Update on alcohol. Our neighborhood goats. Covid 19 and the least popular best-selling books.
20211221
Six days after my last sip. I am happy to report that my toe feels close to normal. It still hurts a bit, but it stopped throbbing.
More interesting than this small fact has been the reaction. If I had been juggling bricks and dropped one on my foot you would have said "Hey stupid! Stop juggling bricks." It would have been absolutely appropriate. The same kind of reaction would have fit alcohol very nicely.
It is a sign of this age that my situation was regarded as potentially tragic and that I might be a victim of alcohol. I'm not a victim except of my own weakness. It saddens me that people are no longer expected to be able to take charge of their own lives and do things like quit drinking when the time has come.
I have three adult children, one of whom had quit drinking shortly before she broke off communications with me five years ago. My guess is that one of the reasons she doesn't want to talk now has to do with her failure to come through on that. Only a guess – nobody is talking to me. But she and her siblings were raised in the school of thought that blames everybody else for their problems. Their problems remain with them.
There are certainly good reasons for me to give up drinking right now. One of them is acid reflux. Another is potential liver damage. Another is that I feel a little bit better without alcohol in my system – although the difference doesn't seem to be that vast.
Probably the greatest reason would be to set an example for my children. If they don't see me drinking they may not be as inclined to do so themselves. I very definitely took up smoking because my parents told me was a bad idea and did it anyhow. And I respected them. My drinking probably was somewhat the same.
Although Eddie will be in a position to repeat the stories I have told him about his grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather's love of the bottle, and their ability to live full and satisfying lives despite drinking, he has also heard about his half-sister, and his great uncle who committed suicide at 48 as an alcoholic. So it is just as well that he not grow up glorifying drinking.
We talk about other vices. He was playing around with matches the other day and asked me about the difference between strike-on-the-box safety matches and strike-anywhere kitchen matches. I told him that when I smoked I used to carry kitchen matches in the watch pocket of my Levis. As my father had showed me, I would lift my right leg, pulling the jeans tight over my butt, and strike the match against the jeans. It was a cool thing to do. Other cool things were lighting a pipe in a high wind by cupping my hands, blowing smoke rings, French inhaling, and putting a cigarette out by simply pinching the smoldering end. It's quite a catalog of skills that became suddenly obsolete when I stop smoking.
It's a good idea not to glamorize these things. I've also told Eddie about my experiences with marijuana, which were rather limited, and his older half siblings' experiences, not quite so limited. I've told him the stories of the many people with whom I attended high school and college whose lives just kind of went nowhere after they got involved with the weed. It's not that the marijuana killed them. It simply led more than a few of them to dissipated lives with a lack of purpose. The same for my grown children's generation. I don't know of any whom drugs have killed, but I don't think it has benefited any, and quite a few seems still to be wandering through life without much purpose.
Wrapping back to the topic of my own drinking, please, I am not a victim. I'm in charge of my life and I think that that's the lesson to be taken from the story.
As I dictated this, I was on my way to the Sunday market to buy dinner. Zoriana was with me for the walk. We were standing in front of a field of goats that Grandmother Olga raises for meat. It's probably about one acre, grazed pretty short, with ricks of straw for the goats. Olga is a delightful old soul probably my age whose pleasure in life is taking care of her flock. She travels around on a bicycle and greets all the neighbors. Last summer my kids learned a lot about goats talking to her. We stood looking for ten minutes as Zoriana bleated at them and the goats paid no attention to her and nuzzled up against each other trying to get at their fodder.
The plan for dinner was that I go buy salmon, broccoli, spinach and perhaps some tomatoes so we have a proper dinner. It was my birthday and also St. Nicholas Day, the Ukrainian day for exchanging presents. A pretty big deal.
St. Nicholas was kind to Eddie – he got a nice big cake from the delicatessen. Zoriana got her own chocolate cat –like a chocolate Easter bunny. Eddie's gift was bigger but he's sharing it with the family. Zoriana went through the cat all by herself. I got a huge box of candy.
The books by Robert F. Kennedy Junior, Joseph Mercola and Alex Berenson are at the top of bestseller lists. This is sort of a panic for the establishment. Ron Unz has a wonderful article out about how the Associated Press assembled a team of six writers to do a hatchet job on Kennedy. Fellow writer Kevin Barrett calls his theme "The dog that didn't bark." The AP's team of six heavyweight writers did everything they could to savage, to eviscerate RFK, Junior. But they did not make any mention whatsoever of the first half of the book, a full 200 page exposé of Anthony Fauci's role in the AIDS debacle of the 1980s and 90s. AZT and all of that. An absolutely striking omission. The establishment simply does not want to talk about it.
A quick note on bestseller lists. The New York Times refuses to mention these titles. Instead it is still flogging very old, tired books like Sapiens, Thinking Fast and Slow and the 1619 Project. They don't know what to make of these books on themes they want to deny.
Below you will see a screenshot of what I find on Amazon for Pandemia and what Alex Berenson sees. He sees his book as number one in Kindle selling for $2.99. I see it costing $9.99 and rated down below 100th in three categories. The establishment certainly doesn't know how to manage its own lies.
I should restate the consensus of Peter Duesberg, Kary Mullis, Celia Farber and others who have written about this that the human that HIV, human immunodeficiency virus, is not dangerous. Luc Montagnier, who won the Nobel Prize for its discovery, says the same thing. It is a harmless fellow passenger.
The real problem is not a virus it all, but the bathhouse lifestyle of male homosexuals that brings on so many opportunistic infections through drug use, neglect of sleep and ordinary hygiene, and huge numbers of sexual partners infected with various diseases.
The proof of the pudding is the fact that the incidence of AIDS has remained more or less constant, about a million cases, since the first description in the 1980s. Moreover, it has remained stubbornly confined to the gay community, despite widespread fearmongering propaganda to the contrary. Most notably, all of Africa was supposed infected. They were predicted all to have died within five years. They are still here. It was supposedly a danger to us heterosexuals. The very few who were affected were those who partook of the same undisciplined lifestyles – Plato's Retreat in NYC, and all that.
Many in the gay community amended their ways, took the multi-drug cocktail and got better. At any rate, interesting that as Ron Unz notes, the meanest imaginable hit piece against Robert F. Kennedy Junior is totally silent on this major portion of Fauci's history.
What was so attractive about the HIV - AIDS theory? Money! Fauci had a financial stake in an expensive albeit poisonous cure in AZT. They tested for HIV very widely, with test reminiscent of the Covid 19 PCR tests. They revealed a lot of positive diagnoses. They put people on AZT so that they wouldn't die. They continued as these people continued to deteriorate. They claimed that AIDS, not AZT killed them. It seems a great deal like the Covid 19 crisis, with the deaths that are occurring from the expensive, poisonous and useless remdesivir and ventilators, and vaccine injuries.
The gay community came into its own in the 1980s. They started coming out of the closet in droves after the Stonewall riots of 1969. Gay bathhouses popped up in New York, San Francisco, and other major cities. There was a new highly permissive gay lifestyle. It was very evident where I live in Washington DC.
The priest of the Episcopal Church I attended had been married when I started attending about 1977. He left his wife and the place changed. A number of the employees of the church – a couple of choir Masters in succession – turned out to be gay. More and more gays showed up in the congregation. There were rumors that the priest was having affairs with people in the congregation. By the time he was thrown out in 1993, for corruption, the congregation was about a quarter gay. Despite his slurs of homophobia, our victorious coalition was also a quarter gay. During his time there the church hosted a number of AIDS benefits at which I got the opportunity to know the community fairly well. For a married straight guy, that is.
I joined the Washington Independent Computer Consultant Association in 1980, shortly after its founding. As the third president of the organization I chose as my successor a black fellow named Maurice Goode. He turned out to have AIDS. He had a huge funeral, attended by most of us computer consultants and a vast number of his gay friends.
I started working with Oracle software in 1986 and by 1992 had written a couple of books. about it. At that time it looked like packaged software was going to be the future. I temporarily left independent consulting to become an employee of the Mitre Corporation which was installing the Oracle financials suite that I wanted to learn. I worked alongside a very capable employee name Joe Costantino. I proposed to him that we start our own computer consulting company. His being gay didn't bother me at all.
Joe is an intelligent and charismatic fellow who knew the consulting community. Many of employees he attracted turned out to be gay. They were great employees. Joe's only problem was one that afflicts a number of gay men. He followed his heart all over the country. We wound up having clients as far away as Philadelphia and Los Angeles. We were stretched far too thin.
It turned out that our other gay employees, Tom and Mark, had far more stable relationships than Joe. So far as I know they are still with their lovers of 25 years. A couple had been diagnosed with AIDS, but by taking good care of themselves and changing with the more conservative times they are still here. AIDS isn't a death sentence. Not even a virus.
That's my take on the AIDS thing. I think that Kennedy's take on AIDS, and that of Nobel laureates Kary Mullis and Luc Montagnier that it is lifestyle and not a virus are right on. Anthony Fauci is an unscrupulous opportunist who invented the AIDS virus to get rich. But money talks, and we are still talking about the AIDS virus as if it were real.
Everybody here is still dragging tail on account of one seasonal illness or another. Dry coughs, sneezes and whatnot. Not sick enough to call itself disease, but not well enough to let you go out. One thing for which to be grateful. For the next six months the days are going to keep getting longer. A second boon is that Zoriana is in day care and Eddie is at a school camp for the week. Babysitter Anna is here with Marianna, which means Oksana and I are free to do exactly what we feel like. Pretty much nothing.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the men are strong. Most of the time. The women are good looking in spite of what they think. The children are off demonstrating their above average talents to somebody else, which is fine with us.