The more things change, the more they stay the same

Zaphod Beeblebrox, Galactic President and just this guy, y'know?

It seems like only yesterday when I began this blog with the intention of by-god-speaking-my-mind. It also seems like only yesterday when I more or less abandoned this blog for more specifically-focused blogs where I could by-god-speak-my-mind about specifically-focused things, and so I created a blog about alternative health care, a blog about religion, a blog about Freemasonry, and a blog about insurance and legal services.

And then it only seems like yesterday when I more or less abandoned all of my blogs and began instead briefly posting meaninglessly on MySpace and then after a (very) short 140-character-at-a-time adventure on Twitter I finally homesteaded a place on Facebook and became a hoopy frood.

My first two posts back in July 2005 were about how Big Pharma (the medical-pharmaceutical industrial complex) was using its power to denigrate alternative health care modalities, and about how a medical doctor had left an infant blind and comatose by accidentally hooking a breathing apparatus for the child up to a carbon monoxide source instead of the intended oxygen source.

Those are the very same types of things I would take note of and and get agitated about and write about today. Only in shorter posts. And on Facebook instead of in a blog.

Hopefully I'll discover new and fun and exciting and meaningful things to blog about. Looking at the long list of links on the sidebar of this blog, it looks like once upon a time I was into spiritual and metaphysical things both deep and profound. I wonder what ever happened to that part of me?

After several false starts (if thinking about it could be called a "start") here I am, finally writing a new blog post on my original blog, this the aptly named "Wave Function Collapse."

Basically, wave function collapse is a scientific term that means that something only happens when you look at it. The phenomenon in which a wave function — initially in a superposition of several different possible eigenstates — appears to reduce to a single one of those states after interaction with an observer: the reduction of the physical possibilities into a single possibility as seen by an observer. Or, in my case, commented on by the observer, me.

Or at least this is what I was thinking when I chose the blog's title in 2005... but then, I was reading a lot of Robert Anton Wilson and Douglas Adams at the time.

So anyway, perhaps I've come back to my roots. Maybe it has to do with karma, or the Circle of Life. Or maybe it's just that now that "Breaking Bad" has ended and "Lost" is but a fond memory, I have more time to think (and maybe write down some of those thoughts).

Well, that's it for now. The wave function is collapsing... Aieieieieie!

It's always your choice

"Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it's always your choice." -- Dr. Wayne Dyer

What is it all about?

"What is it all about? To get things done? No! Because you do them, and you undo them, and you do them, and you undo them, and you do them, and you undo them.... What is the point in all of it? It is the thrill of the process along the way. Physical human minds keeps thinking, 'We have to be going towards some end.' And you kill each other by the millions trying to decide what is the appropriate end that you are all going toward. And we say: well, there's your flawed premise. Because there is no end that you're going toward. We are all on a perpetual cycle of joyous becoming. We will never get it done, ever, ever, ever, ever." -- Abraham

Earth's immune system trying to get rid of us?

"I think our planet’s immune system is trying to get rid of us and should. You know, after the Spanish Inquisition and the Roman games and burning women in squares — public squares, and World War I and World War II and the Holocaust and Nagasaki and all that." — Kurt Vonnegut, 2005

Don't go cuckoo over avian flu

Links to many great articles that put the Avian Flu Panic into a less than scary perspective can be found over on the Other Blog AltHealthNews.com. I especially like the one reprinted below.

Whittier Daily News
by Robert Rector
Jan 4, 2006

In a world that has been characterized lately by Old Testament-style natural disasters, unspeakably violent acts of terror, frightening economic uncertainty and, at least in Los Angeles, really bad baseball, comes now a new reason for concern: The avian flu.

It joins a long list of Things to Fear that has included West Nile virus, Ebola, anthrax, flesh-eating bacteria, swine flu, SARS and mad cow disease - all of which fell a bit short of eradicating the human race, despite predictions to the contrary.

That is not to say we should take the bird flu lightly. The Centers for Disease Control warns: "So far, spread of the virus from person to person has been rare and has not continued beyond one person. However, because all influenza viruses have the ability to change, scientists are concerned that the virus one day could be able to infect humans and spread easily from one person to another.

"Because these viruses do not commonly infect humans, there is little or no immune protection against them in the human population. If the virus were able to infect people and spread easily from person to person, an influenza pandemic (worldwide outbreak of disease) could begin."

So what are we to do?

First of all, don't turn to the Internet for aid and comfort. It's full of snake oil salesmen offering dubious advice. A sampling:

"Hospitals and emergency rooms will be overwhelmed. You will be turned away or taken to a warehouse to die. Nurses and doctors will be on all fours trying to breathe," warns a company hawking face masks.

"Corpses will pile up because mortuaries will be inundated. Where will the bodies be stored?

"The New York Stock Market will collapse. It's too crowded to come to work. Too risky. One sneeze and they all die."

Or consider this guy's advice:

"Here's another manufactured disease meant to mass control the people. Don't fall into the vaccine trap. Vaccines are the real mass exterminators. Consider fasting on your own urine, as urine has the most powerful antibodies."

Another firm promotes protection through, what else, chicken soup. Or Breathe Free Onion Syrup. Or three Mexican remedies for colds and flu, "including one supplied by the great-great-granddaughter of Geronimo."

Second, don't panic. Unless you're running a chicken ranch in Vietnam, chances are you're not going to be exposed, according to medical experts. And you're not going to catch avian flu from your parakeet. Or eating turkey.

Third, it wouldn't hurt to follow the CDC's common-sense public-health recommendations: Hand washing, covering your nose and your mouth when you sneeze or cough. If your child gets sick, don't send him to school. If you're sick, don't go to work. Avoid crowded places where people are confined in an indoor space.

As for me, maybe I'll try one of those Mexican cures. Pass me the tequila.

Robert Rector is associate editor of the Pasadena Star-News and a resident of Glendale.

Jump Out of Your Boiling Pan of Mediocrity

By Dr. Gene Clerkin, D.C.

When we greet someone it is quite common to ask, “How are you doing?” Other variations include what's up, what's going on and how have you been? Of course the standard answer is usually “I'm fine,” “I'm okay,” “Pretty good” and my favorite, “I'm hanging in there.” My usual response to the latter is “Well, hang on.”

These less than enthusiastic responses remind me of the boiling frog story. This is a little gross but read on, there is a point. A few years back I heard about an experiment using frogs and water. First, a shallow pan of water was heated to boiling point and then a frog was dropped in. What do you think happened? He jumped out of course. Then a second frog was placed in a shallow pan of room temperature water, which was subsequently heated very slowly. Unfortunately for the second frog, the rise in temperature was so slow that by the time he realized it, he had become frog soup.

Now, I'm certainly not in favor of torturing frogs and to be honest with you, I don't even have the particulars of that experiment, but it does bring up an interesting parallel to how most people experience their life. In general, people don't lose their health, wellness and vitality all at once, like the first frog. It usually happens so slowly that we don't even realize its happening. If people were experiencing their optimal state and then, all of a sudden, were cast into experiencing their “normal” state, they would know something was drastically wrong.

So, when someone answers with the standard “I'm fine” what does that mean? It most likely means that they feel like they did the day before, and the day before that. Of course we know when we feel like crap, and in comparison, “fine” is certainly a whole lot better than that. Unfortunately, feeling okay has become the benchmark that most people have learned to settle with.

Usually when someone experiences symptoms they seek out a practitioner to help restore them to the state they were in before becoming symptomatic. Sometimes a practitioner will help maintain them in that state so the symptoms won't return. This way, instead of feeling bad, they can feel okay.

A wellness practitioner, on the other hand, would seek not just to restore them to their previous state, but to a higher level of functioning than they were previously experiencing. Besides, if you take the same path you'll land up in the same place. Unfortunately most people have forgotten what wellness feels like, so they settle for fine or just getting by. I've actually had people tell me they were in good health and than name the half dozen medications they were on in the same breath.

Well, I'm here to tell you that it doesn't have to be like that. Everyone, no matter what his or her health condition, has the potential to experience a higher level of wellness. All they have to do is wake up and jump out of that slowly boiling pan of mediocrity they call their life.

So, don't just hang on... Rock on!

Develop a vaccine against official secrecy

An editorial from the Roanoke Times, Sunday, Nov. 6, 2005

Develop a vaccine against official secrecy -- Senators should not grant immunity to a biomedical countermeasures agency.

Even as President Bush last week unveiled his plans to protect the nation from deadly disease outbreaks such as an avian flu pandemic, a quintet of senators, including Majority Leader Bill First, were rushing forward with their own plans.

They have introduced some ideas worth discussing, but apparently could not resist the penchant too prevalent among Washington leaders today for secrecy and capitulation to corporate donors at the expense of civil protections.

The creation of a Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency is at the heart of the senators' proposal to prepare the nation for the threat du jour. BARDA would oversee research into countermeasures against menaces such as epidemics and biological attacks by terrorists.

At first blush, the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute of Health would seem already able to accomplish that, but a single agency to coordinate specialized research in the public and private sectors is worth considering. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), most well known for creating the Internet, has had tremendous success in a similar role.

The biomedical agency, however, would go beyond its defense cousin, entering new government waters shrouded in fog.

The public can scrutinize DARPA -- and every other federal agency -- through the Freedom of Information Act and the Federal Advisory Committee Act. The senators backing BARDA would exempt the agency from those important public oversight laws.

Even the CIA is subject to public information requests. Allowing judicial review of classified information ensures national security without completely restricting public access to most government records. A blanket exemption for BARDA would sanction an unacceptable extreme in government secrecy.

The bill goes even further to undermine the public good by handing a blanket exemption from liability lawsuits to pharmaceutical companies engaged in biomedical security research. If a company working under BARDA were to injure or kill people through reckless testing or distribution of a vaccine, the injured parties would have no recourse to seek just compensation through the courts.

Without the threat of litigation, little would stand in the way of drug companies' ramping up production of unproven products to turn a profit at the expense of public safety.

The United States must prepare for biological threats but not by throwing away fundamental rights and protections. The paternalistic approach to governance that asks Americans not to worry about what officials and drug companies are up to only contributes to increasing public frustration and distrust of government.

Mold and slime grow in the shadows where there is no accountability. The Senate should keep biomedical research in the light.

New Orleans' Toxic Waters

"The water isn't as static and opaque as it looked from 20 feet above. Smoky black wisps dissolve and re-form every few seconds as we glide by. The scary thing is that there aren't any mosquitoes flitting about -- if they're afraid of this stuff, we humans have got to be seriously screwed."

--Josh Levin, Slate Magazine, 9-10-05, on New Orleans floodwaters