"Grad school provides exciting new road to poverty": http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-04-20/news/wanted-really-smart-suckers/1/ "Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off."
Not that science is much better: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science "This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.... What about personal experience? The women that I know who have the IQ, education, and drive to make it as professors at top schools are, by and large, working as professionals and making 2.5-5X what a university professor makes and they do not subject themselves to the risk of being fired. With their extra income, they invest in child care resources and help around the house so that they are able to have kids while continuing to ascend in their careers. The women I know who are university professors, by and large, are unmarried and childless. By the time they get tenure, they are on the verge of infertility. "
And: http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2012/sep/28/post-doc-research-job-hunt "After completing my PhD in 2001 I worked as a post-doc researcher in biological sciences in two different labs until 2006. Despite best efforts, the second post-doc didn't work out research wise and after two years of negative results my funding ran out. Even though I applied for other positions, by the time my contract ended I was officially unemployed. To save money I decided to move back in with my parents and claim jobseekers allowance, a galling process when you are 33 and have three higher degrees."
All that to become: http://www.disciplined-minds.com/ "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 an
Some top Google results for "fasting cancer chemotherapy": http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fasting-might-boost-chemo "Fasting appears to protect normal cells from chemotherapy's toxic effects by rerouting energy from growing and reproducing to internal maintenance. But cancer cells do not undergo this switch to self-repair and so continue to be susceptible to drug-induced damage -- making for what the researchers call a differential stress resistance. Fasting, then, the authors wrote, should enhance the power of chemotherapies without having to resort to "the more typical strategy of increasing the toxicity of drugs.""
So fasting during chemotherapy works in part precisely because it protects the chemotherapy patient's normal cells from becoming weakened.
Research by Valter Longo, of the University of South California (USC) in Los Angeles on mice: "Fasting May Boost Chemo By Weakening Cancer Cells" http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/241454.php "He and his colleagues found, for example, that repeated cycles of fasting with chemotherapy cured 1 in 5 mice with a highly aggressive form of children's neuroendocrine cancer, and 40% of mice with a less severe form. In either case, no mice survived when treated only with chemo. For their study, in which they used used cancer cells and mice, Longo and colleagues found that for all the cancers they tested, fasting combined with chemotherapy improved survival, slowed tumor growth and/or limited the spread of tumors. They found that fasting without chemotherapy, slowed the growth of breast cancer, melanoma, glioma and human neuroblastoma. In several cases, fasting was as effective as chemotherapy."
One from a decade or two ago by Joel Fuhrman: http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/healthy-food-dr-fuhrman-on-fasting.html "Therapeutic fasting accelerates the healing process and allows the body to recover from serious disease in a dramatically short period of time. In my practice I have seen fasting eliminate lupus and arthritis, remove chronic skin conditions such as psoriasis and eczema, health the digestive tract in patients with ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, and quickly eliminate cardiovascular diseases such as high blood pressure and angina. In these cases the recoveries were permanent: fasting enabled longtime disease suffers unchain themselves from their multiple toxic dugs and even eliminate the need for surgery, which was recommended to some of them as their only solution."
One problem of course in Western Medicine is than an oncologist can't justifying charging, say, $20,000 for telling a potential customer just to stop eating for a bit. Not sure if the source is accurate, but the sentiment probably is: http://www.doctoryourself.com/longevity.html "One-quarter of what you eat keeps you alive. The other three-quarters keeps your doctor alive. (Hieroglyph found in an ancient Egyptian tomb.) "
But ultimately, while fasting can help some people, people need to eat healthier long term. One big problem with people today fasting is that there is so many to
As I said originally, once you have detectable cancer, it is iffy to get rid of it, although eating better can help prevent recurrence and possibly help some during treatments (and medically-supervised fasting may help too in some cases). You are ignoring also that I mention things like vitamin D and iodine, which are not "fruits". Also, "vegetables" and "mushrooms" are not fruits. Just to get started on the links between nutrition and cancer, from: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx
References:
1. Santarelli RL, Pierre F, Corpet DE. Processed meat and colorectal cancer: a review of epidemiologic and experimental evidence. Nutr Cancer. 2008 ; 60(2): 131?144. 2. Larsson SC ; Wolk A. Meat consumption and risk of colorectal cancer: a meta-analysis of prospective studies. Int J Cancer. 2006; 119(11):2657-64. 3. Sinha R, Park Y, Graubard BI, et al. Meat and meat-related compounds and risk of prostate cancer in a large prospective cohort study in the United States. Am J Epidemiol. 2009 Nov 1;170(9):1165-77. 4. Chao A, Thun JT, Connell CJ, et al. Meat Consumption and Risk of Colorectal Cancer JAMA 2005;293:172-182. 5. Sesink AL, Termont DS, Kleibeuker JH, Van der Meer R. Red meat and colon cancer: dietary haem-induced colonic cytotoxicity and epithelial hyperproliferation are inhibited by calcium. Carcinogenesis 2001;22(10):1653-1659. Hughes R, Cross AJ, Pollock JR, Bingham S. Dose dependent effect of dietary meat on endogenous colonic N-nitrosation. Carcinogenesis 2001; 22(1):199-202. 6. Zheng W, Lee S. Well-done Meat Intake, Heterocyclic Amine Exposure, and Cancer Risk. Nutr Cancer. 2009 ; 61(4): 437?446. 7. Fraser GE. Association between diet and cancer, ischemic heart disease, and all-cause mortality in non-Hispanic white California Seventh-Day Adventists. Am J Clin Nutr 1999;70(3 supp.):532-38S. Sarasua S, Savitz DA. Cured and broiled meat consump- tion in relation to childhood cancer. Cancer Causes Control 1994;5(2):141-48. Favero A, Parpinel M, Franceschi S. Diet and risk of breast cancer: major findings from an Italian case-control study. Biomed Pharmacother 1998;52(3):109-15. Levi F, Pasche C, La Vecchia C, Lucchini F, Franceschi S. Food groups and colorectal cancer risk. Br J Cancer 1999;79(7-8):1283-87. Steinmetz KA, Potter JD. Food-group consumption and colon cancer in the Adelaide Case-Control Study: meat, poultry, seafood, dairy foods and eggs. Int J Cancer 1993;53(5):720-27. Levi F, Franceschi S, Negri E, La Vecchia C. Dietary factors and the risk of endometrial cancer. Cancer 1993;71(11):3575-81. Negri E, Bosetti C, La Vecchia C, et al. Risk factors for adenocarcinoma of the small intestine. Int J Cancer 1999;82 (2): 171-74. Chow WH, Gridley G, McLoughlin JK, et al. Protein intake and risk of renal cell cancer. J. Nat. Cancer Inst. 1994;86: 1131-39. Kwiatkowski A. Dietary and other environmental risk factors in acute leukemias: a case- control study of 119 patients. Eur J Cancer Prev 1993;2(2):139-46. National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute. 1996. Cancer rates and risks: cancer death rates among 50 countries (age adjusted to the world standard), 4th ed. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Lung cancer, p. 39. Source: World Health Organization data as adapted by the American Cancer Society. Deneo- Pelligrini H, De Stefani E, Ronco A, et al. Meat consumption and risk of lung cancer; a case- control study from Uruguay. Lung Cancer 1996;14 (2-3):195-205. Zhang S, Hunter DJ, Rosner BA, et al. Greater intake of meats and fats associated with higher risk of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. J Nat Cancer Inst 1999;91(20):1751-58. Cunningham AS. Lymphomas and animal-protein consumption. Lancet 1976;27:1184-86. Franceschi S, Favero A, Conti E, et al. Food groups, oils and butter, and cancer of the oral cavity and pharynx. Br J Cancer 1999;80(3-4):614-20. Tominaga S, Aoki K, Fujimoto I, et al. Cancer mortality and morbidity sta- tistics. Japan and the World. Boca Raton, Fl
One of the reasons I quoted Iain Banks about "the good ship Arbitrary" is that I half-expected this kind of response from someone who is having their paradigms about health challenged. In this case though, it is not hilarious, it is only sad.
See, for example: http://www.raysahelian.com/quackwatch.html " Is Stephen Barrett, M.D. a Quack? According to the Quackwatch website, Stephen Barrett, M.D. says this about quackery: Dictionaries define quack as "a pretender to medical skill; a charlatan" and "one who talks pretentiously without sound knowledge of the subject discussed."
Stephen Barrett, M.D. does not have a degree in nutrition science. He has been trained in psychiatry but has not practiced psychiatry for many, many years and has, to the best of my understanding, never practiced nutritional medicine. In my opinion, Stephen Barrett, M.D., when it comes to the field of medicinal use of nutritional supplements, can be easily defined as a Quack since he pretends to "have skills or knowledge in supplements and talks pretentiously" without actually having clinical expertise or sound knowledge of herbal and nutritional medicine.
A person can't be an expert at a topic if they have not had hands-on experience. Would you feel comfortable having heart surgery by a doctor who has read all the medical books on how to surgically replace a heart valve but has never performed an actual surgical procedure in an operating room? Would you feel comfortable relying on nutritional advice from a retired psychiatrist, Stephen Barrett, M.D. of Quackwatch, even though he has not had hands-on experience using supplements with patients and does not have a degree in nutrition science?
On a positive note, he often does a good job when it comes to researching credentials of individuals in the nutritional industry, or researching the legitimacy or marketing practices of certain supplement companies. He has uncovered or brought to light several cases of companies that have shady or fraudulent practices. I suggest he stay on this course (which is his forte) rather than giving his uneducated opinion on nutritional medicine or supplement research. I also hope he becomes more balanced in his reviews and makes the effort to also mention positive outcomes regarding supplement research, and not just negative outcomes. "
On dairy specifically, see: http://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Fatty-dairy-linked-to-early-cancer-death-4355398.php "People who are diagnosed with breast cancer and then go on to consume a steady diet of high-fat dairy foods increase their chances of dying years earlier than those who consumed low- to nonfat milk products, according to a new study by Kaiser Permanente researchers. The study, published Thursday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, is considered the first to look at the differences in high-fat and low-fat dairy intake following a breast cancer diagnosis on long-term survival."
Am I making an assumption about Iain Banks' diet? Yes. But most people in the industrialized world eat a "standard American diet" or a variant of that (standard Scottish diet?). Most are vitamin D deficient. (Jaundice can be related to sunlight deficiency.) Most are iodine deficient. So, those are pretty safe assumptions. All can contribute to cancer. If they are not correct here, well at least others may still learn something.
I pointed to a scientific study related to fasting improving the effectiveness of chemotherapy. I pointed to Dr. Joel Fuhrman's work on preventing cancer which is heavily based in science (just read his reference list). Just scroll down on this page: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx
My post on cancer and nutrition got modded down to zero, so obviously there are more people who share your sentiments. I'd suggest they did not read my post very carefully. See also my followup post here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3610805&cid=43353459
To turn things around, from what I read, most mainstream cancer treatments don't cure cancer, with many extending the lifespan at most a few months on average (and painful months at that). When your doctors have told you you have a few months left to live and have inoperable cancer, what do you have to lose by eating better? But some people here would apparently prefer to prevent Iain Banks from making his own informed choice about that, or for others to learn how to prevent a similar situation for themselves using all this computer technology we created. What's the point of all this fancy computer networking stuff if we can't use it collectively to share ways to improve our health?
That's a bit like saying no one should not use "NoScript" because they know someone who had trouble using Facebook with it installed.
If someone has a localized cancer that is easily treatable completely by surgery, then surgery can make a lot of sense of course. Steve Job's cancer apparently was one rare such situation. In that sense, he did regret not having surgery sooner. But many cancers, by the time they are detected, can't be easily removed surgically. Procedures to remove cancers can also let cancerous cells loose in the bloodstream. Removing one cancer may allow others that cancer suppressed to grow. Even when cancers can be removed 100% surgically, the conditions (diet and lifestyle) that contributed to the cancer growing would likely just support more cancers or other health issues. There are also quite a few cases of a person's immune system rallying and the cancer going into remission.
Consider: http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/27/opinion/weil-steve-jobs "Steve Jobs had a long run with a rare form of cancer (a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor) that is sometimes curable by early surgery. While I was not his physician and don't have access to the details of his illness or its treatment, assertions that his use of alternative medicine shortened his life strike me as uninformed. No one knows how long he would have survived or what his quality of life would have been had he opted for immediate surgery and used only conventional treatment."
And: http://www.livescience.com/16551-steve-jobs-alternative-medicine-pancreatic-cancer-treatment.html " "I don't think waiting nine months for surgery was a bad decision," Dr. Maged Rizk, a gastroenterologist at Cleveland Clinic, told WebMD in an interview last week. "Especially if it is limited disease, especially if it is an islet-cell tumor and the cells are [typical of early cancer], and as long as you don't have symptoms, you can sit on it a bit," Rizk said. (Neuroendocrine tumors are also known as islet-cell tumors.)
But what about Jobs' use of alternative medicine? Could that have had an impact on his cancer?
Some experts say that, if anything, use of alternative medicine approaches may have helped Jobs' overall health. Jobs lived 8 years after his diagnosis.
The average life expectancy for someone with a metastatic neuroendocrine tumor is about two years, according to PCAN. (It remains unclear whether Jobs' cancer was metastatic when he was diagnosed.)
"I believe that he must have really refocused his heath practices," through changes in diet and exercise, said Dr. Ashwin Mehta, an assistant professor and medical director of integrative medicine at the University of Miami's Sylvester Cancer Center. "To do as well as he did, he must have done a lot of things right," Mehta said."
So yes, eating better may have helped Steve Jobs live a lot longer, whatever one can say about his decision about surgery. Iain Banks says parts of his cancer are inoperable, so it is a very different situation. He says he is considering chemotherapy; I pointed to potential ways as to how to make it more effective,
People are always getting pre-cancerous and cancerous cells. They usually don't get "cancer" because their body's immune system kills the cells. So, anything you can do to strengthen your immune system can help you do better. So can anything you do to remove additional toxins and also to remove things that may promote cancer growth (including apparently some substances in dairy).
The worst thing about making cancer treatment decisions (beyond all the personal trauma) may be that most oncologists get paid by the treatment. So there is no financial incentive for oncologists to suggest anything other that treatments they can supply. This sort of conflict-of-interest between patient and specialist physici
Iain Banks should look into iodine, vitamin D, eating a lot more vegetables, medically supervised vegetable juice and/or water fasting, and a variety of other things (beyond what is in mainstream medicine might be helpful, too). While once you have cancer getting rid of it is iffy, some things can still help, including preventing it from coming back again if you do manage to get rid of it somehow. See especially: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx
Mix that approach with a high-phyto-nutrient diet (including certain mushrooms), eliminating refined sugar and refined starch, eliminating food additives, supplementing with vitamin D and iodine, and some other related changes, and maybe there is some small chance of Iain Banks getting several more years of good health.
And so we can get at least one more fantastic Culture novel.:-)
I love his writing. I hope we can figure out a way to help him with all this post-scarcity technology like he wrote about and which we already have to some small degree (like the internet), whether he would choose to use that time to write another novel or not.
But the health advice above is generally good for anyone who wants to minimize cancer risk and maximize health. And I could only put all that together thanks to the internet and similar post-scarcity technology like Google and web servers and personal computers and all the advances in nutritional science made possible by less expensive testing and the accumulation of medical research knowledge and so on. Which is all the stuff implied in his books. Even if much of Earth may perhaps be oblivious to it all: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_State_of_the_Art "'Also while I'd been away, the ship had sent a request on a postcard to the BBC's World Service, asking for 'Mr David Bowie's "Space Oddity" for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.' (This from a machine that could have swamped Earth's entire electro-magnetic spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn't get the request played. The ship thought this was hilarious.'"
I saw that link on slashdot recently in someone's comment, and it is an insightful essay on privacy. There is a sense that a certain degree of privacy is both a human right and a human requirement in our society, and government should have a duty to protect it (even for reasons beyond ensuring the government remains accountable to the people policitcally).
There are also chilling effects. My house has electric heat, so if I grew hydroponic vegetables instead of running the heaters in winter, I would still get the heat via the lights (thermodynamics) and I'd also get fresh veggies all winter. But I know if I buy a lot of hydroponic equipment, I'll most-likely end up on some government list somewhere to have my door kicked in (see another comment here by someone else about an example of that and our misguided drug laws). Or see: http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/pinellas-hydroponic-garden-shop-has-attention-of-deputies-searching-for/1204506
Although another reasons I don't do it is concerns about humidity and mold, and also finding the space, so that is not the only concern, beyond the cost of the equipment.
Thankfully, in the USA we are nowhere near the total squashing of dissent like was accomplished using the 1930s German gestapo secret police, although they apparently mostly used neighbors turning in neighbors since it was before the internet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestapo
"According to Canadian historian Robert Gellately's analysis of the local offices established, the Gestapo wasâ"for the most partâ"made up of bureaucrats and clerical workers who depended upon denunciations by citizens for their information.[36] Gellately argued that it was because of the widespread willingness of Germans to inform on each other to the Gestapo that Germany between 1933 and 1945 was a prime example of panopticism.[37] Indeed, the Gestapo -- at times -- was overwhelmed with denunciations and most of its time was spent sorting out the credible from the less credible denunciations.[38] Many of the local offices were understaffed and overworked, struggling with the paper load caused by so many denunciations.[39] Gellately has also suggested that the Gestapo was "a reactive organization" "...which was constructed within German society and whose functioning was structurally dependent on the continuing co-operation of German citizens".[40]
After 1939, when many Gestapo personnel were called up for war-related work such as service with the Einsatzgruppen, the level of overwork and understaffing at the local offices increased.[39] For information about what was happening in German society, the Gestapo continued to be mostly dependent upon denunciations.[41] 80% of all Gestapo investigations were started in response to information prov
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_credit "In the United Federation of Planets, Replicators and other advanced technologies provide for virtually all basic material wants and needs equally and sufficiently to all. Every citizen of the Federation has plenty of food of virtually any type they want, clothes, shelter, recreational and luxury items, and has all their basic material needs easily met. A society based around self-improvement and collectively improving the human race instead of cutthroat competition, combined with heavy automation, means labor is essentially free, menial tasks are automated, and goods are made freely available to all citizens due to superabundance. As seen in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes featuring Jake and Joseph Sisko, people are apparently not paid in credits for their work."
http://books.google.com/books/about/In_Defense_of_Childhood.html?id=hO9dPgAACAAJ "The pressures of modern life are increasingly squeezing the adventure, the wonder, the physicality -- the juice -- out of children's lives. Virtually every arena of kids' experience is now subject to some form of outside control, and this is a serious threat to the unique spark that animates every child. Lamenting risk-averse parents, overstructured school days, and a lack of playtime and solitude, this book is a clear and compelling plea to save childhood."
Other thing we can do beyond a basic income include expanding our gift economy, improving democratic participatory planning at all levels of government, and improving tools for local subsistence (like gardening robots and cheap solar panels).
I agree the human hand is a marvel, along with hand-eye coordination. But these sorts of technologies are rapid displacing the value of much paid human labor in different areas of the economy. Creating factories generally means re-engineering most tasks so they fit what machines can do. Service industries will also do that more and more (like the US post-office automates, fast-food places automate, hospitals automate, people get household vacuuming robots or buy prepared food, etc..) This means our economic social contract is breaking down where an adult's right to consume was linked to selling his or her labor in the market -- as predicted decades ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution
A basic income is one way to address this, but there are a mix of others.
We have vast amounts of technology now, and we should use that technology to create material abundance for all. We do that through five interwoven types of economic operations involving subsistence production, gift giving locally and globally, exchange in the market, planning at various levels of government, and theft/extraction/conquest (see my site). Bitcoins fall mostly into the area of exchange (as an artificially scarce token). However, there is a seeming subsistence aspect in Bitcoins because you can in theory produce them yourself. That is similar to how people can create virtual objects in some online games which they can exchange for national currencies. But, in the case of Bitcoins, they are produced more as a form of almost online gambling (since you may not find one even having put in the electricity).
In general, it is a waste of CPU cycles and electrical energy to engage in this form of creating artificially scarce tokens to be used for exchange. Society woudl be better off if peopel with spare CPU cycles from always on computers donated them to other causes like protein folding or NASA or SETI or whatever. It is better to create locally useful products for subsistence, or to create inherently worthwhile things for exchange or gift-giving. We should be planning how to create more shared abundance not more artificial scarcity.
For those interested in a virtual currencies, a better model is "LETS" (Local Exchange Trading System) systems where currency production is regulated by democratic involvement in a LETS system, which anyone can set up for their local community (subject to any local laws and gathering community support). http://www.lets-linkup.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_exchange_trading_system
Anything that has some value due to rarity can be used as a currency as a medium of representing demand. That can include artificially created things like fiat dollars, Bitcoins, Kanban tokens, or LETS credits. But a currency not based on one-for-on exchange with a useful item (like electricity currently or food or CPU cycles) only has value if the community gives it value as a medium of exchange and signaling demand. Thus stable currencies need to be regulated by a community or a trusted organization the community delegates the responsibility to -- because a currency represents a social contract. Otherwise, we will see some pattern of valuation as a bubble as the community eventually figures out the dynamics of the thing (which may take some time for the learning to propagate). Example of a community slowly becoming aware it is being collectively scammed in another financial context: http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/600m-ponzi-scheme-incubated-small-nc-town-18845335#.UVhOeLAq3D0
The bottom line: it is wasteful of electricity to compute otherwise worthless mathematical functions for arbitrary social reasons. Of course, the same can be said of much gold mining, too -- although at least gold looks pretty and has some inherent usefulness. If people want a fiat currency, there are many ways to create one like via LETS that don't entail that level of waste.
Perhaps the biggest problem with Bitcoin conceptually if it is successful may just be that anyone can make a slight variant of it with a somewhat different mathematical function (Bitcoin1, Bitcoin2... Bitcoin100000) -- and then what is the value of Bitcoin0, the first one? The only value is in the social sentiments about it. And feelings can change about the social worth of a pattern of bits in some computer somewhere.
Will some people make a lot of money from Bitcoin0? No doubt, as people have told about on Slashdot already. But people will likely lose a lot in the bubble, too. And the waste of electricity is a surety. LETS its a better idea which promotes a re
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket "War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
There are other reasons people make wars (including pride and political power) but the reasons the infrastructure is there to excess is profit-driven. Nothing like preparing for war or resupplying during or afterwards to boost the profits of certain companies. And then there are, sometimes, the profits to be made during the occupation and "reconstruction" phases. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
Estimates there range from about $1 trillion to $6 trillion. A company that can siphon off even just 0.1% of that has made at least a billion dollars. There are billions of dollars to be made destroying parts of North Korea and then pretending to fix them up again. And if the US can get into a huge cold war or lots of proxy wars with China, many companies could make stupendous profits for years.
See also: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1220-28.htm "There were Seymour Melman's op-eds and letters to the editor in the New York Times starting in his twenties. There were his cogent Congressional testimonies about the permanent war economy and its damage to our civilian economy and necessities of the American people. His economic conversion plans and his advocacy for a muscular peace agreement with the Soviet Union illuminated what kind of economy, innovation and prosperity could be ours in the U.S.A.
Melman's work was detailed and he challenged what President Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" like that of no other academic. He would show how talented scientific and engineering skills were sucked into this permanent war economy to the detriment of civilian jobs and economic development as if people's well-being mattered. "To eliminate hunger in America = $4-5 billion = C-5A aircraft program," he would say, referring to Lockheed Martin's chronically bungled, defective and costly contract."
Yes, there is a lot of nonsense in alternative medicine. But there is a lot of nonsense in mainstream medicine, too (e.g. much mainstream cancer and heart disease treatment is misguided dues to financial conflicts of interest in the providers). We need the best of both. The mind can affect health in a variety of ways -- including by moderating the immune system to reduce inflammation (and possibly destroying some cancer), providing natural internal painkillers, and by choosing to eat healthier and otherwise live a healthier lifestyle (which may even include religious-motivated things like periodic fasting that can have health benefits in some contexts). We need to make the most of those possibilities in a responsible way.
"In February 2006, Randi underwent coronary artery bypass surgery." "If you look into the nutritional medicine that Dr. Joel Fuhrman, MD, practices, but you can also find several others who say the same, you will find that most bypasses are unnecessary and blocked arteries can be unblocked and brought back to health in about two years of an agressive nutritional approach of a diet heavy on vegetables, fruits, and beans (and a little nuts, seeds, and whole grains). So, in one of the greatest decisions of your life, you were, I'd suggest, scammed by the mainstream medical community and its connection with the mainstream agri-business. In fact, people who get a bypass but don't change their eating habits tend to just have the same problem come back."
See also: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx "Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, nearly all cardiovascular surgery, and many suppliers of the biotechnology. In many cases, interventional cardiology is the major income generator to hospitals. The ending of this ill-conceived, out-dated and ineffective technology would dramatically downsize hospitals in the United States and free up over $100 billion annually in medical care costs. Besides being ineffective, interventional cardiology places the responsibility in the hands of the doctor and not the patients. When patients finally realize they must take control of their heart problems with aggressive dietary modifications (and when needed medications for temporary periods) we will essentially solve the health crisis in America.
The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportuni
Existing military technology like nukes, plagues, and bureaucracy, are so powerful that they could greatly harm most human life on the planet. What kinds of plagues does north Korea got? Do we really know? I worried about the same thing when the USA invaded Iraq. Plagues are the poor man's WMD. The USA got lucky with Iraq in that we did not see hundreds of millions of US casualties on US soil from a plague launched by Saddam when things looked bleak for him personally and billions more casualties globally among those on the sidelines.
Soon enough, cheap military robotics (flying mines), nanotech, cyberwar, and other things will add to that list of massively harmful possibilities which we have, at best, limited defenses against at the civilian level and could thus completely disrupt our infrastructure in a place like the USA. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
As in my sig, the biggest challenge of the 21st century is technologies of abundance like nuclear energy and biotechnology and so on can be made into powerful weapons or they can be used to bring material abundance for all. The increase in powers of our technology are making the Earth seem smaller and smaller relative to the capacity for either governments or individuals to do harm. Modern technology requires us, if prudent, to both expand into space and to come up with better ways of living together on Earth. http://globalcommunity.org/flash/wombat.shtml
Because the US military has not yet integrated this truth into all their doctrines, they still seem to think they can "defend" the USA against an (apparently) crazy person by a show of force, as with these bombers. That does not work that way if the person is crazy enough or if the local social dynamics is crazy enough to force a leader on to ever more aggressive actions. Just look at the US financial meltdown to show how individuals or collectives can deny reality for a long time or can take great risks (Enron) and so eventually destroy themselves while greatly harming the lives of everyone around them.
Not saying it would work for sure, but at least it is a different option.
Remember: the people of oppressive regimes are generally suffering a lot too. Why make them suffer more just to get the leadership to change? That tends rarely to work anyway (for example, Cuba or Iraq). Any external threat just tends to make collectives pull together and silence dissent -- just like happened in
Great analogy as an example of "market failure" due in part to "unquantified risk" (and to a lesser extent de-facto monpoly by market position).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure "Market failures are often associated with information asymmetries, non-competitive markets, principal-agent problems, externalities, or public goods. The existence of a market failure is often used as a justification for government intervention in a particular market."
There have been Star Trek episodes like that too, where people are on a Holodeck with their memories suppressed. That's also why, even having been in a PhD program in ecology and evolution, I have to accept it is possible that our universe is a simulation started 6000 years ago from some old backup. http://www.simulation-argument.com/
The problem of course is that, even if true and interesting to contemplate, those sorts of beliefs are not very practical, like in understanding how the flu virus mutates every year, or in figuring out where mineral resources are likely located based on geological processes, and so on. Or even in understanding how religion may have come about and persisted in the first place (a point I first saw in someone's comment on slashdot a year or two ago): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religions http://evolution-of-religion.com/ https://www.google.com/search?q=evolution+of+religion
I also think many scientists overreach -- moving from scientific statements about material things to an unackowledged theology of "scientistic materialsm" like Charles Tart points out. http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/about-dr-tart/the-end-of-materialism/ "Of course there are nonsensical elements mixed in with religion and spirituality: that's true for all areas of human life. But to totally deny our spiritual nature, as science apparently does, harms and inhibits people. Indeed, a deeper look shows that it's not science that denies our spirituality, it's scientism, a rigid philosophy of materialism, masquerading as science."
Some suggest we are not Earthly beings on a spiritual journey, but rather are instead Spiritual beings on an earthly journey. If so, it is hard to say for sure what difference is makes how long that journey is -- whether 15 hours or 15 decades? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Dreams_May_Come
People also find it worthwhile to play plenty of video games that may only last a short time. So a reasonable skeptic has to accept a lot of things are possible and that our knowledge of all the levels of reality is apparently limited as human beings. Still, then there is the issue of what is useful to believe in this current reality as far as dealing with the pains and pleasures and relationships and values and challenges and so on that it presents.
Around them, I also put together another proposal to collect and organize stories about security issues as a modernized "Risks Digest" using software like my wife desiged my wife wrote called "Rakontu": http://www.rakontu.org/
From 1999 to NASA, some ideas about rethinking our manufacturing infrastructure systematically and in an open source way: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
And also to DARPA in 1999: "DARPA Progam Manager Position on Self-Replicating technology" https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups=#!msg/virgle/feS-LaqnFyM/z0sqkvvCx2QJ "We of course need to minimize military tensions around the world through arms control, international aid, and setting a good example. This delays the culmination of these other trend to war, but in my opinion will not prevent them because of ever-present potential for a small group of unstable people to use weapons of mass destruction.... I also don't think we have a significant choice. Such self-replicating and self-repairing systems will be developed eventually anyway, if only from commercial competitive pressures. The only thing we can do is slow down their development. Yet that has its own risks of our current infrastructure being overwhelmed by current weapons of mass destruction or sophisticated terrorism. Also, should such self-replicating technology be developed first clandestinely by an oppressive regime, the consequences for the United States could be disastrous."
And I can keep on working towards those other ideas as very limited spare time permits.
I guess I am mostly just a creation of 1960s-1970s TV about our future in space -- to keep banging my head against the wall of space and security for decades?:-) Star Trek, The Starlost, Space 1999, Silent Running, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Lost In Space, Thunderbirds, and so on... And way too many sci-fi novels.:-)
By that line of reasoning, a wolf that can survive well in the wild will do just as well living in a mall? Children and parents are *adapted* to a certain environment. Add endless new hazards and you can expect changing results... There are limits to human vigilance and human flexibility.
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm "Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
That said, I think this was actually a good investment for the IRS, to create an in-house facility that gives it more expertise in video media. Video is an important way these days to communicate with citizens. TurboTax has always been helpful with its videos explaining tax issues. Really, $60K to show the IRS can make high-quality videos at an annual meeting is nothing on the scale of the that organization. It's sad they have to back peddle on trying to be innovative or at least "in touch". Of all the things the US government does, this seems one of the more worthwhile to me -- trying to use humor to educate.
Here is an example from IBM of a funny video with "Rowlf the Dog" muppet made for a sales convention, just to show how this is typical for large organizations:
"Muppet meeting Film IBM" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KNT0DF6yrg
I'd be more concerned if I were the IRS about whether they licensed the copyrights for the music or various visuals or even possibly need to license Star Trek trademarks -- not that I'm a huge extended copyright fan, because if we had older copyright laws still on the books, all that music would be public domain by now, but unfortunately, it is not... Unfortunately, the laws like for copyright (and all to ofter tax policy) are being written to often for narrow private interests, not the broader public interest.
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/left_and_right.html "Although the [extreme] Right and [extreme] Left have major differences that make it almost impossible for them to agree on anything, they also have certain -- if not immediately apparent -- similarities as well. In fact, they are remarkably similar for how different they are. Since these similarities are of a type that tends to make them blind to any other view, these similarities further reinforce the dichotomy between them: that is, the similarities I am about to discuss make for more differences."
Without the internet and the world wide web on top of it, it is unlikely I could have learned so much or passed it on to others, like I mentioned in this essay from 2004: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html "First, as a side note, I could not have written an essay like this before the World Wide Web -- I just would not have had the time to cover so many areas in a couple days writing from home, far from a university library, and relying on Google to make solid ideas that were just wisps of memory (from years of reading broadly on the web); nor would I before the wide adoption of the internet and email and the world wide web have been able to provide immediately accessible links for further exploration by readers, all at essentially no direct monetary cost. That is an example of the sort of exponential increase in technological capacity this essay is referring to. I certainly would not call this essay a scholarly work as it neither cites enough primary sources or connects all the dots, and I'm sure it has its share of flaws, but please consider it as a proof of concept that if even a little of what I write is true, there is enough to go around and make this Earth a more fantastic and more free place for every being on it. "
Slashdot Mirror
"Grad school provides exciting new road to poverty": http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-04-20/news/wanted-really-smart-suckers/1/
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off."
Not that science is much better: ... What about personal experience? The women that I know who have the IQ, education, and drive to make it as professors at top schools are, by and large, working as professionals and making 2.5-5X what a university professor makes and they do not subject themselves to the risk of being fired. With their extra income, they invest in child care resources and help around the house so that they are able to have kids while continuing to ascend in their careers. The women I know who are university professors, by and large, are unmarried and childless. By the time they get tenure, they are on the verge of infertility. "
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
And:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2012/sep/28/post-doc-research-job-hunt
"After completing my PhD in 2001 I worked as a post-doc researcher in biological sciences in two different labs until 2006. Despite best efforts, the second post-doc didn't work out research wise and after two years of negative results my funding ran out. Even though I applied for other positions, by the time my contract ended I was officially unemployed. To save money I decided to move back in with my parents and claim jobseekers allowance, a galling process when you are 33 and have three higher degrees."
All that to become:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"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 an
Second link should be instead: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGrmA8iylds
Some top Google results for "fasting cancer chemotherapy": http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fasting-might-boost-chemo
"Fasting appears to protect normal cells from chemotherapy's toxic effects by rerouting energy from growing and reproducing to internal maintenance. But cancer cells do not undergo this switch to self-repair and so continue to be susceptible to drug-induced damage -- making for what the researchers call a differential stress resistance. Fasting, then, the authors wrote, should enhance the power of chemotherapies without having to resort to "the more typical strategy of increasing the toxicity of drugs.""
So fasting during chemotherapy works in part precisely because it protects the chemotherapy patient's normal cells from becoming weakened.
Human trials are starting up:
"Clinical Trials: Short-Term Fasting Before Chemotherapy in Treating Patients With Cancer"
http://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT01175837
Research by Valter Longo, of the University of South California (USC) in Los Angeles on mice:
"Fasting May Boost Chemo By Weakening Cancer Cells"
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/241454.php
"He and his colleagues found, for example, that repeated cycles of fasting with chemotherapy cured 1 in 5 mice with a highly aggressive form of children's neuroendocrine cancer, and 40% of mice with a less severe form. In either case, no mice survived when treated only with chemo. For their study, in which they used used cancer cells and mice, Longo and colleagues found that for all the cancers they tested, fasting combined with chemotherapy improved survival, slowed tumor growth and/or limited the spread of tumors. They found that fasting without chemotherapy, slowed the growth of breast cancer, melanoma, glioma and human neuroblastoma. In several cases, fasting was as effective as chemotherapy."
Cancer patients looking into it:
"48 hr Fasting before Chemo"
http://csn.cancer.org/node/237518
Here are two books related to fasting in general.
One is from a century ago by Upton Sinclair:
http://www.healingcancernaturally.com/fasting-cure-for-health.html
One from a decade or two ago by Joel Fuhrman:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/healthy-food-dr-fuhrman-on-fasting.html
"Therapeutic fasting accelerates the healing process and allows the body to recover from serious disease in a dramatically short period of time. In my practice I have seen fasting eliminate lupus and arthritis, remove chronic skin conditions such as psoriasis and eczema, health the digestive tract in patients with ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, and quickly eliminate cardiovascular diseases such as high blood pressure and angina. In these cases the recoveries were permanent: fasting enabled longtime disease suffers unchain themselves from their multiple toxic dugs and even eliminate the need for surgery, which was recommended to some of them as their only solution."
One problem of course in Western Medicine is than an oncologist can't justifying charging, say, $20,000 for telling a potential customer just to stop eating for a bit. Not sure if the source is accurate, but the sentiment probably is:
http://www.doctoryourself.com/longevity.html
"One-quarter of what you eat keeps you alive.
The other three-quarters keeps your doctor alive.
(Hieroglyph found in an ancient Egyptian tomb.) "
But ultimately, while fasting can help some people, people need to eat healthier long term. One big problem with people today fasting is that there is so many to
As I said originally, once you have detectable cancer, it is iffy to get rid of it, although eating better can help prevent recurrence and possibly help some during treatments (and medically-supervised fasting may help too in some cases). You are ignoring also that I mention things like vitamin D and iodine, which are not "fruits". Also, "vegetables" and "mushrooms" are not fruits. Just to get started on the links between nutrition and cancer, from: http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx
References:
1. Santarelli RL, Pierre F, Corpet DE. Processed meat and colorectal cancer: a review of epidemiologic and experimental evidence. Nutr Cancer. 2008 ; 60(2): 131?144.
2. Larsson SC ; Wolk A. Meat consumption and risk of colorectal cancer: a meta-analysis of prospective studies. Int J Cancer. 2006; 119(11):2657-64.
3. Sinha R, Park Y, Graubard BI, et al. Meat and meat-related compounds and risk of prostate cancer in a large prospective cohort study in the United States. Am J Epidemiol. 2009 Nov 1;170(9):1165-77.
4. Chao A, Thun JT, Connell CJ, et al. Meat Consumption and Risk of Colorectal Cancer JAMA 2005;293:172-182.
5. Sesink AL, Termont DS, Kleibeuker JH, Van der Meer R. Red meat and colon cancer: dietary haem-induced colonic cytotoxicity and epithelial hyperproliferation are inhibited by calcium. Carcinogenesis 2001;22(10):1653-1659. Hughes R, Cross AJ, Pollock JR, Bingham S. Dose dependent effect of dietary meat on endogenous colonic N-nitrosation. Carcinogenesis 2001; 22(1):199-202.
6. Zheng W, Lee S. Well-done Meat Intake, Heterocyclic Amine Exposure, and Cancer Risk. Nutr Cancer. 2009 ; 61(4): 437?446.
7. Fraser GE. Association between diet and cancer, ischemic heart disease, and all-cause mortality in non-Hispanic white California Seventh-Day Adventists. Am J Clin Nutr 1999;70(3 supp.):532-38S. Sarasua S, Savitz DA. Cured and broiled meat consump- tion in relation to childhood cancer. Cancer Causes Control 1994;5(2):141-48. Favero A, Parpinel M, Franceschi S. Diet and risk of breast cancer: major findings from an Italian case-control study. Biomed Pharmacother 1998;52(3):109-15. Levi F, Pasche C, La Vecchia C, Lucchini F, Franceschi S. Food groups and colorectal cancer risk. Br J Cancer 1999;79(7-8):1283-87.
Steinmetz KA, Potter JD. Food-group consumption and colon cancer in the Adelaide Case-Control Study: meat, poultry, seafood, dairy foods and eggs. Int J Cancer 1993;53(5):720-27. Levi F, Franceschi S, Negri E, La Vecchia C. Dietary factors and the risk of endometrial cancer. Cancer 1993;71(11):3575-81.
Negri E, Bosetti C, La Vecchia C, et al. Risk factors for adenocarcinoma of the small intestine. Int J Cancer 1999;82 (2): 171-74.
Chow WH, Gridley G, McLoughlin JK, et al. Protein intake and risk of renal cell cancer. J. Nat. Cancer Inst. 1994;86: 1131-39.
Kwiatkowski A. Dietary and other environmental risk factors in acute leukemias: a case- control study of 119 patients. Eur J Cancer Prev 1993;2(2):139-46.
National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute. 1996. Cancer rates and risks: cancer death rates among 50 countries (age adjusted to the world standard), 4th ed. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Lung cancer, p. 39. Source: World Health
Organization data as adapted by the American Cancer Society.
Deneo- Pelligrini H, De Stefani E, Ronco A, et al. Meat consumption and risk of lung cancer; a case- control study from Uruguay. Lung Cancer 1996;14 (2-3):195-205.
Zhang S, Hunter DJ, Rosner BA, et al. Greater intake of meats and fats associated with higher risk of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. J Nat Cancer Inst 1999;91(20):1751-58.
Cunningham AS. Lymphomas and animal-protein consumption. Lancet 1976;27:1184-86. Franceschi S, Favero A, Conti E, et al. Food groups, oils and butter, and cancer of the oral cavity and pharynx. Br J Cancer 1999;80(3-4):614-20.
Tominaga S, Aoki K, Fujimoto I, et al. Cancer mortality and morbidity sta- tistics. Japan and the World. Boca Raton, Fl
One of the reasons I quoted Iain Banks about "the good ship Arbitrary" is that I half-expected this kind of response from someone who is having their paradigms about health challenged. In this case though, it is not hilarious, it is only sad.
See, for example:
http://www.raysahelian.com/quackwatch.html
" Is Stephen Barrett, M.D. a Quack?
According to the Quackwatch website, Stephen Barrett, M.D. says this about quackery: Dictionaries define quack as "a pretender to medical skill; a charlatan" and "one who talks pretentiously without sound knowledge of the subject discussed."
Stephen Barrett, M.D. does not have a degree in nutrition science. He has been trained in psychiatry but has not practiced psychiatry for many, many years and has, to the best of my understanding, never practiced nutritional medicine. In my opinion, Stephen Barrett, M.D., when it comes to the field of medicinal use of nutritional supplements, can be easily defined as a Quack since he pretends to "have skills or knowledge in supplements and talks pretentiously" without actually having clinical expertise or sound knowledge of herbal and nutritional medicine.
A person can't be an expert at a topic if they have not had hands-on experience. Would you feel comfortable having heart surgery by a doctor who has read all the medical books on how to surgically replace a heart valve but has never performed an actual surgical procedure in an operating room? Would you feel comfortable relying on nutritional advice from a retired psychiatrist, Stephen Barrett, M.D. of Quackwatch, even though he has not had hands-on experience using supplements with patients and does not have a degree in nutrition science?
On a positive note, he often does a good job when it comes to researching credentials of individuals in the nutritional industry, or researching the legitimacy or marketing practices of certain supplement companies. He has uncovered or brought to light several cases of companies that have shady or fraudulent practices. I suggest he stay on this course (which is his forte) rather than giving his uneducated opinion on nutritional medicine or supplement research. I also hope he becomes more balanced in his reviews and makes the effort to also mention positive outcomes regarding supplement research, and not just negative outcomes. "
On dairy specifically, see:
http://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Fatty-dairy-linked-to-early-cancer-death-4355398.php
"People who are diagnosed with breast cancer and then go on to consume a steady diet of high-fat dairy foods increase their chances of dying years earlier than those who consumed low- to nonfat milk products, according to a new study by Kaiser Permanente researchers. The study, published Thursday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, is considered the first to look at the differences in high-fat and low-fat dairy intake following a breast cancer diagnosis on long-term survival."
Am I making an assumption about Iain Banks' diet? Yes. But most people in the industrialized world eat a "standard American diet" or a variant of that (standard Scottish diet?). Most are vitamin D deficient. (Jaundice can be related to sunlight deficiency.) Most are iodine deficient. So, those are pretty safe assumptions. All can contribute to cancer. If they are not correct here, well at least others may still learn something.
I pointed to a scientific study related to fasting improving the effectiveness of chemotherapy. I pointed to Dr. Joel Fuhrman's work on preventing cancer which is heavily based in science (just read his reference list). Just scroll down on this page:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx
My post on cancer and nutrition got modded down to zero, so obviously there are more people who share your sentiments. I'd suggest they did not read my post very carefully. See also my followup post here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3610805&cid=43353459
See also:
"Joel Fuhrman MD: Nearly Everyone Gets Cancer "
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3610805&cid=43353459
To turn things around, from what I read, most mainstream cancer treatments don't cure cancer, with many extending the lifespan at most a few months on average (and painful months at that). When your doctors have told you you have a few months left to live and have inoperable cancer, what do you have to lose by eating better? But some people here would apparently prefer to prevent Iain Banks from making his own informed choice about that, or for others to learn how to prevent a similar situation for themselves using all this computer technology we created. What's the point of all this fancy computer networking stuff if we can't use it collectively to share ways to improve our health?
That's a bit like saying no one should not use "NoScript" because they know someone who had trouble using Facebook with it installed.
If someone has a localized cancer that is easily treatable completely by surgery, then surgery can make a lot of sense of course. Steve Job's cancer apparently was one rare such situation. In that sense, he did regret not having surgery sooner. But many cancers, by the time they are detected, can't be easily removed surgically. Procedures to remove cancers can also let cancerous cells loose in the bloodstream. Removing one cancer may allow others that cancer suppressed to grow. Even when cancers can be removed 100% surgically, the conditions (diet and lifestyle) that contributed to the cancer growing would likely just support more cancers or other health issues. There are also quite a few cases of a person's immune system rallying and the cancer going into remission.
Consider:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/27/opinion/weil-steve-jobs
"Steve Jobs had a long run with a rare form of cancer (a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor) that is sometimes curable by early surgery. While I was not his physician and don't have access to the details of his illness or its treatment, assertions that his use of alternative medicine shortened his life strike me as uninformed. No one knows how long he would have survived or what his quality of life would have been had he opted for immediate surgery and used only conventional treatment."
And:
http://www.livescience.com/16551-steve-jobs-alternative-medicine-pancreatic-cancer-treatment.html
" "I don't think waiting nine months for surgery was a bad decision," Dr. Maged Rizk, a gastroenterologist at Cleveland Clinic, told WebMD in an interview last week. "Especially if it is limited disease, especially if it is an islet-cell tumor and the cells are [typical of early cancer], and as long as you don't have symptoms, you can sit on it a bit," Rizk said. (Neuroendocrine tumors are also known as islet-cell tumors.)
But what about Jobs' use of alternative medicine? Could that have had an impact on his cancer?
Some experts say that, if anything, use of alternative medicine approaches may have helped Jobs' overall health. Jobs lived 8 years after his diagnosis.
The average life expectancy for someone with a metastatic neuroendocrine tumor is about two years, according to PCAN. (It remains unclear whether Jobs' cancer was metastatic when he was diagnosed.)
"I believe that he must have really refocused his heath practices," through changes in diet and exercise, said Dr. Ashwin Mehta, an assistant professor and medical director of integrative medicine at the University of Miami's Sylvester Cancer Center. "To do as well as he did, he must have done a lot of things right," Mehta said."
So yes, eating better may have helped Steve Jobs live a lot longer, whatever one can say about his decision about surgery. Iain Banks says parts of his cancer are inoperable, so it is a very different situation. He says he is considering chemotherapy; I pointed to potential ways as to how to make it more effective,
People are always getting pre-cancerous and cancerous cells. They usually don't get "cancer" because their body's immune system kills the cells. So, anything you can do to strengthen your immune system can help you do better. So can anything you do to remove additional toxins and also to remove things that may promote cancer growth (including apparently some substances in dairy).
The worst thing about making cancer treatment decisions (beyond all the personal trauma) may be that most oncologists get paid by the treatment. So there is no financial incentive for oncologists to suggest anything other that treatments they can supply. This sort of conflict-of-interest between patient and specialist physici
Lots of health links collected by me: http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
Iain Banks should look into iodine, vitamin D, eating a lot more vegetables, medically supervised vegetable juice and/or water fasting, and a variety of other things (beyond what is in mainstream medicine might be helpful, too). While once you have cancer getting rid of it is iffy, some things can still help, including preventing it from coming back again if you do manage to get rid of it somehow. See especially:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx
And see also these other links:
http://theiodineproject.webs.com/cancerandiodine.htm
http://www.futurity.org/health-medicine/vitamin-d-helps-body-put-brakes-on-cancer/
http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART03060/Treating-Cancer-With-Integrative-Medicine.html
And:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2098363/Fasting-help-combat-cancer-boost-effectiveness-treatments.html
"In every case, combining fasting with chemotherapy made the cancer treatment more effective. Multiple cycles of fasting combined with chemotherapy cured 20 per cent of those with a highly aggressive form of cancer while 40 per cent with a limited spread of the same cancer were cured."
Mix that approach with a high-phyto-nutrient diet (including certain mushrooms), eliminating refined sugar and refined starch, eliminating food additives, supplementing with vitamin D and iodine, and some other related changes, and maybe there is some small chance of Iain Banks getting several more years of good health.
And so we can get at least one more fantastic Culture novel. :-)
I love his writing. I hope we can figure out a way to help him with all this post-scarcity technology like he wrote about and which we already have to some small degree (like the internet), whether he would choose to use that time to write another novel or not.
But the health advice above is generally good for anyone who wants to minimize cancer risk and maximize health. And I could only put all that together thanks to the internet and similar post-scarcity technology like Google and web servers and personal computers and all the advances in nutritional science made possible by less expensive testing and the accumulation of medical research knowledge and so on. Which is all the stuff implied in his books. Even if much of Earth may perhaps be oblivious to it all:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_State_of_the_Art
"'Also while I'd been away, the ship had sent a request on a postcard to the BBC's World Service, asking for 'Mr David Bowie's "Space Oddity" for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.' (This from a machine that could have swamped Earth's entire electro-magnetic spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn't get the request played. The ship thought this was hilarious.'"
Good points on priorities. See also on privacy: http://fyngyrz.com/?p=25
I saw that link on slashdot recently in someone's comment, and it is an insightful essay on privacy. There is a sense that a certain degree of privacy is both a human right and a human requirement in our society, and government should have a duty to protect it (even for reasons beyond ensuring the government remains accountable to the people policitcally).
But failing that, we should at least have David Brin's "Transparent Society" where everyone can watch the watchers:
http://www.davidbrin.com/transparency.html
See also my suggestion:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319
There are also chilling effects. My house has electric heat, so if I grew hydroponic vegetables instead of running the heaters in winter, I would still get the heat via the lights (thermodynamics) and I'd also get fresh veggies all winter. But I know if I buy a lot of hydroponic equipment, I'll most-likely end up on some government list somewhere to have my door kicked in (see another comment here by someone else about an example of that and our misguided drug laws). Or see:
http://www.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/pinellas-hydroponic-garden-shop-has-attention-of-deputies-searching-for/1204506
So, buy hydropoincs and have your dogs shot as a result of data mining?
"Why do SWAT teams kill all dogs when serving a warrant at a household?"
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110721154445AAWtx8u
Or, see also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse
Although another reasons I don't do it is concerns about humidity and mold, and also finding the space, so that is not the only concern, beyond the cost of the equipment.
Thankfully, in the USA we are nowhere near the total squashing of dissent like was accomplished using the 1930s German gestapo secret police, although they apparently mostly used neighbors turning in neighbors since it was before the internet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestapo
"According to Canadian historian Robert Gellately's analysis of the local offices established, the Gestapo wasâ"for the most partâ"made up of bureaucrats and clerical workers who depended upon denunciations by citizens for their information.[36] Gellately argued that it was because of the widespread willingness of Germans to inform on each other to the Gestapo that Germany between 1933 and 1945 was a prime example of panopticism.[37] Indeed, the Gestapo -- at times -- was overwhelmed with denunciations and most of its time was spent sorting out the credible from the less credible denunciations.[38] Many of the local offices were understaffed and overworked, struggling with the paper load caused by so many denunciations.[39] Gellately has also suggested that the Gestapo was "a reactive organization" "...which was constructed within German society and whose functioning was structurally dependent on the continuing co-operation of German citizens".[40]
After 1939, when many Gestapo personnel were called up for war-related work such as service with the Einsatzgruppen, the level of overwork and understaffing at the local offices increased.[39] For information about what was happening in German society, the Gestapo continued to be mostly dependent upon denunciations.[41] 80% of all Gestapo investigations were started in response to information prov
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_credit
"In the United Federation of Planets, Replicators and other advanced technologies provide for virtually all basic material wants and needs equally and sufficiently to all. Every citizen of the Federation has plenty of food of virtually any type they want, clothes, shelter, recreational and luxury items, and has all their basic material needs easily met. A society based around self-improvement and collectively improving the human race instead of cutthroat competition, combined with heavy automation, means labor is essentially free, menial tasks are automated, and goods are made freely available to all citizens due to superabundance. As seen in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes featuring Jake and Joseph Sisko, people are apparently not paid in credits for their work."
http://books.google.com/books/about/In_Defense_of_Childhood.html?id=hO9dPgAACAAJ
"The pressures of modern life are increasingly squeezing the adventure, the wonder, the physicality -- the juice -- out of children's lives. Virtually every arena of kids' experience is now subject to some form of outside control, and this is a serious threat to the unique spark that animates every child. Lamenting risk-averse parents, overstructured school days, and a lack of playtime and solitude, this book is a clear and compelling plea to save childhood."
The challenge of addiction will only get worse:
http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/B0057DC3VY
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Yes, and we should be planning for that now! Our path out of any technological singularity may have a lot to do with our path into it, and that path includes our politics and socio-economics. Are we going to wait twenty years until most human labor has little value even in most service industries?
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
Other thing we can do beyond a basic income include expanding our gift economy, improving democratic participatory planning at all levels of government, and improving tools for local subsistence (like gardening robots and cheap solar panels).
see: http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
I agree the human hand is a marvel, along with hand-eye coordination. But these sorts of technologies are rapid displacing the value of much paid human labor in different areas of the economy. Creating factories generally means re-engineering most tasks so they fit what machines can do. Service industries will also do that more and more (like the US post-office automates, fast-food places automate, hospitals automate, people get household vacuuming robots or buy prepared food, etc..) This means our economic social contract is breaking down where an adult's right to consume was linked to selling his or her labor in the market -- as predicted decades ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution
A basic income is one way to address this, but there are a mix of others.
We have vast amounts of technology now, and we should use that technology to create material abundance for all. We do that through five interwoven types of economic operations involving subsistence production, gift giving locally and globally, exchange in the market, planning at various levels of government, and theft/extraction/conquest (see my site). Bitcoins fall mostly into the area of exchange (as an artificially scarce token). However, there is a seeming subsistence aspect in Bitcoins because you can in theory produce them yourself. That is similar to how people can create virtual objects in some online games which they can exchange for national currencies. But, in the case of Bitcoins, they are produced more as a form of almost online gambling (since you may not find one even having put in the electricity).
In general, it is a waste of CPU cycles and electrical energy to engage in this form of creating artificially scarce tokens to be used for exchange. Society woudl be better off if peopel with spare CPU cycles from always on computers donated them to other causes like protein folding or NASA or SETI or whatever. It is better to create locally useful products for subsistence, or to create inherently worthwhile things for exchange or gift-giving. We should be planning how to create more shared abundance not more artificial scarcity.
For those interested in a virtual currencies, a better model is "LETS" (Local Exchange Trading System) systems where currency production is regulated by democratic involvement in a LETS system, which anyone can set up for their local community (subject to any local laws and gathering community support).
http://www.lets-linkup.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_exchange_trading_system
Anything that has some value due to rarity can be used as a currency as a medium of representing demand. That can include artificially created things like fiat dollars, Bitcoins, Kanban tokens, or LETS credits. But a currency not based on one-for-on exchange with a useful item (like electricity currently or food or CPU cycles) only has value if the community gives it value as a medium of exchange and signaling demand. Thus stable currencies need to be regulated by a community or a trusted organization the community delegates the responsibility to -- because a currency represents a social contract. Otherwise, we will see some pattern of valuation as a bubble as the community eventually figures out the dynamics of the thing (which may take some time for the learning to propagate). Example of a community slowly becoming aware it is being collectively scammed in another financial context:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/600m-ponzi-scheme-incubated-small-nc-town-18845335#.UVhOeLAq3D0
The bottom line: it is wasteful of electricity to compute otherwise worthless mathematical functions for arbitrary social reasons. Of course, the same can be said of much gold mining, too -- although at least gold looks pretty and has some inherent usefulness. If people want a fiat currency, there are many ways to create one like via LETS that don't entail that level of waste.
Perhaps the biggest problem with Bitcoin conceptually if it is successful may just be that anyone can make a slight variant of it with a somewhat different mathematical function (Bitcoin1, Bitcoin2 ... Bitcoin100000) -- and then what is the value of Bitcoin0, the first one? The only value is in the social sentiments about it. And feelings can change about the social worth of a pattern of bits in some computer somewhere.
Will some people make a lot of money from Bitcoin0? No doubt, as people have told about on Slashdot already. But people will likely lose a lot in the bubble, too. And the waste of electricity is a surety. LETS its a better idea which promotes a re
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
There are other reasons people make wars (including pride and political power) but the reasons the infrastructure is there to excess is profit-driven. Nothing like preparing for war or resupplying during or afterwards to boost the profits of certain companies. And then there are, sometimes, the profits to be made during the occupation and "reconstruction" phases.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
Estimates there range from about $1 trillion to $6 trillion. A company that can siphon off even just 0.1% of that has made at least a billion dollars. There are billions of dollars to be made destroying parts of North Korea and then pretending to fix them up again. And if the US can get into a huge cold war or lots of proxy wars with China, many companies could make stupendous profits for years.
See also:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1220-28.htm
"There were Seymour Melman's op-eds and letters to the editor in the New York Times starting in his twenties. There were his cogent Congressional testimonies about the permanent war economy and its damage to our civilian economy and necessities of the American people. His economic conversion plans and his advocacy for a muscular peace agreement with the Soviet Union illuminated what kind of economy, innovation and prosperity could be ours in the U.S.A.
Melman's work was detailed and he challenged what President Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" like that of no other academic. He would show how talented scientific and engineering skills were sucked into this permanent war economy to the detriment of civilian jobs and economic development as if people's well-being mattered. "To eliminate hunger in America = $4-5 billion = C-5A aircraft program," he would say, referring to Lockheed Martin's chronically bungled, defective and costly contract."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Homeopathy_as_a_big_picture_example
Yes, there is a lot of nonsense in alternative medicine. But there is a lot of nonsense in mainstream medicine, too (e.g. much mainstream cancer and heart disease treatment is misguided dues to financial conflicts of interest in the providers). We need the best of both. The mind can affect health in a variety of ways -- including by moderating the immune system to reduce inflammation (and possibly destroying some cancer), providing natural internal painkillers, and by choosing to eat healthier and otherwise live a healthier lifestyle (which may even include religious-motivated things like periodic fasting that can have health benefits in some contexts). We need to make the most of those possibilities in a responsible way.
As I suggest in that essay, Randi himself probably got scammed by mainstream medicine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi
"In February 2006, Randi underwent coronary artery bypass surgery."
"If you look into the nutritional medicine that Dr. Joel Fuhrman, MD, practices, but you can also find several others who say the same, you will find that most bypasses are unnecessary and blocked arteries can be unblocked and brought back to health in about two years of an agressive nutritional approach of a diet heavy on vegetables, fruits, and beans (and a little nuts, seeds, and whole grains). So, in one of the greatest decisions of your life, you were, I'd suggest, scammed by the mainstream medical community and its connection with the mainstream agri-business. In fact, people who get a bypass but don't change their eating habits tend to just have the same problem come back."
See also:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/PCI_angioplasty_article.aspx
"Interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery is basically a scam based on a misunderstanding of the nature of heart disease. Searching for and treating obstructive plaque does not address the areas of the coronary vascular tree most likely to rupture and cause heart attacks. If there was never another CABG or angioplasty performed or stent placed, patients with heart disease would be better off. Doctors would be forced to educate our citizens that their heart disease risk is determined by what they place on their forks. Millions of lives would be dramatically extended. To abandon the theory of stretching and cutting out areas with plaque would shut down interventional cardiology, nearly all cardiovascular surgery, and many suppliers of the biotechnology. In many cases, interventional cardiology is the major income generator to hospitals. The ending of this ill-conceived, out-dated and ineffective technology would dramatically downsize hospitals in the United States and free up over $100 billion annually in medical care costs. Besides being ineffective, interventional cardiology places the responsibility in the hands of the doctor and not the patients. When patients finally realize they must take control of their heart problems with aggressive dietary modifications (and when needed medications for temporary periods) we will essentially solve the health crisis in America.
The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportuni
Existing military technology like nukes, plagues, and bureaucracy, are so powerful that they could greatly harm most human life on the planet. What kinds of plagues does north Korea got? Do we really know? I worried about the same thing when the USA invaded Iraq. Plagues are the poor man's WMD. The USA got lucky with Iraq in that we did not see hundreds of millions of US casualties on US soil from a plague launched by Saddam when things looked bleak for him personally and billions more casualties globally among those on the sidelines.
Soon enough, cheap military robotics (flying mines), nanotech, cyberwar, and other things will add to that list of massively harmful possibilities which we have, at best, limited defenses against at the civilian level and could thus completely disrupt our infrastructure in a place like the USA. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
As in my sig, the biggest challenge of the 21st century is technologies of abundance like nuclear energy and biotechnology and so on can be made into powerful weapons or they can be used to bring material abundance for all. The increase in powers of our technology are making the Earth seem smaller and smaller relative to the capacity for either governments or individuals to do harm. Modern technology requires us, if prudent, to both expand into space and to come up with better ways of living together on Earth.
http://globalcommunity.org/flash/wombat.shtml
Because the US military has not yet integrated this truth into all their doctrines, they still seem to think they can "defend" the USA against an (apparently) crazy person by a show of force, as with these bombers. That does not work that way if the person is crazy enough or if the local social dynamics is crazy enough to force a leader on to ever more aggressive actions. Just look at the US financial meltdown to show how individuals or collectives can deny reality for a long time or can take great risks (Enron) and so eventually destroy themselves while greatly harming the lives of everyone around them.
That is why the USA needs to rethink its security policy along the lines of mutual and intrinsic security. Thus:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-open-letter-to-the-intelligence-advanced-programs-research-agency-iarpa/
"Especially in conjunction with an exponential Moore's law, it feels like there has been a systematic global intelligence failure to connect the dots about exponential change and present that information to decision makers in a persuasive way."
There may be no good way to deal with this situation. As with most disease (including mental illness) it is best to avoid it by healthier global living.
http://www.changemakers.com/morehealth/entries/health-sensemaking
One other idea by me though -- to airdrop millions of small cell-phone or tablet-sized mesh-networked solar-powered computers into repressive countries:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192755&cid=15823703
Total cost: $1 billion to transform North Korea into a connected place. Or about the cost of one of those bombers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_B-2_Spirit
Not saying it would work for sure, but at least it is a different option.
Remember: the people of oppressive regimes are generally suffering a lot too. Why make them suffer more just to get the leadership to change? That tends rarely to work anyway (for example, Cuba or Iraq). Any external threat just tends to make collectives pull together and silence dissent -- just like happened in
Great analogy as an example of "market failure" due in part to "unquantified risk" (and to a lesser extent de-facto monpoly by market position).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure
"Market failures are often associated with information asymmetries, non-competitive markets, principal-agent problems, externalities, or public goods. The existence of a market failure is often used as a justification for government intervention in a particular market."
From another domain, but a related example of greed and short-sightedness:
"Regulating Real But Unquantified Risk [with antibiotics given in animal feed]"
http://www.riskworld.com/abstract/2002/SRAam02/ab02aa311.htm
There have been Star Trek episodes like that too, where people are on a Holodeck with their memories suppressed. That's also why, even having been in a PhD program in ecology and evolution, I have to accept it is possible that our universe is a simulation started 6000 years ago from some old backup.
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
Or that everything in it may have been designed with tools that involve interactive design of selections from variations, like software I co-wrote about designing plants and tunes:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/
http://www.evojazz.com/
The problem of course is that, even if true and interesting to contemplate, those sorts of beliefs are not very practical, like in understanding how the flu virus mutates every year, or in figuring out where mineral resources are likely located based on geological processes, and so on. Or even in understanding how religion may have come about and persisted in the first place (a point I first saw in someone's comment on slashdot a year or two ago):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religions
http://evolution-of-religion.com/
https://www.google.com/search?q=evolution+of+religion
I also think many scientists overreach -- moving from scientific statements about material things to an unackowledged theology of "scientistic materialsm" like Charles Tart points out.
http://blog.paradigm-sys.com/about-dr-tart/the-end-of-materialism/
"Of course there are nonsensical elements mixed in with religion and spirituality: that's true for all areas of human life. But to totally deny our spiritual nature, as science apparently does, harms and inhibits people. Indeed, a deeper look shows that it's not science that denies our spirituality, it's scientism, a rigid philosophy of materialism, masquerading as science."
Some suggest we are not Earthly beings on a spiritual journey, but rather are instead Spiritual beings on an earthly journey. If so, it is hard to say for sure what difference is makes how long that journey is -- whether 15 hours or 15 decades?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Dreams_May_Come
People also find it worthwhile to play plenty of video games that may only last a short time. So a reasonable skeptic has to accept a lot of things are possible and that our knowledge of all the levels of reality is apparently limited as human beings. Still, then there is the issue of what is useful to believe in this current reality as far as dealing with the pains and pleasures and relationships and values and challenges and so on that it presents.
From 2011: http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2368162&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=37016386
"Twirlip: Towards a 21st Century Worldwide Public Intelligence Desktop Platform for Collaborative Sensemaking, Analysis, Risk Assessment, and Horizon Scanning"
Around them, I also put together another proposal to collect and organize stories about security issues as a modernized "Risks Digest" using software like my wife desiged my wife wrote called "Rakontu":
http://www.rakontu.org/
Another spin on that from this month:
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/civic-sensemaking-by-working-with-stories-using-rakontu/
With some more code links and a video here:
http://twirlip.com/
See also:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-open-letter-to-the-intelligence-advanced-programs-research-agency-iarpa/
From 1999 to NASA, some ideas about rethinking our manufacturing infrastructure systematically and in an open source way:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
And also to DARPA in 1999: ... I also don't think we have a significant choice. Such self-replicating and self-repairing systems will be developed eventually anyway, if only from commercial competitive pressures. The only thing we can do is slow down their development. Yet that has its own risks of our current infrastructure being overwhelmed by current weapons of mass destruction or sophisticated terrorism. Also, should such self-replicating technology be developed first clandestinely by an oppressive regime, the consequences for the United States could be disastrous."
"DARPA Progam Manager Position on Self-Replicating technology"
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups=#!msg/virgle/feS-LaqnFyM/z0sqkvvCx2QJ
"We of course need to minimize military tensions around the world through arms control, international aid, and setting a good example. This delays the culmination of these other trend to war, but in my opinion will not prevent them because of ever-present potential for a small group of unstable people to use weapons of mass destruction.
From 1987 for grad studies on improving security via self-replicating space habitats:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
A long string of failed proposals. :-)
Well, at least I can still try to promote great ideas by others that have met with more success: :-)
"A Conceptual Framework for System Fault Tolerance"
http://hissa.nist.gov/chissa/SEI_Framework/framework_1.html
And I can keep on working towards those other ideas as very limited spare time permits.
I guess I am mostly just a creation of 1960s-1970s TV about our future in space -- to keep banging my head against the wall of space and security for decades? :-) Star Trek, The Starlost, Space 1999, Silent Running, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Lost In Space, Thunderbirds, and so on... And way too many sci-fi novels. :-)
By that line of reasoning, a wolf that can survive well in the wild will do just as well living in a mall? Children and parents are *adapted* to a certain environment. Add endless new hazards and you can expect changing results... There are limits to human vigilance and human flexibility.
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
From: http://dontmesswithtaxes.typepad.com/dont_mess_with_taxes/2013/03/irs-boldly-went-too-far-with-star-trek-parody-video.html
"The cost of both videos was around $60,000, with the Star Trek one accounting for most of that expenditure, according to the IRS. They were produced at the agency's in-house studio, which Boustany said "may have" cost more than $4 million to build."
That said, I think this was actually a good investment for the IRS, to create an in-house facility that gives it more expertise in video media. Video is an important way these days to communicate with citizens. TurboTax has always been helpful with its videos explaining tax issues. Really, $60K to show the IRS can make high-quality videos at an annual meeting is nothing on the scale of the that organization. It's sad they have to back peddle on trying to be innovative or at least "in touch". Of all the things the US government does, this seems one of the more worthwhile to me -- trying to use humor to educate.
Here is an example from IBM of a funny video with "Rowlf the Dog" muppet made for a sales convention, just to show how this is typical for large organizations:
"Muppet meeting Film IBM"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KNT0DF6yrg
I'd be more concerned if I were the IRS about whether they licensed the copyrights for the music or various visuals or even possibly need to license Star Trek trademarks -- not that I'm a huge extended copyright fan, because if we had older copyright laws still on the books, all that music would be public domain by now, but unfortunately, it is not... Unfortunately, the laws like for copyright (and all to ofter tax policy) are being written to often for narrow private interests, not the broader public interest.
Perhaps we on the sidelines can look forward to an upcoming RIAA vs. the IRS "battle of the titans" lawsuit, and then maybe also vice-versa if the IRS were to start digging? :-)
http://news.slashdot.org/story/00/09/15/174230/courtney-love-sues-for-her-share
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/01/15/1329200/antitrust-case-against-riaa-reinstated
http://www.themusicindustryissick.com/post/9966065351/courtney-love-does-the-math
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/left_and_right.html
"Although the [extreme] Right and [extreme] Left have major differences that make it almost impossible for them to agree on anything, they also have certain -- if not immediately apparent -- similarities as well. In fact, they are remarkably similar for how different they are. Since these similarities are of a type that tends to make them blind to any other view, these similarities further reinforce the dichotomy between them: that is, the similarities I am about to discuss make for more differences."
Without the internet and the world wide web on top of it, it is unlikely I could have learned so much or passed it on to others, like I mentioned in this essay from 2004:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
"First, as a side note, I could not have written an essay like this before the World Wide Web -- I just would not have had the time to cover so many areas in a couple days writing from home, far from a university library, and relying on Google to make solid ideas that were just wisps of memory (from years of reading broadly on the web); nor would I before the wide adoption of the internet and email and the world wide web have been able to provide immediately accessible links for further exploration by readers, all at essentially no direct monetary cost. That is an example of the sort of exponential increase in technological capacity this essay is referring to. I certainly would not call this essay a scholarly work as it neither cites enough primary sources or connects all the dots, and I'm sure it has its share of flaws, but please consider it as a proof of concept that if even a little of what I write is true, there is enough to go around and make this Earth a more fantastic and more free place for every being on it. "
Just wanted to thank you for the encouragement, bbelt, which contributed to my submitting this entry to the current Knight News Challenge on Open Government:
https://www.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/civic-sensemaking-by-working-with-stories-using-rakontu/