Sheep and Goats

Category: Health

  • Alzheimer’s Research: So the Cops Shoot the Bad Guys Instead of the Good Guys…

    Now that I’m old enough to receive the AARP magazine, I read each issue cover to cover. They’re packed with nice articles geared to the aging, and……there’s no nice way to say this…..that’s what I’m doing. But a recent piece about Alzheimers research in September’s Bulletin (Alzheimer’s: a new Theory, by Elizabeth Agnvall) left me un-warm and un-fuzzy. I’ve known people to succumb to Alzheimers. Moreover, I don’t have it now, but how do I know it’s not lurking around the corner? Some would say it’s made certain inroads, already. So…yes…I want medical science to get its act together on this malady. Sure, they have their act together now, the author maintains. But they insisted, with the same fervor, that they had it together just a few years ago. The author points out, however, that today’s approach is a 180 degree reversal from yesterday’s.

    Turns out that for the last 20 years, medical science has proceeded on the theory that “sticky plaques” are the culprit causing Alzheimer’s. Drugs have been developed to search and destroy those plaques. Haven’t they been peddled on American TV: Ask your doctor if such-and-such is right for you? Those ads drive Pop into a rage. But now sticky plaques are thought to be not the culprit! Rather, they are the body’s defense for attacking the real menace: clumps of amyloid beta protein, called oligomers. Oligomers do the damage, not sticky plaques, so the new thinking goes. Sticky plaques are the body’s means to take them out! We’ve been targeting the wrong enemy! Medically sanctioned “friendly fire”……the practice for the last twenty years!

    Now, being a blogger who believes in God, I have to be so careful writing anything that might be perceived as critical of science, lest some science-worshipping atheist come along and lecture me that science is based on EVIDENCE, whereas religion is based on mere BELIEF, and what do I think is smarter when I’m sick: pray myself better, or go to a science-based doctor, and do I still believe that the earth is flat?! I tell you, it’s a risky course to take. So, let me say it upfront: I’m not against science. I know it’s a discovery process. I know mistakes are made along the way. Alright, so the cops arrive upon the scene and shoot all the good guys instead of the bad guys! Is that any reason to be down on law enforcement? Of course not! A slight adjustment is all that’s needed. So let bygones be bygones and we’ll all be happy.

    No. I’m not critical on that account. Mistakes happen. God knows there’s plenty of people who scour past publications of JWs to find understandings which have changed, and then get all hysterical over it, supposing, I guess, that any modification is like smashing the Ten Commandments tablets. Jehovah’s Witnesses tack. We hone in. We get ever closer and sometimes alter course. Why should science not do the same?

    What grabs me is this quote: “[Andrew] Dillin, of the Salk Institute, started pursuing the oligomer theory several years ago. Then, the idea was so controversial, Dillin says, that some scientists would walk out of the room when he made his presentation at conferences. Now, he says, many of the top researchers in the field are convinced.”

    They walked out of the room? How dogmatic does that sound? How in keeping is that with Plonka’s manifesto “prove a scientist wrong and he will thank you for it.” It’s rather hard to prove them wrong when they walk out of the room as soon as they hear something they don’t like. Now, that’s intransigence of the sort they would, in a heartbeat, ascribe to religion.  And yet, just a few years later, these same scientists alter and say “Oh…..you know, that fellow was right all along!”


    They’re not immune to stubbornness, that’s all I’m saying. What steams me is those who claim they are…..that second buttressing layer of scientist-philosopher-cheerleader-atheist types who worship science themselves and ram it down all of our throats as the be-all and end-all. For, if this new theory is right, then you were better off declining when your doctor prescribed those Alzheimer’s medications. “No, I don’t trust it,” and “these guys don’t know what they’re talking about” are now seen to be perfectly reasonable views to have held. But God help you if you held them while the fat-headed 180 degree ass-backward Alzheimer’s approach was in vogue. “Alright, don’t take the meds, if you’re going to be so pig-headed!” can’t you hear some of them say. “Maybe you want to go to a faith healer, or a witch doctor, instead!” But now we see that’s exactly what you should have done. They may not have helped, but they wouldn’t have hurt, as did the now-outdated science-based approach.

    The article soft-pedals this bit of unpleasantness: “And if the [new] theory is correct, then drugs that target plaques – as many of the most promising medications have done in the past few years – may not help people who have the disease. They could even make them worse.” A very deferential statement, is it not? If the theory is correct, they certainly make them worse…..one would think, in exact correlation with how they were supposed to have made them better. Even though they were the “most promising” medications. Unless the old meds never did anything in the first place. Perhaps, in that case, you can now claim they do no harm. But when marketers urge us to pester our doctors for the stuff, surely the response they hope to elicit from that learned one is not “don’t bother, they don’t do anything, you’ll just be wasting your money!”

    It took me awhile to realize….dikki clued me in, actually….that pharmaceutical companies advertizing on TV is not a worldwide phenomenon. It happens in only two countries, I am told, of which the United States is one. So it will be hard for non-American readers to fathom just how obnoxious these ads are. Decisive, immaculate and impossibly handsome doctors stride purposefully through futuristic laboratories. They glance alternately at teams of researchers peering into microscopes, at banks of computers, at their clipboard, and, of course, at YOU, as they authoritatively report the very latest astounding medical breakthrough. “Such-and-such is not right for everyone,” they acknowledge, “but…damn it, man,” they seem to be saying, “you know it’s right for you!” Even as I write, I’m recalling one such “doctor” striding through a lab reminiscent of Batman’s lair, touting some new med that unlocks the very “power of the sea,” (fish oil…the stuff you’ve been able to buy forever at any health foods store) and…..would you believe it?….the donkey actually ends his pitch peering contemplatively into the lab’s full-wall aquarium, as if marveling how his outfit has managed to make a buck out of something God provided free.

    This formula is not set in concrete. It can vary slightly. Alzheimer’s, for example, afflicts our grandparents, and our grandparents are kindly, aren’t they? So a brusque futuristic setting will not do. No. The setting here must be warmer, a kindly doctors office, for example, and the doctor himself ought to have gray hair. Antidepressants, too, ought to be touted by a kindly and caring doctor, not some self-centered jerk who’s Porsche vanity plates read “PSYCH DR.” For woman’s health, we even change the doctor’s gender, for isn’t any guy specializing in female issues a little suspect? No longer is the doctor an impossibly handsome man. Now it’s an impossibly attractive woman, who’s also athletic, has piercing eyes and an oddly spelled first name….you know, a Bond girl.

    This type of 180 reversal in medical science happens all the time*, so that one ought to be given more credit than they commonly are (namely, none) if they choose to pass on the latest medical, or even scientific, thinking. It’s somewhat as they say about the weather here in Rochester (or most anywhere else, I imagine): don’t like the weather? Just stick around. It will change. Those who resist the latest advances of science for whatever reasons….perhaps reasons they can’t even articulate…..intuitive reasons, if you will, sometimes come out ahead. They certainly do so often enough that there’s no reason to criticize them. To acknowledge such is not to deride science, but only to put it into perspective. It’s a generally progressive means of discovery, but not so sterling that it trumps every other sort of thinking. If one accepts that the present scientific consensus is tentative, then one does okay, and one can take it in stride when understandings change, being happy about the advance. Even then, however, it’s only a (most likely) forward step taken, and not the finished mystery. Alas, there are ever so many who take the latest scientific notion as dogma. God help you if you fail to embrace their conclusions as truth.

    It doesn’t mean you ought to disparage science, of course, but surely it means you need not respond “how high?” when science says “jump!”

    [6/3/26 update: doesn’t seem that anyone has learned anything: https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/major-review-casts-doubt-on-a-generation-of-alzheimers-drugs-6014470?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2026-06-03&src_cmp=gv-2026-06-03&utm_medium=email&est=it6vUFrTwtlDWpy2WT3bxLj0udESvQCHQMYPM5wPbRdrLP%2BM0b6IbOSuuNP41V0%3D ]

    *********  The bookstore

  • Celeste

    Know who made that tub? My sons did,” Mama says. “Know who made that picture?” pointing to a wall hanging. “I made it, I did.” See these walls? My sons made them. See that curtain? Know who made that? I made it, I did.” “Didn't your sons make that television, Mama?” I ask. “No, they didn't. I bought that television at Macy's in New York City.” 

    Of course, Celeste's not really my mama, though she thought she was. But then, she thought she was the mama of ever so many people. Yes….here is another story from days at the group home.
     
    Celeste had no end of sons. Oddly, she tended to arrange them in groups of fifty, as in the Bible.  Lots of daughters, too, but she emphasized sons. She had fifty sons who were policemen, she'd declare. They carry big guns with them, this long (a gesture about a foot and a half) Mess with them, and they'll crack you right in the jaw! She had another fifty sons who were priests, also sons who were bishops, and a son who was a Pope. Others were firemen. Ah….it's good to have so many sons, she must feel really blessed. “Nah….they're all bastards,” she'd say. “They all have their own wives. They don't come to see their mother. They just think of themselves, they do.”
     
    It must be stated at this point that “bastard” was Celeste's word of choice. Everything was a bastard. She'd use the word when angry. She'd use the word when not angry. Her room was filled with objects both animate and inanimate….they're all bastards, she'd chuckle. “That elephant, that there, he keeps looking at me, he does, the bastard,” she'd mutter, and thumb her nose at it. Easing herself into the sit-down tub, she'd curse her own leg. “Get in there, you bastard!” and then “Hah! Called my own leg a bastard!” followed up by a  laugh at the witticism. “Shut up, you bastard!” she'd tell the toilet, and then: “How can it talk? It don't have a mouth.”
     
    Now, being wholesome such as I am, I gave serious thought as to whether I should really sprinkle this post with “bastards.” In the end, I decided I would. First, it was Celeste's word, not mine. Second, I can't imagine conveying a feel for the woman without using her vocabulary. Third – trust me on this -  I'm sparing the reader (so far) 90% of what she'd routinely say. Fourth, aren't the real swear words ones like “kill,” “rape,” “war,” as Brother Wease told our brother? “The words I use (a lot….he's the closest Rochester comes to “shock jock”) are just silly words,” he says. To which our guy replied that since they are silly, we try to avoid them, but he didn't disagree with Wease's premise. Fifth, I sometimes wonder if strict avoidance of all course words isn't more a Victorian relic than a biblical one. Read through the Old Testament, and you'll find some earthy accounts. Somehow, I can't picture those OT characters using the sanitized words modern translators ascribe to them. When Elijah taunted no-show Baal, for example, in front of  his worshipers: “And it came about at noon that Elijah began to mock them and say: “Call at the top of your voice, for he is a god; for he must be concerned with a matter, and he has excrement and has to go to the privy,” I somehow can't picture him using that word. Celeste refers to the same substance frequently, and, believe me, she does not say “excrement.” Therefore, for this post only, I am relaxing my normally impeccable standards of fine language. [let the reader be warned]
     
    When Celeste was but a young woman, her father gave her in to the latest medical craze – that of lobotomies. For about 15 years, that operation was all the rage in America. Group house lore was somewhat vague on dad's reason, obscured by many decades, but it seems Celeste had borne a couple of children out of wedlock. That didn't sit well with the family, and the operation was deemed a good way to control her behavior.
     
    Lobotomies were first performed on humans by Dr. Antonio Egaz Moniz. He won a 1949 Nobel prize for his work. Dr Moniz' technique was to drill two holes on either side of the forehead, through each of which he would insert a special surgical knife to sever the brain's frontal cortex from its thalamus. As might be imagined, the operation was none too precise. However, it was thought to aid psychotic patients afflicted with repetitive thought, and a number of them did find relief. But there were also some who got worse, and others who showed no change, in fact, the results were in just about the same proportions one might obtain by doing nothing.  In time, Dr Moniz would advocate his procedure for only the most extreme and incurable of cases. He retired from medicine after one of his patients shot him, leaving him paralyzed. It's tempting to say it was one of his lobotomized patients, but no…it wasn't. It was a non-lobotomized one. (but did the fellow fear he might be next on the "to-do" list?)
     
     
     
    Once you attuned yourself to Celeste's frequency, she was quite enjoyable to talk to. You'd play along, of course, try to enter her world. What was real and what was delusion? Sometimes, she'd claim to have made this knicknack or that contraption, like that wall hanging, other times she might say she'd bought them at Macy's in New York, a store owned by one of her sons. Life had apparently been harsh for Celeste. Any number of people in the past had hit her, even her own sons. They'd hit her hard for no reason at all, but she'd always managed to get them back, one time, for example, by knocking them “down the stairs and breaking both their f**king legs, the big bastards.”
     
    Yet in public she could be surprisingly gracious, uninhibitedly complimenting this or that person on their dress or shoes or general appearance, going from person to person, then back to a favorite or two. People loved her. At first I braced myself for the type of invective that she would hurl in a heartbeat back home (“My God! Look at that ass! No wonder – she eats like a hog!”) but there was none of it, as if she was a different person. And if you led her in song ("I wonder if we can get away with singing a song for these people, Mama") such as Unforgettable, you'd find she would join in with perfect pitch, though she'd manage only a line or two undistracted. She used to sing, so she said, on a stage in New York City when she was seven years old. Several people at the last doctor's office waiting room said she'd made their day.
     

    They used to come in through the eye sockets, just above the eyeball; American doctors had learned to streamline Moniz's time-consuming European process. And, surely reserving the process for only the most desperate and incurable was too conservative! Insert an ice-pick instrument behind the eye, a light smack of a mallet would pierce thin tissue and bone underneath, and then a quick rotation of the pick end. The knife end would swish like a windshield wiper, severing all in its path. Some experienced doctors, it's said, would faint at the sight. Electroshock sufficed for anesthesia. The entire process could be done in ten minutes. Largely through the near-evangelistic promotion of one American physician, Walter Freeman, (who trained scores of others) lobotomies became accepted therapy for convicted criminals, for discipline cases, for difficult relatives, for those exhibiting otherwise undesirable behavior. Eighteen thousand were performed between 1939 and 1951 in the United States. President John F. Kennedy's sister Rosemary received the operation as a young girl. The mildly retarded girl was going a little “boy-crazy,” much to the well-connected family's embarrassment, so dad took her to Dr Freeman. After the procedure, Rosemary spent the rest of her life institutionalized. Her father never told the rest of the family what he had done. (The case sounds remarkably like that of Celeste, though be assured, they were not the same person; there were many such cases.)
     
    The media couldn't get enough of Dr Freeman. When he rolled into town, in his Loboto-Mobile – yes, newspapers actually called it that! – his exploits would make front page headlines. Curing mental distress was as easy, they wrote, as curing a toothache! Magazines such as Time and Life sang his praises, exaggerating his successes, sweeping aside his failures. A showman, he would sometimes do both eyes at once, two-handed lobotomies! He'd line patients up as in an assembly line, once doing 25 women in a single day.
     
     
     
    I'd somehow assumed a lobotomized person wouldn't recall the procedure. I was mistaken. “I got a son who's a doctor,” Celeste confided once, “a brain doctor! He did an operation on me, he did, he hurt me real bad, he did. I saw stars from heaven! See….I got two holes in my head. (I leaned forward to feel them….no, mama, I can't feel them anymore. They must have healed up) I was out cold for a week! It hurt like hell, it did. He didn't give a goddamn. It didn't hurt him any!” I asked why he would do something like that. “Well, I did some things when I was a girl,” she muttered sheepishly, “and he didn't like that.”

    She had a lot of anger; that was apparent to all. She took it out on her housemates  – “get away from me, you bastard, I'll cut your throat!” – though they'd done nothing to her. (in time, one of them learned to make preemptive strikes) Yet she could unexpectedly change her tune: “Oh, that dress looks very nice on you, Connie.” And her sorrow at learning of someone's death was genuine. Lots of things frightened her, even things she'd made. She feared death, too. “What do you think happens when you die?” the psychologist probed. “Oh, I'll probably go to hell,” she responded. So the psychologist thought she might do well to see a priest, an idea that gained some traction and I went to a nearby church to see what could be arranged, till Celeste herself slammed the door with: “I don't wanna see no f**king priest!” So I told her later, when she likewise expressed concern over hell, that I didn't think there was any such place. "You know what hell is?" she said to me, dead serious. "This is hell, right here." I swear I don't think there was anything wrong with the woman mentally before the lobotomy. Strong-welled, likely. Rebellious, perhaps. But mentally, I bet she was okay. She isn't now, though.
     
    You couldn't really pin down details, but there was a theme to her early life. It wasn't a nurturing one. Housemates will shed few tears when she dies, I fear, and one or two will positively rejoice. Was she “born mean,” as she herself would tell you? Was she raised mean? Or did she become mean pondering what  had been done to her. For, at a young age, those she trusted most were duped by the latest medical craze. She was put into their clutches, and they lobotomized her, they did.
     
    The bastards.

  • Watchtower, the Church, and the Nazis

    Wowwheee! Did this guy ever get pilloried!
     
    ………………………………
     
    Assemblyman Dov Hikind, whose mother survived the death camp at Auschwitz, said yesterday that only Jews persecuted during the Nazi reign should be honored at a Holocaust memorial in Brooklyn.
     
    Hikind said even though 5 million people from other groups — including gays, the disabled and Jehovah's Witnesses — were killed along with 6 million Jewish people during the Holocaust, the memorial in Sheepshead Bay should be for Jews only.
     
    He said he is not against a memorial to honor the other groups — as long as it is somewhere else.
     
    "These people are not in the same category as Jewish people with regards to the Holocaust. It is so vastly different. You cannot compare political prisoners with Jewish victims."    New York Post, June 2009
     
    …………………………………
     
    This blogger, for example, went so far as to bestow upon the Assemblyman his "Idiot of the Day" award! (I didn't check to see who the year's other 364 idiots were.)

     
    This one called him a "jerk" and a "hypocrite."

     
    This one called him (ahem) "a real dick."

     
    I suppose I should join in the chorus, but somehow I can't get my heart into it. I know where this fellow is coming from. Should he not be given a free pass on account of his mother alone? Oh, I suppose if this memorial is publicly funded, like the Holocaust Museum, you should include all groups. But, if you identify with one of the groups, as Hikind does, I see his point. You can't compare political prisoners with Jewish victims.
     
    As it turns out, I also identify with one of the groups, in fact, I identify with two of them. Everybody knows that I've worked closely with the developmentally disabled. I've written posts about them here, here, and here. They are my people. Life hasn't dealt them a very good hand, and perhaps if I had been dealt the same hand, I would not have played it as well. So if they (or their advocates) were to put up a memorial for their disabled holocaust victims, it wouldn't bother me for a moment that Gypsies weren't included, or gays, or Jews, or Jehovah's Witnesses, or political prisoners. You really can't compare them with these other groups. True, as one blogger pointed out, they were all murdered, but – from the Bible's point of view– all who have ever died have been "murdered," by Adam at least, if not also by some more immediate villain. Why not put up a memorial for all dead people and be done with it?
     
    Of course, the other group with whom I identify is Jehovah's Witnesses. Here again, to extend the Assemblyman's reasoning, you cannot compare Jehovah's Witnesses with Jews or Gysies, or Poles, or gays, or the disabled, or anyone else. Unique among all holocaust victims, Jehovah's Witnesses were able to write their ticket out at any time. All they had to do was sign a statement renouncing their faith and pledging support to the Nazi regime. Only a handful obliged – a fact that seventy years later I still find staggering.
     
    In the face of those who would deny the Holocaust, Jews are ever vigilant to keep the record clear and unambiguous. See Prime Minister Netanyahu's address before the U.N. 64th General Assembly, for example. Wow! Did he ever pin their ears back! (Unfortunately, did anyone listen?) Even watering down the Holocaust record makes them bristle. I've no problem with that. I understand it. We do the same.
     
    There are any number of serial gripers on the internet who are alarmed at any favorable mention of Jehovah's Witnesses, and who immediately attempt to negate such praise. Some of these characters strive with all their might to denigrate Jehovah's Witnesses' stand during the Holocaust. Of course, this is not easy to do, because the stand is among the most courageous actions of the past century. But they try. Generally, they feign applause for the astounding courage and faith of individual Witnesses, but then take shots at their organization, as if it was entirely separate. Yes, those Witnesses were amazing, they say. Too bad they were sold out by an oppressive, self-serving, uncaring Watchtower central machine.

    Man, that steams me!! Any Witness will tell you, it's because, not in spite of, the support and direction of their organization, that they withstood Hitler. Nazi troops overran Watchtower branch offices in lands they controlled; their occupants were arrested and imprisoned alike with the rank and file. Meanwhile, the mainline churches refrained from criticizing the Nazis, lest there be reprisals. "Why should we quarrel?" Hitler (correctly) boasted. "The parsons….will betray their God to us. They will betray anything for the sake of their miserable little jobs and incomes." [The Voice of Destruction, Hermann Rauschning, 1940, pp. 50, 53.] The major churches received large state subsidies throughout the war.
     
    Not so with Jehovah's Witnesses. After the war, Genevieve de Gaulle, niece of latter French President General Charles de Gaule wrote: "I have true admiration for them. They ….have endured very great sufferings for their beliefs. . . . All of them showed very great courage and their attitude commanded eventually even the respect of the S.S. They could have been immediately freed if they had renounced their faith. But, on the contrary, they did not cease resistance, even succeeding in introducing books and tracts into the camp.”
     
    Would that Catholics and Lutherans, who comprised 95% of the German population, were similarly "sold out" by their respective churches. The Hitler movement would have collapsed!
     
    After the war, Catholic scholar and educator Gordon Zahn examined the records and, diligent though he was, could find just one among 32 million German Catholics who conscientiously refused to serve in Hitler's armies. He found another 6 in Austria. Why so few? He reports that his extensive interviews with people who knew these men produced the “flat assurance voiced by almost every informant that any Catholic who decided to refuse military service would have received no support whatsoever from his spiritual leaders."
     
    Instead, Pope Pius XII, in 1939, directed chaplains on both sides of the war to have confidence in their respective military bishops, viewing the war as "a manifestation of the will of a heavenly Father who always turns evil into good," and “as fighters under the flags of their country to fight also for the Church.”*
     
    *quoted from the December 8, 1939 pastoral letter, Asperis Commoti Anxietatibus, and published in Seelsorge und kirchliche Verwaltung im Krieg, Konrad Hoffmann, editor, 1940, p. 144.
     
    One might imagine that, chastened by their shameful WWI record, the clergy would have resolved to do better come the next crisis. Didn't happen. See the article Pope Pius XII and the Nazis—A Fresh Viewpoint, from the Feb 22 1974, Awake magazine (from which most of this post's detailed quotes are taken). No, it was not Jehovah's Witnesses who were sold out by their organization.
     
    Now, seventy years later, along comes Ragoth– good old analytical Ragoth, who can always be depended upon for substantial comments – Ragoth, meaning no harm whatsoever, who "would also point out the Confessing Church during World War II, a la Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Granted, most of them were put to death, Bonhoeffer for spying for England and being involved with the plot to assassinate Hitler, but they stood their ground in opposition to the Nazi take-over of the German church. Now, also granted, they didn't take a pacifist stance. Bonhoeffer and Barth originally started that way, but Bonhoeffer became convinced that as evil a thing as it would be, he would have to suffer the consequences in the afterlife to help the Brits, and, eventually, to become involved in the assassination plot…..they were a relatively small group, but, I just wanted to throw in there were some other religious groups openly and constantly opposed to Hitler and the Nazi party, even in the face of death threats and directly against the rest of the churches out of which they came from."
     
    Ragoth has a point. Not everyone in the German churches supported Hitler. Perhaps 10% of German Protestants took a stand against the Nazis. Doubtless Catholics as well. The point is, though, that they had to defy their church to do it. They were an embarrassment to their respective churches, from whom they received "no support whatsoever." So some of them banded together into schisms of their own – such as the Confessing Church. Others acted independently as renegades. These were the "political prisoners" mentioned before, no doubt. I have nothing but admiration for these persons. Ragoth is absolutely right to recognize and honor them. They were extraordinary people.
     
    But not everyone is extraordinary. Most people are quite ordinary. It's true with Jehovah's Witnesses. Some are extraordinary, but most are just regular folk. Jehovah's Witnesses did not have to stand against their own religious organization or form a new one because theirs had betrayed its values. We stood against Hitler largely because of our religious organization. Those others stood against Hitler in spite of theirs.
     
    People benefit from organization, even though "organization" has become practically a dirty word today. Even the minimal organization of family is too much for many these days. You should hear how often the terms "brain-washing" and "mind control" are applied to us. But without leadership from a genuine principled organization, only 10% of Germans were able to resist the greatest atrocity of all time. With leadership from a principled organization, virtually all were able to resist. If there really is a God, why would he not be able to provide some sort of organization so that believers are not tossed about like seaweed on the surf?
     
    No, I don't want to hear bellyaching about the manipulative Watchtower. It's nonsense. It comes only from those who despise all of Jehovah's Witnesses. After the fall of France in 1940, the Vatican’s Cardinal Eugène Tisserant wrote to a friend that “Fascist ideology and Hitlerism have transformed the consciences of the young, and those
    under thirty-five are willing to commit any crime for any purpose ordered by their leader.” It's an extreme case, but it illustrates how people are. They run in herds, overwhelmed by national, economic, social or class concerns of the day. The then-current generation ever imagines they are the first to break the trend. When the dust settles, though, they're seen to be subject to the same laws of human nature as everyone else. It takes a loyal God-centered organization to cut through the murk, and keep moral principles ever before its people, as happened in WWII and as happens today.
     
    ………………………………..
     

    This excerpt comes from the United States Holocaust Museum Memorial, regarding Jehovah's Witnesses.

    *************************

    Tom Irregardless and Me        No Fake News but Plenty of Hogwash

  • The French Version of Geraldo?

    It's not unusual for the developmentally disabled to have issues of self-esteem. And it's not hard to see why. If your closest associates – in the vast majority of cases, your only associates – are people who have to be paid to see you, you don't think you might have some self-esteem issues?

    But Doug has no issues of self-esteem. He is one of the few who has benefited from heavy family involvement. At the restaurant, he barks (more or less literally) directions to staff as they pass by – this or that dish is empty, and he holds it up to make his point. Doug is non-verbal. If you don't know him, you won't understand a thing he says. If you do know him, you still won't understand a thing he says but, combined with gestures, you can usually catch the drift. Doug's very social. He thrusts out a hand to men as they pass, inviting a handshake. From women he wants hugs; he holds out both arms.

    After the meal, we drive over to the Fairport commons area – Liftbridge Park – to hang out a bit. We're in luck. Lots is happening – a classic car show and a live band. I wheel Doug near the band, an all-girl group called It's My Party, who perform songs from the early 60's, and perform them very well. They have matching outfits, just like in the 60's, synchronized gestures, and … um…some campy 60's dialog between songs. The drummer is their producer, and their website says they have performed for 20 years. How can that be, since the singers themselves are yet high-schoolers? Ah, the producer has been around that long, and maybe some of the backup musicians, of which there are 8 or 9 – are some of them high-schoolers, too? The girl singers have been replaced once or twice.

    Many in the audience are older folk – revisiting their youth, one suspects – and after the show, a woman remarks on the lankiest singer's long limbs. "Yeah, it's hard to get clothes," the performer replies. Actually, I thought she said it's hard to get close. That would fit too, for the trio accentuate their songs with 60's cheerleading gestures, arms flailing like windmills.

    Doug is captivated by all this. You want to leave? I ask after a few songs. Slight but emphatic shake of the head no. You want to stay? Slight but emphatic shake of the head yes. You want one of their CDs? Yes. So we wait in the lineup, which really isn't wheelchair accessible, and they sign his copy with hugs and kisses – xxooxxoo. Of course, Doug solicits actual hugs and gets them from the girl or two closest to him. Backing out, he keeps it up and gets several more hugs from other girls….you know…girls in the audience, girl friends of the singers, and so forth!

    Back at the home I write up a report – they like to keep track of social progress and "if it's not documented, it didn't happen." I tell about all the hugs and conclude with the question "how does he do that?" I mean, it's not as if anyone offered to hug me.

    These are my people: the developmentally disabled – to use the current jargon. Working at the group home was probably the most enjoyable job I've ever had, and I resisted any attempts to rise in the ranks because each step up meant more bureaucracy and less contact with residents. I still keep up with them. This outing with Doug was on my own time.

    All this explains why I'm not in a hurry to pick any quarrel with Sabrine Bonnaire, one of France's premiere actresses. We're on the same team. True, I'm not familiar with her acting career, but then I'm not French, am I? Who would ever have thought that a film would be made about a group home, and if it was, who would ever have thought it would be any good? But such is Ms. Bonnaire's first stab at film directing. The film is Her Name is Sabine. It's a documentary set in a group home. Sabine is Sabrine's sister.  Sigh….I hope it's not a sign of how invisible these people are that even the reviewer has screwed up the title: it is not the cheery My Name is Sabine, as he states. It is the more provocative Her Name is Sabine, implying that most people would see her as a subject, a patient, a resident, a disabled person, a ….but she has a name.

    Sabrine Bonnaire makes sure people know her name. She's pulled photos and home movies out of a seemingly bottomless reservoir to show her sister growing up – a vibrant, talented (she plays classical piano), pleasantly quirky girl – once inseparable from the 18 month older Sabrine. But she suffers from autism. It's effects grow more pronounced through the years. Her parents pull her out of school and hire tutors. Still, she deteriorates. An admittance to the hospital's psych ward is a total disaster – the screen goes black while Sabrine narrates the details.

    Sabine is now in a group home, just like where Doug is. The French actress used her fame to jump-start funding, and the house exists largely because of her. She's since met with French President Nocolas Sarkozy and Minister for Work and Social Affairs Xavier Bertrand to argue for the disabled. Is Sandrine Bonnaire the French version of Geraldo Rivera? Like him, she's done much to advocate for this most vulnerable population, and I can't do anything but cheer her for that.

    Now….the point upon which I would contend with Ms. Bonnaire is a small point. It's hardly the focus of her story. Barely worth mentioning. On the other hand, I will mention it AND I will make a big deal over it. It steams me. In the midst of the film review linked to above is inserted Sabrine's observation about their Jehovah's Witnesses upbringing (who would have guessed?), as if it somehow explains Sabine's troubles:

    Sandrine and Sabine grew up in a large, working-class family on the outskirts of Paris. Their mother was a Jehovah's Witness whose strict adherence to the sect's rules on birth control explains the number of children: 11 in total, of which Sandrine, now 41, is the sixth, Sabine the seventh. Growing up in a Jehovah's Witness home was "quite heavy", says Sandrine. "First of all, it was very boring. You don't do birthdays and Christmas when everyone else does them. You can have them, but three or four days after the date, so you feel apart from your friends."

    I tell you, I won't put up with it. I'll bet you anything that this girl was fully embraced in the local congregation and circuit, where the atmosphere is warm and accepting, and where children are taught to be kind and compassionate to those less fortunate, rather than "bullying" and "mocking" (yes, even during birthdays and Christmas), as they were in the grade school Sabine had to be pulled from. It's not Jehovah's Witnesses who screwed up the title of her film. The JW mother ought to be a hero in this story, not a token religious nut. She nurtured her daughter as a child and adult as, one by one, other siblings departed for lives of their own. How is it that Sabine plays classical piano without, at the very least, mother's support? Mom dutifully followed doctor's advice and admitted Sabine into the local hospital, where they put her in locked isolation and straightjacket, administered drugs by the truckload, denied toilet facilities, and ultimately forbade family visitation – these were medical experts, mind you – and finally returned the woman to her mother in far worse shape than they found her. Does it occur to anyone that the mother's faith helped her carry on when everyone else failed her daughter? As stated at the outset, family involvement with the developmentally disabled is, at least in the U.S, rare.

    And what is this about the "sect's rules on birth control?" Nobody among Jehovah's Witnesses has any hang-ups about birth control, unless you mean the abortion-inducing IUD kind, which yes, we do reject. But contraceptives? Condoms? No one has any issue with them. So if the mother did have strong views in this regard, it didn't come from the "sect." And the holidays? Well, yes, I suppose. But surely it's a matter of perspective. There were Jewish kids when I was going to school and they sat out every Christmas and Easter. It wasn't that big of a deal. There were compensating attributes within their own faith. No one carried on about how they were deprived. Look, if there's a party going on, of course a child will want to be part of it, same as all will want to subsist on ice cream and candy. But as adults, you hopefully come to realize what's important and what's not. Christmas, to take the most prominent example, does not fall on Christ's birthday. Jesus never said anything about celebrating his birth anyway, and most customs associated with it are from non if not anti-Christian sources.

    In fact, is it just Sabrine Bonnaire or is it all of France? For perhaps two decades, France has leveled a 60% tax on financial contributions made to Jehovah's Witnesses, a repressive measure unheard of in any free country, and a plain attempt to stamp out the group. The policy's been under appeal from the outset and will likely be decided in the European High Court. Look, I know that much of Europe is intensely secular, and probably France most of all. I suspect it stems from World Wars I and II, bloodbaths that found fertile soil in the very continent where churches held most sway. If churches can't prevent such mass slaughters, what good are they? But how ironic that the only Christian group with the guts to unilaterally stand up to Hitler is the one most harassed in post-war France!

    Still, the movie is great. It's a shame so few Americans know of it, just as they know nothing of Maigret. French critics dubbed it "the most beautiful film Cannes has given us this year". Mrs. Sheepandgoats and I, though not of that august body, fully concur.

  • A Willowbrook Legacy

    When my nephew was small, the family lived far away, so I didn’t see him very often. Every time I did see him, therefore, I had to get reacquainted. Young children are shy and it does you no good to cozy up during a short visit; on the next visit you’ll have to start again from scratch.

    So there I was trying to warm up to the child, showing interest in his activities, doing goofy things and so forth, and the look on his face plainly said “get this creep away from me!” Obviously a new tack was needed.

    “Mitchell,” I ventured, “let me tell you about my friends.”

    The boy looked like he might put up with it.

    "I have one friend named Carolyn who likes to make herself a cold drink when she gets home from work. Do you like cold drinks? ……My friend goes to the refrigerator and pours a glass half-full with milk. Do you know what she pours for the other half?” The boy looked up.

    “Ranch salad dressing! Does that sound like a drink you would like?” The lad looked wondrous, as if I was from Mars, and shook his head emphatically. I had his attention.

    Carolyn loved ranch dressing and would have drunk it all day if we had let her. We didn’t, of course. She’d make raids to the kitchen and grab the two ingredients. Sometimes she’d get so far as to emerge one jug in each hand, but we’d always intercept and send her off, to howls of protest.

    “I also have a friend named Jackie,” I said. “Do you know what she eats?" The boy shook his head. “Anything,” I answered. “Even if it’s on the floor. Even if it’s not food. She’ll grab it quick and put it in her mouth.” The boy looked at me as if I was from Venus.

    She’d also eat paper clips and screws and tacks, so you had to follow her around and watch her very closely. If she spied some….say, dryer lint….she‘d lunge….it was unbelievable how strong she was at such times, so you were wise to clear the area beforehand. It’s a condition known as Pica….who would have thought there’d be a name for it?
    She’d also talk non-stop, but only about a dozen phrases said again and again and again. You couldn’t help but like her, and you couldn’t help but regard her as a mischievous child, same as Carolyn. Always active, she used to wander around the house constantly, and staff would have to follow her, lest she ingest carpet, knickknacks, paper, what-have-you, like a giant vacuum cleaner. But she fell ill and spent several months in a coma. (something she ate?) In the hospital, I’m told, they didn’t move her too often and the weight of the bedcovering pressed down on her feet till she could no longer straighen them. Discipline meted out to lots of people, of course, but it didn't do her any good, did it? Thereafter in a wheelchair, she'd talk constantly of going to work and would almost shake her chair apart in excitement when the van showed up. “Go to work,“ she’d repeat, banging fists together up and down, like hammer on anvil……the sign language gesture for “work.“ At work, they told me, she’d speak of nothing but going home.

    Then there was Christopher. Christopher couldn’t walk either, or talk, but if you set him on the floor he could hop about and cover surprising ground. I got in the habit of reading stories to Christopher, shamelessly overacting the characters when I saw how much he liked it. He’d rock back and forth and positively howl with delight. You could also give commentary on the TV, as over-the-top sportscaster, for instance, and get the same enthused result. Other times, in the early morning we'd roll out onto the deck and listen to the birds.

    The second part of Christopher’s life has been much more pleasant than the first, thanks to the Willowbrook Decree. As a kid, Christopher was placed at the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island. Places like this were once hailed as panacea for the developmentally disabled. Not only would they live in happy bucolic surroundings and get plenty of care geared to their needs, but they would be far away. But in 1972, Geraldo Rivera snuck into the school with hidden camera and detailed shocking conditions: children packed in like cattle, cowering naked and filthy. Feces on the walls. Urine all over. Frequent and violent deaths. The place was, as Robert Kennedy had declared a few years before, “not fit for even animals to live in.” Geraldo’s on-air reporting (which earned him a Peabody Award) jarred consciences. Investigators investigated, hearings were heard, speeches were spoken, and groundbreaking legislation was legislated. All 5000+ residents were dispersed and relocated in small communities. They also received and are still receiving  life-long oversight to ensure personal wellbeing.
    The present trend to place individuals with developmental disabilities in community residences, the birth and spread of day programs and special education in New York, then in other states, then in other countries, can all be traced, at least in part, to the Willowbrook hearings. So Christopher, former member of the Willowbrook class, is a hero, a pioneer of sorts, though I doubt he is aware of it.

    My nephew enjoyed hearing about my friends and we became chums again. And in calling them friends, I really don’t misspeak. They became friends. I might pull up a chair in Doug‘s room, for instance, and watch some TV with him. This was a challenge, since it was his set, he had the remote, and he’d flip through channels as if spinning a roulette wheel. Still, considering what‘s on these days, it was probably just as well.

    Sometimes when I assisted these folks in their daily routines, I would imagine seeing then again in the new system, with sound body and mind. But for dumb luck, life might easily have turned out differently, with them assisting me. In many ways, working in the disabled home was the most enjoyable job I’ve ever had. And it changed my overall conduct. Now, if I am invited to a party or someplace, I will put my hands in my pockets, murmur some niceties to whomever I must, and then go search for some mentally retarded persons to hang out with.

    ……………………………………………………………..

    All names have been changed of course, even that of the nephew. Only my own, Sheepandgoats, is rendered accurately.

    update available here.

  • Vioxx, the Scientific Method, and the Atheists

    Lots of people, if you levied a $4.9 billion fine on them, might look for a bridge from which to jump. But when Merck, the pharmaceutical company, struck a deal with lawyers to settle 27,000 lawsuits for that amount, legal and financial types were ecstatic. It could have cost so much more. I've heard 25 billion. I've even heard 50 billion. This is how you do it! one market analyst gushed. This is how you come back from a defective product. You fight each case no holds barred for a few years to discourage plaintiffs. Then you offer to settle for a lowball amount. Merck's stock rose 2.3% the day they announced the move, even while the overall market was sharply down.

    Medical and ethical folks were less enthused. Like Dr. Eric Topol, for example, the cardiologist who in 2001 co-authored a JAMA paper warning of heart attack risks associated with the drug company's Vioxx. “I think they’ve gotten off quite easily, frankly, for the problems that they’ve engendered,” he said. A large clinical trial that ended in 2000 showed that Vioxx was much riskier than Aleve, an older painkiller. Four more years were to pass before Merck took the drug off the market, pulling the plug on their Young Rascals jingle "It's a Beautiful Morning" when it seemed the morning might not be so beautiful after all.

    But if Dr. Topol groused, you should have heard Dr. Katherine Di Angelis. "What people should learn from this is you don't believe anything, not one thing, put out by a pharmaceutical company. Just don't believe it," she said on National Public Radio. "You start from there." She estimated probably 5-10 % of the people who were taking it really should have been taking it. The other 90% raised their risk of a heart attack or stroke with no significant benefits. "When you want to make money by selling products to people who don't need it….then you're going to get into this kind of trouble"

    Dr Di Angelis is Editor in Chief of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

    Now, this sticks in my craw even more than it might normally because I've just been squabblingwith a flock of atheists who worship science. Of course, they would never use that term – I can hear them sputtering now – yet what they do so closely resembles worship that I can't tell the difference.

    "You don't believe anything, not one thing, put out by a pharmaceutical company," she advises the public. Okay. Good advice. Did she have counsel more harsh for medical doctors? After all, you could not get this drug over the counter. A doctor had to prescribe it. The general public can be excused for being duped by drug hype. But what of medical doctors, those high priests of the scientific method? The atheists I mentioned positively gush over the scientific method, the ultimate test of truth. Yet here we see that it's foremost representatives in the medical field, doctors, are every bit as susceptible to error as the average Joe. They uncritically swallow any bilge handed down to them.

    My skirmish with the atheists was with regard to alternative health treatments: chiropractic, acupuncture, homeopathy. All hoax, they insist. They know that because they and their scientific allies have subjected such techniques to the Scientific Method – double blind repeatable controlled studies – with very unspectacular results. The fact that more and more people are choosing these therapies over conventional medicine means nothing to them. Those folks have only testimonials to offer, say the atheists, or even worse, anecdotal evidence. Absolutely worthless, they insist rather dogmatically; it only goes to show how gullible people are.

    Tell it to the 27,000 plaintiffs who allege injury or even death of their loved ones from Vioxx. If alternative therapies fail, they simply fail. It's very rare for them to do harm.

    One alternative that has gone from cult to mainstream within my lifetime is chiropractic. It's every step forward was fought tooth and nail by the American Medical Association, (AMA) which attempted to use its science stature to label the competition quackery. It took a lawsuitwhich ultimately went to the U.S. Supreme Court to end the iron fist.

    As burdensome as the "quackery" namecalling was the financial hit one incurred in seeking chiropractic care. Insurance rarely covered chiropractic. Patients paid out of pocket. Imagine: medical care could be had for free (or with small co-pay); chiropractic care you paid for yourself. People chose chiropractic care. (To this day, a cynical friend swears by the rule: if it works, insurance won't cover it.) It wasn't superstitious dolts choosing the alternative therapy, which I suspect the science camp would love to maintain. No, it was the more educated and well-heeled, the only persons who could ignore the financial implications of seeking chiropractic care.

    To this day, devotees of medical science grouse that chiropractic fails their tests of proof. Some grudgingly allow that it can serve a limited purpose in the case of back pain, but nothing more. Meanwhile, one constantly runs across persons crippled for life by disc removal surgery, (I know some of them) the mainstream medical practice that dominated for years. (still does, I think) How did chiropractic become so well accepted? Largely through the avenues my atheists despise: testimonial and anecdotal evidence. Thirty million people in the United States seek chiropractic care. Are they all fools?

    Many areas of alternative medicine are more art than science. Didn't we once refer to all medicine as "healing arts"? They draw on the subtle uniqueness of each individual, not on the broad similarities which we all share. But therein lies a problem for scientific verification. If every single patient is different and your health care is attuned to those differences, that's a problem for the scientific method, which is most useful when there are common attributes readily grouped and measured. Alternative medicine is more like your child who does something irresistibly cute, so that you want to show him off. Will he do the same thing for relatives or friends or camera? Not a chance. How do you apply the scientific method to individual attributes, when it is those very attributes that form the basis of this or that treatment? Insisting alternative medicine conform to the scientific method is a bit like playing an away game, on someone else's turf with all their fans booing you. Better to play on your own field.

    Then again, it could be that conventional science simply ignores what is too contrary to prevailing wisdom. This apparently happened withthat studyconcluding the placebo effect is overhyped. It made front page news one day in 2001, then it vanished without a trace, like a mafia don with concrete boots. Nobody ever mentioned it again. Might this be the case with alternative treatments, whose supporting evidence is ignored by the AMA people?

    Inconceivable, says my science-adoring atheist: "The vast majority of scientists revel in what they don't know because it provides them with an opportunity to find out what's happening and explain it. Prove one wrong and he or she will be ecstatic," he tells me.

    No, I don't think so. Science does not purge humans of human nature. Max Planck the physicist offers a more realistic assessment: "People think new truths are accepted when the proponents are able to convince the opponents. Instead, the opponents of the truth gradually die, and a new generation comes along who is familiar with the idea."

    I'm not opposed to conventional health care. I'll see a doctor when sick (unlike Pop). But it's not the monopoly on truth that it would like us to believe. Alternatives work too well. I've seen, heard, and experienced it. When testimonials become overwhelming, you don't reject them simply because it's not the type of evidence you would prefer.

    Vincent McCabe's book Let Like Cure Like (1997) discusses principles underlying most alternative therapies (homeopathy in his particular case): These philosophies, both thousands of years old, have yet to be proved scientifically because of the limitations of science, not because they are not true. p 17

    Awake!, on the other hand, the JW publication, stays above the fray. Often it discusses matters of health. Invariably it states it does not endorse any specific treatment, but discusses what it does for informational purposes only. In other words, let's not have anyone take my views and think it represents all of Jehovah's Witnesses.

    ********************************  The bookstore

     

  • The Death and Rebirth of the Placebo

    For just a brief moment, there was no placebo; there was no such thing. Just for a day. Placebo had its 15 minutes of antifame. And then the day passed, placebos resurfaced, and they've ruled ever since, just as before.

    That day was May 24, 2001, and the front page read Survey Finds Placebo Effect Imaginary. From the Associated Press:

    "One of the most strongly held beliefs in medicine, that dummy pills or other sham treatments greatly help many patients, has been called into question by Danish researchers who found little or no "placebo effect" in dozens of studies."

    Those Danes had looked at study after study after study in which the experimental new drug was compared to the look-alike dummy pill, the placebo. If the new drug was any good, test results beat that of the placebo. But where researchers bothered to include a third group receiving neither drug nor placebo, the Danes found that that group fared about the same as the placebo group. In other words, people sometimes get better all by themselves! They sometimes do, in fact, just about as often as those who received the placebo.

    I spoke to a few people involved in pharmaceuticals. They hadn't read the paper and hadn't heard of the survey and didn't believe me. A few days later, I googled "placebo." Conventional wisdom ruled once again. My article was buried many pages back. It took forever to find it. (But you can find it here.) Nobody ever touched the subject again.

    I suspect placebo is a notion too good and too lucrative to let die. After all, when you're testing your new drug for efficacy and you can't wait to urge people to ask their doctors if it's right for them, you want it to seem like it has teeth. If it's so much better than the placebo and the placebo is so much better than nothing…..well, you've got some powerful stuff. But if the gap between nothing and placebo collapses, then your drug is not so effective as you thought. Better to keep that gap intact: broad shoulders for all new meds to stand on!

    The fact is big pharma pushes a lot of drugs on us. We (in the USA) spent $2.7 billion on prescription drugs in 1960. By 2002 it was $162 billion. There were 600 prescription drugs to choose from in 1960. By 2002 it was 9000. Plus 4000 over-the-counter. Are we that much sicker that we need all those meds? Or conversely, are we that much healthier now that we have them?

    And where did this term "meds" come from anyway? They're medicines, dammit! Isn't "meds" a sneaky con attempt to make them seem warm and fuzzy, friendly-like?…every day you take your meds just like you take your tea, or chocolate.

     

    That's why when Pop goes to the doctor and the doctor "puts him on" this or that drug, Pop tells him to forget it. Either that or because he's a stubborn cuss. But it's hard to tell someone 85 who's in perfect health that he'd be so much better if he'd just be gobble down more pills. It's a standing joke with us. I meet him in the doctors office, after his yearly physical. (it took forever to get him to agree to those, and he only did so for insurance reasons) "What do ya think, Pop?" I ask, "Want me to get a wheelbarrow for all your pills?" "HA!" he says, "that'll be the day! No pills!"

    Most people, overawed by our age's slobbering idolization of science and the doctor's high-priest membership of that discipline, obediently swallow anything they're told to. Not Pop. "Your blood pressures too high," the doctor says, reading his machine. "I want you to take these beta-blockers." "What I'll do," Pop says, "is buy one of those machines myself and see if I can get the blood pressure down with diet and exercise. If I can't, then I'll think about your beta-blockers." He's been able to do exactly that, aided with an immediate drop in blood pressure that comes just from not being in the doctor's office, where we're all at our hypochondriac worst.

    Yeah, the old boy thinks that if you steer clear of drugs then one day you'll die in your sleep or drop in your tracks. And isn't that what we all want? A graceful exit when we go. But if you gobble down every pill someone pushes at you, you'll waste away slowly sans dignity in a nursing home. Who's to say he's wrong?

    ***********************

    Tom Irregardless and Me       No Fake News but Plenty of Hogwash

  • Isaac Asimov and Ignaz Semmelweis

    I once worked with a girl named Casey who positively loved science fiction. In the context of other things, I mentioned the film I, Robot.

    Oh, that was terrible! she said.

    But as we kept talking, it turned out she had never seen it. Um…Casey, how do know it's terrible if you've never seen it? I asked. The answer was that she was a purist. She knew the movie did not follow Isaac Asimov's storyline, and that was enough for her!

    For an Asimov purist, the movie would indeed be blasphemy. Asimov, who wrote almost all the time, having 500 books (written or edited) and 90,000 letters to his credit, with works in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal system, penned the Foundation trilogy and the I, Robot series, both pillars among science fiction. His plotting was ingenious, and had he been able to empathetically sketch people as well as ideas, he might have gone down as one of literature's true greats. Alas, his characters are cardboard, like those TV characters who are freely interchangeable save for one or two superficial features: this one is mean, this one likes to eat, that one is a geek, etc. Too bad – for every other aspect of Asimov's writing is extraordinary.

    Asimov was an atheist, but I always imagine that, if current atheists had been taught the Bible by Jehovah's Witnesses instead of the churches, they may not have turned atheist. It's probably not so but I dream it anyway. For example, in his last autobiographical book, Asimov observes that hell is "the drooling dream of a sadist" crudely affixed to an all-merciful God; if even human governments were willing to curtail cruel and unusual punishments, wondered Asimov, why would punishment in the afterlife not be restricted to a limited term.  [Wikipedia entry on Isaac Asimov] Yeah! Man, I wish he had heard first from Jehovah's Witnesses! Virtually alone among Christian faiths at the turn of the last century, Jehovah's Witnesses exposed hellfire for the vicious rubbish that it is. JW "founder" C. T. Russell was known in his lifetime as the man who "turned the hose on hell and put out the fire!"

    At any rate, had he been a Witness, it would have benefited him personally. He died in 1992, of AIDS contracted from a blood transfusion nine years prior.

    Still, I am grateful to Dr. Asimov, not only for the hours of intriguing science fiction he laid upon me, but also for his non-fiction works. Asimov's Guide to Science probably was my springboard to individual branches of science. If Asimov lacked in sketching fictional characters, he was gifted in sketching real ones. Not only the pillars, but also the buffoons, he succeeded in portraying the humanity of scientists. It is from him (Asimov's guide to Biology) that I first read of Ignaz Semmelweis, early advocate of antiseptic surgical practices and forerunner of germ theory.

    In the mid 1800's, Semmelweis got it in his head that fever and death following doctor-assisted childbirth could be curtailed by washing hands and equipment frequently. Doctors back then would deliver a baby, having just emerged from an autopsy, only wiping their hands on their smocks! There were some sort of tiny "particles" contaminating the women, Semmelweis proposed. Doctors howled with laughter at such nonsense. Asimov's book vividly portrays Semmelweis' presenting his ideas at seminars, with his esteemed audience mocking him, hurling catcalls! Doctors argued that, even if Semmeweis' findings were correct, washing one's hands each time before treating a pregnant woman would be too much work. Semmelweis enforced strict antiseptic practices at the hospital under his supervision, cutting deaths to under 1%, and it made no difference in their attitude! Colleagues ridiculed him his entire life, he suffered a nervous breakdown and, says Asimov, died in an insane asylum tormented by memories of women screaming in their death-agonies following hospital-acquired infections. With Semmelweis out of the way, his own hospital went back to familiar practices and the mortality rate climbed to 35%.

    You can read the bare facts in many places, but Asimov's account is the most vivid I have come across, remarkable in a book that purports only to be an outline, a "guide."

    Whenever those atheists start prattling on about how scientists graciously change their views at the first hint they may be off-base, whereas it's only the pig-headed religionists who "stay the course" come hell or high water, I play the 'Semmelweis' card.

    Athiest or not, I miss Isaac Asimov.

    A5AA677E-8AAF-4FDE-9FAD-0D8002CFFC29

    **********************************  The bookstore

  • Mitochondria DNA and the Y Chromosome

     

    Some scientists were reading a post on this blog or somewhere else when they came across a serious reference to Adam and Eve. They laughed so hard they fell off their perches and cracked their heads, whereupon they were rushed to the hospital. After some patching and a blood transfusion each to top off the tank, they were released.

    Alright, alright! So they weren’t scientists. I mean….they were, but they were specifically evolutionists. Not all scientists believe evolution, though most do.

    But why should they laugh till they hurt themselves? Do we not hear all the time about the missing link that connects us to primates? That’s link, (singular) not links (plural). If the necessary mutation needed to separate our ancestors from those of the orangutan has a one in bazillion chance of occurring, are we to believe it happened numerous times? So even from their standpoint, if it just happened once, why not term that being Eve, and its first mate Adam? (or vice versa)

    This conclusion is supported by some evidence. Scientists have studied mitochondria DNA, inherited only from the female, and have traced all living humans back to a single female, a MRCA (most recent common ancestor). They have studied the Y chromosome, inherited only from the male, and traced us all back to a common male ancestor as well!

    Now don’t get all excited. Evolutionists don’t say they were married, or even lived at the same time. The dates they assign, depending on who you read, are within the framework of Genesis. But they don’t say these were the only two persons alive in their time. Far from it.

    They do agree on a common male and a common female ancestor. Some agree on a time frame compliant with Genesis. And that’s something.

    >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

    Yes, with regard to the evolution/creation debate, we do think it’s well to weigh in on behalf of the good guys, not only of account of the question itself, but also on account of its clear implications. If God truly did create the earth and humankind, maybe he has a purpose for them. Maybe he just won’t stand by and see humans wreck everything he has made. Maybe he will toss the destructive louts, just like a landlord will toss rotten tenants. In short, maybe there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

    On the other hand, if earth and everything on it are merely the result of blind chance, of mutation, preserved only by natural selection, then if humans have any bright future, it lies in efforts they themselves are making.

    And they’re not doing so well.

    ******  The bookstore

     

  • Ask Your Doctor if Reading is Right for You!

    People don’t read like they used to and that’s not good for the Democrat and Chronicle. They want to boost circulation, not cut it. So they fired the clods that had been handling their publicity and entrusted their entire advertising budget to the Carriertom Into-Wishen Research Institute. True, Carriertom has no experience in that sort of thing but, as Tom persuasively argued to the D&C, you have to start somewhere.

    It was a wise move. The Institute realized right off that the trick was to make people read the paper. And who has more authority today than one’s own doctor?

     

    Ask your doctor if daily newspaper reading is right for you.

    Ccf07162006_00005_1 I always wanted to be an intellectual but I didn’t know much.

    Ccf07162006_00008_1 I only knew a few really big words for conversation, like rhinoceros.
           "So, whatdya think of those Rochester Rhinoceroses?"

    Cci00000_1

    Whenever I agreed with something I would say yeppur!

    I know what I want, and I don’t want to be dumb! So I asked my doctor if daily newspaper reading could help.

    Ccf07162006_00003_1 And he said yes!

    How about you? Why not ask your doctor if daily newspaper reading is right for you!


    Daily newspaper reading is not for everyone. Blind or unconscious persons may experience impaired results. Editorials may cause busted guts due to anger or laughter. Pigheaded and pinheaded editorial writers may induce high blood pressure. Do not attempt to read while showering, sleeping, or water-skiing. Sourpusses should avoid comics. Do not attempt to follow all columnest advice, especially not that of Dr Ruth. In some cases, severe reactions can occur when you read that your mutual fund is going down the toilet. Ditto with the Buffalo Bills. (though you should be immune to that by now) Those over 110 years of age are at elevated risk of death within one year of reading a paper. Newspaper reading should not be used to avoid communication with one’s spouse or significant other. Unread newspapers should not be used to housebreak puppies. Speak with your linguist before beginning a reading program.

    Daily newspaper reading is not for everyone. But maybe it’s right for you.
    Ccf07162006_00006_1

    Ya, know, I really am kinda stupid. What should I do?

     

     

          Ask your doctor if daily newspaper reading is right for you!

     

    ***********************

    Tom Irregardless and Me                No Fake News but Plenty of Hogwash