Morning blog-readers

Nice morning here.  Moon's still full, almost straight overhead, cool, clear sky.

A friend told me a couple of interesting anecdotes she's encountered recently, yesterday.

Seems there's an outfit in California that's found a successful means of treating Alzheimer's, which is a happy piece of human gossip.  Lady just out of the village is putting her home up for rent to take her mother out there for a year to go through the complete 19 month regimen.  She's gone through the first phase here (six weeks) and seen such improvement that she feels a lot of confidence the treatment works.

Interestingly, it's mainly a matter of retraining the communications within the brain, re-routing electrical impulses to do what they did before the brain deterioration began, but via different packets of nerves.  Evidently, the mere restoration of communications within the brain halts further progress of the physical damage.

The nursing home industry and possibly the medicos won't like this, but everyone else probably will find it a blessing if they're able to afford the treatment for their loved-ones whom they're watching slowly sink into an ugly oblivion.

Same friend also told me an interesting anecdote about the daughter of yet another woman who's just come back from Iraq, evidently National Guard.  Says she's overwhelmed by nightmares, getting no sleep, won't go anywhere and sleeps with her M-16.  Constant state of unreasoning fear and anxiety.

The ship carrying all her belongings and those of her co-troops was evidently destroyed in the NO hurricane, so there's also that to keep her feeling down.

Crazy sending women to a place such as that.  This whole all-volunteer army thing is one that could have used some testing in a lot of ways before it was implemented, but the political atmosphere was absolute death to the draft, and they needed to shore up the numbers of warm bodies to use for cannon-fodder some way.  Adding women doubled the pool while tipping a hat to political correctness.  Still does.

And strangely enough, while men mostly weren't much interested in making a career of the military if they could do anything else, except those of a particular personality type, women chomped at the bit to get in, then fought to get into the combat arms branches. 

A person has to be careful what he asks for in this life, out of respect that he might get it.  They've got it all worked out now as a precedent.  Next war big enough to involve the draft will have women coming home in body bags in roughly the same numbers as men.

What a piece of work is man!
How noble in reason!
how infinite in faculties!
in form and moving, how express and admirable!
in action how like an angel!
in apprehension, how like a god!
the beauty of the world!
the paragon of animals!
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither.

I have of late,--but wherefore I know not,--
lost all my mirth,
forgone all custom of exercises;
and indeed, it goes so heavily
with my disposition
that this goodly frame, the earth,
seems to me a sterile promontory;
this most excellent canopy, the air,
look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament,
this majestical roof fretted with golden fire,--
why, it appears no other thing
to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

William Shakespeare
Hamlet II

Back during the draft days a major part of the young men were tickled pea green to have flat feet, anything to keep them out, while women had an automatic non-obligation along those lines.  They were what young men were supposed to be fighting for.

Strange stuff, when you think of it. 

It's going to be interesting to watch the battle between the FDA and medicos and that new Alzheimers treatment bunch, thinks I.  It's not a 'medical' treatment, per se, and it has all the earmarks of just the sort of thing that ought to bring the folks who make a living out of keeping the status quo on ugly death out with their jack-boots polished to a fine sheen.

Similar to the way they've kept out a simple herbal method of shrinking tumors to zip clean out of the respectable cancer treatment business.  Native American herbal recipe involving sheep sorrel, black burdock, slippery elm and turkey rhubarb you can brew at home, knocks out benign and malignant tumors anywhere and in the human body, but there's not a medico in the US who will prescribe it, despite the thousands of people whom they've pronounced living dead who are walking around because of it.

Ah well.

Jack