11:14 PM 11/29/10
I'm very annoyed about something. I am reading about some experiments where they meant to test whether there is such thing as a 'smell of fear.' I know absolutely for sure that there is. However, these tests, all the ones that I'm reading about, were focused on the armpits. They always tried things like putting a pad under the armpits to collect the sweat while you watch a scary movie or when you were about to go skydiving. They assume that it's a 'smell' and that it comes from the armpits because the armpits smell and because you are sometimes consciously aware of sweating from your armpits when you are anxious. It's true, I know that I myself have sometimes sweated from the armpits when I was anxious. But that's not all there is.
Those tests are badly designed and I was very annoyed every time I read about yet another 'armpit sweat' test. The 'fear smell' isn't even a 'smell.' I don't smell an odor. Not only that, but it could come from lots of other places besides the armpits. There is no reason to believe that the armpits have anything to do with it at all. It could be breathed out of the lungs, whatever it is. It could be sweated all over the body through the skin, not just the armpits. It might even be an oil-soluble substance secreted through the oils of the skin.
It happens when Peter's blood sugar crashes. When I walk into the room, I feel fear immediately. I feel it in myself. I feel terrified for no reason. My heart starts pounding. It's a normal room and I don't see anything scary. I just feel terrified for no reason, right away. I know myself. I'm 36 years old. I know when it's normal, and when it isn't normal, to suddenly get terrified and feel my heart pounding.
I don't 'smell' anything at all. But as soon as I breathe the air around him, I become terrified. I know right away that his blood sugar is crashing.
I didn't talk about this incident. Something happened the first time I went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It was during the scene where Harry and Hermione are alone, and Ron has just recently left. In fact, I think it was just before the dance scene that I liked so much. Harry and Hermione are walking around up on top of a cliff. The ground is rocky and irregular. Tiny snowflakes begin to fall. They talk about going to Godric's Hollow, and Hermione agrees to go.
Right at that moment, I heard a strange sound coming from behind me in the audience. It was way up near the top. Some person started breathing in and out making loud whooping noises. I thought that it was a retarded kid or an autistic kid or somebody who made uncontrollable noises. I've heard that sound made by many different people for different reasons.
Suddenly a kid ran out the door, followed by a couple other kids. The kid shouted 'I don't want to be here anymore! I want to go home!' The other kids followed her out the door. She just ran away for no reason. I didn't know what was going on.
Then a minute later, a guy stood up and said (yes, he really said this, for real, just like on TV), 'Is there a doctor in the house?' Nobody went to him. Nobody answered. They then started making phone calls to 911, and somebody got a movie theatre employee to stop the movie while they waited for the ambulance.
I started tapping my face, my hands, my collarbones, and my ribs using Roger Callahan's Thought Field Therapy, but actually, I wasn't using any particular sequence, and Thought Field Therapy is very specific and it claims that the order of your tapping is very important... so actually, I was using 'Emotional Freedom Techniques' or EFT, instead of TFT. (I looked this up on the net again. I've known about it for years because of Nathaniel Branden mentioning it.) I was just tapping myself randomly wherever I felt like tapping, in no particular order.
The movie people came in and made an announcement that the movie would start up again in a few minutes and everything would be okay.
I was tapping myself because I started to feel fear and panic. It went right through the whole audience. I smelled that same fear that I always smell when Peter's blood sugar crashes.
I was tapping myself also, because I had the urge to go help the guy who asked, 'Is there a doctor in the house?' I'm not a doctor. But my dad is a radiologist, and my mom is a nurse (although they're not working anymore). I've studied medicine, and alternative medicine, on my own. I have experience with a person who has a chronic health problem that causes him to have incidents of low blood sugar and ambulance calls. So I thought there was a chance that I might know the answer to their question, if someone had an unexplained attack, and if they didn't know what was causing it.
After a minute of tapping, I calmed myself down. The tapping actually works. I still smelled and felt the fear, but I was calm and in control of myself. So I got up, and I quietly walked over to the people in the back row. I walked down all the steps, to the front of the audience, and walked across the room in front of everyone. I was the only person who did this. It was unusual, and actually, I was embarrassed. But I thought that now is not the time to worry about inappropriate behavior, because this is an emergency.
So I walked up the steps on the other side, and went to the people who had the problem. The row in front of them was empty except one guy who had stayed there. (After a couple minutes, that guy left, while I was still sitting there.) I sat next to him because he was right in front of the people with the problem. I quietly asked the one guy, in the row behind me, the guy who was standing up, next to the person who seemed to have passed out, the guy who had said 'is there a doctor in the house,' I asked him, 'What was it that happened?'
He said, 'I don't think people should be coming over here and asking questions.'
I said, 'I'm sorry I made you angry.'
'What?'
'I'm sorry I made you angry.'
He nodded his head and didn't say anything else to me. This felt to me like 'I accept your apology,' and I didn't leave, I stayed, and I persisted.
Then I looked at the lady who was holding the man in her arms. He had passed out and was lying with his head back. I could see that he was still breathing, and he was alive. He was passed out and not talking. The smell of fear was very strong all around these people. The children had moved out of the seats, and they were sitting against the wall instead of sitting in the seats next to the guy who passed out. That was one of the kids who had run away, the girl who had said 'I want to go home.' She had come back and was now waiting with them for the ambulance. She was crying. Her mother was holding the man passed out. Her mother was talking to her and telling her that we were waiting for the ambulance and it was going to be okay. I think there were three kids. One was a little girl, then an older boy, then a teenage boy, if I recall. One of the kids said, 'This was the worst Harry Potter ever.' That would have been kind of funny, if it weren't in such a bad situation. The kids will always remember that one time when they went to see Harry Potter and dad passed out and had a seizure.
I knew it was a seizure because that's what they said when they were talking. I was listening. I found out that they already knew what had happened. The mother was talking to someone else. It might have been when she was talking to the 911 people on her cell phone. She made a couple of phone calls during this time. One person she talked to was a friend or family member, someone who knew them.
This guy had had a brain tumor. He had had surgery on the brain tumor. For a while, he was on anti-seizure medications because of the tumor and the surgery. This had happened before. But he had been off the anti-seizure medicine for a few months. She said that the last time he took it was in February.
So now I knew what had happened. I quietly asked her, 'Does he just fall asleep after a seizure?' She nodded. Because he seemed to be asleep. He was snoring. ('Why's he snoring?' the little girl asked anxiously.) I knew he was probably going to be okay, now that I understood that it was only a seizure, and that he was still breathing, and seemed to be asleep. He needed to recover and wake up, and the smell of fear was causing everyone else to be terrified too, and it was a very, very strong smell. I didn't smell an odor, but it was in the air all around them. There was no odor at all. I just knew the air was bad. It made me feel uncontrollably terrified, and the only thing calming me down was that I was, now and then, tapping the Callahan TFT points.
I was there because I thought that maybe, whoever it was, they wouldn't know what was going on. I thought it could possibly be something I would know the answer to, in case they didn't know. There was a chance. I'm not a doctor, but I know a lot of random things from spending years and years reading about medicine, having parents who were both in medicine, and having a friend who gets frequent ambulance calls and goes to the doctor a lot. But they knew what it was: a seizure.
So I stayed there until the ambulance people came, and I watched as they lifted him up and took him away, and the whole family went along. I wasn't able to tell them anything useful. After a minute or two, I got up and left too.
I went back to my seat. I said to the lady beside me, 'He had a seizure. That's what happened.' She just nodded and said, 'Oh.' The movie started up again. The smell of fear was still very strong. I felt sick and unable to relax for the rest of the movie.
That's why I went to see it again a second time that very same night. I ended up in a different theatre than I was in the first time. I was much more relaxed that time.
So if anyone says, 'Is there a doctor in the house?' and if nobody else says 'Yes,' I might possibly pretend to be a doctor, if I happen to find out that nobody else knows what to do or knows what's going on. I am not a doctor, but I play one on the internet. I am a doctor of last resort.
It was a very strange experience. I didn't talk about it, because I wasn't really happy about it. It was scary and unpleasant. I already knew that Thought Field Therapy or Emotional Freedom Techniques actually work - I've used them before. They made me much calmer than I otherwise would have been. They are the reason why people naturally hug each other and hold each other, and touch their own faces or hug themselves, in scary situations. People already know this, but some observers have made it into a more exact science, and so we have EFT, TFT, acupressure, and other systems. They give you a more specific idea of which places to tap or put pressure on. And you can feel a pleasant tickling, relaxing sensation when you are in the right place.
I'm not going to argue about whether or not it's a 'placebo...' The 'placebo effect blog' is still on my infinite to-do list. I want to talk about why 'the placebo effect' is a huge fallacy misleading millions of people. But that's for another day. You have people who are helpless in a scary situation, and then, you have people who know how to control themselves using 'the placebo effect.' It doesn't matter if it's a 'placebo.' It works. That's enough arguing for now.
Well, I was reading about the smell of fear because I am still trying to understand why I can't eat bone marrow. I don't have a definite answer yet. I don't know the name of the hormone or chemical in the bone marrow that caused me to get sick. I just know that it happened.
Placebo effect blog... some other day... enough for now.
Showing posts with label medicine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label medicine. Show all posts
Monday, November 29, 2010
Thursday, June 11, 2009
my new shoes are nontoxic!
i am overjoyed. today: positive decontamination results.
i bought new shoes for work. the old shoes had been contaminated badly for a very long time.
how did they get contaminated? mostly because i would put them on, wearing socks that had been contaminated by the carpets. the main contaminants on the carpet are: borax, tobacco, stevia, st. john's wort, and ephedra. i wear sandals at all times when i'm in the house, but sometimes my socks or feet get contaminated by accident anyway. so gradually, the old shoes had contamination building up in them over time.
my feet have been burning quite noticeably for a while now. i know they're getting poisoned with something when they sting like that. and i feel slow and tired at work, while wearing the contaminated shoes.
the new uniform and new pants were very helpful. but i didn't get new shoes for a while. then i bought some and tried them on today. i was so much more alert and clear and energetic. i wasn't slow and exhausted all day at work. (i also wore new socks, and kept them separate from the socks i wear in the house. the new socks are kept with the new shoes. i won't put contaminated socks into the new shoes.)
something unusual happened on the way home, too. i cried while listening to music. i haven't been able to cry much for a while.
i had also covered up the car seat with a garbage bag, too - the old garbage bag ripped off, and i started getting hit with the mystery chemical on the car seat - it resembles the new york contaminant, but it might have come from someplace else - it causes physical and emotional numbness, sexual dysfunction, and i think also high sugar, insomnia, restless legs, akathisia, and trouble swallowing. i thought it was abilify.
however, i might have gotten contaminated with a similar drug someplace else - it could have been on the waiting room couches at the doctor's office where i took peter, in altoona, or it could have been on the waiting room chairs at his dialysis place. it began rather recently, in the past couple months, at the same time that i tried to wear clothing that had been exposed to the new york contaminant. all of those incidents happened in the past few months - reopening the bag of new york clothes and wearing something from it, and going to the doctor's office several times with peter. so i'm not certain what drug it is or where it came from, i just know that the car seat contamination correlated with several different things.
(note: quick story behind the 'new york contaminant.' i visited a friend in new york; he was probably using an anti-anxiety drug at the time, or at least, had used the drug at some time in the past, and was contaminated with it. at the time, i did not know that it was possible to get severely contaminated with a drug just by touching someone briefly - i suspected it, but i didn't know how severe it would be. when someone is using a drug, it gets all over their clothing - partly because it is excreted in sweat, and partly because they are handling and touching pills, then touching their clothes. i have found, since then, that if i hug or touch someone who uses a drug, i can get hit with it very badly even with a very brief, shallow physical contact.)
so... i also covered up the car seat again today, along with wearing my new shoes.
well, i heard 'halo' sung by beyonce, and i've been writing about beyonce lately, about how her voice has so much range from high to low. i was feeling overjoyed, manic, and very excited all day because of the decontamination - i felt so much clearer and healthier. i was able to react emotionally to music, while driving home. i wept listening to 'halo,' and, as i said, it's been a long time since i was able to cry, and a long time since i responded strongly to music. the drugs and contaminants have made me emotionally numb, and physically unable to weep.
it is wonderful to have a positive confirmation of what i knew: that there's nothing wrong with me at all. i'm just contaminated. all i have to do is get away from all of the chemicals, and the clothing that's contaminated, and things like the car seat. i will get healthy quickly, immediately, for sure, within the very first day of being decontaminated.
it makes me hopeful for other people too. peter has been worse than usual, especially with erectile dysfunction, and whenever i lean against or sit on the couch in his living room, i become numb and sleepy, and i stop moving and i lie still, and i stop responding sexually. there is something on that couch. i don't know for sure what it is or where it came from. it might have come from me, but it might have also come from his clothing or his drugs. he wasn't using anything new, though. well, not really, but kind of.
he's using phosphate binders, and THEY ARE HORRIBLE. phosphate binders are about the most horrible drug ever created. they make you vomit. i don't know how he's surviving. i think the only way he eats anything is by sometimes skipping the phosphate binders. so, it could be phosphate binders that i'm reacting to. he's only been using those somewhat recently.
he also used one free sample of levitra, and didn't use it ever again, because it gave him a headache - not just a headache, but 'my head is going to explode - this is almost bad enough to go to the emergency room' kind of thing, lasting for hours and hours. i wonder if levitra could, paradoxically, cause impotence? this would be like homeopathy. at a low dose, it causes impotence, but at a high dose, it causes an erection. the concept of homeopathy is that a particular drug or chemical has some effect, whether good or bad, on a particular organ or tissue - the 'target organ'. it affects it, that's all you know, and depending on the dose, the effects can be helpful or harmful. so that's one theory.
but i still believe it was a contaminant that came from my new york clothing, which was probably abilify. and i don't know for sure.
i know that i felt better immediately today, wearing the new shoes and new uniform, and re-covering my car seat with plastic.
'passive detox' or 'passive decontamination' is the name i'm calling it. i call it 'passive' because i do not detoxify people by using new chemicals - for instance, i'm not going to use chelation, where they give people some activated charcoal, or something, and other chemicals, to try to get the heavy metals out of their bodies. and i'm not going to tell people to take a whole bunch of nutrient supplements and herbal pills. that's 'active.' you add a new chemical. i'm not adding anything, i'm just taking things away, but i'm doing a more thorough method of decontamination than any other 'detox' programs do. there are lots of detox programs and methods that exist, but i haven't seen anything yet that mentions clothing and surface contamination that goes through the skin (transdermal route of entry) and affects the body at microdosages for many months or years, even after somebody stops using the drug.
so 'we' were thinking about this, all day long - i was talking to voices about it, and they were seeing it as a program or method or protocol to follow, a set of rules for decontaminating yourself from drugs and chemicals that cause symptoms by entering the body through the skin.
i was overjoyed by the results. the new clothing and new shoes worked - i got rid of the contamination, and felt better immediately, the very first day.
it will be difficult to fix the car seats. i was thinking about reupholstering them. anything durable, any objects or belongings that are very expensive, and sentimental, things that can't be cleaned off or thrown in the garbage - those will be the worst.
this is like a 'cursed item.' cursed objects might be real. all you have to do is contaminate something with a poison that cannot be washed off, and it's 'cursed' forever. there are rumors that have been around for hundreds, or thousands, of years, about magic, and some of the phenomena can be explained if you know about transdermal drug contamination. cursed areas, cursed locations, cursed people, the 'untouchable castes,' all of those things could be explained if you knew that some people, places, or things were covered with chemicals or drugs that made them sick and would be passed from person to person through touch.
so it's nice to have hope.
dealing with air pollution will be a little more difficult... the health problems caused by urban air pollution - that's what i'm researching now. or rather, researched a little bit recently. 'dabbled in.'
so far:
1. no vaccines
2. no synthetic dietary supplements: vitamins, minerals
3. no drugs, no herbal drugs, no alternative medicine drugs (there could be some exceptions to this)
4. avoid air pollution
5. avoid contaminated objects and surfaces, avoid plants and drugs and chemicals that cause contamination
6. eliminate certain foods and chemicals from the diet, which can trigger reactions in some people
7. no dental fillings of any kind, no retainers, no braces
8. no removal of body parts, organs, teeth, tonsils, appendix, foreskin, etc
9. no implants, like pacemakers or defibrillators (i don't know what to do about pacemakers - i don't know enough about them)
10. no drinking tap water
i'm sure there are more things i'm forgetting, which i will think of as soon as i've posted this. or rather, 'they' will think of, and remind me about. there are more things to do and things to avoid, on the list of ways to prevent chronic illnesses.
what i have lived through is almost unimaginable to anyone who hasn't experienced environmental illness or chemical sensitivity.
i bought new shoes for work. the old shoes had been contaminated badly for a very long time.
how did they get contaminated? mostly because i would put them on, wearing socks that had been contaminated by the carpets. the main contaminants on the carpet are: borax, tobacco, stevia, st. john's wort, and ephedra. i wear sandals at all times when i'm in the house, but sometimes my socks or feet get contaminated by accident anyway. so gradually, the old shoes had contamination building up in them over time.
my feet have been burning quite noticeably for a while now. i know they're getting poisoned with something when they sting like that. and i feel slow and tired at work, while wearing the contaminated shoes.
the new uniform and new pants were very helpful. but i didn't get new shoes for a while. then i bought some and tried them on today. i was so much more alert and clear and energetic. i wasn't slow and exhausted all day at work. (i also wore new socks, and kept them separate from the socks i wear in the house. the new socks are kept with the new shoes. i won't put contaminated socks into the new shoes.)
something unusual happened on the way home, too. i cried while listening to music. i haven't been able to cry much for a while.
i had also covered up the car seat with a garbage bag, too - the old garbage bag ripped off, and i started getting hit with the mystery chemical on the car seat - it resembles the new york contaminant, but it might have come from someplace else - it causes physical and emotional numbness, sexual dysfunction, and i think also high sugar, insomnia, restless legs, akathisia, and trouble swallowing. i thought it was abilify.
however, i might have gotten contaminated with a similar drug someplace else - it could have been on the waiting room couches at the doctor's office where i took peter, in altoona, or it could have been on the waiting room chairs at his dialysis place. it began rather recently, in the past couple months, at the same time that i tried to wear clothing that had been exposed to the new york contaminant. all of those incidents happened in the past few months - reopening the bag of new york clothes and wearing something from it, and going to the doctor's office several times with peter. so i'm not certain what drug it is or where it came from, i just know that the car seat contamination correlated with several different things.
(note: quick story behind the 'new york contaminant.' i visited a friend in new york; he was probably using an anti-anxiety drug at the time, or at least, had used the drug at some time in the past, and was contaminated with it. at the time, i did not know that it was possible to get severely contaminated with a drug just by touching someone briefly - i suspected it, but i didn't know how severe it would be. when someone is using a drug, it gets all over their clothing - partly because it is excreted in sweat, and partly because they are handling and touching pills, then touching their clothes. i have found, since then, that if i hug or touch someone who uses a drug, i can get hit with it very badly even with a very brief, shallow physical contact.)
so... i also covered up the car seat again today, along with wearing my new shoes.
well, i heard 'halo' sung by beyonce, and i've been writing about beyonce lately, about how her voice has so much range from high to low. i was feeling overjoyed, manic, and very excited all day because of the decontamination - i felt so much clearer and healthier. i was able to react emotionally to music, while driving home. i wept listening to 'halo,' and, as i said, it's been a long time since i was able to cry, and a long time since i responded strongly to music. the drugs and contaminants have made me emotionally numb, and physically unable to weep.
it is wonderful to have a positive confirmation of what i knew: that there's nothing wrong with me at all. i'm just contaminated. all i have to do is get away from all of the chemicals, and the clothing that's contaminated, and things like the car seat. i will get healthy quickly, immediately, for sure, within the very first day of being decontaminated.
it makes me hopeful for other people too. peter has been worse than usual, especially with erectile dysfunction, and whenever i lean against or sit on the couch in his living room, i become numb and sleepy, and i stop moving and i lie still, and i stop responding sexually. there is something on that couch. i don't know for sure what it is or where it came from. it might have come from me, but it might have also come from his clothing or his drugs. he wasn't using anything new, though. well, not really, but kind of.
he's using phosphate binders, and THEY ARE HORRIBLE. phosphate binders are about the most horrible drug ever created. they make you vomit. i don't know how he's surviving. i think the only way he eats anything is by sometimes skipping the phosphate binders. so, it could be phosphate binders that i'm reacting to. he's only been using those somewhat recently.
he also used one free sample of levitra, and didn't use it ever again, because it gave him a headache - not just a headache, but 'my head is going to explode - this is almost bad enough to go to the emergency room' kind of thing, lasting for hours and hours. i wonder if levitra could, paradoxically, cause impotence? this would be like homeopathy. at a low dose, it causes impotence, but at a high dose, it causes an erection. the concept of homeopathy is that a particular drug or chemical has some effect, whether good or bad, on a particular organ or tissue - the 'target organ'. it affects it, that's all you know, and depending on the dose, the effects can be helpful or harmful. so that's one theory.
but i still believe it was a contaminant that came from my new york clothing, which was probably abilify. and i don't know for sure.
i know that i felt better immediately today, wearing the new shoes and new uniform, and re-covering my car seat with plastic.
'passive detox' or 'passive decontamination' is the name i'm calling it. i call it 'passive' because i do not detoxify people by using new chemicals - for instance, i'm not going to use chelation, where they give people some activated charcoal, or something, and other chemicals, to try to get the heavy metals out of their bodies. and i'm not going to tell people to take a whole bunch of nutrient supplements and herbal pills. that's 'active.' you add a new chemical. i'm not adding anything, i'm just taking things away, but i'm doing a more thorough method of decontamination than any other 'detox' programs do. there are lots of detox programs and methods that exist, but i haven't seen anything yet that mentions clothing and surface contamination that goes through the skin (transdermal route of entry) and affects the body at microdosages for many months or years, even after somebody stops using the drug.
so 'we' were thinking about this, all day long - i was talking to voices about it, and they were seeing it as a program or method or protocol to follow, a set of rules for decontaminating yourself from drugs and chemicals that cause symptoms by entering the body through the skin.
i was overjoyed by the results. the new clothing and new shoes worked - i got rid of the contamination, and felt better immediately, the very first day.
it will be difficult to fix the car seats. i was thinking about reupholstering them. anything durable, any objects or belongings that are very expensive, and sentimental, things that can't be cleaned off or thrown in the garbage - those will be the worst.
this is like a 'cursed item.' cursed objects might be real. all you have to do is contaminate something with a poison that cannot be washed off, and it's 'cursed' forever. there are rumors that have been around for hundreds, or thousands, of years, about magic, and some of the phenomena can be explained if you know about transdermal drug contamination. cursed areas, cursed locations, cursed people, the 'untouchable castes,' all of those things could be explained if you knew that some people, places, or things were covered with chemicals or drugs that made them sick and would be passed from person to person through touch.
so it's nice to have hope.
dealing with air pollution will be a little more difficult... the health problems caused by urban air pollution - that's what i'm researching now. or rather, researched a little bit recently. 'dabbled in.'
so far:
1. no vaccines
2. no synthetic dietary supplements: vitamins, minerals
3. no drugs, no herbal drugs, no alternative medicine drugs (there could be some exceptions to this)
4. avoid air pollution
5. avoid contaminated objects and surfaces, avoid plants and drugs and chemicals that cause contamination
6. eliminate certain foods and chemicals from the diet, which can trigger reactions in some people
7. no dental fillings of any kind, no retainers, no braces
8. no removal of body parts, organs, teeth, tonsils, appendix, foreskin, etc
9. no implants, like pacemakers or defibrillators (i don't know what to do about pacemakers - i don't know enough about them)
10. no drinking tap water
i'm sure there are more things i'm forgetting, which i will think of as soon as i've posted this. or rather, 'they' will think of, and remind me about. there are more things to do and things to avoid, on the list of ways to prevent chronic illnesses.
what i have lived through is almost unimaginable to anyone who hasn't experienced environmental illness or chemical sensitivity.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Circumcision again
They woke me up talking about one of my favorite subjects again. Instead of talking about it, I should just show everybody the way to the anti-circumcision web pages, where other people have argued about it much more clearly than I can, since I'm probably going to be long-winded, rambling, and disorganized, and not necessarily logical.
There is a problem with people reading the files on my computer: it slows down my dialup internet connection, and I notice when it's happening, so I hit the button on the firewall and wait a minute until they temporarily stop trying. It's usually less of a problem if I have already gotten the web pages and am 'settled in' instead of just starting up. But that means that a lot of their reading attempts might have been cut off by the firewall. They could have jumped to conclusions about what I was going to say, if they read only a little bit of it, but since I ramble, by the end I could be saying the opposite of what I said in the beginning. So I could have said lots and lots of positive, complimentary, good things about a person, but they might have read only the one small bad thing that I said, and quit reading or didn't get all of it.
Well, last time I talked about this, I focused on one single theme: circumcision and STDs or AIDS. I could still go on about that argument. But I'll go to another topic.
Focusing on one thing helped because this subject has so many parts to it, it would be worth a whole book. That would be an entertaining book, sort of a medical-porn genre.
Well, I have been getting bombarded for most of the past year with questions about a taboo subject, body odors. That started up again and they want me to write about how this relates to circumcision.
Humans evolved in a world without indoor plumbing, so, a long time ago, people didn't take showers every day. They still found each other sexually attractive, or we wouldn't be here. Other nonhuman animals and insects use pheromones to tell other animals whether they are ready to mate. (Pheromones are chemicals emitted by one animal and detected by another animal. They are similar to hormones. They are airborne, and inhaled through the nose like a scent, but they are usually odorless.) So, worrying about how people smell is a modern thing. In the past, it was part of how we bonded socially and sexually.
(This is totally off-topic, and yet, relevant at the same time. I haven't added any new Flickr photos for months, because I spent the last few months in a half-dead state, and also, my laptop is running out of hard drive space, which is why Dennis gave me a zip drive. So I keep hearing voices complaining that my Flickr photos start off with that annoying duck climbing up on my back and trying to have sex with me, and/or pecking my eyes out, instead of sitting still and letting me pet him in a platonic way. I didn't upload the one photo where I snapped the picture at the exact moment when he pecked my crotch, because I thought it wasn't family-friendly enough to keep my Flickr page rated G. By the way, my landlord gave those muscovy ducks away to somebody else, because they kept 'attacking' visitors who didn't understand that they weren't really being violent, just extra-friendly. That duck gave me parasites, too. But he really was a nice duck, you just had to make sure he didn't climb up on your back. One time he got his clawed feet tangled in my long hair and it was difficult to gently remove a large, struggling, flapping duck without hurting him. That took a few minutes, but, obviously I did untangle him. I will eventually add some more pictures that aren't so ridiculous.)
Anyway, back to the topic. 'It smells bad' is one of the excuses for circumcision. There are a few different counterarguments to that. Maybe I should just brainstorm and list them all without elaborating, and then elaborate on them later?
1. maybe it smells good, but we're not allowed to say that or think that
2. washing it off can be done quickly and easily
3. removing the foreskin is permanent - it will never grow back. if you regret it, too bad, you can't fix it. the grief and loss and self-hatred, when you realize that you permanently injured yourself, can even lead to suicide, just like any other form of unnecessary cosmetic surgery - unless you choose to dedicate yourself to an anti-circumcision campaign, which is how some people survive this trauma - by preventing others from making the same mistake.
4. body odors become associated with a memory; smell is a key to triggering a vivid memory of an entire time period of your life, with all of the emotions - whenever a smell is associated with sex, it is permanently part of your memory of that whole experience, that person, the mood you were in, the emotions you felt at the time - everything. so the smell of the human body becomes associated with memories of intimate encounters, closeness, and physical contact.
5. it smells exactly like the smegma that appears on the FEMALE labia, which is the same substance. should we cut off the female labia? (in Africa, they do!)
I can tell my own personal experience with this. I had a brief encounter with a European immigrant, someone who I worked with on an overnight cleaning job. I quit that job, and back then, I was very antisocial, so I didn't stay in contact with this guy afterwards. So I only had the one encounter.
He had a foreskin. It did have a strong smell. It was strange to me because I associated that smell with my own body - it was exactly the same, but stronger. However, I was already anti-circ back then, and was fully committed to accepting everything and getting used to it, no matter what. So I decided that the smell was just something you got used to. I thought I would probably learn to like it if I had enough pleasant experiences with it. And the smell was only noticeable in the beginning, for a minute, which might be because it was underneath his clothing all day.
I also knew already that there are many benefits to keeping the foreskin intact, and you lose a lot when you remove it. So I said, if it bothered me, I could just get him to wash off, which is easy and trivial, because the permanent loss of the foreskin is a major loss. If people are aware of how functional the foreskin is, if they appreciate what it does, if they understand that it feels a lot of sensation, and protects the glans from drying out, and makes vaginal intercourse much easier, and does a lot of other useful things, then the smell seems like no big deal in comparison. And, as I said, I think it's something people learn to like whenever they get used to it.
I wanted to focus on #3 in the brainstorming list above. The others are pretty self-explanatory. During the 'discussions' going on in my mind, they said 'circumcision is a load of crap,' and suggested an alternative title: Circumcision Is Suicide. That's not necessarily true for everybody... but there are SOME people who DO feel that bad afterwards.
When I was a little kid, I used to sometimes have nightmares - probably fake nightmares, now that I know about dream control. I occasionally dreamed that I had severely injured a person or animal, sometimes a person I loved, like my parents, and they were injured so badly that they could not be fixed, and had to be 'put out of their misery.' I would then have to completely kill the person or animal. These were horrible dreams and I would wake up crying.
Whenever you inflict permanent injury on yourself or someone else... The doctors and nurses who circumcise infants - you can't go tell them that circumcision is wrong, and that they've been doing something horrible for years and years. They have to protect themselves against realizing how bad it is. They have a very strong rationale for why they do what they do, and if that rationale breaks down, they need something equally strong to substitute for it, something positive, something they can do to make up for all that they have done.
And right now, there isn't much a person can do. I can imagine a corporation that would find a way to regrow a fully functioning foreskin (or female genitals, or anything else removed or changed by cosmetic surgery). However, it would be very expensive in the beginning, so not everybody could do it. You could argue about whether health insurance should cover this: you are the victim of an 'accident' that occurred in your infancy. But healthcare is a mess in this country... and that's too big of a topic for me to get into - I would have to explain everything I've learned in all of my reading over the past few years about WHY the healthcare system is such a mess. Anyway, it would be difficult, dangerous, expensive, and not everybody could do it. Some people would go without.
If you remove something, and you absolutely cannot get it back, ever, that seems like too big of a risk to take.
People in the USA don't know what they're missing - they don't know what life with a foreskin is like - because they lost it when they were infants. So they don't know what they're doing to their children.
But if you circumcise yourself as an adult, you have years and years of experience with having a foreskin, so you notice the difference when it is gone. There are anecdotes on the net, where people described all of the differences that they observed after getting circumcised as adults. And some of them were badly traumatized by it, deeply regretting this self-inflicted permanent injury, and, as I said, some people even feel suicidal.
This isn't as severe, but I have body parts that I lost. I had eight of my teeth removed whenever I was too young to refuse consent. The internet didn't exist back then, so we couldn't just google some counter-arguments whenever big decisions needed to be made. If you wanted to research something, you had to go to a library and you had to know exactly what you were looking for. Information was difficult to find. Especially anecdotes - the stories people tell. You might find something 'official' and 'scientific' published in a book, but you wouldn't find the experiences and stories of ordinary people. Maybe for popular topics, yes, but for obscure topics, it was harder. So I couldn't have gone online and researched whether other people might have chosen not to get braces on their teeth, or chosen not to remove the wisdom teeth, and read about what happened to them.
Also, I am annoyed because my mom taught me how to pluck my eyebrows, when I was a young teenager. I was taught that having any eyebrow hair over the bridge of my nose was bad. So I ripped out all the hairs over my nose bridge, over and over again, week after week, and as a result, the roots of the hairs scarred, and they never grew back. They grew back a little bit, but it's sparse - only a few hairs here and there. That bothered me, because I eventually changed my mind about plucking eyebrows, and I wanted them back. I grew up and appreciated the beauty and touchability of thick, full, unplucked eyebrows. Hair is there to be stroked and petted.
I have a picture from back then, but the scanner isn't set up on my computer right now, and that's a big nuisance project that I won't be doing anytime soon, so I can't easily show the picture. (I tried to take a picture of the picture using my digital camera.) It shows my eyebrows plucked almost down to nothing, and I was also trimming them short with scissors, too, and it looked horrible, like I had some disease.
The teeth lost, and the eyebrow hairs, aren't as bad as circumcision. I can only faintly imagine what it would be like to lose a part of your body that felt sensation. Teeth and hairs don't feel much sensation - I guess hairs do, somewhat. But the foreskin feels A LOT of sensation. You notice a big difference when it is gone.
If some guy is with a woman who complains about the way that he smells, and wants him to get circumcised because of that, she needs to understand just how much sensation that skin feels. I can't emphasize that enough, and I've already rambled for too long. But I want to contrast how trivial the smell is, next to how important the foreskin is - and that assumes you don't like the way it smells.
I rambled enough... Hearing voices asking me to talk about the subject of body odors and social/sexual bonding, for the past few days - I gave in and finally talked about it. This is one of those 'taboo' subjects in the USA... and the Europeans are at risk from the 'Circumcision Prevents AIDS' bullcrap, because their belief systems aren't strong enough or explicit enough to ACTIVELY FORBID circumcision. You can't just passively neglect to circumcise. You have to actively, strongly say that it is not allowed.
I associate Judith Swack with the onset of my overt psychotronic attacks, so I don't really trust her... However, there was one thing that I really agreed with, and admired. She was Jewish, however she rejected the Jewish practice of circumcision. She still called herself Jewish, and still was part of that religion, but she strongly disagreed with that one thing, and said that if she had had a son, she would have kept him intact. I think other Jewish families should do the same thing.
In the USA, circumcision isn't religious, it's part of mainstream culture. So they could just as easily 'forget' to circumcise, for passive reasons ('my health insurance provider wouldn't pay for it, so we didn't do it' - that's why they stopped circumcising in Great Britain, if I recall). But the Jewish religion actively REQUIRES circumcision. Mainstream USA does it merely because it's popular, it's common practice, it's quick and easy to do, and the hospital encourages it - but in reality, they don't care one way or the other about it. There are men who don't even KNOW that they're circumcised, don't know there is such a thing as circumcision, until they grow up and read about it on the internet, or see another guy who 'looks different,' or see something in porn videos. Nobody ever told them 'You Must Circumcise!' If they happened to have their baby outside of a hospital, for whatever reason, they might just accidentally forget to circumcise their baby. It would not be a conscious decision, it would just be ignorance and inconvenience. Anyway, there is a big difference between passively neglecting to circumcise, versus being ACTIVELY FORBIDDEN to circumcise. And there is a difference between passively going along with the routine of the hospital circumcising your baby for you, versus being actively required to circumcise because you're Jewish. As I said, Europe is in danger because they are 'passively neglecting' to circumcise, and that's not strong enough to fight against the disinformation about AIDS. ('They' said they are tempted to start a 'Circumcision Causes AIDS' campaign.)
Rambling... I type too much. In person, I don't talk like this. However, 'they' demanded that I talk about this subject, for the past few days. So, here it is.
There is a problem with people reading the files on my computer: it slows down my dialup internet connection, and I notice when it's happening, so I hit the button on the firewall and wait a minute until they temporarily stop trying. It's usually less of a problem if I have already gotten the web pages and am 'settled in' instead of just starting up. But that means that a lot of their reading attempts might have been cut off by the firewall. They could have jumped to conclusions about what I was going to say, if they read only a little bit of it, but since I ramble, by the end I could be saying the opposite of what I said in the beginning. So I could have said lots and lots of positive, complimentary, good things about a person, but they might have read only the one small bad thing that I said, and quit reading or didn't get all of it.
Well, last time I talked about this, I focused on one single theme: circumcision and STDs or AIDS. I could still go on about that argument. But I'll go to another topic.
Focusing on one thing helped because this subject has so many parts to it, it would be worth a whole book. That would be an entertaining book, sort of a medical-porn genre.
Well, I have been getting bombarded for most of the past year with questions about a taboo subject, body odors. That started up again and they want me to write about how this relates to circumcision.
Humans evolved in a world without indoor plumbing, so, a long time ago, people didn't take showers every day. They still found each other sexually attractive, or we wouldn't be here. Other nonhuman animals and insects use pheromones to tell other animals whether they are ready to mate. (Pheromones are chemicals emitted by one animal and detected by another animal. They are similar to hormones. They are airborne, and inhaled through the nose like a scent, but they are usually odorless.) So, worrying about how people smell is a modern thing. In the past, it was part of how we bonded socially and sexually.
(This is totally off-topic, and yet, relevant at the same time. I haven't added any new Flickr photos for months, because I spent the last few months in a half-dead state, and also, my laptop is running out of hard drive space, which is why Dennis gave me a zip drive. So I keep hearing voices complaining that my Flickr photos start off with that annoying duck climbing up on my back and trying to have sex with me, and/or pecking my eyes out, instead of sitting still and letting me pet him in a platonic way. I didn't upload the one photo where I snapped the picture at the exact moment when he pecked my crotch, because I thought it wasn't family-friendly enough to keep my Flickr page rated G. By the way, my landlord gave those muscovy ducks away to somebody else, because they kept 'attacking' visitors who didn't understand that they weren't really being violent, just extra-friendly. That duck gave me parasites, too. But he really was a nice duck, you just had to make sure he didn't climb up on your back. One time he got his clawed feet tangled in my long hair and it was difficult to gently remove a large, struggling, flapping duck without hurting him. That took a few minutes, but, obviously I did untangle him. I will eventually add some more pictures that aren't so ridiculous.)
Anyway, back to the topic. 'It smells bad' is one of the excuses for circumcision. There are a few different counterarguments to that. Maybe I should just brainstorm and list them all without elaborating, and then elaborate on them later?
1. maybe it smells good, but we're not allowed to say that or think that
2. washing it off can be done quickly and easily
3. removing the foreskin is permanent - it will never grow back. if you regret it, too bad, you can't fix it. the grief and loss and self-hatred, when you realize that you permanently injured yourself, can even lead to suicide, just like any other form of unnecessary cosmetic surgery - unless you choose to dedicate yourself to an anti-circumcision campaign, which is how some people survive this trauma - by preventing others from making the same mistake.
4. body odors become associated with a memory; smell is a key to triggering a vivid memory of an entire time period of your life, with all of the emotions - whenever a smell is associated with sex, it is permanently part of your memory of that whole experience, that person, the mood you were in, the emotions you felt at the time - everything. so the smell of the human body becomes associated with memories of intimate encounters, closeness, and physical contact.
5. it smells exactly like the smegma that appears on the FEMALE labia, which is the same substance. should we cut off the female labia? (in Africa, they do!)
I can tell my own personal experience with this. I had a brief encounter with a European immigrant, someone who I worked with on an overnight cleaning job. I quit that job, and back then, I was very antisocial, so I didn't stay in contact with this guy afterwards. So I only had the one encounter.
He had a foreskin. It did have a strong smell. It was strange to me because I associated that smell with my own body - it was exactly the same, but stronger. However, I was already anti-circ back then, and was fully committed to accepting everything and getting used to it, no matter what. So I decided that the smell was just something you got used to. I thought I would probably learn to like it if I had enough pleasant experiences with it. And the smell was only noticeable in the beginning, for a minute, which might be because it was underneath his clothing all day.
I also knew already that there are many benefits to keeping the foreskin intact, and you lose a lot when you remove it. So I said, if it bothered me, I could just get him to wash off, which is easy and trivial, because the permanent loss of the foreskin is a major loss. If people are aware of how functional the foreskin is, if they appreciate what it does, if they understand that it feels a lot of sensation, and protects the glans from drying out, and makes vaginal intercourse much easier, and does a lot of other useful things, then the smell seems like no big deal in comparison. And, as I said, I think it's something people learn to like whenever they get used to it.
I wanted to focus on #3 in the brainstorming list above. The others are pretty self-explanatory. During the 'discussions' going on in my mind, they said 'circumcision is a load of crap,' and suggested an alternative title: Circumcision Is Suicide. That's not necessarily true for everybody... but there are SOME people who DO feel that bad afterwards.
When I was a little kid, I used to sometimes have nightmares - probably fake nightmares, now that I know about dream control. I occasionally dreamed that I had severely injured a person or animal, sometimes a person I loved, like my parents, and they were injured so badly that they could not be fixed, and had to be 'put out of their misery.' I would then have to completely kill the person or animal. These were horrible dreams and I would wake up crying.
Whenever you inflict permanent injury on yourself or someone else... The doctors and nurses who circumcise infants - you can't go tell them that circumcision is wrong, and that they've been doing something horrible for years and years. They have to protect themselves against realizing how bad it is. They have a very strong rationale for why they do what they do, and if that rationale breaks down, they need something equally strong to substitute for it, something positive, something they can do to make up for all that they have done.
And right now, there isn't much a person can do. I can imagine a corporation that would find a way to regrow a fully functioning foreskin (or female genitals, or anything else removed or changed by cosmetic surgery). However, it would be very expensive in the beginning, so not everybody could do it. You could argue about whether health insurance should cover this: you are the victim of an 'accident' that occurred in your infancy. But healthcare is a mess in this country... and that's too big of a topic for me to get into - I would have to explain everything I've learned in all of my reading over the past few years about WHY the healthcare system is such a mess. Anyway, it would be difficult, dangerous, expensive, and not everybody could do it. Some people would go without.
If you remove something, and you absolutely cannot get it back, ever, that seems like too big of a risk to take.
People in the USA don't know what they're missing - they don't know what life with a foreskin is like - because they lost it when they were infants. So they don't know what they're doing to their children.
But if you circumcise yourself as an adult, you have years and years of experience with having a foreskin, so you notice the difference when it is gone. There are anecdotes on the net, where people described all of the differences that they observed after getting circumcised as adults. And some of them were badly traumatized by it, deeply regretting this self-inflicted permanent injury, and, as I said, some people even feel suicidal.
This isn't as severe, but I have body parts that I lost. I had eight of my teeth removed whenever I was too young to refuse consent. The internet didn't exist back then, so we couldn't just google some counter-arguments whenever big decisions needed to be made. If you wanted to research something, you had to go to a library and you had to know exactly what you were looking for. Information was difficult to find. Especially anecdotes - the stories people tell. You might find something 'official' and 'scientific' published in a book, but you wouldn't find the experiences and stories of ordinary people. Maybe for popular topics, yes, but for obscure topics, it was harder. So I couldn't have gone online and researched whether other people might have chosen not to get braces on their teeth, or chosen not to remove the wisdom teeth, and read about what happened to them.
Also, I am annoyed because my mom taught me how to pluck my eyebrows, when I was a young teenager. I was taught that having any eyebrow hair over the bridge of my nose was bad. So I ripped out all the hairs over my nose bridge, over and over again, week after week, and as a result, the roots of the hairs scarred, and they never grew back. They grew back a little bit, but it's sparse - only a few hairs here and there. That bothered me, because I eventually changed my mind about plucking eyebrows, and I wanted them back. I grew up and appreciated the beauty and touchability of thick, full, unplucked eyebrows. Hair is there to be stroked and petted.
I have a picture from back then, but the scanner isn't set up on my computer right now, and that's a big nuisance project that I won't be doing anytime soon, so I can't easily show the picture. (I tried to take a picture of the picture using my digital camera.) It shows my eyebrows plucked almost down to nothing, and I was also trimming them short with scissors, too, and it looked horrible, like I had some disease.
The teeth lost, and the eyebrow hairs, aren't as bad as circumcision. I can only faintly imagine what it would be like to lose a part of your body that felt sensation. Teeth and hairs don't feel much sensation - I guess hairs do, somewhat. But the foreskin feels A LOT of sensation. You notice a big difference when it is gone.
If some guy is with a woman who complains about the way that he smells, and wants him to get circumcised because of that, she needs to understand just how much sensation that skin feels. I can't emphasize that enough, and I've already rambled for too long. But I want to contrast how trivial the smell is, next to how important the foreskin is - and that assumes you don't like the way it smells.
I rambled enough... Hearing voices asking me to talk about the subject of body odors and social/sexual bonding, for the past few days - I gave in and finally talked about it. This is one of those 'taboo' subjects in the USA... and the Europeans are at risk from the 'Circumcision Prevents AIDS' bullcrap, because their belief systems aren't strong enough or explicit enough to ACTIVELY FORBID circumcision. You can't just passively neglect to circumcise. You have to actively, strongly say that it is not allowed.
I associate Judith Swack with the onset of my overt psychotronic attacks, so I don't really trust her... However, there was one thing that I really agreed with, and admired. She was Jewish, however she rejected the Jewish practice of circumcision. She still called herself Jewish, and still was part of that religion, but she strongly disagreed with that one thing, and said that if she had had a son, she would have kept him intact. I think other Jewish families should do the same thing.
In the USA, circumcision isn't religious, it's part of mainstream culture. So they could just as easily 'forget' to circumcise, for passive reasons ('my health insurance provider wouldn't pay for it, so we didn't do it' - that's why they stopped circumcising in Great Britain, if I recall). But the Jewish religion actively REQUIRES circumcision. Mainstream USA does it merely because it's popular, it's common practice, it's quick and easy to do, and the hospital encourages it - but in reality, they don't care one way or the other about it. There are men who don't even KNOW that they're circumcised, don't know there is such a thing as circumcision, until they grow up and read about it on the internet, or see another guy who 'looks different,' or see something in porn videos. Nobody ever told them 'You Must Circumcise!' If they happened to have their baby outside of a hospital, for whatever reason, they might just accidentally forget to circumcise their baby. It would not be a conscious decision, it would just be ignorance and inconvenience. Anyway, there is a big difference between passively neglecting to circumcise, versus being ACTIVELY FORBIDDEN to circumcise. And there is a difference between passively going along with the routine of the hospital circumcising your baby for you, versus being actively required to circumcise because you're Jewish. As I said, Europe is in danger because they are 'passively neglecting' to circumcise, and that's not strong enough to fight against the disinformation about AIDS. ('They' said they are tempted to start a 'Circumcision Causes AIDS' campaign.)
Rambling... I type too much. In person, I don't talk like this. However, 'they' demanded that I talk about this subject, for the past few days. So, here it is.
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