You might enjoy this. It's from an account named "The redheaded libertarian". The clip is about 45 seconds long. The speaker explains what various Asian languages sound like; I laughed out loud at it. The speaker is Asian, so it doesn't come off as a slur against someone else, if that makes sense. Kinda making fun of himself.
Just ask your prescribing physician if he has read the IFU, inserts, and comprehends the adverse events? The probability of occurrence. If they have read any of the BigPharma FOIA available studies.
I'm guessing that less 25% actually have read and can intelligently explain the risks.
Of we made cars and Trucks with the Safety and Efficacy of pharmaceuticals, we'd kill 2 Million people a year
I am friends with some of my female friends from college, some ex-gf (Katie is amused by it); one of them recently went off her ADHD medicine. She was always hyper, but in a charming way. She is finding she is able do more today as a result. In talking to her, I have learned to listen more, and she just processes out loud. And so she is more focused as a result.
As a school teacher she was reluctant to refer kids for ADHD; she felt some of it was immaturity or not having a healthy home life, etc. When she began teaching inner city kids she felt the home life was a much bigger factor than recognized. Although it didn't help that some kids only came to school 5-6x a month.
The 1940s novel My Friend Flicka has a connection to the condition that came to be known as ADHD. The remake in the early 2000s cast the main character as a girl (who else do you expect to pay to see horse movies?) but she was clearly identified as having ADD.
When I learned this, bought the book and, sure enough, it did contain a discussion that pointed in that direction.
I read with interest anything about ADHD. My son was diagnosed with it 35 years ago, and we tried every non-medication treatment modality being tried at that time. After 3 years of no improvement, I overrode Dad and said "let's try medication." After a couple of titrations to the correct dose, and about 6 weeks after landing on the correct dose, I asked my son if he thought the medication made a difference. "I wish you'd done this sooner."
We would do "drug holidays" over the summer, and even his "will never medicate my child" dad would comment on the negative difference between my son's behavior off the med vs on the med. I can't speak for every family; but medicating my son helped him enormously in school, activities, and in his personal relationships. But it is very hard to know what might be right.
My wife is generally medication-wary. She had a young female riding student many years ago who was on ADHD medication. My wife would remark how she could immediately tell if her student had not taken her medication that day. When on her medication she could concentrate and follow directions. Off her medication she was dangerously unfocused. Not good on a 1,200 pound animal.
As a school teacher she has many students on medication. For some of them there is a noticeable improvement in classroom behavior and concentration when they are on their medication. She still believes many students are medicated more for the benefit of the parents than the student, but she admits there are cases it seems to be appropriate.
It's a bit of both. In some situations and with some students it helps a lot, others, not so much. It's probably overprescribed, but a prohibition would be a bad idea.
I'm getting continued "likes" and a thumbs up emojis on my comments from yesterday's "spider" commentary. I didn't recognize the person, thought maybe we had someone new in town, so I clicked on their avatar to check their page. Very large breasts and a sultry come hither stare into the camera lens, with an address link something like "girls4u.com".
I didn't know Substack had a porn contingent, but I suppose it was inevitable.
Well, Kurt, over time I've had several encounters with similarly "seductively" - but not actually indecently - avatar-ed individuals attempting to make contact after "liking" one or more of my comments and then using the Substack chat function, always with the same 3-word message and nothing more: "What's up Trosino?" Or "What's up M?" And after it's ignored, nothing further shows up.
I've also seen a couple of obvious porn come-ons as avatars and with links to Lord knows what (well, I'm pretty sure I knew *what*) in a few places in Substack comments, but they usually didn't last too long before they were called out or reported, deleted and blocked.
But I did have a seemingly rather nice and attractive younger lady contact me with the chat function once about a year or so ago. And it was, as I suspected when I first responded to her original message, entirely legit.
But no, she didn't contact me for the reason I'm sure you (and probably everyone here at CSLF) would expect... my profile pic of an irresistibly attractive-to-the-fairer-sex guy, a man's man on horseback with all the obvious skill of a consummate cowboy equestrian and horse whisperer.
No, that one was the pic I originally used for my profile years ago with me on one of my other horses, but I soon had to tone it down a bit and use the current one because of all the "come hither" responses that first one generated...
Anyway, the young woman lived in Tennesse, and having seen my current profile picture and then having read my comment about spending some time in Nashville and the surrounding area a very long time ago, she wanted to know if I'd ever lived in a certain area of the state, since she thought my picture looked like a gent she used to know in the past who was a horse breeder down her way somewhere.
I told her no, not me, but by an interesting coincidence the little mare I'm riding in the pic (the horse that I bought for my wife not long after we were married) was bred, foaled and raised down in Tennessee until someone up here in Michigan bought her to use as a show horse for their daughter for 2 or 3 years, and then sold her to me as a pretty well-trained horse in her prime at the age of six-coming-on 7. And the young lady and I ended up in a pleasant back and forth on the subject of vacations (the reason why I'd been in Nashville) and a couple of other things off and on over the course of an afternoon.
So, Kurt, as to the pair with the come-hither stare, I'd say your skepticism was completely justifiable and would note that if you get too many "likes" from any other tarts who may seem perhaps just a little bit more legit, I'd still be real careful. 'Cause if it's that picture of a seagull that's attracting them, they may be just a bit more weird than you'd care to find out, even if you are half a world away.
Oh yeah. I know the one... from around '08 or'09 I think. The one where instead of a badass he just looks like an ass. I'd have said horse's ass, but no reason to insult the horse like that.
Kurt, another substack I look at is produced by Adam Tooze. It is a daily feed of charts and topics he finds interesting. The post today included an article from China Digital Times about "garbage time" and how that's being used in China as short hand for what some see as inevitable economic decline in China. It may be of interest (to dismiss or not!) to those on the ground there.
I've been reading Tooze for a couple years. This one is pretty good. I read the Garbage Time piece with some interest. Garbage Time is something that's been getting kicked around for several years. The hard predictions related to it are like hard predictions on anything; it's too early to tell. Huang's thing about the end of Ming and all Chinese history actually being in 1587 is kinda stupid and ignores an amazing number of things that happened in the following centuries that were both positive and negative. It ignores the central theme of Chinese philosophy, that of cycles. I feel similarly about the current downbeat feelings.
It's sure easy to wonder about this stuff and get disheartened. It's asking the eternal existential question, "why are we here?" Just to consume a bunch of crap? Apparently. Or not.
In traditional China, life for approximately 95% of the population was outlined into neat and clean realities, bookmarked and punctuated by holidays and rituals centered on the cycles of agricultural production. It's a very attractive and seductive world view. In a large sense, that only disappeared 40-50 years ago. Lots of young folks are now wondering what they lost, and are understandably bummed about it. I feel their pain. Standing in the middle of a Chinese village, one feels the relatedness of everything and the relationships of necessity with their neighbors. When that anchor disappears, it's bewildering. I spend a lot of my life bewildered at the world. I fit right in with the youngsters.
Chinese conventional thought looks at history and the world as cyclical. Endless cycles within cycles. I mostly look at it the same way, but occasionally forget all of it to focus on my golf game.
That is so interesting, and I get it. I am much more centered with routines (cycles of a sort), and a more provincial way of living. I can imagine the tremendous changes in China are very disruptive to peoples with such history. Thank you for your perspective on that!
Golf, uggh. I just started playing again. Only a few rounds under my belt and pretty discouraging. All good though.
Everyone is a crappy golfer. McIlroy carded 4 double bogies on his way to his recent Masters victory. Recovery from lousy shots is the game.
Sometimes, I'll hit a 5 iron off the tee because it's my highest percentage club. I consistently hit the fairway at about 190 yards. It makes the game more fun.
Good morning. 39 and sunny here, with predicted high in the 50s.
The mothership is reporting on the long-running antitrust case against Meta, formerly known as Facebook. (Did you know about that case? I didn’t).
FP is headlining “Trump vs Harvard”. Trump is threatening to cut off various federal funds to Harvard unless they meet several demands, beginning with dismantling DEI, but go far beyond, in what seems like monumental overreach. Harvard, to date, is resisting.
Trump's threat to Harvard involves a couple of billion $$ in grant money and $60M, IIRC, in contract money over a couple of years. And Harvard can easily afford it. Harvard is the richest university in the world bar none, with an endowment that, before Trump zapped ten trillion-with-a-T dollars' worth of value from world stock markets in 48 hours, was north of 43 billion-with-a-B dollars. And it's not like Harvard alums are suffering from penury and can't kick in a buck or three to cushion the loss a bit if needs be. Unless, of course, their names are Cotton, Cruz or Stefanik and the like.
Harvard's kiss-off response to Trump seems to be genuine and firm, as well it should be, just as it should have been from every other college, law firm and business or other organization that's so readily caved in to his unconstitutional and lawless blackmailing.
They all might just as well start wearing stylish little 24k hangman's nooses as lapel pins, each engraved "We choose to hang separately." But of course, that wouldn't fly because somehow that would be seen as racist, I'm sure.
Geez where is everybody? Usually I’m the late one to the comment party. I was able to pick up limbs/sticks after the snow melted yesterday afternoon. There’s a huge pile on the terrace. It was chilly! It’s sunny and 21 now and headed to 50 so hoping to blow leaves later. The northern lights would have been visible last night, dang cloud cover! I saw photos from Bayfield where it was clear. The juvenile eagles like to stand on the edge of the retreating ice, I counted 5 yesterday.
Bayfield. I was last up there 40 years ago. It's a beautiful area with a troubled social situation once the tourists go away. I used to go up and hang with the younger newcomers seeking Xanadu, and their relations to the locals was kinda ugly. I often wonder if things evened out, or if it's still the charming Potemkin Village.
It follows on from treating pregnancy as an illness, which follows from treating menstruation as an illness. It's as if being biologically female is, in itself, a "health problem."
Oh gosh…don’t even get me started on this topic. I think ADHD is BS. I have very little regard for the psychiatric industry. I know it’s colored by my own experience.
My favorite take on the psychiatric industry is in Jon Ronson’s “The Psychopath Test”. The audiobook form of it is, in fact, probably the best form of it.
I have often joked that I became a preacher because I loved church but couldn’t stand to sit still for an hour.
The pharmaceutical industry wants to maximize profits which involves maximizing diagnoses. And human beings find taking pills easier than behavioral change. Add to this soup an educational system that rewards passivity and compliance.
ADHD is only one diagnosis which will eventually be understood to be on a normal personality spectrum.
There’s been quite a bit said about the diagnosis being more indicative of a shift in bias to favor girls over boys. It would make sense to me, considering natural sex/gender differences—even while it should be acknowledged that the male bias in all scientific research was unfair. ADHD could almost be read as a cluster of symptoms that are apt to identify boy behavior and call it a pathology.
The point strikes me as valid and worth taking into consideration when shaping policy, even if I’ve never much liked the politics of grievance. And I’ve never thought the solution to grievances is just licensing new subsets of the population to feel aggrieved…
Before I retired I taught in the VoTech. I was well aware of the academic research about the bias of education towards girls over boys. I was fortunate that I could structure my classroom environment to minimize this. I would often 'rant' to my students about my dismay at what they had to endure in the high school environment: "Sit down in rows, shut up, and listen". This was a (slight) exaggeration to get their attention. As long as they completed their studies and didn't bother their classmates, they had a lot of freedom to structure their workspace as they wanted.
I had a lot of students who were 'failing' in the academic environment. Many of my students went on to impressive careers in IT, as well as other professions, who were labelled 'failures' by the high school.
Late in my father's life a doctor commented he was probably dyslexic. How did he know? "His coping mechanisms". He then explained 4-5 "tells" he saw with my dad. He then asked what my dad did for a living "Electrician". "He can probably glance at it and know what to do". "Yup". That's a good fit for a dyslexic.
My Dad did poorly in school, but was also a card counter (He could count into a 3 deck shoe in blackjack). Playing euchre against him, he could tell you what was in the shoe, every hand.
"Add to this soup an educational system that rewards passivity and compliance."
I think this is such a big part of it. Less "free-play" and constant pressure to suppress normal boyhood behavior. As well the constant social justice vibe and climate catastrophizing integrated into schools - subtly or not - that wears on the emotional health of kids.
My wife is a children's / young adult fiction writer. The agents and publishers for many, many years have only been interested in Bipoc centric stories. Almost exclusively. No wonder the boys don't want to read.
I read an interesting comment recently that resonates with me. The author pointed out that elementary schools are nearly all female today, and that they tend to favor girl-type behavior. It used to be female teachers knew how to lasso us young lads, but later we were simply described as trouble. And now, apparently medicated for it. Many boys enjoy rough and tumble, running, laughing, and passing gas. That behavior is not rewarded in most schools today.
As a church camp counselor, out of hundreds of kids, less than 1% probably needed ADHD medicine, but so many got it prescribed anyway. My solution was "death marches". I took campers on hikes, I held canoe races, water races, I had tons of physical activity. At night, they slept soundly! That's the best way to get them to behave. And during the day, they were well behaved. Our camp was about a 1/2th mile off the road, we had giant stone pillars there. I used to joke if 3/4th of my campers weren't asleep by the time parents got to the pillars I had failed as a counselor!
My youngest is gifted in math (among other subjects); in 3rd grade they asked if we wanted to skip him a grade, we declined. But they put him into the 4th-5th grade math club, where students did "fun" math problems (e.g. learning Fibonacci). What made it work was Mr. Carnahan, the 4th grade teacher (and math club sponsor) understood boys. He designed problems to appeal to them. I came in an gave a guest set of lectures (and activities) on statistics. I explained how you want to remove any extraneous motion from throwing/shooting. I explained arcs in basketball, and kids loved it (the boys more than girls).
He requested my son for 4th grade, but was also given many "problem students". He did fine with them. He was very free spirited, and did lessons almost individually. His goal was to identify what made each child curious, and then do work based on that. And at different levels; my son worked mild engineering problems, other kids did other types of problems. His classroom encouraged exploring, and kids could walk around (as long as they didn't disrupt others). Other teachers disliked him because he didn't discipline boys for being boys.
As for BIPOC, what matters more is a good story. Too much dreck gets published because it fits the stereotypes of what the publisher wants.
Cool! Is she published? I would love to check out her work.
I was involved in SCBWI for a number of years and it was informative. But I saw the tendency towards the bias you describe. In the aftermath of the several incidents including George Floyd, there was a very troubling exchange on one of their discussion boards that lead to An Official Pronouncement that turned me off completely. I was the center right one in the local group, so I was surprised to find similar reactions when I ran into others recently.
Thanks for asking! She's written 3 books, but is not published - yet. Not for lack of trying! She's had several agents sort interested, asking for complete manuscript but no contracts. I know she's participated in SCBWI events. I think we spent a few days at a conference somewhere, but I'm fuzzy on details. I don't know anything, but my suspicion is that her stories are meant for a different time (happier time!) but agents / publishers are looking for more edgy, culturally sensitive stuff. But that's just not her. She's in writing groups where the most successful is a Palestinian woman writing a story about Palestinian and Jewish children in some storyline. Right time right place. She's now plugging away on an adult book, hoping the market is a little more open. Still, there are a lot of writers (mostly women) trying to get published. Not quite, but sort of odds like a very good high school basketball player hoping to go pro.
For the kids market, I wonder how much is driven by what publishers can sell to schools, which is driven by not a lot of people, mostly progressive, at advisory organizations and school administrators.
I think the trend for series has shut off a lot of opportunity. There's only so much shelf space, and why put the effort into finding new authors when you can churn out a gazillion more episodes in The Babysitters Club. It's a business decision, though it does allow them room to take risks on good but unusual material when it comes along.
My nephew...who's had 3 well received books with very respectable advances, he's actually making a decent living at it...says the exact same thing. The industry went Bipoc to a degree that I did not know existed until nephew told me about it.
Bourbon Empire, Wild Minds, Wanderlust. Reid Mitenbuler. He's done stuff in Air Mail too, that online thing with Graydon Carter.
Wild Minds is the one that got the big reviews in the NY'er, the NYT, and the WSJ. Not just reviews, like real major pieces on the book. The NY'er was a 5 pager by Gopnik. Full page in the Sunday NYT. WSJ a half page Sunday edition.
Bourbon Empire is fun; he hit the crest when bourbon was suddenly popular about...what...10-12 years ago...(?) He became the Brooklyn hipster author and appeared on local TV and radios stuff. Now he's in LA doing screenplays and rewrites; it's the only way to turn a buck as an author nowadays because the publishing industry is collapsing. The traditional business of reviews is overturned by 22 year olds on TikTok with 180 billion followers.
The beverage, and more to the point, the history of America relative to bourbon, which was the major American currency of the 18th and 19th century. Bourbon is the McGuffin.
Interesting! I’ve seen the one or other headline/story mentioning this bias in what publishers are choosing to do when it comes to YA and adult fiction.
I am becoming more convinced that pharmaceuticals are overprescribed and overused in various ways. One developing example is the “trans” phenomenon. Individuals who have surgically “transitioned” become dependent on hormonal treatments, which cost money and mean profits for Big Pharma. The widespread resistance to vaccination is partly due to distrust of Big Pharma.
IMHO, the best approach to pharmaceuticals would be to rely on them as a last resort rather than the first. If it’s possible to eliminate disease by asking patients to change their behaviors, this would be preferable, since many of the long-term side effects of prescription drugs are unknown, much less how drugs interact with one another.
When it comes to communicable disease and infection, a lot of what we know comes from the field of animal husbandry. That’s where the concept of “herd immunity” comes from, and it is a real consideration learned in practice over time. We know from our own past that diseases have decimated populations of our ancestors, before we had any inkling of how diseases spread. As long as we are a mass species on the planet, congregating in dense cities, we’re going to need to use vaccination—at least until we come up with alternatives.
"The widespread resistance to vaccination is partly due to distrust of Big Pharma."
Reasonable distrust, especially since the pharmaceutical industry is a branch of the government, which just lies when they feel like it ... or vice versa.
On the other hand, look how many things we're not dying from now, not being crippled by. A lot of hostility toward drug companies is based on their not providing everything they develop for free, because I should have whatever I want at no cost to myself.
The drugs treating cholesterol, blood pressure and diabetes are the ones keeping more people alive longer. All pretty cheap medications. But keeping people alive longer also tends to mean very costly last 5+ years in and out of hospitals or memory care facilities. Tough tradeoff.
GLP-1 drugs have potential to be as impactful - but are far more expensive. Controlling weight is a complicated subject. I have a brother that is extremely obese that was approved for Ozempic, filled the prescription, and then refused to take it. Strange.
My personal experience biases me in favor of dietary interventions to clear up most of the symptoms related to metabolic disorder. But a big problem is that, thanks to path dependence, the medical establishment treats dietary limitations on macronutrients as extremely risky, whereas it treats life-long prescription drug use as healthy and risk-free.
Part of the problem is in the regulatory agencies being captured. But that itself is almost entirely unavoidable. Knowledge of the drugs is so highly specialized that the total number of scientists with deep enough knowledge to regulate them is approximately the number of researchers who designed the drugs. The regulators are often therefore the drugs’ developers.
I think the UK came up with a sensible semi-solution in requiring statistics in favor of drugs not only to be those furnished by drugmakers, but also more comparable metrics like “number needed to treat”, or NNT. Those statistics show efficacy in a different light. Many popular prescription drugs fail to deliver at the promised rates, wasting a lot of single-payer money.
"the medical establishment treats dietary limitations on macronutrients as extremely risky, whereas it treats life-long prescription drug use as healthy and risk-free"
Funny about that last part. It's as if there's a financial incentive. But even if there's not, there's the idea of being the One with the Solution, as opposed to the client's having the agency.
Yes, when you zoom out from the question of prescription medications to the larger view of medical goods and services and their cost, it gets very complicated.
If humans simply took the actions that have the greatest potential upside and the least chance of disaster, we wouldn't be human. We'd be something else.
Yes, it’s complicated. Vaccines benefit millions. Many medications help people, like insulin-dependent diabetics, organ transplant recipients needing immuno-suppressants, live a normal life. But medications are not the answer to every health issue.
"But medications are not the answer to every health issue."
Exactly. It's such a different situation in China, where the idea of taking pills for everything doesn't exist. OTOH, there are lots of people (my wife!) that take daily doses of various "teas" made from all sorts of weird smelling roots and botanicals for moderating or theoretically controlling various bodily conditions.
I've tried the teas for a problematic sinus condition I've had for years. US doctors routinely prescribe antibiotics which never made anything better. 1 month of the tea and my sinus condition is vastly better. I'm intrigued enough to keep drinking the disgusting stuff, because it seems to work.
I also did acupuncture for the sinus. Very deep needle work and extremely painful, but I breathed through it and am still here. I don't know if it was the tea, the acupuncture, or some miracle, but the sinus that had been a major problem for 40 years is now just about perfect. Still a teeny bit of problem, but I do daily Neti Pot treatment and it's been holding steady. The Neti Pot didn't help until after the tea and acupuncture.
I'm neither a believer nor a dismissive of acupuncture but darn if things didn't get a lot better after 3 treatments a week for a month and half.
There's this other stuff that's pronounced "Banlangen". It's marketed in America under the brand name "Cold Away"; you can get it through Amazon and it's expensive. Years ago, someone gave me a bottle of the tablets to ward off cold symptoms, and it absolutely killed the cold symptoms. So, the following year, I was getting what felt like a really rough cold coming on, ordered a bottle of Cold Away, and wham! Symptoms vanished in about 24 hours. That was about 17 years ago. I've used it 3 or 4 seasons over the last 17 years and it's worked like a miracle every time.
I took a bottle to China one year, told my friends about it, they were skeptical that America could produce TCM. They read the bottle and announced "Banlangen...of course. Everyone takes Banlangen when they get a cold.".
It was then that I discovered my wife had a cabinet full of Banlangen, cheap. It's like generic aspirin over here.
It doesn't have a name. My TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) doctor gave me two packages of lumpy brown barks and roots...every day I mixed up a 2:1 ratio of the items, held my nose, and choked it down. Lots of honey made it tolerable.
TCM pharmacies are wild. There's a wall of drawers, each drawer containing who the hell knows what. The "pharmacist" gathers up various combos of stuff, it goes in an unlabeled zip lock foil bag, and you go home and make stinky tea.
I don't buy into a lot of it, but I'm giving it some credibility since much of it has been around for literally 2000 years, and there's got to be some validity to it if it's been around that long...and in my case, it seems to have provided relief.
Hi Kurt:
You might enjoy this. It's from an account named "The redheaded libertarian". The clip is about 45 seconds long. The speaker explains what various Asian languages sound like; I laughed out loud at it. The speaker is Asian, so it doesn't come off as a slur against someone else, if that makes sense. Kinda making fun of himself.
https://x.com/TRHLofficial/status/1912582713631965445?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1912582713631965445%7Ctwgr%5Ec387a3ec3d447a68d1e3efe19ca4bd890e8c7c96%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fnotthebee.com%2Farticle%2Fthis-guy-is-here-to-tell-us-how-to-tell-asian-languages-apart-in-the-most-hilarious-way-possible
🤣🤣🤣
ICYMI from yesterday’s comments: Kurt pointed out that Dave Barry has a Substack newsletter:
https://davebarry.substack.com/
This filled in some of my attention deficit regarding good news rather nicely. Not the kind of news story usually associated with books these days...
(a few still pics and video all in one)
https://apnews.com/article/bookstore-book-brigade-chelsea-michigan-03c553623c91c16a272b8a8149e4c298
Just ask your prescribing physician if he has read the IFU, inserts, and comprehends the adverse events? The probability of occurrence. If they have read any of the BigPharma FOIA available studies.
I'm guessing that less 25% actually have read and can intelligently explain the risks.
Of we made cars and Trucks with the Safety and Efficacy of pharmaceuticals, we'd kill 2 Million people a year
I am friends with some of my female friends from college, some ex-gf (Katie is amused by it); one of them recently went off her ADHD medicine. She was always hyper, but in a charming way. She is finding she is able do more today as a result. In talking to her, I have learned to listen more, and she just processes out loud. And so she is more focused as a result.
As a school teacher she was reluctant to refer kids for ADHD; she felt some of it was immaturity or not having a healthy home life, etc. When she began teaching inner city kids she felt the home life was a much bigger factor than recognized. Although it didn't help that some kids only came to school 5-6x a month.
The 1940s novel My Friend Flicka has a connection to the condition that came to be known as ADHD. The remake in the early 2000s cast the main character as a girl (who else do you expect to pay to see horse movies?) but she was clearly identified as having ADD.
When I learned this, bought the book and, sure enough, it did contain a discussion that pointed in that direction.
I remember reading that book but not, alas, the details.
I read with interest anything about ADHD. My son was diagnosed with it 35 years ago, and we tried every non-medication treatment modality being tried at that time. After 3 years of no improvement, I overrode Dad and said "let's try medication." After a couple of titrations to the correct dose, and about 6 weeks after landing on the correct dose, I asked my son if he thought the medication made a difference. "I wish you'd done this sooner."
We would do "drug holidays" over the summer, and even his "will never medicate my child" dad would comment on the negative difference between my son's behavior off the med vs on the med. I can't speak for every family; but medicating my son helped him enormously in school, activities, and in his personal relationships. But it is very hard to know what might be right.
My wife is generally medication-wary. She had a young female riding student many years ago who was on ADHD medication. My wife would remark how she could immediately tell if her student had not taken her medication that day. When on her medication she could concentrate and follow directions. Off her medication she was dangerously unfocused. Not good on a 1,200 pound animal.
As a school teacher she has many students on medication. For some of them there is a noticeable improvement in classroom behavior and concentration when they are on their medication. She still believes many students are medicated more for the benefit of the parents than the student, but she admits there are cases it seems to be appropriate.
It's a bit of both. In some situations and with some students it helps a lot, others, not so much. It's probably overprescribed, but a prohibition would be a bad idea.
I'm getting continued "likes" and a thumbs up emojis on my comments from yesterday's "spider" commentary. I didn't recognize the person, thought maybe we had someone new in town, so I clicked on their avatar to check their page. Very large breasts and a sultry come hither stare into the camera lens, with an address link something like "girls4u.com".
I didn't know Substack had a porn contingent, but I suppose it was inevitable.
Well, Kurt, over time I've had several encounters with similarly "seductively" - but not actually indecently - avatar-ed individuals attempting to make contact after "liking" one or more of my comments and then using the Substack chat function, always with the same 3-word message and nothing more: "What's up Trosino?" Or "What's up M?" And after it's ignored, nothing further shows up.
I've also seen a couple of obvious porn come-ons as avatars and with links to Lord knows what (well, I'm pretty sure I knew *what*) in a few places in Substack comments, but they usually didn't last too long before they were called out or reported, deleted and blocked.
But I did have a seemingly rather nice and attractive younger lady contact me with the chat function once about a year or so ago. And it was, as I suspected when I first responded to her original message, entirely legit.
But no, she didn't contact me for the reason I'm sure you (and probably everyone here at CSLF) would expect... my profile pic of an irresistibly attractive-to-the-fairer-sex guy, a man's man on horseback with all the obvious skill of a consummate cowboy equestrian and horse whisperer.
No, that one was the pic I originally used for my profile years ago with me on one of my other horses, but I soon had to tone it down a bit and use the current one because of all the "come hither" responses that first one generated...
https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/macho-man-handsome-cowboy-riding-on-679201165
Anyway, the young woman lived in Tennesse, and having seen my current profile picture and then having read my comment about spending some time in Nashville and the surrounding area a very long time ago, she wanted to know if I'd ever lived in a certain area of the state, since she thought my picture looked like a gent she used to know in the past who was a horse breeder down her way somewhere.
I told her no, not me, but by an interesting coincidence the little mare I'm riding in the pic (the horse that I bought for my wife not long after we were married) was bred, foaled and raised down in Tennessee until someone up here in Michigan bought her to use as a show horse for their daughter for 2 or 3 years, and then sold her to me as a pretty well-trained horse in her prime at the age of six-coming-on 7. And the young lady and I ended up in a pleasant back and forth on the subject of vacations (the reason why I'd been in Nashville) and a couple of other things off and on over the course of an afternoon.
So, Kurt, as to the pair with the come-hither stare, I'd say your skepticism was completely justifiable and would note that if you get too many "likes" from any other tarts who may seem perhaps just a little bit more legit, I'd still be real careful. 'Cause if it's that picture of a seagull that's attracting them, they may be just a bit more weird than you'd care to find out, even if you are half a world away.
Is that Putin in that Shutterstock image?
Putin only wishes he looked as good on a horse as I do.
(No, in case that wasn't clear😉)
It was very clear. I should've included the satire emoji.
(I'm sure you know that dipshit photo I'm referring to, when Putin appeared on horseback trying to look like a badass.)
Oh yeah. I know the one... from around '08 or'09 I think. The one where instead of a badass he just looks like an ass. I'd have said horse's ass, but no reason to insult the horse like that.
Speaking of an insult to horses...
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/08iK8NxetAM
eeeeeeww.....
Is it someone you brought along from Dave Barry? 🧐🧐🧐
Thanks for the information. I got notification of the comments, since I was the article author, but I didn't think anything of it.
Very interesting and thoughtful essay today. Thanks for that.
Kurt, another substack I look at is produced by Adam Tooze. It is a daily feed of charts and topics he finds interesting. The post today included an article from China Digital Times about "garbage time" and how that's being used in China as short hand for what some see as inevitable economic decline in China. It may be of interest (to dismiss or not!) to those on the ground there.
https://open.substack.com/pub/adamtooze/p/junk-bond-market-in-shock-north-american?r=colht&selection=0282d31a-174c-4999-a91e-93398f02a9c1&utm_campaign=post-share-selection&utm_medium=web
I've been reading Tooze for a couple years. This one is pretty good. I read the Garbage Time piece with some interest. Garbage Time is something that's been getting kicked around for several years. The hard predictions related to it are like hard predictions on anything; it's too early to tell. Huang's thing about the end of Ming and all Chinese history actually being in 1587 is kinda stupid and ignores an amazing number of things that happened in the following centuries that were both positive and negative. It ignores the central theme of Chinese philosophy, that of cycles. I feel similarly about the current downbeat feelings.
It's sure easy to wonder about this stuff and get disheartened. It's asking the eternal existential question, "why are we here?" Just to consume a bunch of crap? Apparently. Or not.
In traditional China, life for approximately 95% of the population was outlined into neat and clean realities, bookmarked and punctuated by holidays and rituals centered on the cycles of agricultural production. It's a very attractive and seductive world view. In a large sense, that only disappeared 40-50 years ago. Lots of young folks are now wondering what they lost, and are understandably bummed about it. I feel their pain. Standing in the middle of a Chinese village, one feels the relatedness of everything and the relationships of necessity with their neighbors. When that anchor disappears, it's bewildering. I spend a lot of my life bewildered at the world. I fit right in with the youngsters.
Chinese conventional thought looks at history and the world as cyclical. Endless cycles within cycles. I mostly look at it the same way, but occasionally forget all of it to focus on my golf game.
That is so interesting, and I get it. I am much more centered with routines (cycles of a sort), and a more provincial way of living. I can imagine the tremendous changes in China are very disruptive to peoples with such history. Thank you for your perspective on that!
Golf, uggh. I just started playing again. Only a few rounds under my belt and pretty discouraging. All good though.
Everyone is a crappy golfer. McIlroy carded 4 double bogies on his way to his recent Masters victory. Recovery from lousy shots is the game.
Sometimes, I'll hit a 5 iron off the tee because it's my highest percentage club. I consistently hit the fairway at about 190 yards. It makes the game more fun.
Thanks! It was originally linked at Drudge Report, iirc.
Good morning. 39 and sunny here, with predicted high in the 50s.
The mothership is reporting on the long-running antitrust case against Meta, formerly known as Facebook. (Did you know about that case? I didn’t).
FP is headlining “Trump vs Harvard”. Trump is threatening to cut off various federal funds to Harvard unless they meet several demands, beginning with dismantling DEI, but go far beyond, in what seems like monumental overreach. Harvard, to date, is resisting.
Trump's threat to Harvard involves a couple of billion $$ in grant money and $60M, IIRC, in contract money over a couple of years. And Harvard can easily afford it. Harvard is the richest university in the world bar none, with an endowment that, before Trump zapped ten trillion-with-a-T dollars' worth of value from world stock markets in 48 hours, was north of 43 billion-with-a-B dollars. And it's not like Harvard alums are suffering from penury and can't kick in a buck or three to cushion the loss a bit if needs be. Unless, of course, their names are Cotton, Cruz or Stefanik and the like.
Harvard's kiss-off response to Trump seems to be genuine and firm, as well it should be, just as it should have been from every other college, law firm and business or other organization that's so readily caved in to his unconstitutional and lawless blackmailing.
They all might just as well start wearing stylish little 24k hangman's nooses as lapel pins, each engraved "We choose to hang separately." But of course, that wouldn't fly because somehow that would be seen as racist, I'm sure.
It’s sunny and 40 now, but was in the 30s earlier. Looks like today won’t be as gusty as yesterday, ranging close to 60 this afternoon.
Geez where is everybody? Usually I’m the late one to the comment party. I was able to pick up limbs/sticks after the snow melted yesterday afternoon. There’s a huge pile on the terrace. It was chilly! It’s sunny and 21 now and headed to 50 so hoping to blow leaves later. The northern lights would have been visible last night, dang cloud cover! I saw photos from Bayfield where it was clear. The juvenile eagles like to stand on the edge of the retreating ice, I counted 5 yesterday.
Bayfield. I was last up there 40 years ago. It's a beautiful area with a troubled social situation once the tourists go away. I used to go up and hang with the younger newcomers seeking Xanadu, and their relations to the locals was kinda ugly. I often wonder if things evened out, or if it's still the charming Potemkin Village.
I was up way too early, hours before the post was scheduled. I had to go back to bed again to finish sleeping…
I went for an outdoor walk before the remainder of the family got up. It was cold, by local standards.
Good morning. 70 degrees, they say, today. I'll have to wear a coat.
As Rev Julia observes, factory schooling - like factory work - is obviously not the ideal environment for many people. Unexpected! *drink*
I agree that ADH is very likely one way of being a normal human in a healthy environment. So is dyslexia. So is menopause.
At the tisk of being labled a clueless male, I didn't realize anyone considered menopause as anything but normal at a certain time in a woman's life.
There's a whole industry of treating menopause as an illness.
I read Phil's comment and was about to say the exact same thing. It's an industry.
It follows on from treating pregnancy as an illness, which follows from treating menstruation as an illness. It's as if being biologically female is, in itself, a "health problem."
tbf, over a very long period of time it does have a 100% mortality rate.
That is indisputable.
I think that's right. The thick residue of centuries of idiotic ideas about women's health and/or their bodies is still here.
Oh gosh…don’t even get me started on this topic. I think ADHD is BS. I have very little regard for the psychiatric industry. I know it’s colored by my own experience.
My favorite take on the psychiatric industry is in Jon Ronson’s “The Psychopath Test”. The audiobook form of it is, in fact, probably the best form of it.
I’ll have to check it out. Roger McFillin has a great podcast too called “Radically Genuine.”
I have often joked that I became a preacher because I loved church but couldn’t stand to sit still for an hour.
The pharmaceutical industry wants to maximize profits which involves maximizing diagnoses. And human beings find taking pills easier than behavioral change. Add to this soup an educational system that rewards passivity and compliance.
ADHD is only one diagnosis which will eventually be understood to be on a normal personality spectrum.
There’s been quite a bit said about the diagnosis being more indicative of a shift in bias to favor girls over boys. It would make sense to me, considering natural sex/gender differences—even while it should be acknowledged that the male bias in all scientific research was unfair. ADHD could almost be read as a cluster of symptoms that are apt to identify boy behavior and call it a pathology.
The point strikes me as valid and worth taking into consideration when shaping policy, even if I’ve never much liked the politics of grievance. And I’ve never thought the solution to grievances is just licensing new subsets of the population to feel aggrieved…
Before I retired I taught in the VoTech. I was well aware of the academic research about the bias of education towards girls over boys. I was fortunate that I could structure my classroom environment to minimize this. I would often 'rant' to my students about my dismay at what they had to endure in the high school environment: "Sit down in rows, shut up, and listen". This was a (slight) exaggeration to get their attention. As long as they completed their studies and didn't bother their classmates, they had a lot of freedom to structure their workspace as they wanted.
I had a lot of students who were 'failing' in the academic environment. Many of my students went on to impressive careers in IT, as well as other professions, who were labelled 'failures' by the high school.
It's complicated, for sure.
Late in my father's life a doctor commented he was probably dyslexic. How did he know? "His coping mechanisms". He then explained 4-5 "tells" he saw with my dad. He then asked what my dad did for a living "Electrician". "He can probably glance at it and know what to do". "Yup". That's a good fit for a dyslexic.
My Dad did poorly in school, but was also a card counter (He could count into a 3 deck shoe in blackjack). Playing euchre against him, he could tell you what was in the shoe, every hand.
Good students figure out how to
"Add to this soup an educational system that rewards passivity and compliance."
I think this is such a big part of it. Less "free-play" and constant pressure to suppress normal boyhood behavior. As well the constant social justice vibe and climate catastrophizing integrated into schools - subtly or not - that wears on the emotional health of kids.
My wife is a children's / young adult fiction writer. The agents and publishers for many, many years have only been interested in Bipoc centric stories. Almost exclusively. No wonder the boys don't want to read.
I read an interesting comment recently that resonates with me. The author pointed out that elementary schools are nearly all female today, and that they tend to favor girl-type behavior. It used to be female teachers knew how to lasso us young lads, but later we were simply described as trouble. And now, apparently medicated for it. Many boys enjoy rough and tumble, running, laughing, and passing gas. That behavior is not rewarded in most schools today.
As a church camp counselor, out of hundreds of kids, less than 1% probably needed ADHD medicine, but so many got it prescribed anyway. My solution was "death marches". I took campers on hikes, I held canoe races, water races, I had tons of physical activity. At night, they slept soundly! That's the best way to get them to behave. And during the day, they were well behaved. Our camp was about a 1/2th mile off the road, we had giant stone pillars there. I used to joke if 3/4th of my campers weren't asleep by the time parents got to the pillars I had failed as a counselor!
My youngest is gifted in math (among other subjects); in 3rd grade they asked if we wanted to skip him a grade, we declined. But they put him into the 4th-5th grade math club, where students did "fun" math problems (e.g. learning Fibonacci). What made it work was Mr. Carnahan, the 4th grade teacher (and math club sponsor) understood boys. He designed problems to appeal to them. I came in an gave a guest set of lectures (and activities) on statistics. I explained how you want to remove any extraneous motion from throwing/shooting. I explained arcs in basketball, and kids loved it (the boys more than girls).
He requested my son for 4th grade, but was also given many "problem students". He did fine with them. He was very free spirited, and did lessons almost individually. His goal was to identify what made each child curious, and then do work based on that. And at different levels; my son worked mild engineering problems, other kids did other types of problems. His classroom encouraged exploring, and kids could walk around (as long as they didn't disrupt others). Other teachers disliked him because he didn't discipline boys for being boys.
As for BIPOC, what matters more is a good story. Too much dreck gets published because it fits the stereotypes of what the publisher wants.
There are lots of girls who don't like to read that stuff, too.
Cool! Is she published? I would love to check out her work.
I was involved in SCBWI for a number of years and it was informative. But I saw the tendency towards the bias you describe. In the aftermath of the several incidents including George Floyd, there was a very troubling exchange on one of their discussion boards that lead to An Official Pronouncement that turned me off completely. I was the center right one in the local group, so I was surprised to find similar reactions when I ran into others recently.
Thanks for asking! She's written 3 books, but is not published - yet. Not for lack of trying! She's had several agents sort interested, asking for complete manuscript but no contracts. I know she's participated in SCBWI events. I think we spent a few days at a conference somewhere, but I'm fuzzy on details. I don't know anything, but my suspicion is that her stories are meant for a different time (happier time!) but agents / publishers are looking for more edgy, culturally sensitive stuff. But that's just not her. She's in writing groups where the most successful is a Palestinian woman writing a story about Palestinian and Jewish children in some storyline. Right time right place. She's now plugging away on an adult book, hoping the market is a little more open. Still, there are a lot of writers (mostly women) trying to get published. Not quite, but sort of odds like a very good high school basketball player hoping to go pro.
For the kids market, I wonder how much is driven by what publishers can sell to schools, which is driven by not a lot of people, mostly progressive, at advisory organizations and school administrators.
I think the trend for series has shut off a lot of opportunity. There's only so much shelf space, and why put the effort into finding new authors when you can churn out a gazillion more episodes in The Babysitters Club. It's a business decision, though it does allow them room to take risks on good but unusual material when it comes along.
yeah, that too.
My nephew...who's had 3 well received books with very respectable advances, he's actually making a decent living at it...says the exact same thing. The industry went Bipoc to a degree that I did not know existed until nephew told me about it.
Congratulations to him! Titles? I need something fresh to read.
Bourbon Empire, Wild Minds, Wanderlust. Reid Mitenbuler. He's done stuff in Air Mail too, that online thing with Graydon Carter.
Wild Minds is the one that got the big reviews in the NY'er, the NYT, and the WSJ. Not just reviews, like real major pieces on the book. The NY'er was a 5 pager by Gopnik. Full page in the Sunday NYT. WSJ a half page Sunday edition.
Bourbon Empire is fun; he hit the crest when bourbon was suddenly popular about...what...10-12 years ago...(?) He became the Brooklyn hipster author and appeared on local TV and radios stuff. Now he's in LA doing screenplays and rewrites; it's the only way to turn a buck as an author nowadays because the publishing industry is collapsing. The traditional business of reviews is overturned by 22 year olds on TikTok with 180 billion followers.
That’s awesome.
Bourbon Empire! It's about the beverage.
The beverage, and more to the point, the history of America relative to bourbon, which was the major American currency of the 18th and 19th century. Bourbon is the McGuffin.
Interesting! I’ve seen the one or other headline/story mentioning this bias in what publishers are choosing to do when it comes to YA and adult fiction.
I am becoming more convinced that pharmaceuticals are overprescribed and overused in various ways. One developing example is the “trans” phenomenon. Individuals who have surgically “transitioned” become dependent on hormonal treatments, which cost money and mean profits for Big Pharma. The widespread resistance to vaccination is partly due to distrust of Big Pharma.
IMHO, the best approach to pharmaceuticals would be to rely on them as a last resort rather than the first. If it’s possible to eliminate disease by asking patients to change their behaviors, this would be preferable, since many of the long-term side effects of prescription drugs are unknown, much less how drugs interact with one another.
When it comes to communicable disease and infection, a lot of what we know comes from the field of animal husbandry. That’s where the concept of “herd immunity” comes from, and it is a real consideration learned in practice over time. We know from our own past that diseases have decimated populations of our ancestors, before we had any inkling of how diseases spread. As long as we are a mass species on the planet, congregating in dense cities, we’re going to need to use vaccination—at least until we come up with alternatives.
"The widespread resistance to vaccination is partly due to distrust of Big Pharma."
Reasonable distrust, especially since the pharmaceutical industry is a branch of the government, which just lies when they feel like it ... or vice versa.
On the other hand, look how many things we're not dying from now, not being crippled by. A lot of hostility toward drug companies is based on their not providing everything they develop for free, because I should have whatever I want at no cost to myself.
The drugs treating cholesterol, blood pressure and diabetes are the ones keeping more people alive longer. All pretty cheap medications. But keeping people alive longer also tends to mean very costly last 5+ years in and out of hospitals or memory care facilities. Tough tradeoff.
GLP-1 drugs have potential to be as impactful - but are far more expensive. Controlling weight is a complicated subject. I have a brother that is extremely obese that was approved for Ozempic, filled the prescription, and then refused to take it. Strange.
My personal experience biases me in favor of dietary interventions to clear up most of the symptoms related to metabolic disorder. But a big problem is that, thanks to path dependence, the medical establishment treats dietary limitations on macronutrients as extremely risky, whereas it treats life-long prescription drug use as healthy and risk-free.
Part of the problem is in the regulatory agencies being captured. But that itself is almost entirely unavoidable. Knowledge of the drugs is so highly specialized that the total number of scientists with deep enough knowledge to regulate them is approximately the number of researchers who designed the drugs. The regulators are often therefore the drugs’ developers.
I think the UK came up with a sensible semi-solution in requiring statistics in favor of drugs not only to be those furnished by drugmakers, but also more comparable metrics like “number needed to treat”, or NNT. Those statistics show efficacy in a different light. Many popular prescription drugs fail to deliver at the promised rates, wasting a lot of single-payer money.
"the medical establishment treats dietary limitations on macronutrients as extremely risky, whereas it treats life-long prescription drug use as healthy and risk-free"
Funny about that last part. It's as if there's a financial incentive. But even if there's not, there's the idea of being the One with the Solution, as opposed to the client's having the agency.
Yes, when you zoom out from the question of prescription medications to the larger view of medical goods and services and their cost, it gets very complicated.
If humans simply took the actions that have the greatest potential upside and the least chance of disaster, we wouldn't be human. We'd be something else.
Yes, the attitude that everything people like should be a government benefit itself needs inoculated against…
Yes, it’s complicated. Vaccines benefit millions. Many medications help people, like insulin-dependent diabetics, organ transplant recipients needing immuno-suppressants, live a normal life. But medications are not the answer to every health issue.
"But medications are not the answer to every health issue."
Exactly. It's such a different situation in China, where the idea of taking pills for everything doesn't exist. OTOH, there are lots of people (my wife!) that take daily doses of various "teas" made from all sorts of weird smelling roots and botanicals for moderating or theoretically controlling various bodily conditions.
I've tried the teas for a problematic sinus condition I've had for years. US doctors routinely prescribe antibiotics which never made anything better. 1 month of the tea and my sinus condition is vastly better. I'm intrigued enough to keep drinking the disgusting stuff, because it seems to work.
Do they sell that tea in the US? I have constant sinus issues. Avoiding milk helped a good bit, but not entirely.
I also did acupuncture for the sinus. Very deep needle work and extremely painful, but I breathed through it and am still here. I don't know if it was the tea, the acupuncture, or some miracle, but the sinus that had been a major problem for 40 years is now just about perfect. Still a teeny bit of problem, but I do daily Neti Pot treatment and it's been holding steady. The Neti Pot didn't help until after the tea and acupuncture.
I'm neither a believer nor a dismissive of acupuncture but darn if things didn't get a lot better after 3 treatments a week for a month and half.
There's this other stuff that's pronounced "Banlangen". It's marketed in America under the brand name "Cold Away"; you can get it through Amazon and it's expensive. Years ago, someone gave me a bottle of the tablets to ward off cold symptoms, and it absolutely killed the cold symptoms. So, the following year, I was getting what felt like a really rough cold coming on, ordered a bottle of Cold Away, and wham! Symptoms vanished in about 24 hours. That was about 17 years ago. I've used it 3 or 4 seasons over the last 17 years and it's worked like a miracle every time.
I took a bottle to China one year, told my friends about it, they were skeptical that America could produce TCM. They read the bottle and announced "Banlangen...of course. Everyone takes Banlangen when they get a cold.".
It was then that I discovered my wife had a cabinet full of Banlangen, cheap. It's like generic aspirin over here.
It doesn't have a name. My TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) doctor gave me two packages of lumpy brown barks and roots...every day I mixed up a 2:1 ratio of the items, held my nose, and choked it down. Lots of honey made it tolerable.
TCM pharmacies are wild. There's a wall of drawers, each drawer containing who the hell knows what. The "pharmacist" gathers up various combos of stuff, it goes in an unlabeled zip lock foil bag, and you go home and make stinky tea.
I don't buy into a lot of it, but I'm giving it some credibility since much of it has been around for literally 2000 years, and there's got to be some validity to it if it's been around that long...and in my case, it seems to have provided relief.
"But medications are not the answer to every health issue."
Absolutely true.
Also, not every issue in life, not everything that makes a person uncomfortable or causes an inconvenience, is a "health issue" or a "medical issue."