It’s hard to remember every one of Nanny’s thousands of scams. Most of us fondly recall Nanny’s recurring Salt Scam. Remember? Putting too much salt in and on our food made blood pressure soar. That threatened billions of people with early death. Millions were in danger of going blind. Salt-weakened bodies were susceptible to plague, malaria, and virtually every other disease known to man. The medical problems had no end. Evil manufacturers were to blame.
Nanny hired helpers. Sincere actors costumed as doctors and scientists assured us that nearly every part of the human body was adversely affected by salt. Glands were thought to be particularly vulnerable to “potential damage”.
Many of us have a favorite Nanny Scam. What’s your favorite Nanny Scam? One of the biggest, most popular Nanny Scams centered on sugar. That was one of Nanny’s biggest, longest running scams. We have been hectored, warned, and pestered about excessive sugar content for over a century. Does Nanny ever get tired of warning us about the dangers of sugar?
In a word, “No.”, not even when reminded that, despite the highest sugar, and salt, ingestion in recorded history, human beings were living longer than ever. Still, Nanny’s Salt and Sugar Scams are getting a little frayed around the edges.
Frankly, most of the younger Nannies are weary of the Sugar Scam. “Let’s go for the big bucks!”, these bold, young Turks demand. “The really big money is in the Climate and Energy Scams. As we replace two cent per kilowatt hour electricity with dollar and a half costs for the same amount of energy with wind and solar generators that don’t work most of the time, we get to buy stock in companies that governments support with guaranteed loans. Forget the sugar ‘n salt scams! They are so yesterday! The big money’s in the Climate and Energy Scams!”
It is sad, but true, that the older Nannies aren’t able to make the adjustment. New warnings about melting ice caps, solar output, “greenhouse effects” and terms with really big words have to be painstakingly memorized. Once the new lies and exaggerations are committed to memory, they must be repeated with the necessary sense of alarm, excitement, and facial contortions that make the dimmest of us believe that something Very Important is being talked about.
Not overly intelligent to start with, lifetimes of lies have left the Old Nannies’ brains barely able to function. Few things are sadder than seeing a once-brilliant Nanny ranting about the horrors of melting icecaps, forget which scam they’re on, and blame the near-extinction of precious polar bears on eating too much candy.
Still, even the oldest Nannies can use a little extra income. The only scams and alarms they can reliably get their decaying brains around are the old, well-memorized scams, like sugar and salt.
So, we still see dire announcements, and doom-threatening press releases, predicting early and painful deaths for those who may go past “the tipping point” of sugar consumption.
