Taomeow

P.S. Pens are on my mind in conjunction with longevity of late, seen information (and believed what I saw for once) that one of the best ways to protect/preserve one's brain later in life is to write in longhand. Apparently this activates three times as many neural connections as clicking keys or finger-poking screens. And of course it's got to be a fountain pen (personal opinion, corroborated by aficionados.) So I hunted down on ebay and bought this present for my vintage brain:

And an Epi New Pen. (Saw it on the news today -- there's a legal battle unfolding to equip medical first responders with EpiPens nationwide. )

What is known in psychology as The Dark Triad -- a personality combining narcissism, machiavellianism, and psychopaty -- is estimated at 7% of the population, on average. It means that in an average family -- grandparents, parents, a couple of kids -- you have almost a 50% chance of one of them being in that category (it could be you, of course. ) But in reality it seldom works like that. "Average" means that in some families they don't have anybody in that category and in some, everybody. Same thing with encounters in school, at work, among random neighbors, just people one meets in a lifetime. Some are spared close encounters with the dark triad representatives and some might have one for a boss, one for a neighbor, one for a sibling, one for a spouse, one for a parent (which is about as bad as it gets -- the worst scenario is to have both parents in that category.) I think the dark triad can be contagious -- in many cases the defense against being their victim is to internalize their ways and become the perpetrator -- toward someone else (most typically one's own children, but could be toward just about anyone in a weaker position.) And this someone else might contract it too, and the chain remains unbroken throughout generations. What's the solution? As my Primal guru used to say, just because there's a problem doesn't mean there's a solution. (Incidentally he was in that category himself.) They are the people who make the world as strange as I find it.

There's very little truth in what the public has been led to believe about what's healthy. Also about what it is we're actually eating, drinking and smoking -- a lot of it is grossly falsified, depleted, and poisoned. "Feed the ancestors," meaning the ancestral make-up of your own body, which is one of the taoist culinary principles, can IMO serve one better -- try eating what generations of your ancestors ate before you, not the latest fad. Although a lot of our ancestors were starving, not fasting by choice but starving due to poverty and social upheavals and endless wars. Yet those of them who were well-to-do enough to eat "healthy" had access to the kinds and varieties of food we can only dream about. (My grandmother on my mother's side used to tell me what was eaten in her mother's home in the early 20th century and all I could do was salivate. On my father's side, however, the ancestors were very poor and lived through periods of starvation. My mother's side of the family were the longevity folks, not my father's side.)

This is a very important key. I asked AI (Grok) about smokers and drinkers among the verified longest lived individuals. Here's a partial list (there's a bunch of others too who have birth documents but "are not fully verified" so I skipped their names) Name Country Age at death Smoked? Drank? Notes Jeanne Calment France 122 y 164 d Yes – ~2 cigarettes/day for 96 years, quit at 117 Port wine daily The absolute record holder (verified) Antonio Todde Italy (Sardinia) 112 y 346 d Yes – cigars and cigarettes most of his life Wine daily Oldest verified man in Europe when he died in 2002 Christian Mortensen USA (Danish-born) 115 y 252 d Yes – cigars and cigarettes until late 80s Occasional alcohol Oldest verified man ever until 2012 Maggie Barnes USA 115 y 319 d (disputed) Yes – smoked unfiltered cigarettes for decades Moonshine occasionally Age debated but widely accepted at the time Susie Gibson USA 115 y 108 d Yes – smoked cigarettes until 106 Occasional whiskey Quit only when she couldn’t light them anymore Richard Overton USA 112 y 230 d Yes – 12–18 cigars a day until 109 Whiskey in his coffee daily America’s oldest WWII veteran when he died in 2018 That Richard Overton guy surprises me. Not so much the 18 cigars a day but whiskey in his coffee. Coffee pairs perfectly with cognac. Whiskey?.. Assuming he started when he was legal to drink, that's almost a century of misguided daily use of a rather uncouth beverage. But I guess couth/uncouth is not a factor in longevity.

Kombucha is good, but bubble baths are quite harmful (toxic chemicals). Getting one's claws out when the situation warrants it is IMO healthier than being addicted to the drug peddled heavier than any other -- Repressitol. All things in moderation...

Edit: removed in response to the removal of what it was about