25th December
Christmas Day, which goes without saying is a regular, working day like any other, here in the Holy Land....
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I'm sure anyone who's spent any time on facebook in the last few years, has heard about the miraculous, curative and health-giving powers of coconut oil. I can personally attest to the fact that – whatever pseudo-scientific nonsense you may have seen and heard from snake-oil peddlars on the Internet – what you have heard about coconut oil is true. You should try it.
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Having concluded that my headaches were more related to tooth-decay than with the micro-dosing of LSD, I remembered to try coconut oil. I'd got out of the habit in the last few months, and that was when all the trouble started.
A teaspoon of this miraculous substance, swished around the mouth for ten or twenty minutes before brushing teeth is better than the best treatment any dentist can provide. I have read that it can even help cavities regrow into healthy teeth – but I can't attest to that, as my teeth are full of holes. Certainly no dentist I have ever spoken to believes a word of it, but what do they know? All I can say is that since I've started using the coconut oil again, my toothaches have got less and I feel generally more energised and healthy.
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My latest student of guitar making to be joining me in my guitar making workshop, is Ehud – a biologist from Switzerland.
Ehud is the head of a team of scientists at the cutting edge of the cancer research industry. His descriptions of the state of the art equipment they use is mind blowing and fantastical – especially in contrast to the archaic woodworking hand-tools we're using here – some of them a hundred years old or more.
What is slightly more disturbing is his description of the work they carry out, which mainly involves experimenting on genetically modified mice.
These unfortunate creatures have been intentionally and specifically designed so that they will develop cancer, which can then be observed in strict laboratory conditions and treated with various experimental drugs.
They are a very useful tool, I'm sure – and Ehud says that because of the research they are carrying out, cancer survival rates are higher than ever. At the same time, incidences of cancer are also increasing, with new types of cancer appearing all the time, as well as more cases of cancer in children, which is something which was rarely seen in the past. There must be some environmental factor being overlooked, surely... How can you find a cure when you don't know the cause?
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28th December
The most frightening movie I have ever seen in my life, and one which I would recommend everyone to watch at least once, is called 'Threads'. It was made in the 1980's in Sheffield, England, at the height of the cold war. It depicts very realistically what would happen in the event of a total nuclear war and its aftermath.
Ehud would say that radiation is a useful tool when accurately and precicely directed at cancer cells. He also believes that quite soon, much surgery will be carried out by robots. There's no way around it. In some ways they're so much better than we could ever be – with their supercomputer brains, their tiny fingers and hands that don't shake – it would be inhumane not to use them.
Kate says that radiation isn't as bad as most people make out. Obviously no-one wants to be vaporised in an atomic bomb blast, or worse still, suffer the effects of radioactive fallout. Nobody really wants to be in the vicinity of a meltdown at a nuclear power plant either – but most of the really bad stuff, she says, has a short half life, so we could return to life as normal before too long, if the worst came to the worst.
Personally, I'm still fairly sure that there are enough alternative solutions to humanity's crisis and the ecological disaster we are perpetrating, that we don't need to take such risks in order to satisfy our craving for electricity and the power needed to maintain industrialised civilisation. But I keep my mind open to the possibility that she might be right.
Radioactive Thorium has many promising uses. It's much cheaper and more readily available than Uranium, as well as being safer in many ways. The only reason it hasn't been used much is that its bi-products can't be used to make nuclear weapons. A piece of Thorium smaller than a match-head could power your car for a hundred years. You'd never have to refuel. Encased in a strong, indestructible box, the risks would be far less than driving about with forty litres of explosive gasoline under the back seat of your car. We live with risks all the time, but we learn to ignore them.
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In recent years, there was this state – I think it was Estonia – which tried to break away from the Soviet Union. In response, Russia carried out a cyber attack on that country, which in a matter of hours completely shut down the internet, bringing the country to a standstill, and isolating it from contact with the outside world as well as blocking all communication within the state itself. Suffice to say, they got the message pretty quick and soon came back to the fold.
At another time, in response to a sophisticated computer virus attack which caused massive damage to Iran's nuclear facilities, the transport system of an American city was the target of a cyber attack (perhaps by North Korea, it's not certain where it came from) causing it to temporarily shut down. Of course, this was a warning to say – Don't go down that road. We can also do these things - without mobilising a single warplane, tank or soldier. Next time it might be your banks, your hospitals, your power supply...
We don't need to look very far to see how dependant we are on technology. Of course, that doesn't make it a bad thing in itself – but if we don't learn to use it well, and learn to get along better with each other, the risks are very great indeed.
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Like my 'Investigations into the Internet', my experiment with LSD micro-dosing, though interesting to me, was ultimately inconclusive.
I haven't managed to, or even attempted to put my more abstract thoughts or experiences into words, as that would go beyond the scope of this investigation and would be mostly incoherent anyway. I'd say it's fairly safe, but would recommend that you consult your dentist before trying it.
The difficulty, as I have discovered – as with a lot of scientific research – is that there are often so many variables, which may or may not effect the results. Whatever you do, there is always an area of doubt. And the question always remains of what would have happened if you hadn't carried out the experiment at all.
As with observation of light and quantum particles, the very act of observing something effects the thing itself. It's impossible to tell how it would appear if no-one was looking. When the object of the research is the nature of reality itself, these things are very hard to pin down. There is also the butterfly effect, where small things have a big effect further down the line, elsewhere. These effects are impossible to predict.
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You can watch the movie 'Threads' here:
Warning - This is not light entertainment.
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You can read my 'No Internet Diaries' from 2015 and 2016 at:
Check out ecoTrain For the best and latest, original, mind expanding content:
https://steemit.com/nature/@eco-alex/the-best-of-ecotrain-2017-highlights