Saturday, May 23, 2009

All a Matter of Perspective

I saw a man beat his dog outside my house the other day. He picked up his dog, slammed her back onto the ground, then with an open hand hit the dog in the face a couple of times and threw her into his van. 

I called the police, they found the guy and talked to him. They also took his dog to the vet to get it checked out. The vet found nothing wrong with the dog and said they were happy to let the dog go back to its owner. Because there was nothing wrong with the dog, they just gave the man a warning.

So we have a couple of different perspectives. The vet sees nothing wrong with the dog.
The owner of the dog probably knew how he could beat the dog without causing injury.

To me it looked like a very brutal act which shouldn't happen.
To another it was discipline without mid-long term harm
To another nothing happened.

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Guns don't kill people. Nut and Dairy allergies do.

I remember when I was studying psychology at university one of the topics was about over diagnosing people with illnesses/syndromes. It looked at the trend that as time went by, the people being diagnosed with ADHD, Autism etc. etc. also increased dramatically. Doctors and researchers attributed this to...

People recognising their children having some sort of problem.
Their willingness to take them to a specialist.
The ability for doctors to diagnosis them with a condition more accurately.

The doctors had a guide to help them called "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders". Over the years it has been refined, revised and has now reached to version 4. 

Alright. Let's say we give this some credit. Lets look at something I feel is on the increase and it has nothing to do with psychology.


ALLERGIES.

 

I'm 26, and back in my days no one had allergies. Some kids had asthma, but there weren't many.

 

Peanut allergies?
Diary allergies?
What are they?
The only allergies I knew of was from Bee stings (thanks ‘My Girl’).

However, everyone has allergies now. 

Friends of mine have kids that had both peanut and dairy allergies...death by peanut or death by ice-cream is not a good way to go out (not at the age of 2 anyways). 


Get your child one of these if they have any serious allergy. It can save their life.










Schools and day cares have pictures of people with allergies on the staffroom notice, on their duty jackets so they know which kids have it. There are just too many of them with too many different types of allergies to simply remember who has what.

My question is why? 20 years ago allergy testing was as good as it is now (though there are many more ways to test it now).

So Why?!

I am going out on a limb and say it is because of the food industry. 

The food industry has created a Probladox. While trying to keep up with food demands, they have made super chickens that grow 3 to 4 times faster than normal chickens, but not only that, they are larger than normal chickens. They inject animals with hormones to make them grow faster; they spray chemicals to make our vegetables safe from insects; they genetically modify crops to make them look prettier, taste better and grow faster.

Not only are our produce and meat affected, but things like mayonnaise, potato chips and the like are affected too.

 

An increase of allergies.

Food industry the causation? No, there have always been allergies.

Food industry heavily correlated? Yes

 

What do you think?

 

Friday, May 01, 2009

Book Porn: April Centerfold


In Hard Cover... YAY! Now my set is complete