Malawi and MCP Cards?

[Many Miles]

I believe in evolution.

I know this will stagger the faith of some participants here. But I just have to say it.

Evidence:

This discussion started by asking the question "How many here have ever held an MCP party card to look it over and see what it is?"

Watching the subsequent path of this discussion has made me a believer. Oh, and we even have a talking beaver chiming in from time to time!

 

[TrueTomHarley]

1 hour ago, Many Miles said:

I believe in evolution.

I know this will stagger the faith of some participants here. But I just have to say it.

Evidence:

This discussion started by asking the question "How many here have ever held an MCP party card to look it over and see what it is?"

Watching the subsequent path of this discussion has made me a believer. Oh, and we even have a talking beaver chiming in from time to time!

 

Oh, stuff it. You got your licks in. Let that be enough for you. Time to move on.  

It’s a little like @The Librarian, aptly named, whining on about the defilement of her card catalog that exists to keep order! Then someone like Pudgy comes along, and says, ‘Hey, forget order; let ‘er rip. You can be organized to such a degree that it starts to come out of your pores, like the brothers whose gestures are so similar that they begin to resemble synchronized swimming.

[Many Miles]

3 minutes ago, TrueTomHarley said:

Oh, stuff it. You got your licks in. Time to move on.  

It’s a little like @The Librarian, aptly named, whining on about the defilement of her card catalog that exists to keep order! Then someone like Pudgy comes along, and says, ‘Hey, forget order; let ‘er rip. You can be organized to such a degree that it starts to come out of your pores.’

Hey. I was just confessing!

[TrueTomHarley]

42 minutes ago, Many Miles said:

Hey. I was just confessing!

Gasp!!!!

A conspiratorially-minded person could take this confession for an admission that MM IS The Librarian!!!! Now, that would be a puzzle piece to crow about!

Just like I have progressed from being rebuked years ago for shamelessly promoting my first book, Tom Irregardless and Me, to participating here to such a degree that some think I actually own the site.

When the number of my comments surpassed those of the formerly dominating @Pudgy (under a different name) I said, ‘What’s wrong—cat got your tongue? I never thought they would surpass those of @JW Insider, but that too eventually happened.

A few dark and paranoid persons began insisting I was the owner. I denied it, but there is a certain type of person who once they get something into their heads, you can forget about ever getting it out. So I began to play along with the notion, and will continue to do so until this site shuts down, which you never know if that will happen or not. @admin was sweating it a while back about some proposed legislation that would make it hot for webmasters. Apparently, the storm blew over. Meantime, I put most of my writing on my own platform, so if this ever does go up in smoke, I go up to a lesser degree.

I dedicated In the Last of the Last Days: Faith in the Age of Dysfunction to @The Librarian. A writer needs more than a muse. He also needs a villain—and she has provided a playground where villains roam freely, as well as others falling in diverse places on the spiritual spectrum. It’s not always clear where they fall, but it sure is engrossing to put together the puzzle—just know, if you find you have stepped into it, you have to back out for a time. Not every one on a mission is actually on one. Sometimes, they just so closely resemble a person on one that you can’t tell the difference.

Avant-garde to carry on in this way? The entire system is avant-garde, from the slippery one who chuckles hehehe))))) as he is cast down from the heavens, to the brother who rebadges the WaPo byline as ‘Theocracy Dies in Darkness,’ to the brother who cries ‘There is not a righteous man, not even one; there is no one who has any insight; there is no one who searches for God—except me.’

[TrueTomHarley]

On 12/4/2023 at 4:39 PM, George88 said:

We have [individuals] who mistakenly believes that blood transfusions are a panacea

The Great Courses professor on philosophy, expounding on the topic ‘how do we gain knowledge?’ cited an example of those he thinks who have not. He speaks of Jehovah’s Witnesses rejecting “life-saving blood transfusion.” (The logical error they have committed, he says, is rejecting the findings of ‘experts’ which, he maintains, is something you must never do.) The guy has nettled me up to this point. Now he’s toast.

It is very strange that the adjective “life-saving” is never separated from the noun “blood transfusion,” all the more so because the 2008 New Scientist article indicated “life-threatening” was more apt. Where did that convention come from? Do we ever hear of “life-saving heart transplants” or “life-saving antibiotics?” When you drop, do they send a “life-saving ambulance?” No, they send a regular one! So what is it with blood transfusion alone being “life-saving?”

The strangest example of this (for me) occurred with a certain news article I blogged about. A certain serious risk of transfusion was under discussion, which went on for several paragraphs. It was a source like the Associated Press. Individual newspapers subscribing to that news service picked up that story and ran with it. Half of them simply reprinted the story. The other half also reprinted the story, but with an added first sentence: “Although blood transfusions have saved countless lives, they are not without problems” or something to that effect.

https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2007/10/blood-transfusi.html

It took me some time to believe my eyes. Some of them had it. Some didn’t. What’s with that? I wondered. I finally surmised that there were many editors who could not tolerate an affront to the god of blood transfusions so they offered him an opening pinch of incense so that he would not become incensed at them. I didn’t know how else to account for it. I used the oddity to my own advantage, however. I then writing Tom Irregardless and Me and began to insert, not only that god, but several other ones: the god of football, the god of qualifications, the god of higher education, and the god of the sex abuse registry—making reference to an Economist article lamenting that modern hysteria over pedophilia has resulted in sex registries so long as to be useless to law authorities, so that they mostly become a registry to shame people. Then (the article did not extend it to this) they become a vehicle for shaming those you don’t like. The stuff is the Chief Planetary Product. There is plenty of it to go around, so that focusing on groups in where it has occurred makes a great forum for spouting off, but not so much for fighting the problem. It occurs everywhere, people have discovered. 

Anyway, from where does this crusade to substitute “life-saving blood transfusion” for “blood transfusion” arise? Might it be to fend off Jehovah’s Witnesses, who have dared to offend a god?

[Many Miles]

1 hour ago, TrueTomHarley said:

It is very strange that the adjective “life-saving” is never separated from the noun “blood transfusion,” all the more so because the 2008 New Scientist article indicated “life-threatening” was more apt. Where did that convention come from? Do we ever hear of “life-saving heart transplants” or “life-saving antibiotics?” When you drop, do they send a “life-saving ambulance?” No, they send a regular one! So what is it with blood transfusion alone being “life-saving?”

First off, blood transfusions are no panacea, which you realize of course. When it comes to "blood transfusions", all sorts of products are rendered from donor whole blood for transfusion. No products rendered from blood for transfusion are a panacea, and all of them have risks and benefits.

Now, as for the usage of "life saving", it's common usage for a wide array of therapeutics. It is false to say the term is never separated from blood transfusion. As a adjective the term is applied when context suggests it is applicable, no matter the noun it's describing.

If you're bleeding out and on the cusp of death for lack of blood, about the only "life saving" hope you have is transfusion of red cells. But you'll find the adjective "life saving" frequently used colloquially for many things, including emergency transports.

[Pudgy]

54 minutes ago, Many Miles said:

. But you'll find the adjective "life saving" frequently used colloquially for many things, including emergency transports.

 

[Thinking]

On 12/5/2023 at 4:13 AM, Anna said:

It seems that Cryosupernatant Plasma is not a "cure all".

In the document bellow it mentions it is not to be used as volume replacement, one of the biggest reasons for blood transfusions, especially during traumatic blood loss. 

wf-lab-apl-form-cryosupernatant-plasma.pdf 249.52 kB · 4 downloads

And this bit is also quite scary:

https://www.rdm.ox.ac.uk/publications/190785

 

 

Probably why it’s kept of the list of alternatives.

[Many Miles]

8 minutes ago, Thinking said:

Probably why it’s kept of the list of alternatives.

I don't understand that comment.

Nothing on "the list of alternatives" is a "cure all".

What do you mean?

[TrueTomHarley]

1 hour ago, Many Miles said:

Now, as for the usage of "life saving", it's common usage for a wide array of therapeutics. It is false to say the term is never separated from blood transfusion. As a adjective the term is applied when context suggests it is applicable, no matter the noun it's describing

It may be that I am too close to the forest to see the trees on this one, but is sure seems to be the way I said. At any rate, that bizzare treatment of the article I linked to I have never seen anywhere else.

[Many Miles]

9 minutes ago, TrueTomHarley said:

At any rate, that bizzare treatment of the article I linked to I have never seen anywhere else.

Maybe I missed something, but the article I read that you linked to was an apologetic work. Bizarre is often in the script when writing to protect a view rather than writing to share a view.

Is there a link you provided I missed?

Here's the one I read: https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2007/10/blood-transfusi.html

[TrueTomHarley]

2 minutes ago, Many Miles said:

Maybe I missed something, but the article I read that you linked to was an apologetic work. Bizarre is often in the script when writing to protect a view rather than writing to share a view.

Is there a link you provided I missed?

Here's the one I read: https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2007/10/blood-transfusi.html

Hmm. Yeah, you’re right. It is there, but it is several paragraphs down since it is not the main point. It reads:

”Oddly, there are two versions of this AP story by Randolph E Schmid. One leads with the butt-kissing "blood transfusions have saved millions of lives" and one doesn't. I suspect Mr. Schmid, who is a science writer, did not include it. But somewhere along the line, some pious editor unable to tolerate the blood transfusion idol besmirched, added the phrase. Versions that have the phrase are here, here, and here. Versions that do not are here, here, and here. (I've included so many because some sources don't archive their stories very long....I hope some of them survive.)”

Alas—none the versions have survived. Papers don’t maintain their archives as they used to, or they put them behind paywalls.