There is a lot to comment on here, a lot of great, thought-provoking content, but rather than try to over strain myself on a Monday morning, I wanted to say that people are absolutely getting uglier. I feel like a concreted snob saying that - I'm of strictly slightly above average looks myself (or so I'm told) and far from a paragon of health - but over the past two or three years I've been putting in a lot of effort to clean up my diet and get my act together health-wise because it seemed like the moment I turned 25, my body started falling apart, piece by piece. Point is, once I learned about all the poison you mentioned early in the article, I felt as if I'd had the glasses from "They Live" stapled from my head, and it's not just that I feel physically repulsed on the rare occasion circumstances force me to eat processed foods, but the people around me look... different. I had a friend who's a good three decades older than me say, "I remember when fat people were just fat." And I realized that I did too. Fat people aren't fat anymore. Like, I can remember when the fat people in my life (e.g. my father, before he shed a good hundred excess pounds) were big, but they were proportional. These days I feel like I see more and more what a friend deemed "eggs on legs" - these people are huge, bloated, swollen like ticks around the middle, their skin stretched taut rather than soft and pliant, with bloated faces, eyes forced into a squint, but their arms and legs are skinny and spindly. They're clearly malnourished and riddled with varicose veins and ugly, wine-dark splotches of bruising, but only on the extremities. But the excess flab on their bodies looks saggy and wrong. The best way I can put it is that they look like melting wax. To be perfectly frank, I see the same thing in the thirty pounds of excess weight I've been working to burn. It doesn't feel like I feel like it should, if that makes sense.
Worse still, so many of them are dim and inattentive. They toddle around on unsteady legs, dressed in pajamas, eyes bleary and dull and wheezing as they trawl the middle aisles of the grocery stores, almost wholly aware of their own surroundings. I notice this is more pronounced in driving, where any time I see an accident, or am nearly involved in one myself, it's usually someone quite large who's simply not paying attention.
I don't say this to be rude, though I know it very much is. Having put on an embarrassing amount of excess weight from working a sedentary job, I know that even though I've shed most of it, I'm still hurling boulders in a glass house. I have some degree of compassion for these people, ultimately. But what I see out there, more and more, is really beginning to concern me, because I believe that these people are quite literally eating themselves stupid, grazing like cattle more and more until they're quite literally bipedal livestock. Most people reading this probably are aware that saturated fats aren't just bad for your heart, and everything else, but especially your brain. The brain is sixty percent fat. If the only fats you introduce to your brain are saturated fats... well, you can extrapolate the rest. Needless to say, in my opinion, it's like building the frame of a house with brittle, plastic timber. I read more and more about "brain fog" and such stuff and can't help but think the fact that these people are building their brains from literal poison might have something to do with it. And, since I've typed way more than I thought, I'll just end with this - the heart of what truly concerns me about the issue isn't that these people are eating themselves to death. What worries me is that - metaphorically speaking - they're basically being transmogrified and domesticated into swine, and as they grow ever sicker, ever more feeble, ever more unable to care for themselves, they'll be clamoring for the farmer to feed them more slop. It's not just that we'll all have to bear this cost as a society; I fear that, since most of us in these spheres very much wish to limit the power of this metaphorical farmer - and you know what I'm referring to - do you really think the howling, wailing mobs of starving swine who rely on the farmer for everything will tolerate that? Regardless of their diminished, withered, and wizened states, they'll still be able to vote. And they'll be demanding the farmers use force to ensure their endless glut of slop never ceases or slows.
I know this only addressed one small point you made and spun it off into a tangent, but it really caught my attention since it's something that's been on my mind more and more, as of late.
Great comment. So it's not just me - I'm not imagining things. Thing is though, even the people who aren't fat often look weird, not just malnourished but twisted off of true, somehow.
It really is some kind of Lovecraftian body horror. The goblinization of human beings into shoggoths. Reminiscent of the island in Pinocchio, where the boys gradually turn into donkeys, step by gradual step without their ever realizing it, all because they allow themselves to be led around by their untrained appetites and lack the discernment to perceive the dark motivations of those encouraging them in this self-degradation.
It feels like we're speciating. Most of us becoming abominations, some few moving in the opposite direction. It's downright offensive that they're allowed to vote, and yes, so long as that continues we're certainly not voting our way out of this.
One note, it's the polyunsaturated fatty acids that are the real toxin. That's the rancid shit in canola oil. Saturated fats, as in bacon, butter, olive oil, are fantastically good for you.
Regarding polyunsaturated fats: close but no cigar.
The real issue is biological fats that our enzymes can slice, vs. synthetic fats that our bodies cannot deal with properly.
Delicate polyunsaturated fats BECOME varnish when exposed to high heat. I read this in Science Digest in the junior high school library back when Gerald Ford was President. Our bodies struggle to deal with varnish -- or original Crisco, or old school margarines.
Here's a simple test: if you go to a restaurant and find that you have a greasy mouth feel that won't go away, the odds are good that you have either eaten either partially hydrogenated fats or cross-linked fats (varnish). Soybean oil in a jar of mayonnaise is NOT the same thing as soybean oil that has been sitting in a deep fat fryer for a week, or soybean oil squirted on a 500 degree griddle.
You can eat tallow, coconut oil, butter, soybean oil, walnuts, flax seeds, sardines, olives, etc. without a lingering greasy mouth feel. Your body can deal with these fats. (There may be good reasons for a particular balance of these fats. Too much polyunsaturated oil can go rancid within the body as well, but nowhere near as fast as it goes bad at high temperatures.)
When I was young I used to eat a lot of baked goods which used partially hydrogenated oils. Store bought cookies and Pop 'n Fresh dough were my vices. I used to get terrible boils and had a phlegmy throat as well as run terribly high fevers when sick. Once I learned about trans fats and eliminated anything with partially hydrogenated oils, by skin got better and my fevers when getting sick were much lower. And my throat was clear.
But some of these symptoms often return when I go out to eat. Even though the government has clamped down on poisoning people with partially hydrogenated oils (which I think is an example of government doing the right thing for a change), when a restaurant cooks using delicate oils at high temperatures, bad oils are being produced on the spot.
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Regarding ugly people: I noticed quite some years ago -- after being on a low trans fat diet for a long time -- that people who ate a lot of margarine had what I internally thought of as "frog fat." That is, their subcutaneous fat was particularly soft, and not in a pleasant way.
Whereas the government has limited the intentionally generated non biologic fat in processed foods, the government has not set good standards for deep fat fried factory foods, or griddle fried foods in restaurants.
And something else has joined the toxic mix in the interim. I suspect it's too many foods cooked in plastic vessels. Microwave ovens were still exotic when I was young. I never used one until I was at least 20. And it took longer than that for microwave dinners to replace foil packed TV dinners as food for lazy cooks.
Then again, I also don't recall seeing No Till farming until after getting my first college degree. It was around earlier, but it wasn't the norm yet. No Till means more herbicides.
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The number of chemical changes is huge. Rolling the clock back completely would cost trillions.
But I would definitely start with avoiding varnish and food cooked in plastic..
And I can say from experience that people who shop in the more expensive grocery stores look different from those who shop in the cheaper grocery stores. Show me a grocery cart filled with sausage, American cheese, microwave dinners, deep fried crunchies, Texas toast, and Mountain Dew, and I'll show you a very ugly person pushing the cart.
Linoleic Acids are the culprits in PUFAs. As are the monogastric animals consuming them. It can take easily 8-10 years to rid one’s body of linoleic acids. Eat Bovines and know your rancher. Avoid any/all ‘low fat’ claims. Full fat dairy is actually a very good thing especially when fermented with strains such as Lreuteri. But you guys totally get it!!
I see what you mean - I guess I notice it more in the grotesquely obese but you're not wrong. I notice a lot of disproportionate features. Maybe it has something to do with being chronically malnourished or some sort of endocrine deficiency, but I see people who are tall and thin but with long, narrow middles and short limbs, and vice versa. I especially notice a crisis of hair in men in my age cohort - I can't think of a single millennial male who's hit 25 and hasn't started to either thin, recede, or just go outright bald. I noticed in my own life around the start of the pandemic and, fortunately, supplements, switching to homemade shampoo, and reducing stress has reversed some of it, but it's shocking how just how bad it is. I've been going to a nearby game store to play tabletop games with a friend, and I see a lot of young men who are five to ten years younger than me and, between their thinning hair, bad skin, and stooped, hunched postures, they look far older than I do - and I'm already gray at the temples and increasingly so everywhere else (thankfully, this is demonstrably genetic, also I don't really care what color my hair is so long as I have it). Like, I really do not say this to pick on anyone, I'm just making observations.
Not to get overly esoteric and schizo but part of me also believes part of that is negative energies, traits, juju, whatever you want to call it expressing in a physical way. Not to say that everyone who isn't Adonic in their looks is outright evil, but ever since I was a kid I was able to pick out untrustworthy and unreliable individuals just from their features and body language. Obviously, vices like sloth and gluttony are going to have some very noticeable physical effects on a person that manifest much more obliquely, but I greed, deceit, envy, rage, even chronic stress and depression - I think the chemical changes they bring about in the brain have some effect on you and can absolutely change your features. Corruption of the soul manifests in a corruption of the body, I'd assume, but that's a whole other matter entirely.
The Pinocchio metaphor is apt. The worst part is so, so many of these people don't even know they're donkeys, even when the transformation is complete. When I first started going down these rabbit holes and trying to explain what I was finding to others and many weren't receptive, and some vehemently denied it. I can't tell you how many times I heard, "Well, they wouldn't be able to sell us actual poison", and their justification was always either, "The government would do something and they'd get sued" or "They wouldn't harm their consumers because then who would buy their product". I don't need to explain to anyone here why that is naivety of the highest degree, but it's maddening all the same. I can't tell if they know and they won't accept it because a comfortable lie is preferable to a hard truth, or if they're truly so ignorant they can't wrap their heads around the fact that - *gasp* - corporations actually don't have their best interests in mind (I'd say they actually actively hate their consumer bases, but I'm not sure malice is a thing that can be ascribed to an incorporeal economic egregore). Either way, I have a feeling that it's something of both, depending on the individual, and ultimately, it doesn't even matter. These people don't even know what they don't know, and when they struggle so hard to keep the blinders over their eyes, I have difficulty feeling compassion for them, even though I know that's probably what they need more than anything. Except for maybe a hard kick in the ass.
And that was my mistake about the different types of fats - I get the two terms mixed up a lot. I generally just avoid anything that isn't butter, animal fats, olive oil, and avocado oil when it comes to cooking or what I put in my food. Needless to say I ended up putting so much stuff back on the shelf that I stopped trying to find pre-made sauces, marinades, what have you and just learned to make my own that didn't have canola or soybean oil. I'm so on the olive oil train I take a spoonful of it alone every day for the anti-inflammatory properties - and yes, I make sure to get the good stuff, 100% pure, uncut, and fresh from reliable sources.
A while back I decided I wanted some mayo to make ham sandwiches. Went through the entire shelf and nothing but soybean oil, until I found one tiny jar of avocado oil mayo.
It's just toxins everywhere.
And yeah, most of the population don't even notice.
Glad you've got your good fat and oil list sorted out. I'd consider adding Coconut and clean Palm oils. I pop my popcorn in expeller pressed organic Coconut oil, for example. Then I apply the butter!
Love the observations! They ring true. But I disagree that saturated (animal) fats are the problem fats. The problem "fats" are the industrial seed oil fats, the so-called vegetable oils.
Yeah, that was my mistake for getting the terminology mixed up. I know seed/vegetable oils/industrial lubricants are the ones to avoid but I get saturated versus unsaturated confused sometimes. Makes it explaining to the less aware segments of the population difficult. especially since there's a lot of contradictory information out there. You really have to dig into sources off the beaten path to even get to that conclusion, considering if that you look up "saturated fat" examples on google - a worthless site these days anyways, but still the default search engine - several of the first page results are about how to reduce your intake of them and the deleterious health benefits of them, which, as has been stated multiple times, is really the inverse of the truth. It's little wonder the average person who doesn't have the time or effort has trouble finding out what's true when corporate shills pay to have hit pieces on healthy food on the front page of the world's largest search engine. I remember I had my epiphany when, after first learning about seed oils, I had a nutritionist tell me they were "fine" and there was no "real scientific evidence of negative health effects", which - I could not make this up if I tried - they began to recite from a roll-out tape on a pen that was branded by a canola oil company (though I can't remember which one). Clearly, these companies know what they're doing and are heavily involved in damage control. It would be comical if not so sinister.
They get a short term advantage from suborning medical professionals to become spokeshills for their toxic garbage, but in the long run this ruins the credibility of those medical professionals. Not that this matters to the corporate executive class, those long-term detriments are well outside the horizon of quarterly reports.
When I lived in the DC area, I used to see quite a few of those "eggs on legs" when I went into rural areas: an enormous middle, but quite average arms, legs and face; a grayish, sickly, or acned complexion, greasy hair. It was quite a different look from the "normal" fat people I see -- I wonder what it is more specifically.
I know part of it has to be a totally botched endocrine and immune system. I've seen it in my own life. My younger sister had a remarkably poor diet in college that was so bad it hurt to even watch. Nothing but fast food, UberEats, and junk food years, on top of quite literally doing nothing but work in an office and then come home and watch Netflix in a dark room and taking an ever-changing cocktail of SSRI's.
Fast forward to now and she's got the eggs on legs body shape. She was having all sorts of health issues that regular doctors would just shrug at and say, "Beats me, here's more pills", until my mom sent her to a homeopathic doctor who diagnosed that her endocrine functions are severely impaired and that the inflammation in some of her organs was so bad that the immune system was basically attacking itself, as I understand it., and it all came down to an abysmal diet and taking more SSRI's than several normal people combined (all prescribed of course). She's since working to reverse it, but it's not an uphill battle but more of a 90 degree sheer-face scaling expedition.
Point is, given the amount of Americans that rely on fast food and UberEats for their diet and the 37 million of them on one or more SSRI's, I'm fairly sure that's got to be a critical component of this particular phenomenon, because it is not how a human body should or normally would store fat.
Excellent post, but as it has been noted already, saturated fats aren't bad for you. My family and I eat a LOT of saturated fats and our health is amazing. Typical day is coffee with butter and salt for breakfast, pan fried trout with eggs and blueberries for lunch, and a BBQ'd ribeye topped with grilled shrimp and asparagus for dinner. Outside of the coffee I drink water. My kids still drink grassfed whole milk. In fact, we don't eat a very diverse diet. I have eaten exactly that three days last week. That is not a diet low in saturated fat and I've been eating this way in perfect health for over a decade now.
Saturated fat, butter, avocado and olive oils, and full fat pastured dairy are all healthy fats providing they are sourced from a clean environment. Avoid canola, rapeseed, soybean oils.
My diet is similarly unvaried. Butter-fried eggs, buttered toast, and coffee for breakfast. Whey powder and slonked eggs for lunch. Meat, veggies, potatoes for dinner. Repeat.
Curious: Do you notice a slight rise in body temp after slonking?
I never skimp on eggs in terms of cost ever since I was told by my MIL that eggshells used to be much harder to break. I used to get the pretty brown eggs just because I liked that their yolks looked richer and tasted better, so, luckily, I've almost always had high quality eggs in my diet. But ever since MIL pointed out the brittleness of some supermarket eggshells to me, idk I haven't looked at other options the same way again. I think I'd still eat them if I had no alternatives available to me, but there really is no comparing them to free-range/farm fresh eggs.
It isn't only the fragility of the shells. The yolks also have a less intense color, although they've started feeding the chickens dye to hide that. Less flavorful too. Battery chickens are malnourished.
Haven't noticed a body temperature change, as a lot of the time after slonking my energy levels crash and I pass out for a bit. Combination of fatigue from the gym catching up and that sudden infusion of protein puts me right out.
Something to watch out for, especially for the men in the audience: there are hormones
in dairy products. Natural hormones. Always have been.
But the levels have gone up because farmers are overoptimizing, forcing cows to get pregnant more often via artificial means. Studies are limited, but I have seen at least one indicating that the milk from pregnant cows contains far more estrogen than non-pregnant cows.
As as former micro-dairy farmer, I must say that it is true that the milk from pregnant cows contains more estrogen. And now cows are milked until 2 months before birth, typically, out of a nine month lactation, so that adds a lot of pregnant cow milk into the bulk tank at the dairy. On the other hand, cows produce by far the most milk per day shortly after birth, while they are not pregnant. If you know your farmer, you might be able to get milk from non-pregnant cows. In my own experience, I've been able to keep my T high and still consume a major portion of my calories from dairy. A key is to stay lean, as body fat turns T to E.
I think not just epigenetics, but regular genetics is a big part of this. I've been fat before and didn't live the healthiest lifestyle ever, and I never had problems with being disproportionate, or looking like melted wax, nothing like that. I've always been told I have beautiful hair, eyes, and an attractive face. Maybe it's because my lineage was healthy historically. And if so, I didn't want to ruin that, so I'm that's why I'm getting my shit together. But I don't know if that's really how it works.
You're not wrong. It's kind of a touchy subject for a lot of people for obvious reasons but, if we're being totally, completely honest with ourselves, the genetic stock in the West has by and large declined precipitously. I've seen convincing arguments that the reason that much of Western Europe in particular is the way it is is, in part, related to having many of their best and brightest slaughtered wholesale in the first half of the twentieth century. Entire bloodlines were exterminated between WWI and WWII. Not to say that an artillery shell discriminates between the gallant and courageous versus the cowardly, but, again, for obvious reasons, cowards have better odds of seeing the other side of a conflict. This is to say nothing of the naturally declining birthrate, where, by and large, the poor and uneducated reproduce at exponentially higher rates than the educated and wealthy. Obviously education and wealth don't correlate to moral virtue or intelligence, if our "educated" elites are anything to go by, but it doesn't really need to be explained why it isn't a good thing that a meth-addict living in a ramshackle trailer having ten kids with ten different fathers who are in and out of prison may not be the best for society.
Point is, yes, genetics is definitely a factor in what we're seeing.
I don't think the situation is unsalvageable. There is still plenty of excellent stock available ... the problem is that it isn't reproducing itself and is being gradually thinned out even further by low birth rates and miscegenation, while of course epigenetic damage is taking a huge toll.
Repair of the Western gene pool is doable, but will require a eugenic project spanning generations, which in turn will require a complete revaluation of values.
"people are huge, bloated, swollen like ticks around the middle, their skin stretched taut rather than soft and pliant, with bloated faces, eyes forced into a squint". I've heard it alleged that fully half of the excess weight is not fat, it's inflammation.
I'm not sure if the inflammation manifests as weight or not, but in my research from reliable and more honest sources all say that excess fat and obesity cause major inflammation, which in turn encourages more weight gain for a variety of reasons. I believe this inflammation is definitely tied with the weird bloated middles that are tight rather than soft., and I'm even more convinced it's why some of them look so puffy and dimpled with cellulite. There was a doctor who did a video that showed the stark difference in appearance, composition, and consistency between the fat build up in a person that comes from unsaturated fats versus saturated fats - I'd link it if I could find it again, but if you manage to find it it's a good demonstration of what I'm talking about.
We've been buying some of our food from a local farmer network for maybe 15 years now. Spouse was once on the board. It has always struggled to survive. It's been the same group of people who buy from them ever since it started. Every once in a while whenever I pick up the food I ask how things are, if the group of people buying has grown. The last time I asked was about a year or year and half ago, when there were sporadic shortages going around, and I figured surely they had picked up some new customers. Nothing.
The vast majority of people just don't give a shit.
The bad news: George Sorosdemon and his ilk, who have been the puppetmasters orchestrating much of the madness now consuming what's left of the West, will be making a killing manipulating the dollar and engaging in other financial schemes during the economic cataclysms that lie ahead. He and his fellow demons probably won't get theirs in this life, and they're all on such good terms with the devil that they may not even get it in the next life either. The good news: all those communist DAs and political harlots and NGO activists Sorosdemon and company have been sponsoring to destroy America from within will all be out of a job and may even get thrown a rope party of two, as it becomes clear just how badly they sold out their fellow countrymen just for a fast buck and the appearance of power and self-importance.
On a different note, The Matrix seems to have been prophetically accurate when it indicated that 1999 was the height of modern prosperity and used that era as the model for its simulated reality, and then had the "real world" going straight to hell post 2000.
Indeed! By the way, have you seen The Thirteenth Floor? (A movie that may or may not have inspired The Matrix and that predated it by only a few months; apparently the Wachowskis had access to its script and some of the similarities are uncanny).
I just realized I told you the wrong movie. 13th Floor is also really good as an exploration of the "simulation hypothesis," but the movie I had in mind that the Wachowskis may have partially ripped off was "Dark City." It's interesting to note that these three movies were all released within a few months of each other in 1998-1999 . . . almost like someone was trying to tell us about the new layers of Psyop BS that were about to get added to the Matrix after 9/11.
Indeed, although whether that's the power structure telegraphing its moves in advance in order to avoid violating free will according to some esoteric formula, or simply psychic premonition, is an interesting question.
Cloud Atlas was quite good, too. Some interesting ideas in that movie.
Will have to check that one out too. Now I'm wanting to re-watch Dark City, Thirteenth Floor, and The Matrix. Movies like those are to our culture what myths and epic poems were to the ancients, in terms of providing symbols and stories to make sense of intuitions about a deeper reality. I guess that era was a great one for Hollywood. I think Christopher Nolan's Memento was around that time too (also had a couple of actors from The Matrix), with some really interesting issues raised in that film about the role of memory (including false memories) in forming one's identity. Late 90s cinema was like a golden age of psychological and metaphysical metaphors.
Watching it recently I noticed the lingering focus on the Cypher character. In those scenes I see the Wackoffskys' approvingly contemplating the deal with the Devil that they later consummated themselves. A fantasy of the pleasures of the flesh, turning their back on reality. They might be the most open-eyed of the trans pervs.
The matrix is a terrible metaphor for the different dimensional realities. I think of it like multiple dimensions layered on top of each other. We do not live in the matrix, we live in purgatory in my opinion. The religious doctrine is not very well understood and lacks discernment in this regarding (the concept of) purgatory. We are born fallen, separated from God, spiritually banished/dead but still physically alive and capable of gaining redemption. therefore it’s plausible that this dimension is purgatory. Boom 🤯
All we've got are metaphors, some more useful than others, but none are precise descriptions of reality as it is. Somewhere at the intersection of the various ideas that run through the good metaphors, is something that, like a hologram, is an approximation of whatever is real. The Matrix isn't perfect, because no metaphor is, but it has something going for it, as a metaphor. Purgatory is another useful idea.
Soros and his ilk are going to be arrested, their ill-gotten gains seized, and live out the rest of their lives in monk-like conditions. Hopefully, no death penalty, just a 50 degree cell and nutri-loaf until they die.
Any deal with the devil doesn't end well. He likely considers his sellout devotees beneath the contempt he has for everyone else. A somewhat Equal Opportunity Hater as it were.
Oh how I resonate with this essay. Thank you John.
Factory made food like product is indeed no way to nourish ourselves.
My whole life I have felt this nightmare coming down the pipes. 25 years ago I bought land and grow cows, poultry and sheep. I did it to be able to feed and clothe my family. I have all I need to live truly and honestly, more than merely to survive on the scraps of worthless garbage we are expected to accept. Gaining basic skills, farming, butchery, woodworking and textile skills means I am well placed and today feel blessed with the benefit of this forethought all those years ago. Hard work but good living. I feel for those who are lost in the sea of modernity to the reality of life.
Thanks again John, I appreciated reading this essay.
Where do you recommend for someone wanting to set up like this now? I live in a deteriorating liberal stronghold and want exactly this: space, self sufficiency, and sanity
Where is left? I dunno. Run for the hlls? Go West? Wherever there are no/not many people. Where there is no infrastcucture because the geography is hard. Those are always the last outposts because it's a hard place to live. Always make sure you have water, after that the next most important thing is solitude and shelter. It's a tough life for sure though. Still, these isolated places do still exist and are affordable because not many folk truly want to live so isolated and dependent on themselves. It's not a life for the faint hearted, it's not the good old life romanticised by Hollywood etc. I am a mile from a road and it's still way too close for me, but at least I am surrounded by my own land. I remember saying to my mum when I was five that when I grew up I wanted to be a hermit, so it's long been in the planning for me. Not that I am or ever could be a hermit! I hope you find your desire.
I'm afraid even that might be harder than you expect. My sister recently acquired a few acres in the middle of nowhere. The land and construction costs for an extremely modest house are pushing $1 million.
My extremely very modest house is one room up and one room down and not all that big a room either. A little old stone 'man made cave structure' called romatically a 'cottage'. Still, it's less to heat in winter and we only need to be inside in summer to sleep, most of the time. I know most in the C21 don't wnat to be living like that though..
I hope your sister's project goes well and she she has found her perfect place. This isn't going to get any easier for any of us.
It's gotten pretty bad. That's one reason I rather look forward to financial implosion. It's insane that housing has become so unaffordable, and a huge part of the reason for that is the market distortion caused by the legacy monetary system.
This. Container garden, learn to can and buy fruits in season in bulk. Learn to dry, learn to pickle. Find a food co-op or a farmers market and make friends with local farmers. Get a freezer and buy your meat in bulk from a local who raises responsibly.
For the win! I have been saying similar things to my optimistic libertarian friends for some time, but nowhere near as well as you just said them.
Case in point: I haven't seen a real peach in many years, and I live in a "peach" growing area.
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Such issues are why the Right needs to take back the mantle of being the real environmentalists. Not the environmentalism of cramming people into cities and eating bugs or soy paste, but the environmentalism of living in the environment: growing real food, and making things out of real wood.
Outsourcing to China is just a way of avoiding environmental regulations
Letting bums camp in the streets and hooligans loot stores unpunished does not mix with a desire for bike friendly towns and cities.
Such is the subject of my latest post, but you might not like the price of stealing the true greens from Team D. But if you are willing to pay it, you have a tool for establishing a beachhead on campus.
Indeed, some of these libertarians are actively working on alternative regimes around the world.
But the optimism I'm describing is a bit more of the Rah! Rah! Capitalism! variety.
Then again, working an alternative regimes does expose one more to what is happening around the world. Some of the poorer parts of the world are by many metrics far more prosperous. For example, you don't hear much about starvation in Africa these days. McFoodProduct is objectively better than starvation.
I am in a third world country. No industry here to speak of. Most work with their hands or are in a service industry. Homes are modest. Wealth is generational. Education is valued. Work ethic is success. They work until 4 or 5 and stop working. They average wage is 25 k.
No big industry.
Most young people in Canada are overpaid. Especially government employees. Sitting on their butts typing at a keyboard.
My personal pick in 65 years of life is the growth of tech. It has fucked up everything. Government employees dont have paperwork or filing cabinets, so they come up with more ideas to bother everyone with a program. The coming to Jesus meeting is soon. Bank failures, digital currency, dumb rules and a totalitarian government run by AI. All dragging a generation off to fight a war in Europe. This is the the roaring 20s. We are in 1929 right now. Crash and burn is imminent.
Nice phones though.
And health care in Canada sucks. My local doctor is 20 bucks a visit and actually does something if I visit and it takes 20 minutes.
A doctor in Canada costs 50 bucks for 5 minutes. Follow up and follow up and off to a specialist. North America in its entirety is one big scam. Everything is a lie or part of a lie in North America.
They have been driving trains for 200 plus years and still crashing them. You haven't figured that out? WTF.
They replace one mental midget with a senile old corrupt diaper soiling pedo puppet in the US.
In Canada and Europe, pedophelia leads the way with trans men waving their shit at kids all supported by a cabal of idiots, elected by dumb fucks who exchange their vote fo 100 bucks and get a tax bill in the mail for $800. Trudeau and Macron are supreme.
Technology? I think we need to step back 50 years.
My point is we dont need industry. Never did. We need family and a moral compass.
GHGs aren't caused by the little guys. It is industry. Not that I believe GHGs are necessarily a bad thing. I voted for global warming. I hate snow.
That's not what I mean by industry - I'm referring rather to heavy industry, our ability to manufacture and build. I certainly agree that pharma and water fluoridation are counterproductive. A great deal of this is malinvestment arising directly from the fiat monetary system, which enables the regime to pick winners and losers and thereby direct resources towards activities motivated more by social control than by production.
I had a rather long post to respond to yours. So I shortened it up. But here goes.
I was born in a mining town in Northern On. I have lived in an industrial area where the city and nearby towns were devastated by 75 years of smelting ore to get nickel. Not a tree, weed or grass grew in an area the size of Toronto. The lakes were a pretty blue with no weeds. Serious acid rain. Our throats were often sore. Alcoholism and violence were the norm you retired at 65 and died by 66. Cancer, heart disease whatever.
So in the 70s they built a super stack, centralized the smelting and doubled production. The sulphur dioxide traveled all over eastern north America. INCO "serving the world with progress" was their motto.
And I realize that we have to suffer with waste in order to move forward.
However, in my limited view of the world, industry has to be stamped on and closely watched. If we have to pay more, fine. That is what it costs. We just pay to protect the environment and humanity.
Central banks have to be crushed.
They are 90 percent of the problem. The profit and greed is sick. Government also has to be watched. My country is so corrupt I cant even stand my own country or most countrymen. They note for a crook to get 100 bucks and get a bill for 800.
First and foremost we need to protect our environment from the liars and profiteers. They have to honestly answer every question and do their best to do the least harm possible or shut down.
I dont know what all of the byproducts of industry are. But silicone didnt exist until someone invented it. Now it is pretty much found in every waterway on the planet. Dont get me started on plastic bottles.
Currently the WEF is blaming the every day citizen for pollution. We know full well that is BS. All the cars on the planet dont emit the same level of pollution as one tanker does in a day. And do we really need a tanker of toys from China for a dollar store so Granny can buy the screaming brat a toy car?
I am 100 percent behind every job we can create. I am 100 percent against jobs that completely destroy the planet. We know most shit ends up in landfill and in two generations people will be drinking and eating them as they break down in the environment. Creating even more health problems.
We absolutely need transparency and honesty everywhere from everyone. And that is where we start.
It isn't going to happen. Whomever is pulling strings will just get another puppet.
Much of the problem is how we manufacturer things. We build disposable products with highly durable materials, such as plastics, which is insane for several reasons. But at the same time, we build products that should be durable in such a way that they are disposable.
So for example, the stupid plastic shit. Make it out of cardboard, wood, whatever - it's only meant for a moment, so make it from something that will break down quickly.
But take something like a shovel. We use brittle plastic for the handle, handle snaps, can't replace it - gotta buy a new shovel. This is nuts. We should build shovels to last forever, so they only need to be built, and bought, once.
These crazy contradictions are everywhere in our material economy, and they all trace back to that fraudulent monetary system that demands corporations 'grow' at all costs.
Hosea 4:6 6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.
Are people's lives ruined due to lack of love from God ? Does God's callousness and carelessness makes people fall into ruin and live in misery?
No.
People, even God's people, are destroyed due to a lack of knowledge.What is the knowledge? The knowledge is available in the Bible, i.e., how to walk in faith,how to overcome difficulties, how to get prayers responed, and how to fight with the devil, and so on.
We are at war with fear. We take a dose of fear every day with edicts and obvious stupidity We should not be afraid, for we are truth. God is love. Love is truth.
We can beattell of these demons with love and truth.
I copied the first two paragraphs. I believe. Because I am getting familiar with truth. And love.
The devil tells us to ignore the bible.
I can thank all of this to substackd and my Martian guardian who throws fancy words at me forcing me to use a dictionary and my wee brain.
I might begin to sound like a broken record. I know how to build a house. I can grow more food than I can eat. I have years of experience fermenting alcohol. I am building a big garden and an orchard this year.
Have you read Dr Weston Price's Nutrition and Physical Degeneracy? He was a dentist that traveled in the 1930s and documented the faces and teeth of those on tradition diets versus those on modern diets. You will see those changes in facial structure. And the tradition diets vary widely. There is a reason why we now see obese people with fat deposits on the back of the neck and other odd places.
There is a Weston A Price foundation to carry on the work. I found his book so interesting. And the photos show you how healthy people used to be, without modern medicine or dentistry. There were illnesses but then, we have that now too.
I scanned through some of this a few months ago. I was quite shocked by the case studies of siblings taking different nutritional paths and the health repercussions, even pictures of the distinct physical differences brought about the junk food diets that some ate. Tough to blame genetics when they are siblings in the same household (caveat: although the rates of adultery in some of those areas is also shocking! :-) )
Even the "businesses" that young people are encouraged to start today are vapid -- ebooks about how to write ebooks, youtube channels, only fans, social media influencing, "life coaching", "dating coaching", supplements, clothes, etc. I understand that not everyone can work with his hands, be a farmer, or be a tradesman. But what real value do these products have? They do nothing to increase either physical capital or human capital. When the tide goes out, we're going to see that a lot of people were swimming naked.
Sobering, John. I'm going to have to pour myself something stronger to deal with this. Of course, you're right and while we think ourselves rich, just visit one of the 'shithole' countries we've made 'shithole' by bombs, plunder and unmanageable debt. God bless America.
That's the best-written reality check I have bumped into recently. But may I add some context? The one time the US got objectively retrospective was in 1969 and, confident that the findings would confirm the American Dream, they dug deep. Shock time. 40% were trapped in poverty and most of these were black, a formulaic percentage driven by economic policy. 12% suffered permanent severe brain damage from malnutrition. I forget the other horrific statistics, but America vowed never to look at itself through the reality lens ever again. Propaganda is so much more palatable.
In Australia, I decided that becoming a specialist in any field made one an interdependent cog in a vast machine which, if one cog broke, the entire machine falters. So I became a generalist. I can grow food, fix a car, write a book, read legislation, fire a gun, hunt my meat and fish, speak local languages, design a government, and build a house.
I realised that many Amerricans, Preppers, thought likewise and so learned from them. I built websites, warned my countrymen, avoided vaccines and processed foods, and generally got viewed by my family and friends as a nutter; a term now replaced by 'conspiracy theorist'.
It seems that the die was cast when the world bought into free trade and credit. Those of us who have our refuge in the wilderness may quite possibly survive, if robbers don't relieve us of our prudential goodies. I have given up warning folks. They still do not want to know. I now regard this as a human evolutionary correction. The Culture of Acquisition will die, along with all of its adherents and there is nothing we can do about it. This will be replaced by the Culture of Harmony, because those who rejected rat-racing have always wished for that dual role of Avoiding Conflict and Seeking Harmony. I enjoy a certain advantage here, in that ancient Aboriginal culture is a holistic expression of those very values. As this may help people rebuild humanity, I detailed their culture in a novel titled "The Lost Track". It's free to anybody who wants a copy in PDF, at least until the publisher makes his move.
"So I became a generalist. I can grow food, fix a car, write a book, read legislation, fire a gun, hunt my meat and fish, speak local languages, design a government, and build a house."
An accounting professor of mine told us (around 1988), never be a specialist, be a generalist. He was correct. Although he was speaking of the accounting profession, it is true for most people in most aspects of life. We need many more people with general skill sets for living than with specialized skills.
I do wish I had learned more about gardening when I was young.
Just read a Wendell Berry essay in which he pointed out that more black farmers lost their farms during the 20 years of the greatest Civil Rights gains (1950s to 70s) than at any other time, and they lost them at a higher rate than white farmers, though their losses during that time period were also devastating.
That’s a good question. Between Berry’s writings and Michael Pollan’s, I would say it was the collusion of government and Big Food and Ag, conspiring as usual to disenfranchise independent, small operators.
My wife and I regularly comment as to how odd people look these days when we are out and about.
Weird misshapen heads, proportionally weird bodies and unable to speak coherently.
We started noticing this 5 years or so ago.
Seed oils? Herbicides such as roundup, 2-4-d, etc? Lack of exercise? Chemicals leeching out of plastic water bottles? Fluoride? No exercise? Computer screens/X-box/cell hones? Over the top vaccination schedules? Combination of all?
I dunno, but something has accelerated the change that started in the 1960's.
My parents were born in 1930 and 1931. My father was from a citified family in Terre Haute. My mother was raised on a farm in central Indiana (as was I, and for a short time my children as well). My mother's family was always looked down on by the other side as ignorant, uncultured -- almost brutish. "She married up." Yet throughout the depression and the war, it was *mom's* family that never went hungry, never went cold or unclothed, never went 'unemployed,' were never forced into idleness or onto the dole. The only economic pressure was not having enough cash to pay the property tax. They made up the difference by trapping in the winter.
This divide has only gotten worse. Half the country sits in the air conditioning with clean uncalloused hands and looks down their noses at the half in sweaty stained Red Kap work pants that smell of diesel oil and creosote. Yet you might be a tad too pessimistic about the young'uns. And this may be affected by where you live. I have just had to replace the tank for my oil boiler. The two men sent to do the installation could not have been 21, yet they certainly were not boys. They were polite, competent, did the job quickly with self assurance and zero problems. I see many more young men like them in my community than I see gender-confused metrosexual layabouts. The main economic drivers here are agriculture, fishing, excavation, construction, and milling and paving. Being the county seat there's also a place for lawyering, bail bonds, and a couple of banks -- but other than that if there are a dozen people in town besides me getting a paycheck for pushing bits around on a cloud server I'd be staggered. I'd much rather be here when the breakdown comes.
I suspect some of the young are intuiting the direction things are going, and adjusting to meet those challenges. Certainly they're not all lost. Much as I dislike Andrew Tate, his popularity among zoomer males is a sign of some degree of emotional health, of life, of resilience in the face of the psychologal abuse they're subjected to.
How does one get a good cross section of the populations beauty, today or 30 years ago?
My social circle is relatively fit and attractive.
But I was at a Boston meetup of creators yesterday, and brunch after church today, and the thought that even my small sample size of above average people seems to be, well, not particularly attractive.
In my eyes, there seems to be a disproportionate shortage of attractive (and heterosexual) females in the US.
I dated two in college and now, six years later they’re both dating women.
True. It also seems like if they’re attractive they’re either partnered or mentally ill or both.
I the post church gathering today, as usual, there were five single fit, competent, wealthy men and one single, not very attractive, female. Where are the attractive single women in North America? Either hiding in their studio apartments or they don’t exist. I just watched this eye opening video on a, lol, incel revolution https://youtu.be/jxdKvPcov98?si=0Q0rbgTMqINJcQp9
This is so true! If you watch any TV show or commercials, which I stopped doing a while back, you will only see masculinized, horrible women, and very feminine men.
There is a lot to comment on here, a lot of great, thought-provoking content, but rather than try to over strain myself on a Monday morning, I wanted to say that people are absolutely getting uglier. I feel like a concreted snob saying that - I'm of strictly slightly above average looks myself (or so I'm told) and far from a paragon of health - but over the past two or three years I've been putting in a lot of effort to clean up my diet and get my act together health-wise because it seemed like the moment I turned 25, my body started falling apart, piece by piece. Point is, once I learned about all the poison you mentioned early in the article, I felt as if I'd had the glasses from "They Live" stapled from my head, and it's not just that I feel physically repulsed on the rare occasion circumstances force me to eat processed foods, but the people around me look... different. I had a friend who's a good three decades older than me say, "I remember when fat people were just fat." And I realized that I did too. Fat people aren't fat anymore. Like, I can remember when the fat people in my life (e.g. my father, before he shed a good hundred excess pounds) were big, but they were proportional. These days I feel like I see more and more what a friend deemed "eggs on legs" - these people are huge, bloated, swollen like ticks around the middle, their skin stretched taut rather than soft and pliant, with bloated faces, eyes forced into a squint, but their arms and legs are skinny and spindly. They're clearly malnourished and riddled with varicose veins and ugly, wine-dark splotches of bruising, but only on the extremities. But the excess flab on their bodies looks saggy and wrong. The best way I can put it is that they look like melting wax. To be perfectly frank, I see the same thing in the thirty pounds of excess weight I've been working to burn. It doesn't feel like I feel like it should, if that makes sense.
Worse still, so many of them are dim and inattentive. They toddle around on unsteady legs, dressed in pajamas, eyes bleary and dull and wheezing as they trawl the middle aisles of the grocery stores, almost wholly aware of their own surroundings. I notice this is more pronounced in driving, where any time I see an accident, or am nearly involved in one myself, it's usually someone quite large who's simply not paying attention.
I don't say this to be rude, though I know it very much is. Having put on an embarrassing amount of excess weight from working a sedentary job, I know that even though I've shed most of it, I'm still hurling boulders in a glass house. I have some degree of compassion for these people, ultimately. But what I see out there, more and more, is really beginning to concern me, because I believe that these people are quite literally eating themselves stupid, grazing like cattle more and more until they're quite literally bipedal livestock. Most people reading this probably are aware that saturated fats aren't just bad for your heart, and everything else, but especially your brain. The brain is sixty percent fat. If the only fats you introduce to your brain are saturated fats... well, you can extrapolate the rest. Needless to say, in my opinion, it's like building the frame of a house with brittle, plastic timber. I read more and more about "brain fog" and such stuff and can't help but think the fact that these people are building their brains from literal poison might have something to do with it. And, since I've typed way more than I thought, I'll just end with this - the heart of what truly concerns me about the issue isn't that these people are eating themselves to death. What worries me is that - metaphorically speaking - they're basically being transmogrified and domesticated into swine, and as they grow ever sicker, ever more feeble, ever more unable to care for themselves, they'll be clamoring for the farmer to feed them more slop. It's not just that we'll all have to bear this cost as a society; I fear that, since most of us in these spheres very much wish to limit the power of this metaphorical farmer - and you know what I'm referring to - do you really think the howling, wailing mobs of starving swine who rely on the farmer for everything will tolerate that? Regardless of their diminished, withered, and wizened states, they'll still be able to vote. And they'll be demanding the farmers use force to ensure their endless glut of slop never ceases or slows.
I know this only addressed one small point you made and spun it off into a tangent, but it really caught my attention since it's something that's been on my mind more and more, as of late.
Great comment. So it's not just me - I'm not imagining things. Thing is though, even the people who aren't fat often look weird, not just malnourished but twisted off of true, somehow.
It really is some kind of Lovecraftian body horror. The goblinization of human beings into shoggoths. Reminiscent of the island in Pinocchio, where the boys gradually turn into donkeys, step by gradual step without their ever realizing it, all because they allow themselves to be led around by their untrained appetites and lack the discernment to perceive the dark motivations of those encouraging them in this self-degradation.
It feels like we're speciating. Most of us becoming abominations, some few moving in the opposite direction. It's downright offensive that they're allowed to vote, and yes, so long as that continues we're certainly not voting our way out of this.
One note, it's the polyunsaturated fatty acids that are the real toxin. That's the rancid shit in canola oil. Saturated fats, as in bacon, butter, olive oil, are fantastically good for you.
Regarding polyunsaturated fats: close but no cigar.
The real issue is biological fats that our enzymes can slice, vs. synthetic fats that our bodies cannot deal with properly.
Delicate polyunsaturated fats BECOME varnish when exposed to high heat. I read this in Science Digest in the junior high school library back when Gerald Ford was President. Our bodies struggle to deal with varnish -- or original Crisco, or old school margarines.
Here's a simple test: if you go to a restaurant and find that you have a greasy mouth feel that won't go away, the odds are good that you have either eaten either partially hydrogenated fats or cross-linked fats (varnish). Soybean oil in a jar of mayonnaise is NOT the same thing as soybean oil that has been sitting in a deep fat fryer for a week, or soybean oil squirted on a 500 degree griddle.
You can eat tallow, coconut oil, butter, soybean oil, walnuts, flax seeds, sardines, olives, etc. without a lingering greasy mouth feel. Your body can deal with these fats. (There may be good reasons for a particular balance of these fats. Too much polyunsaturated oil can go rancid within the body as well, but nowhere near as fast as it goes bad at high temperatures.)
When I was young I used to eat a lot of baked goods which used partially hydrogenated oils. Store bought cookies and Pop 'n Fresh dough were my vices. I used to get terrible boils and had a phlegmy throat as well as run terribly high fevers when sick. Once I learned about trans fats and eliminated anything with partially hydrogenated oils, by skin got better and my fevers when getting sick were much lower. And my throat was clear.
But some of these symptoms often return when I go out to eat. Even though the government has clamped down on poisoning people with partially hydrogenated oils (which I think is an example of government doing the right thing for a change), when a restaurant cooks using delicate oils at high temperatures, bad oils are being produced on the spot.
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Regarding ugly people: I noticed quite some years ago -- after being on a low trans fat diet for a long time -- that people who ate a lot of margarine had what I internally thought of as "frog fat." That is, their subcutaneous fat was particularly soft, and not in a pleasant way.
Whereas the government has limited the intentionally generated non biologic fat in processed foods, the government has not set good standards for deep fat fried factory foods, or griddle fried foods in restaurants.
And something else has joined the toxic mix in the interim. I suspect it's too many foods cooked in plastic vessels. Microwave ovens were still exotic when I was young. I never used one until I was at least 20. And it took longer than that for microwave dinners to replace foil packed TV dinners as food for lazy cooks.
Then again, I also don't recall seeing No Till farming until after getting my first college degree. It was around earlier, but it wasn't the norm yet. No Till means more herbicides.
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The number of chemical changes is huge. Rolling the clock back completely would cost trillions.
But I would definitely start with avoiding varnish and food cooked in plastic..
And I can say from experience that people who shop in the more expensive grocery stores look different from those who shop in the cheaper grocery stores. Show me a grocery cart filled with sausage, American cheese, microwave dinners, deep fried crunchies, Texas toast, and Mountain Dew, and I'll show you a very ugly person pushing the cart.
Linoleic Acids are the culprits in PUFAs. As are the monogastric animals consuming them. It can take easily 8-10 years to rid one’s body of linoleic acids. Eat Bovines and know your rancher. Avoid any/all ‘low fat’ claims. Full fat dairy is actually a very good thing especially when fermented with strains such as Lreuteri. But you guys totally get it!!
I see what you mean - I guess I notice it more in the grotesquely obese but you're not wrong. I notice a lot of disproportionate features. Maybe it has something to do with being chronically malnourished or some sort of endocrine deficiency, but I see people who are tall and thin but with long, narrow middles and short limbs, and vice versa. I especially notice a crisis of hair in men in my age cohort - I can't think of a single millennial male who's hit 25 and hasn't started to either thin, recede, or just go outright bald. I noticed in my own life around the start of the pandemic and, fortunately, supplements, switching to homemade shampoo, and reducing stress has reversed some of it, but it's shocking how just how bad it is. I've been going to a nearby game store to play tabletop games with a friend, and I see a lot of young men who are five to ten years younger than me and, between their thinning hair, bad skin, and stooped, hunched postures, they look far older than I do - and I'm already gray at the temples and increasingly so everywhere else (thankfully, this is demonstrably genetic, also I don't really care what color my hair is so long as I have it). Like, I really do not say this to pick on anyone, I'm just making observations.
Not to get overly esoteric and schizo but part of me also believes part of that is negative energies, traits, juju, whatever you want to call it expressing in a physical way. Not to say that everyone who isn't Adonic in their looks is outright evil, but ever since I was a kid I was able to pick out untrustworthy and unreliable individuals just from their features and body language. Obviously, vices like sloth and gluttony are going to have some very noticeable physical effects on a person that manifest much more obliquely, but I greed, deceit, envy, rage, even chronic stress and depression - I think the chemical changes they bring about in the brain have some effect on you and can absolutely change your features. Corruption of the soul manifests in a corruption of the body, I'd assume, but that's a whole other matter entirely.
The Pinocchio metaphor is apt. The worst part is so, so many of these people don't even know they're donkeys, even when the transformation is complete. When I first started going down these rabbit holes and trying to explain what I was finding to others and many weren't receptive, and some vehemently denied it. I can't tell you how many times I heard, "Well, they wouldn't be able to sell us actual poison", and their justification was always either, "The government would do something and they'd get sued" or "They wouldn't harm their consumers because then who would buy their product". I don't need to explain to anyone here why that is naivety of the highest degree, but it's maddening all the same. I can't tell if they know and they won't accept it because a comfortable lie is preferable to a hard truth, or if they're truly so ignorant they can't wrap their heads around the fact that - *gasp* - corporations actually don't have their best interests in mind (I'd say they actually actively hate their consumer bases, but I'm not sure malice is a thing that can be ascribed to an incorporeal economic egregore). Either way, I have a feeling that it's something of both, depending on the individual, and ultimately, it doesn't even matter. These people don't even know what they don't know, and when they struggle so hard to keep the blinders over their eyes, I have difficulty feeling compassion for them, even though I know that's probably what they need more than anything. Except for maybe a hard kick in the ass.
And that was my mistake about the different types of fats - I get the two terms mixed up a lot. I generally just avoid anything that isn't butter, animal fats, olive oil, and avocado oil when it comes to cooking or what I put in my food. Needless to say I ended up putting so much stuff back on the shelf that I stopped trying to find pre-made sauces, marinades, what have you and just learned to make my own that didn't have canola or soybean oil. I'm so on the olive oil train I take a spoonful of it alone every day for the anti-inflammatory properties - and yes, I make sure to get the good stuff, 100% pure, uncut, and fresh from reliable sources.
A while back I decided I wanted some mayo to make ham sandwiches. Went through the entire shelf and nothing but soybean oil, until I found one tiny jar of avocado oil mayo.
It's just toxins everywhere.
And yeah, most of the population don't even notice.
Glad you've got your good fat and oil list sorted out. I'd consider adding Coconut and clean Palm oils. I pop my popcorn in expeller pressed organic Coconut oil, for example. Then I apply the butter!
Love the observations! They ring true. But I disagree that saturated (animal) fats are the problem fats. The problem "fats" are the industrial seed oil fats, the so-called vegetable oils.
Yeah, that was my mistake for getting the terminology mixed up. I know seed/vegetable oils/industrial lubricants are the ones to avoid but I get saturated versus unsaturated confused sometimes. Makes it explaining to the less aware segments of the population difficult. especially since there's a lot of contradictory information out there. You really have to dig into sources off the beaten path to even get to that conclusion, considering if that you look up "saturated fat" examples on google - a worthless site these days anyways, but still the default search engine - several of the first page results are about how to reduce your intake of them and the deleterious health benefits of them, which, as has been stated multiple times, is really the inverse of the truth. It's little wonder the average person who doesn't have the time or effort has trouble finding out what's true when corporate shills pay to have hit pieces on healthy food on the front page of the world's largest search engine. I remember I had my epiphany when, after first learning about seed oils, I had a nutritionist tell me they were "fine" and there was no "real scientific evidence of negative health effects", which - I could not make this up if I tried - they began to recite from a roll-out tape on a pen that was branded by a canola oil company (though I can't remember which one). Clearly, these companies know what they're doing and are heavily involved in damage control. It would be comical if not so sinister.
They get a short term advantage from suborning medical professionals to become spokeshills for their toxic garbage, but in the long run this ruins the credibility of those medical professionals. Not that this matters to the corporate executive class, those long-term detriments are well outside the horizon of quarterly reports.
When I lived in the DC area, I used to see quite a few of those "eggs on legs" when I went into rural areas: an enormous middle, but quite average arms, legs and face; a grayish, sickly, or acned complexion, greasy hair. It was quite a different look from the "normal" fat people I see -- I wonder what it is more specifically.
Jesus, yeah, the hair. Lank, greasy, thin. I see that everywhere now.
I know part of it has to be a totally botched endocrine and immune system. I've seen it in my own life. My younger sister had a remarkably poor diet in college that was so bad it hurt to even watch. Nothing but fast food, UberEats, and junk food years, on top of quite literally doing nothing but work in an office and then come home and watch Netflix in a dark room and taking an ever-changing cocktail of SSRI's.
Fast forward to now and she's got the eggs on legs body shape. She was having all sorts of health issues that regular doctors would just shrug at and say, "Beats me, here's more pills", until my mom sent her to a homeopathic doctor who diagnosed that her endocrine functions are severely impaired and that the inflammation in some of her organs was so bad that the immune system was basically attacking itself, as I understand it., and it all came down to an abysmal diet and taking more SSRI's than several normal people combined (all prescribed of course). She's since working to reverse it, but it's not an uphill battle but more of a 90 degree sheer-face scaling expedition.
Point is, given the amount of Americans that rely on fast food and UberEats for their diet and the 37 million of them on one or more SSRI's, I'm fairly sure that's got to be a critical component of this particular phenomenon, because it is not how a human body should or normally would store fat.
Excellent post, but as it has been noted already, saturated fats aren't bad for you. My family and I eat a LOT of saturated fats and our health is amazing. Typical day is coffee with butter and salt for breakfast, pan fried trout with eggs and blueberries for lunch, and a BBQ'd ribeye topped with grilled shrimp and asparagus for dinner. Outside of the coffee I drink water. My kids still drink grassfed whole milk. In fact, we don't eat a very diverse diet. I have eaten exactly that three days last week. That is not a diet low in saturated fat and I've been eating this way in perfect health for over a decade now.
Saturated fat, butter, avocado and olive oils, and full fat pastured dairy are all healthy fats providing they are sourced from a clean environment. Avoid canola, rapeseed, soybean oils.
My diet is similarly unvaried. Butter-fried eggs, buttered toast, and coffee for breakfast. Whey powder and slonked eggs for lunch. Meat, veggies, potatoes for dinner. Repeat.
This is high-t eating right here. Well done.
Curious: Do you notice a slight rise in body temp after slonking?
I never skimp on eggs in terms of cost ever since I was told by my MIL that eggshells used to be much harder to break. I used to get the pretty brown eggs just because I liked that their yolks looked richer and tasted better, so, luckily, I've almost always had high quality eggs in my diet. But ever since MIL pointed out the brittleness of some supermarket eggshells to me, idk I haven't looked at other options the same way again. I think I'd still eat them if I had no alternatives available to me, but there really is no comparing them to free-range/farm fresh eggs.
It isn't only the fragility of the shells. The yolks also have a less intense color, although they've started feeding the chickens dye to hide that. Less flavorful too. Battery chickens are malnourished.
Haven't noticed a body temperature change, as a lot of the time after slonking my energy levels crash and I pass out for a bit. Combination of fatigue from the gym catching up and that sudden infusion of protein puts me right out.
Oh definitely! The difference in color and taste is stark, too.
I do local homemade yogurt and local oats in addition to butter (real butter) fried eggs. And generally opt for rice over potatoes for carbs
Something to watch out for, especially for the men in the audience: there are hormones
in dairy products. Natural hormones. Always have been.
But the levels have gone up because farmers are overoptimizing, forcing cows to get pregnant more often via artificial means. Studies are limited, but I have seen at least one indicating that the milk from pregnant cows contains far more estrogen than non-pregnant cows.
As as former micro-dairy farmer, I must say that it is true that the milk from pregnant cows contains more estrogen. And now cows are milked until 2 months before birth, typically, out of a nine month lactation, so that adds a lot of pregnant cow milk into the bulk tank at the dairy. On the other hand, cows produce by far the most milk per day shortly after birth, while they are not pregnant. If you know your farmer, you might be able to get milk from non-pregnant cows. In my own experience, I've been able to keep my T high and still consume a major portion of my calories from dairy. A key is to stay lean, as body fat turns T to E.
I think not just epigenetics, but regular genetics is a big part of this. I've been fat before and didn't live the healthiest lifestyle ever, and I never had problems with being disproportionate, or looking like melted wax, nothing like that. I've always been told I have beautiful hair, eyes, and an attractive face. Maybe it's because my lineage was healthy historically. And if so, I didn't want to ruin that, so I'm that's why I'm getting my shit together. But I don't know if that's really how it works.
You're not wrong. It's kind of a touchy subject for a lot of people for obvious reasons but, if we're being totally, completely honest with ourselves, the genetic stock in the West has by and large declined precipitously. I've seen convincing arguments that the reason that much of Western Europe in particular is the way it is is, in part, related to having many of their best and brightest slaughtered wholesale in the first half of the twentieth century. Entire bloodlines were exterminated between WWI and WWII. Not to say that an artillery shell discriminates between the gallant and courageous versus the cowardly, but, again, for obvious reasons, cowards have better odds of seeing the other side of a conflict. This is to say nothing of the naturally declining birthrate, where, by and large, the poor and uneducated reproduce at exponentially higher rates than the educated and wealthy. Obviously education and wealth don't correlate to moral virtue or intelligence, if our "educated" elites are anything to go by, but it doesn't really need to be explained why it isn't a good thing that a meth-addict living in a ramshackle trailer having ten kids with ten different fathers who are in and out of prison may not be the best for society.
Point is, yes, genetics is definitely a factor in what we're seeing.
I don't think the situation is unsalvageable. There is still plenty of excellent stock available ... the problem is that it isn't reproducing itself and is being gradually thinned out even further by low birth rates and miscegenation, while of course epigenetic damage is taking a huge toll.
Repair of the Western gene pool is doable, but will require a eugenic project spanning generations, which in turn will require a complete revaluation of values.
"people are huge, bloated, swollen like ticks around the middle, their skin stretched taut rather than soft and pliant, with bloated faces, eyes forced into a squint". I've heard it alleged that fully half of the excess weight is not fat, it's inflammation.
I'm not sure if the inflammation manifests as weight or not, but in my research from reliable and more honest sources all say that excess fat and obesity cause major inflammation, which in turn encourages more weight gain for a variety of reasons. I believe this inflammation is definitely tied with the weird bloated middles that are tight rather than soft., and I'm even more convinced it's why some of them look so puffy and dimpled with cellulite. There was a doctor who did a video that showed the stark difference in appearance, composition, and consistency between the fat build up in a person that comes from unsaturated fats versus saturated fats - I'd link it if I could find it again, but if you manage to find it it's a good demonstration of what I'm talking about.
Trans-rich, that's a good one.
We've been buying some of our food from a local farmer network for maybe 15 years now. Spouse was once on the board. It has always struggled to survive. It's been the same group of people who buy from them ever since it started. Every once in a while whenever I pick up the food I ask how things are, if the group of people buying has grown. The last time I asked was about a year or year and half ago, when there were sporadic shortages going around, and I figured surely they had picked up some new customers. Nothing.
The vast majority of people just don't give a shit.
Nearly everyone learns the hard way.
Oh, well! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The bad news: George Sorosdemon and his ilk, who have been the puppetmasters orchestrating much of the madness now consuming what's left of the West, will be making a killing manipulating the dollar and engaging in other financial schemes during the economic cataclysms that lie ahead. He and his fellow demons probably won't get theirs in this life, and they're all on such good terms with the devil that they may not even get it in the next life either. The good news: all those communist DAs and political harlots and NGO activists Sorosdemon and company have been sponsoring to destroy America from within will all be out of a job and may even get thrown a rope party of two, as it becomes clear just how badly they sold out their fellow countrymen just for a fast buck and the appearance of power and self-importance.
On a different note, The Matrix seems to have been prophetically accurate when it indicated that 1999 was the height of modern prosperity and used that era as the model for its simulated reality, and then had the "real world" going straight to hell post 2000.
Wachowski siblings were so on the mark with the Matrix that the Matrix punished them by breaking their minds.
Indeed! By the way, have you seen The Thirteenth Floor? (A movie that may or may not have inspired The Matrix and that predated it by only a few months; apparently the Wachowskis had access to its script and some of the similarities are uncanny).
I've heard of it, but never got around to seeing it.
Did you see Jupiter Ascending?
I haven't. Will check it out.
I just realized I told you the wrong movie. 13th Floor is also really good as an exploration of the "simulation hypothesis," but the movie I had in mind that the Wachowskis may have partially ripped off was "Dark City." It's interesting to note that these three movies were all released within a few months of each other in 1998-1999 . . . almost like someone was trying to tell us about the new layers of Psyop BS that were about to get added to the Matrix after 9/11.
Indeed, although whether that's the power structure telegraphing its moves in advance in order to avoid violating free will according to some esoteric formula, or simply psychic premonition, is an interesting question.
Cloud Atlas was quite good, too. Some interesting ideas in that movie.
Will have to check that one out too. Now I'm wanting to re-watch Dark City, Thirteenth Floor, and The Matrix. Movies like those are to our culture what myths and epic poems were to the ancients, in terms of providing symbols and stories to make sense of intuitions about a deeper reality. I guess that era was a great one for Hollywood. I think Christopher Nolan's Memento was around that time too (also had a couple of actors from The Matrix), with some really interesting issues raised in that film about the role of memory (including false memories) in forming one's identity. Late 90s cinema was like a golden age of psychological and metaphysical metaphors.
Watching it recently I noticed the lingering focus on the Cypher character. In those scenes I see the Wackoffskys' approvingly contemplating the deal with the Devil that they later consummated themselves. A fantasy of the pleasures of the flesh, turning their back on reality. They might be the most open-eyed of the trans pervs.
That's insightful. Hadn't considered the character from that angle.
The matrix is a terrible metaphor for the different dimensional realities. I think of it like multiple dimensions layered on top of each other. We do not live in the matrix, we live in purgatory in my opinion. The religious doctrine is not very well understood and lacks discernment in this regarding (the concept of) purgatory. We are born fallen, separated from God, spiritually banished/dead but still physically alive and capable of gaining redemption. therefore it’s plausible that this dimension is purgatory. Boom 🤯
All we've got are metaphors, some more useful than others, but none are precise descriptions of reality as it is. Somewhere at the intersection of the various ideas that run through the good metaphors, is something that, like a hologram, is an approximation of whatever is real. The Matrix isn't perfect, because no metaphor is, but it has something going for it, as a metaphor. Purgatory is another useful idea.
Language, and thought itself, are literally built from metaphors.
https://open.substack.com/pub/ascensionfromdarkness/p/jesus-neutered-the-devil-real-bad?r=25fg9s&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Soros and his ilk are going to be arrested, their ill-gotten gains seized, and live out the rest of their lives in monk-like conditions. Hopefully, no death penalty, just a 50 degree cell and nutri-loaf until they die.
I hope you're right, though that would certainly be much better than what he deserves.
Any deal with the devil doesn't end well. He likely considers his sellout devotees beneath the contempt he has for everyone else. A somewhat Equal Opportunity Hater as it were.
Bug burgers on Sunday after the obligatory sermon. 😁
Barf_emoji.jpg
https://open.substack.com/pub/ascensionfromdarkness/p/welcome-to-the-great-tribulation?r=25fg9s&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Oh how I resonate with this essay. Thank you John.
Factory made food like product is indeed no way to nourish ourselves.
My whole life I have felt this nightmare coming down the pipes. 25 years ago I bought land and grow cows, poultry and sheep. I did it to be able to feed and clothe my family. I have all I need to live truly and honestly, more than merely to survive on the scraps of worthless garbage we are expected to accept. Gaining basic skills, farming, butchery, woodworking and textile skills means I am well placed and today feel blessed with the benefit of this forethought all those years ago. Hard work but good living. I feel for those who are lost in the sea of modernity to the reality of life.
Thanks again John, I appreciated reading this essay.
Where do you recommend for someone wanting to set up like this now? I live in a deteriorating liberal stronghold and want exactly this: space, self sufficiency, and sanity
Ain't that the question.
Where is left? I dunno. Run for the hlls? Go West? Wherever there are no/not many people. Where there is no infrastcucture because the geography is hard. Those are always the last outposts because it's a hard place to live. Always make sure you have water, after that the next most important thing is solitude and shelter. It's a tough life for sure though. Still, these isolated places do still exist and are affordable because not many folk truly want to live so isolated and dependent on themselves. It's not a life for the faint hearted, it's not the good old life romanticised by Hollywood etc. I am a mile from a road and it's still way too close for me, but at least I am surrounded by my own land. I remember saying to my mum when I was five that when I grew up I wanted to be a hermit, so it's long been in the planning for me. Not that I am or ever could be a hermit! I hope you find your desire.
I'm afraid even that might be harder than you expect. My sister recently acquired a few acres in the middle of nowhere. The land and construction costs for an extremely modest house are pushing $1 million.
Oh, ouch.
My extremely very modest house is one room up and one room down and not all that big a room either. A little old stone 'man made cave structure' called romatically a 'cottage'. Still, it's less to heat in winter and we only need to be inside in summer to sleep, most of the time. I know most in the C21 don't wnat to be living like that though..
I hope your sister's project goes well and she she has found her perfect place. This isn't going to get any easier for any of us.
It's gotten pretty bad. That's one reason I rather look forward to financial implosion. It's insane that housing has become so unaffordable, and a huge part of the reason for that is the market distortion caused by the legacy monetary system.
Just start homesteading, in small ways, right where you are. Don’t wait until you can buy land.
This. Container garden, learn to can and buy fruits in season in bulk. Learn to dry, learn to pickle. Find a food co-op or a farmers market and make friends with local farmers. Get a freezer and buy your meat in bulk from a local who raises responsibly.
Read this substack.
https://www.brunettegardens.com/
Research Permaculture. You can feed yourself in ten square feet.
I see that I can buy containers that have bananas, tomatoes, and all that. How do I find a reputable place to buy these plants please?
For the win! I have been saying similar things to my optimistic libertarian friends for some time, but nowhere near as well as you just said them.
Case in point: I haven't seen a real peach in many years, and I live in a "peach" growing area.
---
Such issues are why the Right needs to take back the mantle of being the real environmentalists. Not the environmentalism of cramming people into cities and eating bugs or soy paste, but the environmentalism of living in the environment: growing real food, and making things out of real wood.
Outsourcing to China is just a way of avoiding environmental regulations
Letting bums camp in the streets and hooligans loot stores unpunished does not mix with a desire for bike friendly towns and cities.
Such is the subject of my latest post, but you might not like the price of stealing the true greens from Team D. But if you are willing to pay it, you have a tool for establishing a beachhead on campus.
Some of those Libertarians are optimistic because they see the current regime collapsing, and that we'll get to build something way better afterward.
Maybe.
Indeed, some of these libertarians are actively working on alternative regimes around the world.
But the optimism I'm describing is a bit more of the Rah! Rah! Capitalism! variety.
Then again, working an alternative regimes does expose one more to what is happening around the world. Some of the poorer parts of the world are by many metrics far more prosperous. For example, you don't hear much about starvation in Africa these days. McFoodProduct is objectively better than starvation.
"Rah! Rah! Capitalism! variety" oh, I see, you misspelled lolbertarians.
Yeah, conflating free enterprise with "capitalism" is really irritating.
It's the same crowd that defends free trade even thought the theory assumes everywhere, and at all times, that trading partners are non-hostile.
That be Rule 1, sir.
And yes, there are double-plus smart libertarians who cannot grok the point. I have engaged them under my real name.
And then there was the single-plus smart libertarian who was Trumpier than Trump back in 2016, and probably didn't realize it.
(Everyone has blind spots. Regardless of IQ.)
Been starting my own garden, chooks, fruit trees, getting educated about herbs, all positive outcomes from the collapse of our society.
Most excellent. Would that I could do the same, but I'm a non-property owning pleb.
I'm starting a garden with permission on a farm near here. She is elderly, doesn't garden anymore and is thrilled at the idea of a garden again.
John, do you have a balcony? How about indoor micro greens?
I tried growing tomatoes at my last place but my balcony only got a few hours of sunlight a day.
If you "own" something, but require permission from others to do anything with it, who really owns it?
And thus the secret to the invisible, all-pervading power of the managerial state.
I've assiduously avoided HOAs all my life for this very reason.
I am in a third world country. No industry here to speak of. Most work with their hands or are in a service industry. Homes are modest. Wealth is generational. Education is valued. Work ethic is success. They work until 4 or 5 and stop working. They average wage is 25 k.
No big industry.
Most young people in Canada are overpaid. Especially government employees. Sitting on their butts typing at a keyboard.
My personal pick in 65 years of life is the growth of tech. It has fucked up everything. Government employees dont have paperwork or filing cabinets, so they come up with more ideas to bother everyone with a program. The coming to Jesus meeting is soon. Bank failures, digital currency, dumb rules and a totalitarian government run by AI. All dragging a generation off to fight a war in Europe. This is the the roaring 20s. We are in 1929 right now. Crash and burn is imminent.
Nice phones though.
And health care in Canada sucks. My local doctor is 20 bucks a visit and actually does something if I visit and it takes 20 minutes.
A doctor in Canada costs 50 bucks for 5 minutes. Follow up and follow up and off to a specialist. North America in its entirety is one big scam. Everything is a lie or part of a lie in North America.
They have been driving trains for 200 plus years and still crashing them. You haven't figured that out? WTF.
They replace one mental midget with a senile old corrupt diaper soiling pedo puppet in the US.
In Canada and Europe, pedophelia leads the way with trans men waving their shit at kids all supported by a cabal of idiots, elected by dumb fucks who exchange their vote fo 100 bucks and get a tax bill in the mail for $800. Trudeau and Macron are supreme.
Technology? I think we need to step back 50 years.
My point is we dont need industry. Never did. We need family and a moral compass.
GHGs aren't caused by the little guys. It is industry. Not that I believe GHGs are necessarily a bad thing. I voted for global warming. I hate snow.
Ramblings of an old man.
I agree with most of that, but we absolutely need industry.
Depends. We dont need flouride. We dont need big pharma. All media must become independent or have a giant label on who is paying for today's lies.
That's not what I mean by industry - I'm referring rather to heavy industry, our ability to manufacture and build. I certainly agree that pharma and water fluoridation are counterproductive. A great deal of this is malinvestment arising directly from the fiat monetary system, which enables the regime to pick winners and losers and thereby direct resources towards activities motivated more by social control than by production.
I had a rather long post to respond to yours. So I shortened it up. But here goes.
I was born in a mining town in Northern On. I have lived in an industrial area where the city and nearby towns were devastated by 75 years of smelting ore to get nickel. Not a tree, weed or grass grew in an area the size of Toronto. The lakes were a pretty blue with no weeds. Serious acid rain. Our throats were often sore. Alcoholism and violence were the norm you retired at 65 and died by 66. Cancer, heart disease whatever.
So in the 70s they built a super stack, centralized the smelting and doubled production. The sulphur dioxide traveled all over eastern north America. INCO "serving the world with progress" was their motto.
And I realize that we have to suffer with waste in order to move forward.
However, in my limited view of the world, industry has to be stamped on and closely watched. If we have to pay more, fine. That is what it costs. We just pay to protect the environment and humanity.
Central banks have to be crushed.
They are 90 percent of the problem. The profit and greed is sick. Government also has to be watched. My country is so corrupt I cant even stand my own country or most countrymen. They note for a crook to get 100 bucks and get a bill for 800.
First and foremost we need to protect our environment from the liars and profiteers. They have to honestly answer every question and do their best to do the least harm possible or shut down.
I dont know what all of the byproducts of industry are. But silicone didnt exist until someone invented it. Now it is pretty much found in every waterway on the planet. Dont get me started on plastic bottles.
Currently the WEF is blaming the every day citizen for pollution. We know full well that is BS. All the cars on the planet dont emit the same level of pollution as one tanker does in a day. And do we really need a tanker of toys from China for a dollar store so Granny can buy the screaming brat a toy car?
I am 100 percent behind every job we can create. I am 100 percent against jobs that completely destroy the planet. We know most shit ends up in landfill and in two generations people will be drinking and eating them as they break down in the environment. Creating even more health problems.
We absolutely need transparency and honesty everywhere from everyone. And that is where we start.
It isn't going to happen. Whomever is pulling strings will just get another puppet.
I agree with all of that.
Much of the problem is how we manufacturer things. We build disposable products with highly durable materials, such as plastics, which is insane for several reasons. But at the same time, we build products that should be durable in such a way that they are disposable.
So for example, the stupid plastic shit. Make it out of cardboard, wood, whatever - it's only meant for a moment, so make it from something that will break down quickly.
But take something like a shovel. We use brittle plastic for the handle, handle snaps, can't replace it - gotta buy a new shovel. This is nuts. We should build shovels to last forever, so they only need to be built, and bought, once.
These crazy contradictions are everywhere in our material economy, and they all trace back to that fraudulent monetary system that demands corporations 'grow' at all costs.
Hosea 4:6 6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.
Are people's lives ruined due to lack of love from God ? Does God's callousness and carelessness makes people fall into ruin and live in misery?
No.
People, even God's people, are destroyed due to a lack of knowledge.What is the knowledge? The knowledge is available in the Bible, i.e., how to walk in faith,how to overcome difficulties, how to get prayers responed, and how to fight with the devil, and so on.
We are at war with fear. We take a dose of fear every day with edicts and obvious stupidity We should not be afraid, for we are truth. God is love. Love is truth.
We can beattell of these demons with love and truth.
I copied the first two paragraphs. I believe. Because I am getting familiar with truth. And love.
The devil tells us to ignore the bible.
I can thank all of this to substackd and my Martian guardian who throws fancy words at me forcing me to use a dictionary and my wee brain.
I might begin to sound like a broken record. I know how to build a house. I can grow more food than I can eat. I have years of experience fermenting alcohol. I am building a big garden and an orchard this year.
Most excellent.
Have you read Dr Weston Price's Nutrition and Physical Degeneracy? He was a dentist that traveled in the 1930s and documented the faces and teeth of those on tradition diets versus those on modern diets. You will see those changes in facial structure. And the tradition diets vary widely. There is a reason why we now see obese people with fat deposits on the back of the neck and other odd places.
I've heard of Price, but haven't read him. Sounds like he was onto something.
Oh and look up Pottenger's cats! He found out how few generations it took for the effects of poor nutrition to be seen.
There is a Weston A Price foundation to carry on the work. I found his book so interesting. And the photos show you how healthy people used to be, without modern medicine or dentistry. There were illnesses but then, we have that now too.
I was going to mention Weston Price and Pottenger.
https://price-pottenger.org/
There is a British orthodontist I’ve seen on Darkhorse podcast talk about this. Fascinating how diet has changed faces
Is that Dr. Mews?
Yes.
Dude's onto something.
Whoa, you mean this might be a documented thing?
I scanned through some of this a few months ago. I was quite shocked by the case studies of siblings taking different nutritional paths and the health repercussions, even pictures of the distinct physical differences brought about the junk food diets that some ate. Tough to blame genetics when they are siblings in the same household (caveat: although the rates of adultery in some of those areas is also shocking! :-) )
https://healthwyze.org/archive/nutrition_and_physical_degeneration_doctor_weston_a_price.pdf
Collapse will release the people from the trap.
This is the hope, yes.
Even the "businesses" that young people are encouraged to start today are vapid -- ebooks about how to write ebooks, youtube channels, only fans, social media influencing, "life coaching", "dating coaching", supplements, clothes, etc. I understand that not everyone can work with his hands, be a farmer, or be a tradesman. But what real value do these products have? They do nothing to increase either physical capital or human capital. When the tide goes out, we're going to see that a lot of people were swimming naked.
💯
Sobering, John. I'm going to have to pour myself something stronger to deal with this. Of course, you're right and while we think ourselves rich, just visit one of the 'shithole' countries we've made 'shithole' by bombs, plunder and unmanageable debt. God bless America.
That's the best-written reality check I have bumped into recently. But may I add some context? The one time the US got objectively retrospective was in 1969 and, confident that the findings would confirm the American Dream, they dug deep. Shock time. 40% were trapped in poverty and most of these were black, a formulaic percentage driven by economic policy. 12% suffered permanent severe brain damage from malnutrition. I forget the other horrific statistics, but America vowed never to look at itself through the reality lens ever again. Propaganda is so much more palatable.
In Australia, I decided that becoming a specialist in any field made one an interdependent cog in a vast machine which, if one cog broke, the entire machine falters. So I became a generalist. I can grow food, fix a car, write a book, read legislation, fire a gun, hunt my meat and fish, speak local languages, design a government, and build a house.
I realised that many Amerricans, Preppers, thought likewise and so learned from them. I built websites, warned my countrymen, avoided vaccines and processed foods, and generally got viewed by my family and friends as a nutter; a term now replaced by 'conspiracy theorist'.
It seems that the die was cast when the world bought into free trade and credit. Those of us who have our refuge in the wilderness may quite possibly survive, if robbers don't relieve us of our prudential goodies. I have given up warning folks. They still do not want to know. I now regard this as a human evolutionary correction. The Culture of Acquisition will die, along with all of its adherents and there is nothing we can do about it. This will be replaced by the Culture of Harmony, because those who rejected rat-racing have always wished for that dual role of Avoiding Conflict and Seeking Harmony. I enjoy a certain advantage here, in that ancient Aboriginal culture is a holistic expression of those very values. As this may help people rebuild humanity, I detailed their culture in a novel titled "The Lost Track". It's free to anybody who wants a copy in PDF, at least until the publisher makes his move.
"So I became a generalist. I can grow food, fix a car, write a book, read legislation, fire a gun, hunt my meat and fish, speak local languages, design a government, and build a house."
Heinlein's definition of a human ;)
An accounting professor of mine told us (around 1988), never be a specialist, be a generalist. He was correct. Although he was speaking of the accounting profession, it is true for most people in most aspects of life. We need many more people with general skill sets for living than with specialized skills.
I do wish I had learned more about gardening when I was young.
He must have been a clear thinker, therefore of an earlier era LOL.
Just read a Wendell Berry essay in which he pointed out that more black farmers lost their farms during the 20 years of the greatest Civil Rights gains (1950s to 70s) than at any other time, and they lost them at a higher rate than white farmers, though their losses during that time period were also devastating.
Was this the banks moving in, or the stock and station agents?
That’s a good question. Between Berry’s writings and Michael Pollan’s, I would say it was the collusion of government and Big Food and Ag, conspiring as usual to disenfranchise independent, small operators.
My wife and I regularly comment as to how odd people look these days when we are out and about.
Weird misshapen heads, proportionally weird bodies and unable to speak coherently.
We started noticing this 5 years or so ago.
Seed oils? Herbicides such as roundup, 2-4-d, etc? Lack of exercise? Chemicals leeching out of plastic water bottles? Fluoride? No exercise? Computer screens/X-box/cell hones? Over the top vaccination schedules? Combination of all?
I dunno, but something has accelerated the change that started in the 1960's.
Anon
Was just watching something about glyphosate last night, actually, and yes, that is very likely to be a factor in all of this.
My parents were born in 1930 and 1931. My father was from a citified family in Terre Haute. My mother was raised on a farm in central Indiana (as was I, and for a short time my children as well). My mother's family was always looked down on by the other side as ignorant, uncultured -- almost brutish. "She married up." Yet throughout the depression and the war, it was *mom's* family that never went hungry, never went cold or unclothed, never went 'unemployed,' were never forced into idleness or onto the dole. The only economic pressure was not having enough cash to pay the property tax. They made up the difference by trapping in the winter.
This divide has only gotten worse. Half the country sits in the air conditioning with clean uncalloused hands and looks down their noses at the half in sweaty stained Red Kap work pants that smell of diesel oil and creosote. Yet you might be a tad too pessimistic about the young'uns. And this may be affected by where you live. I have just had to replace the tank for my oil boiler. The two men sent to do the installation could not have been 21, yet they certainly were not boys. They were polite, competent, did the job quickly with self assurance and zero problems. I see many more young men like them in my community than I see gender-confused metrosexual layabouts. The main economic drivers here are agriculture, fishing, excavation, construction, and milling and paving. Being the county seat there's also a place for lawyering, bail bonds, and a couple of banks -- but other than that if there are a dozen people in town besides me getting a paycheck for pushing bits around on a cloud server I'd be staggered. I'd much rather be here when the breakdown comes.
I suspect some of the young are intuiting the direction things are going, and adjusting to meet those challenges. Certainly they're not all lost. Much as I dislike Andrew Tate, his popularity among zoomer males is a sign of some degree of emotional health, of life, of resilience in the face of the psychologal abuse they're subjected to.
On this topic of uglies.
How does one get a good cross section of the populations beauty, today or 30 years ago?
My social circle is relatively fit and attractive.
But I was at a Boston meetup of creators yesterday, and brunch after church today, and the thought that even my small sample size of above average people seems to be, well, not particularly attractive.
In my eyes, there seems to be a disproportionate shortage of attractive (and heterosexual) females in the US.
I dated two in college and now, six years later they’re both dating women.
It's women in particular I'm thinking of. They just don't seem to be as hot as they used to be. More masculinized.
Men, meanwhile, are more feminized.
Obviously there are exceptions, but people seem like they have to really work at it now. In the past it was comparatively effortless.
True. It also seems like if they’re attractive they’re either partnered or mentally ill or both.
I the post church gathering today, as usual, there were five single fit, competent, wealthy men and one single, not very attractive, female. Where are the attractive single women in North America? Either hiding in their studio apartments or they don’t exist. I just watched this eye opening video on a, lol, incel revolution https://youtu.be/jxdKvPcov98?si=0Q0rbgTMqINJcQp9
Ha! Yeah I saw that video. YT took it down fast.
Whatifalthist is great.
Dynamics like that are one of the reasons I don't bother with church. "Go to church, find a wife" doesn't work anymore.
As to where the cute girls are? In their apartments doing OnlyFans.
This is so true! If you watch any TV show or commercials, which I stopped doing a while back, you will only see masculinized, horrible women, and very feminine men.