"We now live in a nation where ...


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You can rise above all or most of that by living a moral life, right Greg?

For example you have little or no use for doctors because real health care is self care. The way to achieve and maintain health is to deserve it. Anyone who gets a disease, it's their own damn fault, usually.

And contrary to Peikoff, health care, meaning care of health, is a right. I have a right to take care of my own health and you have a right to take care of your own health.

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Wherever goeth a man if he goes without self responsibility he goes to get screwed. Everything else is a luxury and/or an add on. It doesn't matter if you're in paradise or the shit is up to your eyeballs--a Jew in Nazi Germany or another Jew at the same time in New York City. You do what you can and sometimes it's not going to be enough. If you say we gotta change the government, that's fine, but that's a luxury of a society in which it's not necessary for what you need to do right now--like accumulate wealth for wealth, properly used, is part of one's arsenal for your own freedom.

As for Greg and health care, doctors will fuck you up on Friday--for life--and play golf on Saturday with no thought of you except how they'll be paid and how much--some doctors. Some doctors are awesomely great, most mediocre and some--very few--horrible. Each year 100,000 American hospital patients, each under a doctor's care, die from medical mistakes. Basd on my knowledge and experience in and of medicine over 50 years--I have loved taking down medical auhoritarians for I know much more than the layman about medicine (you'll usually find these types in hospitals and nurses can be the worst)--I suspect Greg and his wife are going to do as well as can be done when it comes to medical care as applied when it's needed. I bet they'll jump on an airplane, if it comes to that, and fly to Thailand or India as medical tourists for serious optional (non-emergency) operations than risk financial and physical injury in Los Angeles county.

--Brant

medical rationing and "Death Panels" coming to a hospital near you as third-party payers completely take over the health care of third party recipients--your friendly insurance company is a monster wearing a doctor's white coat and more dangerous than almost any doctor as you and he bang on its door demanding the supremacy of their own judgment about you and your health and care DENIED by some stupid, bureacratic killer nurse on the other end of the phone line

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You can rise above all or most of that by living a moral life, right Greg?

Yes. :smile:

The absolute finest quality protection from the evil in this world is doing what's morally right.

I have almost no interaction with any of the things that guy is complaining about.

I can take care of my own body, thank you.

You'll never find me in court. It's a pit of vipers.

I've never needed to go to a university and I never will.

The government leaves me alone to enjoy my life.

I haven't had a television connection for 14 years, and don't follow the mainstream media.

I don't belong to any organized religion and walk my own path.

I've always consistently prospered in business regardless of economic cycles, because I create my own economy.

The way to achieve and maintain health is to deserve it.

The way to achieve and maintain health is to PRESERVE it. The majority of disease is behavioral. So if you want to be well, change how you live.

And contrary to Peikoff, health care, meaning care of health, is a right. I have a right to take care of my own health and you have a right to take care of your own health.

I totally agree. :smile:

Greg

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Moralist. How would you handle a burst or hot appendix? By yourself? By your exceedingly virtuous ethics?

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I find it increasingly most amusing at to how some folks use an argument like Bob's above.

Hell, Brant answered it for Greg.

Bob, Greg would not wait to die and recite a passage from Francisco's speech?

A...

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Moralist. How would you handle a burst or hot appendix? By yourself? By your exceedingly virtuous ethics?

Not a chance, Bob. :smile:

Appendicitis is behavioral. The finest protection is prevention, so I don't eat meat.

Greg

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I can't help remembering Rand's beliefs (as reported by BB) that cigarettes are harmless and that cancer is a result of emotional repression - until she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

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I can't help remembering Rand's beliefs (as reported by BB) that cigarettes are harmless and that cancer is a result of emotional repression - until she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

She wanted to smoke and she did. Smoking is common for writers. Old time newsrooms were filled with cigarette smoke. The nicotene enables better concentration and helps filter out distractions. I knew smoking was bad for me for several reasons so I stopped 46 years ago. Part of it was from my army medical training respecting emphysema. I figured I was a prime candidate for it. I quit smoking when Eisenhower died on my 25th birthday in 1969. I knew smoking took 10 years off his life. It was sort of poignant for I had spent 13 nights with him at Ft. Gordon army hospital after he had had a heart attack while on a golfing vacation at Augusta (and the famous "Eisenhower Tree") in 1965. I also remembered my music teacher in the 8th grade who inhaled a cigarette into his mouth in front of the class and blew the smoke through a common facial tissue leaving a residue of tar. (If he did that today he'd probably be fired.) Currently a heavy smoker's chance of dying of lung cancer is one in seven. Stop smoking and ten years later it's still one in seven. 20 year data has yet to arrive. Yul Brenner came down with lung cancer and died 13 years after he stopped in 1971. I smoked a pack a day for about 4 or 5 years. I had a slight smoker's cough and a skin allergy test said I was allergic to the smoke years before I smoked. In Vietnam I was more worried about bullets than cigarettes. It wasn't too hard for me to stop. I do not have an addictive personality. My big weaknesses are cookies and candy bars, wine and booze. So I just keep them out of the house. Will power on the cheap. (As a weakling, I don't have much to spare.) A bag of cookies makes me totally helpless and the cookies are doomed. I just ate two candy bars this morning I got from Walgreens. I should have only purchased one or none but they were only 2 for a buck on sale. I have to work on that. The problem with alcohol is one drink lowers resistence to the next and that crap is too hard on my throat. I have no intention of getting throat cancer, which is a risk. My neighbor plied me with rum, yum, yum, a week ago, which is no problem, especially since she's not trying to seduce me. (Do I have that backwards?) That's the way (for me) to do it. Perfection! This helps my self esteem. When I need more self esteem I'll go get some more rum--if she hasn't drunk it all. (Do I have that backwards?)

So: candy bars are hard or impossible to resist. That's my next project. After that cutting back on red meat. Coffee is a question. There's a reason Mormons tend to live long--and Seventh-Day Adventists--and I'm out of compliance. My real big worry, however, is whether my laptop is frying my balls.

--Brant

I want to keep them

(I've told these smoking stories before, but by repeating them you don't have to root them out of the archives [my well integrated dynamic humanitarian plus ego impulse])

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Moralist. How would you handle a burst or hot appendix? By yourself? By your exceedingly virtuous ethics?

Homework assignment: Appendicitis - Dr. Tilden

If you get appendicitis, it is because you deserve it.

I know that "deserves" sounds harsh... but it is imperative to realize that our actions do have consequences.

The whole pharmaceutical/medical/healthcare/insurance bureaucracy exists to compensate for our failure to take proper care of our own health.

Greg

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Moralist. How would you handle a burst or hot appendix? By yourself? By your exceedingly virtuous ethics?

Homework assignment: Appendicitis - Dr. Tilden

If you get appendicitis, it is because you deserve it.

I know that "deserves" sounds harsh... but it is imperative to realize that our actions do have consequences.

The whole pharmaceutical/medical/healthcare/insurance bureaucracy exists to compensate for our failure to take proper care of our own health.

Greg

You have a lot of one-sided views which can be defended on the side where they are. I know a lot about medicine. Appendicitis has gone from a long ago killer to a killer if you let it go and it bursts causing peritonitis. From a small incision and easy repair the patient gets a long surgical scar likely requiring a followup operation to put in a re-enforcing mesh for the abdominal wall was weakened and will never be as strong as it once was.

Taking proper care of your health is very valuable of course. In the 19th C. the result of that still was you could commonly die before 50 of things you don't die of today. Before antibiotics people lived in a constant state of low-grade terror of bacterial infections. Who is worrying about polio anymore if you don't live in Pakistan? The black plague depopulated Europe. Getting pregnant late in one's reproductive life was a death sentence. Graveyards were filled with babies. My Tucson was once famous as a place to go to if you had TB. Not quite as famous, though, as Reno for divorce.

Can you imagine going through life with ringworm because there is no effective treatment? Now you slather on an industry ointment.

Medicine, reactive and proactive, doctor and patient, has to be differentiated from the third-party payer monstrosity we can call the medical industry which has retarded advances in medicine through licensing, regulation and the brute force of money in the wrong places. Injury lawyers have attached themselves to the whole thing like leaches.

Medicine is a combination of art and science. Laypeople are so bambozzled by doctors who claim to be servants of science--art?--what's art?--they tend to defer to their natural tendency to authoritarianism, especially some, hardly all or most, over-educated specialists who are not dermatologists. Hence the value of a second opinion if your own second opinion can't match up with the first which we'll call the doctors.

The basic strength of specialization is concentration on a slice of digestible and usable knowledge, for taken as a whole medicine is too much for anyone to know enough about. A radiologist doesn't do brain surgery on the side and when one specialist sees another specialist the specialist with the problem is going to have to defer somewhat to his new doctor. This is more commonly done by the lay patient not a doctor by way of a referal. The basic weakness is not seeing the patient as a whole so you start with a generalist or used-to-be-called "family doctor."

The human body is designed not to be sick but it sometimes needs a boost no matter how responsible you've been about properly taking care of yours. Then there are genetic predispositions, some great and some bad and most mediocre. My own are to die for. Teenagers are practically invulnerable. All the DNA cares about is the teenage boy knocking up the teenage girl and everybody goes to heaven by the time they are 30 or 40 and their children are already going at it in turn.

--Brant

to be continued--my life, I mean

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Moralist. How would you handle a burst or hot appendix? By yourself? By your exceedingly virtuous ethics?

That is just mean, Bob. Greg has only said "most" -- not all -- disease is behavioural. If you look at America in a large view, the main disease or disorder is one that is (stupidly, IMO) called "metabolic syndrome." It's a with-six-you-get-eggroll kind of diagnosis, but reflects the trends of obesity, high blood pressure, high fasting glucose, too many high-density lipoproteins, too much fatty acid in the blood.

The syndrome is a an appetizer for the next course of diseases cardiovascular, and it can be argued that most of the syndrome appearances, in one in three adult Americans, is due to behaviour, non-healthy behaviour one could say.

It is mean because we always have an out for our own cases. Greg's family suffered through and beat cancer, but it was a doctor who diagnosed and excised it. Similarly, I expect Greg's child had her requisite vaccinations. If Greg, heaven forbid, should fall from the apple tree and break a bone, he is not going to the neighbourhood bonesetter. He is fine with the university-educated medical staff who do attend when the family needs help.

Greg is no dummy. He knows it is not a perfect world. He knows cancer can be non-behavioural. He knows there are hundreds of disabling or chronic disease states that have nothing to do with behaviour (except in the sense of the behaviour of genes). His sympathy goes to the child stricken with leukemia, and applauds medical advances that mean it is no longer a perfect killer of the young. He is not going to encourage his daughter to avoid medical attention if in distress.

For the other items on the ridiculous "quoat" of the journo up above, Greg would likely easily come up with situations in which a university degree is a good thing, like in nuclear physics, or more generally, science and engineering. I am sure that in his heart there beats a pride that American universities are still outstanding in the world, giving forth marvels. He is no rube..

Similarly, lawyers. The perennial lawyer joke goes here. Courts, lawyers, piss on them. Piss on them and then piss on them again. Until and unless you need one. There is always an exception for the self and its interests. You have no reason to doubt Greg has written a will, and expects a court to probate it after his final stroke. And of course it is a mere pose to say that he of all people escapes government. He willingly submits to its exactions -- it hardly "leaves him alone" compared to anyone else here.

If your point was to mention the outlier, the rule-breaker, of course you are right to do so, Adam's snitty comment notwithstanding.

Call a doctor? The same way his neighbors do when they need an electrician and call him?

Yeah, really.

Reidy's comment gets my stars for tone, pith and bang. It puts paid to the bullshittery in too-elegant generality and points to the reason for exception -- self-image, self-exculpation, self-delusion or even plain old tales-we-tell-ourselves.

I wish someone had also written about the actual quote (it ain't) and its purported author (he borrowed). It is elegant, implausible and extreme, without exception. It's memorable, pessimistic, and wrong. Hardliner Hedges above quite happily sat his bony ass in university, including Harvard Divinity School, so he's okay, and he didn't make them spectacles himself, and his views, while wildly progressive, should not be encapsulated in a picture-meme, as if Moses and Tablet. I don't like the quoat, as it has run through many hands and is purveyed by smug anti-imperialists as if truth. It sounds like a not even wrong political action slogan from RT America, Gag.

I frankly prefer Greg's sunny optimism over the dourness of the quoat.

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Shelton supervised 40,000 fasts, probably more fasts than anyone else. His book "The Science and Fine Art of Fasting" is perhaps the best book ever written about fasting, even in spite of advancing modern knowledge.

In this book I found the following remarkable statement.

"The stomach, intestines and colon are given a complete rest by the fast and are enabled to repair damaged structures. Piles, proctitis, colitis, appendicitis, enteritis, enteric fever (typhoid), gastritis, etc., speedily recover under the fast."

Notice, appendicitis is in the list.

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Shelton supervised 40,000 fasts, probably more fasts than anyone else. His book "The Science and Fine Art of Fasting" is perhaps the best book ever written about fasting, even in spite of advancing modern knowledge.

In this book I found the following remarkable statement.

"The stomach, intestines and colon are given a complete rest by the fast and are enabled to repair damaged structures. Piles, proctitis, colitis, appendicitis, enteritis, enteric fever (typhoid), gastritis, etc., speedily recover under the fast."

Notice, appendicitis is in the list.

Nearly 40 years ago I was successfully treated for two intestinal parasites I picked up on a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. There was a residual problem, however. I was in a continual state of low grade intestinal distress my doctor could find no reason for. A woman employee at the airport I was taking flying lessons at said she had had the same problem after a trip to Greece. She said eat plain white rice and yogurt with live cultures. Today I'd imagine that'd be pro-biotics. I did that for three days until I couldn't stand it any more, but it solved my particular problem. My doctor today thinks everybody--practically everybody anyway--would benefit from pro-biotics, but he doesn't push the issue in any respect unless you initiate the conversation. I think that's because it's outside the conventional medicine loop. There's always a danger when you step outside that loop professionally. If your patient gets fucked up consequent to whatever, your doctor-ass could be fucked if it is determined you could have had anything to do with it correlationally even if objectively it was the right way to go even if not enough for, say, lack of patient compliance. On the other hand, if your patient dies but you went by the book even if the book killed him you're off the hook. Conventional medicine killed Washington and McKinley, one through induced bleeding and the other by mucking around inside the wound without using proper sterile technique and wound debribement resulting in the gangrene so common in gut wounds most people died from them. In fairness to his doctors, however, the odds were against him. Everything damaged in the gut has to be fixed and the abdominal cavity lavaged with sterile normal saline. The film maker Frank Capra was told years after the event he had survived a burst appendix as a young man--no one had operated--and he atrributed his survival to the unremitting nursing care from his mother when he was on the verge of death.

--Brant

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William,

I don't always understand what you're saying. But you say it extremely well.

My favorite lawyer joke [contains both a doctor and a lawyer]:

Q. Doctor, before you performed the autopsy did you check for the pulse?
A. No.
Q. Did you check the blood pressure?
A. No.
Q. Did you check for breathing?
A. No.
Q. So then is it possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
A. No.
Q. How can you be so sure, doctor?
A. Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
Q. But could the patient have still been alive nonetheless?
A. It is possible he could be alive and practicing law somewhere.

A co-worker, some time ago now, while talking about conditions in other countries many of which are dictatorial if not totalitarian made a comment that he didn't care what the laws of a country were, he would just get in with the guys doing well, shut the f' up, do his job and enjoy his life. I felt alarm bells going off. I didn't say anything (what would be the point?) but I did give it some considerable thought. I had recently read "The Mystery of Capital" by Hernando DeSoto. Virtually no property rights in many S. American countries, as a result the majority of the population lives in poverty. But what of the people doing well? Many are just thugs, dictatorial politicians, bureaucrats, military. But many of the people doing well simply 'shut the f' up' and work for the guys in charge. Technocrats, doctors, cooks, nannies, electricians, plumbers, etc. If you keep your mouth shut and are in the right place at the right time, are reasonably intelligent and have a trade or skill and you don't care who your customers are you can do all right. And just fuck off you 98%, you complaining losers. Everybody gets what they deserve, right?

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You have a lot of one-sided views which can be defended on the side where they are.

I'm not damning medicine, Brant. When I need medical services I don't hesitate to avail myself of them. They're excellent compensation for my lack of taking proper care of my own body.

Medicine, reactive and proactive, doctor and patient, has to be differentiated from the third-party payer monstrosity we can call the medical industry which has retarded advances in medicine through licensing,

That monster exists solely because people expect someone else to pay their bills. What an effing shameful lack of personal responsibility.

Then there are genetic predispositions, some great and some bad and most mediocre.

There's whole generations of kids taking the genetic hit for their parents having done dope.

Greg

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Shelton supervised 40,000 fasts, probably more fasts than anyone else. His book "The Science and Fine Art of Fasting" is perhaps the best book ever written about fasting, even in spite of advancing modern knowledge.

In this book I found the following remarkable statement.

"The stomach, intestines and colon are given a complete rest by the fast and are enabled to repair damaged structures. Piles, proctitis, colitis, appendicitis, enteritis, enteric fever (typhoid), gastritis, etc., speedily recover under the fast."

Notice, appendicitis is in the list.

Our bodies have the amazing ability to maintain an inherent internal equilibrium so long as we aren't mucking it up.

Greg

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