While researching his book, Humes obtained what was one of the last interviews with William Rathje, the late University of Arizona garbage researcher. During that conversation, the archaeologist said that US overconsumption reminded him of the ancient civilizations he had studied, in which the moment that extravagance began to outstrip resources always seemed to signal the descent into contraction and decline. In Garbology, Humes urged a break with that historical pattern and an all-out commitment to cutting waste. But in his conversation with Rathje, the university researcher noted one big problem with this idea: “No great civilization of the past has ever pulled this off,” Humes says Rathje told him. “None.”People sometimes wonder when I say that the state never can be reformed long-term towards liberty, I say look at history. It's never happened once, ever. Society's slide into authoritariansim is irreversable until revolution or collapse.
Perhaps it is easy to sneer at aging investment bankers tottering down to the doctor to get juiced. Consider, though, the case of a trans man who wants the biochemistry he feels to match his gender identity. In both cases, in the traditional way of thinking about medicine, doctors would have to label the men diseased before they could receive the drug that allows them to change in the desired ways. And if there is a logic to supporting the trans man in his quest for bodily autonomy, should the same reasoning extend to everyone else?
These are not merely abstract, philosophical questions. What’s at stake is not only the ethical future of the medical community, but the boundaries of a human life.
In the 1930s it was Otto Warburg who won two Nobel Prizes for his discovery that cancer cells convert from using oxygen to sugar for energy.[4] There is always some “sugar burning” going on, but cancer cells generate up to 60% of their energy from sugar rather than ~5% in healthy cells.
By the way, because cancer cells utilize sugar for energy they expel lactic acid, and that is how the alkaline theory of cancer got started in the wrong direction. The acid is expelled outside of the cancer cell.
Indeed, the very way cancer is detected in this modern era is to image tumors using PET scan technology where radioactive sugar is instilled and the sugar is immediately attracted to feed the fast-growing ball of cancer cells wherever they may be, and then visualized on the PET scan.[5] The cancer industry certainly knows sugar feeds cancer.
