Ethics

All posts in the Ethics category

Indigenous Wisdom

Published December 7, 2022 by tindertender

CRISPR Technology, Changing the Male

Published December 6, 2022 by tindertender

They (scientists) are changing the male, which changes humanity.

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-y-chromosome-is-slowly-vanishing-a-new-sex-gene-could-be-the-future-of-men

CRISPR Technology

Published December 6, 2022 by tindertender

This is what they are doing. This is why it was so important people take the injection which did not prove to assist in preventing transmission.

The Twitter Files – Volume 1

Published December 2, 2022 by tindertender

Written by @mtaibbi

What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter.

The “Twitter Files” tell an incredible story from inside one of the world’s largest and most influential social media platforms. It is a Frankensteinian tale of a human-built mechanism grown out the control of its designer.

Twitter in its conception was a brilliant tool for enabling instant mass communication, making a true real-time global conversation possible for the first time.

In an early conception, Twitter more than lived up to its mission statement, giving people “the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”

As time progressed, however, the company was slowly forced to add those barriers. Some of the first tools for controlling speech were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters.

Slowly, over time, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools. Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well: first a little, then more often, then constantly.

By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine. One executive would write to another: “More to review from the Biden team.” The reply would come back: “Handled.”

Celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or reviewed at the behest of a political party:

Both parties had access to these tools. For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored. However:

This system wasn’t balanced. It was based on contacts. Because Twitter was and is overwhelmingly staffed by people of one political orientation, there were more channels, more ways to complain, open to the left (well, Democrats) than the right. https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/summary?id=D000067113

The resulting slant in content moderation decisions is visible in the documents you’re about to read. However, it’s also the assessment of multiple current and former high-level executives.

Okay, there was more throat-clearing about the process, but screw it, let’s jump forward.

The Twitter Files, Part One: How and Why Twitter Blocked the Hunter Biden Laptop Story

On October 14, 2020, the New York Post published BIDEN SECRET EMAILS, an expose based on the contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop:

https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad/

Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.” They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.

White House spokeswoman Kaleigh McEnany was locked out of her account for tweeting about the story, prompting a furious letter from Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn, who seethed: “At least pretend to care for the next 20 days.”

This led public policy executive Caroline Strom to send out a polite WTF query. Several employees noted that there was tension between the comms/policy teams, who had little/less control over moderation, and the safety/trust teams:

Strom’s note returned the answer that the laptop story had been removed for violation of the company’s “hacked materials” policy: https://web.archive.org/web/20190717143909/https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hacked-materials

Although several sources recalled hearing about a “general” warning from federal law enforcement that summer about possible foreign hacks, there’s no evidence – that I’ve seen – of any government involvement in the laptop story. In fact, that might have been the problem…

The decision was made at the highest levels of the company, but without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, with former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde playing a key role.

“They just freelanced it,” is how one former employee characterized the decision. “Hacking was the excuse, but within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold. But no one had the guts to reverse it.”

You can see the confusion in the following lengthy exchange, which ends up including Gadde and former Trust and safety chief Yoel Roth. Comms official Trenton Kennedy writes, “I’m struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe”:

By this point “everyone knew this was fucked,” said one former employee, but the response was essentially to err on the side of… continuing to err.

Former VP of Global Comms Brandon Borrman asks, “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?”

To which former Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker again seems to advise staying the non-course, because “caution is warranted”:

A fundamental problem with tech companies and content moderation: many people in charge of speech know/care little about speech, and have to be told the basics by outsiders. To wit:

In one humorous exchange on day 1, Democratic congressman Ro Khanna reaches out to Gadde to gently suggest she hop on the phone to talk about the “backlash re speech.” Khanna was the only Democratic official I could find in the files who expressed concern.

Gadde replies quickly, immediately diving into the weeds of Twitter policy, unaware Khanna is more worried about the Bill of Rights:

Khanna tries to reroute the conversation to the First Amendment, mention of which is generally hard to find in the files:

Within a day, head of Public Policy Lauren Culbertson receives a ghastly letter/report from Carl Szabo of the research firm NetChoice, which had already polled 12 members of congress – 9 Rs and 3 Democrats, from “the House Judiciary Committee to Rep. Judy Chu’s office.”

NetChoice lets Twitter know a “blood bath” awaits in upcoming Hill hearings, with members saying it’s a “tipping point,” complaining tech has “grown so big that they can’t even regulate themselves, so government may need to intervene.”

Szabo reports to Twitter that some Hill figures are characterizing the laptop story as “tech’s Access Hollywood moment”:

“THE FIRST AMENDMENT ISN’T ABSOLUTE”
Szabo’s letter contains chilling passages relaying Democratic lawmakers’ attitudes. They want “more” moderation, and as for the Bill of Rights, it’s “not absolute”

An amazing subplot of the Twitter/Hunter Biden laptop affair was how much was done without the knowledge of CEO Jack Dorsey, and how long it took for the situation to get “unfucked” (as one ex-employee put it) even after Dorsey jumped in.

There are multiple instances in the files of Dorsey intervening to question suspensions and other moderation actions, for accounts across the political spectrum.

The problem with the “hacked materials” ruling, several sources said, was that this normally required an official/law enforcement finding of a hack. But such a finding never appears throughout what one executive describes as a “whirlwind” 24-hour, company-wide mess.

It’s been a whirlwind 96 hours for me, too. There is much more to come, including answers to questions about issues like shadow-banning, boosting, follower counts, the fate of various individual accounts, and more. These issues are not limited to the political right.

Good night, everyone. Thanks to all those who picked up the phone in the last few days.

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394?s=21

https://www.foxnews.com/media/elon-musk-reveals-twitter-suppressing-hunter-biden-story-2020

15 REMINDERS FROM THE ELDERS

Published November 29, 2022 by tindertender
  1. Get up with the sun to pray. Pray alone.
  2. Be tolerant of those who have lost their way. Ignorance, presumption, anger, jealousy and greed come from a lost soul. Pray for them to find guidance.
  3. Find yourself, by your own means. Do not let others make your path for you. It is your path, and only yours. Others may walk with you, but no one can make your way (or walk your path) for you.
  4. Treat guests in your home with great consideration. Serve them the best food, give them the best bed and treat them with respect and honor.
  5. Do not take what is not yours, whether from a person, a community, from the jungle or from a culture. It was not given or won. It is not yours.
  6. Respect all the things that are on this earth, be they people, plants and animals.
  7. Honor the thoughts, desires and words of all people. Never break them in, or make fun of them, or imitate them rudely. It gives each person the right to their personal expression.
  8. Never talk about others in a bad way. The negative energy you put into the universe will multiply when it returns to you.
  9. All people make mistakes. And all the mistakes can be forgiven.
  10. Bad thoughts cause illness to the mind, body and spirit. Practice optimism.
  11. Nature is not FOR us. It is PART of us. She’s part of your family in the world.
  12. Children are the seeds of our future. Sow love in your hearts and water them with wisdom and life lessons. When they grow up, just give them space to grow up.
  13. Avoid hurting the hearts of others. The poison of their suffering will return to you.
  14. Be true (transparent ) all the time. Honesty is the test of one’s will in this universe.
  15. Keep yourself balanced. Your Mental person, your Spiritual person, your Emotional person, and your Physical person: they all have the need to be strong, pure and healthy.

~Indigenous Civilization

The Ghost Dance

Published November 15, 2022 by tindertender

On this day, November 12th, 1890, an indigenous movement giving hope to the peoples in their loss and grief, was met with fear and violent suppression by the US government and it’s armed forces.

The Ghost Dance is, and was, a spiritual movement that came about in the late 1880s when conditions were in grave despair on Indian reservations with sickness, starvation and death ever present, Native Americans needed something to give them hope.

  • the Ghost Dance song:
    “The whole world is coming,
    A nation is coming, a nation is coming,
    The eagle has brought the message to the tribe, The father says so, the father says so.
    Over the whole earth they are coming,
    The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming, The crow has brought the message to the tribe, The father says so, the father says so.”
    “When the Sun died, I went up to Heaven and saw God [Creator] and all the people who had died a long time ago. God [Creator] told me to come back and tell my people they must be good and love one another, and not fight, or steal or lie. He gave me this dance to give to my people.”

    ~ Wovoka. HISTORIC AUDIO RECORDING, click on link below to hear. https://archive.org/embed/CollectedWorksOfJamesMooney

The Ghost Dance was an answer to the subjugation of Native Americans by the U.S. government. It was an attempt to revitalize traditional culture and to find a way to face increasing poverty, hunger, and disease, all representing the reservation life of the Native Americans in the late nineteenth century.
The Ghost Dance originated among the Paiute Indians around 1870. However, the tide of the movement came in 1889 with a Paiute shaman Wovoka (Jack Wilson). Wovoka had a vision during a sun eclipse in 1889.

While many European Americans were alarmed by the Ghost Dance and saw it as a militant and warlike movement, it was quite the opposite — an emergence of a peaceful resistance movement based on Indian beliefs. It was also a movement of desperation, as existing treaties had been violated and Indians in the West were forced onto reservations. For the Plains Indians, this was a period of starvation as the buffalo were slaughtered, destroying their way of life and main source of food. From an Indian point of view, Europeans were not only destroying the way of life of Indian peoples, but destroying the natural resources of the plains to an extent that would make it impossible for anyone to live there. European Americans often saw the Ghost Dance as irrational. From an Indian point of view, what was being done to them and their way of life was irrational.

James Mooney wrote a book about the Ghost Dance, hoping it would help to counter newspaper articles about it that were inaccurate and promoted prejudice toward the Indians. His research was first published as part of a report in 1890, then enlarged as a book in 1896. The press encouraged popular belief that the dance was dangerous and possibly a prelude to an Indian uprising. Mooney emphatically explained that it was peaceful. In his introduction he describes several fieldwork trips between 1890-1894 that “occupied twenty-two months, involving nearly 32,000 miles of travel, and more or less time spent with about twenty tribes.” As a participant/observer he sang and danced with the Arapaho and Cheyenne, consulted with participants in the new religion, and also took photographs. One reason for the excitement about the Ghost Dance among ethnographers at that time was that the researchers of American Indians were seeing the emergence of a new religion developing in a surprisingly short time and crossing culture and language barriers. This was an extremely rare event. The new movement spread throughout the Native camps in the West, giving Native people much needed hope.

White settlers reacted differently to the “new religion”. Some traveled to the reservations to observe the dancing, others feared the possibility of an Indian uprising. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) eventually banned the Ghost Dance, because the government believed it was a precursor to renewed Native American militancy and violent rebellion. One of the goals of the agency was to convert the Natives to Christianity. The agency did not recognize the Ghost Dance, misunderstanding and ignorance were part of the BIA decision.

Wovoka’s message clearly promoted pacifism. However, spreading rumors of Indian treachery ignited fear and panic with non natives. On November 12th, 1890, president Benjamin Harrison ordered the military to take control over Lakota Sioux reservation in South Dakota.

On December 29, 1890, 300 Lakota men, women and children were killed in an event that came to be known as the Massacre of Wounded Knee. What started as a peaceful movement in 1889, was brutally ended a year later by the U.S. military.

Pfizer Documents the FDA tried to have sealed until 2097

Published November 8, 2022 by tindertender

Premeditated … in all ways.

November 3rd, 65 Years Ago, Laika Was Launched In Space. No Return.

Published November 6, 2022 by tindertender

Laika, “Little Barker”, real name Kudrjavka, “curly”.

Captured on the street, in Moscow.

Half Husky and half Terrier, she was around 3 years old at the time.

Choice because good, docile and perfectly adaptable to the Sputnik 2. capsule. Equipped for life support (food and water) the mission didn’t involve return.

For Laika it was a death sentence.

The interior of the satellite was lined and the interior space was wide enough to allow Laika to lie or stand. The internal temperature was set to 15. and a refrigeration system had to protect the animal from excessive thermal surges.

On November 3rd at 2 am Sputnik 2 was launched into space.

Laika probably survived for seven hours.
But some sources claim that agony was much longer: four days.
Alone, in space.

The satellite returned to atmosphere 5 months later, April 14, 1958, after turning 2.570 laps around Earth.

It disintegrated upon return to the atmosphere.

There’s a deep guilt that all of us should feel reading what we did to Laika. Human progress has often been achieved at the expense of animals that had nothing to do with our desire for supremacy.

Many people believe this was an acceptable price for our conquests, but it seems obvious, even reading this story that was really just a trivial form of prevarication.

We had a duty to choose another path.
We still have that duty today.”

#stopanimaltesting #laikadog #neverforget

Some History of the CDC and Vaccines

Published October 20, 2022 by tindertender

Written by @Forrestmaready

For those of you shocked by the CDCs action today re:COVID vaccines on the childhood immunization schedule, you should know that the other shots weren’t necessary either.

For example:
Hepatitis B is almost always sexually transmitted.
CDC votes yes anyway. Necessary for infants.

Pertussis (Whooping Cough).
Vaccine doesn’t prevent transmission of disease (proven in actual studies).
CDC votes yes anyway. Necessary for school kids.

Tetanus:
Disease is not contagious. Even an actual infection itself doesn’t confer immunity.
CDC votes yes anyway. Necessary for school.

Measles:
Mortality rates from measles were nearly zero.
Unknown if vaccine prevents transmission.
CDC votes yes anyway. Necessary for school.

Polio:
Oral vaccine actually a direct source of disease transmission.
CDC votes yes anyway. Necessary for school.

Mumps:
Disease mortality nearly zero before vaccines.
Unknown if vaccine prevents transmission.
CDC votes yes anyway. Necessary for school.

Nearly every single vaccine on the CDC childhood schedule was rubber-stamped in the same way you saw today with the COVID shots.

What you saw in full view today has been going on for decades. The COVID vaccine is no different.

Might want to look into natural immunity.

If you made it this far, this next info might really interest you.

——————————-

The polio story as you learned it is wrong. It’s one of the most often misunderstood sequence of events in the last two hundred years. I wanted to explain a few things about the disease to help people understand what actually happened.

The first modern account of something resembling polio was in 1789. A physician named Michael Underwood described an illness in children he called “Debility of the Lower Extremities.” He attributed it to teething and foul bowels. https://archive.org/details/b28771254_0001

One of the next mentions was from Louisiana in 1841. A few children came down with paralysis. The supposed cause: teething. Why would teething be associated with paralysis?

https://books.google.com/books?id=yzlmyeM6-B0C&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=colmer+louisiana+1841+teething+paralysis&source=bl&ots=bPfo39KmTY&sig=I1f9Gvnfm_WDjs58UyVnElYEZ50&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjr2tDKucTbAhXM3FMKHShmAvoQ6AEILDAB#v=onepage&q=colmer%20louisiana%201841%20teething%20paralysis&f=false

Various stories appeared throughout the 1800s of children coming down with paralysis, almost always in their legs. Many people called it “teething paralysis,” but others settled on “infantile paralysis.”

This was a new phenomenon: Doctors had never seen it before and didn’t know why it was happening. Research began to reveal that the cause of paralysis were lesions on the grey part of the spinal cord.

If you developed a lesion on your spinal cord, they called this a “poliomyelitis.” Polio = grey. Myelitis = inflammation of the spinal cord.

A poliomyelitis was a lesion on your spinal cord. You could have more than one of them. But they didn’t know why children had begun developing them, seemingly out of nowhere.

Scientists conducted research on animals by purposefully poisoning them with arsenic, an ingredient of popular medical remedies of the time. The result? Paralysis in their hind legs.

When they did autopsies of the animals, they discovered lesions in their spinal cord. The animals had what they called “poliomyelitis.”

During the 1800s, the most common medical treatments for any sickness contained mercury—in order to clear the bowels. Infants received mercury-containing teething powder.

This wasn’t a fringe treatment, but something as common as Tylenol might be considered today. If the metal arsenic was known to cause poliomyelitis, then perhaps, so could mercury.

Throughout the 1800s, there were a few cases of infantile paralysis that would pop up here and there. Not really any epidemics. In the 1890s, something changed.

A new pesticide was invented in 1892 called lead arsenate near Boston, Mass to combat the spread of a foreign invader—the gypsy moth. It combined lead and arsenic together because it couldn’t be easily washed off.

http://www.deq.state.va.us/Portals/0/DEQ/Land/RemediationPrograms/Brownfields/Weaver1-195-1-PB-8r.pdf

If you’re interested, I talk about this whole story in my book, “The Moth in the Iron Lung.” You can get it here: https://www.amazon.com/Moth-Iron-Lung-Biography-Polio/dp/1717583679

The pesticide began being sprayed aggressively and within two years, the first real epidemics of poliomyelitis (infantile paralysis) began to appear in the northeastern U.S. Rather than a few children coming down with something, it started getting into the hundreds.

These epidemics affected children more than anyone, but had another strange set of victims: animals. Horses, dogs, chickens, pigs. All dead from poliomyelitis—lesions in their spinal cords that caused paralysis & death. https://archive.org/details/infantileparalys00cave

I say strange because the poliovirus doesn’t affect animals (besides Old World Monkeys). These early outbreaks are referred to as the first polio outbreaks in the U.S., but we know it couldn’t have been due to the poliovirus if animals were being struck.

Another event would confuse scientists of the day—an effect which is the main reason people get the polio story so wrong even today: Koch’s Postulates. https://www.medicinenet.com/kochs_postulates/definition.htm

Koch’s Postulates were some research guidelines that basically stipulated there was a single causative microbe for every disease. It WAS true for all of the other diseases: cholera, typhoid fever, diphtheria.

Over the next few years, scientists discovered that many things could cause a poliomyelitis—it wasn’t just arsenic. There were several other viruses and bacteria that if injected directly into the nervous system could cause lesions that would trigger paralysis.

But the cloud of Koch’s Postulates hung over their research, and many scientists felt that—like all the other diseases—poliomyelitis HAD to be due to ONE thing: a bacteria or a virus. They just had to find it.

You can see the shift in their thinking around this time. They start referring to the disease as a proper noun: Poliomyelitis, rather than using it as a symptom: The patient has a poliomyelitis.

At this time, viruses were still very difficult to work with. They couldn’t see them, only deduce their presence by the symptoms they might cause. In 1908, a virus was found to be able to cause paralysis in monkeys. https://historyofvaccines.org/history/polio/overview

They named it “poliovirus,” because it could cause poliomyelitis in the monkeys. Other viruses and bacteria could cause the same thing: coxsackievirus, echovirus, D68, etc.

With Koch’s Postulates guiding their search, they began to focus on this one virus as THE cause of poliomyelitis, despite knowing there were many other causes. This mistake would create suffering for millions of people over the next few decades.

The question is if viruses and bacteria COULD cause poliomyelitis, why then, and not before? Why did epidemics of polio suddenly appear in the 1900s when they did not exist before?

Some have suggested improvements in sanitation as the cause. They suggest that better sanitation prevented people from picking up the infections as children, when they were protected by their mother’s breastmilk antibodies.

This hypothesis is weak. The disease was called infantile paralysis by many even in the 1940s because it seemed to always strike infants. If better sanitation was the cause, teens or adults should have been the ones with problems.

Also, the early outbreaks were always in rural areas, where there was little change in sanitation practices. Not coincidentally, these rural areas were subjected to heavy pesticide spraying.

The real question is if the spinal cord was well-protected from these paralytic infections, why did it suddenly seem to become vulnerable starting around this time.

I believe ingested pesticides, known to cause cellular membrane dysfunction, created a path directly from the intestines to the bottom of the spinal cord, located directly behind, for the viruses and bacteria to take hold.

This is why multiple viruses (poliovirus, coxsackievirus, echovirus, etc.) all began paralyzing children around this time. It wasn’t a genetic mutation. It wasn’t sanitation improvements. It was a physical alteration of the gut integrity by pesticides.

Modern scientists will say the virus gets in the blood and reaches the spinal cord that way. But why did the infection nearly always affect the bottom of the spinal cord, when the blood supply reaches the entire cord evenly?

This is why I believe infants & children were the worst affected. The bottom of the infant spinal cord (the part that controls the legs) lies directly behind the intestines.

As you grow, the spinal cord does not grow as much as the vertebrae and in adults, the bottom of the spinal cord ends up being much higher in relation to the intestines—well out of reach for most toxic or microbial assaults.

This is why the injected Salk polio vaccine worked so poorly. It created antibodies for only one of many viruses that could paralyze, and it created antibodies in the blood—a useless defense against an intestinal infection.

As lead arsenate fell out of favor because of its toxicity, a new set of synthetic pesticides came into play and made this problem much worse.

After World War 2, DDT began being applied everywhere, sprayed directly onto children’s food, their clothing, their bedding, etc. It made people very sick and the paralysis of poliomyelitis exploded. It was horrible.

By 1952, it was clear many of the insects were becoming DDT-resistant, and its toxicity began to concern people. They began to use safer pesticides and, with lead arsenate also fading out of the picture, infantile paralysis began to disappear.

Even Steedman’s Teething Powder, the mercury containing product administered to teething infants for so long, changed its formula. https://t.co/diycA8lq6f

By 1960, the ineffectiveness of the Salk vaccine concerned scientists and they gathered in Chicago to discuss the problem. People were getting paralyzed after even 4 or more shots. https://t.co/dK31UNcQse

They were also concerned about study in Detroit where they had taken stool samples of nearly 1,000 people diagnosed with polio. Just one third of those people tested actually had polio. Everyone else had been stricken with some other paralyzing virus. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/327642

This presents a problem because many people were told they had “polio” when they were affected as children. The reality is—doctors could not have known what caused the paralysis. It could have been one of many different viruses, pesticides, or even bacteria.

The Sabin oral polio vaccine soon came into use & it could actually control the poliovirus infection within the gut—where it actually made a difference. But it didn’t matter. It only affected the poliovirus—none of the other paralyzing microbes.

By this time (1963), poliomyelitis (aka “polio”) had all but disappeared. As it turns out, neither of the vaccines were actually necessary. The Salk vaccine was horrible at actually preventing paralysis, and the Sabin vaccine came too late to make a difference.

Today, countries that use toxic pesticides still struggle with infantile paralysis, aka polio. Extremely aggressive oral polio vaccine use may help control poliovirus infections…

https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/135/Supplement_1/S16/33686/Evaluation-of-Clinical-Features-of-238-Cases-With?redirectedFrom=fulltext

…but with several other paralyzing viruses in existence, it is not the panacea people believe it to be. To complicate matters, the oral poliovirus vaccine itself occasionally creates paralysis. https://t.co/Qs306taI1x

So what is one to takeaway from all of this? “Polio” is a man-made problem. The paralysis caused from direct pesticide exposure OR from viruses being allowed into the spinal cord can be directly attributed to a man-made cause.

It appeared in epidemic form in the 1890s from the introduction of lead arsenate and disappeared in the 1950s when DDT usage fell. Because we know it was caused by many different things, the effect of a single-virus vaccine on its decline is minimal.

As I mentioned earlier, I have a book that covers this entire story in detail and mentions many things I’ve skipped. It’s called “The Moth in the Iron Lung.” I hope you’re able to read it.

If we can get the polio story correct in our heads, many other problems can be solved. The infantile paralysis that still takes place in many developing countries will not be solved from the polio vaccine! Cleaning up their environment is absolutely necessary.

Many thanks for reading, and I’m happy to try and answer any of your questions.

One more thing, this picture is what everyone thinks of when they think of polio. This was a publicity stunt arranged for Life Magazine. Most of these iron lungs were brand new and were headed around the country to other hospitals.

It was taken in the auditorium of Ranchos Los Amigos Hospital in Los Angeles, which had been emptied of its rows of seating to make this picture. It was designed to show worried parents that the U.S. was ready for battle.

Although the hospital had the largest polio ward in the country, at its peak it would have never had this many iron lungs in operation. Most hospitals in big cities had a couple of iron lungs.

There were around 1,100 in the whole country at their peak. Nothing like this picture would indicate.

The next time you look at this photo, you should be struck at the destructive power of man and his inventions. The poliovirus, like all the other paralytic causes of that era, were incapable of harming us without some of our help.

End.

It’s Too Heavy

Published October 5, 2022 by tindertender

“Sex,” I was pretty sure, meant whether you were a boy or girl, and “sin” made Tante Jans very angry, but what the two together meant I could not imagine. And so, seated next to Father in the train compartment, I suddenly asked, “Father, what is sexsin?”

He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, but to my surprise he said nothing. At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case from the rack over our heads, and set it on the floor.

“Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?” he said.
I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with the watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning.

“It’s too heavy,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “And it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It’s the same way, Corrie, with knowledge.

We are asking our children to carry loads that are way too heavy for them.

They should not be forced, as children, to see and feel the world through the lens of adults.

Innocence is worth protecting and worth fighting for.

We need to do our part as teachers, parents and caregivers to carry certain things for them until they are old enough to bear the load.