Optimizing for old battles

About 3/4 of our management expertocracy is optimizing for old battles. It’s a pattern which is pervasive in Western Civilization, which is one of the reasons everything is so weird right now. Gather together a group of bureaucrats to solve a real problem, it’s still there 50 years later doing .... things. Things which are probably not important or even helpful. New people get hired to work on new things, and the old fungoid bureaucracy is still there doing things which may or may not be helpful.

As an example, it is bizarre to me that people want to genetically engineer rice to produce vitamin-A. Also that USDA approved rice is required by law to be “fortified” with a bunch of crap nobody needs. Dealing with the latter: nobody in the US needs “fortification” in their goddamned rice or anything else. Most people in the US are over-provisioned with nutrients, and those who aren’t can take a goddamned vitamin pill. In particular, adding iron to rice is fucking insane. Men do not need iron in their diet. They get enough from meat, eggs or legumes that they eat. There’s reason to believe iron in particular in USDA fortificants is dangerous. It’s not something humans evolved to eat, and it’s not the same chemical as exists in actual food. The other shit: vitamin-A and some B vitamins: vitamin-A might also be .... suboptimal, and I don’t want that crap in my food. Wash your rice, fellow Americans. It removes some of the arsenic, but mostly it removes the slop the vendors are required to add to the rice. Genetically engineering rice to produce vitamin-A; what could go wrong? Considering recent track record of “muh scientists” it seems like a lot could go wrong. These substances were added to rice and flour back in the day because people didn’t eat much of anything else. It’s an 80 year old health intervention; literally something we did in WW-2 to help the soldiers and imposed on the colonies afterwords. Can we revisit this idea? I don’t think it’s helping, and it might be hurting people.

Folic acid is another, possibly even more alarming nutritional example. The US government mandates (since 1998) it be put in stuff like cereal and bread. The idea is to prevent folate deficiency, which can cause neurological issues, especially in infants; folate deficiencies can cause neural tube defects in infants, a rare and awful condition. The problem is folic acid and folate are different substances, and they behave differently in the human body. Folic acid does not exist in nature, at all; only in the test tube and in “fortified” american grains. It’s so different from natural folates, it is used to induce kidney damage in animal experiments. Folic acid needs to be metabolized in the body into folate, and one can develop actual antibodies against it, which causes problems with the folate receptor. Autistic kids have a lot of these antibodies fiddling with their folate receptors. This supplement came about because of experiments on rats, who process folic acid differently from humans. A fact which wasn’t figured out until 2009, 11 years after the mandates (which have spread worldwide). It was seen as a harmless addition which was an unambiguous public health win, but nobody has bothered thinking about whether there might be problems with this chemical, despite all the behavioral and health problems that have sprung up since the stuff was mandated in the food supply. This isn’t something I’ve fully figured out, and I wouldn’t stake my life on the idea, but it looks like it could be bad and it is unambiguously clear that the public health organizations are determined to put this bullshit in everyone’s flour, with no thought for whether this might actually be harming more people than it helps. Concerned citizen scientists have a website you can look at. There’s also a video including Covid Grandpa which made me aware of it.

Cholesterol: there is a fairly strong correlation between heart disease and high levels of LDL cholesterol. Unfortunately, there is also a fairly strong correlation between long life and high levels of LDL cholesterol when the patient is older. What means? The standard doctor thing is cholesterol bad, giving a number of interventions which may or may not marginally increase lifespan, while having terrible side effects. They tried another intervention recently: crispr gene therapy to reduce cholesterol. That one is unambiguously bad; one of the participants in the trial died already. The reality is, various bureaucrats have decided cholesterol bad, and are managing the number. Actual scientists driven by truth-seeking are still puzzled by this correlation, and notice other things are better predictors of cardiovascular disease. For example, the ratio of HDL to triglycerides; lots of HDL is good, lots of triglycerides is bad. Most people with high LDL have a lot of triglycerides because they’re sustained on a diet of sugar and grease, so this correlation could be measuring the same thing. I sometimes have high LDL (mostly when doing something keto-like with low fiber, which is a known phenotype which also doesn’t have increased CVD risk), always high HDL and never high triglycerides. Also no heart disease in my family. Other scientists notice a particular kind of heart disease is anti-correlated with cholesterol. Also, dementia, which ought to be disturbing to anti-cholesterol bureaucrats, but somehow isn’t. Others notice CVD’s biggest risk factor is actually insulin resistance. There are other ideas; APO-B is another one which people take drugs to control. Same problem as LDL: you’re controlling a number correlated with a risk, not the risk. When you look at the risk after you control the number, not so much. Yet we still have imbeciles talking about putting statins in the goddamned water. All public health officials talking about putting anything in the food or water should be machine gunned into a ditch, and the remaining ones need to look at the current state of the research with some consequences (perhaps shipping them to El Salvador to aid with their public health problems) if they get it wrong. Of course this will never happen, as the unseeing bureaucracy is dedicated to number go down. The reality is, LDL is correlated with a whole bunch of other stuff, and the metabolic dysfunction that causes heart disease isn’t caused by the presence of LDL. They need to go find the discriminating factor here, and treat that. Dispensing statins to everybody isn’t useful.

Consider another example: pollution from cars. Particulates, unburned hydrocarbons, nitrogen dioxides, carbon monoxide: 60s cars were farting out some nasty shit (including lead vapor). You could kill yourself idling a car in the garage back in the day. Car exhaust is now pretty clean; even smoky diesels are now barely smoky. The bureaucracies continue to drive these numbers down: new US standards coming again in 2027, this despite car exhaust being quite breathable now (don’t try this at home). The relentless pressure to build more electric vehicles is also related to this. Meanwhile, tires and braking material leave obvious layers of dirt everyplace near cars being used. You breathe that shit; it’s not good. Car tires are probably the biggest source of microplastics in people’s lives. Braking material is basically asbestos (ceramic brakes are floated as a longer lasting alternative, but nobody knows if the dust they make is worse or better -there’s less of it anyway). If you live in a city in southern Europe you’re also surrounded by mopeds which have no emission laws associated with them: or if they do I don’t know how they manage to smell like 1960s era car exhaust. Yet, the car makers are required every couple of years to reduce their pollutant levels: they’re not doing anything about the big problem, but making everyone’s lives worse optimizing on the old problem.

Chemicals in the environment: I think it’s great we stopped pumping heavy metal and other chemical waste into rivers to make newspaper or whatever. This is a real achievement and has had tremendous long term health benefits. Unfortunately, other regulatory agencies allow companies to put nasty stuff in your clothes and on your skin; in food containers, on frying pans: they even require manufacturers to put “fire retardant” chemicals in your furniture and in children’s clothing. You can’t put it in the ground or in the water, but you have to put it in furniture and children’s clothing; mostly because of an old California law. This stuff is dangerous; it’s probably a big chunk of why men’s testoterone and sperm count has been declining. Back in the 70s when California dipshits forced manufacturers to start adding this crap to furniture, it probably seemed like a good idea. It’s not a good idea. Of course like all shitty ideas from California it’s now a federal standard: U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is in charge. Supposedly they’re investigating the flame retardants, but I’m not optimistic they’ll be removed from our lives. The bureaucracy is concerned with burning furniture, which as far as I can tell only happens when dipshits fall asleep smoking on flammable furniture. Why not just ban flammable furniture? You could dump hot coals on any of my furniture and pretty much nothing would happen: no weird chemicals needed.

These problems all have their origins in bureaucratic heat death. When bureaucracies were created, they were innovative and productive organizations. I know it’s hard to believe, but USDA, the FDA and the EPA were once as innovative and productive as early years NASA. Now ... not so much. People have been complaining about PFUAs and stuff like fire retardants to the EPA for decades. But the squirreley numskulls who warm the chairs there are too busy doing the crap they’ve been doing since Nixon created them by fiat in 1970. Optimized for old battles. Most of which are already won.