Link Log for 9.19.23, With Rant

Mostly rant, by volume, but it does end with a new pop song.

Animals 

If I'd found this meme sooner I could've worked it into the Petfinder post. But I'm experimenting with those, anyway, to see whether it makes a difference how many words come in front of, or behind, the cat pictures. 

I found it at HowToMeowInYiddish.blogspot.com; Google traces it to a Chinese-language site, from which it entered the American blogosphere via Redbubble.com. It may be a topic your cat has been trying to bring to your attention for a long time. Cats do a lot of sniffing and licking behaviors that fit into the general category of kissing. Each one expresses a different mood and level of affection, and they tend to be pretty particular about who, if anybody, is allowed to dampen their fur. Specifically, if something leaves residues on their fur, they're going to have to lick it off. Lipstick? All those yucky chemicals? Eww. Ick. Outside the immediate family most cats tend to limit their kissing behavior to sniffing each other's coats, anyway.

Animals, Smaller 

For anyone who's printing and saving the butterfly posts, a reminder that the post about Byasa dasarada is at "the Meow": 

https://howtomeowinyiddish.blogspot.com/2023/03/a-butterfly-post.html

Censorship 

I don't do weight-loss diets. When my waistline disappears, that's a glyphosate reaction. When my jawline looks saggy, I need rest, hydration, and/or exercise. When my fat pants start to fit around the hips, that means I need more exercise. And I absorb information by reading, not by sitting through hours of talking-head video, which doesn't seem like a good strategy for people trying to lose weight (though I suppose they can always listen on headsets while they exercise). So I've only just noticed this Dr. Berg and his video presentations on the ketosis approach to weight loss.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETonDtzkETw&t=771s

"Keto" isn't new. It's worked for some people since at least the 1960s. It's not worked so well for other people but, hey, to each per own. For me, as a unique quirky individual, one high-fat meal is a reliable, efficient, gentle laxative and then I feel a complete lack of interest in trying to eat any more fatty food for a while, so I suspect "keto" would be a total non-starter. But let's face it--much of the plant-based food out there is still so toxic, due to chemical contamination, that the "keto" diet I find so off-putting is probably less dangerous for many people than the raw-fruit-and-veg diet that served me so well when I was fighting viral arthritis in the 1980s. That's a horrible situation for today's candidates for weight-loss diets to be in, but it's what it is now.

I think the World Health Organization's bulkiness and dependence on Big Money just undercut their credibility more than the members of the organization could have imagined. They're relying on medical science all right--and they're doing that science all wrong. What they're getting right is that consuming large amounts of meat is unnatural for humans and exposes us to all the disease conditions all those other animals ever had. That's true. And intestines overloaded with fat become clogged with putrefying sludge that can breed pathogens like a sewer, make the body smell like one too, and also keep us from absorbing nutrients. Also true. And nature intended us to prevent this horrible effect by balancing our diets with plenty of cleansing fibre from the raw fruits and vegetables that put so much variety and nutrition into our food lives. Also true. As babies we're designed to live on milk, so as children we retain a taste for sweet creamy stuff like ice cream and chocolate. As we grow up, our adult palates open up to new flavors. We really love and crave things like beans, beets, celery, parsley, tomatoes, spinach, watercress, and even rutabagas. So many people, like the McDougalls, have worked so hard to spread the good news that several deadly diseases can actually be cured by eating a diet of healthy natural vegetables, that it is painful for people--like our late lamented Grandma Bonnie Peters, and Adayahi--to admit that that diet is failing people these days. It failed GBP, horribly. WHO is now committed, as only a huge bulky organization can be, to marketing the idea that we can get our protein from wheat and all our other nutrients from those beautiful, nutritious vegetables. And if you know your glyphosate reactions and eat mindfully to prevent them, tell me if you've NOT craved spinach so badly you've dreamed about it at night. But that diet, though still tasty, is not making people perky and healthy and resilient these days. It's making them bloated and miserable--every one in a different way. "Keto" is providing relief. God help us all. And unless, and until, the WHO admits this new fact--that vegetables may be even more immediately toxic than meat is, these days--the WHO is purveying medical misinformation. Our existing governments may not have ways to hold them liable for the suffering and premature deaths this misinformation may cause, but God will. 

Grandma Bonnie Peters belonged to one of the more rational, less "charismatic" churches. So far as I know she only ever did one vision quest, and reported one vision, in her life. She did it in a very level-headed, one might even say English way; no days of wandering deep into the wilderness, no fasting to the point of hallucination; she just went to the top of the nearest mountain and knelt down and prayed earnestly for guidance. And maybe all she saw was an ordinary sunbeam shining through the trees; maybe the voice she seemed to hear inside her head was her own; I wouldn't know. But she was given very clear and specific directions: go to a certain place, and there a man will give you a book that will tell you what you need to be healed and to make use of the talents you were given. She went to the city specified and rented a shop in a block where some old acquaintances, dentists, had also rented space. They gave her the book Victory Over Arthritis, which helped so many people recover from what was probably a kind of viral arthritis that circulated in the late 1960s, using a plant-based diet. It worked for her, and the very next job she was offered, after selling the shop, was caring for a patient who had liver cancer during the acute pain and projectile vomiting stage. "If I'd eaten what you eat," the old lady said, "I might have been spared this. If I'd known that eating anything would have spared me this, I would've done it!" GBP empathized; she believed the diet that was working for her might have helped her patient fend off liver cancer, as more recent science suggests it might have done. She took that as an indication that her vocation in life was to be a nurse and, as her reputation grew, a life coach. She helped so many people feel so much better. She was credited with what people believed were miracles. And if I went back to school and earned a medical doctor's degree, GBP would still have taught me most of what I know about health and healing. 

During the Obama and Trump years, as more and more celiac-safe foods gave us celiac reactions because of their glyphosate contamination, I often said I'd like to do another vegan phase, but it seemed that every time that thought crossed my mind, another vegetable moved to my "don't even touch it" list. GBP wanted to believe that the nutrients in the vegetables were offsetting the toxins. She carried on eating vegan meals, probably 360 days of every year. And her health declined, but even in rehab after the stroke, she was such an active, healthy, alert octogenarian. When she was shuffling around an indoor track she rallied other patients to shuffle along with her. Such a good patient, such amazing progress--on some fronts...and then, when she learned she had liver cancer...

Misleading medical information. B*y h*l. GBP believed the same thing about diet the WHO are trying to enforce on everybody. She staked her own life on that belief. And it was misleading medical information--the wrath and curse of God be on those who made it so, but it was. And it still is.

So, should YouTube bother its little head about whether "keto" diet doctors are purveying misinformation? If you take the position that YouTube is responsible for everything everyone uses it to say, which position will effectively destroy YouTube in any case...I can see their point of view. Doing "keto" with only published videos for guidance is likely to disappoint more people than it kills, but if we take the simplistic idea that a practice is either good for "people" or bad for them...The solution is of course to stop trying to recommend anything as good for "people." "Keto" is effective for some people, and at least other people either avoid or stop it in time that it's not done them any great harm. What I think YouTube should do is post a disclaimer on every video that mentions health, weight loss, or any other medical question, along the lines of "EVERY BODY IS DIFFERENT. YOU SHOULD DISCUSS YOUR PERSONAL HEALTH WITH YOUR PERSONAL MEDICAL CARE PROVIDER." 

After all we wouldn't want Big Money influencing YouTube to do anything as disastrous as promoting any high-risk new vaccines, like those swine flu shots in the 1970s, or Gardasil or the COVID...oh, wait...

Here's the rest of the comment I excised from the YouTube link above, the one with the survey in it:

"

I also think...the medium is the message. YouTube is a good site for music and cute animal videos. Serious medical information does not make good videos and the video format does not support serious information well. When people have more to say than "Hey look, this is funny/pretty/nostalgic/novel/cute," they need to use written words. More than a few seconds of a talking head on the screen may work for some people, but to me it says "I don't think what I'm saying was worth writing down; I don't think youall in the audience are worth writing it down for." So when real doctors are presenting real clinical findings, and don't want to sound like these quacks who pay for ten-minute ads to yammer on about this GENIUS solution to this HORRIBLE PROBLEM that's never been more than a nuisance to any of your long-lived elders who had it but IS GOING TO RUIN YOUR LIFE IN THE NEXT FEW YEARS if you don't BUY MY PRODUCT NOW, maybe they *should* avoid YouTube.

No doubt other people will say that they find it easier to absorb complex information from a talking-head video than from a printed page. Very likely enough people feel that way, especially with so many baby-boomers putting off replacing their glasses (or buying a pair), that doctors should continue to present research in video format. I still think it's likely to boost doctors' credibility if they present the printed or printable articles first and offer the videos as an alternative.

The whole Internet is so much fun that we're all going to miss it if Al Gore's (et al) plans to impose censorship on it are allowed to ruin it. (They will; a censored site is a dead site. Look at how fast Twitter, or "X," is NOT moving these days.) Unfortunately, we all need to be prepared for the most popular interactive sites first, and then possibly the whole Internet, to crash and burn...and that's another reason for doctors to focus on printed articles rather than videos.

"

.Holidays 

"Talk Like a Pirate Day" was invented by Dave Barry as a way to spread hilarity in an often un-funny world. In observation of this day, someone has compiled an official "Swear Like a Pirate" list of foul but mostly printable things to say to relieve stress.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b...

Choosing from among the funniest phrases the meme generated for various members and friends of this web site, I hereby channel the Ghost of Zeke Newton, who I suspect would have known exactly how to deal with our Professional Bad Neighbor, and proclaim all glyphosate sprayers to be Pants Soilin' Gaggin' Reptiles, All it takes is a slip of the hand to make this literally true.

Music 

Since missing the chance to preview John Scalzi's comic novel Starter Villain, I have been amazed by the publicity Scalzi has put into promoting a book that could sell well on the strengths of his name and the silly cover picture. There's an official theme song:

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2023/09/19/starter-villain-is-out-starter-villain-theme-song-by-dessa/