How to form men. The Boy Scouts still exist! Sources of useful advice. New Year's

20211231

If society is going to restore itself it needs men. Needs men in the most basic biological sense. Men who are willing to create families and take responsibility for them, and teach them to be like himself.  The institutions that have encourage masculinity have been systematically weakened.

The Boy Scouts used to instill a sense of ethics, morality and civic responsibility. I recited the Boy Scout law to Eddie as best I remembered that: a Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. I also remembered the Boy Scout motto: be prepared. The scout oath came back after a minimum of prompting: on my honor, I will do my best, to do my duty to God and my country and obey the Scout Law; to be helpful at all times; and to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.

That stuff has to reverberate with many of you readers, including David, Ricky, John, Dennis and Gus with whom I share those experiences. It was part of our formation.

I told Eddie that his far as I knew The Boy Scouts was long gone. I thought they had been forced by an onslaught of litigation to admit girls and gays, then bankrupted by litigation because some leaders took advantage of the boys.

But – they survive! They claim two million members. Their website is a monument to diversity. A little investigation reveals, however, that at the organizational level there are girls' troops and boys' troops. Keeping them separate makes all the sense in the world. And happiest of all, they have hung onto the Scout Law, Scout motto and the Scout oath. Even the part about reverence. Maybe all is not lost.

Scouts was always intensely local, a matter of neighborhood fathers providing growth experience for neighborhood kids.  I have recently taught Eddie how to tie a slipknot, square knot, sheep shank and fisherman's knot.  This morning I tied a carrick bend, usually intended to tie hawser's together on shipboard, to fasten two small ropes holding a swing. He soaks it all up.

I find that there are still a few Scout troops in my old haunts in Washington. I had tried to get my son Jack interested back in the 1990s. Troop 666, an ominous number for religious folks, met in the basement of the Methodist Church on Nebraska Avenue. It was not, I have to say, a terribly welcoming organization. Bill Bennett – a heavy in the Reagan administration – was there with his kid and a squad of Secret Service. The movers and shakers never felt like inviting a plebeian such as myself to take any sort of role. Jack disliked it instinctively, and we didn't stick around.

I hope that scouts in the United States can continue to form kids the way it did when I was a member. I hope it is still a local organization with caring parents and intelligent and well-meaning leaders who find time to help kids grow into adulthood. I wish there were something analogous here.

I know Ed and Braxton through service in the National Guard, and a whole contingent through our work together in Vietnam supporting the military. Although Baden Powell founded the Boy Scouts on a military model, the military has never reflected anymore morality than the people who are in it. As Rudyard Kipling had written, "Single men and barracks don't grow into plaster saints."

Still and all, the military was a very masculine organization when I belonged in the 1960s. Reading "Up Front" about the Second World War with Eddie had the same feel. These were men who acted like men, respected manly men, liked their fellow soldiers, loved their country and wanted mostly to go back to their wives but were also not above catting around with whatever women were available in the meantime. As I've written before, the ethos of the military reflected more than anything else that of the Scots Irish Appalachian Southerners who formed its backbone.

That ethos has been systematically eaten away over the last few decades. It is now in an absolute full retreat in the face of wokeism. Gregory Hood describes it well. They are doing their absolute best to drive away real men. What they are left with is a bunch of people who are there for what they can get out of military service. The sense of patriotism and service is history.

The military exemplified masculine virtue, but it did so with a convenient ability not to notice things. Double standards serve a wonderful purpose – they reconcile the ideal with the actuality. There were many gays in the military in Vietnam.

My conclusion is that we were all better off when everybody pretended to be straight, whatever the reality was. Now, with individuals insisting on recognition, acceptance and even adulation of their peculiarities, we are simply fostering more peculiarity. I do not believe that peculiar people make the best soldiers.  The military is doing itself no favors by making the environment so hostile for normies.  I would venture that we had a more committed military when they were fighting for wives and children back home.

I have saturated myself with videos on the Covid situation. Today I saw an interview with Peter McCullough that covered the waterfront. It is amazing how much energy this man has.

He knows the history of Covid 19 inside and out. He knows all of the medications that have been proposed: when, by whom, how they work pharmacologically, and the fate that they met at the hands of the CDC and FDA.

He also knows what is going on than the rest of the world. This is worth listening to. They know how to handle Covid 19 in Bangladesh, Honduras, Argentina, Mexico, Egypt, and sub-Saharan Africa. They do not have nearly the problem we do. Isn't that odd? Their medical infrastructures, levels of education, income and everything else is vastly below ours. In my last post I mentioned that Japan has been smart enough to follow their example and has reduced the incidence of new cases on hundredfold in three months. There is something going on!

I mentioned what's happening in France. I checked Israel – same thing. Things are not exactly going the direction they were supposed to.

A simple fella like myself would ask the question, what did the successful countries have in common? They don’t have Anthony Fauci!!  They let the doctors figure out how to deal with the problem.

Returning to Peter McCullough, he says good words about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. But in the same breath he mentions a dozen other medicines that have been proven to work. The only thing that they have in common is that the United States government, media and big tech have ensured that you never hear of them. This is a scandal. Two families of our totally vaccinated neighbors here have caught Covid in the last month. Meanwhile, our family sails blissfully along, unaffected.

McCullough describes the way that the virus enters your body. It comes in through your nose. It is so small that it can easily pass through a mask. Besides which, clinical studies show that 18% of the air we breathe goes around the masks anyhow. They are useless.

Once the virus gets in your nose, the ACE receptors (he didn't mention this – I know it from previous reading) are the point of entry into your body. The viruses stick around in your nose and throat for a few days, growing in number, before they head south for your respiratory tract. This is also old news.

What was new to me is that Betadine.  Or povidone-iodine.  Or even highly diluted bleach will kill the virus in your nasal passages before it can multiply. So when you sense something coming on, or even just come home from a gathering where you might've been exposed, just rinse out your nose with one of these things. The fearmongers will try to convince you these are poisons. Duh!  They are if you swallow them, but only in large quantities, and nobody swallows them in the first place! They are meant to be spit out.

This is a good time to mention other sources on Covid. The so-called vaccines introduce spike proteins into your body and even teach your body how to make them. They are poisonous. Getting rid of them is a good idea, whether they come from Covid itself, a vaccine, or are made by your own body as taught by the vaccines. Here is a regime of over-the-counter medicines to detoxify your body.

Because the American Medical Association (AMA) has long been captured by the pharmaceutical and insurance interests, an alternative American Association of Physicians and Surgeons was formed many decades ago. Reflecting the long standing split, they have a totally different take on Covid 19. You will find a lot of useful articles here.

McCullough is remarkably even-tempered when talking about the pigheaded stupidity of the authorities, but in the last five minutes of the interview he gives a hint as to what he really thinks. This fixation with injections, absolutely rejecting any other solution, is something more malign than mere stupidity.

Yesterday I forgot pictures of the cats. Here are pictures of Puma with Rusty #1 from her springtime letter and Rusty #3 and another from her fall litter.

We celebrated New Year's last night because Anna is taking the weekend off. Here she is with Eddie and her daughter Sophia making sushi. They made a ton of it and it went amazingly fast. It was delicious.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the winter crud, having sidestepped azithromycin, is dragging on and on for me and everybody else. Strong men are drinking strong herb tea, the good looking woman is hiding in her room, without even energy enough to make sure the kids are not watching too much video (Cinderella and Dumbo today), and while the cat's away, the kids will play. The lineup on my bed resembles the lineup on Homer and Marge Simpson's sofa.