Discoarse: Sunday musings…3/9/2025
1) Collabrity. Collaboration among celebrities. Used to describe a bunch of my colleagues at a conference.
Should be a word.
2) BLUF. Bottom Line Up Front. Mandatory strategy when presenting to the Department of Defense. Probably not a terrible strategy for slightly lower pressure presentations like our discussions a couple of weeks ago about how to educate our colleagues on mite-eradication.
Lower pressure, that is, unless you see a mite.
3) Beaker. Wordless Muppet’s character with hair that looked oddly similar to frozen vertical gummy worms. Strangely and consistently hilarious.
And apparently the inspiration for the most au courant hairstyle of the young male.
4) Healthspan 5. Supplements. The Holy Grail of longevity, right? Just give me a pill. No exercise. Eat whatever you want. Sleep when you’re dead. 300 yard drives until your 80, right out of a bottle. People have been talking about this since I was in grade school. Every single longevity “expert” has at least one chapter on this. Some, like Sinclair, have made their biggest marks doing research with this as the ultimate goal.
For the moment there is no magic bullet; what we have at the moment is supplements.
No reason to embellish, this is a pretty straightforward area at the moment. While there is literally a laundry list of stuff you COULD use, the list of stuff that is reasonable to add in at this stage is actually rather short. Over 40? Take one baby aspirin per day. Got any reason to take a statin? Just say yes. Metformin, the ubiquitous medication for Type 2 Diabetes has been shown to lengthen the telomeres, the end caps on chromosomes. Longer telomeres mean a younger chromosome. 500 mg/day, 1000 if you have an abnormal HbA1c or fasting glucose. There are almost no side effects and Metformin is so old that it is usually free.
How about stuff that is singularly associated with longevity and Healthspan? Nicotinamide Mono-nucleonside (NMN) is an NAD facilitator, increasing the efficiency of cell metabolism. 1000mg/day. Tirmethylglucolyte (TMG) facilitates the activity of NMN (500mg/day). Resveratol, the antioxidant made famous by 60 Minutes is somewhat controversial, but in my reading it is either beneficial or neutral; add in 1000mg/day. Round out your kit with 4-5000IU of Vitamin D3, 180-360 IU of Vitamin K2, and ~2500mg of re-esterified Omega-3 fatty acid and you have a cutting edge but conservative longevity supplement strategy.
Note that none of this is FDA-tested let alone approved. I am not providing medical advice or writing a prescription. This is my take-home from extensive reading and it is what I am doing at the moment. I am investigating “Fatty-15”, a newly discovered omega fatty acid found in healthy dolphins and will return someday with my thoughts.
I mean, if you could be as cool as a dolphin just by taking a pill…
5. Discoarse. Conversation or communication that is uncouth, unsavory, and impolite. Should be a word.
I think discoarse as I have defined it is a very apt description of the state of our national conversations. All of them. I find almost all of them to be lacking politesse in all ways. My granddaughter Lila once asked me what it sounded like if you were “reading cursive”. I really love that. The speech writers who backed people like JFK and Reagan spoke in cursive. Heck, Churchill THOUGHT in cursive and simply told the world what he was thinking. Now? There’s no elegance or style. Everything is a full-frontal assault. It’s as if everyone we read about on all sides of government is speaking in the big, bold, not very precise block letters we see in kindergarten homework.
It’s all so very coarse.
And so very personal. Vindictive and personal. It’s as if all of governance has been distilled down to nothing more than one zero-sum game after another. A policy installation is only successful if it knocks out an incumbent statute, a “game” that makes the writer of the new rule the winner at the expense of whoever wrote the prior one. As if a signature goal of every new policy is to turn the creators of the older policy into losers. What ever happened to working toward a common good? You know, something we would all rally around. I seem to remember that non-zero pursuits, the rising tide lifting all boats and all, I remember when that was how our leaders talked to one another and to us.
It’s been a very long time since all of us peasants out here in the villages were entirely in the dark about what actually went on in D.C. That all probably went away in the late ’60’s with Viet Nam and all that came with it. Would we have thought about “Camelot” in such romantic ways if we knew as much about what was going on as we came to know about the Nixon or Clinton administrations? Doubt it. But come on, they at least made an effort at smoothing out the bad news. Now? Language as if drawn by the literary equivalents of brutalist architects, laden with invective and shouted in ALL CAPS from the social media site of the moment. Next thing you know we’ll have a Senator channeling Khrushchev and pounding a podium with his shoe, or a couple of Members paying homage to Jackson era political battles by throwing down MMA style in the aisle during a House session.
Good idea, bad idea, idea you simply don’t care about, the discussions are toxic. Honestly, it just makes all of us Chez bingo unhappy; I don’t think we are alone in that. It’s ugly and unseemly and it reflects poorly on all of us, not just the folks who are supposed to be looking out for the common good. You can argue about who started it all and when, but whoever and whenever, it is now so coarse that it makes many (most?) people unhappy just from the listening.
Our public discourse has become coarse bordering on vulgar. We are all the lesser for it.
I’ll see you next week…
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 23rd, 2025 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.