Corruption everywhere. White Christmas. I need you.
20221212
Corruption in medicine again. These medical associations seem to be pretty soft targets for the deep-pocketed pharmaceutical industry. Thank goodness one can still access a variety of opinions via the Internet, including known contrarians such as Andy Wakefield, Joseph Mercola and Robert Malone. They may not always be right, but they are always worth listening to. In medicine I think that’s called getting a second opinion.
Yesterday the snow melted just enough to get me out on my bicycle. Almost enough. I went down, but in the most graceful way. The front wheel slid out on a patch of ice as I was turning right, going slow. I was able to put my right foot out and manage the fall gently enough that I suffered no damage at all beyond getting a bit muddy.
The farmers’ market offerings were uneven. Everybody has a ton of apples this year priced at 15¢/20¢ per pound. My guess is that they haven’t been able to export them. Pears are likewise pretty inexpensive. On the other hand, they had no bananas whatsoever and only one vendor offered tomatoes, not very good looking at that.
Yesterday’s rain turned into snow before everything melted. We woke up to 3 inches of lovely heavy, fresh stuff today. I can remember several years in a row wishing for a white Christmas that never arrived. Then, three or four years ago we got it. We had snow on the ground for a longer stretch than I could remember, from December 4 to the end of March. This year will probably break that record. It has been far colder and snowier than I can recall. Highs this week will be one degree over freezing; next week all below freezing, dropping into the mid teens.
Whereas the west says winter starts on the solstice, December 21, here we reckon it to be the months of December, January and February. March may officially be Spring, but nonetheless we are lucky to see snowdrops and crocus that early. In any case, by our way of reckoning we are already an eighth of the way through winter, and the Russians haven’t frozen us out yet.
We did change our calendar this year. Stalin brought the Russian Orthodox Church under state control eight decades ago. The current Metropolitan Kirill is a deeply corrupt, very rich man who has put his blessing on Russia’s war against Ukraine. In severing ties with the Russian church, Ukraine has shifted our holiday schedule to the Western calendar adopted by Pope Gregory in 1582. The alignment between calendars got progressively more out of sync as the Russians stayed with the Julian calendar until after the October Revolution. Which took place in November. Therefore Orthodox Christmas in Russia is still celebrated on January 7 and New Years on January 14.
I haven’t commented on Elon Musk. Robert Malone seems to be on top of the situation. The powers that be, certainly including the United States government, do not have our best interests at heart. The best quote from the above bit by Malone is "Fifth-generation warfare is a strange game. The only winning move is not to play." I’m certainly not. I’m long retired and long gone. Up till now I’ve been trying to pay attention. It seems at this moment that there are enough forces in motion that the fraud in the Covid response, the 2020 elections and everything else will be brought to the surface. I’ll be content to simply watch it unfold.
My confident prediction is that there will be several years of sound and fury. American government, medicine and education, rotten beyond repair, will at some point experience a cataclysmic collapse. The long delayed economic collapse will come as well. All this will happen with or without me. Raising my voice would do me no good. Per Malone, my best move is not to play. Be glad I am gone. I’ll raise my family in the knowledge that the world into which they grow up will be radically different. Predicting how and why it will be different would be impossible, but pretending that it will be anything like today’s would be irrational.
My objective is both simple and nigh on impossible. Teach my children reading, writing and ‘rithmetic. Tell them about the world as I see it, and tell them as well that they need to be willing to challenge what they hear from any source, including me. That leads to the fourth R, reasoning. And the hardest thing of all – I’ll stretch to create a couple more R’s. Respect for other people, especially their life partners, and reproduction. Religion figures in as well. When all others have forgotten how to make families, my kids’ children may indeed inherit the earth.
My Toastmasters speech this Saturday will be this video review of Why We Sleep, now up on Amazon. Please give it a helpful vote. I’m working on another speech entitled “I Need You.” The gist is that the family structure worked better back in the days when women needed men, and vice versa.
Women in the modern world can and do earn their own livings. One thing both men nor women clearly cannot do as well on their own is bear and raise children. A harder case to prove, but one that seems true in my experience, is that most people, most of the time, derive more satisfaction out of life in imperfect marriages than none at all.
Making my case will be a challenge. The notion of this speech has been floating around my mind for some time. It crystalized at our last Toastmasters meeting, attended by three beautiful and accomplished women. 2xPhD, 1xDD. The DD is divorced with a six-year-old daughter, the others single in their early 30s and not sanguine about their prospects for marriage. Stories like theirs are extraordinarily common in Western Europe and the USA. My thesis is that since they don’t obviously need men, they aren’t willing to make the compromises necessary to make a pairing work. We needed those compromises to make us fully human, for our own happiness, and definitely, to raise the next generation.
My message for men will be similar. Married life is simply more satisfying. Given that women don’t need us as much for financial support or physical protection, we need to hone other skills that women find appealing. Cooking, fixing things, musical talent, social skills and the like. They may be inessential, but we can make them appealing enough to cement a relationship.
That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where by some miracle the power has remained on for six hours running. Time to gather the above-average children and get them to bed. Oops! Just went out. Bye.
Will be interested in your thinking about the needs balance. I find that men and women have complementary thought processes likely developed by evolution. Men seemed tuned to objects/things while women are tuned to persons/feelings. If each attends to those areas and supports each other the arrangement in optimal. Now obviously there may be overlap and partnership can be created from a reverse of those generalities.
I've always found it curious that my gay friends have a degree of creativity that I and my late wife lack. Their creativity was similar to my wife's but with a different verve, hard to define. My creativity revolved around building things of utility to meet some need, not for beauty itself.
Ponderables for the elderly philosophers, which I am not educated well enough about.
'My thesis is that since they don’t obviously need men, they aren’t willing to make the compromises necessary to make a pairing work.' That seems very true. However, it isn't just women not making the normal, natural compromises of life to find a partner and make it the relationship work, it's also men no longer engaging and seeking long term partners. A large proportion of men are simply not seeking rerlationships with women. My theory is that a large part of that is because men need to be needed. If men are not needed, but, at best, tolerated, then they have no sense of purpose or self worth. Men need more than to just be an optional lifestyle accessory. Instead, we have a society that works hard to make men's roles redundant. And then people wonder why men are losing their motivation, drive and sense of self worth, with marriage rates dropping like a proverbial stone.