July's argument of Fluoridation

Fluoridation arguments.

http://newanthropocene.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/misleading-is-merilyn-haines-the-innocent-casting-stones/  Merilyn Haines who is she, misleading facts on fluoridation

http://designatedthinkers.blogspot.ca/2010/03/fluoride-support-against-evidence-again.html#comment-form read the comments, how supporters of Fluoridation removal distort the facts to prove their points.

Okay, I took a look at only one of the articles you sent me yesterday, the last one I think which was the blog that just had a bunch of quotes that had a lot to do with Fluoride.  I did not even complete the list because it was midnight and if I closed my eyes at that point it would be nearly 12:30 before I was asleep.  Anyways I say fluoride because some of the quotes were only about fluoride and not about fluoridation.  A lot of them were about the adverse effects of fluoridation, but almost all of these were studies or papers on the effects of naturally fluoridated water higher than the recommended levels.  Some studies had the levels of fluoridation at four or more times the recommended highest level of water fluoridation.  

One study suggested that hip fractures and fluoridation were strongly correlated, but looking at the data suggested a second outcome.  The information suggested that the lowest rate of fractures on hip bones was at fluoridation rates comparable to that in municipal water.  There was no significant difference between no fluoridation and municipal rates, it should be pointed out, in fact there was no difference.  Only when the researcher compared extremely high fluoridation to normal or no fluoridation was there a significant increase in hip fracture rates. So here lies the problem: one, scientifically literate anti fluoridation people chose these studies and ignored the actual findings.   Two, anti fluoridation people exceed the recommended levels of fluoride to show that there is an ill effect to prove their point.  Three scientifically illiterate people see an article that supports their stand point and refers to the study without dissecting the actual results.  

I am not going to claim which is true, but I will say that scientists have been known to embellish their findings and write more exciting titles in hopes of getting publicity.  Because, really, since Einstein, has there been any rockstar scientists?  

Anyways, what it looks like is a coverup of the facts of life, everything in moderation, too much of anything is bad too little of some things is bad too.  Iron, magnesium, zinc, copper and many others are micronutrients that you need to live, too little and you begin to die, too much and you begin to die.  Moderation in everything.  To little fluoridation and you start to get cavities, (dental poor health can lead to death) too much is bad too.

***

I am about to agree with you, in the first world, we don't need fluoride in our water, because we get it in other ways, like toothpaste.  We don't need it because we have a robust dental program and many people have dental insurance, however, not all do and that would be the major reason for universal dental healthcare.  We don't need it because of all these things, but it does do one other thing, it says that it is safe and it is something that poor countries can do, poor regions can do, to prevent cavities and to prevent tooth loss and to prevent potential infections too.  As long as it does not cause harm right?

***

One of the things that this article, blog post of sources, liked to quote was YouTube videos.  Really?  The overall video might be considered one piece of evidence, but not each individual speaker, especially a video transcript that figured Mystery Person, which I guess was an appeal to the commoners.  The scientists that were quoted could be researched.  At least of them were strongly associated to FAN a site that is noted for the number of flags that are associated with Conspiracy Theory Websites.  

At this point I feel that I should step away from the last statements, because it sounds like I am attacking the messenger and ignoring the message, but I am not.  When someone publishes a research paper and they want to be considered legitimate, they seek interviews with legitimate media and avoids conspiracy websites.  When AIDS denialists, 911 truthers, and other fear mongers of the "New World Order" begin to advocate for you, you are in trouble.  A few of the sources are in this class. 

The other thing about the anti-fluoridation crowd is that it is very old, right from the beginning in the forties and fifties people were against fluoridation. They used the arguments of the day to argue against adding health care to the water.  It is a communist plot.  It causes cancer in the seventies.  Each time, it was debunked and now this.

Recently Waterloo Ontario was trying to decide whether it should have fluoride in the water or not and the No side posted this cunning picture:

http://www.waterloowatch.com/Index_files/Swallow%20Don%27t%20Swallow%20-%20Which%20Fact%20Is%20True.pdf

Take a look at it.  There are two things that you should see, lots of math and lots of scientific notation.  There is a reason why they do that: most people are scared off by math and science notation, but most people trust presentations in science, because it is proven fact.  The problem here is that they are misleading.

The first set of equations are not lies.  They set forth a series of calculations to determine how much fluoride by mass there is in any given volume of toothpaste.  I followed it, it looks right.  The third calculations show how much fluoride there is in a glass of water, that looks on the ball too.  I missed the second set of calculations, because it is the lie.  The second calculation takes the first answer and converts a small amount of toothpaste and calculates how much fluoride is in a child serving.  Except the first calculation calculates the amount of F in a volume and not a mass, as the second calculation does.  They either skipped a step and did not show their work, or they are misleading people.  Of course the warning on toothpaste is more about children swallowing the entire tube of toothpaste in one go, as children are likely to do than swallowing a pea sized amount.  Misleading people about something is lying.  

Using quick math and the numbers that are given on that picture, the amount of fluoride in a 100ml tube of toothpaste is 0.15 g, or 150mg.  So, if you were going to consume and equivalent amount of water to get 150mg of F, you would divide 150 by 0.7 or you would have to consume 214.3 L of water.  Also if you continue the lesson they would have you learn, a glass of water is 0.3L of water, so a tube of toothpaste is equal to over 700 glasses of water.  They are then by comparison suggesting that a child's toothpaste would last for nearly two whole years.  I love math, it does not lie.

Anyways, I see that you are not amused by this, if a child ate a tube of toothpaste call 911 and induce vomiting, but if your child did not spit, it is not a real concern provided they had a recommended volume of toothpaste.

Here is me going back to reading the endless list of articles.

Incidentally I really loved the letter that was presented as evidence that said nothing on the subject at hand what-so-ever:  http://www.fluoridealert.org/wp-content/uploads/epa-masters.pdf

I guess nothing means something?

Here is a quote: “Hydrofluorosilicic acid (HFSA)… Due to the OH & S implications associated with the handling of this chemical, Fluoride dosing is accomplished under very strictly controlled and monitored conditions” (LMW n.d.).

Here is the complete quote:

 ‘Fluorodose’ process in which sodium fluoride is used to add fluoride to the water at Robinvale WTP. This system is used for small to medium installations to significantly reduce OH&S issues and improve ease of operation.

Hydrofluorosilicic acid(HFSA)dosing system at the other WTP’s.Due to the OH & S implications associated with the handling of this chemical, Fluoride dosing is accomplished under very strictly controlled and monitored conditions.

Come on, what are they doing?

http://consciouslifenews.com/fluoride-toxic-poison-learn-differences-between-natural-synthetic-fluoride/

Okay I started this one next and the very first link talked about Aluminum Toxicity and how to avoid it.  The first way to avoid excess Al is to not get vaccinated!!  An anti-vaccination site!  Okay I clicked to see what this site is promoting: the healing power of the Pyramids among other things.

Second link to the same source as before.

Not backed up with proof is this line: The pure form of sodium fluoride is so toxic that by just consuming a small volume of it could kill you.  It does not suggest a dose.  They are suggesting that any dose is lethal, from a nanogram to what ever they consider a small dose, which could be a tablespoon.  From this example everything could be considered lethal.  Water, if too much is consumed, will kill you.  Iron, to much of that and you are tits up.  Too much alcohol and you are dead too.  Too much fluoride and you are dead.

NaF is more toxic than some rat poisons, that is why they regulate how much you can put in water or in toothpaste.

Then the put in a direct quote from PreventDisease.com.  Except that there is no evidence on that site, just assertion after assertion. And by that I mean on that site they did not even offer the pretense of offering proof for their statements.

Fluoride spill eats through concrete.  From the video, it is clear that there was no concrete involved only asphalt.  Semantics right?  This is all about concentration. pH is base ten logarithmic scale, each increment is ten time greater or lesser concentration than the one before.  Concentrated form it is dangerous, but after a dilution of a million times it is safe.  Let us do some comparisons, pH of 2 is stomach acid, apples are about 3.5 meaning stomach acid is about 50 times as acidic as an apple. A pH of one is ten times as acidic as stomach acid and so about 500 times that of an apple.  Fluoride is diluted from its highly acidic form to that of a million times less, or six orders of magnitude, six plus one is seven, a pH of seven, neutral.

The sources of this article, are the one above, PreventDisease.com as discussed already and another article with no sources, which is about Arsenic in the water.

Arsenic in the water interesting, second paragraph, the cancer-causing metallic element… the American cancer society says yes, interesting they also say that As in the water is strictly controlled at 10ppb.  Interestingly arsenic is bad for different reasons, it is a close fit for Phosphorus and so the body will substitute Ph for As sometimes so it will cause errors that way too.  Arsenic is also more of a danger in untreated water than treated water, so that is funny too, considering the source this article is against is treated water.

Tomorrow, 50 reasons to oppose Fluoridation, oddly be the same source as the Arsenic paper with no sources . . ..  http://fluoridealert.org/articles/50-reasons/

Okay the problems with this site are multiple.  First it is self referencing.  That means it refers to itself to prove its point, eg the world is flat, I said so in A, B, and C.  If you look article A it says there is an edge to the world, as I said in B, C and D.  Look up B and it says the world is supported by four elephants standing on a turtle, as I said in A, C and D.  Look up C and it says the Sun orbits the Earth as I said in A, B and D.  D was the first article.

Second, when there is an article that they reference, the article says nothing that proves that statement that it is trying to say.  Fluoride causes low IQ, but the article never mentions how much Fluoride the subjects consuming.  When it does mention the amount of fluoride being consumed, it is well above the amount in our water system.  Indeed the finer detail of the article says that there was no effect on IQ from low levels of Fluoride as the levels in drinking water.

Thirdly, the proof in some cases has been thickened up by adding studies twice to the same proof.  Once the article listed as proof that towns were removing fluoride from the drinking water, it listed San Antonio Texas at the start and at the end of the list.

For a more comprehensive review of one part of this website try this:

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2010/12/02/anti-fluoridation-crankery-how-1960s/

Okay, a couple of there things I found out about fluoride. It has a body half life of about eight to ten hours.  A body half life is the amount of time that it takes the body to expel half the substance.  It is similar to a half life of radio active materials, but that is where the similarity ends.  Other half body times that I know of the top of my head are Methyl Mercury, 70 days, Ethel Mercury, 3.7 days.  From this you can see that it has a comparatively short stay in the body

More math: let us assume that you drink 4L of water every day and the fluoridation rate is N even 1mg/L of water, which is pretty generous as most anti-fluoride people admit that it is 0.7g/L.  Let's assume that you get it all at once, which is extremely unlikely.  So you have 4g in your body, and since I chose a higher concentration of F to work with and assumed it was introduced all at once for math ease, let us also take the faster of the two half life times, 8hours.  

After 8h, half the F is gone leaving 2g, after another 8h another half is gone leaving 1g and finally after another 8h the amount of F left in your system is 0.5g.  that is after one day, following that example after two days you would have 0.0625g in your body. After 3 days approximately 0.008g, at 4 days, 0.001g, 5 days 0.0001g, 6 days 0.00002g and one week after you would have 0.000002g of Fluoride in your body from the initial 4g.  Wait I hear you saying that you are adding 4g every day, what is the most F you could have in your body?  Add it up, and you get a whopping 4.572522g of fluoride at most in your body and that is if you consume it all at once every day, which is very unlikely. It is much more likely that you will have less than three grams of fluoride in your body at any given time.  All the credible research suggests that this amount of Fluoride in the body is safe.  Double and quadruple this value and you get an unsafe number that is correlated to lower IQ and bone fractures

So I must conclude that from that available research, low levels of Fluoride are safe and help prevent cavities and high levels are not safe and may cause lower IQ and more bone fractures.  I say may, because the sample size of these studies was still quite small between 70-40 subjects to increase the certainty of their findings they need to up the sample size, keep in mind that the CDC studies have a million times as many participants.  The other conclusion is that some people do not like that available evidence and further their point, make up or use information in misleading ways to make their stance seem reasonable and to create hysteria in the general public. As evidenced by Doug Heal's letter to the editor: http://m.parrysound.com/opinion-story/4187710-get-toxic-fluoride-out-of-our-water-reader/ where he cites all the same things that the pseudoscience peddlers promote, but none of the real, hard scientific facts.

I also conclude, that while safe, removal of Fluoride from Canada's drinking water will not negatively impact the dental health of anyone who can afford to see a dentist regularly.  Oh wait, fluoride in the drinking water means that it is in the majority of Bottled Water (which is typically bottled tap water) and fruit juices and soft drinks, which means the majority of liquids people drink, is fluoridated.  Removal of Fluoride may have a greater affect than to just the people who drink tap water, but still if you brush your tenth with fluoridated tooth paste your saliva will protect your teeth for up to two hours between brushings.  So in First World countries, where toothpaste costs .02% of the average wage removing Fluoride will not greatly affect people.  But in Developing countries where the cost of toothpaste with fluoride represents up to 4% of their wage, fluoride in the water or the salt or any other carrier, becomes more important.

Still, keeping Fluoride in the water posses no threat to people and does provide additional protection to the very poor in our society, who may not understand the importance or may not be able to afford proper dental preventative care.

Response to enlightenment

1.  Be you in every moment

Who else would I be?  The suggestion is that you should not be waiting for the perfect moment to do something, because at perfect moment will never come.  Which is why I NEVER make New Year's resolutions, because if it is important enough to resolve that issue, then it should not be put off for a special moment; the special moment is when you decide to do it, ie right now.

To quote the nine hundred year old philosopher, "Do or do not, there is no try".

2. Let go the fear of feeling

This is explained through analogy of exploring a house, the house is yourself and the rooms are aspects of yourself.  Exploring the house is exploring your identity, but the analogy is for something else and not letting go the fear of feeling.  

To me the statement is about releasing the fear of experiencing life.  Life is a series of feelings, emotional and experiences such as feeling the  job you are doing.  Releasing the fear is equivalent to setting your mind to a state where you can go and seek the experiences of life with out being guided by negative experiences of the past.  Fear is the comes as a result of negative outcome, but also the possibility of negative outcomes.  When you learn to ride a bike, you will fall, and accepting that fact allows you to go beyond the fall to appreciate the future of bike riding.  If the fear of falling stops you, wou will never experience the freedom of riding a bike.  

If you were hurt in a past relationship, do not let the possibility of being hurt in the future from experiencing another relationship.  Small fears can be helpful, serving as a warning, but if it leads to inaction, then you doomed.

3. Identify with nothing

Unfortunately it is in our language, Indo-European Language is a identifying language.  It takes things in the world and sets them in concrete ways inside people's minds.  Other language groups do not do this in the same way.  Native North American languages, at least the ones in the North are without a concept of ownership, so in cultures where there is no word for "mine" everything is free for everyone to use.  In these cultures the languages have no tense and stories told are stories that happened in a time that is not clear, it could have happened yesterday or several generations ago.

But it is not thee languages and those cultures that we exist in.  We exist in a culture with a language that names and identifys things; it limits things.  As an ancient student of life once said, "Hill … it is a hasty word for something that has stood here since this part of the world was shaped."

Essentially, the idea behind identify with nothing is, do not chain yourself down with limited definitions, because everyone is more than the some of their experiences and can be anything as long as you believe that anything is possible.  Or, once you believe that you are limited, those limitations become the best you can achieve.

4. Don't be so hard on yourself

A failure of myself.  The problem with this goal is that it can potentially lead to negativity in the form of Identity.  I had a friend who accepted himself totally and I was mad at him because he accepted all his limitations as fact.  He never tested his conceptions of himself, he essentially limited himself by defining what he could not do and accepting it.  

Last Tuesday for the bike ride we went down McDougall road.  It has some very substantial hills.  Heading back I had to walk part way up the first hill because I was out of breath and I could not risk the easiest gear because I was afraid that it would be stuck there.  If I had accepted that limitation, I would have had to walk up all of the hills, but I did not.  I challenged my perceptions that the hills were too steep and I rode up them.  I nearly died, but I made it.  Accept your limitations, but challenge them too.

5. Don't make personal growth the mean to "Get what you want"

Clearly this is one I have to work on.  On the other hand, personal growth is important and it will help me get what I want.  But I guess what they are saying here is that personal growth is its own reward and getting what you want is a secondary concern.  I plod through life trying to improve my understanding of my situation, I have the occasional epiphany, but these epiphanies are the rewards of personal growth and not what they will get me.  Just this week, Friday afternoon I realized something that I had been mulling over in my head for a long while.  It was the epiphany that was my reward, I unlocked another aspect of my personality and even though I saw implications fanning out that would give me other more tangible rewards, it was the epiphany that was my true reward.  You can ask me about that if you wish.

6. Be more interested in your reaction than what triggered it

The just seems to be that you should ignore the triggers of a particular behavior and instead focus on your reaction.   A better way to say this is stop reacting to things beyond your control and focus on the things you do control, like your reactions to things.  If there is a belligerent stressor at work, thinking about the stressor will do nothing to relieve the stress, but thinking on why it stresses you out may allow you to understand and thus relieve your stress.

Also you can understand the things that you can't change, and you can accept that you can't change them, but you can change how you choose to react to them.

7. Make friends with the Unknown

Essentially this line could be rendered as: Treat the unknown as an opportunity.  You wake up, got to work, go home go to sleep, repeat.  It becomes a routine and often it begins to aggravate us, but because it IS routine it becomes comfortable.  The older you get the more comfortable it gets and the more important it is to be comfortable.  Breaking the routine becomes scary, but it is necessary to break your routine if you are going to find a better routine that fits better with you.  90-95% of people are born in the same town as they lived and die, they might get a cottage and after years they move to the cottage, but that change is so gradual that it is not change.  To get up and to quickly switch towns to a place you have never been, where you have no roots is super scary, but might be what you need to do to change things up for the better, so why be afraid?

New jobs, new careers, new friends, new relationships, new towns, new ideas.  Each is scary but each has its rewards.  But we are resistant to the word new. Do not be.

8. Don't over analyze.

Okay I admit this is my Achilles' Heel.  I do it, women do it, but generally men do not.  For the most part, men do this very well.  It might because they think of nothing a lot more than women.  And that is tough if you don't.  I know why women don't think of nothing, well I have a guess.  In a hunter gatherer society the women were the gendered roled as the gatherers.  Gatherers and hunters have very different mind sets, the hunter is narrow and is head down concentrating on one task, but not so gatherers.  Gatherers are groups that are facing every direction because they are more vulnerable, because they have children and my be encumbered.  They are constantly communicating and they relay information about the surroundings and the task that they are performing.  In other words they are thinking all the time.

Why do I thinks all the time, I am broken, I admit it and as per #4, I accept it, but I have learned that I can mitigate my brokenness through analysis and thinking.  So I am a man, who by being a man takes things as they are presented verbally (you said it you must mean it), but I am constantly thinking about what your body language might mean and most frequently, why people did not move as predicted.  In teachers college the often bunted around stat was that 95% of all communication is nonverbal.  I count myself as luck if I can read 50% of it, I know that I am not very lucky.  Briar chastises me every time, she knows I can't read body language but body language is so obvious that she finds it hard to believe that I can't see it.  Stop she says, you are too intense, you are pushing her away from you.  I want the opposite outcome but I can't read anyone so I fall back on analysis.  

And I admit I can over think stuff and make it worse, but I fear that alternative is worse.  When I am comfortable in my situation, I am accepting and relaxed, but still, my past proves that I have missed things when I am relaxed and comfortable.

9. Be in the body.

This is 8b.  When you stop thinking you are open to the things around you and you accept them.  Makes me think that the precepts of enlightenment were invented by a man, who could do these all naturally because they were a man.  

Nature brings this state out in me though.  Sitting in a canoe or sitting in my happy place I feel this.  Not sure if I can at other times.  I will have to experiment.  This sounds like meditation.  The kind that the Dali Lammas practices.  Do what you are doing but do it with your entire mind.

10. Love freely

No free love, not that love was ever free.  I worry that I love too freely.  I worry that when I am not in love I fall in love to quickly and I am generally too trusting.  But one advantage I can see to this is that I seem to exude trust to others.  The trouble is when I am friends with someone and they are troubled.  I love my friends and I need to help them when they are troubled.  And maybe I should not love my friends too, because when my friends are newly single, my attraction intensifies and I fall in love with them. It could be argued that I don't fall in love, but feel free to express it.  

I would say that the extension that is not mentioned here is that love freely naturally extends to things and actions.  Love driving.  Love reading.  Love cars.  Love books.  Love bike riding.  Love people.  Love specific person.

I have come to several conclusions about love over the years due to my obsession with Love.  Soul mates are everywhere, or rather they don't exist anywhere.  Spend enough time with someone that shares a number of your interests, when you have mutual caring, you will form a connection people call soul mates.  It can happen among friends and lovers.  Love is this feeling that is used freely to mean one thing, but it is one word that describes an infinite different feelings.  I tried a thousand, but it is a thousand different feelings in billions of different people that have ever lived.  Love is infinitely complex and different every time.  The grail of love is love that you share with one who loves you.  But not the act of love, which is not love, but a chemical reaction caused by sex.  Love is respect and caring and a desire, not carnal desire, to put the other ahead of your desires.  When this kind of love is mutual …

11. Look at a picture of the Earth

When I look at the Earth I feel love.  The feeling that people feel when they look at the Earth is a realization that petty concerns are in consequential, that life is precious.  And it is, but the picture of the earth is so ubiquitous these days that the meaning has been lost.  It was reinvigorated by Carl Sagan when he wrote his poem about the image that Voyage took of our planet from a billion miles away, called The Pale Blue Dot.  Everyone you have ever known, everyone you have ever loved was born on that pale blue dot.  There was another picture taken next to Saturn, of that Pale Blue Dot, possibly more contrasting of a different idea, that all of what we know is on the Earth, but we  know very little at all of everything in the Universe.

I look at the transformer outside my window attached to the telephone pole and light standard framed by the deep blue sky.  Beauty after a fashion.

Birth of a Nation

The war started back when the iPad that I am writing this on was cutting edge technology.  That was four and a half years ago.  The roots began in the end of colonial times, as it seems many conflicts today do.  One hundred years ago in the early stages of the Great War, the colonial powers were engaging in an all out struggle.  The Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, the two empires on decline threw in with the upstart late comer German Empire to fight it out with the largest empires and their smaller satellite empires, the Russian Empire, the French Empire and the British Empire, with the Dutch Empire and Belgian Empires.  The burgeoning American Empire, chose to sit it out at first as it was completing its digestion of the remains of the Spanish Empire.  

Germany's gamble was that it could take away from the larger empires, while their allies were hoping to regain some of the glory of the past.  When the war ended empires were left dead in the history books and the great powers were sullied by deceit and betrayal.  The Austro-Hungarian empire was dissolved and the Ottoman Empire devoured.  Germany was defeated, but so was Russia, one from without and the other from within.  

The Middle East, was betrayed.  Promises of autonomy were ignored and they were cut up and added to the two greatest empires.  Cut up, by bureaucrats who never walked the ground; tribes and peoples were divided in two, sometimes into threes and fours and the modern troubled nations of the area were first conceived, not born mind you, just conceived.  Think how much bloodshed over the last century was caused by the willy-nilly arbitrary lines on a map.  If they had given control to the ethnic peoples.

Five years ago before the start of the Arab Spring trouble was brewing.  Crushing unemployment and no social safety net were pushing people to desperation.  One man, a graduate of university, forced to sell fruit on the streets on Tunis, to get enough money to feed his family one day bought Gasoline instead of fruit and set himself on fire.  That was the signal that the people had had enough.  The squalor of the people set beside the wealth of the rulers, dictators and Life long Presidents.  The people protested, the people rioted and the rulers blinked.  The country of Tunisia fell and the leaders fled.  And the oppressed people of the Islamic world sat up and took notice and took to the streets of the oppressive regimes.  Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Syria, countries with more than a 'y' in common in their names.  They were all lead by oppressive regimes, who used their military against their own people.

The problem with the Mid East is of course, oil.  But not every oppressive regime in the Middle East, has oil and those that do there is a large variance between the amount they supply.  Yemen and Syria have none and Libya and Egypt have only a little and the ones at have a lot had a strong grip on their people.  Egypt also has one of the largest populations in the area and a few important strategic resources to e world's economy, for example, the Suez Canal.  The international pressure as well as the internal pressures caused Egypt to fold to the pressure of its protesters, but in the years following its collapse has anything really changed?

Libya was different, there was armed conflict.  The government army was relatively well equipped and the rebels poorly, but still the rebels gained some measure of control so much that the paltry oil reserves were threatened and the price of oil rose on world markets.  The west reacted by sending in their air forces and they aided the beleaguered rebels.  And after months of airstrikes and armed conflict the leadership of Libya collapsed and was overrun.

Yemen was also different.  No one talked about it, there was no oil and the land is resource empty.  It's people were forgotten and minor concessions were made to have democratic elections in the distant future, which has not happened yet, and likely never.

Syria was different again because the Syrian leadership saw what happened in Egypt when peaceful protests were allowed to happen. Bashar al-Assad, learned that if he was going to hold on to power he had to stop the people dead. He used soldiers and he used tanks to suppress protests.  First with their presence but soon with force.  It was close at the start, some of the soldiers refused to fire on the people, their people, but that was quickly solved.

There were news reports, one stated that an army unit was ordered fire upon the protesters in one town and they refused.  The general in command solved this by ordering another unit to fire upon the unit that refused to shoot the unarmed protesters.  The very next day, a different unit was ordered to shoot the protesters in that town because the previous day there were soldiers shot in the town.  Never mind that the soldiers who were shot the previous day were shot by their own soldiers.  That was in the early days of the civil war.

the civil war was characterized by poorly armed civilians fighting well armed soldiers and leaders were detached and had lavish vacations and posted inane comments on social media proving that they were completely detached from the reality of their country.  The army had jets and they fired missiles at their mostly poor unarmed civilian combatants until they realized that there was. nothing that their opponents had that could touch them and began to fly helicopters to drop barrels of explosives in the neighborhoods of the rebels.  The rebels did not have anything that could touch the helicopters and barrel bombs were cheaper than missiles.  Most of all, barrel bombs kill civilians just as good as missiles.  

The international communities were not eager to join the war, there is no oil in Syria.  The mishandled Afghanistan conflict was wrapping up and the unjust war and occupation in Iraq was over.  Most of all one of the security Council Members in the UN with full veto powers was Syria's ally and supplied the army with weapons.  The most that western nations were able to give the rebels were small arms like handguns and light machine guns and those in limited quantities. 

The refugees poured over the boarders, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and even war torn anarchy filled Iraq was seen as a safer place than Syria.  Syria almost made a mistake, they fired shots on the fleeing people, bombarded the fleeing people, the attacked them inside Turkey.  Turkey is a member of NATO, if the will to protect the people of Syria was present, the attack could have been treated as aggression and the conflict could have been shorter and less atrocious.  But Syria realized its mistake and apologized.  Besides which, Syria has no oil and people think it is a shame that people are dying, but they are just Muslims.  They are not Christians, they are not white and they are not us.  

Individuals migrated to Syria, because there was a need and because the cause was just.  Canadians left to fight for the people just as Canadians have been doing since before the Spanish Civil War.  They fought the oppressors and doctors went to treat the injured, as the government began killing wounded patients, as they were obviously rebels, children and elderly alike.  Hospitals were bombed.  Doctors targeted and killed.

The atrocities began to grow, but right from the start it was captured on iPhones and Blackberries and other recording devices and broadcast to the world at large.  People protested, and sanctions were suggested but world binding resolutions were vetoed by Russia, the country that sold Syria, the bombs and the missiles.  Nations gave the rebels bullets and guns, but nothing larger, no tanks, no bombs, nothing that equalized their position against a full trained and equipped army.  

Libya sold oil to Europe and has a million barrels under the ground, a bit player all told on the world scene.  But that is enough to launch Air Raids and drop bombs.  Egypt has more than Libya and it has the Suez Canal, the canal that all the old flows through.  International pressure pushed change there.  Bahrain sold all its oil to America, so it was ignored.  Yemen has nothing, not even a lot of people, also ignored.  Syria has people and history and almost no oil, so people are not that willing to help them.  Barrel bombs were dropped on residential neighbourhoods and the world looked on.  They said words, but only words.  People flowed out of the country.  Syria was abandoned, by history and in this war.

The people were desperate.  And they were punished.  Punished harshly.  The only people to come to their aid were outlawed terrorist organizations.  Which displeased the Western Nation heads.  But what is the difference between a Western Nation that does not give you help and a Western Nation that won't help you because you are accepting help from people that they hate?  Nothing.  

When the Ottoman Empire was divided, there was a choice made, whether to line the old colonial pockets and to break the land up among its peoples and the powers chose themselves, arbitrary lines in the sand that divided the people.  The choice was remade, to follow the rules of the UN, set up after the second World War, to keep power among that era's rulers, or to break a broken system where one greedy nation could hold human dignity hostage.  Not for the first time.  The United States, China, England, France and Russia, all at one time stood against the entire world, vetoing world consensus.  

The desperate people, pounded by jet planes and barrel bombs, tanks and RPG toting professional armies supplied with the very best, turned to religion and armed themselves with desperation.  And they attacked.  They fought for survival, with all the aid they could get, from Anti-Western terrorists.  As the Mujahideen rose from their own ashes from the fight with The USSR in the eighties to be come al-Qaeda, the desperate civilians rose to become ISIS.  We in the West fear them.  They kill everyone that does not side with them.  They kill all who are not with them.  They struck first for survival, but the Fundamentalism that they were forged in has become the purpose that they strive for.  That they succeed tells them that God is on their side and they are just, but it was not God that made them; it was us.  We ignored them and sought the safety of money, of not being them.  We did it to them this generation, the last generation and the two before that one too.  

We did not give them guns and point them at people who they could kill, we ignored them.  Not helping people is just as good as giving them to our enemies.

When the United States gave military aid to the Mujahideen through the back channels of one proxy war to another, they successfully propped up the Afghanistan nation against the Russians.  Oliver North dealt with the unknown Osama bin Ladin feeding them military hardware.  But then stopped when the Russians left.  They ignored the nation.  They ignored the people.  Landlocked and crippled, left to drug lords extracting the wealth of a nation from its people, we let them.  We acted surprised when 9/11 occurred.  A people  left forgotten for fifteen years, hit back.  We never learned from our failures.  We never learned that people, oppressed people, desperate people can kill us.  We never learned that a penny of aid is worth a dollar of weapons in the long run.  We never learned that we could have prevented 9/11 by investing in Afghanistan.  We proved that we have not learned by ignoring oppression in Syria.  The West is as much the Birth Father of ISIS as the hinterlands of Syria and the Syrian Regime is its mother.

Have we learned?

Phrase bombs, love and sex.

From another age…

I have easily a dozen blog posts that I have nearly finished, but rather than finish them I sit here starting something new, because I have something on my mind, several things and maybe I will post them all here, now.

The toughest part of crushes, amongst the great number of horrible things to do with crushes is when all the beans line up, intellectual, states of singleness, freedom of movement, timing and all that is the lack of mutual attraction.  I wish it were not the story of my life, but it is.  I don't get crushes on attached people very option and I become intellectually attracted to people, so I assume that there is that in common.  All the may be lacking is timing and mutual attraction.  I tend to have poor timing, getting crushes on women who are just getting out of relationships and who may be just getting in to relationships, but mostly it is that the woman thinks of me as only a friend, which implies lack of attraction.  It is a mental thing mostly, but it can make one self conscious of their appearance.

Currently I have the ends of a tattered crush with a woman who I feel is suffering from two of the above, poor timing and lack of attraction.  Of the two, I have noticed that strong attraction overrules poor timing and good timing never over rules good timing.

Cont.

Three weeks later

What is the nature of these things that three weeks leaves me in a completely a different place and the same place.  In three weeks I have walked around at random to find myself in the same place and a different place.  I knew that she did not want to talk to me outside of work for a while but I could not admit to it. Because I did not understand why.  I still don't.  Maybe it is because when I see her and talk to her i see similarities and when she does the same she sees differences.  Maybe that is all that there is, maybe.  Maybe she knows that it won't work, or that the above was essentially true, bad timing and no attraction.  Maybe.

I wrote points out to the things that I wanted to talk about, I read them and I understand my short hand, I know what I wanted to talk about nearly a month ago, I can continue, maybe with more insight.

Sex, what is it.  Then, it was the ultimate expression of social interaction.  Now it is this thing do when people talk and know each other really well and want to spend more time with them and it is an expression of that closeness.  And it is also a physical interaction that two people do to relieve tension especially when they are attracted mutually.  It is also a getting to know you method.  In all of them it is a social interaction and it is something people do.  I may not be people any more, if I ever was.  I mean I might never have sex again and I need to let this fact go, if I am going to continue. 

My problem is that I really only want to Make Love, the sex that occurs when you have all the time in the world to have sex with someone that you love.  But all the sex that I can get are Fucks, sex with strangers, or sex without social interactions.  Sex with prostitutes.  Raping.  I would never rape, ever, but it feels like that is they only way that I will get to interact with people, sexually, who I love.  I will never rape.  The day I rape, is the day I die, —not if I find out that I am going to die, but the reason why I die.  I could never intentionally hurt someone.  But it feels like if I want to be with someone that I like, that is the boundary that I would have to cross.

My present direction is to try to be fulfilled by just being friends.  Because while sex is the ultimate social happiness, everyone tells me this as they then tell me that it is not; they say that it is not true with words and then they lose focus or glaze over, they talk about how wonderful it last was.  But I will focus back on relationships of the friendship level, again.  Because it is old hat.  I used to be only just friends.  I would miss the chances to expand upon things, or I would ignore them because they were friends.  It does not matter though, maybe that is the best I can be to another person, a friend.  Friends are great.  They do anything for each other.  They will help you bury bodies if you are close enough.  They will do things for you because they love you for being you.  The best lovers are made from the best friends, but friends do not make lovers.  The best lovers become best friends more like.  Who knows.  

The theory goes that if you seek only friendship, you will find love, but in the last twenty years, I have only had sex with one friend and had opportunity only one other maybe.  In practice, friends can only be friends.

Next subject, phrase bombs.  When I was in Grade 9 PE class the teacher let us know that he had become a father the night before, during our Sex Ed class.  One of the boys pipped up that if he did not get an A he was going to seeker out one day and break her heart.  Everyone laughed, including the teacher.  Years later when I was with a friend, who was pregnate, with her boyfriend and his two friends, the announced that it was a girl, so I announced, to get a laugh that one day I was going to break her heart.  No one laughed.

Phrase bombs are one of the things I used to do, because I did not understand social interactions at all and desperately wanted to fit in and get a laugh.  Laughs are things that people do when you you do good.  It is an acclaim that I was not used to, unless people were laughing at me, but not to acclaim but because I failed in some way.  It is about the Autism.  You see a social situation and you hear a phrase that was used to get social acceptance and you save it away for future use.  Then you use it to fake social competency.  They are bombs because they are a condensed package of meanings that always hurt when ever they are used usually the person using them.  

There was this movie in the Nineties I think it was called, Chasing Amy.  There was a phrase used by my friend from that movie to suggest the ultimate virility of masculinity, effectively, "You know that you are a real man when you can make a lesbian straight."  The problem with Hollywood is that it delivers these lines without reality interacting with people and people recieveing social acclaim within its context.  Most of the ways that I interact with people at the times came from snippets of television and movies.  The horrors.  And that was how I destroyed my friendship with MagicEyes.  You know that you are a real man when you turn a lesbian straight.  And the reverse, you know that you are a failure as a man when you date a straight woman and turn her into a lesbian.  I texted this to a friend, because I was sad, because I was I love with MagicEyes and her own personal journey was away from men, not because of me, or inspite of me, but just was.  I was sad because yet again I was I love with someone who would not love me back that way.  I texted it to my friend, because I was hurting and wanted to hurt myself more, to demasculate myself in their eyes.  So I sent my friend that text.  Only I didn't.  I sent it to MagicEyes by accident.  And I ended our friendship, only I didn't, because she was my friend and I was not her friend; I was in love with her.

Phrase bombs, they are ways of learning to interact with people, but they seem to explode in my face all the time.

One step forward, one to the side and three back over the brink

Of the nature of Enlightenment.

I feel that I am closer now.  I had a talk last week with the Wise Woman of the Mountain.  And she explained things to me.  

She explained to me that I don't have to do things for people for them to want to be around me.  She explained that I do things for people and that is just as bonus.  Afterwards I felt incredibly empowered.  I WAS a new person.  A weeks time has not eroded that feeling.  But a weeks time has not lifted my loneliness and I feel like I want to sell myself short to end my loneliness.  But I haven't yet done so.  Knowing that I am worth more than the sum of my talents is one thing, but accepting it will be difficult.

The thing is, I accept that OTHER people do not need to do things for me, so it is really a question of self esteem.  When the WMW told me that I don't need to do things for people, my self esteem did go up and it has stayed up, but it needs to go up more.  

I define myself and my self worth by being in a relationship and my self esteem and self confidence is never higher when I am in one, but means I am dependent on the relationship.  I suspect that a lot of people are too.  A psychiatrist once told me that happy drugs are a crutch that allow depressed people to do things successfully and accomplish things so that when they don't have the drugs they can see that they can do things successfully.  Perhaps, some people with the relationship drug see themselves as more than e relationship and can thrive without it.  I suspect that a lot of people on happy drugs make the connection to the drugs and not to the successes; some people would say that they were successful because of the drugs and only because of the drugs.

Happy drugs are a lie though, they cause nasty side effects that trigger the patient into realizing that they are working and if they are working they must be happier and so they are, so dependency on these drugs is utterly false.  However, relationships are not.  There are endorphins and there may be sex, there is euphoria and there may be orgasms.  All completely natural.  all very real.  So when they end, there is a real loss.  Perhaps it all ends slowly, the loss of one or another of the things that make it all good.  Perhaps you end it because your defined self esteem is great.  Then good, but if it ends and you were dependent on it, then it sucks.

That was two weeks ago.

I have learned since then I have to change.  It feels like I have to change everything.  And in the midst of this change I don't know what is left of me.  I need to change how I relate to people, how I talk to them.  I need to quash my sexual obsessions as they turn people away from me.  I need to turn off my intensity, even though I don't understand how or why I am intense, because I have been told that it makes me creepy and burns people, so they stay away from me.  

I understand how to turn off the sexual obsessions, I just have to turn them down and tune them out, but the intensity is different.  It is core to who I am, I don't know where it is where it starts or ends.  Excising it might mean destroying ME.  I don't know what it is that is intense.  Is it how I look at people?  Do I stare at my feet when I talk to people?  Or do I just not make eye contact?  Is it something else that makes me intense?

There are changes to make.  That I know that there are changes to be made and that I have worth am I one more step towards enlightenment?

Alone

Sometimes I wake up and realize that there is nothing in my life that I enjoy that is all mine.  The are things that I enjoy, but they are mine to enjoy while they want to be there.  I am thinking of my friend's children.  Should I live my life for them?  The is nothing that gives me enjoyment here in Smallville.  I try to find love and it feels that it is impossible.  I have friends but lately it feels that things are one way—it probably is not, likely it is just that they are unhappy too.  Or that they need things from me.  They need a massage, they need me to care.

I feel like I am dying inside again.  The combination of feeling unattractive and used.  One friend wants me to change into what she wants me to be, she changed so I should too.  I love my friends, love means friendship, friendship means love.  But I feel that things are sinking out of control on some fronts.  Maybe I want something that my friends can't give me.  Maybe what I want does not exist.  I want to curl up in a ball and be held.  I want to have sex, but I don't have to.  I want to feel like my love is returned.  I would like to feel my love returned, maybe with a little extra.

I want to reach out and touch someone's mind and feel them touching me right back and then I want time to end or to die so that it will never end.

I know that my friends love me back, but sometimes I wish that I was not left feeling alone.  Maybe that is just the world is for me, alone.

Crushes

The nature of crushes is really horrible.  It is the act of being in love with someone that will never love you.  Well, there is a chance that they will love you back, but if they love you back it is no longer a Crush.  I think it is called a Crush because when you are hit by one you are left in a crumpled state and when you part ways you are crumpled for a very long time.  When you get dumped you feel obliterated, but at least you have all the time before filled with happiness.  Crushes are different.  Very few of the benefits and less destructiveness at the end, for some people.  

I genuinely believe that I can't have a normal relationship.  I do believe that I can have relationships, but not the way that other people have them.  I can't meet and have sex with someone on the same night, on the same week or really within a month.  I can't decide that I will have sex with someone right upon meeting them. It seems that that is how normal people do things.  The getting to know each other happens after they have sex.  

To me, that seems backwards.  I think you should get to know someone, spend a few nights talking through the night.  If you don't hate each other after that, you keep going, if you like each other then you kiss, and when I say kiss, I mean spend time kissing.  When was the last time that you spent an hour just kissing?  When was the last time that your lips were swollen from kissing?  

Making love, having sex, fucking, used to be reserved for people that you wanted to spend the rest of your life with because making love risked a permanent change to your life and having sex with no thought changed everyone's lives with pregnancy.  People don't have to worry about pregnancy anymore, we can stop it before it happens and if it begins we can stop it still, but that does not mean that it should be approached lightly.  

Maybe it is because I can't do the modern relationship dance that I suffer from crushes so often and for so long.  Have women decided that I was not interested, or that my overtures of conversation mean that I want to be just friends, I don't know.  Most likely, I become friends with people, get to know them and then fall in love with them and they have no interest.  Sometimes, an aquaintence tells me, I meet them and become their friend and friends is all I ever will be, because I have entered the friend zone.  I also feel that it might just be that I am unattractive to women or just the ones I like.  It is really hard to tell.

When I have a crush one someone it changes me permanently.  If my life is described as a house with my love affairs and my crushes taking up space in the house, some of the crushes have bigger rooms than my love affairs and each of them is remembered.  I just got over my last love affair; it took four years to get over her while it took eight years to get over one of my crushes.  I can list them, in order, because I remember them all.  Some of them have floors in my house, some have a shelf, but they are all a permanent part of my life.

Sarah, India, Anne-Marie, Laurisa, Katarina, Anna, BlackCat, OldFriend, Kumuthiny, Sheryl, Sangita, Seven, Belarus (which is a bit hard to admit because we just chatted online), MagicEyes and now SuperGirl.  Hyun and MPTR .  I have to put them in too because I loved them too and they returned my love for them.  

I think a few of the crushes loved me back, but not enough to be in a relationship with me.  

It is taking me a long time to write this.  I am reminiscing too much and dwelling on my past mistakes.  And I am distracted.  I don't want any more crushes, I want to turn them into something lasting and sustaining.  I have already wasted too much time on them.  And yet I seem to be wasting even more time.  

This weekend that I am writing this I realise that I can't make someone love me and telling someone that I love them will not make them love me.    I know that love is something that anyone can feel for anyone given time, but they have to be willing.  Just as I can't force myself to fall in love with someone who I intellectually know is a good match on paper, but who I have not been able to overcome my shyness or a deficit of socialization.  I can't jump start a relationship with sex and I can't force someone to alter the way they think of me.  

I hate being me.