A Field Guide to The Menelaus Gambit

When I look at things as they actually are, try relentlessly to be true to “what is,” and don’t let my ego or fears or “depending on the kindness of strangers” get in my way, I find I can solve problems and create abilities that I never even imagined existed, much less imagined I could solve, create, and benefit from. 

( Click here or go to “About” for why I chose the title The Menelaus Gambit.)

Some examples of what you may find and value in this Substack:

1.  Penelope and Odysseus

Looking beneath the many-purposed illusions Homer creates in The Odyssey, I found in its human action the most finely crafted, empowering, and heart-warming story I have ever enjoyed.

It’s at root a thrilling love story: the desperate return of an MIA and the woman who fought, as a woman fights, to save him.  Along the way, it shows how Penelope and Odysseus survived and triumphed, realistically, as individuals and as a couple, with family and friends sticking by them, in the face of daunting obstacles and dire perils.  Its heroes are good, highly admirable people, as modern as tomorrow (masters of themselves, material matters, communication, and dealing with people) coming to us from 3,000 years ago.  The action is intensely dramatic, turns on true human nature every time, and is surprising whether you know the Odyssey or not. 

You can read it in my play Penelope and Odysseus (A True Story?), Copyright 2009, in its own subsection of this substack.

I wrote it for the thrill of it.

And if it’s classical Western virtues can be an effective counterpoint to the death-eating cultures so prevalent today, so much the better.

The action in it speaks for itself, but how and why I got there, and Homer’s style, do not. For that, look for “Seeing Beneath Homer’s and Translators’ Illusions.”

2. “Curing” the Common Cold, Flu, and Other Viruses with Vitamin C

We have all heard statements that there is no cure for the common cold, and that intake of vitamin C over the U.S.’s RDA produces nothing more than expensive urine.  Well, not by my experience.

After perhaps 27 years of getting three or four colds per year, and the flu every three or four years, I started following Linus Pauling’s advice in the early 1970s for taking vitamin C to cure them. Ever since, I haven’t had a cold or flu, or I have ended them within a day of very minor symptoms. Look in this Substack for “A Fuller View of Natural Anti-Infectives,” which I wrote in the summer of 2020, and which goes way beyond just vitamin C (as crucial as it is). 

3.  Some Nutritional—Complementary—Therapies for Ailments

We have all heard the claims that nutritional supplements beyond perhaps a one-a-day multivitamin are unnecessary.  Not by my experience.

I got and continue to get crippling, life-threatening, and just plain sickening symptoms in consequence of the 1976 Swine Flu Shot. (It disabled my parents too.)  Following doctors’ advice on what to do, I got worse. 

Believing my “lying eyes” about what worked for me, during 50 years of reading, and trial and error, I have found that using many nutritional supplements, as complementary—adding what is missing—therapy, plus careful food selection, healed, neutralized, or ameliorated many of those symptoms. 

That is because the 1976 Swine Flu Shot greatly overexcited my immune system.  It attacks me 24/7/365 and uses up nutrients at a hellishly rapid pace; hence the immense value to me in resupplying those nutrients. (Hence too, I can’t risk getting any vaccine, which I expect could kill me, given my hyper-active immune system.) Look for “Allopathic Medicine vs. Complementary Health,” and a post going into many of these nutrients for clues on how to look for yourself to deal with health problems you might have. (Relevant to Covid-19-vaccine injuries too.)

3A. Sidebar: Focusing on What I Could See and My Hands Could Feel Beneath an Illusion

In one consequence of what the Swine Flu shot did to me, I actually came to do in real life what I have Menelaus say he did in Penelope and Odysseus.

After getting that shot (panic rushed, people dying, vaccine withdrawn, most harm unacknowledged), my health gradually deteriorated until one evening I suddenly got sicker than the worst case of the flu I had ever had, with nausea that I had never felt before and that welled up from inside my gut into my breath.  And it didn’t get better in the weeks that followed. 

I was so sick and shaky “inside” that I feared for my life.  My doctor prescribed Valium (brand name for diazepam, then called a “tranquilizer”) and it helped me sleep.  After several months, I had stabilized enough that I felt I didn’t need the Valium any more; but mindful that stopping even prescription drugs can cause withdrawal symptoms, I took half the dose for a few days, then one quarter of the dose for a few days, then stopped altogether. 

The next day I suddenly become very dizzy, so much so that I couldn’t walk safely; I almost couldn’t sit without falling.  It was the kind that had me feeling the dizziness was in my head, my body weaving; not the kind where the eyes see the world spinning or the eyes keep lurching. Just to get about my apartment, I started grabbing hold of solid furniture and focusing intensely on the stability I felt as I moved from one to the next.  I also looked intently at stable objects and forced my eyes to keep looking at them.  Soon the dizziness stopped.  It’s as if I had reprogrammed my inner ear to be consistent with my sight and touch. I find that in reading about withdrawal symptoms for diazepam, they can last for months.

About nine months later, the same thing happened to my mother.  Sickened as I had been by the 1976 Swine Flu shot, she too had been taking Valium, then had stopped cold turkey, and got very dizzy.  Fortunately I was there, convalescing with my parents, and I told my mother what I had done.  It seemed to work for her too.

4.  First Principles

In a graduate-level course I took in electromagnetism, Val Fitch, a professor in Princeton University’s Physics department, who later won a Nobel Prize in physics, would say that he liked to proceed from “first principles.”

I interpret that to mean that experts specialize in ever-narrower fields of study, making simplification after simplification until narrowly-focused, specific problems can be solved, but when good solutions can’t be found, we have to go back to the original facts of the matter to broaden our thinking and fact-finding.

That doesn’t happen in public debate today. 

So much of what passes for public debate and news is really a long series of segues, baits and switches, and assorted unfounded assertions built solely on what various public people choose to say for their own self-interest. They can be very plausible and very convincing.  Yet they diverge very far from a healthy reality.

Once you go back to first principles and foundational realities, and then logically work out the consequences of them, you can be amazed at how different reality is from the illusional “narratives” being spread about. This is really life-altering, yet simple, stuff; simple to see once you focus on it; but hard to keep in focus because of all the “spin” and other diversions and distractions.  It is profound, nevertheless, and evergreen.  This section will take you there.

For example:

The scourge of sexually transmitted diseases is utterly ignored by every media outlet I see, except for the very rare report that enables them to say they “covered” it. 

            Yet if major public attention were brought to sexually transmitted diseases, women’s health, reproductive and otherwise, would definitely be improved, and the highly emotional issue of abortion would be significantly transformed and partially defused. 

            Relevant to that, more black women in NYC between 2012 and 2016 aborted their pregnancies than carried them to live births (Jason Riley, Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2018, summarizing NYC Health Dept. data).

In other words, it is entirely within the logic of the situation that abortion in America can be safe, legal, and rare-by-choice due to health considerations.

Keep your eyes open for posts along the lines of:

            Why Government Reactions to Covid Were Obviously Wrong from the Start

            When “Following the Science” is NOT Science (in Health also)

            Allopathic Medicine vs. Complementary Health (in Health also)

            Principled Debate: How even people who are wrong can contribute value

            How Experts Use Models

            Massive Climate Change Denial (Not what you think)

            What Capital Actually Is, and Why It Is So Good for US  (This is developed further in Political Economy.)

5.  Political Economy

Don’t be intimidated by the words “political economy.”  They conjure up dark treatises for which the eyes glaze over and no one can understand. As I develop it, it is about everything that happens and matters in your life: the food you eat, the clothes you wear, how you earn a living, where and how you live, how you travel, the services you use, the people you meet and their needs and behaviors, and so on. 

Look for such posts as:

            The Tyranny of Expert Ignoramuses (Outside of their narrow fields, experts are ignoramuses in whatever else they claim to command, and the politicians and media who kite them are worse.) 

            When “Covid” Isn’t Covid

            The 2008 Financial Meltdown: Made by Big Government

            Why the Dark Night Sky Shows Karl Marx Was Wrong

            What Fascism Looks Like

            Power’s Achilles Heel: Corruption Attracts and Begets Incompetence

            Using Jiu-Jitsu and Reductio Ad Absurdum

            Moving America Dramatically Towards Freedom

            The Many Profound Advantages of Capitalism

Why the Osprey?

When I saw the picture of the osprey carrying material to its nest, a lot of things came together. (Photo credit to Skyler Ewing, with thanks to her for posting the photo and making it free to copy.)

Ospreys fly high above the water and use their keen eyesight to see beneath the surface when they hunt for fish to eat.

Ospreys mate for life, as has been the case for my wife and me (and for Penelope and Odysseus).

Ospreys build nests, as the picture shows. I believe in building; it works for me.

Male and female ospreys work together, for one must hunt for food while the other guards the eggs and hatchlings. 

Ospreys are family birds. I got to see this in action. While on vacation on the barrier island of Captiva, Florida, and looking through binoculars, I watched as five or six ospreys rode up and down thermal currents.  This was in late March or early April, when fledgling ospreys would be learning to fly.  Otherwise, while on our several vacations in Captiva. I never saw ospreys flying in groups. I infer that parent ospreys were teaching their offspring the finer points of “earning a living.”

Ospreys catch and kill fish for food, but they are not wanton killers.  I got to see this in an extraordinary way.  It was while on another vacation in Captiva.  I was standing on the shore looking out onto the water.  To my right, by perhaps one hundred yards, was a tall pole erected by the people of Captiva, and on it was a nest with an osprey sitting in it.  Straight ahead of me was a small wooden pier going out over the water with a cross pier at the end of it, like a “T,” that served as a station for boaters to clean fish they caught.  A great blue heron was on the far right side of that cross pier and was beginning to take off—straight in the direction of the osprey.  Well, the osprey shot out of the nest like a heat-seeking missile toward the heron. The heron quickly changed direction and fled, but not fast enough.  The osprey caught up to the heron, just touched its rear, then changed course and returned to the nest:  message delivered and received!

Ospreys are just beautiful birds to watch.  They are big and dramatic looking.  They fly in the hunt over open water, so vision observing them is unobstructed.  Behind Captiva towards the mainland is a large expanse of shallow, protected water, tailor made for ospreys to hunt.  And the people of Captiva built poles for ospreys to build nests.