Understanding the 21st Century Through the Lens of the Blogosphere
What can we learn from 22 years of blab?
On Christmas Day of 2001, I started a blog called Daily Pundit. Actually, it was called The Blogical Suspects, in order to sport the handle “TheBS.” Cute, eh? Yeah, me neither. That name lasted about a week until I came to my senses and instituted the moniker Daily Pundit and so it is today, 22-plus years later. It has remained in continuous existence since, with posts and comments appearing over a span of 7,868 days, for a total of 44,741 separate posts and 280,361 comments on those posts which covered just about everything under the sun, although the primary concentration was on current events, with subsidiary emphasis on history, culture, society, science, technology, politics, and anything else that caught the attention of a large number of very intelligent, very articulate people. Stupid people did not survive there long, for a variety of reasons, mostly because people weren’t averse to pointing out, and demonstrating to them, how stupid they were. For some reason this offended them.
As a cultural and historical artifact, the Daily Pundit archives are not unique - a few other blogs have been of similar size and even somewhat greater age - but not many, and not continuously. The Blogfather himself, Glenn Reynolds, and his Instapundit blog springs to mind, for instance. And Glenn, as well as Mike Hendrix from Cold Fury, have migrated here to Substack, while still maintaining their original blogs, both of which have also been in continuous and active existence, and predate my own by a few weeks.
One of the things I find most valuable is that my archives are fully searchable, and are also loosely organized by subject matter categories. I have never kept a personal diary, but if I want to know what I was thinking about, and caring enough about to write something public about, it is but the work of a moment to pull up a date, or a subject, that is relevant. And it’s much better than a vanilla diary, because I’m quite likely to pull up a range of opinion on that particular subject on that particular date via input from an ever-changing cast of commenters getting their two or more cents in as well. Or I can just pick a category and start reading to see the shifting panorama around the subject over time. It’s an eerie sensation to follow the news of the day as it morphs into just another part of the history of a decade - or longer.
The quality of the discourse has remained consistently high, if not always entirely high-minded. Over the years there have been a couple dozen people who assumed editorial duties - they put up posts about whatever caught their attention- and at least a thousand people who have posted comments on those posts over the years. If only for historical significance, having a record of what a number of intelligent people were thinking about on any given day over that entire period is quite useful. At least I have found it so.
Even more important, every post is usually linked to some media item that triggered an editor to put up a post about it. So I can get a multi-lensed point of view from editorial posts, linked media sources of inspiration, and a range of commentary narrowed down to a single snapshot of a particular time, place, and subject. It has not been at all uncommon on something fast breaking to have the commenters themselves, in converse with editors and other commenters updating the discourse on a minute by minute basis. In a way, we bloggers had Twitter before Twitter had Twitter.
Admittedly, a significant portion of the media/blog links have succumbed to link rot, but in going over things recently, I was pleased to find that had occurred much less often than I expected. I imagine that is a function of cheap and/or cloud storage. When I bought my first PC in mid-1984 or thereabouts, (a Tandy 2000 - technically a marvel for the time, faster even than the dominant IBM PC/AT, but it had DOS compatibility issues - I paid, as I recall, about $1500 to add a 10MB hard drive to the package. Even at the turn of the millennium, when storage was much cheaper than that, compared to what we are accustomed to today, it was still expensive.
A lot of blog archives were lost forever because of that. I lucked out because I found a good host and stuck with them for many years, and kept my archives there. Eventually, of course, I backed them up to personal media, where they remain in several different formats. Just in case.
This resource has been sitting on various drives, cloud havens, and internet hosting services for more than two decades, essentially unused. So I decided to do something about that, especially since I’ve noticed that memories tend to fade in a few short weeks or months, let along years or decades. Sadly, that includes mine as well.
So what is it good for? Here’s a possible example. My last Substack essay revisited my weight loss experience with Eli Lilly’s new drug Mounjaro, which has been approved for controlling blood sugar in type 2 diabetics, and is expected to be approved for weight loss sometime in the fall. I was surprised at some of the pushback I got on the matter, part of which struck me as almost religious in nature. Certainly it was puritanical enough. Another surprising aspect to the commentary was how much of it seemed very surprised that Mounjaro performed as well as it had been advertised, or, in my case, considerably better. Perhaps my Singularitarian blinders kept me from anticipating dissenting points of view. If anything, I thought, people should be surprised that it took this long for an effective obesity cure to make an appearance.
And…wait a minute, I thought. I think I predicted a true obesity cure quite a while ago. At least I vaguely remembered something along those lines.
Off to the archive site I went. I had two categories that seemed relevant, “diet,” and “obesity.” But I just went for the search: “cure+obesity.” Up popped this, from early January of 2008.
Hang on, all you fat folks. There’s a hell of a lot going on beneath the news horizon you don’t know about. The revolutionary approaches that are just beginning to flow from the biotech labs will change your lives far beyond anything you expect today.
A prediction: a workable, effective, easily administered cure (yes, cure) for obesity will be available within five years.
Well, I was only off by four years or so, if you count the initial onset of the GLP-1 analogues (incretin mimetics) like Ozempic and Trulicity in 2017, which are effective in helping people to lose weight, although not nearly as effective as Mounjaro.
So I did make that prediction. And, although I shouldn’t have been surprised, the usual sort of fathead immediately cropped up in the comments:
“A prediction: a workable, effective, easily administered cure (yes, cure) for obesity will be available within five years.”
There already is – don’t eat so damn much.
Since hardly anybody at Daily Pundit has ever suffered fools gladly, or even at all, I responded:
“There already is – don’t eat so damn much.”
Why yes, that works so well. It’s why you hardly ever see any overweight folks around.
You arrogant, condescending dumbass.
Other commenters caught my reference to the Singularity and embroidered on it.
I think you’re right Bill…maybe even sooner. “Fantastic Voyage: Live long enough to live forever” by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, M.D. has a bunch of promising breakthroughs along that line (and many others) that we can expect very soon. It was also interesting to read that in many cases, obesity is NOT just due to lack of willpower. The complexity of the human body just astounds me. I would strongly urge DP readers to look into this book. Well worth the effort. Then again, the majority of you probably already have!
Since I’d been struggling with my weight for decades by then, I was well aware of that, but it seemed a lot of people weren’t. And actually, fifteen years after that blog post, a lot of people still aren’t. As was evidenced by this, from the comments to a post on Daily Pundit about Mounjaro that went up on June 28, 2023, just a few weeks ago.
I’m around people with “fat disease” symptoms every day, including my wife, and I’ve never “caught” it. I haven’t had a “fat disease” “vaccine” and I don’t take “fat disease” “medicine.” In fact, I’ve never had to “combat” “fat disease.” What could possibly explain that? I suppose you could say I just have “lucky genes,” but I do know how I could “combat” “LEAN disease.” Pass me the remote, something fizzy in a bottle, and something crunchy in a plastic bag, for a start.
It’s wonderful that you’ve lost weight (less wonderful that you apparently think toxic—and they all are—pharmaceuticals heal the body).
This commenter, by his own admission, has never been fat, and on top of that he has something of a Luddite/Puritanical distaste for modern medicine, yet he honestly seems to think that his smug arrogance is perfectly justifiable as he eructates at length on what the problem is with all you disgusting blobfats.
Did you ever consider that it was something YOU did or didn’t do that made you fat, which might be reversed by YOU NOT doing something, or doing something you WEREN’T doing? Years ago, I gained enough weight after a month in Uruguay that I moved here with extra pants, a size larger than normal. Then I made non-holiday decisions about things like desserts and French fries, and after a year gave the “supersized” pants away. My waist is now four inches less than when I arrived (FWIW adult Uruguayans’ waists have trended the opposite in the same period).
It’s all about choices.
So he went to Uruguay, gained ten pounds or so and a single belt notch, then ate less and exercised more, lost the extra ten pounds, and is now an expert on those of us who would love to have had his little ten pound problem, rather than the hundred, two hundred, or more pounds we’ve been in a literal fight to the death with for much of our lives. A walking, talking poster boy for Dunning-Kruger Syndrome, he is.
Amazingly, in his telling, while he was losing his massive ten pound bump, the entire nation of Uruguay was getting fatter. I wonder what caused that. Did they all make the choice to acquire the “fat disease” at the same time?
They say ignorance is bliss, and even though this fellow as a consequence must be one of the happiest men alive, flaunting it is just…embarrassing. Although he doesn’t let that stop him.
“Semaglutide, the active ingredient found in the widely used anti-diabetes and anti-obesity drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, respectively, are linked to an increased risk of thyroid cancer in patients who take the drugs in accordance with a doctor’s prescription.
I think that is supposed to support his contention that all medical drugs are toxic.
However, he wasn’t opining to a choir of Billy and Betty Boobfoods. A commenter actually not an ignoramus immediately responded.
JustAGuy4477
4 days ago
There has not yet been an association of thyroid cancer with Mounjaro. The warning is included only if you or immediate family members have a history of medullary thyroid cancer. It has only been found in mice — not humans, during the development and testing of GLP-1 drugs. According to the National Institutes of Health, medullary thyroid cancer is pretty rare, making up only 3% – 4% of all thyroid cancers. The five-year survival rate for all thyroid cancers is above 99%. I’m focused on the stroke I’m not going to have because I’m taking Mounjaro.
Our hero, never having heard, apparently, the maxim about holes and digging, decided to get in a final killer shot.
So I take it obesity just happens no matter what choices a person makes? Or do people get fat because they’re not taking obesity drugs?
He would probably have done better to just let it ride, because what he got in response from another commenter was this:
Sigh. A man who admits to never having a significant problem with diet and weight for his entire life, except for one dalliance of a month while traveling, tries to lecture other people on weight.
Listen up, chump. Maybe the choices that were made in my youth weren’t made by me, but by my parents and school cafeteria. Maybe I grew up believing that chips and fries and bread were actually food, and maybe I grew into adolescence when my own government lied to me and said that grains were healthy and butter and eggs were bad. Maybe never-fat know-nothings kept lecturing that I was lazy, slothful, didn’t exercise enough, ate too much. Way to encourage a guy!
Maybe I found myself 40 years old, always overweight, and lectured still by the government and Weight Watchers that the only way to health was to eat poisons like bread and sugar and “healthy whole grains”, only to restrict the quantities so I was always, ALWAYS, miserable.
Maybe you could look at the actual, you know, science. There are these things called hormones, and they run all the processes in your body. And after decades of abusing them, you are not internally the same as a normal, healthy person. Spend a few months reading about metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, leptin resistance, and ketogenic diets. So, yes, if my parents had fed me better, if the school had fed me better, if the government had not lied to me and forced trans fats into me, if I knew then what I know now, I may have been able to have kept good internal body chemistry throughout my life. Who knows, I may have even been athletic!
But unlike the unicorn farts you’re inhaling, I live in the real world. My body chemistry is a mess, and I need to change it. That requires major intervention, and time. I’m trying, at present, to do it with keto and (mostly) carnivore, and even then I’m using MCT oil and dihydroberberine to help me fight the hunger. Less extreme interventions than Bill did with Mounjaro, but harder, and statistically more prone to failure, as defined by the weight loss.
You can no more lecture a victim of addiction than a blind man can tell me what color to paint my house.
Speaking of which, how about going to your local homeless camp and tell them how to get off drugs? It is, after all, just a choice.
So what did we get out of that? Well, we saw a socio-cultural bookend encompassing the thorny issue of obesity over a period of fifteen years. We learned that ingrained ignorance is nearly as hard to defeat as obesity itself, and that this doesn’t seem to be changing very much. We learned that fifteen years ago issues of overweight and obesity were quite touchy, in some cases almost in a religious sense, though there was almost nothing being done to effectively deal with the root causes of those issues. Not that much different from today, even though, astonishingly, we do finally have effective solutions for the problem. As long as we don’t let ignorance, superstition, fear, or unbridled arrogance prevent our availing ourselves of them.
Just one snapshot of one issue on one day in January of 2008. But you know what? As the comedian said, “I got a million of them.”
It’s like having my own personal Wayback machine. I think I’ll take a look at Iraq II versus Ukraine I from a Blogospherean perspective the next time around. Although I am definitely open to suggestions, and if you have some, please put them in the comments.
If you enjoyed this essay, or any of the others on this Substack, don’t forget to…
The thing is, many of the manufactured foods cause weight gain - not specifically 'junk food', just additives to common foods that cause the body to grab onto fat cells at an accelerated rate.
Couple that with the growth of commonly prescribed medications that lead to weight gain, and you have the beginnings of a vicious cycle. Once you have extra weight, it becomes significantly more difficult to lose it - you will have developed joint problems, diabetes, and other metabolic conditions that make moving freely difficult.
CAN you begin losing weight?
Certainly. But, it's NOT going to be easy. And, in the absence of access to a pool - which takes the pressure off the lower body - moving and exercising can cause problems such as shin splints, broken bones, back pain (not always a temporary condition, but leading to lifelong deterioration of the spine).
It's more expensive - junk food is cheaper.
Hi Bill, thanks for clarifying that individuals are in no way responsible for the state of their own health.
Now what happens when you reach your desired weight - can you just stop your weekly injections and you're good to go? Or do you do them once in a while? Or is this one of those corporate every-week-for-the-rest-of-your-life dreams?
Perhaps the reader who so astutely skewered the thyroid cancer risk prominently featured on the web site might want to dig into other Mounjaro serious side "features," like pancreatitis, hypoglycemia, serious allergic reactions, kidney failure, severe stomach problems, changes in vision, or the common side "features," including nausea, diarrhea, decreased appetite, vomiting, constipation, indigestion, and stomach (abdominal) pain. N.B. "these are not all the possible side effects of Mounjaro."
Were I in your position, I might want to explore this: https://www.mindvalley.com/wildfit/content/people-dont-fail-diets - I have done other MindValley programs, and found them insightful and worthwhile.