Perfection Posts
Dear F
The fact that you're choosing to eat less lead and cadmium is still - in your view - choosing, knowingly, to put those things in your tissues.
We can't escape the ingestion of toxins.
Here's a list from WHO of natural toxins in a wide range of foods.https://www.who.int/
Puritanism is a curse even if it leads to longer life.
"Too Pure Principles" Make Things Worse, Not Better
Religion, Perfectionism, Savonarola and The Pending Apocalypse of The Republican Party (This Post Was Written In 2012)
Every loon in the Freedom Caucus thinks she's a righteous warrior for the restoration of purity.
This quest to restore purity is what they all have in common - the sense that America has been dirtied and degraded by "the unwashed masses", coupled with the inconvenient truth that everyone of them would rather kill "the unwashed" AND trash democracy because they then believe that purity will be restored.
They are on a mission from God.
And since God is on their side, they can do NO WRONG.
You've gotta have a little dirt with your potato (or life-saving fecal transplant).
Puritanical righteousness is a curse masquerading as religion.
A fundamental component of my Dad's political thought was that is essential to have a legal system with such high standards for proving guilt that many evil doers would go free in order to prevent the imprisonment or execution of the innocent.
The alternative is fascism and the iron-fisted control on which it relies.
Trouble is, fascism -- although seductively attractive to people with authoritarian/absolutist orientation -- never delivers the purity and restoration it promises... only oppression and the normalization of injustice.
By aspiring to be like the angels, humankind falls lower than the beasts.
Love
A
PS I have nothing against prevention - within normal limits.
PPS You never wore a mask prior to COVID even though seasonal flu (much of which could have been prevented by masking... even among those who were vaccinated against influenza) caused one tenth the number of deaths as COVID does. We all "set personal limits" -- and that's pretty much okay with me -- but I think some limits are not as conducive to happiness as others. Couple this with the fact that we cannot know for sure, and we confront -- as we always do -- an uncertain universe, full of contingencies.
On Sat, Feb 4, 2023 at 2:27 PM FV wrote:
I just sent this as a matter of information.I'll eat 70 dark choc. but will choose a low cadmium- lead one.Stop smoking save lungs.Stop cadmium save kidneys. Cadmium and lead are not reversible once in tissue.It's called prevention .On Sat, Feb 4, 2023, 12:49 PM Alan Archibald <alanarchibaldo@gmail.com> wrote:Dear FWHO has determined that cadmium poisoning first shows up as kidney toxicity.Here is a link that enables you to get your cadmium levels tested for $74.99 - https://www.findlabtest.com/lab-test/heavy-metal-testing/ cadmium-testing-cost-quest-299 You can probably get your kidney function tested for free through MedicareI will try to track down an NPR spot I heard several years ago about the California men rather whimsically you decided to force the government to label those plasticky cardboard, coffee cups, used by fast food vendors as a cancer risk because those cups contained some infinitesimally minute, but nevertheless, measurable amount of a carcinogen.And he won his case!Here is a related NPR report, though not the audio file I hoped to find. https://www.npr.org/2018/08/30/643246149/coffee- does-not-merit-cancer-warning- label-ordered-in-california- fda-says The segment I wanted to forward concluded with the narrator visiting the government facility which did the coffee cup testingAs the narrator was leaving the building, he said: “How long will it be before the inside of this exit door must bear an obligatory alert, saying: "Danger! - You are now entering an area where ultraviolet radiation has been proven to cause.”As an aside, I will mention that if a cube of sugar is placed in a body of water the size of Honeoye lake (4 miles long by 1 mile wide), then - after a few days - sugar can be detected from a water sample taken anywhere in the lake.Thomas Aquinas made the seismic observation - and I quote from memory - that "all sin is characterized by loss of perspective and proportion".During my years of marriage, I had a ringside seat to the way that public health investigators “grow their programs” compulsively by scaring people with environmental and occupational threats that DO exist, but matter so little as to be vanishingly remote risks.No one gets out of here alive, F.And the death rate - at bedrock - is one per person.I will try to track down the saying about living one’s life with enough courage and abandon That one’s body will have gone through enough real life experiences, so that the person's corpse will be wrinkled and scarred - showing signs all over of having taken a beating.Here it is!We should not live recklessly, and we should take preventive measures wherever we can avoid high risk to life and limb.But I also agree with Chesterton’s observation that truly healthy people are so buoyant -- so blithe, blasé and insouciant -- that they spend little time monitoring their health and obsessively “checking” to see what condition my condition is in.I knew a person who was so obsessed with her health that she monitored it ceaselessly, a behavior which is itself a pathology of its own, a pathology that led her to speculate worrisomely about the existence of maladies she did not suffer.It became my constant observation — an observation I frequently repeated to her — that she was continually “yanking up her life by the roots in order to ensure herself that the roots were growing properly.”Worry and anxiety are their own serious diseases, F.Tragically, capitalism - particularly in its pharmaceutical industry manifestations — has normalized, worry and anxiety, redounding to the financial benefit of "the magnates" while doing real damage to the people capitalism/consumerism indoctrinates.Seen from one vantage, Capitalism is the ceaseless process of converting "wants" into needs."There is just enough bullshit to hold things together in this country. Bullshit is the glue, that binds us as a nation. Where would we be without our safe, familiar, American bullshit? Land of the free, home of the brave, the American dream, all men are equal, justice is blind, the press is free, your vote counts, business is honest, the good guys win, the police are on your side, god is watching you, your standard of living will never decline… and everything is going to be just fine— The official national bullshit story. I call it the American okie doke. Every one, every one of those items is provably untrue at one level or another, but we believe them because they're pounded into our heads from the time we're children. That's what they do with that kind of thing—pound it into the heads of kids, ‘cause they know the children are much too young to be able to muster an intellectual defense against a sophisticated idea like that, and they know that up to a certain age children believe everything their parents tell them. And as a result, they never learn to question things. Nobody questions things in this country anymore. Nobody questions it—everybody is too fat and happy. Everybody's got a cell phone that'll make pancakes and rub their balls now— Way too fucking prosperous for our own good. Way too fucking prosperous, Americans have been bought off and silenced by toys and gizmos. And no one learns to question things."George CarlinGeorge Carlin Describes America's Dumbf*ck Quandary
"Americans are fucked. They've been bought off. And they come real cheap: a few million dirt bikes, camcorders, microwaves, cordless phones, digital watches, answering machines, jet skis and sneakers with lights in 'em. You say you want a few items back from the Bill of Rights? Just promise the doofuses new gizmos."George Carlin
"You Have NO Choice," A New Frame For George Carlin's Classic Shtick "The American Dream""Shopping and buying - and getting and having - comprise the Great American Addiction. No one is immune. When the underclass riots in this country, they don't kill policemen and politicians, they steal merchandise. How embarrassing."George CarlinI am confident that nothing I say will induce you to leave behind your non-stop flirtation with hypochondria, and - like everybody - you have real reasons to believe you are right.But even so, what is the proportionate response to life’s ubiquitous menaces, which - if taken too seriously - either diminish one’s quality of life, or prevent a person from soaring into the rarefied realm of unconditional love and joy.
I happen to know that my kidney function is stellar, and so I will continue to eat my 70% cacao Aldi’s chocolate until there is some EVIDENT indication that my kidney function is declining.I will conclude by pointing out the QAnon’s lifeblood is taking a real fact “here and there” - like the existence of child sexual abuse - and turning into a cause celebre that drives fundamentally fearful people into believing that Tom Hanks and Hillary Clinton are abusing and sacrificing children in order to drink their blood in satanic rites."Unless Truth Is Richly Contextualized, It Is Likely That Uneducated, Ideologically-Driven People (Who Never Learned How To Think In Context), Will Use Fragmented Shards Of Truths To Tell Colossal Lies""How Conservatives Use Decontextualized Shards Of Truth To Tell BIG Lies"When I was pubescent, I suffered from the theological affliction called "scrupulosity" which is, I suppose, an umbrella term that covers a range of "issues" including hypochondria. From Wikipedia: "Scrupulosity is a modern-day psychological problem that echoes a traditional use of the term scruples in a religious context, e.g. by Catholics, to mean obsessive concern with one's own sins and compulsive performance of religious devotion. This use of the term dates to the 12th century." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrupulosity I will close with a somewhat corny - but true - observation: "The best way to break a bad habit is to drop it."In Nicaragua, Ed Myer and I - over beer at a downtown Managua cantina - got to talking about my cigarette smoking. Ed mentioned a number of the 250 plus toxins in tobacco, and detailed their effects on the body... right down to the cellular level. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/ tobacco/cessation-fact-sheet Scared the shit out of me!But his "charla" motivated me to stop smoking immediately.LoveA
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