"More energy goes into making gasoline from electricity and natural gas than it would take to make electric cars go the same distance" http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power "Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that U.S. domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy.[1] In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current. [2]"
Given the exponetial growth of renewable energy, and how PV solar panels are about to reach grid parity and the prices will continue to drop, I think we will be all renewables by about 2030 from market forces alone at this point. (Unless cold fusion pans out, or if small scale nuclear like Hyperion gets popular.)
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt "Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes."
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit?... Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
I suggest just give the money as a basic income to the parents instead... http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html "New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators:-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out."
But sadly, true. For a related example:
"Twilight War: The Folly of U.S. Space Dominance" by Mike Moore http://www.amazon.com/Twilight-War-Folly-Space-Dominance/dp/1598130188 "Moore warns of the dire consequences of the U.S. drive toward the military dominance of space. Twilight War is an indispensable resource for anyone looking to get smart on a possible new cold war in space. Wide-ranging research and an elegant writing style make for an easy tutorial. This is a marvelous book." (Joseph Cirincione, vice president for national security, Center for American Progress)"
Or; http://www.cfr.org/united-states/toward-american-space-dominance/p12179 "The Pentagon has avoided specifics about the report, but soon afterward the Bush administration released an unclassified version of its new U.S. National Space Policy, which goes far beyond previous policies in asserting America’s right to respond forcefully to such threats. Bill Martel, a space policy expert at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, tells CFR.org in this podcast that the new space policy “sounds like a precursor to the weaponization of space.” Supporters readily concede the point. “Space supremacy is now the official policy of the U.S. government,” writes Michael Goldfarb in the Weekly Standard."
Thanks for your other comments. Personally, I would not like to be president.:-) I feel sorry in general for politicians etc.
As I quoted Alfie Kohn here from "No Contest: The Case Against Competition": http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html#Moving_beyond_competitiveness_towards_cooperation_at_PU "If competitiveness is inherently compensatory, if it is an effort to prove oneself and stave off feelings of worthlessness, it follows that the healthier the individual (in the sense of having a more solid, unconditional sense of self-esteem), the less need there is to compete.... I do not want to shy away from the incendiary implications of all of this. To suggest in effect that many of our heroes (entrepreneurs and athletes, movie stars and politicians) may be motivated by low self-esteem, to argue that our "state religion" is a sign of psychological ill-health -- this will not sit well with many people.(Page 103)"
That said, one can learn a lot by playing games and being challenged. So, how to interpret all that in daily life for the rest of us is open to question. Also, it is compounded by this fact: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/07/health/la-he-mean-girls-20110208 "Faris and a colleague studied the relationships among 3,722 middle and high school students over the course of an academic year and found that the teenagers' propensity toward aggression rose along with their social status. Aggressive behavior peaked when students hit the 98th percentile for popularity, suggesting that they were working hard to claw their way to the very top. However, those who were in the top 2% of a school's social hierarchy generally didn't harass their fellow students. At that point, they may have had little left to gain by being mean, and picking on others only made them seem insecure, Faris said."
I agree with you on reflectiveness, and thanks for saying that in such an interesting way about quality. In any case though, if I take credit for anything, it is mostly reading and learning about the ideas of many, many others who have gone before me (including people like Leon Shenandoah).
We need better tools for community-powered reflectiveness IMHO, as I su
"What I want is highly efficient cruise missiles with HUGE chemical loads and an awesome satellite imaging system: I want to point at every missile silo in the country that just bombed us and make them operationally defunct in one hour."
Thanks for the other comments, which in general I can see making some sense in the context of finite games, especially your point at the end on not poking the tiger. As well as the issue about morale.
On the quoted point, the problem is that it is stated US defense doctrine to assume that any potential physical threat is a real threat that needs to be responded to. So, if everyone adopts a similar policy, everyone else would, by US military logic, have to see the USA as a terrible threat that needs to be neutralized ASAP in some way. So, we would get arms races. Eventually, whatever weapons are lying around are going to get used, if only by accident or misunderstanding.
Real knifes generally don't act on their own, but robots, cruise missiles, and bureaucracies are a lot closer to magic swords that can more easily be set in motion by accident or malfunction (or in the case of the USA, by a president with some sort of emotional issue about Iraq). Any system set for automatic reprisals then compounds the problem. Granted, it's not quite as big a problem if, as you outline, people use conventional weapons and target only military installations as opposed to target populations, but that's not the current policy in the USA.
I feel that big institutional bureaucracies and their artifacts just have a different sort of logic than human individuals in a one-on-one match. That's based on reading stuff by people like Langdon Winner "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a theme in political thought". Or of course, seeing the movie, Dr. Strangelove.:-)
Also, if you think of US expansionist history, the USA has its own skeletons in the closet (like the displacement of the Native Americans, the taking of California from Mexico, what happened in the Philippines, and so on). Or, for that matter what just happened with Iraq, invading a sovereign country on false information.
Anyway, I just think the nature of the game changes as we change the scale. At some point, I would expect quantitative changes in military capacity need to lead to qualitative changes in doctrine. But has that happened? When a war is over in fifteen minutes, and both societies are in ruins, there is a lot less time for sounding out the other's intentions, style, and so on. What would Go be like if you had to play 100 stones in one minutes or lose them (and there was no turn taking)? Maybe there are such games? But they might look a lot different than what you are used to?:-) So, a big quantitative change (shortening the duration by a factor of 10X or 100X) can probably lead to a qualitative change in the Go experience. The same is true for modern warfare I would think. That's why I feel James P. Carse's emphasis on "the infinite game" is so essential (which is essentially the game of playing lots of games of Go and not letting your life rest on the outcome of just one).
Or, if someone said you if you lot a game of Go you had to stop playing, would you play differently? Would it enhance or spoil the quality of the play? Would it turn you into someone up-front always demanding a lot of extra pieces to ensure your victory before you start playing? And then what would be the point? You would stop growing as a player... You can only enjoy Go in that sense because it is part of an infinite flow of Go games where you can take chances and grow, as do your opponents.
But, nuclear war (or plagues or robots or whatever) is more like that Go game situation where if you lose you can't play anymore every again. But, what would the Go community be like if everyone was told that -- it's win or you can never play again? It would presumably destroy a sense of community, right? Who would play? So, in that sense, nuclear war is a very different game than
"The way to end a fight is to hit the other guy back until he stops wanting to be hit; level of force and end goal (knock-out, kill) depends on the attack you're receiving and its severity (idiot bar fight, person trying to kill you... are they strong or weak?"
Thanks for the reply on this link and the additional insights to Go (which I have only played a few times). I had a boss/coworker at IBM Research who was a Go player, and told me a lot about it (including the chess/go distinction in outlook), but he would not teach me to play it as he said it might destroy my productivity by taking up all my time (as he said it had to someone else he had taught it to).:-) But, it intrigued me enough to get a set and play a little with my wife and to read more about it. So, I really appreciate all the first hand info.
While I can't disagree that the approach you outlined that I quote can sometimes work for a time, it can lead to future conflicts, either sneak attacks or arms races. Here is a different way to deal with day-to-day bullies (although Izzy Kalman admits it won't work well with someone who is emotionally unstable or has a history of violence): http://www.bullies2buddies.com/How-to-Stop-Being-Teased-and-Bullied-Without-Really-Trying
Still, Izzy Kalman's techniques assume the rule of law, but war, even with "laws of war", usually involves times when the rule of law is essentially suspended or being renegotiated.
Still, in general, all wars come to an end and a peace is negotiated, as people decide the cost of war exceeds the cost of the peace (or when everyone is dead). Again, I suggest that you still assume in what you learn from Go that the other player is not going to smash the board to the ground and you are not both going to be killed by robots in that case. Unfortunately, that crazy situation I suggest is more and more the norm as our technology continues to grow in capacity. That is why Albert Einstein said essentially that with the harnessing of the power of the atom, everything has changed but our way of thinking. Also, it is more in the news these days that then president George Bush was pushing with war with Iraq for personal reasons even before 9/11. So, even the "leader of the free world" can have emotional problems that lead to launching a war which potentially (thankfully not) could have been met with a plague in that case (the poor man's WMD) as Hussein realized he could not win and maybe decided to take everyone with him. GW decided to play with fire, it's a miracle the USA only got burned to the tune of a couple trillion dollars and not mass casualtes in the tens of millions (even though blowback from Iraq may well in the future still cause mass casualties in the USA as those in Iraq who have seen their families destroyed by US actions may decide in the future to follow a vindictive course with WMDs).And of course no doubt many people have died in the USA from the want of money to go into wellness or transporation safety and infrastructure and so on -- but a little old lady not getting good care in a nursing home starved for funds is not normally called a casualty of war, even if there may be a connection.
When, as in the original article, we talk about whether to invest in "defense" or invest in "science", we make a choice about how we want to shape the future. Personally, I am all for investing in "defense", but to me, "defense" means mutual
Thanks for the insights in this (as well as your other two recent replies).
Still, without denying the truths in what you wrote, there remains the issue of arms races and of one player dashing the game to the ground. That is the "finite" vs. "infinite" game aspect.
From: http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm "Kohn defines competition as any situation where one person's success is dependent upon another's failure. Put another way, in competition two or more parties are pursuing a goal that cannot be attained by all. He calls this 'mutually exclusive goal attainment' (MEGA).
Kohn goes on to define two distinct types of competition. In 'structural competition' MEGA is an explicit, defining element in the nature of the interaction. For instance in a game of tennis there can be only one winner. The same is true of beauty contests, presidential elections, and wars. Everyone knows they are out to beat the others though the rules of engagement may vary considerably between events.
Intentional competition' is a state of mind, an individual's competitiveness or his proclivity for besting others. Anyone can go to a party determined to establish him or herself as the most intelligent, the most attractive, etc. Similarly, in school, the work place, and on teams people can try to beat others whether or not anyone is formally keeping score and declaring winners and losers.
One place where competition cannot exist, according to Kohn, is within oneself. Such striving to better one's own standing is an individual, not interactive matter; it does not involve MEGA. Of course some people cannot imagine pushing themselves without the possibility of 'winning' or the threat of 'losing', but this by no means implies that all motivation is dependent upon competitive frameworks. Throughout history countless large and small accomplishments have been achieved simply out of an individual's desire to do better without any thought of beating others. Such striving for mastery cannot be confused with competition."
In any case, if you and an "opponent" play Go mainly to increase your mastery of the game and ideas like balance (as you obviously have) and to find joy in cooperating together to do so, then I guess one might say you are playing a cooperative infinite game, even through the finite competitive mechanism of Go?:-)
Anyway, thanks again for the very informative analysis of current US defense posture from the perspective of an experienced Go player.
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/dispatches-heartland/2011/feb/8/ibm-watson-jeopardy-harbinger-vexing-politics/ "It’s hard to imagine the mood of the country changing if these trends persist. Will our bad mood turn to deep funk if we’re entering a period of long-term, systemic underemployment without even a hint of a plan for how we’ll manage? Does it make sense simply to hold on to our faith that eventually life will be like it was in the 1940s, 50s and 60s? It is marvelous to witness the technological advances brought about by human ingenuity. It’s a kick to watch computers compete against humans on shows like Jeopardy. But, IBM Watson’s real success on Jeopardy would be if it helps kick-start a meaningful political conversation about the economy of the future."
"We need to train people in martial arts (Judo, Aikido, etc) so they can defend themselves"
Having training in Aikido, I think the main reason people should learn that is to be able to redirect aggressive impulses in more positive directions.:-) Which is essentially what the entire art is about...
"Aikido, redirecting an attacker’s hostile energy" http://www.mvccglacier.com/2010/11/aikido-redirecting-an-attackers-hostile-energy/
Or, in other words, accepting that all emotions can be valid and healthy, it is what we do with them that matters most:
"What do you do with the mad that you feel" http://pbskids.org/rogers/songLyricsWhatDoYouDo.html
So, how does a war machine better allow us to do better Aikido at redirecting another's hostile energy in positive directions? Maybe some aspects of it do. So, can you find those aspects and build on them?
More on the true spirit of Aikido:
"Terry Dobson's Aikido Story: a paraphrasing of "Another Way"" http://unofficial.ki-society.org/another.html """ Terry Dobson was riding on a train in Japan (in the 60's?), when a drunken man boarded. The man was violent, aggressive, and a real physical threat to the other passengers, whom he pushed around and bullied.
Dobson had been intensively training in aikido almost every day for three years, and was eager to put that practice into "real" action. Although he knew his teacher had said that aikido is the art of reconciliation, and that even wanting to fight means that you've already lost touch with the Universe, Dobson, in his youthful eager way, wanted to physically take down this threatening drunk in an act of righteous justice.
Just as Dobson was starting to egg the drunk into attacking him, however, a little old man interrupted by calling out joyfully to the drunken man. In a cheerful manner, the little old man started talking to the drunk, asking friendly questions and going on about his own family and the persimmon tree in his garden.
Soon thereafter, the drunk's nasty exterior had melted away. He was weeping, explaining his wife had died, that he'd lost his job and his home, and that his life was a total wreck and that he was terribly ashamed... he was lying with his head on the little old man's lap, while the old man stroked his dirty hair. The would-be attacker had been brought to peace -- all without a single martial arts move.
Dobson realized that what he had witnessed was real aikido in action. What he had wanted to do -- vigilante-style, self-righteous justice -- was not aikido. What the old man had done, though, was aikido as it was meant to be -- humble, gentle love, bringing peace and healing. """
So, yes, I agree with you. More people should study Aikido.:-) But for more for learning about "reconciliation" than "how to hurt someone else who you see as threatening".
Some other points on: "It's ridiculous to think we don't need self defense, in the same way that it's ridiculous to ban guns and weapons and tell people violence never solved anything (French taxation without representation. British taxation without representation. Slavery in America. Slavery in Haiti. Hitler. Stalin. Japan's expansionism. It goes on)."
History is tricky, because one can always pull out a situation where people have let things get really bad because they would not consider other alternatives and then say, see, violence was the only answer.
Canada secede from Britain without a shot being fired, has a better health care system than the USA, and treated its native people better. What did the US revolution accomplish in that sense?
The British abolished slavery without an internal civil war.
The British said they would abolish slavery if they won the American revolutionary war, so was it good that the rich white Americans won? Something like a third of the people left the country (mostly to Canada). (I'm not saying there were not legitimate grievances.)
If the South had been allowed to secede from the Union, could things have ultimately been better for the Blacks than the grinding poverty and economic abuse they got after the Civil War, since the South would have toppled eventually over slavery.? See also the previous point. Also, slavery might not have been possible without all the people making fancy weapons to use to enslave people like Columbus did.
It also was a reaction to reparations related to a previous war, and that war itself was related to compulsory schooling. Abolish compulsory schooling and maybe we would not need so much war machinery? From: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm "The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done."
The USSR crumbled in large part because of a people's revolution in the 1990s (even as the USA likes to take the credit). Still, had it not engaged in a foolish arms race with the USA (or had the USA not been so provocative) the country that put the first satellite in orbit, that put the first man and woman into space, that put up the first space station, that invented phage therapy, that country might have been a much happier place. But every time doves in the Kremlin said, maybe the USA people are not so crazy, the USA would push another round of weapons and the hawks would say, see I told you so, and the doves would get purged. Who was at fault there?
On Japan, well true they had a messed up culture in a lot of ways and did a lot of evil things in other countries -- but it was a militaristic culture of the kind you are celebrating (Samurai). The USA also attacked Japan economically (shutting of oil flows) before Japan attacked at Pearl
As I see it, both the USSR and the USA lost the cold war. it is just taking the USA a little longer to topple, given, as you say, all the money the USA had to use to that end (and the social processes set up then and before just continue). From a two time congressional medal of honor winner and Marine Major General, Smedly Butler: 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."
See also how your life depends on how well Russian and Chinese computers in charge of nuclear weapons are working (computers the USA may have tried to sabotage).
Sure, the USA has a war machine you may trust to only go off when and where it is pointed. Funny how you need to trust the Russians and Chinese about that too, when presumably we have a war machine because we can't trust the Russians or the Chinese or whoever else. How much do you trust Russian and Chinese engineers with your life? If you are willing to do that, then why are you so worried about them taking... what?
Every step in an arms race may make a weird kind of sense, but overall, the end result of the game when you play with post-scarcity powered weapons is pretty much everyone is going to die as the arms race spirals out of control. Plagues, nukes, killer robots, security bureaucracies with gas chambers, asteroid bombs, particle beams, and so on -- take your pick if you want to keep building the war machine and encourage everyone else to keep building the machine.
"99 red ballons - Nena " http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14IRDDnEPR4
See also, for a new idea about games: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games "Finite games have a definite beginning and ending. They are played with the goal of winning. A finite game is resolved within the context of its rules, with a winner of the contest being declared and receiving a victory. The rules exist to ensure the game is finite. Examples are debates, sports, receiving a degree from an educational institution, belonging to a society, or engaging in war. Beginning to participate in a finite game requires conscious thought, and is voluntary; continued participation in a round of the game is involuntary. Even exiting the game early must be provided for by the rules. This may be likened to a zero sum game (though not all finite games are literally zero sum, in that the sum of positive outcomes can vary).
Infinite games, on the other hand, do not have a knowable beginning or ending. They are played with the goal of continuing play and a purpose of bringing more players into the game. An infinite game continues play, for sake of play. If the game is approaching resolution because of the rules of play, the rules must be changed to allow continued play. The rules exist to ensure the game is infinite. The only known example is life. Beginning to participate in an infinite game may be involuntary, in that it doesn't require conscious thought. Continuing participation in the current round of game-play is voluntary. "It is an inv
Living in water provides two benefits -- radiation shielding and progressive resistance for muscle maintenance (think whales having big bones but they essentially live in a weightless environment).
From Wikipedia: "Liquid immersion provides a way to reduce the physical stress of G forces.... Liquid breathing for acceleration protection may never be practical because of the difficulty of finding a suitable breathing medium of similar density to water that is compatible with lung tissue. Perfluorocarbon fluids are twice as dense as water, hence unsuitable for this application."
However, consider if a suitable compound was found. Ignore the issue of acceleration. What is a potential big problem on long duration space flights or indefinite habitation in microgravity is bone loss. The body adapts to lack of stress by eliminating bone and muscle that in no longer used, but this makes returning to a strong gravity field problematical. Savage has proposed future medicine or genetic engineering to overcome this, and one can also in theory create big rotating O'Neill-style structures, and there is also (boring) microgravity exercise, but what if there was another way?
Fish and mammals like whales and dolphins spend their entire lives in a sort-of microgravity suspended in water. They can have strong bones and muscles. Aquatic therapy in a pool is often recommended for humans to improve strength. So presumably, like the mythical Seapeople, if humans could breathe a liquid while living in outer space in microgravity (like during a long trip to Mars), then by just living and moving around in a liquid environment in a space craft, they would maintain their muscle tone and bone mass. The liquid might also provide cosmic ray shielding, and might even be designed to use cosmic rays to clean or re-oxegenate itself.
An important difference between an undersea civilization and a liquid-breathing space-faring one is that there is no water pressure in space in Zero-G (beyond surface tension or compression). Thus, liquid structures could extend in space for miles in three dimensions of endless tubes, all at essentially the same pressure. So there would be no risk of the "bends" when moving around this construction. Another possibility is that a big drop of liquid a mile across might be all one needed for a large space habitat floating in zero-G if the surface tension held the liquid in. This might make it trivial to construct habitats, and micrometeorites might pose less of a problem as the surface would heal itself by surface tension. Comets and asteroids could be mined, but the major result need only be a stream of this breathable liquid, which could be shaped into habitats of desired size by how much liquid was added.
This is all speculative at this point.
Liquid breathing obviously should not be experimented with outside a well-monitored research laboratory situation due to the risk of drowning or lung damage. Various research has already been performed, see Wikipedia for links.
Anyway, all speculative. But kind of cool (to me). I was inspired a litt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilla_Watson "If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity "The fully-loaded cost (not price) of solar electricity is $0.25/kWh or less in most of the OECD countries. By late 2011, the fully-loaded cost is likely to fall below $0.15/kWh for most of the OECD and reach $0.10/kWh in sunnier regions. These cost levels are driving some emerging trends:[8]... Oerlikon Solar announced in 2010 that its 'ThinFab' production line is capable of manufacturing 143Wp panels at a cost of 0.5 euro per watt (0.64 dollars per watt) and has a capacity of 120MW per year. The company also claims that its production plants have very low energy consumption rates, so that the energy payback time of its 10% efficient, silicon thin-film modules is less than one year.[12]"
Who has been telling you otherwise, and why?
Eventually we will have 3D printing systems that probably can also recycle plastic and reuse it, as well as print out plastic solar panels to power them, and print out equipment to produce plastic...
I agree with you about Go, but ultimately we need to move past the irony of using tools of abundance to fight over artificial scarcity in the real world, like the irony of using nuclear weapons to fight over oil fields, or using military robots to force people to work like industrial robots, etc... http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
So, ironically, cutting science and feeding the war machine out of fears about scarcity would just make the problem of this irony worse...
I'm sorry, but there is a link between nutrition and many chronic diseases. And it's not just about "boosting" the immune system, but also about having a "smarter" immune system that knows better when to turn itself on and off in different situations.
Other sources on curing type-2 diabetes with diet in a matter of days in most cases: http://www.rawfor30days.com/index4.html http://www.ravediet.com/preview.html If you study the science, you will see why. The combination of removal of refined carbohydrates, plus significant eventual weight loss, puts the body back into a range where it can produce enough insulin on its own (with less insulin resistance due to less fat) that the body can manage itself again (in most cases of type-2).
Dr. Fuhrman is not a "questionable source". He is a board certified family practice doctor, author of numerous books, has a published study to show his successes, and has been on numerous media shows, and so on. His work is probably the best scientifically footnoted recommendation of anyone in the field of health and nutrition.
As for Lupus or Herpes, I can only point to what he says: http://drfuhrman.com/disease/Other.aspx "As long as you are still breathing, it is still possible to improve your health with improvements in lifestyle and nutrition. It is typical for people to see a variety of great changes when they adopt the high, nutrient diet-style which I recommend. Besides reaching an ideal weight and lowering blood pressure and cholesterol, other problems are resolved too. For example, it is common for those with attacks of recurrent herpes to stop experiencing attacks. Those with indigestion and reflux don’t need their acid-suppression therapy anymore. People stop getting hemmorhoids. Their body odor improves. They have better stamina and think more clearly, and their skin tone and color improves."
If you don't want to explore that, well, that's certainly your choice. There is a lot of misinformation and conflict of interest out there and it is hard to wade through it. And no one can guarantee results.
But the logic is there -- immune system health is effected by things like vitamin D status and vegetable and fruit consumption (and probiotics and good sleep and humor and so on). That fact is undeniable based on the overwhelming scientific evidence, even with most scientific money going in to prove magic bullet drugs and ignoring basic nutrition.
Nutrition matters. Other things matter as well, of course.
As I've said before, unfortunately, a focus on magic bullets often distracts us from the basics. And the meat, dairy, processed corn, and big pharma companies are in no hurry to tell us any different (even though each can sometimes be part of a healthy life etc.).
"On the other hand, not eating your veggies just affects your own health."
Well, are you saying being vegetable deficient (or eating too much sugar and refined starch etc.) does not put everyone else's health at risk as well, by the same argument you use for promoting vaccination, if such an eating style compromises someone's immune system?
I'm not saying whether that applies to you. That is just a general fact about health. And even the most casual glance at US Americans shows almost all are vegetable deficient.
I personally am not angry with you whatever you eat or why; you just sounded angry about the vaccination issue. I'm just asking you, if that anger exists and is justified, is it legitimate to consider such anger applicable for other contexts?
Should I get angry when I see someone drive up to a fast food restaurant?
It would seem to me that if a person is not eating well, and then that person's immune system can't fight off infection well because that person is vegetable deficient by a lifestyle choice or unwillingness to break out of a "pleasure trap", then that person is creating a health hazard for other people?
Of course, not many people know about pleasure traps or how to break out of them, so the issue of willfullness is questionable, and in this society, the whole society essentially makes it hard to eat well: http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html "These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."
With that said, I can see your point about the issue of what public figures say as opposed to what private individuals do, which is indeed a very good point I can agree with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity "The fully-loaded cost (not price) of solar electricity is $0.25/kWh or less in most of the OECD countries. By late 2011, the fully-loaded cost is likely to fall below $0.15/kWh for most of the OECD and reach $0.10/kWh in sunnier regions. These cost levels are driving some emerging trends:[8]... Oerlikon Solar announced in 2010 that its 'ThinFab' production line is capable of manufacturing 143Wp panels at a cost of 0.5 euro per watt (0.64 dollars per watt) and has a capacity of 120MW per year. The company also claims that its production plants have very low energy consumption rates, so that the energy payback time of its 10% efficient, silicon thin-film modules is less than one year.[12]..."
Not to disagree that oil production has (or will soon have) peaked, but whale oil peaked, too, and we survived that, and the whales are better off for us moving on to other things, too. Wind and PV are here now, and growing exponentially. In twenty to thirty years at current rates of growth, they will supply all our power. And nuclear continues to improve, too, as with Hyperion, for somewhat the same reasons as renewables are getting better, more research, better materials, and a design focus on safety.
Look at it this way. We live in a community with lots of apple trees making golden delicious apples that are healthy for you and let you live a good long happy life. Those trees are outside everyone's homes. The problem is, you have to walk a little ways, get out a ladder, climb into the tree, and pick the apples. There are also rotten oily coal fruits that drop from the sky all the time. To eat those, you just have to walk out your door and pick them off the ground, although a group of people said they have first rights to them and you have to pay an annual "defense" tax just because you might pick them. Rotten oily coal fruits taste awful, give you gas, and shorten your life, but they sure are easy to get, and they are cheap at baseball games, plus you are already paying a tax for them anyway. So, everyone says golden apples are too expensive, eats rotten coal fruits insteads, suffers bloating from gas, and dies early. Whenever a few crazy people try to get together organized groups to pick the golden apples, or to make special equipment to make those apples easier to get without climbing trees, the large numbers of people who make money off of selling rotten oily coal fruits at baseball games beat the crap out of these innovators with baseball bats, and then they go around and cut down some of the golden fruit trees, too, just to make their point. Some scientists now say rotten coal fruits are not falling as often from the sky these days, and may stop falling altogether in a few years due to changing weather conditions. Is this a good or bad thing? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
Both are involved with immune function in different ways. Adequate vitamin D is needed to make the brain's master antioxidant, glutathione. Adequate iodine helps excrete heavy metals. Both are involved with zapping cancer cells (it's said the average adult gets one cancer cell a day, but a good immune system deals with it). Vitamin D is essential to preventing pregnancy complications, including C-sections.
The US RDA for iodine may be way too low, especially considering how much bromine and fluorine kids are exposed to. The vitamin D RDA is also too low, even with being recently revised upward.
Let's get that all right before arguing too much over other stuff and what the true risk/reward assessment is for otherwise healthy kids and vaccines. A focus on magic bullets may be leading us to miss the big picture here about optimal health, which is earned by eating right and a lot of good lifestyle choices.
If pediatricians educated parents more about nutrition, we'd probably have a lot healthier population, even without vaccines. "Disease-Proof Your Child: Feeding Kids Right" http://www.amazon.com/Disease-Proof-Your-Child-Feeding-Right/dp/0312338058 "A groundbreaking book that explains the connection between nutrition and disease prevention-showing parents how to keep their children healthy by feeding them right. Bombarded by the media with stories about childhood obesity and dangerous hormones, pesticides and additives in foods, and told that allergies, asthma, and ear infections are on the rise, parents have never been more concerned about what to feed children. In this invaluable resource, featuring easy-to prepare, tasty recipes, Dr. Joel Fuhrman explains how cutting edge nutritional science can be brought to the family table with amazing results. "
No doubt there are socieconomic issues at play in the disparity, but 5X and 9X?
Note that in the link you provide, the units were different (nmol/L which requires a higher level to be in the right range).
I'm still not following their logic to dismiss what they found: "Age-standardized means based on observed serum 25(OH)D concentrations were significantly (P http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/07/22/pregnant-women-advised-to-get-more-vitamin-d.aspx "Please do not assume your levels are fine, as Drs. Hollis and Wagner found that over 87 percent of all newborns and over 67 percent of all mothers had vitamin D levels lower than 20 ng/ml, which is a severe deficiency state. As a result, the researchers recommended that all mothers optimize their vitamin D levels during pregnancy, especially in the winter months, to safeguard their babies' health. This finding could easily help to explain the disproportionately high numbers of poor outcomes among African American births, as deficiency is extremely common among people with darker skin colors."
However, another variable is how much vitamin D do people with different ethnicities or skin color need? So, even the general ranges above, are they appropriate for all ethnicities? Maybe people with darker skin have other adaptations to function well on less? So, there remains more to research about all this. But with that said, just look at how much sun people got 1000 years ago, and look at how much people get now, and considering how melanoma is one of the easiest to detect and treat cancers, how much sun or vitamin D supplements seems "conservative" considering the conditions human are adapted for? Pretty much no humans in the past spent all their lives in caves that I'm aware of (except maybe rich ones, but they probably got diseases of affluence like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and so on).
We got hit by this ourselves with health issues with our kid (as well as a C-section, which turns out to also be at increased risk with vitamin D deficiency). We just naively followed all the advice to stay out of the sun, etc.. I actually asked our pediatrician if we should be giving vitamin D sup
That study started with data from 1988, and avoiding the sun through spending more time indoors and travelling by car instead of foot has been going on for almost a century. So, even if correct, one may not be able to draw such a broad conclusion from that study. Also, they presumably did not look at the blood level of pregnant women or young children (who are kept out of the sun much more now than in the past).
Also, from the summary, they start out finding a big differnece and then proceed to invent ways to show it does not exists. Which reminds me of this::-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour "In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. To an untrained outsider, Latour and Woolgar argued the entire process resembles not an unbiased search for truth and accuracy but a mechanism for ignoring data that contradicts scientific orthodoxy."
I'm not saying that means they were wrong to do adjustmented, just what it reminds me of.:-)
When studies show kids have a huge reduction in influenza risk with some supplementation, I'd say kids were deficient.
Also, I'd suggest these studies showing some effect are still using too little vitamin D, or they woudl see a bgger effect. But, as I've said elsewhere, a good diet rich in vegetables and fruits is part of the problem too, and that can also help prevent cancer and infectious diseases by improving the immune system.
Anyway, the reason I harp on this is I can almost guarantee you that the kind of indoor-oriented person who reads and posts on slashdot (like me) is almost certainly vitamin D deficient unless they are supplementing, and will have multipel health issues from that. Just trying to help others not go through what I've gone through.
The problem is, some wacky computer guy saying get your vitamin D and eat your vegetables if you want to be an effective programmer (rather than just spend more time hacking indoors drinking diet soda), sure, it sounds kinda crazy, beyond sounding impossibly hard.:-) But I can point to several hackers going down early from cancer or depression or obesity/diabetes or heart disease. Another one I learned about today, co-author of the Wiki Way, dead after cancer at around age 57: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Leuf http://web.archive.org/web/20080506125118/http://www.leuf.com/ What a loss.
By the way, on breakthroughs, if someone invented a cheap pill in their basement that prevented most autism and cancer, how many years would it take before anyone believed them? What would the medical industry want to do to that person to preserve their profits?
Whan answering, consider that this guy was essentially beaten to death for suggesting handwashing prevented doctors spreading disease: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
So how long is it going to be before people admit dermatologists caused autism by telling women and children to avoid the sun? Or that junk food caused some of it too?
But you can find many peopel who say similar things about type 2 diabete. Type 1 also benefits from such a diet, but you'd still need some insulin, but with less complications.
The other two I don't know much about. But I can believe diet effects them.
Dr. Fuhrman is a great hero of medicine. There just is not much money in preventing or curing disease. And, sadly, most people just say the same things you do. It's hard to get people to change their diet, and our society offers little support for that. Here is part of why that is true: http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Anyway, I'd readily agree the field of alternative medicine has frauds in it, but I'd say the same thing of areas of mainstream medicine too. The Flexner Report from 100 years ago was part of what made US medicine become so messed up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report
Just one example for there, from Marcia Angell: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption/
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."
Please see (the page has references to the scientific literature): http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/Other.aspx "We routinely hear that asthma, acne, allergies, arthritis, herpes, reflux esophagitis, irritable bowel syndrome and many more have nothing to do with diet. This is simply not true. Doctors are trained as experts in prescribing and monitoring the risks and effectiveness of medications. They typically have little or no expertise in using nutrition as their primary modality of treatment. They are biased in favor of their own method of treatment (drugs) and do not have broad experience or training in motivating patients and utilizing nutritional and lifestyle interventions.....
A significant number of medical investigations have uncovered that, just like other diseases, people develop asthma and allergies for reasons. Asthma and allergies have been linked to nutritional factors:
* Low levels of fresh fruits and flavonoids[iii]
* Fried foods, protein-rich and fat-rich foods of animal origin[iv]
* Low blood levels of fruit and vegetable derived antioxidants[v]
* Dietary fatty acid imbalance—an excess of omega-6 over omega-3 fats[vi]
* Increased intake of high saturated fat foods (meat, cheese and butter)[vii]
* Bread and butter consumption, lower vegetable intake [viii] My experience in working with hundreds of patients attempting to resolve asthma and allergies has been rewarding. The asthmatics gradually improve, and the allergic patients slowly reduce the severity of their allergies and many become entirely non-allergic. Many patients who had strong allergies to cats, dust mites and pollen, no longer have these sensitivities. From a combination of dietary advice and a limited amount of nutritional supplements, most people start to improve their condition in a few months. I have even had patients who surprisingly continued to be allergic a year late,r and then after about 20 months following my recommendations, their allergies faded away. Recoveries are the rule and not the exception.... Working with patients with autoimmune diseases such as connective tissue disease, myositis, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus is very rewarding. These patients were convinced that they could never get well and are eternally grateful to be healthy again requiring no medication. I regularly get notes and letters, such as these unsolicited comments:..."
Your mileage may vary, but if you have not looked into this, you might want to.
"Glad it worked for you. Trust me when I say it won't work for me."
Have you seriously looked at and tried Dr. Fuhrman's approach? http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/Other.aspx "We routinely hear that asthma, acne, allergies, arthritis, herpes, reflux esophagitis, irritable bowel syndrome and many more have nothing to do with diet. This is simply not true. Doctors are trained as experts in prescribing and monitoring the risks and effectiveness of medications. They typically have little or no expertise in using nutrition as their primary modality of treatment. They are biased in favor of their own method of treatment (drugs) and do not have broad experience or training in motivating patients and utilizing nutritional and lifestyle interventions.... I have been utilizing a high antioxidant, acrlyamide-free diet for many years with marked success. Acrylamides are toxic substances produced by baking and frying carbohydrates. The diet-style I recommend for fibromylagia patients is rich in natural plant foods especially organic berries and green vegetables and restricted in animal products and baked grains. Vegetable soups and steamed vegetables are encouraged. Fibromyalgia patients routinely get well, and they get well quickly. Studies in the medical literature support this method of treatment.[ii] Though the researchers do not seem to have the experience and understanding of why what they are doing works, the effects are dramatic.... A significant number of medical investigations have uncovered that, just like other diseases, people develop asthma and allergies for reasons. Asthma and allergies have been linked to nutritional factors:
* Low levels of fresh fruits and flavonoids[iii]
* Fried foods, protein-rich and fat-rich foods of animal origin[iv]
* Low blood levels of fruit and vegetable derived antioxidants[v]
* Dietary fatty acid imbalance—an excess of omega-6 over omega-3 fats[vi]
* Increased intake of high saturated fat foods (meat, cheese and butter)[vii]
* Bread and butter consumption, lower vegetable intake [viii] My experience in working with hundreds of patients attempting to resolve asthma and allergies has been rewarding. The asthmatics gradually improve, and the allergic patients slowly reduce the severity of their allergies and many become entirely non-allergic. Many patients who had strong allergies to cats, dust mites and pollen, no longer have these sensitivities. From a combination of dietary advice and a limited amount of nutritional supplements, most people start to improve their condition in a few months. I have even had patients who surprisingly continued to be allergic a year late,r and then after about 20 months following my recommendations, their allergies faded away. Recoveries are the rule and not the exception. "
If you have not tried this, or at least reviewed the research, how would you know it does not work?
Now, if you are not following these dietary guidelines, should I get angry with you for putting my own family's health at risk by the same logic you are using in regard to vaccinations?
Slashdot Mirror
http://remineralize.org/
And such fertilizer produces healthier plants that need less pesticides.
"Biodegradable plastic made from plants, not oil, is emerging"
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturing/2008-12-25-biodegradable-plastic_N.htm
"Why luxury safer electric cars should be free-to-the-user"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en
"More energy goes into making gasoline from electricity and natural gas than it would take to make electric cars go the same distance"
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
"Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that U.S. domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy.[1] In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current. [2]"
Other approaches to all renewables:
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
Given the exponetial growth of renewable energy, and how PV solar panels are about to reach grid parity and the prices will continue to drop, I think we will be all renewables by about 2030 from market forces alone at this point. (Unless cold fusion pans out, or if small scale nuclear like Hyperion gets popular.)
Three quarters of US agricultural production also just goes to produce livestock, and the health consequences of too much animal products are harming people's health, too, so we really don't need most of the fertilizer we produce.
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/diet-myths-the-food-pyramid-of-the-insane.html
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://www.ravediet.com/preview.html
How to deal with the economic consequences of all this increased efficiency:
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/more-on-the-future-implications-ibm-watson-technology/#comment-534
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled responses, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance -- all of these things are good training for permanent underclasses, people derived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose from even its own original logic -- to regulate the poor; since the 1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle classes."
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm ... Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit?
So, yes, give schools more money and they will do this even better:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
I suggest just give the money as a basic income to the parents instead... :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
"This is asinine."
But sadly, true. For a related example:
"Twilight War: The Folly of U.S. Space Dominance" by Mike Moore
http://www.amazon.com/Twilight-War-Folly-Space-Dominance/dp/1598130188
"Moore warns of the dire consequences of the U.S. drive toward the military dominance of space. Twilight War is an indispensable resource for anyone looking to get smart on a possible new cold war in space. Wide-ranging research and an elegant writing style make for an easy tutorial. This is a marvelous book." (Joseph Cirincione, vice president for national security, Center for American Progress)"
Or;
http://www.cfr.org/united-states/toward-american-space-dominance/p12179
"The Pentagon has avoided specifics about the report, but soon afterward the Bush administration released an unclassified version of its new U.S. National Space Policy, which goes far beyond previous policies in asserting America’s right to respond forcefully to such threats. Bill Martel, a space policy expert at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, tells CFR.org in this podcast that the new space policy “sounds like a precursor to the weaponization of space.” Supporters readily concede the point. “Space supremacy is now the official policy of the U.S. government,” writes Michael Goldfarb in the Weekly Standard."
Thanks for your other comments. Personally, I would not like to be president. :-) I feel sorry in general for politicians etc.
As I quoted Alfie Kohn here from "No Contest: The Case Against Competition": ... I do not want to shy away from the incendiary implications of all of this. To suggest in effect that many of our heroes (entrepreneurs and athletes, movie stars and politicians) may be motivated by low self-esteem, to argue that our "state religion" is a sign of psychological ill-health -- this will not sit well with many people.(Page 103)"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html#Moving_beyond_competitiveness_towards_cooperation_at_PU
"If competitiveness is inherently compensatory, if it is an effort to prove oneself and stave off feelings of worthlessness, it follows that the healthier the individual (in the sense of having a more solid, unconditional sense of self-esteem), the less need there is to compete.
That said, one can learn a lot by playing games and being challenged. So, how to interpret all that in daily life for the rest of us is open to question. Also, it is compounded by this fact:
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/07/health/la-he-mean-girls-20110208
"Faris and a colleague studied the relationships among 3,722 middle and high school students over the course of an academic year and found that the teenagers' propensity toward aggression rose along with their social status. Aggressive behavior peaked when students hit the 98th percentile for popularity, suggesting that they were working hard to claw their way to the very top. However, those who were in the top 2% of a school's social hierarchy generally didn't harass their fellow students. At that point, they may have had little left to gain by being mean, and picking on others only made them seem insecure, Faris said."
I agree with you on reflectiveness, and thanks for saying that in such an interesting way about quality. In any case though, if I take credit for anything, it is mostly reading and learning about the ideas of many, many others who have gone before me (including people like Leon Shenandoah).
We need better tools for community-powered reflectiveness IMHO, as I su
"What I want is highly efficient cruise missiles with HUGE chemical loads and an awesome satellite imaging system: I want to point at every missile silo in the country that just bombed us and make them operationally defunct in one hour."
Thanks for the other comments, which in general I can see making some sense in the context of finite games, especially your point at the end on not poking the tiger. As well as the issue about morale.
On the quoted point, the problem is that it is stated US defense doctrine to assume that any potential physical threat is a real threat that needs to be responded to. So, if everyone adopts a similar policy, everyone else would, by US military logic, have to see the USA as a terrible threat that needs to be neutralized ASAP in some way. So, we would get arms races. Eventually, whatever weapons are lying around are going to get used, if only by accident or misunderstanding.
Real knifes generally don't act on their own, but robots, cruise missiles, and bureaucracies are a lot closer to magic swords that can more easily be set in motion by accident or malfunction (or in the case of the USA, by a president with some sort of emotional issue about Iraq). Any system set for automatic reprisals then compounds the problem. Granted, it's not quite as big a problem if, as you outline, people use conventional weapons and target only military installations as opposed to target populations, but that's not the current policy in the USA.
I feel that big institutional bureaucracies and their artifacts just have a different sort of logic than human individuals in a one-on-one match. That's based on reading stuff by people like Langdon Winner "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a theme in political thought". Or of course, seeing the movie, Dr. Strangelove. :-)
Also, if you think of US expansionist history, the USA has its own skeletons in the closet (like the displacement of the Native Americans, the taking of California from Mexico, what happened in the Philippines, and so on). Or, for that matter what just happened with Iraq, invading a sovereign country on false information.
Anyway, I just think the nature of the game changes as we change the scale. At some point, I would expect quantitative changes in military capacity need to lead to qualitative changes in doctrine. But has that happened? When a war is over in fifteen minutes, and both societies are in ruins, there is a lot less time for sounding out the other's intentions, style, and so on. What would Go be like if you had to play 100 stones in one minutes or lose them (and there was no turn taking)? Maybe there are such games? But they might look a lot different than what you are used to? :-) So, a big quantitative change (shortening the duration by a factor of 10X or 100X) can probably lead to a qualitative change in the Go experience. The same is true for modern warfare I would think. That's why I feel James P. Carse's emphasis on "the infinite game" is so essential (which is essentially the game of playing lots of games of Go and not letting your life rest on the outcome of just one).
Or, if someone said you if you lot a game of Go you had to stop playing, would you play differently? Would it enhance or spoil the quality of the play? Would it turn you into someone up-front always demanding a lot of extra pieces to ensure your victory before you start playing? And then what would be the point? You would stop growing as a player... You can only enjoy Go in that sense because it is part of an infinite flow of Go games where you can take chances and grow, as do your opponents.
But, nuclear war (or plagues or robots or whatever) is more like that Go game situation where if you lose you can't play anymore every again. But, what would the Go community be like if everyone was told that -- it's win or you can never play again? It would presumably destroy a sense of community, right? Who would play? So, in that sense, nuclear war is a very different game than
"The way to end a fight is to hit the other guy back until he stops wanting to be hit; level of force and end goal (knock-out, kill) depends on the attack you're receiving and its severity (idiot bar fight, person trying to kill you ... are they strong or weak?"
Thanks for the reply on this link and the additional insights to Go (which I have only played a few times). I had a boss/coworker at IBM Research who was a Go player, and told me a lot about it (including the chess/go distinction in outlook), but he would not teach me to play it as he said it might destroy my productivity by taking up all my time (as he said it had to someone else he had taught it to). :-) But, it intrigued me enough to get a set and play a little with my wife and to read more about it. So, I really appreciate all the first hand info.
While I can't disagree that the approach you outlined that I quote can sometimes work for a time, it can lead to future conflicts, either sneak attacks or arms races. Here is a different way to deal with day-to-day bullies (although Izzy Kalman admits it won't work well with someone who is emotionally unstable or has a history of violence):
http://www.bullies2buddies.com/How-to-Stop-Being-Teased-and-Bullied-Without-Really-Trying
Here Izzy Kalman explains why attempts to legislate and end to bullying instead of teaching kids to handle the problem in the way he outlines is counterproductive (I have a comment there, too):
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/psychological-solution-bullying/201011/rational-alternative-the-national-school-anti-bullying-p
Still, Izzy Kalman's techniques assume the rule of law, but war, even with "laws of war", usually involves times when the rule of law is essentially suspended or being renegotiated.
Still, in general, all wars come to an end and a peace is negotiated, as people decide the cost of war exceeds the cost of the peace (or when everyone is dead). Again, I suggest that you still assume in what you learn from Go that the other player is not going to smash the board to the ground and you are not both going to be killed by robots in that case. Unfortunately, that crazy situation I suggest is more and more the norm as our technology continues to grow in capacity. That is why Albert Einstein said essentially that with the harnessing of the power of the atom, everything has changed but our way of thinking. Also, it is more in the news these days that then president George Bush was pushing with war with Iraq for personal reasons even before 9/11. So, even the "leader of the free world" can have emotional problems that lead to launching a war which potentially (thankfully not) could have been met with a plague in that case (the poor man's WMD) as Hussein realized he could not win and maybe decided to take everyone with him. GW decided to play with fire, it's a miracle the USA only got burned to the tune of a couple trillion dollars and not mass casualtes in the tens of millions (even though blowback from Iraq may well in the future still cause mass casualties in the USA as those in Iraq who have seen their families destroyed by US actions may decide in the future to follow a vindictive course with WMDs).And of course no doubt many people have died in the USA from the want of money to go into wellness or transporation safety and infrastructure and so on -- but a little old lady not getting good care in a nursing home starved for funds is not normally called a casualty of war, even if there may be a connection.
When, as in the original article, we talk about whether to invest in "defense" or invest in "science", we make a choice about how we want to shape the future. Personally, I am all for investing in "defense", but to me, "defense" means mutual
Thanks for the insights in this (as well as your other two recent replies).
Still, without denying the truths in what you wrote, there remains the issue of arms races and of one player dashing the game to the ground. That is the "finite" vs. "infinite" game aspect.
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_game
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_gameplay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_board_game
http://familypastimes.com/
http://www.learningherbs.com/wildcraft.html
From:
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
"Kohn defines competition as any situation where one person's success is dependent upon another's failure. Put another way, in competition two or more parties are pursuing a goal that cannot be attained by all. He calls this 'mutually exclusive goal attainment' (MEGA).
Kohn goes on to define two distinct types of competition. In 'structural competition' MEGA is an explicit, defining element in the nature of the interaction. For instance in a game of tennis there can be only one winner. The same is true of beauty contests, presidential elections, and wars. Everyone knows they are out to beat the others though the rules of engagement may vary considerably between events.
Intentional competition' is a state of mind, an individual's competitiveness or his proclivity for besting others. Anyone can go to a party determined to establish him or herself as the most intelligent, the most attractive, etc. Similarly, in school, the work place, and on teams people can try to beat others whether or not anyone is formally keeping score and declaring winners and losers.
One place where competition cannot exist, according to Kohn, is within oneself. Such striving to better one's own standing is an individual, not interactive matter; it does not involve MEGA. Of course some people cannot imagine pushing themselves without the possibility of 'winning' or the threat of 'losing', but this by no means implies that all motivation is dependent upon competitive frameworks. Throughout history countless large and small accomplishments have been achieved simply out of an individual's desire to do better without any thought of beating others. Such striving for mastery cannot be confused with competition."
In any case, if you and an "opponent" play Go mainly to increase your mastery of the game and ideas like balance (as you obviously have) and to find joy in cooperating together to do so, then I guess one might say you are playing a cooperative infinite game, even through the finite competitive mechanism of Go? :-)
Anyway, thanks again for the very informative analysis of current US defense posture from the perspective of an experienced Go player.
As I say here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone."
Call that having an "efficient" war machine, if you want. :-)
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/dispatches-heartland/2011/feb/8/ibm-watson-jeopardy-harbinger-vexing-politics/
"It’s hard to imagine the mood of the country changing if these trends persist. Will our bad mood turn to deep funk if we’re entering a period of long-term, systemic underemployment without even a hint of a plan for how we’ll manage? Does it make sense simply to hold on to our faith that eventually life will be like it was in the 1940s, 50s and 60s? It is marvelous to witness the technological advances brought about by human ingenuity. It’s a kick to watch computers compete against humans on shows like Jeopardy. But, IBM Watson’s real success on Jeopardy would be if it helps kick-start a meaningful political conversation about the economy of the future."
Solutions (my comments):
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-392
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2
"We need to train people in martial arts (Judo, Aikido, etc) so they can defend themselves"
Having training in Aikido, I think the main reason people should learn that is to be able to redirect aggressive impulses in more positive directions. :-) Which is essentially what the entire art is about...
"Aikido, redirecting an attacker’s hostile energy"
http://www.mvccglacier.com/2010/11/aikido-redirecting-an-attackers-hostile-energy/
Or, in other words, accepting that all emotions can be valid and healthy, it is what we do with them that matters most:
"What do you do with the mad that you feel"
http://pbskids.org/rogers/songLyricsWhatDoYouDo.html
So, how does a war machine better allow us to do better Aikido at redirecting another's hostile energy in positive directions? Maybe some aspects of it do. So, can you find those aspects and build on them?
More on the true spirit of Aikido: ... he was lying with his head on the little old man's lap, while the old man stroked his dirty hair. The would-be attacker had been brought to peace -- all without a single martial arts move.
"Terry Dobson's Aikido Story: a paraphrasing of "Another Way""
http://unofficial.ki-society.org/another.html
"""
Terry Dobson was riding on a train in Japan (in the 60's?), when a drunken man boarded. The man was violent, aggressive, and a real physical threat to the other passengers, whom he pushed around and bullied.
Dobson had been intensively training in aikido almost every day for three years, and was eager to put that practice into "real" action. Although he knew his teacher had said that aikido is the art of reconciliation, and that even wanting to fight means that you've already lost touch with the Universe, Dobson, in his youthful eager way, wanted to physically take down this threatening drunk in an act of righteous justice.
Just as Dobson was starting to egg the drunk into attacking him, however, a little old man interrupted by calling out joyfully to the drunken man. In a cheerful manner, the little old man started talking to the drunk, asking friendly questions and going on about his own family and the persimmon tree in his garden.
Soon thereafter, the drunk's nasty exterior had melted away. He was weeping, explaining his wife had died, that he'd lost his job and his home, and that his life was a total wreck and that he was terribly ashamed
Dobson realized that what he had witnessed was real aikido in action. What he had wanted to do -- vigilante-style, self-righteous justice -- was not aikido. What the old man had done, though, was aikido as it was meant to be -- humble, gentle love, bringing peace and healing.
"""
So, yes, I agree with you. More people should study Aikido. :-) But for more for learning about "reconciliation" than "how to hurt someone else who you see as threatening".
Some other points on: "It's ridiculous to think we don't need self defense, in the same way that it's ridiculous to ban guns and weapons and tell people violence never solved anything (French taxation without representation. British taxation without representation. Slavery in America. Slavery in Haiti. Hitler. Stalin. Japan's expansionism. It goes on)."
History is tricky, because one can always pull out a situation where people have let things get really bad because they would not consider other alternatives and then say, see, violence was the only answer.
Egypt had a revolution without a war just now. India had one decades ago. Why not France eventually?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi
Canada secede from Britain without a shot being fired, has a better health care system than the USA, and treated its native people better. What did the US revolution accomplish in that sense?
The British abolished slavery without an internal civil war.
The British said they would abolish slavery if they won the American revolutionary war, so was it good that the rich white Americans won? Something like a third of the people left the country (mostly to Canada). (I'm not saying there were not legitimate grievances.)
If the South had been allowed to secede from the Union, could things have ultimately been better for the Blacks than the grinding poverty and economic abuse they got after the Civil War, since the South would have toppled eventually over slavery.? See also the previous point. Also, slavery might not have been possible without all the people making fancy weapons to use to enslave people like Columbus did.
Haiti was in a sense destroyed by capitalist ideology and greed more than weapons:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
How are you going to ensure the weapons are not in the hands of greedy capitalists?
Nazi Germany was a pyramid scheme that would have fall apart pretty soon anyway:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,347726,00.html
It also was a reaction to reparations related to a previous war, and that war itself was related to compulsory schooling. Abolish compulsory schooling and maybe we would not need so much war machinery? From:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/7a.htm
"The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done."
The USSR crumbled in large part because of a people's revolution in the 1990s (even as the USA likes to take the credit). Still, had it not engaged in a foolish arms race with the USA (or had the USA not been so provocative) the country that put the first satellite in orbit, that put the first man and woman into space, that put up the first space station, that invented phage therapy, that country might have been a much happier place. But every time doves in the Kremlin said, maybe the USA people are not so crazy, the USA would push another round of weapons and the hawks would say, see I told you so, and the doves would get purged. Who was at fault there?
On Japan, well true they had a messed up culture in a lot of ways and did a lot of evil things in other countries -- but it was a militaristic culture of the kind you are celebrating (Samurai). The USA also attacked Japan economically (shutting of oil flows) before Japan attacked at Pearl
As I see it, both the USSR and the USA lost the cold war. it is just taking the USA a little longer to topple, given, as you say, all the money the USA had to use to that end (and the social processes set up then and before just continue). From a two time congressional medal of honor winner and Marine Major General, Smedly Butler:
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."
See also Arms Race:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_race
See also failing infrastructure in the USA.
http://costofwar.com/en/
See also how your life depends on how well Russian and Chinese computers in charge of nuclear weapons are working (computers the USA may have tried to sabotage).
Sure, the USA has a war machine you may trust to only go off when and where it is pointed. Funny how you need to trust the Russians and Chinese about that too, when presumably we have a war machine because we can't trust the Russians or the Chinese or whoever else. How much do you trust Russian and Chinese engineers with your life? If you are willing to do that, then why are you so worried about them taking ... what?
Every step in an arms race may make a weird kind of sense, but overall, the end result of the game when you play with post-scarcity powered weapons is pretty much everyone is going to die as the arms race spirals out of control. Plagues, nukes, killer robots, security bureaucracies with gas chambers, asteroid bombs, particle beams, and so on -- take your pick if you want to keep building the war machine and encourage everyone else to keep building the machine.
"99 red ballons - Nena "
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14IRDDnEPR4
See also, for a new idea about games:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games
"Finite games have a definite beginning and ending. They are played with the goal of winning. A finite game is resolved within the context of its rules, with a winner of the contest being declared and receiving a victory. The rules exist to ensure the game is finite. Examples are debates, sports, receiving a degree from an educational institution, belonging to a society, or engaging in war. Beginning to participate in a finite game requires conscious thought, and is voluntary; continued participation in a round of the game is involuntary. Even exiting the game early must be provided for by the rules. This may be likened to a zero sum game (though not all finite games are literally zero sum, in that the sum of positive outcomes can vary).
Infinite games, on the other hand, do not have a knowable beginning or ending. They are played with the goal of continuing play and a purpose of bringing more players into the game. An infinite game continues play, for sake of play. If the game is approaching resolution because of the rules of play, the rules must be changed to allow continued play. The rules exist to ensure the game is infinite. The only known example is life. Beginning to participate in an infinite game may be involuntary, in that it doesn't require conscious thought. Continuing participation in the current round of game-play is voluntary. "It is an inv
Living in water provides two benefits -- radiation shielding and progressive resistance for muscle maintenance (think whales having big bones but they essentially live in a weightless environment).
In The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps by Marshall T. Savage there was a discussion of using six feet of water as shielding as the outer layer of habitats, as well as drugs or genetic alteration to deal with weightlessness:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Colonizing_the_Galaxy_in_Eight_Easy_Steps
There are other ideas like clothing that provides resistance to movement.
I wrote about this issue here: http://www.oscomak.net/wiki/Liquid_breathing_to_resist_bone_loss
From there:
===============
For a broader outline on "Liquid breathing", see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_breathing
From Wikipedia: "Liquid immersion provides a way to reduce the physical stress of G forces. ... Liquid breathing for acceleration protection may never be practical because of the difficulty of finding a suitable breathing medium of similar density to water that is compatible with lung tissue. Perfluorocarbon fluids are twice as dense as water, hence unsuitable for this application."
However, consider if a suitable compound was found. Ignore the issue of acceleration. What is a potential big problem on long duration space flights or indefinite habitation in microgravity is bone loss. The body adapts to lack of stress by eliminating bone and muscle that in no longer used, but this makes returning to a strong gravity field problematical. Savage has proposed future medicine or genetic engineering to overcome this, and one can also in theory create big rotating O'Neill-style structures, and there is also (boring) microgravity exercise, but what if there was another way?
Fish and mammals like whales and dolphins spend their entire lives in a sort-of microgravity suspended in water. They can have strong bones and muscles. Aquatic therapy in a pool is often recommended for humans to improve strength. So presumably, like the mythical Seapeople, if humans could breathe a liquid while living in outer space in microgravity (like during a long trip to Mars), then by just living and moving around in a liquid environment in a space craft, they would maintain their muscle tone and bone mass. The liquid might also provide cosmic ray shielding, and might even be designed to use cosmic rays to clean or re-oxegenate itself.
An important difference between an undersea civilization and a liquid-breathing space-faring one is that there is no water pressure in space in Zero-G (beyond surface tension or compression). Thus, liquid structures could extend in space for miles in three dimensions of endless tubes, all at essentially the same pressure. So there would be no risk of the "bends" when moving around this construction. Another possibility is that a big drop of liquid a mile across might be all one needed for a large space habitat floating in zero-G if the surface tension held the liquid in. This might make it trivial to construct habitats, and micrometeorites might pose less of a problem as the surface would heal itself by surface tension. Comets and asteroids could be mined, but the major result need only be a stream of this breathable liquid, which could be shaped into habitats of desired size by how much liquid was added.
This is all speculative at this point.
Liquid breathing obviously should not be experimented with outside a well-monitored research laboratory situation due to the risk of drowning or lung damage. Various research has already been performed, see Wikipedia for links.
Anyway, all speculative. But kind of cool (to me). I was inspired a litt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilla_Watson
"If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time.
But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity ... Oerlikon Solar announced in 2010 that its 'ThinFab' production line is capable of manufacturing 143Wp panels at a cost of 0.5 euro per watt (0.64 dollars per watt) and has a capacity of 120MW per year. The company also claims that its production plants have very low energy consumption rates, so that the energy payback time of its 10% efficient, silicon thin-film modules is less than one year.[12]"
"The fully-loaded cost (not price) of solar electricity is $0.25/kWh or less in most of the OECD countries. By late 2011, the fully-loaded cost is likely to fall below $0.15/kWh for most of the OECD and reach $0.10/kWh in sunnier regions. These cost levels are driving some emerging trends:[8]
Who has been telling you otherwise, and why?
Eventually we will have 3D printing systems that probably can also recycle plastic and reuse it, as well as print out plastic solar panels to power them, and print out equipment to produce plastic...
Too bad I used up my mod points. Informative and insightful, thanks.
I agree with you about Go, but ultimately we need to move past the irony of using tools of abundance to fight over artificial scarcity in the real world, like the irony of using nuclear weapons to fight over oil fields, or using military robots to force people to work like industrial robots, etc...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
So, ironically, cutting science and feeding the war machine out of fears about scarcity would just make the problem of this irony worse...
I'm sorry, but there is a link between nutrition and many chronic diseases. And it's not just about "boosting" the immune system, but also about having a "smarter" immune system that knows better when to turn itself on and off in different situations.
Other sources on curing type-2 diabetes with diet in a matter of days in most cases:
http://www.rawfor30days.com/index4.html
http://www.ravediet.com/preview.html
If you study the science, you will see why. The combination of removal of refined carbohydrates, plus significant eventual weight loss, puts the body back into a range where it can produce enough insulin on its own (with less insulin resistance due to less fat) that the body can manage itself again (in most cases of type-2).
Dr. Fuhrman is not a "questionable source". He is a board certified family practice doctor, author of numerous books, has a published study to show his successes, and has been on numerous media shows, and so on. His work is probably the best scientifically footnoted recommendation of anyone in the field of health and nutrition.
His advice is easier to follow when you also read this:
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
As for Lupus or Herpes, I can only point to what he says:
http://drfuhrman.com/disease/Other.aspx
"As long as you are still breathing, it is still possible to improve your health with improvements in lifestyle and nutrition. It is typical for people to see a variety of great changes when they adopt the high, nutrient diet-style which I recommend. Besides reaching an ideal weight and lowering blood pressure and cholesterol, other problems are resolved too. For example, it is common for those with attacks of recurrent herpes to stop experiencing attacks. Those with indigestion and reflux don’t need their acid-suppression therapy anymore. People stop getting hemmorhoids. Their body odor improves. They have better stamina and think more clearly, and their skin tone and color improves."
If you don't want to explore that, well, that's certainly your choice. There is a lot of misinformation and conflict of interest out there and it is hard to wade through it. And no one can guarantee results.
But the logic is there -- immune system health is effected by things like vitamin D status and vegetable and fruit consumption (and probiotics and good sleep and humor and so on). That fact is undeniable based on the overwhelming scientific evidence, even with most scientific money going in to prove magic bullet drugs and ignoring basic nutrition.
Nutrition matters. Other things matter as well, of course.
If you do even the tiniest bit of research yourself, you will see the connection.
http://www.google.com/search?q=immune+system+nutrition
As I've said before, unfortunately, a focus on magic bullets often distracts us from the basics. And the meat, dairy, processed corn, and big pharma companies are in no hurry to tell us any different (even though each can sometimes be part of a healthy life etc.).
"On the other hand, not eating your veggies just affects your own health."
Well, are you saying being vegetable deficient (or eating too much sugar and refined starch etc.) does not put everyone else's health at risk as well, by the same argument you use for promoting vaccination, if such an eating style compromises someone's immune system?
Example:
http://www.google.com/search?q=immune+system+vegetables
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/587037/best_fruits_and_vegetables_to_help.html
"Regularly eating fresh fruits and vegetables is the natural way to boost your immune system."
I'm not saying whether that applies to you. That is just a general fact about health. And even the most casual glance at US Americans shows almost all are vegetable deficient.
I personally am not angry with you whatever you eat or why; you just sounded angry about the vaccination issue. I'm just asking you, if that anger exists and is justified, is it legitimate to consider such anger applicable for other contexts?
It's OK to be angry, even healthy; it's what we do with the anger that matters.
http://pbskids.org/rogers/songLyricsWhatDoYouDo.html
Should I get angry when I see someone drive up to a fast food restaurant?
It would seem to me that if a person is not eating well, and then that person's immune system can't fight off infection well because that person is vegetable deficient by a lifestyle choice or unwillingness to break out of a "pleasure trap", then that person is creating a health hazard for other people?
Of course, not many people know about pleasure traps or how to break out of them, so the issue of willfullness is questionable, and in this society, the whole society essentially makes it hard to eat well:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
http://paulgraham.com/addiction.html
"These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly."
With that said, I can see your point about the issue of what public figures say as opposed to what private individuals do, which is indeed a very good point I can agree with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity ... Oerlikon Solar announced in 2010 that its 'ThinFab' production line is capable of manufacturing 143Wp panels at a cost of 0.5 euro per watt (0.64 dollars per watt) and has a capacity of 120MW per year. The company also claims that its production plants have very low energy consumption rates, so that the energy payback time of its 10% efficient, silicon thin-film modules is less than one year.[12] ..."
"The fully-loaded cost (not price) of solar electricity is $0.25/kWh or less in most of the OECD countries. By late 2011, the fully-loaded cost is likely to fall below $0.15/kWh for most of the OECD and reach $0.10/kWh in sunnier regions. These cost levels are driving some emerging trends:[8]
http://nextbigfuture.com/2007/11/nuclear-battery-can-be-used-to-help.html
"The Hyperion [nuclear battery] site claims to be 30% of the cost of natural gas approaches to insitu recovery of oil shale"
And maybe someday LENR "Cold Fusion":
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270
Not to disagree that oil production has (or will soon have) peaked, but whale oil peaked, too, and we survived that, and the whales are better off for us moving on to other things, too. Wind and PV are here now, and growing exponentially. In twenty to thirty years at current rates of growth, they will supply all our power. And nuclear continues to improve, too, as with Hyperion, for somewhat the same reasons as renewables are getting better, more research, better materials, and a design focus on safety.
Look at it this way. We live in a community with lots of apple trees making golden delicious apples that are healthy for you and let you live a good long happy life. Those trees are outside everyone's homes. The problem is, you have to walk a little ways, get out a ladder, climb into the tree, and pick the apples. There are also rotten oily coal fruits that drop from the sky all the time. To eat those, you just have to walk out your door and pick them off the ground, although a group of people said they have first rights to them and you have to pay an annual "defense" tax just because you might pick them. Rotten oily coal fruits taste awful, give you gas, and shorten your life, but they sure are easy to get, and they are cheap at baseball games, plus you are already paying a tax for them anyway. So, everyone says golden apples are too expensive, eats rotten coal fruits insteads, suffers bloating from gas, and dies early. Whenever a few crazy people try to get together organized groups to pick the golden apples, or to make special equipment to make those apples easier to get without climbing trees, the large numbers of people who make money off of selling rotten oily coal fruits at baseball games beat the crap out of these innovators with baseball bats, and then they go around and cut down some of the golden fruit trees, too, just to make their point. Some scientists now say rotten coal fruits are not falling as often from the sky these days, and may stop falling altogether in a few years due to changing weather conditions. Is this a good or bad thing?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing?pli=1
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/autism-information.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/cancerMain.shtml
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/07/22/pregnant-women-advised-to-get-more-vitamin-d.aspx
http://www.iodine4health.com/
Both are involved with immune function in different ways. Adequate vitamin D is needed to make the brain's master antioxidant, glutathione. Adequate iodine helps excrete heavy metals. Both are involved with zapping cancer cells (it's said the average adult gets one cancer cell a day, but a good immune system deals with it). Vitamin D is essential to preventing pregnancy complications, including C-sections.
The US RDA for iodine may be way too low, especially considering how much bromine and fluorine kids are exposed to. The vitamin D RDA is also too low, even with being recently revised upward.
Eating fruits and vegetables also helps preventing lots of disease and is essential to good health.
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/diet-myths-the-food-pyramid-of-the-insane.html
One can tease out a lot of the individual nutritional and environmental causes in some cases of autism:
"Autism Research: Breakthrough Discovery on the Causes of Autism"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
Let's get that all right before arguing too much over other stuff and what the true risk/reward assessment is for otherwise healthy kids and vaccines. A focus on magic bullets may be leading us to miss the big picture here about optimal health, which is earned by eating right and a lot of good lifestyle choices.
If pediatricians educated parents more about nutrition, we'd probably have a lot healthier population, even without vaccines.
"Disease-Proof Your Child: Feeding Kids Right"
http://www.amazon.com/Disease-Proof-Your-Child-Feeding-Right/dp/0312338058
"A groundbreaking book that explains the connection between nutrition and disease prevention-showing parents how to keep their children healthy by feeding them right. Bombarded by the media with stories about childhood obesity and dangerous hormones, pesticides and additives in foods, and told that allergies, asthma, and ear infections are on the rise, parents have never been more concerned about what to feed children. In this invaluable resource, featuring easy-to prepare, tasty recipes, Dr. Joel Fuhrman explains how cutting edge nutritional science can be brought to the family table with amazing results. "
See also for how to break out of the junk food pleasure trap:
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
After you get your level checked, you'll have to then decide what level is a good thing.
Here are four different recommendations for optimal levels in increasing order
IOM:
http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2010/Dietary-Reference-Intakes-for-Calcium-and-Vitamin-D/DRI-Values.aspx
>20 ng/mL (but their recommendations sort of imply not much more than that is important)
Dr. Fuhrman:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/vitamin_D_recommendations.aspx
35–55 ng/mL
Grassroots Health:
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
40–60 ng/mL
Vitamin D Council:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
50–80 ng/mL (or higher for some specific conditions)
So, it's great to have a level. But even then there are disagreements about what is best.
Remember, parents have been warned heavily over the last decade or two to keep their kids out of the sun.
The vitamin D hpothesis easily explains stuff like the high rate (5X) of autism among Somali children or the high rate (9X) of schizophrenia among second generation Afro-Caribbeans in the UK.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/minneapolis-and-the-somal_b_143967.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2418996/
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/abstract/167/3/362
No doubt there are socieconomic issues at play in the disparity, but 5X and 9X?
Note that in the link you provide, the units were different (nmol/L which requires a higher level to be in the right range).
I'm still not following their logic to dismiss what they found: "Age-standardized means based on observed serum 25(OH)D concentrations were significantly (P http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/07/22/pregnant-women-advised-to-get-more-vitamin-d.aspx
"Please do not assume your levels are fine, as Drs. Hollis and Wagner found that over 87 percent of all newborns and over 67 percent of all mothers had vitamin D levels lower than 20 ng/ml, which is a severe deficiency state. As a result, the researchers recommended that all mothers optimize their vitamin D levels during pregnancy, especially in the winter months, to safeguard their babies' health. This finding could easily help to explain the disproportionately high numbers of poor outcomes among African American births, as deficiency is extremely common among people with darker skin colors."
However, another variable is how much vitamin D do people with different ethnicities or skin color need? So, even the general ranges above, are they appropriate for all ethnicities? Maybe people with darker skin have other adaptations to function well on less? So, there remains more to research about all this. But with that said, just look at how much sun people got 1000 years ago, and look at how much people get now, and considering how melanoma is one of the easiest to detect and treat cancers, how much sun or vitamin D supplements seems "conservative" considering the conditions human are adapted for? Pretty much no humans in the past spent all their lives in caves that I'm aware of (except maybe rich ones, but they probably got diseases of affluence like diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and so on).
We got hit by this ourselves with health issues with our kid (as well as a C-section, which turns out to also be at increased risk with vitamin D deficiency). We just naively followed all the advice to stay out of the sun, etc.. I actually asked our pediatrician if we should be giving vitamin D sup
That study started with data from 1988, and avoiding the sun through spending more time indoors and travelling by car instead of foot has been going on for almost a century. So, even if correct, one may not be able to draw such a broad conclusion from that study. Also, they presumably did not look at the blood level of pregnant women or young children (who are kept out of the sun much more now than in the past).
Also, from the summary, they start out finding a big differnece and then proceed to invent ways to show it does not exists. Which reminds me of this: :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour
"In the laboratory, Latour and Woolgar observed that a typical experiment produces only inconclusive data that is attributed to failure of the apparatus or experimental method, and that a large part of scientific training involves learning how to make the subjective decision of what data to keep and what data to throw out. To an untrained outsider, Latour and Woolgar argued the entire process resembles not an unbiased search for truth and accuracy but a mechanism for ignoring data that contradicts scientific orthodoxy."
I'm not saying that means they were wrong to do adjustmented, just what it reminds me of. :-)
As far as deficiency, when studies can show things like a huge reduction in breast cancer risk within a year or two of some vitamin D supplementation, I'd say people were deficient.
http://www.dkfz.de/en/presse/pressemitteilungen/2008/dkfz_pm_08_22.php
When studies show kids have a huge reduction in influenza risk with some supplementation, I'd say kids were deficient.
Also, I'd suggest these studies showing some effect are still using too little vitamin D, or they woudl see a bgger effect. But, as I've said elsewhere, a good diet rich in vegetables and fruits is part of the problem too, and that can also help prevent cancer and infectious diseases by improving the immune system.
Anyway, the reason I harp on this is I can almost guarantee you that the kind of indoor-oriented person who reads and posts on slashdot (like me) is almost certainly vitamin D deficient unless they are supplementing, and will have multipel health issues from that. Just trying to help others not go through what I've gone through.
The problem is, some wacky computer guy saying get your vitamin D and eat your vegetables if you want to be an effective programmer (rather than just spend more time hacking indoors drinking diet soda), sure, it sounds kinda crazy, beyond sounding impossibly hard. :-) But I can point to several hackers going down early from cancer or depression or obesity/diabetes or heart disease. Another one I learned about today, co-author of the Wiki Way, dead after cancer at around age 57:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Leuf
http://web.archive.org/web/20080506125118/http://www.leuf.com/
What a loss.
By the way, on breakthroughs, if someone invented a cheap pill in their basement that prevented most autism and cancer, how many years would it take before anyone believed them? What would the medical industry want to do to that person to preserve their profits?
Whan answering, consider that this guy was essentially beaten to death for suggesting handwashing prevented doctors spreading disease:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
So how long is it going to be before people admit dermatologists caused autism by telling women and children to avoid the sun? Or that junk food caused some of it too?
From:
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Type 2 diabates in most cases is curable within a week by superior diet. You don't have to look far to find lots of evidence for that.
Here are two videos by Dr. Fuhrman on that:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46_GInjBeQU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPiR9VcuVWw
But you can find many peopel who say similar things about type 2 diabete. Type 1 also benefits from such a diet, but you'd still need some insulin, but with less complications.
The other two I don't know much about. But I can believe diet effects them.
Dr. Fuhrman is involved with a non-profit to do clinical research on nutrition:
https://www.nutritionalresearch.org/
Here is a study he was involved with that suggests his dietary approach is more effective than gastric bypass surgey for weight loss:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/high_nutrient_diet_and_weight_loss.aspx
Dr. Fuhrman is a great hero of medicine. There just is not much money in preventing or curing disease. And, sadly, most people just say the same things you do. It's hard to get people to change their diet, and our society offers little support for that. Here is part of why that is true:
http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx
Anyway, I'd readily agree the field of alternative medicine has frauds in it, but I'd say the same thing of areas of mainstream medicine too. The Flexner Report from 100 years ago was part of what made US medicine become so messed up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report
I collected lots of links here about how and why mainstream medical research has gone wrong:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html
Just one example for there, from Marcia Angell:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption/
"The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine."
Please see (the page has references to the scientific literature): .... ... Working with patients with autoimmune diseases such as connective tissue disease, myositis, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus is very rewarding. These patients were convinced that they could never get well and are eternally grateful to be healthy again requiring no medication. I regularly get notes and letters, such as these unsolicited comments: ..."
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/Other.aspx
"We routinely hear that asthma, acne, allergies, arthritis, herpes, reflux esophagitis, irritable bowel syndrome and many more have nothing to do with diet. This is simply not true. Doctors are trained as experts in prescribing and monitoring the risks and effectiveness of medications. They typically have little or no expertise in using nutrition as their primary modality of treatment. They are biased in favor of their own method of treatment (drugs) and do not have broad experience or training in motivating patients and utilizing nutritional and lifestyle interventions.
A significant number of medical investigations have uncovered that, just like other diseases, people develop asthma and allergies for reasons. Asthma and allergies have been linked to nutritional factors:
* Low levels of fresh fruits and flavonoids[iii]
* Fried foods, protein-rich and fat-rich foods of animal origin[iv]
* Low blood levels of fruit and vegetable derived antioxidants[v]
* Dietary fatty acid imbalance—an excess of omega-6 over omega-3 fats[vi]
* Increased intake of high saturated fat foods (meat, cheese and butter)[vii]
* Bread and butter consumption, lower vegetable intake [viii]
My experience in working with hundreds of patients attempting to resolve asthma and allergies has been rewarding. The asthmatics gradually improve, and the allergic patients slowly reduce the severity of their allergies and many become entirely non-allergic. Many patients who had strong allergies to cats, dust mites and pollen, no longer have these sensitivities. From a combination of dietary advice and a limited amount of nutritional supplements, most people start to improve their condition in a few months. I have even had patients who surprisingly continued to be allergic a year late,r and then after about 20 months following my recommendations, their allergies faded away. Recoveries are the rule and not the exception.
Your mileage may vary, but if you have not looked into this, you might want to.
"Glad it worked for you. Trust me when I say it won't work for me."
Have you seriously looked at and tried Dr. Fuhrman's approach? ... I have been utilizing a high antioxidant, acrlyamide-free diet for many years with marked success. Acrylamides are toxic substances produced by baking and frying carbohydrates. The diet-style I recommend for fibromylagia patients is rich in natural plant foods especially organic berries and green vegetables and restricted in animal products and baked grains. Vegetable soups and steamed vegetables are encouraged. Fibromyalgia patients routinely get well, and they get well quickly. Studies in the medical literature support this method of treatment.[ii] Though the researchers do not seem to have the experience and understanding of why what they are doing works, the effects are dramatic. ... A significant number of medical investigations have uncovered that, just like other diseases, people develop asthma and allergies for reasons. Asthma and allergies have been linked to nutritional factors:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/disease/Other.aspx
"We routinely hear that asthma, acne, allergies, arthritis, herpes, reflux esophagitis, irritable bowel syndrome and many more have nothing to do with diet. This is simply not true. Doctors are trained as experts in prescribing and monitoring the risks and effectiveness of medications. They typically have little or no expertise in using nutrition as their primary modality of treatment. They are biased in favor of their own method of treatment (drugs) and do not have broad experience or training in motivating patients and utilizing nutritional and lifestyle interventions.
* Low levels of fresh fruits and flavonoids[iii]
* Fried foods, protein-rich and fat-rich foods of animal origin[iv]
* Low blood levels of fruit and vegetable derived antioxidants[v]
* Dietary fatty acid imbalance—an excess of omega-6 over omega-3 fats[vi]
* Increased intake of high saturated fat foods (meat, cheese and butter)[vii]
* Bread and butter consumption, lower vegetable intake [viii]
My experience in working with hundreds of patients attempting to resolve asthma and allergies has been rewarding. The asthmatics gradually improve, and the allergic patients slowly reduce the severity of their allergies and many become entirely non-allergic. Many patients who had strong allergies to cats, dust mites and pollen, no longer have these sensitivities. From a combination of dietary advice and a limited amount of nutritional supplements, most people start to improve their condition in a few months. I have even had patients who surprisingly continued to be allergic a year late,r and then after about 20 months following my recommendations, their allergies faded away. Recoveries are the rule and not the exception. "
If you have not tried this, or at least reviewed the research, how would you know it does not work?
Now, if you are not following these dietary guidelines, should I get angry with you for putting my own family's health at risk by the same logic you are using in regard to vaccinations?