Cystic Fibrosis is all your fault

Cystic Fibrosis is a serious genetic disorder caused by the inheritance of a defective transporter protein. It leads to an accumulation of mucus and fluids in the lungs that can cause progressive scarring and damage to the tissue, and eventually loss of so much lung function that respiration is inadequate, and the victim dies. It’s a terrible disease, and it’s in the news today because a ten year old girl just received a lung transplant to deal with CF.

If you want to learn more or do more, read the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation website. That’s a reasonable source of public health information.

But do not read the Guardian Express.

The Guardian Express has published an article that suggests lung transplants aren’t the best option for CF. I just want to say…lung transplants are a last-ditch effort when no other recourse is available; nobody would suggest casually getting a transplant when other precedures are available for amelioration and maintenance. You get a lung transplant when your lungs are on the verge of failing to function.

So this article is talking nonsense from the title onwards. And then you discover why they’re arguing against transplants.

The problem is, after receiving a lung transplant, the new lungs do not have CF, but Cystic Fibrosis still exists in the sinuses, pancreas, intestines, sweat glands and reproductive tract, which may find their way to the new lungs eventually.

Let that sink in. CF is a genetic disease. This article is giving out medical advice, written by an author who thinks genes migrate out of the sweat glands into the lungs.

And what does this author suggest in lieu of a transplant? Oregano oil, yoga, rubbing essential oils on your skin, and herbs.

You may be thinking this all sounds terribly ineffective in the face of a disease that destroys the tissues of the lungs. But you’d be wrong. It’s an emotional disease, believe it or not.

According to metaphysics and those who study the relationship between our emotions and the body have found a correlating belief for nearly every physical manifestation in form. Often these beliefs are passed down to us from our parents and we aren’t even aware we are carrying them. In those with what is known as cystic fibrosis, this could be the case – as more often than not, individuals are born with this condition.

Louise Hay, a famous proponent for linking emotional causes to physical ailments has written several books on the subject (You can Heal your Life; Heal your Body) after healing herself from serious health problems by addressing her thoughts and emotions. The correlation she places for those suffering with cystic fibrosis is that they have a ‘thick belief that life won’t work for them.’ In order to combat or heal this belief, she offers the daily affirmation: “Life loves me and I love life. I now choose to take in life fully and freely.” If this is a condition you or someone you love is dealing with, perhaps it would be beneficial to look at the emotions behind the dis-ease. We are a whole being, not just a body, and when we can address our problems more holistically we have a greater chance at success.

Holy crap … I thought the article was a solid wall of garbage until that point, but when they stoop to victim blaming and telling people that cystic fibrosis is a “choice”, I suddenly find myself sympathizing with those people who believe in a Hell, because I want this person to go there.

But don’t worry! They include a disclaimer at the end!

(Information in this article is not intended to diagnosis, treat or cure and is not medical advice, but rather the researched opinion of the journalist. Please discuss options with your health care professional)

The article is full of medical misinformation and medical advice. The disclaimer fools no one, Stasi Bliss, you ignorant fraud.

It’s not just this one author, though. The Guardian Express regularly publishes tripe, such as this one about “Organ Transplants Cellular Memory Proves Major Organs Have Self-Contained Brains?”.

Organ transplants cellular memory is a premise which exemplifies that our brain is not the only organ that stores personality traits and memories because major organs may have self-contained brains. This is not a new theory because imaginative writers have already written about this concept in the 17th century, which is long before organ transplants were even believed possible.

In our modern culture, cellular memory was first studied in heart transplant recipients when the patients displayed strange cravings, change in tastes, cravings and mild personality. Major organs like the heart, liver, kidney, and even muscles are known to contain large populations of neural networks, which are self-contained brains and produce noticeable changes. Acquired combinatorial memories in organ transplants could enable transferred organs to respond to patterns familiar to the organ donors, and it may be triggered by emotional signals. Science discovered evidence that nervous system organs store memories and respond to places, events, and people recognized by their donors.

When your ideas are supported by 17th century fiction, you have a problem. They do cite one contemporary source: Gary Schwartz, the life-after-death charlatan from Arizona.

In Boring fields

In Boring fields the suburbs grow
In Council houses row on row,
A cozy place; and in the sky
The plastic bags still bravely fly
Used once by urbanites below.

We paved the Dead. Short days ago
It lived, sank roots, let seedpods blow,
Ten thousand years, but bid goodbye
to Boring fields.

Dig up the squirrel with backhoe:
On us, the moneyed hands bestow
A coin, a handshake and school tie.
You’ll do no good to wonder why.
We shall not sleep till leaseholds grow
In Boring fields.

World conquest…slightly delayed

When we fired up all cylinders on our majestic fish apparatus today, we discovered…leaks. Nothing tremendous, no sprays of water under pressure all over the place, just a couple of slow, steady, trickling drips. We demand perfection since this will be running 24 hours a day for months on end. So joins are being resealed and retested. Damn science. Damn engineering. Damn plumbing.

Have no fear, we’re just pushing back teleostageddon a few days. But the Daniocalypse will happen! We cannot be stopped now! The device is nearly complete!

Announcing…FtBConscience

This blog network has decided to put on a show. We go to conferences a lot, we have conversations with all kinds of atheists, we have things to say and we know you do, too, so we have decided to put on our own conference, with our themes and interests. And because we’re a blog network, we’re entirely comfortable with doing it all in our pajamas, so we propose to do this entirely with the technology our readers have on hand already: the internet. And further, we’re going to do it entirely for free — if you can get on the internet, you can access the talks and panels. If you can type, you can converse with everyone in our chat room.

A conference for atheists with a conscience

An Online Conference
19-21 July 2013

FtBCon is a free, online conference organized by the Freethought Blogs network. It will take place on July 19-21 and will focus on social justice, technology, and the future of the freethought movement. Without travel, registration, or hotel costs, FtBCon will be accessible to freethinkers around the world. Conference sessions will be held through Google+ hangouts, and attendees will have the opportunity to interact with each other in chat rooms and to submit questions to moderators.

We are currently assembling our schedule. If you or your organization are interested in participating, submit your session ideas for consideration by e-mailing PZ Myers with a proposal.

See that last bit? The event is a month away, and our schedule is filling up, but we also want to make this a participatory event that draws out your voices. If you’re part of a group that you’d like to see represented, if you have something valuable to say that fits into our overall theme, contact me soon and we’ll see if we can fit you into our programming grid.

There is a long list of scheduled speakers at FtBCon.org. Want to listen to them? Want to join them? Come right here to FreeThoughtBlogs on 19-21 July.

Flying over the Bakken

Ecoflight is a non-profit that uses light planes in the service of wildlands conservation. (I got on their mailing list a couple years ago after I took one of their flights over the California desert with pilot Bruce Gordon.)

Today’s offering from EcoFlight’s mailing list included a link to this video of oil drilling in North Dakota’s Bakken Formation. It’s sobering.

Californian that I am, my grasp on North Dakota geography is a little tenuous. I’ve visited the state, but just once, and that was way back in 1996 when Zeke, my ex-wife, and I were all still puppies. I’d imagined the Bakken development as mainly happening in the northwest corner of the state, and we’d visited the southwest corner, near the south unit of Teddy Roosevelt National Park near the bustling micropolis of Medora, where Zeke and I shared a bison burger.

Apparently, despite my assumption, you can see the oil wells flaring at night from the south unit of the Park. One more landscape changed irrevocably in the service of human society.

Living things are more than the sum of their minerals

sockeye

I tell you, that’s a beautiful fish. It’s a sockeye salmon, native to Washington state, British Columbia, and Alaska, a gorgeous anadromous beast that has to spawn in lakes of the Pacific Northwest. Huge numbers of them live in Bristol Bay off the Alaska coast, which is pretty much the center of their population range.

Now mining interests want to gouge out what would be the largest open pit mine in North America in their breeding grounds. They want to punch this monstrosity out in the middle of a wilderness, requiring roads and other infrastructure elements to be built first, and then they’ll sluice the poisonous wastewater and toxic mining tailings out into the Kvichak and Nushagak Rivers, and then out into Bristol Bay. All to recover gold and copper, at the cost of destroying half the sockeye population.

What price are we willing to pay for the privilege of poisoning the salmon?

We are go for fishiness

We are now testing the capabilities of our fully armed and operational homebrew fish facility in the lab. Pumps are humming, water is flowing, we are evaluating all joins for leakage, and it’s looking good. Tomorrow we put in a small bank of tanks and start the water cycle. Next week, fish!

That is all.

And once it’s fracked, vomit it over the landscape

I know you’re all busy fracking that poll, but this is relevant. It’s all about the oil, and Charles Pierce always puts it so well.

As we await the decision on whether or not TransCanada will get to complete the northern leg of our old friend, the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death-funnel aimed at transporting the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel from the poisoned moonscape of Alberta down the spine of North America to Texas, where what already hasn’t spilled out and killed ducks and bunny rabbits — and the agricultural economy of half the country — will be put on ships and sent out to the rest of the world, we should check to see how the pipeline system is working elsewhere.

It’s not working so well.

A Northern Alberta pipeline sprung a little leak. A leak that spewed 9.5 million liters of waste water into Canadian wetlands. A spokesman for the company running the pipeline, Texas-based Apache Corp. (do you Canadians know you’ve got fucking Texas oilmen running loose in your backyard, with boldly named racist companies?), said it was just “salty water” with “trace amounts” of oil. Right. Do you believe him?

The substance is the inky black colour of oil, and the treetops are brown. Across a broad expanse of northern Alberta muskeg, the landscape is dead. It has been poisoned by a huge spill of 9.5 million litres of toxic waste from an oil and gas operation in northern Alberta, the third major leak in a region whose residents are now questioning whether enough is being done to maintain aging energy infrastructure.

“Trace amounts”. OK.

“Every plant and tree died” in the area touched by the spill, said James Ahnassay, chief of the Dene Tha First Nation, whose members run traplines in an area that has seen oil and gas development since the 1950s.

Oh. Well that sounds…innocuous.

This is where capitalism fails, among many other places. Look to the future: as gas and oil prices steadily climb, there will be more and more incentive to unscrupulous people to profit at the land’s expense, and there’s nothing to stop them. Furthermore, there will always be lots of short-sighted people who will see only dollar signs and easy comfort, who will chant “drill baby drill” and enable the looters. And then someday we get to live in the wreckage.

Somebody has to actually reckon the cost and say simply, “no.” Even if it discomfits a few Texans.