Social Destruction?

Air conditioning and screen windows all but eliminated malaria in the United States. Well, DDT and draining wetlands helped too, but AC was a major contributor in the South / SE US.

That's not true. It is actually illegal for a school to do that -- in fact it's illegal for a school to even recommend Ritalin.

Which specific additive-symptom associations are you thinking of?

Oh come on.

The original article that made this association had only 12 patients in the study, and 10 of the 13 authors later retracted their conclusions. REPEATED studies have failed to show any association between autism and vaccines.

Vaccine Safety - Concerns - Vaccines and Autism

In the last month alone I've seen two major medical journal articles identifying strong genetic markers disproportionately seen in autistic children, which is a MUCH more likely etiology (considering that signs of autism are often visible from birth with delayed social and linguistic development).

Approximately 1 million children and infants die of measles every year because of lack of vaccine deployment worldwide, not to mention the millions of preventable infant and child deaths from pertussis, Haemophilus influenzae type B, Pneumococcus, diptheria, tetanus, and pertussis. Hepatocellular carcinoma is one of the leading causes of cancer death in the world, and it's largely preventable with the Hep B vaccine. And this is not to mention influenza.

But factually incorrect nonsense like you're spouting here is ENTIRELY responsible for things like the recnt measles epidemics in Europe, the US, and Israel, as well as the recent mumps outbreak in the midwest.

Outbreak of Measles --- San Diego, California, January--February 2008

Multistate Measles Outbreak Associated with an International Youth Sporting Event --- Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Texas, August--September 2007


Yup, I've seen it all working in health clinics in Africa and South America. Go look up what they die of before railing against vaccines.

Does anyone else find it absolutely absurd that most americans can't name the first five presidents? Don't really know what's in the constitution or the Declaration of Independence? I don't wonder why our education is the laughingstock of the world...Isn't this another form of social destruction?

You can teach school to till the moon comes up, and people will only learn what they find necessary. Try to teach people that a job is worthy that is not worth a living wage, and people forget all about it until you go tired from teaching it. If you want to learn something from the declararation of independence, and why should you since it is no part of the law of the land; but if you do, look to Jeffersons use of the word form; because it says he understood the situation. When he says:Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they have been accustomed. -It is all about forms, and everything you can concieve of including economies and Governments are also forms of relationship. If it were a marriage and it left you as unhappy as your government or economy; you would split. We should split, break the old and give birth to the new, and never seek perfection; but never endure discrace for forms that have long lost their goafterandgetit.

Agreed. But, how do you achieve the split if a powerful if not always logical government doesn't want it?

Every single relationship is the same. All relationships have some formality, and all demand some sacrifice. All relationships demand some truth, and trust. Now; you know that our government surrounds itself with the trappings of power. It needs its great statues, its giant prisons, and huge edifices. It is nearly all form, and little of relationship. But there is no denying that it does not accomplish what was its goal, and what it set forth as goals in the preamble. We are led to believe that there can be no better government even while we can look abroad and see many people doing as well. Ulitmately we only have to disabuse ourselves of our faith that it we get better. We have only to see once what a failure it is, that it is form without relationship; and withdraw our faith, -and it will fall like a house of cards. We cannot organize to tear it down. That is what the government is prepared for, and expects. We have to be willing to disorganize to tear it down. We have to be willing to act as we see ourselves: as individuals. We don't have to do anything. We have to undo everything.

Aedes, Ritalin might not be the drug of choice where you live, but it is called for in many school districts.

As far as additives go, I'm specifically speaking about ; sucrose, HFCS, dyes, aspartamine and hormones. All of them are added to food. The EU will no longer accept our beef that has hormones.
I'm not including thousands of other chemicals that affect everyone;
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/toxic-chemicals-blamed-for-the-disappearance-of-arctic-boys-402077.html

The cited article on the autism-vaccination link is from the CDC. They're always behind the curve. They don't pander to big pharma quite as much as the FDA, but they're still big drug pushers.
You need to do more reading on the latest research.
I drove from Fairbanks to Lima, drove around Mexico, Asia, OZ, Europe, middles East etc. I've been in the clinics and hospitals and all the rest. I visited friends in Tumaco, Colombia. It's a hell-hole for malaria. Yes, DDT did kill mosquitoes. Now the bay in Tumaco has a strata of DDT. It poisons the crustaceans and , of course, enters the food chain.

Tumaco is also the center of the drug eradication efforts. They kill a lot more than coca.

The number one killer in the world is diarrhea. It doesn't matter if a person has cholera or whatever, it's the diahrrea that kills them. I travelled around India by road,,, even went to Benares. I got giardia , missed hepatitus. Sailed on the Nile in a felluca, got something, missed shistosomiasis. So far I've missed Lyme, and West Nile.

Modern medicine is very impressed with itself. The truth is that it is very limited. You can't vaccinate for dirty water. I'm sure that vaccination has some value. It isn't the problem-free cure all that big pharma would have you believe.
You need to do more complete research.

I hold three medical board certifications, my friend, including pediatrics. It is ILLEGAL for schools to even recommend ritalin to parents. A school district CANNOT have a "drug of choice". Ritalin, concerta, etc are FDA controlled drugs and can only be prescribed by a physician. Most school boards will have policies about recommending a physician evaluation, but they would never take responsibility for formally recommending or requiring a specific drug even if it were legal -- one adverse event and they would be crushed in a lawsuit. A school can prevent a child from entering because of a communicable disease, but they CANNOT under law require Ritalin. EVER. At least not in this country.

Whether pediatricians are overprescribing ADHD meds is a different issue, which has more to do with the diagnosis of ADHD to begin with.

You did not answer the question. I asked about additive - symptom associations. You have named a number of food additives but not named a single additive that is known to prevent children from concentrating (which is what you said in your previous post).

Yes, agricultural spraying of DDT, which accounted for around the vast majority of all use, did cause considerable environmental harm. But when used for indoor spraying to prevent malaria it has no significant environmental impact. And it has never been associated with human illness either, with all due respect to Rachel Carson who claimed that it had. Look up some of the literature on IRS (indoor residual spraying) of DDT -- it's very effective and FAR less harmful when used this way.

WRONG.

Look at Table 1.8 in the 2008 UNICEF State of the World's Children report on Child Survival (on page 16).

http://www.unicef.org/sowc08/docs/sowc08.pdf

Perinatal mortality is number one. But of kids who make it out of the newborn period, the number one cause of death is pneumonia, which in most cases is caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae (pnemococcus) or Haemophilus influenza type B (HiB), both of which are vaccine-preventable (and treatable with antibiotics, incidentally).

The number 2 killer (and formerly number 1 killer) of children is diarrhea, and the most common cause of diarrheal death is rotavirus, which is vaccine-preventable.

This is not to make the point that vaccines are the sole solution for these problems -- but they are MAJOR interventions for the most common killers of children in the world.

Just a note on infant and child mortality here. The primary causes of death vary from country to country. Malaria is the most common single cause of child death in most of sub-Saharan Africa, and there is of course no malaria vaccine. While HiB and many Pneumococcus serotypes are vaccine preventable, malnutrition and exposure to respiratory viruses and environmental pollutants greatly potentiate pneumonia mortality. Similarly, there are many non-vaccine prevntable causes of diarrhea and intestinal parasitosis, and nutritional status contributes greatly to susceptibility to diarrhea.

I raised this point about vaccines in contraposition to your skepticism about vaccines because of the (well-debunked) association with autism, but then your illustration of global child mortality. Vaccines have played a major role and will continue to do so in reducing infant and child mortality worldwide, even though they are only one of many needed interventions.

It's not as simple as that. The cause of the diarrhea DOES determine their likelihood of mortality, as well as communicability/infection control and clinical management.

I completely agree with you. A vaccination program can only truly succeed as part of a comprehensive public health program that includes hygiene and sanitation, nutrition, primary pediatric and obstetrical care, basic infrastructure (i.e. roads), and basic literacy.

However, sanitation alone isn't enough. Rotavirus is spread by direct person-to-person transmission, not just in contaminated water, so improved hygiene and sanitation would probably be insufficient so long as living conditions do not change.

I just completed a 3 year long postdoctoral fellowship in infectious diseases and tropical medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health; I am a member of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, the Pediatric Infectious Disease Society, the Infectious Disease Society of America, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, and I have publications in textbooks and journals of tropical diseases, with a research article on malaria currently under review. I've done medical work and tropical disease research in four African countries and in the Peruvian Amazon. I have practiced travel and refugee medicine in the United States, as well as general clinical infectious disease / HIV practice. And in my 8 years as a physician and 12 years in the medicine I've studied this field extensively. I'd consider that to be a reasonable background for this type of conversation.

Diarrea does not kill people. Life kills people. People live next to sewers and swamps because other people are shooting children at the future to see which ones can hang on. If we did not breed in such extravagance we would never eat ourselves out of our food, and we would not war, and we would not drive others into the swamp or sewer. Nature knows that many will be wiped away; and it cheats fate, and it degrades humanity when so many are driven to destruction and many are saved. Medicine will never keep up with a microbial ability to adapt. We have to adapt to reality and quit breeding ourselves to extinction. We should get very general in our approach to public health. We should all look at the social and medical costs of injustice, and rationally ask after the implications of dire poverty, and try to determine at which point social misery might become medical misery. And we should treat the person and not the disease. If you could cure people of excess all true disease would perish.

Fido, one of the greatest predictors of poverty is medical disease, and the greatest predictor of population growth is infant mortality. You MUST intervene in the medical problems (mainly through public health measures) if you want to address these social problems. This has been repeatedly demonstrated. You can't address overcrowding, poverty, and crime unless you deal with the underlying public health crises.

I think one of the biggest predictors of poverty is lack of social control. Our idea of freedom as some spiritual, and metaphysical experience leads us to deny to society its own social control. Freedom is seen as contrary to democracy because some few will not be governed, and will not govern themselves. Only people can decide in what fashion they must curb their behavior to live in balance with others and the environment. Only this freedom will guarantee success. Do I think people must be saved? Since those who must suffer illness are seldom the cause of illness they should be spared. But we should be aware that the general fear of death and the lack of security cause people to kick out more children than the land can support. Surely there are people with far more land than is required for their support. Without security of mind, and peace of a practical nature people will breed themselves into every possible niche. It is just that some places are better left to the fowls and fleas, and to be there means to breed diseases no man can predict. No society is more free than democratic, and no society suffers more social control than democracies. But it is illogical to think one can have social control without self control or self control without social control. No practice of social control will ever manage for the poor what they must manage for themselves. And, even if one is not directly threatened by injustice, poverty, or preventable diseases; still, each is threatened in a general way, and each has a say, and each should deliver justice to others for the sake of health and peace. I think you would find that most people live with poverty because they feel they have no choice. Disease is not the problem. No choice is the problem. Thanks

The predictors I mention are supported by a tremendous amount of actual research, including large scale interventions with control groups. Philosophical musings have never solved practical problems on this scale, nor will they ever. Cultural change happens because people's living conditions change, not the other way around.

To be sure there is a cyclic relationship between diseases of poverty (both social and medical) and the stability and "social control" in such a society. But when you look at the research what you repeatedly see is that poverty regresses again and again to disease and mortality as strong independent predictors.

And societies with strong social control do not necessarily benefit from development, modernization, or stability -- after all, didn't Afghanistan under the Taliban have an extremely tight social control system? And yet it had the highest infant mortality rates and lowest life expectancy in the entire continent of Asia. Zimbabwe's public health has gone down the crapper ever since Mugabe turned it into a police state. How about Guinea-Conakry under Toure? The thread that unites these examples is that the social control is imposed by an oligarchy, and trickle-down discipline has never worked on a large scale. You want to change culture, then address what people are suffering from first.

Yes, it is. Our students receive a very peculiar education in this country, not simply from schools but also from parents, social interactions, and media. They are taught the basics in math and language arts, making them intelligent in the lowest sense. They can read and calculate, and thus can perfom all kinds of self-preserving tasks: manage money, follow politics, maintain technology, and function somewhat effectively within an "information" economy. In essence, they are machines or barbarians, but machines/barbarians that exist in a partly non-mechanical, non-barbaric world, a world of culture and values.

And this is my biggest concern: these students are not sufficently educated about values or culture. They are literate, and thus can participate in politics--but I would rather that they did not participate in politics, since literacy is not a sufficient condition for good political decisionmaking, i.e., virtue. The question of what is a sufficient condition for virtue is a virtuous question; it is the true starting point of virtue. And since the idea of virtue has been lost in our culture (replaced by the law and by a vague utilitarian rationalism), we need to return to this question--and never, ever lose sight of it again.

The best way to do this is to read what wise people have said about virtue, and to keep reading. This is the true form of literacy, the only form that has any value. And it is also the true meaning of education.

In my opinion

POSTSCRIPT: So much of what kids do to act out is really the manifestation of their desire to realize a value-laden world. Kids can easily spot the Nothing, since they have not yet grown so used to it that they no longer even notice it.

I disagree with your view on education. To be educated is to be aware of points of view, to know something about the world around you, and to be able to formulate your own oppinions that are based on some sort of evidence. Knowing what virtue is does not hold any value on its own; you need to take what others have said on it and make your own oppinion on it. My philosophy TA mentioned an interesting comparison between university students. He said there are the cows and the bulls. The cows take the info they're presented and regurgitate it, the bulls take the information digest it, and make their own "substance." Let the kids read till their eyes bleed, but if they don't have the interest or the ability to make something of it, they're just barfing up useless, meaningless facts. That is not a truely educated person, you're still caught in the same loop of barbarians and machines like you said. I don't think education is the root of society's problems... The knowledge and information is out there; people don't care enough to do anything with it.

You're absolutely right, and I think you've hit on what I consider to be the spirit of education: interest or desire. However, I would not extricate education from its spirit, as you seem to do. Nor would I draw an absolute dividing line between facts and values, as our "culture" does all the time. (If you are a young person, I admonish you to retain your passionate idealism, and resist the temptation to bow down to mere facts, since mere facts--extricated from all value--are not the proper objects of the desire you rightfully preach. And you seem to know this.)

Lately I've been doing a lot of thinking about desire--about how it might best be inculcated or even induced (like vomiting?) in the classroom. The contemprary educator faces an almost impossible task: to get kids to see the value in what they are learning. Many teachers, as we all know from experience, are not even aware of the value of what they teach. Sometimes I wonder if I am any different ...

Well I think I seperate "the spirit" of education so much because I think there is a difference between knowledge and education. You might have a vast knowledge of something, but that doesn't make you educated. I think that's what I'm really getting at.

Well as far as classroom interest, my dad, whose a high school art/photo/socials teacher is always telling me how the kids don't get the simplist of concepts, they don't care, and they're mentally lazy. I myself am 19 and recognize my own mental laziness. Just for example, I have finals in a couple of days, and my mind is just anti-studying; i just wanna go do other things. I think technology is a major contribution to the my own and up coming generation's mental laziness. How many times have I easily gotten distracted with online chat or games or whatever. Information is so easy to get (wikipedia, google, etc) that classroom learning runs at a rediculously slow pace in comparison. In addition to that, I think pop culture has a huge impact. You have this "gangster" mentality that glorifies street life, drug trafficing, drug use, degrades women, and I would argue promotes a general "school isn't cool" message. Compare that image to those in the 60's and 70's; yes they weren't exactly pro education, but they didn't glorify high school drop outs who sold drugs for x number of years. Of course suggesting that pop culture affects EVERYONE would be a generalization, but when looking at the masses or society in a whole, I think i can get away with it this one time. hehehe

I think you and I have been in agreement from the beginning. We've just been saying the same thing in two very different ways

You're 19 and I'm 27, so really we're both young. Yet of late I have felt the bow of my spirit begin to slacken. Facts set in like the winter cold. When you're young it is all-too-easy to resist facts, and your virtue in resisting them is like the virtue of physical beauty, one that comes naturally and hence is not really earned. As our natural resistance to facts fades, the true test of our spirit begins. Do we merely go through the motions of our bodies, until death? Or do we take arms against a sea of facts, and by opposing them, help to preserve one little blossom of value against the acidic winds of mere matter--the storm without the god?

Our education and culture should make life enjoyable, beautiful, harmonious, and good. If they do not, then to hell with them.

Hmmm wouldn't resistance to facts be lowest in youth? By the time we're older we would have formulated our opinions and be the least willing to move from them. A child will believe just about anything you tell them, and they'll addopt your point of view until they get older and develop their own.
Personally I think our education and culture are making life enjoyable. Even if we see our society crumbling before us it gives rise to enjoyable discourse and a gathering of minds. Is that not an enjoyable, beatiful, harmonious and good thing? It is not necissarily society that gives us those things... We make them.

Kids' resistance to facts is not a truly philosophical resistance, hence its inconsistency and (if no real education intervenes) its inevitable failure. To use a common expression, this natural resistence "is just a phase." One can, in principle, have a true belief, but this belief is subject to change since it is not properly grounded in truth, as wisdom must be. A stopped clock is always right twice a day. And a person who has no desire to do evil will not do evil--not because they are wise, or even really virtuous, but simply because they do not want to do evil. If the desire changes, they will do evil. (We have all seen a sancitimonious goodie two shoes turn into a satyr when subjected to certain temptations that they never had before. They were never really angelic; they just never had any good reason to do naughty things.)

Children are incredibly succeptible to other people's thoughts. In fact, they ARE other people's thoughts--even their resistance to other people's thoughts, along with their resistence to facts, is just other people's thoughts. The fatal thought or belief is that people start out a certain way and then end a certain way, and for the majority of humanity, this means that people start out better and happier and then end up worse and less happy, until death takes them. Kids start out beautiful and energetic and incredibly wise--but all of this is a kind of illusion, a copy of the genuine article, since kids are just manifesting everyone else's beliefs about them.

At some point, we must reach the center or cause of our being, instead of remaining helpless at the effect or circumpherence. This attainment is Wisdom, and the false imitation of Wisdom is the virtue (like physical beauty) that is not really earned, and hence not really understood or possessed.

POSTSCRIPT: I should mention what I mean by "fact." A fact is not a truth, since a fact does not include or embody value, whereas a truth does. A truth, as I define it, is a unity of fact and value.

A truth sans goodness and beauty: that is a mere nauseating fact.

Ah. Well my view is that we all start off as a blank slate. So there has to be that early conditioning when resistance is low. Personality builds with experience; enough so that it may alter someone's disposition. Just because a small child is generally a happy one, does not mean they will necissarily end happy.

"a person who has no desire to do evil will not do evil--not because they are wise, or even really virtuous, but simply because they do not want to do evil. a person who has no desire to do evil will not do evil--not because they are wise, or even really virtuous, but simply because they do not want to do evil. " This I strongly disagree with. To me this would be an act of either ignorance on the part of the person who desires no evil, or it shows a lack of social conditioning to define what is good and evil. There's another thread on Good and Evil so i won't go too much into it here, but good and evil are relative to other actions and perception. Anyway, I dont think not wanting to commit evil will garuntee that.

You don't have to agree with this example, as long as you understand my idea . Take instead my first example of the broken clock, and then consider, if you will, the idea that it illustrates.

Enjoyable conversation by the way. Work is slow right now.