Tradition > Rhinos?

I know I’ve talked about this before but it’s one of the most disgusting things that are happening in the world today. With an extremely simple scientific explanation, it’s clear that rhino horn, made of keratin, is just the same as our hair or nails. People looking for medicinal properties in rhino horn should probably just cut their hair and stew it up. But no, instead, for the sake of creating traditional chinese medicines, endangered species of rhino are being slaughtered for their horns, horns that are no more medicinal than our fingernails.

And it’s not even that this is a remnant of times long gone, the number is actually growing by 6% a year, with 2011 seeing 448 killed for this purpose, and as alternative medicine becomes a movement within itself, this makes me very worried for our wildlife. For a movement that has clung on so hard to the ‘natural’ label, destroying what little we have left of this threatened creature is, to me, ironic to the point of ripping my hairs out.

Perhaps if I do, they can use it in traditional medicines, perhaps I’ll treat it with something so that it looks the same as a rhino horn. I wonder how much that would cost, because it would probably be more than worth it…

According to the BBC, the South African rhino population is quickly approaching the point where birth rate will exceed death rate, and for what?

Sending endangered creatures into decline because governments are reluctant to provide real healthcare for people? Sending endangered creatures into decline because a small group of people don’t trust lifesaving treatments backed up by actual evidence, because they’ve had bad experiences with physicians?

Surely no matter how much of the kool aid you’ve drunk on this issue, this is clearly wrong. I dare you to try and justify this.

Sunday Hangover: A Phallic Solution To A Phallus Problem

Welcome to the Sunday segment where I spout utter crap from my fingers in a vain attempt to try to bring levity, brevity and humour to this blog as well as trying to fulfill the ‘idiocy’ section of the blog’s tagline.

Today I would like to ponder over a topic mentioned on Russell Howard’s Good News but I can’t for the life of me find any sources for this.

It stands to reason I suppose, that something as absurd as trying to cure erectile dysfunction by hanging a weight off of your penis with a sash and then swinging it back and forth would disappear from the internet, or never be mentioned on it at all.

Although I suspect it’ll make it onto a fetish site somewhere in the dark bowels that lie outside of the republic of internet, on the questionable erotica isle.

Really though, how stoned do you have to be to think that would work?

And even after a couple of tainted brownies; what would convince you to sell this to other people?

More importantly… what the hell are people doing actually buying sessions?

I suppose there are weirder things in Chinese medicine, God only knows how many rhinos we would have saved if people lost faith in the ancient art of pretending that the body parts of endangered creatures could get your dick hard.

I would like to propose that we work out a way to sell people the placebos they want without hurting any creature or any penis, whether it be attached to them or not.

Perhaps we could market donating to charity as a medicine? It’s more believable than the real suggestions and it would probably have a much better effect on the person donating, not to mention the society we’re trying to champion.

Have We Got New Year Wrong?

The concept of new year I suppose is a nice little tradition, albeit one without a real necessity, the calendar only ends on December 31st because we decided it did and nothing much changes when the clock hits twelve and January 1st rolls around.

Perhaps, if we’re going to be going with more intuitive ways of measuring the passage of time the new year should come around at the start of spring? Flowers bloom and babies are born and things start moving again, doing it in the middle of winter seems, well, counter-intuitive.

Admittedly I am biased in this opinion being in a country where it would seem winter follows us all the way through to the end of March, certainly February’s always a bit of a monster, and we would have to change the date based on climate change etc. so it’s not entirely practical.

But still it would probably be a better starting point for calling something a ‘new year’.

Perhaps the Chinese have it better, perhaps their yearly cycle makes more sense than ours, or perhaps they’re both as frivolous as each other.

Either way I enjoy the idea and the celebration, I just like to play devil’s advocate to these things within my own mind, and although debating myself isn’t exactly the kind of thing a sane person would do, I believe in some instances it helps to keep me sane.

And with that, some wise words from Alan Moore.

An Entire Species > Your Superstition

Take a look here.

The international union for the conservation of nature announced recently that the northern white rhino and the javan rhino are now ‘possibly extinct’, obviously it’s pretty difficult to determine if every single one has been wiped out but this is pretty sad news.

This is sad news for the beauty of biodiversity and the other benefits offered by broader heterozygosity.

But do not be mistaken, this is sad news for humankind as well, because we played a large role in this, and in particular the practice of traditional chinese medicine played a huge role in the poaching of the rhinoceros for its horn. A horn that is made primarily from keratin and which contains no medicinal properties whatsoever that fingernails or the human hair would not be able to provide.

So despite the fact that there is no science to show any benefit to the use of rhino horn in medicine, and despite the fact that it is clear that this apathy towards inter-special genocide is a bad thing for the biosphere, it’s not stopping.

People are still spouting superstitious reasons to use rhino horn for remedies with no effect, people are still contributing to the destruction of the rhinoceros for the benefit of no-one except themselves and their wallets.

And for those of you who’ll back this up by citing the placebo effect, is it really worth the slaughter of these endangered species for an effect you can get by any intervention?

Would it not be simpler to, I don’t know, get a treatment that doesn’t involve wiping out this rare and beautiful creatures?

Superstition is no excuse for this, no matter how nicely you dress it up.

This is wrong, and the ethical connotations of this should have been enough to stop this practice years ago.

Alas, people do not always listen to reason.

That’s The Spirit

…so in light of the germ theory of disease and its implications, is there any room for ancient chinese medicine?

Well, not if it’s intention is to cure people of their ailments at least, since it is incredibly clear that the germ theory of disease has managed to identify much more that imbalances in spirit ever did.

Can we say clearly then that there is likely no such thing as a spirit?

Not the one above, that film, unfortunately, exists, although any movie that’s rated ‘two thumbs up’ should probably be looked at with about as much scepticism.

Well, it depends how you picture a spirit, if it exists outside a testable realm there is absolutely no way we can ever prove or disprove its existence, however, if you believe there is evidence that the spirit exists, then surely that evidence is testable, and therefore we would have the ability to test its plausibility.

It just so happens that when people have strokes, or brain damage, and lose certain bits of their personality, that would imply that the spirit, if it exists, does not contain our personality, and that our personality, language etc. are a phenomenon with its root in neurology rather than spirituality.

With that in mind, what is left for a spirit to encompass?

Just the simple fact of being alive?

Because in that case, when does something gain a spirit?

Single celled organisms?

Viruses?

Only humans?

It can’t be just me that sees this reasoning as rather convoluted, with the boundary of when we can say something is alive infinitely blurry, when, if ever, would the concept of a spirit manifest?

And back on the subject of medicine, if chakra, or qi, was indeed the source of our ailments, would it not make sense that techniques based on the manipulation of these techniques would produce more than just a placebo effect? Would surgery or drugs disturb this pattern due to their workings on a biochemical and physical basis?

Due to the fact that science based medicine has done wonders for human health since the inception of the germ theory of disease into our culture, and that the efficacy of alternative practices is much less than viable, can we not postulate that one method of treating ailments is superior to the other?

And could it be the one that has actually been proven to work?

This is not to say it’s not possible for different interpretations of the spirit to be correct, however implausible they may be considering what we know about the universe so far, but that these aspects surely have been long put to bed, and the fact that they still (ironically) haunt modern culture is more than disturbing considering the wilful ignorance it takes to ignore the mounting evidence to the contrary.

Cocaine Rabbits Eating The Rainforest!!!

Now that I’ve got your attention…

Let me hit you with some knowledge.

Ancient chinese medicine was never intended to fight disease.

Why?

Because nobody knew that there was such thing as disease at the time, they assumed that a person’s inner energies were off balance.

Sound familiar? It should because most practitioners of treatments such as acupuncture actually express this belief before then claiming that their treatment causes a multitude of diseases.

The point is however, that science based medicine was nowhere near close to being established, and most diseases go away over time.

So you can see surely, that after doing this treatment they invented up, 98% or so of patients got better, and because their model for disease was so far from reality they had no reason not to think that their treatments were working.

These days however, surely there’s no room for this backward thinking, hundreds of years is a long time to get better at science, and for life expectancy to increase.

In fact the argument from antiquity is the least acceptable, even for a logical fallacy, in the world of medicine, which is why I get so perplexed when ancient techniques are presented as being equal to proven western practices.

More on this story later…