Fools for Christ, Fools for Atheism?

(*Well, here's the situation. I write lots more stuff than what I actually publish on my blog. On the blog, I only post things that are relatively neatly written, relatively coherent - although I know they aren't always - and I keep the subject matter restrained, proper, and calm, cool, and collected. But meanwhile, I spend hours and hours writing journals that I just keep without publishing them. I write them for my own entertainment, to enjoy my own thought processes. They're sloppy, they're rambling, they're disorganized. In my private journals I write about things that are vulnerable, things that are gross, embarrassing, sexual, personal, strange, bizarre. I write about what exactly the voices say and do, what happens, what they want, what we've been thinking about. I'm forming lots of unfinished ideas that aren't neat-and-tidy enough to publish. I write about specific people, too. So today I decided that this particular journal would go to the blog instead. I had to change a couple minor details because occasionally there are people whose names I don't feel comfortable mentioning in public. I might change that later on.*)

(*The problem with just posting this journal is that it mentions things and refers to things that I've written elsewhere. There is a long history of other journals before this one. People reading this would say 'What the hell?' because they don't have the slightest idea of what I've been spending all my time thinking about. You're basically opening a book up in the middle and trying to understand how you got there.*)

(*Sometimes, the neat-and-tidy stuff just isn't as interesting as the sloppy stuff that I don't publish. I have been interacting with 'the voices' for YEARS. This is not new! And some unusual, interesting, and also in some ways terrible, events began, starting in april and continuing through may, and on since then. I haven't publicly explained much about what in the world happened. In my notes I've been joking that it must have been the 'economic stimulus package' that caused all this to happen - which is why I find it rather frightening that Obama says we need yet another economic stimulus package! And the seduction community was also involved. So this writing has been going on for a while now, but I just wasn't ready to summarize the whole thing in a readable, organized way.*)

(*Once again, it's that situation where somebody has two different selves: they show one self to the public, and the other self is doing and saying and thinking all these things that nobody knows about. I keep the 'messy, disorganized rambling' writing away from everybody. But it's authentic and interesting in some ways.*)

(*So, beware. My writing is usually somewhat detached and impersonal. This isn't!*)




they're telling me that some of the guys are doing the exact opposite of everything i say, in order to be counter-authoritarian, or something. i don't know if it's true or not but they claimed that somebody actually got circumcised, while also being an adult and able to consciously choose not to.

then again, that could be just metaphorical, because i compared circumcision to my tooth removals - i said that if i rejected people for having been circumcised as infants, which they had no choice about, then it would be the same as if somebody rejected me because i had teeth removed from my mouth when i was too young to decide about it. so maybe somebody else had dental work done and that's all it is. they sometimes just give me fantasies about things so that i'll start talking about an entertaining subject. it's always supposed to be something that either is explicitly sexual or has an embarrassing double meaning that i myself am not aware of until it's too late. (i was thinking of something just now and they said the word 'watermelon.' this is based on the joke or myth, where you see a pregnant woman and say she must have swallowed a watermelon seed and it grew inside her. i remember that myth from when i was a kid, that swallowing watermelon seeds is what causes pregnancy. i know somebody told me not to swallow watermelon seeds but they didn't explain the reason why. now, i know apple seeds contain cyanide, as do flax seeds, which i only learned recently, so you don't want to eat lots of them. but watermelon seeds make you get pregnant. that must be how the 'pregnant man' got pregnant! i didn't read that news article.)

the 'fools for christ' research has to do with the idea that my obvious changes in grooming rituals can serve a purpose of drawing attention to my new religion. they saw it as just being chaos or 'troublemaking' or something, just having fun, but i can't just go have fun without some kind of rationale behind it. so for me, it's a religion. the joke was 'making sense out of making scents.' i smell unwashed because my religion tells me to be that way. the 'fools for christ' concept is just that people do strange, visible things that get other people's attention and help to convert them. i don't necessarily mean going crazy and talking to god out loud and walking around the streets half naked and some of the other things they described. i'll be a little more tame about it. just a slight nudge of cognitive dissonance here and there. but it's actually not just for that purpose. i really was 'doing what the voices told me to do.'

the concept of ending some people's deprivation, the people who are most keenly aware of grooming, aware of humans as animals, aware of the loss of hair and scent - only some people are strongly aware of it, others are only vaguely aware of it, others might briefly muse over an occasional question 'do i really have to do this?' when they don't feel in the mood to spend half an hour scraping a razor over the entire surface area of their legs, and others say 'of course you have to do it! human bodies are totally disgusting unless we spend hours and hours and thousands of dollars to change everything about ourselves!' - the goal is to find the small but devoted cult following, the ones most keenly aware of this loss and deprivation, the ones most grateful to see their fantasies manifested in real people.

when you walk around in public, visible to the world, as 'fools for christ,' (or fools for atheism, or the name of my local sect, whatever that sect's name will be) and people see a group of religious people who all have long hair and beards, and the women have hairy legs, and everyone 'smells like horses,' then it's an advertisement to the small but devoted cult following who's been looking for this all along. of course, the logistics of everybody having long hair at the same time are actually difficult. new members won't have long hair. they're 'in training.' you only get long hair after a decade or two. only the lifetime members will be really noticeable when we walk around in public as a group.

but it doesn't matter. body hair is fully grown in about a year. i can't recall which year it was, but i did shave off all of my hair sometime a few years ago. i stopped shaving back in the early nineties, like 1993-94, and had one or two temporary incidents of shaving it all off for one reason or another - i don't know for sure, but the one time was when i lived with eric, and he and i both shaved our entire bodies together for the fun of it. but it wasn't fun! after you've shaved a very large area with very long hair on it that has never been shaved before, the razor gets very dull. then the dull razor scrapes the skin and causes horrible razor burn, which tortures you for weeks. you get this bumpy rash over every single hair follicle. eric was furious. he swore he would never, ever do that again! if you ever try that, you have to remove the 'gross filth and heavy soil,' so to speak, the overall long hair, first, using an electric razor or something. then, finally, after all that, you can smooth it down to skin level with a sharp razor. 'gross filth and heavy soil' is something usually written in the instructions of cleaning products. it means that you won't get something very clean at all if you merely try to spray it with the cleaning product while it's still covered in large lumps of mud and dirt and things like that. you have to get rid of that first. that's why it annoys the heck out of me when i see people at work taking the scissors that were used for cutting the chicken strings, and the scissors are all covered with blobs of grease, and they stick it into the sanitizer container as though the sanitizer will magically sanitize all the way through those big blobs of grease. it's disgusting to pull a pair of wet scissors out of the container and see that it's all just a bunch of grease covered in sanitizer. nobody bothers to remove the 'gross filth and heavy soil' first. but anyway.

i've had these discussions with them in my mind. being obsessed with this phenomenon is a real thing and it's very painful and humiliating for the people who experience it. imagine if you really, really desire something, but everybody says it's disgusting, and they absolutely refuse to do it for you. they make fun of you for even wanting it, for even talking about it. i'm saying that this is legitimate and i take it seriously. they know i understand because i feel the same difficulty finding long-haired men with beards. (the typographical error said 'long-haired men with bears.' 'bears' are large hairy men, so that typo fits. in reality i've usually gone after the smaller and thinner men, but it was just an amusing typo.)

they like talking to me about this subject, they like it when i write about it, they like the fact that i'm actually doing it in reality, but at the same time they always feel sort of embarrassed, ashamed, or humiliated, for demanding this, for obsessing about it, for thinking about it so frequently. someone theorized that it's an 'oral fixation' of some kind that probably is connected with being hungry and thirsty. i know from my own observation that i think about sex a lot if i'm actually hungry and thirsty. so you could probably reduce the obsession if you just eat and drink something and 'take the edge off.'

i remember something i read about free trade. they said that free trade between countries is one of the best ways to prevent wars. if one country has something that another country really, really wants - like oil - then it will tend to cause wars if the countries don't have free trading of that commodity. people want to invade iraq so they can take over the plentiful oil wells. OPEC controls the production and pricing of oil, so that is something other than free trade - it's restricted trade.

well, the same thing happens when one gender controls resources that the other gender sexually desires and can't get on their own. if they restrict it, it causes that deprivation and obsession. it becomes a 'fetish.' we've mentioned that word and we think it's the wrong word to use for appreciation of the natural body, because, in my opinion, a 'fetish' is something bizarre, something unnatural, something that can't or shouldn't be done in reality. humans have had bodies like this for tens of thousands of years, so therefore, all the excessive grooming, the running water and electricity and hot showers and perfumed factory-made cosmetics - all of THAT stuff is the bizarre and unnatural 'fetish.'

i found this reassuring: i'm glad that i mentioned the 'horse barn' analogy. i love the smell of horse barns, even though that smell contains things that you might think would be disgusting, like horse urine and manure. horse sweat has a specific, recognizable smell. but being around the animals, and grooming them, and riding them, is a pleasant memory i have from childhood. i loved the barn. my mom loves the horses and they're the center of her life. the smell of the horses is part of that. if the smell were gone, the whole experience wouldn't be the same. whenever i feel embarrassed about how i smell, i think of the horse barn analogy, and i tell myself i smell like a horse. it reassures me.

actually, in reality, the smell fades away after i've been inside a dehydrated, air-conditioned building for a while, with the low humidity. i have tested going quite a few days without showers and, somehow, it stops 'building up' after some point. it doesn't just get more and more extreme. you reach a stable point and it doesn't get much more intense. but i find it uncomfortable to have sweaty, greasy skin, especially on my face, so i usually wash my face if only that. you sometimes rub your hand over your face, and it rubs the oils into your eyes, which burns a lot and irritates your eyes. there is a very soothing comfort to the 'sauna' effect of a hot shower, so i don't want to abandon showers entirely. however, in a small, primitive, subsistence community, hot baths and showers are extremely expensive. big pots of water boiling over a hot fire - that's where hot baths come from. that's not convenient. so you have to get used to going without it. (i don't like the 'have to' phrase.)

in the religion, the idea is that we explicitly accept that humans are animals, which is another reason why i accept meat-eating (LITERAL meat-eating). i ate pork ribs today from damon's. oddly enough, even though damon's is nearby, i never go there. but i wanted to try eating 'real meat,' because i've been eating all this awful processed food, like sliced deli meat. i haven't had any real food. i don't keep groceries in my refrigerator. each meal is prepared as needed, by purchasing it ready-made, because i have trouble cooking, partly because of cooking for only one person, and for a lot of other reasons. in reality, i would love to have made-from-scratch, prepared-at-home, feingold-diet, healthy food.

the voices - i'll get angry if i think about this - always attacked me, the criminals, if i was purchasing a lot of prepared foods or foods from sheetz. they called me a spendthrift and i wasn't a spendthrift. i bought foods on a day-to-day, emergency basis because of extremely severe chronic fatigue. you don't know how hard it is to cook for yourself when you are spending all day in bed. and whenever you feel half-starved, you can't even get up and move around UNTIL you've had something to eat, so i had to go get stuff to eat right away merely IN ORDER to get up and do anything. it is not easy at all to take care of myself whenever i'm sick and fatigued. but they did really terrible things, like giving me dreams at night, if i got food from sheetz (which they called 'shitz') and gave me dreams about shit. and they acted like i WANTED to eat food from sheetz, even though, actually, i can't stand their food, and i only buy it because it's the only place open in the middle of the night when THE CRIMINALS have awakened you, and you shouldn't be awake anyway. it's a convenient, nearby place, with awful food and no variety, and i don't buy it because i LIKE it, but because i am too sick and exhausted to cook, and everything i buy goes bad, because i can't eat it all. they acted like buying junk food at sheetz was a 'reward.' i remember times whenever they gave me 'rewards' by 'allowing' or 'encouraging' me to go out and buy junk food, even though in reality junk food is disgusting to me and i would love to have cooked-at-home-from-scratch food if i could. they never understood. they thought that my junk food was 'self-indulgent,' when actually it's something i don't enjoy at all. they thought that i LIKE junk food, and that i'm ENJOYING myself when i eat junk food.

junk food is starvation food. junk food is deprivation. healthy, home-cooked food is MUCH more 'self-indulgent' and is actually enjoyable. home-cooked meals depend on having several people there to prepare them and to eat them so the food doesn't go to waste. you can't make single portions inefficiently every day, after coming home from work and not wanting to do anything. you can't eat an entire head of cabbage or lettuce before it spoils. (actually, cabbage lasts forever, that's a bad example. but lettuce gets ruined really quickly.) that's why i wanted a garden. i would just pull a couple of leaves when i needed them. so i HATE being stuck here forced to eat junk food, fake food, and non-nutritious food. i want natural foods and home-cooked foods that meet my dietary requirements, that don't cause me to feel muddle-headed (like wheat gluten tends to do) and restless and sick and uncomfortable.

in my family, growing up, we had certain kinds of foods. my parents tended to purchase certain things that were not the kind of foods i would have wanted. i actually wanted more healthy foods available. i craved vegetables and fruits - they were scarce and special. we only had certain kinds of fruits, sometimes, and they were fruits i hated. I HATE APPLES! what part of 'i hate apples' don't you understand? but my parents always had things like apples and oranges. when i lived with them, whenever i didn't have a job, when i had to eat my parents' food, they always had stuff like cookies and chips available, but i couldn't go get a bunch of fruits and vegetables or 'real meat.' i could get bologna, or pepperoni, which aren't 'real' by my definition, and cheese, and stuff like that. but i had to wait for mom to make dinner if i wanted any real foods, and we didn't always have a prepared dinner, and it wasn't always a healthy dinner. we had canned foods in the cupboard, and so if i wanted a hot meal i could get a can of campbell's soup. but... canned soup is disgusting! i feel sick even thinking about what it was like when there was nothing to eat and i had to open a can of soup because nothing else was available and there wasn't any real food.

i really liked the food from damon's, actually. a small half rack of ribs was $14, which is really expensive. the ribs were great. they're like the caviar of pigs. i know caviar is fish eggs, but i'm referring to the fact that it's scarce and expensive and sought-after. the ribs are like that. they're so expensive but they're really good. i ate it all really quickly and it was gone. there was hardly anything there. i've been thinking about this because i read about the 'paleolithic diet,' which emphasized meat, since they were hunting mammoths and stuff before the ice age killed them all. (i can't talk about 'pigs,' because the voices always interpret pigs as referring to police officers. different animals refer to different kinds of people and personalities.)

i was studying nutrition and reading books about it. i wanted nutrition to help me with my chronic fatigue. i didn't understand that my chronic fatigue was probably happening because of pesticides and chemicals that were used to treat the wood on the sides of the house.

i was thinking back about why we didn't have good food. i sort of remember what happened, but i'm not sure. i had 'deprivation' times in my adolescence. a couple of things. i originally was focused on talking about food, but actually i thought of something else too. my dad moved us to west virginia, when we used to live in greensburg pa. it was because the hospital changed management. the policies changed and he didn't like the way they were running the place. we went someplace else because of that. that was my understanding of why we moved. anyway, dad had a 'midlife crisis,' which was the phrase mom used to describe it. he would've been in his early forties if i recall. the psychologists (the imaginary ones, who talk to me in my mind, that is) have all pointed out to me that i've spent many years dating older men, in their early forties - i dated the married guy joe who was 41 when i was 23, and i dated eric who was in his late thirties, when i was in my mid twenties. i found, ummmm, 'paul,' (yes, i probably shouldn't mention his name) who is now 41, and he was i guess 39 when i met him. i've dated men in their late thirties and early forties, over and over, and they tell me it's because that's when dad stopped being loving and fatherly because he went through his crisis. he withdrew, and became focused on money, because he hated his job more than anything else, and all that he wanted on earth was to be able to stop working and retire early.

so he focused all his energy on learning about the stock market, about saving money, about investing, and he made himself become wealthy, in order to leave his job. and he regretted having children, because if it weren't for the children he wouldn't have been so tied to his job. he explicitly admitted that, in a conversation with me when i was an adult, when i asked him about his choice to have children. this affected my own feelings about children, and how childbearing can be a wonderful thing if only you have enough social support for it, so that you don't become a slave to providing for your children at the expense of all your own happiness, your own free time, your own hobbies, time alone in private, fun activities and vacations, etc. we stopped doing fun stuff. we stopped going on vacations, because it was expensive to go to the beach and stay in hotels, and it was expensive to fly on planes. he also bought a large house, and actually, i don't really understand why we bought a large house. i'm not sure why they made that decision. we had only four people. and a couple dogs and cats and fish and horses. but the horses weren't in the house. :) we didn't need much space.

the house was expensive and he had to pay off the debt. this is ridiculous nowadays, with the housing bubble and the prices of millions of dollars for a tiny little place, but back then, in 1983, our house was really expensive - it was like $200,000 or $250,000, something like that. that was hugely expensive back then. it was a big deal. other houses were like $50,000. you can't imagine how cheap houses were back then compared to now, if you didn't see it. our house is pretty big. but he had to pay off all this debt and he hated being in debt, so he was a debt-slave because of a house that was really too big for us.

and they wonder why i don't feel comfortable about inheritance, and taking money from my parents - i can't stand it - i hate to accept their birthday and christmas checks - it's partly because it throws me off, financially, and makes it hard for me to predict what my earnings will be, and it's complicated - but it's also because self-reliance is an issue, where i'm not burdening my father. this is in the inigo montoya 'i want my father back, you son of a bitch' kind of spirit. money and gifts don't mean anything. you want the real person. i would rather have a close relationship with my father instead of a financial gift.

anyway, i was talking about deprivations. we were focused on saving money, and so we didn't get really nice food. we got cheap food. we bought stuff in bulk. we bought non-perishable foods, and you can pretty much bet that anything non-perishable is going to be fake and artificial and processed and full of preservatives. for me, going out to the freezer in the garage, and getting a box of frozen spinach, was a special treat. i had to ask permission to go cook a box of spinach, because vegetables were expensive. dad complained if i ate too many boxes of frozen vegetables. we had a garden in greensburg, and we made one in west virginia too, but we didn't really plant much in wv. i didn't even really feel comfortable cooking in the kitchen at all. it wasn't 'my territory.' it was mom's kitchen. i was afraid to claim too much of it, afraid to make a mess, afraid to really use it. it wasn't mine. so the kids on the school bus, and the kids at school, thought that my brother and i were 'rich' because my dad was a doctor and we lived in a large house. but we didn't live like we were rich and i didn't feel rich. we didn't waste money on indulgences. people were jealous of me, for something i wasn't even enjoying. you could be jealous of somebody for being miserable all the time, i guess, but that doesn't make much sense. actually i wasn't miserable, i was pretty happy when i was younger. i had moments of happiness. but i did have lots of problems with fatigue in my later teens and i spent most of the time sleeping.

it really meant something to me when john found the julian simon book. a lot of the important books i've read came from john. not all of them, but many of them. it totally changed my view of families and children. my belief in large families is not trivial - it's very serious. this belief in 'two children' is all over the united states. it's supposedly the 'american dream!' a family with two children is the 'dream' lifestyle. it represents 'perfection,' a desired state of things. but i love it in the harry potter movies, at the burrow, with all the weasley kids around the table. they're poor, but they have their own garden, and they have company. it's true, you would want space and time alone and you would need quiet and privacy. i understand that.

well, the midlife crisis thing was one of the deprivation problems. another time was later on, in my late teens, when mom for some reason kind of stopped cooking. i am not sure why. i remember that these neighbors moved in and we didn't get along with them. they were jerks in a lot of ways. the horse barn was on their property. we got along with the previous people, who owned the horse barn. we borrowed space in their barn because we didn't have our own. when the previous people moved out and the new people moved in, it was a major conflict since we were using their barn. and they were loud and annoying and they just ... i don't even remember the kinds of stupid things they did. they were destructive and irresponsible in a lot of ways. these were the people whose son i dated, the son who later turned out to be gay, the one that i got in a fistfight about. he collected all these japanese anime movies.

anyway during that time mom was always stressed and she didn't put much effort into cooking. we had sparser meals. she was probably going through menopause too. we were kind of on our own. i could go to the refrigerator and put something together, but it wasn't any good. it was that cheese and pepperoni kind of thing. not real food. (i know, anytime i talk about sausage-shaped objects, people are thinking about penises. but i'm just talking about LITERAL pepperoni.) so that time period was a major stress time, the conflict about our horses being stuck in somebody else's barn and we didn't like the people responsible for that property. so we started building our own barn. we bought the empty lot next door and put the new barn there. that really helped mom a lot and she loves having her own place. but for a while it was terrible.




it makes me angry because, why is it that people are able to read your mind, but they totally misinterpret you and don't understand you at all? they totally mis-portray and misunderstand everything you do, and distort it to mean something which is not you at all, and how can that possibly happen if they're able to read your mind and see everything you're feeling? why can't they understand how it feels to be you? and they rationalize that people enjoy pain and suffering, merely because they themselves enjoy inflicting it upon others without the victims' consent, when in fact, we ENDURE and SURVIVE pain and suffering, and we get stockholm syndrome, identifying with the attackers, and they make us behave in unnatural ways for years at a time, which is why i wrote the horrible emails to the guy i met in the chatroom. i didn't do that stuff because i liked it. i didn't like being the victim of an attack. i was a puppet and i was twisted and abused to do things that were not at all like myself or who i wanted to be.



so anyway. thinking of a religious community. it's going to be pro-sexual instead of anti-sexual, pro-body instead of anti-body, supporting life on earth, etc. all the stuff that ayn rand would've complained about whenever she hated religions - it's in the general spirit of doing the stuff she would have liked and avoiding the stuff she hated. although i am going to say that the ascetic urge isn't necessarily antilife, or any other stuff she might have said about it - for instance, it turns out that occasional fasting really is good for your mental clarity, because i know about the feingold diet, wheat gluten intolerance, and stuff like that.

and nathaniel branden pointed out other mistakes ayn rand made, in requiring people to be perfectionistically rational all the time, and disowning feelings and emotions, and all that - i don't need to go into it - it's easy enough to just read it from nathaniel branden himself. he did a good job of naming everything that made me uncomfortable about ayn rand. for a while, my brother was a hardcore rand follower, and he used to get annoyed with me if i said things that were 'irrational.' i was afraid to say anything at all for fear of making a mistake. i was afraid to be myself. (they're suggesting that maybe people are afraid to talk to me because i'm going to judge them harshly. but i'm a lot more tolerant than that.) anyway, the religion will explicitly address people's sexuality, instead of making sex into a big secret the way the puritans did. some of it i would say is 'inspired by objectivism' or 'based on objectivism,' although a lot of things are behind the general idea, the concept of it, the spirit of it. it's not very specific as of yet.

however, ayn rand wasn't pro-family. she didn't have children. she was focused on creativity, writing, thinking, philosophizing. she wasn't explicitly anti-family either, but she had a kind of scorn for people who excessively valued 'motherhood' and all that. there are themes through her books where she makes it look like valuing parenthood and families is bad. that's not really where i originally got my own feeling from. i was anti-family and anti-childbearing before reading ayn rand. i thought it would prevent me from having any fun, doing random and spontaneous things, being free to move around, spending my money however i wanted, etc. anyway i'm just saying that my religious concepts have some background in objectivism, but they're not LIMITED to objectivism. they incorporate other things that objectivism didn't have, such as emphasis on families and emotions and relationships.

it's interesting, i read that it's much more common years ago to have ten children, and other large numbers like that. i've encountered several instances of this in recent readings and discussions. i was talking to someone about geneology at work, and in her research she had found someone who had ten kids, and i just saw another example of either nine or ten kids in my reading, last night. often, the children died before they grew up. since i advocate the refusal of vaccinations, then having ten or fifteen kids is a good idea. (since i like the dozenal notation instead of the decimal notation, i should advocate having twelve kids. i just mention fifteen because that was the number i said many months ago when i first started talking about this.)

this is something they complain about with the africans - they say that africans are having too many kids, and all their problems would be solved if only they reduced their population. julian simon can totally destroy that whole argument. it's a load of crap. i don't know what caused the AIDS virus in africa, but it might have been caused by vaccinations. there are some decent theories as to how or why vaccinations could have caused the AIDS epidemic in africa. they want me to write about the disinformation campaign saying that circumcision (of course, it'll be universal involuntary infant circumcision, as always) prevents the spread of AIDS. i am going to argue that even if it were true and correct, it still doesn't justify involuntary infant circumcision. anyway, the population in africa ISN'T the cause of the starvation and economic problems and diseases! not only is the population moderate, not high, but also, the children born are all dying before they reach adulthood - so who WOULDN'T try to bear as many children as possible? i'd have to go get out the 'ultimate resource' book to really go into detail about how to destroy this disinformation, but that's the general idea.




if you ever are going to obey someone else's command, it helps if they're commanding you to do things that are congruent with what you're already doing - things that are in the same overall spirit of stuff you already like. they noticed that i already questioned shaving, hair length, mustache whiskers, and deodorant (which i've used intermittently, sometimes going without it for several years). so they said that if i were going to obey any kind of command or orders or rules at all, they would be rules telling me to do what i was already doing, and do an even better job of it, taking it to its 'logical extreme.' if i'm going to question grooming, i might as well question more and more aspects of it. and it helps if they tell me that i'm doing it for somebody, a guy, who either is disgusted by perfumes, outright allergic to them, or excited by natural smells, or all of the above. and since i sympathize with that myself, it's a 'downhill battle' to convince me.

well, i think i could write a blog today about religious and meditative experiences and how they used to be different. i'm claiming, by my 'humans instead of aliens theory,' that the change in psychological phenomena was recent, in the past hundred years. either the aliens only showed up recently, or else it's not aliens, and it really is because of advances in human technology that we're now experiencing psychotronic mind control events. i can't disprove the aliens theory, but i can get evidence suggesting that things only changed rather recently, and that long ago, people had totally different kinds of experiences while meditating. and the source of this material is the religious texts. they describe their meditative experiences, their visions, what they saw and heard and felt. they did not 'hear voices' explicitly speaking to them in words, telling them things. when they talked about 'hearing the voice of god,' they always explained that this was just a metaphorical thing, not a literal voice saying words - it was a special kind of mental experience. the large numbers of people who 'hear voices' nowadays is a NEW phenomenon. they literally hear words and sentences being spoken. that is not at all what the old mystics, meditators, and religious people wrote about in the old texts.


one thing i want to be careful about is this: when people know your background, when they know that you have 'psychological' or 'historical' reasons motivating things you do, giving you a perspective and feeling about something, they think that means it's no longer legitimate or logical. it's all merely psychological, therefore everything you're doing is a metaphor for something psychological that you're frustrated about. they could say that my religion isn't 'real,' because, actually, it's all just a bunch of deprivation and not having enough love from my father and things like that.

however, i'm going to argue this: physical appearance, clothing styles, hairstyles, grooming, etc, are all very ARBITRARY, unless you have an actual safety and health purpose for something. you can do just about anything you want, and objectively, it really doesn't matter. it doesn't make much difference how you dress or how you style your hair, in terms of objective results. there are totally different kinds of reasons for having a particular style of appearance. it tells people what tribe you're in, what group, what gang, what community. it tells other people that they can trust or distrust you, that you are familiar or unfamiliar to them. (note, i'm not saying we should go around distrusting everybody. i'm just saying we automatically trust people who look more familiar.) so i could just as easily argue that, for my religious community, we really need to wear rainbow-striped mohawks, and this is really important, and it has to be exactly that way and no other way, and the mohawk must reach but not exceed a particular length. objectively, there is no reason why not (unless you don't like touching the chemicals used for coloring the hair and spiking it up, which would fall in the 'safety reasons' argument). now that i think about it, the chemicals will probably make you more likely to go bald later on, although i'm not sure about that. but i'm just saying that you can pick any particular physical appearance you choose, for your 'sect' or community, and you can argue that it's just arbitrary, therefore 'why not this and not some other style?'

but anyway. if someone says that i have an obsession with certain physical appearances because there was 'something psychological' in my background or family history, that can be true, but that doesn't make it invalid. there is no particular reason WHY NOT. why not arbitrarily invent a new particular style of physical appearance, and ask that everyone who joins your group must look this way? the only reason i'm not openly urging anyone to do it right this very instant is because i don't actually have a plot of land picked out where i'm going to build my tents and shanties out of old junk. i don't have a chosen stream to pull buckets of water from. when i've settled my affairs here then i can go do that. that's when i'll start the advertisements saying something to the effect of 'hey, would you like to cook for me?'

they don't want me to abandon the 'community' fantasy if i start a real family and get married. if i have all those family needs satisfied, they think i won't care about a community anymore. they really would like to see this happen out in the real world, because it would have a helpful impact and it would help a lot of the 'lost' people who have nowhere to go. the people with no culture. the tribeless people who don't know what to do, and they live unhealthy lives because they don't know what to eat or what poisons to avoid. they don't know what to believe, what to value, what to think, how to understand anything, what's important, what's unimportant. they think that the stuff on television can tell them what they should value and believe. so they spend hundreds of dollars on hairspray and makeup. and big cars and big houses. (*and also, from another perspective, this will be important as the economy falls apart and makes more people homeless and jobless. the community is supposed to protect people against the collapse of fiat money.*)

because on television, all the tv shows are about renovating houses. i don't have tv, but i see it when i visit 'paul.' he has the tv on all the time, because his drugs and his illness make him too sick to really do anything useful at home except sit there. he can't be ambitious. the drugs make him tired and depressed. and he won't question anything about using those drugs or any of the advice the doctors give him. i can't help and i gave up on trying to help. i wanted to give him nutritious foods and some kind of herbal medicine, but it's just too much for me, with his kidney failure and him going on dialysis and all that. and my life fell apart totally, because i contaminated the house with ephedra, because i had chronic fatigue, which was made worse by contamination with st. john's wort.... which i had to use because i myself was tired and unambitious and couldn't do anything... which was because i didn't grow up in a community that taught me how to eat properly and how to avoid poisons and food allergens and other things. (although we were lucky my parents found the feingold diet - i at least vaguely knew about that, but most of my life, i wasn't on the diet.) and they wanted me to mention my metallic dental filling too. that wasn't good for me. (*i haven't written yet on my blog about the horrors of the new resin composite fillings! my advice is, don't get them, they're AWFUL, and i'm not quite ready to talk about it yet, but it's very, very, VERY bad for you to get composite fillings.*)

it goes on and on and on... it never ends... (*i've been chemical-sensitive all my life*)... one thing led to another... and so many things went wrong, and wasted so much of my life, and i wasn't able to help myself or help anybody else, for so long. all this time. just because of being sick and fatigued constantly. it's a huge, huge waste. and lots of people are experiencing this chronic illness. the chronic health problems are everywhere and they have many causes.

the community is designed to protect people against that kind of thing, so that our lives aren't wasted, and we can get started earlier, and more efficiently, to live happier, healthier lives.

they want to make sure that this goal still matters to me, even if my own needs are fulfilled by marriage and family. they don't want the community to be merely a fantasy, merely a metaphor for something unfulfilled in my own life. they want it to be a real place, with a physical location, and real people with names, living in it, for the rest of their lives, and it will go on after our deaths. it won't need a charismatic leader. it will be good enough that people WANT to live there, to meet the needs they can't meet outside. it has to go on after my death and after the death of the first generation who builds it. it's meant to protect us over the next millennium, which is really ambitious, since nobody can see ahead that far. i know we can't predict anything for a whole millennium. i know we can't perfectionistically guarantee that this exact location will still belong to our descendants 1000 years from now. that's not what i mean. i mean in just a very general, vague way, it will 'get us started in the right direction' and help things along. it won't be perfect. it won't be immortal. it won't be exactly the same 1000 years from now as it is today. it won't be what it was when it began. in fact we might not recognize it, or we might get mad and say 'that's not what we wanted for you!' but you still do it anyway.

the idea is that it's better than nothing at all. what we have right now in our society is a big mess. nobody knows what to do. nobody supports anybody. nobody knows their neighbors. people are isolated. families are in their own little worlds, in their own separate little houses. and it's not helping us to 'develop our unique identities,' by living that way. instead it's making people aimless, uncertain, afraid, not knowing who they are, not knowing what they want, and they try to do things that don't satisfy them. if living in isolated nuclear-family houses, without knowing our neighbors, actually DID help us develop unique identities, that would be different. if we really DID know our own unique identities because we're allowed to style our hair however we want, and wear whatever kind of clothing we want, then it would be okay. but we've done that, and it isn't working. we just have a big mess. nobody knows who they are.

meanwhile, and i have to mention this, and i know it interrupts the smooth flow of talking about a nice, pleasant community, and a nice, pleasant, primitive lifestyle, and families, and food, and religions, and all that, and hairstyles. but i HAVE to mention that meanwhile, underneath all this normal stuff, there are bad things happening that involve technology. and i don't know exactly how to do it, but that HAS to be incorporated into the protectiveness of the community. a way of protecting against it, understanding what it is, liberating ourselves from the slavery of it. that is absolutely essential to 'knowing who we are.' we can't know who we are, when we're stuck with other people's personalities in our heads. no matter how primitive this particular community or sect might be, i still imagine that it addresses all those things we don't like to talk about, the psychotronic technologies, no matter how hard it is to talk about those things, no matter how little detailed information we have about them or their sources - it HAS to be addressed, not avoided. if it's going to protect people for hundreds of years into the future, it MUST confront these technological phenomena. they're not going away.

The importance of destroying satellites while it's still relatively easy to do so

I'm not sure why they want me to write about this topic today. I know how the discussion started, though.

I went off the deep end again because somebody prepared my food improperly without following the instructions. And it's one of our slightly more expensive food items. A crucial ingredient or two was left out, and it affected my enjoyment of my meal.

Whenever I 'go off the deep end,' I don't actually yell at anybody out loud. I grumble and mumble and say a few curse words, and call them all a bunch of insulting names, in private, without actually saying anything to them directly. Or I complain about it on my blog.

I always feel guilty about this because I see myself as being too judgmental or too harsh. And I sometimes envy people who are able to just sloppily throw things together just so that they get done quickly and it's out there on the shelf. The shelf LOOKS full, and therefore, nobody gets in trouble. You'd have to examine each thing really closely (the way the customer does, as they're eating it) to see what's wrong with it.

(Everyone loves it when I talk about food. But that wasn't really the main topic.)

So anyway, some people reassured me that maybe I wasn't being too harsh - maybe this wasn't a bad thing. Instead it's a virtue in some situations to be picky and perfectionistic, to follow the rules exactly and to the letter, to not allow a single mistake. In some areas it matters.

It matters a lot if you're working with things that are very dangerous. Quality control in anything that involves chemicals, explosives, manufacturing, diseases, surgery - anything that really DOES have to be perfect in order to be safe. That's what got us on the subject of satellites.

For me, the 'mind control satellites' are just theoretical. I can't tell you their exact coordinates, how they work, who put them there, how they got there, how long they've been there, or what exactly they're doing. I can only speculate that perhaps they're up there, because I experience the things that I experience, and a lot of other people are also experiencing the same things.

I would rather that those satellites not be up there. I think I'm not the only person who would strongly prefer that those particular satellites not be up there, doing what they're doing.

However, somebody else thinks they SHOULD be up there. Somebody decided that that is the appropriate way to treat human beings. A lot of us disagree with that opinion. I think this is a legitimate grievance. I think mind-control satellites are NOT the appropriate way to treat human beings.

I'm usually rather strict about using nonviolent approaches to solving problems in society. I argue against 'blowing stuff up' and I agree with the joke that said the government spy in your group is the guy telling you to blow stuff up. However, I'm making an exception for those theoretical mind-control satellites. I think there will probably be very few civilian casualties or collateral damages if a mind-control satellite gets destroyed. There aren't many people standing around next to them, as far as I know.

We got on the topic of satellites in kind of an indirect way because they mentioned that perfectionistic pickiness is a good thing to have whenever you're building something to shoot at the satellites. (Again, I wouldn't know who's doing any such thing - and no, it isn't me - but I wish them the best of luck.)

So really, this all happened because I complained about sloppily prepared food, and felt guilty for being so annoyed about it.

Satellites are one of those things that do actually worry me a bit. I don't worry about much, but there are certain things that seem like they really WOULD be a big deal. For instance, if a giant asteroid crashed into the planet, that would be a serious problem. And also, if there were any theoretical mind-control satellites up there right now, doing things we aren't happy about, it would really suck if, for some reason, we couldn't get them down or shut them off. It's not easy to just go up there whenever we want to. If I can't sleep at night because a bunch of people are yelling 'WE ARE... PENN STATE!!!' that's not so bad. It's a little harder to deal with it if, for instance, I can't sleep because some satellite is doing stuff I don't want it to do.

And another little thing to worry about is how difficult it might be to get those satellites down from there if, for instance, a plague or some other problem wiped out large numbers of people down here on earth. We wouldn't really have many resources, like a large manufacturing industry, to produce things like metals, chemicals, tools, electronic equipment, and anything else that might be useful. So we might find it difficult to shoot down the satellites (assuming they even exist, since I can only speculate about such things) if we had no resources down here on earth. That would suck.

I imagine there will probably be some arguments about how to use our resources, what little resources we have. I've been pushing for some kind of shielded areas to give people help immediately, however the satellite project also seems pretty important too. So I wish them the best on that. I can only imagine things like mind-control satellites, but I'm sure there are people out there who know that they're real, and are already working on that problem. There are those of us who do appreciate the help.

there's a person in there!

(When I wrote this poem, I was 'under the influence' of St. John's Wort. I don't normally attempt to write poetry. Most of my 'experiences' over the past few years have involved meeting people and then losing them. It makes it difficult to have stable, normal relationships. I'm afraid of losing people. It's especially bad to try to meet people on the internet and have long-distance relationships with them. And it's hard to 'be myself' whenever I'm so often a slave, a puppet for words that are not my own. I don't know who I'd be if I were really alone. The 'trains' image comes from the Nazi concentration camps. The phrase 'there's a person in there!' was something that 'the voices' said to me, along with 'no more insight than you.')



there's a person in there!

what a fragile hold you have on them:
you don't know
when, where, or why they come and go.
two freight trains travel opposite ways
and they both slow down at once one day, then
slave one cries, 'help me, dear friend,
is that you?'
'how can i help?' calls back slave two.
'i have no more insight than you.'
slave one says 'is that where you are?
i can't even see you from this far.'
their blind eyes meet through an invisible fence
in discreet - recognition, shared experience -
the two trains start,
their connection breaks.
two separate cages of human freight... part...
and not they nor anyone ever knew
if slave one had ever really known slave two.
(but still the cameraderie was real
for in some way all slaves know how other slaves feel.)

Disinformation wars

I almost never go to chatrooms anymore. But back in 2000 - when it all began, for me at least - I did, quite often.

I haven't quite been feeling well since I had my two fillings done. I think the resin composite has been giving off bisphenol-A, an endocrine disruptor that mimics estrogen. And it's been making me feel depressed and sad. I'm still deciding what to do about this.

In that sad mood, I actually visited a chatroom the other day. And I had an experience that really reminded me of something I read in a Vernor Vinge novel, 'A Deepness in the Sky.' It also reminds me of something I read on fsk's blog somewhere about how it's possible to alter telephone conversations in real time, mimicking the voices of the people speaking.

I went in as a guest and then randomly made a silly name for myself, FilteredSentence, because some obnoxious person kept posting a URL and the chatroom kept sending a message that said 'sentence filtered - no URLs allowed' or something to that effect. I just sat there watching and occasionally made a comment. I even harassed somebody who seemed to be an FBI agent pretending to be a little girl attracting pedophiles (although it's possible it really WAS a little girl attracting pedophiles, which is why I didn't say anything too terrible to 'her').

Some guy p2p'd me (person-to-person chat) and behaved as though he thought I had p2p'd him, when I hadn't. We talked a little bit and after a few minutes I told him that I am a victim of electronic mind control. He was tolerant, curious, and compassionate.

He kept talking to me, and I said I wanted to study materials science to learn about how electromagnetic fields and sound waves interact with matter. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, after having previously been compassionate and tolerant, he said abruptly, 'I think you need to see a doctor.' Then he totally stopped answering.

By now, I'm old and cynical. I know that there's something wrong with the world. So I decided this probably wasn't his fault. I wrote something like, 'Thank you for your compassion. I'm not in any immediate danger and I'm going to be okay.' Then I let him go. I didn't keep trying to make him reply to me.

When people do strange things in chatrooms, if all of a sudden they stop answering, if they stop emailing, if they suddenly cut off communications or make a sudden drastic change in behavior, it's probably not their fault. I'm more inclined towards the "network corrupt" theory nowadays. In the Vernor Vinge book, some of the characters figured out that the (spoiler warning! if you haven't read this book! are you sure you want to read this spoiler? it's a really, really good book :) ) aliens were controlling the network, and altering all the information going across it, changing things, deleting things, and posting disinformation on the internet. Okay, that's not that much of a spoiler. That's pretty vague. But anyway, that scene made me laugh. They decided they had to hand-write all their military commands on paper and they could only speak to people in person, not by phone or over the net. It's ridiculous and true at the same time.

But anyway, sometimes I think that's what's going on in my own life. That's why I could relate so well to that book. (Granted, I've written about aliens before and my reasons why I choose to assume that all the phenomena are being caused by humans. But the basic idea is still valid.)

I remember another guy who used to go to that chatroom, and he was a victim long before I knew I was. He would always talk to the main room about his ESP-like experiences and things like that. I had several conversations with him and he was sometimes distrusting, but very clearly intelligent and articulate. But it frustrated me because he was so far away and I knew I would never communicate with the real person.

And every now and then, we'd be in the middle of a chat with each other, and all of a sudden he'd say things that seemed 'incongruent,' somehow, like he didn't see what I'd written, or like he had seen something different from what I'd said. His behavior was just kind of unpredictable. Back then, I assumed that he was slightly mentally ill - but back then, I also believed in ESP and psychic powers. So I thought he was sick with some disease that enhanced his psychic abilities. If anything strange ever happened, I just passed it off as being caused by his mental illness. But nowadays, looking back, I wonder. It's possible that he and I were speaking perfectly clearly to each other, but somebody intervened to screw things up.

When I googled 'operation network corrupt,' hoping that somebody might have mentioned that scene from the Vernor Vinge book, I didn't find it, but I found stuff talking about our own military's network warfare - for instance, "Army activates network warfare unit" and the military's network warfare page.

Now, I'm not saying that THOSE SPECIFIC operations are responsible for the things I experience. I'm just saying that, in general, that type of thing exists, and those are examples. I always emphasize that many different agencies, governments, countries, corporations, groups, and individuals are fighting an enormous information war, and you can never know which specific people are responsible for which incidents. That's the whole point of disinformation - to make it look like somebody ELSE did it, not you.

I haven't yet told the whole story of what exactly started happening to me in 2000. (It actually began before that, but I became more aware of it and began to understand it in 2000.) And this probably isn't the right time to tell it all, since I have to go to work today.

But I've learned some things over the past few years. I've learned that sometimes, people aren't responsible for what they do - they're puppets. While googling Vernor Vinge, I saw he's written a book called 'Synthetic Serendipity.' I haven't read the book, but that's a good phrase to describe what I usually call 'puppeteering.'

Here's a trivial example, one of the 'painless' incidents that didn't actually do anything bad. I wrote a blog about my obsession with growing long hair and how I used to want to be a hairstylist. And at the end I wrote a list of 'don'ts.' I know from experience just how awful it is trying to untangle long hair that's been blowing in the wind. Well, the next day, a guy rode his bicycle across the road directly in front of my car when I was at a stop light. I don't call these things luck or coincidence anymore. This bicycle guy had a long beard and long hair that looked like it hadn't been brushed in years. It was a stringy, matted mane of tangles, knots, and dreadlocks.

I didn't even get annoyed. It's difficult to perturb me nowadays. I see these 'coincidences' all the time, every day. When I see them, I just keep going. It's all part of the 'synthetic serendipity' that I experience. I endure these events, while at the same time, I quietly send them off to my long-term to-do list, among the many things that need to be understood, the things that I can't pass off as merely some supernatural or mystical events, some mysterious will of the deity or whatever. That's not a good enough explanation for me. I need to know HOW - all the way down at the level of 'one quark bumps into another quark.' If you don't know how it's done, you can't protect yourself against it.

I endure these events, yet at the same time, I'm sick of the disinformation wars. Real human beings are getting hurt.

I'm thinking of how we'll live through the next millennium and make life not just bearable, but enjoyable, meaningful, and fulfilling for as many people as we can.

The vegetarianism conflict and my 'religion'

i've been hearing from some people about the fact that i'm very much a pacifist and animal lover, yet i advocate eating meat, and i myself eat meat. i love animals, i hate the mistreatment of animals, and i can't bear to hurt them, but yet i still do say that eating meat is nutritious, and i don't want to stop.

i admire gandhi and his rules of pacifism. and one thing he required was a vegetarian diet. but i disagree - or at least, i'm not sure.

this is still an unreconciled conflict.

there are things that happen to you when you experience killing an animal. it traumatizes you. you feel like you're killing part of yourself. you feel like it's you who's being killed. and then, perhaps it becomes easier to kill something else. perhaps you become more callous towards human beings as well. perhaps, once you've killed an animal, you no longer mind causing pain and suffering to live animals - they're only objects, and they're going to die anyway.

since i've been in the position of a helpless animal, as someone who can't fight against the psychotronic attacks, i do understand how it feels to be the victim of somebody who's physically or technologically stronger than I am.

i've only killed insects, and i've seen the death of small animals and family pets. i've seen the bodies of both of my grandfathers after they died, but i was not near them at the moment when they died. my family 'put to sleep' one of our dogs when i was a teenager.

the empathy of killing or hurting something is strongest when the animal is very similar to you.

there is some literal truth to the experience of trauma while killing an animal. i read about the detailed process of how to slaughter a pig. they mentioned that when you do it, you experience an unpleasant adrenaline rush, a rush of fear or panic, the fight-or-flight feeling, and that this is something you have to get used to. i suspect that this adrenaline rush doesn't come from inside you. i believe that the adrenaline is released by the animal, and that it either vaporizes into the air, or it penetrates your skin through touch.

i have experienced getting an adrenaline rush of panic when i was close to somebody who was getting emergency medical treatment because his blood sugar was dangerously low. when his sugar was low, it caused his body to start panicking. the feeling of panic wasn't my own. i sometimes recognize it when feelings and sensations aren't coming from inside me. this would also explain 'mob mentality.' when a large group of people are together, and somebody feels an adrenaline rush, anger, excitement, or whatever, the emotion spreads to other people through the air. they inhale the hormones emitted by other people, and respond as though they were their own.

studies have already verified the observation that females start menstruating all at the same time, when they're together in a group, because they emit volatile hormones that are inhaled by the other females. or pheromones, i forget which. those volatile hormones affect all the women. i've observed this really happening. at my workplace, all the women get our periods at the same time. we all joke about it. it's happened at almost every place i've worked. this happened back when i lived in a college dorm too.

so i suspect that when you slaughter an animal, the animal's feelings are probably transferred to you in a similar way. you may experience the trauma directly because the pain, fear, and bodily damage create hormones that affect you as though the feeling were your own.

this is usually a good thing because it helps people to have empathy with other people and animals. when one person or animal feels pain or fear, other people do too, but in a more vague, dim, indirect way.

but i do believe that eating meat is nutritionally beneficial to people. i don't advocate a vegetarian diet. i've been against vegetarian diets ever since i began studying nutrition. there are too many 'unnatural' things you have to do to compensate for the loss of nutrients that would have been provided by the meat. and soy is not the miracle food it's advertised to be. soy is not an appropriate replacement for meat! you can't just eat a bunch of soy and hope for the best. and in a primitive group of people who have few resources, we won't be able to make a bunch of artificial vitamin pills ourselves.

philosophically you have to ask, where do you draw the line? i am a heterotrophic organism. i must eat organic chemicals produced by other living things. i have to at least eat plants. when a plant gets injured, it responds by trying to heal the injury and regrow some part of itself. don't the plants suffer and feel pain somehow too? i don't understand how they feel, but that doesn't mean they don't feel. they're still an organism trying to survive. so if you refuse to kill anything at all, your only choice is to allow yourself to starve to death.

in wondering about this before, i learned about the practice of eating insects. this is acceptable to me, and i definitely will include it in the list of acceptable foods in the community/religion that i imagine. but i don't know how nutritious it is if insects are your ONLY form of meat. i don't know how well it supports pregnancy and infant development. also the insects must be fed a clean and nutritious diet. i don't like some of the feeding methods described for edible insects - they seem to be lacking variety. natural, wild insects could eat dangerous, poisonous, or contaminated foods, so i understand the reasons for culturing them and feeding them yourself. but the diets they described were very narrow and limited in their nutrient content.

i have thought that perhaps meat eaters could be required to kill a small animal themselves, and if they were willing to do this, then they would be ethically allowed to eat meat. i don't like the idea that you pay somebody else to kill an animal for you, someplace where you can't see the event occur. if you can't bear to admit that the killing really happens, then it seems unethical to eat meat. if i required this, it would be done in the least traumatic way possible. it would not serve the purpose of just causing people to feel guilt and pain. they would only do whatever they felt comfortable with.

or maybe at the very least, they could observe someone else killing an animal. it's easy to tolerate the idea that somebody i dislike was killing an animal, but what if it was done by somebody who i like and respect? what if it was done by somebody i cared about? i didn't grow up on a farm, but when you do, you see your own parents killing animals.

i just don't know about the ethics of purchasing something that you yourself can't imagine doing, or producing, or watching, or really comprehending in any direct way. if you can't bear to think of it or admit that it's real, then it seems like you shouldn't be buying it and using it. i understand that division and specialization of labor in society makes it so that one person is really good at mathematics, and another person hates math and wants nothing to do with it, and the math-loving people go into certain professions. but the math-hating people don't think that doing math is wrong or evil. they just think that doing math is unpleasant. it's different when the division of labor has some people doing an activity which your religion might define as morally wrong - if you actually thought about it.

it usually seems more tolerable to kill and eat a fish rather than a 'warm, fuzzy' mammal. again, the dissimilarity makes the animal seem less like yourself, less empathic. there are several types of semi-vegetarian diets that actually draw the line to allow fish in the diet.

i have thought that killing animals might be less traumatic if it were done a certain way, according to a particular set of rules or quality requirements, like the kosher rules. there could be some kind of religious rite associated with killing an animal. there could be very strong rules about how the animals would be treated while alive, to prevent their pain and suffering, and specific rules about exactly how the killing would be performed. of course i advocate that the animal must be killed very, very quickly and effectively, so that death occurs instantly.

i've also thought that hunting wild animals, rather than raising them on a farm, seems less bad.

'they' think that i advocate eating meat because i've been doing it all my life and it would be traumatic to admit that i've been doing a horrible thing for years. they think that i'm just rationalizing, so that i won't feel guilty about what i've done.

that argument seems plausible, but also, i really feel convinced by what i've read in my studies of nutrition. i also know from personal observation that i feel healthier and stronger when i have meat in my diet, and i feel sicker and weaker when i eat a vegetarian diet. i also feel much less satisfied by each vegetarian meal, and i feel constantly frustrated and hungry. it feels like i need to eat all the time, and i'm still not getting what i need.

some people describe meat eating as an 'addiction.' i don't describe it that way. humans are animals. many other animals are omnivorous or carnivorous. you can't say they have an 'addiction' to eating meat. a wild tiger or lion isn't 'addicted' to eating meat.

there are some psychological phenomena that i want to avoid. i want to make sure that when people kill animals, they don't become callous and insensitive. i want them to at least acknowledge that the animal's life was real, even if this is done through a religious ritual without much emotional involvement. and i don't want them to transfer the 'able to kill' feeling over to humans.

i have heard that native americans did something like that, a ritualistic acknowledgment of respect paid to the animal killed. but i'm not sure what to believe about the native americans, because many stories about them are myths - for instance, the famous chief seattle speech is a fake.

i want to make sure that animal handlers don't mistreat the animals because they're anticipating that the animal is soon to die anyway. the animals must be comfortable and at ease up until the very last moment of their lives. they must not feel fear. i would prefer that they not even be alerted to the fact that they are about to die, if they are captive animals on a farm. it would be different with hunted animals, because they are probably running away and being chased. there is no way to avoid alerting them to the danger, if they are startled and are trying to run away.

i have seen the type of people who do kill animals. i've heard people talking about slaughtering animals. i felt disgusted by their attitudes and emotions. they really did not understand empathy. the particular person i'm remembering was somebody who said that he got paid to shoot somebody's pigs to slaughter them. he described it as though it was no big deal. also, he wanted to go into the military. his desire to go into the military had exactly the same incomprehension. it never occurred to him for even a second that he could be getting paid to shoot and kill innocent people, people speaking another language that he could not understand, for reasons that were wrong and evil and stupid. this was something that he just could not imagine. the military was just a good job that paid a lot of money, and it was fun and exciting. he didn't mind the idea of going to iraq - he liked it. he just repeated all the government brainwashing that says he's protecting our country from terrorists. i had several conversations with him about this. there was just no way to explain or convince him that he would be paid to kill real human beings whose lives actually mattered, people who had done nothing wrong, innocent civilians just like me and everyone he knew - except they had a slightly different physical appearance, and another language and culture. and the government said it's okay to kill them. and yet, somehow, he wasn't abnormal in his social relationships. he was able to interact with other people, as long as they were white americans.

i'm not really sure about this, but, in my experience, people who hunt wild roaming animals don't seem quite as unempathic as people who slaughter captive animals in a group. they seem to have a SLIGHTLY better acceptance of non-white, non-americans as being human. they seem to have more respect for the animals that they chase and kill - although, again, some of them speak disrespectfully of the animals as objects. and some of them are prejudiced against non-white non-americans. i actually don't know, now that i think about it. i haven't known very many hunters or people who get paid to slaughter animals. it actually seems like both groups of people tend to be the types who define all other human races and cultures as 'not like myself, therefore killable.'

in the community i imagine, i would like to deliberately adopt multiracial children and deliberately invite immigrants. the community members would find it more difficult to look at nonwhite races and call them killable. they'd be too familiar.

the worst people seem to be the ones who don't mind killing a large group of animals who are physically trapped and cannot escape, animals who have been fed and nurtured for months or years. i know that farmers who raise animals might send them away someplace else to be slaughtered, so that they don't have to do this themselves. i know farmers do sometimes speak about the emotional pain of killing animals that they nurtured. but some people really do seem to be without any feeling or understanding of it at all.

i don't necessarily want hunters or farmers to suffer every single time they kill an animal. but i want them to somehow acknowledge or respect the animal in some way, even if it is merely a ritual and even if they don't sincerely 'feel' the meaning of the ritual. it is almost an act of politeness. like saying 'please' and 'thank you.' even if they don't really feel it or understand it, it is a minimal way of acknowledging the animal's dignity and value.

if i decide that i'm not comfortable with the killing of 'large, warm, fuzzy' animals, i still will advocate eating insects, and probably fish, and possibly some other kind of small animal.

right now i am still paying other people to kill large animals for me.

this is all about designing an intentional community with a particular culture, a particular religion. i'm an atheist, and i would like to see community support for atheists. community support for christians already exists, although i would sympathize if christians said that even they felt the need to see an intentional community built for themselves. it's true that mainstream christianity isn't really doing this either.

NOBODY is allowed to build the particular kind of intentional community i'm thinking of, because all intentional communities challenge or violate zoning laws. even the amish community frequently gets into conflicts with the government over zoning laws. anytime your community needs to do something small and local, on its own, there will be a law saying they can't. you're not allowed to build houses right around manufacturing sites, for instance - the land must be categorized as 'residential' if they would allow houses there. what if you had a small factory and you wanted to allow the workers to sleep right nearby on-site? and wouldn't it be nice if there were informal outdoor markets right on the street, and you could just walk out of your house and go to the market?

(i have seen one example of zones that made sense to me. it was a geological map that described the different types of rock and soil over a whole area. the areas were divided into zones because certain kinds of land were physically unsuitable for certain kinds of buildings. the soil might not be solid or stable enough for a very large building, and that kind of thing. but not all zoning laws have practical reasons like that. i've read that the amish get into conflicts because they build small additions on their houses to allow their parents and grandparents to continue living there with the family. those add-ons built on the house get them in trouble with local laws. but the 'english,' as they call us, usually don't live in the same houses with our parents and grandparents after we grow up. we usually move away, sometimes very far away.)

this overlaps with topics i'd like to write about separately because they're too long - questions about what IS a 'community,' why communities are what they are today, why people lack a sense of community, what needs they meet, how the government has made it difficult to form communities, etc. i will have to write another blog about this.

so anyway, my 'intentional community' concept involves asking questions about what kind of culture i would like to create, and that includes ethical-religious questions like whether we eat meat. since i picture the community producing at least some of its own food, then we would need to decide right away about whether to kill animals and how to do it. and since i picture it as a more pacifist, nonviolent community, i don't want to do things that encourage people to view other living creatures, including humans, as killable objects. it's important to avoid doing things that teach people that it's okay to turn off your empathy and hurt people. personally, i think i will allow meat eating, but i want to consider how it affects people psychologically whenever they kill animals.

so, i haven't reconciled the vegetarianism conflict yet, but i do take it seriously.

The Hair Breakage Myth

I'm recovering from the dental filling replacement. I don't feel too bad today.

Today I got a comment from a well-meaning person about my hair. I disagreed with the theory behind the comment, and since it was a brief, casual conversation, I knew there would be no time to explain it to that person. So I'll explain it to the world in general instead.

She looked at my braid, complimented me for how long it was, and then said that it was very thin towards the end. She asked me, when was the last time I had it cut? The assumption was that the tapering-off thinness was caused by breakage of split ends, and that the hair would become thicker and longer if only I cut it to remove those breaking ends.

Many people believe that when you grow your hair very long, the split ends begin to break off, and that's the reason why your hair stops getting any longer. I used to believe that too. This is actually not the reason why hair stops at a certain length.

It's true that hair develops split ends, and that the ends are dry, fragile, and easily broken. It's also true that my hair has split ends. But that's not the reason why it's getting thinner at the bottom of the hair.

Hair is 'programmed' to grow only a certain length. Each hair individually grows a certain number of years. Then it stops growing and just sits there for a while. Supposedly, that's all the growing it will ever do, although I wouldn't be surprised if somebody discovered that individual hairs restart growth after stopping. But eventually, a new hair begins to grow from the same place underneath the old hair, and it makes the old hair disconnect and fall out.

The length of any particular hair is determined by its location on your body, and by your genes, your race or ethnic group, your overall health, and other things like chemicals and hormones.

This is easier to understand if you ask why your eyebrows and eyelashes don't just grow down and cover your face. Each hair grows perhaps a month or two and then stops. Occasionally, one hair falls out and is replaced by a new one.

My hair is reaching its fullest length. It's also very, very thin, and it always has been. Everyone in my family has thin, straight hair. This is why the longest hairs are very few.

I've entirely stopped trimming it. I'm not even using the special techniques that some people use to trim very long hair - you can read about them on various websites. They twist the hair until the ends are sticking out and then just cut the individual pieces that are split.

Since I'm not even trimming them, the hairs are just stopping at whatever length they happen to reach. I used to cut my hair. Therefore, many of the hairs were cut at some time during their growth phase, and so they will never reach their absolute fullest possible length. Each individual hair might have been trimmed multiple times.

The probability of any particular hair growing to its absolute fullest length, and not ever having been trimmed, is the lowest at the very end of the hair. That would be a brand-new piece of hair whose end was right above the level of the very last haircut I ever had.

It would be so much easier if I could just draw a diagram instead of explaining it in words.

Anyway, it's normal for very long hair to taper down thinner and thinner towards the ends. That doesn't mean it's breaking off. It doesn't mean that you ought to chop a bunch off so that it will be thicker and healthier. It just means that hardly any pieces have been lucky enough to survive that long of a time without ever having been cut or having fallen out.

I used to think it was bad when hair looked that way. I've always been fascinated with hair since I was a teenager, and I considered becoming a hairdresser. Except now, with my beliefs and preferences about haircutting, I want to AVOID cutting hair, instead of getting paid to cut hair according to specific styles. I totally reversed a lot of my old 'makeover' images to become their exact opposites. So I would be an anti-hairdresser. I guess I wouldn't mind being a 'groomer,' someone who brushes it and braids it, or something.

So now I appreciate the sight of a person growing extremely long hair even if it looks imperfect by the standards of 'zero split ends' and 'all hairs level with each other.'

Some long hair websites describe a trimming technique, which I've tried. It's not easy, but you can do it if you are either very patient, or have a helper. I don't advocate this technique anymore, after having tried it.

Basically, you separate the hair into strings, and then twist each string at the end, so that the shorter pieces' ends bristle outwards. Then you trim just the bristly pieces sticking out. I don't advocate this anymore, partly because I don't like anything that's too time-consuming - and it would be VERY time-consuming if your hair was thick - and also, because it DOES make a substantial difference in the length of your hair. The technique is intended to avoid, as much as possible, excessive trimming, to preserve the hair length. But I believe that even that method of trimming will slow it down and reduce the eventual final length of hair you achieve.

At some point, a few years ago, I decided to just abandon the 'zero split ends' standards. Instead I defined the new 'perfection' as: all of my hair will be as long as it's able to grow. I'm still perfectionistic, but I'm judging it by a different standard than I used to. I handle the split ends by just combing them very gently.

So, if you try to grow very long hair, eventually you stop trying to keep all of the hair exactly level and perfectly free of split ends.

It's interesting. I have a totally different way of looking at hair than many people do. To me, nowadays, hair is a goal-oriented thing. I try to grow it as long as I can, and I see that length as an achievement. It's something I have control over. I remember thinking, years ago, that a lot of goals were very difficult to achieve, very complicated, very expensive, very time-consuming, but growing hair was one goal you could easily do without even trying. You just sit there and your hair gets long all by itself. The less you do, the better.

I think that most other people have a totally different kind of goal they want to achieve. They think that having hair at a particular length is 'good,' and it's 'bad' to grow the hair longer than that. They think that a particular style must 'frame the face,' and that 'long hair doesn't look good on just anybody.' Most women call it 'long hair' if it reaches someplace below the shoulders and above the waist, somewhere in the middle of the back. And there's something 'bad' about growing it any longer than that. Or they get restless and impatient and they want a change. They don't have a conscious, deliberate goal, a plan to grow it as long as it can be.

They also believe that 'changing something' is inherently interesting, so they make sudden drastic haircuts or perms or new colors. In a way, I agree that change can be interesting. But I value full-length hair so much, and am so firmly committed to it, that I think some other solution should be found. People can wear their hair in a different style than usual, without cutting it. There are many different ways of braiding and weaving hair, and they can be done once and then left in place for a while, so that it's not too time-consuming.

I've almost always gotten compliments and positive responses about my hair. Nobody comes up to me and says, 'You know, that hairstyle looks awful with your shape of face. You should cut it and perm it and it would be more flattering to you.' Instead, they appreciate the sight of something scarce, something that isn't seen very often.

I feel the same way when I see other people with very long hair. I don't want to compete against them, or worry that their hair is longer than my own. Instead I feel almost like they're cooperating or helping me to do something that I value.

I see very, very few people with full-length hair. It would be amazing if more people did it, too, because most people have thicker, healthier hair than I have. They'd be able to grow it down to ankle length, which mine will never do.

Of course, there are things you can learn that will make it easier to do. The most important thing you can learn is that you must comb or brush your hair starting from someplace pretty far down instead of starting at the top. That way, you get the lower tangles out of the way first, and then you gradually comb from higher and higher levels. This prevents you from making huge, impossible knots that can't be undone. You don't want to cut knots out every day.

Don't ever ride a roller coaster with your hair down - it will tangle very badly, and also it could get caught on a moving object. Don't drive a car with the air from the open window blowing your hair around. DON'T GET CHEWING GUM IN IT!!! :D Don't wear staticky polyester - if you hate staticky polyester clothing as much as I do, you'll find this fabric to be even more annoying than usual when it sticks to your hair and tangles it up. Don't wear long hair loose around heavy equipment or machines! Don't slam the door on it. I heard a story about someone with long hair who drowned in a sauna because her hair tangled around the spinning filter fan. There are lots of 'Don'ts' that you learn.

Anyway, I wanted to write about the 'breakage' myth. I can't always explain things quickly and easily in a casual conversation, but I can always write about them.

amalgam fillings

I didn't post anything this week because on Monday I had my silver amalgam filling replaced with a composite resin filling. I also had a new cavity in one of my canine teeth, so I got that one filled too.

My reaction to the composite resin was really bad, so I was sick all Monday night and just didn't feel like myself on most of Tuesday. I still don't quite feel like myself.

There is a good effect I'm noticing. The metal filling had been leaking enough that I could frequently taste metal. Whenever I tasted the metal, I would then feel very sick at my stomach afterwards. That problem has been solved. I also have less of a horrible taste in my mouth when I wake up in the morning, now that the metal filling is gone. And I'm not sure yet whether this is a long-lasting effect, but I'm noticing it's easier to get up in the mornings - I'm not so exhausted.

I'm doing some research to decide what I want to do about these fillings in the long run, because I don't really feel comfortable about these composite resins. I think I'm better off than I was with the leaking silver-mercury-copper amalgam. But the new composites are causing some unpleasant and frightening symptoms - as i said, I just don't really feel quite right. This is one of those times when it's really, really obvious just how severely chemical sensitive I am. I react badly to almost EVERYTHING.

I'm thinking I'll wait about two weeks and see if the new fillings 'settle in' and if the symptoms get better. If not, I'll go from there.