271 thoughts on “Bad Science”

1. To add to my previous comment, funnily enough the only STEM types I saw that were critical of the entire Covid-19 nonsense were engineers. The scientists (PhDs) and physicians all toed the party line like the professional prostitutes that they are.

2. You make the classic mistake so many people do, Z, of conflating engineers with scientists.

   “Americans assume there is a solution to all of the practical problems of the world. On the other hand, Americans suspect that the people offering those solutions are not on the level. As a result, American can marvel at scientific progress but hold science in low regard.”

   The people who actually provide the solutions to all practical problems = engineers, not scientists.

   “These movie tropes are common because they appeal to the cultural framing of science. While scientists may be our smartest people, they are not the most trusted people.”

   Scientists are not our smartest people, engineers (the traditional ones – civil, mechanical, chemical, electrical, etc) are. And the movie tropes exist for a reason – most PhD types really are petty and evil. There is a reason these guys and gals got bullied in K-12.

   “he three main drivers of health and longevity in the West are antibiotics, nutrition and sanitation, not great scientific breakthroughs.”

   You can thank engineers for providing the infrastructure for all this. Consistent manufacturing and quality control of antibiotics, increase in food supply through industrialization (engineering!) and mass production of cleaning products.

   Scientists very often take care for the work of engineers, or even think their contribution was vastly more than it really was.

   That said, I agree with your thesis. Most “scientists” today are clowns. The big problem is testing scientific theories rigorously. That simply doesn’t happen.

   On the other hand, you’ve got thousands of semiconductor engineers working together at Intel or TSMC consistently pumping out chips that actually work.

   I know we take a dim view of Vox Day on this blog, but he was right when he stated engineering was the only rigorous “science” out there. It’s the only thing that is consistently tested and consistently works.

   You can (mostly) trust engineers to build bridges, setup an electric grid or a distillation facility and have it all work. Scientists, physicians…yeah that’s a whole different game.

   If it wasn’t for the E in STEM, none of it would have any positive reputation or prestige.

   • As one of the Es in STEM, I too love all these, “scientists,” with their wunder tech that can solve every single problem on Earth as long as they never need to exit a carefully-controlled laboratory environment.

3. Why do I have the impression that Z-man had a doctor’s appointment today?

   • “So Mr Z, your BMI is 30 and your BP is 130 over 90. I’m going to put you on statins and blood pressure pills. Cut out the meat, fat, and salt.” 😏

     • And no more booze!

       • Do we have the same Doctor? 🤔

         M’Lady: “You need to cut back on your drinking. What happens if your doctor tells you no more alcohol?”
         Me: “I’m finding a new doctor.” 😏

         Of course I abstained from alcohol this week for two whole days and M’Lady asks “Are you OK? Is there something you’re hiding from me? No alcohol for two days?”

         Can’t win, don’t try. 🤦‍♂️

4. For most of agricultural history, wheat was meant to be made into beer, not bread. Suddenly the story of Cain and Abel can be understood…

   • So true! As well as the conflict between grazers and farmers (sheep desertify fertile land with overgrazing), it also is shorthand for hunter-gatherers versus wheat growers.

     The fat, greasy, bad-smelling wheat grower would show up in the village.
     Eventually, the men would sell him their women to get some of that beer.

5. Lung cancer is not the reason to avoid smoking. Very few smokers get lung cancer. The two reasons are: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease – everyone who smokes enough will get it, and many smokers die of it, and arteriosclerosis with resultant strokes, heart attacks, heart failure, and sudden cardiac death – far, far more common in smokers than lung cancer. The number one cause of death in the USA is cardiovascular disease, and the two greatest contributors to cardiovascular disease are diabetes and smoking.

6. A distinction the SCIENCE! crowd misses and I never hear mentioned is the difference between scientific principles, and the application of these principles to solve a given problem.
   I work in a physics-based field and see this all of the time. I have participated in working groups to write official governing…documents…to guide the application of certain physics-based principles.
   It can be maddening to find agreement; around a table are a dozen “experts” on the topic and all understand and agree on the underlying immutable physics (i.e. science), but can all disagree on the way to apply them to achieve the targeted end.
   All have different reasons for their different approaches, some commercial, experiential, generational, and so on.
   In fact all of their approaches may be generally correct w just differing variables in outcome, some faster, more cost-efficient, less risk, etc,.
   This can be extrapolated to medicine – point being there is immutable biological and chemical properties of the body, but how these are addressed to treat any specific condition is the APPLICATION OF SCIENCE…not SCIENCE!!!!
   The midwit (or lower) idea that there is some single truism for any medical topic and application of science to address it, is…stupid.

7. OT:

   Speaking of bad political science, the Duran are reporting Cookies Nuland has been promoted to #2 at State.

   More interestingly, they are reporting rumors that F the EU is directly in charge of the vaunted counteroffensive.

   God help us all.

   • Standard FAGe (Failed American Globalist Empire) protocol. Fail up to being the next first Woman ________

   • Doesn’t matter. The conflict is all but over. There simply are no more Ukrainians left to die for their country. The only thing that will prolong it is direct intervention of troops from NATO. Doubtful.

     • Escalation is the only choice the GAE has

     • No more Ukranians left to die for Zelensky’s country and Zelensky’s folks only die in large numbers onscreen in unverifiable and improbable ways that you damned well better not question.

8. usNthem, below:
   “Now days, they’re mostly just employees of some larger “health care” organization and more frequently, female.”

   With 40 years’ experience, the medical brother revealed a very interesting pattern.

   A pattern, about meetings, and priorities.
   On why when women take over, nothing ever gets done.

   The head nurse always starts.
   She explains her feelings on the matter; the others nod.

   She explains in full.
   The rest wait, listening; each is allotted their time, because each will get their turn.

   The next femme. Then the next, and so on, until all are heard.

   Female timing is different.

   This cannot be bypassed, or short-cut.
   The meeting is actually about the women reaffirming their place.

   Whatever subject is at hand, is only a flagpole until they reach “consensus”: that is, until each has reaffirmed her place.

   The timing, the display, is everything.
   They will be talking about the very same subject twenty years from now.

   The male in the group must wait.
   Again, this ritual and timing cannot be shortcut.

   When all have had their say, they are waiting. They are waiting for the male to speak. It’s his turn, to announce his place in the consensus.

   What the male says, is “okay, so now, here’s what we’re going to do.”

   That’s what the women, in their own unique way, were waiting for.

   But they will not accept it until they’ve fulfilled their ritual of display.
   That, is consensus.

   • Flagpole?

     Pretty sure what your brother is describing is what has been correctly dubbed, “the longhouse.”

     • Ah! Yes. Yes indeed, quite.

9. I have 3 doctors in my family, they put padding on the conners of their furniture so the kids won’t bump their heads, they wear masks at church, and when I see them on the holidays I always bring up the fact that the most important course in medical school is the course on billing the patients. They always respond with a uncomfortable laugh and change the subject. Total joke. Low quality people on another quest to grift what’s left of the country.

   • I’ve had to visit a bunch of doctors recently and it is literally this. The only thing they care about is how and when you are going to pay. I’ve given up on the medical institution.

   • I had many “friends” in college who were pre-med. None of them particularly clever, though they were particularly full of themselves. Many of them are now practicing physicians (doctor is a term applicable to scholars, not physicians*).

     They of course all toed the party line when it came to Covid-19. I even had to argue with a few of them on Facebook. They did not enjoy having their authority challenged. “Friends” cut from my life, Facebook deleted.

     I’ve never really understood the especially American adoration physicians enjoy, considering they’re quite dim-witted. But then again, if I presume most Americans are grifters and being an MD can be seen as an especially lucrative grift, it does make sense.

     *Would also explain why a grifter like Ben Shapiro went apoplectic when Jill Biden was referred to as Dr. Jill. Despite one’s personal thoughts on the merits of a research doctorate (PhD, EdD and others), it is in fact Jill Biden, who as a scholar has the right to call herself Doctor, and not the physician Ben is married to.

     Nothing like reminding fools they’re fools and not kings.

10. I feel the same way about medicine and doctors that most people feel about lawyers and the law profession. Medicine is not a legitimate science or technical discipline. As such, it is largely fraud. The difference between doctors and lawyers is that lawyers do not have a legal monopoly on the practice of law.

    No where is the fraud of medicine more evident than with vaccines. The medical profession claims that vaccines are “safe and effective”. Yet a law was passed in 1986 that gave complete immunity to the vaccine manufacturers from product liability. Not even other medical products (remember Vioxx?) have such immunity. Thus, from the standpoint of conventional tort law, the claim that vaccines are safe and effective is a fraudulent claim.

    • However, Z-man is wrong about bread vs. meat…Agriculture showed up about 10,000 years ago, and eventually supplanted the hunter-gatherer lifestyle…The result was that agro-humanity lost 6 inches in height and life expectancy dropped from 35 to less than 30…The rulers hunted and ate lots of meat, and notoriously the Normans in England were bigger, stronger and lived longer than the peasants…Humans 15,000 years ago ate plenty of meat and fish and any vegetables or fruit they could find, as we know from their midden heaps…

      • I agree with you. But it does not detract from the overall message he is conveying here.

        Medicine as a true technological discipline would not be called “medicine”. It would be called “bio-engineering”. There is real bio-engineering work going on. It is mostly focused on anti-aging and regeneration.

      • Yes, Pyrrhus is right. Also, I totally disagree with Z when he calls carnivore a “fad diet”. It might be a very boring diet to someone like Z, but it is not fad. Maggie White, an 85 year cattle rancher from Canada, she’s been strict carnivore since she was 20. Is that a “fad diet”? Check out “Dr. Chaffee Maggie White on YouTube.

        • T Colin Campbell and Caldwell Esselstyn, both in their 90s, have been whole-food plant based (WFPB, vegan in other words) for several decades.

          I’m not sure what’s going on with these extreme diets. They do seem to work for a few people here and there. But overall, I don’t think either works all that well for the majority of people and either fully vegan or fully carnivore seems to be harmful for most people.

          One thing I will say is that these fad diets (yes, that’s what they are) tend to attract a lot of mentally ill people. Frank Tufano and Jordan Peterson come to mind as the mentally ill drawn to the carnivore diet.

      • I reckon farmers didn’t lose 6 inches in height, but 6 centimeters.

        Our ancestors were omnivorous, not carnivorous, this is what Z was saying, and this is what the paleo diet morons ignore. No one denies that hunter-gatherers ate healthier than agriculturalists, but they were far from a meat-only diet.

        Don’t forget that we are mostly descended from people who did comparatively well on an agriculturalist’s diet, and to quote the great Henry Harpending: “we evolved more in the last 5,000 years than we did in the last 100,000 years.”

        Paleo diet theory seems to deny that any recent evolution in the human specie took place. Since human evolution being divergent and recent is a core truth of today’s dissident right, one would be surprised to find any in our numbers taking to the paleo diet fad.

        That is, if you don’t account for all the shallow minded numpties out there.

    • The absolute best way to lose faith in doctors & the medical system is to become a lawyer and deal with them regularly.

      • Ha, bingo. Truth cluster bomb there.

      • I’ve learned to hate them by having medical problems that I can’t precisely diagnose myself.

        I do have friends who get real, science-based medical treatment because their mothers were famous actresses, their brothers are top “research” oncologists, etc. Celebrity lifespan is up!

        I go to doctors to beg for permission to buy pills that don’t quite work.

      • I’m a patent lawyer (a “patient liar”). I had an MD client early in my career who was furiously attempting to obtain a patent.

        This surgeon was in the process of being removed by the licensing board in his third state and back then it was three strikes and you’re out of medicine permanently in the US.

        He showed me some of the prior de-licensing files. This fellow had left a trail of maimed and dead in two states equivalent to the Battle of Shiloh. My boss kept him as a client regardless despite I wanted to line the bastard up against a wall and execute him slowly and starting at his ankles then work up.

      • Or to interact with them in college when they were still pre-meds. Morons at age 18 don’t suddenly turn wise or intelligent with the conferring of degrees.

11. “Greetings my fellow countrymen! ! I am an expert on far-right Dissidents!

    Did you know that science skepticism is being politically weaponised against blacks and jews?”

    When this chit show blows, it is going to be epic. The hate and fury the left is stoking is going to boil over soon…

12. Fake science is inseparable from fake money. If the fake money disappeared so would the fake science, immediately. As long as the fake money persists, the fake science will be with us. There have always been and will always be quacks, but I’m talking about the Scientism of the regime that is dependent on the fake money the regime supplies.

    Treatment of heart disease has been mostly successful, for people who seek it. Nothing you can do for the guy who doesn’t go to or ignores the doctor. For instance, Robert E. Lee died at 63 of heart disease, and I’m pretty sure modern medicine would have given him another 20 years. Dick Cheney would have been dead a quarter century ago if not for his many bypass surgeries etc. My uncle likely would have died in his 60s without his pacemaker but lived to 87 with it.

    I think it’s a little early yet to look for a drop in lung cancer due to people smoking less, since many of the older folks who smoked more are still around, and dying from it.

    • So on cost/benefit of heart disease treatment, Dick Cheney alone marks a massive cost pit of extending that sellout son-of-a-bitch’s life.

      • No doubt he put his own personal touch on GAE militarism, but if it wasn’t him it would have just been someone else

        The greater calamity is the bitch he spawned who harangues us still. Had there been no Cheney rep for her to coattail, we could have been spared.

    • The guy who pretty much invented the maths of statistical distribution, called upon in the original Congressional hearings about cigarette advertisements, said there is no significant, demonstrable correlation between lung cancer rates and tobacco usage.

      (That, I believe, is where the noxious canard of “ain’t causation!” comes from. It has been heavily abused to discourage us from practicing the general art of Noticing.)

      Not to say there isn’t “a” difference; a smoker’s chance of developing lung cancer is a few percentage points above a non-smoker.

      It would be silly to claim otherwise; oral and lip cancers in dippers and chewers are more frequent due to the concentrated tars. Smokers do lose a butt-ton of aveolar (oxygenating) capacity, our lungs are coated in tar.

      The genetics, it seems, are the main difference. The susceptibility or likelihood.

      The very best billboad I’ve ever seen showed lungs at 0, 2, and 3 months after quitting: from purplish to nearly the original pink. Very incentivizing.

      This all became a big deal again when Congress wanted to line their pockets. I’d say Bloomberg also wanted to line the pockets of his Mafia buddies. Cigarette loads are as heavily sensitive (tracked and followed) as pharmaceutical and electronics loads, high-risk targets for hijacking.

      I do accede Zoar’s point; we’ll have to wait and see if they don’t find a quicker way to kill us after ruining millions of small business venues and conditioning us in compliance and segregation.

      As for me, they’ll only take my Camels from my cold, dead hands!

13. The ‘scientific method’— observing some aspect of the world and noting what you see, distinguishing facts which can be shown to be true from unproven conjecture, coming up with a theory that plausibly accounts for what you’re observing, explaining why you believe that theory is the most reasonable explanation for those facts, submitting your theory to a community of scientists who devise various ways to test that theory, to either confirm or disprove it— this is unquestionably the most reliable way human beings have devised to learn about the world around us.

    Prior to the advent of the scientific method, people were just guessing; about where human beings came from, about what causes the weather, about why people get sick, about the nature of the starry skies, etc.

    *Science provided a reliable way to test those guesses*; and to distinguish ‘what can be shown to be true’ from the various cultural myths purporting to explain observed reality.

    Genuine science is not about dogmatically defending your position; rather, it’s about *actively seeking disconfirmatory evidence*: ‘What would prove my theory wrong?’ Only when no disconfirmatory evidence can be found— only when other scientists have tested and replicated your results— does a theory attain the status of ‘the science’.

    And when scientists can launch a spacecraft off the orbiting, spinning Earth, slingshot it around the Moon, guide it through billions of miles of space and transmit back videos of the rings of Saturn— there can be no doubt about the power of the scientific method to provide us with truth regarding the nature of reality.

    The problem with so much of what passes for science— the traditional ‘food pyramid’, the notion that salt and fat are unhealthy, all the lies around Covid, the way Big Pharma has hijacked mainstream medicine— is that *there’s nothing scientific about them*.

    Each of them involved various material interests wanting to sell you something which benefits them, under the guise of ‘science’. The food industry pushing the food pyramid, Big Pharma pushing medications as the solution to every health problem, and untested vaccines as a ‘solution’ to the fabricated ‘Covid crisis’: their claims to reflect ‘the science’ were lies, pure and simple; and they relied on peoples’ justifiable belief in the explanatory power of science to sell those lies.

    And it was science which eventually revealed them for the lies they were.

    • -” Prior to the advent of the scientific method, people were just guessing; about where human beings came from, about what causes the weather, about why people get sick, about the nature of the starry skies, etc.”

      Yeah… not sure the scientific method has actually answered too many of these issues…

      • There is no ‘scientific method.” Feyerabend explained why. Newton and Einstein didn’t use this “method.” This “method” is another myth pushed on the rubes and marks out there and also serves to provide a rationale for science as a unified discipline (rather than as made up of disparate disciplines that don’t have much in common with one another).

        • He’s right. The intellectual split that occurred when scholasticism was supplanted by natural philosophy was predicated on the belief that the independent fields of study would reunify eventually in some grand instauration. This never happened. In many ways, this is one of the hallmarks of modernity.

        • Completely agree with the comment. The big change during my life has been the religious reification of “Scientist” into an identity guild/mafia, in line with Z’s poast above discussing the birth of the professional expert. Of course this happened with “Journalist” well before that, and (perhaps most destructively of all) this artificial group/trade consciousness has congealed around on “Politician.” The orange beast did not hire on enough seasoned consultants from Dupont Circle, etc.

          We used to laugh at but not discourage athletes and stage actors and TV news anchors from protesting their professional dignity and sense of fair play within the industry, because the compensatory fussing checked out psychologically— at the end of the day they know their work doesn’t matter. Unfortunately more practically important jobs have been infected by the dancing-TikTok-nurse mentality inter alia.

    • Understanding the scientific method (which you’ve summarized pretty well) helps one understand the the basic tension of the modern world. That tension is found in the fact that the modern West needs *something* to replace the old Christian moral framework and has decided that “science” is going to be it. You can see a problem right away here. Science, in the limited sense you describe, is NOT a moral framework. It doesn’t even get close to addressing the questions the old religious ideas touched on. Furthermore, the actual scientific method isn’t even accessible to people of average intellect. A pretty high level of intelligence, augmented by a lot of mathematical and scientific education, is needed to grasp the reasons why the Theory of Relativity is correct, for instance.

      This is why science actually can’t do the job the modern West wants it to. That won’t stop people from trying to shoehorn it into the role though. Thus, we simply expand “science” to include any or all of the following:

      1. Whatever political viewpoint is held by some fraction of scientists. This is where you get your local woke-monkey telling you that “90% of scientists describe themselves as liberals” or whatever the percentage is.

      2. Whatever political “solution” to a given scientific issue is favored by a majority of “scientists” (in what field?). This is where you get the fundamentally stupid fight about climate change. It seems the majority of “scientists” believe that some sort of global carbon dictatorship is needed to solve this problem. Does this make sense? Do these kind of globalist schemes EVER work? Won’t production just shift to corrupt countries that don’t care about carbon (Yes, it seems we do know the answer to that one).

      3. Getting even more loose and sloppy in our reasoning we can extend this to “X% of scientists (defined however you like it) favor race-based reparations”, or perhaps “X% of scientists agree with the LGB….XYZ+ agenda”.

      The problem with the list here (and of course this is only the first 3 of trillions more entries) is that the reasoning used gets ever more careless and the definitions ever more useless. I think we all know plenty of “scientists” in various soft-sci fields who can’t solve for x in the equation “x = 4”. Even obviously brilliant men like Einstein and Oppenheimer believed in all sorts of nonsense like World Government and Communism. It’s the other side of Gell-Mann amnesia.

      This is why we’ve ended up where we are, which is essentially defining “science”, using the kind of sloppy logic I’m illustrating here, as, effectively, whatever the ruling faction of the managerial class in the global West believes. Then we take the further step of declaring that this “science” (which by now simply means the Divine Will) must override all laws, customs, basic rights and freedoms, etc…

      You end up with a basic one party state of a very dishonest sort. The Chinese at least have The Party. Everyone knows who’s in the Party and who’s not. We have a less well defined managerial class and a half-assed theocracy of “science”. Our system is less efficient because it requires a vast media machine that coordinates all the various power centers. I suspect that as the GAE contracts the more efficient and centralized Chinese system will prove more robust.

      I’m cross-posting this on my blog, if anyone is reading that. It’s linked in my handle.

      • Excellent examples of the difference.
        “in what field?” wins

        “

    • “…their claims to reflect ‘the science’ were lies, pure and simple; and they relied on peoples’ justifiable belief in the explanatory power of science to sell those lies.

      And it was science which eventually revealed them for the lies they were.”

      Stellar, Real Bill- fits right in with my own agenda, in spades. Thanks!

14. I am a physician who shares Z’s politics.

    This piece is FULL of errors.

    For starters–no, humans have NOT eaten bread “for ten thousand years.”

    Carnivore is WAY WAY closer to a path of health than eating carbs.
    CARBS KILL is a great way to approach food.
    As do seed oils, food made from petroleum byproducts.

    If you are suffering from diseases of modernity–stop eating like a modern.
    Find local sources of real food, and eat that. Your health will be restored.
    Promise!
    Physicians backing carnivore are NOT quacks.
    Sorry Z–you do NOT know what you are talking about here.

    • Totally agree…and as to supplements, if food contained the nutrition it had a century ago, or more, and we ate a balanced diet and got adequate sun, they wouldn’t be necessary for most people..In fact, however, none of those things are true for most of the population, and supplements, particularly vitamins C and D, make a substantial difference…

    • Lee: “This piece is FULL of errors.”

      Two words: Protein Poisoning.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning

      Yep.

      Blood Urea Nitrogen.

      “BUN”.

      It’s a thang.

      To counteract PP on a carnivore diet, you’re gonna hafta eat the SATURATED FAT, because you’ve already ruled out the carbs.

      Searching on “saturated fat cancer” at PubMed gives 4386 hits.

      https://tinyurl.com/3cpj9944

      And I don’t know of anyone who thinks that whole grains are bad for bowel ailments, ranging anywhere from constipation*** to the various bowel cancers.

      [And trust me, you don’t wanna go wading into the Paleo forums on the question of “Butter versus Olive Oil”.]

      ===============

      ***Which is ackshually quite deadly…

      https://tinyurl.com/ys5ebz3x

      Look for “Valsalva Maneuver” under “Cause of Death”.

      • I’d like to add one quick point on Protein Poisoning.

        If you’ve got a family member who’s eating a very high protein diet; for instance, a child who is training for a strength sport [football, wrestling, MMA, swimming, triathlons, etc], and trying to maximize muscle mass; then get some urine dip sticks to keep an eye on the kid’s protein levels.

        Roche markets their dipsticks under the “Chemstrip” label, and Siemens markets their dipsticks under the “Uristix” label.

        The cheapest dipsticks start with just two tests: Protein & Glucose.

        Whereas the expensive dip sticks can have 10 or more tests [Specific Gravity, pH, Leukocytes, Nitrates, Protein, Glucose, Ketone, Urobilinogen, Bilirubin, Blood].

        Anyway, with just the basic el-Cheapo 2-test dip sticks, you should be able keep a watchful eye on your budding young athlete, and get a sense of whether or not he’s urinating excess protein [because of too much protein in his diet].

        And if you can’t afford dipsticks, then simply sniff the urine in the commode, and see whether it reeks of Ammonia…

    • My wife has stopped eating at the cafeteria at work due to declining hygiene standards (also known as hiring more diversity). Instead we buy these “Farm-to-Fit” meals. They’re basically just wholesome meals sourced from local farms with very few ingredients but a definite low-carb bias. She’s lost 5 pounds without even trying to. I agree that this is something Z probably got wrong.

    • Lol the lack of self-awareness on display here.

      Z: physicians are quacks who promote fad diets like carnivore
      Physician: I promote the carnivore diet

      Ok, quack, whatever you say

15. How many carnivores are there in the Zman audience? Come on, speak up! I switched to carnivore a year and a half ago and lost 40 pounds. It was the easiest thing I ever did. It dropped by BMI from 30 to 24 in 6 months. I went from obese to normal and reversed my indicators for metabolic syndrome.

    Tens, no, hundreds of thousands of people have done the same thing. Probably millions have done it. The testimonials are endless. Eat meat and improve just about anything that ails you.

    Humans have been apex predators for more than three million years. We’re carnivores, not herbivores or omnivores. We’re alive today because all of our ancestors survived by eating other animals. The best evidence for this is stable isotope analysis of human bones. The bones show that humans have had the benefit of nutrient concentration as nutrients are passed up the food chain. This couldn’t have happened on a plant-based diet.

    Human brains were expanding up until about 20,000 years ago, just at the point that humans began settling into agricultural groups. Since then, brain size has been declining. The Egyptians ate massive amounts of grains, and left us a large supply of mummies to document the effects of grains. The mummies definitively show that the Egyptians suffered from obesity, diabetes, and heart disease as bad or worse than current Americans.

    The carnivore movement is causing a sea change in conventional medicine. There are now dozens and dozens of funded trials in all areas of medicine to test low carb keto or zero carb carnivore diets as treatments for everything from cancer to mental illness to heart disease. The carnivore diet improves lives and eliminates disease.

    About 100 years ago, Otto Warburg discovered that cancer is primarily a metabolic disease. Cancer cells burn 100-300 times more energy than normal cells, and require glucose for metabolism. Thomas Seyfried has researched this for years and has expanded Warburg’s thesis with modern methods. He is now leading cancer trials that eliminate glucose to freeze tumor expansion and metastasis. It works. If you know someone who has been diagnosed with cancer, get them off of grains and all carbohydrates immediately.

    Don’t be fooled by the Zman’s snarky attitude about carnivore diets. It changes lives for the better. In fact, you might expect that the Zman would be hugely in favor of the carnivore diet. It’s exactly the kind of thing that anyone can do without government control. It’s the kind of thing that small groups of people can do together to avoid the medical-industrial-complex. It’s exactly the kind of thing that restores a sense of humanity in a disintegrating world.

    Do your homework and eat meat.

    Humans are carnivores
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqx6jGs-1bU&t=2s

    Cancer is a metabolic disease
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ebPZP9hBPA

    • Its hard/less appealing to eat the amount of calories you ate on SAD when you eat carnivore. This is also true of basically any restricted diet whatsoever.

      You could lose the same amount of weight if you ate only potatoes, or twinkies, or beef jerky, or grapefruit.
      Calories in vs calories out, simple as.

      Intermittent fasting, restricted diets, keto, whatever… any of it can absolutely work and should probably be followed so long as its a way that youre personally more likely to follow and restrict calories.

      Exercise also helps although its hard for most regular americans (read: sedentary piles of crap) to exercise enough to counter overconsuming calories.

      • The SAD has an awful lot of “empty calories” though so I think, in general, the reverse is true. Those Farm-to-Fit meals we buy are all around 500-800 calories and are quite filling. They’re full of things like green beans, squash, lean meat and fish. By contrast a typical starchy white bread “dinner roll” might have 400 cal and yet is smaller than your hand. At the extreme of the SAD, of course, you have those (very sad indeed) people who consume Big Gulps of soda that have as many calories as a whole day’s food ration and hardly fill you up at all.

        • Those Big Gulps are loaded with sugars, from cane sugar to the refined, corn-based products, that provide no nutrition but a lot of calories. They are obviously not filling, so people tend to eat foodstuffs–particularly processed fast food products–to satisfy their perceived hunger. The result is consumption of hundreds, if not thousands of excess, non-nutritious calories that are then stored as fat. Look around and you’ll see the result; obesity is the new normal. With obesity come all the other health issues like diabetes and cancer. There is no doubt that cancer cells multiply far faster when fed a steady diet of sugars. A word to the wise should be sufficient, but as Paul the Apostle asked two thousand years ago, “Where is the wise man?”

    • I have cut out most carbs save the occasional indulgence.

      I have a buddy who beat a very serious cancer and part of the permanent treatment and recovery regiment is a keto diet. The chemo tube was removed and he is 12 years onto recovery. It is one data point, but he and his doctor swear by it as an effective cancer preventative/treatment.

      You can’t stay in constant ketosis, and you can waver in moderation. Even as a detox a few times a year it is a good thing. Also, do salt water enemas once a year. Clean out all the toxins in your colon.

    • Lads, it’s not the Ice Ages anymore.

      Remember, some of those medievals were big, big boys.

      Besides, all a trucker needs to be happy is hot coffee and bad chili.
      It’s war, I tell you, it’s war!!

    • SkepticMan: “I switched to carnivore a year and a half ago and lost 40 pounds. It was the easiest thing I ever did. It dropped by BMI from 30 to 24 in 6 months.”

      Care to give us a synopsis as to what it was which you EXCISED from your diet?

      4 times per day (((Starbucks))) lattes each with 256 tablespoons of pure corn syrup and 512 tablespoons of tropical oils?

      Just curious.

      • I excised everything except bacon, eggs, beef, and hard cheese. Now it’s mostly beef and cheese, a few eggs, and sometimes bacon.

        • Yes, but what was the caloric nature of the “EVERYTHING” which you excised?

    • I do Keto combined with Intermittent Fasting and feel the best I’ve ever felt in my life. I have just decided that Sugar is the enemy and avoid it like the plague. I just do not crave it anymore.

      • A literal 3 star chef, rated in Michelin’s, told me straight up: “sugar is poison.”

    • I am essentially carnivore. I do eat some asparagus and onions because I like the types of bacteria that they feed. Red meat and eggs makes up 99% of what I eat for my own nutritional needs. You don’t need anything else.

      Humans were meant to be in ketosis.

16. I am a physician who shares Z’s politics.

    This piece is FULL of errors.

    For starters–no, humans have NOT eaten bread “for ten thousand years.”

    Carnivore is WAY WAY closer to a path of health than eating carbs.
    CARBS KILL is a great way to approach food.
    As do seed oils, food made from petroleum byproducts.

    If you are suffering from diseases of modernity–stop eating like a modern. Find local sources of real food, and eat that. Your health will be restored.

    • No bread, pasta, rice and potatoes. Seems eminently reasonable. It’s not as if those are staples or anything.

      • If you try taking rice away from an Asian or a Jamaican, it WILL be WW3.

        (In Kipling’s memoirs about the famine in India, the British were constantly confounded by starving South Indian mothers, their breasts dry of milk, who would still yet trade a pound of wheat for a few handfuls of rotting rice.)

      • Ostei Kozelskii: “No bread, pasta, rice and potatoes. Seems eminently reasonable. It’s not as if those are staples or anything.”

        Potatoes are one of the few foodstuffs our White occidental ancestors of the Far North could have counted on for Vitamin C in their diets.

        Without potatoes [plus broccoli & Brussels sprouts & spinach], our Far Northern ancestors would have quickly gone extinct due to Scurvy.

        Of course our ancestors wouldn’t have understood any of this in a moderin deductivistic sense, but they would have been keenly aware that, empirically speaking, folks who ate only meat had a bad habit of bleeding to death [for no apparent reason].

        • This is incorrect. Fresh meat has ample vitamin C. Ask the Eskimos, or Ernest Shackleton’s shipmates marooned on Elephant Island for four months, or the remnant of Vitus Bering’s crew that survived on fresh seal meat for more than a year in the Aleutian Islands.

          The key: FRESH meat. It has everything the body needs, which cannot be said of potatoes or rice, let alone pasta and bread.

          Recommended reading: Gary Taubes’ ‘Good Calories, Bad Calories’, Stephen Finney’s ‘The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living’, Nina Teichholz’s ‘The Big Fat Surprise’, for a start.

          • Bro, the reason the Brits are called “Limeys” is because a series of genius-tier ships’ doctors [John Woodall, John Fryer, James Lind, etc] noticed that sailors who added lime juice to their diets didn’t die of Scurvy.

            And the subsequent addition of lime juice to the British naval diet allowed Britannia to win the Napoleonic wars and rule the entire world for well over a century.

            Point being that lime juice is NOT a meat extract.

        • Potatoes were brought to Europe from South America.

17. “ When your doctor says you have high cholesterol and need to take pills, you want to trust her, but then you find out that there is not a lot of evidence that the pills make a real difference. You start to wonder if she is just another type of sales rep from the pharmaceutical industrial complex.”

    “Real difference” is the key here. Big Pharma loves to conflate “relative” with “absolute” effect when touting their drugs. Suppose for example, you have “high” blood pressure. Let’s assume it’s not acutely high as in some sort of trauma, but just naturally high from a Western lifestyle and age. You might have a risk of complication—stroke, heart disease, kidney failure, etc.—of 1 in 10,000.

    Along comes big Pharma with a drug and diet regime they claim reduces your “risk” by 20%. Ignoring the arm-long list of side effects of the drug, you now have a 1 in 8000 (absolute) risk. Is this worth changing you entire lifestyle? Similarly, they might tout their drugs as twice as effective as their competitor’s which is a “relative” risk comparison and of little use in judging whether you, yourself, are significantly better off taking such. And finally, there is the old trick of stopping safety studies midstream when the results at that point are positive—as was done with Covid vexxination (albeit under another pretext).

    As I’ve said many times, most doctors are not scientists, but technicians who follow a “standard of care” passed down from the medical establishment. When dealing with such, one should not buy into their attempt to “treat the numbers” but should insist that they describe the pathology those drugs are meant to prevent and request that they look *specifically* for that in your examination.

    Another area of inquiry I find fascinating is looking at the typical measures prescribed by modern medicine to prolong life—diet, exercise, medicines, etc—and the actual live extension that can be attributed (statistically) to these measures. In many instances, the prolonging of life span is estimated in a few months—not decades or even years. For example, a study (IIRC) came out from the NHS (GB) of the “average age of death from breast cancer”. In the USA with all its touted breast examinations and money spend in early detection was not significantly different from the (limited) NHS health service breast cancer results.

    I disagree a bit with the potential gist of Z-man’s commentary—there are good doctors out there. There are some really smart ones and brave ones, and ones really worthy of the name “scientist”. They are few, but that’s where I’ve gleaned my important insights into modern medicine during the latest pandemic. Don’t toss the baby out with the bath water.

    • Compsci: “there are good doctors out there”

      Yes, there are.

      But they are becoming rarer than hens’ teeth.

      There are even good nurses & female doctors, as well.

      [PRO-TIP: All of them want desperately to see masculinity in you. Show them masculinity and you WILL get laid. I guarantee it. However, the existential tragedy now is that all of those beautiful talented fertile females are V@XXINATED…]

      On the other hand, the reptiles in human skin suits, atop the pyramid of the medical industrial complex, are uniformly satanically evil.

      It’s shocking how quickly the serpents seized control of the reins of the medical industry.

      It was so sudden that you have to wonder whether the serpents were always there, but were simply biding their time patiently, until the Frankfurt School & the Council of the Sanhedrin gave them the green light to step out of their human skin suits and reveal their scales for all to see.

18. The problem is not science, it’s scientists. By reading the official (and most likely massaged) mortality rates, I used the scientific method to deduce that there was no reason to vax.

    I suspect that a part of the Anglo skepticism about science is linguistic: in Germanland, the term “science” only refers to the hard sciences, so it’s implicit that medicine, psychology, economics and sociology belong to different magisteria of knowledge. This unlucky conflation is compounded by the tendency of the soft sciences to mimic science-speak as to cloak their quackery in borrowed finery.

    Said Noam Chomsky:

    You’ve got these guys in the physics departments and the math departments, and they have all kinds of complicated theories (which of course we can’t understand but they can understand them) and they have principles and they can deduce complicated things from these theories and they do experiments and they find out if they work or they don’t work.

    And that’s really impressive stuff so I want to be like that too; I want to have a theory, be just like the physicists. They talk incomprehensively, we can talk incomprehensively. They have big words, we’ll have big words. They draw far-reaching conclusion, we’ll draw far-reaching conclusions. We’re just as prestigious as they are.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKn3PnXeF-A

    • Well, I’ve never been a fan of Chomsky–quite the opposite–but that plainspoken statement about the social sciences is an excellent explanation for the incoherency of pomo speak. I’ve long known this to be the case, but it’s interesting to hear a guy like Chomsky enunciate it, too.

      • it’s interesting to hear a guy like Chomsky enunciate it

        Yes, rather ironic, considering that he’s also speaking about himself.

        Equally ironic, it was Chomsky who (briefly) made me a neocon. Back when I was a Commie, I despaired at our leaders all being slack-jawed imbeciles and it was a great relief to have Chomsky explain that no, they’re not cretins, just incredibly evil and duplicitous.

        • (((Chomsky))) was all on board with the covid jab and stated in October ’21 the unjabbed should remove themselves from society and that the unjabbed getting food after that ‘was their problem’.

          To hell with that rotten SOB.

          • I’m not defending Chomsky or his worldview, but the guy is older than Kissinger and quite senile by now.

        • One needs to separate the man from the science. Chomsky was/is a terrible lefty individual, but was a linguistic genius in his time. Hell, he all but invented the field. I remember as a young student in CS having to study him—and it was tough.

          • OMG no he did not “practically invent the field” of linguistics.

        • Chomsky and Foucault had a “debate” back around 1970. The chief topic was the Vietnam War, and given that both were opposed to US intervention there and for very similar reasons, there was no debate to be had. But what I found interesting was a remark by Chomsky after the “debate.” He said–and I paraphrase–I actually liked Foucault, but he might as well have been from another planet because I couldn’t understand anything he was saying. And it was not because Chomsky didn’t understand French.

          • Yes. In the link above, Chomsky mentions that the Parisian intellectuals were the last to still proudly declare themselves Leninists and Stalinists, and they spent their time exploring ways to express simple truisms as convoluted and impenetrable as possible, a process Niklas Luhman calls “self-mystification”.

            Chomsky gives an example of a guy who objects to the notion that some pharaoh died of tuberculosis, because tuberculosis was only invented in the 19th C.

19. There are two fundamental reasons that Science and scientists cannot be trusted. First, without the ability to see how matter and energy interact in real time, down to the subatomic level, there is no empirical basis for understanding the natural world and its physical reality. And even if we could view those interactions, no true wisdom can be derived without an infinite number of observations, as the human socio/political/economic complex is in constant flux. So everything we think we know is ultimately just a guess.
    Second, Science is part of the Communications Apparatus, along with the news media, the education establishment, the entertainment industry, and the scientific community. The purpose of this apparatus is to miscommunicate “facts” (news), propagandize concepts (education), trigger acceptable emotions reinforcing those facts and concepts (entertainment), and justifying the results by mystification (science, vs. religion in earlier times). As a result, Science is just another rationalization for the society’s operating paradigm, designed to favor those with the genetic heritage to succeed under its rules for playing the Game of Life.
    As such, Science fits within the core ruling functions and functionaries: the Commercial Apparatus (persons with legal authority over wealth generating assets, either for profit organizations or pools of investment funds), the Authoritative Apparatus (government officials, elected and appointed, with authority to make enforceable rules for society), the Coercive Apparatus (law enforcement officers, local, state, and federal, the military, the intelligence agencies, and the black ops killers), and the Communications Apparatus. The Commercial Apparatus makes the coin of the realm, the authorities take a piece of the action while authorizing some profitable activities and prohibiting some activities or persons/organizations from participation therein, the Coercive Apparatus kills or maims those who dissent, domestically or internationally, and the Communications Apparatus falsifies and justifies it all, intellectually and emotionally.
    Seen in this light, Science is just another lie we have been told all our lives. Trust No One with authority over you. Respect those people who act likewise, and cooperate with other economically insecure citizens where possible to force those apparatuses to act responsibly.

    • Hey, Mr. or Mrs. down voter: what’s your disagreement with my screed above? I’m genuinely curious. Doesn’t seem like anything I said can be falsified (“science!”). Are we in the presence of a true believer in The Science, or its Method? Let’s debate, shall we?

      • I thought so. That’s some real courage of your convictions, eh?

    • Your epistemological nihilism is absurd. Just because we can’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist and can’t be measured, the Uncertainty Principle notwithstanding. And as for the relatively chaotic nature of human society, that is really neither here nor there with regards to the practice of science or any other serious endeavor, just so long as there is the infrastructure, financing and physical security in place to perform it.

      As to the rest of your screed–at least your honest about the nature of your post–it does apply pretty well to science in postmodernity and in totalitarian states, but is far less relevant to science from earlier periods, which is when the vast majority of breakthroughs were made.

      But, if you’re really convinced we don’t know a sausage and that science is a chimera, I suggest that, if you ever begin expelling copious amounts of blood through your bowels, you consult a plumber rather than seek out medical tests. After all, if knowledge is really just a sham, what difference does it make?

      • Appreciate the reply OK. The point made above is that nothing is knowable with absolute certainty absent the ability to observe at the lowest material level. Of course, it is possible to make educated guesses that allow a measure of control over reality. The Bomb proves the point. But omniscience would allow medicines tailored precisely to a particular person’s biochemistry and neurology. And the ability to manipulate human society precisely.

        Of course, the parable of the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge exists for a reason: absent immortality, humans will always be tempted to act as selfish materialists because we are all mortal, and so must take what we can when we can. That is why no system can be devised that treat all citizens with respect. Even a dissident right society will devolve. If that is nihilism, so be it. Life sucks, then we die. That is reality.

        • ATTN: Joseph R. Chloupek

          The truly scary thing is that many quantum physics dudes are starting to suspect that the future influences the past.

          If that proves to be true, then our future physics and mathematics textbooks won’t be 500 or 1000 pages long; they’ll be more like 5 million to 10 million pages long.

          And you’ll need to read hundreds of those million-page tomes in order to earn a PhD.

          We might require AIs simply to go on 1-in-a-bazillion needle-in-a-haystack quixotic empirical searches, looking for candidate solutions to equations, and using up all of the energy produced by our Sun simply to find those candidate solutions to equations.

          • Exactly, B. That is what I was saying above. When we can manipulate matter and energy so that a feather can be converted to an aircraft carrier, or an automobile manufacturing plant into a bubble, then humans could cure disease or injury instantaneously. Ultimate power.
            Until that day arrives, we are helpless in either understanding or effectively using our environment. And as a result, faith in any science is unjustified. Hurts to admit to helplessness, but it is as it is.

        • I don’t have much problem with what you say in this post. Its claims are less radical than those in your initial post, i.e. absolute knowledge versus knowledge in general.

20. Re: Diets and nutritional maladies, I also wonder about gout. It was a crippling problem in the medieval and Early Modern periods; more than one noble lost more than one battle because he was too bedridden with gout to take command. And modern people do of course get it. I get it myself sometimes. But that’s the weird thing: For me, the cause is a combo of alcohol and red meat, which explains why medieval / Early Modern aristocrats got it. But you’d think with the obesity etc. rates everyone would have gout now, and it seems few people do. Wonder why?

    • Actually going to a rare visit to a doctor after podiatrist was useless to get help on what I’m sure is gout even though uric cid levels are normal.

      You can imagine I will be dubious of any recommendations because I know the side effects may be worse. Nothing before but four episodes this year is enough. I don’t fear doctors but fear I may follow everything they say to do.

    • Years ago Jared Leto was in some indy movie playing Mark David Chapman – the guy who shot John Lennon. He tried to pack on all these pounds for the role by eating pints and pints of ice cream every night. It’s always been a source of great amusement for me that he ended up with gout because of it.

    • There are other paths to obesity besides meat and mead.

    • “But you’d think with the obesity etc. rates everyone would have gout now, and it seems few people do. Wonder why?”

      Most fatasses’ diets are 90% sugar, starch, and fat. To get a mighty gout bunion that makes the ladies swoon you need to be able to destroy an entire pot roast in one sitting.

21. My current view is that yes, humans ate whatever they could find in prehistoric times, but the thing they prized above all else was animal fat. That’s why hunting was a big deal. The best hunters were at the top of their societies. Hunting was the sport of kings in medieval times for good reason. If the king could prove his prowess with a lance against a wild boar, that validated his position with his rivals. In any event, eating meat is more satisfying than a diet of tofu or lentils.

    • Ding! ding! ding! There is a reason that predators such as lions go after the organ meat – it’s a high fat, high nutrient bonanza. Jeepers, they don’t get scurvy or pellagra, do they?

22. The way I understood it, cancer is primarily a problem of immunodeficiency. That doesn’t help much once you’ve got it, I suppose, but you shouldn’t get it until you’re quite old, if at all. Genetic predisposition, too, but I wonder if anybody has looked for a link to immune function in such individuals.

    Still, if eradicating cancer is job #1 of the immune system, it’s probably the best tool to treat it, and getting it to function properly would be the direction I’d research.

    They also called it a lifestyle disease back when I was studying these sorts of things. Don’t recall the historical incidence of cancer, if it was even tracked before fairly recently, but that might say a lot about the modern lifestyle.

    • I recall reading that 1 in 30 died of it circa 1900.

      • That seems waaay too high. Cancer is a disease of old age, really. As folk pointed out, once your immune system declines, you’re screwed, and that happens to all of us as we age. In the first decade of the 1900’s, heart disease, stroke, influenza got most people. And, of course, the average life expectancy was 50ish or so. Folks didn’t live long enough to get a high rate of cancer.

        Check out the CDC stat’s here:

        https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data-visualization/mortality-trends/index.htm

    • I’ve always thought there should be (at least) two separate categories when talking about cancer: one for the folks over 70 and another for everybody else. We all have to die of something, someday. A 90 year old dying of cancer is not at all the same thing as a 20 year old doing so. This sort of thing can get lost when one looks at cancer deaths as one number. It’s plausible that cancer deaths can increase just because more people are living longer.

      • Quick search, short, interesting read:

        https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/09/researchers-report-dramatic-rise-in-early-onset-cancers/

        • And I’ll raise the specter, since I’m sure nobody is researching it: maybe we’re becoming dysgenic at the same time. All the easy living and lack of natural selection. Just a little?

23. The Big Bang hypothesis is worth mentioning as a possible example of scientism running wild in a profession which fails to police its own adequately. Influential believers such as Neil deGrasse Tyson say that all the data support the BB. Well, what about the helium data and the lithium data?

    Watch the first video of the playlist linked here. The author gives the BB hypothesis failing marks, and not just for its predictions about light element nucleosynthesis.

    https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBg1fqjrUVrnOnOzcry3ilvOH6iOxV56m

24. A timely topic. The Covid lockdowns and webinars on Covid had a lot of grifts including charging the panels with “fees” for taking part in the webinar.

    https://www.science.org/content/article/costly-invite-scientists-hit-with-massive-bills-after-speaking-at-covid-19-conferences

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_R1Q3l_cQZA

25. “ Medicine is still not sure why cancer exists, much less how to prevent it.”

    The reason cancer exists is rather simple. Genetic damage that leads to unregulated cell growth. The problem is that the genome is so complex, that there are too many different genetic components that can break that all lead to cancer. Then fixing what is wrong at the scale of a few million cancer cells imbedded within the 30 trillion healthy cells is largely beyond our ability.

    Imagine if when your car broke down, you had to fix a few million tiny gearboxes that you needed a microscope just to see. Each of those microscopic gearboxes has 20,000 separate microscopic gears that you would first have to diagnose which ONE was broken. Then you would have to fix what you couldn’t see without damaging other things you couldn’t see. You would probably give up and send the car to a junkyard. This is our dilemma with the problem of cancer.

    Science faces two main problems. One is that all the low-hanging fruit of understanding has already been picked by previous generations. What puzzles remain may simply be beyond what the human mind is capable of understanding.

    The second is that human intellectual capital in the west is on a steep decline. While the puzzles are harder, the ability to even understand them is dropping precipitously. Even at the intellectual height of western civilization, it was tiny tiny minority of mostly men who were able to think in a particular way to figure everything out.

    Too many people entering the sciences today are mostly social and religious thinkers. They are interested in acquiring social status by associating themselves with “Science”, but are completely incapable of thinking in the way that scientists did before that institution earned its current prestige.

26. This is sort of related but is statistics a form of a science. I don’t claim that it’s as replicable but is at least somewhat useful. As long as you have the humility in what you’re doing, it’s half the battle.

    One of the things I’ve been trying to figure out is how best to measure music popularity over a long period of time. One of the things that statistics has trouble capturing is the “hit vs standard” phenomenon.

    So for example you had hits in the 50s by Teresa brewer Patti page etc that haven’t aged well and have less than a million Spotify plays. Then you have songs by chet baker that no one really listened to at the time but whose view counts are in the mid to high eight digits

    • After thinking about this subject for many years, I’ve come to the opinion that not only is statistics not a form of science, it’s not even a form of math. It’s more like a very trimmed, quantitative form of historical literature that allows you to tell a story about something after the fact.

      • Statistics is one of the ugly sisters of Cinderella (mathematics). It’s a search for patterns, and often patterns of cause and effect, when one doesn’t have a clue as to what is going on. It’s the science of dullards.

        • What youre talking about is epidemiology NOT statistics. Statistics is a branch of math built on the same bulletproof deductive frame as Euclidean geometry or number theory.

          Epidemiology is the (mis)application of statistics by people who frequently dont have the math background to even understand the statistics. Its a women’s field where a perfect tool is used in frequently retarded ways.

          Hammers are great tools but this does not make them an appropriate way for your aunt to open her first evenings bottle of rosemount shiraz.

          • Aye. However–and without weakening your point one bit–most of our aunts quaff Rosemount from the box, and I’m told it is deucedly difficult to open a box o’ that stuff with a ballpeen.

      • “… statistics not a form of science, it’s not even a form of math.”

        Well, then you’d be wrong. The mathematics behind the broad field of statistics is solid and often complex. That statistics is mostly (yes, mostly) misused and misunderstood is not to the contrary. If you think statistics is simply pulled out of the air, then you simply have no formal acquaintance with the subject.

        Without statistics—which is grounded in probability, we’d have very little of the pleasures we currently enjoy of the modern world. For example, insurance, which is based on probability analysis of loss events would be impossible—unless you want to go back to the days of Lloyd’s of London and taking a gamble while sitting in a pub.

        • Thank you. The idea that statistics is not a hard science is absurd and only comes from ignorance.

      • Tell that to an actuary, tough guy.

    • Maybe, that’s a legacy of payola. Most of the hits of those eras may have been synthetic and an outcome of unscrupulous people controlling the music industry.

      Which is why they haven’t aged well.

    • An interesting question. According to the definitions, Stairway to Heaven was not a “hit,” because it wasn’t on some chart. But it clearly was a hit, long before streaming was a thing too.

      • many such cases. You also have songs where the most known version wasn’t a hit and the version that everyone knows wasn’t a hit at the time.

        For example, the song “At Last” was a hit for Glenn Miller around 1942 or so. But the version by Etta James with like 400 million downloads was only a minor hit (No 42 on the billboard 100).

    • The streaming boom coincided with the general public coming to think of music as always “from” something else, not a standalone product. Those belatedly popular non-hits are songs used in movies, commercials, video games, etc.

      Taylor Swift is the only remaining popular musician.

      • Taylor Swift is the only remaining popular musician.

        If that isn’t a marker of societal decline… what else is?

27. It is quite remarkable how the “food pyramid” and the Covid restrictions perfectly align with the commandments of Climate Religion. I mean, the Venn diagram is quite precise. It is almost as if they are geared toward Gaia’s perceived health rather than your own.

    • all roads lead behind the same curtain.

    • Oy! The Green movement is like the Civil Rights movement,.designed only to do the WORST kinds of damage. Not merely useless or less efficient, the WORST.

      Green is whales with broken eardrums on the beach,

      cutting down forests for toxic silicon junkyards,

      burning windmills on quarter-acre anchor of concrete that are kept spinning by bought electricity,

      bunker-oil cargo ships dumping the trash in the ocean,

      Green is a lithium pit mine the size of Ohio.

28. I’ve often been a critic here, but—to give credit where credit is due—today’s post is very good. I would endorse 99% of it, and I think Z-Man is at his best when he sticks to things like this rather than veering off into the more ethereal subject of religion, which requires a different kind of analysis. But, back to the subject at hand.

    “Science,” in the only pure and genuine sense of the word, is supposed to be contemplation, or theoria as the Greeks called it. This does not mean idly sitting around speculating about things without verifying them (as Whig bigots and critics of Aristotle are wont to accuse), but rather proving them by the exact processes of reasoned demonstration. Scientia in the ancient world literally meant “truths knowable by demonstration,” which was meant to distinguish it from other kinds of knowledge such as that concerned with making or doing.

    From this it follows that much of what modern man calls science isn’t really science at all, but “technology.” The Greek word techne, or art, referred to the knowledge of how to make things. This word does not distinguish between what we today call the fine arts and other types of making, so that (for example) the knowledge of how to paint a nice portrait or how to build a stone wall were both different types of “art.” The point is that they were both concerned with making something.

    The difference between science and art consists in the fact that art is concerned with things that may or may not come into existence, while science is concerned with things that are true by necessity and hence eternal. Both art and chance work on the same material; anything art can do, chance can do; and anything chance can do, art can do (a profoundly deep and portentous observation); but neither art nor chance can demonstrate the necessity of any truth.

    Thus, the Western habit of conflating science with technology involves a category mistake, combining things that really belong to entirely separate orders. Even the products of highly advanced and developed technology could still be produced with or without reference to any theoria, as long as the processes involved in their making are followed. Lasers shine and diodes emit light because nature works that way, not because “science says so.” Nature will continue to do what it does, blissfully independent of such pretensions. And since it is principally on the strength of his technology that modern man claims authority for his science, it follows that many such claims are largely pretentious.

    If modern man wants to congratulate himself on his force of will in forging technical achievements, that he may legitimately do; but he cannot congratulate himself on his “science,” for science really had nothing to do with it. In fact, when we look at the theoretical aspects of Western science, we see that it is in rapid decomposition. The last major theoretical achievements in this field were Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, which really ought to be called anti-achievements, as they undercut the very grounds for doing science at all. By foreswearing exactness and absolute references, they violate the very basis of what science is supposed to be. At this point, some science-simp will usually show up to tell me that GR and QM are “experimentally verified” and “numerically accurate,” which only goes to show that they understand the problem not at all. Numerical accuracy means nothing; all scientific descriptions are underdetermined and the number of “numerically accurate” theories describing reality is infinite. I don’t care if Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are “numerically accurate”; they are conceptually wrong, and in science concepts are the point.

    Properly understood, it is entirely true that Western science has been far more trouble than it’s worth. It is mostly a collection of impious, heretical, and goofy rationalizations that have given pretensions to authority to some of the most unqualified men in history. But Western technological expertise has produced some notable and useful gains—particularly in the fields of chemistry, materials science, and structural engineering—that should be preserved. The task ahead is to condense this knowledge into a poetic system of relations that can serve as the habitual and traditional training methods for future guilds of craftworkers, while jettisoning the Western ideological baggage. The town chemist and the master millwright will be thriving and respectable trades in the not-too-distant future.

    • Beautiful post, like your other one today.

    • Electromagnetism is conspicuously absent from your short list of approved sciences. I trust that you understand the origins of Einsteinian relativity in a bizarre result of Maxwell’s work. The speed of EM in vacuum will be the same relative to any observer no matter what his motion or that of the emitting source of EM. So you need EM to be neglected, forgotten, and buried to exorcise the relativity hobgoblin. A problem is that chemistry is very much a science of electronic reactions. It’s only natural for a chemist to think, from time to time, about charges. Soon he’s gets to the topic of electrochemistry, the puzzling behavior of currents, electroplating materials to improve their usefulness, and so on.

29. You nailed it with the statement of fact that it is antibiotics, nutrition and sanitation that have improved our material comfort and longevity.

    Everything else is just a make-work project funded by government debt and propelled by the Managerial Sinecure Conveyor Belt.

    I just finished, “Reprogramming the American Dream”, by Kevin Scott. Scott is a brilliant software engineer. The premise of the book is that if we are smart about AI we can use it to maintain small-town, rural America and enhance the lives of the people there who were shafted by 1960s and onward post-America.

    Outside of software systems, Scott is a terrible thinker. He grabs two anecdotes of small town success and rehashes them over and over. He contradicts himself on the job loss vs. job gain consideration. He saus the job losses will be certain, and the job gains will be based on economic theory and past patterns. Interestingly, he argues that the jobs that will go away will be monotonous and terrible anyway, but the most concrete job he is certain about emerging is labeling data – the most mind numbing and monotonous job you could find. Of course, that will be off-shored too.

    I am not against AI and tech. I actually think that our folk need to seize the opportunity to be the vanguard in using AI and software to use it for local, niche manufacturing and productivity enhancements and increased self-sufficiency. This technology and mastery of it is a key for our people’s project to endure post-America and build our new homeland as the opportunity arises. He is right that AI and robotic tech is an opportunity for a more local community to command its destiny. That is true – so long as the commodities of digital infrastructure are available to us. Robotics, 3D printing, and any sensor based and AI technology is a part of us taking control of our destiny.

    I thought of this as relevant to the post because, you can see in Scott, a rural Virginia boy who I believe is honest and sincere in his desire to help his American folk, the limitations in this regime. There is no cohesive analysis and rigor in this book. I would call it a treatise, but an airport book written with little thought is not a treatise. This topic deserves to be a treatise, written by a serious person with deep knowledge of Greco-Roman-Nordo/Germanic civilization whose highest aim is the good. What you can see from this book is how this system is stuck and how its incentive structures keep it stuck.

    Scott genuinely wants to end the war on Heritage America and our locales. However, he does not do it in any scientific manner. To do so would mean to question every single starting assumption. He comes to the table with the assumptions that are the very things that may be what broke all of this. That assumption is that mercantilism and technological development are the sole forces that improve lives and humanity. He is Peter Thielian to the core.

    In Scott’s case he is constantly going to the well of climate change to justify some of the ag tech, and he is constantly ladeling out the tired ‘kinder, more inclusive’ tropes into the reader’s bowl. It feels like it is done merely to slap a facade of morality on something that beneath the surface he knows doesn’t feel right. Climate change means we need far more productive agriculture he says. Anyone who pushes climate change can’t be regarded as a serious thinker. That said, I don’t think his motives are sinister. I think he is doing it because he senses something is wrong and his case is not certain. But, he is stuck with his prior assumptions that don’t hold true – namely that building new technologies to create more jobs and economic growth is a a guaranteed means for making everything better.

    Worse, he is stuck with a limited education and tunnel vision. Technological invention and business growth are the only ingredient you need to make life better he thinks. He is a symbol of this regime. He is a savant. To these techno-savants who spend 20 hours a day on symbol manipulation, the spiritual, cultural and social dimensions of life are just garnishes that get good automatically once you have achieved more technical progress. ‘We scaled LinkedIn to 20 million impressions per second and reduced timeline latencies to 13 milliseconds! The world is way better!’

    These people are the antithesis of the Greco-Roman genius that created civilization of unparalleled success and beauty across all dimensions of what pleases the European/Indo-European bio spirit. Whether intentional or not, they are monsters from the Greco-Roman point of view. In fact, the book opens with mention of Yaval-Harari. It is disheartening that an old Virginia boy would look to that Satanic beast for moral guidance and a source of future visions.

    Finally, he is stuck because of the system’s incentive structures. He worked to escape country Virginia and become CTO of Microsoft and a venture capitalist. So, why would he question any of his a priori assumptions, that is, to be a truly scientific thinker, when to do so would be to become an apostate of the regime? He signed up to grow Microsoft’s AI platform which will be the new OS of the new AI utopia. That is what he is going to do. That is his primary and ultimately his sole goal. Since that is the locus of the effort, that is what is certain to happen. Having it help rural America is a nice side effect that he hopes for, but it isn’t the highest aim. It is just the garnish and moral veneer that is just a nice-to-have, to use software industry vernacular.

    In any case, we are stuck. Thiel is the same way. He acknowledges that something is horribly wrong but then says that we must unlock more growth and productivity from technology somehow some way. I am not against that, but that will not happen because it is the wrong aim. Tools and toys are not enough, especially when the utility of the tools are questionable and the toys are ubiquitous and Satanic. Why should we take advice from him when he has only contributed to the problem. Look at his biggest trophies: Facebook; Palantir; PayPal. He can’t even call PayPal and tell them to stop the social credit system shenanigans. The funniest thing is watching the psychopathic Thiel say, (paraphrasing), ‘we have to ask ourselves why it is that this system promotes nothing but the most psychopathic and deranged individuals. Something is wrong here.’

    This was long, but I think highly topical. This is a great post. It gets to the heart of the matter. More importantly it lead us, the Dissident Right, to the skeleton key of our success. It is this critique that is the good one. Why? Because it is at the heart of the matter, and it leads us directly to the solutions, without which, nobody will care about us. When we wield articulate the problems, who perpetuates them, and talk about the solutions that the best and brightest know in their European bones are correct, we will win.

    The destruction of the Ancien Regime set up the merchant driven society. Its balance of powers was a consolidation of power in the hands of tunnel visioned merchants. When the world was a high-trust, all European society it worked – for a time. However, once The Hive pulled a Marcus Aurelius, and started importing the world to create a new tax and vote pasture, it was doomed beyond redemption. The system had no defenses for the folk and the progenitors of the system itself. The worst actors and the barbarian locusts, lack the art of civilization building that only we have. The lies about the Ancien Regime destroyed it. Our job is to build it up as best we can and show its utility as we embrace technology in a healthy way. The merchant-of-debt and techno-savant path is a dead end. We must envision, articulate and demonstrate a better road – one that has worked in our past. Expounding on this topic toward solutions and seeding them in reality is our task.

    • “Greco-Roman-Nordo/Germanic civilization whose highest aim is the good.”

      I mean, look what we named the Highest. The God.
      Not some weird name, not some unspoken name- we named it “the Good.” (from gott or güt)

      You mentioned Yuaval Hariri.
      Here is my abiding suspicion; let me me claim it as from my ignorance.

      “It”- that which Hariri works for, that which drives him and fills him and guides him- is striving to create a new life form.

      New vessels far more susceptible to Its habitation. This is why Whites must be either absorbed and diluted, or eliminated outright.

      As part of the Design, we are made to counter this force, that a higher objective of the Design might be fulfilled.

      Our task, and we, exist because that which fills Hariri cannot stop itself, anymore than a mold or virus (or a nerve, or water, or a volcano) can.

    • What an excellent post. Very nice review and I believe your impressions are accurate.

30. The YouTube channel, “Evil Food Supply,” is doing great work exposing scams like the food pyramid, plant-based ‘meat’, and flouride in the water supply.

    • Must check it out.

31. Science idolatry parallels or replaces fundamentalist morality.

    I myself am a morality expert and have been chagrined that others fail to regard me as such. Here in one of the last Covidian holdouts, masks and boosters are still required for attendance at various events. It was Keynes or Alan Greenspan who’s credited with saying that markets can remain irrational longer than we can stay solvent. “Markets” are a synonym for just about anything.

    So my motto: If you can’t beat ’em, hide.

32. In the 90’s statins came out and everyone was calling them miracle drugs, practically Drano for the arteries. I remember a TV doctor over 20 years ago saying that “statins should be put in the water supply. They’re that good.” I’m out of the loop as I’m not on them but I have family members with high cholesterol who swear they’re poison and won’t take them. Clearly something changed at some point. I would probably research why I shouldn’t take them if I was prescribed that. My default is better living through chemistry.

    However, notice that the 105 year olds interviewed by the media all say the same thing to the usual question of “how did you live so long?” They say “well, back in 1956 some doctor gave me pills for a condition and they made me feel bad so I threw them down the toilet. I only have a brandy in the evening and that’s fine for me.”

    • Some of those old guys just have great genes. I’d say taking cholesterol medicine is probably the better choice if you have really high cholesterol. It may be helping things in ways that the doctors can’t even explain because they don’t know.

      But it seems like people live longer on them.

    • I think the evidence is in that people live longer on statins. So if a person has really high cholesterol it’s probably worth it.

      Those stories of the 105-year-olds are always interesting. I think they just have great genes. Because there are plenty of other people who never go to the doctor and drop dead early.

      • no, that’s just it, in general, people do not lived longer on statins. there is one group that does – people who have already had a serious heart attack. statins interfere with the body’s natural use of cholesterol, like in forming insulation for nerve tissue; muy malo.

        • The body’s 3 basic building blocks are natural fats, cholesterol, and proteins.

          Lipitor was approved using a study that indicated *the possibility* of a 1% increased risk in males over 300 pounds. One percent is statistically meaningless.

          As a side benefit, Lipitor does destroy one’s liver. Need more hospital insurance?

          • “ One percent is statistically meaningless.”

            Second time I’ve heard this. I get where you are coming from. But the put down is incorrect. Given a large enough sample size, “n”, the 1% can be said to be statistically *meaningful*. Whether or not that is meaningful in any practical or useful sense is the issue here.

            And I agree, 1% is not persuasive to me to change my lifestyle, but we need to decry it on those terms.

          • Relative risk.

            Worth the cirrhosis of the liver,

            and are you a 300 lb. male who wasn’t born with naturally higher levels of cholesterol?

            (Those born with chronic condition actually live longer, by the way, on the average.)

          • I believe the number of people who have liver problems from statins is a about 1 out of 100,000. Most of those problems are reversible. So I don’t think it’s fair to say it destroys the liver except in rare cases.

        • karl von hungus: Plus statins cause muscle pain/weakness and mental confusion in many oldsters. My very old mother remained reasonably mentally sharp until she was prescribed statins. Granted I do not see her in person and only communicated via phone calls, but her cognitive ability (imho) went into steep decline immediately thereafter.

          • IMHO, a fate worse than death.

        • I know there’s a very passionate group of people who are anti-statin. But it all seems very uncertain to me. A lot them from the “all natural” school of thinking. And they’re not always that credible.

          I’m sure it’s true that statins interfere with things to some extent. But the question is how much. The goal isn’t to drive LDL down to zero. They’re also seem to be anti-inflammatory effects of statins which I believe even the opponents say is true.

      • I think the evidence is in that people live longer on statins

        Do you have a link for that, its not what I’ve heard.

        • The Clot Thickens: Dr. Malcolm Kendrick. all you need to know about the cholesterol con.

    • This dynamic is playing out with Ozempic at warp speed. the media hailed it as the new obesity wonder drug a few months ago, now the side effects are coming out… and they’re really bad. We have to find a middle ground here. I’ve often heard that the best way to eat is the way your great-grandpa did, and I can’t help but think that’s true. At the same time, we have access to genuinely useful medicine and technology that he didn’t, which is great. Yet it’s not going to overcome an unhealthy, destructive lifestyle.

      • > . I’ve often heard that the best way to eat is the way your great-grandpa did

        He probably ate grass-fed beef, no seed oils, and far more nutrient dense vegetables than exist now. At this point you either need to have your own garden and source your meat well from local farmer, or have a 50% increase in your grocery bill.

        The latter may not be the worst thing in the world though. Food SHOULD be what you take the time to buy the best in, but it’s not easy to till a mom of 4 making less than 100k that though.

        • Couldn’t agree with you more. I may be exaggerating a bit but I see the modern supermarket as a purveyor of disease and death. Cheap food is generally bad food and will lead to bad health. The problem is real food costs real money, and many (most?) Americans cannot afford it. That’s probably why many poor Americans I see are obese — they have to be, subsisting as they do on food-like substances and the svelte people are mostly upper middle class and above. The world of Soylent Green

          • Ignorance and apathy are greater obstacles to health than poverty. Poor folks can eat healthily enough if they want to. But most of them don’t give a dam’ about their own health, unless a white cop puts a knot on their head.

          • Fattening us up for our Green future!

            I mean our future is literally, “to be Green.”

            And aren’t natural fats a healthy choice that should be available to the wealthy?

        • Who here remembers their mothers or grandmothers cooking with Crisco? Turns out the name is a portmanteau of “crystallized cottonseed oil.” It was developed by the Germans as submarine lubricant, but they sold the formula to Procter & Gamble, initially to make soap.
          Interested parties bribed the FDA to reclassify cottonseed and other PUFA oils from industrial waste to food-grade. And the rest is history.

      • The biggest health problem for secular sexually normal white men in 21st century west is sudden onset cranial lead perforation.

        Which is to say, our problem is a macro spiritual one of being a defeated materialist people subject to regime promoted isolation, humiliation, and nihilism. We still have enough spirit to resist living in the sewer we’re being offered as a home.

        Go to church, workout, disengage from consumerism
        homeschool a bushel of kids who you teach to do the same… this will prevent premature death more effectively than statins and all the rest.

    • I’m not quite as skeptical about medicine as Z is, and my reasoning is experience.

      Around 10 years ago I had a cardio event of some sort. Rushed down to the doc-in-a-box and they did an EKG which came back irregular. They set me up with a cardiologist who prescribed an exhaustive round of tests, including stress tests.

      The results were not good. Blood chemistry–including cholesterol and triglycerides–severely out of whack, hypertension and incipient atherosclerosis. The doc gave me the usual spiel about reducing fat, sugar and salt intake, increasing exercise, and he put me on a drug regime of Ramipril, Atorvastatin, niacin, Vitamin D, COq10 and aspirin.

      Six months later and another round of blood panels. Dramatic improvement across the board. Since then biannual visits for the blood tests, and almost without exception, my blood chemistry is squarely within normal ranges.

      Several months ago I went to my GP who, among other things, took my BP and listened to my heart with a stethoscope. He said I have the ticker and the blood pressure of a 20-year-old. Suffice it to say, I’m far beyond the age of 20. I truly believe that, without the efforts of my cardiologist, I would have had a heart attack by now, and I might not have survived it.

      • Ah, the benefits of certain health insurance plans. At least some of gooduns still get ’em too.

        Blue collar working men used to drop dead when they were 55 in the good old Jackie Gleason days.

        Remember when we were 65 we were supposed to look and sound like Wilford Brimley?

        I, for one, am kinda glad a certain few are still spitting fire and kicking azz. Experience and guile will beat youthful enthusiasm every time.

        • Very true. If you look at the bios of Golden Age Hollywood movie stars, seems that a very high percentage of them snuffed it in their 50s and 60s. And most of them smoked like London chimneys. Don’t know much about their diets. Lots of red meat, I’d imagine, and even more alcohol. They probably didn’t get much exercise and obviously didn’t get the type of medical treatment we get today. On the other hand, they were probably far less likely to abuse drugs such as cocaine and weed.

          • Umm, I wasn’t talking about Hollywood stars. The Zblog audience is far too modest, sirs and ladies.

      • You may wish to investigate supplementing with Nattokinase (I take Boost brand; 4000FU). It breaks down fibrils in about six hours and has a half-dozen other benefits. Hospitals prescribe it. It’s powerful enough that one pill can kill, so consult with your doctor first. For me, it has measurable, clear prophylactic results. 0.02

        • Many thanks. Is that any way related to the Japanese vegetable “nakko”, said to scour out vascular plaque like Drano?

          • Yes. Japanese consume lesser amount in food. Supplement companies isolate and concentrate the active ingredients.

            If you research nattokinase, you can find time lapse images of petri dishes containing fibrils and a small amount of natto. Six hours later the fibrils are _gone_ as if beamed to space.

            Also removes arterial placques and rejuvenates vasculatures.

            Almost all supplement mfrs claim powerful effects of their products. This sh_t is like Drano and it actually does what is claimed.

            You can’t take it if you are on certain meds, e.g., hypertension and cardio-pulmonary meds. That would be bad.

33. My pet theory on obesity, kinda tongue in cheek but not really, is that air conditioning is a major driver. Pre-AC, how much of a person’s caloric budget was spent just on thermoregulation? Imagine going through a summer in Lagos without even an electric fan. It’d be one hell of an appetite suppressant, for one thing, and how much weight would you simply sweat off? Same deal in the winter — very inefficient fireplace heat and clothing made from natural materials. Not that I want to give up AC, but I bet that would solve most of the “obesity epidemic” right there.

    • You could add tons of other modern conveniences to the list. Walking further to find a place to relieve yourself, gathering food, manual labor, housework, balancing on a horse…

      • Physical activity of any kind is an appetite suppressant, a really good one. I worked on a landscape crew for a summer. I lost a bunch of weight (and this is when I didn’t have much weight available to lose; I went from “in shape” to “really skinny”).

        At first I thought it was because I was expending a lot of calories on the job… and I was, but I also realized that I was eating significantly less. Which is weird — I was burning off 4K calories (let’s say), but only eating enough for 1.5K (again let’s say — enough that my parents noticed, anyway. They said “You’re just picking at your food” at dinner, and I hardly ever ate lunch). But I wasn’t wasting away; my body seemingly found the natural balance it was supposed to have.

        And then the summer ended, and I went back to school, and I found myself just monstrously hungry, all the time.

        • Sev-

          My experience concurs with yours.

          I regularly go out for a walk or jog in the afternoon/early evening heat and I consistently find that I have little appetite for anything beyond a light dinner after said activity.

        • Prior to entering grad school I was a beanpole. To such an extent that I was a bit self-conscious about it. But grad school changed all that. Went from an active lifestyle to a sedentary one. In my dorm room reading and writing constantly. No more pick-up basketball. I went from about 160 to about 195 and have remained there since.

        • Ditto. I now must concentrate on eating more. This really is difficult, more so than I ever imagined.

    • you don’t sweat off weight. but you do shiver it off. being in a cold environment will burn off tons of calories; so will a good case of the flu.

      • yeah Sev’s wrong about that. I worked mostly outside for 42 years, you can’t eat a heavy lunch or breakfast in heat, and you drink a lot. For 25 years I only ate salads for lunch. Winter, yeah you just burn the calories off, I always put on 5-10 pounds in the fall because I started craving high calorie foods.

    • Excellent point. Decades ago, I had a case of Graves disease, or hyper-thyroid condition. I went to a Endocrinologist, who told me I needed a radiation procedure which strips the thyroid and would cause me to need supplements for my lifetime. I (ignoramus) said I thought that sounded terrible, and I didn’t think I wanted to do it, so he got angry, and I left. Ultimately, I did some reading and made some lifestyle changes, but I’ve always maintained that the cure was effected by taking up spin classes. Spin doesn’t do much for weight in my experience, or slim you down or anything, but it does cause you to sweat profusely. I’d rather do spin class than give up AC. Anyway, my problem went away.

      To Z’s point, I’ve been highly suspect of the experts ever since. I agree with others here who have pointed out how incredibly complicated the human body is, and I think our modern “experts” know very little about it.

      • This is precisely why I do not consider medicine to be a legitimate technical discipline. Note that the endocrinologist offered no discussion of the underlying molecular biology of the condition. What enzyme, growth factor, or hormone is causing your thyroid to be more active? Instead, he trots out a “cookie-cutter” treatment that is not rooted in any understanding of molecular biology that damages the thyroid where it does not work any more, at all. All medical conditions are based on molecular biology. Thus, a molecular biological solution is required to fix them. Anything else is fraud.

    • I’ve brought it up before but there does appear to be an environmental component to the weight issue. Any one thing, even heavily processed foods, aren’t great to be sure, but the issue is the problem keeps getting worse despite some of these ills being with us for generations (i.e., their effect should have topped out at some point). BigMed has no answer though, and doesn’t appear to want an answer either.

    • Dang. None of us ever thought of the caloric exchange in thermal homeoregulation. Good one!

      Gotta keep that pilot light lit so the fueled power plant can cycle up and down.

      Plus, REM sleep is cardio. Getting off the couch is aerobics. And going outside on a hot or cold day is the goshdanged Olympics.

    • I lost a lot of weight one time working out in the cold for a few weeks.
      Well, 7lbs. In two weeks.

    • Once upon a time, I worked the night shift in Afghanistan, and slept in a tent during the day. (true story). The tent had AC, but it didn’t retain it well, and it reached close to 100F in there in the middle of the day. I lost a tremendous amount of weight during this time, I believe mostly from sweating while sleeping. The altitude played a part too, high desert it was. Colorado is the least obese state in AINO thanks to the altitude.

34. The worst crackpot diet was the one you mentioned: the low-calorie, low-fat food pyramid — that is, low meat. It’s a concentration camp diet nobody can stay on. Gary Taubes’ books showed the “science” was funded at Harvard by the sugar industry. No wonder we have an epidemic of diabetes.

    Also, a funny mad scientist is Dr. Panzer in the Three Stooges’ “A Bird in the Head.” The name derives from it being 1945:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiukhlrVACk&t=29s

    • The truth is European humans did evolve for the food available. Whole grains, nuts, root vegetable, fish, meat, dairy, etc. Northern Europeans had more fish and meat and less bread and fruits than Southern Europeans. If you want a diet fit for you then eat what your people ate in the middle ages. Also spend six days a week doing hard labor.

      • Hard labor is key. The “eat what your ancestors ate” argument is useless without it. Medieval people got lots of calories — you could eat a medieval peasant diet and get fat (consider that some kinds of medieval beer, and the mead that Beowulf was always chugging, is probably pushing a thousand calories per mug). But then you look at archeology, and the crazy wear and deformation on their bones, and you realize why they never got fat eating 4,000 or more calories per day (as is the current best guess to daily intake IIRC).

        • I’ve read somewhere that by the end of a long Northern Winter everyone who hadn’t starved to death would have been in ketosis for a few months — all those smoked hams and cheeses being for the hunger months when all the perishable carbs were gone and no more to be had before springtime.

          As for the ‘Mediterranean Diet’ — apparently the geniuses who did the original study in Crete didn’t consider two factors: 1) Cretans spending most of their days climbing up and down precipitous crags chasing their sheep and goats and pursuing feuds and 2) More importantly since I give less credence to the calories in / out business and more to the overall biochemical situation: Greek Orthodox fasting regime. Nassim Taleb goes on about this a bit too. They were always doing different types of fasts throughout the whole liturgical year such that they take a break from eating most of the various staples regularly.

      • A race-base diet, eh? This sounds perilously close to crimethink. Double plus ungood.

        • I’m familiar with a hyper-athletic vegan gentleman of mixed Maori and European ancestry who assures me that he’s genetically pre-disposed to eat rice for evolutionary reasons. The Science says so, apparently. I have to resist pointing out that his true ancestral diet is in fact Soylent Green. Pigs being OK when people were in short supply.

35. When they say “trust the science,” they are trying to capture the trust people have in science by equating whatever it is they are promoting with actual science and engineering. It’s the same thing as giving Barrack Obama a Nobel Prize. They capture the authority and then wear it like a cheap skin suit. It’s a type of counterfeit money.

    Real science gives us TVs, cars, finds and produces oil and builds 50 story buildings that have been standing for many decades and an electric grid that works so well that it becomes invisible to us.

    • Yes, I’m starting to think most science is done by engineers and workmen. Then after enough data has been collected and patterns are clear, they get consolidated and written up by a scientist.

      The mistake is thinking that the scientist dreamed it all up himself. He’s almost more of a lagging indicator.

      • That isn’t correct though. Theoretical science is critical to engineering and inventiveness. There are some things that we can’t have without the theory. That said, science’s biggest contribution is its methodology, which is used in science and engineering.

        You don’t have digital machines without Claude Shannon’s master thesis. Besides, throwing out the theoreticians is to throw a huge number of our men who designed this world and made it possible for our many men who are builders and tinkerers.

        • Robert, you couldn’t be more wrong. let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. edison was more of an engineer, and he wanted a DC based electrical system. Tesla was the scientist who determined AC was the way to go.

          engineers are important, but their work is downstream from science.

          • “ engineers are important, but their work is downstream from science.”

            Exactly. Engineers apply the science. Now, I admit that in some cases, the science is not yet known. Nonetheless, I separate scientific discoveries from application.

        • I’m not too impressed with modern engineers these days. I’m watching the completion of a major civil infrastructure project and the new system is a trainwreck compared to the old system it replaced.

          It’s as if none of the engineers who planned this ever had to pull a 1000lb electric motor or service pneumatics. And the dumb retards they contracted to build the damned thing, well that’s another story. The future is fancy pants tech, poorly planned, and built in a slapdash manner by 70iq third world scab labor. And you can complain all you want, management DGAF.

          • Ah shoot. Somewhere I click-copied a list of the most important equations in the world.

            Literally all of them were White Men, except the stuff Einstein stole from an Italian.

        • *Laughs in John von Neumann*

          Not that I’ve got anything against Shannon… one of the greatest. Plus what he did with Roulette.

          An earlier example of it being wise to have a theoretician on board would be Lord Kelvin having to come up with transmission line theory after the earliest sub-sea cables manifested unexpected ‘capacitance’ == impedance mismatch reflections.

36. Where’s Ned Ludd and Arnaud Amalric when we need them?

    • Unfortunately Arnaud Amalric was misheard in the heat of battle and ZOG has been sorting us out every since.

37. My parents and a friend are on the carnivore diet. I was highly skeptical, given nutritional deficiency unless you eat a lot of eggs, lack of fiber, etc. (Apparently there’s supplementation involved, but still.)

    All three have lost a lot of weight, fast but not crashing, all three report achy joints and stiffness associated with normal aging diminishing or disappearing, increasing energy— the stuff you want. In my parents’ case, both have gotten physicals and bloodwork, and everything seems OK so far. My mom was becoming a bit indoorsy; now she’s outside in the garden and flower beds every day, like she used to be.

    So I’m a bit less skeptical. Who knows? I mean, I wouldn’t mind eating steak and eggs with lots of butter and salt every day lol. Not endorsing it, just offering some anecdotal evidence.

    • I’m with your Mum & Pops, Painter. Wife & I have followed a similar diet of meat, eggs, nuts & berries and are in very good health – no complaints, no weight problems.

      God fearing too. I’m sure that helps. HE likes us. I don’t understand his ways, but HE knows we’re trying our best and he appreciates that.

    • There is nothing new about this diet. It has been around with different names since the 1970’s. It works until your get tired of eating steak and eggs every day. The reason you lose weight is you sharply reduce your caloric intake as your body adjust from processing carbohydrates for energy to using fat. By the time people quit the diet, they have plateaued.

      That said, American consume far too many carbs and especially highly processed carbohydrates. Simply cutting out things like snacks, sweets and bread can do wonders. It turns out that your mother was right. Eat your spinach and never snack between meals.

      • start tracking what you eat and you will be surprised at the results; re:macronutrient ratios. i thought i was getting enough protein, and found out i was much lower than expected (and getting more carbs than desired). have to really fight to keep protein up and carbs down; e.g. take whey protein drinks daily.

        • Cottage cheese: curds and whey. The grayish liquid is the whey. Probably common knowledge, but a little college dairy science blew my mind. Started eating cottage cheese instead of drinking God-knows-what back when I did some weight training.

          • Read the label first. Cottage cheese producers are now diluting the dairy with vegetable gums, up to five gums in some Aldi cottage cheese l just inspected. These gums replace nutritious dairy with non-nutritive glue. It’s unconscionable give how cheap milk is to acquire. Nancy’s (Oregon) and Kalona (Iowa Amish) are available where I live and they make wholesome cottage cheese including the cultured type.

          • Did you hear about Saddam Hussein shelling northern Iraq?

            No.

            Yeah, there were some Kurds in his way.

            (A rather old joke.)

      • Agreed. I do love spinach. Steamed with sautéed garlic and browned butter poured over it. Yum!

        • Butter is a superfood. Get grass fed if you can afford it.

        • Is good for you. In moderation. Shovel down mountains of the stuff and you *will* get kidney stones. It’s high in oxalates.

      • I restarted consuming bread and pasta. I mill my own flours from organic grains like einkorn and buckwheat. The whole grain is eaten together with the natural constituents. That’s what our ancestors ate, it tastes fantastic, boosts my egg and healthy oils consumption, and yields gigantic human waste product. If you have the time and money, you should consider milling flour just before cooking.

38. “She Blinded Me With Science”
    – Thomas Dolby

    • Can someone explain what that the lyrics of that groundbreaking song mean? The lyrics suggest that her beauty and good housekeeping tamed or overshadowed science. Maybe “She Blinded me from Science” would be more accurate.

      https://mojim.com/usy126240x12x7.htm

      • A modern take on witchcraft? A nerd’s understanding of women? Art is practically a curse word these days, except wrt self-expression and ego masturbation.

    • Oh, but folks lately I have been spotted
      With a Big Mac on my breath
      Stumbling into a Colonel Sanders
      With a face as white as death

      I’m afraid someday they’ll find me
      Just stretched out on my bed
      With a handful of Pringles Potato Chips
      And a Ding Dong by my head

      – Larry Groce

    • “Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto!”

39. I have noticed numerous times when scientists talk about relativity and other famous Einstein endeavors they never talk about it detailed terms or explain the current thing with the theory. It’s always ” as Einstein said, or noted or theorized”

    As if he is an oracle who is cited. They can’t explain so they refer to the oracle.

    • there is a tremendous amount of hand waving in modern physics.

      • Right. And there’s a tremendous amount of mid-wit literature (*) marketed to people who want to feel and sound smart.

        I know a CFO who likes to opine on matters quantum and cosmological. I know he doesn’t know what a PDE is, let alone any of the other higher maths. Now I know what goes on with PDEs (was once a hack engineer), and also I know that I don’t know jack shit about Abstract Algebra and all the other high-falutin stuff that theoretical physicists use to play their Glass Bead Games… No big deal. I know I know less than nothing. Cool with that. Not deeply ego-invested in being a Besserwisser. Not much anyway.

        The problem is that the managerialist bugmen Economist and FT readers and the rulers they serve don’t know they don’t know. And what they think they know is worthless and dangerous.

        * Yuval Noah Creepycrawly and shrivelled up robot voice dude and invisible in the dark unless he smiles planetarium projectionist guy all say hi.

    • Is this of a piece with the witches’ tactic of using, “some people say…”(e.g. “hormone suppression of 8 year olds is completely safe and reversible”)?

    • GR and SR have lots of experimental confirmation over the years. There is very little woo-woo in relativity. The woo-woo is all concentrated in quantum theory rather than relativity.

40. My grandma always said, look at what kind of teeth an animal has & that tells you what their diet should be.
    Humans are omnivores so eat what you like, you may not necessarily be healthier or live longer but following some extreme fad, veganism for instance, won’t extend your life it’ll just seem like it.
    Eat drink & be merry for tommrow we will die.

41. On the topic of turning science into religion, didn’t the Jacobites try to impose a worship of science on the French population to replace Christianity? Didn’t the Bolsheviks try to do the same to the Russians? I’m too busy to research it now, but maybe one of our resident history jocks can assist.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Reason

    I’ll conclude with a point that some of my atheist friends cannot grasp: science cannot replace religion, morality, or ethics because science can only explain how the world works and knowing how the world works does not tell you what your values should be.

    It’s surprising how many people who appear to be intelligent cannot grasp this point. I wonder if we there is an exact point in the IQ distribution that separates those who can and cannot grasp this point.

    This reminds me of how many blacks can’t grasp how ratios and per capita work. It seems to be literally beyond their conceptual reach.

    • The dam’ Leftists have been on the right side of history for at least 240 years it seems. Funny how being on the right side of history so often results in epochal bloodbaths…

    • I tell ya, the Badthink is getting worse.

      We’re going to go from a race-based diet to a race-based religion,

      and that will bring our Doom!!
      The Wrath!! The End Udda World!!

    • Got to add in: “… because science can only explain how the world works and knowing how the world works does not tell you what your values should be.”

      Finest distinction ever.
      Standing ovation.

42. In the last year I’ve noticed that many products in their advertising try to work the word “science” into their tag lines, e.g. “Science did that!”. Of course this is usually accompanied by images of strong women, often brown, working happily in a white lab coat to create this new world.

    But science is never defined. The word itself is supposed to confer legitimacy by suggesting competence and results. Even after the divers failures of the Covid experience, science has claimed for itself a religious aura.

    • Thumbs up for using the word divers!

    • Lol. Most brown women in labs are looking for parrisites in stool samples.

      • They’re looking in the wrong place. The parasites are all in the front office.

    • Pythagoras was a negro, dontchaknow…

      • He ate beans; not okra and catfish.

        • Beans with mayonnaise.

    • “strong women, often brown, working happily in a white lab coat”

      Hahahaha! Thanks, I needed that.
      Lordy, they love playing dress-up.

      They pursued a High Science career because all their smart brown men are out chasing white wimmen!

43. You simply cannot take anything a physician tells or suggests to you at face value anymore. At one time they were held in high regard – perhaps too high a regard, but at least they were mostly their own men. Now days, they’re mostly just employees of some larger “health care” organization and more frequently, female. Further, one can do one’s own research and weigh the options and consequences rather than categorically taking one person’s word for it. It’s harder and harder to rely on the supposed “experts” these days.

44. It’s not just soft sciences like medicine and economics and so on that are corrupted. I’ve been coming more and more to the realization that even so-call “hard” sciences like physics are largely nonsense. The outstanding example is string theory that may have seen promising at one time many many years ago but has since been seen to predict absolutely nothing new. Not only that but it’s total failure has generated a lot of pseudo-scientific nonsense from the profession like multi-verses and the “anthropomorphic principle”. And still billions and billions are set on fire every year to smash a bunch of **** together in these insanely expensive colliders for no apparent reason.

    This defect isn’t entirely apolitical either. These self same physics types that are willing to sign on to believing all sorts of pseudo-scientific nonsense – Derbyshire’s intricate systems with no actual content – are the same types pushing “climate change” as “settled science”.

    • What about all that invisible dark matter that explains so much. A while back they revisited that and thought maybe not. Today, they may all be onboard with it again. Capricious group for one that supposedly hold to hard facts.

      • More seeming pseudo-science. It’s matter but somehow magically it doesn’t interact with anything so there’s no way to actually observe any of it. You just have to take our word it’s there and there’s no way you can prove us wrong.

        • Don’t get me going on paleontology.

          • did someone say “paleontology”? 😛

        • They lost me with the square root of -1=I, an imaginary number.

          • Imaginary numbers are OK. They just get a bad rap because of the silly name. This so-called i is just a shorthand way of describing rotations. One i is just a turn of 90 degrees. Take another i and you’ve turned 180 degrees in total and are now facing the opposite direction – hence if you started pointing in the “1” direction then two i’s in a row will leave you pointing in the “-1” direction.

          • Just wait until you find out about exp(i*pi).

            Anyway i or j depending on your preference turns out to be kind of handy for reasoning about all sorts of things. We’d be in a pretty pickle if we couldn’t do the maths for alternating current circuits and rotating machinery.. And FFTs seem to have some potential… Maybe one day 😀

      • Yeah there’s money in them there Dark Matter mines, which is why the math will be tortured to show it must exist and can be shown “for sure” after decades of more research grants.

    • The more they try to turn a science into public interest, the more corrupt it tends to be. As far as I know, string theory is just a bunch of garbage without a shred of evidence to back it up, just “beautiful math.” AFAIK, there has only ever been one experiment performed that had to potential to generate evidence for the theory and it failed.

      Something like string theory could only exist for so long as it has in academia and other government funded institutions. Same with the search for fusion power or even SETI. These things persist for decades and decades wasting enormous resources while producing absolutely nothing.

      I have nothing against basic research. But at some point you have to say maybe we just aren’t there yet and that new technology needs to be invented before going further down the road on a particular line of inquiry.

      • Hey! That’s not true. There is nothing more edifying that the soothing voice of The Southpark Chef of Science, Neil deGrasse Tyson (is he really just a hyphenated black lesbian in disguise?), telling me that nihilism and buddhism are science and the world is better understood.

        • Come on now. Saint Tyson revealed to us the holy truth: that Pluto wasn’t a planet!

          Millenia of white guys debunked. They had it wrong all along.

45. The “science” is about money and ideology for the most part. Regarding the Covid scam IMHO the population reduction theory can’t be overlooked. If the scam was only about money the powers that be could simply have come up with a “vaccine” that did not work but was not harmful.

    Instead they came up with one that is both ineffective and much more harmful than the original virus. This not to mention banning treatments that were effective and substituting treatments that were deadly. Many, if not most, of the Covid deaths, were due actually to hospitals killing people with Remdesivir and ventilators instead of using proven cures.

    • Not only that, they made a cocktail of known, cheap treatments that they denied worked so they could release a government sanctioned version of it that costs $750.

      I know some elders who recently did their retirement dream cruise and got Covid. They had to quarantine for 6 days and couldn’t see their dream city. They took the $750 ivermectin/hydroxycloriquine (sp?), cocktail and felt better for two days. Now they are back and going to the critical care unit because they are still horribly sick. They also got sick after taking the vaccine.

      This thing is very sinister. Just look at Bourlas. Can you imagine how bad his breath is and how heinous his farts are? The evil that resides in that guy and that radiates from his core is palpable even in pictures and film clips.

    • to me, the fact they even got the israelis to judas goat their own people is telling.

    • Heh. Just wait til the sterility rates kick in.

      The secret to victory is to separate cause and effect in time. By the time the victims start to realize something happened, the perps are long gone, the event forgotten, and the cover lie enshrined.

46. The most flagrant example of scientific malfeasance in nutrition was when there was an egg shortage in the 60s, so President Johnson asked the health boards to declare eggs unhealthy, to which they immediately complied and still make the claim to this day.

    Scientists follow prestige and grant money, and the peer review they are so proud of is now nothing more than gatekeeping in the modern age, not to mention unnecessary when the internet allows anyone to publish data and findings to a large audience.

    • Is *that* where it came from. Thanks. Food “science” like a temporary war tax.

      Eggs, bananas, and breast milk: the three most perfect foods.

      • Good thing I regularly get 2 out of 3.

        • Yeah me too, I almost never eat Bananas

47. “Given the trillions spent on medicine and medical research”

    Who pays the piper calls the tune. Scientific “research” is rarely objective — either the paymaster wants certain results or the scientist is on his own account deliberately looking for certain results, which may extend even to faking results (even Newton was not immune).

    As G.B. Shaw used to say, every profession is a conspiracy against the lay public. Science is no exception. I still don’t know what qualifies as science. Physics? Yes. Chemistry? Yes. Biology? Yes. Medicine? I don’t think so. Just putting on a white lab coat doesn’t make one a scientist. Furthermore, even in what I accept as scientific disciplines, there’s not that much in common. So why use the umbrella term of “science?” Physics in large part (but not completely) is distinguished by an abstract mathematical approach. This doesn’t hold for either chemistry or biology (though there are areas such as physical chemistry and mathematical biology where there is some math). Coming back to what Shaw said, scientists seem to be a self-appointed cabal of priests, supporting and supported by the modern state and private interests.

    Even areas of science that have been spectacularly successful, we don’t understand that much. Physicists do not really understand why quantum mechanics works, what is really going on. But it works — which is the key criterion for any science — so we use it.

    In late Western civilisation (a la Spengler) we’ve reached the point of sharply reducing returns on scientific research. I don’t know when the last spectacular advance in theoretical physics took place. There is no unification of gravity theory and quantum mechanics on the horizon. There may be limits to our understanding of the physical universe. As Frances Amelia Yates pointed out, mathematics turned out to be one of the master keys to the cosmos. But it may not be the only one, and it may have limits we have not arrived at.

    In popular culture (i.e., among people who haven’t and probably cannot even master basic calculus) science exists as a cult — one either to be embraced unthinkingly or to be kept at arm’s length, with a heavy does of scepticism. I’m sympathetic to the latter.

    • Let’s thank our lucky stars that there is not yet a quantum theory of gravity, assuming that one is possible. It would be a profound advance soon followed by foolish scientists rushing to tell governements about exciting new weapons or other insidious technology which could be made if only politicians would subsidize them (and the fools) with billions of dollars, euros, yen, and so on.

    • does quantum physics work? i see it mentioned in relation to computing, but no commercial products yet. is something real if it cannot be monetized?

      • My limited understanding of q computing is it does work but is too resource intensive for now to be commercially practical.

48. The facts speak for themselves: the USA is not a top-tier country when it comes to longevity. The worship of so-called experts did more damage than good. This is why I’m not a fan of technocratic authoritarianism.

    Remember, none of the people paid to study the USSR predicted its collapse. This is a recurring problem with “experts”.

    But yeah, this doesn’t mean go believe in some crackpot theory. It just means we all have to ultimately think for ourselves.

    • The hilarious thing about the CIA being completely wrong about the Soviet Union is they turned around and spent millions on studies to prove they were in fact right all along.

    • i used to work with this indian guy, and he made an offhand mention of how much cancer there was in the US (compared to India). so i looked it up, and he was right; there is much more cancer here, than there; and India is a shot hole country. something very wrong and very dangerous has been going on here for a very long time.

      • If I had to pick a single culprit it would guess processed slop.

      • Much higher diabetes rate in India, though. Constantly hogging down rice and bread, and Indians also have the helluva sweet tooth. Mebbe that’s why their ice cream (kulfi) is the best I’ve ever eaten.

        • Mebbe that’s why their ice cream (kulfi) is the best I’ve ever eaten.

          The pistachio one is phenomenal. So is the mango one. The rice puddings are excellent. They have something else called “ras malai.” You have to try it before you die.

          • Yeah, the pistachio is my favorite. Lady Kozelskii dotes on ras malai. But hell, I just love Indian food in general. Too bad most of the recipes I cook at home just don’t quite measure up to the stuff I get in good Indian restaurants.

      • The aspect of who has it worse is confounded by the populations being compared. Until they control for the genetics, we have no answer.

      • Life expectancy in India is less than 70 for men, and that is an improvement over the 60 or so not that long ago. If cancer and age are related, and there is some indication they are, that probably is the reason. Men in the US live to about 76 now, down a bit from not too long ago.

        • We need to be careful here, the statistic you cite is “from birth”. Those of us reading here are far from “birth”, although for a few, the comment “born yesterday” still seems appropriate. 😉 In other words we’ve passed a few significant milestones in the game of life.

          IIRC, the figure I was told and that was used in retirement calculations was (in my 60’s) a mean of 84 yo.

49. While taking a human biology class it was amazing how many times the answer to questions on body functions and processes were, “It just does that.” So much science has not learned yet.

    • Very true. I had a conversation with a gastroenterologist who told me, point blank, that he and his colleagues don’t really know how the esophagus works. Blimey.

    • shit, we can’t even cure a virus yet!

50. Talking about how he wrote women characters so well, Melvin Udall has it right about many experts: “I think of a man. And I take away reason and accountability.”

51. On the subject of experts and science, there’s never been a statement as arrogant and ridiculous as Dr. Anthony Fauci declaring, “I am the science.”

    • He was like a lame Judge Dredd.

    • Fauci is another example of a senile old coot (but at a higher level than Biden). A prime example of a medical bureaucrat, whose office depends crucially on supporting the state and other vested interests. In ancient times he would have been a high priest supporting some despotic regime. Look at his face — there isn’t a vestige of intelligence or honesty there.

52. The interesting thing one learns when taking a couple of human biology classes is the number of functions in the body that have no explanation. The “It just does that” reasoning for these processes becomes almost comical in the true lack of understanding we have for systems in the body.

    • It really is amazing. Billions were spent to let boomers have an erection, but we have no idea if dietary fat has any impact on serum cholesterol levels. Now we have pharmaceutical companies running ads with the phrase, “sex assigned at birth.” Why would anyone trust these people?

      • I can see the meme.

        BoomErection

        An old semitic/ghandi looking guy with tits drooping to his stomach, skin falling off his body, his pants around his emaciated, bunyan pocked ankles with a ginormous, tumescent boner standing tall above his balls that hang to his knees. In the background POC mutants loot and burn and murder in the smoldering urban ruins while the Pfizer helicopter lands atop the Blackrock skyscraper.

        I bet Jim Goad already has some artwork like this somewhere in his canon.

        • Hieronymus Bosch ain’t got dicksquat on you, RR…

      • well, to be accurate, viagra was developed as a treatment for high blood pressure. the ED benefits were a nice “extra”. and in fact the family of PDE-5 inhibitors (Viagra, Cialis, et als) do have tremendous benefit with regards to preventing heart attacks and strokes.

        • Actually, there’s a bit more to that. Viagra was indeed a medicine invented for another cause, but big Pharma gets to redo the patent if they repurpose the drug. They got a new “use” patent for Viagra. Prior to that, compounding pharmacies were grinding up the old drug and marketing it for ED. It also doesn’t hurt either that the market for sexual potions is huge (see: China).

53. Had to go to Fedi to snag this bit:
    The science types are like women. They don’t think. They repeat consensus.
    Missed in this too was that while I was getting preached at by an acquaintance about COVID a different hospital in their medical system was cutting the genitals off of kids.

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