From a Tampa Bay Tribunestory about oxycontin addiction, a jaw-dropping fact:

Oxy makes junkies out of people who would never buy from a street dealer. It is everyman’s high, heroin in a pill.

Of all the oxycodone prescribed in America in the first half of last year, 98 percent was dispensed in Florida. According to the state medical examiner’s office, an average of seven Floridians die from prescription drug overdoses every day — more than from car accidents.

Ninety-eight percent! Why Florida? Any idea? This brings to mind something a new friend told me over lunch right after I’d moved to Fort Lauderdale in 1995. She said that it was no accident that the FBI’s national office for investigating fraud was located in south Florida. Hmm.

Christopher Johnson at Midwestern Conservative Journal draws our eyes to Rutherford Johnson — that’s His Royal Highness Prince Rutherford Johnson of Etruria, who is also Rutherford Cardinal Johnson, the patriarch of the recently invented Anglican Rite Roman Catholic Church. Chris writes:

I really don’t mean to poke fun here.  If the Anglican Rite Roman Catholic Church brings you closer to God and helps you to better serve and glorify His Son, then God bless, strengthen and encourage both it and you in your walk with Him.

But look.  What do you suppose would happen if I were to decided that I was a member of some Indian tribe no one had ever heard of and that my “people” and that I intended to seek federal recognition?  What if I were to start calling myself a Knight Templar, a real member of the real order which, contrary to the views of actual historians, mostly escaped the clutches of Philip the Fair and remained in existence?

What do you think the reaction would be if I seriously declared that I had just discovered that I was a direct descendant of the Paleologus family, invented myself a seal with my name and titles in Greek around a double-headed eagle and started seriously styling myself “Basileus kai autokratōr Rhomaiōn.”  I’ll tell you what the reaction would be.

People would quite rightly think I was nuts.

Now, now, Mr. Johnson, where is your imagination? Where is your charity? I, for one, would like to extend an invitation to the Prince-Patriarch, pictured below, to relocate the Curia here to West Feliciana Parish. We love eccentrics, we’re fairly Anglophilic around here (this parish is known as English Louisiana), and our local clergy could certainly use some more scarlet in their collective raiment. I mean, come on, look at this get-up! Ecce, His Eminence’s Nativity address to the faithful:

(Wake up, Sam, this one’s especially for you.)

I’ve got a lot of writing projects to do before I can leave the house to do anything, but one of the first things I intend to do next week is go to the next town over, Zachary, and book a membership at one of their gyms. I’ve got to get back to exercising. I’ve been off my routine for a couple of months — I was sick for a whole month this fall, and couldn’t exercise, and then didn’t get back into it because we were busy preparing to move — and the weight I’d lost is coming right back. Very frustrating — but at least I know how and why it’s happening. Eating all this rich holiday food doesn’t help.

I was at my mom’s last night. “Can I send some of this cake back home with you?” she said. “We’ll never eat it all.” NO! KEEP THAT CAKE HERE!

As I’ve written in this space many times before, I’ve struggled with weight all my life. I was an obese child who had horrible eating habits: sugar, fat, starch, I ate it all, and lots of it. I lost all that weight when I hit my growth spurt, but have been struggling to keep it off for over 30 years now. Sometimes I’ll go for a while being relatively then, but mostly I’m at least 20 pounds overweight, sometimes more. There is never a time when I don’t think about food, and not just in a foodie-enthusiast way. In fact, my foodie-ness only complicates my response to food.

I was very surprised to learn from this important New York Times Magazine article that Tara Parker-Pope, the paper’s wellness columnist, is 60 pounds overweight. She writes about what science can tell us about why people are fat, and stay that way. Here’s the depressing gist:

For years, the advice to the overweight and obese has been that we simply need to eat less and exercise more. While there is truth to this guidance, it fails to take into account that the human body continues to fight against weight loss long after dieting has stopped. This translates into a sobering reality: once we become fat, most of us, despite our best efforts, will probably stay fat.

As you’ve no doubt intuited, this is because once you become fat, and remain fat for a certain period of time (a period that we can’t yet define), certain biochemical changes take place within the body that make it very, very difficult to shed those pounds permanently. As Parker-Pope writes, it’s not that we should give up healthy eating and exercise, and surrender to our fates. It is, however, that we should understand exactly what we’re up against: not only willpower, but biology. This should help us have realistic goals about what we can achieve, and what it will take to achieve it. In so doing, we can avoid the pointless moralism and guilt tied to weight.

Science indicates that it’s also the case — as Erin Manning has brought out so eloquently in our past discussions of this topic — that each body has a different response to food and weight loss. I have tended to side with Sam MacDonald’s view, based on his own experience, that a proper application of heroic self-discipline can result in permanent weight loss. This resonates with my own experience. I ran across the other day a photograph of myself taken when I was at my thinnest this past summer, and I was startled by how trim I’d become, simply from daily exercise over a sustained period. In my case, I know it can be done — but the minute I fall off the wagon, my body rebounds to its flabby standard. Parker-Pope writes that scientists have demonstrated what many of us know from experience: that you can feed the same people the same diets, and get the same amount of physical activity out of them, and some will gain a lot more weight than others. It’s all about metabolism.

I think this is the most important point in Parker-Pope’s article:

Given how hard it is to lose weight, it’s clear, from a public-health standpoint, that resources would best be focused on preventing weight gain. The research underscores the urgency of national efforts to get children to exercise and eat healthful foods.

In my case, I was always going to be genetically predisposed to being overweight, given my father’s genetic inheritance, but I will always wonder how much easier it would have been to have maintained a normal weight had I developed better eating habits as a child — specifically, if I hadn’t had junk food available to me 24/7, and eaten it constantly. Julie and I have worked hard to help our children develop good habits in this regard, and boy, is it ever difficult given this culture. Despite all the supposed health consciousness we have around us today, there seems to be even more junk food, and an eat-constantly mentality in the culture today than when I was a kid in the Seventies. But it can be done, even if you have to endure the disapproval of other adults, who think you’re being mean to your kids by not letting them eat junk all day long. In a way, getting your kids to adulthood at a healthy weight, with good eating habits (versus shaming them into dieting; I have a friend whose mother gave her diet pills as a young teenager), is a physiological analog to helping them get through college without taking on crippling amounts of student debt.

Finally, given how sharply the obesity rates have risen in our country over the past two or three decades, it can’t be the case that we are biological determinism explains it all. The kind of food we eat, the decline in physical activity — these environmental factors also play a role. Parker-Pope’s article makes me think that one especially significant factor is the rise in childhood obesity. Obese kids, it seems, will be highly likely to become obese adults, because of biochemical changes that take place during their obese childhoods. It makes sense that American parents allowing their children to become overweight set into motion a biochemical phenomenon that has proven extremely difficult to reverse — and that may only be reversed once those parents resolve to be strict (relative to permissive American cultural standards regarding childhood eating) about what they allow their kids to eat, and how often.

“By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:35):

Plan to be there for the really big show or miss out on all the hysterical wailing, the obsequious pageantry, and the free beer!

Via Gawker.

Bill Kristol callsfor Sarah Palin to get into the race for some unnamed Cincinnatus to step off her snowmobile throw down his plow and come forth to save the Republic:

And it is a moment, as you prepare to cast your vote, for others to reflect on whether they don’t owe it to their country to step forward. As this is no time for voters to choose fecklessly, it is no time for leaders to duck responsibility. Those who have stood aside—and who now may have concluded, as they may not have when they announced their original decision, that the current field is lacking—will surely hear the words of Thomas Paine echoing down the centuries: “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

You betcha!

Is this the craziest Republican primary campaign, or what? Now Newt Gingrich has collapsed in the Iowa polls. With voting there only six days away, Newt will be lucky to come in third. Right now, it looks like Romney, Paul, and Santorum, in that order. Meanwhile, Gingrich’s commanding lead over Romney nationally has also collapsed. They’re now tied in a Gallup poll.  Gingrich desperately needed a win in Iowa to sustain his campaign. He’s not going to get it there, and he’s definitely not going to get it in New Hampshire, which Romney’s going to win easily. Why would anybody give money to a campaign that can’t win Iowa or New Hampshire, is fading nationally, and that is so badly organized it couldn’t even get on the primary ballot in Virginia?

Let us bow our heads and utter words of prayer in remembrance of the Gingrich campaign.

And let us endeavor to enjoy such precious moments as Speaker Gingrich has to give us for as long as he can keep going in this thing. Like today’s insight, for instance, in which he said his and Callista’s luxury cruise of the Greek islands was actually training for fiscal leadership:

“Ironically, being in Greece during the Greek crisis was very helpful and gave me a much deeper perspective of how hard this was going to be.”

Ironically, drinking that $150 bottle of Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame on my 10th wedding anniversary gave me a much deeper perspective of the physics of carbonated liquids.

Peter Hoh sends this powerful essay by a Lehman Brothers veteran, denouncing his former life. Excerpt:

 It was in May 1961 that a series of circumstances took me from the hushed precincts of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I was working as a curatorial assistant in the European Paintings Department, to Lehman Brothers, to begin what for the next 30 years would be an involvement—I hesitate to call it “a career”—in investment banking. I would promote and execute deals, sit on boards, kiss ass, and lie through my teeth: the whole megillah. In consequence of which, I would wear Savile Row and carry a Hermès briefcase. I had Mme. Claude’s home number in Paris and I frequented the best clubs in a half-dozen cities. But I had a problem: I was unable to develop the anticommunitarian moral opacity that is the key to real success on Wall Street.

“Anticommunitarian moral opacity”? Whatever does he mean? Here’s a clue:

I have lived what now, at 75, is starting to feel like a long life. If anyone asks me what has been the great American story of my lifetime, I have a ready answer. It is the corruption, money-based, that has settled like some all-enveloping excremental mist on the landscape of our hopes, that has permeated every nook of any institution or being that has real influence on the way we live now. Sixty years ago, if you had asked me, on the basis of all that I had been taught, whether I thought this condition of general rot was possible in this country, I would have told you that you were nuts. And I would have been very wrong. What has happened in this country has made a lie of my boyhood.

The author expects there to be significant violence ahead. I don’t see that. It seems hysterical, actually. But maybe I’m wrong.

UPDATE: The philosopher John Gray points out that the stability that we take for granted (and that makes someone like me suspect that predictions of violence against Wall Street and its tribe are overheated) is actually not the normal condition of our civilization. Excerpt:

In different ways utopian thinkers and believers in gradual progress both look forward to an end to history as it has always been.

The response to the current crisis in Europe shows the continuing hold of this myth. History, many seem to think, is something that happens only to previous generations. We, the product of centuries of progress, could not conceivably be repeating the follies and delusions that led to disaster so often in the past.

Yet if you step back a little and look at the situation from a more detached perspective, it seems clear that no solution to Europe’s problems can be found within existing institutions. Rather like the planter’s house Koestler read about in the book on termites, European structures are eaten away by debt. Wherever Europe’s elites turn for support, the pillars begin to shake and crumble.

Our leaders insist there is no alternative to propping up these deeply eroded constructions since their collapse would cause a financial and economic earthquake. This may well be right, but shoring up a structure that is inherently unsound only ensures a larger collapse some time later.

Eventually every utopian project comes to grief. And while it started as a benign creation, the European project has long since acquired an unmistakably utopian quality. The efforts that are being made to renew the project are only accelerating its demise.

He’s talking about the European Union project, but I wonder to what extent this insight could be applied to our political and economic institutions and relations in the US.

I love me some ham, but if I have to eat another slice of it, I’m going to cut my tongue out and feed it to the coyotes. I am worn out by holiday feasting. I’m going to make turkey pot pie for lunch today — I make a pretty good one, if I may say so — but what I really want to do is to be turned loose on a field of rye grass to graze and masticate my cud until all the hammy, bacony, sugary residue of Christmas works its way out.

Our wedding anniversary is on Friday, and New Year’s Eve is the day after that, but Julie and I have lost our professional edge on reveling. I think we’ll just make thin soup and watch something on TV, though perhaps we can muster the wherewithal to go see a movie and gnaw on a head of butter lettuce, or something.

What do you like to eat after the Christmas blowout? Do you like to eat anything? I don’t have the stamina anymore for sustained rich eating after two or three days of it. I’m thinking about cooking some sort of greens in a broth seasoned by turkey leg. You have advice for me? For us all?

Next time I go into Baton Rouge, I’ve got to get back by Whole Foods and buy some more $10 bottles of prosecco. We had a bottle of that at Christmas dinner. I was surprised by how good it was, especially for the cost. There’s nothing more festive than sparkling wine. This prosecco was plenty crisp enough to slice right through the butter and bacon infusing most dishes at the table. New Year’s Eve spent drinking prosecco and watching trashy TV sounds about right to me. I need to save up my revelry reserves for the LSU-Bama game. We’re going to be at Antoine’s, in the French Quarter, all afternoon, at a big party. Can you say “Sazerac”? Baby, I knew you could.