Category: Uncategorized

For fifteen years or more I suffered from lower back pain. The pain was like a chess opponent. I tried this, the problem evolved. I tried that, the problem evolved again. I’m almost seventy years old. One might be tempted to just concede to aging and move on, but I haven’t. I’m lucky to have a great family practice doc and a great physical therapist, and I didn’t give up.

Here are the final four moves in the chess game, ending with checkmate by JailBreak! First, suddenly I couldn’t carry an overnight backpack for more than two miles without pain in my left hip. My doc referred me to my physical therapist, who diagnosed it as ‘tight hips’ and prescribed four stretches which are described below. The stretches helped, for a while.

Then, whenever I went jogging I suffered from tight legs, and a sore back on the following day. The doc decided to raise the ante by referring me to someone new, who made a diagnosis (weak hamstrings) which led me down some other unproductive paths; but every step along the way gets you closer to the goal. Just keep working. The stretching helped, but was overwhelmed by other problems.

My final move in the game was to go to the web looking for ideas. I found the following YouTube video: 5 Of The Best Core Exercises You Should Do Everyday.

The result is I’m able to jog comfortably, and I’m able to do heavy labor that I could not a year ago, all without suffering from pain and stiffness on days following big efforts. The key seems to be the combination of the four stretches, plus a set of five core-strengthening exercises. Details follow.

The Stretches
Four stretches, sixty seconds each.

• Single knee to chest stretch Lay flat on your back, pull one knee up to your chest and hold it for sixty seconds. Then repeat with the other knee.
• Figure 4 stretch Lay flat on your back, lift one knee up, pull the other ankle across the top of the knee, pull the knee back toward your chest and hold it for sixty seconds. Then repeat with the other knee.
• Hip flexor stretch Kneel down into a lunge position, one knee down and the other foot on the ground in front of you, knee bent at 90 degrees. Push your hips forward, but don’t lean backwards into your spine. (You should feel a stretch in the front of the hip and down the thigh.) Hold for sixty seconds, then switch sides and repeat.
• Seated toe touch Sit with your upper body upright and your legs straight out in front of you. Lean forward from the waist and grab your toes. Hold for 60 seconds.

The Core-Strengthening Exercises
See the YouTube video here. I’m still doing the ‘easy’ version of each exercise.
The two plank exercises are tough. Pre-covid I’d go to the gym a couple times per week, and on each visit I’d do 10-second side planks, left and right, and a 30-second prone plank. The presenter in the video is asking for 60 seconds, so now I’m up to 55 seconds on the prone plank, and 40 seconds each on the side planks. The other three exercises seem crazy easy, but the impact of the five exercises together when I do them daily, combined with the stretches, is dramatic.

The bottom line
Works for me, and it’s not hard! My back feels almost as good today as ever. Let me just add that I’m not licensed or trained in medicine or physical therapy, and my intent is only to describe my personal experience and good fortune! Best wishes.

Rights
Rights as defined in the constitution are NOT things you can buy. Our Bill of Rights protects behaviors and beliefs: speech, worship, bearing arms, etc. The Bill of Rights LIMITS GOVERNMENT POWER over our actions. Extending ‘rights’ to cover access to goods and services trivializes the meaning and value of rights. Right to medical care? Right to housing? Right to food? No.

Equality
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution propose that we are created equal, that we have equal opportunity, and we are equal before the law. Nowhere is there a guarantee to equal wealth or equal happiness. How much wealth and happiness you acquire is up to you, and best of luck.

The only way the government can provide equal wealth and happiness is to trample on all of our rights. A famous man once said: “If you are free, you are not equal. If you are equal, you are not free.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Meritocracy
Personally, I prefer that airline pilots and doctors are promoted on merit, rather than racial or gender preference. We need valid hierarchies of competence. We need the BEST plumbers, contractors, and engineers. If your father is dying of brain cancer, do you want the most competent neurosurgeon, or one selected to meet a quota?

We want to know who’s the best so that we can reward them, and so that they continue being the best. We reward the competent not as a recognition of their intrinsic being, but so that we can continue to receive the value of their skills.

Free Speech
Where are Lenny Bruce and Mario Savio when we need them? Free speech should be protected. Unpopular free speech especially deserves protection, because it NEEDS protecting.

Progressives do not believe in free speech. Ask the editors of the Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Times, and the editor of the editorial page at the Wall Street Journal. Ask Drew Brees. I believe in free speech. I’d love to hear a Progressive explain and defend his position on free speech.

No one has the right to reserve particular words for their use only.

Diversity
If diversity of race and gender are promoted, why not diversity of ideology as well?

Economics
Free markets are necessary to create wealth. Capitalism allocates resources more efficiently than other systems. The private sector is a better source of job creation than government. Wall Street and the banks play a positive role in our society. Similarly, the best remedy for poverty is capitalism and free markets.

Race
The only thing special about black people is their relationship with the Democratic Party: black voters are a key part of the Democratic coalition. Black people are NOT the largest minority in the US, Latinos are the largest minority. Black people are NOT the minority that has suffered the most, Native Americans have suffered more. Black people ARE dependable supporters of Democratic candidates, which makes them valued and important to the left.

Reparations
If reparations are owed to anyone, they’re owed to Native Americans. Regarding the proposal that we pay reparations to descendants of African slaves, a fair accounting would show the reparations are owed by them, not to them. If any reparations are owed as a result of slavery, perhaps they might be paid by descendants of black slaves to descendants of US Civil War veterans (364,000 dead and 281,000 wounded). In the same vein, we also sacrificed a President to the cause of abolition.

Does truth exist?
Yes, it does. Denying that truth exists is pathologically cynical. The English philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”

First, reality exists. Start with a sunny day in the country, flies and mosquitoes buzzing all around you. Try to swat a fly. Usually, the fly easily evades your swing – a simple example of multiple species interacting in real time. Fly vision may be dramatically different than human vision, fly consciousness may be so different we can’t even imagine it; but multiple species share the same reality, interacting within it. That’s reality.
Second, if reality exists, then facts exist. Your first swing at the fly was a bit low and left, and a fraction too slow. Occasionally you’ll connect and a fly will die. That’s a fact.
Third, if facts exist, then truth exists. It is true that you killed a fly, and it is true that another fly escaped. You may struggle to descry facts and truth in the sensory rubble of modern life, but don’t give up and say truth doesn’t exist.

Frenchmen and post-modernists might think truth does not exist, but they spend too much time in their salons and coffee shops. Get outside and look around. Reality exists, facts exist, truth exists. It does!

Government and Big Business
Government is a dangerous institution. There is a lot more to fear from government than from corporations. There is a lot more to fear from politicians than from CEOs and members of corporate boards.

Thomas Paine is quoted thus: “There are two distinct classes of men in the nation, those who pay taxes, and those who receive and live upon the taxes.” Those are certainly strong words. I won’t go quite that far, but if there is a threat to your liberties and your property, it’s rarely from corporations.

History has lessons for us. What can looking into the past tell us about issues like slavery, the value of women’s work, and the right to bear arms? I recently listened to a series of lectures on Late Antiquity published by The Great Courses. Unexpectedly, the lecture titled ‘The Social World of Late Antiquity’ had interesting information bearing on contemporary issues.

When was Late Antiquity? I think it’s something like 200AD – 600AD. The lecturer’s geographic focus was basically the Mediterranean world, on occasion adding in the British Isles and Persia.

Slavery
It may be, as claimed by a Forbes magazine writer on this page, a popular misconception that slavery was invented in the American colonies. But actually, slavery was invented before the invention of writing. Slavery was commercialized by the Romans, and practiced everywhere in the Mediterranean world in Late Antiquity. The Catholic Church owned slaves. Slave versus free was the most basic distinction in society at that time.

Quoting from Prof. Noble:
“Slavery was a feature of all these late antique societies. … Slavery was more prominent in the Islamic world than it was in the Germanic world. … The legist Ulpian said ‘We compare slavery approximately to death.’ … The number of slaves declined in Roman and barbarian society. Generally speaking it expanded pretty rapidly in the expanding Muslim society.”

The value of women’s work
Placing a lower value on the work of women was common in Late Antiquity, as reflected in the prices of different classes of slaves. Prof. Noble provided the following prices as of 301AD, denominated in solidi, a gold coin issued in the Late Roman Empire.

• ages 16-40: males 51.5; females 43 (20% discount )
• ages 40-60: males 43; females 34 (26% discount)
• ages 60+: males 26; females 17 (53% discount)

Ethnic conflict
Ethnic conflict seems to be ‘everywhere and all the time’ today. We have probably lost memory of times when ethnic conflict was uncommon. Prof. Noble begins by describing how people defined themselves at the time he recorded the lecture. The copyright date on the recording is 2008, and here is his description of ‘identity’:

“How would people listening to my words right now identify themselves? They might say I’m an American, or I’m a Californian or a Virginian, or I’m a Republican or a Democrat, or I’m a Catholic or a Jew. We can all have many many identities. I’m a student, I’m a worker, I’m a doctor, I’m a dentist, I’m a plumber.”

Ethnic identity is unmentioned! Prof. Noble continues by showing that ethnic conflict was not present in Late Antiquity:

“The Romans were a political union made in historical times. They were not a race. They were not an ethnicity. … The sources reveal to us in antiquity very little evidence of anything like ethnic antipathy. The kind of virulent prejudices and hatreds of modern times are simply not in evidence in antiquity. These cannot be traced back to antiquity. They don’t have roots there. It’s not our place here to talk about how these awful kinds of invidious distinctions and comparisons emerged in modern times but suffice it to say they’re not there in antiquity.”

Prof. Noble makes the point that where hostility existed between groups in the Roman Empire, it was over religious doctrine:

“Christianity was universal. … But there were certainly strains that inevitably attended the divisions that we’ve talked about earlier in these lectures, of people into Chalcedonian, Monophysite, Nestorian, Coptic communities and so on. There were some real antipathies here, but it wasn’t because people were of a particular ethnicity; rather because people disagreed on certain fundamental points of doctrine.”

The absence of ethnic sensibility extended to the barbarian tribes:

“Barbarian cultures on the whole were remarkably open. Adherence to a tribe for example was very largely a matter of choice, and a matter of personal identity. We’ve talked about the fact that our barbarian peoples generally speaking were confederations. … Once people entered one or another of these confederations and sort of began moving along the historical path that that particular confederation which now maybe had the name Visigoth or now had the name Franks or now had the name Lombard one begins moving along that path one doesn’t find evidence of hostility either inside the groups or between and among the groups.
One can’t find evidence that Franks didn’t like other peoples because they were Goth, or they didn’t like other people because they were Lombards. That sort of thing just doesn’t appear in the sources.”

Right to bear arms
In the US today we focus on the minutia of defining terms like ‘militia’ and ‘assault rifle’. In Late Antiquity they saw the heart of the issue: the right to bear arms was a basic mark of freedom. Prof. Noble said:

“Ordinary free men had the right to bear arms. So, interesting enough one of the things throughout much of the history of Western civilization that marks a person’s loss of freedom is his loss of the right to bear arms.”

The lecturer was Thomas Noble, Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. Prof. Noble is winner of the Edmund P. Joyce, CSC Award for Excellence in Teaching, and coauthor of the textbook Western Civilization: The Continuing Experiment.

The Bottom Line
Slavery was not invented by racist American colonists. The connection between the right to bear arms and freedom was understood well before the 2nd Amendment was written. The value of women’s work was probably discounted as long ago as the time of Cleopatra.