My own superstitions. Monkeypox and baby formula. Whither the war.

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In fairness to my wife and mother-in-law, I should recount some of the unfounded beliefs my parents held during my own childhood. Each of us is constrained in many ways by received wisdom, some of which turns out to be wrong. I offer this incomplete catalog of the wisdom I received and how well it has stood the test of time.

Throughout my childhood we were not allowed to go in swimming within two hours of eating. This was to avoid stomach cramps. Throughout my life I have never known anybody who got them. As I have gotten older, I have fairly frequently got leg cramps while swimming. The solution is simple – slow down and wait for them to go away, then keep on swimming.

We were told to avoid getting too much sun. It would lead to melanoma. Just this year there are studies coming out to indicate that this is probably not so. Conversely, the chemicals in the sunscreens that our mothers used to slather us with are probably dangerous. At a minimum it deprives us of vitamin D, which is useful among other things and staving off Covid.

Flossing your teeth became standard practice in the 1960s and 70s. Most of us accepted it without too much difficulty, though it did lead one to wonder how our uncivilized ancestors had survived long enough to evolve into us. When they first had me use floss I applied it with a sawing motion which made my gums bleed. It took some practice to get it right. I eventually got to the point of using it only when I needed to dislodge a piece of meat stuck in my teeth, Now – now they tell us that it is all unnecessary and maybe not helpful.

Various government agencies have fiddled endlessly with the food pyramid since my childhood. Peanut butter comes and goes. Catsup is sometimes a vegetable. Red meat leads to heart problems or maybe not.

We count calories as they are measured in a laboratory. That's because scientists don't fully understand how our body metabolizes different kinds of foods. By this logic we should avoid eating sawdust because burning it in a laboratory generates a lot of heat. However, except for the termites among us, our bodies would pass it straight through, our digestive system being unable to extract the energy.

Which leads us to fats and cholesterol, which remain a bugaboo for many. The naïve assumption is fat to fat, cholesterol to cholesterol. Which begs the questions of how beef becomes marbled with fat even though cattle eat grass. My own assumption is that our bodies are able to extract most of the energy we take in in the form of fats and carbohydrates, and that the round number estimates of 9 cal per gram of fat and 4 per gram of carbohydrate are more or less correct.  Our intestines break this stuff down into raw materials, which pass into our bloodstreams and are circulated throughout our bodies, where our own metabolic processes synthesize them into the fat that pads our waistlines and the cholesterol that may or may not cause the harms ascribed to it.

My take is that the generally accepted figures for caloric intake, 2000 per woman in 2500 for men, are about right. I am sure that our bodies process various foods differently, and different individuals will process the same food somewhat differently. Bottom line is that rigorous food pyramids, calorie counts and that sort of stuff are largely a matter of self-deception. It is enough to eat a balanced diet avoiding processed foods.

Body mass index is a measure that came into use long after I reached adulthood. The theory makes sense. I will tell my children about it. The standard formulas however are a one-size-fits-all affair.  The build I inherited, heavy legs and a solid trunk, meant that I spent most of my life in the overweight category. However, since I was out of the house before BMI was even a consideration, nobody ever made an issue of it.

Physical condition is what matters. My mother was prejudiced against bodybuilders, epitomized at the time by Charles Atlas. Neither of my parents encouraged me to exercise. I wasn't coordinated enough to do well at sports, so I was content to remain out of shape through my teens.

Other parents were encouraging their kids to exercise, which was obviously the right thing to do. Children of my generation had more freedom to cruise the town on bicycles, roam the hills on foot, and gather spontaneously for games such as softball, football and prisoner’s base.

It wasn't until I went in the Army at the age of 21 that anybody made me run a mile or develop the upper body strength to do a pull up. The fact that all it took was determination was a revelation. On my way to Vietnam in 1968 I bought a copy of Dr. Kenneth Cooper's book  Aerobics. That was transformative. In the 54 years since I have been dedicated to bicycling, running and swimming.

Along the way I re-examined my mother's prejudice against bodybuilders. There were chin up bars at the tracks where I ran. I found I enjoyed looking in the mirror a bit more after I had added pull-ups, chin-ups and push-ups to my routine.

The advertisers of my youth inspired all sorts of fears in us. We had to use the right kind of toothpaste to avoid halitosis – bad breath. And yellow teeth. We had to use the right kind of shampoo to avoid dandruff. We had to use antiperspirant deodorants so that we wouldn't smell offensive to the girls and wouldn't have sweat stains in our armpits. It didn't work, by the way.

The womehimn had it even worse with an ungodly invention called the feminine deodorant spray. FDS. If you have never heard of it, you don't want to know. It is a credit to my parents that they told us kids that these fears were balderdash – there was nothing to worry about.

My father the scientist cleaned out the attic periodically to prevent spontaneous combustion. Reading now about the process as I consider cleaning my own attic, there is nothing now and was nothing then that could have caught fire by itself. However, cleanliness is next to godliness, virtue is its own reward, and cleaning up never hurt anything. I'm cleaning our attic the summer.

On the societal level there were the hucksters lining their pockets by promoting the usual kinds of global fears. The population bomb. Global cooling. Nuclear power plant accidents. The communist menace.  On the other hand they did get some things right. They removed lead from gasoline, they concluded that smoking was bad for your health, and the Montréal convention shrunk the hole in the ozone layer. 

That's a short survey of the bogeymen of my childhood, the things that our elders, often our parents as well, told us we should fear. Most kids took them at their word. We didn't have the tools or the desire to examine the substance of the issues. They were no more than superstitions – received wisdom from the generations preceding us.

It is worth noting that there wasn't much of a downside in fearing the things that they told us to be scared of. Things are different today. Fear of Covid can lead you – force you – to get an injection that might kill you. Childhood uncertainty as to whether you were born into the right kind of body can lead to irreversible surgical changes to that body. Acceptance of the conventional wisdom that marijuana has no downside leads kids to drop out, avoid sex and marriage, and sometimes go on psychotic rampages.

In Covid news, I’m pleased to report that the “Die, unvaccinated scum” comments and emails have dried up.  I still have yet to get a letter to the effect that “I was wrong – my triple-vaxxed husband has an aggressive cancer” or similar.  Nor do I expect I will, however clear the connection becomes.

The Daily Expose hits the theme daily.  Recently,  here and here.  As I have written, there is a total disconnect between them and Team Covid, epitomized by Your Local Epidemiologist and Eric Topol. 

Meanwhile, I think there is some serious money behind monkeypox.  It is a story so stupid it should have disappeared after a couple of news cycles, but it must have some powerful friends.

Weird events pique my curiosity. When I was a kid mothers made their own baby formula. When the crisis came up I searched the Internet for homemade baby formula and found two dozen articles imploring me that it was a stupid idea to make your own. Leave it to the professionals.

Then the truth came out. Alex Berenson published an article I can’t find, and Unherd did this one. It is largely a manufactured crisis, attributable to a government-sponsored duopoly. And you can make your own baby formula. Not an issue for us – Marianna is happily breast-fed.

The war has managed to become boring just as it hits a crescendo. While I appreciate Bob Homans’ work, he is an unabashed advocate of Ukraine.  If you want the other side of the story, Revolver News may be a good place to start.

Revolver currently has a link to an article by Atlantic magazine. Atlantic has faithfully represented woke opinion in the United States for a long time now. I have a personal connection – I served on a private school board chaired by Kathleen Bradley, the wife of publisher David Bradley. It was the most hoity-toity tied-in Washington group imaginable.

At any rate, Bob Homans recently commented that Ukraine is simply inconvenient and that the powers that be would like the war to end. Even with territorial concessions to Russia. This article supports that theme.

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man feels good to be writing again, the good-looking women may spend an inordinate amount of time in the garden for what we will get out of it in terms of food, but they are soaking up sun and enjoying themselves, and the children are running and laughing just like they should in the summer. We are all waiting for beach weather.

Graham