Lewis and Clark marked their trail with laxatives
THESE PILLS WERE the pride and joy of Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the Founding Fathers and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
Later, a descendent of Dr Rush would go down in infamy for a foolhardy escapade to the Titanic in a carbon-fiber submersible called Titan.
Dr. Rush’s style of “heroic medicine” had caused his star to fall quite a bit by this time — especially after the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793, when his patients died at a noticeably higher rate than untreated sufferers.
Seems familiar...
250 years after Dr Rush and somehow the head doctor in our country believes in the miasma theory of disease, only marginally more modern (still ancient Greek).
His point is we have 364 days a year to address obesity, but - in practice - the medical community waits until the last day and tries to develop a vaccine that will allow us to stay overweight and just kill the germ.
That is a quite controversial claim and one I hope he did not make. Do you seriously mean we should not have developed a vaccine because fat people dying would have been preferrable? If we had not developed a vaccine I do not think people would have changed their habits, more overweight people would just have died.
The medical community has taken overweight very seriously and a lot of money has been put into developing weight loss drugs but it is not like CDC can magically make people eat better.
Do you seriously mean we should not have developed a vaccine because fat people dying would have been preferrable?
I really have no idea how you could read that from those words? He's saying he wishes we had been more proactive in tackling obesity prior to the pandemic.
As you say, yes, they already do a lot, so it's still quite misguided, but still very far from how you were framing it.
He uses the terms in a muddled way rather than disputing germs existence. Eg:
Miasma exponents posit that disease occurs where a weakened immune system provides germs an enfeebled target to exploit.
When a starving African child succumbs to measles, the miasmist attributes the death to malnutrition; germ theory proponents (a.k.a. virologists) blame the virus. This is in the second paragraph and is exactly what tfa represented. It also argues directly against the idea that “a weakened immune system provides germs an enfeebled target to exploit” using measles deaths in otherwise healthy yet unvaccinated American children as an example. This is only a “hit piece” in that it’s blatantly critical of RFK Jr. and his ideas - those ideas are complete garbage and deserving of ridicule, and the leader of HHS espousing them should make him a target of far more criticism than this.
His point is we have 364 days a year to address obesity, but - in practice - the medical community waits until the last day and tries to develop a vaccine that will allow us to stay overweight and just kill the germ.
Maybe I need reevaluate my interpretation here, but this reads heavily like you’re not only blaming doctors for failing to “cure” people’s obesity, but also for waiting too long to address it, instead (incorrectly) opting to treat or prevent the virus that the patient is seeing them for. Am I reading that right? Basically “doctors refuse to treat the real problem - obesity - and instead wait until the last second and (wrongly) treat the virus”?
It’s just difficult for many people to lose weight and keep it off.
Even wrong theories can have a kernel of truth. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory
And viruses being airborne (carried on droplets) simply isn't what miasma theory is. Actual miasma theory is wrong and has no kernel of truth ... a fine example of how correlation is not causation.
And let's get back to the point:
somehow the head doctor in our country believes in the miasma theory of disease
The man is an extraordinarily dangerous crank who is putting the health of Americans at grave risk ... he has already killed numerous children and it will soon get much worse. Any attempt to defend him in any way is vile.
no arguments against a virus causing respiratory disease being carried airborne
In the US this was not true. Authorities strongly asserted that the virus did not have "airborne" transmission properties, despite numerous people contracting it while locked in their cruise ship cabins.
I was successful in convincing an elderly friend that this advice was wrong and she needed to wear an N95 when inside grocery stores even if she sanitized her hands after every time she touched anything and even if she stayed 6 feet away from people. It took about 12 months for the mainstream narrative to start to say that vulnerable populations should wear N95 masks when indoors with the public.
My take is that they fucked up but in an understandable way (rather than some evil conspiracy).
I remain convinced that Trump was against masks because it would mess up his bronzer and ruin the illusion it's intended to convey.
And if we're going to talk about Fauci's noble lies in the interests of public health, we ought to say something about the loon with a dead worm in his brain who sincerely believes, promotes, and enforces all sorts of nonsense that is going to result in a lot of illness and death.
Why the WHO took two years to say COVID is airborneEarly in the pandemic, the World Health Organization stated that SARS-CoV-2 was not transmitted through the air.
Also, by the standards of so-called "evidence based medicine" where we care less about the proposed mechanism a treatment works by, and more about whether it actually works, then miasma theory (or maybe it's more accurate to call it miasma practice, then?) doesn't look so bad. Florence Nightingale didn't bury horses because she believed in germ theory, she did it because they stank - and because she had developed statistical evidence that such hygiene interventions worked, whatever the mechanism. It took a long time for germ theory to get sophisticated enough that we can say it started saving more lives than sanitation (which was developed based on miasma theory).
The first incarnations of an ultimately correct theory often work worse in practice at the start.
Not that it excuses Kennedy.
600 giant pills that the men called 'thunder-clappers,'
I love little reminders that people haven't changed that much over the centuries
Source: the amount of time it takes to scroll through the Wikipedia page for “it’s all Greek to me“ (variations common across dozens of languages)
Sadly the list does not include an entry for how you would express this sentiment in Ithkuil.
(both are of course conlangs)
You also have another joke from 1600 BC: "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? Sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile - and urge the pharaoh to go fishing."
My host: they're called see-you-tomorrow
Me: oh ok
Host: because they're indigestible
Me: awkward pause
Host: you're gonna shit!
Me to myself: oh thank God. Between the flights and insomnia it's time.
This doesn't seem particularly safe or good for the environment.
I doubt if the product is sold now.
/endrant
This site would otherwise be fine and not lose any charm if it just had a media query to switch to a single column layout and larger font size for screens below a certain px width (768px usually for mobile).
I don't get why it's not implemented. I didn't really have to do much in my user styles except remove the float in the "barBod" class and set the width to 100% on the table elements.
Anyway the obligatory related guideline:
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
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font: 100%/1.3 Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
background-color: #666;
background-image: url("https://offbeatoregon.com/assets-2010/1012b_gorge-highway-crown-point/crown-point-1800px.jpg");
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position: center top;
background-attachment: fixed;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
color: #222;
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The https://offbeatoregon.com/ one looks ok though if a bit busy maybe.
Eg, birds at a falconry can’t be fed just the usual bird “meat”, they need to have the skin and feathers attached which is essential for their digestive tract.
One of my favourite things I didn't know was that they kept getting to new 'untouched' villages of Native Americans who would come out to trade and knew perfectly well that white people existed as they'd been visited for years by various fur traders.
- The expedition was like StarTrek/Voyager if it were a satire. A technological advanced boat with phaser weapons and futuristic medicine going boldly up the Mississippi to search for a wormhole to the Pacific and make first contact with new civilizations. Every village (and every random Indian dude) they met they presented their shiny uniforms and gave long-winded speeches (which were badly translated by Neelix/a good-for-nothing French trapper) about how they should ally with idealistic Starfleet (United States) instead of the evil Romulans and Ferengi (British and French). The Indians politely heard the speeches, than sat stoically in silence for a while during which they wondered how clueless from One to a thousand L&C were, and then asked for guns, alcohol and tobacco as gifts.
- Lewis & Clark give instead out medals of the Great Father Thomas Jefferson and funny hats left and right to make diplomacy with “chiefs”. Often the guy is just some hunter in the wilderness or some dudes being left in the village, I wonder how many big men and new hierarchies L&C created by randomly giving out a cool hat. Anyway the Indians politely take the gifted hat and then ask for guns, alcohol and tobacco.
- Every village they visit they ask that the tribe shouldn’t war against other tribes anymore as the US is strong enough to protect everlasting peace. Sometimes a village made the mistake to believe them and was promptly raided by the opportunistic warriors of a neighboring tribe.
- The L&C crew fucked more Indian women than Kirk kissed green girls from Orion. Of course women like exotic men in shiny uniforms giving expensive gifts, but often it was the men who brought their squaws without jealousy, because the advanced “medicine magic” must surely rub off through sex.
- The first contact between Starfleet and the Klingons (Prairie Sioux) was friendly but a big culture clash! The Americans polished their uniforms extra shiny and marched in formation and the Sioux one-upped them with their feather regalia and drum dancing. The Sioux proudly showed of the many slaves they just had raided in a war, look how mighty warriors we are! tlhIngan maH taHja!, and Lewis&Clark meekly suggested that the war captives look quite wretched, it would be christian to release at least the poor women and children?, and the Sioux are “Wtf, why? What is wrong with you Earthlings?”
- The Indian men treat their women shockingly bad. I guess I expected the “noble savage” from the westerns movies of my childhood, a wise hero who is in tune with nature and Gaia-feminism. No, the Prairie is a brutal Mad Max patriarchy! One time L&C (who are Virginia gentlemen) call the Indians out why they make their squaws do all the work and their excuse is that they are warriors who always have to be on guard and keep their hands free in case enemy tribes are attacking right now. Yeah, sure…
Edit: It seems I cant decide if I tell a story plot points in past (it is 200 year old history) or present tense (I remember it like a movie).
No, the Prairie is a brutal Mad Max patriarchy
this is the hard truth about tribal societies - a peaceful tribe is rare because they're at risk of being wiped out in a single day by an experienced warfaring tribe. I wish our schools taught the truth, rather than dancing around it and showing those optimistic "Dances with wolves" type films that glorify the tribal lifestyle.
If they shat themselves to death halfway, would they have been remembered as much?