Beer!
In the popular imagination, beer is often associated with carefree indulgence and unhealthy excess. But I, Thomas Carlyle, would like to set the record straight.
Contrary to its reputational baggage, beer can actually be a healthy and beneficial part of one’s diet. Firstly, it is important to note that beer contains a variety of essential nutrients that can contribute to a well-balanced diet. B vitamins, fiber, and minerals such as potassium and magnesium can all be found in this beloved beverage. With moderate and responsible consumption, beer can provide a valuable source of nutrients to keep one healthy and nourished. Moreover, studies have shown that moderate beer consumption can reduce the risk of heart disease. It is well established by now that heart disease is one of the leading causes of death globally. However, the moderate consumption of beer can help to reduce the user’s cholesterol and promote a healthier cardiovascular system.
In addition to these nutritional and physiological benefits, beer can also provide a boost to our mood and emotional well-being. Beer stimulates the production of serotonin, a neurotransmitter associated with regulating our emotional state. As such, moderate consumption of beer can help to promote relaxation and stress relief, which is important to maintain a healthy mental state.
In conclusion, it is clear that beer, in moderation, can provide numerous benefits to our bodies and minds. We should not be too quick to dismiss it as an unhealthy vice. After all, moderation is the key to success in all aspects of life. So next time you crack open a cold one, remember that you are doing your body and mind some good!
OK, I admit it, this was written by ChatGPT, supposedly in the style of Thomas Carlyle. Not bad but could do with some work.
Vim & RTFM
This week I ditched Doom Emacs, after a couple of years, and went back to using Vim & Gvim as my main text editor.
Doom Emacs looks great and has more features than I could ever figure out, let alone use, but lately I’ve found keeping it up to date to be a bit of a chore. Every other update seems to involve changing repositories, adding stuff in or taking stuff out of the config or having to continually update the programs it depends upon, OK if that’s your thing but too much work for text editing and the occasional journal entry in org mode.
So back to Vim, which now I’m getting to grips with is much better than I’d realised, although there’s still a bit of a learning curve. Demonstrated perfectly by me having to rewrite one of my draft German letters three times as I’d completely misunderstood what “Nwrite” did. Hence RTFM.
We Killed the Tsar?
According to the somewhat rabidly anti-British Graf zu Reventlow in “Der Vampir des Festlandes” the British government was complicit in the murder of Paul I of Russia in 1801. This surprised me at first and I was more than a little sceptical as Reventlow is a bit of a loon (let alone a socialist and a Nazi, but I repeat myself), but Wikipedia tells me otherwise, so it must be true…
Paul I actually sounded like a pretty reasonable Monarch, advocating chivalry for the nobles and better conditions for the workers, but he stood in the way of British trade so he had to go it would seem.
“with the alleged support of the British ambassador in Saint Petersburg, Charles Whitworth” is as good as saying that our government did it, as I doubt the ambassador took the initiative alone.
I’d never heard of this before, but I’m fairly sure that Vladimir Putin knows all about it.
Reason?
Excuse the subject matter but “Bestiality & me” makes a good point about the limits of reason.
If anything can be justified by reason, then either everything is permissible, which obviously is leading us already to a very dark place (don’t make me tap the sign), or reason is not always correct, in which case the last 250 years or so have been a catastrophically disastrous failed experiment in man’s hubris and arrogance.
I think this may have been pointed out to us a couple of thousand years ago, but we never listen.
Flying Peasants
This morning I was reading this article in The Daily Sceptic about “Net Zero” and possibly no more flying for peasants by 2050, and it occurred to me yet again that this wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.
I’m not at all sure that endless credit and foreign travel has really improved our peasant lives at all, probably the opposite, and it’s likely inevitable that it will have to end when the sham financial system that supports such a lifestyle ends, and that’s looking like soon.
The problem is that at the same time, the same people are (and have been for more than half a century) merrily destroying our native environments and social bonds, which at least would give us some roots to return to.
“Fuchs-Eier und Schaumwein“, Marwitz hatte Recht.