Human Rights: How do we protect the cognitively different?

So I was reading an article on MSNBC about the latest suicide attacks in Baghdad. Standardly I see militant actions of suicide bombers as choosing to remove themselves from the overall society at large and thus (While horrible) at least has a small sense of existential risk choicemaking involved. But this case threw me for a loop. It indicates the women who were the "Bombers" both had Down Syndrome. Since I don't know to which degree this diagnosis applied to either woman I cannot say too much. But if it was to an extensive enough degree then I can say that they were likely manipulated and may have been totally unaware of, or at very least incapable of understanding the existential risks. The bombs aledgedly were detonated remotely. This also implies they were unaware or incapable of awareness of the imminent death they faced.
Until now, as a largely peaceful and peace promoting person, I have tried to stay out of any blogging related to war efforts. However this changes that resolve, immensely. This takes it out of the war aspect and places it into a hardcore human rights venue for me. Any person or persons that choose to subject people to being blown up that they view as on their OWN side is not a person/group worth accounting for. I think that they just hurt their cause in untold ways. Apathetic as I may be towards the entire mid-east debacle (And I am partially due to media fatigue and partially due to knowing we lied about why we went over but we show no signs of leaving) this should outreage any person with any valuing for life at all. I think this might be a move that angers even the most anti-war activist. Good going Al-Qaida you just pissed off the the last people who were opposed to us being there by showing just how inhumane you really are.

OK now I am into angry ranting mode and need to let this drop for the time being. When I can be more detached and logical I will likely update more.

Innoculating the masses to prevent future sentience shock.

So I am sitting there with 2 of my 3 kids and watching Transformers (The new version that runs on cartoon network). I was struck by a few different things.
Firstly, I was impressed by the fact that the Transformers seem to be humanity independent. They assert a culture totally separate from humans that encounter humanity as an accident. Suspending the language barrier issue aspect as rational option via a cartoon rather than an assumed hurdle it would almost show a Simultaneous but non-biologic evolution.
All of the Auto-bots and Decepticons (As they do not define themselves as transformers), seems to have a defined concept of birth (Coming on-line), the soul (The spark), and death (Going off line). They also have people protecting the "All-Spark" which seems to be the source of "Coming on-line". And while the Auto-bots have control of it, they do not use it to destroy the decepticons, but the decepticons have said they would use it as such.
They also seem to recognize the "All spark" as existing as part of life in humanity. This poses a number of questions for me. Such as how they will relate to the mass of humanity when they discover that most of them eat flesh. Or would they simply break it down to taking parts from a PC for upgrades?
On the 1st episode (after the pilot) already bigotry of man vs. Machine was being demonstrated. And it was clear that people were feeling threatened and were developing plots to take them down.
I figured what better opinion to get than that of a 7 year old. So I looked at my daughter and asked her what she thought of that episode. She instantly looked at me and told me how "Stupid" the "mean people" were for not liking the "Transformer people". To her, it was clear that these characters were as capable of emotional capability as the people were. Of course she thinks that animals feel that way too (more and more scholars are starting to agree). I am not saying this supports or denies anything but what it shows me is that certain groundwork is being lain.
My 7 year old and 4 year old already accept the concept of non-biologic sentience as Truth. It will be exposure to others that will lead them to believe otherwise.
Just a half thought. Meant solely to engender other thought.

Racing mind........Well, Yeah.

I hear people complain about their minds racing, about constant mental chatter. A favorite blogger (I thoroughly enjoy reading his posts) mentioned our 50,000+ daily thoughts recently. I find these complaints confusing. I like my mind to have a dozen exciting new ideas filling it and rolling around in it at once. Suddenly, I have a lot of new questions regarding this. Please allow me to explain.

I have heard much about the peace and benefits of meditation, and find meditative exercise to bring great benefit. It does still the mind for me some. Or more accurately for me it brings me to a narrowed focus of thought. It allows me to contemplate one or two important concepts at a time versus the usual steady stream I am accustomed to. However, in recent months I have become interested in Buddhism, it seems, largely a pretty natural off shoot of where I am already. The problem I am encounterring is that as I try to meditate and quiet the mind I feel largely lost and alone. I find that without my thoughts for companionship and for reinforcement I sort of flop about in nothingness. I guess that is part of the whole letting go of attachment to identity thing.

For me, slowing the mind is a sort of denial of desire. There are few things that bring me the joy and elation of rolling a new idea around in my head and letting it flavor my entire existence for a while. To me total misery is stagnation of concepts, thoughts, and innovations. I like to have my paradigms shifted regularly. For my mind not to be full to the brim with things to be compare, cotrast, assimilate, regurgitate and distribute is painful. I often use continuous thought as a stimulant. It's true. I seem to run on a need for a constant upper. And since I have stopped using as much caffeine I seem to be seeking extra thought provocation incessantly. The reality check is that I am tired, alot. I get bored, easily. Lately I seem to see life like a beginner book and I am craving doctorate level material or at very least some good victorian erotica.

I guess it would benefit me to sit back and not consume so much info but I cannot see how. I slow down and all I want to do is sleep. I have been told that excessive sleep means one is driving one's self too hard. I don't know that I buy that either. I get tired when I slow down, but if I could need less sleep I would get so much more done. I used to have a 3 pot of coffee a day (plus supplemental espresso) habit. I have cut back to 2 cups a day plus a diet soda or two. I am slowly becoming more moderate in my habits. Moderation though, does not make me so much happier as it makes me more bland. I feel happiest when I more land asleep then drift off. Of course, sleeping the sleep of the dead, makes it less likely to hear my husband snoring, and that means deep sleep. Always a bonus.

I just think I am not meant to get the whole step back and be quiet thing. The only time I observe that centerring and quiet is in nature or in ritual. Somehow I doubt that is likely to change. I seek moderation, but I think I may already be overly moderalte and this is why quiet is not so much for me.

Veganism & Sentience Musings

I'm a vegan. Have been for over a year now. It comes up in conversation often. Not because I bring it up. But things as simple as choosing lunch locale's trading recipes, or choices of snacks bring it up. I am not an "in your face" vegan. I don't attempt to impose my dietary choices on anyone else. But I get alot of questions. I've been thinking on them more lately and my vegan voyage has been a progression for me.

I initially became vegan before my last surgery. I reached a point where eating certain foods hurt. Or caused other unpleasantness. The worst culprits were animal products and greasy foods. I am a largely rational person so I quit eating those things. And I went full bore. It was a bit hard at first, but wasn't long till I had made the switch. After becoming a vegan certain aspects of my eating habits were questioned (often not too kindly) by family and friends. I finally just listened and didn't explain my choices. I found that people had their own ideas why I had taken this route and no amount of explanation would sway them other wise.
My grandmother was sure I had joined a religious cult and that was why. My mom actually got it. My husband saw it as a grand new challenge. My friends all assured me I'd be deficient in protein and Iron, and my peers in nursing school (at that time) saw me as difficult or odd.

I am comfortable in my vegan skin now. It makes me healthier, happier and more productive so it is good. But as I go along and hear the arguments for why people should eat meat I am faced with a defined speciesist argument every time. I for one am not ever convinced of a "natural order" of who should be predator and who should be prey. Nor do I necessarily buy that they are "lower" creatures. I have been wondering about tests for sentience in animals and how this will affect people's eating habits. Will they be less inclined to eat something if they believe that thing they are eating may have a rational mind with a comparable self-awareness? It occurs to me that part of the problem in addressing these issues is that a good selection of people around me do not think in these terms. And they are simply not interested in making that leap. Animal=tasty. No thought required.
I see this applying to the eventuality of AI too. In the minds of the masses, "It is a machine therefore it does not feel or if it does feel that feeling is not real." I really think that in order for them to accept something so new as the concept of machine sentience, they must first get over speciesism as relates to currently existing species. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe a thinking-feeling-rational machine may jar them out of their apathy and shake up their personal paradigms enough to allow them to reflect on other species as well. All I know is that with the current mass-media-pop-culture mindset where the mass of the populace has been lulled into a state of complacency I do not think much time is spent contemplating.
I view a good chunk of mass media right now as "capitalist porn". Let me define that for you. In pornography sex and partners and sexual gratification is readily accessible, there is not a denial (unless it enhances the gratification later) and there are no consequences to expending sexual efforts or energies any where with anyone. Modern mass media has developed a culture of readily available goods and services with no need to earn the capital to acquire them. The people portrayed always have the latest goods and services while seldom having a job or having to rationalize needs vs. wants. There is no bankruptcy as a common theme. Credit cards help distance from the tangible spending. That is what I mean by "Capitalist porn". I define it now because I use the phrase frequently.
This distancing of gratification from sources and consequences to the masses does not improve the ability to assay accurately future implications of the now. I wonder if we'll have to find a way to make a singing cow pop star that is fully sexualized in order to persuade people to stop eating meat.

Kool-aid urine and tinnitus acceptance.

As I finish Ironing my scrubs for another week, my head is full of thoughts and reflections.

Last week I saw one of my patients after chemo. One of the infusion nurses had said the patient was in pain, and also had the standard nausea that the harder core drugs often induces despite all the anti-nausea meds we pump them full of. We ushered the patient to a bathroom and acquired a urine sample. It looked like berry kool-aid or even beet juice. I was petrified, but smiled and stayed (on the surface) calm for the patient's sake as I ushered the patient to a room and laid him/her (I don't breach confidentiality) down on an exam table. I left him/her in the ultra capable hands of the infusion nurse and ran to the lab with sample in hand. Even the lab tech asked me to please tell her that the cup was anything other than urine. We rushed it over to the machines and I went back to tend my patient and continue patient flow for my Dr. once he had handled this crisis. We ended up admitting the patient to the hospital in the end.

This made me think about the drugs we use in my practice. There is BIG money in chemo drugs. We have one cabinet with a person's unused meds in it. There is a 10 month supply which translates to $55,000 worth of meds. That is only one person's drug. And that is a single drug. Many patients are on multi therapies. Or have even more expensive drugs. This is a burgeoning business of patents and promotion. All to treat the cancer. None of this cures cancer at all. The funding for research is given by those looking to make a profit. Curing is not really a goal. It is more cost effective for pharmaceutical companies to treat forever and accept pain and loss and damage than it is to cure. See a cure has a defined end point. A place where the $ stops coming in. It would not be viable for them to invest in unpatentable drugs either. So any and all research on unpatented drugs is left to researchers using indepenent funding. Now lets say an unpatented cure (Like the one covered in New Scientist last month) comes up. Who would fund the trials for that? Not the pharmaceutical companies. Without funding, the FDA won't even look at the viability of a trial much less approve the trials to start. It all seems very frustrating. Until we revamp the system enough that cure is more cost effective than treatment and acceptable loss there will be no funding for the right research.

This weekend I went to my husband's workplace and talked with a lady who works there. Her mom has had inner ear issues. The last doctor was willing to accept that hearing loss, loss of equilibrium, and lost mobility were totally acceptable because of her advanced age. I have encouraged the daughter to seek different medical care for her mother. Largely because I don't believe that accepting age as part of a debilitation process is reasonable. I think that the way we treat the elderly attests to our defeatism about the war on aging. So often doctors discount the realities because of aging. Well this lady's mother went from bedridden and hearing loss to regaining bits of her hearing (still a constant ringing in one ear) and regained mobility. All with the simple insertion of tubes. If they keep pushing they may even find some way to eliminate the ringing. I want to see wellness in the elderly. Not acceptable decrepitude.

Again there is not big money in improving quality of life. There is big money in end of life treatment, however. When health care as we know it collapses (and I truly believe it will, and hope it will) part of restructuring and values will be ethically driven cost effectiveness. Wellness over profit. It seems logical but I assure you in America the idea is still frighteningly novel.

Limitations and perception.

It's was a long weekend full of many personal things that won't end up in here but a few things are touch points for greater discussion, or think of them as jump off points for my internal conversation.

Yesterday morning I did something I have been planning for the better part of 10 years. I got my very first tattoo. I'm no spring chicken, I am 32, but have waited on this for a myriad of reasons. But as I leaned into the post and felt the needles driving ink into my flesh I had a sort of revelation about modification of the human body. We do things like this to adorn or express ourselves. People associate a certain amount of stigma (depending on your community) with something as simple as inking your skin.

I have often dreamed of having a mechanical enhancement done to my right hand. It is largely missing all the joints in the fingers. I see that the reality of any enhancement technology may not look like a "normal hand". In fact the most functional and useful hand may not look "attractive" at all. To me a certain level of expression could be achieved there that I have yet to acquire. I would be able to hold on to bandages, take care of test tubes, and the myriad other things my job requires with far greater efficacy. But I wonder if such a prosthesis, even in theory, would be so unsettling to my patients as to increase their discomfort level and make what is already a traumatic point in their life even more so.

This may seem an extreme concern but when selecting the location of my tattoo I had to be sure it was in a place my patients would not see. Even with tattoo's becoming more commonplace and accepted, in my line of work the only tattoo's I see are on WWII veterans who got them during their military service. So how much more disturbing would my prosthesis (In the future) be to them?

I often wonder if my perspective is growing more divergent from society as a whole or if the specific population I work with is just that far behind. I realize that part of the issue is as a mildly disabled person I largely "pass" for no disability. Very few people notice the malformation of my hands after the numerous surgeries because I am not self-conscious about it and I have excellent dexterity despite the limitations I have. I knit, I tat, I play a really horrible pool game, but my hands are not ever an issue. Still I know there are activities I am limited in. I have always wanted to go rock climbing. This would require finger tips and I do not have those. Trust me, no one tries to obtain fingerprints off my right hand. And the time my friends drug me to a palm reader, she had a hell of a time.

I just wonder if there will ever be societal room for the improvements I desire. Or will the stigma be more limiting than the lack of joints. Just my thoughts for the day.

Compromise, it's an illusion.

I am starting to think that compromise is an illusion I fool myself with when I have given in on something I should not have. Often a compromise seems to be a lack of willingness to continue a battle, however noble, due to fatigue of some kind. I will ponder on this more and post as the thought develops, but I really think there is something to this line of logic. I see it in my personal life and also see it on a grander scale. Look at one of my favorite subjects: life extension. People grow weary of hoping or trying to make it a reality or of trying to rally resources and "compromise" on a treatment or research point and accept treatment of only illnesses rather than a diversified wellness regime. Look specifically at Cancer (Working in Oncology I feel very close to this one) we seek treatments and are willing to have a "Remission period" as an acceptable outcome rather than pursuing the cure. Many of you may have seen the recent links in New scientist on a cure for cancer. Patients ask for the treatment and Dr's are unable to give it to them because of State Board rules. It's a bad situation. Even the Dr's have to "Compromise" and wait for FDA approval. It seems it's just another way of saying I no longer care to keep on till you make it easy for me to do so. I don't know that I can advocate that anymore.