Maggie's Farm

Man can not live on bread alone. Is The West's Loss Of Faith Terminal?

"...the wind of opinion in recent years appears to have begun to blow against those who insist that Western liberal societies owe nothing to the religion from which they arose. Partly because the more we become acquainted with other traditions, the harder it becomes to sustain. Indeed, although some people still hold out, it should be evident by now that the culture of human rights has more to do with the creed preached by Moses and Jesus of Nazareth than that of, say, Muhammad. Nevertheless, the question of whether this societal position is sustainable without reference to the beliefs that gave it birth remains deeply pregnant and troubling in the West."

 From the article:

A psychiatrist colleague recently retired but he turned to coaching as a second career because it emphasized the relationship he had valued most in his work as a psychiatrist. As an example, he finds that coaching is particularly relevant for dieting and exercise needed to reduce obesity. A late-career psychologist switched more and more to coaching techniques. Those who have had mental health care training can add depth to coaching that others may not be able to obtain. 

We have a "Physical Phitness" diary going on here lately. That's good. We all compete with Father Time, but he wins 100% of the races. How does he do it? Greater endurance, to demonstrate that endurance is a good goal.

I often write about dietary and nutritional issues here, trying to debunk the fads, but I think anything people do to keep moving with vigor in all stages of life improves the quality and functionality of life. Physical and mental challenges, constantly.

All kinds of resistance exercises are excellent for the regular sedentary Western person to maintain posture, balance, function, bone density, and muscle mass. The challenge is that middle-aged people develop aches and pains, reminding us that Nature and maybe God never intended us to live much beyond our prime breeding ages. But, there is a need for a few wise elders. Why not be one?

What exercise cannot do, unless you are hiking the Appalachian Trail (we did it as a between-jobs extended sabbatical, before kids - Georgia to Katahdin. A crazy 5-month honeymoon of bliss, bonding, and exertion. Youthful woodland passion from hill to dale, from state to state. God saw us. Then hubbie's "garden leave" ended, we started new jobs,  I got an office, life returned, and kids came. I think we created our first one towards the end of that hike and we later nicknamed him "Trail," - short for Trail Mix) is get rid of fat. Only diet can do that.

When people have young kids, they rightly neglect their own well-being. Nature demands that. After that chapter, you either rise or fall.

These are averages for average-fit people, not what might be desired. Average sizes, not lifters and hard exercisers (for ages 30-60). These rough numbers are with reps, however many one can handle (1-10):

Average fit male can bench press his weight.
Average fit female can bench around 80-90 lbs.
Average fit male can deadlift  1.25 his body weight
Average fit female can deadlift 90-120 lbs.
Average fit male can do 8-10 pull-ups
Average fit female can do 1 pull-up

It's not all hoarding - some people just can't let go of their "precious" stuff.

The Economics of Tidying Up: An Economist Reads Marie Kondo. “People are wrong when they think that pair of jeans will ever fit again, Kondo is arguing. Optimistic predictions keep people from getting rid of things they don’t need.”

We adhere to the two-year rule except for jewelry, art, firearms, and heirlooms.

Narcissistic patterns, to use an analogy, may have similar phenotypes but different genotypes. For some, it is a manifestation of a hollow or even sociopathic core and, on the other end of a spectrum, it can be a defensive style. Either way, they tend to use people for their own purposes.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Rethinking What We Know

Watch out. Assess peoples' characters, if you can. Watch out for flatterers and users.

Yesterday I posted a bit about sexual anarchy.

It's nothing new in human cultures. It's been around forever. It's not culture that becomes sexualized, it's human nature. I think my point was that when you place mixed sexes in close proximity, really regardless of age, chemical things happen for a hundred different reasons. Often with unfortunate consequences. Work, home, school, wherever. More so today with coed campi and many women in the workforce.

Truth is, it can be overstimulating for both men and women. Overstimulating, and too easy for the weak of character and conscience.

My advice from such experience: Guys, if you desire your family's au pair, get rid of her. If you can't take your mind off your receptionist's body, get rid of her and hire an old lady.

This is why everybody needs his or her own code of behavior, and his or her own boundaries. No need to invent one's own because many smart people have thought about it already. God, too, as a gift to us.

Most exercise is a terrible and inefficient way to lose weight if you are too heavy or fat. Just think about it: A four-five mile high-speed walk will barely burn off the calories in a donut, muffin, or bagel (with the cream cheese, add another few miles). You would have to walk all day, every day, to lose weight.

Remember, all carbs=sugar and yes, that includes the carbs in beans, peas, corn, carrots, potatoes, yams - all the high-carb "veggies." We feed those things to farm animals to fatten them for slaughter. Some people get wacky about sugar, but human digestion turns all carbs into plain sugar so there is lots of physiological ignorance out there about "complex carbs" and so forth. So-called "complex carbs" just get turned into sugar more slowly.

Nature designed us to love carbs because nature expected us all to be poor and half-starving on the African savannah. If you have excess fat which bothers you or slows you down, you do not need hardly any carbs. You do need some fatty meats, though, or other fats like olive oil.

If happy with your physical condition and level of conditioning, please ignore all of this.

I've been following Bird Dog's fitness renewal program which is not designed for weight loss but to convert fat weight to muscle weight, and I approve of it. A bonus of that sort of high-intensity program (which I have done for a few months in the past to rapidly get back to fighting condition after periods of relative sloth, such as after childbirth, to get back my 28 year-old weight and fitness) is that it can help a fellow survive a male's almost-inevitable MI by building up collateral cardiac blood supply.

While high-intensity work-outs will burn fat (but only if on a carb-restricted diet), the main things they build are aerobic capacity and endurance, agility, a feeling of youthful vigor, and muscle fitness if not muscle power. Those are all good things. (Gross muscle power development - body-building - requires heavy lifting instead of reps and is more about appearance than fitness. A harmless hobby for some.)

Barnhardt says this:

When true Christian faith in a culture is weak-to-absent, superstition fills in that vacuum.  One of the main vectors of superstition in the post-modern, post-Christian west is this business of obsessing about food.

I do not think food is the main post-Christian preoccupation, but it does seem common in the higher socio-economic classes. These are often the educated who missed Physiology 101 and Biochem 101. Think Whole Foods and "organic" farming. I think we have been clear on this site that most dietary preaching here is about weight loss, not general health. Nobody can define a "healthy" human diet, as we are omnivores which means we can thrive on anything digestible. In America, we are blessed with cheap and abundant food of all sorts and spend a lower percentage of our funds on tasty food than anywhere else in the world. Thus many people eat more than they need, for fun.

As I have said, I have seen 6'3" football players who grew up on nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, macaroni and cheese, and the occasional hot dog.

Now let’s talk about one of the biggest, most successful and STUPIDEST cons out there today.  ORGANIC FOOD.  Guys, it is a complete racket.

It's worth knowing, same as your height and weight.

This gives a very close idea, I'd say +/- 3 points. It is context-free so has nothing to do with education, just pure mental horsepower. Give it a try. You will either be humbled and hate yourself for being an overachiever - or hate yourself for being an underachiever. No, not really. Many will figure they had themselves pegged correctly.

Speed counts, of course.  No allowances for slower thinkers or "disabilities" because it is not a test of knowledge or operations. I came out 123 which I think is about right.

I have posted about IQ in the past. It's said to be a measure of "g", which is not much different than saying IQ is a measure of IQ.

IQ and total SAT scores are well-correlated so, at the least, it says something about one's power to handle relatively, but not extremely, complex cognitive tasks like higher math, challenging reading, high-level abstractions, etc. etc. It's about cognitive potential more than anything else. In today's world, cognitive powers matter more than they used to and more than they should, I suppose.

Many psychiatrists and psychologists have learned over the years to estimate peoples' IQs quite accurately, just in conversation. Subtlety of mind, rigor of logic, and curiosity as manifested by breadth and depth of knowledge are some of the markers. Of course, there is the birds of a feather issue too: people tend to find others within a similar range most engaging.

Very high IQ is a life handicap, sad to say. There are few of those, though. Lower IQs which are fully-functional and effective in life are far more common.

Medium-range IQ is the most life-adaptive (ie 110-115) for 95% of things in life from plumbing to software sales to money management. It's often been reported that the ideal IQ for CEOs of large, intricate organizations is near or around 130. Of course, character, personality style, sense of humor, and ability to connect with others in a positive way play perhaps larger overall roles in life although they will not help you perform, or even understand, a regression analysis. Furthermore, even moderately alert managers can easily hire brighter people to carry their water and make them look good. We call that "savvy" or "street smarts," not intelligence.

Here's a good essay on IQ and professional performance.

...a significant percentage of people with IQs over 140 are being systematically and, most likely inappropriately, excluded from the population that addresses the biggest problems of our time or who are responsible for assuring the efficient operation of social, scientific, political and economic institutions. 

Lots of awkward nerds there.

Report says schools still shortchanging gifted kids - UI research finds many high-ability children bored and unchallenged, despite increased access to programming

Most public school teachers can rarely keep up with the truly gifted

IQ Science Versus The Cult

IQ and wealth are the two of the main things social justice warriors hate. They sort-of tolerate every other sort of inequality like musical talent or running speed.

DARVO is a common maneuver for liars and wrong-doers of any sort: Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender

We were introduced to this handy term for a certain kind of manipulation by the McCain website.

This is the sort of crap that drives docs to retirement. It's called "electronic medical records," and it is essentially government-mandated in hospitals now. It is an incredible time-waster, and almost requires physicians to follow a script instead of focusing on you. Docs used to just note relevant positives and relevant negatives quickly on a piece of paper in a minute, and then practicing the art and science of caring about you.

"Care" is not an economic term. It is not a technical term. The "medical care" experts don't get that.

Read it and weep: Please Choose One.

Related,  What Does Real Meaningful Use of an EHR Look Like?

It's too late to keep corporate and government bureaucracy out of American medicine. We all must now just seek out physicians with the traditional, independent medical values, who work for you despite the intrusions. However, most of them will not "take insurance" anymore. They can't afford the professionally-trained billing staff.

The challenges of marrying outside your social class.

I have seen plenty of marriages hit the rocks on those shores, but on plenty of other shores too. "Class" doesn't mean money in the bank. It means a shared understanding and approach to reality and relationships - and interior decor!

The gap dividing psychoanalysts and cognitive-behavioral therapists and researchers is wide and growing.

Different people with different problems and different personalities can benefit from different approaches. Psychoanalytically-informed approaches can be extremely valuable for some people, and useless for others.

The Irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous

I read that article in The Atlantic. I disagree with almost all of it. There is no better or cheaper (it's free) approach to substance abuse for the motivated person.

It's not about "Does it work?" It's about "Does the person work it?" Sanity, like physical health, is not a passive enterprise.

Nothing can be done for the unmotivated person. However, some people on a downward spiral need a little rehab (ie forced abstinence) first to get a little clarity; some people benefit from naltrexone or topamax, and all benefit from treatment of any coexisting problems.

Hard Feelings: Science’s Struggle to Define Emotions - While it's possible for researchers to study facial expressions, brain patterns, behavior, and more, each of these is only part of a more elusive whole:

 Around the mid-18th century or so, Dixon writes, these passions and affections were lumped together under the umbrella of emotion. In the early 19th century, Scottish philosopher Thomas Brown was the first to propose emotion as a theoretical category, opening the door for scientific research. But though he was eager to study it, Brown couldn’t define it.

“The exact meaning of the term emotion, it is difficult to state in any form of words,” Brown said in a lecture. And so it has remained.

“The only thing certain in the emotion field is that no one agrees on how to define emotion,” Alan Fridlund, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote to me.

"Emotion" is sort-of an artificial construct, is it not? It - whatever it is - can rarely be separated from cognition, perception, ideas, and all other mental processes and biological instincts. We easily can identify, in ourselves, lustful desire ("urge to merge"), rage, despair, joy, fear and anxiety - but these extremes are rare and still more expressible by poets and musicians than by scientists.

How people came to believe the myth that nutritional supplements could make them into better, healthier versions of themselves

Marketing can work wonders, as can the placebo effect. Don't be a sucker.

I recently learned that "HD" - Hoarding Disorder - is now a reimbursable and nameable disease. It has long been considered just an eccentricity.

What drives the disease craze? Big Pharma, and insurance. Normal variants are labeled as diseases and disorders. Think ADD, ED, infertility, fear of dying, and on and on. I term them, smirkingly, "life-style disorders."

Here's an emerging new disorder: A Pill That Boosts a Woman’s Sex Drive Is Almost Here. But Do We Need It?

What shall we term the medical disorder which this pill fixes?

How Many Kids Grow Up With Their Married Mom and Dad?

I am glad to say that I did, and my kids are.

This is the sort of thing I can imagine the UK requiring - along with diversity training and recycling training. Is there a ‘right’ way to bring up your child? Linda Geddes asks whether parent school is the answer.

These programs are designed by Child Psychologists. Since when are they experts in this? I'd prefer a panel of grandmas, myself. Some kids, of course, are especially challenging if not impossible. Easy kids make parents look good; tough kids make parents look bad.

Related, Parenting Expert Has Nerve To Tell You How To Raise Your Own Goddamn Kids

A brief history of marriage, by a gal who may have missed the boat: All the Single Ladies

 For thousands of years, marriage had been a primarily economic and political contract between two people, negotiated and policed by their families, church, and community. It took more than one person to make a farm or business thrive, and so a potential mate’s skills, resources, thrift, and industriousness were valued as highly as personality and attractiveness. This held true for all classes. In the American colonies, wealthy merchants entrusted business matters to their landlocked wives while off at sea, just as sailors, vulnerable to the unpredictability of seasonal employment, relied on their wives’ steady income as domestics in elite households. Two-income families were the norm.

Not until the 18th century did labor begin to be divided along a sharp line: wage-earning for the men and unpaid maintenance of household and children for the women. Coontz notes that as recently as the late 17th century, women’s contributions to the family economy were openly recognized, and advice books urged husbands and wives to share domestic tasks. But as labor became separated, so did our spheres of experience—the marketplace versus the home—one founded on reason and action, the other on compassion and comfort. Not until the post-war gains of the 1950s, however, were a majority of American families able to actually afford living off a single breadwinner.

How Patient Suicide Affects Psychiatrists

Mental-health practitioners whose clients kill themselves can face stigma from their colleagues, lawsuits, and a toll on their own psyches—making them less likely to take on suicidal patients who need their help.

Unlike most other medical specialties, where deaths are routine, suicide is imagined to be preventable. Very often it is not, any more than death from most cancers can be prevented. If all suicides were caused by simple depressions curable by a pill, that would be different. However, it's not like that. Intractable, relentless emotional pain is only one of many paths to suicide.

Like most Psychiatrists, I have had a number of them in my practice. It happens if you take on difficult cases or cover ERs.  Despite all I know about suicide, it still does shake one's confidence and excites the ambulance-chasers. Most suicides, of course, never seek any help from physicians, and some who do, lie.

I recommend this game to those who are hypersensitive to rejection: By Making A Game Out Of Rejection, A Man Conquers Fear

Look, everybody must come to terms with the fact that most people will not like us, or be interested in us, or want to help us. That's part of growing up. Despite that, there are plenty of people out there who want a friend. We have to understand that others, like us, are discriminating in their own ways. When friendships and relationships do click, it sure is fun and life-enriching, isn't it?

I once helped a very shy young fellow deal with his fear by commanding him to introduce himself to a pretty girl on a daily basis - including in NYC stores (eg Bloomingdale's), gourmet food markets, and supermarkets. He complied bravely with great faith in my advice, and in a very few instances somebody liked the cut of his jib and his (apparent) confidence and phoned him. Cured by Reality Therapy! He did not become thicker-skinned, just realistic.