As you probably know, United States congressmen will soon vote on SOPA and PIPA, the two laws that will likely result in a Great Firewall of the USA. Unlike the Chinese or Australian versions, this one won’t, for the moment, be used to block sites that address issues that the government doesn’t want its citizens to discuss, instead being erected for commercial reasons. It could, of course, quickly develop into something way worse if it will be allowed to pass in its current form, but for the moment it “only” gives copyright holders the power to cut off funding or even completely block the access to any site that they consider to be hosting any of their material, all of this being done through a very one-sided process.
Whatever you may think of “piracy”, this is nothing less than censorship and handing over an enormous amount of power to a small number of wealthy individuals and companies that pull way too many strings as it is. It’s something that can’t be accepted under any circumstances and, as the fact that I’m writing this shows, you hardly have to be a citizen of the United States to oppose it. This is something that many copyright holders and governments all over the world are watching closely and if it passes it could very likely start a wave of legislative changes that will mark the end of the Internet as we know it and the start of an age of draconian censorship, so the entire world must unite and stop it at all costs!
As a result, I’m doing what little I can and joining the blackout against SOPA and PIPA on January 18, so this site will be blacked out between 00:00 and 24:00 EET. If you have any complaints, go to Stop American Censorship for methods of addressing them to those responsible, even if you’re not a citizen of the United States.
Edit: Decided to extend the blackout until 3 AM EET, to match the scheduled end of the protest, at 8 PM EST.
Over the three weeks that I spent struggling with this cold, which I’m still not fully free of, I’ve been thinking about our overreliance on modern medicine much more than usual. In part, that was due to having to withstand a fair amount of pressure to take antibiotics and other such things during the worst of it, though one of my parents did see a doctor and take everything that was prescribed, yet still seems to be doing worse than me, obviously due to a significantly weaker constitution. And that’s a good part of the point I’m trying to make.
Usually, it is my belief that modern medicine should have three major roles: Providing accurate diagnoses, when the cause of the symptoms can’t otherwise be determined by the patients, handling emergencies, as other methods are obviously not up to the task in such cases, and treating serious illnesses that advance at a significant pace, since this likely means that other methods, which are generally gentler and therefore also slower, won’t have time to become effective. Even so, while modern medicine offers the only truly effective methods to provide accurate diagnoses and handle emergencies, the treatment of serious illnesses that advance at a significant pace could and, if the patients’ so desire, should be the result of a “collaboration” between modern and alternative medicine, so it could perhaps be said that modern medicine should have about two and a half areas of clear influence.
Yet what we’re seeing now is an overreliance on modern medicine, as people are being pressured into seeing doctors, who then prescribe pills and other such treatments, for pretty much anything. This includes ailments that can usually be cured with entirely natural remedies, ailments that most people should usually be able to pull through even without any real treatment and even things that shouldn’t be considered ailments at all. But this latter case largely deals with the mental health field, so let’s leave it aside and focus on the others, which are ailments that people whose constitutions aren’t particularly weak and who don’t suffer from other, much more serious, illnesses should in fact use to boost their immune systems and train themselves and their bodies to better deal with similar issues in the future. When drugs are used in such situations, this opportunity is lost and, istead of possibly becoming stronger as a result, people are likely to end up needing to rely on modern medicine even more in the future.
Of particular concern is the use of antibiotics. It’s true that infections are a huge threat and were a major cause of death before the advent of modern antibiotics, but it is equally true that microorganisms evolve extremely fast and quickly learn to resist such treatments. After all, we’re already seeing how the fact that antibiotics are taken far too often, largely by livestock, but also by humans, is creating particularly vicious pathogens that resist pretty much everything that we can throw at them, resulting in scenarios that may actually be worse than the ones such treatments were originally meant to prevent.
There are already voices saying that the age of antibiotics is ending, less than a century after it began, so all we can probably do at this point is delay this moment by being extremely careful and only using such drugs when there’s absolutely no other option. This will make pathogens adapt slower, as they’ll have less of a reason to do so, and therefore give us more time to develop new antibiotics that will be effective against the infections that truly require them. For the rest, we should strengthen our immune systems and use natural remedies whenever possible, as these are also living organisms and therefore likely to evolve alongside the pathogens they fight against, as long as said pathogens aren’t forced to evolve faster due to their contact with artificial antibiotics.
In a way, I could now easily go into various conspiracy theories and say that all of this is actually planned, that someone actually wants to weaken people’s immune systems and strengthen pathogens in order to give the large pharmaceutical corporations more power and therefore more income. It’s certainly something that I could believe about the heads of such corporations and we’re already seeing various developments that can only strengthen such beliefs, but let’s put all of that aside for the moment and not look for other reasons when something can be properly explained by plain old stupidity and, to some extent, laziness.
The truth is that having a doctor tell you to take this and that pill without you having to pay much attention to what’s going on with your body or learn what other remedies are known to be effective and how to properly use them on your own is the easy way. And modern medicine does usually tend to act way faster than other methods, so it caters to this modern need for immediate gratification. That it often does so by focusing on the effects instead of the causes and usually by offering short-term benefits at the cost of creating long-term problems, which can include making patients’ bodies less capable of dealing with similar problems on their own in the future, is something that can be lost on those who either don’t usually think that far or simply value the present far more than the future. And since this pretty much describes the “normal” modern human…
To conclude, my view is that, on top of making resistance to disease the first criterion used to determine who should still have children, which is another issue entirely, we should do all we can to better equip our bodies to fight pathogens on their own. Past this, we should learn more about natural remedies and use them whenever needed, leaving modern medicine to its three, or two and a half, areas of clear influence and avoiding powerful modern drugs in general and antibiotics in particular unless their use is absolutely required. This way, both our bodies and the treatments will evolve naturally alongside the harmful microorganisms, developing new ways to combat them and improving our overall health in the long-term while at the same time reducing our reliance on artificial substances produced, controlled and sold by others.
I’ve been wondering which category should this post be filed under, since it deals with environmental issues as well, but eventually realized that I’ll be ranting about the sport itself a fair bit. Yet you should still find a fair amount of references to environmental issues, since this is the idea that I started from and there certainly seem to be an increasing amount of problems caused by unsuitable weather, even in spite of the recent rule changes, which were mainly meant to mitigate the effects of such issues and allow the competition to continue even when the weather isn’t cooperating.
Ski jumping is and will always be an outdoor sport. The kind of gigantic wind tunnels which would need to be built in order to provide good and controlled conditions to the jumpers are completely unfeasible, so the sport will keep needing to find ways to manage the weather. However, this seems increasingly harder to do in recent years, when we see competitions dragging on and even getting canceled more and more often, almost always due to unsuitable weather, which includes a lack of snow in areas that should normally be covered in a thick white blanket at the date the competition is scheduled.
Yes, the wind is often to blame, blowing too hard or from the wrong direction, and that can be said to be in part due to the way the sport is developing, but this is hardly the only reason for the problems. Ever increasing hill sizes result in more time spent in the air and therefore a higher sensitivity to wind conditions, but that’s normal and not what this post is about. Instead, as I said above, this post is about the competitions plagued by high temperatures, lack of snow, sometimes even rain, or quite the contrary, heavy snowfalls precisely at the wrong time. All of these things are obvious effects of climate change, seeing as these competitions usually take place in locations that have been used for many decades and are known to usually have just the right conditions for a sport that’s so sensitive to any changes in the weather.
I’d have a hard time picking any rounds from this season that haven’t been plagued by unsuitable weather. On top of high winds, which have always been a problem for this sport, I have seen competitions canceled and moved due to a complete lack of snow, competitions for which the snow was brought from the surrounding area because there wasn’t enough of it in one place, competitions plagued by high temperatures and even rain, leading to the snow rapidly melting, and also competitions with the opposite problem, namely heavy snowfalls coming precisely at the wrong time. And all of this without even being halfway through the season yet!
This is hardly something new, but I don’t think there has ever been a time when there were quite so many problems with the weather. Of course, seeing as such weather problems have plagued the sport more and more frequently in recent seasons, it was quite obvious that we will end up reaching a point when nearly every single competition will be a struggle. However, that doesn’t make it any less alarming when it actually does happen, particularly when you realize that it’s only going to get worse. And, at this point, I’m not sure how much worse it can get without seriously jeopardizing the continued existence of the sport itself, considering how much it relies on having just the right conditions on the selected days at the selected locations year after year.
Under these circumstances, these new rules that have been in use and infuriating nearly everyone for the past couple of seasons, with the adjustments made for wind and start gate, therefore allowing the start gate to be moved over the course of a round without this requiring a restart anymore, can be said to be a desperate attempt to keep the sport alive. However, they mainly deal with changing wind conditions and, to some extent, can help mitigate the negative effects of a moderate snowfall. They can’t be of any help when it comes to the problems most notably caused by climate change, namely high temperatures, lack of snow or the presence of rain. No rule changes could ever make a winter sport keep going when the winters are going away.
On the other hand, there is a summer competition, so the sport itself may continue to exist even without snow. But what will become of it then, when a winter sport will become a summer sport instead and the snow and cold will be replaced by artificial carpeting and warm weather? I don’t have any interest in the summer competition now and I’m sure I’m not the only one, so what will happen with the number of fans if the sport will be forced to focus more and more on such competitions at the expense of the traditional winter ones, which will become increasingly difficult to organize? By how much will it drop, and how will a sport that currently enjoys such a significant following cope with such a loss of fans? Will it remain relevant under those circumstances?
I don’t really see solutions and the future seems bleak, seeing as the conditions are almost certain to continue to worsen. It’s a sad state of affairs to say the least, but it is also one more thing that shows the kind of effects our continued indifference to greenhouse gas emissions has. That is, if simply looking outside and noticing that you no longer get anything worthy of being called a winter isn’t enough for you, because I for one have noticed getting only two of those over the past decade. But many may not care enough to see such things, or may just want to get things done without thinking about Nature’s cycles and therefore be happy that snow no longer gets in their way. Yet those same people, if any of them happen to be ski jumping fans as well, may notice how this affects the sport and start thinking, even if just a little. And if they’ll also have commentators like the one we have here, who, whenever a competition is plagued by such problems, makes a point of briefly mentioning that, considering what we keep doing to it, it’s amazing that Nature isn’t lashing out even worse, even better.
Couldn’t spray today due to the weather, as it rained and it would have had a hard time drying. Let’s hope it’ll be better tomorrow, because this really can’t wait any longer. On top of breathing it in, I’m very worried about it getting in my desk already, seeing as there’s plenty of it right here next to it. That’d be quite a problem, as I like this desk quite a lot and it was made by somebody based on my own design, to fit everything just right, so I really don’t want to end up needing to get rid of it anytime soon because of this or any other problem.
On the other hand, I’m not sure how I would have been able to get things done today even if the weather would have allowed it, so I also don’t know how will I manage to do it tomorrow. Now that I finally seem able to sleep again, I’d do nothing but, so I barely managed to crawl myself out of bed not long ago and still am very sleepy. It’s about time to recover all the sleep lost while I couldn’t get any due to coughing continuously, but right now I can barely even think. As a result, not quite sure what I’m writing here…
As a second personal post of the week, this complicates matters, as I’m now left with just two “slots” for such posts and, if anything, writing only gets harder and harder the more I try, so it’ll be quite a problem to make it out of this situation. At the same time, it may just be the incentive required to write two serious non-personal ones next week, if I’ll recover enough to be able to at least think straight. I mean, I was able to do it at some point, right?
This sure was a nasty cold, seeing as I’m still struggling with it two full weeks after the first symptoms appeared. Right now it seems to be too exhausted to make things worse and I’m too exhausted to get better, so there are no other symptoms anymore and there’s not much more crap being generated either, but it’s too hard to spit out what little remains when all the muscles involved in the process hurt as much as they do and can hardly move anymore. And right now I won’t say anything else, because I said last time that I thought I was just about cured and it got a lot worse just a few hours afterwards.
I’m sure the mold that once again reared its ugly head in my room doesn’t help either, especially since it got noticeably worse just these days. But I’ll be moving everything and spraying tomorrow, with dad’s help, so that should be dealt with. And in fact that was the plan, as I had noticed it for some time but wanted to just spray in January and perhaps not need to do it again by the end of the cold season, the only issue being that it decided to spread significantly faster than anticipated just now, since my cold got worse, so it’s actually getting worrying and I certainly can’t wait until I’ll be well again.
I tried to keep writing proper posts last week, regardless of how I was feeling, but this is all you’re getting now. Need to save all the energy I have for tomorrow’s work and then for whatever I’ll manage to write about on Sunday, because I guess I’ll be sticking to two posts per week this year as well, even if it’s getting harder and harder. But at least that story of mine is advancing…
