The Man Who Saved 160 From Suicide - and What We Can Learn From Him

 88-year old Don Ritchie's house is on a high plateau in Australia with a great view.  It might seem like a dream retirement home to some, but there's a catch - right outside his door is a popular suicide spot where people show often to throw themselves off of a cliff.

It probably doesn't sound like a dream house anymore.  But Don doesn't mind because he's found his calling - he talks people out of suicide.

When someone is standing at the ledge getting ready to jump, Don can be found catching up to them and hoping it's not too late.  When he arrives, he simply smiles and asks if they would like to come in and have a cup of tea.

Rather than pretend to be something he's not (in this case, a therapist), Don just listens to people's problems and lets them know that he cares, and he's saved approximately 160 lives this way.  I've known many people who help depressed people to become even more depressed by trying to fix their problems citing homespun wisdom and tired clichés - Don Ritchie just listens.   He is not always successful, but the lives he has saved make him a very happy person despite the ones who still jump (sometimes right in front of him).  There's more to this wonderful story, and I recommend you read it here.

For our purposes, we should consider how truly awful it is that one cannot find a nice face or an understanding ear sometimes until it is almost too late.  This chilling paragraph from the same article says it all:

Mental health professionals tell the story of a note left behind by a man who jumped off San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way to the bridge, the man wrote, I will not jump.

Not one person.  (Of course, San Fransisco, like L.A., is well known for its morose citizens.)  It's fantastic that Don Ritchie does what he does, but he shouldn't have to.  What if you were the person who listened to someone's problem before they got to the ledge?  Perhaps I should try to be the Don Ritchie that people around me need before they get to that point.  Of course, none of us will be so famous as Don for our efforts - in fact, we can never know if we are helping people or not - but we should remember to do our best for those around us because we simply don't know what they are going through.

many years ago I met a young man when I was in a grumpy mood and I didn't take the time to talk with him - he shot himself soon after.  I'm sure I probably wouldn't have made a difference if I had chatted with him, but I might have.  I've changed how I deal with people ever since that happened.

(Story via Instapundit)

Freaky Monday.

A premature baby declared dead by doctors was found to be alive hours later when he was taken home for a funeral wake.

The baby's father, Jose Alvarenga, was told by doctors that his son had died shortly after birth.

Staff from the state-run hospital in Asuncion, the Paraguayan capital, delivered the infant's body to Mr Alvarenga's home fours hours later.

Shortly afterwards, the grieving father opened the baby's coffin to bid an emotional farewell to his son.

"I opened it to look at his remains and found that the baby was breathing," Mr Alvarenga said. "I began to cry."

He rushed back to the hospital with his unnamed baby in his arms and nurses placed the infant in an oxygen chamber.

He is now reported to be in a stable condition.

"This is a very unusual case," said Ernesto Weber, head of paediatric intensive care at the hospital.

No kidding, it's an unusual case.

Heck, that's the freakiest thing I've ever heard. It was alive for four hours without any discernible heartbeat or breathing? It's astounding. Can you imagine if the father hadn't opened the casket? Thank God he did.

(By the way, there are no typos in this blog entry - the above was copied from a British newspaper and you know how they are with their spelling...)

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205165/Father-opens-coffin-dead-baby-alive.html#ixzz0NkSdjBQk

Things I Didn't Know About the Amish (For Example - They Could be Reading This...)

I didn't realize I had misunderstood the Amish until I read an article in TheTechnium that described them differently than the neo-Luddite hillbillies I had imagined. (Which is really unfair, in retrospect.) I was surprised to find out that, not only are they technologically bright, but one particular group of them even manufactures an electric fireplace that is sold to people all over the world.

Electricity is not a problem for the Amish - but it is very important for them to feel like they are "separated" from the rest of society. Being linked up to the same power grid as a local strip club is unacceptable, but something like solar power is not.

My knowledge of the Amish begins and ends with Harrison Ford. (Same goes for archaeology and space travel.) Also, Viggo Mortenson plays an Amish teenager in this film and I always look for Orcs to come running over the hills when he is on screen.

The Amish also have pioneered interesting ways to use pneumatic energy to make their own localized electricity and are known to put solar powered telephone booths in their fields so they can call to check on their wives - who answer on their own solar powered gizmo. Currently, some Amish are considering cell phone use.

They are not opposed to using someone else's electricity or riding in someone's vehicle because owning a thing is not the same as using a thing. Amish can also be seen in local libraries using the internet - so it's only a matter of time before they find out about "Amish Paradise".

Fearing they could go "Ben Hur" at any moment, local motorists cautiously let the Amish buggy have the right of way....

Interestingly, if some lunatic destroyed the power plants in Pennysylvania area the Amish could use their electricity and go about business as usual. If the power grid failed the rest of us would be technologically behind them for a change. Their ability to survive without the outside world might make them the wisest people on the planet. (Also, Michael Bay should make a film about what I just typed.)

Thank goodness they are a peaceful people.

(Read the whole entire article from TheTechnium here.)

5 Reasons Things are Better Than They Were During the Middle Ages

People like to complain about the times in which we live and everyone I am around is always full of gripes. There is nothing wrong with trying to improve the quality of our lives, but it's also good to look back and remember how much we have accomplished. Being a medievalist makes this an easy thing for me to do.

Here are a few things to be thankful for:

• Usury Laws - You might think banks are full of crooks, but in the old days there were not always laws against excessive interest (until you tried it on King Phillip the IV). Today, even the stupidest investor is protected by laws against unconscionability. Of course, if Jesus were in the temple that day, you were in luck.

Jesus - 1; Userers - 0

• Disease - There are people today who think we shouldn't use soap so we can build up our own natural immunities. They wouldn't say this if they remembered the great plagues that destroyed Europe. The black death struck young men first; when the older men and women died there were no younger people to replace them. It took Europe 300 years to re-populate; until then, the country side was empty and devoid of life. This kind of thing is unimaginable to us.

"But we're not dead!"

• Taxes - Sometimes, one class group accuses another group of not paying taxes. Since all of us do pay taxes this is an obvious hyperbole, but at one time it was true that the rich didn't pay taxes but used them to take money from the poor. Even in its most corrupt and broken form, the U.S. tax system is far more equitable than the old Roman system.

"Just think, in 1000 years people won't have to wait in line at the tax office!" (Also, what are those midgets doing there?)

(Image from Paradoxplace.)

• Literacy - My favorite. The printing press led to great reformations that were not as possible before people could read and pass the word along to others. (By they way, these medieval barbarians always wrote better than the average YouTube commenter.)

"Should I tell William that he misspelled France on ALL of these?"

• What do you want to do with your life? This question was not relevant to a medieval person. Almost every individual had to be involved in food production every single day so that people could eat. You didn't get to be an astronomer or an actor because your heart so desired it; instead, you got to grow plants or raise cattle. Every day. Today, you can pursue anything you want; even poor people in poor countries have an outside shot at success, which is more than anyone could ask for in the olden days.
  

"I wonder what I should have for dinner, tonight. Cabbage? No, not cabbage..."

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. My life isn't perfect, but I have a lot of comforts for which I am thankful.

Happy Halloween! The Mystery of Dyatlov Pass...

In happened in 1959 when a group of experienced Ski Hikers in Russia left on a hike and, except for the one hiker who got ill and turned back, did not return. Investigators were skeptical that entire team of experienced explorers could be lost completely, but when they finally launched an investigation they were horrified at what they found.



The campsite was a disaster and bodies were found all over the place. (It took months to find them all even after the campsite was found.) The tents showed evidence that the some of the campers had exited their tents by tearing a hole in the back of the tent, instead of going out the front flap. Some of the hikers were found nearly naked, as if they felt the need to exit the tent into the unforgiving cold as quickly as possible. Whatever frightened them was scarier than being exposed to the Russian winter and gave them the impression that they needed to tear their tents apart to escape.

The bodies were strange in themselves. There were no obvious signs of trauma on their dead bodies but some of them had head wounds and other internal damage that would seem to be a cause of death. Authorities said that it would take an impact similar to getting hit by a car to cause the internal injuries that were discovered. Oh, and the bodies had a peculiar orange glow about them. The bodies showed a high level of radiation when they were tested. (I should add that UFO's were sighted in the area that evening, but I almost hate to include that. Gotta' be thorough.) It doesn't help that many of these details were suppressed by the Russian government.

To make things worse, the official cause of death is an 'unknown compelling force'. Creepy.

Here's more information:

Skeptoid Article
Neatorama Article

Building Nuclear Power on the Moon

Here's the kind of story that will seem unimportant to the mass media, but could have far reaching implications: NASA is trying to build a nuclear reactor on the moon.

I'm already anticipating the protesters with signs reading, "You ruined Earth/Now you're ruing the Moon' or something terribly sad and poignant. If you're stuck in the 70's and you think nuclear power is bad, none of this will appeal to you.

Humans will probably eventually need to leave the Earth to live somewhere else. (We're talking about the distant future, not next week when the polar ice caps melt and the world is underwater because we didn't recycle.) If we are going to explore space and find another home we will need to colonize other planets and the Moon is a good place to start. Building a nuclear power station could give us the power we need to start building living quarters, landing pads, and observatories. The Discovery article reports that the amount of power NASA is trying to provide would power about 8 U.S. homes, so they are obviously working on long term plans that could put people there. It makes me wish I had gotten into astrophysics.

Putting nuclear power on the moon might seem trivial, but humans in the future could remember this as the first step toward putting a permanent residence on another planet.

Life in Outer Space. I'm Serious.

In 1969, a meteorite that had partially broken up in the atmosphere landed on the ground in the town of Murchison, Australia. More than 200 pounds of the meteorite (cleverly called the 'Murchison Meteorite') have been recovered and it's contents have been shocking.

92 amino acids were found to exist on these space rocks, which may have come from a comet, and only 19 of the 92 amino acids were from Earth. So, where did the other 73 originate? They could only have originated in space.

This has been a highly debated subject for decades because it has been contended that the 73 mysterious amino acids are a result of earthly contamination. However, in today's news...

...the team of research scientists from the US and Europe have demonstrated that uracil and xanthine are present in fragments of the Murchison meteorite and are not terrestrial in origin.

This isn't the first time we have found stuff like this, apparently, but it seems the be most high profile case. Oddly, more people are using this to try to back up their own theories of the origin of life than simply pointing out how cool it is that there could be other lifeforms out there.