While I continue the process with Tim and Dr. Grace Liu to create a book that the very most people will want to read worldwide, I've had to pull back a bit on blogging, source good commenter and contributor material, and do stuff like this: just a random dump. But, you're getting maybe the best 5% of everything of the hundreds of things I see daily.
~ Farts are healthy for you.
Farting Is Healthy, Says Mayo Clinic
“Could passing gas, in some instances, be a sign that our gut microbes are busy keeping us healthy?” she asked.
Kashyap’s answer: “Absolutely. Eating foods that cause gas is the only way for the microbes in the gut to get nutrients. If we didn’t feed them carbohydrates, it would be harder for them to live in our gut.”
Kashyap continued, adding that when gut microbes “gobble up food” and create gas, “they also make molecules that boost the immune system, protect the lining of the intestine and prevent infections.”
“A healthy individual can have up to 18 flatulences per day and be perfectly normal,” he added.
For a more complete explanation of why farting is healthy and not rude — really, it’s not — we recommend you check out the full scientific report.
~ Keeping on the topic of social unacceptance, I finally have a scientific basis for my potty mouth.
Why the #$%! Do We Swear? For Pain Relief
But cursing is more than just aggression, explains Timothy Jay, a psychologist at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts who has studied our use of profanities for the past 35 years. "It allows us to vent or express anger, joy, surprise, happiness," he remarks. "It's like the horn on your car, you can do a lot of things with that, it's built into you."
I've always told those who complain about my swearing to just go fuck off. And when they use the regurgitate they spout about being uneducated or uncreative, I cite Samuel Clemens.
"Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." — Mark Twain
~ What's the earth epidemiology on Alzheimer's and Dementia? Glad you asked.
Industrialized Nations in Red
You can see the chart as well. The U.S. is #3 behind Finland and Iceland. Notable is that while there are a handful of "underdeveloped" (how hubristic-pretentious, eh?) countries in the red zone, you will not find many 1st world or well-"developed" country in the far more numerous green, purple, and grey zones. A few very low to extremely low notables are: Portugal, Germany, Austria, China, Greece, Russia, and both Singapore and Monaco at ZERO.
Draw your own conclusions. And follow the money and the whores of politics and public policy and influence, paid by massive "food" and drug companies. And yes, so it doesn't fill up comments, we all hopefully understand the confounding variable of diagnosis and reporting accuracy. Nonetheless, it paints at least a fuzzy picture for me.
~ I took a look at the program lineup for AHS14 yesterday and was disappointed.
Don't get me wrong. I have been a staunch supporter of the Society and its annual Symposium since when I lafed at Aaron Blaisdell and Brent Pottenger for trying to put it together, starting in about 2009. Never thought it would happen to the scale they envisioned. I promoted it anyway, best I could—I truly love to be wrong—and ended up speaking alongside big names in our community in both 2011 and 2012.
Moreover, in the aftermath of Seth Roberts' (a 2011 presenter alongside Tucker Max) death, I was kindly shown how both Seth Roberts and Melissa McEwen stood up for me against complaints, in speaking in '12, after I'd shot my potty mouth off way too much, too often; ironically, Melissa was one of the targets. Perhaps I attained a bit of enlightenment as to how she decided to turn on me right after the event, when I published a post taking to task a volunteer who had a lot of bad to say that I took umbrage to.
So where's the beef? It's just mostly SOS as far as I can tell. Very few presentations on the gut biome, i.e., the frontier of human health science, now. So very many presentations that are essentially the same as when I spoke in '11 and '12, giving me an essence of cloistered Ivory Towersville.
Ironically, Paleo/Ancestral, as it's being put out now, is falling behind the science big time. I wonder how many have integrated C4 plants, grasses, sedge tubers and their easily and abundant exploitation, and with a nutrition profile that rivals mother's milk. Not many so far.
Perhaps AHS15 will be more worthy of attendance. Hope so. Always room for improvement. And I dearly wish for not so much success as I do staying in front of everyone.
Here's a bit I worked just yesterday in chapter 6 of the book, that's now about 400 pages and 2,000 references, regarding diets at the extremes of civilization.
Everywhere early man went, he encountered food and microbes that supported him, and his gut. It should by now be clear to the reader that for optimal health and fitness, our gut relies on a substantial intake of plant matter and microbes. At various points in the human migration out of Africa to all corners of the globe, turns in the road led them to places without access to fresh fruits and vegetables year round. Many point to the North American Inuit as just such a group of isolated hunter-gatherers that had little or no fiber or plant matter of any kind—consuming almost nothing but sea and land animals.(79) Surely, some assert, the fact that man can survive on an all animal-based diet is proof that humans need no plants. We believe this conclusion to be a substantial leap, one that could merit an entire chapter—perhaps a book. At the same time, such fringe positions—existing as far from the human norm as the arctic circle is from the equator—merit but brief mention here. We believe the evidence actually shows the Inuit to be a prime example of a people that targeted the use of plants their microbes needed, quite the opposite of how they’re often portrayed.
In his 1935 article, Adventures in Diet, Vilhjalmur Stefansson wrote of his travels in the Arctic and of living with the Inuit of Canada and Alaska.(80) He detailed how the Inuit would go for 6-9 months at a time on nothing but meat and fish—virtually a zero carbohydrate diet. He later made headlines when he and a fellow explorer spent a year under medical supervision eating nothing but meat and offal, remaining in good health. His detailed descriptions of how the Inuit remained healthy exclusively on meat and fat are often cited as justification in the promotion of very low carbohydrate or ketogenic diets.
While it’s possible that Stefansson observed and reported accurately, the Inuit and Eskimo are hardly strangers to plant foods. While they were certainly not eating big salads daily, or growing vegetable gardens when Stefansson observed them, the inhabitants of the far north were eating far more plant matter than the purveyors of low-carbohydrate folklore care to acknowledge. And what they were eating may surprise you.
You'll have to suspend surprise. And yea, those are the 79th and 80th cites toward the end of a single chapter, and all the others are just the same. Huge numbers are from 2013 and even 2014.
Stay ahead of the science, or fall way behind. Once you fall behind, investment motivates you toward entrenchment, and being increasingly wrong and incomplete by the passing of days.
~ I believe it was Jeffrey Tucker who coined the term "Beautiful Anarchy."
I actually led off my 9-Part Series on Anarchy Begins at Home with a quote from the bow tie sporting gentleman.
Thriving through lack of control
I saw this one, yesterday on his Facebook page.
Might everyone finally start minding their own business?
Jeffrey posted this quite interesting, illustrative piece about natural, beautiful anarchy yesterday, disembarking a commercial aircraft.
Can society manage itself? The examples of this happening every day are all around us. We only need the perspective to see why it matters.
At Liberty.me, we've seen examples of anarchy in golf and in surfing.
The process of deplaning from a crowded flight is an another interesting case in point. You have people who have been sitting for hours. The plane lands and pulls up to the gate. The ding sounds to signal that we are free from our seat belts.
Everyone wants off as soon as possible. The impatience is palpable, which is strange if you think about it. What difference could a few minutes make? But so it is.
There are no real enforcers in the deplaning process; not even flight attendants can manage this situation in its details. There are no explicit instructions. All we know is that we need to do something to free ourselves from this crazy metal tube and get on with our lives.
In this process, under crowded conditions, there are certain rules that emerge, even though they are not decided upon by anyone overtly and the norms pertain to randomly assembled strangers. These are the worst conditions for emergence of social norms; there are only 10-15 minutes in which it is allowed to happen. But since it is in everyone's interest that this little society and activity [do] well, order does indeed emerge.
The most obvious rule grows out of the physical reality. There is a narrow corridor and the people can only move in one direction. You can't easily get in front of others. You could rush ahead but that seems to violate some inherent sense of justice, which people just presume to mean "people closer to the exit should go before those further away."
So you wait your turn, row by row, systematically. Your own responsibilities are narrow: you wait for the person in front of you. What if that person is taking too long? There is a cost to hoping ahead unless you are invited to do so. A major one is that you can come across as rude and you will face glares and stares. Social ostracism is a powerful force even when there is no chance for further social interaction and no other identifiable downside to misbehavior.
For the most part, people comply. Not always of course. In a flight the other day, the couple in front me, occupying the window and middle seat, did not. They squeezed past the person [in] the aisle and stepped in front of passengers 5 and 6 rows in front of them. The disapproval of this action was intense from everyone around me. People were mortified, so much so that it struck me as overly scrupulous. I mean, what's the big deal about waiting an extra 15 seconds? But it's not about the time; its about the etiquette and the norms. And this reaction on the part of others was a signal to everyone else around me: do not do this.
There is one major exception here. If the person and people in question ask fellow passengers to go ahead because of a possible missed connection, everyone is very happy to allow free passage. In that case, we are being given a chance to show our sympathy and benevolence, and we are pleased to do so. This is what we would want others to do for us were we in this situation.
Here we have two behaviors that are exactly identical in every physical respect. People are essentially cutting in line. But our response to the actions are different based on what we perceive to be the motivations of the line hopers. It's amazing how the human mind can alter the meaning of a situation. A simple ask and a good excuse can turn what would otherwise be a burning annoyance into a occasion of charity.
We feel better about ourselves by deferring to people in need. You don't need mandates, bureaucrats, public service campaigns, much less a massive enforcement mechanism. The desire to do good for others, even when it is not directly to our personal advantage, is a feature of the human personality. There just has to be a compelling reason to do so.
Another condition that allows for an exception to the general rule is a person with a crying baby. That person really needs to step out in front, and everyone is very happy to let the suffering parent get a free pass.
There is also the delicate matter of baggage handling. There are light bags and heavy bags in the overhead compartments, and it can be awkward to pull them down while trying to stay out of the aisle. There is something [of] a taboo associated with touching other people's property, even to move it over in the luggage compartment. People tend to ask politely at boarding time: "may I move this over?"
Indeed, the presumption of property rights over baggage on an airplane is indisputable. Forget discussion about redistribution, inequality in possessions, much less the ridiculous notion of socialist ownership over all baggage. On the airline, everyone present, regardless of political ideology, is a firm believer in the absolute security of private property. Not even a seeming emergency can alter it; the pleas of a bagless person for the right to reapportion ownership rights [will] be rejected by one and all.
Anyone who would suddenly enact a fairer way for everyone to distribute baggage property would be shouted down immediately, and probably even tackled. It isn't just the case that you have to secure your own bag. Everyone present has a strong interest in a social norm that would stop theft, so everyone is willing to be a watcher and enforcer. We don’t need hectoring announcements that "if you see something, say something." We all know the rules and believe in them out of our own self interest, which is bound up with the interests of everyone else.
At the same time, some people clearly need help to get a large bag down from the compartment. A ritual begins. A stronger and taller person in the vicinity will politely offer help. The person with the large bag agrees to the assistance. The exchange occurs and everyone feels affirmed in this spontaneous act of socially coordinating benevolence.
But note that this is not only about benevolence. Everyone has an interest in speeding up the deplaning process. Informal rules and practices, friendly glances and deferrals, subtle body cues and motions, quiet hand movements, reasonable exceptions and general adoption of norms—all of these contribute to the instant order that emerges in this tight and and temporary social microcosm.
What makes it work? Most everyone wants [it] to work because we all want out. There could be chaos. Instead there is order—order without enforcement or overtly stated rules. If this could happen under these implausible conditions, it can happen throughout the rest of society too.
Let me conclude with an observation about something that has always mystified me. As we enter the airport and flying experience, we are constantly bombarded with messages about our bags and their security. Our bags are searched and there is great intensity about the whole matter.
But once we get to the baggage claim after we deplane, it’s a completely different matter. Our bags are thrown out on a carousel with no practical security at all. There are no attempts whatsoever, on the part of any authority, to make sure that people are picking up the right one. Sometimes an agent will feign interest in whether the ticket matches the bag but it's not authentic.
In principle, anyone could grab anyone's bag and scurry away. The whole scene looks rather alarming. And yet, I’ve never once heard of this happening. Maybe it does but I’ve never encountered it. People wait for what is theirs and go on their way. It works. Why? Because everyone has a personal interest in making it work. That’s the whole secret to why society can thrive without a state.
~ Looks like Scout is settled in. Much joy. Fully integrated, wrestling with Nuke all the time, chasing each other all in—a little much on the barking but work in progress—and sleeping next to mommy every night. He's gained a pound or two of lean, and is beginning to sport a ripped hind end. He's the poorest baby in the foreground.
Poooooor pathetic babies vying for a walk and foods
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