From 1994: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."
Also: 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? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system."
And from eetimes:
"Engineering: The next generation" http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4209831/Engineering--The-next-generation "We often hear from readers who are engineers that they try to dissuade sons and daughters from entering the profession. Their reasons vary, but most have reached the conclusion that globalization has made it impossible to build a career, much less make a living, as an engineer.
This is a sad state of affairs. One result is that too much talent has been diverted to unproductive pursuits lik
Some things have improved, some things have gotten worse. It's hard to say, overall, that most people in the USA are much happier than the Haudenosaunee (Iroqois) were 500 years ago, even living a bit longer perhaps on average. Are those alive now in the USA much happier or more physically fit than the Arawak in Haiti who Columbus and his successors wiped out?
See, for example: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html "Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:
"They... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want." These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus."
So, sure, we have fancy laptops and the internet, and that is great. But do most of us have real families, real communities, and meaningful work anymore?
We can't go back to those days and keep our big populations. But we can at least honor the memory of what was good about those times, and try to bring that goodness into the 21st century. Some people are trying: http://www.blessedunrest.com/
Overall, I think Eric Schmidt was trying, too. I'm sort of sorry now I made fun of him and Knol here: http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/5bd385feed4127d7 """ Gold Leader: Pardon me for asking, sir, but what good are semantic wikis and desktops going to be against Virgle? General Dodonna: Well, the Empire doesn't consider a small cgi script on a shared server or desktop to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense. ----- Commander #1: We've analyzed their attack on Knol, sir, and there is a danger. Should I have your Golden Parachute standing by? Governor Schmidt: Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances. """
Still, if he had listened to the points I was trying to make about Google and Post-Scarcity, maybe he would have had more success? http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html "This is an email I posted to the Project Virgle email list. Project Virgle was an April Fool's joke by Google and Virgin, which many did not see as that funny.... Essentially, by focusing on "profit" (and so Empire to defend that profit and related "ownership" and "equity") this is the kind of deadly farce of the bubble of Empire that Google and Virgin are (in jest) proposing bringing to Mars. It's just the "uns
Even China is automating to cut costs: http://plasticsnews.com/china/english/headlines2.html?id=1278958338 "In the wake of labor unrest, Chinese factories are adding automation to control rising labor costs. It was bound to happen. China, once considered one of the lowest-cost automotive producers because of its supply of cheap labor, is becoming another example of rising expectations as workers demand their share of the country's growing industrial prosperity."
It is the fiscal logic of mainstream capitalism in its final death spiral...
What's going to happen when a billion+ Chinese get a taste of prosperity and then lose their jobs to machine? Judging by the USA, not much... The unemployed will just suffer and die I guess... Is that the "hopeful" end to all this? Can't we hope for something better? There are other options for progressive change as I outlined, but here is a sci-fi story by Marshall Brain about two of them, suffer and die vs. a basic income as a right of citizenship: http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
There was no net job growth in the USA for the entire last decade (despite rising population). That has never happened before in the USA. Yet, productivity in terms of the US GDP grew 40% (with the benefits almost entirely going to the business owners/investors). Why should that trend not continue? Mainstream economists, even liberal ones like Paul Krugman, seem pretty much oblivous to the implications. Offshoring is a huge red herring they are chasing...
Part of why mainstream economists don't have clue: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/economy/04econ.html?_r=1 "But in the wake of the recent crisis, a few economists -- like Professors Reinhart and Rogoff, and other like-minded colleagues like Barry Eichengreen and Alan Taylor -- have been encouraging others in their field to look beyond hermetically sealed theoretical models and into the historical record. "There is so much inbredness in this profession," says Ms. Reinhart. "They all read the same sources. They all use the same data sets. They all talk to the same people. There is endless extrapolation on extrapolation on extrapolation, and for years that is what has been rewarded." "
I think you make an excellent point. However, consider this point by John Taylor Gatto: 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? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system."
It uses high speed visual servoing to dribble a ping-pong ball and to toss and catch a cell phone.
Ironcially, I am listening to President Obama's speech as I write this, and his advisors (and speech) seem clueless about the changing nature of economics given robotics and other automation, AI, better design, and voluntary social networks (even as I think he means well and it is good for the US that he his helping create some jobs by increasing some exports): http://www.earthtechling.com/2011/01/obama-visits-ge-wind-turbine-plant/ Pres. Obama can talk all he wants about "winning a global competition", but the average human worker anywhere is not going to win a competition with advanced robots... Humans need to learn to "cooperate", not "compete".
In brief, a combination of robotics (and other automation, all made possible by cheaper computing), better design (whether from cold fusion devices or thin-film solar panels), and voluntary social networks (especially with volunteers cooperating through the internet on free and open source digital public works), are decreasing the value of most paid human labor by the law of supply and demand. Cheaper energy will only accelerate this trend, since often you can substitute energy for labor and thought.
At the same time, demand for goods and services is limited for a variety of reasons. These reasons include some classical ones, like a cyclical credit crunch or a concentration of wealth (with that concentration aided by automation, intellectual monopolies, and the rich getting richer and buying up more and more resources like land for rent seeking). The reasons also including some heterodox alternative economics ones, like people moving up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as they get a lot of "stuff" and move on to other pursuits than materialism (including spiritual aspirations, self-actualization, and social connections in communities), and as people embrace a growing environmental consciousness of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" to protect the biosphere.
In general, mainstream economists ignore these issues or have very unexamined beliefs about them. Imaginative innovation, like economist Julian Simon talks about in "The Ultimate Resource", makes possible many wonderful potentialities if we think them through. Please don't let your inventiveness or cold fusion get blamed for any issues caused by unimaginative scarcity-based economic models held onto with almost a religious fervor by so many (see "The Market as God" by theologian Harvey Cox in the Atlantic). Mainstream economist have long used such scarcity-based models to apologize for an overly hierarchical social order that we probably did not even need in the past -- search on "The Mythology of Wealth". Still, some degree of centralization can be a good thing; see Manuel De Landa on "meshworks and hierarchies", and how they keep turning into each other and how all real systems are mixtures of both. So, we need to think and experiment regarding ways to allow our 21st century society to function in a healthy way given all the 21st century technology people like yourself are busy creating in all sorts of areas.
A New York Times article called: "They Did Their Homework (800 Years of
... those thinking in terms of scarcity: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all.
So, while in the past, we had "nothing to fear but fear itself", the thing to fear these days is ironcially... irony.:-) "
In brief, a combination of robotics and other automation, better design, and voluntary social networks are decreasing the value of most paid human labor (by the law of supply and demand). At the same time, demand for stuff and services is limited for a variety of reasons -- some classical, like a cyclical credit crunch or a concentration of wealth (aided by automation and intellectual monopolies) and some novel like people finally getting too much stuff as they move up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs or a growing environmental consciousness. In order to move past this, our society needs to emphasize a gift economy (like Wikipedia or Debian GNU/Linux or blogging), a basic income (social security for all regardless of age), democratic resource-based planning (with taxes, subsidies, investments, and regulation), and stronger local economies that can produce more of their own stuff (with organic gardens, solar panels, green homes, and 3D printers). There are some bad "make work" alternatives too that are best avoided, like endless war, endless schooling, endless bureaucracy, endless sickness, and endless prisons.
Simple attempts to prop things up, like requiring higher wages in the face of declining demand for human labor and more competition for jobs, will only accelerate the replacement process for jobs as higher wage requirements would just be more incentive to automate, redesign, and push more work to volunteer social networks. We are seeing the death spiral of current mainstream economics based primarily on a link between the right to consume and the need to have a job (even as there may remain some link for higher-than-typical consumption rates in some situations, even with a basic income, a gift economy, etc).
Essentially, mainstream economists are clueless and living in a conceptual bubble. And that is not just e saying it, other economists say that about their peers, like here:
"They Did Their Homework (800 Years of It)" http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/economy/04econ.html "But in the wake of the recent crisis, a few economists -- like Professors Reinhart and Rogoff, and other like-minded colleagues like Barry Eichengreen and Alan Taylor -- have been encouraging others in their field to look beyond hermetically sealed theoretical models and into the historical record. "There is so much inbredness in this profession," says Ms. Reinhart. "They all read the same sources. They all use the same data sets. They all talk to the same people. There is endless extrapolation on extrapolation on extrapolation, and for years that is what has been rewarded.""
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA [youtube.com] "The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income... A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income."
Sorry, "in our vitamins" should have been "in our environment".
Although, there are problems with our vitamins too, like too much preformed vitamin A (which competes with vitamin D and may have other problems, since we are supposed to make it ourselves from plants). http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/2008-december.shtml
Dr. Fuhrman says similar things too, about excess vitamin A and other things in vitamins.
But, again, I meant to write in our environment, that a heavier toxic load requires a better diet, but our diet has gotten worse. But, as I reflect on that mistake, toxins in our vitamins may indeed add to that, too.:-(
Also, while I'd agree that a lot of stuff that happens in the womb or the early years can't really be improved (short of Star Trek 24th century medicine we don't have), nutrition and vitamin D clearly can improve a lot of things, and not just for your son, but even in your own life, so you can take better care of your son for a long time. It is not natural for humans to get little sunlight exposure. It is not natural to eat processed and refined foods, or so much factory-farmed animal products (especially weird dairy). Neither is it normal to have so many heavy metals and other toxins in our vitamins, which *increase* the need for a better diet, when instead we have a worse one. Whether fixing all these issues can improve ASD, they certainly can help prevent (or in many cases reverse) heart disease, diabetes, cancer (prevention only mostly), arthritis, and other chronic diseases.
Genetics do affect part of health and part of behavior. But the vast majority of health and behavior reflects the interaction of genes and environment, and you can effect the environment.
Vaccines are a distraction in that sense, where even if they work to some extent, and even if they are safe to some extent, the focus on a "magic bullet" is like a permission slip for ignoring the big picture about wellness. Dr. Fuhrman's work is heavily based on science, so you can find thousands of studies he references in his works (more than anyone else probably).
Anyway, call it "garbage" if you want. But science more and more is telling us the same thing that old wisdom told us about health -- eat a diversity of mostly whole plant foods for health.
Ask yourself, where have you gotten your nutritional and other health information? What conflict-of-interests or profit-making influences have been involved in shaping your opinions about what is "normal"? http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
In general, if you read something like Dr. Fuhrman's advice on nutrition in its entirety, and use a basic supplement, plus others as he recommends like vitamin D, it is highly unlikey you would do "more harm than good".
Doctor Hyman, a different doctor I linked to who suggests in addition to many other things, chelation. I'd agree chelation is risky. I'd pass on the chelation until trying everything else (and even then, adequate iodine might help a kid excrete heavy metals rather than using chelation). But making sure a kid is not eating processed foods and is eating more whole foods is almost certainly not going to hurt them (one could probably invent behavioral scenarios or monodiets where there could be issues, so I'm not saying there are not things to think about at all).
Do you own research, since most doctors are clueless about chronic conditions.
And more specific stuff here: http://www.google.com/#q=play+therapy+autism http://www.a4pt.org/ps.playtherapy.cfm?ID=1161 http://www.playproject.org/ http://www.autismlink.com/pages/autism_therapy_play "Play therapy, or floortime, as some refer to it, is the t ype of therapy coined by Dr. Stanley Greenspan. The theory behind the concept is to enter the child 's world, play with the child on his or her terms, and slowly expand the base of play to include new ideas. Although there have been few studies on the efficacy of play therapy/ floortime, many parents have seen excellent results. For example, if a child is perseverating or obsessing with cars and perhaps watching the wheels spin, the play therapy approach would be to get down on the floor with the child and begin by watching the wheels spin with him or her, then eventually d o other things with the car, such as drive it on the floor as a typical child would do. Slowly, over time, the child will learn to expand his or her repetoire o f play, and will learn to interact with others. An excellent book on this subject, called "The Child with Special Needs," by Dr. Stanely I. Greenspan, explains the concept in depth, or you can click on some of the links below.
AutismLink does not recommend one type of therapy over another. We can, however, tell you that what counts is the amount of time that the child spends ENGAGED with other people. No matter which modality of treatment you choose, you will see your child make progress. There is considerable debate among parents and pro fessionals as to which type of therapy is the "best" or the most effective. Choose what you feel is right for your child. Only you can make that decision. You can also choose more than one type of therapy and use a combination approach."
I like this book, btw, just about play and education in general, from someone who helped run a "free school" that was play-based for thirty years: http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
After discussing it with our (new) pediatrician, we give our kid about 2000 IU D3 daily (as one 5000 IU D3 gel cap every other day or so). Dental issues should have been an early clue to vitamin D deficiency, but the medical and dental community have been clueless in the past about nutrition. A source for better general advice we like is Dr. Fuhrman (even as I think he is a tad low about vitamin D): http://www.drfuhrman.com/children/default.aspx "As parents, we want what is best for our children. We would never intentionally harm them. In fact, we make sure to get them the best care we know, read to them at bedtime and insist they wear their seatbelts, but when it comes to children and food, somehow we don't know what is the best thing to do. Our children seem finicky and only eat cheese, pasta, chicken fingers or milk and cook
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html "Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process...."
Are there any links you could please provide to any books or web sources about how to "build... cognitive and social skills via directed play therapy"?
I'd agree that raising kids has many aspects. Nutrition is only one of them.
But, while I agree with the dangers of chelation (I think appropriate iodine supplementation might be safer and as effective), in general, I feel Mark Hyman is right about the big picture.
The problem is that in the USA, dermatologists and cosmetics companies have scared everyone about being in the sun, which along with and indoors lifestyle have led to vitamin D deficiency (which is involved in dealing with heavy metals). And with the way the meat, dairy, and processed/refined food industries have captured the US FDA, we have a crazy food pyramid that contributes to most people in the USA getting about half their calories from animal products and about the other half from refined and processed foods, with less than 10% percent of calories from fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts, and seeds. We need to turn that around so less than 10% of calories comes from animal product and refined/processed foods, and 90% of calories comes from whole plant foods. 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
Unfortunately, because of the "Pleasure Trap", people have a hard time breaking out of that bondage to deadly foods and thus come up with endless rationalizations for why they are not harming us: http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm
And we've been told for so long by so many people to avoid the sun (whether for health or energy), it's hard to think it is important. A little story about that is at the end of this: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/2008-october.shtml "Then, new priests of science and medicine, told the people the Sun God was only a star, one of trillions, nothing special. Great temples called hospitals and research institutes arose, which admitted only filtered sunlight and where the people offered sacrifices to the gods of science and medicine, sacrifices that enriched the new priests. Then, thirty years ago, the new priests of dermatology told the people to shun the Sun God. "Banish her from your lives", they said, "She is evil." The people listened to the new priests and kept their pregnant women out of the Sun God's warmth, and told their children she was wicked. The people stayed inside, their children with them and traveled behind glass in their cars and wore sunblock and sunhats to keep the Sun God away. The Sun God grew vengeful...."
Look, we've been told for decades that type 2 diabetes in incurable, when it is in most cases cured within a week of a better diet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46_GInjBeQU http://www.rawfor30days.com/ Above is a link on how to get past the "pleasure trap" keeping people from changing their diet for the better and readjusting their tastes to healthy food.
We've been told heart disease and cancer are just inheritable and "genetic", when most of that is
Parents can choose to avoid compulsory school by homeschooling or using alternative schools or tutors with more flexibility, which is how most of humanity has been educated for most of time.
You're also saying parents have less control over choosing to breastfeed for two years or choosing to feed their kids whole foods (vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, seeds, whole grains, water, plus a few supplements like vitamin D) instead of junk? Less control than what? If so, why is this? Are their any commonalities between magic bullet thinking like with vaccines and other aspects of our society that relate in a refusal to invest the time and effort it takes for true health both as individuals and as societies building healthy infrastructures? Such as: http://www.bluezones.com/
I'm not saying these things are not difficult to some degree -- more difficult than going with the mainstream profit-drive flow of US society, I'd agree. But, so what? If people are going to condemn others and suggest they be dumped on an island somewhere for posing a health risk, where do you draw the line?
Also, is this the standard you use for vaccine safety and effectiveness? http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14401 "Critics point out that CROs can come with built-in problems. Conflicts of interest can arise when CROs are paid royalties only after a drug is approved rather than being paid a set fee that is independent of how safe or effective the drug turns out to be. Problems can also arise because CROs know that favorable findings mean that research into a test drug will continue, and they may also believe that results that please the hiring corporation can lead to future contracts. "[C]ompanies know that the farther the compound moves through the research cycle, the more money they can raise," Nature reported. Merck spokesperson Amy Rose refused say how many trials Merck contracted to CROs or what percentage of the Gardasil subjects these contractors recruited in the Third World. She also refused to specify how, or even if, the company oversees CROs."
Have you given any of this any thought before? For a long time, neither had I...
Anyway, the bottom line is that it is almost certain that the poster I replied to meant well with that comment. I'm just following through on the logic expressed there. You seem to think then that we should draw the line on "cheap" things? So, it's OK to feed kids junk and to send them to physical and mental disease factories because that is the cheap and conventional thing to do? Well, that's your right in the USA, I guess. But the original poster is suggesting rights be taken away for people for not submitting their children to essentially medical experiments with new vaccines some of which have had only limited trials in foreign countries by profit-making organizations with conflicts-of-interest -- and implies that is great parenting, but mentions nothing else about keeping kids healthy. So, anyway, again, if we are going to talk about exiling parents and their "spawn" for living differently than the mainstream who submits their children to day prison brainwashing, who feed their children a lot of junk food (obesity is a big problem in the USA), who can't be bothered to breastfeed for two years or more, and who without question inject their children with any stuff some companies in foreign nations tell us is "safe", then what should the standard be for exiling families for "bad" parenting and a wanton disregard for public health and safety?
Although, as in my other comments, the issue may be a much broader one about dealing with toxins, dealing with immune system issues from vitamin D deficiency, and so on, where the extra heavy metal toxic load or allergic reaction from some vaccines is just one of many issues...
The first link suggests that pretty much all autism is related to various issues like you discovered in time (there are just a bunch of them from vitamin D deficiency, to iodine defiency, to lack of omega-3s, to dairy, to toxins of various sorts in processed foods or, presumably, vaccines). From there: "Most neurodevelopmental disorders have common roots. But looking at only one aspect of such conditions will not solve the problem of autism. Current autism research is based on an outdated approach -- one that is something like blind men examining the proverbial elephant. Each researcher works in his or her own silo examining different factors and coming to different conclusions. Research that integrates, synthesizes and examines all the data on causes and potential treatments is practically non-existent. The mitochondrial dysfunction identified in the JAMA study I've been talking about is ultimately only one downstream symptom of many upstream causes. Other researchers have found systemic inflammation,(ix) brain inflammation,(x) gut inflammation,(xi) elevated levels of toxins and metals, gluten and casein antibodies,(xii) nutrient deficiencies including omega-3 fats,(xiii) vitamin D,(xiv) zinc, and magnesium, and collections of metabolic dysfunction related to quirky genes that make it difficult to perform chemical reactions essential for health in the body such as methylation and sulfation.(xv)"
The second and third links show why excessive dairy is pretty harmful for most people (even ignoring how most of the world is lactose intolerant). The fourth is something I'm just learning about at the moment (iodine deficiency, where dairy is often a primary source of iodine, so watch out for it without dairy or eating seaweed or supplementing).
Your son is lucky to have you as his Dad. You might want to still monitor for the other health issues and take pro-active steps to "disease-proof" your family on a diet of mostly vegetables, fruits, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains).
As a four year old, my wife had surgeons open up her belly and take her guts out (and put them back) because they refused to listen to her mother who suggested she had a millk allergy (from an article she read) -- and it turned out, after all the trauma, yes it was an allergy to milk and lactose. Doctors (especially surgeons) seem to be trained to sound very confident even when they don't have a clue (especially about nutrition). Part of how it got that way, starting around 1910: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report
Also, from: http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14401 "Merck spokesperson Amy Rose refused say how many trials Merck contracted to CROs or what percentage of the Gardasil subjects these contractors recruited in the Third World. She also refused to specify how, or even if, the company oversees CROs. Many consumers assume that the FDA carefully monitors CROs. But the agency hobbled by under-funding, politicization, and dependence on industry fees has few resources to assess foreign trials and relies on drug companies. "
But that's the problem -- there are no enormous profits in natural wellness; the only big profits are in palliation and treatment for sickness or random attempts at "magic bullet" wellness through phrama stuff.
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From 1994: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result."
Also:
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? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system."
A related post I made here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/98e7c08690c377cf
And from eetimes:
"Engineering: The next generation"
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4209831/Engineering--The-next-generation
"We often hear from readers who are engineers that they try to dissuade sons and daughters from entering the profession. Their reasons vary, but most have reached the conclusion that globalization has made it impossible to build a career, much less make a living, as an engineer.
This is a sad state of affairs. One result is that too much talent has been diverted to unproductive pursuits lik
Some things have improved, some things have gotten worse. It's hard to say, overall, that most people in the USA are much happier than the Haudenosaunee (Iroqois) were 500 years ago, even living a bit longer perhaps on average. Are those alive now in the USA much happier or more physically fit than the Arawak in Haiti who Columbus and his successors wiped out?
See, for example: ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
"Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:
"They
These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus."
So, sure, we have fancy laptops and the internet, and that is great. But do most of us have real families, real communities, and meaningful work anymore?
See also:
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
We can't go back to those days and keep our big populations. But we can at least honor the memory of what was good about those times, and try to bring that goodness into the 21st century. Some people are trying:
http://www.blessedunrest.com/
Overall, I think Eric Schmidt was trying, too. I'm sort of sorry now I made fun of him and Knol here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/5bd385feed4127d7
"""
Gold Leader: Pardon me for asking, sir, but what good are semantic wikis and desktops going to be against Virgle?
General Dodonna: Well, the Empire doesn't consider a small cgi script on a shared server or desktop to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense.
-----
Commander #1: We've analyzed their attack on Knol, sir, and there is a danger. Should I have your Golden Parachute standing by?
Governor Schmidt: Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances.
"""
Still, if he had listened to the points I was trying to make about Google and Post-Scarcity, maybe he would have had more success? ... Essentially, by focusing on "profit" (and so Empire to defend that profit and related "ownership" and "equity") this is the kind of deadly farce of the bubble of Empire that Google and Virgin are (in jest) proposing bringing to Mars. It's just the "uns
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
"This is an email I posted to the Project Virgle email list. Project Virgle was an April Fool's joke by Google and Virgin, which many did not see as that funny.
... already does that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5YftEAbmMQ
We need to move beyond the irony of militarizing the tools of abundance from scarcity fears:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
Even China is automating to cut costs: http://plasticsnews.com/china/english/headlines2.html?id=1278958338
"In the wake of labor unrest, Chinese factories are adding automation to control rising labor costs. It was bound to happen. China, once considered one of the lowest-cost automotive producers because of its supply of cheap labor, is becoming another example of rising expectations as workers demand their share of the country's growing industrial prosperity."
It is the fiscal logic of mainstream capitalism in its final death spiral...
What's going to happen when a billion+ Chinese get a taste of prosperity and then lose their jobs to machine? Judging by the USA, not much... The unemployed will just suffer and die I guess... Is that the "hopeful" end to all this? Can't we hope for something better? There are other options for progressive change as I outlined, but here is a sci-fi story by Marshall Brain about two of them, suffer and die vs. a basic income as a right of citizenship:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Also, people like to do a lot of jobs like raise good food, but our society and its economic model won't allow them (or at least makes it really hard) because the quality of the actual work experience itself is discounted:
http://www.californiadreamseries.org/rfc.htm
http://www.hulu.com/ripe-for-change
There was no net job growth in the USA for the entire last decade (despite rising population). That has never happened before in the USA. Yet, productivity in terms of the US GDP grew 40% (with the benefits almost entirely going to the business owners/investors). Why should that trend not continue? Mainstream economists, even liberal ones like Paul Krugman, seem pretty much oblivous to the implications. Offshoring is a huge red herring they are chasing...
Part of why mainstream economists don't have clue:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/economy/04econ.html?_r=1
"But in the wake of the recent crisis, a few economists -- like Professors Reinhart and Rogoff, and other like-minded colleagues like Barry Eichengreen and Alan Taylor -- have been encouraging others in their field to look beyond hermetically sealed theoretical models and into the historical record. "There is so much inbredness in this profession," says Ms. Reinhart. "They all read the same sources. They all use the same data sets. They all talk to the same people. There is endless extrapolation on extrapolation on extrapolation, and for years that is what has been rewarded." "
I think you make an excellent point. However, consider this point by John Taylor Gatto:
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? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system."
See also my other comment to this story.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1963016&cid=34976334
Similar: http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
It uses high speed visual servoing to dribble a ping-pong ball and to toss and catch a cell phone.
Ironcially, I am listening to President Obama's speech as I write this, and his advisors (and speech) seem clueless about the changing nature of economics given robotics and other automation, AI, better design, and voluntary social networks (even as I think he means well and it is good for the US that he his helping create some jobs by increasing some exports):
http://www.earthtechling.com/2011/01/obama-visits-ge-wind-turbine-plant/
Pres. Obama can talk all he wants about "winning a global competition", but the average human worker anywhere is not going to win a competition with advanced robots... Humans need to learn to "cooperate", not "compete".
Economic solutions (my comments):
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/38e2u3s23jer/2
From a comment I posted yesterday in relation to an (purported) demo of a cold fusion device:
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270
In brief, a combination of robotics (and other automation, all made possible by cheaper computing), better design (whether from cold fusion devices or thin-film solar panels), and voluntary social networks (especially with volunteers cooperating through the internet on free and open source digital public works), are decreasing the value of most paid human labor by the law of supply and demand. Cheaper energy will only accelerate this trend, since often you can substitute energy for labor and thought.
At the same time, demand for goods and services is limited for a variety of reasons. These reasons include some classical ones, like a cyclical credit crunch or a concentration of wealth (with that concentration aided by automation, intellectual monopolies, and the rich getting richer and buying up more and more resources like land for rent seeking). The reasons also including some heterodox alternative economics ones, like people moving up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs as they get a lot of "stuff" and move on to other pursuits than materialism (including spiritual aspirations, self-actualization, and social connections in communities), and as people embrace a growing environmental consciousness of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" to protect the biosphere.
In general, mainstream economists ignore these issues or have very unexamined beliefs about them. Imaginative innovation, like economist Julian Simon talks about in "The Ultimate Resource", makes possible many wonderful potentialities if we think them through. Please don't let your inventiveness or cold fusion get blamed for any issues caused by unimaginative scarcity-based economic models held onto with almost a religious fervor by so many (see "The Market as God" by theologian Harvey Cox in the Atlantic). Mainstream economist have long used such scarcity-based models to apologize for an overly hierarchical social order that we probably did not even need in the past -- search on "The Mythology of Wealth". Still, some degree of centralization can be a good thing; see Manuel De Landa on "meshworks and hierarchies", and how they keep turning into each other and how all real systems are mixtures of both. So, we need to think and experiment regarding ways to allow our 21st century society to function in a healthy way given all the 21st century technology people like yourself are busy creating in all sorts of areas.
A New York Times article called: "They Did Their Homework (800 Years of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_society
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days
... those thinking in terms of scarcity: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all.
So, while in the past, we had "nothing to fear but fear itself", the thing to fear these days is ironcially ... irony. :-) "
From my comment here: http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-392
In brief, a combination of robotics and other automation, better design, and voluntary social networks are decreasing the value of most paid human labor (by the law of supply and demand). At the same time, demand for stuff and services is limited for a variety of reasons -- some classical, like a cyclical credit crunch or a concentration of wealth (aided by automation and intellectual monopolies) and some novel like people finally getting too much stuff as they move up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs or a growing environmental consciousness. In order to move past this, our society needs to emphasize a gift economy (like Wikipedia or Debian GNU/Linux or blogging), a basic income (social security for all regardless of age), democratic resource-based planning (with taxes, subsidies, investments, and regulation), and stronger local economies that can produce more of their own stuff (with organic gardens, solar panels, green homes, and 3D printers). There are some bad "make work" alternatives too that are best avoided, like endless war, endless schooling, endless bureaucracy, endless sickness, and endless prisons.
Simple attempts to prop things up, like requiring higher wages in the face of declining demand for human labor and more competition for jobs, will only accelerate the replacement process for jobs as higher wage requirements would just be more incentive to automate, redesign, and push more work to volunteer social networks. We are seeing the death spiral of current mainstream economics based primarily on a link between the right to consume and the need to have a job (even as there may remain some link for higher-than-typical consumption rates in some situations, even with a basic income, a gift economy, etc).
Essentially, mainstream economists are clueless and living in a conceptual bubble. And that is not just e saying it, other economists say that about their peers, like here:
"They Did Their Homework (800 Years of It)"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/economy/04econ.html
"But in the wake of the recent crisis, a few economists -- like Professors Reinhart and Rogoff, and other like-minded colleagues like Barry Eichengreen and Alan Taylor -- have been encouraging others in their field to look beyond hermetically sealed theoretical models and into the historical record. "There is so much inbredness in this profession," says Ms. Reinhart. "They all read the same sources. They all use the same data sets. They all talk to the same people. There is endless extrapolation on extrapolation on extrapolation, and for years that is what has been rewarded.""
For more info:
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-402
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA [youtube.com] ... A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income."
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income
http://www.ageofautism.com/2011/01/breaking-news-statement-from-dr-andrew-wakefield-no-fraud-no-hoax-no-profit-motive.html
http://www.ageofautism.com/2010/05/peer-reviewed-papers-support-findings.html
I'm not saying who to believe there; I'm just linking to his defense vs. Deer's accusations
See also for alternatives to prevent/cure/mitigate ASD:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/vit-D-theory-autism.shtml
In general, for good health through better nutrition:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
And discussion comments here (pro and con):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jenny-mccarthy/vaccine-autism-debate_b_806857.html
Sorry, "in our vitamins" should have been "in our environment".
Although, there are problems with our vitamins too, like too much preformed vitamin A (which competes with vitamin D and may have other problems, since we are supposed to make it ourselves from plants).
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/2008-december.shtml
Dr. Fuhrman says similar things too, about excess vitamin A and other things in vitamins.
But, again, I meant to write in our environment, that a heavier toxic load requires a better diet, but our diet has gotten worse. But, as I reflect on that mistake, toxins in our vitamins may indeed add to that, too. :-(
Please see this post by another parent about how nutritional issues (dairy in that case) were the cause of autistic-seeming behavior:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1947552&cid=34849468
Also, while I'd agree that a lot of stuff that happens in the womb or the early years can't really be improved (short of Star Trek 24th century medicine we don't have), nutrition and vitamin D clearly can improve a lot of things, and not just for your son, but even in your own life, so you can take better care of your son for a long time. It is not natural for humans to get little sunlight exposure. It is not natural to eat processed and refined foods, or so much factory-farmed animal products (especially weird dairy). Neither is it normal to have so many heavy metals and other toxins in our vitamins, which *increase* the need for a better diet, when instead we have a worse one. Whether fixing all these issues can improve ASD, they certainly can help prevent (or in many cases reverse) heart disease, diabetes, cancer (prevention only mostly), arthritis, and other chronic diseases.
Other links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPiR9VcuVWw
http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/foodpyramid.aspx
http://www.drfuhrman.com/children/default.aspx
Genetics do affect part of health and part of behavior. But the vast majority of health and behavior reflects the interaction of genes and environment, and you can effect the environment.
Vaccines are a distraction in that sense, where even if they work to some extent, and even if they are safe to some extent, the focus on a "magic bullet" is like a permission slip for ignoring the big picture about wellness. Dr. Fuhrman's work is heavily based on science, so you can find thousands of studies he references in his works (more than anyone else probably).
And here is other scientifically based advice on wellness:
http://www.bluezones.com/
Anyway, call it "garbage" if you want. But science more and more is telling us the same thing that old wisdom told us about health -- eat a diversity of mostly whole plant foods for health.
Ask yourself, where have you gotten your nutritional and other health information? What conflict-of-interests or profit-making influences have been involved in shaping your opinions about what is "normal"?
http://www.seriouseats.com/2007/11/the-subsidized-food-pyramid.html
In general, if you read something like Dr. Fuhrman's advice on nutrition in its entirety, and use a basic supplement, plus others as he recommends like vitamin D, it is highly unlikey you would do "more harm than good".
Doctor Hyman, a different doctor I linked to who suggests in addition to many other things, chelation. I'd agree chelation is risky. I'd pass on the chelation until trying everything else (and even then, adequate iodine might help a kid excrete heavy metals rather than using chelation). But making sure a kid is not eating processed foods and is eating more whole foods is almost certainly not going to hurt them (one could probably invent behavioral scenarios or monodiets where there could be issues, so I'm not saying there are not things to think about at all).
Do you own research, since most doctors are clueless about chronic conditions.
Even look into info for spiders:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachnophobia
"The alternative view is that the dangers, such as from spiders, ar
Thanks. No need to go out of your way. I see a bunch of links here:
http://www.google.com/#q=play+therapy
http://www.a4pt.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_therapy
And more specific stuff here:
http://www.google.com/#q=play+therapy+autism
http://www.a4pt.org/ps.playtherapy.cfm?ID=1161
http://www.playproject.org/
http://www.autismlink.com/pages/autism_therapy_play
"Play therapy, or floortime, as some refer to it, is the t ype of therapy coined by Dr. Stanley Greenspan. The theory behind the concept is to enter the child 's world, play with the child on his or her terms, and slowly expand the base of play to include new ideas. Although there have been few studies on the efficacy of play therapy/ floortime, many parents have seen excellent results. For example, if a child is perseverating or obsessing with cars and perhaps watching the wheels spin, the play therapy approach would be to get down on the floor with the child and begin by watching the wheels spin with him or her, then eventually d o other things with the car, such as drive it on the floor as a typical child would do. Slowly, over time, the child will learn to expand his or her repetoire o f play, and will learn to interact with others. An excellent book on this subject, called "The Child with Special Needs," by Dr. Stanely I. Greenspan, explains the concept in depth, or you can click on some of the links below.
AutismLink does not recommend one type of therapy over another. We can, however, tell you that what counts is the amount of time that the child spends ENGAGED with other people. No matter which modality of treatment you choose, you will see your child make progress. There is considerable debate among parents and pro fessionals as to which type of therapy is the "best" or the most effective. Choose what you feel is right for your child. Only you can make that decision. You can also choose more than one type of therapy and use a combination approach."
I like this book, btw, just about play and education in general, from someone who helped run a "free school" that was play-based for thirty years:
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
By the way, make sure you check vitamin D levels:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/autism-information.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/another-autism-case-report.shtml
After discussing it with our (new) pediatrician, we give our kid about 2000 IU D3 daily (as one 5000 IU D3 gel cap every other day or so). Dental issues should have been an early clue to vitamin D deficiency, but the medical and dental community have been clueless in the past about nutrition. A source for better general advice we like is Dr. Fuhrman (even as I think he is a tad low about vitamin D):
http://www.drfuhrman.com/children/default.aspx
"As parents, we want what is best for our children. We would never intentionally harm them. In fact, we make sure to get them the best care we know, read to them at bedtime and insist they wear their seatbelts, but when it comes to children and food, somehow we don't know what is the best thing to do. Our children seem finicky and only eat cheese, pasta, chicken fingers or milk and cook
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html ... So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process. ..."
"Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case"
based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
A larger elaboration on that theme:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
Two related posts by me to other comments to this article that echo your point from another angle:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1947552&cid=34856878
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1947552&cid=34860252
Are there any links you could please provide to any books or web sources about how to "build ... cognitive and social skills via directed play therapy"?
I'd agree that raising kids has many aspects. Nutrition is only one of them.
By the way, two counter links:
http://open.salon.com/blog/rahul_k_parikh/2009/09/06/huffington_post_health_watch_mark_hymans_faux_autism_cure
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/09/dr_mark_hyman_mangles_autism_science_on-.php
But, while I agree with the dangers of chelation (I think appropriate iodine supplementation might be safer and as effective), in general, I feel Mark Hyman is right about the big picture.
The problem is that in the USA, dermatologists and cosmetics companies have scared everyone about being in the sun, which along with and indoors lifestyle have led to vitamin D deficiency (which is involved in dealing with heavy metals). And with the way the meat, dairy, and processed/refined food industries have captured the US FDA, we have a crazy food pyramid that contributes to most people in the USA getting about half their calories from animal products and about the other half from refined and processed foods, with less than 10% percent of calories from fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts, and seeds. We need to turn that around so less than 10% of calories comes from animal product and refined/processed foods, and 90% of calories comes from whole plant foods.
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
Unfortunately, because of the "Pleasure Trap", people have a hard time breaking out of that bondage to deadly foods and thus come up with endless rationalizations for why they are not harming us:
http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/PleasureTrap.htm
And we've been told for so long by so many people to avoid the sun (whether for health or energy), it's hard to think it is important. A little story about that is at the end of this:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/2008-october.shtml
"Then, new priests of science and medicine, told the people the Sun God was only a star, one of trillions, nothing special. Great temples called hospitals and research institutes arose, which admitted only filtered sunlight and where the people offered sacrifices to the gods of science and medicine, sacrifices that enriched the new priests. Then, thirty years ago, the new priests of dermatology told the people to shun the Sun God. "Banish her from your lives", they said, "She is evil." The people listened to the new priests and kept their pregnant women out of the Sun God's warmth, and told their children she was wicked. The people stayed inside, their children with them and traveled behind glass in their cars and wore sunblock and sunhats to keep the Sun God away. The Sun God grew vengeful...."
Look, we've been told for decades that type 2 diabetes in incurable, when it is in most cases cured within a week of a better diet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46_GInjBeQU
http://www.rawfor30days.com/
Above is a link on how to get past the "pleasure trap" keeping people from changing their diet for the better and readjusting their tastes to healthy food.
We've been told heart disease and cancer are just inheritable and "genetic", when most of that is
Lots of stuff (good and bad) is posted there (along with discussion of good points and bad points). Ignore it all if you want. Other links:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/new-harvard-paper-on-autism.shtml
http://drhyman.com/why-current-thinking-about-autism-is-completely-wrong-470/
Compulsory education in the USA was not "normal" until the last hundred years, and has a lot of negative side effects beyond being a major vector for communicable disease:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
Parents can choose to avoid compulsory school by homeschooling or using alternative schools or tutors with more flexibility, which is how most of humanity has been educated for most of time.
You're also saying parents have less control over choosing to breastfeed for two years or choosing to feed their kids whole foods (vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, seeds, whole grains, water, plus a few supplements like vitamin D) instead of junk? Less control than what? If so, why is this? Are their any commonalities between magic bullet thinking like with vaccines and other aspects of our society that relate in a refusal to invest the time and effort it takes for true health both as individuals and as societies building healthy infrastructures? Such as: http://www.bluezones.com/
I'm not saying these things are not difficult to some degree -- more difficult than going with the mainstream profit-drive flow of US society, I'd agree. But, so what? If people are going to condemn others and suggest they be dumped on an island somewhere for posing a health risk, where do you draw the line?
Also, is this the standard you use for vaccine safety and effectiveness?
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14401
"Critics point out that CROs can come with built-in problems. Conflicts of interest can arise when CROs are paid royalties only after a drug is approved rather than being paid a set fee that is independent of how safe or effective the drug turns out to be. Problems can also arise because CROs know that favorable findings mean that research into a test drug will continue, and they may also believe that results that please the hiring corporation can lead to future contracts. "[C]ompanies know that the farther the compound moves through the research cycle, the more money they can raise," Nature reported. Merck spokesperson Amy Rose refused say how many trials Merck contracted to CROs or what percentage of the Gardasil subjects these contractors recruited in the Third World. She also refused to specify how, or even if, the company oversees CROs."
Have you given any of this any thought before? For a long time, neither had I...
Anyway, the bottom line is that it is almost certain that the poster I replied to meant well with that comment. I'm just following through on the logic expressed there. You seem to think then that we should draw the line on "cheap" things? So, it's OK to feed kids junk and to send them to physical and mental disease factories because that is the cheap and conventional thing to do? Well, that's your right in the USA, I guess. But the original poster is suggesting rights be taken away for people for not submitting their children to essentially medical experiments with new vaccines some of which have had only limited trials in foreign countries by profit-making organizations with conflicts-of-interest -- and implies that is great parenting, but mentions nothing else about keeping kids healthy. So, anyway, again, if we are going to talk about exiling parents and their "spawn" for living differently than the mainstream who submits their children to day prison brainwashing, who feed their children a lot of junk food (obesity is a big problem in the USA), who can't be bothered to breastfeed for two years or more, and who without question inject their children with any stuff some companies in foreign nations tell us is "safe", then what should the standard be for exiling families for "bad" parenting and a wanton disregard for public health and safety?
Actually, I'm starting to think th
http://www.talkaboutcuringautism.org/medical/studies-about-vaccine-autism-link.htm
Mentioned here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/hxwhite/no-link-found-between-vac_n_715090_61080424.html
Although, as in my other comments, the issue may be a much broader one about dealing with toxins, dealing with immune system issues from vitamin D deficiency, and so on, where the extra heavy metal toxic load or allergic reaction from some vaccines is just one of many issues...
Please see my other posts to this article, including these links and others:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
http://www.amazon.com/Disease-Proof-Your-Child-Feeding-Right/dp/0312338058
http://www.ravediet.com/preview.html
http://www.iodine4health.com/
The first link suggests that pretty much all autism is related to various issues like you discovered in time (there are just a bunch of them from vitamin D deficiency, to iodine defiency, to lack of omega-3s, to dairy, to toxins of various sorts in processed foods or, presumably, vaccines). From there: "Most neurodevelopmental disorders have common roots. But looking at only one aspect of such conditions will not solve the problem of autism. Current autism research is based on an outdated approach -- one that is something like blind men examining the proverbial elephant. Each researcher works in his or her own silo examining different factors and coming to different conclusions. Research that integrates, synthesizes and examines all the data on causes and potential treatments is practically non-existent. The mitochondrial dysfunction identified in the JAMA study I've been talking about is ultimately only one downstream symptom of many upstream causes. Other researchers have found systemic inflammation,(ix) brain inflammation,(x) gut inflammation,(xi) elevated levels of toxins and metals, gluten and casein antibodies,(xii) nutrient deficiencies including omega-3 fats,(xiii) vitamin D,(xiv) zinc, and magnesium, and collections of metabolic dysfunction related to quirky genes that make it difficult to perform chemical reactions essential for health in the body such as methylation and sulfation.(xv)"
The second and third links show why excessive dairy is pretty harmful for most people (even ignoring how most of the world is lactose intolerant). The fourth is something I'm just learning about at the moment (iodine deficiency, where dairy is often a primary source of iodine, so watch out for it without dairy or eating seaweed or supplementing).
Your son is lucky to have you as his Dad. You might want to still monitor for the other health issues and take pro-active steps to "disease-proof" your family on a diet of mostly vegetables, fruits, and beans (and some nuts, seeds, and whole grains).
As a four year old, my wife had surgeons open up her belly and take her guts out (and put them back) because they refused to listen to her mother who suggested she had a millk allergy (from an article she read) -- and it turned out, after all the trauma, yes it was an allergy to milk and lactose. Doctors (especially surgeons) seem to be trained to sound very confident even when they don't have a clue (especially about nutrition). Part of how it got that way, starting around 1910:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report
For down the road:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
http://www.holtgws.com/
See my other posts for this article with links to this and others: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1932134&cid=34740048
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1932134&cid=34740098
Also, from:
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14401
"Merck spokesperson Amy Rose refused say how many trials Merck contracted to CROs or what percentage of the Gardasil subjects these contractors recruited in the Third World. She also refused to specify how, or even if, the company oversees CROs. Many consumers assume that the FDA carefully monitors CROs. But the agency hobbled by under-funding, politicization, and dependence on industry fees has few resources to assess foreign trials and relies on drug companies. "
On the point in your sig, and maybe a way to get better research by less conflict-of-interest in funding:
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-392
On keeping people healthy for cheap:
http://www.amazon.com/Disease-Proof-Your-Child-Feeding-Right/dp/0312338058
http://lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html
http://www.iodine4health.com/
http://www.ravediet.com/preview.html
http://www.bluezones.com/
But that's the problem -- there are no enormous profits in natural wellness; the only big profits are in palliation and treatment for sickness or random attempts at "magic bullet" wellness through phrama stuff.