I have not posted anything for a number of months. It started near the end of last years election cycle when I really came to understand that I did not like either of the two candidates. The choices seemed to be between the guy on the right who gave off bilious gasses from both ends, and the woman who bragged about her failures and who’s best achievement stemmed from the fact that she, along with her husband, has been able to avoid going to jail.
During this period I started a number of articles, I will try to get back to them, that I was not really sure how to present. Each time I started on one of them, such as one I started to do about Medical Quackery, reinforced the understanding that much of what we believe comes from our perception of what it is…
Take the one I was going to call “Why I love the Internet”. In this article I was going to point out that with the ability to search the internet for information a searcher could find more than one way of looking at almost any idea.
Take the idea of the Religious Trinity.. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Some will point to sections of the bible and explain that they are all three aspects of the Father, while others might point to the same section and explain that they are all separate and say that the other idea, that they are all the same entity, makes no sense.
In the Medical world there seems to be an argument that MMR vaccines cause autism. The anti-vaccine people will point to studies that, they say, proves that Autism is caused by the MMR vaccines, and that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC) had been outed as having fixed it’s studies to show that there was no connection between the two. The other camp, which is sometimes called Mainstream Medicine, will tell you about the CDC studies that prove there is no connection and will even go so far as to tell you that the studies, by the Anti-vaccine group, have been refuted numerous times and they they still bring them up.
Andrew Wakefield is a name that often comes up in these discussions. It was from a study he did, along with 6 or 7 other researchers, that lead to the assertions of Autism being connected to the MMR Vaccines. The study, published in the British medical journal the Lancet, would later have his fellow researchers ask to have their names removed from the paper, after his press conference that explained the connection, a connection his fellow researcher stated was not contained the their results of the study. The Lancet would retract the story, and the British Medical establishment would take his Doctor’s licence away after charging him with a number of ethics violations, such as abusing the 12 people he used in his study and lieing about his work being approved by an ethics panel, or the medical community that took away his credentials and struck him from the Physician list in Britain.
My point here is that we often form our opinions of this based on the way we look at things.
For my last item to think about is this. In the United States we had a series of mass shootings. Some people saw this as a call to get firearms away from the public, others saw this as a demonstration that the police can not protect the public and that they have a right to buy more firearms they can then use to defend themselves. It is a situation where you have to ask : do we work on the symptoms, or the cause, of this violence…
I plan to get back into a routine of articles. Hopefully you will think about what I say. I don’t believe I will change anyone’s mind, but maybe the readers will consider what I put forth, and make up your own mind.
These are, as the title says “How I see the world”.
Thanks,
That Joe Guy.
That Joe Guy 