Believe me, I do not enjoy it when I am forced to assume a lecturing and somewhat preachy “school marmish” tone with my blog readers, but there we have it: it is often necessary. For those of you who are young or non-English native language readers, a “school marm” is what the female teacher in a one room school house used to be called back in the prairie and Western settlement days. It is slang for a woman teacher who has to keep a strict rein on her pupils, who are rowdy and undisciplined. So with that as a foreword and forewarning, here is the subject: how modern notions of “cleanliness” have contributed to destroying the planet’s health, has reduced rather than improved human health, and has resulted in unbalanced mental and emotional views about “cleanliness.”
This is mostly going to be a history and social lesson and rumination, but here is the theology link: The often quoted “cleanliness is next to godliness” is not a quotation from the Bible. In fact, the only cleanliness referred to in the Bible was related to 1) religious injunctions and strictures, 2) hospitality and 3) spiritual and soul cleanliness, not the vanity of the body. I’m going to return to this subject later on and describe how “cleanliness” “worked” in Biblical times, but first I need to give my mostly youthful and affluent readership a few rings on the clue phone about recent history of modern “cleanliness.”
Let us start with the primary concern (aka obsession) among westerners, which is “washing” by using water in either a bath or most modernly the shower. Baths have, in general, become passé and are often not even installed in modern structures, with the assumption being everyone either uses the shower or if they want to “soak,” they do so for recreation, social and erotic reasons in hot tubs, Jacuzzis and so forth. So to keep it simple let’s talk about showers in the modern vernacular, but understand that all bodily washing previous to the past several decades was conducted in a bath tub or other container.
Why is this? Well, my young and spoiled audience, until recently having water pumped into a house at all was a luxury, not something that one would squander in a running shower that goes right down the drain. Further, the fuel to heat the water was likewise scarce. For nearly two thousand years since Biblical times until pretty much the 1950’s, water and the fuel to heat it required often backbreaking work to prepare and was expensive for the average impoverished or marginally poor family. Now here’s the rub: just because for two thousand years people did not shower that does not mean they were “dirty,” “unclean” or “smelled bad.” That is one of the great delusions of this post-intellectual society where people have skewed and distorted notions regarding just about everything. So I’m going to tell you “what it was like” as recently as the 1950’s, when I was growing up.
There is an old expression “the Saturday night bath.” This came about from the reality that the average poor family did indeed have a bath only once a week. The water was pumped from outside the house and carried by many trips with the bucket into the central location (usually the kitchen), where a large tub was filled with the water, cold water. However, if this was to be a warm bath, each bucket of water was heated, using precious coal or cut firewood, before being added to the tub. Then each person in the family took turns in the tub, using the same water.
One of the housekeeper’s main chores was to keep the family with a good supply of soap, which was made by hand by each family. What is soap? Soap is a substance that facilitates cleaning. It is not an antiseptic, as so many crazy people think today, though it had a slight element of it. Here is how soap “works.” Soap is made up of a combination of three substances that do the following: one dissolves dirt, one is abrasive to scrub the dirt away, and one is slightly reactive in an astringent way, kind of a slight antiseptic but also to make the dirt bubble up somewhat as it is scraped away. Thus soap is made up of a fat (from either an animal or plant oil), an abrasive such as ashes or sand, and a reactive material such as lye. The fat dissolves the dirt and outer layer of skin, the abrasive sloughs it away, and the reactive material makes it easy to remove and is somewhat antiseptic. Now people did not know about germs and so forth but being farmers and animal hide tanners they knew about rot. That is how people over the years realized to use substances such as lye in soap, without realizing they were also destroying some germs.
So having a bath was a huge amount of work, with hauling the water, heating it up, and using preciously made soap, for most people who were until modern times poor and of the lower classes. Even when most homes had hot water bathrooms and bath tubs in the 1950s onward, poor people still maintained a high standard of cleanliness in between infrequent baths. Whoa, wait! Did you read that right or did I make a typo? Did I really mean to say these poor slobs maintained a “high” standard of cleanliness? Didn’t I mean that they were dirty bums? Nope, I meant what I said. How did people “stay clean” when they only had weekly baths? They were EXPECTED TO STAY CLEAN ON A ROUTINE DAILY BASIS. Even men who worked in the coal mines and so forth, or in the field, in dirty jobs, were expected to stay as clean as possible on a daily basis. How did they do that? It’s a wonderful invention called a washcloth and a bar of soap. For several thousand years humans kept themselves clean by using the hand water pump located outdoors or in modern times, brought inside via a sink through modern plumbing, to “wash up” using a bar of soap and a washcloth. Imagine that!
That is exactly how things worked in my household growing up, and that is how I maintain my body, for the most part, to this day. We had a bathtub and a warm water plumbing but my dad being born in 1903 and my mother being a war refugee kept themselves clean on a daily basis, and taught me to do the same, until one had the weekly, or if for reason more frequently, full bath. That’s one reason I have lots of wonderful washcloths, and not because I have psychic solidarity with former POW Senator John McCain who as a POW realized one’s one washcloth was one’s only and most treasured possession. People who were thrifty with resources (water and fuel) either to be thrifty, from necessity, or because to procure them meant back breaking work, learned how to maximize cleanliness while causing a small “footprint” on earth resources over a period of hundreds of years. I have persistently favored a bar of a good soap, washcloths, and a once or twice a week bath, PERIOD.
The exception to what I outlined above was that small children received daily baths (and think about it that usually was in the kitchen sink or in a basin.) I still remember very well the small white galvanized basin that as a baby I was put into and washed: not filling up the tub until I was older. The basin had a red rim and two holes, which fascinated me as a baby (the holes were for hanging the basin if needed). So babies were washed daily, even by the poor, since they were seated in a small basin that was easy to fill with warm water. They didn’t drown too many babies back then while “bathing them” either. Being thrifty is also being safe, in many cases. The other exception in the 1950’s was when more and more kids, even in poor neighborhoods, had sports activities and access to school showers. People today do not realize what a change that was in how things were. So my brother was expected to shower at school, if he could, when he was in sports. Our cheap mother would otherwise argue and begrudge him using the shower or the tub in the house. See, I can share this with you because as I’ve pointed out in previous blog postings, I’m old enough to have personally experienced and can witness to you how the older generations lived, how they thrived, and how they coped and made do.
So let’s look at this wonderfully “clean” generation. We have droughts everywhere and the cost of water is going up, but people think they are filthy and damned if they don’t have a lavish shower, where the water runs down the drain, every day. Do they use regular biodegradable bars of soap? Nope. They use “bath products,” which are filled with chemicals that damage the environment and also the skin. So rather than “keep it clean in between” on a daily basis as my generation did (except for the rich ones of course who always had what they wanted, LOL), these same young people who worry about one’s “carbon footprint” sneer at someone like me who “keeps it clean in between” and who does not take a daily shower.
The same is true of washing one’s hair. NO ONE washed their hair on a daily basis anywhere in the world, EVER, until the last fifty years or so. People understood that washing the hair strips it of its vital oils and makes the scalp unhealthy, rather than “clean.” This is the origin of the old saying “one hundred strokes” came from: women used to brush or comb their hair with one hundred strokes every night to stimulate the scalp and distribute the hair’s natural oil. (That, by the way, is what a bird does when it “preens” its feathers. The bird is grasping each feather in its beak or bill, squeezing until the oil glands exude oil, and then spreads the oil in an even coating over each feather. That is not just beauty treatment; that is survival necessity as birds must be waterproofed using their natural oil in order to survive). Women would wash their hair on the weekly ‘bath day’ and to keep it clean in between they would comb or brush their hair and scalp with one hundred strokes.
The downfall of soap came about through two causes. One is the desire to have beautiful fragrance at a cheap price, so instead of using genuinely natural scented flowers and herbs, modern “bath products” are packed with artificial chemicals and colors that look and smell “like” “natural” substances, but are not. Indeed people are just scratching the surface at realizing how packed with cancer and pollution causing chemical such “cleanliness” products are. The other is the obsession with germs and doing a “thorough” cleaning, which means packing cleansers with nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur and other chemical compounds, rather than the good old formula of oil/lye and abrasive. All of this crap, along with the wasted water of daily showers and the heating energy uses, is squandered each and every day by millions of people who think they are somehow better people for it than their grandparents who kept themselves clean as needed, and not according to one’s overheated imagination.
I spoke up about this through my local Audubon society at a city council hearing when I was in high school (1969-1970 as I recall) when modern laundry detergents, packed with nitrogen and phosphorus, were causing the lakes to be destroyed via algae blooms. For forty years I have been warning that the “cleanliness” craze was helping to destroy the planet (while, ironically, no one wants to build latrines for the over one billion people in the world who still crap in the fields and the streets). People would read and drool over science fiction like “Dune,” while then having their daily shower packed with artificial chemicals that harm both the environment and the body’s health, rather than enhance it. People don’t wash their hands after going to the bathroom or handling raw food, but boy, they brag about their daily showers and their hair gels. They pay to go to fitness centers but they sneer at me for using a washcloth at the sink, as needed, and scrubbing, rather than standing like a rich moron under a shower and letting the water run down the drain.
For quite a while I have given up. I buy the lotions and bath potions in the dollar store because I like how the pretty bottles look, and artificial fragrance is all that the average person can get these days. I rub the hand creams packed with chemicals into my hands because frankly, my dears, I don’t give a rat’s ass anymore, since no one acts upon my warnings (except to make things worse, apparently) anyway. But that is one reason why I still buy and use Vaseline. No, not because like so many people I dream about anal sex. Vaseline is a natural product (from the petroleum process) that is great for skin care. My stepfather, bless his soul, used it for his aching muscles when he would work as a car mechanic, finding it helped far more than the chemical laden modern products. So people giggle at my washcloth as needed, my bars of soap, my Vaseline, my preference for a bath than a shower, while at the same time they are destroying the planet and making carbon and water “footprints” bigger than the clown shoes of Bozo the Clown.
So that takes us back to Biblical times. Jesus did not shower. Moses did not shower. Mary did not shower. Peter not only did not shower but he worked as a fisherman, and the gutting and cleaning of fish is one smelly job. The Prophet (PBUH) did not shower. Further, in the Qur’an you can read with great clarity what the spiritual philosophy behind the Bible scriptures is but that most moderns seem to miss. Washing was done in Biblical times primarily for 1) honoring God and 2) as hospitality. People washed to maintain their cleanliness before God, not because God was allocating bodily shower times. Thus the Bible contains instructions for the Israelites for RITUAL washing. Further, as everyone walked the “must wash” “bits” were the feet, and as hospitality, a host would provide such water and a basin and towels. This is why Jesus washed the feet of the Apostles, not because you were getting a glimpse of Biblical water hygiene. So here is where the Qur’an makes this clear for Bible readers who somehow miss that point. The Qur’an explains that worshippers are to wash their feet, their arms up to the elbows, and the face before worshipping God. The Qur’an then says that because God is not trying to make it difficult for people that if water cannot be found then sand can be used for the ritual cleaning. Again, it is impossible for the observant reader to miss that when the scriptures allude to washing it is only for ritual (worship of God) and hospitality reasons. The scriptures are not designed to remind a person to “keep it clean in between” since that’s just part of life and common sense is it not?
Further, what does God command when he wants a good odor in front of him? Not to squander the world’s water with prideful daily showers when they are not needed. No, God asks for sacrifice of incense at the incense altar when he wants a “good odor.” God has never sent a worshipper away for not bathing often enough or not smelling good. Sheesh!
I mention this because of the “cleanliness is next to godliness” old adage that has absolutely no Biblical or scriptural basis whatsoever. I mean, the scriptures do not tell people how often to go pee and poop since that is an “as needed” basis that has nothing to do with sanctity, does it not? But speaking of which, here is more scriptural history for you. During Biblical times people peed and pooped wherever it was convenient. It was often done in the fields since fertilizer came from both human and animal waste. People would “go” whenever and wherever they had to go. They did not have community locations or latrines, as logical as that may seem today, for the reason I just mentioned, that the fields were viewed as benefiting from whatever human or animal soil is placed there. But archeologists recently found evidence that one sect, centered in one village actually had a location outside of the village where people trekked to do their business. That was a great rarity and actually gave modern scientists realization that what seems like advancement in “cleanliness” actually caused a problem. Analysis of the soil along the path to the common latrine reveals that there was a higher evidence of harmful bacteria around that village on that path, rather than less. Why? Because people tracked the bacteria on their feet in the same places over a long period of time, allowing concentrations of bad stuff to build up rather than disperse naturally. Sanitation illness may have been HIGHER among the village that had the shared location to void outside of the village than the other Biblical villages where people just went, mostly in the fields, where it was convenient, and did not beat a path of bad germs.
This is another example of how modern people are too quick at thinking they are superior to “the old ways” and so much “cleaner.” I’m all for latrines and toilets (and again, why are over a billion people in the world not having their sewage concentrated and treated, if moderns are so interested in cleanliness). But think about that example, where without understanding the transmission of germs, that one sect’s village might have thought they had a great idea, which is everyone walk one path to a common place to poop, but instead made a germ highway that could not biodegrade, while the more primitive majority system of “going” in the fields when one needed to meant that nature could handle the biodegradation more thoroughly and without spreading and packing down germ pathways.
Before they were conquered by the whites the American Indians of the plains, the Lakota in particular, often had individuals who lived to their nineties in age and even their hundreds. Yet they did so without having daily showers and chemical laden cleansers. How did they do it? There are two keys. One is that the buffalo meat was incredibly healthy for them, along with the other natural foods that they ate. The other was that they remained active. People don’t “live longer” or are “cleaner” by having daily showers with huge carbon footprints laden with artificially scented and colored chemicals that then rush out the drain to pollute the environment, resist biodegrading and possibly cause cancers.
If I ever attend a Steelers game (which I have a lot of trouble imagining) I won’t mind at all waving my “terrible towel” except that, being mostly modest and authentic, it will be one of my “terrible washcloths.” Perhaps I could attach a hard milled bar of soap with a chain to the end of a stick and wave it as a medieval flail as my environmental and cleanliness message. Course a bar of soap, even as a flail, never hurt anyone, but a chemical filled plastic (pollutes and large footprint) pump containing a chemically filled “liquid soap” would probably do much more harm, as it most certainly does in reality. A bar of soap (for those of you who have forgotten what they look like) dissolves after use, is highly biodegradable, and comes in a waxed paper wrapper, which is also mostly harmless and biodegradable. But hey, why go with that when you can mock while using your daily high footprint plastic container and chemical biodegradable resistant goop that is flushed down the drain in order to strain the water purity even further than it already is? Who really “smells bad” in THAT case?
I hope that you have found this “helpful.”
Here's the reading from the Qur'an:
Surah 4:43 O you who believe! do not go near prayer when you are intoxicated until you know (well) what you say
[This is saying to not go to prayer while drunk but wait until one is sober. Alcohol is of course forbidden in general in Islam, but God here is specifically prohibiting approaching him in prayer while 'impaired.']
nor when you are under obligation to perform a bath
[This means that you must first perform any ritual washing]
-unless (you are) traveling on the road
[In which case one can pray as needed along the way and take the measures listed below]
-until you have washed yourselves; and if you are sick, or on a journey, or one of you come from the privy or you have touched the women, and you cannot find water,
betake yourselves to pure earth, then wipe your faces and your hands; surely Allah is Pardoning; Forgiving.
So this is not a list of times, places and methods to wash the body as one would take a modern shower, but rather it indicates the circumstances under which one must ritually wash before approaching God. So if you have ritually washed, but then before you arrive at the prayer place one of the above circumstances occur (such as going to the bathroom) and you are no longer near the water place, you can use pure earth (sand) to wash one's face and hands.
Showing posts with label pollution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pollution. Show all posts
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Babies' health, spiritually and for the economy
It's a sign of the times, and not a good one, that many of you might wonder what the health of infants has to do with the economy and the current economic crisis. These modern times are so ill informed and warped in their priorities that obvious connections are no longer recognized or well understood. So here are some thoughts and background for you to contemplate.
For virtually all of human history parents have had many children, and several of them have died young. As recently as the early 1900's this was an unsurprising pattern. Everyone knew a family who had a baby die at birth or soon after. It was a great sorrow and not spoken about, not because people were ashamed of the poor baby, but because that was how everyone was "in the same boat" and coped by feeling sorrow but moving on.
We then had tremendous health breakthroughs in the middle 1900's where prenatal care was better understood and provided, hospitals provided rapid response to problem births, and people began to learn how to treat many birth defect conditions and other problems that put a baby's life at risk.
I don't know if young people today know the old expression of relief that new parents would express, saying "As soon as he or she was born we counted all his or her fingers and toes." This is from the time when there was no sonogram or other prenatal diagnosis of fetal health, and upon first sight virtually all parents "checked" the hands and feet of their newborn for all the fingers and toes. Birth was a time of suspense because as I said, everyone knew a family who had lost a baby in birth or in young childhood and the counting the fingers and toes was a kind of "laughing in the dark" ritual that accompanied the sigh of relief when a birth was healthy and successful.
Humans have a horrible problem of back sliding, though. One would assume that infant health would only get better and better as society and technology "progressed," but it has not. For example, just as infant prenatal and post natal doctor care improved, women took up smoking cigarettes. Women did not smoke, either while pregnant or normally, until pretty recently. So in a way, much of the health of infants that was achieved through technology progress was canceled out by women taking up cigarette smoking. A study announced today shows that women who smoke while pregnant put their children at higher risk of being aggressive. That is a risk factor that simply did not exist throughout human history, just to give you one example. During more socially prurient times mainstream women did not smoke cigarettes, drink or take illegal drugs, including marijuana. Thus on the one hand women gained the benefits of prenatal care and more prosperous lives in which to have safer births (housing, heating, vaccinations, antibiotics, for example). However, on the other hand, "liberated" women started putting substances into their bodies both before and during pregnancy. See, I am not explaining this to blame, but to educate especially the young people about why things change the way that they do in human social and medical history. As having babies became safer women (and the fathers) accelerated their unsafe choices that canceled out much of the progress.
Further, lifestyle and environmental situations changed around all humans, both those having children and not. For example there is a huge influx of food additives, chemicals such as in plastic, medication and hormones that are in the drinking water, and toxins in the air and even more insidiously in the household. Again, the health gains of safer prenatal care and post birth delivery and treatment of any birth defects or conditions has been canceled out by the acute toxicity of the environment. In my time I have witnessed houses that used to be made out of natural materials (wood, stone, brick, etc) be replaced by houses made out of artificial chemically produced and "treated" materials. People were slow to recognize that humans have built two generations of "sick buildings." Upholstery and carpet used to be made from cotton and wool. Now it is filled with toxic material. We used to wash our bodies and homes with soap and water. Now the "cleansers" are worse than the dirt and those that kill germs only breed stronger and stranger germs to replace them.
So now we see all sorts of mysterious physical, emotional and mental reactions in babies and children and lots of them look like "allergies." The asthma crisis of several decades ago should have been the first wake up call. Mold and the dander and leavings of vermin such as roaches are a large contributor to the asthma crisis. But now it is even more insidious because even the "cleanest" modern house is filled with toxins. Just as an example, those expensive lovely granite countertops in the finest homes sometimes emit radiation. Scented products are no longer scented by the actual flower or herb but potentially toxic chemicals. So your "cinnamon"candle does not have cinnamon but a chemical that is "derived" from or "smells like" cinnamon.
Thus there is a confluence of three tragic things:
1) People have very high and unrealistic expectations about the health and survivability of all of their children since they only remember the good times where people could take it somewhat for granted, and thus forget that there has always been a real risk of losing a child to death or being presented with very serious life curtailing conditions.
2) People have unwittingly canceled out much of the progress in infant and child health by engaging in optional activities (drugs, drinking, smoking) or enduring unwittingly enforced (surrounded by toxic products) high risk conditions.
3) People have not invested their economy's wealth into addressing these problems and promoting the best of healthcare, free healthcare, for all pregnant women and their fetuses, and their born infants and growing children.
So here is the economic kicker. No economy thrives or survives that is not based on a high child bearing population.
"It's not the spending, stupid."
People think that "spending" is the key to the successful western economy. It is NOT. The key to the (previously) successful western economy was an economy that was highly child and child birth oriented.
The "baby boom" was a great time, not because babies were born with charge cards and thus we had "more spenders."
The "baby boom" was a great time because genuine economic growth and thriving relies on lots of people having lots of children and building child friendly communities and thus jobs.
Where there are many children there were investments in health care facilities, schools, infant and child clothing and products, nutrition industries... you name it.
What is key is that these were lasting products. A school is not a video game.
This country has invested in total trash for thirty years now while losing all the gains of "progress" regarding our infants and children.
I do not understand how the economy can survive and recover, especially in the form of the "faux capitalism" that I've explained previously that has ruined genuine capitalism, if it does not reform to have a new orientation toward the having of children in families.
We lack babies, we lack children, we lack jobs, we lack health care for those who do have children, we have more, not less, troubled children with grave medical or emotional woes, we have less healthy communities that are structured around schools and family place of worship, and ultimately we have less workers and people who participate in the grassroots life and growth of the economy.
While people are yapping about "carbon credits" they are letting their babies (if they even had any) crawl on artificial chemically infested surfaces, letting water get polluted, ignoring sewage treatment plant needs, not researching childhood diseases and conditions as much as they could have been, and letting communities that used to be child-centric dissolve into narcissistic enclaves of "self actualizing" garbage oriented "entertainment."
If I were President Elect Obama I would not sign funding for a single "project" that does not have an "invest in our children" orientation, one way or the other.
Healthy or desperately sick, all children should live within a total network of family and community support. I cannot believe the crap that this country has invested its treasure in while parents of sick children lack proper care and have to fight for the smallest of gains.
That's why I believe that there should be free medical care for prenatal and young infants and children and kick the stupid and greedy insurance companies right out of it. I've blogged about this before, presenting my vision and arguments for why this economy will never recover (say nothing of the country's spiritual goodness) if there is not comprehensive and free prenatal (NOT "market driven") preventative and medical care for prenatal to age of majority children, period.
With such a system you would also address the problems that are now plaguing our children, whether asthma, diabetes, obesity, autism, rare or common birth defects, teenage depression and nihilism, addiction etc. All children need in a just and prosperous society comprehensive medical care and a system of preventative medicine that includes components such as vitamins and nutrition.
I don't understand how economists and other "experts" do not realize that a successful economy relies on a vigorous and loving birth rate in a stable child-oriented community structure nationwide, not on "spending" in and of itself.
Meanwhile, start to educate yourselves about the housing materials that you take for granted. We are all living among materials that are hazardous and unnatural and it is only getting worse, not better.
Some of it is "lazy safety" thinking. Rather than being careful around fire and so forth people started pouring "fire retardant" chemicals onto the fabrics and building substances around them. This is just an example of where what looks like a safety "break through" is the addition of needless chemicals. The same with food additives: rather than cook fresh food people eat pounds of "preservatives" in every bite of food that they consume. I remember the days when things were packaged in waxed paper and glass; now it is plastic and God knows what added to the handy packaging for "microwaves."
Think about Korea and Japan, who used to have traditional housing of wood such as bamboo and even paper. As they moved to modern housing they have also had increases in instances such as the recent discuss of Kawasaki syndrome. Japan is a useful study and I've blogged about this before. Breast cancer among Japanese women was extremely rare until the 1960's when those who moved to the USA and also adopted western diet and probably trigger substances in their environment observed that their numbers now converged on what western women experienced.
This country will not "get back to good" unless it becomes child oriented again and we look long and hard at the environmental pollution of home and work place substances, and until we treat all children, sick and well, for free and comprehensively. I get lots of sheer frustration headaches whenever I think about this topic and look at the horrible mess that everyone is in today.
For virtually all of human history parents have had many children, and several of them have died young. As recently as the early 1900's this was an unsurprising pattern. Everyone knew a family who had a baby die at birth or soon after. It was a great sorrow and not spoken about, not because people were ashamed of the poor baby, but because that was how everyone was "in the same boat" and coped by feeling sorrow but moving on.
We then had tremendous health breakthroughs in the middle 1900's where prenatal care was better understood and provided, hospitals provided rapid response to problem births, and people began to learn how to treat many birth defect conditions and other problems that put a baby's life at risk.
I don't know if young people today know the old expression of relief that new parents would express, saying "As soon as he or she was born we counted all his or her fingers and toes." This is from the time when there was no sonogram or other prenatal diagnosis of fetal health, and upon first sight virtually all parents "checked" the hands and feet of their newborn for all the fingers and toes. Birth was a time of suspense because as I said, everyone knew a family who had lost a baby in birth or in young childhood and the counting the fingers and toes was a kind of "laughing in the dark" ritual that accompanied the sigh of relief when a birth was healthy and successful.
Humans have a horrible problem of back sliding, though. One would assume that infant health would only get better and better as society and technology "progressed," but it has not. For example, just as infant prenatal and post natal doctor care improved, women took up smoking cigarettes. Women did not smoke, either while pregnant or normally, until pretty recently. So in a way, much of the health of infants that was achieved through technology progress was canceled out by women taking up cigarette smoking. A study announced today shows that women who smoke while pregnant put their children at higher risk of being aggressive. That is a risk factor that simply did not exist throughout human history, just to give you one example. During more socially prurient times mainstream women did not smoke cigarettes, drink or take illegal drugs, including marijuana. Thus on the one hand women gained the benefits of prenatal care and more prosperous lives in which to have safer births (housing, heating, vaccinations, antibiotics, for example). However, on the other hand, "liberated" women started putting substances into their bodies both before and during pregnancy. See, I am not explaining this to blame, but to educate especially the young people about why things change the way that they do in human social and medical history. As having babies became safer women (and the fathers) accelerated their unsafe choices that canceled out much of the progress.
Further, lifestyle and environmental situations changed around all humans, both those having children and not. For example there is a huge influx of food additives, chemicals such as in plastic, medication and hormones that are in the drinking water, and toxins in the air and even more insidiously in the household. Again, the health gains of safer prenatal care and post birth delivery and treatment of any birth defects or conditions has been canceled out by the acute toxicity of the environment. In my time I have witnessed houses that used to be made out of natural materials (wood, stone, brick, etc) be replaced by houses made out of artificial chemically produced and "treated" materials. People were slow to recognize that humans have built two generations of "sick buildings." Upholstery and carpet used to be made from cotton and wool. Now it is filled with toxic material. We used to wash our bodies and homes with soap and water. Now the "cleansers" are worse than the dirt and those that kill germs only breed stronger and stranger germs to replace them.
So now we see all sorts of mysterious physical, emotional and mental reactions in babies and children and lots of them look like "allergies." The asthma crisis of several decades ago should have been the first wake up call. Mold and the dander and leavings of vermin such as roaches are a large contributor to the asthma crisis. But now it is even more insidious because even the "cleanest" modern house is filled with toxins. Just as an example, those expensive lovely granite countertops in the finest homes sometimes emit radiation. Scented products are no longer scented by the actual flower or herb but potentially toxic chemicals. So your "cinnamon"candle does not have cinnamon but a chemical that is "derived" from or "smells like" cinnamon.
Thus there is a confluence of three tragic things:
1) People have very high and unrealistic expectations about the health and survivability of all of their children since they only remember the good times where people could take it somewhat for granted, and thus forget that there has always been a real risk of losing a child to death or being presented with very serious life curtailing conditions.
2) People have unwittingly canceled out much of the progress in infant and child health by engaging in optional activities (drugs, drinking, smoking) or enduring unwittingly enforced (surrounded by toxic products) high risk conditions.
3) People have not invested their economy's wealth into addressing these problems and promoting the best of healthcare, free healthcare, for all pregnant women and their fetuses, and their born infants and growing children.
So here is the economic kicker. No economy thrives or survives that is not based on a high child bearing population.
"It's not the spending, stupid."
People think that "spending" is the key to the successful western economy. It is NOT. The key to the (previously) successful western economy was an economy that was highly child and child birth oriented.
The "baby boom" was a great time, not because babies were born with charge cards and thus we had "more spenders."
The "baby boom" was a great time because genuine economic growth and thriving relies on lots of people having lots of children and building child friendly communities and thus jobs.
Where there are many children there were investments in health care facilities, schools, infant and child clothing and products, nutrition industries... you name it.
What is key is that these were lasting products. A school is not a video game.
This country has invested in total trash for thirty years now while losing all the gains of "progress" regarding our infants and children.
I do not understand how the economy can survive and recover, especially in the form of the "faux capitalism" that I've explained previously that has ruined genuine capitalism, if it does not reform to have a new orientation toward the having of children in families.
We lack babies, we lack children, we lack jobs, we lack health care for those who do have children, we have more, not less, troubled children with grave medical or emotional woes, we have less healthy communities that are structured around schools and family place of worship, and ultimately we have less workers and people who participate in the grassroots life and growth of the economy.
While people are yapping about "carbon credits" they are letting their babies (if they even had any) crawl on artificial chemically infested surfaces, letting water get polluted, ignoring sewage treatment plant needs, not researching childhood diseases and conditions as much as they could have been, and letting communities that used to be child-centric dissolve into narcissistic enclaves of "self actualizing" garbage oriented "entertainment."
If I were President Elect Obama I would not sign funding for a single "project" that does not have an "invest in our children" orientation, one way or the other.
Healthy or desperately sick, all children should live within a total network of family and community support. I cannot believe the crap that this country has invested its treasure in while parents of sick children lack proper care and have to fight for the smallest of gains.
That's why I believe that there should be free medical care for prenatal and young infants and children and kick the stupid and greedy insurance companies right out of it. I've blogged about this before, presenting my vision and arguments for why this economy will never recover (say nothing of the country's spiritual goodness) if there is not comprehensive and free prenatal (NOT "market driven") preventative and medical care for prenatal to age of majority children, period.
With such a system you would also address the problems that are now plaguing our children, whether asthma, diabetes, obesity, autism, rare or common birth defects, teenage depression and nihilism, addiction etc. All children need in a just and prosperous society comprehensive medical care and a system of preventative medicine that includes components such as vitamins and nutrition.
I don't understand how economists and other "experts" do not realize that a successful economy relies on a vigorous and loving birth rate in a stable child-oriented community structure nationwide, not on "spending" in and of itself.
Meanwhile, start to educate yourselves about the housing materials that you take for granted. We are all living among materials that are hazardous and unnatural and it is only getting worse, not better.
Some of it is "lazy safety" thinking. Rather than being careful around fire and so forth people started pouring "fire retardant" chemicals onto the fabrics and building substances around them. This is just an example of where what looks like a safety "break through" is the addition of needless chemicals. The same with food additives: rather than cook fresh food people eat pounds of "preservatives" in every bite of food that they consume. I remember the days when things were packaged in waxed paper and glass; now it is plastic and God knows what added to the handy packaging for "microwaves."
Think about Korea and Japan, who used to have traditional housing of wood such as bamboo and even paper. As they moved to modern housing they have also had increases in instances such as the recent discuss of Kawasaki syndrome. Japan is a useful study and I've blogged about this before. Breast cancer among Japanese women was extremely rare until the 1960's when those who moved to the USA and also adopted western diet and probably trigger substances in their environment observed that their numbers now converged on what western women experienced.
This country will not "get back to good" unless it becomes child oriented again and we look long and hard at the environmental pollution of home and work place substances, and until we treat all children, sick and well, for free and comprehensively. I get lots of sheer frustration headaches whenever I think about this topic and look at the horrible mess that everyone is in today.
Friday, December 5, 2008
Case study of personal and societal neurosis
This isn’t going to be a very nice topic but as you know, I blog very frankly about the many problems that individuals and society as a whole have to face. So I’ve decided to address one of those problems as a case study, so you can both learn about the issue itself and also observe how to analyze when such a problem creeps up gradually until people don’t even realize it exists.
Two things precipitated my awareness and alarm about this topic. One is a continual pattern of infant and child abuse related to it, and the other is my awareness when I did my undercover occult investigation that cultists promote a very unbalanced view about this subject. In fact what they teach their own children is in every sense of the word also child abuse.
First let’s define some terms. A neurosis is a mental disorder that is considered “manageable.” In other words, it may be a mild obsession, or it could be a severe mental or emotional anxiety or discomfort, but one that if the patient is willing and has the right treatment can be remediated. A psychosis is a severe mental disorder that is fundamentally defined as a breakdown in one’s perception of reality. The problem I am going to describe is a neurosis that many individuals have, and that much of modern western society has developed as a whole. But I want to point out that untreated and inflamed neuroses can result in psychotic behavior, so one should always try to treat and remove the pain from even a mild neurosis.
Here is the problem. In certain circles of western society, particularly among the youth of the past two generations, there has been a development of a neurosis about “going to the bathroom,” particularly the function of defecation. The perspective I am going to give to you is based on both my age, which means I have a clear understanding of the “before” and “after” of the development of this neurosis, and also as a psychological counselor. This is very much a human biological, mental and societal problem; there is not a spiritual crisis component for me to discuss except when I explain how cultists have outrageously tried to “explain” and actually fuel the defecation neurosis by assigning it to a spiritual disorder. It’s so frustrating and disgusting, but I am getting ahead of my explanation so let’s start.
Hardly a day goes by that we do not read of a young parent, the boyfriend or girlfriend of a parent, or some other caregiver who severely beats and abuses, even killing, a baby over a matter of their “wetting their diapers” or “having an accident.” I’ve written about the overall problem before, in very blunt terms, about how the past two generations have had a spike in numbers of near monsters who will abuse, torture and kill their children or someone else’s, for a variety of “reasons,” but all rooted in rage coupled with a dehumanized view of the most innocent and helpless of their human victims. But I want to speak about the particular “reason, “related to a baby’s defecation, so that you can have a specific case study to examine the breakdown of societal education, perspective and identify the guilty parties. This has especially been on my mind as a thirteen year old boy in a city near my own home town beat a baby for an entire hour, brutally and with no mercy, because she urinated on the floor. She died needless to say. Police found that the baby was left alone for hours at a time, on the floor, while the mother and her live in “boyfriend” went to their high school classes. Yes, they left a baby alone on the floor for hours, and then beat her to death when she had to “pee.”
How has society developed so many people who are insane with rage when a helpless baby has to do what comes naturally, which is to urinate and defecate? My readers in South America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, I understand you must be shocked and puzzled when you read this. This is because this is a phenomenon of “advanced” “Western” society, particularly in the United States. It is a neurosis that has developed in this society as a whole, and is fueled by a number of factors. This is what we will examine here.
The first problem is a problem of technological success and wealth that has an unintended result of detaching people from understanding reality. Specifically, I have noticed a change in behavior when parents were first able to replace cloth diapers that had to be washed and reused with disposable diapers. When I was a teenager I had to take care of my niece when she was a baby and this was during the time of cloth diapers. It’s not the most wonderful chore in the world, to change a baby and to clean the diaper enough that it can go into the laundry service, but it’s not the worst job either (as those of you who are still sane in the rest of the world well know). But when what seemed to be the “blessing” of disposable diapers came along, an unintended accompaniment to the throw away diaper was a changed mindset of the parents, which is that a baby’s bodily function is “dirty” and “disgusting.” I can practically point to the time when this happened, which is in the 1970’s.
Back when cloth diapers were used, parents were also better “potty trainers,” as they praised babies for doing “their job,” rather than hating them for doing what they have to and should be doing. So I noticed that soon after the rising of the problem of viewing a baby’s defecation as “disgusting” came a generation that suddenly started failing at “potty training.” Books were written, talk shows mentioned it, and I just shook my head. So when disposable diapers replaced cloth diapers and either home laundering or the use of commercial diaper services, there was a collapse of both equanimity and a healthy view of a baby’s normal bodily function, and also a collapse of understanding how to transmit healthy “potty training” to the child.
The children who picked up from their handlers this view of disgust grew up and went into the workforce. They then stoked “bathroom humor” to appeal to fellow traumatized adolescents. One cannot attend any movie pitched at the youngest of children, teenagers or young adults without constant “humor” which is mentioning and demeaning either defecation itself or the various ways that it is achieved. That’s one reason, seriously, that I will rarely view a film. The entertainment industry, having grown up with this neurosis themselves, honestly think that it is a “normal” source of humor, and that everyone loves, wants and expects “gross” humor based on “s***,” “buttholes,” “farting,” “asses and their assholes,” "booty crack" etc. The first traumatized and neurotic generation trained the next generation to not only be traumatized and neurotic, but to think it is an “adult” rite of passage, to make such humor, constantly. Trust me, the adolescents who went on to fight World War II did not grow up on a diet of “potty humor,” and they did not expect it. They all had, in general, sane and good parents, a sane growing up experience, little brothers and sisters who they gave sane care to, and also exposure to the realities of living on farms. Further, focus on the rectum etc. has become a predominant topic in rap videos and other "entertainment."
This is also another reason that you see the extremely underreported problem of people putting crap in other people’s food. Trust me, if you knew what I know, you’d hesitate to eat anything that you did not personally prepare yourself, and that is a horrible shame. Those who stoke this behavior as part of “pop culture” are beginning to regret it a little, and so once in a while they will allow a mention to get into the media (usually something like showing that people do it often to police, or to show a “nut” doing in on secret camera). But cultists and pop culture mavens have secretly promoted doing this for years, as “revenge” on people who offended them in “past lives,” and for other very scary and insane reasons. Think “vampire” and you won’t be too far from the mark in understanding their “logic” and “belief systems.” As a way to alert people of the very thing they have stirred up, they allowed the “pizza deliver guy” or the “waiter” “revenge” stories to trickle (excuse the pun) into the media. This is them slowly realizing how destructive and demented they have become, and trying to “come clean” and alert people to the cultural monster they have unleashed. Gosh, thanks.
People, I cannot begin to describe to you how jarring and shocking the change has become. You really had to be there, to be observant and of my age to witness how this has happened.
As a result there is a bonfire when you combine this second generation of “defecation neurotic” young adults with rage stoked by other things (drugs, alcohol, too early sex, thug environments, broken families and abuse) and you have hundreds if not thousands of cases each year where young men or women loath their own babies’ healthy functions and will literally “beat the s*** out of them.” Police and social workers, if they are honest with you, will tell you how traumatized they are by seeing so many of these cases. Even one is too many, obviously.
Here is the unspoken problem of the cultists. Since they have a totally unbalanced and delusional view of life, one that is simply ignorant in addition to being spiritually dirtied, rather than “enlightened,” they have taken the defecation neurosis and concluded that it exists as a homoerotic component of “spirituality.” This is one reason that anal rape has become not only common, both of babies and of children and adults, but also has become a catchphrase in everyday discourse. If you are shocked, especially those of you who are in countries and cultures that are still sane on this subject, all you need to do is see what is posted in the comments section on the Internet whenever a particular heinous criminal is sentenced to prison. Immediately people post to speculate how often, and hope for, as frequent anal rape of the prisoners as possible will occur by their fellow prisoners. This has obviously been also picked up in the porn industry for a very long time, further stoking the problem.
It is one of the things that most shocked me about the depraved mentality of cultists, who secretly steer much of the discourse in “popular” culture. While I obviously observed the “diaper problem” along with the poor parenting skills myself, I would never have guessed that cultists teach a “spiritual” homoerotic component to the rectum and human defecation function. For example, that is why there was the springing up of “colonic cleansing” services, which even Princess Diane availed herself of, due to the influence of her circle of cultists. Yes, people believe there is a health and “spiritual” benefit of shoving a tube up their rectums and flushing their colons with various fluids. They think that the body “does not work properly” unless one does this flushing. I wonder how the population of the earth reached billions of sane and healthy people in a period of 7,000 years, all without “colonic cleansing.” So now we are on the third generation of people growing up in some very dysfunctional parts of society that think that without “spiritual health intervention” that ‘bad things’ stay ‘stuck in your colon’ and must be “cleansed naturally” by paying $50 to $100 for a “spiritually healthy” “colonic cleansing.” The same third generation has members who will also flip out and beat the life out of their baby when the baby naturally does defecate in or outside of their diapers, and cry to signal they need to be changed, as they are supposed to do. They also look at their own children with sexual eyes, and that is an abomination, whether it occurs “in the front” or “in the back.”
Do you see the problem?
I sometimes despair that humans will ever remember what it is really like to be sane and human. This is one of those examples that I admit, I really wonder how to ever get an increasingly self hating and insane generation (one generation after the other) to learn to return to normal when it is something that they never grew up to know.
There is another horrible problem, one that is so ironic. This “do gooder” generation has forgotten the basic “do gooder” priorities of the generations past, which is to build latrines in poor countries, and sewage treatment plants near cities, and to learn better ways to control farm waste. They cry about “global warming,” yet they have neglected an essential component of preserving the endangered oceans and also the war on poverty, which are sanitation facilities. Another example of how dysfunctional they are is if one raises the issue with them, they will lecture you about stopping eating meat, and that way you have no cattle who “fart” and “crap” (thus “no pollution” and “no greenhouse gases.”)
But that used to be the basics of every generation before us, the first thing they did when they brought clean drinking water to a poor village, for example, was the development of latrines and a sanitation ethic, one that is based on simple reality, not neurosis. But now everyone wants to “stamp out a disease” (the most popular of the do good causes) or “save the polar bear,” yet the oceans are increasingly fouled by the modern neglect of promoting and providing complete sanitation. It is so bad that the UN earlier this year addressed this problem. I suspect the UN does not realize what they are up against, one of the hidden reasons why there is so much aversion to doing something about this problem. They don’t realize that the “do good” money, the people who support the “good causes,” while not beating their own children to death due to potty accidents, are equally unbalanced on the subject in their core, unlike our very sensible forefathers and mothers.
Like I said above, I honestly do not know what to do about this problem, because I despair of teaching sanity to those who grew up in very unbalanced conditions. How does one teach to society as a whole something to lose a neurosis and go back to a sane and balanced view, when so many never experienced that sane and balanced view? But whatever the solution, if one exists, obviously it cannot start unless people have the facts, and so this is why I’ve written this particular blog post. I must admit, thirty years ago, I never dreamed I’d have to be writing this type of post. Yes, concerns about the poor skills in the raising of children-that I foresaw-but not the total breakdown of sane education and perspective about human body function, and the resulting violence that has occurred. Nope, I am surprised, unpleasantly surprised.
Good luck, young people. Good luck.
Two things precipitated my awareness and alarm about this topic. One is a continual pattern of infant and child abuse related to it, and the other is my awareness when I did my undercover occult investigation that cultists promote a very unbalanced view about this subject. In fact what they teach their own children is in every sense of the word also child abuse.
First let’s define some terms. A neurosis is a mental disorder that is considered “manageable.” In other words, it may be a mild obsession, or it could be a severe mental or emotional anxiety or discomfort, but one that if the patient is willing and has the right treatment can be remediated. A psychosis is a severe mental disorder that is fundamentally defined as a breakdown in one’s perception of reality. The problem I am going to describe is a neurosis that many individuals have, and that much of modern western society has developed as a whole. But I want to point out that untreated and inflamed neuroses can result in psychotic behavior, so one should always try to treat and remove the pain from even a mild neurosis.
Here is the problem. In certain circles of western society, particularly among the youth of the past two generations, there has been a development of a neurosis about “going to the bathroom,” particularly the function of defecation. The perspective I am going to give to you is based on both my age, which means I have a clear understanding of the “before” and “after” of the development of this neurosis, and also as a psychological counselor. This is very much a human biological, mental and societal problem; there is not a spiritual crisis component for me to discuss except when I explain how cultists have outrageously tried to “explain” and actually fuel the defecation neurosis by assigning it to a spiritual disorder. It’s so frustrating and disgusting, but I am getting ahead of my explanation so let’s start.
Hardly a day goes by that we do not read of a young parent, the boyfriend or girlfriend of a parent, or some other caregiver who severely beats and abuses, even killing, a baby over a matter of their “wetting their diapers” or “having an accident.” I’ve written about the overall problem before, in very blunt terms, about how the past two generations have had a spike in numbers of near monsters who will abuse, torture and kill their children or someone else’s, for a variety of “reasons,” but all rooted in rage coupled with a dehumanized view of the most innocent and helpless of their human victims. But I want to speak about the particular “reason, “related to a baby’s defecation, so that you can have a specific case study to examine the breakdown of societal education, perspective and identify the guilty parties. This has especially been on my mind as a thirteen year old boy in a city near my own home town beat a baby for an entire hour, brutally and with no mercy, because she urinated on the floor. She died needless to say. Police found that the baby was left alone for hours at a time, on the floor, while the mother and her live in “boyfriend” went to their high school classes. Yes, they left a baby alone on the floor for hours, and then beat her to death when she had to “pee.”
How has society developed so many people who are insane with rage when a helpless baby has to do what comes naturally, which is to urinate and defecate? My readers in South America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, I understand you must be shocked and puzzled when you read this. This is because this is a phenomenon of “advanced” “Western” society, particularly in the United States. It is a neurosis that has developed in this society as a whole, and is fueled by a number of factors. This is what we will examine here.
The first problem is a problem of technological success and wealth that has an unintended result of detaching people from understanding reality. Specifically, I have noticed a change in behavior when parents were first able to replace cloth diapers that had to be washed and reused with disposable diapers. When I was a teenager I had to take care of my niece when she was a baby and this was during the time of cloth diapers. It’s not the most wonderful chore in the world, to change a baby and to clean the diaper enough that it can go into the laundry service, but it’s not the worst job either (as those of you who are still sane in the rest of the world well know). But when what seemed to be the “blessing” of disposable diapers came along, an unintended accompaniment to the throw away diaper was a changed mindset of the parents, which is that a baby’s bodily function is “dirty” and “disgusting.” I can practically point to the time when this happened, which is in the 1970’s.
Back when cloth diapers were used, parents were also better “potty trainers,” as they praised babies for doing “their job,” rather than hating them for doing what they have to and should be doing. So I noticed that soon after the rising of the problem of viewing a baby’s defecation as “disgusting” came a generation that suddenly started failing at “potty training.” Books were written, talk shows mentioned it, and I just shook my head. So when disposable diapers replaced cloth diapers and either home laundering or the use of commercial diaper services, there was a collapse of both equanimity and a healthy view of a baby’s normal bodily function, and also a collapse of understanding how to transmit healthy “potty training” to the child.
The children who picked up from their handlers this view of disgust grew up and went into the workforce. They then stoked “bathroom humor” to appeal to fellow traumatized adolescents. One cannot attend any movie pitched at the youngest of children, teenagers or young adults without constant “humor” which is mentioning and demeaning either defecation itself or the various ways that it is achieved. That’s one reason, seriously, that I will rarely view a film. The entertainment industry, having grown up with this neurosis themselves, honestly think that it is a “normal” source of humor, and that everyone loves, wants and expects “gross” humor based on “s***,” “buttholes,” “farting,” “asses and their assholes,” "booty crack" etc. The first traumatized and neurotic generation trained the next generation to not only be traumatized and neurotic, but to think it is an “adult” rite of passage, to make such humor, constantly. Trust me, the adolescents who went on to fight World War II did not grow up on a diet of “potty humor,” and they did not expect it. They all had, in general, sane and good parents, a sane growing up experience, little brothers and sisters who they gave sane care to, and also exposure to the realities of living on farms. Further, focus on the rectum etc. has become a predominant topic in rap videos and other "entertainment."
This is also another reason that you see the extremely underreported problem of people putting crap in other people’s food. Trust me, if you knew what I know, you’d hesitate to eat anything that you did not personally prepare yourself, and that is a horrible shame. Those who stoke this behavior as part of “pop culture” are beginning to regret it a little, and so once in a while they will allow a mention to get into the media (usually something like showing that people do it often to police, or to show a “nut” doing in on secret camera). But cultists and pop culture mavens have secretly promoted doing this for years, as “revenge” on people who offended them in “past lives,” and for other very scary and insane reasons. Think “vampire” and you won’t be too far from the mark in understanding their “logic” and “belief systems.” As a way to alert people of the very thing they have stirred up, they allowed the “pizza deliver guy” or the “waiter” “revenge” stories to trickle (excuse the pun) into the media. This is them slowly realizing how destructive and demented they have become, and trying to “come clean” and alert people to the cultural monster they have unleashed. Gosh, thanks.
People, I cannot begin to describe to you how jarring and shocking the change has become. You really had to be there, to be observant and of my age to witness how this has happened.
As a result there is a bonfire when you combine this second generation of “defecation neurotic” young adults with rage stoked by other things (drugs, alcohol, too early sex, thug environments, broken families and abuse) and you have hundreds if not thousands of cases each year where young men or women loath their own babies’ healthy functions and will literally “beat the s*** out of them.” Police and social workers, if they are honest with you, will tell you how traumatized they are by seeing so many of these cases. Even one is too many, obviously.
Here is the unspoken problem of the cultists. Since they have a totally unbalanced and delusional view of life, one that is simply ignorant in addition to being spiritually dirtied, rather than “enlightened,” they have taken the defecation neurosis and concluded that it exists as a homoerotic component of “spirituality.” This is one reason that anal rape has become not only common, both of babies and of children and adults, but also has become a catchphrase in everyday discourse. If you are shocked, especially those of you who are in countries and cultures that are still sane on this subject, all you need to do is see what is posted in the comments section on the Internet whenever a particular heinous criminal is sentenced to prison. Immediately people post to speculate how often, and hope for, as frequent anal rape of the prisoners as possible will occur by their fellow prisoners. This has obviously been also picked up in the porn industry for a very long time, further stoking the problem.
It is one of the things that most shocked me about the depraved mentality of cultists, who secretly steer much of the discourse in “popular” culture. While I obviously observed the “diaper problem” along with the poor parenting skills myself, I would never have guessed that cultists teach a “spiritual” homoerotic component to the rectum and human defecation function. For example, that is why there was the springing up of “colonic cleansing” services, which even Princess Diane availed herself of, due to the influence of her circle of cultists. Yes, people believe there is a health and “spiritual” benefit of shoving a tube up their rectums and flushing their colons with various fluids. They think that the body “does not work properly” unless one does this flushing. I wonder how the population of the earth reached billions of sane and healthy people in a period of 7,000 years, all without “colonic cleansing.” So now we are on the third generation of people growing up in some very dysfunctional parts of society that think that without “spiritual health intervention” that ‘bad things’ stay ‘stuck in your colon’ and must be “cleansed naturally” by paying $50 to $100 for a “spiritually healthy” “colonic cleansing.” The same third generation has members who will also flip out and beat the life out of their baby when the baby naturally does defecate in or outside of their diapers, and cry to signal they need to be changed, as they are supposed to do. They also look at their own children with sexual eyes, and that is an abomination, whether it occurs “in the front” or “in the back.”
Do you see the problem?
I sometimes despair that humans will ever remember what it is really like to be sane and human. This is one of those examples that I admit, I really wonder how to ever get an increasingly self hating and insane generation (one generation after the other) to learn to return to normal when it is something that they never grew up to know.
There is another horrible problem, one that is so ironic. This “do gooder” generation has forgotten the basic “do gooder” priorities of the generations past, which is to build latrines in poor countries, and sewage treatment plants near cities, and to learn better ways to control farm waste. They cry about “global warming,” yet they have neglected an essential component of preserving the endangered oceans and also the war on poverty, which are sanitation facilities. Another example of how dysfunctional they are is if one raises the issue with them, they will lecture you about stopping eating meat, and that way you have no cattle who “fart” and “crap” (thus “no pollution” and “no greenhouse gases.”)
But that used to be the basics of every generation before us, the first thing they did when they brought clean drinking water to a poor village, for example, was the development of latrines and a sanitation ethic, one that is based on simple reality, not neurosis. But now everyone wants to “stamp out a disease” (the most popular of the do good causes) or “save the polar bear,” yet the oceans are increasingly fouled by the modern neglect of promoting and providing complete sanitation. It is so bad that the UN earlier this year addressed this problem. I suspect the UN does not realize what they are up against, one of the hidden reasons why there is so much aversion to doing something about this problem. They don’t realize that the “do good” money, the people who support the “good causes,” while not beating their own children to death due to potty accidents, are equally unbalanced on the subject in their core, unlike our very sensible forefathers and mothers.
Like I said above, I honestly do not know what to do about this problem, because I despair of teaching sanity to those who grew up in very unbalanced conditions. How does one teach to society as a whole something to lose a neurosis and go back to a sane and balanced view, when so many never experienced that sane and balanced view? But whatever the solution, if one exists, obviously it cannot start unless people have the facts, and so this is why I’ve written this particular blog post. I must admit, thirty years ago, I never dreamed I’d have to be writing this type of post. Yes, concerns about the poor skills in the raising of children-that I foresaw-but not the total breakdown of sane education and perspective about human body function, and the resulting violence that has occurred. Nope, I am surprised, unpleasantly surprised.
Good luck, young people. Good luck.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Important article about toxins in products, toys
This is a really good article in the Chicago Trib.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/health/chi-household-chemicals_bdaug17,0,7072536.story
***
Ignore the usual moronic comments in the comment section, where some people have a self control problem.
I want to repeat a point I've made before. Do not forget what is called the "multiplier effect."
Suppose a particular chemical is tested to be "safe" at small doses.
The problem is that everyone is exposed to hundreds of products, EACH ONE at their "safe dose."
So you have safe dose 1 added to safe dose 2 added to safe dose 3 added to safe dose 4 added to safe dose 5 etc etc until you have hundreds of "safe doses" added together. Some interact. Some do exactly the same damage and have a compilation effect on the body, compounding one on top of the other. Plus some safe doses may open the door for another safe dose to do damage (such as triggering a genetic disposition toward being affected by one or more chemicals). This is called the "multiplier effect" and it is a fundamental concept that the well informed consumer must understand about pollution, toxins, the environment and product safety.
So it is bogus that companies can test for individual safe levels of individual chemicals and then declare that there is no overall risk. Of course there is overall risk because each dose of a toxin adds together according to exposure, and there is no escaping toxin exposure now. Yes, companies need to measure individual "safe" dose exposure but agencies must start using computer models to recognize that all the "safe" doses are adding together in harmful combinations and in unmeasurable and unpredictable future effects. People MUST start eliminating toxins and other unnecessary chemicals in their food and products.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/health/chi-household-chemicals_bdaug17,0,7072536.story
***
Ignore the usual moronic comments in the comment section, where some people have a self control problem.
I want to repeat a point I've made before. Do not forget what is called the "multiplier effect."
Suppose a particular chemical is tested to be "safe" at small doses.
The problem is that everyone is exposed to hundreds of products, EACH ONE at their "safe dose."
So you have safe dose 1 added to safe dose 2 added to safe dose 3 added to safe dose 4 added to safe dose 5 etc etc until you have hundreds of "safe doses" added together. Some interact. Some do exactly the same damage and have a compilation effect on the body, compounding one on top of the other. Plus some safe doses may open the door for another safe dose to do damage (such as triggering a genetic disposition toward being affected by one or more chemicals). This is called the "multiplier effect" and it is a fundamental concept that the well informed consumer must understand about pollution, toxins, the environment and product safety.
So it is bogus that companies can test for individual safe levels of individual chemicals and then declare that there is no overall risk. Of course there is overall risk because each dose of a toxin adds together according to exposure, and there is no escaping toxin exposure now. Yes, companies need to measure individual "safe" dose exposure but agencies must start using computer models to recognize that all the "safe" doses are adding together in harmful combinations and in unmeasurable and unpredictable future effects. People MUST start eliminating toxins and other unnecessary chemicals in their food and products.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Important study about harmful chemicals
Do read this.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008067309_toxicsmell23m0.html
***
Here's a quick historic/science/economics lesson that everyone needs to understand because globally we are getting into a horrible situation and people don't even realize it is happening, or why.
Up until the industrial revolution humans had to use natural materials in everything. Let me use the example of dye to color fabric. Everyone had to collect bugs, bark, plants, flowers, minerals and other materials (such as a certain sea shell to provide purple, which due to its rareness became "the color of royalty") in order to give fabric or anything else any color. During the industrial revolution people discovered how to use chemicals, man made chemicals, to do the same thing. When you collect something that is rare to do something everyone needs to do (color fabric) it is very expensive and limiting. When you invent a chemical that can be cheaply made and used, it becomes available and affordable worldwide. So, for example, one of the first things traders provided American Indians was fabric colored with chemicals, the same way the settlers used on their own clothes. Everyone thought it was a great idea, and it was. Now, think of everything else that is like dyes going from natural to chemical. Fragrance is another area where it is no longer made from the actual flowers, but a synthetic chemical. Food additives for taste and freshness used to be natural (sugar, salt, vinegar) but are now all chemicals. Again, this is a "good thing" in the sense of making a commodity more widely available and affordable to everyone. Now think about cleansers. They used to be based on natural substances such as fat, oil, lye, and ashes. Even the cleansers are now all chemicals.
So now do the math. Everything we use is saturated and enabled with chemicals that take the place of what were natural substances. And it's not just a "natural vs artificial chemical" problem, but it is dosage related, and THAT is the real problem. In the 1800's if everything else you did was based on low dosages of natural materials, but now you started wearing cotton that is colored with a chemical dye, no problem. The people got low dosages of chemicals in limited areas. But gradually chemicals have become the basis of every substance, increasing the dosage within that object AND multiplying a person's exposure by one hundred fold. Here is what I mean. Natural dyes tend not to be as intense as chemical dyes. So when you use a natural compound you are somewhat limited in your exposure because it's a weaker substance. When a chemist invents a substitute though, there is no built in dosage control. So a dull red piece of naturally colored fabric is forced to have a much lower amount of the natural dye in it than a chemically treated fabric, which becomes saturated with the chemical. So that is one way to understand that chemicals, even if they "mimic" the natural are genuinely different and more risky because they are not dosage controlled.
Here's a food example just to help with the concept. People used to never drink fruit juice (except wine), they would eat the fruit. So a person was lucky and well off if they had say an apple or an orange a day. But how many oranges do you think must be squeezed in order to make a small, to say nothing of a large, glass of orange juice? (This is why it's so fattening to drink juice and not so good for your kids. It is MUCH better to have your kid eat an apple than always drink the apple juice, for example). That's another subject but I know it helps you to understand what I mean by dosage of intensity. So just like an orange can be eaten, or three or four oranges can be "drank" in one sitting, natural substances are by their nature more dilute than chemical imitations or replacements.
So now do the math. If in a period of one hundred years humans have gone from replacing virtually every everyday substance in their lives with chemical based ones instead of natural, you have increased your exposure to each chemical on a per unit basis and you cannot escape chemical use because it is in everything. This is terrible and trust me, it is behind many of the ailments people complain about today. It's no one's "fault" so don't be dumb and run for lawyers because it was a "necessary" step in progress. Remember, people didn't live much beyond their fifties or sixties one hundred years ago, in general, and so improving, even chemically, the health and cleanliness of their lives in one or two areas meant prosperity and a longer life could be achieved. The problem is that 1) now people live longer and are exposed to chemicals even in the womb and through their whole lives 2) there are a hundred fold more types of chemical exposures because it's in everything everywhere and 3) humans do not have the time to "evolve" and "natural select" a bodily response (if it would be even possible), so many more sensitivities and reactions are to be expected since the human race can't evolve "tolerance" to say some cancer causing additive since that would take like ten thousand years or so to do it.
So instead of worrying about climate change you better worry about this problem. We need to get people who are not extreme on either side of the issue to inventory every chemical and examine the full range of implications and options for its usage. SAFETY STUDIES MEAN NOTHING in this regard. Safety studies only test one chemical on one person or animal. I'm talking about the fact that humans now live within and pee out of them hundreds of chemicals coming at them from every direction constantly so that basically humans are getting hundreds of doses of chemicals (each of which, like the fabric to the early settlers) may be harmless if that were the only thing, but now it combines with hundreds of others in daily exposure AND it continues to circulate in the environment both during their manufacture, their disposal in garbage AND through human bodily functions. It is a global crisis and it has been building for decades now. Universities and researchers ought to develop the "chemical additive profile" that the vast majority of humans are exposed to and divide up among themselves studying the implications and where the dosage and intensity can be mitigated. Pollution specialists need to also focus more on the every day chemicals instead of only the famous toxic dump and waste remedial processes. Consumers need to just be aware that there are no longer real rose petals in even "rose scented," and there are no pine needles in "pine fresh"... it is all chemicals that mimic the fragrance but are not the same chemical composition and even if they were, they are exponentially intensive AND they are contained and transported (like in an aerosol) by other chemicals.
I could write much more but I think everyone gets the point. It's a mess, I'm not going to lie to you and say this is a minor problem or that it will be easy to fix (and if people will even be able to stand to focus on more 'bad news' and get consensus that it must be remedied). But you can start to do things in your own household now that I've filled you in on what is going on. That's one reason I'm such a glass fan. But even that would need looking into because we can no longer be sure what enters into the manufacturing process. But you manage your odds because, for example, if there's no color decoration on the glass I know I'm not dealing with a color dye substance, nor a plastic issue, etc. So you can minimize your exposures. I've written about this before, how I use old fashion soap where I can, and not chemical laden cleansers, even using tea bags in water for cleaning surface. But someone somewhere has got to get on top of this problem. Hmm.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008067309_toxicsmell23m0.html
***
Here's a quick historic/science/economics lesson that everyone needs to understand because globally we are getting into a horrible situation and people don't even realize it is happening, or why.
Up until the industrial revolution humans had to use natural materials in everything. Let me use the example of dye to color fabric. Everyone had to collect bugs, bark, plants, flowers, minerals and other materials (such as a certain sea shell to provide purple, which due to its rareness became "the color of royalty") in order to give fabric or anything else any color. During the industrial revolution people discovered how to use chemicals, man made chemicals, to do the same thing. When you collect something that is rare to do something everyone needs to do (color fabric) it is very expensive and limiting. When you invent a chemical that can be cheaply made and used, it becomes available and affordable worldwide. So, for example, one of the first things traders provided American Indians was fabric colored with chemicals, the same way the settlers used on their own clothes. Everyone thought it was a great idea, and it was. Now, think of everything else that is like dyes going from natural to chemical. Fragrance is another area where it is no longer made from the actual flowers, but a synthetic chemical. Food additives for taste and freshness used to be natural (sugar, salt, vinegar) but are now all chemicals. Again, this is a "good thing" in the sense of making a commodity more widely available and affordable to everyone. Now think about cleansers. They used to be based on natural substances such as fat, oil, lye, and ashes. Even the cleansers are now all chemicals.
So now do the math. Everything we use is saturated and enabled with chemicals that take the place of what were natural substances. And it's not just a "natural vs artificial chemical" problem, but it is dosage related, and THAT is the real problem. In the 1800's if everything else you did was based on low dosages of natural materials, but now you started wearing cotton that is colored with a chemical dye, no problem. The people got low dosages of chemicals in limited areas. But gradually chemicals have become the basis of every substance, increasing the dosage within that object AND multiplying a person's exposure by one hundred fold. Here is what I mean. Natural dyes tend not to be as intense as chemical dyes. So when you use a natural compound you are somewhat limited in your exposure because it's a weaker substance. When a chemist invents a substitute though, there is no built in dosage control. So a dull red piece of naturally colored fabric is forced to have a much lower amount of the natural dye in it than a chemically treated fabric, which becomes saturated with the chemical. So that is one way to understand that chemicals, even if they "mimic" the natural are genuinely different and more risky because they are not dosage controlled.
Here's a food example just to help with the concept. People used to never drink fruit juice (except wine), they would eat the fruit. So a person was lucky and well off if they had say an apple or an orange a day. But how many oranges do you think must be squeezed in order to make a small, to say nothing of a large, glass of orange juice? (This is why it's so fattening to drink juice and not so good for your kids. It is MUCH better to have your kid eat an apple than always drink the apple juice, for example). That's another subject but I know it helps you to understand what I mean by dosage of intensity. So just like an orange can be eaten, or three or four oranges can be "drank" in one sitting, natural substances are by their nature more dilute than chemical imitations or replacements.
So now do the math. If in a period of one hundred years humans have gone from replacing virtually every everyday substance in their lives with chemical based ones instead of natural, you have increased your exposure to each chemical on a per unit basis and you cannot escape chemical use because it is in everything. This is terrible and trust me, it is behind many of the ailments people complain about today. It's no one's "fault" so don't be dumb and run for lawyers because it was a "necessary" step in progress. Remember, people didn't live much beyond their fifties or sixties one hundred years ago, in general, and so improving, even chemically, the health and cleanliness of their lives in one or two areas meant prosperity and a longer life could be achieved. The problem is that 1) now people live longer and are exposed to chemicals even in the womb and through their whole lives 2) there are a hundred fold more types of chemical exposures because it's in everything everywhere and 3) humans do not have the time to "evolve" and "natural select" a bodily response (if it would be even possible), so many more sensitivities and reactions are to be expected since the human race can't evolve "tolerance" to say some cancer causing additive since that would take like ten thousand years or so to do it.
So instead of worrying about climate change you better worry about this problem. We need to get people who are not extreme on either side of the issue to inventory every chemical and examine the full range of implications and options for its usage. SAFETY STUDIES MEAN NOTHING in this regard. Safety studies only test one chemical on one person or animal. I'm talking about the fact that humans now live within and pee out of them hundreds of chemicals coming at them from every direction constantly so that basically humans are getting hundreds of doses of chemicals (each of which, like the fabric to the early settlers) may be harmless if that were the only thing, but now it combines with hundreds of others in daily exposure AND it continues to circulate in the environment both during their manufacture, their disposal in garbage AND through human bodily functions. It is a global crisis and it has been building for decades now. Universities and researchers ought to develop the "chemical additive profile" that the vast majority of humans are exposed to and divide up among themselves studying the implications and where the dosage and intensity can be mitigated. Pollution specialists need to also focus more on the every day chemicals instead of only the famous toxic dump and waste remedial processes. Consumers need to just be aware that there are no longer real rose petals in even "rose scented," and there are no pine needles in "pine fresh"... it is all chemicals that mimic the fragrance but are not the same chemical composition and even if they were, they are exponentially intensive AND they are contained and transported (like in an aerosol) by other chemicals.
I could write much more but I think everyone gets the point. It's a mess, I'm not going to lie to you and say this is a minor problem or that it will be easy to fix (and if people will even be able to stand to focus on more 'bad news' and get consensus that it must be remedied). But you can start to do things in your own household now that I've filled you in on what is going on. That's one reason I'm such a glass fan. But even that would need looking into because we can no longer be sure what enters into the manufacturing process. But you manage your odds because, for example, if there's no color decoration on the glass I know I'm not dealing with a color dye substance, nor a plastic issue, etc. So you can minimize your exposures. I've written about this before, how I use old fashion soap where I can, and not chemical laden cleansers, even using tea bags in water for cleaning surface. But someone somewhere has got to get on top of this problem. Hmm.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Important pollution article, 1.7 billion pounds worth
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-cigarette-butts-0618-nujun18,0,5021273.story
snip
Experts say cigarette butts rank at the very top of litter problems—not just for their ubiquity, but for their toxicity and non-biodegradable nature.
The things stick around in sewers and soil for years, even decades.
Sanitation workers can't clean them up fast enough, and volunteer cleanup crews can only pick up so many, every so often.
"It's about cleanliness," said Chicago Park District superintendent Tim Mitchell. "People have been using North Avenue Beach as an ashtray. By leaving cigarette butts on the beach, that adds to the pollution of the lake, and that's our greatest natural resource."Not that Chicago's streets have it any easier. Walk down a busy stretch of the Loop and it's not unusual to count up hundreds of butts in a blocklong stretch. That butts turn up with such abundance irks Matt Smith, spokesman for the Department of Streets and Sanitation."Smokers tend not to be very courteous with their material disposal," Smith said. "It gets thrown down and we have to sweep it up with our regular street debris. It's an ongoing problem; it's dirty and a remnant of someone's habit."
snip
Estimates on how long it takes a cigarette butt to turn into a fine powder vary, but the consensus places it at somewhere between 10 and 15 years.
Yet butts don't biodegrade, they only break down.
The distinction is important to environmentalists, who say butts end up as a plastic residue that stays in ecosystems for decades.
A substance that biodegrades, by contrast, is usually organic: plant or animal matter neutralized by enzymes or sunlight.
The bottom line: Old cigarette butts only get diluted or buried. They never truly vanish.A
n estimated 1.7 billion pounds of cigarette butts accumulate in lakes, oceans, on beaches and the rest of the planet annually, according to the New Jersey-based American Littoral Society, a coastal environmental organization.
And to understand the full impact of all those butts, it helps to know what goes into one. The 12,000 strands in a typical filter might resemble cotton, but they're made of something else entirely: a plastic called cellulose acetate, bound to outer paper layers by glue. And because that tiny filter you flick from your fingers is attached to a tobacco product potent enough to earn a Surgeon General's warning, it contains a host of potent chemicals. Among them: carcinogens such as benzopyrene and formaldehyde; poisons such as arsenic, lead, acetone, toluene, cadmium, nicotine and benzene; and hazardous chemicals such as butane and ammonia.If only the dangers stopped there. Butts still containing traces of lit tobacco pose a serious fire hazard; extinguished ones are a threat to marine life and a temptation to toddlers on playgrounds, who tend to put most anything in their mouths.
***
I think it has to start sinking in with people that everything they discard, even what they pee into the toilet, is filled with chemicals and toxins that do not naturally "break down."
It is mindboggling that 1.7 BILLION pounds of the toxic components of cigarettes are thrown away and enter the ecosystem where they linger and do not "break down" into "harmless organic" components.
People have to start picking up after themselves, no matter how "small" or "inconvenient" or you are going to small and inconvenient yourselves right off of this planet.
snip
Experts say cigarette butts rank at the very top of litter problems—not just for their ubiquity, but for their toxicity and non-biodegradable nature.
The things stick around in sewers and soil for years, even decades.
Sanitation workers can't clean them up fast enough, and volunteer cleanup crews can only pick up so many, every so often.
"It's about cleanliness," said Chicago Park District superintendent Tim Mitchell. "People have been using North Avenue Beach as an ashtray. By leaving cigarette butts on the beach, that adds to the pollution of the lake, and that's our greatest natural resource."Not that Chicago's streets have it any easier. Walk down a busy stretch of the Loop and it's not unusual to count up hundreds of butts in a blocklong stretch. That butts turn up with such abundance irks Matt Smith, spokesman for the Department of Streets and Sanitation."Smokers tend not to be very courteous with their material disposal," Smith said. "It gets thrown down and we have to sweep it up with our regular street debris. It's an ongoing problem; it's dirty and a remnant of someone's habit."
snip
Estimates on how long it takes a cigarette butt to turn into a fine powder vary, but the consensus places it at somewhere between 10 and 15 years.
Yet butts don't biodegrade, they only break down.
The distinction is important to environmentalists, who say butts end up as a plastic residue that stays in ecosystems for decades.
A substance that biodegrades, by contrast, is usually organic: plant or animal matter neutralized by enzymes or sunlight.
The bottom line: Old cigarette butts only get diluted or buried. They never truly vanish.A
n estimated 1.7 billion pounds of cigarette butts accumulate in lakes, oceans, on beaches and the rest of the planet annually, according to the New Jersey-based American Littoral Society, a coastal environmental organization.
And to understand the full impact of all those butts, it helps to know what goes into one. The 12,000 strands in a typical filter might resemble cotton, but they're made of something else entirely: a plastic called cellulose acetate, bound to outer paper layers by glue. And because that tiny filter you flick from your fingers is attached to a tobacco product potent enough to earn a Surgeon General's warning, it contains a host of potent chemicals. Among them: carcinogens such as benzopyrene and formaldehyde; poisons such as arsenic, lead, acetone, toluene, cadmium, nicotine and benzene; and hazardous chemicals such as butane and ammonia.If only the dangers stopped there. Butts still containing traces of lit tobacco pose a serious fire hazard; extinguished ones are a threat to marine life and a temptation to toddlers on playgrounds, who tend to put most anything in their mouths.
***
I think it has to start sinking in with people that everything they discard, even what they pee into the toilet, is filled with chemicals and toxins that do not naturally "break down."
It is mindboggling that 1.7 BILLION pounds of the toxic components of cigarettes are thrown away and enter the ecosystem where they linger and do not "break down" into "harmless organic" components.
People have to start picking up after themselves, no matter how "small" or "inconvenient" or you are going to small and inconvenient yourselves right off of this planet.
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