Ensurance

     If you take a notion to, or are advised by a quack Doc. to, drink Ensure, or any of its many variants, don't do it.  And by that I mean don't frickin' do it!  It is toxic garbage, with sugar, safflower oil, and soy protein among its ingredients.  It has no more meaningful nutrition than a milkshake despite the pittance of vitamins it, supposedly, has.  It is in fact an anti-nutrient.  It is straight-up medical malpractice to feed this crap to hospital patients and nursing home residents.   The same can be said for any and all of the many "diet" shakes available.  Don't touch any of them.  Not eating anything at all (fasting) is far far healthier than drinking metabolic poison.  I might drink one if I had been lost in the desert for a month without any food, but short of that no way in hell would I consume that horrid liquid.

I Approve Of This Message

     I think this doc, among an increasing number of others, is entirely correct and what he says accords with my direct experiences.  Please to watch. 

 Plants

Alphabet Villainy

     The, formerly, prestigious American Academy of Pediatrics has come out with a recommendation that powerful appetite suppression drugs and bariatric surgery should be used on obese 12 and 13 year-olds.  Drugging and mutilating children has received the imprimatur of one of the medical alphabet agency crowd.  I consider this no less than outright villainy.  First of all, there has been no long term, or short term for that matter, clinical study of the effects of the likes of Ozempic and Wegovy on the health of children.  These are powerful drugs with a parade of known serious side effects.  To think those effects would be no worse in children is the very worst sort of hubris. 

     The possible hideous side effects of the so called "puberty blocker" drugs are equally minimized, even approved, by the medical alphabet soup, but confining the discussion to the scourge of childhood obesity, subjecting children to surgical procedures such as "stomach stapling" that will permanently damage their digestive systems is simply beyond the pale.  Millions of adults have subjected themselves to similar mutilation, but adults are, presumably, capable of making an informed decision about the procedure.  Children are manifestly, and legally, not capable of such an informed decision.  However, they are susceptible to the importunings of medically corrupt doctors and ignorant parents.

     Modern medicine does not in general concern itself with true root causes.  It is all about treatment, with drugs and surgery, of conditions that in reality are almost all highly responsive to dietary interventions.  So, instead of informing clueless tetchy parents, largely overweight themselves, that they are responsible for their children's obesity by feeding them unbelievably crappy carb and sugar saturated diets, medicos take the easy, and profitable, way out by suggesting drugs and irreversible surgical interventions.  However convenient this is for the medical establishment, it is nothing less than blatant Hippocratic malfeasance.  

     We now live in a world of steadily declining sanity, with few countervailing influences.   So eat and drink up everyone, for we may die tomorrow, if not sooner.

    

     

     

Too Bad

 So S.A.D.

Too many carbs.

Too fat.

Too sick.

Too many pills.

Too soon feeble.

Too soon senile.

Too soon deceased.

No Mo' Oil?

      I have to, ruefully, laugh when I see eco-activists swanning about in one public venue or other waving signs that proclaim "NO MORE OIL".  This is a slogan born of a very fine and special kind of blithering stupidity.  Where do these ignoramuses think the bulk of what they use daily comes from?  They simply do not know how pervasive, and necessary, crude oil is to a modern technological existence.  Damn near everything comes from, however far removed, crude oil.  Virtually the entire chemical industry depends on crude oil feedstocks.  The entirety of composite and polymer production depends on it.  And before I hear you cry "But what about plastic in the oceans?"  I'll point out that the U.S. dumps virtually no plastics into the ocean.  Some of it is recycled and most of the rest is in landfills.  China and India alone account for ninety percent of the plastics found in the ocean, and we can't do a darned thing about that.

     A thousand different types of synthetic rubber depend on crude oil feedstocks.  Many thousands of different types of paint and coatings ultimately come from crude.  A large percentage of medical equipment depends on it.  Countless types of electrical insulators come from it.  Millions of gallons of transformer oil and a bewildering array of lubricating oils and greases come from it.  And that includes lubricants needed in electric motors, of which there are hundreds of millions in use in this country alone.  The blades of giant wind turbines are made entirely from composite materials, all sourced from crude oil. I could go in this oily vein for some time, but you get my point.

      There is at present no substitute for crude oil for all these crucial products.  There isn't even a hint of what might replace it.  Sometime in the future a universal petrochemical feedstock might be invented, but it would have to essentially be crude oil synthesized from some other organic materials.  And we would need hundreds of billions of tons of said materials to synthesize enough of it.  There is nothing on the technological horizon that can do the job.  Even if the problem is solved in the lab, it won't be implemented without the investment of very many trillions of dollars to build new synthetic petroleum refineries.  And without any doubt synthetic crude will be cost far more than current crude prices.  Far more.  And it is a one hundred percent solid bet that such processes will entail carbon emissions.

     What those gormless protesters may mean is that they don't want oil to be used for motor fuels so there will be plenty of crude left for other uses.  That's fine, assuming the protestors have a clue about how important crude is to the world economy.  So, No More folks, pony up the much larger than the total world GNP cost of doing that.  For all those countless trillions we'll just, A, Soak billionaires for the costs, or B, just declare the supply of money octupled and bugger the economic consequences.  The first simply won't happen because there aren't enough billionaires to soak, and the second is already in progress.  Let me know how that works out.  So far it's not looking good.

Common

Quote o' the day from writer and essayist David Bentley Hart.  

"If you attempt always to descend to the lowest common denominator, you will never hit bottom."

The Thoraxian Incident

 

 

     

      Next on the menu is yet another rumination on the doings at the comic strip 9 Chickweed Lane.  My writing it was prompted by the recent marriage of the whacky yet enigmatic "itinerant dairyman" named Thorax, and deputy sheriff Esme Meadow.  A strange pairing, but any pairing at all with Thorax would have to be considered strange.  I first thought to write a short exploration of what their married relationship might look like, taking into consideration what we've seen of Thorax to date, and how it would affect his few close friends.

     It did not stay short.  Once I jumped on this horse it galloped off at a dead run into unknown territory.  Strange and wonderful territory.  It's a broad ranging exploration of an alien's love for a human woman.  Not an original premise, at all, but I hope my treatment of it will be an enjoyable read for Chickweed fans.  It is, as I said, not short.  It is much longer than my other pieces on the subject of 9CL.  When finished, it turned out to be a medium length novel.

     Most of the characters in 9CL are in it, and their assorted reactions to Thorax's marriage, and the subsequent life changes that occur for all of them, are what constitute the bulk of the tale.  If anyone is offended by the uber-frank language and vividly rendered sexual situations, too bad.  If a high level of loving and gently graphic eroticism is not your cup of tea, then I suggest you go elsewhere. 

      There are also several brief references to events that "happened" in my other efforts in regard to 9CL, but did not actually occur in the strip.  This piece starts out "in canon" as they say, but it quickly diverts into territory that is light years, literally, away from canon.  My previous pieces are explorations of what happened in the strip's past, or to expand upon some aspect of it left unexplored.  This one is different because it projects events well into the future.  

     Nothing of what I wrote has the remotest chance of ever appearing in the strip, to put it as mildly as possible.  If the inestimable Brooke McEldowny gets wind of this piece, I hope he is not outraged by my presumption.  My apologies to him in advance, along with my assurances that this tale will never be monetized in any way, shape, or form.

     I emphasize that before reading this, one should be familiar with not only my shorter pieces of Chickweed fiction, but also be reasonably conversant with all the characters and their life stories up to the time this was written, which was in the fall of 2020.

     This piece is too long to include in this blog, so I've made it available as a free PDF which can be downloaded or read online.  The link below will take you to it.  Thank you.

      Warning Warning!  This novel is significantly lustier, but just as loving as my other pieces.  Significantly lustier as in wildly erotic.  Fully and baldly X-rated, with possibly another handful of Xes thrown in for good measure.  Alarmingly frank I would call it.  But every outre' happenstance occurs in the context of deep and abiding love.  If you can not abide such eroticism then I strongly suggest you not read this novel.

     Addendum, 21/09/03:  Recent plot developments in Chickweed make this piece even more speculative than it was before.  Alas, being overtaken this way this is a distinct hazard of writing fan-fic about an ongoing creative project.  I'll just call it an alternate history of Chickweed that diverges, drastically, from canon shortly after William and Esme's marriage. 

The Thoraxian Incident