Covid pays a visit. Superstitious me. Openness and orthodoxies

20220113

Oksana is holed up in her room with a diagnosis of Covid 19. It had to happen sometime. She has a dry cough, feels weak and has had a fever of 99° or so for the last week. As I wrote last time, she over extended herself with Christmas caroling and more recently taking care of her father.

Sasha went to the hospital last night. Some combination of the kidney problems that have bedeviled him for a long time, the circulation problems in his leg that have him hobbling, and something bleeding in his stomach that they said required an endoscope down his throat to patch. He is not a healthy man.

Grandma Nadia sees Sasha's weak points very clearly yet sticks by him. Her sense of morality would not let her give him anything less than her best. She very carefully watches to be sure he takes his medicine, got unduly distressed when she discovered that he had not told anybody when he ran out of his kidney meds, and basically does everything that could be expected and then a little bit more. This is the way people used to be, and it is a noble thing indeed.

Oksana asks my opinion about medications for everybody in the family. She knows that I'm pretty good at researching these things on the Internet. She does not, however, always take my advice. She picks up little scraps of advice and wisdom here and there and puts them together and combinations that don't seem terribly reasonable to me. I'm going to recount some of her idiosyncrasies, as a segue into my own. Hell, I don't know either.

It is a custom in this family to keep silverware, plates and bowls for sick people separate from those for everybody else. I am quite confident that people don't pass that many germs down to their plates, that germs don't last very long exposed on exposed surfaces, and that simple dishwashing will probably get rid of them. But I go along with this practice because we have enough table service that it doesn't cause problems.

We are keeping Zoriana home for two weeks because Oksana has Covid 19. I have read a great many analyses to the effect that asymptomatic people, and children in general are not vectors of the disease. Omicron is becoming ubiquitous and keeping her home makes no sense to me. However, I'm going along with it. 

Zoriana's new favorite pastime is playing dominoes. Since she was home, we played several games this morning. By now she has a pretty good understanding of the rules and what the dots mean. The challenge of the moment is figuring out what plays are going to score. I'm playing just a little bit hard to get, hoping that she will continue to look at it as a treat when I finally give in and play with her.

The stuff Oksana reads on the Internet indicates that there can be interactions among vitamin and mineral supplements. Some of this makes sense – calcium and iron would tend to displace each other as cations in metabolic processes. She has been reluctant to take zinc as part of the Covid 19 prophylaxis, and now cure. Anyhow, her symptoms are not severe and whatever she's doing I'm sure she'll be fine.

Now we come to myself. I have taken Betadine (½ tsp to ¼ cup water) to clean my nose out the last couple of days. There is such an ocean of good advice about what to do that I really don't know which advice to take. People have long recommended washing your nose out with saltwater, which has never seemed to me to work especially well. The theory for this Betadine killing viruses seems sound and I'll give it a shot. But if anybody were to call it mere adherence to voodoo superstitions I don't think I'd have a strong counterargument.  It does keep my sniffer clean and uncongested – that much I can say.

You could ask the same questions about my belief in the Maths+ protocol for prevention of Covid. Why do I believe these doctors? How can I accept that some of them are indeed a bit whackadoodle in some ways but still probably right in others?  I feel confident about my basic grounding in math, physics, biology and statistics. I was never great in chemistry, and biochemistry is a whole new deal, but inasmuch as I have never seen any progressive at any time put forth a reasoned argument on biochemistry, I feel even my weak understanding is probably good enough. At least I am attempting to use scientific method, whereas some like Sonia Sotomayor have apparently never even heard of it and are not whatsoever embarrassed by that fact.

Speaking of voodoo superstitions, I wrote recently that the esteemed Dr. Robert Malone had quite fully embraced the Mass Formation theory of Mattias Desmet.  My man David Cole, a critic for all seasons, expressed some pretty reasonable skepticism in his column.

I expect that Malone is sophisticated enough to see that the theory does not explain everything well. Embracing Mass Formation moves the argument from medicine into the realm of psychology, where I think it definitely belongs, even if within that realm there might be something more convincing to be found. This whole thing is moving fast – let's watch as it develops.

A few of you cannot be disabused of the notion that I am a white supremacist, a term used pretty much interchangeably with white nationalist.  I think this meme which floated in a couple of days ago is pretty indicative of Desmet's "free floating anger and frustration."  I would observe that the progressives, whether or not they are pissing deplorables off, seem to be ginning up charges and manipulating the judicial system to lock up those whom they would call white nationalists at a pretty good clip.  Locking people up does indeed get them angry.

I feel fortunate to be far enough away that I will not be subjected to litmus tests for adherence to orthodoxies. Progressives may be horrified that I am allowing my children to watch Walt Disney's Song of the South today. This movie has been thoroughly purged from the canon.

I find uncle Remus to be a very sympathetic character. I'll say the same for the crows in Dumbo, which they watched a couple of weeks ago, to whom Disney also gave some great lines. Eddie and I had similar discussions about Jim when we read Huckleberry Finn. Since there is no danger that my children will say anything politically incorrect to any other kids whose parents would care, I'll simply let them enjoy the movies for their uplifting messages and entertainment value.

Every age embraces its own set of orthodoxies. As I have mentioned, we often discuss those of the Soviet Union with regard to social class, the brotherhood of peoples, and the role of the state. This is a good back drop for discussing the heated arguments going on in today's West about some of the same issues. We can also talk about state control of science – Lysenkoism in Soviet times and the social justice pieties enforced throughout the social science departments of modern universities.  And IMHO the party line with regard to this virus.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the men will strongly stand behind their opinions, orthodox or not; the good looking women will stand behind their men, and the children grow up somehow thinking all this is how average people act and the way things should be.