Fire

A failed workout tonight. A racing heart. Always freaks me out a little. Stopped early. A failure. Failure. Failure. One of the words from my childhood. It was a theme with my father. Why did he feel the need to lecture on the topic? I don't know. Phonies, Hollywood phonies, he talked a lot about, and was one. Failures too. Didn't talk so much about health, or even fitness as I understand the term. The appearance of both. He was after all a bodybuilder. Lot's on about how good milk was. And being, or looking, strong. At least he didn't drink.

So I'm feeling insecure and depressed. Very tired, very weak. At such times it's easy to listen to distant voices, drawn near because the walls are down.

I had cause tonight to consider my place in society. It's a little troublesome. I have a profound distrust of authority figures. Government, banks, officials. It's just that I do know there is no justice, and only integrity holds a society together. A healthy society. Like a crime victim. The police can only do what they can do. Never more. Like lawyers. You want them to fight, to value your cause, to stand by their contract to secure your rights. But that's idealism, and integrity, and corruption is the end of every story. So pardon me if I'm dark sometimes. Show me where I'm wrong and I'll believe you. I'm right.

Can you trust marriage? An arbitrary institution, dissolved like salt in water, on a whim. I don't love you anymore. So much for vows. I won't abandon you. But they do. Employers will cut you off at the bottom line. God will let you get sick. He'll let you die, or those you love. This is a world so completely corrupt that it can never be cleansed. Literally. It will be destroyed by fire, and remade. How corrupt is that? Some things can never be destroyed, and burn forever. Everything else burns and is remade, or abandoned.

Yes, I'm dark. But I am resolved to be honest with those I have dealings. Light, perhaps, to the darkness. And loyal to those who give friendship. And I will feel love in not give it, to those who are kind. It's certainly not because I'm good. But I am a philosopher, after my fashion, and I have to find meaning. So, yes, everything is relative. With the relativity of fire. We find meaning in clouds, and in flames.

I'm so ruined. I need to be useful. It's not that I'm generous. It's just that there's so much need, and hardly anything does any good. So give what there's a need for. Start with kindness.


J

Perspective

What is it, Tuesday? I don't usually deal in such short units of time. Hours, days -- what mean these things to me? Mere trivialities. When I condescend to remove myself from that higher plain of my general existence, it is usually to have sex with Tiger Woods. Oh, yes, didn't you know? I am yet another of his lovers. Or shall I say, he is yet another of mine. For eternal spirit is not restricted by the presence or absences of mere alleles on a chromosome. What after all is the difference between an X and a Y? Such inconsequentialities bore me.

The Mighty Earth Spirits have descended in great flocks of private jets upon Copenhagen, land of my earthly ancestors. There they shall save The Planet, by absorbing copious volumes of carbon in the form of delicate pastries and fine wines. There are giants in the earth, and their footprints are gigantic only because they travel on such urgent business. Saving the world. Not necessarily humanity, but the world.

Humans, after all, are just another product of Evolution. Randomness cannot convey meaning. If not us, then orangutans, or dolphins, or queen bees. It hardly matters. Malaria is also a living thing. DDT is genocide. This, this is an enlightened perspective. I should say, the enlightened perspective, since there is only one correct answer, regardless of the fact that all things are relative. The correct answer is that truth must serve conviction, which thoroughly justifies my subverting scientific method and lying about Global Warming, which is a fact over which there is no debate. Yes, it was I. So sue me.

It seems I've been all over the news recently. Did you like how I convicted that American slut in Italy?


J

Radio

There's a De Niro movie being saturation advertised. About a family that's all right, or fine, or something. Not planning on seeing it. But there's a line, something like, "I just want to be a father to you." He's in his mid 60s, talking to thoroughly adult offspring. And every time I hear it I go through the same internal monologue. Too damn late to be a father.

I'm right, of course. You can't be a father to adult offspring. Notice how I avoided saying adult children. Same reason. Adults aren't children, and when the kids are grown, the fatherhood role is done. There is a role, and I, for example, am a father. But I can't be a father to my son anymore. He has outgrown the need. What the De Niro character means when he says that line, is impossible. There is no undoing the past. No present effort is retroactive. The fatherhood ship has sailed.

There's a way that I'm wrong, but I expect you to get past it. I expect you to see my point, despite the limitations of the vocabulary. It's contained in the question, or the answer, what exactly does the character imagine he can do? What he means is that he wants healthy communication and a loving relationship. He wants forgiveness, and he wants to be understood, even in his failures. If he's wise, he wants to learn what kind of people his children have grown up into. He has a claim on them, inherent in the role, the way our parents can still control us. He has a responsibility to them, no longer of support, but still of integrity and wisdom.

A very little boy recently trotted up to me and asked, how can Jesus be God, and the Son of God. He will have been fed the question, but that he could even remember it was impressive. I said something like, think about your dad -- he's your dad, and he's somebody's son. It's about roles. God will always have a fatherhood role with us. We will always be comparative children. But just as there is no marriage in heaven, there will be no parenthood either. So it seems to me. And here, in this life, parenthood ends, and becomes something else.

What? A deep friendship, I think. A lot of pride, which is a sort of ownership, and a strong remnant of responsibility. Since we are human, there will also be less pure elements -- competition -- a demand for hierarchy, however muted. It will vary from man to man. But we have a right to that, or at least to the feeling. We will, after all, die for them, still. There is obligation even in unsought sacrifice.

I've been listening to the radio again. Got some grunt work to do, and that's what radio is for. When I do cerebral stuff, I can't even listen to music anymore. I think it's an age thing. Same way that I get sore two days after a workout, rather than next day. If I get sore. Same way that I have to hold things about a foot away from my face now, to get a good focus. See? Things change. There's no going back, and there's no re-creating. There's only moving forward, or being stuck, with regret.

Sometimes I think about how very strange this universe is, of God's. Not the death and corruption part. That's on us. The design behind it, where we have to eat, every day just about, for example. That's so strange. This whole metabolism thing. It's so strange. There must be a meaning in it, like there's meaning in seemingly random events in the Bible. It's all symbolic. Food, as a daily reminder of our dependence -- grafted limbs, ensapped by a strong root. Age, as an enforced humility. Death, as interest on a debt already paid, but the transaction isn't quite finalized. It's all about motion, change, experience and transformation.

Not an easy thing, for some of us, who hold on rather than let go. But there it is. It's about trust. Trust for our daily bread. Trust for the safety of our children. Trust that our friends will be faithful. Trust that we will always have a father who guides us as best he can.

Let's not think of it as failure. It's freedom.


J

Newscycle

All day long, and for the next few weeks no doubt, the responsible news media have been reminding us to think about Tiger Woods' penis. And the vaginas of at least three women. This is very interesting and newsworthy, the fact that he had a crash with a tree after a fight with his wife about the intercourse, penis to vagina, he has engaged in with other vaginas than that of his wife but occurring while Woods was technically married. All these details come to us via the airwaves and other media, so that we will be aware of important events in the world.

Likewise, the news is full of the very interesting fact that a soirée at the White House had two guests in attendance present without invitations.There's going to be a Congressional investigation into the matter. Congressional subpoenas will be issued to Executive staff, and contested due to Executive privilege. It's a Constitutional crisis, almost. Governments fall over such matters. Lucky for us we don't have a parliamentary system.

And Obama made yet another brilliant speech. Did he make it, or give it? It was so good and eloquent. About how we're going to surge into Afghanistan and then start to leave in 18 months. So the enemy has fair warning. You will be defeated within 18 months. Get your affairs in order, for the first week of June 2011 shall be the day of final reckoning, and another 18 months after that, Dec of 2012, the world itself ends. It's good to warn your enemies about things like this. The Bible is full of that sort of thing, warnings to evil-doers, and prophecies and stuff.

Oh, and Phil Spector was out of prison for the day getting his teeth cleaned in Burbank. If you can pay for security, you get to keep your own doctor when you're in prison. It's an inalienable right. Like welfare in Cali, or free education for foreign nationals -- and welfare for them too, and healthcare. It's good to be compassionate and liberal like that, taking care of the planet and all the living things and the climate. Since property is theft, money must be, um, adultery. Except there's no such thing, that's just a patriarchal conspiracy left over from when sex was bad and only for one man and one woman, or something like that. Now sex is good, as Tiger Woods' penis will agree. I think that's my point.

Oh, Tiger, you are so good looking and rich. You married a woman who looks exactly like I did when I was a boy. She is so hot. Those Swedes. I'm a Dane. Same difference, really. We're very hairy, and have long penises. No, I mean long noses. And very blond. She still has white hair. I had white hair. They called me a towhead, which I didn't understand and found insulting.

J

Snap

Finally getting around to reading the book Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. Saw him on Charlie Rose a while back and got enthused. This one is about the process of snap judgments. Implications about free will -- from a certain perspective we're just computers, controlled by the information that's fed into us. So subjects who are fed subliminal data are more polite, or ruder, depending. For a brief time, until our dominant programing reasserts itself. Sort of makes us puppets.

But no. Because free will isn't about what we do. It's about what we decide to do. It's more will, than free. The issue is far too vast to ever get a clear idea about it. Just general. That's good enough. Indeed, it's one of those snap decisions, in a way. Just as we don't have a choice about our heart rate -- or our heart beat -- it's all autonomic -- what we do affects it. And we do have control of rate, and beat. Same with decisions. Will, as opposed to choice or preference, is the stubbornness of the matter. It's the hammer, not the arm. Will, and what directs will, are two different things.

One of the points Gladwell makes is about habits of character. By analyzing very short snippets of conversations between married couples, we can get a 95% accurate prediction of the likelihood of divorce withing 15 years. For marriage to be strong, positives communications need to outnumber negative by five to one. Eye-rolling indicates contempt. Toxic. Unqualified agreement, "Yes, you're right," is golden. The point is that we make evaluations, entirely unconsciously, about the unconscious signals we're being sent. Sometimes it takes 15 years for the message to get through. I feel contempt for you. Or, I love you and want to support you.

We perceive subconscious communication as sweaty palms, depression, elation, a sudden memory -- any way that perception can occur. It's a matter of how good we get at noticing. A sort of oracle, reading meaning in entrails or scattered sticks. It's reading ourselves as if we were crystal balls. Because we are. Magic.

None of this is new. New studies, to shed light on old ideas. Positive thinking. Prayer. Ways of rewriting the unconscious script. Why do we have to be reminded of this, over and over. It's as if darkness were a conspiracy.

I'm going to take a month or two off from bjj. Scheduling issues, and a rest is a good thing. Those are real reasons. But not the only ones. Of course. Haven't you been paying attention?

J

Emissions

Some sort of sporting event tomorrow. Possibility of rain. I'm too busy to notice either. Some of it is just thinking about things that have only a theoretical importance. Attending to details that nobody will ever notice. I justify it as subliminal. But it's just me, yielding to my inner tidier. There's real work to do, big stuff, actual labor, as in lifting boxes or pounding things. That schedule is not my own, alas, so it is perforce slow. In any case, I'm inhibited by a lack of tools and sundry resources.

I enjoy both sorts of work. I built a house in Australia, you know. I'm not useless. And the picky stuff, about where commas go, or thinking about the virtues of the letter X -- I enjoy them, but they are not important. It's a little surprising how unimportant some details are -- when compared to how important other details are. When it's statistics, details don't matter. Stalin was right -- a million deaths are just a statistic. Stats really don't have anything to do with decimal places. Round to the nearest ten, is about it, or thousand, or million -- whatever. It's only death, which is as common as dirt. It's what dirt is made of. Oh, you think not, but that's because you are young, and don't understand how random and corrupt the world is.

As with, say, climatology. You've heard about the email scandal. Some of the lefty ideologue High Priests of Gaia have been cheating the data, and strong-arming dissenting views out of the public eye. Threatening scientific journals, warning them off publishing the heretics -- you know, the guys who don't agree. Really slimy stuff. And these are the characters pols are trusting to justify policies such as capping CO2 emissions. Lysenkoism. Don't we learn anything?

The answer of course is no. As a species we don't learn anything. It's a zero sum game, statistically. Humanity gets wiser the way a puddle gets bigger -- just spreading out, never any deeper. More knowledge, but there has always been more knowledge than anyone could know. More specialists, then. Like priests of human sacrifice -- they know just how to cut hearts out. Like politically-driven climatologists -- who's to say they lie? It's only if their secret emails get leaked, that we see the corruption of their barely human hearts.

I heard that it's a conspiracy. Get the government in charge of healthcare and we dare not oppose government. Oh, that's a different conspiracy. Control emissions and you control the economy. Industry doesn't emit pollution, but rather products -- carbon is a side-effect. But like stopping up the exhaust pipe, if you stop the production of waste, you stop the whole machine. It's a compromise then between efficiency, having minimal waste, and effectiveness, getting real things done.

Well, these are obvious points. We live in an emotional world -- it defines reality. The lying climatologists do it because of their emotions. I work with fractions of an inch for the same reason. But behind emotion there has to be character. Seeing what really matters. You don't like X? Fine, we'll do without it. What matters is getting the job done, well if not perfectly. Because perfect is an emotional theory, and notwithstanding what I've just said, there's such a thing as reality.

I knew a guy once who was a sort of realtor, and his voice message was, "Hello, this is X Reality". He was a genuinely stupid man, the depth of which was only hinted at by the fact that he did not know how to pronounce the name of his business. If I met him on a dark secluded street, I would beat him to death.

Except I'm too calm, or self-controlled rather, too rational, and too afraid of my conscience, for all that I love justice. I say all this because I know you've been missing me. It's just that I've been busy.


J

Stuff

Caught an interesting show about “Hoarders” just now. Lots of anxiety and catastrophizing. “I feel like just leaving and never coming back.” Yeah, sure, you’re going to go kill yourself because people are exasperated with all your mess and crap. You’ll just disappear from the planet. It’s not the hoarding of course. It’s the mess. If it were organized it wouldn’t be hoarding. It would be collecting. As it is, it's just a reluctance to throw out anything that might possibly someday be somehow useful.

But really, it’s not the stuff. It’s the mess. That’s something I know how to deal with too. I had a household, once, sort of full of kids, so I know about mess. It’s really important to stay on top of it. Especially with boys. Two rules. First, have a place for everything. All the papers -- work, academic, finance -- all the books, dishes, jackets, shoes, toys, games -- they all have a place. Boxes, chests, closets, hampers, drawers, cupboards, cabinets, shelves -- these are places, for things. Armoires. Credenzas. Highboys. Whatever. They don’t have to be neat in their place, but they have to be in their place, and out of sight. Their place is not on tabletops, chairs, beds, floors, floors under beds. Their place is not, ever, on a surface. Surfaces do not count as places. Things are either out of sight, or on display. It’s more a matter of judgment than of taste. And when they get messy in their place, out of sight, well, once a week, places get a going over. Sunday evening, after dinner and before family time. It's a part of family time.

Second rule, no mess at bedtime. Never let it get out of control. You do that by having a procedure. Whose ever bedtime it is, there’s a few minutes before that, for spot check. You know what you’ve been doing. If it’s kids, they don’t know what they’ve been doing. So there’s a checklist, formal or informal. I used to put it on them -- go take a look, and anything that’s yours and out, take care of it. Of course they wanted to do a sloppy job. It’s not bad, it’s human. But there’s accountability too. After they got used to the rules, they’d know that any toy they left lying around, I’d keep for a while. Put it up high, where they could see it but not have it. Mean? I smile with thin lips, and call it justice.

Too much stuff? Not enough places? Really, that's not hard. Decide if you want to be a hoarder. Keep what you need, keep what you like, but don't keep what you might perhaps someday maybe have a use for possibly. It's like paint cans. When you repaint, many years from now, is it going to be the same color? Really? Liar. Buy less than you want. It's more than you need. I knew a fellow who had a rule. Anything that wouldn't fit on the one shelf in his garage, had to go. Severe, but it worked. He had one big place, rather than a lot of more specific ones. It worked for him.

Too much mess? There's the Mount Vernon technique of housekeeping. It's such a big place, how do you clean it? Start in a corner, and work out. It's a system, and systems get things done. Doesn't have to be the best system ever, or the most efficient. Just effective. No search-and-rescue grids required. Overwhelmed? Schedule time. Do it in pieces. Make it a project. Ask for help. Hire someone. Just get it done.

It's important because people form judgments. Family overlooks it. Friends make allowances. Strangers don't care, or shouldn't. Social workers write reports. But everyone has opinions. And if there are kids, well, there it is. We want them to benefit from our excellence. Sadly, they have to deal with it all.

That’s it. Two rules. Have a place, and use it. But that's how it is with everything. A few rules, just common sense, and chaos becomes cosmos. I'm sure this is how God created the universe. With a rule, a unified field. Light. Then a lot of separating.


J

hmn

Poignant isn't the right word. Compassion, pity, sympathy, empathy -- not it. What ever it is though, about futility, I feel it. Felt it. I felt it about fatherless kids, enough to try to do something about it. To a lesser degree I feel it about fat people.

Futility. A concrete noun that carries with it an abstract feeling, if you feel it. I won't go into it again, the insanity cycle of doing the same thing expecting different results. Not in detail. Broadly, calorie restriction slows metabolism up to 45%, stopping calories from being used as energy, storing it instead. Lethargy and cravings.

Of course there is some character issue involved. A little bit at least. It's the industrial carbs that gets the obesity cycle started. Everyone knows not to eat those sorts of things. Chips and cookies and things in bags and boxes, of whatever flavor. It's the stuff parents don't want kids to ruin their appetites on. A sort of folk wisdom. What, it doesn't apply to adults? But since we're answerable only to ourselves, in actuality, we eat what we want. Character, then.

But that's what's behind almost every problem. You married a slutty woman because you were attracted to her. You lost your home to foreclosure because you were adolescent with credit cards. You lost your job because et cetera. Not about blame, though. We have problems because we're human.

The fat problem is about what we eat. I know of people who eat once a day, and spend no small part of it on the treadmills, and they don't lose the fat. It's the carbs. The industrial carbs. Refined, denatured, powdered, fried. Pre-digested. What are we, baby birds? Instant bloodsugar means instant hyperinsulinemia means excessive fat storage and consequent lack of energy. Industrial carbs means an excess of the raw materials that are essential in forming fat. Don't eat the industrial carbs and you will starve your fat instead of your immune system. Seems like a good deal.

But appetite is what it is. Even with the actual sure knowledge of what the problem and its cure are, some shocking number of people will continue as they are. Smoking through the hole in the neck. At which point, futility largely decouples itself from compassion. Perhaps not though. Judgment hardly does any good at all. It serves justice only, if anything. Justice is an abstract.

As for fatherless children, well, for a time that's what Jesus was, on the cross. Isolation is our natural state. If we fill the void with comforts, it cannot be a surprise. High on the list of first-learned-words, is "mine".

Even good boys need to be bad sometimes. Bad, in the sense of disobedience. Find a way you can get away with it. Because otherwise it's always about being good, and that's not possible. Not fully human. It's not healthy. I saw that yesterday. It was very interesting. I hadn't known it in quite that way before. I called to a little boy and he kept on running. Heard me of course, he's not deaf, but he made the calculation that he didn't have to listen. I think he was right. It's a safety valve. A subtle assertion of individuality. Yes, we want them to be above criticism. We want them to receive the praise of strangers. But on the other hand, those are the children who get into windowless vans idling by the bushes in big parks. We have to practice being disobedient.

I seem to have mellowed. Maybe it's the season.


J

Snake Oil

Obama bowed to the Emperor of Japan. The picture shows the Emperor and his wife, smiling, oddly, perhaps embarrassed but still pleased. Perhaps I'm reading too much into the picture. Of Obama's skinny ass as he bends way way over, deep. Better to puke on foreign dignitaries than to grovel like a lackey. Lookit me, bowin tuh duh emerper of Japland! I'm so humble and appropriate.

Those who represent in their very persons the greatness of America should be modest, but never humble. Obama is a fool, not because of any lack of ability or measurable intellect, but because he does not understand his job. All of his understanding of symbolism involves only words.

Most recently Obama has said that such and such a terrorist -- soon to be put on civilian trail in the very city of his, and Islam's, greatest triumph ... said Sheik of Falling Towers will definitely be convicted. Failure is not an option. So what's the message to the world? We're so enlightened and soft that we give terrorists full Constitutional rights. At the same time, the verdict is certain. Hm. But it's not a mixed message at all. Soft people are corrupt.

As a certain senator has observed, OJ got off. All it takes is a stupid jury. By giving Khalid Sheikh Mohammed his day in civilian court, the Obama administration sets the puppet stage, a Punch and Judy farce, except that farce is funny and this is a complete tragedy. Nine Eleven, as I have always said, was not a tragedy but an atrocity. An obvious distinction once it's made. This is a tragedy, again, because it brings on the dark fate of a man's flawed character. Man, or nation. When true confessions have been made, the path of justice is clear. Process should become secondary. Here, there is such a love of form over substance, verbiage over integrity, that we'll have to sit through a clamorous shadow play, Javanese in its incomprehensibility.

Ours is not a system of justice, nor a system of laws, nor even of process. It's not the legal system, it's the lawyer system. That says it all. No large, and perhaps no great nation can have a true justice system. As with a healthcare system, competence is always about the individual, and almost never about the bureaucracy.

I'm in a declarative statement sort of mood. Very Oscar Wilde tonight. My point is that given the clarity, of admitted guilt, and given the clarity of military justice, why has Obama set about subjecting us to this medicine show? It's enough to make me sick.

What a fool. What a fool. Like children dressing up in grown-ups clothes. Not oversized. They fit, tailored. Elegant, really. But it's playing. Silly people pretending. Surprised when the let's-say game of supposing has real-world consequences that represent reality rather than theory. But I'm repeating myself. It's almost as if I'm in love with the sound of my own oratory, and the variegated manifestations of my iterations.

This is why I write so little about politics anymore. It may be that Bush did not tend to exigent problems, focused on too narrow a thing. The current occupant of the White House is spraying gasoline rather than water on a conflagration. What a fool.

J

In the Woods

I have to eat more. I think I'm losing weight again. Indeed, I have been eating less. Not at all today, until deep into evening. Then I attempted a workout and, well, it was not pretty.

Failure is discouraging. It's tangled up with self-worth. I failed because I'm bad stupid useless and therefore I am unloved hated. Well that's how the world is. News about a little five-year-old girl sold by her mother some number of times for sex, now found murdered and dumped in the woods. Where was God?

Some years ago catastrophe overtook me and I lost assets and standing and family and hope and actually several other things that I won't be even this non-specific about. I haven't been back to church since. God does not protect the innocent. He does not protect children, or families, or honesty or righteousness or innocence.

What is the future? Something that Jesus said to not concern ourselves with. Not urging us to irresponsibility. It's just that towers fall and crush passersby, and armed men come and make victims out of citizens. It's why people believe in fate. I don't believe in fate any more than I believe in the assurance of earthly blessings. God keeps his promises. He just never promised to keep us safe. He deals with eternity -- a longer span than the future Jesus had in mind.

God is forgiving, but reality is not. Physics is unrelenting, and acknowledges no repentance. What this tells me is that physics may not be more powerful, but it is far more present than God. When that little girl was being sodomized, as she must have been, and stabbed or strangled in close proximity to spilled jizzum, that was science at work, biology and psychology. No actual theology involved -- just pathology. When I failed in my workout 4 minutes in, well, don't I know that people have to eat?

See how it is? We are victims of choices, our own or of monstrous mothers and murderous scum. Victims of happenstance as well, having turned right instead of left, or waited a moment instead of moving. What horrors have we missed, for such choices? Or suffered?

I see people speaking of the future as if it were a real thing. We have to act as if it were. That's what hope is. But always in my heart I hear the sound of stifled sobs, memory of lost loved ones and the triumph of evil. Compassion is easy. Some people bleed it. Even so, as I referenced in my last entry, in the things that matter we must persevere.

The cat came back. Murdered little molested girls don't come back. Somehow, though, God will find comfort for them, and redress, the wounds to their souls healed, and the price in suffering they have paid will buy them, somehow, comforts of infinitely greater value. I forget this most of the time, psychology being what it is.

Self-esteem? The things that I'm good at, I'm better than great. It's not how pretty I am. I'm not pretty. It's not how smart I am -- there are plenty of plenty smart people. But this blog is an example. Anyone who knows it and doesn't value it is an absolute fool. That's my self-esteem. I can fail in my workouts. I can be stupid or irresponsible, sometimes, once in a while, where other people aren't depending on me. I don't have to eat. My self-esteem can absorb occasional failure, and learn from it. It makes me wiser, and eventually stronger.

That's how God sees his fallen creation. It can be full of failure, and yet, somehow, of infinite value. Enough, somehow, to be worth an infinity of suffering.


J

My Hero

J

The Rules

It's obvious, but the obvious bears repeating. Fitness is really easy, because it's just this limited set of specific behaviors enacted in a brief period. Ten or twenty minutes of intensity, a few times a week, and you get fit. Easy. Oh, sure, it's tough. But tough things can be easy. If you take my meaning.

Then there's diet. It should be so easy. It's just what we eat, and we pretty much have complete control over what we eat. We may not be able to lift 500 pounds -- it's just impossible -- but anything we can eat, we can lift. It's just that we shouldn't eat everything we can lift. Temptation. Hardly anyone is tempted to get fit. It's a discipline. We sacrifice, as a sort of agape, that we may have more abundant life. Food on the other hand is one of the things Satan tempted Jesus with.

So both, diet and exercise, are easy, and hard. In my mind there is no question whatsoever as to which is more important. Diet is about health. Exercise is about fitness. Health is about proper functioning. Fitness is about what we can do. Both are important. But you can't depend on a malfunctioning machine. You are made out of what you eat. Imagine trying to build health out of cheetos and dingdongs and coca cola and pig colons. Coca colons. It's like a Great Wall, made out of paper mache.

Any talk about health or fitness is going to be repetitious. These things are not unknown. Details may be wrong, and whole philosophies, but being sensible is the message. Sure, religions have cults, that pervert universal truths, but that's why criminals counterfeit real money. It is the nature of evil to mock truth. Point is, eat good food, and use your body vigorously, that it might be vital. Everyone knows this. Why then is there illness and indolence?

It's easy and it's hard. The relatively few minutes it takes to be fit require sometimes an almost heartbreaking intensity. We might approach it with dread. But it's easy, once it's done. The not-unreasonable self-control of diet -- the very same that we expect from children, about not filling up on candy -- well, parents can, really they can, control the diets of their children. Controlling other people is much easier, and apparently more pleasant, than controlling ourselves. It's diet. Diet is what's hard. All it would take is the application of rationality. Eat this, because it is healthful. Don't eat that -- it is sweet but deadly, like a bad woman.

The rules? Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. That's one rule, or set of rules in a catagory. Work hard, don't get injured, rest. So those are the rules of diet and of exercise. Real food is nourishing -- not transfats, not dried molded slurries in boxes, not factory meat. Real work is practical -- not sitting on a bench doing dumbbell curls. What that achieves is impractical -- big guns, no grip and no shoulders. It's work the way compulsive handwashing is work.

It's hard because intensity is hard, and so is appetite. We're tempted to sloth, and to indulgence. Just saying no, or yes, gets us through some larger fraction of a second, in the process of self-discipline. After we've said no to the bad thing, or yes to the good, there still remains the need for action. And we do, as everyone knows, live in bodies of death.

Hope? There is no hope. Just do it? Sure, somehow. How? That's the magic. There must be hope, as the desert seed awaits the brief showers of spring. My feeling is that encouragement helps. We are after all very small children, learning to walk. Attaboy! Other people, and their opinions, seem to matter -- even people we don't respect. It must be a sort of temptation. But that's the alchemy of it. Even as we can transform vitiated food into almost 60 or 70 years worth of lifespan, we can draw motivation out of human contact.

That must be another rule. Be human, not impatient, with integrity. Humans strive to transcend weakness. They aspire beyond their capacity. Humans are foolish, like small children. They should make us smile. The meaning of their lives is embodied in the word, hope.

J

Atlantis

Cable television. A wasteland of diamonds. Crap. And some things worthwhile. There's a show on, uh, TLC I think, about ghost hunters. Some tubular enthusiast with a tight teeshirt so we can see his big guns, going through abandoned death rows and insane asylums and, uh, abortion clinics at night, with infra red -- no, cuz it's green -- night-vision cameras. "Oh!" he enthuses, peering intently at a screen, "did you SEE THAT!?! It was a GHOST!! Clearly a dancing sphere of light on the screen, and a sharp echo!!! You saw it too! It was astounding!!! Are you HERE, spirit!/!!?? Are you trying to tell us a message about your existence??!e;?!?!> ? wuz ur deth paynfull!!?!!!EI??"

So we can consign Ghost Search! to the crap factory. Then there's Mystery Quest, on the History Channel. Something tonight on Jack the Ripper -- made a pretty good case for a suspect. But it was what followed. Atlantis. Two teams, one of divers, exploring the old news about the "Bimini Road", and some rectangular "storage buildings" that would have been ten feet above the 10,000 BC Caribbean coastline, now 100 feet below water. The Ice Age, don't you know. Long story short, carbon dating on the beach rock of the "road" gives a date of about 3000 BC, or maybe 1600 BC -- I forget. But 7000 years or more too young to be the artifacts of the Lost Continent of Atlantis.

Again, the "scientists" slash "explorers" were filmed staring at and commenting upon the sonar and video images of their efforts. "See that?!? It is clearly a right angle, a perfect right angle, indicating carved rocks of human construction proving Atlantis of course. And notice how regularly spaced these storage structures are! It's such a shame they are utterly covered by 10,000 years worth of coral overgrowth, which law forbids us from removing, but the sharp angles of these humanly carved blocks have nevertheless survived 12,000 years of eroding strong currents that threaten us in our dives to sweep us out into the miles-deep ocean."

I did not see right angles. I saw random formations of rocky outcroppings or displaced boulders. Hard to say which. As for the "road", it is indeed an interesting "archaeological" or geological phenomenon. Analogous to natural formations found on, say, dry lake beds. Highly ordered and regular geometric shapes. Who can say. But where does the "road" go? Has its course been mapped? I've known about it since the mid 70s, and in the ensuing 35 years we would expect this elementary question to have been pursued. How long is it? How wide? Does sonar or other testing reveal a network or a pattern? Perhaps there are answers, but the show did not give them.

The show concluded that perhaps this too-young lost civilization, if it is one, was of the descendants of the Atlantians. Sure. They survived the 9000 years of utter silence, in Bimini.

Atlantis is crap. Absolute garbage, archaeologically speaking. Neato myth, from Plato, used as a codicil to his Republic utopia, but useless as history. Nearly 2000 years followed Plato, with nothing new about Atlantis. Then Thomas Moore wrote another work about another Utopia, placed in America, called Atlantis. It's not even a theory. Theories are for testing. This was a literary myth. No problem with that, but fools later tried to make it history.

Atlantis was, as the second team on the Mystery Quest show considered, the Minoan Civilization of Crete. It is a certainty. I don't have easy access to my old, pre-internet notes, for the second volume of my reconstruction of ancient history, the first volume of which, Most Ancient Days, is partially available here online. Because I'm so generous. I may never write the second volume. But it would deal with, in part, the Minoans and Mycenaeans. Hittites and Kassites and Assyrians and Carians and Hurrians and Mitanni and Uratuans and New Kingdom Egyptians and Dorians -- well, it goes on. I'm getting a little distracted thinking about how cool it is.

Point is, the island of Thera, Santorini, was the cultic center of the Minoan religion, and it blew up volcanically about 1600 BC, leaving a caldera, ring-shaped island. The consequent tidal wave crippled the Minoan civilization on Crete, 70 miles away. We find the signs of the waves. They rebuilt, a pathetic shadow, and lasted a few hundred years more, then got wiped out again in another disaster. It's in my notes.

Plato tells us Atlantis lay beyond the Gates of Hercules. Gibraltar, right? No. There was another strait by that name, in the Aegean. Beyond which lay Crete. Plato says 9000 years. 900 years before Plato wrote, the second destruction of Crete occurred. He says Atlantis was a series of concentric islands and harbors. Thera survived as a ring-shaped island. Get it?

Pretty good memory, actually. And we can find the correctable errors. I like that. As for the UFO pyramids on Mars dudes, I get a little impatient with them. I love mysteries. I like their solutions to be rational, and to answer the evidence in the simplest way possible. You know, parsimony. Occam's Razor.

When we are young we love to speculate, but we generally have only a little actual knowledge, so we may be led to all sorts of pleasing but incorrect solutions. With maturity should come probity. We must be skeptical of even our cherished ideas. The Bimini swimmers needed someone on board who had a capacity for critical thought. The Spook Hunters ... well, they need to open a stripper bar and do their reality show about that, instead of "science."

Look. I think the world is 6000 years old, and UFO aliens are fallen angels, and demons are the shades of a hybrid cross between fallen angels and the daughters of mankind. I think there was a literal world Flood, survived by a single human family in an ark that contained the entire genome of all land-based vertebrates. I believe many ridiculous and disreputable things. Understanding that dignified things can be ridiculed, and disrepute is a fashion, not an inherent quality. Like, the Bible as history rather than metaphor. Like Jesus on a cross, dying and actually redeeming the sins of mankind. Ridiculous things, that some people honor.

The age of the world and the great questions of geology are interesting, fascinating, but secondary. Maybe Evolution is the true religion. Maybe space aliens seeded the cosmos with panspermia. Maybe there are giant faces on Mars. I could be wrong. It's important to remember what's important. But regardless of whether we're right, let's not be right only by coincidence. Let's analyze the evidence methodically, instead of being wishful-thinking clowns.

It's just embarrassing, is all, and annoying. I don't consider being annoyed to be a form of entertainment.


J

Principle

So a guy who has no off-switch just started talking about a controversial subject -- no context, no antecedent conversations -- just launching himself on the topic. First he said that it was a principle of law, not of morality or ethics, but of law, that there is no right without ability. Well, that's sort of a shorthand way of saying it. I've looked at Blackstone, and I know something about natural law, so the idea that there should be a principle behind a law is not foreign to me.

But from this rather abrupt starting point he immediately declared that, because of this principle, abortion was supported in principle under law. Because a fetus does not have the ability to live on its own, it does not have a right to life. The mother suffers its existence, at will. All of this came as a flurry at me, and I was actually engaged in some things that pressed me for time, but I did have to stop.

Usually I simply don't engage people, in public. But it was so clear. I said, "Here's the flaw in your reasoning." And he made an excited face, as if it would be a delight to encounter such a rare thing. "An infant, a babe-in-arms, doesn't have the ability to live on its own. It has to be cared for or it will die. Therefore, what ... it can be killed?" "The difference" said he, "is that anyone can care for an infant, but a fetus depends on the mother." I replied, "You've just changed the principle of law that was the foundation of your argument. First it was lack of inherent ability, now it's who provides ability."

I just didn't have the time, and this is a guy who can talk for hours. He's very bright. You see it though. If the principle is that ability is necessary for a right, it is irrelevant as to who provides that ability. If it is the mother, to an in utero child, or a stranger, for a foundling -- either both, or neither, have the right to terminate the life. If someone provides the means, the receiver is without rights? It seems like an unprincipled sort of reasoning.

What about easement? The fact that a practice -- say, crossing a field, or being alive -- has been tolerated, allowed to continue, establishes its right before law. Ergo, a fetus has a right to life, by the fact that it was not terminated at the earliest convenient moment. A partial vindication of life. For those mothers and socially-aware activists who are in principle for early termination, some other equally subtle and principled counter must be found. Like, um, fetuses are alive, human, and should not be killed -- you know, like the eggs of endangered species. Protected.

Wise fools. It comes, in part, from imagining that principles have meaning in themselves. Principles are axioms. For numerous generations some part of the law was founded on the principle that people could own other people. They had after all the ability, and the effectively universal backing of their society. They had the law.

The law is an ass. There is no principle outside of ethics and morality. Thinking otherwise leads us to the pristine logic of death camps. Rational, indeed, given the precepts of the syllogism. Evil is often quite logical. But formal logic can be valid without being true. That's elementary. The fellow of whom I have spoken is very bright. Why doesn't he know this?

J

Nidal Malik Hasan

An unsurprising name. Yesterday he expressed his understanding of the Hippocratic Oath, and of Islam, by gunning down as many unarmed people as he could. Islam apparently takes human sacrifices. One early report had him as a convert. Now he's said to be of Palestinian heritage. Hardly matters. Nidal, in any case, is a name that means "struggle," as in Um Nidal, the heroic mother of a heroic suicide bomber from Ramallah. You'll have to pardon me. It's just that they're so dang heroic.

Hasan ... or Nidal ... it's hard to know exactly which is his last name ... suffered some "harassment" because of his exercise of his faith. His free expression included aggressive and provocative attacks on American policy and society, to distressed combat soldiers just returned from the field. So harassment may not be quite le mot juste. He used his office of trust to proselytize for his religion. Defrocked, disbarred ... what's the word for doctors? -- when they're kicked out of the profession? No matter. It didn't happen to The Struggler.

Here now in Obamerica we are too evolved to report on the ethnic appearance of kidnappers or gunmen or other entrepreneurs. So we most certainly will not be expecting to hear about disgruntled military persons who post comments such as that infidels should be beheaded and oil poured down their throats. Well, we might hear about them after they do something newsworthy, but I mean ahead of time, like, proactively. That would be profiling.

There's not really a lot to say. America is the real terrorist. We're committing a genocide against moslems and islam and arabs and shit. It's the oil. And the spices. Well, whatever it is that arabs have and we want. Submissive women.

I had a professor once, Dr Baruk abd-al-Malik. An admirable man. Coptic Christian, from Egypt. Had a tattoo on his wrist, as all Copts do, of a cross. A tradition, so that if they were kidnapped as babies and made to be moslem, they'd know something of the story. My point? It must be that the world is horrible, in which we must act honorably. Hardly anyone is always wrong. Kidnapper child molesters have many good points, as do sex offenders with multiple dead and rotting bodies stored in various places about their homes. How do these guys afford such nice houses? Anyways, sometimes we do have to be judged for our worst moments.

Hasan lived. It will be interesting to see how long it takes to hang him. If ever. Allah's will be done. Gog is great.


J

Wax Off

I might read To Kill a Mockingbird. I don't expect I'll ever read Catcher in the Rye. Stories of adolescence bore me. I know who I am, and I know how the world is. Self-indulgence and phony rebellions hold no fascination. I can't watch James Dean movies. Boo hoo. You're so misunderstood.

There's this one aggressive unskilled smaller teenager who, for all that he's peripheral to me, wants to roll with me, and have conversations with me, and flatter me. The rolling I don't mind, and a bit of talk. No time for flattery. Yes, I know I'm buff and ripped. No, I'm not a bodybuilder. I don't do anything for appearance. I'm too pure for that. What I am comes from what I do. Yes, I'm wonderful. Maybe he'll take the hint. You're my hero, he says, only half-jokingly. He likes to be honest and open. That's because, I reply, I'm very heroic.

Honestly though, I hardly emit a personality. Why would I even be noticed. Tonight he said I reminded him of Atticus Finch. Well I haven't read the book, although I do know the character. A morally centered guy. Even-handed, admirable. So that's nice.

He wants to be a writer, and I taught writing for many years, so he wanted me to look at his poetry, and I said sure, if he's prepared to not be flattered. Early poetic efforts are almost always obvious. Things that everyone thinks of, spoken as if they are discoveries. A mentor needs to be gentle about these things, and identify the skill of the communication, rather than the content. It's how we say it, not what we say. Nothing is new. He asked me why I write. I said, because I do it well. I don't have a lot of stories. I just like making beautiful things.

So, on that note, I was leafing through these pages and realized with a shock that it had been simply forever since I'd updated you on my penis. It's doing fantastic, slightly radioactive after the gamma ray treatment, and it should be released from the R&D lab within a week. I'm planning on promoting it to my sidekick, when I go about saving the world as Capitaine Hardbone. We haven't come up with a name for it yet, but we're working on it. I was favoring The Cheta! but then I realized the feline connection, and that just wouldn't do. And the imagery of speed doesn't really play all that well in this context. So I'm starting an online competition, to name my penis's superhero identity. Please, serious suggestions only. Grandprize will be an all-expenses-paid luxury afternoon at the fabulous Beautiful Downtown Burbank Brazilian Wax and Lazar Mole-Removal Boutique, travel expenses not included.

Politics? It's been long enough since the Great Delusion so that Obama has to take a bit of the credit for the economy, which resulted in the Republican victories of Tuesday's elections. The party in power gets the blame. Wouldn't it be nice if once in a while we elected competent people? Real leaders who have a vision and some skills? Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others? Perhaps, if by democracy we mean an informed electorate of vested patriots. We should try that. Instead of, you know, this idiot popularity contest prom queen crap. Anything that has democra in its name seems predestined for failure and corruption and shortsightedness. But maybe that's just this current election cycle speaking. Maybe things will get better. Like, human nature will change, or whales will start voting, or something.

A 22 year old man in Saudi Arabia was convicted of raping and killing a number of little boys aged between 3 and 7 years old. Left them in the desert to die. He was sentences to be beheaded and then crucified. They have the right idea, but they got the order wrong. Still and all, it's as much justice as we can expect. How come they get it and we don't?


J

Chill

It is there, laying in wait, looking for its chance. Is it hot or is it cold, is it a choking mist or something more filthy than mud, does it have claws and teeth or is it all blades. I always know it's there. I know it's always there. It's in my earliest memories, as confusion and alienation. A sense of strangeness. It is depression, a part of my personality. Who would I be, without it.

It helps to be busy. But of course depression has a feral intellect of its own, emotional, nothing so romantically dramatic as tombs and crypts, but much to do with something like death. Thanatos. And I often understand that even if love were offered to me, I would reject it. This makes me sad, but I must want to be sad. Hope? Yes. A sentiment of great power. I wonder which is stronger?

I put some pine nuts in my smoothie today, and it made me nauseous. No more pine nuts, whatever they are. Slept for three hours, feeling betterish. Were they rancid? Some sort of bacteria? I guess I have to throw out the second half of the smoothie. Missed my workout. I think its the first one I've missed. Haven't been sick for something like three years. A few times a decade. I'm not opposed to illness -- it just needs to have a purpose. Now I'm hungry. I'm hungry and slightly nauseous. I wouldn't have thought that was possible.

How does nausea work? Are there sensors in the stomach? Reacting to germs or toxins? Does it need to get into the bloodstream? -- some metabolite or peptide? Travel along nerves? There's only one nerve connecting brain and gut -- the vagrant vagus nerve. Can people who have this nerve cut feel nausea?

I seem to be under some pressure. Not all news is bad, but the future is such an intangible thing. And when one is prone to depression, creating opportunities is hard. It's not about energy. It's about moving out rather than folding up. I look at people with their emotions, their anger that they use to argue with, as if it will get them what they want. I don't believe anger changes anyone's mind. It might frighten someone into giving you what you want. But I suppose that's as good a way to be as how I am. I don't believe it's possible to change anyone's mind. Maybe their mind will change, but I didn't do it. Anger or cold rationality -- I just don't see how anything gets done.

That's depression talking. It wants me to be helpless. Right now it's winning. I'll stop now.


J

Father Abraham

If you would understand God, consider Abraham, a friend of God, told to sacrifice his son. His only son. Not his only son though, as Jesus was not God’s only son. Each however was an only son of promise -- Isaac a promise of love -- Jesus a promise of love as well.

But it doesn’t help us, the fact that Abraham was given a son that he could love. And what of unloved Ishmael? God too must have children He does not favor.

That’s not it either though. Take your son, your only son, and go to a place I shall show you, and sacrifice him. We say it was a test, of obedience: which does Abraham love more, his Lord or his son. Adam faced the same question and chose Eve. Abraham must have had more life experience.

We say it was a test, then. But it wasn’t. It was a lesson. The innocent die, unjustly, under agencies answerable to a different urgency. Justice is not the most immediate law of the universe. Sometimes we never see it or its effect. It wasn’t a test, it was a lesson, and not even really about life, and the universe, and being a father. It was a lesson about God.

In a tangle of brambles and horns a sacrifice was found, on a mountaintop. Innocence is redeemed by righteousness. We look at ourselves, and understand that we have no innocence, or righteousness. Only desire and resolve, imperfect. Since it’s all we have, it has to be enough.

Redemption is a bloody thing though, and perhaps not the very Cross, but crosses in general, of thieves, say, must have been splattered with feces. A dirty business. Holy altars on which unblemished lambs were offered would have stunk like any other abattoir. That must be why they were made of stone rather than wood. Easier to wash.

The idea that blood can cleanse is only a metaphor. Blood cannot cleanse. Blood, like any vitiated protein-rich substance, putrefies. What we’re looking at then only seems to be blood. Somehow, even spilled, it is life.

Abraham knew of the resurrection, as did God of course. So slaying their sons, each, respectively -- Isaac and Jesus -- the consequences were less somehow than we might suppose. A moment or some hours of pain, however sharp, a period of separation, and then life again, and more abundantly. What’s the big deal? For Abraham, the big deal was that it wasn’t Isaac who died. It was Abraham. He cut out his own heart, bloodless.

Every father would sacrifice himself in place of his child. You know it’s true. That’s not how it works. We have to give up the thing most dear. That is not our lives. It’s our love. For all that we may say, take me instead, some sacrifice cannot be vicarious.

What is it God wants? It’s not really about obedience. He wants to be loved, and obedience is the action that proves the feeling. It’s simple and it’s complex, and resolves in the central fact of my faith, which is that God is human.

J

November

I had a sex dream last night, or this morning rather. Arid and analytical. An object of desire never before of interest to me. The amorality of dreams. It's not our true selves. It's not ourselves at all. We are simply observers.

And it must have been Friday that I heard -- not overheard, since I was right there -- a fellow talk about a former girlfriend who wanted him to tie her up with duct tape and take pictures. Oh no, he said, it was such a temptation, but she might later press charges. I can't think how it would be a temptation. I do my best to avoid dominating and degrading people. I think he must get his fantasies from pornography. Imagine letting pornographers direct your desires.

Imagine a universe where there is life, and that life ends. What sort of a universe would that be like? A very strange place. First, life would have to have arisen randomly. An impossibility in itself, but this is some other universe. Randomly I say because a purposeful universe would be directed by intelligence, or God if you will, and God is not capable of creating life that ends. Animals? Their souls must return to that vast subclass of life that loses its identity when it becomes nonphysical.

That's my latest understanding about the soul. The thing that remembers going to the light, but then returns, in near-death experiences? That's not the spirit. That's the soul. Soul is the emotional body, elemental, a sort of ethereal feeling clay that becomes impressed with a shape for a time, which it may retain, but is not a real identity. There may be ghosts, but they're just emotional corpses. The light that they should be liberated into is the non-being of Buddhism. Soul is not who we are. We don't have eternal souls. We have eternal spirits.

So I need not trouble myself over dreams. They may speak of psychology, or memory, or information processing, or metabolic upset, or of the interference or communication of other souls, benign, malicious or just wandering in their sleep. There is randomness, for all that there is purpose. God made a quantum universe, regardless of whether or not he plays dice. For God, randomness shows up as free will.

What are the statistics. About twenty percent of Americans belong to some sort of fitness club. Of those, about 20% are active. I'm pulling different data sources together here, so there are likely to be inaccuracies. But, uh, twenty percent of 20% is, um, 4%. Of Americans are serious about fitness. Sounds about right, actually. Man I'm smart. The point is that everyone wants to be fit, healthy, beautiful. Why aren't they. Free will is not the same as will power.

Take the phrase, dig deep. Under pressure, sorely tried, hard pressed -- time to show your mettle. Dig deep. But only 4% are deep. We don't start with any depth at all. We start on the surface. To get deep, we have to dig. That's a process. A practice. A skill. Character? It is developed, like shaped clay, by what we do habitually.

This is not encouraging. It feels deterministic. When we need to be strong, in the crisis, there is only the strength we have prepared. Sort of a conservation of energy thing. Anything else would be a miracle. And there are no miracles. None at all. God disapproves of them. You know -- things happening for no reason. Other than free will, of course.

You know what the universe looks like to a photon? It looks frozen. And a photon is just a line, from its origin to its terminus, each point on the line existing in a next moment relative to the external universe, but part of a single timeless moment of existence to the photon itself. Light is like life, except it has an end. Light ends, right? Or does some light just go on and on, forever, from the first utterance of God, until -- well, there is no until. What good is it then, if it is never seen?

I got out of October without any serious depression. My foolish mother is being sued by a criminal in November, and she has no lawyer. That will be depressing. I really don't understand the world. There is no justice -- the outcome is effectively random. A prayer, or willpower, or digging deep -- if they make a difference it would be a miracle, or a change of emotion. There are no miracles. There are only people, and emotions.


J

F U

There was a disturbing little thing on this Facebook. A major player on the field seems to have political opinions of a sort divergent from my own. Why would I care. He seems pleased to share them. Again, it's party talk -- just the sort of thing that stakes out his territory. Not so much dog piss as the assertion of personality. It is our right. I don't know the conventions of FB, but I view it with restraint. There was however a strange attack on FOX News that just seemed foolish to me. You know, boogieman. It seemed gratuitous and incivil. I did what I rarely do, and "wrote on my wall." Lord. Discursive and indirect. Hinting at how we might conduct ourselves, publicly.

I got back something like, F-you. Well, no, it was exactly that. "F-you."

I don't have a problem following the rules. I don't like them, but see the need. In my few comments there, I maintain a vaguely stilted tone, ironic, alienated, overly-formal but colloquial. It just seems like a place to be superficial. Am I wrong? I don't understand these things. It's not my place. This is my place, where I pull the veil back, a little. It must be that this fellow feels the same way about FB -- where he can vent superficially on politics with the expectation that everyone upon whose page he appears will agree, or remain silent. That's probably what irritated me. I don't mind bias. I prefer that it be supported by evidence. And I encourage that it be challenged.

I acted out a little puppet show, and the fellow modified his tone. We can't ever be sure what the original intent was. But sometimes we just need a gentle reminder, and we're jolted without necessarily being made ashamed. It's a dangerous thing to confront a man's dignity.

We'd say Americans are so stupid, loving Obama, or hating him, or Bush. But it's not Americans, it's people. And it's not Obama or Bush, it's philosophies and tactics. Be generous with the poor? Certainly. But the redistribution of wealth by the coercive force of government is not generosity. Care for those who are ill? Certainly. But "healthcare" is not caring for the ill. "Healthcare" is a huge bureaucracy, a drug and surgery factory that has very little to do with health, and very much to do with disease. See? Philosophies and tactics. They're not stupid for disagreeing with me. They're wrong. Or maybe I am. In either case, we merit civility until we demonstrate otherwise. This isn't hard stuff to understand.

But I expect too much. That's why I generally keep quite. My humor is not likely to translate, and I don't want to impose. Here, I indulge myself. It is my place. You come here, albeit less and less, by choice. My ball, my rules. But I'm fair.

Halloween tomorrow. When the masks come off.


J

Update

Dennis Prager says there are two parties, the Stupid Party and the Destructive Party. Obvious, but still amusing.


It's like being Christian. Most don't quite have it figured out. Well, it's not a gnosis. But always be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you. There are however many commandments we do not strictly adhere to. Alas, the handwavers are so much more public than the readers. Reading doesn't make for good television. They're not wrong, and human nature is what it is. Emotion seems to be easier for most people.

It's like testosterone. Cliches aside, there really can be too much. As with cholesterol, there's a healthy range. Too little T and a man is a hairless epicene doughboy. Too much and he's a reckless lockdown fool. That's really not a good thing. It's not masculine to be an uncontrolled violent overgrown boy. It's not spiritual to be a TV-weeping verse-quoter. An understanding heart includes the intellect.

I wonder why I'm talking about this. Feeling out of balance, maybe. It's an unsettled time for me. Slow season in terms of my mysterious sources of income, and I feel an obligation to assist my foolish, one might say stupid, mother. I've been paying for her various car repairs. Ah well. I don't need to buy books. Every family should have a mechanic, a doctor, and a lawyer. Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. The Indian chief is the politician, to rhyme with thief. But lawyer covers both anyway. We don't expect poetic density from nursery rhymes though. Every family should have a politician. Someone with power, to waive permits and fix tickets. What, you think it's about justice? Has your life taught you nothing? The Afghan warlords know the score. There is no loyalty. There is only a highest bidder.

Which brings us to Obama. When was the last time Chicago gave us a president? Kennedy? Well, that was cut short. The Machine, with its mechanics, is running full-bore now -- just down a peculiar road. Healthcare reform? Now? To whom is this a payoff? At this period in history, is healthcare reform really the burning issue? Leadership is about priorities. Economics is about the allocation of scarce resources. It may be true that Bush was unqualified when he came into office. It may be true that he was not a true conservative. And I find that my passion for the war has ebbed, with the safe return of my son. It's only human. But Bush focused on the priority, for all that he miscued himself with other issues. That huge government funding of pharmaceuticals. Well, I'm not a drug guy. All I know is, kill implacable foes. Here Obama is, pushing a government takeover of healthcare, worshiping at the altar of Climate Change, looking for a way to bug out from the war. The word unqualified springs to mind, and the word priorities.

A number of highschool students gang-raped a 15 year old late of an evening last week. Dozens of people knew about it while it was going on. No one called the police. Five have been arrested so far. The emotional tenor is, no remorse. California has a system of ranking schools, 1, lowest, to 10, highest. This highschool is a 1. More than half of its students are illegals.

California has the highest welfare roles -- fully one third of ALL welfare in the US. We have the highest proportional and absolute number of "homeless". We have the highest number of illegals. We have the highest deficit -- three times the sum of all other states. We have among the highest tax burdens. We have the most incompetent and perhaps the most corrupt state legislature. No wonder illegals are not prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Only Americans enjoy that privilege. Anything else would be racist. Yes, being illegal is a race.

It seems I'm in a dark mood. I'm feeling pretty good though, physically. Knee clicks in a disturbing way, but otherwise I'm solid. Bjj is going well. Gotta take my father to the doctor in a few days. Haven't seen my son for a month or two. Was it on my birthday? Once since then? Well, that's how I am. My computer has a virus I don't know how to fix.

Mindfulness is the state of being in the present. That's hard to do.


J

Cant

But pray, Eminences -- what if it is true? Oh, it cannot be? And you will not deign to look, stoop to peer through my spyglass at the heavens? For it cannot be so? I am to be condemned, then, if I do not recant? Very well then. I recant. The moon is perfect, a perfect orb, embedded in a crystalline sphere, one of seven concentics, centered upon the Footstool of God's Creation, this Earth. Let it not be said that I was heretical, nor willful, nor that I consorted with deceivers. Rather, I was enthralled to melancholia, and my frail mind was captive to its dark deceptions.

The clarity of your faith has lightened my way, though, for which I give you eternal thanks. The Ages will sing praises to your names, merciful agents of the Lord and His works that you are -- while my name shall be utterly forgotten, returned to ignominious dust. The bright and morning star does not run through phases. My eyes deluded me, tears of grief no doubt clouding my vision. As with those phantoms I thought I saw encircling the wandering star Saturn -- perhaps it was a deceiving spirit, sent by Satan to blaspheme the Almighty and His perfect works? Yes, that must be it.

Please instruct me, good Doctors of the Law -- as wise as the Pharisees whom our Saviour so respected -- in a matter of doctrine that my humble intellect has been been unable to apprehend. Creation is, as every child knows, Fallen -- the work of Satan upon the frail flesh of Man. For it pleased the Lord to make us frail, that we might someday receive the blessing of His forgiveness, blessed be His name. And from this Fall might we derive the cause of every foul and imperfect thing that plagues the world as it now stands, awaiting its judgment of fire. Given this, then -- that the Capstone and Center of God's Universe has been cursed -- how is it that the moon escaped? -- and Venus? How, in such a perverted Cosmos, could the planets too not have suffered? So that Saturn might not have gained its own moons, as Satan seduced his followers? He swept a third of the stars from the heavens. Could not some of them linger to survey great Saturn?

No, of course, you are correct. Such speculations are for greater minds than mine, and in any case the question is settled, in ancient times by noble pagans blessed somehow with wisdom greater than any that we might have. Only a fool would imagine that the Bible encourages to test all things. I am sure you recall in the Book of Second Job that we are told to believe in fables and myths, no doubt because they led to a sounder method of observation than any we might discover.

So that's it then. I apologize. No harm done. My spyglass is good for military purposes, and I'll be sure never to point it above the horizon again. And I'll try to get help about this melancholia. Maybe seek out a leecher. A barber to open a vein. Perhaps I'll beat myself with a flagellum as I crawl from cathedral to cathedral, an act of penance for my folly and pride and emotion and poor eyesight. Something like that. Because it really pleases God a lot, to see us mutilate ourselves to His glory. It's in the Bible, after all, as I'm sure you would have read, if you read the Bible, which you mostly don't have to bother with, because you already know the answers, because tradition tells you so.


G

Mindful of Small Things

God? Who is this "God" you keep yammering about? What proof is there of this "God" person? You religionists are so superstitious, so ignorant and anti-scientific. Evolution explains it all.


A horse fly. Horse flies are for killing. Who knew that they were beautiful.






Flies. Beelzebub is the lord of flies. But they didn't start out bad.


The grasshopper. Very discreet.


A bee. And its pollen.


A harvestman. Seems to be missing a leg. Life is hard.


Jumping spider, male.


Jumping spider, female.


Body shot. She's hot.


Ladybug. Not a good name.


There are dragons -- Chinese dragons. They're just an inch long, is all.


Even a weevil -- such crasftsmanship.


You don't have to get along with God. But surely you must believe in Him -- if you don't want to be a complete fool.


J

Measuring Up

Shall I let another day of silence roll by? I decline my noble head slightly in momentary consideration, then agree to condescend, yet again, to share of the bounty of my genius. It's not that I had to think about it. I know all the answers already. But one must steel oneself. Futility is so draining.

I could speak of my masculine beauty, and you would be edified. Truth does that. How tiresome it is for me, the weight of your desire upon my modesty. All I shall say is that no man's performance could match the expectation created by my beauty. The artist understands this, and implants some slight imperfection in his masterpiece. Thus we find sublime harmony, made possible by imperceptible flaws, the significance of which is that of shadow to light -- only thus may we see.

Damn I'm good. You think writing that crap is easy? Well, yes, for me ... I mean for average people.

I'm getting a bit more organized with the workouts. Keeping neater records, by which patterns may be discerned. Trying to find a relationship between workload and recovery, between power and perceived effort and difficulty. Metrics, dude -- metrics. What is slightly disturbing to me is that I don't think my performance is consonant with my appearance. I look stronger than I am. It feels vaguely dishonest.

I had a brief conversation about being a father. We're hardly ever empowered to say it out loud, but my own father wasn't actually very good at it. He forbade whole classes of emotion. He didn't tolerate a healthy emotional reaction. Well, there will always be an emotional reaction. It's just a matter of whether it's healthy. Don't be sad. Don't be angry. Don't have any emotion judged to be negative. Don't use the toilet. Don't breathe. Well there it is. I had a brother I had the misfortune of sharing a room with. I say "sharing" as a convention of speech. He would say, hiss, command, "Don't breathe!" He didn't want to hear me breathe.

I've gotten through most of October without any serious depression. November was poisonous, last year. I must be watchful. I'm not busy enough right now. I need a project.

I've been thinking about what I said, about how all my loyalty points outward. That's a sad thing to say. I say many wise and sad things here. In business, a partnership requires not just loyalty, but some indispensable talent or skill. Anything else is just an employee, whose position should be indispensable, but any qualified person can fill it. That's business. The personal is not necessarily different, but it's muddier. Emotions will do that. All the plans we lay, confounded by a feeling, as by chance. It's like being a father. An indispensable role, requiring loyalty and skill. Families are partnerships. Or should be.

For years I've thought to myself, if I had a business with employees, would I hire him -- someone I've met or gotten to know a bit. Almost always the answer is no.


J

Tonic

It is required that you use a little common sense. Not even a lot. Just some. I mean, you actually believed that alcohol was good for you? Because the news told you about a study? Sometimes I come close to despairing. Your mommy told you there was a Santa. Your teacher told you there was Evolution. Can't we just please do a little thinking for ourselves? Yes. Sure. Drinking poison, a toxin, is going to do wonders for you. It's so good for your heart. Mmm. That red wine is a miracle drug! Salute!

Or you could use your brain. Oh, it reduces cardiovascular disease in women? -- raises good cholesterol and moderates bloodsugar? That's so great! And it makes them sexually available too! So that's a win-win situation for me! Cuz those mood-swings and heart attacks while I'm sexing them, it gets old. And a daily glass of wine is linked to reduced dementia, boneloss, and lymphoma. That too must somehow be good for my love life. Demented, boneless, lymphomatic chicks -- they just don't do it for me.

But drinking any alcohol at all -- let alone "moderate" -- increases risk of getting cancers of the breast, liver, mouth, pharynx, larynx, esophagus, colon and rectum. The cardio benefits of wine are precisely matched by the increased risk of stroke -- it's good for the heart and bad for the brain. Drinking any amount over moderate, one glass daily for women, two for men, is powerfully linked to a plethora of problems. Disturbed sleep, impaired judgment, and slowed reflex reactions. Fetuses. For younger men, the risks of accident with even moderate drinking far outweigh the cardiovascular benefit.

Health benefits? They come largely from the antioxidants and anti-inflammatories that red wine and dark beers have, independent of alcohol content. Grape juice does the same thing. Or fruits and vegetables, and they don't deplete your B vitamins. But I am biased. I see alcoholic as a moral evil. Yes, it decreases social inhibitions, and I for one might benefit from that. On the other hand, the real me might show through, whatever that is, and it may be vicious.

The convivial lubricant and gaiety-maker has, in my observations, a perfect inverse correlation to the quality of the conversation. To those who are enjoying their moderate drink, their comments may seem profound or at least insightful. To me, they are even more obvious than usual. There is much to be commended in emotional availability and an unguarded tongue. But the same could be said for marijuana and LSD. When we are sick, we need drugs. Give strong drink to the dying. Alas, the judgment it would take to make the judgment call is impaired by the cure.

The ethanol molecule interacts with human biology in untold ways. Of course there are some benefits. But the cardio benefits that moderate drinking provides would not be needed at all, were it not for an toxic diet. To use one poison to mitigate against another poison is standard medical practice. Prevention at the level of root cause is not standard practice. So, sure, if you eat foolishly, drink wisely. There is a wisdom of sorts in this. But it's an ironic one.

In my middle age I have come more and more to the simple philosophy of, be happy. I think this requires that we be good. The mild tonic effect that alcohol can have is not toxic. The body can handle small doses of poison. If you know your particular genome down to the final allele, then you can do no wrong, or if you do, it is a choice. But you don't know your genetics. Live in fear? Feel deprived? No. Be happy. Be happy if you have a stroke, though, or get cancer of the rectum.

But as I say, I'm biased. Take what I say with a grain of salt. I'm very neurotic. But I have a good heart.


J

Acknowledged

Isn't acknowledged a weird looking word? Ack now led ged. It's like a random assemblage of syllables. Like someone who doesn't speak English is trying to speak English.

I had some time free up Friday evening. Hardly knew what to do with myself. And some time just opened up now. Too late to go back to sleep. Too early for a booty call. I knew a guy once who said, off-handedly, that he'd just like to invent something and live off the money so he could train bjj all day long. That same guy recently had a sort of a business opportunity to teach and train bjj all day long, and he turned it down. Isn't that odd? It would have entailed other responsibilities, regarding which he was not motivated. But even inventing something must require compromises.

I'm such a strange person. Are you strange too? I wonder what it's like not to be strange. I think it's healthy to be normal. I don't think being strange is a good thing. It's like being offered a good thing, and turning it down. That's strange. Why are we like that. It's a sort of self-loathing. Not laziness. Fear of being complete. Fear of being happy. Like Yggdrasil. Hmm. The spell-checker knows that word, Yggdrasil. How strange. It's the tree of the world, in and under which all creatures live, and upon which all creatures feed, off the leaves and fruits and bark. At its root, a monstrous worm gnaws unceasingly. That's how I think it is. I think we will always be incomplete. I'm strange because I think that's normal.

All my loyalty points outward. I don't seem to feel any sense of duty to myself. That's not a good way to be.

Someone should open up a chain of restaurants that are holiday themed. Christmas all year round, and Halloween. Those are the powerful ones. Playrooms for kids, full of toys or scary things to play on. Easter, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving -- they seem less evocative. There's a fortune to be made in that idea. But who could be bothered. (I hereby assert and proclaim all rights commercial and otherwise to all original ideas explicit and implied contained within this paragraph.)


J

Balloon Men

News? I seem to be too preoccupied. Something today though about a six year old boy who may have been carried away by the family's giant storm-chasing balloon. "Help! Help! Falcon was in the box and may have been carried away!" So might the hue and cry have gone out from the distraught-appearing brothers. A three hour chase, something seen to have plummeted to earth during the flight, and the balloon comes to ground, empty.

Turns out the boy was hiding in the garage attic. His father you see had YELLED at him for playing in that self-same balloon. It's not safe, you see, to play in the box of giant helium-balloons that are all set to sail away, maybe. "Falcon? Falcon! Where are you? Honey? Falcon! Are you here?! Or were you carried away into grave danger by the escaped balloon?!?"

Wolf Blitzer I think it was, who asked the question of the assembled and happily reunited family. "Falcon, why didn't you answer when you heard them calling?" Well, the boy is six, and barely speaks a human language. He said something like, "They told me ... we did this for the show." From the mouths of babes.

The father, you see, likes to be on television. On the show Wife Swap twice, it seems. Reality TV is a centrifuge of sorts, separating out the various types of humanity. Dad has the type of humanity that addresses a monologue to his 9, 8, and 6 year old sons that will have gone a little something like this: "Okay, Ryu, you say that you saw Falcon in the box, and you think he got carried away. Number Two son, you release the balloon, but don't let anyone see. Falcon, you hide in that box in the attic and don't answer when we call, and pretend that you were afraid because I supposedly yelled at you. Yeah, they'll buy that -- you're six -- it doesn't have to make sense that you hid for three hours in a box in the attic because I told you not to play in the balloon box. And when all the cameras come to look at me, just be cute and six. I'll handle the media. This is so great. We're gonna git our own show! 'The UFO Man!' 'The Tornado-Chasing Family!' Whatever. I'll pitch it to TLC. Maybe MTV. Whatever. They'll all come a-knocking! Cuz I'm so interesting."

Tens of thousands of dollars in search costs -- just for the helicopters. Canceled flights at the nearby airport. Well, that's fine, to rescue a little boy. Dad may have to pay it back, and that's as it should be. Pay for your mistakes. It's a sort of justice. He can't buy his way out of being an eh-hole, but we've always understood that. The real vileness was getting his poor impressionable children to collude in the sham. "Lie, boys. Lie."

The six year old puked twice during later interviews.

When I was 12 and the parents took us to the movies, and the cutoff age for children's admission was 11, and they told me to say I was 11 if asked -- that bothered me. Wasn't I supposed to be honest? Little things, that cause shame and confusion. Nothing like being kidnapped and held as a sex slave -- but little things matter too.

Parents need to respect their kids, as they themselves expect it. We show respect through our diligence and our integrity. I never lied to my son. Never. Well, I'm a rigid man in many ways. That's what righteousness is, though, and integrity. Rigid. It's about lines that will not be crossed. Some people don't have any lines at all. Just arrows, all pointing at themselves.

I watch TV while I eat dinner, now. Having that dog got me into it again. Saw the new Late Night show, and the Monty Python guys were on. Cleese is brilliant, but he did a cheap gag of throwing water at Terry Jones, unmotivated, just to be wacky. It was embarrassing. Hilarity ensued. Some time during the show Terry Gilliame, the cartoon guy who directs now, said that he had renounced his US citizenship three years ago. He said it as if it were a good and honorable thing. The host passed over it, wisely. It's a comedy show, and his role is to be the host, facilitating humor. Pass over the gaffs and gaucheness of your guest. It's gracious. The audience seemed not to notice, or was too polite to boo. Any vets in the house remained silent.

But what an asshole. It is his right, to renounce his citizenship. The fact that poor desperate little foreigners load themselves onto tied-together logs and sail the vast seas to get here -- that people leave their villages and families and walk and bus hundreds or thousands of miles to sneak across our boarder and live in fear of discovery, unfounded though such fear may be, that they may work crap jobs for little money ... somehow I must have more respect for them, even in their scofflaw actions, than for someone who was born into this great privilege, this golden ticket of US citizenship, and then renounces it. It is his right, though. And he had the, what? -- not integrity, not decency ... he had the understanding of his own character and loyalties to do the right thing, for such a one. Leave. It's better than to stay, and hate. It's probably why he was in England in the late 60s. Avoiding that old war.

Fathers' loyalty must be to their family. Teach your children to speak the truth. A citizen's duty is to defend his country. If you don't like a current president and his wrong-headed policies, well, we do have elections, and new administrations have new policies. See? Take the long view. If you lie to your little children, they are empowered to lie to you as teens, when it really really matters that they tell the truth. If you renounce the only hope the world has for liberty, well, you should be booed, and challenged by even a gracious host, when you announce it, smugly, as if pleased with a good thing that you've done -- something a fool would take for integrity.

So that's some news, and something I saw on television.


J

My Workout

It's disgusting, a little, how slavishly attentive you are to my every merest whim. Can something be a little disgusting? I think not. You should try to be more accurate. If it's not vile enough to be completely disgusting, the word shouldn't be used. It's like saying something is very unique. A thing is unique or it's not -- no modifier of degree is appropriate. I hope you remember this valuable lesson in syntactic precision that I've given you for free. I chose to use syntactic rather than syntactical because brevity is another of my many countless virtues. And I used the redundancy of many countless as a subtle and ironic witticism, because I'm like that, all generous with my humor.

My workout, then, if I may return to the point, was 3 rounds of 30 box jumps, 20 inches high; 25 jumping chinups, standing, grasping the bar overhead where it would meet the wrist; 20 thrusters with a 45 lb bar -- thrusters are a squat with an overhead press when erect; and 15 burpees -- from standing, get down to a pushup, then up with a jump and an overhead clap -- you can see it on YouTube if that's not clear.

Took me 14:49 to finish. Then I decided to calculate the total work output. And the power output as well -- how many pounds would have been moved one foot in one minute. Work is what you got done. Power is how hard you worked ... doing it faster is harder. We've been through this before, but I know how you are. The formula for Work is Force (which is weight moved times number of reps) times Distance. The formula for Power is Work (F x D) divided by total time for those movements. Convert inches into feet, and convert time from minute/seconds into minutes/decimal -- 3:30 would be 3.5.

Three rounds of 30 box jumps is 90 jumps. I moved my whole body weight, 180 pounds aprox. It's foolish to get too precise, since any estimates will automatically render any precision effectively arbitrary. You must remember this from high school, multiplying measurements -- you have to use the least accurate of your measuring tools or you get a false precision that can be harmful to the overall process. If one measurement is 9 inches, and the other is 8.292 mm, you need to express the mm as whole inches. So, about 180 pounds. Moved 20 inches. Total time was 3:40 -- 3.7 minutes. Work is 27,550 fp, rounded to the nearest 50. Power is 7750 fp per minute. Jumping chinups, 180 pounds, 75 reps, moved the length of my arm, shoulder to wrist -- work is 24,300 fp; work divided by 2.9 minutes: force is 8400 fp/m.

Burpees, 180 pounds, 45 reps ... and here it gets tricky. I'm definitely moving the whole body, but the feet move only a few inches up, whereas the head moves more than my height. So I figure it from the center of my body mass, about 0.6 of my height-- about at the navel. Sort of a seesaw calculation. Average movement, 3.8 feet. Work, 30,800 fp. Time, 3.3 minutes: force, 9300 fp/m

Thrusters are really two movements, front squat and overhead press. How much weight are you moving, with a squat? Not your whole bodyweight, since you are not actually lifting your feet or calves, and only part of your upper leg. So let's say bodyweight minus legs. How much do legs weigh? Each is about 10% of total weight -- perhaps not for apple- or pear-shaped people. Arms, about 6%. Head about 8%. Trunk then, the remaining 60%. So, 180 minus 20%. Plus the 45 pounds of the bar. Call it, uh, 190. Moved the length of my thigh, aprox 1.5, 60 times -- 17,100 fp. Then add in the overhead press, 45 pounds 60 times about 1.9 feet -- 5150 fp. Thruster work 22,250 fp, divided by 4.9 minutes -- power 4550 fp/m. These are tough for me. I'm slow. Long bones make for bad leverage

Work total, 104,900 fp -- like moving one pound 100,000 feet, or 100,000 pounds one foot. Total workout force would be the total fp divided by the total time. I think. 14.8 minutes. 7100 fp/m. A single value that reasonably approximates the actual effort. It may seem like a lot of calculating, but nowadays they have these things called "calculators" -- in my day we had to use our actual brains. It's just a few measurements, like knowing the length of your arm, for all the pulls and pushes, and knowing a few percentages, and a few conversions. It's why they still make pencils -- so you can write these things down in a place convenient to the recording of your exercise efforts. You know, records?

The value lies in the formula's use of time as a factor. That's major. The bench polishers take just as long as they feel like, to do their curls and their preacher curls, and, uh, hammer curls, and Arnold curls, and, um, curls with a fancy twist at the top ... is that Arnold curls? Dude, I worked out for TWO HOURS today. Lookit my guns!!! Sadly, no intensity -- time is a unit of intensity, and it took TWO HOURS!!! That is a bad thing. Do it in 14 minutes and 49 seconds and you would be an absolute Hercules. Hardly anyone could do that, though. Some sort of superman. A genetic freak with amazing courage and character, maybe, that all the chicks are so hot for. And he's so goodlooking too. Heroic, is what it is. The dude's a total He-Man.

Have I been misspelling aprox all this time? Approx? Why don't you people tell me these things? I was in second grade twice -- how many times to I have to say this before it gets through your thick skull? I was too much of a giant intellect for the grade, and they didn't understand me. I can't be bothered with petty details like spelling. Sometimes I just feel like giving up. You so don't deserve me.


J

Day of Reckoning

I have my little jokes, but it is serious business. Diet, nutrition. Right now just for the fun of it I'm reading a book on the link between diet and acne. Not my problem. Anymore. But adolescence was difficult. Yes, it's genetic, but diet is major. Stay away from dairy. And as with cardiovascular disease, it turns out to have a major inflammation factor. Omega-3, then. But that's not my point.

I'm taking my own advice, keeping track of what I eat. It's easy for me, since my tastes are simple. Just a few little jottings. Then I decided to actually plot out the glycemic load. It's a little embarrassing. But today was an odd day. You know those Trader Joe's granola bars? No sugar, all natural ingredients. Lots of "fruit juice" -- lots of "cane syrup". Plenty sweet. Tiny little bars, six to a box. It's easy, really it is, to eat the whole box, those six tiny little itty bitty bars. I roughed out the glycemic load: 23 grams of digestible carbs. A glycemic index value of aprox 70 -- estimated from other granola bars with posted values. We don't have to be too precise ... but a GL of about 95. That is. A lot. A boxload. A whole day's worth of GL. Remember? A day's worth typically ranges between 60 and 180, with the mean a tad below 100. Like, say, 95.

I don't always eat a whole box. Even so. GL of 16 per bar. That's a bowl of rice. Or take a bag of microwave popcorn. My other vice. No one eats a single serving. There are 2.5 "servings" in the bag. That, my friend, is marketing BS. "See? A serving of our wonderful popcorn is only a mere inconsequential 160 calories!!!" True. But the bag has two and a half "servings" -- and since I am a math genius, I'll just inform you that it amounts to 400 calories. Lies lies lies. The bag has a glycemic load, then, of 26. Adds up, don't it.

Well. Today was not a good day, then. I do have a scratchy throat. Missed out on my smoothie, too, my healthful berry smoothie. I'll rough out a GL score for that, too. Probably about 8. A whole big blender full of nutrition, for free, in terms of insulin. That's the easy thing about it. The really nutritious food is free. It's the crap that costs so much, metabolically. As I have said, the Lord appointed seven annual feasts unto the Hebrews. Seven pig-out days. The body can handle it. But for Americans, every day is a feast day. This is not actually the blessing some might suppose, especially since there is hardly ever any thankfulness that goes along with it.

It's not hard, estimating glycemic load. Most people only eat 10 different meals. The meat doesn't count, or the fat. It really is just the industrial carbs, and the hardcore starches -- potatoes and rice. After that it's just a matter of estimating the serving size, and that's simple too. About the size of your palm? (Palm, without fingers or thumb or wrist.) About the size of your fist? (Palm, with fingers and thumb -- twice as much.) So it's a little bit of figuring, and then you know it. It's like writing a check to pay a bill. Yes, it's a little bit of a hassle, having to spell out those words and know the date and sign your name. Such a chore. Then again, it's the price you pay to pay the price you have to pay.

A can of coke has a GL of 15. At least my granola bars have a nutrient somewhere in there.


J

Mess Call

"Glycemic load has no long term impact on weight loss, study"

So goes the headline. No, I'm not inclined to call it an outright lie. Mere inaccuracy or imprecision is not a lie. Lies are deliberate. Bush lied and people died. That sort of thing -- you know, evil. Here, it's just sloppiness. The study did not look at the long-term impact of glycemic load on weight loss. It studied the effect of calorie restriction on weight loss, comparing higher and lower glycemic load diets. There was a minor advantage at six months, for low GL diets. At 12 months, there was no difference -- both yielded about an 8% weight loss.

It was a good study. Well designed. Here's another report on it, with an equally sloppy headline. Too bad then that the study is not reported carefully. Headlines matter. I found them in a google search, and the first thing was these disturbing headlines, and if I had not applied the incisive edge of my diamond-faceted intellect to the question, no one would ever know about the misreporting.

Calorie restriction, you see, is a confounding factor. It requires that you get fewer calories than you need. The theory is that you will release stored body fat to make up the deficit. Under restrictive stress, however, could it not be that insulin levels are raised at the influx of even a smaller number of calories, thus washing out the low-glycemic benefit? You cannot metabolize stored body fat in the presence of excess insulin. It stands guard and keeps fat locked up. This study shows, then, that calorie restriction -- supposedly 30% less, but actually, with measured cheating, about 16% or 17% less -- allows for only an 8% weight loss in one full year. That's weight, not fat. Muscle and bone? Could be a problem, on a calorie restricted -- read nutrient restricted -- diet. For overweight people, 8% may be 20 pounds or more. But overweight people are more than 8% overweight. See? Calorie restriction is the wrong modality.

Eat enough. Change your insulin. Low glycemic load seems to do that. I'd like you to test it, since you are overweight. Of course you are. 2 out of 3 are, and you, being a fan of mine, that is, a reader, will be in that demographic. I mean, you're not out running around being skinny. Just don't lie to me, alright? So now that we have that settled, I want you to weigh yourself now, and write it down, and from now on write down approximately everything you eat. By approximately, I mean write down what you eat, and approximate the serving size. Drinks too. Don't count calories. But write down the glycemic load of the carbs.

Send me the data. I'm building a data base. I'd like you to keep the total load below 100 every day, the lower the better. I've given you links to sites that give the values. This is Saturday. So next Saturday get back to me. Email it -- not in comments.

Some before and after pictures would be good too. It will be very embarrassing for you, but shirtless. Don't worry, it will get better. With my help, you'll be an Adonis -- or at least a Narcissus.


J

Sweet Victory at Last Finally Prevails!

Oslo, October 9 (FP) -- The American President Barack H Obama Friday won the Nobel Peace Prize on account of "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." He did this by performing fellatio on a chain-gang of moslem diplomats, in a public ceremony conducted in Cairo, to the wild cheers of the ecstatic throng of admirers. Further overtures were conducted behind closed doors, and all President Obama would reply to the numerous queries tossed his way regarding the details was, "I took one for the team. Then another one. And another..." trailing off with the charming smile for which he is so renowned.

Secretary of State H Clinton commented, "It's about time America got bee-effed, royally. God I hate this stinking country. Ignorant Bible-thumping racist scum." Further comments were drowned out by cheers from the assembled reporters.

The award came as a complete surprise to virtually every expert, since Obama had been president for less than two weeks at the time of the nomination deadline. The fact that he had accomplished literally nothing, nor anything since, is a mere irrelevance. Hope itself is after all an emotion, immeasurable as aether, yet by it are we not buoyed unto the highest um heights of uh hope? Let us then come together in a like a sort of uh really happy and good place where children can run and grow free in peace and love forever and let freedom ring that all men may not ask who is a Berliner or the bell tolls.

In winning the Prize, Obama joins the ranks of such giants as Woodrow Wilson, who ended war, and Yasir Arafat, who solved the Middle East slash Jewish Problem. The United Nations won the Prize in 2001, because it's so good at peace-keeping and not molesting children, and in 2002 super-genius Jimmy Carter won because he was not George Bush. Real-president Al Gore won the Nobel Prize for Literature and Peace in 2007, for his brilliant retelling of the Chicken Little story, which cautionary tale in his iteration has saved the world so far, although carbon emissions will kill us all by the end of the decade, or by 2012, whichever comes first. And Hitler won it too, by default, from 1939 to 1943. I'm sure Stalin and Mao are on the list somewhere as well.

Said Nobel Committee Chairwoper Ima Dumphuk, "Sure he hasn't done anything, but it helps a lot that Obama is not white. I guess his mother was, but he has distanced himself from her sufficiently. A lot of your coloreds in America want to pass, it's the thing over there, but uf da, no way Jose, for Obama. Ta det med ro."

In a related story, it seems that the island nation of Tuvalu is sinking not because of Climate Change and rising ocean levels, but because they have been pumping out ground water, causing the atoll to sink. This of course just goes to prove how Global Warming is a fact. Otherwise why would they need the water? Duh.


J

Animal, Mineral or Vegetable

I had my bone mineral density tested today. You know, calcium loss and osteoporosis and broken hips and so on. Well, I say I had it done, but actually I was standing next to a van and the next thing I know I woke up with a gash in my scalp and a missing kidney, strapped to a metal x-shaped table with a tube up my urethra. It was all very confusing. The doctor kept fingering his nipples and giggling. I don't want to talk about it.

The test gives a T-score, which is a comparison to the normal bone density for a healthy in-the-prime adult, rated on a bell curve at a mean of zero (50th percentile), with the standard deviations of -1 to 1 representing 64% of the population. A positive score means denser, a negative means less dense. Denser is better. There's also a Z-score, comparing individuals to their specific age and gender. My T-score was 1.54, and my Z-score was 1.65 -- the opposite of osteopenia. Phenomenal, of course. Unheard of. It is a unique score, never before encountered. The only reason it was measurable at all is that the device was experimental, meant to test elephants or aliens from heavy-gravity planets. I wasn't really listening. I had a tube up my urethra, and there was this constant screaming. It might have been me.

But all that is behind me now. Now I am heavy with pity for you, with your hollow birdlike bones, so frail, so brittle. Such is the burden I must bear. I am sufficient to the task however, what with my powerful godlike bones. Specifically my heelbones, or bone, left heelbone, but it is all of a piece.

What shall my new superhero identity be? Capitaine Hardbone! And my secret identity shall be that of ... Manley Thrust, mild-mannered horticulturist whose salubrious animal-product-free diet consisting largely of radioactive carrots and broccoli -- both very rich sources of bioavailable calcium and other essential minerals, such as magnesium -- has somehow mysteriously converted him into that famous heroic figure endowed with powers heretofore never encountered on this or any other planet!

The fact that I am in this regard only in the top 10% of the population is neither here nor there. It is the totality of my excellence that transforms me, in a dramatic and highly cinematographic transmogrification, into the Hero of The Age Fifty! The Man of Calcium! The Chalk-Colored Knight! Your friendly neighborhood Bonerman! These tabloids just won't stop coming up with droll sobriquets. Anything to sell papers. I don't mind. It is my burden. It is my destiny.

Sometimes I look back now, from the lofty pinnacle of my selfless nobility, and shake my head sadly at the melancholy memory of LowCholesterol Man. A felt celery suit, for crying out loud. What was I thinking? Now I just go naked. So villains will see my bones, and quake in terror at the fearsome sight! And they shall never uncover my secret. Only you shall know. That the mighty Capitaine Hardbone was once a limp stalk of pallid green vegetable matter. Shhhhh.


J

Ta Det Med Ro

A great old Norwegian idiom. Apparently my grandfather used it a lot. He was a depot master in Montana -- ran the train station. Ranchers and farmers would try to bribe him with thousands of dollars, so that they could get 4 boxcars instead of only 3 to move their grain come harvest time. He would not yield. Earned $1.85 an hour, and picked rocks on the weekends. Lived in relative poverty, with five kids, four daughters and my father in the middle. A bad marriage. Worked as a child from age nine to support his abandoned mother and three siblings. That would have been 1907. The pressure must have been overwhelming. He would not bend. He was proud of being Norwegian, for some reason. Surrounded by Germans and Poles. Made the kids say their prayers in the old language. Although he was born here.

Ta det med ro. Take it with ease. What a beautiful phrase. How wise. Was my grandfather wise? He lived into his nineties and died because he just stopped eating. I remember him as an old man, bald, not large but hard. He was probably reminding himself, the way we need to do, about how to stay alive. Take it with ease. Not take it easy, mind you. My grandfather did not take it easy. I picked rocks as a kid. Because they made me. My grandfather did it because he needed the money -- four daughters and a nagging wife. This was in the 1930s, so there's that. There is a difference, more felt than spoken, between the two, with ease and easy.

I drove my father to some medical thing this morning, to one of his genius doctors. My father is a very strange man. He talked about a cousin of mine, again, dead now, a genius, law school at an early age, prosecutor in Dade County Florida. "He probably had an IQ 50 points higher than average." My IQ is higher than that. He must know that. I know it because it was in my school records. It was surprising. In those days they still measured IQs in schools. They must have talked to my father after they tested me. My brother said once, "Like, you're some kind of genius, right?" It was one of the few human things he ever said to me. It must have been a family rumor. Now boys, Jackie has a genius IQ, but nobody is ever to talk about it, and don't be jealous. "Well, I tested pretty well, they seem to think." So all this constant harping about genius, from my father, yet he is incapable of listening to me. Makes me doubt the sincerity of his admiration for genius.

He got to badmouthing that same brother, his choice of a bride. "All these women do is hunt for men online all day long -- they're basically prostitutes. Then they catch one and get pregnant and get alimony." He actually said something like this to my brother. "I tried to warn him after he got married." I just had to say it: "That is really, really bad advice. Good advice isn't just true -- you have to say it right. You married a slut and you're just a sucker. Not such a good thing to say. What man would stand by and have his wife slandered?" But my father wasn't listening. "People just don't like to take advice," he said. No indeed, they do not.

We're all driven. Even the ones who take it easy. It takes real resolve to sit and watch TV all day long. The determination to waste time shouldn't be downgraded, just because it's passive. Self destruction takes a lot of energy. That's why there's so little left to actually get things done.

I do love the weather in this time of year. It's just now feeling autumnal. Pretty good workout last night. Did it with a 20 pound weight vest on. Feel fine today. Isn't it odd, how excellence is so important? With me it's always been intellectual and to a lesser degree physical excellence. Jealous for my character and my integrity, profoundly untrusting but unwavering in my loyalty once I give it. I sound like a pretty great guy, don't I. There are, sadly, plenty of rocks left in the field that need to be picked. There's a part of my soul where I'm just watching TV.

I asked if it was an old-time saying, ta det med ro, from a hundred and thirty years ago, that got remembered in the US but had fallen into obscurity in the hustle and bustle of Oslo. Nope -- they still use it.

My father said about how he visited his father's grave, 15 years ago. He admitted to tearing up. I did not say that the only good that tears can do is to wash us from the inside. One of the best things I did as a father was to just keep my mouth shut, sometimes. Kids should be allowed to make mistakes without being corrected. Correct yourself. Take it with ease.


J

Industrial Carbs

I do have a couple of unanswered questions. If chronically elevated insulin levels have an almost one to one correlation to excess body fat, how do we account for thin diabetics? You can look at someone and know the state of their pancreatic activity by the size of their gut. Insulin is a storage hormone -- the storage hormone -- and the more you make of it, the more you are storing. That’s why it’s an imbalance. So how can there be thin prediabetics. The answer must be that despite the imbalance, they’ve found some sort of homeostasis. Not a very good answer.

The other question I have is about the mechanism that allows starving people to digest all their muscle tissue, until they get to the heart, and die -- all the while retaining body fat. They can starve to death and still be obese. Emaciated and fat, at the same time. Clearly the adipose tissue is morbidly, fatally dysfunctional. Obviously it has to do with pathologically raised insulin, that stands guard, as it were, outside a fat cell and forces free fatty acids back into the cell rather than allow them into the bloodstream. But how is it possible?

The problem boils down to carbs. I don’t care for that word, at all, carbs. Food is carbs. Carbohydrates are the ultimate source of all nutrients. Yeah yeah, sun and soil, but no, for us, plants. But common usage has determined that carbs should refer to refined carbs, sugars and starches. And these are, indeed, the problem. A potato isn’t the problem. But potato chips and pasta and flour and white rice and grain flakes disguised as breakfast and coated with sucrose and fructose and syrup -- well, it’s a bit much. All of it comes from the factory. That’s the problem. Glucose shouldn’t be industrial strength.

Did I ever mention how low my cholesterol is? It's more a function of carb metabolism than of fat intake. Same with triglycerides. There are tests that directly measure insulin levels. A HOMA test. Sounds almost perfect for you. All gay and crap. An hsCRP test, for inflammation. Yeah, flaming, like you. A real flamer, get it? An HbA1c test, which also is really gay like you somehow. I should take these tests, and I would score really well, like I do with the chicks, which I dig so much, unlike you.

Okay, I'm a little hostile right now. I don't quite remember why, but I know it has something to do with you and how badly you treat me. I keep giving and giving, and you just take. If I grow cold for a time, it's understandable, and I always come back, but you never change. I'm worth more than that.

Even I am surprised at how private I am. My anonymity was slightly disrupted recently, and it generated a very strange emotion. It's something I have to get over, but it's very odd. But I don't seem to be using FP in the same way I formerly have. Hope you don't miss me.


J

HI

Hi. My name is Dave. I bought forgoten progfits from Jack H for 28 Dollars. I think it is terific blog, and i hope to carry on in the fine tradition of jack H and the blog that he wrote. I knew jack h becaue i met him in the park where he runs and i watch and feet the birds,. And he was runing and we started talking and he mentined his blog and how noone would sent him a doller and so i bought it from him.

i have been reading forgoten profits and it is very good but sort of confusing too. I hope to continue writing it in the fine style that has been writen here as well.

Man don't you think that obama is bad? I can't stand him. he wasn't even american. he's a moslam who was born in a liberian fraiter ship and he froged his birth certificate

And the muslams should read the bible and stop being so bad and crazy.

And global warming is wrong. it's like a religion to the Left.

And I am so smart and goodlooking and strong.


D

Karma

Connectivity problems. It's your fault. You didn't send me a dollar. It made the difference. You don't deserve me, and now you can't have me.


J

Answer Do

When I realized October is next I became afraid. We have a month dedicated to fear and death. How strange. Well, strange for you. I understand it.

I've been erratic today, full of energy, running around getting things done, not eating at all. I went to Lowes, the giant hardware store. It's practically erotic to me. Then I ate and got achy and tired and depressed. I skipped bjj, which I never do. I could watch it for the next few weeks, the encroaching darkness, and see where it takes me. But I think I'll take control of it and move on. It's possible. All I have to do is move my hands in a certain way and I can feel my chi. That has to mean something, about how we can control ourselves.

I'm concerned now, since I've pretty much finished that big project, that I won't really finish it, if you get my meaning, which you may not. That would really be depressing. Something about learned helplessness?

I've got it all figured out now, about diet and obesity and that stuff. I must sit now by the slow rolling Indus and weep that there are no more worlds to conquer. Go ahead, ask me anything.

It bothers me though, a little, that I can only relate to people on an information basis. All this time I've been thinking it was you who wasn't real. Maybe it's me. Ask me a Turing Test question. Let's try to find out.

I'm so damned gifted. Is being screwed up the price for that? Oh wait. Was that your question? My reply: I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do. Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.


H

The Voices in Your Cells

I don't suppose I'm going to come up with a better analogy -- ones about the same, but no better -- so I'll just go ahead and use it. Think of the food you've just eaten, the available calories, as fluid in a bucket. Let's say the bucket is your bloodstream. All those wet calories, waiting in the bucket of your bloodstream, waiting to be used. Now let's suppose that the bucket has a bunch of tubes in the bottom, through which the calories are diverted to various tasks. There's a tube to the brain for thought, to all the muscles for movement -- tubes for heat and digestion and libido, for the immune system, for growth and repair, for hair, skin and nails. Everything that needs energy has a tube to it. Of course there is a tube to bodyfat as well.

Now let's say that everyday the bucket is filled with 2000, uh, calories, and these calories drain down the various tubes in a predictable and healthy way. Homeostasis. Everything is going along fine. Sure, some calories pour down the adipose, fat tube, constantly filling up those fat cells -- but the fat cells do their job, and drain back into the bucket. Fat cells after all are just a storage system -- not forever, just as a buffer. For a few hours after a meal, there's too much available energy, so the fat cells sop it up, like a sponge, and release it drip by drip until they're not sopping any more, just damp. It's a cycle, a healthy cycle, with adipose tissue expanding and contracting slightly to meet the needs of normal variation. So, uh, like, there's a bucket with tubes, and one of the tubes leads to a sponge that drips back into the bucket. Clear?

Now let's suppose that something goes wrong with the fat tube. The opening gets bigger, and more calories pour down it into the fat sponge. That means there is less energy in the bucket, fewer calories that can go down the other tubes. Because one of the tubes is bigger, the bucket drains faster and gets empty sooner. This means that less energy will have gone down one or some or all of the other tubes. That's thermodynamics. Because, while more calories are entering the fat sponge, the sponge drips back into the bucket at the same, old, slow rate. The sponge gets bigger and wetter, more coming in than leaving. It's a ShamWow™ sponge, that really really holds on to that fluid! Such a deal! Act now!

Well? That's how obesity seems to happen. It's not that more is being poured into the bucket. You're not necessarily eating more. Calories are not being forced down that fat tube by increased pressure -- they are not forced into fat cells. The tube is bigger -- the propensity to store fat increases, for whatever reason.

But now the other systems, the other tubes get less energy. They were getting what they needed, and now they are not. So the bucket needs more calories than before. If it got 2000 calories before, of which 200 went down the fat tube, but now 400 calories are -- well, then the rest of the tubes have to deal with a 200 calorie shortage. So appetite increases, as a homeostatic adjustment, and now the calories bump up to 2200. Great. Problem solved. Except the fat tube gets bigger again. So you either supply even more calories, or just put up with the shortage. Meantime, the fat tube keeps on shunting away too many calories that are not released, creating a constant shortfall for the other systems. Even if the problem doesn't get worse, 200 necessary calories are being misdirected, and simply hoarded. Your are eating the same old amount, always hungry, and getting fatter. Lucky you.

So that's the analogy. Not very pretty, sort of mixed and casual, but see if you can do better. I will use it and not give you credit. You owe me.

What makes the tube bigger? Disrupted hormones. What disrupts the hormones? Bad carbs. If you try to fix the calorie shortfall by eating more bad carbs, you just make the fat tube bigger -- you disrupt hormones even more. Meanwhile, ignoring increased appetite, the body has to prioritize, trying to compensate for the missing calories by economizing in other areas. I think that list was pretty good, don't you? I just made it up off the top of my head. Man I'm smart. Thought, movement, heat, digestion, uh, immune system, and all those other things I thought of. Libido. Hair. They get less energy. Foggy thinking. Lethargy and fatigue. Feeling cold. Illness. Meantime, the fat cells just hoard the treasure. It's not greed. The Bad Carbs are telling them to. Fat cells are very obedient.

Sometimes I just can't get to sleep, thinking about how smart I am. And wonderful. You should compliment me more. I get tired of hearing the same old voice in my head, over and over, telling me how great I am, and how I should get an ax and kill people. Because they're all so fat. I hate that. It's evil.


J

GI Tractate

This is just some basic stuff. The glycemic index tells how fast a given food turns into bloodsugar, on a scale of 0 to 100. Lower is slower, which is better. It's like octane for fuel. Higher is hotter. The raw score however doesn't tell us much of practical value. How much after all of the food, or fuel, do we have? No info. GI tells you about how fast a carb turns into bloodsugar, whether a gram or a pound, not about how much of that carb -- how many calories -- you've eaten.

So the practical approach involves glycemic load, which calculates the bloodsugar effect of a carb serving you actually might use. Honey, for example, has a fairly low glycemic index, but if you eat a bowl of it, not so much -- the load would be very high indeed. The index is an unchanged absolute, a constant; the load varies with appetite. Glycemic load then takes into account serving sizes, the same way gallons count when we talk about fuel. In thinking about miles per gallon, both miles and gallons matter. Each GL point corresponds to the body's response to one gram of glucose. A typical diet includes about a hundred GL points each day, ranging between 60 and 180. Lower is better. A score under 10 is low, between 10 and 20 is moderate, and over 20 is high, bad.

Spaghetti has a GL value of 21 (GI of about 50). Brown rice 16 (≈ 70), white rice 30 (≈ 75). You can see that rice white or brown looks pretty much the same from a GI POV, but it's twice as bad in its actual effect, for amounts you are likely to eat. A "serving." Carrots, grapes, 7 (and both about 45). A donut, 17 (≈ 75). Do you eat just one donut? Three donuts is a GL of 50, and the GI is still 17.

Raisins 28 (≈ 65). Strawberries 1 (≈ 40). Brocolli, califlower, peppers, nuts -- zero.

Here is an index for GL values. This is a site that gives GI values. This is a site that lists too many values for GI and GL. Just more foods than I've ever even heard of. This is that same info, in spreadsheet form. I don't know nothing about no spreadsheet, but some people seem to think it's useful. They're crazy of course, but it takes a village. Which reminds me that somewhere in Kenya, a village is missing its idiot.


J

You gonna finish that?

It's time at last to look at hunger.

Carbs are like a certain ethnic food. An hour later and you're hungry. I always believe stereotypes, because they are always true. Ask me how big my feet are. Obviously, too many easily digested carbs instigates a massive insulin response, which steals too much bloodsugar and stores it away, eventually as fat. The result, low bloodsugar, is a hunger cue. Whether the cue originates from some monitoring mechanism in the brain, or emanates from energy-deprived cells, is speculation, and fundamentally irrelevant. But we'd like to know.

Because, like, it's so odd that a calorie-restricted diet that is low-carb but includes lots of fat is not accompanied by hunger. This is the overwhelmingly reported experience of dieters, even under clinical supervision. Whether it's the absence of carbs that eliminates hunger, or the surfeit of fat, is, again, speculative. The phenomenon itself is what's important in practical terms.

It's both, of course. Refined carbs make you hungry. Ample dietary fat satiates you. Given two calorie-restricted diets with the same number of calories, the high carb diet will make you lethargic and fatigued and irritable, while the fat-rich one will leave you with less blubber and more energy. The cellular starvation created by too much insulin, which overfeeds fat cells, is avoided in the absence of insulin and the presence of FFAs in the bloodstream.

Indeed, starvation and fasting are both notable for the absence of hunger. Whereas, feed someone who's fasting a few hundred calories of carbs, and they become ravenous. I can attest to the truth of this lack of hunger, having fasted, years ago, for ten days. Water only. No hunger. Just the feeling that I'd neglected to do something.

So, hunger is decoupled from calorie intake. Hunger is dependent on insulin and the type of macronutrients ingested. Hunger is not about a taste, not about a fullness in the belly, not about calories per se in the bloodstream. It's about insulin acting on bloodsugar. So the data suggest.

If thermodynamics is what it's claimed to be, then leanness and obesity is a straightforward proposition. If calorie intake goes up and energy output also goes up -- as either heat or activity -- then there is no significant weight change. Likewise, if energy-in is decreased and so is output -- reduced bodyheat or activity -- same result, of no weight change. If it's more energy in and less energy out -- due to either reduced heat or increased storage -- well, obesity. And then there's less in, more out. Thinness.

That's the theory. Thermodynamics.

It's not my problem, that this theory does not work for fat people. I'm not fat, and only a few of the fat people I know will change their behavior because of what I say. But the reality is that, for healthy people, by which I mean people with a not-hysterical insulin response, they can eat crap and look good. But those who tend to obesity, not so much. They store it. Likewise if their calorie intake goes down, and their activity level goes up, or down. They store it. They will always store it, regardless of thermodynamics. Because insulin trumps physics. Biology then is a sort of metaphysics. Kidding. Not really. Only sort of. But only sort of.

Mixed in with all this mystery, this alchemy, is hunger. Just as glycerol transforms free fatty acids into triglycerides, insulin transforms carbs into hunger. Dietary fat plays at most only a minor role in any of this. How odd.

Obese people, then, have two problems relevant to this discussion. Insulin hysteria is one. The other is that they release free fatty acids from adipose cells more slowly than lean people do. They hoard it. So there's less energy available between meals. Cells are starved. Hunger. Because the last meal's glucose was hoarded away by insulin. Double hoarding.

So many complex ideas, expressed so clearly and simply. I'm brilliant. And I'm still waiting for that dollar you promised to send me. What, I'm not worth a dollar to you? That hurts my feelings. How would you like it if this was my last post?


J

Academic Standards

The inevitability of calories. All nutrition orbits around that star. But aside from a glaringly obvious relationship to thermodynamics, how much information does the term contain? Every doctor knows that the body is a mystery. Sure, science and all that. Get numbers on the problem. Metrics -- it’s like money … so good. But some people don’t get well, when all the numbers demand that they do.

Sometime in the nineteenth century they figured out there was such a thing as protein and fat and carbs, and how much heat was released from each when you burned it. No, really, it is important to know that. But it’s not something we should run our lives by. Since that time, we’ve learned a few more things. Like about hormones, say.

We keep using calories as if it were a meaningful concept because it’s a simple number that measures a real thing. That’s very good. But not all real things are meaningful. I have a book that gives brief biographies for the peers and nobles of Great Britain up until the mid 1860s. Is there some way of expressing useful nutritional information in a simple way? A grade? ORAC value, glycemic index, available energy content (with a nod to DIT and fiber)? Bioavailable protein? Bioavailable mineral content? Something where you don’t have to be a brain genius to be able to make a decision? Something where crafty marketers can’t up the score by dumping some vitamins and fiber into their cotton candy? -- like every breakfast cereal?

That’s a lot of info. Looks like a grade isn’t enough. A report card. That’s too much. Not easy. But we can’t just express it as a ratio, dry weight over calories. Sugar gets a grade of ¼. So does a granola bar. Hm. Broccoli is 29 grams over 98 calories. Call it 3/10. In other words, suger is 25%, broccoli is 30%. Does that seem reasonable? Because that’s what the current system thinks is important to tell us. As if 100 grams of one carb is the same as 100 grams of another. That’s just insane. Is my math right?

Point is, calories are like women. All the same.

Oh, is there something wrong with that idea? Not all women are the same? I hardly see how I, Jack H, sophisticated man of the world, could be wrong about this. But in the vanishingly small likelihood that I am wrong -- and the idea is both absurd and offensive to me -- maybe the world is wrong about calories. It’s just barely possible.

I might be getting sick. Bit of a sore throat. I ate two orders of fries last night, from In-N-Out. Just felt like it. So? Workout was very very poor tonight. I think another one this week might have been pretty bad. Maybe it was last week. It’s been a few years since I’ve been sick. Three, I think. I’m not sick. But it could happen. Depends what I eat. Now I'm going to have some popcorn. So?


J

Dances With Polar Bears

There is no difference between animal and plant fat. At pharmaceutically refined levels, pure, the oleic or palmeic acid in pork is the same as that in olive or coconut oil. They are chemically identical. No difference. So the willowy vegetarians don’t have that particular high horse to look down their long noses from. If there is any meaningful health problem with meat, it isn’t the fat content. Which it isn’t.

The problem with meat must lie in one or both of two areas. The first problem is in the gut: as the effect of noxious corpse-eating bacteria and all their ghastly toxic waste products; and as the lack of fiber, which clogs you up and lets the putrifiers have an extended two-day fiesta cruise down your alimentary canal. The other problem is in the bloodstream -- the toxic effect of undigested animal proteins that leak through the gut wall. In the blood they are treated as invaders, attacked with antigens, which may learn to attack one’s own proteins, leading to autoimmune disorders. To be fair, the leaky gut is caused by refined carbs -- yeast infestation.

There are other problems, not controversial. Meat is the end of the food chain, and therefore it is the garbage dump of every environmental pollutant in the system -- strontium and pesticides and dioxins and bovine spongiforms. And then there’s the byproducts of the animal’s metabolism itself -- urea and feminizing hormones and adrenalin and so on. No one can think these are good. Almost no one.

But Eskimos don't get scurvy. The claim that they eat no plant products, in their traditional diet, seems unlikely. One of the thing vegetarians think they know is that the first thing Eskimos eat when they kill an animal is the contents of the stomach and intestinal tract. Plants, don't you know. Organs too. They throw the meat to the dogs. So the story goes. The other story, though, is that they eat no plant material. Let's just accept the fact that both are true, and not argue.

The fact that the Kenyan Maasai eat very much dairy and hunted meats, and have the worst life expectancy in the modern world may be due to dirty drinking water. That their life expectancy for men is 42 years could be due to the fact that they live in, well, Africa. That they have had, historically, less than a 50% chance of living past 60 is, um, racist. Blood diamonds.

Let's not trouble ourselves with having to defend or attack bigtime meat-eating. Because the issue is not whether or not humans can eat a lot of meat, or solely meat. The issue is, what is optimal.

Let's grant that meat provides every known necessary nutrient, including Vitamin C and glucose (via muscular glycogen). How about the unnecessary ones? Does meat have any meaningful antioxidants? Because meat makes them more necessary. Heat is generated just because digestion occurs. It's called diet induced thermogenesis, DIT. Protein is most wasteful in this regard. It's fuel to the flames, and where there's fire there's smoke, and, uh, smoke is pollution.

Tests show that fat digestion wastes only 0 to 3% of its calories as heat; carbs waste 5 to 10%; protein wastes 20 to 30%; alcohol wastes 10 to 30%. Healthy subjects with a mixed diet burn about 10% of their calories as heat. Protein and fat are most closely linked to satiety -- knowing when to stop. For fat, this would be because FFAs in the bloodstream create a buffer, that allows the body to know there's no famine. It's safe to stop. For protein, I suggest that the sheer amount of work it takes to digest these most difficult molecules creates a signal to stop eating -- enough already -- perhaps through the excess waste heat, or perhaps through the digestive cells themselves, and their depletion of energy.

So, back to what is optimal. Does exhausting your digestive system seem like a good thing? Does making more pollution in your body? -- via the free radicals produced by wasted effort? Does it seem wise to increase the need for the antioxidants that damp down this pollution, while at the same time refusing to eat the plant sources that are so rich in these nutrients? Does it make sense to be the carrion eater? The best place on the food chain to be is the place where you don't get eaten, not where you eat all the other animals. The best place is where you can choose wisely, apart from appetite.

I have known for decades not to eat refined carbs. I had thought it was because of the hysterical and eventually pathological insulin response. Now I've learned an additional reason, that glucose results in glycerol, which is the glue that holds blubber together. But blubber has never been my problem. Should I then eat more meat? Or, in my case, any at all? Clearly, clearly, an Atkins-like diet will almost always result in the loss of from one to three pounds a week of fat. Calorie restriction, semi-starvation, diets with "carbs" result in hunger, lethargy, fatigue, muscle wasting, depression, self loathing, guilt, futility, failure, etc. But even so, Atkins and his ilk are wrong.

Wrong because it isn't carbs that's the problem. It's nutritionless, fiberless carbs. Most especially, such carbs poured into an already disrupted bloodstream. In extreme and very rare cases, I would now support a meat-only diet -- if the whole foods vegan diet somehow fails. But that must be a small fraction of a small percent of the human population. Anyone that sick is close to terminal. Short of that point, however, a healthful diet should be rich rich rich with "carbs" -- not starches, not refined grains, nothing powdered. All of that is either predigested, or almost digested. Might as well open a vein and sprinkle in sugar. I mean real food. Like what Adam would have eaten. You remember Adam? He's the guy God made to live in and tend a Garden, with associated trees.

Why so extreme. Everybody needs glucose, and glycerol, and triglycerides. Everyone needs as many antioxidants as they can get. Nobody needs refined carbs, and hardly anyone needs meat. Because it's not about what we can get away with. It's not about the absence of actual disease in Eskimos or their Caucasian Dances with Polar Bears interlopers. It's about longevity accompanied intimately by vitality. Eskimos are not noted for the number of their centenarians. Maybe it has something to do with unnecessary nutrients.


J

Threshold Nutrition

There is a threshold level for glucose, below which insulin is benevolent. Insulin has a vast host of problems, when it is present as a vast host. It will make you a vast host, diabetic, heart diseased, obese. But at an optimal glucose level, all its necessary uses will be met -- brain and organ energy, and whatever else. You ate it, so it’s there, at the right level.

Glycerol is the inevitable waste product of glucose metabolism, and has two functions -- as energy, reconverted into glucose, and as the substrate, the glue of blubber-making triglycerides. If there is no excess glucose in the blood, merely sufficient, or optimal, the resulting glycerol will be used as energy, with a minimal but necessary, optimal, amount left over to formulate triglycerides. We do after all need triglycerides. Bodyfat has a purpose too. Just not so much. Tubby. Sheesh. Go for a walk.

Likewise with protein, amino acids. There is an optimal amount, that lies between an upper and a lower threshold. Too little dietary protein and, well, it’s too damn little. Didn’t you know that? Too much and it just gets turned into glucose, in a very wasteful and expensive process. If that’s the case, why not just eat the carbs? You need as much protein as you need. Any more is redundant and, frankly, stupid.

The constant then should be protein, with focus on the essential amino acids. All other necessary amino acids can be synthesized within the body. The general amount of protein you need to eat can be determined from the nitrogen in urine, and the ideal is to achieve a nitrogen equilibrium. Without references, I recall that the balanced dietary protein level is around five percent of total caloric intake. Obviously athletes would need more, since there is more muscle breakdown. Likewise perhaps with those who are sick or under stress or other exceptional circumstances. What should not happen is that amino acids be wasted by being turned into blood sugar.

The next constant should be glucose. It turns out that the brain uses about 20% of the body’s energy. (My brain would of course use far more than that of ordinary people.) Logically, more than twenty percent of your calories should be from glucose, since there are other needs for bloodsugar. The brain can also use ketone bodies, but that's a backup system. It will always use glucose, even if it has to steal protein from muscles and catabolize it into glucose. Dietary glucose is technically not necessary. Glucose is -- there is a lower threshold. Of course, too much glucose is more than a problem. It is the health problem of the modern age. So there is a huge upper threshold -- let’s turn it into a barrier.

Then there’s fat. Essential fats are essential. The only shortage is in omega 3, and that’s easy to remedy. Of course there are poisonous fats, as excessive carbs are poisonous, and as I say animal proteins are. Poisonous. Transfats. Too much omega 6. But that’s easy to remedy as well. Generally though there are very real health benefits to other fats -- lauric acid, say, or oleic -- and those that are not specifically beneficial are just neutral sources of energy.

Too many calories are a problem because, aside from potential obesity, they get burned off as body heat, and that process creates free radicals, which are damaging and mutagenic and aging and bad. The body can and does regulate its weight homeostatically. It should have to do that as little as possible. Don’t race your engine.

What then is optimal for the macronutrients? Something over 20% for carbs -- brain plus CNS plus organs. Something equilibrated for protein. These seem very much to be not technically constants, but limited to a range. The independent variable, after a few essential grams, is fat. If you’re trying to lose fat you’ve stored, eat it less, so that what you have will be used rather than crowding your blood, even as free fatty acids. If you don’t have a weight issue, it’s all about health and performance. Where are you putting your energy? Lots of thinking? Eat a bit more glucose -- as good carbs. Lots of exercise? A bit more protein, and more fat to supply the muscles. What you don't want to be doing is wasting your energy with digesting more than you needed in the first place.

We do need some common sense. I just finished ch. 19 in Taubes' book. He tells about how good an all meat diet is. Well, I knew it was coming. Hardly anyone is always right. You are very lucky to know me.


J

Fuel to the Fire

For 25 years my cruising weight was 172. In a time of grief I got down into the 150s -- I was afraid to weigh myself stripped, so I don't know the precise number. In my 40s and now, with increased exercise, it's about 180, more if I'm doing strength training. My body finds its weight according to my activity level, and my diet adjusts itself to that. When I stopped bjj last year, I gained about five pounds of useless weight. Same when I stopped running, six years ago. I was eating more than I was using. But it leveled off. There is a lag time, then. But there is self-regulation.

Getting fat, very fat, should be no easier than getting very muscular. Both are functions of hormones and metabolism. Eating by itself won't do either. Neither will moving or not moving. There is a range that normal individuals have, within which they will gain or lose weight. After that, it takes exceptional effort or circumstances, or a profound genetic or hormonal disruption.

To get muscular, amino acids and glucose must be directed within muscle cells. To get fat, free fatty acids and glycogen must be localized within fat cells. It is not the presence of amino acids or FFAs that dictate this. It isn't the presence of insulin per se. It is the receptivity of cells. A muscle cell takes in raw materials not because they are in the bloodsteam, but because its receptors have been activated or sensitized. Exercising a muscle does that. Then, if sufficient nutrients and the proper hormones, testosterone, HGH, etc, are in the bloodstream, muscle growth will occur. Same deal with fat. An excess of glycerol and insuln, in a generally insulin resistant body, will result in the pervading corpulence of the current American population.

It isn't about excess calories anymore than being muscular would be. It's about the type of nutrients and the hormonal reactions. Some people are born to be powerful, some to be fat. The rest of us have to work at it, or fall into it by habits of lifestyle. It's not a moral statement. Only choices can be judged by moral standards. We might say, informed choices. That's why there is the concept of unwitting sin -- it is treated differently by God. The harm is done, but the guilt is less. Those who are congenitally muscular may be proud, as those who are fat may feel shame or guilt. But not all blessings are earned, nor curses. The universe, like metabolism, is hormonal. There is balance, within a range.

Because muscle is made of protein, and fat is made of, uh, fat, people generally assume there is a cause and effect relationship. But perhaps we've seen the dudes with the protein powders straining away in the gym trying to bulk up those guns. Some of them do. But they usually look, to my eye, sort of puffy and soft, and always malproportioned. Unwitting sin. It's the opposite with the fatties. They think fewer calories rather than more grunting will do it. Yes, it will, sort of for a while, until they start eating again in the way they think is normal. But it's not, none of it, about calories, anymore than heat is about fuel. There's a lot of fuel in the world. Why isn't the world on fire? That's a better analogy than you think it is. It just requires that you do the thinking.

If you're tired of reading about fat et al, stay away. I have pages and pages of ramblings now. Not all of it will come up here, but it's a fruitful field, and this is a season in which I get depressed. I'd rather be manic. So suck it up, or leave. I don't want to hear your complaints. And do some pushups. And eat a salad.


J

More on the Bottom Line

The metabolism of fat people seems to run as fast or faster than those of lean people. This observation is repeatedly confirmed. So much for the "slow metabolism" theory. They burn faster. Seems hard to believe. I mean, fat insulates. They need to make less, not more body heat. But the energy they're burning need not be for heat. Maybe it's just expended in moving all those extra pounds around. Even so, it's counterintuitive. Again. Great.

If on average they expend more energy, they must eat more. But they don't. So let's see: they eat the same, they expend more energy, and they save more energy as fat? A conundrum. A thermodynamic paradox. But we've already looked at the idea that it's not a closed system. There's leakage. There's seepage as well. More energy is getting into the system than we think.

Here's my latest hypothesis. The answer is to be found in feces! So. Gram for gram, I propose that the stool of a fat person will burn cooler than that of a lean person. See? It's not that the obese are eating more. It's that they're absorbing more. The lean are wasting calories, by not getting them into the bloodsteam to begin with. If calories remain in the digestive tract only, then they would show up in the self-same crucible that determines the caloric value of food.

We know that not all calories need be absorbed, because stool can be oily under certain diets -- of very much oil. Don't ask me how I know. That oil would burn bright in the camp fire. I'm sure the data are known, but I don't know it. How much protein is to be found, in feces? How many carbs? How much fat? And comparatively, between the obese and lean? Or is digestion generally an entirely efficient process? We would hope so, but is it?

The presumption is that if a lean or a fat man eats, say 2500 calories a day, that's what will end up in their bloodstream. But there must be seepage. More is seeping in, for the obese. Must be, because they eat the same, expend more, and save more. Or, from a different perspective, the lean leak more. They absorb the same, but waste it as fidgeting or body heat or libido or thinking. Either way, the lean seem to be less efficient. Yet somehow that doesn't seem like a bad thing, given the alternative. But if there were a way to harness this supposed waste, toward athletic excellence -- wouldn't that be swell.

Heat, again. We measure basal metabolism by measuring how much oxygen is used. That tells us combustion, which tells us about calories. What it does not tell us about is how the energy was actually exploited. If there are the same amount of calories in the bloodstream -- excluding the confounding factor of digestive absorption -- and if the same oxidation rates are found in the fat and the lean, showing equal energy usage, then it's just a matter of how that energy is wasted, and more importantly, how it is used. It shouldn't be heat, calories, that we measure. There should be a unit of measurement for vitality.

As has been noted, the gut is a brain -- there are as many neurons associated with digestion as there are with the cranium. Further, there is only one nerve connecting the two -- the vagus nerve, the severing of which seems not to interfere with digestion. Hm. I propose, informally -- don't let this get back to my professional colleagues in the, uh, Digestive Sciences and Extraordinary Fitness Department at Übermensch U -- that the gut itself has a homeostatic mechanism, whereby overall bodyfat is regulated. The gut knows where the gauge is set, and maintains that level by digesting and absorbing, or passing through calories, undigested.

It's an easy hypothesis to falsify, if not validate. Get to it. I'll review your data in the morning. I won't tell you how to collect your samples. Lord knows you're sick enough to save it already, wrapped up in baggies in the freezer, all labeled and weighed with notes as to the meal it used to be. You've got like three months there already, don't you. Man you are freaky weird. Get some help.


J

Letting Off Some Steam

Counterintuitive ain't the half of it. We seem to have gotten our understanding of obesity and weightloss from infomercials. Can that be possible? What about Oprah? -- didn't she lose a bunch of fat? And Robert De Niro -- he got fat on purpose for Raging Bull. So eating more will make you fat, and diet and exercise can lean you down. It's obvious. But controlled studies consistently invalidate this observation. Calorie restriction for the obese results in lower basal metabolism and decreased energy expenditure. Exercise increases appetite and for the effort provides a relatively insignificant energy expenditure. That's the clear conclusion from the studies.

It's not genetic, as we know from the obesity epidemic. If Americans were generally not fat 30 years ago, and three times as many are fat now, it's environmental, some behavioral change of diet, lifestyle, etc. It's genes responding, not demanding. So why is it happening? That's not the question I'm going to look at. Now, it's why isn't it changing, with diet and exercise.

I think that somewhere in the brain there is a silhouette of what it thinks we should look like, and the brain works to maintain that shape. I think that a very gradual increase and excess of calories allows for the slow modification, adaptation of that image, so that slow fat gain can be sustained, whereas sudden change is more easily reversed. I think that meditation, visualization, affirmations can hack in and edit that image, allowing for successful weight loss where a merely thermodynamic approach will fail. I say will fail, because that's what the mechanistic studies show -- treating fat loss as a mere equation of positive or negative energy balance results in failure. The silhouette gauge makes adjustments -- faster heartrate, more spontaneous movement, nervous energy, body temperature fluctuation, manipulation of appetite and cravings -- anything to waste or conserve energy, calories, fat.

Here's what it is, I think. The diet and exercise paradigm, to which every sensible person must be attracted, seems to be wrong. You'll have to look at your own life experience to see if it has worked. It's irrelevant in my own life. I've never had visible body fat. That used to be how it was with most young people. I'm not young anymore but that's how it is with me. I don't do anything for it -- that's just how it is. Lifestyle, of course -- not a discipline, a preference. Lucky me. It's why I've always had abs, too -- I just naturally engaged my core whenever I lifted something. But I'm neurotic and self-destructive, so it's not all roses with me. You don't have to be jealous. But I seem to have digressed.

It's not a simple equations, energy in, energy out. If the body were a closed system, that idea would work. But it's not a closed system. There's leakage. It's not energy in, which is either stored or burned for purposeful metabolic functions. Such functions can be quantified, as body heat or lifting or locomotion or breathing or heartbeat or shivering. These are purposeful, and because of that they are predictable, quantifiable, and variables of an equation. The silhouette gauge is a randomizer.

Think of the body as a steam engine, in an old fashioned train. A bunch of coal, a furnace, and a way to get work done. Easy. Straightforward math, whatever the details. But then there's the whistle. The safety valves, that keep the boiler from exploding. It confounds things. Some people are always blowing their whistle. A lot of wasted steam. Keeps them lean. Some people let the pressure build until it's dangerous. Not on purpose -- it's just how the thing is built. Some engine cabs just keep filling up with coal, that doesn't get burned -- or the firebox has a problem, and the coal builds up there. You get the idea. I haven't been elegant with the analogy, but you can play with it yourself.

The point is that the calculations can't be valid if the system is not closed. How can people eat less and still be fat? First, metabolism is not even a steam engine, but rather a hybrid motor, that uses different fuels in a pattern we haven't recognized yet. Then, well, the system is not closed. What goes in? Calories? How meaningful is that? Something burned in a crucible is supposed to translate one-to-one into metabolism? Isn't that actually sort of an insane assumption? And once we have digested these "calories", they can be used only according to the mechanistic expectations of thermodynamics? I'm all for thermodynamics. For mechanistic systems. The fact that fat people can eat less and exercise more than lean people sort of confounds the issue, though, wouldn't you agree?

There's an engineer at the switch, and he operates according to rules that you don't find in elementary physics textbooks. He decides wheel speed and burn rates and heat and pressure and noise. He doesn't like to be starved, and he works at his own pace. How do you make him happy? Feed him right, and have a conversation.

That's all. That's all for now. I'm still looking for answers. Data, rather, from which I can formulate answers. It's what I do. I can explain the Flood -- this will be easy.


J

Diet As Alchemy

The Surgeon General's Office instructs us that "Overweight and obesity result from excess calorie consumption and/or inadequate physical activity." Oh. Well, case closed then. Never mind that most studies suggest that many who are overweight eat fewer calories than those who are lean, and may be as active. What does reality count in the face of authoritative pronouncements? There would hardly be any religions at all, if evidence mattered. And even less politics. Nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time came thirty years ago and is now thoroughly entrenched. Never mind that in the past thirty years overweight and obesity have nearly tripled.

How can the new standard paradigm, of eat less and burn more, be wrong? Never mind what kind of low fat and what kind of high carbs they tell us to eat -- is the theory behind it valid? Because if it's not, the implication is that we might, somehow, eat an unlimited amount of calories and not gain weight. Calories have to go somewhere. It's physics, the conservation of matter/energy. Either exercise it away or store it as fat. Right? It makes sense.

If triglyceride fat, blubber, can only be formed in the presence of glycerol, what happens to excess calories without glycerol? Well, after general vitality is seen to, and the immune system, and recovery and repair from physical activity -- you know, the reason we eat -- the surplus, since it doesn't go to matter, must go to energy. Heat. That's science.

The simplistic thermodynamic analogy is not valid. True, calories must go either to matter or energy. But a calorie is not a calorie. The caloric value of food is identified by actually burning that food in a crucible in a laboratory. The heat generated is measured, and that's how many calories the food has. Never mind that we cannot digest fiber. That's confounding in only an incidental way. The point is that metabolism is not a crucible, for all that we make heat. It's not a simple energy in-out equation. There are various pathways that lead to multiple outcomes dependent on a number of variables. Well that didn't say a lot, and is quite obvious.

Calories are not about heat. Calorie is another of those misleading-therefore-useless words. What calories are actually about are raw materials, out of which possibilities are made. Thinking in terms of calories is like thinking in terms of carbon -- coal is the same thing as diamonds. Well, yes. And no.

Calories are not just a sort of element, that might happen to manifest as certain allotropes -- incidental forms -- like fats or carbs, as carbon has graphite or diamond, which are both pure elemental carbon. Protein, carbs and fat differ in their fundamental, their elemental nature, and that they burn as calories is as meaningful as the fact that they are made out of matter. Meaningful only because reality is what it is. Protein is as different from carbs as nitrogen is different from, well, carbon. Of course they do not behave the same in the body -- not even as calories.

Absent glycerol, then, triglycerides are not made. Fat would be present in the blood as free fatty acids. Maybe in the liver, maybe in cells, muscle or adipose, but not bundled up for storage. That's not such a good thing. We may end up looking sort of skeletal, all hollow-eyed and sunken-cheeked. Heroin chic. It's a look. Like the burlap-bag-full-of-yogurt look is a look. Somewhere between these two looks is a healthy compromise. But even given an excess of calories, there would be no overweight. I expect you could eat until you just got too hot. Maybe you'd fall into a fevor coma. Maybe you'd spontaneously combust. It's science.

I pulled a muscle in my back tonight. I don't know how. Running? Is that possible? It's the same place as last time, so it's a re-injury. Still. Running. Maybe doing fancy situps. And I have no one to give me a backrub. Is that fair? You know how good I am. Why can't I just be loved? But she has to be hot.

J

Glucose, Glycerol, Glycogen, Glycemic, Triglycerides, Thermogenesis -- Too Many Dang Words That Look Alike

I have to write these things down, or I'll forget them and then have to reinvent them later, if I do. That's a hassle.

All calories are, by definition, thermogentic. Calorie is a unit of heat measurement. That doesn't seem like a very smart way of measuring nutritional value. Sort of a blunt instrument. In any case, here's a way to explain how high carb diets can result in less body fat. First, it's not refined carbs, so the uptake is slower. When we say carbs, we generally mean glucose. Glucose wants to be used right away. It's instant energy. It's the preferred fuel for emergencies. That's why it's blood sugar, and not tissue sugar. It's right there in the pipes, waiting.

So, it's used first by the brain and organs, as energy. Then it's formed into glycogen in cells. Then it's stored as fat in cells. Too much glucose all at once stimulates a hysterical response from the liver to form triglycerides, and by insulin to store the triglycerides away. So we want a low, steady drip, like an IV -- not a huge inundating bolus, the way we see villains murder bedridden victims in hospitals.

There is a normal range of body temperatures. One of the ways the body regulates blood sugar -- a non-insulin way -- is by using glucose to bump up the temperature. Once that upper level of the safety gauge is reached, insulin secretion becomes more aggressive. Implications here. In the hierarchy of uses, brain/organ energy first, body heat, emergency muscle energy, fat creation, tumors.

As long as the IV drip is steady, you can eat more carbs/glucose without fat gain, because any slight excess will be used as heat. When carbs are too easily digested, the body doesn't opt for fever, but for fat, via insulin and glycerol.

Meanwhile, the glycerol byproduct of glucose combustion can itself be used as fuel. If glucose levels are good, low, the body will opt to use glycerol as an auxiliary fuel source. When glucose becomes too abundant, glycerol stops burning as fuel and is used as the glue to bind free fatty acids into triglycerides, which get stored as blubber.

The trick is, low insulin. High insulin short-circuits the homeostasis process, and brings on a cascade of health problems. We achieve low insulin not by eating lots of fat and protein, but by eating sensible carbs as well, which are complex carbs, which are unrefined carbs, which are slow-to-digest carbs, which are fibrous carbs. Some grains, sure, once in a while. But low glycemic index, and a low-calorie to high-nutrient ratio. Fructose powder, then, sucks -- low glycemic index, but no nutrients at all. And it provokes a low but long-term insulin reaction -- which amounts to at least an equal overall exposure to raised insulin. Insidious.

Now, I just made a lot of this up, in terms of body temp and glycerol use. I wanted to get it down while I was thinking about it. Otherwise it fades away. Oh, the ideas I've had. But you don't have to read this. It's just notes to myself. Pretend you didn't.


J

Things I Don’t Know

I don’t know the difference between animal saturated fats and plant saturated fats. I don’t think there is one. The palmitic acid in coconut oil and in beef is chemically identical. It’s just the ratios that are different. So, uh, I guess I do know the difference. There isn’t one.

I don’t know the role of enzymes in digestion. I know the words, and how they’re used, but I don’t know anything about how they're produced or excreted, and what happens to them afterwards. I know an enzyme is a catalyst, and catalysts cause a reaction without being changed by it, so I’d figure enzymes are taken up again and reused. But I don’t know how that would work. I know that various digestive processes occur at different parts of the small intestine, but I don’t know what happens where.

On an impulse -- that’s how I make most of my purchases -- I went online and bought a textbook on biochemistry. It just seems so interesting to me.

So that’s everything I don’t know.

We think of diet and nutrients in terms of broad categories. Fats and proteins and carbs. It’s really not useful. Take protein. As I’ve noted, we can’t use it. We need dietary amino acids. But we only need eight or so -- the essential ones; all the others we can make ourselves. Why so vague about how many essentials? Some can be converted into others. Messes up the calculations. But current estimates are that you need only about 16 grams of the essentials, if you weigh 200 pounds, not obese. A bit more than half an ounce. That's like totally hardly anything. But I digress.

There is a qualitative difference between plant and animal protein. No difference between the amino acids, but in the digestion process, huge. Putrefactive bacteria don’t feed on plants. Don’t you just love that word, putrefactive? I use it on purpose. Putrid. Mmm. Then, if undigested proteins leak into the bloodstream, there may be autoimmune problems. As I’ve noted. Point is, protein is not just protein.

Same with fats. Saturated fats are just there to supply energy. On the other hand, your skin can get softer when you eat coconut oil. It’s one of my beauty secrets. And we’ve been through all that with omega 3 and 6. I wonder if these are ever just metabolized for energy, or if they are used only structurally. I’ll have to add that to the list of things I don’t know. Then there are the hydrogenated and transfats. Poision.

Or carbs. Fibrous carbs -- good. Unprocessed carbs, good. Sugars and refined carbs? Slow but very real poisons. Or cholesterol. The term seems to be useless, when the distinction is not made about which particular cholesterol, HDL or LDL, or even subcatagories of LDL.

So if there’s confusion about what to eat, well, common sense has to play a pretty big role. Because you probably haven’t been told about nutrients at any level smaller than protein or fat or carbs. And these studies that are done, measuring the effect of dietary carbs, but that don’t make a distinction between fibrous and refined … useless? Or that talk about high or low cholesterol, but nothing about the ratios. Or that measure protein in the diet without any understanding about the intestinal microzoa that cohabit with you as your constant dinner guests?

It’s a sort of information that is worse than useless. It’s information that is actually ignorance. Like nutrients that don’t nourish. Empty carbs. Dead proteins. Poisonous fats. Really. Couldn’t you just sit down and give the matter some serious thought, and come up with a sensible diet on your own, without the government spending billions of dollars building its pyramids that end up ruining the economy of your health? My, that was an overly complex metaphor. Honestly though, does a cake really seem like food to you? And how is bread much different than cake? Does eating meat three times a day seem like a natural thing to you? From either an Evolutionary or an Edenic perspective? Does drinking bovine milk seem like a sensible thing for an adult human to do on a regular basis?

If you sat down and just puzzled it out, what do you suppose you’d come up with, as a sensible human diet? It’s not a trick question. Get back to me with your answer. It’s one of the things I don’t know.


J

Hot Calories, Cool Calories

I wanted to come home and just do some pleasure reading, or immerse myself again in some technical stuff. But I wasted an hour with that dog in front of the TV. That new guy on The Late Show has some okay stuff. And I actually laugh at AquaTeen HungerForce. That is my sense of humor. Now I've just been puttering around for a while. Replied to a comment. You're welcome.

But I've got some new stuff rolling around in my head. Here's the thing. Vegetarians burn hotter than meat-eaters, per The China Study. These skinny Asians eat over 3000 calories and are, well, skinny. Where does it go? Body heat.

That bothers me. Heat is bad. You know that because heat is bad for your car engine. How could it be good for us? I know it's bad for athletic performance. So is a veg diet bad for exercise? Yes. A grain diet, high carb even unrefined, is not ideal. This seems clear on theoretical grounds.

In terms of performance, I got a call tonight from my son, and I'll have to follow up -- bad connection -- can you hear me now? -- but he said that his endurance seemed a bit less on the raw vegan no oils or supplements diet. Never argue with reality. I didn't want to influence the outcome of his experiment, so I had kept my expectations to myself, that this would or might happen. It was all too theoretical -- too pure and idealistic. That's not how reality seems to work. He'll be adding oils and cooking some food every day or two now. Tweaking. It's about reality. We shall see.

Here's what I think, as an instant theory. Just as different types of fuel combust differently in an engine, producing more or less heat, more or less power -- don't ask me about it, it's just what I've been given to understand ... something about octane and grades and whatnot -- that's how it is with carbs and fats. When you have almost only carbs, glucose, to burn, it burns instantly, more as heat than power. Fat burns cooler, more controlled, with more energy available for movement, if there is movement. Otherwise it stores as fat -- as will glucose too, if it's not used. Glucose doesn't store. If it's not burned it gets changed into glycogen or triglycerides. Think of glucose as flash and fat as glow -- one all intense and mistimed, too much expended all at once, and the other steady, cool, reliable.

I'm going to have to look again at the Kreb's cycle, to see if this makes sense. Fat burns as fat, right? -- not broken down into glucose? I seem to think so. Man I hate the Kreb's cycle. Is that even how it's spelled? Kreb's? Krebs?

Glucose is designed to be brain and organ food. It shouldn't be the primary energy source for muscles. So, that it is less efficient in muscles makes sense. Athleticism is about efficiency. Athletes are better at using fat energy than are non-athletes. Metabolism is trained too, you see. Fat is designed to be muscle food. If you do extraordinary feats, you need an extraordinary diet. Carbs may be great for treks across the Kalahari, or working all day in the fields, but that's not athletics.

As I say, this is an instant theory. I just made it up. No one has ever thought of this before. Man I'm good. A regular Tesla. You should send me money. Jack H, c/o General Delivery, 91504, Burbank, CA. No checks please.


J

The Good with the Bad

Meat, including red meat, or bacon, or lard, seems now to play no role in creating heart disease. It may in fact mitigate against it, in that it promotes good cholesterol and inhibits bad. Meanwhile, carbs, refined carbs appear to be the single major factor in creating heart disease, diabetes, obesity -- Syndrome X. Sounds like bad news for vegetarians, eh?

Indeed it is. Bad news for some vegetarians. The muffin vegetarians. The unthoughtful ones. The PETA freaks. The fanatics. But not for those vegetarians who are about health. Because we don’t use refined carbs. I have always known not to do that, and I was born in the fifties. So, it’s not that meat is good and veggies are bad. It’s that meat, with its mitigating role in disease, should be irrelevant, since those diseases shouldn’t be a problem, and wouldn’t be, given a sensible, plant-based diet.

Of course there are problems with an imbalanced and foolish carb diet. Huge problems, of plague proportions. But if those problems were solved, as they easily could be, by using unprocessed plant nutrients, then what would the major problem with its major diseases be? Meat, and its putrefaction and its autoimmune diseases.

Sometimes I think it's important to blaze up my failing laptop and set these things down for posterity. For you. Because you matter. At least as much as your appetites and addictions. Probably more, to the people who love you. So?


J

Cpt SC

I discovered tonight that there is a pretender to the title of LowCholesterol Man. Doesn't surprise me in the least, envied as I know myself to be. In fact I know who it is. I won't reveal his civilian identity, but he is my former sidekick. I should say my old sidekick, since he is technically a senior citizen. Nothing wrong with that, as long as he knows his place. But he doesn't.

When he worked with me he was known as Captain Skinlesschicken. The dude was such a cliche. He wore a rubber chicken costume -- you know, featherless. So predictable. And a derby, monocle and cane. A real Mr. Peanut. It was embarrassing. His catchphrase was, "I say old top, let's wax 'em, what?" Just lame. Then he'd spill some oil on the ground and hope the villains would slip. Pathetic. His nemesis Colon Boy loved oil. He used to scatter fiber around and slurp up the goo. It augmented his strength. Captain Skinlesschicken never figured that out. A little Alzheimeric. No blame, but it sort of argued against this whole health thing, which is sort of the point about my supermission.

So now Skinlesschicken is pretending to be me. Apparently he's going to health fairs and cholesterol screenings demanding that his blood be tested, and then he crows about how low his TC is. Of course his LDL is measurable, which mine is not, and his triglycerides aren't all that impressive, but the guy is stuck in the Fifties. Read a book, man. It's not about the total score -- it's ratios. Not a hard concept. But he never could change his ideas, or admit when he was wrong. Hence, former sidekick.

I don't suppose I really mind. Nobody mistakes him for me. Nobody who knows me -- as LowCholesterol Man that is. I'm much taller than he is. And I don't always say, "I say old top, let's wax 'em, what?" But it's annoying, because I've spent a lot of time building up this identity, and LwchlstrlMn has a lot of cachet in the superhero community. I'm not like the prop comic Gallagher, who franchises out his character to just any stringy bald guy. (Watermelons are very healthful.) So that's a bother. I'll just overlook it. Because I know where he lives, and it would be so easy for me tip off Colon Boy, now Dark Lumen, about how to find him. Old bugger deserves it. But that's just not me.

It is incidentally true that Skinlesschicken has lower cholesterol than I do. My ratios are much better though. And my superpowers are far more impressive. What's such a big deal about splashing oil all over the place? It was omega 6 oil anyway. Heart UNhealthy. He was hopeless. I convince people all the time to give up their unhealthful habits. I've saved countless lives as LCM. And I'm environmentally friendly. Old Nestor drives a '64 Galaxy, for crying in the soup. Nestor Gould, of 5676 Fairfax Ave, near Wilshire. Hopeless. He deserves what he gets.


J

Hoping Against Hope

U.N COMPENSATION OFFICE
To: sweet_dreamzz19@yahoo.com









United Nations Office, UK
3 Whitehall Court
London
SW1A 2EL

Dear Sir/Madam,

It has come to our notice that 25% of your countrymen has been scammed in one way or the other. I myself has been cheated on by a former lover. Life is so unfair. Sometimes I find it hard to continue on in this veil of tears. On this basis, the UN Office-UK had an urgent executive meeting on the 18th of March, 2009. At this meeting, the issue of payment of compensation to victims was a key point agenda which arose to a lots of argument between executive members. After an hour of violent argument, the debate came to bloody conclusion in which three Asians and some islanders lost their lives and one African ate someone's heart, to pay 40% of the victims a total sum of £1,000,000.00 (One Million Great Britain Pounds) under the section 23, article IV, code 12 of the colonial order.

We congratulate you, as you were among one of the 40% of the 25% selected for the payment of One Million GB lbs. To avoid any imperative mood by intending scammers, your above compensation sum has been transmute to a bank draft. You are advice to fill the below form and return back for proper delivery to your country.

Full name:........................................
Address:...................................
Tel:.....................................
E-mail:.....................................
Bra cup size if applicable.......................................
Favorite scented oil fragrance..................................
Age at first sexual experience (that included penetration).............

Please fill the above form without any error and forward it to the below courier company for them to deliver your bank draft to you.

CRYSTAL DIPLOMATIC COURIER
UNIT 7, TRIDENT INDUSTRIAL ESTATE
BLACKTHORNE ROAD SLOUGH
SL3 0AX, LONDON, UK.
TEL: +44-7031875432
E-MAIL: crystaldiplomaticcourier@live.com

You're to contact them by e-mail so, beware of crooks and imposters who might claim they can help/assist you get your compensation.

Due to the strict law guiding the remittance of huge sum of money in your country by your country's Apex Bank (CENTRAL BANK), you will have to follow legal guidlines given by me, the guy who sent you this email. You shall know me by the scarlet rose affixed to my cravat when we meet after you send me the airfare first class to meet at a mysterious but sexy cafe in your country.

Once again we congratulate you for your success at being a past victim of fraud and goodluck.

Best regards,

Sir Gareth Evans
Head of International Crisis Group
UN-UK

-----

Well? What do you think? I got screwed by Mrs. Arafat, and that South African Lottery never panned out. But this is the freakin United Nations of the World. The U.N fer cripe's sake! So what if the grammar is a little wonky. English is not Esperanto, the world's preeminent auxiliary language. Maybe Sir Gareth's U.N secretary lost her bifocals or something, and couldn't proofread. Maybe Keith Olbermann was busy oiling his hair. And I am not nor have I ever been "sweet_dreamzz19", neither @ yahoo nor anywhere else. I will continue to steadfastly maintain this fact to my dying bre@h. Or is that the U.N email? And I am unable to find section 23, article IV, code 12 of the colonial order ... would the colonial order even be in effect today? Does the U.N have colonies?

My favorite scented oil is Lavender d'Lite by Sensual Secrets, a division of Sweet Dreamzz 19 International. I don't know my pec size. A pharmacist recently took some other biometrics, the very impressive results of which are available to members of my subscription website.

The real question is, do I dare hope? Isn't it about time some good luck come the way of the old Jackhammer? Would that be too much to ask? I'm a very good man. Why can't I catch a break? Sometimes I just feel like dumping a tanker of dioxin into the reservoir. Screw the world. I hate you all.


J

Me Harping On and On about Diet Again

It's not that I'm on a health kick. It's not kicks with me, hepcat. I just roll with health. It's that I'm pretty much done with my big project, and so I have some time to read, and I'm reading that Taubes book, so that's what I'm thinking about in my down time. I love this sort of book. How things work. How wrong conventional wisdom is. Taubes is a professional writer, but he needs an editor. He uses five words where one will do. And the organization isn't so hot. And there's a journalist's penchant for extraneous detail. But it should be mandatory reading. This or other works on the topic.

It's a bit confusing for me, since I've known much of this for decades, yet it appears to be controversial among medical professionals. Hm. That says it right there. Medical -- as in medicine. What does medicine have to do with health? It has to do with sickness. Once you're sick, well, something to do with barn doors and horses. When you're way sick, medicines are good. Why did you get sick though. Because you failed to realize that you are made out of what you eat. If you're sick, non-infectious sick, it may have something to do with the fact that you've used substandard material in the manufacture, construction and/or assembly of your body.

There's a lot to talk about, in terms of what Taubes' discusses. But just now I wanted to make a simple observation. There are three macronutrients: proteins, fats and carbs. Your body never has and never will need or use protein; it needs amino acids, essential amino acids, which you must get through diet. Your body absolutely needs fat, certain kinds of fats -- the essential fatty acids, most notably omega 3. Other forms of fat are beneficial nutrients (say, oleic acid), or neutral concentrated energy -- and this includes saturated fats, even from animal sources -- or flatout poisons, like transfats, or omega 6 in too high amounts. Likewise with carbs. There is no essential carbohydrate. All carbs break down into glucose. You must have glucose -- it's brain and organ food -- but you can make it out of protein or fat. On the other hand, the plant nutrients that come along with carbs (plants) ... the phytonutrients ... you must must must eat these. Which ones? That's a judgment call. But eating too few plant-based nutrients is called malnutrition.

There are essential amino acids, but no essential proteins. You digest proteins into amino acids, which you build up into proteins. Sadly, there are poisonous proteins, commonly eaten -- those of animal origin. In moderation, they are unlikely to be dangerous. In excess, they can aggreiveate an auto-immune response, where your body designs antibodies to destroy any partially or non-digested alien proteins that have leaked into your bloodstream; consequently your immune system may learn to attack your own, similar (animal) proteins. A theory, but one I like.

Likewise, there are essential fats. You must eat them. But when eaten in disproportionate, unnatural amounts, they become toxic. We've looked at this before. Too many vegetable oils and you get a hysterical inflammation response. It is the scourge of the American diet. Poisonous.

As for carbs, there is no essential carb. What is essential in this case is moderation. Because an excess of carbs -- that is, sugars and refined grains ... concentrated and instant carbs -- wreaks havoc with insulin, which is a master hormone. Hormones are involved in one or more of four bodily functions: maintaining homeostasis; producing, utilizing or storing energy; reproduction; growth and development. I remember it as HERG, but that is neither here nor there. What is here and there is that insulin is involved in all of these, and too many carbs really, really really mess insulin up.

Which is the worst? Animal proteins that putrefy in your guts and can get into your bloodsteam, not so very different than viruses and bacteria? Fats that can inflame you or, as transfats, take the place of good fats but do a worse than useless job? Carbs, that in excess will cause diabetes and heart disease and virtually all of the modern black death of diseases associated with the Western and American diet? Well, choose your poison. It hardly matters. Most toxic, I'm tending to think now, is carbs. Maybe I think that because it would be my poison. Animal proteins are irrelevant to my lifestyle. I use no vegetable oils or transfats. But while I have never in my life bought white bread, or white rice, even granola bars are a refined carb, and therefore have an insulin spiking effect. So carbs would be the only danger to me.

We don't have to be perfect. We should be sensible. God appointed seven annual feasts for the Hebrews. Maybe that's how often we should indulge in these common dietary poisons. Just a ballpark estimate. That seems like moderation to me. Meantime, call to mind the thing that you don't want to live without. That thick bloody slab of steak, or the heaping mounds of ice cream, or the delectable sponginess of your cakes and pastries. Whatever it is, that's your addiction. Do you like being an addict? You know the course it takes. Increasing abuse, then death. Would you like an intervention? Beats a funeral.

Ah well. It's all just so interesting to me. So much so that I'm afraid I have to stop now, and get back to reading.


J

Another Nine Eleven

So that makes eight, right? -- since we started noticing nine elevens? Man that's a long time. And still no Giant Memorial yet either. Sort of makes me question our resolve. People just go knocking over our buildings all over the place and crashing our jets, and we just practically ignore it is all? That's wack.

Well, yeah, sure, those couple of wars, but that's a whole different issue. I mean, that was practical. I'm talking symbolism. You know, what really matters. Maybe a human chain of hand-holders or -wringers zigzagging across the free-speech zones of public commons -- something meaningful and evocative and enlightened. Thank god the cowboy is gone. Man I hated him so much. Isn't Obama the bomb? So elegant and eloquent. Did I ever tell you about the time I picked him up hitchhiking, and we shared a motel room? Dude could sweet talk the cherries off a slot machine. And I should know, girlfriend. But don't ask and I won't tell. Oh, I see I've gone all homoerotic all of a sudden. Here, let me just make a little adjustment ... left ... right ... ah, there. That's better.

What is not a fitting memorial is the call to service Obama is, uh, calling for. Service, yes, of course -- a good and fitting thing. But we do not, in the actual world of reality, meet evil with kindness. Not on a societal level. Society is a corporation, the charter of which is to promote the benefit of its shareholders. It's capitalist. Individuals can be as noble and self-sacrificing as possible. More than is possible. Sure, go ahead -- be a saint. The world needs saints as much as it needs fools, as I should know. But while we are enjoined to turn our own cheeks, it is profoundly immoral to compel the turning of someone else's cheek. Obviously. It would be not merely to ignore the oppression of the weak, but to advocate it. No. We meet evil by opposing it.

Hence, two wars.

That's the memorial. That's how we remember atrocities. Sure, soup kitchens too. But there needs to be a fist, somewhere in all that velvet glove. I confess that I'm very primitive and simplistic in my approach. It's not that I don't understand the other side -- whether left, or islamist. I just don't agree with it. Something to do with observation, experience, psychology -- you know, actual reality. Theories? Love them. (This is where I would have said "I love to masturbate, too.") But eventually we need to stop being so adolescent.

The issue is about how to live. It's an ethical question. I've been vegetarian for over 30 years. I'm not about killing. But we have to play the game by the rules. Regardless of how God first created the world, it has been recreated, and death is a tool of righteousness. Don't like it? Get in your time machine and prevent a certain dialogue in a certain garden. Otherwise, keep your eyes open for someone with a sign on his forehead. You'll know him by all that blood in the earth, crying out for justice. He strikes from behind. He's the enemy of all mankind.


J

Fresh Kills

Saw an interesting bit of trivia: Saudi Arabia’s beheading schedule is computerized.

It’s like something imagined in one of those made-for-video Revelationary movies that rich Fundavangelist preachers love to produce.

Big Hair Productions
is prideful to present...

SATAN’S BIG ADVENTURE!!!

It’s big Big BIG!!!
See! -- 144,000 virgins!!!
See!-- Myriads of beheadings!!!
See! -- Hell expanding its borders!!!

Etc. Seems the Beast has a PC. Point is, the bad guys -- yes, even our close allies the, uh, Arabians -- enjoy the benefits of mechanization. Why, if we average our two civilizations together, it’s almost the Industrial Revolution!

Which brings us to a related topic. A monument! A Nine Eleven Monument. What a super colossal idea! What sort of Monument, you query??? How about a sad little virgin wrought large and gazing wistfully out to sea? How about a ring of ethnically diverse children holding hands with soulful eyes focused on a single central point hovering in the middle distance? How about a fifteen-story mechanical bronze sunflower that always faces the sun? How about a gigantic green CRESCENT symbolizing the um inexcoriable passage of time while suggesting the uh completing arc of the lifecycle of the comity of um socio-economo-religical entities as they relate to huh multiethnicalositous perpendicularity?

Yes. While all of the above are really good ideas that I just made up, I have another suggestion -- impossible to execute now, even if we used computers, but a really good idea nevertheless. How about we ... leave the rubble in place! Perhaps we can jump into our Wayback machine, travel back to 9/12/01 and resolve to let reality speak its own mute eloquence? Clean up the neighborhood, clear out the asbestos and other sundry carcinogens, sop up the body fluids as is only fitting, but leave the broken concrete and twisted girders unmolested where they fell? Too raw, you say?

No. Just raw enough.

But that ship has sailed, that garbage scow, laden with 1,200,000 tons of dust and debris from The Pile that was the former World Trade Center. Sailed. Sailed in the form of countless dump trucks, you may remember, bound for Staten Island now that much larger an island. One point two million tons larger. Perhaps it will grow to be a new continent. Yes, we might feel some assurance that if the islamists have their way there shall be a sort of reverse Atlantis, a Brave Newer World rising from the troubled gray waves of our eastern shore, congealed from the dust of toppling landmarks like so many falling dominoes.

And this wonder the islamists will have performed, using our technology and their native genius for mayhem? What shall we call that new continent currently waiting to be coalesced from American blood and grit? (I might be using a metaphor.) We’ll call it ... Allahland!!! No, too West Coast. We’ll call it ... Seventytwovirginistan!!! No, too gauche. We’ll call it ... Saudi America!!!

Oy. What am I thinking? We won’t call it anything. We won’t be around anymore. There won’t be any we. The dodo, the passenger pigeon and, uh, American culture -- which of these three is not like the others? Trick question.

And this fact, this clear and present fact, this self-evident truth -- that there is a death cult that wants us dead -- why, there should be some sort of Monument to this bit of datum and jetsam. It seems that important. A Monument not to commemorate the evaporated dead, but to bring the imperiled future into focus ... so that even rings of ethnically diverse children might see it.

There is already a 9/11 Monument. It’s on the leeward shore of Staten Island at the dump that received some megatons of demolition detritus from its former upscale Manhattan address. Guess what the name of that, uh, landfill is. Did you guess? Wrong. Okay, get ready. Since its opening in 1946, it’s been named ... Fresh Kills!

Too obvious for irony, isn’t it. Fresh Kills Landfill and Nine Eleven Memorial Park. Sounds like prophecy to me. Maybe those big hair preachers are right. Or maybe somebody owns a Wayback machine.


J

Some Mockery, Then Some Information

I have to confess that I'm feeling differently about you. Ever since I saw you naked. I've lost all respect for you. I don't understand how anyone could let happen to them what you've let happen to you. It's astonishing. Clothes sure do make the man. Clothes, and buckets and buckets of pork rinds. It's like pudding poured into a canvass sack. There is a sort of shape. Are there any bones in there? Or is it all batting.

Food is about health. Exercise is about fitness. You can have fit people, elite athletes, who get by on genetics and training. Are they healthy? If health is the absence of sickness, then yes they are. But I see health as a reservoir of potentials. It's not just what's on the surface. Are you able to fight off sickness, and not just avoid it somehow. Can you confront it, and beat it before it gets a hold. And all those diseases that await most people down the line -- are they dormant or incipient or festering now? If so, that's not health.

Same with healthy people, with their great diets. It's not the same as fitness. Diet makes fitness easier, but fitness is about performance, and that has to be practiced. Training. By these standards, though, it is clear that the starting point is health, and fitness follows. Diet, followed by training.

I jumped ahead in the Taubes book. Here's the upshot, about why carbs are bad. All calories can be made into fat. Free fatty acids. That's just a form of usable energy in your blood. These fats are stored in cells as FAT -- blubber fat -- by being bound together as triglycerides. The glue that turns the good free fatty acids into the bad blubber is glycerol. Your body gets glycerol by burning carbs -- glucose. So the more carbs you burn, the more glue there is to bind fats. Glycerol is the limiting factor.

Isn't that interesting? It's exactly the same idea as with omega 3. You can't make anti-inflammatory hormones unless you have omega 3. The more you have, the more you can make, and that's a good thing. The more glycerol you have, the more blubber you can make, and that's a bad thing. The wrong lesson to draw from this is that you shouldn't eat carbs. Plants are carbs. Eat plants. Don't eat glue factories. Grains. Some bread? Sure, once in a while. All the time, at every meal? What, is there a famine? As I say, wheat is great if you're starting a neolithic civilization. But too few calories is not the problem, in 21st century America.

Someone told me last night that Canadians didn't seem nearly as fat as Americans. I immediately said that was because the US government started to sponsor a poisonous -- low fat -- diet, starting in the 80s. Exactly the time when obesity started its meteoric rise. Although meteors don't rise. Sure, low fat generally means fewer calories. But it also means low ESSENTIAL fats. You can turns carbs into fat, but never into essential fats. So it's a malnutrition diet. Brilliant. Thanks for that. Instead of getting the essentials, we got hydrogenated and transfats. Where's a bloody coup d'etat when you need one.

So, review these notes, and we'll discuss them next time. Meantime, re-read chapters 34 and 35 in my study guide.

God bless the United States of America.


J

Eloquence

All I heard of Obama's speech to the kids was the maxim, "When you give up on yourself, you give up on your country." A snippet from the news. And I just had to shake my head. It's such a lame and obvious attempt to sound patriotic. Gotta drag country into this somehow, cuz I'm the prez. Giving up on yourself has nothing to do with country, except in a statistical way. Kids who give up on themselves don't have country in their frame of reference. Might as well pick any other abstract and insert it. They're giving up on capitalism, or the environment, or whatever.

And he gets the order wrong. Backwards. People who give up on their country give up on themselves. That's what a patriot would understand. Of course Obama gets it wrong. It's just words put in some order that sounds nice. I did it too, when I was a teenager. It's a phase we go through. Words are important in themselves, for a while. Then, later, when we're mature, principles matter. We learn words. We discover principles, through life experience. Why doesn't the president of the United States understand this.

I don't tend to listen to music anymore. I was a musician in my youth, but nowadays I have peculiar ideas about music. No matter. Talk radio, when I'm in the car. Not a lot right now. But one station has been playing a byte from Obama's Inaugural Address. "America," he says, "in the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words; with hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come; let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations."

The "timeless words" are some reference to the hardships of the Revolutionary War. And I won't be needlessly harsh about the grandiloquent formulations -- it's the conclusion of the speech, and high-flown language is standard. But he calls us America. That seems odd. Is that normal? Sounds a little like "you people" to me. Sort of distant and impersonal and other-directed. There's me, and there's you all. Hm. The hope and virtue and braving of icy waters -- well, he's striking a pose. Children's children? Other presidents have used it. But, like, a hundred years ago.

Still, it's awfully poetical. Whoever wrote this is damn talented. He should write something for Barbra Streisand. Let me see if I can do it. Ahem.

Let us go forth then, into the glorious unknown of the future, firm in our conviction that no terror shall afflict our resolve, no hardship shall quench our virtue, no adversity shall prevail over our steadfast commitment to the path we firmly set for that great dream laid out before us by our fathers and our fathers' fathers, that our children, and our children's children, and our children's children's children, and our children's children's children's children, and our children's children's children's children's children -- or maybe that was one children's too many, let's see, five, so yeah, that was right -- and our children's children's children's children's children's children -- okay, I admit it, I'm just copying and pasting now, but isn't all this repetition poetical and rhetorically powerful? -- anyway, that all these children with their babies' mammas shall attain to that ancient promise handed down to us from of old, that all men, and women, and children, and children's children, and children's children's children, shall go forth into the bright and morning sunlight of tomorrow!

Man, I'm good. All that was just one sentence! I don't know why I'm not rich and famous, writing speeches for influential demagogues and living in sybaritic splendor on the miasmic banks of the Potomac. But I am just now starting a new business. Dog shaving. Global warming will be making the globe very warm, so it's a growth industry, get it? I was going to call it The Hot Dog Chop, then Hot Tofu Dogs, then VeggieBurgerPorium, then Jack H's Sensual Dog Massage and Vegan Taco Stand. But I couldn't get a permit from the city, so now I'm going door to door with a pinking sheers and a tub for housewives and shut-ins to soak their feet in. Like I say, it's a growth industry. And I offer backyard dog doo removal as well -- I've got a stick with a nail in it.

I have five blisters from tonight's workout. Two were just rips, and two are blisters under thick callouses. I thought I was a big dog, but under all this hair I turned out to be a vegan taco.

Thank you. God bless you. And God bless the United States of America.


J

Bad Science

I'm twenty percent into Good Calories, Bad Calories. So? I'm a slow reader. I'm obviously very good at math though. First section is all about cholesterol. As you will know, my superhero identity is LowCholesterolman. It's a very important mission that I have, but it doesn't, fortunately, have much to do with cholesterol per se. A mere symbol of my overall and pervasive healthful excellence. Because, as I am being informed -- having felt no need of the information previously -- cholesterol levels seem to have a random correlation to mortality.

As Taubes has it, there was an invalid hypothesis, that high dietary fat is correlated to increased heart disease, and this fat is best indicated by serum cholesterol levels. The science does not support the hypothesis, but politics and ambition and bias all coalesced in the late 70s to bring about the announcement if not the reality of a consensus, and the dogma was set.

My own paradigm identifies not dietary fat, but animal protein as the great killer. Well, that, and dietary fat of the omega six kind -- not at all animal ... vegetable, any of the vegetable oils you use to kill yourself with. I call them the Cees and the Esses. Corn, cotton, canola, soy, safflower, sunflower, um, peanut. Not food. Poisons. Lard is better. By far. This is a digression, however.

The problem, aside from politicizing science, is in simplifying it. First, epidemiology -- by which we identify population-wide causes of disease -- is a technique very well suited to identifying single causes, when the cause is singular. A polluted well that is causing dysentery, or cholera, or whatever it is that polluted wells cause. Epidemiology is perfect for this. But when the cause is not some single agent, but something environmental that must interact with the complexities of genetics and diet and a host of other subtle and confounding factors -- not so much. I'm forgetting the word for it, but there's a problem with medications, that can act in unpredictable ways on an individual basis. One size does not fit all. It's not just dosage -- it's categorical.

So when cholesterol was put forward as the dietary Satan, well, Satan is not so simple. They didn't even know to distinguish between HDL and LDL (the bad one, of which I have none). Triglycerides seem to be a greater culprit, and you'd have to be a super brain genius like me to ever have even heard of such a thing.

The problem isn't just that America trotted gaily down the wrong primrose path. By substituting in vegetable oils for saturated fats, America got fat along the way. Not just fat -- sick. Thanks for that, liars and idiots in the sciences, government and media. Now go to hell for your sins.

Application for today? Well, of course change your diet. But there is a perfect analogue to the cholesterol debacle. It's called Global Warming. A single cause, anthropogenic carbon dioxide, blamed for a non-existent rise in global temperatures -- temps have fallen every year this decade. But y'know what? The debate is over.

Like it was for so long with cholesterol. But it's not. The cholesterol idiocy has caused untold damage to the health of well-meaning people. Now we're set to ruin the world economy over carbon. If we live long enough, it seems, we will see every mistake repeat itself, time and again. It's a good thing the government issued those dietary recommendations about heart-healthy veggie oils, so that we'll die too soon to fry to death on the superheated surface of this dying world.

So that's a good thing. Never mind.


J

Optimally Hot

In nearly 4 years of this blog, I've never let so many days go by unattended. Yet you survived. This both pleases and disturbs me. I have made you strong. But I'm not essential? I find that hard to believe. It must be that you have merely survived. Yes. That seems most likely. Then I suppose I must apologize. You are used to, well, milk and honey. Some vegan equivalent -- better, of course, more nourishing.

Ah. I have found my theme.

My son, my wonderful son, of whom you hear so little yet admire so dutifully, is a very serious fitness athlete. He's experimenting with diet, to empirically identify what is optimal. Isn't that a great word? -- optimal? I talked with a guy today who said he got 250 grams of protein a day. Lost 30 pounds or so of Americanism in the past few months, on a sort of Atkins diet. Something like 1700 calories a day, and an hour of cycling, and some weights, which translates as bodybuilding.

I did not slap or even ridicule him. I just pointed out some problems with an imbalanced diet -- explained a bit about protein metabolism. Basic stuff. It's like the heavens opened up for him. He said he'd gotten most of his info from muscleman mags. Well, yes. He said it was always something different -- very confusing. Yes. Lies do that.

The point was my son, and the word optimal. Optimal is not too little, and it's not too much. Too little or much are NOT optimal. This cannot be a difficult idea. So N, my wonderful son, is now trying a totally vegan diet, raw, and mostly liquefied. This is what we might call extreme. He's not doing it as part of a fad. It's a test, for a month. He's tracking the data. Two weeks in.

He is as strong as he's ever been. He's twenty pounds lighter than when he was at his strongest -- and he's that strong now. He's lost five or so pounds. We talked a bit about why that would be. It's fluid the body retains in order to dilute toxins. Like salt -- it makes you hold water because the weaker the solution, the better. Last week he woke up with a white tongue. The body, exploiting a chance to expel goo. It will come out your nose, eyes, ears, tongue, pits, holes, pours -- any way it can. Just give it a chance. It's not sickness. It's cleansing. A good thing, for all that it's unpleasant. Dogs don't like baths.

Do I want him to have a raw liquid vegan diet? The question is improperly formed. I want him to have an optimal diet. This is the process he's using to determine what it is. Don't you wish you had a son as wonderful as mine?

For my part, I am famous of course for my excellence. You have slavishly informed yourselves about the berry smoothie and the veggie stew I use. The missing component, with which I would be perfect, is some saladie stuff. Maybe I'll do it. We shall see.

Here's the point. Saturate your cells in nutrients. Make your bloodstream thick with the raw materials of health. Imagine trying to build health out of denatured flour and fried transfats and chemicalized sugarwater and heated cadaver tissue samples. What in any of those things will build vitality? It's not mysticism or faddism. It's intelligence. Nurture a child and he will grow into an admirable man. Nourish the body and it will grow into vigor and resilience. Or maybe eating that dead fowl flesh is the way to go. Call it fifty-fifty. Putrefactive bacteria verses antioxidants. Tough call.

I'm looking at a book called Good Calories, Bad Calories. No, not an Atkins thing. The author seems actually to be good at science. Just starting it though. Here's a link. Not a fantastic speaker, and he's halfway through before he gets to the point, which is hormones -- but it's good.

I'll quiz you on it later. If you score below 70% you will be barred from this blog for five posts. If you think I can't do it, just ask youself why your computer has been running a little slower lately. And you should be ashamed of yourself, by the way. I've never met anyone so deeply into Bulgarian lesbians. I have to admit, they're hot. Optimally.


J

Play Ground

The news doesn't generally bother me, mostly because I don't listen too closely. General politics is about as much as I can handle. But this thing about the little girl who was kidnapped and used as a sex slave for 18 years by a methhead religious fanatic. Well, I don't think about it. Held in a shanty in the backyard -- shrubbery shielded it from the parole officer inspections. Two little daughters, born when she was 14 and 18. Maybe 13 and 17.

Gee. I'm absolutely certain that there were no baby boys born. Only those two little girls. Yep.

But let me ruin your day. Heard on the radio last night that a neighbor used to sort of observe sex parties going on in the backyard. Every sex offender and drug addict in the county would drop by with a keg, hooting and hollering deep into the night. There'd be a line in the backyard, outside a tent. Bobbing motions could be seen, and high-fives.

I really really need for there to be a hell. I want to do graduate work with a razor and pliars, so I can stand in line to work on this guy. I want to exhaust myself for eternity, beating him to death.

I looked up the state's Megans Law website. Plug in your zip code and get a list of the sex offenders. There are 15 in my zip code, 51 in my town. Mostly against children.


J

Greasy Dick

What a dick. Keith Olbermann. Did I spell it right? Olbermann? I'd hate to make a serious mistake like that. Misspelling. Brr. I mean, a serious thing like that. It would undermine not just my point, but my philosophy and those who tend to agree with me.

I'm talking care of someone's dog, and that, combined with a need to not think at all for a little while, has resulted in my sitting in front of the TV for an hour or so a few times this week. So I saw part of something wherein this character Olbermann was attacking a Fox talking head named Glenn Beck. You'll know it all better than I.

O got all didactic and pedantic, with clips and stuff, too complex for me to really follow, but it seems Beck misspelled something, left out a "c" in a word on the chalkboard. I came in late. I'm guessing. It's all really highbrow stuff, that only a guy with really well-tended hair could understand or articulate. My hair is too short for that. But O talked really fast for quite a while about that, filling up his airtime. He's pretty. And I could tell that he was semi-tumescent over it. He glowed, and his lips were a little loose and slobbery.

Then he got positively rigid about the fact that Beck had misquoted TR's saying -- an African saying actually -- about carrying a big stick. That's probably what got Olbermann so aroused. Get it? Cuz a big stick is like a penis, and Olbermann is so gay. Maybe a little jungle fever at work here? Cuz a hightoned intellectual like O would know everything there is to know about Roosevelt and African sayings.

Well -- and follow along, cuz it gets complicated -- Beck had said, "Walk softly and carry a big stick." Git it!?!?!!! Did you see?!?!!!?!?! Walk softly. WALK!!!! HAAAAAAHAAAA!!!!! But that's NOT IT!!!!! Olbermann enjoys a full release all over it. He ejaculates in a shuddering climax that it's TALK!!! "TALK softly and carry a big black penis!!!!" I quote from memory, but I'm sure about the TALK -- cuz it sounds so much like walk, see, which is Beck's stupid, ignorant and unforgivable mistake, that invalidates any point he did or could ever hope to make.

But it's not "Talk softly and carry a big stick." It's "Speak softly."

What. A. Dick.

But that's not why he's a dick. I wonder if being a dick is genetic. Is Olbermann's mother a dick? His daughter, if he had one? His "wife"? -- if he's not the wife? Are they dicks, or some near equivalent? I only ask because I'm sort of convinced by Olbermann, that people who like Beck are just as bad and evil as he is. I like that reasoning, because it opens the door for me to get personal without evidence and attack Olbermann and his family, who must be dicks. That seems fair, right?

Olbermann is a dick because he attacks Beck for making mistakes while speaking extemporaneously. You know, not reading it off a teleprompter. It's a really good thing to attack that sort of mistake. Because they are so substantive. My own students never learned anything from me, because I sometimes wrote too fast on the chalkboard. They were damaged for life. It's why I don't teach anymore. The guilt was too much.

There Olbermann is, reading his carefully practiced attack essay, composed and proofread and corrected by his staff, about what a fool Beck is for making mistakes while speaking without notes.

Disagreeing doesn't make us dicks. Taking unfair advantage does. What a ball of grease.


J

Departures

Dignity is in our bearing, not some incidental of environment or happenstance.

On the other hand, sometimes a little glamour helps.

It can be taken too far, of course.

External view.

A different mindset.

Because you can't be too careful.

Like, maybe, go for a walk?

Take in the sights.



I said take in the sights!

Get some fresh air.

Work up a thirst.

Meet a hot guy.

Take in more sights.

Have another drink.

Go for another walk.

I said WALK!

Well, uh, all walk and no play...

Something about being careful?

It works both ways.

Slipping the surly bonds of earth!

Beauty and magic are almost the same thing.

Memory isn't the only way we can have roses in winter.

Ah yes. As I say, beauty.

J

Downstairs

Top of my list was to not do to my kids what was done to me. That’s very dire sounding, but it’s just a matter of perspective. It really comes down to respect. I was raised in a household where parenting was a fine balance between discipline and neglect. Again, harsh sounding. I would opt for neglect, frankly -- in fact, I continue to do so. The discipline would most likely be thought of as abuse, nowadays. Well, it was, in a way. It wasn’t the physical stuff. It was the reason behind it. Perfection is not a reasonable parenting goal, and for parents to try to work out their own issues by unloading them onto the kids -- well, that’s a sentence that doesn’t need to be finished.

I say this -- addressing the personal with a sincere rather than my usual ironic voice -- because I’ve been thinking, in a desultory way ... if that’s thinking at all ... about, well, about facebook. There’s someone there from elementary school, fer cripes sake. Junior high, high school. Never expected to even think about these folks again. And here they are, decades later, transformed and no doubt unchanged. No great revelation or insight in this fact. Just the small smile of additional perspective.

It’s just small talk. Something that I excel at, in reverse. You know what the word persona means -- but I’ll tell you anyway, inveterate heterodidact that I am. I just made that word up, in its correct meaning. You may use it. Persona means mask, the theatrical mask of the Greeks. I’m very Greek tonight. Even though persona derives from Etruscan. That’s practically Latin, practically speaking. How else would we even know about the Etruscans? C’mon, work with me. Point is, small talk. It's what fb is about, as far as I can see. On the other hand, it has the quality of a mosaic. Tiny pieces that may go to make something masterful. Could be, if we have the patience to attend that long. I'm very etymological tonight.

Damn, I'm good.

People ask me sometimes how many kids I have. I don’t know what to say. Like, do I have grandkids. I don’t know. I think so, sort of. There are sons of my heart, who are not of my body. Do they count? Of course they do. Even though I will never see them again. You know what it is. It's Gulliver, tied down by ten thousand strings. Only he's tiny. That's what being human is.

Someone's eldest son has gone off to college. I left a comment. Probably came off as preachy. So? Who the hell are you to judge me? Now get upstairs and wait for me.

I spent my birthday with my son. What a holographic statement.


J

What the Sirens Sing

You will have seen my anger, implicit and, less often, expressed. You’ve seen hatred, very rarely. But no, never rage, I think. Well, I’m a pretty self-contained guy. But we’re the dangerous ones, eh? He seemed like such a pleasant fellow. Can’t imagine how he could have killed all those people, and so viciously. So I ran until I found jiu jitsu, then I did that. In 15 months I took two days off. That’s just stupid. It wasn’t even good for my training. But it wasn’t about the training.

Ah well. You’ll have noticed that I use different voices in these little efforts here. It’s not planned. I just start. Just singing in harmony with myself.

Here’s what it is to be human: something bad happens, and we get angry about it. Since we can’t have justice, we become angry with God. He’s big enough to take it, but that doesn’t do us any good. So when we get the chance, we grab hold of him and kill him. What, it didn’t happen? Why do you think people kill babies? I bet that some of them, Jews and Romans, knew who they had, and killed him anyway. You think that you wouldn’t. But you would. Almost everyone dies damned. If I could get my hands on God, and get away with it, it wouldn’t be pretty. Unfortunately, that would be Jesus, and he doesn’t deserve it. Awkward.

I’m just talking. When faced with it, there is no getting away with it. There are people that I can’t think about -- or rather, that I simply do not think about, because there’s only one thing for me to think, and it would just make me crazy. Please, keep your advice to yourself. Such is the nature of addiction. And you don’t know these people anyway.

Once I talked to my son when he was far far away in a land of war and madness, and he was saying how he’d like to be able to be vegetarian, but it just was not possible. He said he’d get so hungry but didn’t want to eat all that fried grease. So he got hungry, then ate the fried grease. I told him he could sprout like we used to have to do back in the seventies. So he ordered a kit for that online. My point is that I said, “Yep, food and sex, the two appetites.” And he gave the instant agreement that comes at hearing a true thing you never noticed before.

Odysseus lashed himself to the mast so that he could hear the sirens’ song. It drove him mad for a time, with some appetite, but he could not jump overboard to swim to them. Save for his bonds he would have died. There is no swimming to sirens.

I heard on the radio about a film project that videoed the Golden Gate Bridge for a year. Caught thirty people jumping. Saved six. Twenty percent survival rate. Sounds about right. One fellow changed his mind just after he launched. Adjusted his angle and survived. In the icy water he tried to cry out for help. He could only gasp. He felt something brushing his legs. Great, I survived just to be eaten alive by sharks. But it was a seal, and only its circling kept him afloat.

The director got the idea for the film when he saw the planes crash into the towers. People jumped rather than burn. Well? Some people leap to the sirens. Some stay and face the inferno.

There are true things that we don’t dare admit. Things about hatred. Things about love. What a horrible world, where appetites are poisonous and innocence is mocked. Sometimes we pass through fire. Sometimes we are consumed by it. Sometimes we are saved from the water. Sometimes we are saved in the water. Sometimes it swallows us whole, or in pieces. What choice, and what power do we have? We are what our natures make us.

Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Freedom is being able to dance like no one is watching. I don’t dance at all. But this is me, singing.


J

Pressure

This morning started pretty much the same as always, all brillig. The toves brought me my fruit, along with their usual bleatings that I deliver them from the momewraiths. I donned my battle apparel and descended into the pit, spent a few hours hacking them down, cleaving their baboon-like hides with my vorpal blade. They tried to outgrab, but you know the drill. Snicker snack. Just more of the same.

I did finish the mohole today. Clear through the magma, just as the theory predicted. Elegant. I found an ancient civilization of hominoids in a mighty cavern illuminated by burgundy phosphorescent fungi. We danced around bonfires of glittering crystal, singing the songs of Eden. Then we feasted on sacred amanita muscaria until the walls of illusion came crashing down.

I floated down an unending river while jaguars swiped at me from the banks. The air was filled with a fragrance of cinnamon, stirred by the fanning of broad leaves hanging from the canopy. The water was salty. A woman rose like sunrise from the green tide, her skin golden and her hair long and black. She walked to me, full-breasted and wide of hips, and she raised her arms and took my hand and drew me to her. I forgot myself and fell into her eyes until after a time I passed through and I was alone again.

And now I come to myself once more. It's my birthday. It has a zero in it. Generally I write something for my birthday. Perhaps I will. But you know the purpose of this blog. It's all, all of it, about emotion. How far, how high, how broad, how deep. How empty. How full.


J

masquerade

He wears a half-face mask, understanding its redundancy. He sees it as an ironical comment on -- well, on everything. He wears a long black cape lined with red, and bounds into a room like mad Hamlet, expecting fanfare and providing his own. With a broad sweep of his arm he swings the wide-brimmed hat off his head and bows as deep as his knees. It is gallantry, and suits somehow his lanky form as flesh suits bone. Seeing that everyone’s a clown, long ago he selected his role and plays out the pantomime with earnest intensity. It must pass for integrity. So many broken toys. So many haunted corners. So many shuddering inhalations.

Understanding also the imperfection of words, he uses them the way a juggler uses plates. They are amusements. They are the smoke and the mirrors of his soul. They are flame and candlewax. They are ashes and he throws them into the wind, showered and growing gray as distant rain. Another mask, of sorts -- but what isn't?

Sometimes he hears the blood behind his eyes and his face, and his half-face grows numb and slack. He stares, blind, at visions like painful memories and every sense becomes possessed with dread and certainty -- like lost nightmares called and numbered and named.

Sometimes the crowing mountainpeaks grow silent before his gaze, their crags dreary as weathered headstones, their melting caverns still as serpents. Saffron waters drip from concave cliffs and evaporate before they reach the convulsing seas under the reddened sun. Beneath his eyes a vast pale plain extends northward, stirring only with the hushed sighs of stunted scrub and low-lying thistles. Solitude nods and bobs between the moon and the stars, and only cold marks the shifting of the day.

On the shores of the churning scarlet sea, in the black volcanic sands that skirt its hungry currents, he sees scraped out like runes, pressed in like cuneiform, what must be words, preserved by some presiding spirit in the world for a purpose unknown even to itself. What meaning, what meaning? He sees them, and knows their form. But he turns without reading and moves along the shore until it bends away while he goes straight. Soon the angry surging of the waves becomes the breathless sigh of thistles whispering beneath his feet.

He wears a mask. Even he doesn't know what lies under it. He listens for the burning of a candle. He hears blood. He hardly speaks.


J

fb

For mysterious purposes of my own, some time ago I opened a facebook page under a rather predictable anonymity. Eventually someone from my primitive past tracked it down, and now, months later, there's actually some "networking" (as you kids say) going on. It's a little unsettling. Sort of plugs me back into a place I never belonged in the first place. I've skimmed through some of the pages, and there are familiar names, to which no face attaches itself.

We can explain infantile amnesia by the incomplete development of myelin sheathing. We'd have to look elsewhere for an etiology of adolescent amnesia.

I have used these pages to conjure more than exorcise the nightmares of the past. My sententious and sentimental mewlings have no therapeutic function -- they are an amusement, an exhibition not a competition. I was so dissociated in those days that I didn't have a shadow. When you're a kid you're not allowed to be aware of how sick the world is. Something to do with myelin, no doubt. It's necessary. I never felt envy or jealousy about those peers who seemed happy. It was just too alien.

Three, no, five now, people have, uh, whatever the term is -- gotten my attention. Two of them I have no clue about. The first three, well, I remember them all, after a fashion. One always wore a jacket. One had a sarcastic sense of humor to match my own. One was class valedictorian. They were actually friends, sort of, at some time or another. I must have had classes with them. But slavish habitue of these pages that you are, you will know my many qualifications of the idea of friendship.

It's like watching caterpillars -- well, larva. What ever shall become of them? I'm a death's head moth. I wouldn't have recognized them. Something to do with the hair? Man, what a horrifying decade. Where's Vietnam when you need it? For my part, there are four changes. I wear my hair short instead of as a shapeless blob, my skin cleared up, I've got hair on my chest, and if there ever was any softness to my face, it's gone.

I thought I had fb figured out, but I don't. Anything I write on mine shows up on other pages? No matter. I looked to see if there was a 25 year reunion. Found nothing. Looked again for 30. Found nothing. Crappiest class ever. Perhaps reunions have been supplanted by the internet? But I would just have been interested in seeing how they've changed, those I remember. My social skills are still as rudimentary as ever -- takes me a long time to pretend to be interested in anyone but myself. Is that wrong of me?

Anyway, you know where you can find me. As I said to God once, I'm just a left click away.


J

Again

As I continue to assert, I'm immersed in a project and just don't want to disengage even long enough to chat for a few moments with you, my good buddy. Now don't be like that. But here's a little something from a couple of years ago, back when we still thought it was okay to try to save the world from tyranny. Ah, how young we were. Now we can shake our heads at the idea of our fond folly. We've come to our senses, and find there is no danger at all, and never was. We are the enemy. Thank you, Obama, for continually pointing that out on the world stage. Helpful.

And to drive this salient and salubrious truism even deeper into our hearts, there's this:

Submitted for your consideration,


How I love that young man.

It seems so familiar. What is it? I've, I've seen it before, I know. Oh. Yeah. Now I recall.

It's the fingers. The awkward gentleness of the hands. Where can I touch that won't hurt? Nowhere, really, but we have to do it. And we can't see his expression, but we know, we know the look on his face.

Beslan.

Beslan. As a tourist spot it makes a great train station.

But people of a certain description looked upon it as a marvelous land of opportunity. Here's what they did with the school's gym:


That's an explosive charge hanging between the hoops. Hope nothing happens.



Oops. Hope it wasn't on purpose.



Well, maybe she's crying about her job?



Oh.







How we cling to each other.



And to God.



Does it do any good?


*****


Beslan

Such passion is normal, and stirs the
blood like wine – think of it as exercise.
And yes that is blood, but after all, death is just
a part of the great circle anyway.
And it’s an interesting anatomy
lesson – look at the ears, look at the spine.
And look at the foolishness in the fingers of his right hand.

Well, no matter: because there is no evil,

this

never happened.


[9/7/04]

______



Sometimes I do go a little mad.

Forgive me for that, will you?


J

banks

I saw you yesterday. You were walking by a riverbank. The water slid along imperceptibly beside you, smooth and flat and blue as twilight. You were naked from swimming, droplets still slipping down your back. The sunlight made your skin glow like you were translucent. You were beautiful.

I stood watching on the far side of the water and I couldn’t come to you. I called your name, and you were close enough to hear but you didn’t turn. Then you stopped. I called again and you moved your head as if catching the scent of flowers. You didn’t look across at me. I was in the shadow of the trees, and I thought if I could get into the sunlight I might catch your eye. But you looked into the water and nodded at some private thought.

A warm breeze stirred the grass at your feet and I knew you were curling your toes into the earth. I could see that you were smiling. The light fell over you like a mantle of tender flames, and I loved you.

Then you turned and walked away from the river, your back to me. It took a long time for you to pass from sight. You never looked back.


J

Something More about Diet

As I may have mentioned, I'm deeply immersed in a project, and I just don't want to scatter my energies. There are a few things that I've wanted to discuss with you, but I don't feel any sense of urgency from you, so why I should put myself out. Still, one of us has to work at this relationship, if it's going to last, and who else, but me. Of course.

What, abortion? Yes, I had some good reasoning on the topic, but I've forgotten that conversation I had with myself. I could reassemble it, but you haven't memorized what I've said already, so, again, why bother.

How about diet? That just always needs reinforcing. So I've had a few conversations with my son recently about it. Protein. He's all about performance. The health aspect of being vegetarian is established. I suppose I could enter into the animal debate, but that's not going to happen right now. His point is that vegetarian athletes who switch to animal foods increase performance. I'd have to look at the details. My instant suggestion was that it's the hormones and metabolic byproducts -- uric acid, say, acting as a toxifying stimulant. And hormones, both artificial, from commercial and factory-fed beef, and also natural hormones, left in the flesh from the terror of being butchered. Yes, all that adrenaline would act as a performance enhancer. There certainly could be a performance boost -- stimulants will do that. At the expense perhaps of long term health, but if it's only about short term performance, well there you go.

Like coffee. Caffeine definitely increases the availability of fat to be used as an energy source for distance runners, and presumably other athletes. But we are reading more and more about adrenal fatigue -- the over-activity of stress hormones. It would be a counterpart to pre-diabetes, where the pancreas is forced to over-produce insulin, because of a dangerous lifestyle. It's imbalanced, it's damaging to long-term health, and it's unnatural. Stimulants, including meat, are performance enhancers? It that's okay, what's wrong with steroids? Extreme example. Draw the line back where you will.

It's just a theory, the stimulatory effect of meat, invented to answer the possibility, the anecdotal possibility that switching from vegetarian to meat-eating yields good results. As I say, I'd have to look at it.

The other idea is about protein itself. I've suggested before that animal proteins are dangerous simply by being like those proteins we ourselves make. If you introduce a similar but alien protein into your bloodstream, you body produces antibodies to destroy it. All well and good. But if those alien proteins are too similar, your body learns how to attack itself. Auto-immune disease, thank you very much. It's a theory. I don't know that it's been established yet. But it makes sense.

Another problem is in the composition of the meat people eat. First, you cannot use protein. Nobody ever used protein. It's useless. That why we digest it. We break it down into its constituent amino acids, and use them. Now here's the thing. If we eat meat, it's fair to suppose that the ratio of amino acids the meat yields is comparable to the meat, muscle, of our own bodies. So, yes, meat would go to make muscle. But there's a problem with the reasoning. Because the meat/amino acids that we might use does/do not go just to make muscle. Our bodies use amino acids for a host of other functions -- to build every hormone we have. They are used as peptides, as neurotransmitters, as the building blocks of bone and hair and fingernails and organs and, well, everything. Everything that gets done in your body is done by proteins. It's not just meat. Proteins are robots, that travel throughout the body and get things done. See? You are guaranteed to get exactly the WRONG ratio of amino acids, if you eat meat.

I don't know what the ideal proportion of essential amino acids might be. I don't think anyone knows. But I know it's not that of any meat. Milk, perhaps? Human milk? But you do not plan on doubling your weight in the next few months, do you? Because that's what milk is designed to do. So milk is the wrong ratio too, for adults. It must be, must be, it seems to me, some admixture of plant materials. What recipe? I don't know.

That's why I advocate eating as wide a variety of plant nutrients as is convenient. I don't know what I need, but my body needs it anyway. So give it a chance to choose. You don't need to have every nutrient at every meal. It's not about loading the stew up with absolutely everything. Indeed, that may be a bad idea. Digestion is a very very very complex thing. We know this because there are as many neurons in the gut as there are in the brain. From this we might conclude that digestion is as hard a thing to figure out as calculating the orbit of Neptune. No worries, our gut can do that. But let's not make it unnecessarily difficult.

So consider those dietary supplements, the powders that have every fruit every heard of, all in a single tablespoon. Sounds pretty good, right? Maybe. But that's like 112 different plant families that your body has to figure out how to digest and absorb, all in one sitting. Sure, it can be done. But it seems like a strain. Like stimulants would be a strain. Like adrenal fatigue would be a strain. Like pre-diabetes would be a strain. Stress is okay. Distress is bad. How about getting all those nutrients over a few meals, or a week, or something like that. Rather than glut yourself, for all that the portions are small.

Well. That's just something that I've been meaning to say. I'd be pleased to have a dialogue about it. Or you can just believe me and obey me like a servant or a child. Either is fine.


J

Wings

Some fellas were talking about who they’d fight for $250,000. Weirdly, I wasn’t the center of attention, which is always a little surprising. But finally, at long last -- and well overdue it was, too -- I managed to draw some attention to myself, and inserted myself into the conversation by saying that I’d fight my own son for a quarter million dollars. Well, I’d have him beat me up. And he’d no doubt do it. He’s seen how much pain I can take.

And here I lay, supine on my silk-draped pallet, naked of course, with a golden light caught up and sparkling on my porcelain skin as the gentle zephyrs of a distant fan teasingly caress my luxuriant body hair. My fingertips trip playfully up and down my manly chest as I savor the sweet tart bouquet of freshly peeled grapes heaped up in an elegant skyphos I once salvaged from an ancient Greek shipwreck. Ah, those fine Aegean youths. But that’s another story, for a different day. My point now is that I’ve been considering what a glorious figure I cut in my own youth so supplely-muscled, such fine lines, perfectly proportioned, as of pristine marble crafted by some sublime genius into the very quintessence of masculine perfection. Beautiful. I was beautiful. Of course, for a man on the imminent cusp of his sixth decade I am still a magnificent blond beast. Glorious. Indeed, for a man of any age I’m simply stunning. But I am forced to turn the brilliant light of my unmatched intellect upon the melancholy consideration of what might have been.

If I had done then what I do now, the world would never before have seen the like. I would have been a phenomenon. N, superb though he is by nature alone, had the impossible advantage of having me for a father. If I myself had been granted that honor -- to have had myself as my father -- well, it is the stuff of legends.

It is a rare thing to encounter the sublime. Yes, I believe it is possible. How much richer the world would have been, had I had the advantages of those who have been blessed to be mentored by me. To have started with such physical and mental advantages -- already at the vanishing point of perfection -- and then to have been raised by the gentle guiding hand of my own saint-like disposition … so wise, so patient -- well, it’s best not to think on such matters. It would be almost blasphemous.

If I did then, a quarter century ago, what I do now, I would have been unstoppable. Next week I turn 50, and even now it would take me two months to get back to running a five minute mile, the level at which excellent college athletes perform. Than whom I am 30 years older. Years ago I would have had my flexibility. I would have had unparalleled endurance. I wouldn’t be stiff and I wouldn’t have ached.

I turn my mind away from such melancholy thoughts. Unattended excellence shall not haunt me. I strive for excellence now. I cannot help, though, but reflect upon those youths who admire me but do not strive for even the shadow of my hard-won perfection. They are, you see, young. They do not know what lies ahead for them. They do not know the pain in the knees, in the back, in the joints and muscles and fibers of the body -- the stiffness that comes after the stillness of a moment. They do not know the morning ache that comes with the decades. For them it is an occasional thing, and not the constant companion of vigorous striving. They do not know that time accelerates, and they do not realize that they must attain excellence now, because it has an absolute standard, and there comes a time when every point of praise must be qualified -- He’s amazing, for his age.

We live in a body for a reason. To celebrate the physical. Excellence is a choice.


J

A Modest Proposal

Okay, so let's look at it. Healthcare is expensive, and there's an industry all geared up to distribute it. You know, doctors and clinics and insurance companies and drug companies. So if the government takes it over, it will be cheaper. That's just summary. It's self-evident -- not the truth of it, but that's the case they're trying to get us to believe.

Why take over healthcare? Because it's catastrophic when you have problems. Sometimes the issues are your fault, and sometimes it's all very mysterious -- a sort of injustice -- but there's no reason to bring blame and morality into it. Let's just look at outcome. People are sick or injured, and healing them takes a lot of money and expertise. They get caught up in a vast and rather bureaucratic system, frankly impersonal in many cases. They are just a file. They see the expert once in a while for a few minutes, who makes decisions almost independent of the client. The expert knows how these things should be done. Who has the wherewithal, the moxie, to assert their own opinion against that of an expert?

It hit me a couple of nights ago. I slapped my head, it was such a good, and obvious, idea. They want to nationalize doctors.

Nationalize lawyers.

If you have a legal problem, whether or not it's your fault, it is catastrophic. You're caught up in a vast and confusing bureaucracy. You can be ruined, financially and spiritually. So everyone should have a lawyer, for free. Not just for criminal cases -- for civil as well. Cases that you cause, and cases that just happen to you. Whatever the details they're trying to hatch for the doctors, they should have a precise counterpart for lawyers.

Sweet?

You can work out more details yourself. Get on the chatrooms. Call up talk radio. You don't even have to give me credit.


J

A Note of Explanation

I suppose there will be a fair amount of confusion over the past few postings on this blog. Let me explain. It’s rather embarrassing. I make no apology for the fact that I am a very private man. But this is a public forum, so it is incumbent upon me to set the record straight, and this requires some personal, if personally distressing, candor.

I have, you see, a twin brother. Through an odd set of circumstances that I won’t go into, his name is also Jack. I of course am the elder, so have prior claim to the name, but that is neither here nor there. My point is that in my recent several days of absence, Jack, my twin brother, has seen fit to install himself as webmaster, and has been making his own rather unique contributions to Forgotten Prophets™. In surveying his odd writings, I’m afraid that a number of misconceptions might have accrued to myself. I shan’t bother to enumerate and correct them, or any of his countless mistatements, in any systematic manner. Enough to say that any reference to emptied bank accounts, consumption of alcoholic beverages, being or not being “gay,” anticipated wedlock to the widow of Yasar Arafat, impending criminal charges or indigence -- such jottings will be entirely the product of the fevered mind of my dear, troubled twin brother Jack.

I returned home this afternoon to find Jack, my twin brother, slumped comatose and naked over the computer keyboard. I feared he was cyanotic, but it appears that at some time in the months since I last saw him he has tattooed himself entirely blue from head to toe. He'd aspirated a large volume of gastric fluid, but fortunately was able to breathe through a certain physiological peculiarity, an anomalous duct unique to himself that joins in a complex arrangement his sinuses, his trachea and the anterior of his neck. He's been featured in medical journals. And in freak shows, but that is neither here nor there. Needless to say all this was quite unsettling -- I speak of his having broken into my home, trashed my belongings and hacked my computer. He has completely plastered the walls with fecal matter -- his own, blessedly, although the sheer volume is astounding. I represent the sentiments of my entire extended family when I say such conduct is not unexpected. But the reality is so much harsher than mere anticipation prepares one for.

The doctors tell me that Jack, my twin brother, will recover. Frankly, we count this as a mixed blessing. Of course we love our dear lost Jack, my twin brother, but frankly the hardship that he and his disorganized personality have caused to every single person he has ever come in contact with is distressing to the utmost degree. If there were some way to neutralize his malignance -- some institution or medication -- we surely would have exploited that expedient. Unfortunately labotomies are no longer a legal option. If only he were still a fetus. But that is neither here nor there. The thought of his freely wandering about in the public streets is a horror, frankly, too terrifying to dwell upon. He can be recognized by the Phantom mask he wears -- and of course by the fact that he is now blue. But I’ll speak no more on the matter. Just hide your pets.

Fortunately, my other twin, Igor, is in no condition, physically or mentally, to cause any harm to anyone. I won’t go into details, but anyone who recalls allusions I've made to a certain fictional “Bobo” will understand some of the burden I’ve had to deal with, my whole life. Igor perpetually slumbers peacefully nestled under my left armpit, the majority of his stunted body having been absorbed into my own flesh when we both shared the tender cloister of our mother's womb. But that is neither here nor there.

I don’t want pity.


J

Outraged and Bewildered

What the hell is this?!? I tried to use my bank card and I don't have any damn money!!! What happened to all my money?!???!! These stupid banks can't get anything right. How am I supposed to get my twenty million dollars if they can't even handle some simple little savings/checking account? Well, they'll work it out. They'd better. Or else! I'll deposit all my millions in another bank! That'll teach them.

But on a lighter note, I'm still feeling like Jed Clampett. Yeeha! Still celebrating a little. I emailed my bank account number and password and social security number and mothers maiding name and all that to my sweety Mrs. Suha Arafat. Haven't heard back yet, but any time now. And then all bets are off. Know the number of any good hitmen? Cuz there are some people whose hash needs to be settled and I don't mean maybe. Only reason it hasn't been taken care of was the money. Like that neighbor whose dog won't stop barking. Oh yeah, I got a little NineEleven Day airmail package for him let me tell you. A real lifechanger, if you get my meaning.

Kind of weird that I haven't heard from Mrs. Arafat though. I mean what's with that? I think there's like this contract, like this contract, right? It's a breach of promise thing if she don't come through. But she wouldn't do that. She's a famous and responsible person. She's like the Queen of Palestine or Arabia or something, right? I mean I have the email, so there's like legal evidence and stuff. A paper trail. It's documented. I could take her to court. But she wouldn't do that. She's famous. Them famous bitches don't like scandal.

So anyways I told my boss to go to hell. Man was that beautiful. I marched in to his little cubicle and didn't say a word and I grabbed him by his wide 1973 tie and shoved my fingers up his nose to the second knuckles and I was gonna lift him over my head like they do in the WWF but I must have slipped a disc or something cuz I got this incredible electric pain in my lower back and fell over backwards and couldn't move at all. They had to call the paramedics, and all this a-hole middle-management wonk could cry about was his freakin torn sceptum. He said he was going to file criminal charges. Yeah Bosco bring it on. big man. I got twenty million simoleons behind me that says you're gonna wish you went to law school instead of Mcdonald's Restaurant Middle Management College. Loser. Tweny milllion!!!!! Looser!!!

So anyways I gave away all my stuff. It was a bunch of crap. A clean start, that's what I'm gonna get. Gucci all the way. Time for some serious bling. But I guess it was a little precipitous, cuase all I have to wear is this clown suit left over from a few Halloweens ago. 1999. and a wide tie. They sent me home from the hospetal in one of those gowns -- I'd sort of soiled myself when I was paralyzed. You'd think they'd do laundry at least, those nurses. A clean start and a clearn pair of underwear. underpair! Anyway I can't find any quarters for the laudromat, and they shut the water off last month. But all that's changing! Good times are here at last!

So anyways. I'll keep you posted. It should be any time now. It's sort of a long walk to the bank, but it's worth it. The phone isn't working. Guess it slipped my mind to pay the bill or something. I'll be heading out in a minute. Just gotta take a few more Motrins. I'm using a chair temporarily for a walker. Hope my a-hole neighbor don't see me. I'll pull up in my Hummer in a few days that I paid cash for from my twenty million. He'll see me then all right.

And I'm out of zima. Got panicked there for a second, but then I remembered that furniture polish is mostly alcohol. Gotta keep this party goin! After a few swollows it stopped having any taste at all. So I ate that leftover potroast from a few weeks ago. Waste not want not. I think it was the pot roast. might have been cottage cheese. Or guacamole. Don't matter. bacteria is food to. bacteria cafeteria . micro flora is good for thE DIGESTION. i WENT TO COLLAG

E YOU KNOW. i HAVE SEVERAL DEGREYS. i'M VERY SAMRT AND EDUCATED. dIDD YOU KNOW i'M 4"6"??!?! tHAS VERY TALL FOR MY AGE... .



rISH RICH RISCH!!! AHAHAAHAAAH!!!! AnD YOUR NOT. sUCKERS!!!!


I CAN'T SEWEE OUt of my left eye? was up with that ??


im not gayThere are rats in my attic

Planning for the Future

Ha! So long, suckers! You can all just go to hell, now that I'm set for life. Yeah, that's right. Set! As in MRS. SUHA ARAFAT is sending me twenty million dollars! Yeeha!! That's right, stupid, you read it right, twenty million sweet little iron men, all for yours truly! Hahaha! Here, losers, let me lay it out for you in simple numbers: 2000000000! Yeah!!! You see it right. Twenty million. All them zeroes is kind of dizzying, isn't it.

Oh, don't cry, little baby. Maybe some hot rich widow will email you someday out of the blue. You wish. She must have been reading my fabulous blog. Yeah, that's it. Mrs. Suha Arafat, former berieved wife of a certain Yasar Arafat -- a name you might be familiar with? And she's blond. that's like so hot.

Look how arfully that picture is composed. He's like a guardian angel! Kind of makes me change my opinion about him. Yessir Arafatcat. She writes me that she's got 6.5 bibibillion!!! And it's all coming to papa! You do know that number, right, retard? Here, let me put it in zeroes -- something you can relate to, being such a zero yourself!! 5.6000, 00, 000, 000000, 0!!!!!! Yeah. Thas righ!!!! $ix point five bullion dollie$!!!! Oh mommy!! *urp* Oh excuse me. That one had a flavor. You'll have to pardon me. I been celebrating. That zima really goes to your head, dont it. So what if moslums don't drink. I'll convert when I have to. Until then the ol jackhammer is gonna paaaaaaardeeeeee!!! HOO AH!!

Oh! Lookie here!!! "I [this is my honey talking here, Mrs. Araphatt] have deposited the sum of 20 million dollars with a private security firm abroad whose name is withheld for now until we open communication. I shall be grateful if you could receive this fund into your bank account for safe keeping and any Investment opportunity. This arrangement is known to you and my personal Attorney." Yeah, I know all about it. Who's saying I don't? They lie!! Oh yeah. My treasure ship has come in -- and let me tell you, matey, it was a long time a-comin' -- but happy days are here again!! First "Investment" I'm gonna make is in a full body massage, with all the extras. I got yer deep tissue right here, baby. Gonna move outta my mothers garage an into a pentouse condo on Wilshire Bullivard!!!! Look down on all you pathetic losers. Look out for water ballooons, termites!!!! You better hope it's only water.

An than she closses :: "Please expedite action and all response to my Email address below. NB / Please reply to: mrsuha_arafat2002 @ yahoo.dk. Yours Sincerely, Mrs. Suha Arafat. Thas soooo sweet. How come there are 2001 other mr. suha_arafats?

Dude, I'll be good for her. And you know what those dirty scum did to her? "I [that's my sweetheart, my little dessert plossum] have even been subjected to physical and psychological torture. As a widow that is so traumatized, I have lost confidence with everybody in the country at the moment." Wait'll I git my hans on her. No I mean them. Them scums!!! Torchuring my sugarpie. Thats the future Mrs. Aaraphat Kack H. Proffits!!!! Oh Im so mad aabaout it to!!

I'm guna by me a red convertible!! and ill have a daughter to, stepdauger named Zahra. cewl. Hope shes hott. an see all you suckers in hel.l. Hahahhaaaah!!!!!!!!!!

G.I.J.O.E

Maybe you picked up the news in one of the trades. G.I. Joe is now a bigtime Hollywood movie. Cool. Yep. G.I. Joe, or rather, G.I.J.O.E. -- which per Variety will stand for "Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity, an international co-ed force of operatives who use hi-tech equipment to battle Cobra, an evil organization headed by a double-crossing Scottish arms dealer." Based out of Brussels.

Isn’t that a boss name? Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity. Cool. Of course "Integrated" and "Joint" sort of mean the same thing. And for that matter "Global" and "Integrated Joint" more or less cover the same territory. And "Entity" is a little sci fi. And "Operating" -- sort of vague, don’t you think? Now that I think about it, it only sounds boss. Grasping Instrumentally Jaunty Organ Enthusiasts. Gonadally-Infected Jazz Orchestra Entrepreneurs. Gas-Inhaling Jellyfishoid Oceanic Exhaustpipes.

Paramount marketing outside of the US emphasizes the fact that G.I.J.O.E. is an international team of crack operatives and not some transplanted transgressing cowboy. The message, according to bigtime Hollywood elite director Stephen Sommers -- no doubt a pervert and a drug-user -- is that "this is not a George Bush movie — it's an Obama world. Right from the writing stage we said to ourselves, this can't be about beefy guys on steroids who all met each other in the Vietnam War, but an elite organization that's made up of the best of the best from around the world." Gooooo, globalism!

Alas. Alas. Y’see, there's a problem. G.I. stands for something. "Government Issue". It was stamped on American military equipment during WWII, and became synonymous with the men who used the equipment. Typical American self-deprecating humor. Ironic -- Americans are not government issued. Government is American issued. We get it, of course. That’s why we fight wars. It’s why we win wars. The Persians drove their solders into battle with whips. The Hellenes raced to see who would draw first blood. Slavery contrasted with Freedom.

"Joe," on the other hand, doesn’t stand for anything. Not in the specific. Generally, it’s an archetypal American name. Interchangeable -- most any man can step into it. Then again, I’m wrong. "Joe" does stand for something. It stands, specifically, for one single man, not named Joe. His name was Mitchell Paige. One-time Marine platoon sergeant. Retired as a Colonel. Died at age 85 in 2003.

When Hasbro, Inc. conceived the idea of making a doll for boys -- well, I said it right there, didn’t I. No dolls for boys. So it really had to be manly, this doll. Not a doll at all. An "Action Figure". And it needed a history, a connection to a hero, whose face they could model the figure after. Mitchell Paige. Of course G.I. Mitchell doesn’t sound all that manly. So, Joe.

Why Mitchell Paige?

The Marines were called to build in the grim days of 1942 an airfield on Guadalcanal, a malarial island strategically situated to protect Australia from Japanese attack. Thus, vital. They set up defenses against the expected onslaught of the Imperial Japanese forces.

Vin Suprynowicz tells of the late October night when Sgt. Paige and his 33 riflemen dug in on their anonymous hilltop with their four water-cooled .30-caliber Brownings, awaiting with their 2000 comrades the assault of perhaps 8000 Japanese infantrymen.

Paige’s position bore the brunt of the assault. During the night every one of his 33 men were killed or seriously wounded. Only Paige remained. He "moved up and down his line, pulling his dead and wounded comrades back into their foxholes and firing a few bursts from each of the four Brownings in turn, convincing the Japanese forces down the hill that the positions were still manned.

"The citation for Paige's Medal of Honor picks up the tale: ‘When the enemy broke through the line directly in front of his position, P/Sgt. Paige, commanding a machine gun section with fearless determination, continued to direct the fire of his gunners until all his men were either killed or wounded. Alone, against the deadly hail of Japanese shells, he fought with his gun and when it was destroyed, took over another, moving from gun to gun, never ceasing his withering fire.’

"In the end, Sgt. Paige picked up the last of the 40-pound, belt-fed Brownings and did something for which the weapon was never designed. Sgt. Paige walked down the hill toward the place where he could hear the last Japanese survivors rallying to move around his flank, the belt-fed gun cradled under his arm, firing as he went. ..."

When dawn broke and the battle was done, on "a hill where the bodies were piled like cordwood, Mitchell Paige alone sat upright behind his 30-caliber Browning...

"And that's where the unstoppable wave of Japanese conquest finally crested, broke, and began to recede. On an unnamed jungle ridge on an insignificant island no one ever heard of, called Guadalcanal."

Ninety Marines were killed. "The American estimate of 2,200 Japanese dead is probably too low."

Some years later, in 1964, Hasbro gave Mitchell Paige a call, wondering if they might use his likeness on a doll. He would have thought they were mad. They were slick talkers, though, because they convinced him. He had one condition. "That G.I. Joe must always remain a United States Marine."

There must have been no actual contract, because G.I. Joe is no longer a Marine. He's a Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity. No contract -- only someone’s word of honor.

You can’t guarantee honor. Not unless you’re a man like Mitchell Paige.


J

Some Old News

Glamorous metrosexual romance novel cover model Fabio describes himself as a "testosterone machine" who "used the fashion industry" but "never let them use" him. Despite his lovely hair, he's not at all gay. "Oh my God, I was going through [female] models like crazy." Nowadays, at age 48, he claims to date mostly would-be actresses. "They're always complaining about their work ... this casting or this part they are hoping to get, and I have to say, 'Come on, you're a fucking waitress.' I don't say that, but I think that, you know, because I'm a gentleman."

On a related note, Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Confederation, has made a Judo instructional DVD. Partnered with World and Olympic Judo Champion Yasuhiro Yamashita, the video will be released in February. Putin has been a black belt in Judo since his college days, and his physical fitness is a significant component in his massive popularity among Russians. He is on record as stating that his favorite president is FDR, whom he uses as a role model; FDR, of course, was untroubled by constitutional niceties, as exemplified by his mass internment of American citizens and his attempts to pack the Supreme Court. On a related note, bill clinton appears to have perfected his salute, which appears to give him a powerful if oddly positioned erection.

Netherlander Yvo de Boer, chairman of the UN Climate Conference in Bali, broke down into tears at the podium when the Chinese delegate launched into a tirade accusing him of excluding the Chinese from a meeting. A vote was then suggested to change the chairman's title to "chairperson". Summing up his experience later, de Boer described the conference as "long". He was seated behind a decorative plant displaying large yellow balls -- his testicles, surprising only in their size, which is explained by the fact that they were empty, mostly. On a related note, iguanas have been observed falling from trees in southern Florida due to a cold snap. The coldblooded creatures just shut down and lose their grip.

The skin of 57 year old Paul Karason of Madera, California, has turned entirely blue. The condition is known as argyria, and is the result of Karason's 14 year use of colloidal silver as a tonic. Karason did not notice the change until it was quite pronounced. He continues to use the product. On a related note, "the equivalent of a quarter to half a teaspoon of cinnamon given to humans twice a day decreased risk factors for diabetes and cardiovascular disease, including glucose, cholesterol and triglycerides, by 10 to 30 percent. ... As an anti-inflammatory agent, cinnamon may be useful in preventing or mitigating arthritis as well as cardiovascular disease. ...cinnamon's ability to block inflammation and enhance insulin function may make it useful in combating [Alzheimer's] as well."

Florida lawmakers are contemplating bumping bestiality up to first-class felony status, after the "rape" and "murder" of "Meg", a pregnant goat. The maximum penalty will be 30 years imprisonment for anyone having sexual contact with an animal. On a related note, German officials are horrified at the disappearance of two polar bear cubs from the Nuremberg Zoo. The cubs seem to have been eaten by their mother.

After severely injuring himself by plummeting off a 40-foot wall while escaping from the Pueblo County jail, Scott Gomez Jr is suing the state of Colorado. He bases his complaint on the claim that guards should have done more to prevent him from the attempt. His suit states that guards "did next to nothing to ensure that the jail was secure and that the plaintiff could not escape." On a related note, Utah inmate Michael Polk has sued for the right to practice the Asatru faith, based on the worship of ancient Norse gods. The felon claims that to fully exercise his constitutional right, he requires a wood and boar-skin drum, a mead horn for quaffing wassail, a rune staff and Thor's hammer.

Accused dirty-bomber and convicted felon Jose Padilla -- whose chosen name is Abdullah al-Muhajir -- is suing an administration lawyer for his opinion that harsh treatment of accused terrorists is legally permissible. Padilla is appealing his 17-year conviction, as is the Justice Department -- the former claiming the sentence is too harsh, the latter that it is too lenient. On a related note, one-third of moslem Arabs are illiterate. Of these 100 million, seventy-five percent are between 21 and 45 years of age. Half of all Arab women are illiterate.

The recent corrupt election in Kenya -- after which election commissioners failed to turn in their tallies, turning off their cell phones and making themselves unavailable for up to 36 hours -- has provided an excuse for tribal violence to erupt. The Luos, rivals to the Kikuyu tribe of President Kibaki, have taken to randomly murdering women and children. In once instance, up to 50 Kikuyu men, women and children were locked inside a church which was then burned to the ground. On a related note, Liberian warlord Gen. Butt Naked has apologized to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for his actions during the long civil war, which lasted from 1989 to 2003. Butt Naked, whose birth name is Joshua Milton Blahyi, received his moniker from his custom of wearing only army boots when he and his drug-addicted troops ran into villages where they would slaughter all the children and eat their hearts; the troops were renowned for using severed heads as soccer balls and for sacrificing children before every battle to receive magical protection. In all, they killed 20,000 villagers. "Every time I tell people my story," says the former general, "I feel relieved." Mr. Naked now lives in Ghana, where he works as a Christian minister.

J

smallness

Everybody knows practically everything already. Ignorance boils down to a matter of details -- the big picture is easy. It's not that we don't know, but that we don't care.

When my son was a very little boy, probably four, we were out shopping, and when we got back into the car he showed me a packet of gum and proudly said, "Look at what I have. And I didn't even have to pay for it!" And I said -- I still remember my tone, so earnest, emphatic, so innocent -- "Oh N, that's called stealing!" And I went back into the store and paid for it. Ho ho, look what my little boy walked out with. Oops. When I returned, he was sobbing into his hands with shame. I took him onto my lap and hugged him, like he was the most valuable thing in the world.

In lessons like these, we learn the big picture.

But somehow, some people don't get it. Maybe they weren't hugged. Maybe at such times their father's tone didn't rise from the heart, but from anger. How dare you fail! In any case, some people skim across the surface of an idea, taking its outline for its substance. They hear some superficial idea, and ask no questions of it. A liberal would say this of a conservative. A conservative would say this of a liberal. The truth does not lie somewhere in between. In some issues there is no compromise, no moderation, no splitting the difference.

To function in the world, we make our peace with injustice. The alternative is to take justice into our own hands, and that generally proves to be an unworkable solution. But we must do what we can, however slight that may be, to reverse the race toward heat death, to shatter the crystallization of atoms that a universe unmotivated by God must otherwise achieve. And part of that process is to remember the necessary lessons we learned as little children.

Remembrance comes with reminding. So I feel no discomfort -- or very little -- in sometimes acting the school marm. Because I get something out of it too. Every once in a while I get to take someone into my long arms and hug them as if I loved them with all my heart. Or at least I am reminded of such times, long past now, and that has a sweetness of its own.


J

Heads Up

One of the creepiest and freakiest things you're likely to see this week. If you watch it. Which I do not recommend, if you are very squeamish, as I am. It's the last few minutes that do it. If it's real.




J

Carbs, Inc., Etc.

Food as medicine. We already know it's a drug, but how about its ability to actually make us well? I myself am a sort of example of this, given the past 30 years and my present state of preservation. But for all that I'm unusual, I've never been anything like disciplined, let alone fanatical. I just don't want to eat meat. That's not a hardship. And it's worked out really well, given that I have 30 years of not having gooey putrefaction oozing sluggishly through my digestive tract, feeding and breeding toxic bacteria so I can absorb their waste products. But I've always had a sweet tooth, so there's not been a lot of real discipline. And still I have really good benefits. Imagine what might happen if we got it right?

Just got an email from my son. He's a very serious athlete, working toward world-class status. And he understands that diet is utterly pivotal. He's eating far fewer carbs -- by which we mean, mostly, grains. The math of his diet works out to 430 calories from carbs (almost all from fruits and vegetables) -- 22%; 500 from protein -- 28%; 970 from fat -- 50%. Total calories, 1900. Aprox.

That's A LOT of fat. A lot of protein too. And yet. And yet it's working very well. "All of my fats are derived from nuts, olive oil, coconut oil, avocados and occasionally flax or organic butter in smaller quantities. I don't count fish oil supplementation into my daily fat intake. If I drop my fat, I immediately feel it and am hungry. I find it impossible to eat any more carbs unless I eat a lot of fruit." Don't you wish you had that problem?

"I've been doing it for 3 weeks and have leaned out more, increased my output and my heart rate has steadily dropped. I weigh in consistently at about 183 but am as strong (actually stronger) as I was at 203. I have very strong mental clarity and focus."

I wake up feeling like I've slept in a cement mixer. Sometimes I can think about a single topic for as long as 15 consecutive seconds.

"I think post-workout nutrition is way overlooked in terms of recovery. When my PW nutrition is solid, I never get sore. My PW meal doesn't count towards my day blocks."

See? It's rational. It's purposeful. And most of all, it's effective. The way doctors fiddle with a patient's medication dosages? The same thing is possible with food. It's just a matter of being methodical. Problem is, nothing is as emotional as food. Might as well tell an addict to be methodical with his heroin injections. They're not called dope fiends for nothing. They are still called dope fiends, right? Donut fiends.

"Right now I have one cheat meal a week on Thursday nights. I have everything dialed in so specifically it's ridiculous; but it's so easy now -- second nature. After I eat my one little cheat meal my veins stick out like crazy. Also, since I don't binge on my cheat meals anymore, I don't have a noticeable increase in morning heart rate or the bodyweight fluctuations anymore."

Veins sticking out is a sign of metabolic stress. Why would eating stress you that much? Imbalance, of course, but I don't know much about this. I'll ask my son.

He mentions a supplement called Resveretrol, and I don't know much about that either, so I asked. It "activates the same genes that calorie restriction does [which increases longevity], only without the calorie restriction. It's taken from stressed grapes that fight off molds and fungus. In eating the stressed grape skins, we activate the genes that are responsible for survival, mimicking the benefits of calorie restriction." Could be. I haven't seen the data. I do know that calorie restriction is the only proven method of vastly increasing vital longevity. There must be genes responsible for that.

Here's the things. Animal proteins are sort of poisonous. If there is such a thing as auto-immune disease, animal products are a major factor. And they are very hard to digest -- like using your gas just to make your motor hot, rather than make it go. Indeed, we do not need protein at all. We need amino acids, the building blocks of protein. We don't need them just to make tissues -- we need them as peptides, as hormones, as neurotransmitters. If we could get that ratio right, well, it would be ideal, the way right things are ideal.

Same with carbs. All carbs break down into glucose. That's a lot of eating, just for the sugar. A lot of health problems, too. It's not the carbs. That's the wrong emphasis. It's the phytonutrients, the chemicals in plants that do all that protecting against mold and bugs and viruses and, uh, cosmic rays. Get those in the right amount, and you will be sure to get all the carbs, the glucose that you need.

Same with fats. Fats are just calories, which is just heat. Heat is, usually, the enemy of an engine. It's not about the calories. Calories are not a problem in our society -- not too few calories, anyway. It's the kind of fat. Point is, there are essential fatty acids from which your body makes hormones. If we get too much of one sort of fat, we get too much of certain kinds of hormones. We get too much omega 6 -- substrate of the inflammatory hormones. So use no vegetable oils unless you think inflammation is a really good thing for you, and use much much more omega 3 -- because anti-inflammatory hormones make you feel so good.

See? We've been propagandized, or at least miseducated, into thinking in terms of proteins and carbs and fat, when it should be amino acids and phytonutrients and omega 3. We think about calories instead of nutrients. If we think of nutrients at all, it's only as vitamins and minerals -- the stuff you can get in superscientifical formulas from the futuristic Atomic Age of the ultra modern Nineteen Fifties, when nutrition was invented and all our food was pills!

It just seems a bit unthoughtful, though, doesn't it? It does to me. Think of it this way. Almost all of the nutrients that a cow eats are not available to you by eating its flesh. Yes, some of the vitamins and probably more of the minerals are transferred to you through the bloodburger, but all, all, all of the phytonutrients have been used up, burned up, by the cow to make its own flesh. Nothing left for you but the flesh, and you can't build out of ashes, if you get my point.

So that's what I wanted to share. Three weeks is not a long time, so my son's experiment is in the very early stages. My own experiment has lasted three decades, and I can speak with authority.

You should listen.


J

Killing Abortionists

I'm conflicted. Because abortionists definitely need to be killed. They just do. Am I wrong? Call me mad, but I don't think so. I don't mean some doctor who does an abortion. Maybe there was a good reason? There is after all a good reason -- life of the mother. And anacephalism is a pretty big gray area that's decidedly skewed toward the black. There's a difference between viability of a fetus, and viability of a baby. A womb is, after all, more than just an incubator; it is a crib, for humans with brains. But as I have said, we do not decide general principles on the difficult cases. So it isn't the procedure per se, and it's not the vanishingly small instances of an undeniable greater good. It's the mass production of death -- the disassembly line of unwanted infants.

We know this is true, every one of us does, because of a simple common question. Are you going to keep it? They don't ask, is the fetus viable. Yes, we all do, all of us, know what abortion is for. Convenience. Parenthood is such a sacrifice -- in the word calibration of Obama, it is a punishment.

Lots of concentration camp apparatchiks were hanged after WWII. It's not like social norms justify monstrous behaviour. The mass slaughter, one at a time for a fee, is not acceptable to a civilized conscience. And yet, Roe v Wade, and its blood sacrifice priesthood.

So, killing abortionists. Usually it's morons who do it. It's about the emotion. Where's a conspiracy when you need it most? Some palpitating yahoo with a gun. Hey ever buddy, lookit me slayun the dragun!!! It's displeasing to me because of the inefficiency and disorganization.

Their Twin Towers should be taken down.

Which is the point. We have suicide bombers too. Not many at all, and perhaps not enough. But for a cause they count as sacred, they move against the rule of law to take justice into their own hands, and they are willing to sacrifice themselves in the cause. Well, this last guy, who shot down the dog in the church -- he tried to get away. Brandished his gun at a couple of other, presumably non-abortionist church ushers. So he's just a criminal who happened to choose an appropriate target. My point is that we too have jihadis -- fanatics who are out of line with the common consensus.

Because, if you didn't get it, I'm not quite serious. Not actually quite serious. I see it as ambiguous, as ambiguous an issue as abortion itself. It's legal but wrong, the way killing mass killers of babies is illegal but ... my, that's a hard sentence to finish. ... but efficacious.

What should we do with abortionist assassins -- I mean, assassins of abortionists? Obviously, put them on trial and convict them. We can't have lawlessness. And it's what they know should happen -- either by their flight or by their surrender. It is, as I say, an act of self-sacrifice, whether noble or ignoble. And conscience has a price, the greater the cause, the greater the cost.

Even I, sitting on a jury, would convict the shooter. Because I know better than most that there is no justice. Sometimes there is only order, guarded by process. It's not right, but what is? If you choose to make yourself a martyr by making yourself a murderer -- and murder it is, not because it is wrong but because it is unlawful -- you may be a hero but you will be a criminal. Good for you, and tough. And maybe you're wrong. Suicide bombers are, although the case isn't quite the same, since their targets are random. Although maybe infidels and marketplace shoppers should be killed, like abortionists. Yet somehow it seems unlikely that even such a capricious deity as Allah would go in for so much randomness. Then again, how many die by "acts of God"? It's confusing.

Take the idiot on Wednesday who randomly killed the gym women. He went on in his ramblings about how if Jesus paid for all sins how could God judge anyone for sin? You shake your head at the logic, and its outcome. Same with abortionists though. It's legal to kill babies, therefore it's right; or, it's legal to kill babies because babies are not human; or, I don't care, I will do abortions because I want the money. Same with assassins of abortionists: I will gun him down because it will save lives, or because of the blood on his hands, or because God told me to, or whatever.

If there were no free will, we'd all agree. If there were no abortions, there would be 50 million more Americans and a much higher crime rate. If there were no suicide bombers moslems would be modern. If there were no randomly murdering gunmen there would be no free will. Choice must therefore be a good thing. If you don't like my logic it just points out once more how much smarter I am than you.

Do you appreciate me? Insufficiently, at best. I don't have to do this you know. It's just that I'm so good at it.


J

What I Say to Distract Myself

I have resigned myself to being alone.

Sotomayor is confirmed. So what. A little bit of a racist. It's the way of the world. The police chief of Los Angeles has resigned to go make a lot of money in Afghanistan, and Antoilio Villaraigosa, America's worst mayor, lithped a thpeeth in his soft Mexi-Catalan politician's voice -- the voice of a man raised by women -- about how anyone, thimply anyone could get the job. "They could be black, white, Latino, Asian, be a woman. It could be a Muslim, a Catholic or a Jew." Golly. That really, really needed to be said. I see that he deliberately left out male Protestants though. Now that we're all Latinas, however -- Sotomayor, Villaraigosa -- we need not concern ourselves with those famously unwise white males that we Latinas are replacing in all high public offices.

If you just step out of it for a brief moment, and think about what this slimiest of pols so ekthquithitely annunthiated, you'll see that he is, actually, insane. It is the madness of crowds, the demiurge of which possesses Villaraigosa the way the Antichrist possessed Nero. The mob mentality, perfectly understood by this "former" gang "member". Of course he relates to group identities, rather than individuals. That's the very foundation of fascism. Syndicalism. Didn't you take Poli-Sci? Mussolini dealt with interest groups. It's the modern way. Tribes, dude -- it's the wave of the future.

And the guy who wrote a blog about his deathday. Went to his gym slash spa with a gun and killed as many women, women, as he could. Only a few. Then himself. Seems he couldn't get a date. Huh. I write a blog. I'm nearly 50. I had eh-hole older brothers. And I haven't been on a date since ... well, it's a little embarrassing. And I own a gun. But, despite all these powerful and compelling similarities, when I finally get my name in the papers it's not going to be for randomly murdering innocent bystanding females. I sort of like women. Not enough, apparently, to date, but even so. Even so, I bet traffic at his blog is way up.

Ugh. That was a mistake. I skimmed it, only. Cah ree pee. It's like kiddie porn. I've never seen kiddie porn, but it's like seeing something really dirty. Only because of how it ended. Otherwise, he might as well be a stupider, uglier, less prolix version of me.

That's what's dirty.

I'm deeply emerged in a project now, and just don't have the inclination to post. It's not a time thing -- I type fast. I'm focused, though, and that's where my attention is. As I said, I wrote the ending of my tragedy -- the ending that's already happened, not any future endings. That loosed things up for me. I won't be posting it. Very unlikely. But it's good for me, if not you. Sure, you'd just love to hear all about it. But it would make you feel dirty.

I'm getting the groove with training, bjj and cf. Two months back at it, and I don't expect to pull any more back muscles. Rolled with the tough guys this week, and I'm weak on getting submissions but I did surprise a few people. R of the Pointed Knee regretted going a little slower with me. I dominated position for ten minutes, had his back, face down, and that couldn't have been fun. But he escaped and eventually got me. Even so, I'm getting there.

I'm achy again, but it's not so bad. I'm right on the edge of too much. I'll be 50 in a few weeks, and I have a very good perspective on the whole thing, but I really do regret having started so late. Nothing to be done about it, but the fact is that age is a major factor now, a physical limitation, where it never was or would have been before. No regrets. I am content to strive for that level of excellence that is actually possible, for me in this body. Sadly, the greatest limitation is not physical, but ... emotional, mental, spiritual ... none of these are the right word. But the same lessons apply. Reality is what it is, and I will live with it.

So I have resigned myself to being alone for the rest of my life. I hope that I'm wrong -- it would be nice to have a family, a woman, sons, maybe a daughter. It's up to God, though. I see it as beyond my power. I know, don't say it. But the change in attitude is what's up to God. The way deciding, somehow -- finding the ... not resolve, courage, strength ... finding the ability to write the end of the melodrama created a change in attitude, in energy. God gives blessings. Perhaps he has another one for me. That would be nice. Beats the hell out of gunning down aerobics instructors in trendy fitness centers.

But apparently I know something the blogging fitness-center lady-killer didn't know. If you're an older guy and you want a young chick, you need to be either very charming, or rich. Posting yourself on Youtube isn't going to cut it. Or he could have blogged more. That's my plan. I can't expect God to do all the work.

My, how I've droned on. But stay tuned: who knows what other exciting and fascinating insights I might inspire you with.


J

Truth Unsupported By Evidence

A certain Dr. Jessica Stern of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government was overheard to opine about the typical American bigoted hypocritical double-standard duplicitous hypocrisy of Americans: Islamic clerics are condemned for their understandable and prudent silence regarding their coreligionists, whereas those stinking Jews and phony Christians get a free pass about all the violence committed by them all, the pigs.

I quote from memory. Oh bother. All right then, I'll look it up. Sheesh. Quoth the sage, "I've heard a lot of bashing of Muslim clerics for not stepping up to the plate and condemning extremist violence. But Catholic priests are not stepping up to condemn those who kill abortion doctors … [and] rabbis are not condemning the violent settlers' movement." Hitching up her bluestockings, she continued with the shocking, simply shocking revelation that "all three major monotheistic religions have produced violence."

Well. QED. Who can contend with the overwhelming power of such reasoning? I am bowled over, brought low, made as nothing upon the earth. My name shall be dust.

When pressed and pressed again for some specific example of these famously violent Jew settlers, she cited the infamous Yigal Amir, who in 1995 assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. Alas for the etiolated Harvard logothete, Amir's crime was condemned by every segment of Jewish society -- Knesset politicos, rabbis Liberal, Reformed and Orthodox (both Ultra and Regular-flavor), kosher butchers, mohels, accountants, agents (both entertainment and real-estate), pawn brokers, diamond merchants... Oy. The list is endless. You know ... Jews.

(A more apposite example of Jew violence -- the citing of which would have required actual informed opinion rather than visceral bias -- would have been that of Dr. Baruch Goldstein, who on Feb. 25, 1994, entered the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and gunned down 29 Moslems before killing himself. Good riddance. Um ... universally condemned.)

Maybe Ms. Stern is onto one of those intuitive truths, though, that we know must be true even if the evidence doesn't quite entirely favor it. That's the trouble with Western Civilization. It's so linear. Something a little more ... oh, I don't know ... arabesque might be in order.

As for the Catholics, well, they're all so primitive, with their idols and incense and prayer and suchlike. Islam only has four gods, Allah and his three daughters. That's much more logical than all them demiurges them Papists got. But I digress from the pure-flowing stream of Ms. Dr. Stern's crystalline logic, as when she reminds us of how the streets flow with the blood of abortionists, shed by the Christian ravening extremists which is most of them.

Bill Donohue, however, of the Catholic League, has taken the bother to point out a few annoying facts. Dang those pesky things. Facts, I mean ... but Catholics too, no doubt. Donohue -- sounds like a dirty mick to me. Anyway, this drunken potato-eating paddy points out that the last abortionist per se to be killed in the US was in 1998. Well, he said this before this year's May 31 dispatching to Hell of George "Babie" Tiller, the Olympic-level abortionist.

But prior to Dr. Killer, it had been, let's see, 13.5 million abortions enjoyed for your protection. Of such killings -- I mean of abortionists, not abortuses -- Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles stated that they make "a mockery of everything we stand for." Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston also denounced them, and ordered a moratorium on sidewalk protest vigils outside abortion centers. In New York, Cardinal John O'Connor said, "If anyone has an urge to kill an abortionist, kill me instead." But they're Catholic priests, and therefore child molesters. Who are they to speak.

Forgive my sarcasm. I see that I 've become inappropriate, and off point. For the initial idea was that religious leaders of each of three monotheisms do not condemn the bad acts of those who share their confession. And we see that this is so easily refuted that the original statement amounts to a lie.

It may well be that the leaders of two of the three religions under discussion here feel safe to take such stands and make such public statements, because they feel no grave threat. Freedom of expression is so ingrained within us that our habitual forthright manner, adopted with such insouciance, in some other culture would be boldness. Freedom is the outgrowth of a Judeo-Christian root -- of Jews and Christians. We might try, out of politeness, to graft Islam into this monotheistic tree, but it is of a different order, as we know from its fruit.

Moslem leaders and laity dare not speak out against the monsters of Islam. Political courage is rooted out in that world. Yes, it's a sweeping generalization, and so untrue. But it's true. We must pity those who belong to societies that require either fanaticism or cowardice. But until such societies outgrow this adolescent stage, they cannot be judged by the same standard, and cannot be adjudged as the equal of mature cultures, which nurture healthy debate and tolerate obnoxious opinion.

No one is more dogmatic, arrogant and intolerant than a teenager. Except, of course, dogmatic, arrogant and intolerant adults. These, however, would be adults only in the sense that anal worms are adults -- capable of reproducing. How more pleasant, the world, if they didn't. Which brings us back to good Dr. Stern.

Opinion should be informed by fact. Social stature should be supported by integrity. The urge to fair-mindedness should be tempered by a demand for self-examination. It is permissible to be wrong. I'm wrong quite frequently. I must be. I invite correction, however. I expect it would be the same with you. We understand something of the complexity of the world. And we were sufficiently chastened in our youth, that now our conviction has been mollified by humility.

How surprising it is then to come across people, and so many of them, who burn with such assurance of their assumptions that they would burn, figuratively -- or literally behead -- another. I am a man of skewed but unshaken faith. I don't quite fit into God's scheme of things, but I know that's my fault. How sad, those who think that they share God's secrets.

Here's a secret I know: the universe barely exists, but it exists regardless of our belief or agreement. If this is so, there are only two acceptable philosophical imperatives -- of self-defense, and self-sacrifice. I find no place, here, for oppression, and none for moral equivalence. Not all things are equal. Of the three gods of the three monotheisms, at most only two can be the God of this place. I find no place, here, for jihad -- which is not self-defense, and not self-sacrifice. It is oppression.

So, Dr. Stern, I must disagree with your premise, of moral equivalence. Your axioms are alien to me. They seem dishonest and irrational. I cannot respect them, and because of that I cannot respect you. But you don't need my respect. You need my civility -- and if you count the calm expression of unpleasant opinions as falling within the category of things that are civil, then you have everything you need, and will get, from me. That, after a goodly measure of initial sarcasm, just by way of introduction.

As for my hateful name-calling, about those dirty Jews and those stinking Catholics, I'm sure my bigotry is much worse than Ms. Stern's. She, after all, is only a bigot against her own culture. That's much smarter and more honest than hating outsiders. Stern. Stern. Sounds like a Jew name. D'ya think she's a Jewess? That would explain so much.


J

Hearing Voices

I've just been busy. Sorry. I get all sorts of interesting ideas, but they're fleeting, and if I don't bother to remember them, they're gone. But let me share two quick ones. I could develop them, of course, but as I say, I'm busy, and want to get to work.

First, though, consider how Islam rose during the deepest of the Dark Age in the West. Forget about Rome -- it was an insignificant backwater, relatively speaking, that mattered only because pilgrims counted it as a holy place. Its claim to fame was that it possessed the True Cross ... worth the trip. As for Constantinople, it offered nothing but a continuation of forms. What the Emperor Heraclius won from the Persians, he promptly lost to the newly invented Mohammadans. A vitiated empire verses a vital one. No contest.

Point is, under a different leader, or with some different general, or in an earlier century, the world would remember Mohammad only as an obscurity. It was not the greatness of his message. The deserts are full of prophets. It was the timing. Unless, of course, you choose to see the hand of providence at work.

The other thing I thought about, on my drive home tonight, is SETI. The aggregate search under various aegises for extraterrestrial intelligence. Mostly looking for radio signals. Well, it's a neat-o idea, if the premises are correct. How old is the universe now? Sixteen billion years? It keeps on changing, and I've stopped paying attention. Oh, I see that now it's about 13.5 billion years old. Okay. So it takes about 4 billion years, on average, for life to Evolve randomly from slimepools into mastery of radiowaves. How long will that mastery be useful, before such and such a civilization Evolves out of a need for such a primitive radio technology -- say, into a mastery of satellites and internets? Radio, for crum's sake. It might as well be steam engines. Referring to our vast data base, we see that outgrowing Marconi takes something over a hundred years.

Well, the math is turning out to be too hard and confusing for me. Let's just say that there is an infinitesimally small window of likelihood, wherein we ourselves might find the sort of evidence that SETI is capable of looking for. And yet, it occurred to me, tonight, that we would indeed find such evidence.

I don't know if there are ET civilizations. I have a pretty specific theology, that understands that the universe is, effectively, infinite -- created that way by God, for a purpose. Humanity, too, is infinite, and eternal. We call it the Resurrection. What will we do, for eternity, in immortal and perfect bodies? Remain on this planet forever? Well, some of course will remain in Hell forever. But it seems to be part of our nature, to explore, if we have the freedom. What better universe for infinite lives, than infinite space, filled, perhaps, with planets? I'm not sure -- it just makes sense.

And perhaps in this universe, God created other intelligent life forms. Their fate will be different than ours. It is for us, after all, that the one and only Son came, and became forever a Man, and died, and rose. Orthodox Christian theology. If there are other intelligent species in the universe, they did not fall, or there is some other mechanism for salvation, or they are lost. How would I know? I do know there are fallen creatures, though. Fallen angels, who had their chance, and rebelled.

There are enemies, spiritual enemies of mankind. They have extradimensional power, which amounts to extraterrestrial. If there are actual UFOs, I believe they are artifacts of such entities. And I suppose, deceivers that they are, they will, eventually, utilize SETI as part of an organized deception, so great that even the Elect would be deceived, is it were possible. Wouldn't you? If you were the enemy of mankind, well, SETI amounts to just another, newer, prophetic voice. Witches and mediums and channelers and gurus and prophets all have the same message -- God is not God. Some other god is god. Why not add SETI to the choir? Propaganda doesn't discriminate.

So those are two quick little ideas I had. I share them because I don't want you to feel neglected. Now I've got to let you go. Things to do.


J

HealthControl

Let's just take a look at what they want to regulate. HealthCare. Not meds. Not even procedures. Not actually even the providers. All these things are regulated already. It's the care itself. How you get it. How you pay for it. Who from. It's the care they want to regulate, not the health. How can you regulate Care? You can Care about this, but not that? As for regulating Health, that's what bodies are for, in close cooperation with behavior.

Consider food. For all that it's regulated, you can buy it on street corners. It might as well be drugs, for the ease of it. What FoodCare would do is tell you where you can buy it, and when, and what. The more seasoned among us recall the Soviet system, of long outside lines in front of counters blocking empty shelves, or filled with jars of pickled rhubarb. And you had to bring your own bag, like in San Francisco or be fined.

HealthControl has been tried as well. Any socialist system does it. It has the very salubrious effect of providing Care where it will do the most good -- to those who need it least. The aged and infirm are obviously low-priority, being the least productive members of society, and the motto is well known, From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Since you need only what you can use, and we know what you can use by what you produce, and the sick are least productive, they need the least HealthCare. QED. Socialism is nothing if not logical.

The solution, of course, is SelfcontrolCare. It's this troublesome free will thing. If only the government would live up to its name, and actually govern us, so that we wouldn't have to. Everything else would fall into place. With a sufficiently powerful government, there would be no poverty or illness or crime at all, or Global Warming which is destroying the Planet because of manmade carbon greenhouse gases and stuff, or any other of the endless blights that beset this chaotic world where people actually have the poisonous freedom to follow their own judgment. We know after all how bad it is to be judgmental. Can't we skip all these intermediate steps, and get right to the solution?

We just need to get organized, fer cripe's sake. More government, controlled by a sort of, oh, I don't know, call it a Politburo, comprised of a right-thinking elite who are all loyal to the correct principles. This democracy thing hasn't really been working out, what with the rising of the oceans and the unrest amongst our Islamic fellow humankind. God I hate Bush. If only Gore had won, which he did, then we'd all be driving electric luxury cars and eating soylent arugula in our palazzi situated on placid azure coves. And we'd live to 120, or 200, or in fact why should we ever die at all? It will be Paradise.

So write your Congressperson now, because HealthCare will Save the Planet!


J

What Happens

One of the more unnecessary, not to say inane, studies we might read about: is it a good thing to swing your arms when you walk. Correct answer is that because we do, universally, it is obviously a good thing. We're made to do it -- it's not learned. Yet it's said to be "a practice that has long piqued scientific curiosity." Manifestly, not all curiosity is a sign of intelligence. Some, uh, experts confuse themselves even further by supposing that "arm-swinging, like our appendix, is an evolutionary relic from when we used to go about on all fours."

First, the appendix is not a relic. Look it up. Second, when I went about on all fours I was an infant. Third, Evolutionism is not my creation myth, so pardon me if I seem heretical. Answering the unnecessary question, however, it seems that in terms of oxygen consumption, arm swinging is 12% more efficient than arms folded, 25% better than swinging the arm and leg on one side at the same time, and 63% better than holding the arms rigidly at the side. Further, it facilitates forward rather than vertical movement.

Yep. That's right. Yes. And, uh, I just heard that Obama is blaming the recession on Republicans. This must be what is meant by being beyond politics, or the new way, or whatever the jargon was. What a coward. I think this would qualify as a lie -- not the specifics of the blame ... the blame itself. He sort of intimated that he was above that sort of thing. Liar, then. Okay, fine, it's the Republicans. Now what. Spend even more money? The Republicans spent too much, so now we should spend more? We have to, per Biden, spend more or we'll go bankrupt? Isn't that sort of like bailing water into a sinking boat? Which do you loath more, illogic or dishonesty?

Um, and what else. I realized a few days ago that I've never been in love. I loved my wife, but I never have felt that in love thing, like in books and movies and songs. I know what it is -- empathetic as I am. I have felt it in theory. Just not toward a person I'd actually have to deal with. Is that bad? Someone has a hormonal upset, therefore they should marry the cause of that disruption? Will the marriage last longer than the hormonal imbalance? I've thought a fair bit about love. I see it as a decision, backed up by stubbornness.

But I might as well face it. I'm just trying to distract myself. I'm depressed again. I know it must be chemical, like being in love, but it poisons my soul so deeply that sometimes I'm just afraid for myself, if I felt fear or anything other than hopelessness. If violence could cure it I would be violent. But violence should be used only in the cause of justice. What is my crime, that I should be punished? Who else deserves my violence, who will not be punished sufficiently by hell? Their unchecked and continuing crimes, undoubted, will have to count as karma. Meanwhile I explore futility in even greater depth. It will be gone again tomorrow for a while, this mood. Then back again, and so on. Like everything else. What is the point.

Stubbornness, I suppose. We just keep on, no matter what.

Someone tonight was talking about his plans on opening his own bjj academy. I cannot understand anyone sharing their plans. They're just inviting ridicule, failure and betrayal. Don't they know? The future only gets worse.


J

and the Stars

Sun Myung Moon. Sun and Moon together, embodied in one flesh like the offspring of celestial and therefore divine beings. And so he would have it. You're too young to remember the Moonies -- adherents to the WorldWide Unification Church ... the Doubleyou Doubleyou Singleyou See, I guess. It seems, basically, to be a personality slash fertility cult. Doctrinal specifics aside, the reverend Moon -- or is it rev Sun? -- counts himself as the Messiah, Son of God, Returned Jesus, Savior of Humanity. Considering that he's 89 years old, he'd best get started saving us. He's doing a piss-poor job so far. I say "piss" because of the rev's theological insights into body fluids.

One fun fact is that his son, Heung Jin Moon died after a 1983 car crash. That's not the fun fact though. What's fun is that Heung is officially counted as the "king of the spirits" in heaven, where he conducts self-improvement seminars. Great gig if you can get it. Here on earth Heung makes his appearance since 1987 by permanently channeling himself through The Black Heung-Jin Nim, a Zimbabwean congregant. The black Moon, if such we shall call him, tours the world preaching, collecting mistresses, beating disciples, handcuffing them to radiators with golden shackles, knocking their heads together, and pummeling them with baseball bats. These troublesome sinners -- what's a divinity to do with them? The rev Moon is reported to "laugh raucously" at news of an especially hard blow to someone who had fallen from his favor.

Moon himself united with Louis Farrakhan in 2000 to sponsor the considerably-less-than Million Family March. Attentive readers will recall that, per Nation of Islam doctrine, Asians are black. Dang -- white man can't get no love.

But funnest of all is that a US Congressperson, Danny K Davis -- not to be confused with the comedic film star popular in the 1950s -- (D, Ill), acted as pageboy at the March 23, 2004 crowning of the rev Moon as King of Peace. Rep. Davis wore white gloves like a cartoon minstrel coon, Mr Bones, say, and carried the resplendent crown on a velvet pillow. The coronation took place in a US Senate office building, before a large crowd which included at least a dozen members of Congress (and perhaps as many as 81, most of whom however claimed to have been broadsided by the gala's true intent). The ceremony was the capstone to Moon's nationwide Moonification "Tear Down the Cross" crusade, urging the removal from public display of all crosses, specifically in poor neighborhoods -- the Cross being a symbol of disunity, and thus a stumbling block to peace.

Upon his investiture, Moon pronounced that he had been sent to earth to save the world's six billion people. According to a vision claimed by Moon, Hitler and Stalin, saved by the cult leader, take pains to assure the world that "Emperors, kings and presidents ... have declared to all Heaven and Earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent." Stalin must be the emperor in question, and Teddy Roosevelt would be one of the presidents. Moonie cleric CH Kwak stated that "the crowning means America is saying to Father, 'Please become my king'." A Moonie organ declared that the coronation "cured God's pain."

That which you can see with your eyes. Strong lefty bias, but it's unsubtle. Was that "coon" comment racist?


J

Gatesgate...No, Gatesaquiddick

You will know more about it than I do. This Gates things, the Harvard professor who accused the cop of racial profiling. A cop simply asks a man to show ID, and any possibility of civility is incinerated in an instant incandescent blast of rage. Well, what with all this newfangled technology nowadays, we have a really good idea as to what actually happened. I regret to say it, but you know it's true: it's a clear case of an uppity nigger. What. What. Oh, I see. It's okay for Gates to be racist, but nobody else can be? That's racist, is what that is, and I just won't have it.

Gates's go-to, his default position, his factory setting is racist. He has any problem at all, and it's because of racism, someone else's racism. It's like a bucket of water over the door. Any movement and you get drenched. And it's your fault. Cuz you're racist, and the fact that you're wet proves it. I'm sure not all Harvard professors of African-American history need be racist. I'm sure it's not absolutely required. There must be scholars who are actually interested in that specialty-niche of history, rather than just cynically using a convenient prestigious platform from which they can spew poison. Right? Every race has representatives who have integrity and honor. Gates simply isn't one of them.

Of course Obama is racist too, leaping to the side of his "friend", the Chief Executive taking sides before he has taken the slightest pains to inform himself in a fairminded way of the facts. Yes, that might be mistaken for friendship, but what is racism but a sort of friendship with your race. Odd how Obama totally abandons the white mother and white grandparents who raised him for the black father who abandoned him. Makes you wonder what he'll do as president -- since his loyalties are so confused, you see. A shame that he has to work out his internal identity conflicts on such a public stage. I do it anonymously in an obscure blog.

Does it matter? No more than any other shameful display of stupidity and racist favoritism. In this case, the cop, Sgt. Crowley, is covered, and he appears to have enough sense of self to not crumple under the racial attacks of his mayor and his governor and his president -- all black, and all on record as taking sides against him, despite the evidence of witnesses and technology and common sense. Sgt. Crowley, and Gates, have been invited by Obama to tea at the White House. Two against one. But silver-tongued pols and pompous pedagogues can leave no more mark on an honorable man than dogs can leave slobber on your hand. It is sort of unclean, but it washes off.

Obama's true colors are showing through. That's a shame. A crying shame. The problem is that we always elect politicians. It's inevitable, since honest men won't run, or when they do, they can't communicate, if you get my meaning. Still, it's the best of a bad situation. Because the opposite of politics is dictatorship. You know, where the guy in charge only has to please himself. Is there a third way? Oh, oops -- that's clinton's thing ... an especially cynical form of politics. Is there a fourth way then? Yes, but the Lord delays His coming. Until then, we have to settle for back-slapping hacks and self-seeking opportunists, and an admirable few who view elected offices as a public trust.

It's enough to make you sick. But that's why it's corruption.


J

Potfalls and Pitholes

Let me explain it in the simplest possible terms. If you are healthy, you don't have healthcare problems. Is that clear? I tried to make it as simple as I could. So the problem isn't healthcare costs, it's getting sick in the first place. Now, we can't, it seems, prevent earthquakes. We can't stop hurricanes. Uh, tornadoes, tornadoes are wild by definition -- not controllable. Um, gigantic floods -- beyond remedy. The economy, it has a mind of its own. These things are so vast or chaotic that all we can do is try to get out of the way, and clean up afterwards. Am I wrong? But health really is a much more rational process.

Again, allow me to be obvious. If I hack at my arm with a serrated butchers knife, I should expect a health problem. If I eat jagged shards of razor sharp glass -- problematic. Um, if I inject prussic acid into my bloodstream, or deposit a bolus of Drāno® into any of my several nasal cavities I might expect some upset to the homeostatic equilibrium of my overall metabolic healthful functioning. See how that works? These very clear examples should be helpful in clarifying behaviors that work against one's health, thus increasing the need of, the demand for, and therefore the cost of healthcare. Get it? The preceding were some examples of things that are within one's control, that one may do, that would most likely result in a need for healthcare.

Not all causes are so clear cut, however. Because the body is such a sophisticated machine that Evolution randomly designed, and because there are so many backup systems and failsafes that randomness haphazardly Evolved, attributing a single, simple and direct cause to some health problem is not always possible. There are a number of factors at play, with any of these so-common degene