This is just a lot of random thoughts. I just woke up from a nap and I am not very alert right now. I have been sick for the past couple days and haven't been able to eat very much, which explains why I'm obsessed with the subject of food (the Weston Price diet), and why I'm sitting here for hours writing in my blog instead of doing something active. I don't feel very well.
But this turned out to be an okay blog, not too negative or cynical or traumatic.
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'Kids, don't try this at home': I haven't tried eating any raw foods other than vegetables and fruits. Parasites and microbes really do exist and they can sometimes be in raw meat. It sometimes happens because the factory where they're packaged is unsanitary, but other times, the animal itself already has something in it. So you have to find out which types of meat are the safest, and which parts, and you have to know what you're doing. I'm only reading about it but not actually trying it.
There are other problems that can happen from eating raw meat. I had a problem with sushi, and it turns out that I cannot eat raw eel. Raw eel blood is toxic, but the poison is neutralized by cooking it. Every time I ate sushi with eel in it, I would get very, very sleepy and tired, feel sick at my stomach and feel very cold, and then have severe leg muscle cramps for days. Muscle spasms were specifically what they described as being a result of eel blood toxin. (I seem to remember a couple of co-workers teasing me about my 'shocking' experience with the 'electric eel.' You know who you are. :) Maybe there's not much eel blood there, and some people can tolerate it, but I can't.
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Generations: I was reading about generations. Having been born in 1974, I am part of Generation X, which is also called the Boomerang Generation and the MTV Generation (on Wikipedia). I had never heard of the Boomerang Generation, but when I read the description, I recognized myself and hung my head in shame. The Boomerang Generation is the group of people who left home, went to school, and then eventually boomeranged back to live at home with their parents again, due to unstable conditions in the job market - layoffs, the dotcom bubble, and now this credit market collapse. I never actually went home to live, but I've gone through repeated periods of unemployment, with financial help from my parents so I could pay my rent.
(In the old days, the job market was more stable. You might go to work at a factory, and you could expect to still be working at the same factory for the rest of your life.)
I agreed with that description, however I don't think it uniquely defines my generation in particular. I think that all the next generations will have that same problem, and that economic bubbles are going to happen every couple years. (I shouldn't say 'I THINK it will happen,' but rather, 'I'm as sure as it's possible to be about the future, and I'm betting on it.') It simply isn't possible to 'learn' from the 'mistakes' of the previous bubble in order to prevent the next one. The government-controlled fiat money system is so totally corrupt and unstable that it will collapse again and again for several more decades, destroying more of our economy each time, and I doubt that they will put gold and silver back into our money in order to stabilize it. Maybe a long time from now, but I don't know when. It's still politically incorrect to talk about gold and silver being used as everyday money.
I was laid off from a 'great' job when the dotcom bubble burst in 2000-2001. I used to sit at a chair in front of a computer, clicking links on a web page and printing things out, earning $10/hr (which was later raised to $12!). I STILL don't earn $10/hr yet at my current job, much less $12.
Then, I got another 'great' job, only to be laid off again a couple years later.
Ever since then I have read about economics and the money system in order to understand why economic bubbles happen, and to predict which types of jobs are more recession-proof than other jobs. Ludwig von Mises explained a lot of it, and so did the other well-known libertarian authors. And later, Antal Fekete explained a lot of it. He's sometimes hard to understand, but he knows how to interpret the significance of economic events that happen. He knows what it all means.
Our economy is becoming more of a 'service' economy, but this actually means something more like a 'subsistence' economy. It means burger-flipping. Let me try to explain this. If you are a primitive hunter-gatherer, you spend all day gathering food, hunting, maybe farming a bit, or tending your herds, and then cooking and eating whatever food you've collected. Then, you do the same thing the next day. Right now, that is exactly what I do, except I do it indoors, and I hunt and gather food out of a refrigerator or freezer, and prepare it so that other people can eat it, and then I take home money instead of food.
There is no feeling of 'progress.' Progress is when you feel sure that tomorrow will be better than today, because something has changed or accumulated. That could be wealth or knowledge or whatever. But people's attempts to make 'progress,' or to build wealth, or to start new business ventures, get destroyed by economic bubbles collapsing. Afterwards, they call that hopeful, optimistic excitement, that sense of progress and improvement, 'Irrational Exuberance.' But the collapsing bubbles are caused by the fiat money system, not by irrationality. (*Oops, what I mean is, yes, the fiat money system is also 'irrational.' But I mean, the problem ISN'T caused by individual people making individual mistakes because of their own irrationality. They didn't just screw up and invest their money in the wrong things because they were irrational all by themselves. The whole money system is messed up. But yes, the fiat money system could also be described as 'irrational.'*)
My pessimism and cynicism are a personal feeling, and I see it out in the world when I look out there. It's the opposite of rose-colored glasses. Optimism and a sense of long-lasting, stable progress: that's what I want to experience. Some people still feel optimistic and hopeful, and they still feel a sense of progress and accumulation. Some people still feel that the economy and their lives are stable and reliable. I've had a really lousy decade, so it's hard for me to feel that way. I think that if I cooperate with other people, we will all benefit and have more progress and stability. This is why I'm interested in community-building. It means: a 'grey market' agorist system, with more economic self-reliance, trading with people you know to get basics like food, without depending on large businesses that experience financial problems again and again.
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As much as I say that gold and silver need to be made into money again, I have a problem with them. I have observed that when I touch my silver coins, I feel a strange sensation in my hand. It feels like the muscles of my hand and arm are going to twitch or have an involuntary muscle contraction. Then, within a minute or two, my head gets a dopey sensation and I can no longer think clearly or express myself very well. Oddly enough, I think that this mind-state might even lead to poetry-writing - that's what happened the last time I experienced this. I just didn't make a finished product out of it and I didn't put it on my blog.
I have a couple theories. First, I think that some of the coins are full of lead instead of silver. If you mix copper and lead, you get a metal whose average density is like silver's. (From what I recall.) Fake silver. So I could be getting lead poisoning from handling some of my coins.
It doesn't always happen, just sometimes. It would be neat to do an experiment where I would be allowed to touch-test coins to see if I could detect which ones were counterfeit merely by touching them and sensing the lead poisoning through my skin. I've thought that I could try testing some of the lead weights used for fishing, to see if I got the same sensation.
But lead poisoning is only one interpretation. The other interpretation is that it could also be copper, or silver itself. I've decided from my own experiences and from what I've read that ALL metals are potentially not good for you, but some of them are much worse than others. Lead is one of the worst. Nickel causes skin irritation when it's used in jewelry or watchbands.
Copper is not really good for you, and I've had some unpleasant experiences with it. I tried holding pennies in my hand, and then pouring vinegar over them and mixing it around while holding it in my hand, and afterwards, I felt crazy and insane and I couldn't think clearly. It was a very bad feeling. The other problem I had was one day when my hair was wet, and I tried using bronze hair pins to put my hair up in a bun. (I usually use cheapo little plastic clips - I don't like them, but they're convenient and easy to use. They're such bad quality that I have to buy new ones every couple months because the plastic breaks.) The bronze pins touched my scalp, and it gave me a persistent, unpleasant tickling sensation that lingered for a very long time, and I was tired and could not think clearly. I remembered that familiar sensation from holding the vinegar-pennies.
(The reason I messed around to see what would happen if I put vinegar on pennies and held it in my hand, was because a while ago, I had a desire to make jewelry out of copper. I LOVE the beautiful bright color of copper, and would love to see it in jewelry, so I thought that I would make something unique that nobody else was making. But in doing my research I found out that pure copper tends to react with the skin oils and sweat, leaving green stains. So I became suspicious and decided it might not be safe, and I read about it, and found out that in ayurvedic medicine, they are very careful about using copper because it can cause convulsions and vomiting.)
Stainless steel seems to be okay for me. I don't feel any unpleasant sensations touching stainless steel 'silverware' or stainless steel food preparation surfaces.
I don't wear jewelry anymore because it gives me an unpleasant sensation on my skin, even if it's gold - though gold jewelry always contains some other metal like copper. I first found out about this when my watch buckle (which contained nickel) left an irritated rash on the inside of my wrist, and I had to wrap the buckle with string to keep it away from my skin.
These are all things where it's not a problem if you only touch a little bit of it. But if you handle large amounts of metal, every day, and if they are the most dangerous ones, like lead or copper, then enough of it will go through your skin that you will develop mental health problems as a result of metal poisoning. People who work at metal refineries will have health problems unless they protect their skin and protect their lungs from inhaling metal.
I can tell when it happens, immediately while it's happening. I feel that something is very wrong and that I can't think clearly. Perhaps that's a lucky thing.
I read on Wikipedia (I think?) that in the Roman Empire, they made water pipes entirely out of lead! Not just a little bit of lead solder here and there, but the entire pipe! I imagine that in and of itself could probably have caused the empire to collapse - and I'm only half-joking. That 'fact' could be wrong, though, and I never read it anyplace else except on one particular day when I was randomly reading things. I would have to look it up again and would probably find out that it was not true.
Anyway, I found out that copper is less of a problem when it's alloyed with some other metal, like zinc or tin. So people can tolerate brass jewelry (copper-zinc) a little better. I forget the details, and I might not be describing it correctly. But reading all about that led me to decide that copper jewelry was a bad idea. That sucks because I really do love the bright color of copper and I thought it would make great jewelry.
It's not as bad if my skin is dry. If my skin or the copper is wet, I get the unpleasant feeling very quickly.
I thought that heavy metal poisoning could explain why Enoch went crazy and eventually got sick, in Garet Garrett's 'The Cinder Buggy.' The Ludwig von Mises website was advertising Garet Garrett a while ago and I downloaded all the pdf files from them. They sell the books on one page, but someplace else, they offer the pdf files for free, if you can find that page. It's in some section called 'online literature' or something similar to that - I'd have to go looking again to find it. I loved Garet Garrett's books. I love the way he writes and the way he sees people.
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That fits in with a theory I haven't talked about much yet: 'Books written a long time ago are very different from books written today.' You can discover this looking through Google Books or on Project Gutenberg. The entire thinking style is much clearer, less 'ADHD' than today's authors. A lot of it is much higher quality. Some of that poor quality of today's writing is explained by the fact that it's cheap and easy for anybody to get published, so EVERYBODY is writing a book, whereas back then, you had to be really great in order for somebody to publish you. But I also think people were psychologically different back then.
I was looking back at them to find out about people's psychic experiences back then - what did they dream about at night, did they hear voices in their heads back then, how did 'mental illness' look back then, how did they describe 'psychic' or 'visionary' phenomena, what happened when they quietly meditated or said prayers - when they prayed, did they hear a literal voice of God talking back to them the way people do today?
The answer is no: The Voice of God was a metaphorical voice, not a literal one. God did not speak directly to people in words the way 'He' does today. You can read about it all over the internet, if you read about paranormal/religious stories that people are telling, where they say a prayer, and God tells them very specifically to do things, in words. Nowadays, many people literally hear voices when they pray to God. I am sure that back in the old days, they didn't. But this gets complicated if you read the Bible and see places where God himself directly tells people things, though, and I want to sort that out and interpret what's going on.
I call myself an atheist. But I wouldn't have much of a conflict with religious people, if only their God was a silent presence that did not speak to them and give them verbal commands. It bothers me that nowadays, God speaks verbally and tells people to do stuff, to do specific things. The metaphorical 'Voice of God' is okay with me, if it's only a feeling or a sense that you should do something - if you meditate quietly and feel sure that some course of action is the right thing for you. But I've found there are some problems with that, too, and I'm not sure if I even trust those types of feelings nowadays. There are so many things that I would like to test within a shielded environment to block out electromagnetic interference.
People need to be able to listen only to themselves, to their own minds, to find the metaphorical Voice of God within themselves, without intrusions and interference from human activities. Humanists or atheists might call it the Voice of the Inner Self, which is how I interpret it. And I hope to experience that silence again someday before I die. Silence is a most precious experience.
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