Ran Prieur

December 9.

2024-12-09T21:50:35Z

December 9. My favorite blog, The Whippet, is back from an eight month break, with #181: Much better than horses. There's a nice section about tautological phrases, like "It is what it is," and how the usefulness of these phrases refutes the reductionist theory of language. "The meaning of a sentence is not the meaning of all the individual words put together." The title of the page is about mules, who are superior to horses in almost every way. Quoting a Reddit post:

But mules are not stubborn simply because they feel like; they refuse to do things if they think it's a bad idea, or if they do not trust the human commanding them. I think it's really interesting that for many centuries, humans have been able to get horses (and humans, for that matter) to charge into battle to meet violent deaths. You simply can't get a mule to do that, because mules know better.

And a Reddit thread with lots of good stories, What's the strangest but completely legitimate reason you've ever made a decision?

December 5.

2024-12-05T17:10:24Z

December 5. Back to doom, starting with two Reddit sub-threads, about ocean fisheries collapsing and electrical linemen retiring.

On the level of political culture, I think Biden's pardon of his son, and the assassination of that health insurance executive, are part of the same trend, and I don't think that trend is moral decline -- as if industrial civilization was ever highly moral.

The trend is that the sphere of public spectacle is now unabashedly Machiavellian. Pundits are worried that this pardon might set a bad precedent, as if Trump would do any fewer pardons because of the shining example of Joe Biden. For fifty years the American left has tried to take the moral high ground, and in all that time they've had solid wins on only two issues, LGBT rights and weed legalization, on both of which they normalized behaviors that used to be considered immoral.

I see little sympathy for the dead CEO, and many jokes. They should look for someone who paid for private health insurance and was denied coverage -- that will narrow the field of suspects to almost all Americans. Or maybe he didn't really get shot, because the bullet wound was a pre-existing condition. A Hacker News comment:

Always seemed pretty strange to me that you can build and oversee an organization widely perceived (whether fairly or not) as evil, host what those evil-perceivers will view as Bad Rich Guy Conference in public, in a country where anyone can get as many guns as they want, and there isn't more violence like this. Seems like an unstable operating point for a society.

December 3.

2024-12-03T15:50:54Z

December 3. Continuing on death, I do a lot of things to put it off, and these are my top eight health practices, starting with the least controversial.

1) Sugar bad, fiber good. These two go together because fiber mimimizes the toxicity of sugar. 2) Drink mostly water. I drink tap water with an under-sink carbon block filter to take out the chlorine. 3) Avoid highly processed foods. We don't know exactly how, but they're definitely connected to the obesity epidemic. If the ingredients list is longer than it is wide, it's probably bad for you.

4) Walk a lot. A little known reason this is good for you, is that your calf muscles pump lymph fluid, which balances and cleans your body. I think this has something to do with restless legs syndrome. I also wear shoes that allow me to walk on the balls of my feet. It's less efficient than heel-toe, but it's a better calf workout and I believe that it's better for my joints.

5) Somewhere I read that the best detox is a very deep outbreath. That's probably not true, but I tried it, squeezing hard to the bottom of my lungs, and it sure feels like a detox. At first I always cough, as my windpipe tastes the bad air at the bottom. After four or five purges, the breath goes smoothly. I try to do this once or twice a day, and since I started doing it, I have not developed any crud in my lungs, even during my last round of Covid.

6) I believe that grass fed butter is the healthiest fat, and I eat a lot of it. Coconut and avocado oil are probably also good, and olive oil is good if it's not fake. The worst fat is anything partially hydrogenated, especially cottonseed, which is full of free radicals. The second worst, I believe, is the industrial blend of sunflower-safflower-canola that is common in highly processed foods.

7) Get some sun. I believe the present sun phobia will go the way of fat phobia as the evidence accumulates. This is a good article with plenty of science, Is Sunscreen the New Margarine? It's still important to avoid burning, but in summer I use hats and sleeves rather than sunscreen, and in winter I do 5-10 minutes of sunbathing on every sunny day.

8) Every chance I get, I walk barefoot in dewy grass. I believe that it's good for my immune system, and it also provides electrical grounding.