Is This The End Of A Nation Of Self-Centered Pricks?

I watched the Inauguration Speech on the 20th.

I haven't done that in nearly two decades.

I've thought of immigration to find a country that might take a better stand on healthcare. I've watched as people point at my son, called him names, and rejected my family, not just my son, because of his autism.

People that make comments at the grocery store, when my son hums to calm himself after being bombarded by chemicals and perfumes from all directions.

I've seen government money denied for research against even the scientists recommendations, based on a simple fact. . .

No one wants to admit to wrong-doing because that would be an admission that our system is broken, corrupt, and misguided.

Hell, I didn't even know it until I had my face rubbed in it.

We've spent decades learning to look out for number one, keep up with the Jones', make the quick deal, screw over the other guy, (whoever that might be at the time). Unions that have lost sight of their original mission, protect workers from gross abuses by employers. Companies that ignore the long-term picture for short-term returns. It's all about the individual, not the community.

Now we're paying the piper. 401k's are damn near useless/valueless, Companies have lost half or more of their value. If our economy hadn't gotten so big to begin with, this would be the second Great Depression. Our economic numbers have fallen more than the original Great Depression! Only the regulatory procedures put in place after the first Depression have kept us from all being smashed under the weight of rampant uncontrolled capitalism.

WAKE UP!

I've grown tired of explaining why I don't watch television to people. I've learned that supplements for my son means that I don't have a 401k. I struggle against non-believers who tell me that autism is incurable, or worse, people who give me sympathy because they don't believe I'll recover my son, but don't want to offend me. I'm tired of reading about studies that 'disprove a link between vaccines and autism', but never mention a single idea as to what is causing autism. I'm also tired of being lumped in with all the men, (and women) who have abandoned their children because of autism.

There are those of us who actually do care and do have a sense of responsibility for what we do! I didn't have a child because I was too interested in getting laid to bother with birth control. I actually WANTED a child. . .

I'm hoping that the new president will help change the general perception of responsibility so that everyone, not just a few of us, start to take responsibility for their own actions.

Generic Man! (or Joe, not the friggin’ plumber, Everyone)

Look! Up in the sky! It's. . . It's. . . Oh, just an airplane. I don't have a cape. I can barely lift my spirits, let alone a train, but I keep plugging away.

As a line from one of my favorite animated movies says, “When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. Then, after a few days, the lemonade goes bad and turns to pig swill.”

I’m not a plumber, or a carpenter, or an accountant, (obviously, by looking at our home finances). Just a little bit of all of the above as a home owner, and a computer geek.

Losing my job sucks. Just another indicator that our economy has been run into the ground. I’m just as guilty as the next guy in that saving sucks compared to instant gratification, and/or in our case, paying for the latest therapy or supplement, trying to find the right combination of therapies/supplements to get our son a little closer to recovered.

On the bright side, the new administration is coming. Hopefully that means the chances for science and rational thought are looking up. Maybe. . .

At this point a little hope seems to have to go a long way.

Short post this time. Too busy trying to keep money in the pipeline, but wanted to post something.

Perspective

I got to see a movie at a theater this past weekend. It's the first movie I've seen in a theater since I was on travel last year. Of course I wasn't with my wife. That would be too much like being married. No, the wife offered to take our son swimming so that I could go watch a show. Normally, when we volunteer like that, it's so the other can get something accomplished at the house. Fix a leaky faucet, mow the yard, try to get plants in the garden so we don't spend as much on groceries, laundry. . .

You see, our son has the best nutrition we can give him, organic food, vitamin supplements that I didn't even know existed before he was diagnosed. The off-shoot of that is that he looks like a little Olympian, with the stamina of a marathoner. Swimming is one of the only activities he likes that will tire him out. Of course we have to be with him at the pool, so one of us is out of action while he swims. The other has a few set hours before the return to try and make some progress on projects at the house. We still haven't finished unpacking from our move two years ago!

We have spent so much time getting him to this level of health and still have miles to go before we finish. That's why going to see a movie was such a big deal in one way and a reminder that we still aren't there yet in another.

I miss going out on dates with my wife! I miss being able to talk about things we want to do. I miss being able to call a sitter on Friday night and going out to dinner. My wife misses being able to ride horses! My wife hasn't been to see a movie on the big screen since the second Lord of the Rings movie! We could go out after our son was asleep and see something. Made for a really easy job for the sitter. . .

Getting out to see a movie was awesome. No, I didn't see the new Indy Movie, I went to see Iron Man, but if I get a chance, I will go see the new Indy, yeah, maybe next weekend. . . Hey honey. . .

Anyway, the whole problem in a nutshell is to imagine what it would be like to have your skin scrubbed off with a dry loofah, and then decide that life could be worse. Like, you could be married to someone who believes in the "Trickle-down" theory of economics, or that fossil fuels don't contribute to global warming, or that vaccine benefits are a proven scientific fact. Heck, at least my son didn't get voted off the island! What a sick thing to do.

Spin Baby Spin!

Okay, in the greater Washington DC area, people accept certain, "Laws of Elected Officials".

An example, "Congressman/Senator/Representative/Mayor so-and-so ran over 3 latino children yesterday afternoon, after a 12 martini lunch with Big Pharma lobbyist." (I made this up, honest)

The story that comes out is, "Congressman/Senator/Representative/Mayor so-and-so took steps yesterday to reduce illegal immigration and is pushing for more vaccines against bumper poisoning!"

The problem is that no one wants to take a good look at our current medical practices and then ask some hard questions. On the way to work this morning, there was a news item that more than HALF the population of the United States is now taking prescription medication for chronic conditions!

MORE THAN HALF THE POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES.

Pharmaceutical companies are laughing all the way to the bank, and the country club, and at you, the drug-taking public. We are so wedded to the magic pill idea that nothing else matters. We don't need to eat right, exercise, sleep. We've got pills!

Can't get it up? Take this pill!

Can't get pregnant? Take this pill!

Why am I not able to conceive? Don't look at the ingredients of that diet soda you're drinking. . .

I now hear more adds for IVF treatments than I hear for auto sales adds!

Don't pay any attention to the explosion of autistic children, or the fact that there are now more children on meds for ADD, ADHD, and a host of other learning disabilities than ever before in our history.

What do you think happens when you feed your children nothing but high fructose corn syrup,  and expect them to act normally?

There are several people that are now coming forward to proclaim that maybe, just maybe, we should actually study the causal link between mercury and autism. It's a cautious claim mainly because everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE is afraid to piss off Big Pharma. If they get even mildly upset with us, the stock market drops, oil prices go up and Democrats start looking for more seats in Congress.

I'm not saying there's an easy fix. Hell, I'd be surprised to find out there even was a fix. Most people are too short-sighted, (myself included) to even understand what might happen if we:

1. Put a known neuro-toxin into a substance with other toxins like formaldehyde and aluminum and cultures of germs and shoot them into infants before they have a chance to establish their immune system, this from Answers.com

"... A concentrated level of antibodies is reached and maintained by seven to eight years of age." (my emphasis added, go to the link above to read the whole description)

2. Start adding things like titanium dioxide and aluminum salts into foods to make them "whiter" so that consumers will buy more, and MSG to make the consumer even MORE addicted, and

3. Created laws that forbids the use of raw, unprocessed foods because someone might get hurt.

We're painting ourselves into a corner, and then breathing the fumes so that we think it's funny!

Taking the Long Road (with detours and roadblocks)

After massive amounts of trial and error, piles of experiments, and truckloads of money, we're still working on recovering our son. He has made a lot of progress, and is as healthy as we can keep him, so I guess we're on the right track.

The problem is that my son isn't just a case of thimerisol poisoning. His case is a little more involved. Since it has been established that the mother now passes toxins, including heavy metals, to the fetus in utero and through breast milk, my wife's old college job doing materials analysis has come back to haunt us. She did mercury porosimetry and in the course of working that job, she ended up with a lot of mercury in her system. What she didn't know, (and no one told her) was that getting rid of mercury is much harder than taking it in.

This goes for any heavy metal that's taken in by our bodies. What my wife didn't know is that even after 20 years, (give or take) she still had a load of mercury in her system that would pass to our unborn son.

It also didn't help that I had a full series of vaccinations when I joined the Army, or that I had taken preventative medication for malaria for a field problem in Egypt while on active duty, or that while on active duty I handled depleted uranium ammunition, and that being a tank crewman, I worked with lots of petroleum products all the time, or that I was, (and still am) a fan of competition pistol shooting, even if I can no longer compete.

I loaded my own ammunition using the cheapest materials I could find. An unjacketed bullet is straight lead cast into the bullet shape with no copper jacket. Lead is used because it is easy to work with, (relatively). I didn't actually cast my own bullets, but I bought unjacketed rounds from a local in my town. Manually handling thousands of rounds meant at least some bodily uptake. Primers have mercury fulminate in them, but come pre-made ready to load into a cartridge. On the other hand, when processing the spent brass, one step is removing the old primer. Any residual mercury fulminate could have/would have been absorbed through the skin of my hands.

What all of this means is that our son has had an exposure to toxins since his conception, or, to put it another way, his mercury/toxin poisoning was/is at a MOLECULAR level.

Then we ran into a problem with pesticides. We moved to Florida so I could go to school, into a nice apartment complex with a roomy 3 bedrooms and the sheer novelty of living in Florida. About a month into school, a bunch of religious fanatics rammed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and let's not forget the one that ran into the ground in Pennsylvania.

Orlando became a ghost town almost overnight! People lost their jobs as shops that catered to tourists started to close. People moved out of the apartments around us and the management decided to lower their standards and allow large pets into the complex. But first, we need to spray pesticide all over the complex to keep unwanted critters away! Meanwhile, my wife was working on some plantings outside our apartment while I was at work, and our son was playing with the garden hose in the mud at her feet. She ended up at the pediatrician's office with my son being non-responsive and having his first seizure.

Take a step forward, then take about 10 steps backwards.

Insanity Plea, or How to Deny Everything

So, we have the CDC, AAP, FDA, AMA, and SCA (Society for Creative Analysis, otherwise known as mainstream media) marketing the hell out of the genetics/better diagnosis angle for the cause of autism. Where are these people getting these ideas?

First, there has to be money to allow for the 'studies' being touted that assure the public that autism isn't also caused by the one thing that makes BILLIONS of dollars each year for a certain private sector industry. Then there has to be a way to keep mouths shut, more money to keep the talkers quiet. Oh yeah, if all the experts work for us, then they can't really speak against us. Problem is, we need people who are experts running the alphabet soup agencies.

Hmm, so what we do is rotate our employees through the government positions, get them to approve funding for the things we want, (like getting the government to purchase billions of dollars worth of medicines that aren't tested for safety or if they actually solve a particular problem) deny any possible negligence, and get the other branches of the government to approve laws that keep the public from suing us. Then rotate them back into the corporate fold, give them raises based on how well they did keeping the business working. Rinse and repeat.

Along comes the Patriot Act! Yay Patriot Act! Yay! We can sneak a BUNCH of legislation into that whopper of a bill and no one will look twice since we all want to be safe from terrorists, and anyone who actually wants to read the bill must be anti-american or a terrorist, so there. . .

Can you sense the sarcasm here!? The folks over at Naked Authors are all about sarcasm too.

Follow the Money

Okay, we've established the fact that my son regressed into autism. We've established that the recovery of my son is very expensive. Hmm, I guess we haven't established that yet.

My wife and I are both educated professionals. She has an MBA and I have been working in IT and graphic arts for more than 10 years and have an AAB and a Occupational Associates Degree, (which is basically a trade certificate). Right now, I'm working, (we've swapped off every few years to allow each other a break) and I make a fair amount of money. With what we spend on my son's treatments, supplements, and therapies, we're barely making ends meet. Can't give more specifics, but we don't have a retirement plan, only have emergency insurance for my son, (haven't found an insurance plan that covers ANY of our therapies, treatments, or supplements), basic insurance for me, (free with the company I'm with, but again doesn't cover most of the things we do to stay healthy), and my wife is flying without insurance at ALL! No 401K, no IRAs, about $500 in savings, give or take, we live paycheck to paycheck.

Now, as my son gets better, we've been able to give up some of his supplements, but most of the time, we just end up having to get something new that replaces the last thing, or we have to have some other therapy or procedure that costs thousands of dollars, (he's got to have dental work done now because his teeth are having problems, which will cost us around $3000).

Okay, so we're not completely broke, but this is expensive. I've also been reading "The Chelation Kid" a comic about a family with a boy on the spectrum. They've got the same issues we've got, but are having even worse problems paying the bills!

So let's move on to the whole Biomedical vs. Genetic issue. Follow the money!

First, for those in the cheap seats, here's the issue:

On the Biomedical side there are parents that believe the Autism has a biomedical cause, namely mercury, but I'm going to expand that to general environmental toxicity or in easy words, I think we're pooping in our own drinking water. This includes mercury in ANY form, which spews from coal-fired power plants, gets used in vaccinations via Thimerisol, (hence the vaccine issue), is in all of those new efficient light bulbs, and is used in the creation of munitions for our military, (mercury fulminate). Aluminum, which is used to 'whiten' all your white foods, like cream cheese, white american cheese they use at Subway, etc. If the food needs whitened, it has aluminum or titanium, (or both) in it.

Really.

Let's see. . . oh yeah. . . antimony, used in fire retardant for furniture, including baby mattresses. . . yep yours too. Look it up. It's right next to Arsenic on the periodic table. Hell, pull out an old chemistry book, flip to that periodic table and start reading off the elements, if you can read it, it's being used somewhere in the average household. Oh yeah, arsenic, used in treated lumber to keep bugs out. I'm not lying!

If you don't believe me, start reading labels!

On the other side is the CDC, FDA, (insert lots of acronym agencies here) and Legislative and Executive Branch of our government, (they get their own mention because they have been creating laws based on information from the other agencies). The official stance of our government is that Autism is caused genetically, and that the increase in diagnosis of cases in Autism is the wider definition of Autism and a wider recognition of the symptoms.

Huh?

So, another way for the government to say this is that we are experiencing a genetic epidemic. We'll look at the numbers for the epidemic in a minute.

If it's that the recognition has gone up, why not tell us where all of the 30 to 50 year old Autistic people that should exist are hidden if it's just better diagnosis. . .

Okay, the numbers for the genetic epidemic. . . hmm. . . wait, aren't those the same numbers collected by the CDC? Can we take a peek at those numbers? No? Why not?

Most of the key people working at the CDC have come from Pharmaceutical Companies! That's like making the executives from tobacco companies pay for their own research into the causes of cancer! Wait. . . didn't we do that already?

What about putting auto manufacturers in charge of safety testing their own vehicles! Wait. . .

I know. . . how about putting the inmates in charge of the mental hospital? Wait. . .