The opposite of discipline is dependence -Seth Capehart
The Siamese-twin of dependency is resentment.
Dr Capehart makes the point that medical science is very good at keeping the husk alive but cannot keep it healthy without your cooperation. It is entirely possible to be feeble and miserable for fifteen years before the Grim Reaper comes to harvest you.
I am not talking about people like my readers K and H who had strokes and are heroically battling. I am talking about the person who passively expects technology to fix all of their problems with no contribution from the patient. They swoon and demand that others catch them.
I had conversations with "grasshoppers" and heard them tell me "I am going to live-large until I can't and then I will commit suicide. I have my doubts. Why would she, in the eleventh hour of her life, do something so out-of-character?
Like the old thrill seekers are known to say "I would have taken better care of my body if I had known I was going to live this long."
World food status
Not all doom-and-gloom for 2026! Next year might be different.
Stockpile carried over from previous year
United States, incorporating data from the most recent NASS Crop Production report from results in a reduction of 1.77 million MT for total coarse grains production (from 2025). Note that the corn belt started getting rain in late-July after months of low precipitation.
For Russia, strengthening indicators of plant health—measured using normalized difference vegetation indices (NDVIs)—across a number of coarse grain producing-regions contribute to raised barley and corn yields and an overall larger production outlook. If realized, Russia’s 2026/27 corn harvest will be record large at 17.2 million MT. Favorable conditions for crop development were experienced across much of Russia’s winter grain belt, as well as the Urals and Volga regions of the spring crop production zones.
Partially offsetting production gains for Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa (Zambia is projected to harvest a record-large corn crop)!!!, coarse grain production for the European Union is cut significantly this month, on extreme hot and dry weather that has further eroded coarse grain yield prospects for a number of countries,
including France.
On the basis of newly-released official data from Companhia Nacional de Abastecimento (CONAB) and Instituto Mato-grossense de Economia Agropecuária (IMEA), 2025/26 corn production for Brazil is raised 2.0 million MT to 140.0 million. Larger 2025/26 production is attributable to a sizable boost for the second (safrinha) crop corn...
Today
I am picking tomatoes and canning them as soup-base. They are going into pint jars. ***Update: 18 pints of soup-base just finished up in the canner with another pint or so for us to enjoy tonight***
My stretch goal is to dig another row of potatoes and to till the patch of ground they were in.
Lifting notes
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A screen-grab from the video. Probably my best side.
I wore long compression socks. No issues encountered. After my usual warm up I did one set at 205 pounds. Then two sets of 215. Then one set at 225. I attempted to take video but was not successful.
What Dr. Capehart did not say was that modern medicine's ability to keep us alive but nonfunctional comes at a MASSIVE cost in dollars. Virtually every night in the ER I see one or more ancient bodies that are essentially a husk, an unaware immobile shell. They come in unresponsive or febrile or with urosepsis. They then get a $20K workup and admitted for a week or more. Some succumb but most are stabilized to the point where they can be transferred back to their nursing home to repeat the process in the near future. Every episode costs society $100K or more. And that is the tip of the iceberg. We as a society need to learn to accept that death is a natural outcome of living. Not something to be avoided at all costs. Costs invariably paid for by others.
ReplyDeleteDan, are you arguing for MAID, or equivalent?
DeletePerhaps you are too close to the fire. My explanation of why seemingly to put a price on human life.
Dan is describing the problem of "externalized costs". If the patient has no skin in the game, there is no incentive for them to chose to the lower-cost option.
DeleteThe Catholic Church who is ardently pro-life does not require that "extraordinary" care be given to patients. That includes intubation for feeding.
Back in the middle-ages, it was postulated that if it were possible to keep somebody alive on a diet that was composed 100% of quail eggs and if it required everybody in the village to become solely devoted to raising quail, it was not a moral obligation of the village to feed that person. God was calling them home. Let them go.
Aesop propose the three tattoo method. When a drug user came into the ER and required extraordinary means to keep them alive, they were given their first tatt, the letter "D" on their forehead (it could be in an ink that fluoresced under UV). The second visit that racked up the $150k bill earned them an "N" and the third time they got a "R"., all on the forehead, in that order from left-to-right to the reader.
It wasn't assisted suicide that Aesop was proposing. It was three strikes from a self-induced problem and then Do Not Resuscitate order.
There are no easy pleasant solutions to this. The most fair one is you get the life saving/extending care that YOU can pay for. In theory MAID, like communism, is a rational solution. In reality both are always corrupted by evil people.
DeleteThe last several weeks I've been canning peaches & tomatoes. Tomorrow I will can the last of the peaches as preserves. If I get enough green tomatoes next month I'll can some chow-chow.
ReplyDelete