Casey Means MD: The US is going DOWN if we cannot change this

One of the great things about being both (or neither!) liberal or conservative is I can judge each emergent narrative on its seeming merits. I'm not perfect and will get things wrong here and there, but hopefully I will also keep an open mind to correct information new to me.

I also feel there is such a thing as "the ring of truth", and the earmark of logic, which can emerge from left right or center.

Why am I beginning this blog post with this?

Because I want to introduce my liberal friends (the majority of my friends) to a conversation with a surgeon who at the very top of the medical game came to realize we're doing it all wrong, and left a very lucrative career and prestigious position to learn for herself the actual cause of health.

Believe it or not doctors are not taught such basic information.

However this conversation is initiated by a known (and widely despised) conservative.

I enjoy tremendously when an intelligent, highly trained and educated person such as Dr Means has a major awakening. Such is the case in this conversation.

So park your biases (temporarily, if possible), and enjoy this conversation. 

(And ignore the other guy:)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUH4Co2wE-I

Diet paradox: high fiber plant based vs no fiber carnivore

I'm interested in this seeming paradox because prominent carnivores are apparently having a good run at the disease reversal aspect of healthy diet. And in a country where 80% of the population is sick and tired, disease reversal comes first.

There's at least one exception among prominent carnivores, Paul Saladino, author of the book "The Carnivore Code: Unlocking the Secrets to Optimal Health by Returning to Our Ancestral Diet" was failing on the diet and fixed it by adding fruits to his carnivore diet.

And I'm not surprised he did this, but apparently a lot of carnivores were. I've been wondering how the prominent carnivores have been able to get away with the no fiber diet. Many follow a diet of beef, eggs, and butter only, with some salt added to prevent electrolyte deficiency, which can cause very uncomfortable symptoms, muscle cramps in particular.

I'm plant based and have also found a high fruit approach to be the difference between really good vs ok but not perfect. I tend to have two main meals, the first is fruit only with about 800-1000 calories depending on activity levels, around noonish, and primarily vegetables for my later meal. I also will frequently have fruit as I am preparing the dinner meal, so it is not unusual for me to get more than 50% of my calories in a day from fruits. 

Fruits are a high energy food source, and easy on the digestion, with no energy lag after eating, a very good thing during the work part of the day. Who wants an energy crash after eating?

Fruit is also the highest food in vitamins on a per calorie basis, with a lot of vitamin C. There have been several notable advocates of a high vitamin C approach over the years, including Linus Pauling, who was no dummy...

And I think I've found the confounder in the mix: very high levels of physical activity. There's a saying: you can be fit and healthy, but you can't be healthy and unfit. Vigorous regular movement of the body is essential for high energy full health regardless of diet.

I'm calling physical activity the confounder because from my observations the plant based approach appears to be more tolerant of a moderate activity approach, whereas the carnivore approach appears to be intolerant of moderate activity. The prominent carnivores  all seem to combine the diet with very high levels of activity.

I am not suggesting to take the lower activity approach if one desires high levels of energy, health, and happiness, regardless of diet. Happiness is included because fitness also causes good mood levels.

But I am saying if one is lower in activity it would seem the plant based approach appears to work better than the carnivore approach.

And then there is the more common omnivore approach, the everything diet, which is replete with confounders, and consequently not conducive to accurate study conclusions. 

We humans are the only primate with a dual fuel system: we can burn primarily carbs or fats for fuel. The debate is essentially which is best when 80% of calories are coming from either.

So it would be interesting to see a long term controlled study that compares both carnivores consuming 80% of calories from fat, and plant based consuming 80% of calories from carbs, each with only moderate levels of daily activity.

But we are always hearing "carbs are bad" and "fats are bad". Both of those statements prey on the general lack of nutrition education out there, and are designed to keep people confused about nutrition.

Both statements are false when we are talking about calories coming from whole foods. And if we think about it a little bit, why would we call calories coming from toxic junk either carbs or fat? These calories are just junk, end of story. When fuel is mixed with "not fuel", as in the case of processed foods, it is degraded relative to the percent of "not fuel" in the mix. 

Simple right?

And even moderate amounts of "not fuel" degrades health significantly. Health is consistent with high levels of both energy (clean whole food calories) and all the other nutrients in combination. 

Anyway, I doubt we will see that study, pharma certainly isn't going to do it, their trillions are dependent on keeping us sick and tired.  It would have to be a long term study, which is to say, expensive.

But it seems to me the anecdotal are clear enough to suffice: plant based high carb wins.

The Intractability of Mythology

We (humans) take on a willful blindness that must accompany mythologies for them to arise and exist, and which come from what might be called "the immortality function". I believe all life has this at the base of it's functioning, it's what gives life it's robust intractability during the confidence phase of a lifespan, i.e. the birth and growth of a life. And life begins to release this intractability at and during the denouement phase of life, which can proceed with immediacy into sudden death, or a more gradual release into "old age".

I believe this is what Freud meant when he began using the term "death instinct" conjoined with the more common term life instinct. He saw that biological matter has a growth phase and a dissolution phase, and extrapolated that to all biology. It's probable then that even a biome (Earth) has these two phases, which in the terms of human consciousness is an incredibly long time, beginning, it is thought, 3.7 billion years ago. From that one thing we can see biology can have an immense quality of durability, at least in the singular case of our own biome.

But do we "own" it, or does it own us? The confidence imbued by the (unconscious) mythology of immortality has us believe we technological humans owns Earth's biome to do with as we see fit through the agency of technology, which seems likely to be equally creative and destructive. 

But in the context of the immortality myth, it is only the creative we can easily admit to. And this can be said to be the hubristic aspect of we humans in the context of the "life instinct" phase.

But do we need to be worried about this? In this aspect we humans can be said to be as unconsciously "stupid" as all the lower species, not different on some level than a plague of locusts. Resources are plentiful, we consume them, and reproduce until resources are sparse, then population collapses, and then the macro life/death cycle begins again.

We have an immediate example staring us in the face right now with the huge additional energy requirements of the artificial intelligence build-out. Do we even know how much additional energy will be required for this in proportion to the existing global energy requirements of humanity?

Whether we have a calculation for that or not, as a single point of reference a rack of traditional servers in a data center runs on 7 kilowatts of electricity, while a rack of AI servers (with increased processing power) uses 30-100 kilowatts. And the global AI server build out is only just beginning. How much energy will eventually be required just for AI servers compared to the total energy requirement for technological earth as existed pre-AI?

Since global energy consumption only goes up, it's probably safe to assume whatever energy "efficiencies" are created by AI will be substantially subsumed by the total AI energy burn. Whatever the total cost to ecology and biology will be, we can be pretty sure that calculation, if it does exist (and early estimates probably do), will not be Trumpeted from the roof tops.

Meanwhile the ecologically minded among us are concerned with the reduction of total energy burn, it is thought to be the only saving grace for the continuance of durable and happy life on Earth. The energy burn of AI will apparently be so large they will not be met with green alternatives, and the only sources with that level of efficiency are uranium and fossil fuel.

I've always thought of technology as a double edged blade of equal sharpness. But since total energy burn and consequent destruction of ecology continues moving in the direction of MORE, I am wondering about Freud's death instinct in the context of the progression of technology. Will there be a tipping point into denouement? Are we there, have we passed it already?

It's impossible to know. What we might assume however is the plot line is significantly progressed at this point.

Why did JD Vance say Trump is America's Hitler?

I was curious why Vance compared Trump to Hitler, so I did a search on Hitler and the first hit was the Hitler Wiki page, which said:

"In the book "Hitler's Psychopathology", Bromberg and Small argue that many of Hitler's personal self-manifestations and actions were to be regarded as an expression of a serious personality disorder. On examination of his family background, his childhood and youth and of his behavior as an adult, as a politician and ruler, they found many clues that Hitler was in line both with the symptoms of a narcissistic personality disorder and of a borderline personality disorder."

AFAIK "personality disorder" wasn't a thing in the days of Hitler's murderous genocide. And this book (link below) wasn't around either: "The Dangerous Case Of Donald Trump".

https://www.amazon.com/Dangerous-Case-Donald-Trump-Psychiatrists-dp-1250212863/dp/1250212863/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

So why the heck did Vance call Trump America's Hitler? And why did he agree to be Trump's running mate?

It seems a bit odd to me that Hitler was so mesmerizing to so much of the German population, as he went about murdering a significant portion of that population. But apparently the power of "mesmerization" is one of the characteristics of narcissistic personality disorder.

Apparently Vance is mesmerized.

Covid Collateral - A documentary film on the Covid pandemic

Covid Collateral, a documentary film on the Covid pandemic, apparently cannot currently be seen. Or if it can I couldn't find it after a pretty thorough search.

What we can see is a conversation after the initial screening with Dr Jay Bhattacharya, an expert epidemiologist and public health economist, Dr Robert Redfield, former director of the CDC, Vanessa Dylyn, the producer and director of the film, and a second economist.

It is still difficult to discern the exact motives of those who controlled the narrative around the pandemic, as these individuals and institutions are basically still in control of those narratives. This is an unfortunate situation as it suggests we no longer live in a free country, a primary earmark of which is an environment where completely open Discourse among established experts is never suppressed and punished. 

Why is this so critically important? The development and dissimilation of accurate knowledge is accelerated.

I found the post screening conversation interesting and informative...it can be seen here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrtJ4zUJeAE

Mythology - what is it's purpose?

Every era in human history has created mythologies.  We modern scientific humans think we are beyond those eras in history because we have science. 

But we're not.

Mythology has crept on stealth feet into science. How do we know the difference between real and fake? The term "science and technology" does the trick. If a functioning and robust technology can be created from a scientific discovery, we know that specific science is solid.

But it does not always turn out that way, in fact, frequently, it does not. And the mythologists can be loath to admit it to themselves, and then of course to others.

Mythologies do not function in an era unless "everybody" believes them. And mythologies are always about immortality in some way. 

The Gods are immortal. In addition they looked like us and had powers we mortal humans do not have. In mythology power is external. 

In reality power is internal. In addition, immortality is a myth. 

Both are true.

One of the more common mythologies of our era is there will be "space humans" in the not too distant future. "The Heavens" have been a mystery and fascination since early humans, for good reason.

Space Humans are not the astronauts who are in space comparatively short term, they are interplanetary humans who colonize other planets (starting with Mars), and travel from planet to planet like we travel by jet from continent to continent.

And it will be a big adventure conquering space!

NASA began to realize some time ago humans cannot survive for lengthy periods in non-biological conditions. But they don't talk about it....it would be cruel to take away one of our most cherished mythologies.

So then we'll just create biological conditions! How hard could that be? We have technology to solve all problems!

Let's just stop a minute to ask a question...how many biological planets do we astronomically informed humans know of? One, obviously. That does not mean there are no other biological planets out there, it means if there are we just do not know about it...yet. We have, so far, been listening for extraterrestrial signals for a century, but have heard nothing. 

Biology IS life, right? And LIFE is intelligence, right? The expression "dumb as a rock" is to the best of our knowledge 100% true...right?

Not to get too far out into outer space, but if biology is the organizing principle for life, and the universe (as we know it) APPEARS to have a "structure" (organizing principle), it does seem likely that there would be other biological planets out there. But even if so, how far away are they? Light years? 

A single light year in human terms is unimaginably long, but in context of the observable universe it's too tiny to comprehend - the current estimate of the observable universe is 92 BILLION light years, end to end.

It would seem then if the conditions for biology to arise (in the biome sense) are very precise, and consequently very rare, it would also then seem that the arisal and eventual collapse happens in singular fashion, and as a consequence of the idea that everything is always changing.

What does any of this have to do with "Space Humans"? Only that humans cannot really survive in good enough health to be functional (or even alive) for long periods outside of an organically created biome, with the only one we know of being earth.

Which brings me to a point I have mentioned once or twice before  :)  ----

Biology is massively underappreciated.