Weighting game. Discourse on poop. Evolution of our madness.

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I’ve always known that a person’s weight was more than simply a matter of caloric intake. Scientists measure calories by putting a measured mass of material into a sort of a crematorium, adding heat until it all burns up, measuring the total heat produced by the time it is fully burned up, and subtracting out the amount of heat that was needed to force the combustion.  The simple rule of thumb is that carbohydrates contain about 4 cal per gram and fats about 9.

Your body uses energy somewhat differently. You could eat 5000 cal worth of sawdust and starve to death because your body cannot digest it. We have all observed that different people seem to metabolize food differently. There are some who can eat everything they want and never get fat. There had to be a better explanation than mere calories.

Lo and behold, here it is.  Beneath the somewhat misleading headline A Third of Americans Don’t Know They’re Obese: 2 Surprising Causes is an explanation of some science I had not seen before. The way your body metabolizes food is a matter of your gut biome.  The article includes the sentence  “Obese people have a completely different composition of intestinal microbiota compared to healthy people.” The article does not discuss a general solution, but it does suggest a promising line of attack.

For what it’s worth, eight months after having stopped drinking I have dropped out of the 73.4% of Americans that the government considers overweight. I never took them seriously in the first place – I consider physical condition far more important than what the scale says – but I suppose the being certified healthy has some merit.

I have written about the messes involved in potty training Marianna. Just about every list of emotions that psychologists compose includes disgust. As a parent you have to get over your sense of disgust dealing with baby poop. I did that long ago, but only now am I starting to appreciate the insights that you gain in dealing with the matter.

We pick up poop off the floor as a matter of course. It is surprising how well it holds together. Cover it with a piece of toilet paper and you can pretty much get the whole thing. A second piece of TP to wipe the floor and you are done.

Babies’ bottoms have to be washed, not wiped. Once again it is impressive how clean they are. I cradle Marianna in my left arm holding her right leg up high and letting the other one dangle over the sink as I use my right hand to clean her. And she gets clean – no hashmarks on her underwear or diaper. And I am clean – wash my hands with soap and it’s over.

That leads me to an understanding of a mystery that eluded me for decades – the bidet. Why would the French use those? The answer is simple. Your hands do a better job than paper, and you can wash your hands. Duh!

It also answers a vexing question posed by the United States government with its 1994 law limiting toilets to 1.6 gallons per flush. Their plan saves water, true. But it doesn’t all go down! After the second or third flush it is still there! The answer is simple. Use your hand, which you were going to wash anyway, to simply push the crap around the corner. You shudder the first couple of times but then get used to it. It is easier to deal with than a lot of other government crap.

Last week I hesitated to buy the Kindle edition of Ed Dutton’s new book Spiteful Mutants for about four dollars. This week it is gone. Now only available in paperback, and $20 at that. I wrote to Ed and asked for a review copy. I am two thirds of the way through, and I will attest to the fact that it is well worth $20. I have previously shared my observation that Amazon carries books that they don’t want you to read, but prices them so you will not buy them. Radix Books, Dutton’s publisher to which I link above, will sell it to you directly. If you buy it, please do so from them – support the dissident right.

Dutton is an evolutionary psychologist, and he explains the weirdness of our age in evolutionary terms. Here is his table of contents. The most important take-home from this is that there are not likely to be political solutions to the problems. The heart of the book is Chapter 3, which describes the dogmas of the modern left as a religion. It is as impervious to argument as Islam. Chapter 4 analyzes the attack on European civilization and those of us of European descent from a religious angle.

1.    THE ENEMY IS ... US?  The Zombie As Modern Myth
2.    MAKING SENSE OF SPITEFUL MUTATIONS The Breakdown of Darwinian Selection
3.    THE RETURN OF HERESY The Faith of the Social Justice Warrior
4.    THE NEXT GREAT AWAKENING The Black Lives Matter Movement
5.    TRUSTING THE PLAN Conspiracy Theories and the American Right
6.    THE EVOLUTION OF A TABOO Homosexuality and Civilization
7.    BORN AGAIN Gender Dysphoria and Alienation As Identity
8.     THE END OF LOVE Herbivore Men and the Decline of Sex
9.     HIDING IN PLAIN SITE The Normalization of Pedophilia
10. THE FUTURE PAST           Our Social Apocalypse

As I have written in several other reviews, Dutton may not be always right, but he has the field to himself because most other scholars are too timid to tackle the subjects that he does. The establishment makes everything difficult for a dissident such as him: University postings, publishing, travel, financial transactions and so on. He long lived in Oulu, in the frozen north of Finland, and I see only now by his return address that he has taken an academic position in Lodz, Poland.

When in 10 years you discover that we in Eastern Europe have taken the lead in science, you may remember reading it here first. We have not handicapped ourselves with political correctness.  I will provide a link when and if Amazon accepts my review.

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man’s gut problems have been diagnosed as nothing more than gastritis and have responded well to a made in Ukraine medication called Hyalera, the good-looking woman is back in stride with her music lessons, Eddie is in heaven because his good friend Yarema is spending a couple of days with us, older daughter Zoriana is becoming less temperamental just as Marianna enters the terrible twos.

Graham