You don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps.

Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal one of the stupidest creatures in the known universe appointed as adviser to US Government

Is it me, or are the people in charge of everything more bonkers than ever? The ones that seem most hellbent on upending democracy are the craziest of them all. Dictators are always a bit mad, aren’t they? Mad, and reliant on a constant diet of paranoia and fact-flecked lies to fuel their reason for existing.

Speaking of fact-flecked lies and paranoia, have you ever seen Stanley Kubrick’s cold war satire, Dr Strangelove, which is about the fruit loop US Army general Jack D Ripper’s determination to nuke Russia because he believes fluoridating the water is a monstrous Communist plot to poison America’s “precious bodily fluids”.

Dr Strangelove is a comedy, and a pretty historic one at that, about what would happen if the wrong person had access to the nuclear codes. Stanley Kubrick directs Peter Sellers, who is the gold standard of comic actors that Will Ferrell manages to get about 63% of the way to meet at his best.

This Substack has a notional theme of wellbeing news [and exorcising my personal derangement]. And lately my little girly wellness niche has been crammed with politics.

I ran my last Substack that attempted to approach RFK’s favourite healthcare fixes (Ivermectin, sunshine, raw milk, et al) through an AI and it told me the argument was hyperbolic and conflicted. (My next question was, is the writer going mad and it said it couldn’t possibly comment.)

The confusion over the promise of non-medical fixes, their allure, and their high snake oil content, is real for someone browsing online. But do we need that confusion as a healthcare policy. The world is going mad. Or at least America is. The clip above is perhaps how Robert F Kennedy explained the evils of fluoridation to Donald Trump, who has said that ending fluoridation, “sounds alright to me”.

Believing fluoridation is a form of malevolent mind control dates back, way back, to when it was first mooted in the fifties and sixties. Fluoride, like seed oils, is some kind of industrial byproduct that the mysterious “they” feed us to make us weak and get rid of their rubbish.

We have fluoridation to thank for giving billions of children a lot less fillings and the plot of the funniest and silliest film ever made about nuclear war. One 2008 academic paper titled, “How a Modest Public Health Measure Became America's Longest-Running Political Melodrama” describes “colorful characters” in the anti-fluoride camp, including a man who would today be a shoo-in for Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). ‘Dr. Charles Bett, a prominent antifluoridationist, charged that fluoridation was “better than using the atom bomb” because the atom bomb has to be made and transported to the place it is to be set off while poisonous fluorine has been placed right beside the water supplies which we consume as a daily necessity.’

“Colourful characters” indeed.

I, being hyperbolic and conflicted, have gone through my worried-about-fluoride-phase, and in the spirt of reducing the casual environmental toxic load on my brain because, well, why not just try and reduce neurotoxic shizz because, “the influence of fluoride on processes of Alzheimer’s initiation and progression is complex, not yet fully understood, and warrants further investigation”. I might add that the far far more protective thing to do for Alzheimers is constantly learning new and difficult things, not being lonely, exercise (aerobic and weights), not drinking too much, not eating crap, not being overweight, and getting good sleep. I know this because I wrote a big piece on the key ages of brain health decline. It was a super interesting piece to write. But changing my toothpaste was easier than learning Mandarin, so I did that.

Professor Barbara Sahakian sees this period as crucial for addressing serious risk factors for dementia and Alzheimer’s: loneliness and social isolation, which studies say can increase the risk of dementia as much as 30 per cent and 60 per cent respectively. “One study showed that five of the 13 proteins linked to brain ageing increased in response to loneliness.”

I found the earnest toothpastes that protect your teeth with mud and camphor and magic or something didn’t make my teeth feel very clean, so I mixed up proper toothpaste and wellness toothpaste. I continued like this until a tooth related can of whoopass was opened in my mouth probably exacerbated by my being run down and grinding my teeth in my sleep during The Cupboard months. Crying in pain, pleading with my kind Iranian dentist for help, she said, buy a high quality toothpaste with the highest fluoride content you can and rub it on the tooth three times a day while the antibiotics are getting to work. In that moment, Kingfisher toothpaste was ova.

There is an alternative to fluoride, and that is hydroxyapatite (HA).
I’m handing explaining the difference over to a dentist and not RFK, who I can guarantee will tell you that fluoride is bad for your brain and will give your child the intellect of a cabbage. “Your tooth is made of hydroxyapatite (HA). When you use HA toothpaste the HA in your tooth is remineralised with HA. When you use fluoride toothpaste, your tooth is remineralised with fluorapatite. The fluoride incorporates into the tooth mineral structure. Fluorapatite is good because it is more resistant to acid attack demineralisation than HA alone. HA toothpastes put your tooth back where it started. Fluoride toothpastes put your tooth a step ahead for future acid attack, thus reducing your risk for future cavities. Remember the dose makes the poison. Used appropriately fluoride is extremely safe and effective and we have decades of data on that. HA toothpastes are new. We’re getting data but we don’t have long term safety and efficacy data yet. Might be fine, might have some risks we don’t know about yet. My guess is it will be mostly fine.”

So, after a big toothpaste dog leg here let’s return to the point. Brevity is the soul of lingerie but not my Substack.

Colourful characters is such a lovely collective word for the full panoply of extremists, eccentrics, hysterics, whistleblowers and frightened people who cannot adequately weigh benefit v risk analysis. Some are genuine mischief makers. Others believe the hype. This jeering from the sidelines for nearly a century is bearing fruits. Fluoridation is going out of fashion now. Partly because toothpaste is more widely used and partly because people don’t like it and/or feel rightly or wrongly scared for their child’s health.

As ever, it’s a complicated picture.

It likely does have a tiny impact on child IQ at certain doses but as this recent review suggests not as great a impact as childhood neglect, abuse, what a kid eats, what their mother ate while pregnant, how well the are educated, who their parents were and, indeed, the diseases they catch. Measles can result in very serious brain damage. *Coughs quietly and waits while everyone in Texas goes “See, told you fluoridation was really bad”*

Texas, enjoying measles and “natural immunity

Some English counties still do it, but Scotland, Ireland, Wales and many EU countries no longer add fluoride to tap water). There’s still the fluoride that occurs naturally (always assumed better, ‘natural’, obvs) in ground water sources like springs and wells, which can go two, three or four times higher than unnatural added levels. In India they de-fluoridate the water because ‘natural’ (= good, right. Right? RIGHT!?) levels are so high.

So. What. Are. You. On. About. Spicer?

Fluoridation. Reducing dental decay and especially so in poor kids while providing us with all sorts of conspiracy entertainment and the great Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb for nearly 75 years.

The reason I thought of this was the jaw droppingly surreal moment when DT announced the US would take over Gaza, ship its citizens out to surrounding Arab countries, and redevelop it as an international shopping, gambling and fucking resort that sounded a bit like Dubai but he said back in October could be better than Monaco.

It sounded mad enough just in and of itself but if you are a prurient gawper at conspiracy theories like me, it was a little bit of a head fück. Just like fluoride in the water is very mildly neurotoxic handing the conspiracists what they would call a win, so too these renderings speak to mischievous misinformation circulated at the start of the massive assault on Gaza in 2023, images suggesting that the whole place was going to be razed and turned into an Israeli Malibu.

Pro-Palestinian friends, some no longer acknowledging my existence, let alone speaking to me, were appalled that I didn’t believe these fantasy drawings of amusement parks and roller coasters were real.

I found the entire war desperate in the way we all had to pick sides and dump anyone with a different point of view. Be anti-semitic, support a bunch of really horrible people, deny the holocaust was “that bad” and flag wave a terrorist organisation or Bibi’s vile little gang. The whole thing was awful, and the renderings just seemed to be AI generated mischief encouraging hysteria, division and conspiracies. Apparently they had come from the desk of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son in law. This was peak conspiracyism in my mind.

Now, I’m left looking like a big woolly sheeple, just like my friends who are no longer my friends because said I was. These were people who thought Putin was a great guy, who thought Zelensky was corrupt and evil. Nutters, right.

Just over a year on and it appears not. They weren’t nutters, they had the advanced insights into geopolitics. The world is now run by the very conspiracy theorists I accused of being deranged narcissistic and not very bright lunatics who had done too many drugs.

We all know an Ivermectin raw milk shake brings RFK to the yard. But not to Substack which is full of nice sensible clever people.

er, mmmn.

People write these sweet notes about finding the good people on Substack, but I think there’s plenty of not good people too. Masses of neo Nazis. And after writing about rape last Autumn I was sent the odd missive by men who felt aggrieved by, I dunno, the entire female of the species. Writing about rape brought all the Andrew Tate fans to my yard. Misogynystack turned up to bellowe at me that one woman’s rape is another man’s “asking for it”.

The algorithm on here is as attuned to echo chamber as any other elsewhere. This is probably why, despite following a few of the more sane conspiracy thinkers out of curiosity, I did not discover full batshit conspiracystack until I started researching RFK’s favourite wonderdrugs, Ivermectin, hydroxycholorquine, stem cells and raw milk, and don’t forget vitamins kids, also a great cure for cancer.

What do we want? Ivermectin. When do we want it? NOW!

Inside those chatrooms and Telegram groups I found lots of substack links to epics of conspiracist fantastical thinking. Of programmed early death via vaccines with mind controlling chips, of oh gosh, it’s just bananas the way they weave everything together so that the complex thing called HUMANITY and THE WORLD, is as neatly linked and tied up as a macrame hanging basket.

Colourful characters are suddenly everywhere and very powerful.

“A bestiary of nihilists, destructionists and even criminals unlike any collection of advisers that any other president assembled. They’d be unscrupulous in all fashions but one: unswerving loyalty…” and, “affirm Trump’s worst impulses, nurture his nuttiest ideas and gleefully carry out his orders.” So wrote Frank Bruni back in October, and he wasn’t wrong.

The “colourful characters” that have existed on the edge of things for quite a while are now at the centre, running things. And it really does feel like that, the recalibration of things is super weird. The conspiracy theorists are in full charge.

Zelensky describes Trump as lost in bubble of misinformation and Trump, like a bitchy teenager over at Putin’s for a sleepover, his BFF, tweets or truth socials or whatevers him to say he’s, like totally a dictator and he started it.

mad hatters tea party, colourful characters wl2m

Bruni says these multiple, “Self-impressed eccentrics and ideological outliers who are happy to make fawning spectacles of themselves consider Musk their spirit animal.”

He is a colourful character alright and fascinating to observe, not like Trump, who is sort of grotesque. Elon is more like an albino salamander you are too scared to pick up from the big glass tank in your weird friend’s bedroom but can’t stop looking at his organs through that transluscent skin.

Elon’s spirit animal, for real

Musk has a spirit animal too. And it is not a wolf, or an owl, or a camel. It is the…

….Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, which appears in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which is entertaining, cutely subversive, totally surreal, gentle and unusual reading for a demented billionaire engineer who finds Nazi salutes hilarious.

Douglas Adams is the homeliest wittiest writer of sci-fi. I read the HHG2tG first and then obsessively read them all. (there are a few in the series). In one there is the line, “…it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

I’m not really a quote person, but Douglas Adams is the author of my favourite: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

The story starts with a boring normal bloke in his dressing gown called Arthur Dent being rescued from Earth by his friend Ford Prefect just as it is blown up by Vogon road workers who are building a new intergalactic bypass (Intergalactic HS2?). It’s a Dr Strangelove sort of plot, in that it is a LOLfest that relies on the planet we call home ceasing to exist.

a hungry hippo of a spirit animal for Mein Musk.

I was about to say I can’t think of a figure who holds such power who is so unabashedly childlike as Musk but actually there’s a lot, it’s very easy. Kim Jong Un clearly looks like, and is, a confused, corn-fed and very spoilt toddler. Other problematic leaders reek of arrested development too. Trump of a child that was psychologically bullied by his Dad. There’s something of the toe curling, unpopular rich kid about him but I could be wrong, perhaps he was a very popular guy, the most popular guy there’s ever been. Putin feels like those brutal little psychopaths you find in hostile environments like boarding schools and borstals. Most dictators are nutters, aren’t they. It’s

Douglas Adams is funny. I warm briefly to Elon Musk as he lays waste to thousands of jobs, helps build a new fascist monarchy in the US and fills Fort Knox with NFTs and bitcoin or whatever it is he’s doing. Underneath it all he’s just a colourful character, an emotional manbaby genius playing spaceships and crypto with his favourite child-friend, X Æ A-Xii (pronounced X Ash A Twelve), a four year old boy who picks his nose in the Oval Office. Less a child, more a sort of emotional support animal.

Don’t Panic

As an aside, I totally get the service animal security blanket thing if you have a bit of a wonky brain. I take my dogs everywhere, partly because no one wants to take care of two wild animals, and partly because they are extremely comforting if you feel a bit lonely. Stroking dogs gives you quite a stack of nice hormones, oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin. Dogs are medicinal.

Like any medicine there are contraindications.

A word of warning if you use your dog as an anti-depressant, which I expect RFK will be encouraging us to do now seeing as SSRIs are, apparently, “harder to get off than heroin”. Dogs are not without their contraindications: they might chew the heel of your favourite pair of Vivienne Westwood shoes, or hurtle off across fields for two hours at midnight only to return having torn themselves a little pocket on their hind leg, they might make it very hard to rent somewhere to live, and they can reduce you to crouching in a field and screaming with frustration as you watch them zip off at 20 miles an hours towards the nearest busy A road. Just me? I think I need to change my dose. Dogs also die on you. Hopefully at the right time, but if they are of the A road hurtling variety, you can never be sure when that time will come.

Dogs are nice. I had to drive down country lanes to find the little one but at bedtime she will come and sleep with me and I will forgive her everything. Dogs give crucial succour to people who feel a bit odd, adrift and outsiderly. They turn a lonely feeling into the more comfortable aloneliness. My old lurcher, Wolfy, was a velcro dog, who walked beside me. These current ones are a bit unpredictable, and never walk beside me unless I staple them to my trouser leg. I don’t always staple them to my trouser legs and so the vet had to staple up the big dog’s bloody pocket. Despite this, she still buggered off again, and again. We have to go everywhere with annoying long leads now. Heroin is more reliable if you did just want to relax and forget your troubles for a while.

Though my operations are a little less high level than Elon Musk’s I still know there are occasions when the emotional support animal should sleep in the car outside. But this isn’t a post about last week’s news, or my dog, it’s a post about conspiracy theories.

Or are they?

I was poking around last week trying to find out what the fuss was about Ivermectin, which is kind of like President Trump’s emotional support worming tablet. A broad spectrum anti parasitic drug that won its inventor the Nobel Prize. Perhaps, as Robert F Kennedy (from here on, RFK) asserts in his bestselling book, The Real Anthony Fauci, Big Pharma in collusion with the deep state has been widely censoring safe drugs in favour of dreadful pharmaceutical solutions that kill more than they cure. The conspiracy Substackers certainly think so. What some call his “dizzying falsehoods” others call, the truth. But as good old Douglas Adams said, “All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.” And I think we’d be well-advised to consider this before taking health advice from Robert Kennedy

AIDS and HIV are better treated, according to RFK, with detoxification procedures, ozone therapy, nutrition, herbal medicine, an antibiotic and “supporting” the immune system. Yes, RFK is an AIDS denier. If you’ve got a life, save yourself an afternoon and ask ChatGPT for a truncation of RFK’s book on Fauci and let me know if you can in any way remain open-minded on the man. I get that people are worried about their health. My brother and I even went out at the weekend to try and score some raw milk, thinking it might help us be better people - the enzymes, the microbes, the bird flu!

“Hey, Will,” I’d say, “I bet you’re buzzed to be in Somerset and going to score some raw milk, man?”

“Psyched!” he’d say.

RFK cannot stop ploughing the vaccine furrow, and he is a full blown possibly mad conspiracy theorist. As he says, “[your child] gets the shot, that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”

*sighs*

I know that Americans of all flavours really don’t like how many vaccines their kids have to have. But a proper conspiracy nutter is in charge of American’s healthcare. He wants me off my ADHD meds, and instead to be fed fresh foods, meat and be “re-parented”.

I had a very upsetting event last week when I was rude to a friend and she was upset. Let’s be clear a lot of people really like RFK and think he is going to “change things”.

My take on RFK hasn’t changed since I first enountered him back in pandemic times while I was fraternising with an extreme conspiracy theorist I’d met in 2018. This man was a failed rock star, anti-semite, conman and narcissist who subjected me to hours of his flowery and incomprehensible conspiracist drivel. I am allergic now to endless usage of the word quantum. At this point in my life I did not have sufficient understanding of conspiracies to grasp what was happening, I just sort fell into his orbit and unprepared for the conspiracy max I was being fed, I just sat and listened, assuming he knew something I didn’t. For a short time I even wondered if it was all true. I had never met people who talked such epic gibberish.

Let’s give him the pleasure of announcing himself…