the other tr5affic on 95

it sucks in more ways than you thought

Arts and crafts

Empty Message

Castle of Glass

I had intended to do a mega-post on all my problems with Columbus, since Monday was Columbus Day, but I think I’ll just sum my feelings towards him as follows: Fuck that guy and the ship(s) he rode in on.

Turning to more recent affairs, it’s pretty obvious this whole sham is falling apart. On Tuesday, Elinor’s teachers from daycare called saying she had a fever, so I picked the kids up early and watched them the rest of the day. After watching them basically for two days straight, I began to seriously wonder why I bother to work at all. Money? That’s a worthless carrot. Most of it ends up back in the hands of the banks who create it out of thin air. Don’t believe me? You should probably read up on the Federal Reserve. The Corbett Report has a good hour and a half intro on exactly how fucked up our monetary system is.

Anyhoo, where was I? Oh yeah....work. Useless. Waste of time. Aren’t there a hundred things you’d rather be doing?

Houses, cars, etc., etc.....all useless. And yet we all keep doing things we hate to buy and maintain them. Talk about fucked up priorities.

Started drawing up a logic diagram on the electoral system and Trump. All signs point to Trump being the ultimate psy-op. Everything we’ve been sold is the exact opposite. He was chosen to be the ultimate distraction so the fleecing can be ramped up, while red state idiots don’t know any better and blue state idiots spend all their time having panic attacks and they can all spend their miserable lives flaming each other online. “Red is blue, blue is red! It’s all a lie!” People are so easily divided and pitted against each other.

Trump is the insider that convinced his followers that he is the outsider. What tipped me off is that Kavanaugh is solidly in the Bush dynasty inner circle. “Drain the swamp?” More like fill that shit to the brim. Trump has lined his administration with all the mainstream neocons he can find. John Bolton? That mustachio’d turd? That guy? Really....

As a colleague at work always says, “it’s all over except the arguing.” Just a slippery slide into oblivion for the empire. The world is probably better off without it, to be honest.

Nothing I can do about it, except point it out to people so they are better prepared when it finally goes south. All that money stored away for a rainy day? Worthless. Could literally vanish overnight.

Not that I would do anything about it, even if I could. I tend to take the Carlin approach these days. On one of his interviews he said that he was not an active participant. He just stays out of it and tries to point out to people “look at what you’re doing to yourselves.” It seems to me that humanity was doomed from the start.

My approach is perhaps best described in Linkin Park’s “Castle of Glass:”

“‘cuz I’m only a crack in this castle of glass, hardly anything there for you to see......

‘cus I’m only a crack in this castle of glass, hardly anything else I need to be.......”

FocusWriter plug / link

A few posts ago, I mentioned FocusWriter.  It's available for all major platforms at the following link:

https://gottcode.org/focuswriter/

Pretty nifty application that lets you focus on writing.  You can set it to highlight all text, or just the paragraph you are currently working on.  You can enable optional typewriter sounds.  Which I would like to get a working typewriter at some point, the one my parents brought up that I used to use in high school was DOA and would have been a project in itself to revive.

FocusWriter also has built-in alarms and controls if you want to set a goal for number of words to write a day.  I haven't used this feature, but whenever I get around to writing the book that's been floating around in my head, I will definitely use that feature to keep writing.

Just a short plug.  All my recent posts have been written using FocusWriter.  It's good to have nothing else on your screen to distract you from the words.

The truth about sports

My parents came up to help watch Elinor, and before we put her to bed we set up the TV antenna so my dad could watch the VT game. For about 20 minutes before heading to bed, I unfortunately saw a bit of the Miami vs. Florida State game (I think). But what struck me was a commercial for a Samsung TV, in which a bearded man and his friends sat catatonic, slack-jawed, staring at a game on the latest 84 inch 4k TV. It was an oddly honest picture of what our corporate overlords wish you to become.

After putting Elinor to bed, I considered writing an honest book about sports from my perspective, sort of a dictionary-style list of everything I hate about sports. Here's a few of the ones I brainstormed:

Sports - an amalgum of activities designed to distract the general populace from actual issues, either by encouraged participation or socially-forced spectation. Participation in some form of sport is recommended as a drain for energy and rage that may otherwise be turned against the ruling class.

Athlete - a person with more muscles than brains.

Professional Athlete - an athlete with a wallet size that far exceeds their brain capacity

Baseball - an extremely dull game where one meathead throws a ball in the vicinity of another meathead, who tries to hit the ball with a stick so other meatheads can try to get it before he runs in a diamond pattern.

Cricket - the international version of baseball, with the added benefit of longer games and incomprehensibility.

Basketball - Inexplicably popular game in which children who never grew up bounce a ball and try to be the meathead team of five that places the ball through a hoop the most times in a given time period

Football - the ultimate meathead sport, in which two teams of meatheads try to beat the little brains remaining out of each other in order to advance an oblong object towards either end of a 300 foot field.

Boxing - a sport in which two meatheads enter a ring and demonstrate in no uncertain terms their disdain for brains.

Mixed-martial arts - similar to boxing, except the meatheads demonstrate an extreme dislike for all bodily organs.

Olympic sports - meatheads from around the globe congregate to compete for a spot on next month's cereal box.

Marathon - a bastardized version of the original, in which overly self-important assholes run a long way and, for the most part, fail to die as originally intended.

Marathoner - a severely damaged human being that has nothing better to do than run for hours on end. For some reason, these people never confront whatever it is from which they are running.

Sprinter - a marathoner with attention deficit disorder.

Tennis - Ping-pong for meatheads, spectated mostly by rich white folks (see golf).

Golf - Meatheads try to hit a ball across a large swath of what should be wilderness, while rich white people spectate and plot how to ruin the rest of the world.

Soccer - Referred to as the world sport because anyone can play it, even destitute kids with both arms blown off from sectarian violence. In the absence of balls, human heads have been used the world over as a subsitutue.

Sports Commentator - A lowlife who makes their career describing the actions of meatheads.

Sports Fan - base human beings that are too fat or weak to be athletes and too dumb to read.

Continuity of Operations

People love to hate on Trump. And it's deserved. The guy is a total bag of shit. Complete. In every conceivable way. I'm not arguing that he exemplifies all of the very worst qualities of humanity, wrapped up in a bloated, hauntingly ugly package. As if the asshole gene had finally been isolated, grown in a test tube, and unwittingly unleashed upon an unsuspecting and unprepared world from a secret government lab.

But what I do question is the belief that "voting" is somehow the answer any of the most pressing problems facing the United States. As if removing Trump from office is in any way going to instantly make America a better place, or fix any of the deep, endemic problems facing the nation.

In point of fact Trump is the very caricature of our dying, overspread empire. He is bloated. Wasteful. Ignorant. Militaristic. Unapologetic. Anti-intellectual. All these things that America has been for a very long time, except taking human form.

And in many ways he is the first unabashedly honest American president, in that he is completely, unabashedly fake. A total fraud. Usually the elite put palatable people into place, alternating red vs. blue sound byte machines that are soothing to the American eardrum. But through every administration, Democrat or Republican, the empire's agenda continues in a remarkably consistent direction. Bipartisan agreement? What a joke. This country is and always has been unipartisan. The rich. End of story. Plutocracy from day one. The two-party system is just a perversion of sport, segmenting the population into two factions rooting for their favorite team. And just as in sports, no one seems to realize that the players are all the same meatheaded assholes, just with different shirts.

With the selection of Trump as the current distractor-in-chief, the power elite seem to have bitten off more than they can chew. Then again, that may all be part of the planned smokescreen. Or maybe they just think it's funny watching everyone harp on his every Tweet while they rob us all blind.

Lately I've been reading a lot about the real history of America. Not the whitewash crap you get in your history texts. No, the real story of power in America and the evolution and consequences of our global empire. Devil's Chessboard. In the Shadows of the American Century. The Power Elite. Dirty Wars. Overthrow. You want to take a hard look in the mirror, America? These are a good start.

And plenty of Gore Vidal. In the end, I tend to agree with him the most. It's time for a constitutional convention to dissolve the United States. Way past time. We've done enough damage to the world. Time to let someone else take over.

And time for the states to handle their own business. No longer would blue states have to even speak to red states, and vice versa, if they so choose. I would think the West Coast would unite, likely with a Colorado or Nevada thrown in there for kicks. Call it the Western Republic. Likely the Northeast states could merge as well. Hell, call it New England and cozy up to Canada and the U.K.

Texas could become it's own republic. I doubt Texas would want to economically prop up all the leftover red states like we all are now, pouring disability funds into them so they can vote against taxes. The rest of the states would just become forgotten gas stops between the big three. Resigned to history, or heritage, or whatever they call their homegrown version of bigotry these days. I'm sure you could get them to vote for their own economic demise. Just slap a Tea Party logo on it and it's a done deal!

All pipe dreams, I know. Will never happen. There's too much capital invested in this hulking juggernaut to let it fracture.

Once again, I'm kind of struck at how stark-ravingly obvious the sham has become. With all the cyber issues circulating the propaganda machine, they've pretty much told you flat out that the results are whatever they decide is best for you. After all, the voting machines aren't connected to anything. Why else would they be so ill-designed that a 12-year old could hack them? Neither are the canditates connected, except to gigantic corporate donors. Your so-called "representatives" in Congress, just how well do they "represent" you and your needs. Not a damn bit is my guess. So what is it? The nice suit? The nice smile? More that he's on your team, and the other guy is on the other team. That's the ticket, right?

I'm guessing the power elite have realized that their Trump card was overplayed, and you'll see a swing to Democratic control of the Senate come November. And half the country will celebrate, believing themselves and the country partially vindicated.......the other half will sulk at their team's recent defeat. Washington will again be settled in its as-designed gridlock.

But the drones will still be dropping bombs all over the world map at an ever increasing rate, in dozens of countries, killing untold numbers of civilians and, quite conveniently, creating more "terrorists" to target down the line. The NSA will still be reading all of your emails, texts, online activity, and calls. At more than a thousand U.S. military installations scattered across the globe, people will go to work doing exactly whatever it is they do to preserve the empire, whether or not they can admit to themselves that this is their function.

And here at home, you'll go to work every day until you're old enough to retire. You'll pay a remarkable portion of your pay to fund the empire, whether you admit that to yourself or not. Most of your money will be fed back to banks and companies solidly vested in the maintenance of the empire. All of your taxes....empire building and maintenance. Food, gas money, mortgage, all of it going to expand their power. Your parents and your kids, same thing, different life.

If you're lucky, you are comfortable. Or at least getting by. For now. And besides, you are an outstanding citizen. You even vote...whatever that means.

E.F.L.R

Testing a new software on Linux, called FocusWriter. It’s a full screen word processor that eliminates all menus and icons on your desktop, and the text you type shows up over on your preferred theme background. Mine, perhaps not surprisingly, is called “Bitter Skies,” a dark themed background picturing a high altitude lightning strike. Very fitting, since I’ve been reflecting more and more on how our whole economic system is sick. Politics, economy, agriculture. All of them terminally ill. But that doesn’t mean that I have to buy into any of it.

I am three months in on a year-long experiment with intermittent fasting. The first phase of the experiment was intermittent fasting (eating nothing on MWF, eating lunch and dinner on T-Th-Sat-Sun), and going vegan with no exercise completely ad hoc (infrequent, lifting once or twice a week, cardio occasionally). I lost 23.2 lbs in 43 days. I then took a break for a month, eating a more consistent schedule (1-2 meals a day). To my surprise, I hadn’t gained any weight back despite dropping most dietary restrictions. I simply found that I wasn’t as hungry, and often forgot to eat for a whole day.

This week I started the second phase of the experiment, with an initial goal of an additional 20 lbs weight loss. My ultimate goal is 60 lbs of weight loss, spread over three phases. For the second phase, I am keeping the same intermittent fasting schedule (MWF no eating) while limiting myself to lunch and dinner on Tuesdays / Thursdays, and a single meal on Saturday and Sunday. Added to this is a structured exercise regimen and a modified dietary approach based on lessons learned in phase 1 (described in more detail below).

Our agricultural system that produces so much food while providing so little real sustenance. This comes into sharp relief when you fast. Fasting completely overhauls your relationship with food. It amplifies the effects of the food you eat. Any positive or negative mental, health, or metabolic effects of a given food are multiplied, particularly if it is the first food that you eat after a bout of fasting.

For instance, I have completely lost my taste for beer, which I used to drink at a rate of almost three a day. There are only a few cases where I can enjoy a whole beer. One is after a long day of physical labor outside, in which case a very light beer is refreshing. The other is a draft beer on special occasions. However, in each of these cases, I have noted that after the fact I have regretted drinking each time. The initial rush gives way to an amplification of snap negative behavior, particularly when dealing with the kids. I have thus concluded that any ingestion of alcohol is ultimately unproductive and not worth the metabolic costs.

Another unexpected result from initial experimentation was a marked reduction in the urge to eat sugars. Now and then, I crave something sweet, but I find that having an apple or a cinnamon toast rice cake is enough to quell the urge. Before intermittent fasting, I would be ravenous for dessert, particularly after dinner. I still have a pang now and again, and admittedly have relapsed and had a single episode of eating cake and ice cream at people’s birthdays. But with these events came a realization that wasn’t there. I had a noticeable reaction that the sweets have no sustenance. No filling value, no medicinal value, just pure energy that is wasted.

Another marked discovery from my dietary experimentation is the marked inflammatory effects of gluten. The ingestion of this vile substance creates across the board inflammation in my body. And it’s in almost everything that I usually eat. And have been eating for my whole life. Horrible. Truly horrible. How much damage have I done to my system over the years from ingesting this garbage? Lots. Well, it ends now.

Regarding veganism, I tried it for about three months and realize that it is an incomplete solution to dietary and moral issues. While it is definitely the lowest carbon dietary alternative, the protein sources you get, particularly nuts, are not necessarily carbon conscious. Almonds in particular. Coconut milk I have found as a desirable and sustainable alternative to cow’s milk. Almond milk is similar, but almonds use a massive amount of resources, particularly water, that I can’t support. Peanuts are another source that I over-relied on during the vegan experiment. However, these may have slight allergenic consequences when consumed at a high rate. Also, I noticed that the over-consumption of nut products acts as a severe depressant. For protein sources, I have incorporated fish products into my diet, since they contain no carbohydrates and healthy sources of fat. Initial results are promising, but I will continue to monitor since I am too early in the process to pass final judgment. All told, it seems that the dietary composition question tends as all things do to a moderate, mixed approach. I will continue exploration of my theory in this regard, which is currently the elimination of as many allergenic foods as possible, with serious limitation but no stringent prohibition on the consumption of animal products.

Also highlighted by recent experimentation is an addiction to coffee, which was eventually cured by intermittent fasting. I used to drink multiple cups of coffee each day, to the point that it took an inordinate amount of caffeine to produce any real response. I was drinking iced coffee at dinner. Initially, coffee was a crutch to help me through the fasts. A kind of treat that I could have while fasting. Once I adjusted to the fast, however, I found that coffee had worn out that use and was making me feel worse. When you fast, your body dehydrates with dropping insulin levels, and coffee is a diuretic, so I found its effects ultimately counterproductive. Tea, on the other hand, hydrates. In addition, herbal teas can be selected for medicinal effects. My current favorite is a turmeric / cinnamon blend. I still have an iced coffee each day, but unless I finish it in the morning I find it hard to finish and opt for tea instead.

All told, intermittent fasting has highlighted the medicinal value of the food you eat, whether those effects be detrimental or beneficial. It amplifies the sensitivity of your body and your mind to these effects, making them obvious. Before, these effects were buried in the noise of your body’s reaction to a cacophony of reactions. With fasting, you can isolate the effects of a given food and make adjustments to your diet accordingly. It is a long, drawn-out, and often humbling process. But I think it works in the long run. It can go a long way to cure food addictions and bad habits, simply by bringing your reaction to a certain food or habit into focus.

Regarding exercise and intermittent fasting, I made a few discoveries over the past four months. Specifically, these discoveries relate to the effects of different types of exercise before and after the fat-burn switchover point, when the body switches from burning glucose to processing fat as it’s primary energy source. I noticed that while fasting, if I performed cardio exercise prior to the fat-burn switchover point (24-36 hours for fresh fast after full feeding, 20 hours during intermittent fasting) resulted in much more extreme desires to eat and a higher fast failure rate. This effect did not occur if cardio was performed after the fat-burn switchover point. In fact, after the switchover point, cardio exercise did not result in an increased desire to eat. Strength training prior to the switchover point, however, does not result in significant increase in hunger. After the switchover point, ultimate strength and endurance seem to decrease slightly early in the intermittent fasting program, but these effects wane as the body adjusts to the new energy source. In effect, your muscles take a while to “learn” how to perform while harvesting fat energy. These discoveries have led to an adjustment in my program. I now only do cardio after I have cleared the switchover point “wall.” Theoretically this should be optimal, since cardio exercise burns the most calories, and if it is performed after the switchover then it will burn only fat. Within the switchover window, I do strength training. During this time, your muscles still have access to dietary protein, and building lean muscle helps to continue burning fat through the fast.

Having learned this, I would recommend to long-distance runners: Try fasting for two days, then running. You will already be past the wall and accessing a much higher reserve of energy that is pent up in your fat cells. The ultimate “bonk” training. Then again, I wouldn’t recommend running at all. After losing more weight in eight weeks of intermittent fasting than I did training for the last half-marathon, I suddenly have an urge to scream at every runner “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!” They are wasting their time burning glucose, only to store it back up at their next meal. Talk about a Sisyphean effort. It is a futile business. It only took me 25 years and a worn down knee to learn this, but hey....better late than never.

Of course any discussion of fasting would be incomplete without discussing mental effects. In the end, fasting is merely an exercise of mind over body, overriding the survivalist tendencies of your body with pure willpower. It is a simple process, but by no means easy. Simple in that all it is in not eating for an extended period. Difficult in the body’s determined will to keep the status quo, even if that three meal a day status quo is an evolutionary outlier. Exercising this type of willpower does take a great bit of effort, and it is much worse at the beginning. But after a while your body adjusts to its new reality, to the point where you wonder how in the hell you ever ate three meals a day when a meal every other day seems more than sufficient. Fasting also opens up time that would otherwise be spent getting and eating food to use for more intellectual pursuits, like reading, writing, exercise, meditation, language learning, what have you. Keeping busy actually helps immensely during the early stages of fasting, because your mind can focus on something other than the constant, unnecessary demand for food from your tummy.

Exercising mind over matter unlocks other effects as well. Noticeably I have been more creative than ever, writing more in my journals, drawing more graffiti concepts. In general, I’m trying to do a single creative thing every day. Today’s is this entry. Yesterday was a graffiti motif “ENJOY LIFE.” Last week was a journal entry on advice to Ryan and Elinor one day, graffiti the next, programming a desktop schedule app in PYTHON the next.

Creativity on one hand, a healthy dose of societal criticism on the other. When you realize what a literal crock of shit you have been fed your whole life, everything comes into question. How deep is the rot? Well, it’s all the way to the core of course. Everything. Every aspect of our culture is subverted. Off kilter. Dead ass wrong. “Everything you know is wrong.”

Which I guess brings me to the point: Life is an experiment. My favorite mug has an infinity sign and says “Experiment. Fail. Learn. Repeat.” I think too often we forget the “Learn” part. When picking up Ryan and Elinor the other day, I overheard another kid tell his father “Scientists know everything.” Incorrect. A true scientist will admit that he knows nothing, but he has theories supported by data. A true scientist would also consider all data, even the data that doesn’t fit into his current theories. In large part science has become it’s own worst enemy by purporting to adhere to these principles, while completely failing to acknowledge or consider data counter to current scientific understanding. It’s only human to think that you are right and everyone else is wrong. But when this is morphed into scientific hubris, it discredits the whole enterprise.

I guess what I’m saying is be a true scientist. Perform your own experiments and learn from them. This is your life. Your time. Experiment. Fail. Learn. Repeat.

Wow. It seems that an ancillary discovery is that, on initial inspection, FocusWriter works. I wonder if they have this on Windows.....