Sunday, September 5, 2021

Sunday Night Links

  • If seed oils are not officially proscribed by the FDA, Frito-Lay will pump you full of seed oils. If the food scientists raise the alarm that seed oils are disrupting our endocrine systems & making us feeble & bloated & androgynous, Frito-Lay will determine whether this creates a risk of bad PR or litigation that outweighs the losses from switching to a less-profitable oil. [extradeadjcb
  • Psychiatry is a load-bearing structure in the Western liberal order. There are lots of things that might fit into your model of sexuality once you’ve accepted the principles of the Family Proclamation - but the one thing it basically has to include is this: that the Western mental health establishment is extremely wrong & intellectually dishonest about sexuality. They’ve been actively & openly laundering moral/spiritual conclusions into the “scientific consensus”, with the connivance of the news media, the other “social sciences”, etc., for decades. And once you’ve called them liars & denied their priestly jurisdiction, you open up all sorts of “settled” questions about education, institutional science, history, mass media, medicine, the legal system, etc. There’s a reason people who question this one thing tend to fall down the rabbit hole. Sooner or later, the Church will have to confront this problem, but it will be a hell of a thing - a philosophical cleavage deeper than the 1st-century Christians’ blasphemy against Roman paganism. Our disagreements with the American Protestant consensus of the 1840s were comparatively trivial. It will eventually be impossible to hold these views & maintain a position as a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, a manager - any position of authority or responsibility in which sexuality might become relevant (i.e. all of them). We’ll lose every member who is unwilling to say “the Church is right & every other Western authority is wrong”. Not only that, but without a compelling alternative epistemology, the sudden shock of losing everything that was solid & certain about the materialist worldview will drive some of our own people out into the schizo wilderness. Sources whom I will not cite tell me that the Church is preparing for this with great urgency. They are disentangling themselves from gentile financial & tech infrastructure - building parallel systems & bringing functionality in-house. They’re preparing for BYU to lose its accreditation, and thus its power as an economic catapult for our cognitive elite (not that that will matter much if we’re unwelcome in elite professions anyway). They’re preparing to lose a tremendous amount of tithing income (both due to mass apostasy, & the destitution of the Saints) without interrupting the work in the temples. They’re buying lots and lots and lots of farmland. [extradeadjcb]
  • Leftism is a pathology caused by the alienation from nature that technology allows. Leftists, the world over, are urban rather than rural, coastal rather than inland, young rather than old. The more alienated you are from the natural world, the more likely you are to be a leftist. Leftist impulses are actually very compelling if you assume nature is optional, or that it has been overcome. Wealth for everyone. Equality for all. Every last child is a genius. Universal basic income, free healthcare. There are no constraints, no practical problems. The people who aren’t leftists, are the people who understand what a bitter fight every last inch of progress actually is. Farmers, weight lifters, rank-and-file soldiers, many endurance athletes, many engineers, even (yes I promise) serious, honest academics. The para-religion at the heart of leftism is the belief in an eternal progress that you have to be on the right side of. This progress has long been slowing, and is now more or less over with. And now that it is over, you can see it with your eyes: leftism is dying. [eugyppius]
  • Honest question: what’s harder — landing on the Moon, or faking the Moon landing and getting everyone involved to keep the secret for 50 years? What’s the easier scam? Tricking a dozen senior military / intelligence commanders into paying you a billion dollars for bullshit, or getting a dozen senior military / intelligence commanders together to realize a billion dollar plan while pretending to be bullshitting? We’re really supposed to believe Elizabeth Holmes conned the Joint Chiefs and they just shrugged and moved on because they were embarrassed by it? [M Mabeuf]
  • There are two paths for a bedside nurse in the COVID era — keep working for a hospital or go work for an agency. Agency pay has gotten ridiculously high, so more and more nurses are quitting the local hospital, signing on with the agency, and then going to work for any hospital that can pay the agency’s rates. In exchange for going wherever the highest bidder is, they get huge increases in their take-home pay. No shame in that. The net effect, I suspect, is that the bargaining power of nursing labor is going way up, though with unequal gains; to benefit, you have to quit your hospital-employed job and be willing to go wherever the agency sends you. And then your open slot gets backfilled by another agency nurse from somewhere else! It’s a reinforcing cycle: As nursing shortages rise, nurses increasingly “work short” — i.e., caring for more patients per shift than is reasonable — or work more shifts per week than typical. That daily stress spurs many nurses to either leave the bedside for something more 9-to-5 (think outpatient clinics) or jump into travel nursing to at least get paid for the extra load everyone is being forced to bear right now. Agencies and travel nurses win, hospitals and hospital-employed nurses lose. You could also tell the story that the labor supply of nursing has historically already been constrained (though of course now more so), and that nurses have historically been underpaid from a supply-demand perspective, and that now it’s a more liquid market (with agencies acting as market makers), so the price for labor is rising. [MR]
  • In his book “The Rise and Decline of Nations,” Mancur Olson suggests a theory for why the Great Depression was so long lasting. (And why the current depression has been, too.) He thinks of the economy as having "fixed price" and "flexprice" sectors. The fixed price sector has monopoly or oligopoly prices set by either government, union, or collusive/cartel combinations. Fixed price also applies to raw materials with prices set by world markets. As with any collusive scheme, the cartel members in the fixed price sector benefit from abnormal profit while society suffers from below-equilibrium output. The flexprice sector is where prices are set by the free market, i.e. industries and sectors that are not just a racket being perpetrated. Macroeconomic discussions usually posit a free market with prices that adjust dynamically according to demand. But during deflationary episodes, the fixed prices in collusive sectors do not adjust downward and consequently become absurdly high, resulting in falling demand and then falling production. [CBS]
  • There I am in the lecture room with a couple of hundred med students. Our lecturer is preparing us for the clinic. Specifically, he is talking about surgery. All of a sudden, something I had never heard before pops up and out of his mouth. “500 mg of Vitamin C given before surgery will speed wound-healing”. Yeah. He said that. I was surprised. So, immediately I did what I have been known for over the years: I asked the pointed question nobody else seemed to want to ask. “Does anybody use Vitamin C before surgery to speed wound healing? I ask because I have never heard anyone ever talk about it.” Answer: “No.” A real “WTF” moment, if there ever was one. I mean, wound healing is one of the most important aspects of recovery from surgery. Infection is exactly what you want to avoid. So, if you could speed up wound-healing with low-toxicity Vitamin C, why would you not do it? [Contrary Warrior Health Blog]
  • I first took choline because I had misinterpreted Adelle Davis’s book on vitamins. I thought I needed high choline levels to balance out the B-complex I was taking. What I noticed, however, was that my concentration and memory improved. I was under a lot of stress at the time, unemployed and without a good place to live. Then, one day, I read how additional choline on the level of 3 grams given to MIT students improved their memory and recall of stuff without a particularly strong image or association. So, what I had observed in me was valid. Eventually the new “improved” choline, choline chloride, a liquid, came out. Choline chloride causes far less GI tract disturbance. Choline pills are choline with the carrier “bi-tartrate”. That’s what can cause gastric disturbance. Nowadays, I can’t find choline chloride, so I take the bi-tartrate form in several small doses a day. When I was living in Italy and wanted to make a good impression at, let’s say, a dinner with my Italian, I would take 3 grams of choline and some Hydergine or an extra cup of coffee. Wow! Really worked. Now, I find that my memory and my short-term memory, in particular, NEED choline or I will just sit there with a blank mind trying to hunt down that apparently forgotten item. [Contrary Warrior Health Blog]
  • Ivermectin proved to be even more of a ‘Wonder drug’ in human health, improving the nutrition, general health and wellbeing of billions of people worldwide ever since it was first used to treat Onchocerciasis in humans in 1988. It proved ideal in many ways, being highly effective and broad-spectrum, safe, well tolerated and could be easily administered (a single, annual oral dose). It is used to treat a variety of internal nematode infections, including Onchocerciasis, Strongyloidiasis, Ascariasis, cutaneous larva migrans, filariases, Gnathostomiasis and Trichuriasis, as well as for oral treatment of ectoparasitic infections, such as Pediculosis (lice infestation) and scabies (mite infestation).14) Ivermectin is the essential mainstay of two global disease elimination campaigns that should soon rid the world of two of its most disfiguring and devastating diseases, Onchocerciasis and Lymphatic filariasis, which blight the lives of billions of the poor and disadvantaged throughout the tropics. [Ivermectin, ‘Wonder drug’ from Japan]
  • America's departure from Afghanistan is a watershed moment, an irrevocable split between America the mighty and America the decadent. Much like in 406, when a fetid Rome could not stop the Germans from crossing the Rhine, America cannot stop its long slouch to the grave. If America had done the sensible thing, if it had shunned the advice of all its 'expert' advisors and set aside all moralistic qualms about its role in Afghanistan, if it had given up on the idea of nation-building, it might have scored a few successes. America could have filled a niche, much like the British Empire had in India, of being brutal but respected. The dusty hills of Afghanistan have played stage to a thousand ethnic rivalries: Pashtun against Tajik, Sunni against Shia, and so on. If America had entered Afghanistan with the notion of maintaining order above all else, the Afghan herder might have said to himself, 'Those Americans are brutal but they're fair. They don't favor Pashtun or Tajik. They keep the village fed and the trains running on time.' With this approach, America would not have been loved, but it could have been respected. It could have become the nation's strongest warlord, a king in a nation of petty fiefdoms; a suitable Douglas MacArthur type could have been earmarked for worship and tribute. But America wasn't content with law and order. It wanted liberation. And liberation meant education. It wanted to build a nation from the ground up - the Afghans be damned. America brought with it all of its neurosis and disorders and foisted it on the Afghan population. The rainbow flag, the transman birthing a child, woman bankers, no-fault divorces, social media, pornography, racial discord, liberal nihilism disguised as toleration - and so, America became a great unifying force for the Afghans - only not as America intended. The Afghan, in his barbaric simplicity, could not help but look at America and see it as a decadent and depraved society: he had always been told it was the Great Satan, and so it was. Even America's allies in the region despised America. How could they not? Even many Americans despise what our country has become. America had two decades to change tactics, to shift its focus to matters more temporal than spiritual, but America refused all opportunities. We are a theocratic empire more didactic than the Taliban. Our dogmas are plain: sexual, civil, and spiritual disharmony in all matters, a nihilistic defiance of mother nature and her laws at every turn. The Afghans were right to see us as their mortal enemies - America is the enemy of all people with genuine convictions. [@fritzpure]

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