Vaccines Don’t Cause Autism, But That’s Not The Point. Stop Being Ableist.

February 6, 2015 //
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Anne Thériault's avatarThe Belle Jar

Here are some typical arguments put forward by parents who choose not to vaccinate their otherwise healthy child (by “healthy” I mean they’re not asking they’re not asking for an exemption because the child is immunocompromised or otherwise couldn’t medically tolerate vaccinations).

For this example, I will pull quotes directly from a recent New York Times Article, Vaccine Critics Turn Defensive Over Measles:

“It’s the worst shot,” [Missy Foster, mother to an 18 month old daughter] said, with tears in her eyes. “Do you want to wake up one morning and the light is gone from her eyes with autism or something?”

Kelly McMenimen, a Lagunitas parent, said she “meditated on it a lot” before deciding not to vaccinate her son Tobias, 8, against even “deadly or deforming diseases.” She said she did not want “so many toxins” entering the slender body of a bright-eyed boy who loves math and geography.

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Categories Uncategorized

How deep do we need to dig?

February 5, 2015 //
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Yesterday I had the opportunity to visit another salt mine, an active one this time,

My mother worked in the mining industry, my father in law was a miner almost all his life, my first job was in a factory building mining equipment, I went down another half a dozen mines before, both active and transformed into touristic attractions. I thought I had a fair imagine about what it means to be a miner.

In the mine I visited yesterday there was a small church, entirely carved in salt of course. On one of its walls the visitors can read:

“Afara-s doar chinuri si nevoi,
Aici, in mina-i Dumnezeu cu noi.”

(Out there, topside, nothing but trouble comes in sight.
Down here, deep into the mine, we have the Lord on our side.)

How deep into our souls do we need to dig in order to find our good nature?

And then I found this picture on Facebook:

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Categories Choices we make, Psychology, Respect Mutual., The kind of world we live in

What kind of government.

January 30, 2015 //
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I started to comment on “The reason the economy crashed and has been slow to rebound is because of government intervention, not the market mechanism” by Nick Sorrentino and got carried away. So I transformed the comment into a post of my own.

I fully agree with your conclusion “I prefer an open sourced economy to one which is manipulated by programmers writing in a language which is full of bugs and which brings the system down periodically.” but I find your initial assumption to be too vague.
The current situation was indeed heavily influenced by government decisions. And yes, they were completely out of touch with reality – central planning never works.
But here is where our ways depart.
The solution for the current situation is not at all ‘less’ government. Or, god forbid, ‘no government’!.
Free market is the most efficient way of running an economy only it has two limitations. It is populated by people and the total amount of trade-able goods is limited. Hence the market is never really free. We do need a free market only the natural evolution of any limited system is to gradually loose it’s freedom. So it is us who have to guard the freedom of the market.
And this is what ‘government’ business should really be. Not to tell us what to do – to plan for all of us – but to make sure that nobody becomes so powerful as to be able to dictate to others what to do.

Some of you might wonder “Why should we not accept any monopoly if it has been ‘lifted to power by the free market'”?
I mentioned earlier that there is no such thing as a really free market.
OK, you might disagree with that, after all we both advocate freedom and I’ll use a reason we both agree upon: “central planning doesn’t work“. Ever! So why do you think that a private monopoly would be able to function any better than a public one? Just because it’s private? I assure you that Lenin saw the entire Russia as his back yard and that didn’t stop him from messing that country so big that it’s still reeling under the consequences. King George saw the American colonies as his private possessions and that didn’t make the early Americans any happier.
So what we have to implement is a completely different kind of government, not a weaker one. Blaming ‘the (notion of) government’ instead of specific government decisions only induces the impression that ‘government’ as a whole is useless/despicable and that drives people away from (the concept of) government.

What we really need, that different kind of government I was speaking about, is a government that is closely watched by the people and who jealously defends both the political and economic freedom of the individuals, not either notion of ‘central planning’ or ‘vested interests’ – which, in the end, are uncannily similar.

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/2015/01/the-reason-the-economy-crashed-and-has-been-slow-to-rebound-is-because-of-government-intervention-not-the-market-mechanism/

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., Choices we make, politics, Respect Mutual.

“Reducotorul impotentei”!?!

January 29, 2015 //
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reducotorul impotentei

Ma documentam pentru postul precedent si am observat reclama din partea dreapta a imaginii.
Avand o oarecare vedere periferica am vazut si scrisul, nu doar picioarele.

Acum am o mare nedumerire.
O fi o simpla greseala de redactare sau un ‘genial’ joc de cuvinte?

Pentru conformitate am pus mai jos linkul de unde am facut captura. Degeaba il leg de poza ca s-ar putea sa nu nimeriti aceiasi reclama. Articolul merita citit.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/22/mommy-wars-similac-video_n_6517242.html

Categories Bancuri

Which ‘best’ is better?

January 29, 2015 //
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Most people tend to be passionate about what they do, parents in particular.
This is absolutely normal, what could be more important than ‘the future of mankind’?

And the more passionate we are about something, the more we want to reach the best results in what we do, right?

Only sometimes we are so busy trying to demonstrate that our best is the best there is that we neglect some of the basic aspects of the day to day reality.
The most neglected one being that very seldom ‘one size fits all’.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-routly/where-similac-and-the-mother-hood-go-wrong-and-why-it-matters_b_6536280.html

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Categories Choices we make, Psychology, Respect Mutual., The kind of world we live in

Makes me wonder…

January 28, 2015 //
5

Interesting .
Cannot stop wondering how is it to belong to a people/tribe and reach the conclusion that the members of another people/tribe are more trustworthy than your own ‘mates’?!?

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/01/27/greek-election-reflects-countrys-differences-with-the-eu/

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Categories 1989 and the Global Financial Crisises., Choices we make, Culture, Psychology, The kind of world we live in

Consciousness. And now what?

January 26, 2015 //
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More than five years ago a friend introduced me to the work of Humberto Maturana.
I was instantly hooked.
Only I’m not that interested in how consciousness appeared to be as I am in the consequences of us being conscient.

“The argument unfolds as follows: physicists have no problem accepting that certain fundamental aspects of reality – such as space, mass, or electrical charge – just do exist. They can’t be explained as being the result of anything else. Explanations have to stop somewhere. The panpsychist hunch is that consciousness could be like that, too – and that if it is, there is no particular reason to assume that it only occurs in certain kinds of matter.”

This excerpt perfect illustrates what I have in mind.

First thing after becoming conscious – ‘aware of his own awareness’ in Maturana’s terms – man realized how fragile he is.  The best way to assuage that feeling was to find an explanation and a purpose for the whole situation. That’s when our immortal soul came to be. Created by God or simply invented by us, it doesn’t make any practical difference.
In time, as rational knowledge constructed wider and wider inroads into the unknown and currently offers scientific explanations for almost everything, the Creator God became less and less necessary. But ‘soul’ survived and now accompanies our still smart and yet unfulfilled desire to understand the origin of our consciousness. And now that we are no longer satisfied with the ‘divine origin’ of anything but not yet ready to accept that we might indeed be something special – fright again, being special implies extreme fragility/responsibility for one’s own fate – we are constantly searching for a new way to connect our nature/fate to the rest of the known Universe.

Hence the advent of ‘panpsyhism’. Which is not such a new idea as it would seem at first glance. The Buddhist notion of successive reincarnation has been around for more than two millennia.

How about accepting what Maturana teaches us – that consciousness of self is something we have continuously improved by using it synergistically with language and all these could take place simply because of the increased processing power that was accidentally bestowed, evolutionary speaking, upon our brains – and move on? If a better explanation will ever dawn upon us – by feat, by chance or even by divine intervention – we can always come back and reconsider – this is how science works, right?
Remaining stuck in this so called ‘Hard Problem’ – what is the direct link between our anatomy/brain physiology and our thoughts? – won’t take us anywhere, for sure.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/21/-sp-why-cant-worlds-greatest-minds-solve-mystery-consciousness

http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/pub/hvf/papers/maturana05selfconsciousness.html

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Categories Choices we make, Culture, Psychology, Respect Mutual.

There is no vaccine against narrow-mindedness.

January 24, 2015 //
3

Vaccines work.
OK, there are exceptions. Some batches are botched, some people develop allergies, some viruses mutate so fast that in those cases vaccination isn’t very effective.
But as a principle vaccination works as intended.

Despite all that, some people choose to deny their children the protection offered by vaccines, without any specific reason – such as an allergy or something similar. Just because they have heard that vaccination may cause autism. Or other equivalent baloney. Against advice vehemently pressed by most doctors.

As a consequence, people have re-started to die. After contracting perfectly preventable diseases.

vaccination

I have a rather ambivalent attitude towards Ayn Rand. I admire her razor sharp mind yet I find her a little too callous for my liking.

But sometimes it’s exactly this combination of traits that helps her pin point the essence of a situation:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/the-new-measles/384738/

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Categories Choices we make, politics, Psychology, Respect Mutual., The kind of world we live in

Homo homini lupus.

January 19, 2015 //
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Cheadle slaves

Click on the picture to read the article.

Don Cheadle learns that his ancestors were owned as slaves by the Chickasaw Nation and that after the end of the Civil War the five ‘Civilized Nations’ refused to liberate their slaves. Further more, after the Chickasaw agreed to liberate their slaves they didn’t offer them citizenship.

It seems that the ancient Romans were right when they said that ‘homo homini lupus’ – men act like wolves do towards other people.

Only his can be interpreted in two apparently conflicting ways:
‘Man predates on other people’
or
‘Man helps his mates, just as wolves do’.

In reality both interpretations are valid simultaneously.
Men coagulate into packs, just like wolves do, and then go prey on other human packs, called ‘herds’ by the ‘hunters’. Somewhat similar to what wolves do, only that wolves do not prey on members of their own species.

And something else. Wolves do this mostly by instinct and on a ‘need to do’ basis. We do it knowingly and because we feel there’s something wrong in there we have to find ‘excuses’ for our acts. Some of us almost never fail to come up with new ones.
‘Ideology’ being just one of the many currently available.

Or we may choose to act the better side of ourselves.

we-carry-kevan-2

http://wecarrykevan.com/

.Other quite interesting ideas on this subject can be found here:
http://associatesmind.com/2013/05/09/homo-homini-lupus-est-man-is-a-wolf-to-his-fellow-man/

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Categories Psychology, Respect Mutual., The kind of world we live in

Am purtat uniforma dar nu like

January 15, 2015 //
0

Cineva a shared de curand fotografia asta publicata de Tony Pop Tamas.

Toata scoala am avut oroare de uniforma, asa ca:

“Am purtat uniforma dar nu like.
Uniforma vrea sa uniformizeze.
Portul uniformei a fost inventat pe campul de lupta. La inceput acestea erau cat mai colorate si mai fistichii pentru ca aveau doua roluri. Pe vremea aia luptele se dadeau fata in fata, cu sabia asa ca uniformele trebuiau sa ii ajute pe combatanti sa ii deosebeasca pe dusmani de cei din propria tabara – si de aceea erau diferite intre ele – si sa mascheze sangele atunci cand combatantii erau raniti – de aceea aveau mult rosu si multe alte culori vii.
Apoi, de cand armele de foc cu bataie lunga au departat trupele unele de altele si a aparut nevoia de camuflaj, uniforma a primit un rol nou. Nu doar sa uniformizeze soldatii intre ei ci si trupele cu mediul inconjurator. Sa-i faca pe soldati ‘invizibili’.
Asta ne dorim pentru copii nostri? Sa fie toti la fel si toti una cu pamantul – adica sa stea cu capul plecat?”

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Categories psihologie, Respect Mutual., Tara din care traim
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