There is an over-the-counter product called BOOST OXYGEN. I bought me a can for around 18 semolians the other day and took it on a strenuous hike. I self-administered the recommended 3-5 snorts after topping out at a saddle, but noticed only a slight, barely perceptible positive effect. Similarly with later tests. I wanted a positive effect, so I might have felt what I wanted to feel. Interim conclusion: not worth the money. Later in the day it seemed to make no difference to my online bullet and blitz chess.
I'll continue the tests and see if my SpO2 (peripheral oxygen saturation) as measured by a portable pulse oximeter is improved. It is already at 97-98%.
Exercise maxim: No day without (exercise induced) oxygen debt!
I caught a preview this morning at 5:15 from the mountain bike. A great caffeine-fueled ride from 5:15-6:43. It's cooling down in the Zone. Wore a shirt for a change. The strenuous life is best by test. It doesn't matter how old you are. Get out there and bust your hump for an hour or two every day. Brother Jackass will be glad you did. He'll be exploding with energy afterwards.
I first heard this when I was ten. This morning's moonset set it off one more once in the old man's head. "Without music, life would be a mistake." (Nietzsche). And it doesn't matter whether it's an old doo-wop number or The Ride of the Valkyries.
Students in their first year of medical school typically learn what a healthy body looks like and how to keep it that way. At the University of California, Los Angeles, they learn that "fatphobia is medicine’s status quo" and that weight loss is a "hopeless endeavor."
Those are two of the more moderate claims made by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-described "fat liberationist," in an essay assigned to all first-year students in UCLA medical school’s mandatory "Structural Racism and Health Equity" class. Launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the course is required for all first-year medical students.
The Left destroys everything it touches, and it touches everything. Problem is, few physicians, comfortable and lazy as they are in their tony suburbs, have the civil courage to speak out against this nonsense.
At the doctor's office the sawbones' assistant takes your 'vitals.' She checks whether your blood pressure, pulse, temperature, and O2 uptake are 'within range.' None of this would be necessary if you were not a mortal man on the way to death. But the young assistant is not interested in trading witticisms with an old man, so you refrain from remarking that she is about to take your 'mortals.'
Nothing is safe from politicization by leftists. And you are still a Democrat? WTF is wrong with you? You geezers in particular need to wake up. This is not the party of Jack Kennedy.
NYC - Dr. Dana Diab is an ER physician at Lenox Hill (@lenoxhill). Dina Diab took to Instagram rejoicing Zionist settlers [aka jews] were murdered, raped, beheaded, and kidnapped by the Hamas terror group on Saturday October 7th. Jewish patients beware.
Did you throw away your useless made-in-China COVID face masks? Yes? Too bad. They now have a use in places like New York City.
If someone is firing a shotgun at you it would be futile to take cover behind a chain link fence. But if you are being pelted by baseballs, the fence would prove barrier enough.
Smoky places unsought are the problem; those sought not so much.
It is still deliciously cool, mornings, this Sonoran spring in the Zone, but the summer will soon be upon us. And so my regimen changes. I leave for my desert mountain bike ride earlier and earlier. This morning I was out from 5:11 to 6:37. First light is now around 5:00. The idea is to get to the Easternmost point of my loop before Old Sol is up and in my eyes. Ideally, he peeps his ancient head over the Superstition ridgeline just as I am turning Southwest.
Will I buy an e-bike? Eventually, after I can no longer respectably crank my Trek 930 over hill and dale, road and trail.
As for what Thoreau calls "the philosopher's drink," I double the early-morning hydration this time of year: no less than two 12 oz glasses of water right after arisal, and only then to coffee, that synaptic lubricant par excellence without which morning would be a mistake.
There is at least one. His name is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I recommend his A Letter to Liberals: Censorship and COVID: An Attack on Science and American Ideals (Skyhorse Publishing, 2022). It is mercifully short, x + 110 pages long, and well worth your time. It is extremely well-documented. The text itself runs to x + 87 pp. with 239 endnotes, most of them with hyperlink info. Here is something I didn't know:
At the outset of the pandemic, most of the world's leading news organizations -- BBC, Reuters, AP, AFD, CBC, CNN, CBS, ABC, Washington Post, Financial Times, Facebook, Google/YouTube, Microsoft, Twitter, and others -- organized themselves into a collusive antidemocratic and anticompetitive cartel known as the Trusted News Initiative (TNI) -- pledged to squelch and censor all reports about government COVID countermeasures that challenged official proclamations. (p. 52 f; endnote 153 points us to the BBC, December 10, 2020.)
I don't believe that there is any chance that RFK Jr. will 'pull a Tulsi' and quit the Democrat Party, although he should. He won't because he's a Kennedy, and I am guessing that he already has enough trouble with his extended family. (See here.) Like many old-time Dems, he fancies he will wrest the leadership of his party away from the 'woke'-left totalitarians who now control it. If that's what he thinks, he's fooling himself.
The irony is that RFK fils, despite his speech impediment and lack of charisma, has a better chance of beating either Trump or DeSantis in 2024 than any other Dem I can think of.
While poking around for a reliable, powerful, bicycle tire pump to keep my mid-sized mountain bike tires up to around 65 psi, I found the following. Comments enabled for anyone who has a pump to recommend. The reviewer is recommending this device.
Andy's Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars This pumps me up more than DJ Khalid
Reviewed in Canada on July 15, 2019
Color: Navy Blue Style: Air Center Plus
My bike has tires. Yes, surprising, I know. Not even the most pessimistic person in 1903 thought we would still be using rubber tires. But here we are, the year is 2019, and we still need to have air filled butyl tyres. This pump works great - filled my 27.5x2.4 tires in like 7 pumps. If you asked my wife she would say something like "that's not the only thing that works in 7 pumps" or "maybe I should be sharing my bed with this pump instead". But this is why we ride bikes -- to avoid the wife, and try to forget the continuous string of affairs she has with her yoga instructors.
Sit down into a cross-legged position on the floor
Rise back up into a standing position
Simple, right? Only for each time you used a hand, knee or forearm to accomplish the task, you have to subtract a point. If you sat down and stood back up using only your core and leg strength, that’s a perfect 10. The goal is to land around eight points or better.
Your humble correspondent is 73 years of age. He used his right hand twice: once to get onto the floor, and once to get up off the floor. So his score is eight points. Now you tell us your age and your score.
What do Covid and 'climate change' have in common? Exploitation for totalitarian lockdown. But the prostitutes in Davos are doing well, raking in $2,500 a pop for maybe an hour's work.
Facebook blocked my page because of my refusal to sign up for Facebook Protect. They wanted me to set up two-factor authentication 'for my protection.' I decided not to go along on their phishing expedition. Not that I have any objection to 2FA as such. You ought to use it for all your sensitive sites financial and otherwise.
Blocked from FB, I opened an account at Twitter. I'll use it mainly to advertise my Substack articles.
I was using FB mainly for linkage, so some of that will be brought back here.
Something to consider: Do you think that a government that lies repeatedly and brazenly about things that can be easily checked, such as the security of the border, will hesitate to lie about things not so easily checked such as the efficacy of vaccines?
The following, snagged from an outlying precinct of cyberspace, sounded bogus, so I put Snopes on the case:
A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks. —Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, 1785
Origins: The passage quoted above is indeed an excerpt from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to his nephew, Peter Carr, on 19 August 1785, as collected in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. It was part of a longer section in which Jefferson touted the benefits of physical exercise (such as walking or shooting) in ensuring both bodily health and mental health:
Encourage all your virtuous dispositions, and exercise them whenever an opportunity arises, being assured that they will gain strength by exercise as a limb of the body does, and that exercise will make them habitual … Give about two [hours] every day to exercise; for health must not be sacrificed to learning. A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprize, and independance to the mind. Games played with the ball and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks. Never think of taking a book with you. The object of walking is to relax the mind. You should therefore not permit yourself even to think while you walk. But divert your attention by the objects surrounding you. Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far. The Europeans value themselves on having subdued the horse to the uses of man. But I doubt whether we have not lost more than we have gained by the use of this animal. No one has occasioned so much the degeneracy of the human body. An Indian goes on foot nearly as far in a day, for a long journey, as an enfeebled white does on his horse, and he will tire the best horses. There is no habit you will value so much as that of walking far without fatigue. I would advise you to take your exercise in the afternoon. Not because it is the best time for exercise for certainly it is not: but because it is the best time to spare from your studies; and habit will soon reconcile it to health, and render it nearly as useful as if you gave to that the more precious hours of the day. A little walk of half an hour in the morning when you first rise is adviseable also. It shakes off sleep, and produces other good effects in the animal economy. (Emphases and irregularities of usage occur in the original.)
1) Interestingly, Schopenhauer also recommends two hours of walking exercise per diem, but makes no mention of packing heat. He did, however, keep a loaded firearm on his night stand. The two great men also concur that the walker should walk and not pack a book or read. TJ appears to have been an early exponent of situational awareness and would undoubtedly have decried the all-too-common practice of walking about while hunched over a smartphone. The trick, of course, is to use your smartphone without becoming a dumbass.
2) If Jefferson could only see how enfeebled the white man has become these days.
3) Jefferson had his priorities straight: the care of the soul and mind ought to come first in the day and the care of the body only later.
The meme below makes a very important point. Everyone, but blacks in particular, need to learn that the police have legitimate authority and that their commands must be obeyed. Not to do so is not only illegal but highly imprudent. Michael Brown, Daunte Wright, and Adam Toledo all brought about their own deaths by their foolish behavior. Similarly with Jacob Blake. He didn't die, but was severely injured. A cop is under no moral or legal obligation to wait for you to shoot at him before he shoots at you.
Racism was not involved in these shootings. A cop will use deadly force against ANYONE who threatens him with deadly force. Race doesn't come into it, except insofar as blacks as a group are more criminally prone than other groups. To put the point as clearly as possible: while there are racist cops, and there are cops who commit murder under color of law, the vast majority of police shootings of blacks are not racist acts. Proportionally more blacks get shot because their criminality is higher than that of Asians, whites, and other groups. This is a well-known fact. Bear in mind that while there are racial facts, facts about race, there are no racist facts. This is a very simple distinction: even a 'liberal' is able to make it. Question is, will he?
Some of us have been through many a flu season. Did we ever have ourselves tested? Why get tested for a disease for which you have no symptoms? Fear, and the ever increasing 'wussification' of the populace, drive the excess of pre-emptive assessment. "But if it saves just one life, then all the fear, all the expense, all the masks and lockdowns and hardships for children and their parents, all the limitations of our liberty, all the expansion of centralized control, and all the destruction of small businesses -- all of this will have been worth it." That was in effect the 'reasoning' of Andrew Cuomo. Remember him?
Irony. Apparently, social distancing is not required for lemmings who agglomerate to be the first kids on their blocks to get a test they don't need.
Which is harder, to run 3.1 miles or 26.2? They are equally hard for the runner who runs right. The agony and the ecstasy at the end of a race run right is the same whether induced by 42.2 km of LSD or 5 km of POT. Below, I am approaching the final stretch of a 5 K trail race (2nd annual CAAFA 5K Race Against Violence, Prospector Park, Apache Junction, Arizona). The date is wrong: should be 3/21/2010. I finished in 45th place in a mixed field of 113, and 28th among 44 men. Time: 33:38.8 for a pace of 10:49.8. That's nothing to crow about, but then I was 60 years old as was the gal right behind me. At age 40 I could cover this distance at a 7:45 min/mile pace. There were five 60+ males and I finished first among them. Not a strong field! But a beautiful cool crisp morning and a great course and a great run. I could have pushed harder! Could have and should have!
LSD: long slow distance. POT: plenty of tempo. Both terms borrowed from Joe Henderson.
Life is for living, and the strenuous life is best by test!
What follows is from my first weblog, and is dated 4 May 2004. The photo was taken this morning by Dennis Murray, fellow aficionado of strenuous pursuits.
.....................
Time was, when running was my exercise, the daily bread of my cardiovascular system. But then the injuries came: chondromalacia patellae in both knees, shin splints, plantar fasciitis, you name it. So I took up the bike, and eventually the mountain bike. Now I run just once a week, on Sunday mornings, for about 75 minutes. The other days I either hike or ride the mountain bike, mostly the latter. I like to be on the road before sunrise, and catch old Sol as he rises over the magnificent and mysterious Superstition Mountains. There is nothing like greeting the sun as he greets the mountains, bathing them in the serene light of daybreak. It is an appropriate moment for gratitude, gratitude for another day on which to bang my head against the riddle of existence. Riding into the rising sun, I sometimes recall Nietzsche’s words from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “O you overrich star, what would you be except for those for whom you shine?”
The beauty of the mountain bike is that you can get off the roads, away from cars and people, and onto trails and jeep tracks. I’d rather dodge rattlesnakes than cars any day. I have even been known to strike out cross-country across open desert. I’ve got kevlar-reinforced tires, with thick tubes, and a strip of plastic betwixt tube and tire as prophylaxis against cactus spines and other impregnators. No need for slime, and no flats for going on two years. My bike is an old Trek 930, a modest mid-range hard-tail – having been called a hard-ass, I suppose this is appropriate – with front-end suspension. As every Thoreauvian knows, one doesn’t have to spend a lot of money to have fun and live well.
Still, nothing in my experience beats running for the endorphin kick. ‘Endorphin’ is a contraction of ‘endogenous morphine.’ The adjective means originating from within, in this case, from within the brain. You know what morphine is. The brain of a body under athletic stress seems to produce these endorphins the existence of which, I understand, is more scientific postulation than verified fact. Endorphins manifest themselves at the level of consciousness in rather delightful sensations. When conditions are auspicious, and I am about 45-50 minutes into a run, I enter a phase wherein I apperceive myself as merely riding in my body as a pure spectator of a pure spectacle. I become a transcendental onlooker, and the world becomes George Santayana’s realm of essence.
“I become a transparent eyeball: I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature.”)
This Unsinn is beneath refutation, but you ought to be aware of it. It supplies further reasons to divest the so-called 'universities' and to never vote Democratic.
I'll grant you that it is if you grant me that leftism is a deadly virus and that leftists, 'liberals,' 'progressives,' and members of the Democrat Party in the USA knowingly and willingly carry and transmit it.
Do we have a deal? But if 'Wuhan Virus' is racist, then then so are the following:
West Nile
Lyme (named after a town in Connecticut)
Spanish flu
German measles
Norovirus (named after Norwalk, Ohio)
Middle East Respiratory Syndrome
St. Louis encephalitis
Lassa fever (named after a town in Nigeria)
Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever
Ebola (named after a river in Africa)
Legionnaires' disease (named after the American Legion)
If the bulleted entries are not racist expressions, then neither is 'Wuhan Virus.'
We introverts need our solitude, and in a world lousy teeming with extroverts, we can easily see the bright side of the 'social distancing' that prudence demands in the face of the Wuhan Flu. It offers us a good excuse to avoid idle talk and social dissipation.
"I really would love to attend the block party and partake of the pot luck, but given my age-related susceptibility and the enormity of the WuFlu threat . . . ."
This coronavirus is new to our species—it is “novel.” It spreads more easily than the flu—“exponentially,” as we now say—and is estimated to be at least 10 times as lethal.
Why is it "novel"? It is a form of flu, and it is not unique in spreading exponentially.
Noonan seems to think that 'exponentially' is some newfangled buzzword. Not so. It has a precise mathematical meaning, and the Wuhan Flu -- to use my preferred politically incorrect moniker -- is not unique in spreading geometrically (exponentially) as opposed to arithmetically.
If you have forgotten, or have never learned, the difference between arithmetic and geometric progressions, Dr. Math has a simple and clear explanation for you.
For perspective, consider that in recent years 30,000 to 40,000 Americans each year have been killed in car crashes, and that thousands and thousands die each year of various strains of influenza the names of which are not bandied-about by the 24/7/366 media. The Maverick advises: resist group-think and mass hysteria. While taking reasonable precautions, live your life and consider what really matters. This is not to say that the COVID-19 virus is not a serious threat. It is, and it is being dealt with by a serious president who gets called a 'racist' and a 'xenophobe' for his eminently sensible travel bans. People such as Joe Biden who hurl these epithets are moral scum and need to be denounced as such.
There are things about which people should be panicked [or at least seriously concerned].
For example, the contempt for America and capitalism taught to a generation of young Americans from elementary school through college is worthy of panic. The extreme levels of economy-collapsing debt we are irresponsibly piling onto the backs of future generations to maintain “entitlements” is worthy of panic.
So is the premature sexualization of children—encouraging them to choose their own gender and taking 5-year-olds to public libraries for “Drag Queen Story Hour.”
But such things hardly register with most Americans.
I feel awful for kids today. They are relentlessly told that global warming poses an “existential threat” to life on earth. They are relentlessly told that President Donald Trump poses an “existential threat to America”—the words used, for example, a few weeks ago by Frank Rich in New York magazine, and used by the “moderate” Michael Bloomberg repeatedly in his speeches.
And now they are told their families had better stock up on toilet paper because only God knows when they will be unable to leave their homes.
It was a Democratic president who told Americans, during World War II no less, that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” He is a liberal idol, in part for saying that.
That is more or less exactly what Trump has been saying. Yet he’s an “existential threat” to our country.
Now chill out and have a beer. May I recommend a
The dude had a couple of Buds, but he was none the wiser.
Some of the Democrat candidates for president are calling for Medicare for all, in those terms. The call makes no sense. Medicare is a U. S. government program for American citizens 65 years of age and older. (There are minor exceptions that don't affect my main point.) Now even Democrats know that not every citizen is 65 or older. So the call makes no sense for that reason alone.
If the Dem dogs weren't such lying "pony soldiers" to use Joe Biden's bizarre phrase, if they were intellectually honest, then they would admit to be calling for universal health care, where 'universal' covers citizens and illegal aliens. The mendacious bunch would also own up to wanting a single-payer system, one that outlaws private health insurance. Outlawing private insurers such as Blue Cross/ Blue Shield, Aetna, etc., would do away with the supplemental plans now available to part B Medicare recipients.
Next Lie: "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan." (Barack Obama)
Contemporary liberals spout nonsense about an 'epidemic' of obesity or obesity as a public health problem. True, we Americans are a gluttonous people as witness competitive eating contests, the numerous food shows, and the complete lack of any sense among most that there is anything morally wrong with gluttony. The moralists of old understood something when they classified gluttony as one of the seven deadly sins.
Obesity is not a disease; so, speaking strictly, there cannot be an epidemic of it. There are two separate issues here. One is whether obesity is a disease. But even if it is classified as a disease, it is surely not a contagious disease and so not something there can be an epidemic of.
I know that 'epidemic' is used more broadly than this, even by epidemiologists; but this is arguably the result of an intrusion of liberal-left ideology into what is supposedly science. Do you really think that 'epidemic' is being used in the same way in 'flu epidemic' and 'obesity epidemic'? Is obesity contagious? If fat Al sneezes in my face, should I worry about contracting the obesity virus? There is no such virus.
Obesity is not contagious and not a disease. I know what some will say: obesity is socially contagious. But now you've shifted the sense of 'contagious.' You've engaged in a bit of semantic mischief. It is not as if there are two kinds of contagion, natural and social. Social contagion is not contagion any more than negative growth is growth or a decoy duck is a duck. 'Social' in 'socially contagious' is an alienans adjective.
Why then are you fat? You are fat because you eat too much of the wrong sorts of food and refuse to exercise. For most people that's all there is to it. It's your fault. It is not the result of being attacked by a virus. It is within your power to be fat or not. It is a matter of your FREE WILL. You have decided to become fat or to remain fat. When words such as 'epidemic' and 'disease' are used in connection with obesity, that is an ideological denial of free will, an attempt to shift responsibility from the agent to factors external to the agent such as the 'evil' corporations that produce so-called 'junk' food.
There are public health problems, but obesity is not one of them. It is a private problem resident at the level of the individual and the family. The totalitarians of the contemporary Democrat party don't want you to know this. They want total control, including control of what you eat. They want, so to speak, the whole enchilada.
Here are some arguments pro et con as to whether or not obesity is a disease.
When it comes to hydration there are two schools of thought. I have spoken with medical doctors who claim that it suffices to drink when one is thirsty. The massage therapists, on the other hand, to a woman recommend the drinking of prodigious quantities of water.
Now water is the philosopher's drink (Henry David Thoreau) and the via media is his path. So I tread the middle path between the sawbones and the back rubbers. First thing upon arisal is the downing of two 12-ounce glasses of purified water. That is against my druthers, a half a cup (4 oz) being all I desire at that time of the morning. But I pound 'em down. That is followed by two cups of strong java. A most excellent diuretic! Then a third glass topped with some orange juice -- an 80-20 mix -- before I leave the house for the morning constitutional which features three episodes of clear micturition, two in the wild, leaning upon my staff, gazing into the Apeiron, the third back at the shack. And then I maintain the inflow for the rest of the day sipping Perrier and San Pellegrino and the effluent of my reverse osmosis tap. Two more cups of coffee for a total of four for the day. No sugary drinks. And no booze until the weekend. And a moderate quantity of that.
Your body is a temple, not an amusement park, pace Anthony Bourdain, who brought his nihilist life to a fitting conclusion by hanging himself.
And if it is a temple, you might want to think twice about defacing it with tattoos, the graffiti of the human body. Leave the tats to the drunken sailors and rough trade that one might find on the waterfront.
As long as this blog has been online, 14 years now, I have railed against the misuse of the the word 'addiction.' Thanks to Dave Lull, I am pleased to see that Peter Hitchens takes a similar line in a First Things article. Excerpt:
The chief difficulty with the word “addiction” is the idea that it describes a power greater than the will. If it exists in the way we use it and in the way our legal and medical systems assume it exists, then free will has been abolished. I know there are people who think and argue this is so. But this is not one of those things that can be demonstrated by falsifiable experiment. In the end, the idea that humans do not really have free will is a contentious opinion, not an objective fact.
So to use the word “addiction” is to embrace one side in one of those ancient unresolved debates that cannot be settled this side of the grave. To decline to use it, by contrast, is to accept that all kinds of influences, inheritances, and misfortunes may well operate on us, and propel us towards mistaken, foolish, wrong, and dangerous actions or habits. It is to leave open the question whether we can resist these forces. I am convinced that declining the word “addiction” is both the only honest thing to do, and the only kind and wise thing to do, when we are faced with fellow creatures struggling with harmful habits and desires. It is all very well to relieve someone of the responsibility for such actions, by telling him his body is to blame. But what is that solace worth if he takes it as permission to carry on as before? Once or twice I have managed to explain to a few of my critics that this is what I am saying. But generally they are too furious, or astonished by my sheer nerve, to listen.
The liberal wussification initiative needs ever more victims, ever more government dependents, and ever more sick people. Hence the trend in this therapeutic society to broaden the definition of 'disease' to cover what are obviously not diseases. Need more patients? Define 'em into existence! Theodore Dalrymple talks sense:
There are cheap lies and expensive lies, and the lie that addiction is a disease just like any other will prove to be costly. It is the lie upon which Washington has based its proposed directive that insurance policies should cover addiction and mental disorders in the same way as they cover physical disease. The government might as well decriminalize fraud while it is at it.
The evidence that addiction is not a disease like any other is compelling, overwhelming, and obvious. It has also been available for a long time. The National Institute on Drug Abuse’s definition of addiction as a “chronic, relapsing brain disease” is about as scientific as the advertising claims for Coca-Cola. In fact, it had its origin as a funding appeal to Congress.
To take only one point among many: most addicts who give up do so without any medical assistance—and most addicts do give up. Moreover, they do so at an early age. The proximate cause of their abstinence is their decision to be abstinent. No one can decide not to have rheumatoid arthritis, say, or colon cancer. Sufferers from those diseases can decide to cooperate or not with treatment, but that is another matter entirely. Therefore, there is a category difference between addiction and real disease.
In the last few years I have given up on the many medical measures—cancer screenings, annual exams, Pap smears, for example—expected of a responsible person with health insurance. This was not based on any suicidal impulse.
Younger than Ehrenreich, I will continue to exercise what is called 'due diligence.'
Dreher has become a daily read for me. But I have to wonder: how can so prolific a writer and family man have any time left over for the practices of the Ben Op? I mean meditation, prayer, spiritual reading, and the rest. It's easy to get sucked in, Rod. Be careful. This world's a vanishing quantity, not that you don't believe it.
Those who aspire to live well must learn to curtail their consumption of mass communication media.
Let's talk about cigarettes. Suppose you smoke one pack per day. Is that irrational? I hope all will agree that no one who is concerned to be optimally healthy as long as possible should smoke 20 cigarettes a day, let alone 80 like Rod Serling who died at age 50 on the operating table. But long-term health is only one value among many. Would Serling have been as productive without the weed? Maybe not.
Suppose one genuinely enjoys smoking and is willing to run the risk of disease and perhaps shorten one's life by say five or ten years in order to secure certain benefits in the present. There is nothing irrational about such a course of action. One acts rationally -- in one sense of 'rational' -- if one chooses means conducive to the ends one has in view. If your end in view is to live as long as possible, then don't smoke. If that is not your end, if you are willing to trade some highly uncertain future years of life for some certain pleasures here and now, and if you enjoy smoking, then smoke.
The epithet 'irrational' is attached with more justice to the fascists of the Left, the loon-brained tobacco wackos, who, in the grip of their misplaced moral enthusiasm, demonize the acolytes of the noble weed. The church of liberalism must have its demon, and his name is tobacco. I should also point out that smoking, like keeping and bearing arms, is a liberty issue. Is liberty a value? I'd say it is. Yet another reason to oppose the liberty-bashing loons of the Left and the abomination of Obamacare with its individual mandate. [This entry is a repost from 28 December 2011. One of President Trump's many accomplishments has been to put an end to the mandate.]
Smoking and drinking can bring you to death's door betimes. Ask Humphrey Bogart who died at 56 of the synergistic effects of weed and hooch. Life's a gamble. A crap shoot no matter how you slice it. Hear the Hitch:
Writing is what's important to me, and anything that helps me do that -- or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation -- is worth it to me. So I was knowingly taking a risk. I wouldn't recommend it to others.
Exactly right.
And like Bogie before him, Hitch paid the price for his boozing and smoking in the coin of an early death at age 62 on 15 December, 2011. Had he taken care of himself he might have kept up his high-toned ranting and raving for another ten years at least.
So why don't I smoke and drink? The main reason is that smoking and drinking are inconsistent with the sorts of activities that provide satisfactions of a much higher grade than smoking and drinking. I mean: running, hiking, backpacking and the like. When you wake up with a hangover, are you proud of the way you spent the night before? Are you a better man in any sense? Do you really feel better after a night of physical and spiritual dissipation? Would you feel a higher degree of satisfaction if the day before you had completed a 26.2 mile foot race?
Health and fitness in the moment is a short-term reason. A long-term reason is that I want to live as long as possible so as to finish the projects I have in mind. It is hard to write philosophy when you are sick or dead.
And here below is where the philosophy has to be written. Where I hope to go there will be no need for philosophy.
In part it is about control. I can't control your body, but I can control mine. Control is good. Power is good. Physical culture is the gaining and maintaining of power over that part of the physical world that is one's physical self.
Self-mastery, as the highest mastery, must include mastery of the vehicle of one's subjectivity. Control of one's vehicle is a clear desideratum. So stretch, run, hike, bike, swim, put the shot, lift the weight.
In short: rouse your sorry ass from the couch of sloth and attend to your vehicle. 'Ass' here refers to Frate Asino, Brother Jackass, St Francis' name for his body. Keep him in good shape and he will carry you and many a prodigious load over many a pons asinorum.
(It is interesting that the German Arsch, when it crossed the English Channel became 'arse,' but in the trans-Atlantic trip it transmogrified into the polyvalent 'ass.' Whatever you call it, get it off the couch.)
That's what it was called before it was called ObamaCare. If you don't like the latter, then you'd better vote for Trump. It might be in your best interest to inform yourself on this matter.
A entirely typical example of liberals who want to do good, so long as it is with other people's money. And that reminds me of a cartoon that should resonate at this time of year.
The public-health establishment has unanimously opposed a travel and visa moratorium from Ebola-plagued West African countries to protect the U.S. population. To evaluate whether this opposition rests on purely scientific grounds, it helps to understand the political character of the public-health field. For the last several decades, the profession has been awash in social-justice ideology. Many of its members view racism, sexism, and economic inequality, rather than individual behavior, as the primary drivers of differential health outcomes in the U.S. According to mainstream public-health thinking, publicizing the behavioral choices behind bad health—promiscuous sex, drug use, overeating, or lack of exercise—blames the victim.
We need ideological quarantine to keep sane but susceptible people from being infected by pernicious ideological viruses. I mean, how willfully stupid can a willfully stupid liberal be? And should we allow liberals around the impressionable and uncritical? We need to think about appropriate measures for social prophylaxis.
And what exactly is wrong with blaming the victim, within limits? As you might expect, I have written a post on this topic entitled, as again you might expect, On Blaming the Victim.
A hard-hitting piece by Joseph Curl exposes the PeeCee Prez for what he is: a disaster whose ever-increasing incompetence is about to turn deadly.
Someone should explain to Obama why we have borders and why they must be enforced. Is he really as stupid as his actions and inactions show him to be, or is he a hate-America leftist that does all he can to destroy the country?
Suppose Ebola spreads into Central America and Mexico. Where do you think people will flee to? But even if the Ebola virus does not penetrate Central America, refugees from those regions bring with them tropical diseases that we are not prepared for. Did Obama and his advisors give any thought to that?
Apparently not. The fool prefers to joke about the border problem. Contemptible! And of course nothing he says in that clip, except the alligators in moats joke, can be taken seriously since he lies about almost everything. Curl concludes:
The White House has repeatedly used one word to describe the administration's response to the Ebola crisis: "Tenacious."
The real word that applies though is "mendacious." Or "fallacious." Any other claim is audacious.
Your post on why the left “went ballistic” over the Hobby Lobby case was well-done as usual, and I for one was grateful for your emphasis that the so-called contraceptives in question were really abortifacients, and that the latter is not a proper adjective for the former. I do have a couple of questions/comments though.
First, about the left and religion. While I don’t like the politics or the theology of people like Jim Wallis of Sojourners or the President’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright, it certainly seems that they are really religious and their politics flow from their faiths. I’m inclined to say that they have a mistaken anthropology and overvalue one understanding of justice at the expense of other legitimate senses, but wouldn’t say that they’re not really religious or that their true religion is leftism. (Well, maybe if I knew more about Wright’s theology I would say that about him. But I don’t believe that all lefties who claim to be Christians are just faking it and make a god out of the state and/or left-wing politics.)
Second, the statement that “they don't have the right to use the coercive power of the state to force others to pay for them when the contraceptives in question violate the religious beliefs of those who are forced to pay for them” seems to be overdrawn, at least if it’s generalized. If a Jehovah’s Witness owns a business, does he have the right to refuse to pay for an employee’s insurance when it pays for a blood transfusion? What about a pacifist being forced to pay taxes to support a war effort (especially one that doesn’t involve direct national self-defense)? There are all sorts of things we’re forced to pay for even though they violate our moral and religious beliefs, and while we can sometimes successfully fight those challenges (when, e.g., it poses an “undue burden”) there are other times when we must knuckle under unless we wish to engage in civil disobedience.
Maybe I will get to the first objection later.
Here is a very blunt response to the second. If you are opposed on moral grounds to blood transfusions, then you hold a position that is not morally or intellectually respectable. Therefore, IF the government has the right to force employers to provide health insurance that covers blood transfusions for employees, THEN it has the right to violate the beliefs of a Jehovah's Witness when it comes to blood transfusions. And the same goes for pacifism. If pacifism is the view that it is always and everywhere wrong to kill or otherwise harm human beings, then I say you hold a view that is not morally or intellectually respectable. I could argue this out at great length, but not now; I told you I was going to be blunt.
Note, however, that the blood transfusion case as described by Monokroussos is importantly different from the pacifism case. The first case arises only if something like the PPACA -- ObamaCare -- is in effect . I say the bill should never have been enacted. Government has no right to force private enterprises to provide any health insurance at all to their employees, and no right to force workers to buy health insurance, and no right to specify what will and will not be covered in any health insurance plan that employers provide for their employees.
The pacifism case is much more difficult because it arises not from a dubious law but from the coercive nature of government. I believe that government is practically necessary and that government that governs a wide territory wherein live very diverse types of people must be coercive to do its job. Moreover, I assume, though I cannot prove, that coercive government is morally justified and has the moral right to force people to do some things whether or not they want to do them and whether or not they morally approve of doing them. Paying taxes is an example. Suppose you have a pacifist who withholds that portion of his taxes that goes to the support of what is perhaps euphemistically called 'defense.' Then I say the government is morally justified in taking action against the pacifist.
But if the government has the right to force the pacifist to violate his sincerely held moral principles, why is it not right for the government to force the pro-lifer to violate her sincerely held principles? The short and blunt answer is that pacifism is intellectually indefensible while the pro-life position is eminently intellectually defensible. But the pro-choice pacifists won't agree!
Clearly, there are two extremes we must avoid:
E1. If the government may force a citizen to violate (act contrary to) one of his beliefs, then it it may force a citizen to violate any of his beliefs.
E2. The government may not force a citizen to violate any of his beliefs.
The problem, which may well be insoluble, is to find a principled way to navigate between these extremes. But what common principles do we share at this late date in the decline of the West?
Perhaps we can agree on this: the government may legitimately force you to violate your belief if your belief is that infidels are to be put to the sword, but it may not legitimately force you to violate your belief if your belief is that infanticide and involuntary euthanasia are wrong. (Suppose the government demands that all severely retarded children be killed.) But even here there will be dissenting voices. Believe it or not, there are those who argue from the supposed moral acceptability of abortion to the moral acceptability of infanticide. May the Lord have mercy on us.
So what's the solution? The solution is limited government, federalism, and an immigration policy that does not allow people into the country with wildly differing values and moral codes. For example, the Hobby Lobby case would not have come up at all if government kept out of the health care business.
The bigger the government, the more to fight over. But we don't seem to have the will to shrink the government to its legitimate constitutionally-based functions. So expect things to get worse.
When we got back to our apartment, I turned on my computer to check the news, and learned of the pair of decisions handed down by the Supreme Court. That both decisions are disastrous goes without saying, but I think they have quite different significances.
The Hobby Lobby decision granting to certain businesses the legal right to claim protection of their "religious beliefs" against The Affordable Care Act is by any measure the more grotesque of the two, and Justice Ginsburg is clearly correct in warning that the majority has opened the door to an endless series of meretricious claims of conscience by those fictional persons we call corporations. Only someone with Marx's mordant satirical bent could fully appreciate the decision to confer personhood on corporations while robbing actual persons of the elementary right to medical protection.
I beg to differ. First of all, the SCOTUS decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby was not that personhood is to be conferred on corporations. That had already been settled by the Dictionary Act enacted in 1871. Here we read:
The Dictionary Act states that “the words ‘person’ and ‘whoever’ include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals.”12
The question the court had to decide was whether closely held, for-profit corporations are persons under the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act . "RFRA states that “[the] Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion.”3 (Ibid.)
If Hobby Lobby is forced by the government to provide abortifacients to its employees, and Hobby Lobby is a person in the eyes of the law, then the government's Affordable Care Act mandate is in violation of the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act. For it would substantially burden Hobby Lobby's proprietors' exercise of religion if they were forced to violate their own consciences by providing the means of what they believe to be murder to their employees. So the precise question that had to be decided was whether Hobby Lobby is a person in the eyes of the law. The question was NOT whether corporations are persons in the eyes of the law. Wolff is wrong if he thinks otherwise.
Note that the issue here is not constitutional but statutory: the issue has solely to do with the interpretation and application of a law, RFRA. As Alan Dershowitz explains (starting at 7:52), it has to do merely with the "construction of a statute."
Not only was the SCOTUS decision not a decision to confer personhood on corporations, it also does not entail "robbing actual persons of the elementary right to medical protection." And this, even if (i) there is a positive right to be given medical treatments, drugs, appliances, and whatnot, and (ii) abortion is a purely medical procedure that affects no person other than a pregnant woman. See Dershowitz.
As a 'Zone Man,' I am well aware of the dangers of dehydration and heat stroke especially when out for an infernal hike. Although a U.S. gallon of water weighs 8 1/3 lbs, those are pounds I don't leave home without. Some will be surprised to learn that even with water there can be too much of a good thing.
The danger is increased if you drink pure water. Since my reverse osmosis water purifier delivers water that is around 95% pure, I add electrolyte replacements such as Gookinaid to my water or else bring along salty snacks.
In fact, the sort of greasy, salty, sugary crud that you shouldn't eat at home makes for good trail food.
Another post from the old blog, dated 3 November 2006. A redacted version, less crude than the original.
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The worst bores in the world are those who subject their listeners to blow-by-blow accounts of their medical procedures. Fear not. I just want to report that I underwent a screening colonoscopy this morning, and that if you are fifty years of age or older, and hitherto 'unscoped,' you should schedule one too.
But don't procrastinate as I did. It is not too much of a hassle. Yesterday I subsisted on clear fluids alone, my last meal being Wednesday's dinner. At four PM I swallowed four Dulocolax tablets and at six began quaffing four liters of a solution ($35 out of pocket, insurance wouldn't cover any part of it due to its one-time consumption) designed for lavage. That term, from Fr. laver and L. lavare, signifies the therapeutic washing out of an organ or orifice. And wash out my lower GI tract it did.
The thought of deep analysis (deeper than sigmoidoscopy) may unnerve some of you, but if your experience is like mine you won't be aware of a thing due to the narcotic cocktail they mainline into your arm. They gave me a bigger shot than I requested, as I wanted to watch the proceedings on the monitor. My last words right after the good Dr. Stein introduced himself and the nurse opened the IV valve were, "Time to be analyzed!"
I refrained from such other prepared witticisms as "Doc, I'm Mabel, if you're able" and philosophical nuggets about wide and narrow 'scope.') I didn't want to cause offense to the sweet nurses who may have been proper Mormons. In no time at all I was floating face-down in the sweet waters of Lethe. Next thing I knew I was putting on my clothes and stumbling out the door with a clean bill of gastroenterological health.
I was too stupefied to remember my prepared parting joke: What did the gastroenterologist say when asked about the meaning of life? "It depends on the liver."
Should I be blogging about a subject like this? Maybe not. But it was no physician who convinced me to get scoped out, but a regular guy in the pool who told me about his experience and how polyps were found.
Maybe it takes a blogger to get you off youranalysandum.
Have I gone on too long, hard by the boundary of boredom? Perhaps. So let me go on a bit more. A physician my own age once recommended a screening colonoscopy. I said, "Have you had one, Doc?" "No, I'm a runner," "Well, I'm a runner too." The doctor's enthymematic argument was bad, but it helped me procrastinate. And my wife once saw him coming out of a fast-food joint. But he was a good practioner and diagnostician. He had a scientific mind, something too many medicos lack.
