Winter crud. My drinking habit. Immunology education. Homeschooling progress
20211218
The whole family is sniffling a bit. Standard winter crud. My head was so congested that my already poor hearing had fallen by half. As reported, daughter Zoriana was also having hearing problems. She has responded fairly well to nonprescription medication.
Despite the fact that it certainly did not appear to be a bacterial infection, I resorted to antibiotics. The congestion cleared up quickly. Four days later I'm still not back on the exercise bike, however. I'm still sneezing occasionally, probably just from dust and dry air, and with everybody else sick I don't want to make myself vulnerable.
The gout in my foot is totally self-inflicted. Too much to drink raises the urea in my system and that for whatever reason results in crystals in the joint of the ball of my foot. I have resolved yet again to hang up the cup.
What I like about drinking is the warm glow that comes with the first glass. What's hard to understand is why I, like most drinkers, can't be content with just one. Alcoholics anonymous concluded early that the place to draw the line is before the first cup. I have to accept that wisdom.
My father, like his father and grandfather before him, was a lifelong drinker. He could put away a bottle of whiskey a day and never appear drunk. He spent his last 25 years on the remote Mendocino coast of California, absolutely dependent on a car to get around, and never had any issue with drunken driving. He was pretty good at it. I also was never stopped for DWI, though any blood-alcohol test would have locked me up several times over.
Dad did complain about gout just as I do. But the thing that did him in at the age of almost 88 was smoking. He used a wheelchair the last years of his life because his emphysema had simply not left breath enough to walk. He didn't complain, but it wasn't a terribly enjoyable life.
I've been amazingly good at skirting around the problems that curtailed my drinking in the past. I have had acid reflux for 10 years. I learned not to drink too close to bedtime and keep Maalox in hand just in case. Too much beer led to gallbladder problems. I let it dry out for a couple months and went back to spirits instead of beer. The time must come when I simply have to accept reality and stop. This may be the time.
This marks 58 years since another such watershed decision. I put my last cigarette out in the Monkey Inn on Telegraph Avenue on the stroke of midnight of my 21st birthday. That vice was far more difficult to give up. The bodily yearning for nicotine was overwhelming. The urge to returned to drinking, on the other hand, will be no more than a tickle, a suggestion that I might get away with it. I simply have to have the will to consistently and strongly ignore that suggestion.
Covid 19 has provided a wealth of fodder for my natural curiosity. A lot has been written about how the Covid innoculations, especially the mRNA variety, weaken our immune systems. In reading several accounts of the mechanics of how that happens, I have picked up a great deal of information that applies to other aspects of my health. I learned that all vaccines, including the common childhood vaccines, reprogram your immune system to some degree. As they do what they are intended, protecting you against the target pathogen, they inadvertently provide both protection and vulnerability to other pathogens. There never has been any totally "safe and effective" vaccine, though for some of them consensus has been that the benefits have significantly outweighed the risks. However, after reading The Real Anthony Fauci, I have more reservations about even the supposedly safe ones.
I have remarked in previous blogs about the different schools of thought represented among us. Some of you are natural progressives, subscribing to a constellation of beliefs that perhaps ought to be independent but are not. These are in all realms of experience – gender, climate, AIDS, Covid, race and many others. Each is characterized by a "right" way of thinking and a "deplorable" way of thinking. And I am appropriately deplored on all of them.
A Belgian social scientist named Mattias Desmet has nurtured a theory called Mass Formation to describe the phenomenon. He has been picked up by many commentators with whom I agree with regard to Covid, including Robert Malone, Joseph Mercola and Steve Kirsch. Mass Formation explains how you whom I consider intelligent can be so impervious to what I considered to be convincing arguments.
Mass Formation involves coordination among many parties with a vested interest in managing our opinions. These include the billionaire class, media, Silicon Valley, government, academia and the corporate elite. Sheryl Atkinson has a pretty good video describing it.
The concept of mass formation was exactly what I was looking for in responding to a request to review the book Climate Apocalypse this week. The Czech author traces the climate alarmist movement back to its origins some 40 years ago, when the panic switched from global cooling to global warming. What struck me are the common threads among all of the fearmongering.
1. The common man can be stampeded by an imaginary bogeyman
2. There is a lot of money to be made from their fear
3. Government can exploit the fear to expand its power and income
4. The media can exploit the fear to retain its audience
5. The global elites can use it to control population
As I have written, my writing these days focuses on how to raise my children in a world depopulated by our reactions to these fears.
It is written that no man can serve two masters. And boys do even less well. I succumbed to the suggestion that Eddie attend Ukrainian lessons at his former school as I continue to work with him on English and math at home. I have also written about the illustrative example of Lachman Balchandani, with whom I worked at Booz Allen four decades ago. Lachman always had two clients, and whenever you wanted to find him he was always at the other client.
Both Sunflower school and I asked Eddie to write something, and whenever I asked how he was coming on my assignment he replied he was working on the other one. And – wait for it – the other one never got done. Mine got completed in a haphazard way. I have used this incident to assert that from now on he is my student. He will not take assignments from anybody else, and if he doesn't get things done I will be totally responsible.
All is not darkness and despair. We are two thirds of the way through his fifth-grade math book. He is doing every exercise in the book – a thoroughness I do not remember any teacher ever assigning. Though he makes stupid mistakes, he understands the stuff pretty well.
Our last writing assignment was about bicycling. Eddie did compose it using dictation software. Needless to say, Dragon didn't understand quite a few things. There were spelling errors such as between wait and weight that Eddie couldn't identify. We used a technique that is only available to a bilingual kid in this modern age. I had him translate it online. The places where the translation to Ukrainian didn't make sense were those where the English source was wrong. Bottom line – though he didn't get a whole lot written over the course of a week, we do have yet another tool in the tool kit.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the men hope to be strong again soon, the women downstairs with their toddlers for the Saturday morning music class are as beautiful as ever, and nobody in the whole country is talking about chasing children down with needles.