Sunday, January 31, 2016

Sympahty for Homeopathy?

I am deeply saddened by the death of three students of SVS college. But what bothered me more is, the college taught Homeopathy. Homeopathy is proven to be a fake system of "beliefs" and unlike Siddha and Yoga there are no way to explain the working of Homeopathy. Traditional medicines like Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani, Chinese medicine etc are all having some or other active ingredients. Again Yoga as a stretching exercise has a basis for efficacy. But Homeopathy? How can a system without any explanation of its working can be approved by government to be taught in colleges? How can people who are trained in this fake system be allowed to practice as "doctors"?

First to make some points clear, I support only science based medicines i.e. medicines that are proven effective by proper studies and trails (be it garlic or statin). Also I strongly believe that there is NO divine touch on any medical system. All the traditional systems are developed by continuous observations,experiments with whatever methods available at that time, trail and error, blind luck, guess etc. That is why unless studied, tested and proven, it is safe to exclude "traditional cures" for any problem, let alone serious problems. But my problem with Homeopathy is that it is plainly false. 100% lie. 0% true. Fake! Bullshit!

Homeopathy Principle:

Like cure like - Any substance that causes a symptom in large dose will cure diseases with the same symptoms in smaller doses.

This is the basis of Homeopathy. There is no germ theory of diseases. It doesn't deal with nutrients and their deficiencies. There are no room for hormone imbalances etc in Homeopathy. For example, this website of Homeopathy advocates says that germ theory is wrong. Compare this with Siddha. If you look at Turmeric, it is proven anti-septic (type of disease: germ induced). Siddha has clam-shell powder to treat Calcium deficiency (type of disease: nutrients deficiency). There are drugs in traditional medicines to regulate bile secretion, acidity etc (type of disease: imbalance of secretions). But Homeopathy has no such system to address any of the above said type of diseases. It again and again claims that "Like cure like".

Also Homeopathy has no equivalent to vaccination or physical exercise or surgery, which even traditional systems have! But still there are success stories for Homeopathy as people are assuming Homeopathy cured their self-limiting diseases. Some diseases come and go by themselves and some others wax and wane over the time. People wrongly assume that Homeopathy is working! Their "anecdotal evidences" are the "proofs" Homeopathy has!

When the concentration of a drug drops below a certain limit, there is literally no chance to have even a single molecule of the supposed "cure" in the medicine. But Homeopaths claim that water has "memory" to hold the effect of the cure! If so, why water has forgotten all other impurities it came in to contact before it got distilled? And the funniest part is that, they claim, the more you dilute, the more potent the cure will become!

A Typical Homeopathy Medicine (DIY):


Here I am going to explain two Homeopathy Remedies that you can do it yourself! (Disclaimer for stupid enough people: Don't take the following remedies seriously and try them on yourselves or on others! Serious harm may happen! If you have any health problem go to a properly educated doctor!)

1. Insomnia

Ask some 5 to 10 of your friends or family members. At least two or three will complain that they have problem in sleeping. So here is a quick and easy Homeopathy remedy for them! You can prepare it in the kitchen itself. All you need is some coffee powder, distilled water, clean ink filler, clean vessels and sugar pills.

We all know that coffee in higher doses hinder with sleep. So according to Homeopathy, coffee in minute doses can cure insomnia!

Step 1: So take a pinch of instant coffee powder. (Important Note: If you are a Surya fan, use Sunrise or if you are a Karthi fan, use Bru. Else use any other brand you like!) Mix it well in 5 liter water.

Step 2: Now with a clean ink filler pick one drop of the coffee solution and mix it in another 5 liter water. Now stir well. Again

Step 3: Repeat step 2 for any number of time! The more you do, the more potent the drug will become. Now take the sugar pills and spray some "cure" on them.

Call in your friend and ask him to take 5 pills. If you have done the dilution enough, he may fall in coma immediately! Does that sound funny? But before you laugh, take a look at here. They claim the same. But people are believing what they say, while laughing at me?!

2. Indigestion

Now instead of coffee, you can grind a pizza or a scoop of briyani or a piece of chicken 65 and dilute it as explained above and spray on sugar pills. That will treat indigestion. As all these foods cause indigestion in large doses, they ought to treat the same in minute doses. Good luck with that!

Conclusion:

As you can see, a system that is based upon flawed understanding of both disease and drug will not work! Then how can government allow colleges to teach Homeopathy as a medical discipline? Is it not counter-productive to other medicinal systems bundled with Homeopathy? Won't it impact their validity negatively? In my opinion, severe action should be taken against the people who are responsible for the deaths of the students. At the same time, similar action should be taken on all Homeopathy practitioners, hospitals, colleges etc. They should be shutdown and banned immediately. Who knows how many people are being mislead by this fake system and not getting proper treatment?

Thursday, January 28, 2016

Book Review: Net Force - CyberNation

Written by Tom Clancy around 2001, the book is set in early 2010s. The book is not worth a review per se, but I am writing this because it confuses free as in freedom with free as in free lunch. Even 10 years after the dissolution of USSR, the author was still afraid of Communism and Socialism. This book is nothing but a knee-jerk reaction towards the presumed threat of deprived "intellectual property rights" or "intellectual communism"!

Long, Boring Story Short: 

CyberNation is a group or a corporate, you can say, consisting of management, hackers, PROs, lobbyists, lawyers etc. Their aim is to replace all the ISPs and fill their space with their own version of Internet, where there is no "Intellectual Property" i.e. people only need to subscribe to the CyberNation to get all their music, movies, books, porn, scientific journals and whatever else that can be downloaded. CyberNation will make money by advertising. So to press the people to make the switch from their regular ISPs to CyberNation, they do all the dirty tricks from DDoS attacks to blowing up hardware using bombs! A special task force called Net Force, tries to identify and stop CyberNation. There are lots of useless diversions like too much of description about martial arts training on both sides (but no martial art fight in the climax!), virtual reality, bashing Russians and commies, New Age bullshit and incorrect futuristic predictions. At last, the "good" guys win.

A Look into CyberNation:

Have you heard about Free Basics by Facebook? CyberNation sounds more like this. It runs ads and campaigns to entice people to support them, just like what Facebook did with Internet.org/Free Basics. It has lobbyists placed in many countries to convince politicians and authorities to make changes in laws exactly like what Facebook did by asking us to send support letters to TRAI. CyberNation has all the money and means to do it exactly like Facebook. Their aim is to loop in more people so that they can earn more by advertising to their user base, again exactly like Facebook. I can feel the ennui here. But I couldn't help.

But CyberNation is against "Intellectual property", the meaningless umbrella term that clubs together various different and uncorrelated concepts like copyright, trademark, patents etc. Instead of me struggling with my half-baked knowledge to explain it, you can hear from Dr. Stallman himself (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html). People who really care for freedom of knowledge and information won't accept invasion of privacy and anything that disturbs net-neutrality. That is why FSF and other like-minded people are vehemently against Facebook's Free Basics and other such schemes that can disturb the net-neutrality. But CyberNation is pro-freedom and anti-freedom at the same time. Like a typical Right-wing person who fights against abortion in public life and forces his daughter to undergo one on her teenage pregnancy to save the "family honor", Tom Clancy can envision such organization without a problem!

CyberNation is much like Mark Zuckerberg running the Pirate Bay. One thing the book got correct is the character of Jasmine Chance. What a person will become when educated in management and shaped by the corporates, a ruthless, self-worshiping person who cares the least about others in achieving their selfish goals. She is much like the so called role models of this generation namely Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Ambanis, Tatas etc. Bribing, killing, cheating all are fine provided you get what you want. This is what today's "business" has boiled down to. Everyone else is labelled as losers or considered running charities.

The book says that the "Intellectual Property Rights" is very important for innovation and without the motivation of monetary benefits it is impossible for new inventions and researches happening. Yeah! We have seen that in the case of Daraprim! Who invented that drug? But the novel idea of "Intellectual Property Rights" allowed a retard like Martin Shkreli to exploit people using a drug that was invented decades before he was born! Similarly the book confuses resale of used book and making unauthorized copies of a book and selling it in market. Coming back to the drugs, what type of drug will get more funds today? Is it the one that will prevent millions of deaths or the one that can amass trillions of Dollars? We all know the answer.

 The greedy, cut-throat completion of the laissez faire economy won't address the "needs" of the people more than the "wants" of the rich any day! For Tom Clancy, putting needs of the general public before wants of the rich is communism. He can call it whatever he wants, but for me this is the very definition of human nature. A monkey never feels guilty for snatching a banana from another monkey. And a group of monkey watching this won't condemn it. But we humans do. If we sit back and allow corporates to exploit labor and resources of the poor for the luxury of the rich, we will be no better than monkeys!

Conclusion:

So sad that Tom Clancy is no more. I am pretty much sure that he will use the exact same arguments like "private property", "individual freedom and rights", "free market" etc. to support whatever Facebook is doing. He will be with the people who are arguing for paid fast-lanes in Internet. All that mattered to him is the rich to win over the poor. He wants the strong to trample the weak with the help of governments holding the poor down with their laws and regulations. That is what democracy is in Clancy's view. But surely a true CyberNation will rise. It will be rule of people. It will fight for freedom of and freedom for ideas, arts, science and knowledge. It will fight for the people's privacy, freedoms and rights. It will shatter the evil monopolies built with the backing of inhuman laws. On that day, NSA or Clancy's Net Force will be silent spectators who will watch the giant force of people marching towards true equality!

Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Leave The Bulls Alone!

The the common bulls of Tamil Nadu are classified along bears, panthers, tigers etc and hence Jallikattu is technically banned. Wow! Kerala can go ahead with its elephants, which are actually wild animals in every sense. But Tamils should not touch the bull. The bulls of Tamil Nadu are selectively bred for their strength and endurance. As an agrarian society, Tamils relied upon bulls for ploughing and drawing carts from prehistoric times. You can't say that selectively bred and domesticated animals are "wild" by any definition. Also, if bull is wild then how cows can be allowed to be kept in farm and their milk to be sold? Can we sell tiger milk?

Unlike bull-fights of Spain, where the bull is actually killed, Jallikattu actually ends with just holding a bull for certain seconds or certain count of jumps. Usage of liquor, torture devices etc are non-native practices and they should be monitored and stopped. But to stop the event itself is far-fetched. Are we going to ban cricket due to gambling? Also regulations can be made to ensure audience safety. Instead of taking such rational and simple steps, organizations like PeTA are forcing government to ban the event itself.

On the other side there are people who are crying that there is a corporate conspiracy to kill the native breed. This also seems to be an overkill. So these people are saying that same PeTA which wants to ban milk and leather industry in the West wants to bring foreign breed cattle here in India! Also some Facebook/Twitter posts by these conspiracy theorists claim that PeTA is silent about beef but protests Jallikattu. In reality PeTA is actively protesting against all forms of meat from chicken to beef. They will surely protest against goat/rooster sacrifice in rural temples. They have already protested against Eid sacrifices. Please go through the links below.

http://www.petaindia.com/blog/celebrate-life-vegan-eid/ - PeTA against Eid
http://www.petaindia.com/issues/animals-used-for-food/milk/ - PeTA against milk
http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/meat-environment/ - PeTA against meat
http://action.petaindia.com/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=111&ea.campaign.id=2856 - PeTA in action
http://www.petaindia.com/blog/victory-animal-sacrifice-banned-at-nepals-gadhimai-festival/ - PeTA against Hindu animal sacrifice

From above links, it is clear that PeTA is a militant and stupid organization that wants to push its version of morality, disregarding the sentiments and traditions of native people. But the conspiracy theorists selectively portray that PeTA is only against Jallikattu and trying to bring other breeds of cows. This nonsense also takes religious and racist tones in some posts. If you people are silent about other activities of PeTA, then the price you pay for it will be a ban on Jallikattu. Are you ready to fight PeTA in all fronts? Then we can get Jallikattu back!

We either look it as a conspiracy by West/NGO/Corporates or we see it as animal cruelty and act of barbarianism. Both are not exactly true. The truth is some where in the middle.

PeTA, which protests against everything from KFC to cow's milk, is often ignored as a fringe group. But that fringe group already has a lot of impact in our everyday lives. They want to save stray dogs at the cost of road users and children's lives. They want to portray meat eaters as criminals, rapists etc. They want to portray traditional foods like fish, poultry, lamb etc as unhealthy. They want to ban fishing, farming of animals, leather, wool, testing drugs on animals and the list goes on! All these have a direct and enormous impact on our lives. Yet they are deceptively hiding the facts and portray themselves as people for protecting animals and a group that is fighting against cruelty.

From hate speech to scaremongering hoaxes, PeTA has tried its hands on many "below the belt" tactics with the public. And with politicians and bureaucrats, they cheat, bribe, threaten or lobby with people's money against people's interest. This organization without any help from corporates can do such dirty jobs and I think this group itself is a corporate! So what we need to do is to identify such groups, isolate them and ban them. One such group is Greenpeace, which our government rightly identified and banned recently. PeTA should face the same fate.

Some people are cherry picking PeTA's campaigns to support some of their views and care less about what PeTA is doing in other issues. For example, some people who are opposing meat, support PeTA thinking that they are actually helping. But they care less about PeTA's stand on milk. How many Indian vegetarians are ready to give up milk? If you support PeTA, think twice. Check out their motto and modus operandi in all issues and then decide if you want to really support them.

So to conclude, the fight is not only towards Jallikattu ban. Tomorrow it may be a ban on animal sacrifice in temples or ban on camel slaughter during Eid. So for everyone's interest, let us fight these inhuman organizations like PeTA, AWB and other such elements that cause too much trouble in the society.

Update: Central Government has made amendments to allow Jallikattu in the law, but the decision has been challenged in court!