Look girls, interchangable heads and breasts!

I saw this at Target and I stopped in my tracks. I thought of three things, Picasso and the show Nip Tuck and Dexter.

Literally this set turns girls into interchangeable body parts and turns the girl into the decorative accessory.

This toy sends a terrible message to girls and my friend Bree said to me "Yes, totally weird. I mean c’mon now – floating heads with interchangeable bodies? It literally splits women into pieces that need to be altered. Women already have problems looking in the mirror and seeing a “whole” person, we divide ourselves into parts – hips, ass, stomach, face, chest – and criticize every little piece. We don’t need dolls teaching our little girls what categories they can (and apparently, should) change.

Ionic Foot Baths cure Autism!

Extra, extra! Read all about it. Ionic foot baths will purge heavy metals from your child and cure his Autism.

Really? Cmon people the junk science has reached an embarrassing low here.
Positive and negative ions don't resonate through the body in response to any such device. And the skin has no ability to excrete toxins. Real detoxification of foreign substances takes place in the liver, which modifies their chemical structure so they can be excreted by the kidneys which filter them from the blood into the urine.

The change in the water color? would happen if your feet were in there or not! Add the addition of your skin cremes, nail polish,sebum and pieces of skin. Also the darkening of the water is due to the electrode conversion and as I said this happens sans feet.

Ionic detox cleanses your cells?

No it doesn't..drink more water, that's what your cells need.

Here is Kelly's common sense approach to how to care for neuro-typical and neuro-diverse children alike.


avoid refined sugar
white flour
soda
juice in extreme moderation
think about balance, salty/sweet/savory
teach your children to enjoy food preparation, it will make them want to taste the food. With balance, also moderation, if your child does overeat something too sweet or fatty, talk to them about how it makes then feel. Are you tired? Sick? Sleepy?

help them make the food and body connection.


Leave the quacking to the vain celebs who can afford to shove tubes up their asses and flush away 3000 pounds of Kobe beef remnants.

Will the internet save us?

Admittedly I am no Einstein when it comes to understanding investments and the economy. The extent of my knowledge of banks failing is what I learned from watching It's a Wonderful Life.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately. During the last Great Depression we had much less media and access to information than we do now. With the Internet and hundreds of channels on television solely devoted to US financial issues even a Walmart employee can easily access information if they so desire.

Will this help prevent total panic? Will people chill and not cash out their 401K's? Listening to an economist rather than Ted the butcher may have a positive effect and help quell panic that never helps stabilize anything.

I may be wrong but to me it makes sense that the economy has to suffer major downturns once in a while, it is cyclical like anything else. I am not going to start stuffing cash under my mattress. I know my 401K is now a 201K but I am going to ride it out and hope for the best.

Making me laugh for 3 days in a row now

If you can watch this all the way through without laughing hysterically you have issues.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vASd3QGn8eo

Pathos and Pedestals, how the mighty have fallen

I am truly terrible at noticing if people change the furniture in their home, get a new car, lose weight etc. It gets me in trouble with my family all the time.

Here is what I never miss: I will notice if you did not get enough sleep, if you twirl your hair when tired, fidget when you lie, or if you got laid right before work. I know if someone is preggo before they start to show by the changes in their skin. Once I know your cadence and expressions good luck getting something by me. If you are a badly damaged person I can sense it after 5 minutes or less of conversation. Likewise I know if you have had good therapy after talking to you for maybe a half an hour. I know if your parents were alcoholics. I know when you are lying or about to lie.

I have a girlfriend I work with and when I noticed she had a tremor I was very worried about her health. I asked our other friends and none of them had noticed it. I approached her about it telling her I wanted her to see a neurologist. She laughed and told me I was the only person in a year to notice that she had a mild tic due to tourette's..

With this extreme pathos I find myself with an ability to see heroic flickers in an otherwise unremarkable person. So far this pans out with them falling off the pedestal in rapid fashion. A flicker alone is not usually strong enough to survive and be a dominant quality.

I find myself wondering, is it a gift or a curse that I have? Is it possible for me to hone these skills to include sensing the deficits as easily as I sense the strengths? I know that I developed these skills as a young child trying to read adults that often kept things from me and talked in whispers. Later when working with non verbal adults all I had to go on were gestures, facial movements, sometimes just the flick of a wrist.

If you wonder, yes I am also painfully aware of both my weaknesses and strengths, I try to push through the weaknesses with sheer will, with mixed success.

I was recently told by someone that they hated people.. I never feel that way. I love people with all their flawed humanity and feet of clay.

This Litter Sponsored by The Gap

When are we going to stop rewarding people with free homes, cars and wardrobes for pimping their families?

We all know about the lady in Cali who just had octuplets. She is a single Mom living with her mother and already had 6 kids at home.She left the country to find an unscrupulous Doctor willing to inseminate her with multiple embryos.

She is actively pursuing the media and sponsors to help her take care of her new litter of children.I saw her tonight on inside edition smirking and pouting for the camera. Nauseating.

How far are we going to take reality TV before we realize what it is doing to our society?

Children raised in front of a camera crew on a reality show are going to have some pretty strange perceptions about the world and what is important. I would like to see the studies done on these kids 20 years later.

The Truman Show really does not seem so far fetched anymore.I wonder how many years before the glut of reality shows makes us so jaded that anything goes. Remember when a bare ass or a curse shocked us?

I would not be surprised if reality TV airs deaths in the years to come. Maybe we can have sponsors for the coffins and gravestones.

Supplements and the quick fix scam

I wrote this in June of last year.
Trace Minerals.com an analysis of the products vs. scientific evidence

The first claim that grabs me off the bat is the one that states through soil erosion trace minerals are being taken from the soil and being swept into the sea. This now compels you to buy supplements derived from the ocean to replace these essential minerals. Here is the scare pitch:

The complexity of the mineral imbalance problem is apparent. It is apparent that our understanding of the mechanisms of mineral imbalances is fragmentary. New inter-relationships are constantly being discovered. We are presently recognizing and correcting only a small fraction of the mineral imbalance problems plaguing animals and man. 5*5.Hoekstra, W.G. Federation Proceedings. National Academy of Sciences: Washington D.C. (Sept./ Oct., 1964).

The complexity of the mineral balance problem is apparent? Mineral imbalances are plaguing animals and man? No studies to back this scary statement up. As a matter of fact no normal American that follows the Dietary guidelines for Americans has any risk of having a vitamin deficiency. The main groups of Americans that are malnourished are the obese population.

This plays into the new marketing technique of why Americans are so unhealthy. It is not because we sit all day, eat fast food and do not exercise, it is because of over aggressive farming, soils erosion and mineral imbalances. The solution is not to eat healthy foods, since trace minerals.com alleges that over use of fertilizer is robbing our foods of essential nutrients. We can blame someone else and get the quick fix solution to what ails us.

The other claim made is that if the minerals we intake do not have the proper ionic charge they cannot be properly absorbed? I spoke with Dr. John Snider M.D a medical internist and teacher at Tufts Medical School and after he stopped laughing he told me this is false and that the small intestine will absorb minerals without you worrying about how ionically charged they are. I have been unable to find any reliable medical sources indicating that this is backed up with any science.

The trace minerals once abundant in our soils are gone because of "overaggressive farming" whatever that means. The site claims synthetic fertilizers are only good for plants and are missing elements humans need. Fertilizer is fertilizer; it enriches the soil causing plants to grow. There are no scientific studies I can find linking synthetic fertilizer with less nutritious crops. Here is a quote from quack watch:

Plants convert natural fertilizers into the same chemicals that synthetic fertilizers supply. The vitamin content of a food is determined by its genetic makeup Stephen Barrett, M.D.
Victor Herbert, M.D., J.D.
The Traceminerals.com has a clever pitch, peppered with scare tactics with enough medical word thrown in to sound pseudo- intellectual, but with no real data other than the articles written by the founder Dr. Meltis who is not an MD but a Naturopath.

The phenomenon of quick fix, take a pill, blame someone else that is pervasive in our culture is a gold mine for the supplement charlatans. We are willing to spend untold mounts of money to ensure our longevity. The fact that the ads also lay the blame elsewhere is a particularly appealing marketing technique.

Added 2/05/2009

I am seeing more of this junky science trickling into real life and it scares me. Parents of Autistic children who have no medical back round at all are allowing Chelation treatments for their children. Chelation treatment has no scientific support as a treatment for Autism. It is supposed to remove lead and arsenic from poisoned people.

Can we please stop pretending we are all doctors? Can we stop thinking anecdotal evidence is good enough to do something as drastic as chelation?

Can we stop trying to quick fix and use science to our advantage?

Bah!

Survival of the fittest brain

I was talking to my friend Jon about my take on survival of the fittest. Weirdly I think about this stuff a lot because of reality TV. When I see the commercials for survivor I think, I am diabetic, I would never survive without the modern comforts that I have. If I got stuck in the woods with no carbohydrates would I know what to eat to stay alive?

Modern nutrition, vaccines and medical technology have usurped some of the importance in having physical strength or stamina. Someone like Steven Hawkins who is medically fragile and not able to speak without technology can communicate mind boggling quantum gravity.

Thinking about modern ways of conceiving via in vitro fertilization also adds another layer to who is surviving now. I wonder what it will all mean in another 100 years. Will the entire idea concept of who is fittest be completely different?

If we did not have all of these tools to help us survive what would our society look like now?

Autism and Scientology

I did write a blog about my thoughts on Jett Travolta's untimely death and whether or not I think he is Autistic.I got almost a dozen emails asking me where my post was.My desire to discuss autism is tempered by my gut. I am not going to publish it. An innocent child is gone.I do not know anything about this child or his medical history.I know he was sheltered from the media and looked well cared for.

I do not have to make money from my blog and do not wish to feed into the machine of corpse pickers in our media who ghoulishly delight in the sorrow of the famous.The adults who chose to be in that industry are one thing but the children they have should be left alone.

The rest of it is left to god or Buddha or whoever you pray to at night.I pray that his parents can go on through what must be the most terrible pain a human can experience, losing their child.

Blessings,
Kelly

Part One: Society's Barriers against evil

Sometimes my optimism is a curse. I am often naive and gullible and disappointed when I am proven wrong about people. The other part of me wants to hang on to optimism because it usually serves me well. I started to realize a few years ago that I am practicing mostly Buddhist methodology in my daily life. Well, minus abstaining from cursing and drinking.

Karma is not fate, because we act with free will and creating our own destiny. If we are good, we will receive goodness; if we are evil, we will receive evil. Karma refers to the totality of our actions and its cumulative reactions in this and previous lives, all of which determines our fate. The benefits of karma lie in intelligent action and dispassionate response.

This does not mean that bad things don’t happen to wonderful and good people, this is usually the unfortunate consequence of free will and other people deciding not to follow the right path. I believe that these people who cause harm to others will be dealt with Karmically. I see it happen every day.

The man who killed my friend by driving drunk and high and tried to flee the scene. I wished so many bad things would happen to him. Then I started thinking about how gentle and kind my friend was. He never complained about anything. I had to let go of some of my hate. Two years later I found an old article on a website for a local newspaper had dozens of comments on the article about my friends death. People that knew this man who killed my friend all had terrible things to say about him. I read with awe about this mans life. It was like the opposite of George Bailey. I can’t imagine being that kind of person day in and out. I think he is reaping the karma he deserves. The universe does not embrace him. There is less chance for peace and true happiness if you are too afraid or too selfish.Self protecting mechanisms can blind you to really amazing people and experiences.

I have read Ann Rand and thought a lot about individualism and libertarianism. There are parts that can be gleaned for all of these seemingly opposing ideologies. I was initially resistant to reading the Lucifer principal because the basic theory of inherently evil man bothered me. However as I read it I do see the social groupings, clusters of behaviors be them good or evil. We are all basically animals, some of us are better able to adapt and cope without resorting to base and violent behaviors.

I believe most people are good. I think organized religion and fear does keep a tether on mans behavior and helps create social norms. I personally believe if the only reason you are doing something good is because you don’t want to go to hell ..it is not really a truly good act.

I am going to take a closer look at all of these ideologies and continue with a few more blogs.