What is “Really Going On”? And What is “Conspiratorial Nonsense”?

Posted on March 14, 2017 by Fenster

Fenster writes:

Glenn Greenwald says that it was not only the Russians that interfered with the presidential election.  The FBI and the CIA were probably in there, too.

CNN’s Michael Smerconish asked Greenwald whether he gave “any credence to the conspiracy theory” that the CIA, along with the Russians, had attempted to manipulate the results of the election, and the journalist replied simply that it “was probably both.”  And he asserted the FBI had also played a part.
“I also think the FBI clearly sided with Donald Trump and did a lot of damaging leaks on purpose to hurt Hillary Clinton,” he added, an apparent reference to the bureau’s handling of the investigation into Clinton’s email.Greenwald went on to sum up the 2016 election as “a proxy war … for unseen forces.” He said he hoped for a “real investigation” into what happened, “where the evidence is publicly disclosed so that we can stop playing these games with anonymous leaks by people with unseen agendas trying to manipulate public opinion.” Doing so, he argued, is the only way to distinguish between “what’s actually true” and what’s “conspiratorial nonsense.”

Greenwald appears credible to me, in part because he comes across as willing to say and do things that will gore oxen when they need to be gored, as opposed to most of the press both left and right that come across as bought and paid for spinmeisters.

The notion of a struggle between powerful forces, whether or not you choose to call it Deep State, was around a lot during the election and then too I found the stories credible.

Of course as Greenwald suggests it is very very difficult for any amateur newsreader, no matter how busy at the task, to distinguish between what’s actually true and conspiratorial nonsense.  The recent Wikileaks disclosures don’t help matters as they suggest the CIA has the ability to leave the fingerprints of others behind where it has been.  That technical ability, combined with a professional inclination to produce disinformation, means that it if fiendishly hard to figure out who is actually doing what.  I have taken to watch the news more to look for what is not said–the “dog that didn’t bark”, as Sherlock Holmes put it–than I watch it in the hope of being told all the news that’s fit to print.

Alex Gibney’s document on Stuxnet, Zero Days, is worth a watch.  People against the CIA want to paint it as a devil and people in support want to paint it as an angel.  The truth is probably more complicated.  The picture that emerges in Zero Days suggests that the US is in a similar place is it was after WW2, when it held the nuclear reins.  We wanted to be the sole power with the bomb since we could then impose a Pax Americana.  But that proved impossible and so we had to engage in a long term, imperfect, messy but essential job: creating some sort of reasonable international rules on nuclear technology to avoid a Wild West.

Zero Days suggests we are in a similar place now with toxic technology.  We’d like to be the Lord of such things.  But we are not.  In fact, the situation is even more difficult than with nuclear technology.  There, the barriers were entry were high: qualified scientific talent, access to uranium, development of centrifuges and all the other mechanical aspects.  By contrast our newly developed weapons are just computer code.  And the process of using them involves letting them loose in the wild so that they can find their way to a target.  Assange indicated that he didn’t get the material he released from the CIA directly but from a source that picked it up in the growing secondary market for these things.  So-called greyhats are out there picking this stuff up and potentially selling them to the highest bidder.

So we are potentially entering a new and dangerous world, with the powers-that-be fundamentally unaccountable and probably convinced that they need to maintain control, which was our default view on nuclear at the start of the cold war.  All the more reason, as Greenwald suggests, to open the beast up for dissection and take a long hard look.

Posted in Politics and Economics | Leave a comment

What the President of Middlebury Did Not Say

Posted on March 13, 2017 by Fenster

Fenster writes:

Charles Murray was properly incensed over the egregious actions of those protesting his recent appearance at Middlebury College.  At the same time he was gracious and generous as regards the way the Administration handled the event.

In truth there is a lot to be said for how the Administration handled the whole affair.  That they allowed it to happen at all and that they agreed to structure it as an open discussion with what appears to be a reasonable (though critical) interlocutor are good things .  The Administration  warned the students about the implications of disruption.  It had a back-up plan for livestreaming that was put into place effectively.  Laurie Patton, the president, made a point of emphasizing free speech concerns in her statements at and after the event.

Continue reading →

Posted in Education, Politics and Economics | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Architecture and Color

Posted on March 13, 2017 by Paleo Retiree

Paleo Retiree writes:

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Possible Good News on Civil Asset Forfeiture

Posted on March 12, 2017 by Fenster

Fenster writes:

Fenster is highly suspicious of the practice of civil asset forfeiture, and wrote of the issue here.

You may know that the law often allows police or other authorities to keep the ill-gotten gains from a criminal transaction.  That’s bad enough as far as creating a financial incentive.  But the moral hazard is serious enough that police often take assets when no criminal action has been shown to have occurred, or if the owner of the asset was not aware of the crime.  Spending sprees are known to result as well.

As I read more about this practice I came across the legal distinction that supports forfeiture.  Typically, when the state proceeds against a defendant in a criminal law setting it does do “in personam“–that is, against the actual person.  It is this proceeding against an actual person that in turn gives rise to the full range of criminal procedure protections such as a right to a jury trial and heightened standards of evidence.

But the legal theory underpinning asset forfeiture is not “in personam” but rather “in rem”–that is, against “the thing” itself.  As Justice Thomas wrote in a recent Supreme Court opinion we will get to below, the use of “in rem” for forfeiture has a long history in American law, with early statutes “permitt(ing) the government to proceed in rem under the fiction that the thing itself, rather than the owner, was guilty of the crime.”

Lawyers are permitted to concoct any number or counterintuitive and indeed absurd devices, and sometimes they will even make sense, or be proven to be useful in pragmatic terms (more on which below).  But I must confess I was stumped when I got here.  A person is pulled over in a routine traffic stop and is found to have several hundred thousand dollars in cash in the car.  The police do not like the explanation, conclude it is ill-gotten in some manner such as a drug transaction, and seize the money without benefit of trial, conviction or criminal standards of evidence.  And this is to be deemed somehow reasonable on the grounds that the cash is guilty of a crime?

Oyez, oyez now comes Justice Thomas writing in Lisa Olivia Leonard v. Texas.  The facts of the case are similar to the ones sketched out above.  It is a one-justice opinion in which Thomas declines to hear the case.  But he uses the opportunity to send a clear shot across the bow of the legal theory justifying forfeiture.

He starts by acknowledging that the use of civil “in rem” proceedings instead of criminal “in personam” proceedings has a long history in the United States.  Forfeiture arose in the context of customs violations and piracy, with the “offending” vessels being seized without the need for the full range of procedural protections.   Thomas quotes from an earlier case dealing with the historical context:

One unaware of the history of forfeiture laws and 200 years of this Court’s precedent regarding such laws might well assume that such a scheme is lawless—a violation of due process.

But rather than endorse the idea that this historical context supports current practice Thomas goes the other way:

I am skeptical that this historical practice is capable of sustaining, as a constitutional matter, the contours of modern practice . . .

 . . . and he takes this view for two reasons.

First, he argues that historical practice and law were substantially narrower than current practice and law.  Cases arose out of customs and piracy matters.  The actual “in personam” person was often overseas and out of reach of the criminal system and so the offending thing was taken “in rem” under a preponderance of evidence standard.  And the assets seized were limited to the instrumentalities of the crime (i.e., the vessel) and did not include criminal proceeds.  The taking of criminal proceeds, or what is held to be such proceeds in the absence of procedural safeguards, is a modern invention.

Second, Thomas argues that there is more than a thread of early legal thinking that clearly recognized that standing behind some of the legal fiction of civil “in rem” proceedings stood a recognition that criminal matters were being addressed.   It is as though a legal fiction was permitted for practical reasons but that there was still an underlying awareness that taking something from a person is still taking something from a person, and that criminal issues lurked near the surface.

Thomas quotes approvingly from another recent case:

Ambitious modern statutes and prosecutorial practices have all but detached themselves from the ancient notion of civil forfeiture.

Thomas turned down a review of the case, citing the fact that the petitioner Leonard only introduced a due process argument for the first time in its brief to the Supreme Court, and not in the Texas Court of Appeals case he was reviewing.  Still, it is an encouraging sign that at least one member of the Supreme Court is willing to tackle this important problem.

Posted in Law, Politics and Economics | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Ideology, Myth and Reason

Posted on March 10, 2017 by Sir Barken Hyena

Sir Barken Hyena writes:

In the 18th century a revolution came to the world. Reason had proved itself the last word in truth for the physical, and the decadent aristocracy left an opening for sweeping change in society. For a thousand years Church and King, founded on myth, held nations together. Now, reason would take over. It was the birth of Ideology.

The failures and crimes of the aristocracy were known, and a new way was wanted. Now on the other side of a few centuries we are beginning to see the dimensions of Reason’s own failures and crimes, and perhaps the path of it’s demise. And we might roughly see the outlines of the answer to: what next?

Ideas were of course not new and religions are full of idea systems. Aren’t religions just ideologies? Wasn’t the change just to evict the God at the center and replace him with Reason? Many think so, and certainly the overlap is deep. But I think there is an important distinction when we regard each as functional systems that affect society and culture, rather than as paths to ultimate Truth, which neither possess. We will know them by their fruits.

In common both religions and ideologies have:

  • Dogma: a set of assumed truths, not demonstrated.
  • A creation story: an explanation of how the world got to it’s present fallen state.
  • Destiny: a picture of the desired end state that corrects the fallen world.
  • Taboo and Totem: assignment of the sacred and the evil.
  • Belief tests: demonstrations of commitment to dogma.

There may be more but that’s a start. In addition to these, both also serve the function of drawing together, inspiring, binding and directing groups of individuals for purposeful action (Ibn Khaldun’s “asafiyah” or group spirit). Nothing happens in civilization without group action, civilization is in fact, simply this on a vast scale.

What differs is the means of transmission. Religion is communicated by means of myth speaking to intuition, ideology by ideas speaking to reason. One by way of heart, the other by mind.

Myth impresses the intuition with it’s mold and thereby directs the individual. It works from bottom up. By means of art and poetry, a moral order is conveyed. Daily repetition of myth and ritual from childhood implants the themes unconsciously. Thinking and questioning is regarded as the lair of the devil, which indeed it often is.

Ideology guides action through thought directly. It works from top down. The means here is by math, science and prose, not poetry. Formulas are devised to parse reality in the manner of an equation that, correctly applied, yields the path of correct action  (though the equation never can be so applied, as we’ll see). Intuition is a temptress who’s siren call leads astray, as it often is.

I’m not concerned here with which is true, or more true, but rather with the character of each. Since no religion or ideology has won the near universal acceptance of Euclid, Newton, Einstein or Quantum Chromodynamics, I conclude none have delivered on their promise of revealing Truth. When only a few obvious cranks can be found to deny it, and that holds up for a thousand years or so, then we might have found it. Until then, I consider them all equally wrong.

Because religions and ideologies transmit through different means, they have different natures, and this is evident in the societies that emerge around them. Religions can persist in stable forms for centuries and even millennia. India, Egypt, China and others prove it. But ideologies are highly fluid, going through steady phases and progressions. Why would this be so?

Ideology has a defect as a creator of “asafiyah”: if the claim is based entirely on reason, then the ideology better square up at all points, to be believed. But freer thinkers are always exposing the logical defects to light, which need patching. Ideologies “evolve” because of this, and restlessly forget original aims in order to recast themselves as the next best thing, the answer to “x”. Past failures are propagandized under the rug. Over time an ideology can change to an actual opposite while retaining it’s outer features, like the way petrified wood forms.

Religions leave the Pandora’s Box of reasoning unopened by creating “asafiyah” with myth. A picture is painted of the righteous path, then you get it on it, if you can. As long as belief is maintained, undermining questions aren’t asked. It usually takes and invasion or colonization to replace a religion.

Since the 17th century when Reason took the lead, we’ve witnessed this steady shifting as  in “progress”, however variously defined, and for we moderns it seems a natural thing. This makes ancient, pre-modern cultures seem oddly static and somewhat pointless from our perspective. They do not seem to have felt so themselves, rather, it’s certainly Modernity that’s marked by existential voids and suchlike. But that’s another topic.

In other words, that’s all because of kicking open Pandora’s Box. In my view, we’ve reached the zenith of all forms of Rationalism, the box is empty, and the task of the next few centuries will be putting it all back and slamming it shut good and hard. This will take the shape of epochal changes in all spheres of human activity, but a common force under these tectonics will be the restoration of myth as the heart of culture.

Posted in History, Personal reflections, Philosophy and Religion, Politics and Economics | 6 Comments

Oh That Awful Madonna-Whore Complex

Posted on March 9, 2017 by Sir Barken Hyena

Sir Barken Hyena writes:

I come from good old WASP/Athiest stock so I don’t think I ever even encountered this odd phrase until I was in my twenties. I thought it baffling. An early exposure was Tess. Dude she’s beautiful and she’s all yours now what’s the PROBLEM!? Again, baffling.

But recently it’s become clear to me that MW complex was there in me, and the whole wider society all along, just wearing different clothes. Now, most men will readily distinguish the two types. These are viewed as two populations of women, however vaguely bordered, and son you better damn well be sure just which one she is before you tie that knot. Hint: you want an madonna. The other kind? They’re good for sex but nothing more. Better for sex, in fact.

Is this view a cultural creation or something rooted in human nature? To find out I deeply researched (googled for an hour) the subject of sex relations among primitive humans, living in something close to the ancestral environment. It seems that the picture there is quite different. While they do possess the institution of marriage, relations are more equal, divorce can be initiated by either party and each retains more freedom than in civilized settings. Women were not property. The typical marriage seems to last about 10 years, long enough for the child, in that environment, to achieve a high degree of independence and more or less take care of themselves. Often the couple will split amicably after this point and find new partners. Trysts are common but usually kept secret.

I don’t want to get all Noble Savage here because it’s not all a rosy picture, of course. There were passion murders, love triangles and all the other staples of Opera, out there in the bush. But once civilization arrives there’s a big change. I can oversimplify it this way: previously men and women were free, but poor. With civilization, freedom is given up for material gain. The men, before free to range the bush and hunt as they liked, were now bound by law and property to support more powerful men. In exchange, civilization made women their own property. The men exchanged freedom for control over their wives and became their own mini-despot of the household. Patriarchy was born.

While in the bush the children were raised to a larger extent by the whole group, once in civilization this becomes the job of the family relations. Now paternity raises it’s head. Women seem to have a hard time grasping how it effects the male psyche that we can’t know for sure if our kids are truly our own. A man doesn’t want to squander his resources raising someone else’s kids that he thinks are his. All of this complicates the question of choosing a mate and escalates all issues revolving around trust, for both sexes. Civilization leads men to solve this problem by controlling female sexuality.

At this point female desire can become a threat to male interests, but not the other way around. If a man strays and impregnates another man’s wife, the child is provided for by the woman’s husband, as long as the secret is kept. It’s a boon to the man (from a “selfish gene” perspective) and no loss to the woman. But for the other guy, it’s a total loss, he’s wasting his resources.

So the new patriarch has got to keep his woman sexually exclusive to himself, and the number one threat to this is her natural desire for sex. So this must be stigmatized, as it never was in the bush. The Slut is born, and as her compliment, the Madonna too.

These are conceived as two distinct groups of females, and each potential mate has to be assessed as one or the other; as good for sex, or good for a wife. While men actively making a social pariah of “the slut”, it doesn’t mean they don’t like them. They like them very much indeed, but not in the home. Meanwhile, “the madonna” is not really liked all that much, she’s kind of a drag to be honest, but respected and valued. And feared a little because the contrast to doglike male sexuality is a little too plain.

This basic pattern is to be seen in all civilizations and, it seems to me, no primitive societies. The two types are evident in literature from across the world, and through history.

In the present day, Feminism has been used to promote the ideal of the two types. This may seem counter-intuitive but it works through putting women on a pedestal, which is equally done by Feminism. Women are either much much better than men, or fallen in prior societies. Under Feminism, they are either much much better than men or totally under their influence, “fallen” in other words. Same thing, either way young men grow to believe women are better than them, and are the path through which their gross nature can be elevated to a higher more spiritual plain.

But what really implants the pedestal view is the mother. I believe that of all human relations, none evinces the unconditional love of a mother for her son. Yes, mothers love their daughters but they judge them more harshly. Yes, fathers love their daughters and sons too but we know that nature has no force like an enraged mother.

Men, such as myself, who come into the world with this kind of motherly love are simply predisposed to believe females are of a more elevated character by this first and most profound contact. And those that don’t, that have a bad mother, also develop this Madonna ideal as what they lack and desire from a woman but aren’t getting.

When we grow up and go out into the world as men to find our soul mate, we naturally seek one like our mothers…or rather, what we imagined our mothers to be. Because hard as it is to see that, she was not that, never was that, and never will be. She was simply showing that side of her because of her love.

Because the problem with the whole Madonna-Whore complex is that these are not separate groups of women, they are the same woman in different contexts, around different men, and at different times. There are no sluts nor madonnas, but simply human women with multidimensional characters that change with every moment, with a range of behavior.

Which is what men are like as well! This is a hard pill to swallow, but it’s most liberating once absorbed. It means, no, women are not more elevated, not better, not kinder but these things can come from them when she really loves you. Then you can have the slut and the madonna at once.

But can you keep her?

Posted in Personal reflections, Sex, Women men and fashion | 3 Comments

Quote Du Jour: From Pulp Fiction to Sober Reporting

Posted on March 9, 2017 by Blowhard, Esq.

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

The Old Bailey Session Papers [the law reports for London’s main criminal court] originated close to an earlier genre of popular literature, the sensation-mongering chapbooks, which were pamphlet crime reports that date back to Elizabethan times. The chapbooks were produced for sale to the general public. Each pamphlet recounted the detail of a recent crime, together with (typically) the ensuing investigation, trial, conviction, and execution. The earliest exemplars of the Old Bailey Session Papers survive from the 1670s. The pamphlets were quite selective, recounting only a few cases likely to have the most popular interest. The early Session Papers also exhibit a moralizing tone that was characteristic of chapbooks.

From these beginnings the Session Papers were published in a substantially continuous series for nearly two and a half centuries. The series underwent incessant change in size, format, content, and function. From their origins as episodic chapbooks they became a periodical, published immediately after each of the eight annual sessions of the court, and sold separately for a few pence. In the 1680s the pamphlets became semi-official, under license from the City of London; by the later eighteenth century, the City was subsidizing the publication. Instead of limiting themselves to a selection of higher-profile cases, the Session Papers began to report increasing numbers of mundane property crimes that comprised the bulk of the court’s caseload. Crude sensation-mongering died out from the title pages, and moral instruction disappeared from the accounts. The series came to operate under an obligation of completeness; at least the outcome of every trial held at the particular sessions was noted. As the eighteenth century wore on, the Session Papers lost interest in street-corner sales and became a stodgy, quasi-official crime calendar, published under license of, and ultimately with financial support from, the City of London.

— John Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial

Posted in Books Publishing and Writing, Law | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Treatments Bad and Good

Posted on March 7, 2017 by Paleo Retiree

Paleo Retiree writes:

It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted to link to an article at The Atlantic. For decades a great magazine that was reliably substantial and well-written, it’s now an SJW-infested clusterfuck that too often reads like it’s being written and edited by ambitious Cultural Studies undergrads.

Forgive a short detour: In the last ten years, many media outlets, in their struggle to cut costs in the digital age, have sent their older employees packing. The impact of this trend on our public discussion hasn’t received nearly enough recognition, IMHO. Whatever the faults of the older crowd — and I say this as one of them (I was retired-with-a-bonus from a MSM magazine in 2008) — they’d seen a lot and they’d dealt with a lot. They had thick hides as well as a healthy cynicism towards both their subjects and their bosses. By contrast, today’s youthful MSM staffers, while having the virtues of energy and tech-savviness, often seem completely unworldly as well as over-eager to please the powers-that-be. When I scroll or leaf through today’s news-oriented magazines and newspapers, I invariably come away with a general impression of callowness and wet-behind-the-ear-ness. It’s as though the writers and editors are dealing with their subjects for the very first time. Wide-eyed freshness can be a virtue in lyric poetry; in journalism maybe not so much.

Takeaway: if our public discussion has come to feel like it’s being conducted by 13 year olds, it isn’t just because you yourself are growing older and more cranky. It’s also because a lot of the people supplying us with reporting and opinions these days really are near-children.

But back to the point of this posting, which is to link to an article by David Epstein. It’s about unnecessary and unhelpful medical treatments that nonetheless continue getting prescribed, and it’s a well-reported, provocative beauty. Why, Epstein asks, even in cases when the best studies show that some treatments are useless or worse, do patients continue demanding them? And why do doctors continue providing them?

Excerpt:

For all the truly wondrous developments of modern medicine—imaging technologies that enable precision surgery, routine organ transplants, care that transforms premature infants into perfectly healthy kids, and remarkable chemotherapy treatments, to name a few—it is distressingly ordinary for patients to get treatments that research has shown are ineffective or even dangerous. Sometimes doctors simply haven’t kept up with the science. Other times doctors know the state of play perfectly well but continue to deliver these treatments because it’s profitable—or even because they’re popular and patients demand them. Some procedures are implemented based on studies that did not prove whether they really worked in the first place. Others were initially supported by evidence but then were contradicted by better evidence, and yet these procedures have remained the standards of care for years, or decades.

Even if a drug you take was studied in thousands of people and shown truly to save lives, chances are it won’t do that for you. The good news is, it probably won’t harm you, either. Some of the most widely prescribed medications do little of anything meaningful, good or bad, for most people who take them.

Epstein’s piece is full of eye-opening examples. One of my favorites is treatments that will make your body hit the sought-after numbers — pills, for example, that bring some blood marker into the desired range, or that lower your blood pressure to “normal” — yet that won’t prolong your life or help you avoid catastrophes. What’s the point of them? Does it matter if your numbers look good if you get sick and die anyway?

Epstein got me thinking over a number of things. I’ve been accompanying an in-law to the hospital for chemo treatments, for example, and so have had a lot of time to observe the scene there. Good lord but there are a lot of fat people and smokers among the patients. People who have just had dumb accidents and homeless people too. One ambulance guy I gabbed with recently told me that 70-80% of the ambulance runs he and his team make are for homeless people. “A lot of them are drunks and addicts. Sometimes they really need treatment but often they just want attention,” he said to me. “You run out of compassion for them pretty quickly.” And a surgeon I knew once said to me that American hospitals would be half as crowded as they are — and America’s perpetual health-care crisis would be much alleviated — if Americans did four things: 1) Avoided getting obese. (“Overweight isn’t a problem,” he said. “Obese is.”) 2) Avoided getting addicted to drugs or booze. 3) Didn’t smoke. 4) Took more care to avoid preventable accidents — falls from ladders, that kind of thing.

These musings led me to two (very amateurish, but hey, I been around) reflections:

  • It’s probably a mistake to think of our bodies as mechanical things — or, to be more up to date, as cyborgs. That view tends to lead people to think of their bodies as a device detached from them that needs the occasional visit to the garage, or maybe the occasional attentions of Apple Geniuses. If you’ve got a pain or a gripe, drop your body off at the hospital and get it worked on. Problem solved. In my experience it all too often doesn’t work out quite so simply. For all the things that modern medicine is good for, I can’t tell you the number of times friends have had back operations or knee replacements or heart stents that haven’t finally done them much good. And, even when these treatments do work out well, the pain, horror and shock of the experience is something people are rarely ready for. Bodies aren’t machines; they’re sacks of wet, gloppy biological materials. They really don’t like being knocked out and cut into. Another big surprise: trauma to the body (and surgery is extreme trauma to the body) tends to have big, unpredictable mental and emotional consequences. You aren’t just dropping your jalopy off at the shop; you’re putting your very being on the line. It isn’t at all rare for people having surgery to come out of the experience feeling quite changed (and often not in a good way) by it.
  • We’re mistaken when we look to Western medicine to make us feel good. Western medicine is brilliant at fixing bone-breaks, at sewing up bullet holes, at curing some cancers and helping with diabetes. But can it really make you feel good in the “I’m experiencing ease and purpose” sort of way? Is it even meant to? Yet that’s exactly what many people look to it for. I can’t tell you the number of friends I have who are, in their quest to feel a little better, taking a half a dozen pills a day. People get hooked on a medication then need more medications to take care of the side effects of it. “There’s no such thing as a medicine that doesn’t have side effects,” a Harvard Med School doc once told me. “Even aspirin has side effects.” My friends swirl around and around, getting groggier and groggier, trying to extinguish symptoms that they themselves have created, and never ever achieving the desired state of feeling pretty good.

Epstein is, btw, very good on the “why?” part of his topic: Why do doctors prescribe these treatments? Why do patients demand them? I think it’s beyond-understandable that people today should look to medicine for miracles. These days, where else are they going to look? It’s too bad, though, if doctors and medicine hold out promises they can’t really deliver on, and it can backfire when people project their larger hopes onto medicine. A little less confusion, heartbreak and pain would be nice.

Fwiw, my working theory about how to proceed is: use Western medicine for what it’s good for, but generally avoid it. For everyday health — and especially for that elusive “feeling good” thang — rely first on eating well, on moderate exercise, on living a modest and low-stress life, and on being conscientious with your mental/emotional hygiene. Qigong, yoga, meditation, massage, swimming, etc, can all do a soul a world of good. Incentive: it never hurts to remember that doctor and hospital goofs may be the third leading cause of death in the U.S. If you’re hit by a car or need a tumor removed, by all means get yourself to a doctor, and do it pronto. Otherwise, why expose yourself to more medical treatments than you probably really need?

Related

  • At my old blog I wrote about receiving a diagnosis of cancer and going through surgery for it. An epilog to that story: I’ve begun to wonder if the surgery was necessary. As thinking about prostate surgery has progressed in the years since my operation, many doctors have come to suspect that there may be several different kinds of my kind of cancer, some of which will kill you no matter whether you’re treated or not, and some of which won’t kill you no matter the treatment. That would certainly jibe with my experience. A good friend of mine was diagnosed with the same cancer I had. His markers and my markers were almost identical — in other words, as far as medicine was concerned and could tell, we were virtually identical cases. And we received identical treatments. Yet he was dead from his cancer within five years while I’m still around and in good shape. So: given that I may have had a brand of cancer that I’d have survived in any case, why did I go through the gruesome, life-changing procedure I did?
Posted in Food and health, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 13 Comments

Architecture and Color

Posted on March 6, 2017 by Paleo Retiree

Paleo Retiree writes:

Posted in Architecture | Tagged | 1 Comment

Naked Lady of the Week: Kira the Little Redhead

Posted on March 3, 2017 by Blowhard, Esq.

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

kiracover

We’re reaching back into vault of remembrance of faps past today for this week’s selection. Kira the Little Redhead wasn’t just a diminutive, freckle-faced ginger with big boobs and an endless appetite putting on, and then taking off, different outfits — she was an Internet pioneer. Her site, active from 1998 to 2002, was one of the first amateur subscription sites. At least it was one of the first amateur subscription sites that I was aware of. How much did I pay? $10, $20 a month? Sure, the flat lighting and bland backdrop (95% of her photosets look like they were shot in her apartment) don’t compare to the slick professional quality you get today, but Kira and her luscious body were just so eager to please. And now that I take another look, the aesthetics of these photos (a style not limited to her of course) prefigure the later American Apparel ads, don’t they?

There are pictures and some softcore videos floating around the tube sites, or you can download a rip of Kira’s old site on the torrents. Enjoy your weekend.

Continue reading →

Posted in Sex, The Good Life | Tagged , , | Leave a comment