Remember Dr Koop?

More than a dozen years ago, my doctor told me I needed to start monitoring my blood sugar and changing my diet to keep things within limits. So I did, and my readings stayed within normal parameters for some time, or they did until the COVID lockdowns, masking, and social distancing. Once I was allowed to go back to the doctor -- remember, this activity was proscribed as well -- he began to worry, my numbers were climbing to the point that something might need to be done.

But my diet hadn't changed at all, although given the lockdowns and everything, I wasn't getting as much exercise. In any case, for nearly three years after 2020, my blood sugar readings were wildly erratic, and the doctor was getting more and more worried, although my diet hadn't changed, other than a few foods becoming unavailable due to the pandemic-related supply chain crisis.

Then all of a sudden, the pandemic went away, or more precisely, everyone was catching COVID in spite of everyone having to get vaccines and boosters. For much of 2022, the LA County health department was threatening to reimpose one or another form of closure, social distancing, or masking, until the health director, the notorious Dr Ferrer, finally threw up her hands and told the press and the county supervisors that reimposing restrictions would cost the health department its remaining credibility -- as I chronicled here, the TSA had finally refused to enforce masking at LAX, and Amtrak and Metrolink had refused to enforce masking on trains.

Somewhere right around that time, when all the remaining restrictions went away, the authorities power-washed the social distancing stickers off the sidewalks, and even the most timid barbers and retailers went mask-optional, I think right around the holidays, my numbers suddenly went back to normal.

In fact, over the past several weeks, my numbers have wound up pretty much the best ever, better than when I was 15 years younger. No meds, just the same diet. I think the final influence was that since the holidays, the number of people wearing masks at Sunday mass has gone from maybe 50% to 10%. I haven't been back to the doctor yet, but I'm assuming he'll recognize the results. I think it's generally understood that the public health response to the perceived COVID crisis damaged everyone's health in all sorts of ways yet to be fully quantified, if ever.

Now and then over the period of the pandemic, I've run into YouTube homilies by Fr William Nicholas, a pastor in the Archdiocese of San Francisco, most recently here:

One of his homilies three years ago, after the lockdowns started, made the point that humans aren't meant to have their faces covered, viz, by wearing masks. He didn't use the term specifically, but I think his implication was that this type of general masking was a violation of natural law. Just recently, in fact, we had Pope Francis by implication invoking natural law in the matter of transgender ideology:

“All humanity is the tension of differences. It is to grow through the tension of differences,” the pope said. “The question of gender is diluting the differences and making the world the same, all dull, all alike, and that is contrary to the human vocation.”

Almost simultaneously, the US Catholic bishops issued a statement on medical care that uses hormones or surgery to modify a person's apparent sex:

As such interventions “do not respect the fundamental order of the human person as an intrinsic unity of body and soul, with a body that is sexually differentiated,” the committee states that Catholic health care services must not perform them.

Somewhere around the time I went to college, the term "natural law", which I hadn't heard before (I was raised Protestant) made me shudder. It struck me as part of a whole bundle of Catholic terms like "immaculate conception", "beatitudes", "state of grace", "mortal sin", and so forth, that were simply alien. It took me much of a lifetime to get past all that. But even leaving its religious context aside, the term "natural law" is extremely useful, as in discussing the case of the self-identified transgender woman who killed six people at a Nashville, TN Christian school.

The legacy media is struggling to get its head around the incident. According to NBC News,

A sense of “resentment” might have played a role in a 28-year-old’s deadly attack on the private Christian school they once attended, Nashville police said Monday.

. . . The former student is alleged to have left behind writings being studied by local and federal investigators.

“We have some writings that we’re going over that pertain to this date, the actual incident,” Drake told reporters hours after the shooting. “We have a map drawn out of how this was all going to take place.”

He said Hale was transgender.

Officials “feel that she identifies as trans, but we’re still in the initial investigation into all of that and if it actually played a role into this incident,” Drake said.

Another piece notes that a group of trans activists had scheduled a well-publicized “Trans Day of Vengeance” for April 1. While there is no formal connection yet established between the shooter and the event or the group, it

purports to seek revenge for what they term “trans genocide,” a conspiracy theory that claims that transgender people are systemically targeted with violence. However, an examination of FBI statistics by the Daily Wire shows no proof to corroborate this claim. In 2021, only two of the 271 recorded hate crimes against transgender individuals resulted in murder. These figures are substantially lower than those of other groups and insufficient to substantiate allegations of “trans genocide.”

The Nashville police chief did, nevertheless, speculate that "a sense of 'resentment' might have played a role" in the attack.

Another factor that's hard to avoid is that the public health establishment has been hijacked by crazies. The COVID pandemic gave them a foot in the door that allowed them to impose destructive policies on world populations for a period of years. This is in contrast to someone like Dr C Everett Koop, Reagan's Surgeon General, cited as "the only surgeon general to become a household name" due in particular to his campaign against smoking as a public health issue -- under his tenure "smoking rates in the United States declined significantly from 38% to 27%."

Contrast Dr Koop with Admiral Rachel Levine, the first transsexual to do whatever they's been doing:

Wikipedia notes that Dr Koop was the first recent surgeon general to revive the tradition of wearing an admiral's uniform, and here we see that Dr Levine, although they isn't surgeon general, is wearing such a uniform, primarily to hitchhike on Dr Koop's prestige. (It's arguable that they's become a household name, though for different reasons, I suppose.) The problem is that Admiral Levine is a public health authority who's in essence declaring that natural law no longer applies, unlike Dr Koop, whose general public health position appears to have been to avoid doing things that are bad for you.

It's pretty clear to anyone who pays attention that transsexualism brings with it a whole cluster of pathologies. I don't care if it's Trump, DeSantis, or some other Republican, but a major 2024 platform needs to be to get the crazies out of public health. Whether it's COVID or transsexualism, they've been actively promoting things that are bad for everyone.