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gojira007 · 4 years

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Movie Meme

Took me a bit of time, but I was tagged by @bunnikkila to list my nine favorite movies, and since I can’t help but be ridiculously verbose about that very topic, you can see them all under the cut 8D

As for who I tag? Well, as always with the caveat that you are free to ignore if you don’t wanna, I’ll go with: @elistodragonwings @kaikaku @donnys-boy @robotnik-mun @sally-mun @fini-mun @werewolf-t33th @cviperfan and @wildwoodmage

and don’t worry, if you DO go for it, you don’t have to get as Extra as I did about it XD

9.)

Look, the meme is about Favorite Movies, not necessarily the BEST Movies, OK? And for the most part this list consists of films where that division is less meaningful in terms of how I evaluate the other movies on here. But in this specific case, “Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie”, which is ultimately not all that different from the “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ TV show it spun off from and thus not particularly impressive as a work of Cinema Qua Cinema, makes the cut primarily because it’s a movie I know so well and have enjoyed so often that I can practically recite the whole thing to you by rote; I quote it all the time in my day-to-day life, I think about it often when I need a little smile, and it’s also become my favorite tool for introducing newcomers to MST3K as a whole since it was designed with a slightly broader audience in mind than the more willfully-eclectic series. And given how much I love MST3K As A Whole, that’s an especially strong factor in its favor.

8.)

Looky looky, @bunnikkila, we (unsurprisingly) have a pick in common! I’m sure this is the one and only time THAT’S going to happen on this list. 8D

Y’know, nearly thirty years (and one fairly useless remake >_>) later, I think the thing that impresses me about “The Lion King” is just how much it is still able to grab me emotionally. Some of that is unquestionably tied up with how strongly I associate this movie with my family, all of whom it became very special to as a Shared Experience. But I also don’t know of a lot of people who haven’t had that same emotional experience with it, and that to me suggests there’s more going on here than just Nostalgia. The mixture of Shakesperean plotting with Disney’s signature strength of Character, for one thing, granting the movie’s story an Epic Scope that never forgets the emotional inner lives of its cast. The music for another, not only its instantly-iconic song-book but also its memorable score, armed with both Big Bombast and Gentle Sentiment. And the unforgettably gorgeous animation, rendering every last element of its world with believable naturalism and strongly-defined personality. All of it, together, makes for what I still personally consider the Crowning Achievement of the Disney Renaissance.

7.)

I think, if I had to name the thing I find most lacking in far too many modern Action Movies, it’s Clarity. They all tend to lard their plots up with a bunch of unnecessary contrivances and complications in hopes of making themselves appear more clever than they actually are, and all it usually does is just dilute the impact of the whole thing. “Mad Max: Fury Road”, by contrast, is all about Clarity. I could sum up literally its entire plot in a paragraph if I wanted, because it is basically One Big Chase Scene from start to finish, never really deviating from that structure for more than a few minutes at a time. And that, combined with its exceptionally well-crafted Action Sequences, means that the full weight of its visceral power hits you full force every time. But don’t be fooled; that simplicity is not to be mistaken for shallowness. Indeed, precisely by getting out of its own way, knowing exactly what it wants to do and why, “Fury Road” also delivers a story that is, in spite of what you might guess, genuinely subtle and smart. Every character is immediately unforgettable and compelling because their role in the story is so well-considered and their personalities all so stark. The world it crafts feels at once fascinatingly surreal and yet All Too Real at the same time because even its most Fantastic elements are ultimately just grotesque reflections of things the audience knows only too well. And most of all, it tells a story with real, meaningful Themes that are deeply woven into each of its individual elements, such that the whole thing is deeply satisfying emotionally, but also piercingly Relevant in all the best, most affecting ways.

6.)

Oh look, another pick I have in common with @bunnikkila! This must be the last one, right?

But yeah, this is just a legitimately great movie, at every level, in every way. Stylistically, it is one of the most radically inventive things to have ever been made in the world of Western Animated Movies, gleefully mixing together a vast array of Aesthetics and Techniques that are at once viscerally distinct and yet coherently connected, all rendered with a fantastic eye toward the world of Comic Book Visual Language that keeps finding new and extremely fun ways to play with that instantly-recognizable iconography. For that alone, I would call it one of the greatest triumphs of 21st century animation. But then, on top of that, the story it tells is one that is simultaneously Arch and self-aware, delivering some of the most fantastically hilarious punch-lines imaginable more than a few of which are at the expense of the very franchise it is working within...but also entirely earnest, sincere, and emotionally affecting. It is, at once, a movie that manages to be about The Idea Of Spider-Man in its totality while also being about just one kid coming to grips with who he is, what he can do, and what his life can be. I don’t know that I can remember the last time a movie so immediately and unmistakably marked itself as an Enduring Masterpiece, but “Into the Spider-Verse” absolutely pulled it off.

5.)

Ordinarily, I would cheat and give this slot to the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy in its totality. But somehow, the fact that this is about “FAVORITE” movies instead of just what we think the BEST one is compels me to narrow it down to just one. And if I had to pick just one, it would be the first of the three, “Fellowship of the Ring”. It’s not necessarily anything that the other two movies get wrong, either. All three of the LotR movies possess many of its keenest strengths, after all. For a starter, there’s the keen understanding of how best to adapt the source material without being enslaved to it; capturing many of its most iconic moments while cleverly tweaking elements to make them more cinematic, knowing what scenes to focus on for the sake of more clearly focusing the emotional through-lines of the story, and knowing what scenes, no matter how good on the page, ultimately don’t fit to the shape the adaptation has taken. There’s also its pitch-perfect casting, each and every actor doing a fantastic job of embodying the characters so well that even as your personal vision of them from the books may differ radically from what is on-screen, they nonetheless end up feeling Right for the part and a strong, compelling presence. And there’s the deft visual hand of director Peter Jackson, who knows exactly how to craft a Middle Earth that feels at once lived-in and real but also Fantastic and magical. “Fellowship”, for me at least, thus wins out mostly because it has the good luck of being adapted from the strongest of the three books, the point at which the narrative is at its most unified and thus has the strongest overall momentum. But also because so few movies have so swept me away with the sense of stepping into a world I have always dreamed of in my mind’s eye, and that’s the sort of thing that can only happen at the beginning of a journey.

4.)

Now here’s a movie that is literally sown in to my very being. It’s the last movie my mother saw in theaters before becoming a Mom. I grew up watching the “Real Ghostbusters” cartoon all the time and playing with the attendant toys; I had a “Ghostbusters” Birthday Party when I was, like, four years old. It has been my annual Halloween Tradition to get myself a big Cheese Pizza and watch this movie for about as long as I’ve had disposable income to myself. There is, quite literally, no point in my life where I don’t remember “Ghostbusters” being a fixture in it. And as a nice bonus? It is, legitimately, a Genuinely Great Movie. I realize that isn’t quite as universally agreed upon these days as it was even a few years ago (thanks, Literally The Worst Kind Of Virulently Misogynist Assholes lD; ), but I still feel pretty confident in saying this one really is That Good. I still find basically every one of its jokes hilarious; even now I could quote just about any one of them and get a laugh. I still find its central premise, What If Exorcism Was A Blue-Collar Business, a brilliant, almost subversively clever one that takes The Supernatural out of the realm of The Unknowable and into a world where even you, an ordinary person off the street, can in fact fight back against it. I still think it’s one of the all-time great examples of how to balance Tone in this sort of High Concept Genre Bender, by allowing The Story to be played relatively straight while allowing the comedy to flow naturally from the characters’ reactions to that story, allowing its Ghostly aspects to land as Genuinely Scary (or at least Worth Taking Seriously) without getting too Stern and Serious about it. And I still listen to that unforgettable Title Song all the time! So yeah, even if I could be more objective about it, “Ghostbusters” would almost certainly make this cut.

3.)

And so we come to the third and last pick I have in common with @bunnikkila, not coincidentally a movie that played a key role in solidifying our friendship, as bonding over our shared love of it was a big part of how we got to know each other on deviantART waaaay back in the day <3

By 2008, I really didn’t think it was possible for a movie or comic or TV show to really become “part” of me anymore, the way things like Sonic the Hedgehog or Marvel Super Heroes or Some Other Movie Character Who Might Be At The Top Of This List had. And then “WALL-E” came along and proved that to be completely, utterly wrong. I didn’t just love this movie, I was inspired by it, to a degree of strength and consistency that I’m still not entirely sure has yet been matched. And to be sure, some of that is undoubtedly because the movie had already basically won the war before I’d even bought my ticket; Adorable Robots In Love is something like My Platonic Storytelling Ideal, after all. But even setting that aside, “WALL-E” is a movie where even now I can’t help but be keenly aware, and gently awed, at the beauty of its craft; indeed, watching this movie in a theater did a lot to make me better understand why movies work on us the way they do, because I left that theater chewing so much on every last one of its elements. Its gorgeous animation, the way it conveys Character through Actions more so than language, the dream-like quality of its musical score (even as i type this i get teary thinking about certain motifs), the clear and meaningful way it builds its theme and story together so harmoniously, and the particular perspective it takes on our relationships with each other, with our environments, and with our own technology...all of it speaks to me deeply and profoundly, and it’s no coincidence that I have seen this movie more times in theaters than any other on this list (twelve times, for the record, and I still remember each and every time XD).

2.)

This one needs no personal qualifications, to my mind. Yes, I have some degree of nostalgic attachment to it for having seen it relatively young with my brothers and being deeply moved by it then, but it’s not at all like the kind of Nostalgia I have for “The Lion King”. “Princess Mononoke” is just flat-out, full-stop a complete Masterpiece, not just my personal pick for one of the single-best animated films ever made, but one of the best films period. It’s almost difficult for me to put into words how great this movie is, certainly in a way that hasn’t been repeated to death by thousands of other smarter people, because no one of its elements quite answers the question of why it is so great, to my mind. Yes, the animation is absolutely gorgeous with a design sensibility that brings Ancient Mythology to life so vividly that its influence can still be felt today (The Forest Spirit alone has been homaged all over the place). And yes, the music is hauntingly beautiful, at once capturing the gentle rhythm of nature but also the elegiac tone of Life Moving On. And yes, the story is an incredible mixture of the Broad Mythic Strokes of an Ancient Legend grounded in all too human Emotions and Ideas about the balance of nature, the full meaning and cost of Warfare, and perhaps most important of all, about how we determine Right and Wrong when everyone involved in a conflict is fighting simply for the right to survive. But all of those things add up together to something even greater than a simple sum, because each one isn’t just good in its own right but because each element so perfectly reinforces the other. And even having said all that? I really could just carry on singing this movie’s praises. Just...an absolute masterpiece, top to bottom.

1.)

I don’t imagine any of you are terribly surprised at this, right? I almost feel like it’d be redundant to explain my love for this movie, given how self-obvious I imagine it is to basically everyone who knows me Literally At All. But heck, I’ve rambled on this long, why not go all the way? Because the thing of it is, “Gojira” (to be clear, the original Japanese movie from 1954 rather than its American edit, “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” from 1956) doesn’t just top the list by being a Great Movie. Though to be clear, it really is. Flawless? No; there’s a reliance on puppetry that even for the time can be a bit chintzier than the movie can really afford, in particular. But brilliant, even so, a heart-wrenching example of Science Fiction Storytelling As Allegory, one that, in a rarity not just for its own genre but indeed for many movies in general, very meaningfully lingers on its deepest, darkest implications. Many a film critic has pointed it out, and it remains true: the stark black-and-white photography heightens the sense of Implacable Horror at the core of the story, and the way the central Melodrama, a tragic love triangle that carries with it many aspects of Class Conflict and Personal Desire VS. The Collective Good, ties back into the main story is truly beautiful in its elegance and emotional impact. Still, for me personally, it tops the list, now and always, because it is a movie that affirmed something for me, that the character I had fallen in love with as a child convincing his family to watch a monster movie with him on television to prove his seven-year-old bravery, really was as genuinely as powerful and meaningful a figure as I had always imagined him to be.

#movies #meme #gojira007

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f4liveblogarchives · 4 years

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Fantastic Four Vol. 1 Annual 1977

Tues Aug 27 2019 [12:59 AM] Wack'd: We open with Johnny testing an experimental racecar [12:59 AM] maxwellelvis: As he does [01:00 AM] Wack'd: Truly life is a hurricane here in...*checks notes*...Nassau County [01:00 AM] Wack'd: So Crystal and Lockjaw materialize in the backseat of the car and snatch Johnny away on some urgent business [01:01 AM] Wack'd: Poor Ted, who is the guy who designed this racecar! I feel bad for him despite the fact that he doesn't even rate a mention on Marvel Wiki [01:01 AM] KarkatTheDalek: That's another reason to feel bad for him, I think [01:02 AM] KarkatTheDalek: What must it be like to be a near complete non-entity... [01:02 AM] Wack'd: Marv Wolfman has apparently decided that Lockjaw's bark sounds like "wurf" and therefore his teleportation is called "wurfing". I agree with both these decisions [01:02 AM] KarkatTheDalek: That's amazing [01:03 AM] KarkatTheDalek: Who needs *BAMF* when you have wurf [01:03 AM] Bocaj: Amaze [01:03 AM] Wack'd: So the Great Refuge has been conquered! Again! Every goddamn week, with these people [01:03 AM] Wack'd: Sure

[01:04 AM] maxwellelvis: Is that one of the yetis? [01:04 AM] Wack'd: I...don't think so? I hope not [01:05 AM] Wack'd: He's a one-off villain from the Inhumans book [01:05 AM] Wack'd: He never appears again after this [01:05 AM] Wack'd: Johnny blows up his gun but he has a force field, which is very good [01:06 AM] Wack'd: Also apparently Crystal can now call down lightning from the sky like she's Storm or something [01:06 AM] Wack'd: Also tornadoes! She has definitely been confused for Storm [01:06 AM] Bocaj: tornadoes is just air [01:06 AM] Wack'd: Not that this does any good. It's a really good force field you guys [01:07 AM] Wack'd: Honestly, like. He would have to just sit in there forever, I think? Not really conducive to ruling a city. [01:07 AM] Wack'd: Maybe he can move the force field around, I dunno [01:08 AM] maxwellelvis: Somebody get some club soda! [01:08 AM] Wack'd: Meanwhile in Hollywood a Fantastic Four movie is being made. It is going poorly [01:09 AM] Wack'd: Sue is irritated that the actress playing her looks nothing like her and is wearing a low-cut bathing suit. Ben is irritated he's been replaced by a giant robot [01:09 AM] Wack'd: Reed is irritated Johnny's been written out because the effects are too expensive [01:10 AM] maxwellelvis: Somewhere, Jessica Alba and Carl Ciarfalio feel insulted. So does HERBIE. And none are sure why. [01:10 AM] Wack'd: And in case you're wondering the Fantastic Four cartoon series that couldn't get the rights to Johnny because they were tangled up in a movie deal had entered production at roughly this time [01:10 AM] maxwellelvis: Spooky [01:10 AM] Wack'd: Or, you know [01:10 AM] Wack'd: People at Marvel knew what was up [01:11 AM] Wack'd: Seems more likely than precognition [01:11 AM] Wack'd: Why do I feel like this guy is a parody of someone specific?

[01:12 AM] maxwellelvis: Dino. [01:12 AM] maxwellelvis: That's who. [01:13 AM] Wack'd: ...from The Flintstones? [01:13 AM] maxwellelvis: The robot, the accent, the emphasis on gimmicks [01:13 AM] maxwellelvis: DeLaurentiis. [01:14 AM] Wack'd: Oooooh [01:14 AM] Wack'd: Brainfart [01:14 AM] maxwellelvis: and of course, the glasses [01:14 AM] Wack'd: I know of him by vague reputation but was unaware of his...peculiarities [01:15 AM] maxwellelvis: The onion smell, I thought was a reference to SenSurround, but I don't know if he had anything to do with *Earthquake!* [01:16 AM] maxwellelvis: But he was an odd man. [01:16 AM] Wack'd: Anyway the giant Thing robot goes berserk. Who could've seen this coming [01:17 AM] Wack'd: Oh hey at least one person can be proven to have liked The Gong Show 😛

[01:18 AM] maxwellelvis: The emphasis on spectacle that the robot provides sounds just like him. As does cutting Johnny from the movie entirely to save on expenses. This is the guy who had a big argument with Sam Raimi over how many explosions should be in the climatic battle in Army of Darkness, after all. [01:18 AM] maxwellelvis: That caricature of Jamie Farr is kinder to him than real life ever was. [01:19 AM] Wack'd: He was kind of transphobic so I'm okay with this [01:20 AM] Wack'd: Ben throws a gong through the robot's neck, decapitating it [01:20 AM] Wack'd: I did not see The Gong Show being plot-relevant but here we are [01:21 AM] maxwellelvis: The Gong Show was probably taped, but I'm pretty sure that's gonna make the final cut anyways. [01:22 AM] maxwellelvis: If anyone has the connections to get the Four to sign off on that, it's Chuck Barris. [01:22 AM] Wack'd: They do keep it in the show [01:22 AM] Wack'd: It gets a 6 [01:22 AM] maxwellelvis: Heh [01:22 AM] maxwellelvis: That's good. [01:24 AM] Wack'd: So Johnny, Crystal, and Lockjaw come back and wurf Ben back to the Great Refuge [01:24 AM] Wack'd: And also stopped to pick up Reed and Sue off-panel [01:25 AM] maxwellelvis: Probably because Ben would have the funniest reaction. I'm getting the feeling this Annual is focusing on humor. [01:25 AM] Wack'd: Well, that bit was [01:25 AM] Wack'd: Ben mostly just grumbles that they ruined his chances of a regular gig [01:26 AM] maxwellelvis: I could see Ben as the new Unknown Comic, honestly. [01:26 AM] Wack'd: So uh apparently a buncha stuff happened in the Inhumans book [01:26 AM] Wack'd: The Great Refuge was destroyed and the Royal Family retreated to space [01:26 AM] Wack'd: Thraxon tried to organize a rebuilding effort but Pietro accused him of trying to usurp Black Bolt and got real mad [01:26 AM] maxwellelvis: Did they finally build Attilan yet? [01:27 AM] Wack'd: It's just what the Great Refuge is called apparently [01:27 AM] maxwellelvis: Huh. [01:27 AM] Wack'd: So anyway Thraxon points out that Pietro is not Inhuman and this gets all the other Inhumans sans Crystal to turn on him [01:28 AM] Wack'd: The Inhuman Royal Family returned and Thraxon kicked all their asses [01:29 AM] Wack'd: We're spending a lot of page time on what's frankly kinda a foregone conclusion, honestly. I'm skipping over a lot of fight scenes that impact literally nothing [01:31 AM] Wack'd: The seldom-seen little sibling of "Sue tries to do something awesome and gets her ass kicked", "Sue does something awesome and literally falls unconscious from the strain"

[01:31 AM] Wack'd: Apparently Thraxon expanded his force field over the whole city. So that's his game [01:32 AM] Wack'd: But not anymore [01:32 AM] Wack'd: Another part of Thraxon's plan is to literally strap the Royal Family and Pietro to a rocket and shoot them into space [01:33 AM] Wack'd: You know, the place they just came back from [01:33 AM] Wack'd: Sure [01:33 AM] maxwellelvis: At least this time she was just faint for a moment and not out for the rest of the fight. [01:34 AM] Wack'd: So fortunately Thraxton loses his powers because the person who gave them to him, "the Dreaded One", has deserted him [01:34 AM] Wack'd: For some reason [01:35 AM] Wack'd: The Four take their own rocket and follow the Inhuman rocket and-- [01:35 AM] Wack'd: C'mon I just made a Mystery Science Theater 3000 joke

[01:36 AM] Wack'd: It's weird realizing only this year do the Four suddenly exist in a world containing Star Wars

[01:38 AM] Wack'd: fuck ooooooooff

[01:41 AM] Wack'd: I'll save you the trouble--a Nova villain who menaced the Four and the Inhumans enough to make it into two issues of the Fantastic Four: Foes miniseries. Also fought the New Warriors and Night Thrasher. Last seen in a Howling Commandos arc from 2016

[01:42 AM] maxwellelvis: He's terribly mysterious [01:43 AM] Wack'd: Character shilling! Also apparently Aaron's staff did eat the staffs of Egyptians what were also turned into snakes. Did not learn this in Hebrew school

[01:44 AM] maxwellelvis: What were you taught? [01:45 AM] Wack'd: Moses turns his staff into a snake to prove God is real but Pharaoh writes it off as a stupid trick [01:46 AM] Wack'd: Presumably because we as kids would be a bit baffled by the idea that all other Gods are fake but also Egyptians had real magic on hand [01:46 AM] Wack'd: It is indeed a bit of a puzzlement [01:46 AM] maxwellelvis: Yeah, the version I'm aware of had the Pharaoh bring in his best magicians to show he's not impressed, but Moses is the one who shows that the other is doing a cheap trick, because his snake is bigger and kills the other two. [01:47 AM] maxwellelvis: Prince of Egypt makes it into a big smoke-and-mirrors routine. [01:47 AM] maxwellelvis: Literally. [01:47 AM] Wack'd: There's no, uh. Rationale in the Bible? [01:47 AM] Wack'd: It's literally just "some other Egyptians turned up and turned their staffs into snakes also, and then Aaron's snake ate them" [01:48 AM] Wack'd: No big reveal or anything [01:51 AM] Wack'd: So anyway this nameless extra from Exodus is exiled for his failure and finds a magic amulet that gives him superpowers and the ability to live forever [01:52 AM] Wack'd: And now he wants to harness Black Bolt's power to hypnotize all of Earth. Somehow. [01:53 AM] maxwellelvis: That's not how his power works. His voice isn't hypnotic, it blows stuff to smitheroons. [01:53 AM] Wack'd: He basically wants to use Black Bolt as a battery to power his hypnosis [01:53 AM] maxwellelvis: Ahh [01:55 AM] Wack'd: Anyway they scuffle for a while before Sphinx gets nervous he might actually get his ass kicked and throws them all out the airlock [01:55 AM] Wack'd: Lockjaw has meanwhile freed the Inhumans. He could've done this at any time probably but okay [01:57 AM] Wack'd: Look dude, sure you manage to miraculously crawl your way to the 21st century, but you still don't even have 100 appearances. Godly power only means something if you have popularity power to back it up

[01:58 AM] Wack'd: ...is this a thing Black Bolt can do? I feel like the answer is "no"

[01:59 AM] Wack'd: Anyway the day is saved by...Black Bolt [01:59 AM] Wack'd: Not much of an Fantastic Four annual [02:00 AM] Wack'd: Sphinx is blasted into space and then everyone goes home [02:00 AM] Wack'd: The end [02:00 AM] maxwellelvis: SPHINX!

#1978 #Marv Wolfman #Keith Pollard #Bob Hall #The Main Book

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your-dietician · 3 years

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Dr. Steven Edelman on Hypoglycemia + Glucagon – Diabetes Daily

New Post has been published on https://depression-md.com/dr-steven-edelman-on-hypoglycemia-glucagon-diabetes-daily/

Dr. Steven Edelman on Hypoglycemia + Glucagon – Diabetes Daily

This content originally appeared on Beyond Type 1. Republished with permission.

By Alexi Melvin

Dr. Steve Edelman, MD, is a diabetes specialist as well as the Founder of Taking Control of Your Diabetes (TCOYD) — an organization focused on empowering those with diabetes and encouraging them to “take a more active role managing their diabetes, and being self-advocates.”

Dr. Edelman recently took the time to chat with Beyond Type 1 about the importance of glucagon, among other key issues around hypoglycemia.

BT1: Thanks so much for speaking with us today Dr. Edelman — to start, can you talk about your personal background with type 1 diabetes?

Dr. Edelman: When I turned 15, I came down with all the drastic signs and symptoms and was diagnosed with type 1. 1970, they really were in the dark ages. So, my doctor put me on one shot of insulin and regular in the morning and we had urine testing and that was it. Could you imagine being on regular insulin just with breakfast?

And then eventually when I was an undergrad at UCLA, I ran into some really good diabetes doctors and they got me on the right track, but I did have really poor control for a long time. I didn’t really realize the importance of it. Unfortunately, as a result, I do have complications, but the good news is they’re stable.

What inspired you to create TCOYD?

It dawned on me that the education to people with diabetes was really quite lacking way back to 1995. I went to the Joslin clinic for my training. I went to UCSC to do clinical research, and I realized, all of the education was just going to healthcare professionals.

Not that it wasn’t good, but that’s the only direction it was going. I decided to put on a conference for people with diabetes at the San Diego convention center in September of 1995 and that was the beginning of TCOYD. And I was just going to do one conference here. I had two young kids and so I was just going to do it once a year. And that was a lot of work. But the feedback was so powerful, and people were, it’s a great phrase, so thirsty for information that I just said, “you can’t just stop at one a year” and then slowly spread. And then we started putting them on around the United States.

I felt that it was still important to educate healthcare professionals and about 15 years ago I kind of gave up on healthcare professionals. They were really stuck in the mud, really hard to change their practice habits, so that’s why I focused on patients. Then about 15 years ago, we started this program called Making the Connection, where we brought people with diabetes and healthcare professionals together in the same learning environment. The healthcare professionals got their own lectures in their own room at the convention centers and patients got their own, but in parts of the day, we brought them together. It was all in an effort to improve the doctor-patient relationship because our system is pretty broken. People are pretty pissed off at their caregivers. And if you don’t have trust in your caregiver and if the caregiver doesn’t have empathy back, it’s a bad combination.

So now we do our CME programs in parallel with our patient programs, and now we converted to virtual and I think we did a really good job. I don’t get much credit myself. If you’ve seen some of the crazy videos we do to try to keep education entertaining. I think we have a combination of good content and entertaining. I think the future’s going to be virtual learning for us. We have a conference on Saturday and we have people signed up from 60 different countries, about 3000 people across the United States, every state.

What sparked your desire to bring awareness to hypoglycemia and the need for glucagon options in particular?

A lot of people do not remember that in the old days there were people dying of hypoglycemia and it still occurs. Thanks to the continuous glucose monitor (CGM), it has gone down dramatically. I haven’t had any patients recently pass away from hypoglycemia, but I’ve had 10 people through the years, and they all were the same. They all had really good control. They were told a zillion times that they need to avoid complications, get their blood sugars down, but we didn’t have tools to prevent severe hypo. After having type 1 diabetes for 10 years, you kind of lose your response to hypoglycemia and you lose your symptoms. It’s really a sad thing.

What are some of the main issues that lead to severe hypoglycemia today?

Being a diabetes specialist, I see some pretty serious stuff all the time including people who failed at using the old glucagon kit, which delayed therapy and caused unbelievable hassles. I also have an uncle who had type 1 and he died from hypoglycemia and he had severe hypoglycemia unawareness. He had no complications of diabetes. He was treated at the Joslin Clinic when he was diagnosed, but he was so strict. I could not get him to back off like my other patients. And he basically got low and didn’t realize it. And that was it.

How have glucagon options progressed?

With the old glucagon kits, you had to be almost like a chemist to put these things together. And think about it, the person administrating and getting the glucagon ready to give, they’re typically not medically oriented. They’re the mother, the sister, coworker. And you’ve got to squirt diluted fluid into a little vile of powdered glucagon, mix it up, make sure it’s all dissolved. Then you got to suck it back out into the syringe. Then you got to take the syringe and jab it into someone on the ground that’s typically having a seizure or biting their tongue or rolling over, or demonstrating pretty bizarre behavior, which can occur. And when someone’s like that, time is of the essence. Anything that could make the quick administration of glucagon in an easy way for almost anybody, no matter what type of background is, is so important.

What would you say is the biggest obstacle around glucagon access today?

I think the biggest issue today is people do not have a valid prescription for it. I always have this analogy, if you have a house or an apartment and it gets robbed and they steal everything that’s important to you, what do you do next? You get an alarm system on your house. And I always say that same analogy. If someone’s had a bad hypo, they always have glucagon with them, but they did not have one at the time that they really needed it when they had a bad hypo. So, we have to really say, “Yeah, it can occur even if you’re on CGM, especially if you’re a type 2 on insulin as well,” cause that happens. And you got to have a valid glucagon kit with you, a valid meaning unexpired. These new glucagon kits last much longer. They don’t expire as fast as the older ones do, so that’s also helpful.

What are some ways that the CGM can most effectively help avoid hypos?

Well, one of the things I do in clinic is to really check where people set their upper and lower alerts. I had a patient yesterday in clinic who has had type 1 for 60 years. Her A1C is unbelievable, but she does have hypo unawareness and her lower alert was 65. You have to convince people that the extra alerts are worth it to you.

A lot of people said they put their lower alert at 65 and they don’t realize this situation called the “lag time.” So, when your blood sugar is dropping, even if you have a diagonal arrow down compared to, even worse, one arrow down or two arrows down, looking at the Dexcom arrows, they don’t realize that the glucose in your circulation is probably much lower than it appears on the Dexcom monitor or your phone. Because the Dexcom sensor and other sensors too, they measure the glucose in the subcutaneous tissue, and there’s a lag between the subcutaneous tissue and the circulation.

When your Dexcom goes off or when your CGM goes off at 65, and if your trend arrow’s going down, you could be 45 or 40. So that’s really an important issue, especially for people that their symptoms aren’t as obvious anymore. You could be caught off guard. And I had multiple patients that has occurred with. And then unfortunately, as you know, the majority of T1Ds in this country do not wear a CGM and that’s the topic of a whole other story.

Does this lag time issue apply to a regular glucometer as well?

Yes. If your blood sugar is dropping, your meter or CGM may be perfectly accurate of the subcutaneous tissue at 65. If you checked your blood sugar with a meter, it’s still going to say 65, but your circulation that’s going to your brain might be 45. So, the lag time is key. You could have the most accurate meter or CGM in the world, it doesn’t affect the lag time.

Is there anything else that you would want people to know about glucagon options that you don’t think is discussed enough?

I would say this, people have to ask their caregiver for it because in a busy clinic, it’s typically the last on the list and it’s important that they ask for a glucagon prescription.

I think they need to know that there’s two now that are just as easy to use as an EpiPen. Obviously, one is the nasal spray (BAQSIMI). But these devices aren’t for them, they’re for people who are going to be around them and that they should get more than one if they’re going to be at work or out of the house a significant part of the day. And have their best friend or their coworker be on the cautious side because when you least expect it, it can happen.

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betterdaysareatoenailaway · 4 years

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Street Saints Inaugural Edition: The Unknown Paramedic

Have you seen Tom Waits on VH1’s Storytellers? It’s easily the best episode of the bunch. Waits’ love of vintage American slang and gruff delivery is particularly well-suited to a format that encourages long-winded origin stories. Before busting out his debut single “Ol’ 55,” Waits regales the audience with an anecdote about a friend he knew who once drove drunkenly home on the Pasadena Freeway entirely in reverse because the transmission on his 1955 Cadillac was stuck. “I think they should give awards for that kind of thing,” Waits deadpans. Now, I’m not a champion of drunk driving (though full disclosure: I’m a former offender myself and fifteen-year old me found the Drunk Drivers Against Mothers in Fight Club, the book, totally hilarious in the way all fifteen-year old kids snicker when a sacred cow is slaughtered). I just agree with Waits’ general point, that the world is teeming with unsung saints and unheralded heroes whose great acts have gone unrewarded or, much worse, unrecorded. Therefore welcome to the inaugural installment of Street Saints, a column that celebrates these heroes nobody knows. I chose the name cuz if you say it fast/slur it drunkenly it sounds like Street Cents, the TV show from the ‘90s that taught my generation to hate capitalism. Today’s post is about a paramedic whose name I’ll never know but whose selfless act impressed me enough to make her/them/him our inaugural saint. Here’s what happened. My favourite heroin dealer is a man I’ll call John. John has a good heart and bad luck. In the span of eight months he suffered two life-threatening motorcycle accidents, one abduction that left him handcuffed naked to a bed (George Costanza-style if you remember that Seinfeld episode), and a near-fatal stabbing that I personally witnessed. The stabbing and the abduction both deserve their own posts, so I won’t go into them right now. John’s second accident was the more serious of the two. He almost lost his left foot. The ER doctor, describing the injury, told John to “picture a brick of butter. Now imagine I took my hand and tore half of it away. The butter in my hand is the tissue you lost. What remains of the original brick is what’s left of your foot. You would have lost the whole thing if not for those leather boots.” Even through the pain and the painkillers they gave him, John understood how lucky he’d been. And not just because he still had two feet. See, as he sailed through the air after getting hit from behind by a somnolent SUV driver, he was dimly aware that the left pocket of his cargo pants contained $1500 in cash, and another $1500 worth of heroin. For a mid-level dealer like John, losing $3000 would be ruinous. If he had lost the money and the drugs, he would have lost his $45-per-night motel room where he lived too, having no way to pay for it. He also wouldn’t have any way to get more heroin, destroying his livelihood. Next to his hospital bed, his cargo pants and t-shirt were neatly folded on a chair. Suddenly remembering the money and drugs, he checked his left pocket and found it empty. His heart rate skyrocketed, causing one of the machines to which he was connected to bleat like a mechanical goat. A harried-looking nurse came in and fiddled with knobs while John took stock of his diminished life. He knew the chance of the money and drugs being in his other pockets hovered around zero. When the nurse finally left he checked his right pocket and everything was there. The money and the drugs, in the other pocket. This means that the paramedic who found John unconsciously splayed out across Kingston Road, also found his drugs and money and put them back into John’s pants. Now that is saintlike behavior. Usually the kind of person whose moral code is such that they won’t steal money from a man who may not even live to spend said money is the kind of person who would notify police about the drugs. And John was carrying a large enough amount to be charged with trafficking, which carries an automatic prison sentence. Who would do such a generous thing? What were they thinking? Admittedly, times have changed. 2020 in particular has seen a massive shift in public perception of and attitude toward police and policing. But John’s accident happened well before the triggering incident of George Floyd’s horrific murder. Maybe this particular paramedic had had his own run-ins with the cops, maybe he was sick of them swaggering through traffic fatalities and making shitty comments. Maybe this paramedic was sick of how cops seem to hog all the cultural credit when it comes to first responders. After all, where are the TV shows glorifying paramedics? Why do cop shows like The Shield seek to normalize violent sociopathic racist policing methods? I don’t know. I’m just speculating here. What I do know is that this paramedic saw a human being clinging to life on the street, with items crucial to his livelihood lying all around him, and felt a twinge of obligation. This person could have walked away with $1500 cash, plus a few beefy handshakes from a couple of cops delighted at the easy arrest, but thought okay…I’m not going to make this guy’s day any worse than it already is. “Almost anybody would’ve swiped that money,” I said to John, when he told me this story after getting out of the hospital. “Almost anybody would’ve called the cops!” he laughed, shaking his head in amazement. But the unknown paramedic did neither. Which is why this person, whoever they are, is Better Days Are A Toenail Away’s inaugural Street Saint. Amen.

#betterdaysareatoenailaway #streetsaints #opiatecrisis #heroin #hospital

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sarkarimirror · 5 years

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Can India become a 'fitness nation'?

Can India become a 'fitness nation'? World renowned fitness entrepreneur Jag Chima on latest 16 new fitness trends and how fitness has changed over the years. INDIA, Mumbai, 24th June 2019: Jag Chima is serious about his mission to rewrite the rules of fitness and front a campaign to get India into shape. He is a global fitness entrepreneur and he has been on a mission on bringing holistic fitness change in India and has been very successful in recent times. He is also the business partner of Kris Gethin who has transformed celebrities such as Hrithik Roshan, Mahesh Babu, Anil Kapoor, John Abraham, and the list goes on and on. We humans always do things to move forward. Our technology gets better every passing year. Our daily essentials are better than what they were a few years ago, even our cars and bikes have gotten better, proving that we aim for betterment. CEO & Co Founder Physique Global and Kris Gethin Gyms, Jag Chima said "India! I know, Here we have trained over 3000 fitness enthusiasts through our educational events. I have been involved in the fitness industry since 2004 and have introduced some of the biggest fitness movements to India from around the world with the biggest names in the fitness and wellness space. We are constantly researching and studying the most eﬃcient way to achieve optimum results and can confidently say that as a result of humans wanting shortcuts to success, the fitness industry continues to see new trends on almost a weekly / monthly basis. However, it is important to ensure each trend is carefully assessed and understood before one assumes it will be the best route to fast results for them. Every person is diﬀerent and thus its never a case of one size fits all. The one important thing I can say is, becoming your best self and living a fitter and healthier lifestyle has never been easier! You just have to be dedicated. Here are some of the current fitness trends : Wearable technology / Apps - (These include products and services such as watches, Heart rate monitors, workout trackers). If you are one of those people who are easily distracted or lose motivation very quickly then this is something you need to look into. For example, If you use a watch that tracks the number of steps you take via an app which you can also connect with friends and family who do the same, you can create healthy competition which will keep you account and ensure you stay on top. No one wants to be second best. You can also use wearable technology to track your heart rate during workouts, track your quality of sleep and much more. Apps like Strava will help you to connect with likeminded people around the world where you can track your runs, cycle rides and much more. Group Training - If you get bored easily or always look for excuses to get out of a workout then group training is the one for you. Training with others has proven to keep people on track, make workouts more enjoyable and get great results. However it is vital that you choose the correct type of group training for you. Group training is not like personal training, usually the whole group will follow the routine and intensity which can sometimes become demotivating for some who need a little more attention and help with form. E.g. Group ‘cross fit’ style training has proven to create the most amount of injuries for individuals and these classes have a low retention of members rate as a result. Bio hacking - Now this is one of the big ones. Mark my words, Bio hacking is about to blow up big time! But what does this mean? Bio hacking has been part of lifestyle for decades, however with the power of social media, accessibility to smart phones and general media, we now find it easier to access real and verified information hence the sudden rise in the use of the word and its awareness. Always be sure to seek medical advice from at least 3 medical professionals before you decide on implementing any bio hacks. Never take for granted what you see online without verifying the information yourself. Because some of the research and products are very new in this space verifying can be a daunting process but is important. Being Vegan - with the many tests available today, many more individuals have begun to understand the way the human body works. For years people have lived with food allergies and intolerances and with India having the largest population of vegetarians being vegan seems to be the way to go for most. Vegan foods are suitable for vegetarians and are free from dairy. HIIT - High intensity Interval Training. This type of training ideal for people with a shortage of time and for people who want to have a highly eﬀective workout. Ideally used for fat loss programs and conditioning for sports. This is particularly good for heart health. An example of HIIT training would be Treadmill - one min walk and one min at maximum heart rate repeated 20 times. Timed Transformation plans - For years many people have joined gyms with not actual plan of action, any urgency or accountability and eventually fail in achieving their fitness goals. Transformation plans have become extremely popular with gyms like Kris Gethin Gyms where there are approximately 7 structured body transformation plans which have been used by millions around the world including actors such as Hrithik Roshan, John Abraham, Arjun Kapoor, Ranveer Singh and many other actors. These plans range from Muscle building, Fat loss and preparation for events such as Tri-athlons and marathons. Keto Diets - These have been in existence for decades, however with so many people looking for quick results, keto diets have become extremely popular. The Keto diets consist of High fats and very low Carbohydrate intake. The idea is for your body to switch from using Carbs as energy to using fats to function. It’s has been know to have been used by business men and women in the olden days as the brain function and focus improves significantly as well as fat loss. Intermittent Fasting - This is when you have a limited window in the day where you east and for their rest of the time are fasting. The most popular ratio would be 18 hours of fasting and a 6 hour window to consume meals. Type of diet has proven to significantly optimise the functioning of the digestive system, improve focus and quality of sleep. Other benefits include rapid fat loss. Some people have used the Intermittent fasting approach and Keto together which has been highly successful for many. Blue Light blocking - With the number of electronics i.e. gadgets an average person own and the type of lifestyle most have, being exposed to blue light is extremely high. Blocking blue light from as little as one hour before sleep has proven to improve the quality of sleep and thus improve general health for many.Blue light blocking glasses have become a hot seller worldwide as a result of these studies which have proven to improve human health. A lack of quality sleep is the root cause of many illnesses. Organic Foods- There has been a rise in illnesses which are directly connected to how food in today's times is produced. From farmers using highly dangerous pesticides and fertilisers to poultry farms using steroids & synthetics to enhance and speed up processes.Organic foods have become highly sought after due to the high quality and health benefits.

Hot yoga - Often referred to as Bikram Yoga, has become highly popular across the globe. This is yoga carried out in a controlled but hot environment. Often temperatures almost as warm as a sauna.

Bhangra fitness classes A fun way to burn calories! Bhangra fitness classes have spread throughout India like a storm. Most international brands have also incorporated these as a result due to their popularity and now are also conducted in fitness facilities across the west of the world in countries like UK, Canada and the USA. Virtual Spin classes - These are classes on a spin bike where you have a huge screen in front of you and can see cyclists cycling in diﬀerent terrains and your position displayed according to your performance in the group. Often these classes do not need a physical instructor as on screen instructions can easily be followed. Ideal for the competitive individual.

Meditation classes - Mental health awareness and its importance has been well received in India, with the busy lifestyles many live, we often forget the importance of taking care of our mental health. The quality of our life is dependent on the quality of our thoughts. To help the very busy individuals, mind therapy has become a huge hit for many fitness and wellness facilities where you would be required to disconnect from the world and focus on the theme within the class. Many high profile people in India have taken this very seriously and even hire coaches to provide services at the comfort of their own homes. A huge revenue generator for fitness professionals. Cryotherapy- Recovery is a huge issue for many. That could be recovery from physical training or from injuries. The inflammation in the human body has a process to reduce and with the proven studies of this process being sped up with Cryotherapy, it is not a hot trend for many of the who is who with the budgets. Cryotherapy is a process where you would enter a chamber where you would be exposed to an extremely low temperature for a short period of time. These treatments have proven to be very successful for professional athletes around the world where recovery in an optimal time is highly important and improves performance when most needed. International Personal Trainers - It has now become fashionable to employ an personal trainer from abroad. With high profile individuals having huge budgets there is no limit to what people are willing to spend. I have seen budgets which range from just 1 lac per month to 50 lacs per month! Unbelievable in most cases as some of the trainers who are very popular in social media have no clue in realty.ALWAYS seek recommendations and check real life track records if you are considering hiring a trainer from foreign countries. There are many educated and competent trainers available in Remember, the worldwide web is available to everyone! Always research before you follow any trend and always seek professional advice. Stay fit! Read the full article

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smartphone-science · 5 years

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How to Keep Your Data Safe as a Business Owner (3 Common Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities You’re Unaware of)

Learning how to keep your data safe is no longer a commodity but a dire necessity. After all, data is the most valuable currency of our time. It’s safe to assume that your private information is constantly under attack.

To fight back against the rise in global security breaches and imminent dangers. You weaponize yourself using the latest and most advanced antivirus on the market.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a great move! But most of the time, it’s not enough. Think of it like installing a security system in your home while leaving the windows wide open all night.

It’s the same with your electronic devices. You can have the most advanced antivirus, but unknowingly leave your doors open for intruders.

Things like changing your passwords every 90 days or so is a no brainer. As well as, being wary of unexpected files and download links (yes, even if it doesn’t say virus in the file name!) is common knowledge by now.

But there’s more to keeping your data safe than those things. Everyday decisions and choices that seem harmless can make you vulnerable to data loss or theft.

When it comes to losing confidential data, like your financial information, it could spell out disaster in all caps!

To start off on the right foot. You should know the difference between a security risk and vulnerability. A security risk is a negative impact that results from exploiting an existing vulnerability in a system. A vulnerability without risk is hardly one at all.

In this post, I’ll go over the most common 3 vulnerabilities that you most likely aren’t aware of. We’ll also go over simple steps on how to handle them to keep your data safe.

Inconsistent or Low-Quality Data Back-up

There are many types of backup, but for the sake of simplicity, let’s focus on two.

So, whether you opt to backup your data using an external hard drive (EHD) or outsource the work to cloud services. You should know the potential risks in both cases.

When using an external drive, your data is safe form any type of remote access. As long as the drive isn’t connected to a device, your data is safe from a variety of cyberattacks.

Not to mention — as long as you have the EHD on you — you can access your data without needing an internet connection.

However! You should know that hard drives sometimes fail without any signs of warning. And that you’re responsible for the protection of your own data.

Not to mention, if identified as a storage point for information, the hard drive can become a primary target for theft.

Here’s how you can work around it:

· Keep Several Backups: If you only want to use external hard drives to backup your data. Make sure you make at least 2 or 3 copies on separate drives.

· Keep Each Drive in a Separate Location: It’s incredibly risky to keep all your backups in the same location. This also includes keeping them separate from the main device where you store your data

· Be Consistent: Your external hard drives aren’t going to update themselves. You need to follow a consistent schedule of updating their content.

· Regular Check Ups: As I mentioned before, hard drives can fail. Always keep an ear out for unusual noises like clicking or screeching when using the drive. Even a slight decrease in its running speed can be a warning sign that it’s time to invest in a new one

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Another way is relying on a cloud computing service that stores your data online. Using a cloud to store and backup your data takes away a lot of your workload. Almost all services offer an automated update of data. They also take care of the security aspect, keep multiple copies, and allow you around-the-clock access.

It’s important to take into consideration the downsides of using a cloud to store your data. The fact that it’s always connected to the internet makes your data vulnerable to attacks at all times. Also, worrying about your service providers taking advantage of your data themselves is a valid concern nowadays.

Here’s how you can work around it:

Don’t Play it Cheap: While money isn’t always a sign of quality. The price of a good security system that keeps your data safe doesn’t come cheap. Always invest in a service that covers your exact needs even if it costs you a little extra.

Background Check: A fancy word for checking up on the service provider’s reputation. Go into depth of how they keep your data safe. And if you’re not tech-savvy? Ring them up! Ask questions until you understand their system and feel safe enough.

Follow Up: Just because your service provider of choice started out on the right foot, doesn’t mean their quality can’t drop. Stay on top of things when it comes to any security breach, and don’t hesitate to leave if you feel that your data is no longer safe.

Each method has its ups and downs, and it’s up to you to decide what suits your needs best. And yes, that can be a mixture of both. A cloud service that updates your data and an external hard drive can be a match made in heaven in your case.

Poor Network segmentation.

pxhere.com

Network segmentation is basically splitting a computer network into subnetworks. With each network being a segment of the main one.

While network segmentation is useful in boosting performance, its main objective is improving the network’s security.

A traditional flat network connects all devices together in a local network (LAN), even ones that don’t need to be directly connected. A network is protected by a firewall. A breach in the firewall gives the intruder access to the devices connected to this particular network.

In a company, If the network isn’t segmented, a potential cyberattack allows the hacker access to all the devices in the network. Not to mention, the sheer size and complexity of a non-segmented network! Making it harder to follow up on the attack and provide suitable damage control.

Network segmentation isn’t a new method by any means. It’s been used for years to cut down on the number of cyberattacks and increase the general level of security. But the process of segmenting a network isn’t as simple as randomly chopping and grouping devices to create a subnetwork.

Effective segmentation relies on its implementation and long-term maintenance. After segmenting a network, each section is then isolated. Preventing direct access to data in the system while providing areas with as little communication as possible.

The bigger the company, and the more sensitive information it has, the smaller the segments are. Small segments are called Micro-segments. Micro-segmentation can be used with public and private clouds, Physical networks and software-based networks.

The complex system needs constant maintenance for it to function well and protect the data in the network.

While network segmentation can feel like an extreme step when it comes to its main costs and follow-ups. It has many benefits that keep it well in use today:

Effective Monitoring: It’s much easier to notice suspicious behavior and track it in a network when it’s divided into small parts.

Stronger Security: When a network is split up, it’s easier and more cost-efficient to control protection. Concentrating it around sensitive information Instead of spreading it thin over the entire network.

Damage Control: In case of a successful cyberattack, the damage is contained in one segment. This works as an extra layer of protection by leaving the remaining parts untouched.

Easier Changes: Segmentation makes it much easier to install changes to specific parts of the network. If one part is compromised, it alone needs fixing, while the rest of the network functions normally.

The number of attacks networks face daily is on the rise. Companies need to catch up with the change to avoid compromising the safety of their data.

To this day, Network segmentation is one of the most effective cybersecurity measures a company can take to fight against cyberattacks.

General Lack of Cybersecurity Awareness.

needpix.com

This whole vulnerability boils down to social engineering attacks. An attacker can use social engineering to manipulate unsuspecting people. Tricking them into doing things that could compromise sensitive information.

This is where human nature to trust people nice us comes to bite. Criminals often use social engineering because of its simplicity. It allows them to exploit people and receive confidential information directly.

Just because they have the word ‘attack’ in them, doesn’t mean they are as violent as other cyberattacks or viruses. Like the Structured Query Language Injection Attack (SQLI Attack.)

A social engineering attack can be disguised in the form of an email. from a friend or a person of authority. There are a few main elements that help point out a social engineering attack email from a normal one:

It contains an unknown link.

It contains a downloadable file.

Displays a sense of urgency to follow the email’s instructions.

Asks for sensitive information.

In 2018, TechTarget conducted a research on social engineering attacks. They sent over 3000 emails to employees. The emails either contained links or asked them for passwords via forums. The test succeeded in tricking 17% of participants whose actions compromised sensitive information.

While people have become more aware of the dangers of social engineering, it’s not enough.

A company needs to hold regular training exercises and seminars. This, in the long run, reduces the amount of data leaked unintentionally by the employees.

There are many cybersecurity vulnerabilities out there that everyone should be aware of. This post covers the most common 3 that threaten the data of both the average user and the small business owner.

But being up to date with these issues never ends. The methods to keep your data safe are evolving, but so are ways to bypass them. Both you and the company you entrust with your data should always be following up on the latest security measures.

How to Keep Your Data Safe (3 Common Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities You’re Unaware of) was originally published in Answers Captured on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

via Science Blogs

#IFTTT #Science Blogs

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foxhenki-blog · 6 years

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Quantum Sigil Magic

FRONT MATTER

I’ve actually had a pretty magical week despite the lack of daily practice and it has really reinforced my belief that sigil magic behaves very much like other languages. When I was learning Ojibwe, it took a full calendar year before things started to bubble back to the surface of my brain and I was able to use them in daily life. Since I was primarily using the written form of the language to learn in the beginning, with spoken reinforcement from my instructor, I think that this behavior might be tied the act of visualizing language. There hasn’t been anything big, but there have been a few instances where some of my work is received much better than it has in the past, a few unexpected dollars cropping up in savings accounts, that sort of thing. They are, however, related to things I sigiled for at the beginning of year.

This behavior of the psuedo-spirits I’ve been anchoring in the ocean of my subconscious along with the themes in this week’s Lovecraft tale, ‘Dreams in the Witch House’, have really started the old steampunk floating armchair a moving about the cavernous library of my memory.

If sigils behave and act in similar patterns as language learned from written resources does, can casting sigils be extrapolated to different, maybe earlier (maybe more potent) forms of symbolic expression?

In keeping with the Lovecraft Magical Aesthetic, let’s travel back to Sumeria, the birthplace of the Necronomicon and the rituals used by humans to summon up denizens of the Cthulhu Mythos. Sumerian, in the real, is also the current front runner for the birthplace of the written word and the alphabets probably all of use today.

I have a number of tomes that mention the spermatogenisis of the word virus.

One of my favorites, ‘Writing Systems: A Linguistic Approach’ by Henry Rogers, has this to say about written languages predecessor, three-dimensional word objects:

“From the period 8500-3000 OLD, a large number of artefacts known as tokens have been found. There are small clay objects of simple geometric shapes: spheres, cones, tetrahydra, cylinders, disks, lens-shaped disks, etc. tokens of this period are known as plain tokens. They are associated with the beginnings of agriculture [and] were used for record keeping… some have been found stored inside sealed, hollow clay balls forming envelopes around the tokens… these envelopes represented a way of safegaurding the record of the contract. If there was a disagreement, the envelope could be broken, and the evidence of the tokens would be inside.”

Extrapolating this practice into the context of modern witchcraft, this appears to be a very usable and possibly forgotten magical technology. If the origins of writing are in these three-dimensional object-symbols and the practice of encapsulating them as a form of binding, then it is plausible that the creation of three-dimensional sigils would be a potent practice. Moreover, instead of destroying the sigils, a common practice with paper sigils today, wouldn’t their encapsulation inside of a clay vessel serve a similar purpose? They would then forever be out of sight of the magician, existing only in her subconscious. The correlation with a binding or contract made real in the form of the clay sphere envelope is also especially potent. The magician is, in effect, binding the sigils, the psuedo-spirits, to their task. If the task is not fulfilled then the sigils could be removed from the vessel, and a new contract / ritual engaged until the magic is made manifest. A similar approach to these three-dimensional sigils could be through the use of 3D printing. In fact, as we will see later, this could be a good way to create and use the actual ‘fourth-dimensional’ sigils described by the narrator of ‘Dreams In The Witch House’.

Moving forward slightly forward in time we travel to the city of Uruk, in southern Mesopotamia, near the Euphrates river, Rogers begins the discussion of the genesis of cuneiform from the garden of tetrahedral language-forms. Cuneiform was the invention of scribes [probably early accountants] and, according to 'Writing Systems':

“We presume that the language is Sumerian, but the pictographic nature of the writing does not give any direct evidence for the language of the scribes…”

So it is not out of the question that the scribes were using another language or dialect. This ‘secret language’ that resembles Sumerian, yet with no intelligible correspondence relates directly to Lovecraft’s descriptions of the language and writing of Nahab, the witch in this week’s tale. Rogers continues, describing the work of the Urukian Occultants:

“The symbols were drawn with a pointed stick, or stylus… Numbers were written with a circular stylus: one impression for ‘one’, two impressions for ‘two’, etc… A rectangular slab of clay, known as a tablet, was held in one hand and the stylus in the other. Early symbols show strokes in all directions, but soon only the one which could be made without too much rotation of the the stylus were used.”

There are a number of implications for sigilmancy here. The primary one, which I believe fits right in with a Lovecraftian Magic Aesthetic, is the imbrication of technology and magic. Keeping with our assumptions that the Western Magical Tradition began properly in Sumeria, and that sigilmancy was an evolution of much much older symbolic magic from when mankind was a proto—post-simian glimmer on the landscape, then the clay tablet and stylus were very likely used to create sigils or to otherwise perform magical operations.

Thanks to Star Treks prop designers, we now live in a world where the writing with a stylus (or finger) on a tablet is once again the primary method of creating symbols. I assert that using a smart phone or tablet with a stylus to create sigils (that are then, once committed to the subconscious via the appropriate ritual, easily ‘burnt’, their existence, their light, extinguished with the swipe of a hand) is not only a valid and potentially highly effective form of sigilmancy, but a method (as in acting) of performing sigilmancy that is much closer to the origins of the craft then using pen and paper. One could even utilize the ‘low attention processing’ method described by Gordon White in his Rune Soup Premium Member course on sigils by setting the sigils as the tablets desktop for a certain amount of time prior to burning.

There is some precedent for technology-enhanced sigils, take the following quote from Benebell Wen’s ‘Tao of Craft’:

“Traditional Fu are rendered by hand with a calligraphy brush. However, I use a regular ink pen or ultrafine-point marker. *I have also found digitally designed Fu printed with modern technology… to be effective.* After all, block printing of Fu sigils has always been popular in East Asia. In block printing, the negative of a Fu sigil design is carved into wood blacks. Ink is applied to the block and the sigil stamped onto paper, and it is then empowered by a magical practitioner.”

Benebell, at the very least, is stating that sigils created using modern technology can become active spells in her experience. She gets at the heart of the ‘how’ in the next quote:

“The most critical aspect to an effective Fu sigil is the process by which it becomes empowered.”

I read this as saying that the medium of the sigil has less to do with its effectiveness than its message, or the message that the magician, to use her term, ‘empowers’ the sigil with. Wen continues:

“To empower a Fu sigil, it not only needs to be designed with particular symbolic representations… but every step of the process of empowerment must be thought through with care and precision…”

Sigils, as they are commonly understood, come from a culture that was driven by paper as a technology. If we look at the above statement closely, however, it does not relate specifically to paper, it talks about design and precision, and the use of the right symbols. This can be done in clay, 3D printed, or in pixels (you can’t get much more precise than pixels, right?).

IMBRICATIONS

Much to my delight, I found one of my all time favorite Christmas shows was available on Amazon Prime this year, the 1985 Rankin and Bass production of L. Frank Baum’s ‘The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus’. You can read a synopsis of the story at this truly amazing time capsule of a blog post from 2013 from the ‘Calvacade of Awesome’. The TL;DR version is this, ‘The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus’ is the most pagan Christmas tale you will every experience, this side of Krampusnacht, and was written by the theosophist creator of probably the most beloved fantasy realm in the entire world. I mean, seriously, just check out the primary character and mentor to Santa Claus, The Great Ak.

Click through the image if you have yet to experience this claymation jewel of the Christmas special pantheon.

Our first Imbrication this week is the band Heilung and their song Krigsgaldr. Heilung, according to my research [OK, it was one stray post on Reddit that mentioned it] compose songs in a variety of languages, including Old English and Proto-Germanic. That in itself is a solid layer on my own take on the tarot as well as being a common trope in much of Lovecraft’s work, the dead languages, unintelligible to all but a select few scholars. And yes, I’m aware that the group’s aesthetic is very probably hugely appropriative and based on likely false foundation of Eurocentric paganism, but goddamit, they own it, and that means something.

OK, I’ve been feeling pretty metal this whole week, so our second imbrication is from one of my all-time modern favorites, Mastodon. I chose their video for ‘Black Tongue’ specifically for the connections it makes to my arguments above about three-dimensional sigil objects and it being the actual craft and attention one puts into them that brings the pseudo-spirit to life. Check out this homeboy’s skills:

And for our last imbrication, another favorite of mine, The Sword, and their song ‘Maiden, Mother, and Crone’. The witch trinity is all kinds of important and reverberates strongly in the 21st century magical renaissance. The connection with this week’s Lovecraft tale is strong also, as Nahab, the ancient yet ageless crone, is the portal we must pass through to understand Lovecraft’s message fully. Check out The Sword below, its fantastic:

RIEMANNIAN SPACE TOURISM

‘Dreams in the Witch House’ is narrated (partially) by a university student by the name of Walter Gilman. Due to a strange fascination with the macabre (not really that strange among my cohort, I guess), Gilman follows local folk tales of a witch by the human name of Keziah Mason, also known by her witch name of Nahab. ‘Dreams’, so far, is the best example of Lovecraft’s technology-enhanced magic that I have read. The below quote just lays it all on the table:

“Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension.”

After reading that, I immediately thought of the path that Dr. Dean Radin is traveling now, specifically the taking of Magic, which is encoded in folklore, and applying it to theories of quantum physics, entanglement, and the like.

Lovecraft name-drops a few key texts in the beginning of the tale, the ubiquitous Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, and Unassprechlichen Kulten by von Junzt. The narrator, Gilman, explicitly recounts the folk tales of Nahab using a combination of sigils and special diagrams that opened up paths between this dimension and the next, in effect, quantum sigilmancy.

The date that connects with this story is not an obscure you, but one recognized to have great power, Walpurgisnacht. There is also mention of Hallowmass, but Walpurisnacht is the clear focus.

Gilman secures a room just below the room where Nahab, in the Witch Trial era, was reported to conduct all of her magical congress. The room has odd dormers, that begin to obsess the student:

“As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of his room increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding their purpose.”

These details, and similar ones in Lovecraft’s work, have always connected this thin silver line between the world of architecture and that of the occult. It brings to mind the Hypnerotomachia Polifili and the author of that masterwork’s obsession with architectural details. I suppose, now that I think on it, this also maps to my theories about three-dimensional sigil objects. But I digress…

Along with the crone, Nahab, there is another entity by the name of Brown Jenkins. Lovecraft describes him as such:

“It had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands… Its voice was a kind of loathsome twitter, and it could speak all languages.”

I think that, if one is really serious about cultivating a Lovecraftian Magical Aesthetic, than Brown Jenkins is a way in, via journeying, an archetype that can be used to communicate with Nahab and her ultimate master, the embodiment of chaos, Azathoth. Gilman, our student, seems to have no problem conjuring up Brown Jenkins in his dreams:

“Of all the bizarre monstrosities in Gilman’s dreams, nothing filled him with greater panic and nausea than this blasphemous and diminutive hybrid, whose image flitted across his vision in a form a thousandfold more hateful than anything his waking mind had deduced from the ancient records and modern whispers.”

The potential journeying component aside, the real tech in this tale is the sigil. Take the next quote, for instance:

“a man might - given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement - step deliberately from the earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern.”

Many grimoire spirits promise knowledge of mathematics and science. I have always taken this as 'known' math and science, but now realize that it is very likely unknown, secrets yet to be revealed. This tale is a very good premise for a witchcraft-dominant future. Perhaps the knowledge of interdimensional / interstellar space travel is locked up with those spirits that can only be contacted via magic. This is taken even further in the next quote:

“Any being from any part of three dimensional space could provably survive in the fourth dimension; and its survival of the second stage would depend upon what alien part of three dimensional space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be able to live on certain others - even planets belonging to other galaxies, or to similar dimensional phases of other space time continue — though of course there must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of space.”

Gilman, as the calendar moves from February towards the fated ‘May Eve’, becomes increasingly better at some very high level, and very new (for Lovecraft’s time) mathematics, presumably due to his nightly dream visits to dimensions of non-Euclidean geometry:

“Professor Upham especially liked [my] demonstrations of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an inefable antiquity - human or prehuman - whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours”

There is also mention of Riemannian equations. This specificity (always a sign of something important and encoded in the author’s stories), sent me down a bit of a wormhole into Differential Geometry and the mathematician Riemann’s contributions in this area.

I believe all of the strange vistas and worlds filled with unusual angles that Lovecraft describes in this tale and many others, are something very real to him, a visualization of what it would be like to be a tourist inside of Riemannian Space. I then got to thinking, could there be a Riemannian 3D printed sigil? And it turns out, that some brains in the Harvard math department have written a paper about just that sort of thing.

When trying to deduce that route to the most perfect Lovecraftian Magical Aesthetic, I try to pay very close attention to his landmarks and other details about place. ‘Dreams’ is filled with these breadcrumbs, which have lead me to a new theory about the town of Arkham, where ‘Dreams’ is set. I would like to assert that the town of Arkham is not a representation of Salem, MA. This is the common understanding among Lovecraft theorists. I believe that Arkham is, in fact, Ipswich, MA, and here is why.

First, is the mention by Gilman of Saltonstall Street. There is such a street, in a location that matches the narrators description, in Ipswich. The street does not exist to my knowledge in Salem. On a midnight tour of the dark city, the narrator describes crossing over the ‘Miskatonic’ river, the description matching a bridge over the Ipswich River very closely. In crossing the bridge, Gilman sees the crone Nahab in the real, and it so frightens him that the next time he was out, he avoided that bridge, instead taking an alternate route:

“An hour later darkness found him in the open field beyond Hangman’s Brook, with the glimmering spring stars shining ahead.”

This is another clue that Arkham is Ipswich, the location of the brook, and the road he takes to cross it, which the narrator calls ‘Peabody Avenue’, match Kimball Brook off of the Ipswich River, which is crossed by Peabody Street. At this point in the story, Gilman is being drawn north:

“After about an hour he got himself under better control, ans saw that he was far from the city. All around him stretched the bleak emptiness of salt marshes, while the narrow road ahead led to Innsmouth, that ancient, half-deserted town which Arkham people were so curiously unwilling to visit.”

If Arkham is, in fact, Ipswich, then Innsmouth can only be the town of Rowley, North of Ipswich and bordering on vast salt marshes. I mean, check out the images of Rowley over at ‘Historic Ipswich’ and you tell me that this village does not fit the degraded and foreboding descriptions of Innsmouth that Lovecraft offers us in other tales.

Further, towards the climax of the story, it is stated that:

“people at the mill were whispering that the Walpurgis-revels would be held in the dark ravine beyond Meadow hill where the old white stone stands in a place queerly void of all plant-life.“

I believe that ‘Meadow Hill’ is most likely ‘Castle Hill’. The great house, which incidentally is where ‘The Witches of Eastwick’ was filmed, was not built until 1928. If Lovecraft had visited Ipswich prior to ’28, and the pastoral area around the hill on which the house was built, it fits his description of ‘Meadow Hill’ above quite well.

Both place and timing is important when trying to get the best results from our magic. Not just accepting that Arkham is Salem because that is what the critics (read: not magicians) say, is a necessary step towards getting this right.

Something else that needs to be added to the work, comes from this description:

“They represented some ridged, barrel shaped object with thin horizontal arms radiating spoke like from a central ring, and with vertical knobs was the bug of a system of five long, flat traingularly tapering arms arranged around it like the arms of a starfish, nearly horizontal, but curving slightly away from the central barrel.”

This is a description of a sigil, which in turn is a symbolic representation of extra-dimensional spirit entities:

“living entities about eight feet high, shaped precisely like the spiky images on the balustrade, and propelling themselves by a spider-like wriggling of their lower set of starfish arms”

The last mention of place, Walnut Street, is likely a reference to Providence, as Walnut Street is directly adjacent the Providence Public Library, the building established in 1900.

Since this is the street that Joe Mazurewicz, the embattled Catholic on the ground floor of the witch house, below Gilman, whose incessant prayers had plagued Waler Gilman, retired to in an effort to find peace, its mention could be interpreted as a coming home for Lovecraft. This would place Providence in the role of a safe haven against the terrors of Arkham and Innsmouth, which would be in line with what is commonly understood about Lovecraft and his psyche.

The primary archetype of ‘Dreams in the Witch House’, the one that we can map back to the tarot, is not Brown Jenkins or Nahab, but the top of the tale’s demonic hierarchy:

“In the lighter preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and Gilman knew she wsa the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her bent back, long now, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression on her face was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he awakened he could recall a croaking voice that presuaded and threatened. He must meet the Black Man, and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth and the centre of ultimate Chaos.”

In our Etteilla deck, Le Chaos, is card number one, replacing the Magician in a traditional deck. Chaos, or Azathoth, maps to the Pope or the Hierophant in classical tarot. For Etteilla, the definition of Chaos would likely be much closer to the Old French understanding of the word as meaning ‘a gaping void’ or ‘immeasurable space’. In Greek, ‘khaos’ represents ‘the abyss, that which gapes wide open, that which is vast and empty’. Our modern understanding of the word, ‘utter confusion’, didn’t take hold until the 17th c. Azathoth, in this mapping, can be connected to the gods Erebus or Nyx. We all love a good correspondence table.

According to Holistic Tarot, The Hierophant represents conformity, being consumed by impulses, repressing aspects of yourself (in our narrator’s case, most of his humanity), and concealment. It is subterfuge, concealed truths, and negative results from good intentions. Gilman’s intentions were innocent at first, but his connection to Azathoth through the conduit of Nahab and her familiar, Brown Jenkins, forced him to conform to Chaos’ will. Wen also maps the Hierophant card to Pope Clement V, the persecutor of the Knights Templar, which is an interesting wrinkle.

In closing, ‘Dreams In The Witch House’ offers us some of the clearest indications of place and how the ancient (arguably the most ancient) practice of sigilmancy has the potential to gain a significant power-up when connected with our modern technology, which in turn connects back to the origin of modern sigils. It also gives us a different lens through which to view chaos and, by extension, Chaos Magic. No longer a description of an ‘do anything you want’ type of magical aesthetic but one that draws its powers from the void that encompasses the majority of our universe.

#sigils #quantum mechanics #chaos magic

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alisonfloresus · 7 years

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Education: There Are All Kinds of Lobotomies

This is a story about mad scientists. A true story.

In 1932, the Education Establishment forced a new, unproven reading method on American public schools (the method was known at the time as Look-say). The results were disastrous.

In 1936, an American doctor named Walter Freeman performed the first prefrontal lobotomy in the U.S. Ten years later Dr. Freeman created a more novel approach, which was called a transorbital lobotomy. He inserted a metal wire into the corner of each eye socket and swished the wire about until the prefrontal cortex was scrambled. Remarkably, this so-called “icepick lobotomy” could be done in a few minutes with local anesthesia. Freeman performed more than 3000 lobotomies, including one on Rosemary Kennedy, the president’s sister. Some patients improved; some stayed the same; some got worse or died.

The decades between the two World Wars were a time of feverish activity and experimentation in Psychology/Psychiatry and in what many took to be the related field of Education. It is not a caricature to say that the Men in White Lab Coats believed they had all the answers, and now it was time for them to take their proper place in the management of the world.

A famous Russian named Ivan Pavlov (died 1936) was in many ways the Godfather of all these developments. Most people know that he experimented on dogs. He showed that dogs could be made to connect various stimuli. What most people do not know is that Pavlov also experimented on children, doing the same things with them that he did with dogs. Later, he experimented on adults, with different goals. Much of this is shrouded in secrecy. His concern was shock and mental disorientation. The question was, what did you have to do to break a man’s spirit? How could you most quickly render a person insane? It should be noted that the Communist government was ideologically materialist. Humans were only flesh and nerves. The Russian government was eager to pursue ANY research that could find better ways to transform people or defeat them.

In general, the Russians wrote the book on psychological warfare and brainwashing. You can see the early results in various Moscow show trials (1936 and later), when Bolshevik heroes abjectly confessed to crimes against everything they believed in. The Russians had a vast prison system, known as the gulag, where scientists could conduct secret research on what would most quickly demoralize people. Hunger? Cold? Torture? Drugs? The Communists used all of their tricks and techniques on captured Americans in the Korean War, circa 1951-1953, and succeeded in turning more than a third into apologists and traitors.

John Watson, the American behaviorist, was famous for declaring (in 1930) that he could turn any child in anything you requested. It’s important to understand the arrogance and hubris of these people. They had their rats in mazes, their sweeping theories, and they were eager to jump from their theories to concrete activity.

Here is some interesting history from a doctoral dissertation by Benjamin Zajicek: “In 1935 fever therapy was eclipsed by the introduction of an important new method of biological treatment, shock therapy. The introduction of metrozol shock therapy in 1935 inaugurated an intense period of experimentation in European psychiatry, a period that lasted from roughly 1935 to 1952, when the first antipsychotic drugs were introduced. The term ‘shock therapy’ is really a misnomer. Metrazol was a drug similar to camphor that was injected into patients to produce convulsions similar to those seen in people with epilepsy…Italian psychiatrists began inducing seizures by applying electricity to the brain in 1938. Along the way, psychiatrists experimented with almost every other imaginable substance that could be injected into the body to induce seizures. (In the Soviet Union, for instance, psychiatrists sometimes intentionally injected their patients with blood of an incompatible type.) Finally, in the midst of this experimentation with shock therapy, Portuguese psychiatrist Egaz Moniz (1874-1955) announced that he had found a way to cure some forms of insanity by operating directly on the brain. The ‘prefrontal leucotomy’ and its more common American cousin, the lobotomy, arguably became the most notorious method of medical treatment in the twentieth century. Moniz went on to win the Nobel Prize in medicine for his achievement in 1949.”

I mention all these things to give you a feeling of the times, the zeitgeist, which was hyper-scientific, relentless, cold-blooded. Meanwhile, political extremism was the norm. Many agreed on one point: the ends, scientific or ideological, did justify the means. Just imagine all this aggressive research going on at hundreds of laboratories (and mental asylums) around the world. Everybody had a new theory to prove, everyone wanted to score a breakthrough that would forever change how we understood our species. The essential belief was that if you poked a person in just the right way, that person would exhibit a predicted response. This one-idea-will-explain-everything mentality naturally flowed into Education, which was very concerned, thanks to John Dewey’s influence, with socializing children, as opposed to educating them.

As I studied Look-say (later known as Whole Word, Sight Words, Whole Language, and many other names), I often had the sense that it was comparable to a lobotomy in disrupting normal cognitive development. This statement certainly cannot be considered rash given that our country has 50,000,000 functional illiterates!

Despite all the promises and claims, Whole Word never actually worked. That was obvious even by 1955, the year Rudolf Flesch wrote his famous book about why Johnny can’t read. So the practical results were dismal; Flesch explained why; but the elite educators still worshipped their failed god.

Just as shocking, the theoretical basis for this method was always very flimsy. In an odd way it was an offshoot of Pavlov’s work on conditioned reflexes. It was akin to John Watson and B. F. Skinner saying they can control everything by the conditioning a person receives. In some weird way, words on the page were to be the stimuli; when the child said, “See Dick run,” this was the response. There actually seemed to be the feeling that learning to read English would be an extended version of teaching chickens to press certain levers to get kernels of corn.

I remember thinking, when I first became aware of this theory, that for it to work there would have to be a reward after almost every word. Otherwise, you don’t have the reinforcement that textbook stimulus-response demands. Somehow there would be a dispenser that gives you a piece of candy when you read the sentence correctly. Isn’t this ludicrous on the face of it?

So Dr. Pavlov — and remember this man was a brilliant surgeon who inserted tubes into the mouths of dogs (and children) so that he could measure their saliva — is really the guiding spirit behind stimulus-response and Look-say. (It seems to me clear that any animal above a shrimp can connect various stimuli, so I think Pavlov’s results were vastly exaggerated.) Even if his discoveries were valuable, a scientific lab is very small and constrained; you wouldn’t think that anybody would try to extrapolate from that tiny controlled arena to the vast cosmos of language. But our Education Establishment surely tried.

That’s the thing we see, as we watch Dr. Freeman stick an ice pick into a person’s eye socket: these scientists were willing to take great leaps of experimental faith. The creed, spoken or unspoken, is always this: we must take bold steps if we are to bring science and reason to this benighted planet. So we see that Dr. Freeman, like Pavlov, is a blood brother to the high priests of Look-say. (By the way, the Russians knew from their own bitter experience with Whole Word, roughly 1920-1931, that it didn’t work at all. If those clever schemers pushed this hoax on us, it wouldn’t surprise me. Then these “high priests” were not so much dunces as traitors.)

Is it fair to mention lobotomy and Whole Word in the same sentence? Well, first of all, let us note that the brain is exceedingly complex; and when you poke it, you can’t be sure what you will get, as Dr. Freeman found out again and again. In the case of Look-say, its effect on many people would seem to be simple illiteracy, almost as if they were simply never taught anything. But at a deeper level, their brains have been successfully inoculated against language. Decades later, these victims still marvel that other people can read books for pleasure. These illiterates, stuck with a holistic (whole-word) reflect, assume that reading is an odd gift, much like perfect pitch. Some have it, some don’t; there’s nothing you can do. So yes, these people have been “lobotomized” in a non-surgical way that makes reading impossible.

There’s a second set of victims, who wind up with results that are even more dramatic. This condition is called dyslexia. Here you find very elaborate confusion, where the words appear backward or they seem to move on the page. Encountering what dyslexics say about learning to read is a twilight-zone experience. A young woman wrote this to me: “Then he pointed to another word, and asked me if I knew that word, but I didn’t. I could not tell what letters they were, and then there was no sound or meaning in the word. It was an empty word then…but he showed me, he wrote it on a paper, and I knew the word then. I know it well… When I say that the font changes are very difficult for me, I mean that strictly in a visual way. Not from sight words, but because the letters do move, or turn, and if they are touching, or close to touching…then I cannot see them clearly, to find their sound.” Possibly she was born with a defect; more probably, according to every phonics expert, Whole Word is the culprit.

Furthermore, when children reach roughly age seven and realize that they can’t read, that they’re falling behind their friends, and that they are defective in some way, they begin to exhibit many unfortunate behaviors. The psychiatric community is only too eager to treat these behaviors with powerful psychiatric drugs. And so you find another kind of lobotomy, that caused by too many years of Ritalin.

My own sense is that Whole Word and Ritalin are not cures, but causes of more problems. At the very least, children should be given a steady diet of phonics and exercise. First, find out if these work. Phonics tutors always report renewed self-confidence, with a dramatic drop in undesirable behaviors.

In the 1950s Dr. Freeman was forced to abandon his approach. Look-say (now known by a half-dozen names) survived as the dominant method until almost the end of the century, and even now survives in what our Education Establishment calls Balanced Literacy. My sense is there is nothing balanced about it at all. If you mix dirty water with clean water, you don’t call the mixture a balanced beverage. This so-called Balanced Literacy is a strategic ploy for retaining some of the worst aspects of Look-say, namely, that little children are forced to memorize graphic designs (i.e., sight-words) as a passport into reading. As many children can never memorize more than 100 or 200 sight-words, in fact, reading is forever forbidden to them. Brain-warping effects are what they get instead.

The 1930s, unfortunately for all of us, were a maelstrom of reckless, unabashed scientism, and an equally reckless ideology in politics and education. I suspect that one of the mutants bred from these excesses was Whole Word.

(For related analysis, Google “27: Ivan Pavlov–Education Goes To The Dogs.”)

from JournalsLINE http://journalsline.com/2017/06/26/education-there-are-all-kinds-of-lobotomies/ from Journals LINE https://journalsline.tumblr.com/post/162262009220

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