial worries. Then at least there are a lot of healthy families around to help out with the kids from the totally dysfunctional families just to be neighborly.
The current system says, all children need to be in prison during the day because some few parents are bad people. Is that fair to everyone else? By that logic, maybe the entire USA population should be sent to prison just to prevent some crimes... Of course, a lot of crimes happen in prisons, too; strangely enough, for all the guards...
If parents are unable to make good decisions, why let them pick the school district they will live in? Why let them pick the jobs they work in? Why let the pick the foods their family will eat? (Food probably has a bigger impact on a child's mental development and behavior than school.) Why let the parents pick the care they drive? Why let the parents pick if they should have a TV or access to the internet? And so on...
Do people do a good job acting in their own interest? I agree, often they do not. Here is part of why (pleasure traps and supernormal stimuli promoted in part for the profits of a very few):
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
http://www.amazon.com/So-Sexy-Soon-Sexualized-Childhood/dp/0345505077
Also, consider, these parents who can't make good decision. Aren't most of them the product of compulsory schooling? What does that say about the ultimate value of compulsory schooling?
But with that said, we can try to create a society that helps people make better choices (like by regulating deceptive advertising or subsidizing healthy activities), rather than forcing people into prison to "protect" them from themselves.
Anyway, as for money, ultimately, giving school funds to parents is just a stepping stone. I'd suggest the better approach in the long term in the USA would be one-half the US GDP spent on a "basic income" (so
Let's just give the school money directly to the parents instead of schools, as I suggest here in some detail: :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities.
"Towards a Post-Scarcity New York State of Mind (through homeschooling)"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
"""
New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
"""
We should also implement a basic income (social security and medicare for all, without age limits or a means test) for everyone as a human right, while we are at it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
If every person got a basic income, everyone could afford to purchase the education they wanted from the market.
Be careful not to make a classical mistake of confusing the intentions of the parts (teachers, who I agree mostly mean well and want to help kids grow), with the intentions of the whole system (to dumb kids down so they fit into a 19th century militaristic industrial society, like NYS teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto writes about).
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency. Ours was to be an improvement on the British system, which once depended on a shared upper-class culture for its coherence. Ours would be subject to a rational framework of science, law, instruction, and mathematically derived merit. When Morgan reorganized the American marketplace into a world of cooperating trusts at the end of the nineteenth century, he created a business and financial subsystem to interlink with the subsystem of government, the subsystem of schooling, and other subsystems to regulate every other aspect of national life. None of this was conspiratorial. Each increment was rationally defensible. But the net effect was the destruction of small-town, small-government America, strong families, individual liberty, and a lot of other things people weren't aware they were trading for a regular corporate paycheck.
A huge price had to be paid for business and government efficiency, a price we still pay in the quality of our existence. Part of what kids gave up was the prospect of being able to read very well, a historic part of the American genius. Instead, school had to train them for their role in the new overarching social system. But spare yourself the agony of thinking of this as a conspiracy. It was and is a fully rational transaction, the very epitome of rationalization engendered by a group of honorable men, all honorable men--but with decisive help from ordinary citizens, from almost all of us as we gradually lost touch with the fact that being followers instead of leaders, becoming consumers in place of producers, rendered us incompletely human. It was a naturally occurring conspiracy, one which required no criminal genius. The real conspirators were ourselves. When we sold our liberty for the promise of automatic security, we became like children in a conspiracy against growing up, sad children who conspire against their own children, consigning them over and over to the denaturing vats of compulsory state factory schooling.
"""
While you have a point, by your own logic, you'll never know how much happier your life or our society might have been if you had not been drilled for thirteen or more years in:
* only doing what someone in authority tells you to do;
* only socializing with people of a similar age, similar mental abilities, and similar social class;
* doing stuff no matter how stupid or pointless you thought it was just because some authority told you to do it or else;
* had more chances to think up your own things to do with people you picked;
* had more chances to work with both your hands and brain;
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?_r=1
* and so on.
See New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto:
"The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher"
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"""
Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes.
"""
See also his:
"State Controlled Consciousness"
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html
"""
If your kids do badly, it does not mean that they're bad readers or anything else. It means they haven't been obedient to the drills the state set down and they're marked for further treatment later on with a mark to be excluded from responsible jobs. Perhaps some way is to be excluded from the colleges that lead to responsible jobs, in other ways from the licenses that lead to responsible jobs.
This was ALL worked out. It didn't evolve by a lot of rational people saying we'll take this this and this from the past, then the next generation says we'll take this this and this. This was set down largely in a handful of places. Prussia was perhaps the most prominent of those places. The Prussian experiment leapt into the United States almost immediately in the 1840's. Leapt into the United States; its propagandists covered the country here. Its backers, its financial backers set up the most important teacher training institutes and then financed those institutes and then no one was allowed to become a teacher who didn't more or less subscribe to the fact that experts could create a curriculum and pedagogues could administer it.
Well, that's exactly what Horace, the Roman essayist, talked about in several of his essays. He said, "the master creates the lessons, the pedagogue (the teacher) administers the lessons." But if you find the teacher creating the lessons or deviating from the direction the lessons are headed in, you get rid of the pedagogue.
"""
And that last is part of what happened to Jaime Escalante. While he may not have understood the bigger picture, he deviated from the lessons, and was ultimately replaced, whatever the results.
As Gatto says at the end there:
"""
A lot of the constraints on us, a lot of the ah, ah - strings that hold us like puppets are really inventions of our own mind. I'm not saying that there aren't armies and police and various ways to punish deviants. But there isn't any way to punish a LARGE NUMBER of deviants. There isn't any way to do that. It's too expensive to even try to do that, unless you can colonize the minds of children
So true. And it's sad your post got modded down as Troll, since you are 100% right on, and whoever did that is probably caught up in the ideology behind monstrosity that is modern schooling (of course, most private schools are little better). Escalante failed to make large changes and was taken down by the institution because, ultimately, he was doing what should not be done in schools -- get poor people to think and climb out of their assigned class in life. More supportive links:
Gatto:
"Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling"
http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Schooling/dp/086571231X
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
"""
Illich:
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm
http://reactor-core.org/deschooling.html
John Holt:
http://www.holtgws.com/
Collections of links by me on this:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005379.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005584.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
Why not just give the school money directly to the parents as they see fit to take care of their children? One proposal (by me):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
I wrote on this elsewhere: "Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism"
http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/1937-unnatural-acts-breaking-the-fever-of-militarism.html#comment-2450
and:
"It's the unrecognized irony that kills you..."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1590182&cid=31561028
"""
It is ironic that the technology that goes into such a missile, from the computers and materials to the social networks that plan and test such things could instead bring abundance to everyone in the world. Yet people still build such things from a scarcity-based mindset, not recognizing the total irony. The tools of abundance all around us now (robotics, computers, networks, biotech, chemistry, nanontech, nuclear technology, and so on) are so powerful -- we will destroy ourselves if we use them from a scarcity mindset. If used from an abundance mindset, we could instead make the world into a much happier place.
As Albert Einstein said, "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind."
We need to change our hearts towards providing abundance for all, before we all die of the unrecognized irony.
"""