I was going to post virtually the same thing. But not just civil war - international wars. We’re a race of animal that has survived by being the cruelest and the most self-serving to each other. Humans still have slavery and genocide, and always will, but now we have the means to spread germ warfare and blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons, and we will. Soon.
We’re already doing the international wars. Although they will of course get much worse.
No, no, that’s not Heaven; that’s the other place.
Seriously, in every other way, whenever there’s a culinary difference between North and South, the South gets it right. But southern sweet tea is an abomination.
As far as obesity goes, take away soda and other ultra processed “food”, eliminate all refined sugars and trans fats, and get people outside, commuting by bicycle and foot and rowboat, and off their devices, and it would go away, with or without dieting. Dieting is fighting with your body, and your body will win. Obesity is just one symptom of the prison of the agroindustrialtechnocapitalist complex we have been chained in. I am certain of this.
Because vegetable were meant to be boiled and everything else was meant to be breaded and fried?
But in the south, it’s possible to get excellent unsweetened iced tea, too. That’s much harder in the north, where often the only choice is sweet, and the hot tea is lukewarm and thin.
I believe this, too, although i can’t prove it.
An excellent way of putting it. I was going to respond with something similar. IMHO the fact that there’s only a very small number of people before WWII who were known to be morbidly obese (and most of those were people like Henry VIII and William Howard Taft who had access to what amounts to the Western diet before it became cheap enough to feed the vast majority of us in that way) is enough to convince me of this.
ETA: In my occasional musings on time travel scenarios, one of the things I think about is that a pre WWII physician would dismiss a present day physician out of hand if we were to tell them that one of the most common problem doctors deal with in 2024 is type 2 diabetes.
My second will be calling on you in the morning.
Regret to say that I almost never drink soda, eat very little ultra processed food, and spend a hella lot of time outside doing physical farm work: and I’m fat. Yes, those are factors. So is the fact that my body turned out to have a really strong famine response. Said response has no way of telling the difference between a deliberate calorie-restrictive diet in the midst of plenty of food and a genuine famine.
That’s for sure.
Every bit of our evolutionary history is behind that famine response.
I’m certain that the number of people who are capable of being good doctors is higher than the number of actual doctors that we have. My guess is we could have double or even triple the amount of doctors currently practicing in the US without a noticeable drop off in the quality of the medicine being practiced. The limit is in the number of spots available in medical school (and in the expense of the education in getting to that point), not in the number of people who are capable of becoming good doctors.
Old anecdote my late dad was fond of retelling, so YMMV caveat emptor and all of that. 1960’s maybe early 70’s–he came upon an NBA team lounging sleepily in the lobby of a hotel late one evening (I’ll posit the Lakers tho I don’t recall the actual team), and on a lark he asked one of them who would win the next day’s game. The half-asleep player simply said “Lakers by 2.” My dad checked the score in the newspaper the following day, and yep, the Lakers won by 2.
A) Patsy Ramsey wrote the ransom note.
B) The Ramseys knew a ton more than they let on
(Beyond that, no clue or idea of what actually happened.)
I have no doubt that, in the 1970s, a pedophile ring operated in the UK Houses of Parliament. Very Important People were involved, and were protected.
I’m not alone in this belief. Member of Parliament Geoffrey Dickens was so concerned that he investigated and put together a dossier. Delivered one copy to the Home Secretary and the other to the Director of Public Prosecutions. As improbable as it sounds, both copies were lost - who would have thunk it? As to what happened next:
On 29 November 1985, Dickens said in a speech to the Commons that paedophiles were “evil and dangerous” and that child pornography generated “vast sums”. He further claimed that: “The noose around my neck grew tighter after I named a former high-flying British diplomat [Hayman] on the Floor of the House. Honourable Members will understand that where big money is involved and as important names came into my possession so the threats began. First, I received threatening telephone calls followed by two burglaries at my London home. Then, more seriously, my name appeared on a multi-killer’s hit list”
Source:
I reckon conspiracy theorists generally don’t think that they’re conspiracy theorists - and here I am saying that the compelling evidence is that the evidence was “disappeared”. But there are further indications - like who was involved.
A former prime minister, maybe?
A very well known MP
Of whom it was reported that he was arrested with child porn in his car, but released after a mysterious phone call from London.
So no, I can’t actually prove any of this. But I don’t think I’m a conspiracy theorist.
j
Thirding @Ulfreida and @puzzlegal, as I sit a quarter mile from at least two Waffle Houses. When I moved down here I naively looked forward to the hype, but only found stodgy starches, and bland meat slathered in syrup then charred. I soon missed the variety of European foods from the Midwest and Asian from the West Coast. The large immigrant mix in the Atlanta metro area fed me much better than the BBQ & biscuit belt outside of it.
Disclaimer: I’ve never more than had a sip or two of sweet tea.
It makes my jaw hurt thinking about it.
That was my southern gal dog whistle.
(I do love my twice a week unsweetened Sonic tea. Lotsa ice)
After reading about MAS*H mentioned in another thread, I could swear there’s an episode where Radar is so tongue-tied by a woman who starts talking to him, he asks “Are you a girl?”
Maybe it’s because he’s always so confused how he should address Major Houlihan, because she’s usually angry, and he replies “Yes sir, ma’am! Sir!”
For starters, currently only 37% of doctors are women. If women went into medicine at the same rate that men do, that would be a 26% increase in the total number of doctors. And more prestigious specialties are even more male-dominated, and so there’s even more potential for growth, there.
Of course, the actual increase possible is almost certainly higher than that, because whatever it is that’s dissuading otherwise-capable women from becoming doctors, some of that is probably also dissuading some men, too. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if your guess of double or triple were proven to be true.
I’m with you on this.
I further believe the brother killed her. All the set up to make it seem like a stranger/intruder/pedo was staged.
Agree wholeheartedly. Because I think dieting is a major driver of obesity doesn’t mean I can’t recognize the other major drivers of obesity. It’s this vicious cycle. I started out I guess a little on the heavier side but nothing crazy. But I did have zero nutritional education growing up. I was reared in my early years on government cheese because we couldn’t afford meat. After finances improved, I was never denied any food I wanted, and by the time I was an adolescent, I was both eating to compensate for my parents’ neglect and my Mom would just give me a shopping cart to fill up with whatever I wanted to eat, because my parents, both working into late hours, sometimes spending the night at the their office, were not going to be cooking me any meals. And I was never really taught to cook for myself.
Then there was the person I admired most as a young girl, my Aunt, who had bulimia and body dysmorphic disorder. So I internalized all of those messages.
So there’s this not great beginning followed by years of attempting to lose weight - mostly in the healthy lifestyle way. I don’t remember any crash diets. In college I was so severely depressed I was subsisting mostly on cheese and soda. Then I would eat nutritiously for a while, then I would go back to junk food. It’s something I have struggled with all of my life, and the more I attempted to lose weight the more weight I gained, until I finally arrived at the point of not trying anymore, and mostly focusing on integrating homecooked meals and exercise into my daily life, with varying degrees of success. I did have to teach myself how to cook and I’m not bad.
I really wanted to avoid this for my kid. I really did. But because of his eating disorder he refuses all fresh foods. He’s been in therapy before, he’s in therapy again now. Even adding one more food to his diet is a huge deal. I know cognitively it’s not the same thing as feeding the kid junk as a path of least resistance, but emotionally it feels like my greatest failure as a parent.