| Government Health Warning I just got the UK Government 'What to do in an emergency' booklet which was a bit of a 'Duh!' read. And I was just wondering what most people think of it, I mean I know we live in much more cynical times and I was reminded of a GMTV news feature not that long after 9/11 about a supposed threat (supplied by US intelligence) to one of our UK airports from terrorists. This report was done in a mock old TV news style, and so we were being told without directly saying so, that the media believed we were being manipulated by the US intelligence. I remember GMTV presenter Eamonn Holmes saying to the reporter in a jokey way 'Could he see any terrorists with rocket launchers around the place'. As I watched this programme I found this a strange experience, I didn't expect such obvious contempt for a news item to be expressed by the UK media and particularly from GMTV!!!.......Times had indeed changed. As a bit of an armchair CTer I believed that 9/11 had a conspiratorial aspect mainly based on the convenient result - A nice little neverending war against terrorism. For most people that's a cynical step too far... However a lot of people believe that although 9/11 was pure terrorism, it has been opportunistically used for nefarious purposes. Despite these different levels of cynicism, the essential question for all of us is - How much at danger of terrorism are we now ? My guess is that we are pretty much the same amount of risk as before 9/11, but it's only a guess and is based on my gut feeling that there was something dodgy about 9/11. Back in the period shortly after 9/11 there were incidents in the U.S. of anthrax being posted to people and at the time I kept on thinking... Why now ? I mean they could have been doing this at any time before 9/11, And also, there was talk of deadly stuff being put in the water supply, wiping out thousands. And this too could have been done at any period in the latter part of the last century. Why haven't they done so ? It would be dead easy to do, in comparison to 9/11. Is there some kind of terrorist etiquette going on here? The ironic thing is that there maybe some kind of etiquette, but of the kind - Don't throw too big a stick at the grizzly bear or it might really get angry ! (Like it did with 9/11. That gory visual spectacle, like a mini apocalypse, which just missed ushering in on time the superstitious entrance into the new millenium.) And so they don't put something in the water and as a rule it's bombs of limited size. Since 9/11 we've had pretty much no incidents of terrorism on Western ground and we are being told that it's due to the increased vigilance of our governments. But an increasing amount of people don't buy that, they simply don't trust the U.S. and to a lesser extent the UK government anymore and it's perception of the dangers facing us. So when this rather sheepish UK Government warning booklet popped through my door, I got the feeling that this was a kind of justification exercise here. Well there must be a real threat because we've gone to the trouble of sending you this, and also it reminds you to keep being scared because we've had nothing of late to make us scared. P.S. I'm a bit of 'They knew but they let it happen' 9/11 CTer and for most people the idea that someone from within a western democracy could have such casual disregard for the lives of all the people in the planes and the building is probably the reason why most people couldn't accept a conspiracy here. But I'm reminded of how in the last century U.S. soldiers were ordered to walk into the path of an atomic bomb to test it's effects and how syphilis was injected into Black Americans for' scientific' purposes. The higher up the rat race you go the more pawn-like we all become . |
| Government Health Warning - First Posted 20/8/04 |
| 'First hand accounts of Symptoms' Database - First Posted 14/10/04 |
| 'First hand account of symptoms' Database I was wondering if anybody out there in internet land with the right skills and attitudes had thought of initiating a website to collect first hand accounts of symptoms and experiences of illnesses, in order to shed light on the more intractible and rare conditions, or come to think of it the whole nature of illnesses themselves. In my personal life I have been generally interested in information that falls through the cracks, the kind of stuff that gets ignored, forgotten about or dismissed as trivial, irrelevant or bogus. This intellectual pursuit came into sharp and intensely personal focus when I became ill about 6 years ago and I found myself flung upon the mercy of the UK medical profession. My local GP had right from the start treated my condition as basically a fungal irritation of the skin. I was on the strongest drug for fungal conditions, but when I came off this medicine my condition deteriorated so fast I was rushed of to hospital and then into the domain of the consultant who eventually 'diagnosed' my condition and refused any fungal connection whatsoever, despite my GP having witnessed such. Anyway I don't wish to go on about that. I have heard plenty of similar tales and the reason why I've mentioned all this, is that in terms of our official medical histories, my experiences and others like it have dissappeared of the map, and that this is happening every day all across the world. I find the enormity of that thought truly daunting. What an appalling loss of knowledge! All those personal experiences and symptoms if collated and analysed could have shown unexpected patterns and connections have just been lost and only maybe haphazardly found through personal internet searches, I find the whole doctor / patient, doctor / consultant relationship deeply unsatisfying from the point of view of a good exchange of information. First of all there is a basic imbalanced power relationship going on here (which becomes more acute the higher you go up the medical hierarchy) and the doctor still won't like the patient challenging his diagnosis Then on a practical level GP's are rushed off their feet and are looking for the ABC's of the illness you might have and when they've got that fixed in their head, other info and symptoms they really don't have time to deal with get lumped into the convenient dumping ground known as 'Psychological symptoms', remember the denial of M.E. as a 'real condition' by the medical profession. To be fair to the GP, he is not a researcher and even if a GP is aware of some extra information, as in my case, he maybe wary of challenging the authority of his medical superiors. The key result of this poor doctor / patient relationship is that you, the patient, can become wary of telling the doctor things he doesn't want to hear. So a lot of people faced with this state of affairs stop the open flow of information and look elsewhere and all those experiences of alternative cures or failures just dissappears from your official medical history and so does all the statistical analysis of it that might have shed light on it too has gone as well. I decided to stress the symptoms aspect of the database idea in the news group posting because in the rarer illnesses a lot of diagnoses are very vague in the understanding of why they appear and what the disease actually is. So I thought if we minimalised the role of the medical labels and focused in on all the symptoms reported by people of their illnesses, no matter how subtle or insignificant they might be, it might enable us to see a clearer picture of what is going on. However I have also come to believe that when we fall ill we all do that in our unique ways. All our experiences before, during and after, all become important to the undestanding of the illness. And although we are each unique there are many similaries between us, and our own stories if told properly, might lead us to the clearest understanding into the whole nature of our illness. So a Symptoms / Biography Database would be a more correct title. Apart from shedding light on the less uuderstood illnesses a database of symptoms combined with a biography might act as a guide when faced with the multitude of treatments out there. Anybody who has found themselves outside the cozy security of official medical practice can find it hard to tell what is bogus or genuine or what is appropriate treatment or not. And we all know personally of, or have heard stories of one person's triumphant success story with one particular alternative treatment only to find that when we try it we blatantly fail. And after trying a good selection of these alternative therapies with all the financial costs and then hopes being dashed it's not hard to get disillusioned and give up. We begin to feel like failures and those success stories only make us feel more so. I imagine this Symptoms / Biography database would be one of those self evolving sites I've heard of driven by a carefully thought out questionnaire.Am I just dreaming here getting carried away on a flight of fancy or is this a good idea ? To see my own unique resolving of my own illness go to http://www.geocities.com/clivemcgee/dowsing.html and I hope that might not put anybody off what I hope is a good idea. I honestly don't believe that nobody else has thought of this and if they have, please let me know for I would be glad to recount my experiences to it. Maybe there are practical problems I haven't forseen. |
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| The Modern Paranormalist |