Month: May 2021

I like French titles. In New York it is difficult to sell a calamari sandwich, but if you say it is a “baguette aux calamars a l’armoricaine”, they eat them so well that you charge double the price. The truth is that as a neighbor to the south I have admiration for many of the things that France has given to the world… Joan of Arc, Laetitia Casta, Catherine Deneuve, Brigitte Bardot… and let us not forget the Citroën CX and the Chateneuf Du Pape!

Following Picketty, I am going to lower the price of the calamari sandwich in New York because it will create inequality and not everyone will be able to taste it. Actually, I think it’s because by lowering the price and considering that this has elastic demand, I will sell more and make more money (that thing that Biden, Draghi and now Lagarde print). Which brings me to the praise of consumerism.

Humanity has spent most of its history surviving in the conditions of life that have touched them. It is enough to look at that in all the wars of humanity until just 100 years ago, more soldiers died from disease than from the hardships of battle. If one looks at migratory movements, the direction is always towards countries where consumerism is “a problem”. Since immigrants praise consumerism with their feet, I will do it with words.

Consumerism is defined as the tendency to excessive and unnecessary consumption of goods and products. It is interesting how many assumptions there are behind those few words…. Ah language!

Can there be excessive consumption when there is a market of supply and demand in which the actors decide according to their availability of resources, skills and wants or needs? No, excessive consumption only occurs when someone does not agree with what you buy or how much you buy freely. Consumerism occurs when someone wants to tell you what or how much you can buy. And for that they even invent accounting terms such as the accounting externalities of fossil fuels, which only they know how to quantify! Thank God for having sent us these lights. I thought that the Holy Inquisition had been abolished in 1834 by Isabel II. It sounds like the Imperial Catechism that Napoleon and the Catholic Church agreed upon in 1806. Follow our rules, we know better!

All economic activity requires a legal framework that guarantees private property and the freedom to pursue its objectives for each of the players in that market. The basis of all consumerism is ultimately a decision to buy or not within a framework of freedoms that go from the producer through the merchant to the consumer. And that is where the condemnation of the modern Holy Inquisition comes… including the church with this undocumented Pope at the forefront… It seems he read Guardini, but he left it there and did not understand much of it. Guardini in his most important book speaks of the uniqueness of man as body and soul, with an unequivocal bodily circumstance that does not diminish the experience of being. The truth is that I love the chapel of the Palace of Fontainebleau, a marvel of baroque and human art (all excessive and marvelous) while Lana del Rey says that we are born to die.

Perhaps in this world of Instagramers the summary is in Fontainebleau!

References

History of military Medicine (1992) by Richard A Gabriel and Karen S Metz

Picketty…. I have not read his book but his interviews, it does not take more to realize that your theory is wrong. Another Gauche Caviar …

After Babel (1975) by George Steiner

The Spirit of the Liturgy (1918) Romano Guardini

Lana del Rey Born to die

Me gustan los títulos en francés. En Nueva York es difícil vender un bocata de calamares, pero si dices que es una baguette Aux calamars a l’armoricaine, se los comen tan a gusto y les pues cobrar el doble. La verdad es que como vecino del sur tengo admiración por muchas de las cosas que Francia ha dado al mundo…Juana de Arco, Laetitia Casta, Catherine Deneuve, Brigitte Bardot ¡Que no se me olvide el Citroën CX y los Chateneuf Du Pape!

Siguiendo a Picketty voy a bajar el precio del bocata de calamares en Nueva York porque va a crear desigualdad y no todo el mundo lo va a poder probar. En realidad, creo que es porque bajando el precio y considerando que esto tiene una demanda elástica, venderé más y ganare más dinero (esa cosa que imprime Biden, Draghi y ahora Lagarde). Lo que me lleva al elogio del consumismo.

La humanidad ha pasado la mayor parte de su historia sobreviviendo en las condiciones de vida que les ha tocado. Basta mirar que en todas las guerras de la humanidad hasta hace apenas 100 años morían más soldados por enfermedad que por las cuitas de la batalla. Si uno se fija en los movimientos migratorios la dirección es siempre hacia países consumistas. Ya que los emigrantes elogian el consumismo con sus pies yo lo hare con palabras.

El consumismo se define como la tendencia al consumo excesivo e innecesario de bienes y productos. Es interesante la cantidad de asunciones que hay detrás de esas pocas palabras …. Ah el lenguaje!

¿Puede haber un consumo excesivo cuando hay un mercado de oferta y demanda en el que los actores deciden de acuerdo con su disponibilidad de recursos, habilidades y deseos o necesidades? No, un consumo excesivo solo ocurre cuando al alguien no le parece bien lo que compras o la cantidad que compras libremente y quiere decirte que o cuanto puedes adquirir. ¡Y para eso se inventan incluso términos contables como las externalidades contables de los combustibles fósiles, que solo ellos saben cuantificar! Gracias a Dios por habernos mandado estas luminarias. Yo pensaba que la Santa Inquisición había sido abolida en 1834 por Isabel II. Suena como el Catecismo Imperial que Napoleón y la iglesia católica acordaron en 1806.

Toda actividad económica requiere un marco legal que garantice la propiedad privada y la libertad de perseguir sus objetivos a cada uno de los actores de ese mercado. La base de todo consumismo es al final una decisión de comprar o no en un marco de libertades que van desde el productor pasando por el comerciante hasta el consumidor. Y ahí es donde viene la condena de la Santa Inquisición moderna … la iglesia la primera con este Papa indocumentado y …. que parece leyó a Guardini, pero lo dejo ahí. Guardini en su libro más importante habla de la unicidad del hombre como cuerpo y alma, con una circunstancia corporal inequívoca que no disminuye la vivencia del ser. La verdad es que a mi me encanta la capilla del palacio de Fontainebleau, maravilla de barroquismo y arte humano, mientras Lana del Rey dice que nacemos para morir.

Quizá en este mundo de Instagramers el resumen este en Fontainebleau!

References

History of military Medicine (1992) by Richard A Gabriel and Karen S Metz  

Picketty …. No he leído nada mas que sus entrevistas, no hace falta más para darse cuenta de que su teoría es incorrecta. Another Gauche Caviar …

After Babel (1975) by George Steiner

El espíritu de la liturgia (1918) Romano Guardini

Lana del Rey Born to die

¡El mes de las flores! Recuerdo que en el colegio (cuando hacíamos la E.G.B) Mayo era el mes de María, por eso durante el mes de mayo lo primero que hacíamos al empezar el día era ir a la capilla y todo el colegio cantaba. La capilla tenía unas vidrieras a la derecha cuya orientación sureste hacían de la luz de la mañana una verdadera delicia de color. Mi colegio, el Mater Dei de Estella, era un colegio pequeño en el que solo había una clase por año y en el que todo el mundo se conocía, era un colegio de familias. Todos los hijos de la familia iban al Mater Dei. De los 20 de mi clase, todavía recuerdo que éramos 11 chicas y 9 chicos, daría sus nombres porque aún me acuerdo, pero… es mejor recordar con sonrisa en silencio. Recuerdo también que comíamos en el colegio, el menú en el comedor de los muy pequeños, con mesas corridas empezaba con sopa todos los días, después venían las alubias o lo que fuera. Si no habías acabado la sopa cuando servían el siguiente plato tenías sopa con alubias u otras combinaciones incluso más peregrinas.  Cuando se pasaba al comedor de los mayores las mesas eran de cuatro comensales y juntaban alguien de cursos superiores, que actuaba de jefe de mesa, con los más pequeños. Hoy en día recuerdo que los martes era el día de garbanzos que suponían una gran dificultad para mí. El caldo era de una consistencia gruesa, de engrudo, que al enfriarse me resultaba insoportable, al punto de darme nauseas. ¡Cuántas veces me quede el último en el comedor con los garbanzos atragantados, sin salir al recreo de la tarde! ¡Y mira que los garbanzos de cocido de mi abuela me encantaban! Era la cocinera del colegio.

¡Volvamos al mes de la Virgen! Es curioso que ese recuerdo de la niñez tiene toda una tradición milenaria en nuestra civilización. La costumbre se originó en Grecia. Artemisa, la diosa de la fecundidad, era celebrada en mayo. En Roma, Flora, la diosa de la vegetación, se apropió del mes. En Roma los ludi florals o los juegos florales se celebraban a finales de abril y pedían su intercesión.

¡En la época medieval siguió habiendo primaveras, a pesar de que si uno lee historia medieval el tiempo y la vida eran en blanco y negro como el NODO! La humanidad siempre ha celebrado la llegada del buen tiempo, es la hora en que la siembra de meses anteriores asoma. El valle de Yerri se pone muy bonito. El verde de la cebada y el trigo que a final de mes ya ha espigado, da toda una gama de verdes junto al amarillo de la soja que ya ha florado. Todo ese color contrasta con el verde del encino en los derredores de Urbasa que no es tan árbol sino muchas veces arbusto mezclado ya con la primera hayas.  

Parece ser que ya en el siglo XII, entró en vigor la tradición de Tricesimum o “La devoción de treinta días a María”. Mas tarde la idea de un mes dedicado a María se remonta al siglo XVII. Es el mismo siglo en el que Newton enuncio la teoría de la gravedad y el mundo se movió hacia el empirismo y la racionalidad para explicar la realidad que nos rodea con mayor exactitud.

Tiene todo le sentido del mundo celebrar esa renovación de las cosas, ¡y esa recurrencia de los ciclos de vida que nos hace tener esperanza, aunque no sabemos si ocurrirá de nuevo el año que viene!

Me voy a regar las plantas de lavanda que dejan ese aroma fresco en las manos cuando una acaricia sus flores. ¡Es primavera, es el mes de María!

It is interesting that in our western society we are quick to feel offended when anyone expresses his religious beliefs and sentiments, we cannot say “Merry Christmas” or “God willing”. We cannot say “God’s grace be with you” when we say goodbye, it would be very “un-woke” even inappropriate and offensive.

It is true that it has been a long and bumpy road for our civilization to come here. Our Judeo-Christian society has gone through steps forward and backwards in the last 2,000 years where we have some level of written knowledge. It is true that we have sometimes not lived to our principles or just abdicated from them at times but our civilization is far richer and deeper than this world leads us to believe.

Interesting that we hear “ancient eastern cultures” when people refer to Japanese, Chinese or Indian civilization, just to quote few of them. When that occurs, it is because they are showing us some miraculous knowledge that has been hidden from us, due to the ignorance of our own civilization. The truth for example is that meditation seems to have originated in India and extended to China, and from there to Japan.

In the west, Philo of Alexandria mentions spiritual exercises” involving attention and concentration” 2,000 years ago. Later Plotinus developed meditative techniques. Of note, Saint Augustine experimented with the methods of Plotinus and failed to achieve ecstasy. Later Saint Theresa of Jesus and Saint John of the Cross in Spain were paradigms of the mystical tradition of the catholic church. So, there has been a tradition of mysticism and meditation in the west, it has not been mainstream and in that respect it is similar to what has happened in India, China or Japan.

Judaism also had meditative practices. In the Torah, the patriarch Isaac goes “lasuach” in the field – “to meditate” in the English translation (Genesis 24:63).

In summary, meditation has touched the Judeo-Christian tradition early on. The Beatles did not discover it to the western world, though the prevalent ignorance of the day makes it look like that was the case.

The western civilization in its tortuous way has had ups and downs. Let us remind ourselves how the Swiss already in the XIV^th century considered themselves a union of free people where citizens’ rights and worth were recognized by law, the idea of citizen obligation to the state was based on a reciprocal duty (citizen and state). Of note, in the contract for the battle of Laupen (1339) the state was required to provide medical service for the common solider. It is the same civilization that during the XVII^th century adopted the empirical method that was rooted in the incipient power of individualism. The ideas held and pushed by institutions and organizations began to be put into question. As Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne invented Apple in a garage, 350 hundred years earlier William Harvey run experiments to demonstrate the circulation of the blood in his own laboratory, Athanasius Kircher used a microscope for the first time to investigate the cause of disease in his room. Later in that same century two schools of thought about the human body were established; the iatromathematical school who understood the body to rely on mathematical and mechanical principles and the iatrochemical school which thought the events of the body were best described as chemical reactions and processes. And that was the start of a long process that has led us to today. Is it perfect? No. Is it good? No question. If you take a look at the migratory movements the flow goes to western civilization countries, that is a fact. It is a good piece of information for all of you woke people who are still here and have not migrated to Arcadia, that place with ethereal kindness, no vaccines, no social security, no food security or personal security, no amazon, no internet and no spotify.

And if you read the bible (Millennial, Yoga teacher in tight pants, guru of the breath and half-ass scholar: Oh my God, the bible, how retarded this author is, this is unbearable), and go to Mark 12:17 you have the most accurate statement of personal responsibility and tolerance to others who do not have your same beliefs: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s”. Jesus himself makes clear that we are our own captains and not everyone will make the same decisions or have the same beliefs but we can all live together, there is no need to mix church and government, my beliefs and our common understanding on how to live respectfully are two different issues. How modern that is ! So next time you see a Christian, shut-up!

And next time someone talks to you about the 7 chakras or energy centers in your body, that to function at your best, your chakras need to stay open, or balanced… you are entitled to enlighten them and remind them that the empirical method has so far:

Described that good nutrition and intermittent fast is best for health, that the interrelation of such events comes through the gastro-entero-neural system, that our diet influences the composition of our intestinal flora, that flora produces different chemical that may act as neurotransmitters, those may impact the local nervous terminals, and that can also send signals back to the brain.

When someone tells you that if you breath heavily you will enter a state of awareness, you are entitled to inform them of their utter and already old ignorance. Hyperventilation decreases your C02 the main driver of your respiratory effort, so if you decrease it breathing heavily (increasing your frequency and inspiratory effort) for 2 or 3 minutes you can go in a prolonged apnea, it is called physiology and it is fun, but the Gods are not calling on your door for something extraordinary (spoiler alert). You did not trick Cerberus and got into the Kingdom of Hades unnoticed. The fact that someone tells you about that as a discovery only talks about how ignorant and dangerous they are. That is a fact, not an opinion.

It is interesting that when it comes to Covid for example, we talk about number of patients with protective levels of antibodies, efficacy of first and second dose of vaccines, technological platforms of vaccines ( mRNA based with liposomal technology or traditional ones or live attenuated or DNA based vaccines). Why is it that when things get serious we immediately go to empirical evidence and hard questions? And it is absolutely fair. But then we listen to ignorants that play as “disrupters” and carriers of the secrets that science and standard knowledge did not share with you. Let us just remember the Wright brothers, the defied the common assumptions but they never challenged the law of gravity and developed control systems over power in engines, in fact they were real scholars of engineering.

So if someone continues talking to you about the Chakras, ask a very simple question, if you have a real problem will you do Sloan-Kettering or Chakras?

When you meditate you do not improve the efficiency of your respiratory system, you do not gain respiratory power or any other nonsense these gurus say. Meditation on a regular basis changes your electrical pattern of brain activation. In the moment of mediation what happens (published already in 1984…. that is 37 years ago!!!) is that your minute ventilation decreases significantly due to a decrease in tidal volume (VT) resulting from a shortened inspiratory time (TI). Meditation is associated with a decreased response to progressive hypercapnia. These observations suggest that an alteration in wakefulness can significantly affect the chemical and neural regulation of breathing. And may be that is the reason I can do the whole swimming pool underwater now. But … oh no is Chakra number 5!  

So next time they say Namaste (a hello to the Gods in the Vedas) you are entitled to say “The Grace of God almighty be with you”.

And the reason for this pamphlet is that my heart was broken when I saw this Indian man carrying his dead wife from covid to a far away place because no one would help him. And I thanked God again for living in this society, in this materialistic society …. because materialism is a choice people make, I am no one to judge, and they make such decision because their basic needs are fulfilled, is this society perfect? No, but it provides for far more people than any others, and provides vaccines within a year of a pandemic outbreak, and for all our divisions we still care for our neighbors. So I am proud of being here, I want to work to make it better, but get out of my way you gurus we do need more empirical knowledge, we do not need fables, and fairy tales, our belief system can be chosen by us from the open and rich tradition we have. It is time we start challenging fame, exoticism and ask you simple real questions. Those who want to be warriors and scholars need to be both, there is a lot of knowledge and science, if they are not able to understand it they are not scholars, we should revere intellectual honesty and depth both in warriors and scholars. It is easy to get a PhD, but that is not a scholar!

References

Readings for all those who do not know what they are talking about. They invited themselves to the discussion so if they are ignorant and cannot understand it is their problem, this is an adult discussion.

West’s Respiratory Physiology: The Essentials is the gold standard text for learning respiratory physiology quickly and easily. Originally published in 1974!

West’s Pulmonary Pathophysiology: The Essentials, offers accessible explanations of disease processes that affect the respiratory system.

https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/jappl.1984.56.3.607 Event 37 years ago there was already an analysis of the physiology of mediation and respiratory pattern.

These are all references I used previously , as you can see this is just a infinitesimal part of all knowledge out there so ….

http://www.anesthesiaweb.org/hyperventilation.php#:~:text=Blood%20is%20not%20a%20wondrous%20fluid%20with%20magical%20properties.&text=Hyperventilation%20causes%20loss%20of%20carbon,binds%20more%20tightly%20with%20oxygen.

Rafferty GF, Saisch SG, Gardner WN. Relation of hypocapnic symptoms to rate of fall of end-tidal PCO2 in normal subjects. Respir Med. 1992 Jul;86(4):335-40. doi: 10.1016/s0954-6111(06)80033-8. PMID: 1448588.

Meah MS, Gardner WN. Post-hyperventilation apnoea in conscious humans. J Physiol. 1994; 477 :527-38.

Kety SS, Schmidt CF. THE EFFECTS OF ACTIVE AND PASSIVE HYPERVENTILATION ON CEREBRAL BLOOD FLOW, CEREBRAL OXYGEN CONSUMPTION, CARDIAC OUTPUT, AND BLOOD PRESSURE OF NORMAL YOUNG MEN. J Clin Invest. 1946; 25: 107-19.

Kilburn KH. Survival of acute respiratory failure. A study of 239 episodes. Ann Intern Med. 1969 Mar;70(3):471-85.

FINNERTY FA Jr, WITKIN L, FAZEKAS JF. Cerebral hemodynamics during cerebral ischemia induced by acute hypotension. J Clin Invest. 1954;33: 1227-32.

Godoy DA, Seifi A, Garza D, Lubillo-Montenegro S, Murillo-Cabezas F. Hyperventilation Therapy for Control of Posttraumatic Intracranial Hypertension. Front Neurol. 2017;8: 250.

Schneider R. et al. Abstract 1177: Effects of Stress Reduction on Clinical Events in African Americans With Coronary Heart Disease: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Circulation. 2009. 120:S461.

C. Jacob, C. Keyrouz, N. Bideau, G. Nicolas, R. El Hage, B. Bideau, H. Zouhal, Pre-exercise hyperventilation can significantly increase performance in the 50-meter front crawl, Science & Sports 2015;30: 173-176

Sakamoto A, Naito H, Chow CM. Effects of Hyperventilation on Repeated Pedaling Sprint Performance: Short vs. Long Intervention Duration. J Strength Cond Res. 2018 ; 32: 170-180.

A History of Military Medicine, Volume II, by Richard A Gabriel and Karen S Metz, 1992.