It’s Been a Long Week

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How about some links?

The fifth installment of Corey’s Digs’ report on population obedience training is out. Follow the links at the page for the first four parts, if you missed them. 2030 Psychological Agenda–Obedience Training for Pre-K to Adults Already Global with Billions in Funding for Full Control – Part 5: U.S. Dept. of Education & Multiple Agencies Involved

I did make one prediction for the new year. I said that I didn’t think it would be long before we don’t have to worry (at least in most states) about forced vaccinations, or losing our jobs due to our pureblood status. Looks like that one is coming true. The Supreme Court actually gave a little bit of relief on this one, though not in a way that makes me have any faith in them at all for the future. At least we can breathe for a minute and prepare for the next wave of pressure, whatever it will be. WHO is backing off, too. I’m sure there’s a trick in there somewhere.

If you remain a Pureblood because you didn’t give in, though you thought you were about to get fired, congratulations, you stand no chance of becoming one of the growing number (more than 150,000 thus far) who have been killed by the mRNA injections. Keep crushing!

Speaking of crushing, I ran a 11.04 mile this morning, 12:15 average for 3 miles. Like my shirt?

Get your own here. Never an affiliate link on this blog. I just want to see a good brand succeed.

If you’ve seen the hills I run, and how short I am, you’ll be impressed with that. If you’re a real runner, maybe not so much. Anyway:

Pat Yourself On The Back - Become Self Empowered with ...

If you’re ugly, this is probably true:

If not, keeping your face exposed is doubly advantageous. In fact, keeping your mask off, even if you’re only average-looking, is probably a social advantage at this point. Except for the truly insane Covidians, people have reacted with palpable relief to my open smile for the past two years. They’re as stressed out by the masks as I am.

Can it really be two years since I’ve been able to see the majority of the faces in town? Thank God I know a lot of people who didn’t fall for this so my children can be properly socialized.

While I don’t feel at all shy about showing my wish-it-were-lovely face all over town, I do cover my head while in prayer or prophesying (not that I am prophetess, but sometimes I do hear a word, like most Christians). I thought this study of 1 Corinthians 11 was very good. If if head-covering were one hundred percent optional due to the sixteenth verse being so easily interpreted to mean either “we don’t do this, so if you don’t like it, fine” or “maybe you don’t like this, but we have never done anything else”, head-covering has a symbolism that drives feminists crazy and terrifies their men. They don’t even need to know the Bible to know what it means. Nature itself testifies to it.

As China protects its own children from the evils of gaming and even the pressures of 24/7 online education, they’re happy to push mind-bending evil on your children. Call them whatever you like, but they know how to take down enemies/competitors using their own weaknesses against them. Gotta respect that kinda smarts.

Is that enough? Yes, I think that’s enough for today. I’ll post some real posts soon, I’m sure. School is swimming along nicely, and taking all my social energy, but…SOON, OK?

 

What to do About Recurring Boils, AKA Hidradenitis Supprativa

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Medical “science” strikes out again. (Please note that I am talking about my own personal experience, and not handing out advice. Follow me or don’t, but don’t blame or credit me for your outcome. This is about my journey, and your causes may be completely different! But what I’ve done is absolutely worth a try if you’re suffering. In case you’re not interested in my story, I’ll put the spoiler up here: stop eating grains, especially wheat, and seed oils, and maybe nightshades and dairy.)

Have you ever heard of hidradenitis suppurativa? It’s a fancy word for boils. You get them under your arms, on your buttocks, under your breasts. If you do a web search, you’ll be told that HS results from infected hair follicles, hormones, skin rubbing together, uncleanliness, or genetics. Smoking and being overweight makes it worse. It’s supposedly rare, and supposedly incurable. The advanced stages of HS often have surgeons flaying the skin off their patients to try and improve the situation. Antibiotics don’t help, because there’s no infection. People–even doctors who should know better– often erroneously attribute it to poor hygiene. It’s debilitating. It’s embarrassing, painful, and ugly, and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.

When I was in my early twenties, I started getting HS boils, and it was a constant bother until just a few years ago. I lived about seventeen years with these things, and it was non-stop, no remission, no matter what I tried. I was not overweight at the time that I developed the condition, and the boils persisted even when I quit smoking, so these two things, for me, seem to have little to do with it. Nothing seemed to cause it, and nothing seemed to help. I’d never had a bacterially-infected boil, nor did antibiotics ever do anything but upset my stomach. I’d had surgery suggested to me, but no way was I doing that. That sounded worse than the disease itself.

It never occurred to me that it was specific foods causing it, and no doctor ever suggested it to me.

It is purely accidental that I haven’t had a single boil in the last four years. If I hadn’t gotten gestational diabetes and then decided to live the rest of my life on a very low carb diet, I’d still be having trouble sitting down. The scars will always be with me, but I don’t even mind wearing sleeveless shirts anymore.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I had a particularly bad boil, and ended up in the ER with it. The doctor who was taking care of me asked, “Do you by any chance have Crohn’s disease? We see this in these patients pretty frequently.” He seemed to think that it was because of the diarrhea that accompanies that disease being an irritant to the skin. It didn’t apply to my situation, but I never forgot what he said. It was a clue. I knew even then that it wasn’t because of skin irritation or infection, but something internal, maybe autoimmune (or autoinflammatory, whatever). I now think that people with Crohn’s are at least partly food-inflamed in much the same way I was. If I knew anybody with Crohn’s, I’d evangelize them about the carnivore diet.

A while back, one of the leading internet carnivore/keto lifestyle doctors posted a video about HS, and how to deal with it, and his solution was (of course) a ketogenic diet and weight loss. When you’ve got a hammer–and a fine hammer it is!–everything’s a nail. Dr. Berry gives a confident, firm, and wrong answer.

I embedded the video because I do like his advice on diet, and you should follow it for plenty of reasons. But it’s not insulin-resistance. At least, it wasn’t for me. Your mileage may, of course, vary.

Certainly, my HS did get better at the same time I went keto. Kelly Hogan tells the same story. But I think Dr. Berry is wrong about the reason for that. It’s not insulin resistance that causes HS. Getting your blood sugar under control will likely not clear up the whole mess, though it will help a little.

I’ve had HS long before I got fat, and I didn’t get better when I lost weight while still eating triggering foods. Now that I’m off the grains and seed oils, no amount of mere sugar can trigger it. I know, because I’ve experimented with it to see. I can eat honey and fruit all day long, and I’m fine. Now, insulin resistance will contribute to inflammation body-wide, just as the good doctor says, so people with HS or any other illness do need to get themselves healthy. This means you absolutely need to lose weight. Fat exacerbates the problem, the same way it exacerbates every other health problem. It does make it worse. I’m not saying to stay fat.

Do not stay fat!

But I don’t think insulin resistance causes HS. For me, HS is a severe, almost instantaneous reaction to certain foods, not insulin resistance. My approach to a ketogenic diet just happened to eliminate the foods that were causing my HS.

One great thing about adhering to a carnivore diet is that you can do controlled experiments on yourself to see what symptoms any given food might cause. I have carefully added back several different foods for the sake of seeing what I can get away with, and to my surprise, I found that, for me, grains (wheat, corn, rice, etc.) and seed oils are the only triggers for this condition. Even a tiny crumb of something made with wheat will set off bleeding, swelling, and itching in my scars. I once went to a BBQ place and there was a stray crumb from the breading of fried okra on my plate. I didn’t even swallow it! I spit it out as soon as I tasted it. Or maybe I swallowed some without realizing it. Anyway, I didn’t think anything else of it until a few hours later when the itching started. Seed oils on my meat at a restaurant will do the same as grains. It’s not even worth eating out anymore, I have to be so careful. I suspect nightshades and dairy could be a problem for some people, but they don’t seem to cause this particular symptom in me.

Whatever it is that caused my HS in the beginning (I think it was ultimately due to a medical procedure I had when I was 18), I don’t have boils now, as long as I stay away from grains and seed oils.

You can call it remission, if you like. I’m not healed. I’ll still get painful boils if I start eating those foods again. But as far as I’m concerned, that’s as good as a cure. With all due respect to the doctor, while a keto/carnivore approach that excludes grains and seed oils may help, I don’t think it’s for the reasons he gives. In fact, you might be metabolically healthy like I was for several of my first years with this disease, and be just fine with your carbs. If so, you could start by eliminating the most likely triggering foods: grains, seed oils, and possibly nightshades, and dairy.

If you have HS, I’d love to hear about your experience, and whether you’ve found foods to be your trigger, either by email or on social media. You can find me on Gab, MeWe, and SG.

2022, Hopefully

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We made it to the obligatory first post of the year!

I could do a look back on 2021, but that would be boring and possibly traumatizing. We’ve already seen all that. Do we really want to see it again?

I could try to make some predictions for 2022, like bloggers do, but honestly, I’d rather eat kale. The world will unfold however it will unfold, and it will do so entirely without my permission or guidance. I will probably be surprised by something every day. I will continue to (hopefully) thrive over here on the fringes with my family while we wonder what the heck is wrong with everybody else.

How about some hopes, though? Surely I can come up with a few of those.

I hope that people will finally take off their stupid, useless masks, but only if it’s because they figured out the scam for themselves, not because the scammers told them it’s finally safe to do so. If they don’t figure it out for themselves, they’re still lost. Sadly, even CNN is starting to call masks useless, so this is a thin hope indeed. I similarly hope that the stubbornly un-jabbed will stand firm. Hang in there, Purebloods!

I hope that I will be a more consistent blogger. Ideally, every post should be interesting, useful, and entertaining. I told myself a long time ago that if any post doesn’t attain at least two of three conditions, I wouldn’t publish it. The trouble with that is that I have become both lazy and perfectionistic by adhering too strongly to these rules.  If I’m going to rebuild this thing, I’ve decided that I must do it in violation of these strictures, so you, Patient Reader, may be getting some seriously questionable posts in the near future.

I hope that some states begin to see themselves as individual nations, as they were intended to, and begin to act accordingly. I see rumblings of it already with new abortion laws and restrictions on unlawful federal government edicts within state borders. But the influx of blue-state refugees to better-run, freer red states does not bode well for the trend. It is not in the locusts’ best interests to admit that they are not the rightful reapers of the crop grown by someone else. They will all need to go back if we’re to have good governance at the state and local levels. I’ll give a positive prediction about that: It ain’t happening–this year, anyway.

I hope that Donald Trump will publicly repent of his mishandling of the plandemic, and especially his touting of the harmful injections we’re all being threatened with. He was a great president for roughly three and a half years. He completely lost the plot with the virus. Sad.

And finally, dear Reader, I hope that this year, 2022, brings your family and mine closer to God. I hope we have peace in the midst of the storms that glower on the horizon. It’s not exactly a prediction, but I don’t feel that it’s going to be an easy year. But I do believe that Jesus is in this boat, and all He has to do is say “Peace, be still.” and it will. Don’t be afraid.

You are in my prayers, though mostly nameless, as “my friends”. If you want to put a name to it, or talk about anything at all, please hit me up on Gab, MeWe, or SG. Our lessons start back tomorrow, so my time will be limited, but I love to hear from my friends.

 

 

A Few Links

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to get you through the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Guess this was the reason I had a hard time finding peppermint sticks for our gingerbread house decorating party. Stop blaming Covid. Blame the government. Covid is just their excuse for making you miserable. They’re psychopaths, and they love to squish little bugs like you under their heels.

Speaking of psychopaths:

Hold firm, Pureblood. I really do think we’re almost out of these particular woods.

How to Succeed Like a Dark Lord is making me laugh every episode. Also, My Sister Suprema.

Omicron is a thing, if you’re vaccinated:

Show kindness to the stranger, they said! Angels unawares, they said! 

When some virtue-signaling ninny insists that importing to your town a number of foreign settlers (many of whom are likely war criminals fleeing justice with their families) who’ve been ejected from their home countries is the same thing as spreading the Gospel, point them toward Hamtramck, Michigan. Perhaps they’d like to go live there and evangelize them for a bit. Contrary to the globalist narrative that we have to take every comer onto our home soil just because Christians are supposed to be nice to everybody, it is to our actual neighbors–you know, the people whose tax money you’re commandeering to pay for all this–that we owe our love. Leapfrogging over your actual neighbor to get more colorful ones is what you do when you’ve already failed to love the ones you have. Importing people who are going to first financially burden and ultimately displace our real neighbors is not Christian.

It’s simply wicked to expect your neighbor to pay, in so many ways, for your “good” deeds.

Proving that the “vaccines”, PCR tests, and social distancing are all useless to prevent this airborne respiratory virus, 48 test positive for covid-19 virus aboard world’s biggest cruise ship. These people were all fully vaccinated, tested before they went aboard, masked when indoors, distanced from non-injected people, and aboard an obsessively sanitized ship for days before catching the cough. If you’re still in favor of all the idiotic measures governments have taken, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

First they make you sick, then they sell you the cure.

And finally, I hope you have time to read a lot this week, because there are three parts out already of a nine-part series from Corey’s Digs that I think is incredibly important for you to read. This is how they’re manipulating us:

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: The Programming

Part 3: Spirituality in Education Programming

 

Carnivore Chips

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Also a nice dog treat.

 

Share with puppeh!

I found some uncured turkey bacon with clean ingredients (no weird poly-or-di-anything) for a really great price, so I took it home with me, knowing full well that turkey bacon doesn’t fit anywhere into my regular diet. It’s…well, it’s just not bacon, OK? So, after it sat in my fridge for a while, wondering why I had forsaken it, it had an idea. “Hey, Cindy!” it called to me, “Let’s see if I can be a tasty chip!”

So I did what I was told, and the turkey strips attained their true calling as turkey chips.

This is hardly even a recipe. Just snip the bacon into two-inch pieces, and dehydrate on 167° for about 8 hours. You could probably go faster on 200° in an oven, but I didn’t try that, so who knows?

The taste is OK. It’s still obviously turkey bacon, but it could be a useful transporter of dip from bowl to mouth. You could use this with melted cheese, or liver paté, or even whatever dip you non-carnivores like. The main thing is that it’s crispy and chippy, and I like crispy, chippy things.

 

How To Render Your Own Tallow or Lard

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It occurs to me that, if you’re going to make my pemmican recipe, you might also want to know how to render your own beef tallow. The instructions for lard and tallow are basically the same, so this is also how you get good, old-fashioned lard for cooking. We really need to up our fat game if we’re going to be healthy in our current food environment, so let’s get cracklin! (SWIDT?)

Like most things I do, rendering fat is super easy.

You can buy tallow and lard already rendered, of course, but to get clean lard that hasn’t been partially hydrogenated can be very expensive. You definitely don’t want what’s on the shelf at the grocery store, unless they have Epic or similar brands. Those are so expensive, I only do that if I have no other choice. If you want to have good animal fat, but you need to be frugal, you have to go local (lots of small farms render and sell lard or tallow) or do it yourself. Being a cheapskate, I nearly always do it for myself.

The first step to rendering fat is getting some raw fat. For the best quality tallow, you need suet. For lard, you want leaf fat. These are the fats from around the kidneys of the animal, and are the purest source of fat. I do sometimes just buy plain old fatback (not salt pork!) and use that instead, and it honestly renders out fine. It’s good enough for the likes of us, anyway. But leaf fat will need no trimming and give you no porky odor in your lard, whereas fatback does sometimes have a slight scent to it when it’s rendered out. Fatback costs less, though, so I do that pretty frequently. Nobody has ever complained.

Leaf fat also gives the best cracklins you’ll ever have. This is something to consider, believe me.

Now that you’ve found some fat, chop it up!

With beef suet, I’ve found that simply chopping it while still frozen breaks it down small enough that you don’t need to do anything further. It practically shatters. For pork fat, cube it with a knife, then put it in the food processor for a few seconds to break it down even further. Or just keep chopping with the knife until it’s tiny and you’re feeling like a greased pig yourself. Whatever you like. (Update: I’ve been told you can skip this step if you’re in a rush. I doubt you’ll get the same delicious crackling or get as much fat rendered out that way, but go ahead if you don’t want to chop!)

Cook it. After the fat is chopped, it goes into the slow cooker on low for several hours. Sorry to be so vague about timing, but it really depends on your fat and your cooker. I’ve had it go for as little as four hours to as long as seven. When the unrenderable portion of the suet or leaf fat has risen back to the top and turned brown, you’re done.

Scoop the solids out into a fine mesh strainer and squeeze the liquid fat back into the crock with a spoon. If you want to eat the cracklins (and honey, you do), salt them and enjoy them after they’ve cooled enough to leave the skin on your tongue. If they’re not quite brown enough yet, you can fry them a little bit more. You won’t be able to eat it all, so invite children to the feast.

Mmmmm, cracklins!

Strain. Place a sieve or a strainer over a stainless steel bowl, and line it with paper towels–I find the cheap Sparkle brand has a great lint-free flow–and carefully pour the hot fat through it. If there are any solid bits left, repeat this step. The finer your sieve and the better your paper towels, the fewer times you have to do this. I usually need to double strain it.

You get a beautiful golden liquid that turns white when it solidifies. Keep it in a glass or metal jar (not plastic, please, for your health’s sake), either out of direct light in a cupboard or in the refrigerator.

Clean up. I use paper towels to wipe as much fat as possible off of my knives, food processor parts, crock pot and bowls. I do not want that amount of fat going down my drain and clogging it up. You don’t either. When you switch to a heavily fatty-meat-based diet, you will want to be careful with your waste, or face plumbing problems.

Now you can cook with your rendered fat, or make pemmican, or rub it on your dry skin, or make soap and candles–sky’s the limit, y’all! Have fun!

Questions or comments? Discuss it with me on Gab, MeWe, or Social Galactic.

 

Should Christians Allow Their Children to Believe in Santa Claus?

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When people tell you Santa Claus isn’t real, remind them that a heretic’s nose once begged to differ.

In my past life as a serious Evangelical, I refused to tell my children that Santa Claus is real. He’s a fake, fat old man who magically gives people stuff, but only if they deserve it. And apparently everybody deserves it, because everybody gets a present. That is, unless they’re so poor they can’t afford presents, in which case, obviously they weren’t very good people.

That wasn’t a very Christmassy way to go about things, was it? For years, I did what well-meaning parents often do, and gave the fat man the heave-ho. When you have a large family, you group them in sets, and each set gets an amazingly different childhood experience. In fact, the different children practically have a different mother as the family dynamics change and the grownups learn to relax a little. We should talk about that sometime, but this isn’t about that.

Anyhow, my oldest kids, the first set of three, knew good and well that Santa Claus is a contemptible secular joke, and he hardly entered our Christmas consciousnesses. (Oddly, one of my older ones, who I will leave nameless for the sake of the child’s feelings, believed fervently in the Tooth Fairy. I guess I figured if they knew Santa Claus wasn’t real, they’d know I was joking about the Tooth Fairy, but apparently kids don’t draw inferences the same way adults do. Learn from my mistake. There was real disillusionment when the truth became known about that.)

My next set, the middle three, have the experience of Santa as a pleasant family myth, and he fills the stockings, and it’s all good, clean fun. None of them ever thought he or the Tooth Fairy were real.

The last set of two (plus the rest of them, who’ve witnessed the evolution of our thinking over the years) get to hear about Saint Nicholas, the man. They’re still not getting the modern Santa Claus experience, because I still don’t let them think he’s actually a North Pole dweller dropping things down our chimney. That’s a fun story, but this is the true one:

Now, not being Orthodox or Catholic, we don’t pray to saints, or necessarily believe some of the myths that have grown up around them. For instance, I very much doubt that Nicholas actually stood up in the bathtub on the day he was born and sang praises to God. I guess that could have happened, if God wanted it to, but I have no reason to view that as a real event. I don’t put it outside the realm of possibility. Nor do I completely either affirm or deny the miracles he may have performed. God does all kinds of things, all kinds of ways, doesn’t he?

What he did do, though, for sure, was help the poor and punch heretics in the name of Jesus. I do wish the heretic-punching were in this book, but since it’s for children, I guess I can understand why not.

We talk about the way the St. Nicholas’s charity is honored by our hanging stockings as a reenactment of his filling of shoes with gold for the poor man’s daughters who needed a dowry. We find ways to help the poor and hurting around us to also have a blessed Christmas. We do indulge in a little pretend play, sometimes putting keto cookies out for the fat man, or jingling sleigh bells after the kids go to bed so they’ll know he’s HERE! Since Nana really does believe in Santa, we also make sure the kids don’t let her know he’s not real.

St. Nicholas is not the only Christmas tradition about which we’ve sadly lost our understanding. I remember a well-meaning preacher saying once “Why do we even have a Christmas tree? We don’t have a religious reason to do that, but I don’t know where else to put the presents!” Well, I do, and it’s not a pagan ritual. It’s a Christian thing to do. So we also talk about St. Boniface and his missions to the Germanic tribes when we put up our Christmas tree.

Far better than throwing out Christmas traditions just because we can’t remember what they mean, is re-emphasizing the history of the Church during this season. So many parents flub it up (in my opinion) by lying and making Santa a huge disappointment when the kids finally figure it out. It is far better to acknowledge the reality, and explain how it became mythologized. In the process, children learn how Christ was stealthily removed from the modern Christmas by makers of mainstream media who hate Him, and why this is wrong. Tossing out the celebratory and magical–let’s rather say miraculous–aspects of the season, as the Grinches and Scrooges would love us to do, is the opposite of honoring Christ.

Here are a few more resources to help you explain the truth of Christmas to your children. As the world grows ever more skeptical of the Incarnation, we need to up our believing game, don’t you think?

Why Christmas is Not Pagan

The Legend of St. Nicholas

St. Boniface and the Christmas Tree

A Generous Spirit: The True Story of St. Nicholas

The Myth of Pagan Christmas

How about you? Does your family do Santa Claus? Elf on the shelf? Talk to me on Gab, MeWe, or Social Galactic.

How To Beat Anxiety and Depression

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Gut health is mental health.

Somebody recently mentioned on a social media site that he had experienced one of those long, dark nights of the soul during which, instead of sleeping, you toss and turn and recall every single stupid or awkward thing you’ve ever said out loud. I’ve had nights like that. Worse than that, I’ve had long, waking days of the same thing. You’re just going about your business and suddenly your mind starts accusing you: I’m the dumbest person ever. How can anybody stand to be around me? I can’t believe I said that!

Not only that, but the anxious mind then takes the opportunity to run a Top 10 (if you’re lucky, it’s only ten) list of your most socially awkward moments ever.

Now, maybe it’s just a function of getting older, but I honestly no longer have any trouble believing that I actually said that, whatever “that” was. You get used to living with your foot in your mouth. You get used to it, but it’s hard to truly learn to let go, isn’t it? I know it’s not just me. Everybody says or does cringe-making things regularly. Not everybody notices it, but most do. So, then, how do they let it go so easily? My gaffes get stuck in my head like a peanut butter and banana sandwich gets stuck to the roof of your mouth!

Surprisingly, for those who suffer from this kind of anxiety, I think it has a lot to do with our guts. No, I don’t mean the socially confident are simply braver than us. I mean that there is a difference in our literal guts, our intestines, that makes the food we eat affect our brains in a unique way. You see, since I started the carnivore diet, I’ve experienced this thing referred to by carnivores who have trod this path before me as the “carnivore calm”. I haven’t had a single 2 a.m. cringing episode since I stopped eating plants!

Almost all plants (and dairy, which I’ll have to address in a separate post) have literally nerve-wracking effects for me. On those days after going carnivore that I just couldn’t resist the asparagus or whatever, I would always notice half a day or so later, I’d get some anxiety again. Not the social kind (that’s really gluten and dairy), but free-floating anxiety. I sometimes get ear worms that seem obnoxiously loud and make me want to jam a crochet hook into my ear to dig them out. I can’t ever just have a nice song that I like in my head. I get to have all of my thoughts drowned out by a 15 second loop of whatever popular atrocity I last heard while flipping through the radio stations. It’s maddening.

Enough days in a row of fiber of any kind, and I become clinically depressed.

(This seems to me a really good place to point out that, in spite of all my anxieties and depression, Jesus has made most of my adult life a productive and meaningful time in spite of all of these hindrances. He’s the real miracle-maker in my life. He gave me the spiritual wherewithal to make it through a lifetime of depression and anxiety and still be a productive and useful person, able to raise a family and work for Him in my own reclusive ways. I give Him all praise and glory for that. And then after all those years of learning to lean on Him, he led me to the physical reason for all these problems that he salved so lovingly for so many years, so that I could move on to the next step in my walk with Him. Give Him praise, people! I never knew what He was doing, but I always knew He knew what He was doing. Eliminating plants and dairy didn’t save me from anything, but it has sure has made me feel better while being saved. OK, back to the OP:)

When I eat zero fiber, I get none of these symptoms. I just hum through my day, clear-headed and happy. I handle stress like a champ. I’m actually having fun!

Carnivore didn’t change who I am. I’m still weird. I’m still introverted. I’m still making mistakes. I still stick my foot in my mouth. I still do stupid things and wonder why I didn’t know any better. But I’m able to forgive myself quickly and move on. My brain no longer stores everything I got wrong today to hate-binge on later when I’m trying to sleep. I’m no longer hindered from enjoying the world by all the negative self-talk that used to try to hold me back.

I’m just so stinking well-adjusted now!

That’s weird, isn’t it? I don’t have all the answers, but I do have a few years of experimentation to share. My depression and anxiety largely went away when I moved to a ketogenic diet, so ketones probably have a little something to do with it. Ketosis does give you a very sharp mental state.

But I also gave up wheat at the same time, and I think that really was the magic bullet for me. Gluten has a deleterious effect on my gut, and thus my brain. I know for a fact, after different experiments adding foods back, that gluten is the trigger for other physical ailments of which I’m now totally free. I probably have undiagnosed celiac disease. I don’t really care to ask a doctor to confirm it.

I have a relative who craved gluten like a drug as a kid, and would only eat foods containing gluten (not hard to pull off in this food environment) and whose mind was very much hampered by the stuff. Gluten exacerbated every stereotypical autistic, and, frighteningly, sociopathic behavior in him. It was my witnessing of this pattern that made me wonder about myself. Gluten is the mind-killer!

Gluten, fine, but how can cauliflower make me feel so bad? To tell the truth, I question this aspect of my condition frequently myself, sometimes to the point where I stop believing it entirely and eat something that’s not meat. And then I invariably find out again. A little bite of something is often no problem, but if I just decide I’m going to start having regular keto food instead of full-blown carnivore, it’s only a matter of a day or two before I start having those same old feelings of anxiety and depression, stress, the little compulsions like over-tidiness, and songs stuck in my head. It has, through some intentional experiments, but mostly mishap, become undeniable to me that it’s the food. Fiber is doing something in my gut–whether feeding the wrong bacteria, making it leaky, or something else I can’t guess–that is throwing off the chemicals in my brain. This could very well be happening to you, too.

Now, I’m sure there are causes of mental illness that don’t originate in the gut. I’m not calling carnivore a magic bullet. But for me it has been almost magical, and it might be worth a shot for you, too. If having a song stuck in a loop in your head doesn’t bother you, and that’s the only symptom you’ve got, maybe you don’t want to experiment with taking plants out of your diet. I miss the plants, to tell the truth. I’d eat them all day long if I could. I simply can’t.

I am not the only person who experiences this. There are maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of carnivores who have discovered this exact pattern in themselves. I didn’t make this up. They didn’t make this up. If you want to hear more, I recommend starting with YouTube videos from Amber O’Hearn or Georgia Ede, then let the rabbit hole suck you in from there. There’s a lot of solid evidence that the Western diet is mentally torturing a number of us.

Now, I have to go lift some weights and then we have a gingerbread house decorating party to host (no eating the houses!), so I’m going to throw this out there mostly unedited. Please forgive any typos, run-on sentences, and irrelevant asides.

Want to discuss this? Meet me on Gab, MeWe, or Social Galactic.

Child-free and Loving It

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In a recent post, I obliquely referred back to the following post, which I’ve rescued from the scrap-heap of GAH 1.0. This was written on March 1, 2013. I was allowed on the Twitter back then, and made a lot of Christians (especially the men) clutch their skirts. The most shocking thing about it is that I ate ramen noodles. At bedtime. Good grief, I was sick. Anyhow, it will be interesting to see the reactions now (if I even get any), when there are a great many more people who understand what I mean, and are raising their own families in full awareness of it.

Child-Free and Loving It

Not me. Them.

In my latest insomnia-fueled excursion around the internet I ran across the above-linked article at The Daily Beast. Go read it. I’ll wait here…

It’s quite a piece of work, isn’t it? It is, in case you were too smart to take the bait, an article cobbled together from reader comments that The Daily Beast had solicited in response to an earlier Newsweek piece about the birth dearth. The intentionally childless—er, childfree, they like to be called—don’t take too kindly to the idea that what they’re doing is foolish, but it is, and for a multitude of reasons.

When I read this article last night, I didn’t feel very strongly about it. In fact, I almost skipped right over it, because there’s nothing new here. Just a bunch of people doing what people have always done when given the opportunity: living for themselves, and seeing no problem with it whatsoever. In fact, Ayn Rand-like, they have managed to make a virtue out of selfishness. A few quotes from the article:

I don’t like it when people and the media imply that I’m not doing my job. I am far more than a baby factory.

 

I never wanted to put another human/soul/awareness through anything as miserable as what I was dealing with…

 

I just see it (having children) as a losing battle on the way to an eventual future straight out of the movie Idiocracy.
I read The Population Bomb at puberty, around the first Earth Day. I decided at 15 that I’d like to adopt one kid of every race, to have a rainbow house. When I grew up and realized humans were causing mass extinction, I got cats instead…

 

…I don’t want to be defined first and foremost as a mother…

 

I saw how much my mother hated the drudgery of caring for children on her own…

Yawn. Just the chatter of a self-absorbed, affluent culture that thinks children suck, mostly because their parents thought they sucked. Not my audience, though, and no need to address it, I thought. So I ate some ramen noodles and went to bed. (I’ll do penance for that indiscretion by doing low-carb next week. Pinky-swear.)

However, by the time I woke up this morning, I was feeling a little restless about it. There’s a lot of worldly reason here that just makes sense to the natural mind, but I get comments to this effect all the time from people who identify themselves as Christian! These people quoted above are correct, according to the logic of their own worldview.

Raising children is a very poor way to try to give life meaning. If you’re adding children to your life for the sake of finding purpose, you will most likely find yourself with nothing but a handful of trouble. Parenthood is just drudgery on the World’s terms. These (I’m guessing and hoping 100% non-Christian) non-parents believe that the purpose of their lives is to, as I once heard Voddie Baucham put it, “get all you can, can all you get, and then sit on the can”. Why in the world would anybody add more people to this miserable existence when they don’t particularly like kids?

Why carry on something as meaningless as human existence?

It makes sense to the World. Of course it does!

But Christians, who have changed hearts and transformed minds, ought to know better. The next generation does matter. We do need them to take up where we leave off. And our hearts ought to be softer than this toward those younger Christian brothers and sisters whom God has given us as offspring. In fact, our hearts, when they are in the right place, will turn to our children.

“See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before that great and dreadful day of the LORD comes. He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers; or else I will come and strike the land with a curse.”

While this was a specific prophecy, and I don’t want to take it out of its Messianic context, it does show one of the benefits of repentance to a nation. Their hearts turn toward their children, and the children in turn incline their affections toward their fathers so that the generations benefit from mutual love and protection during the vulnerable years at both ends of life.  The hearts of men and women in this nation are so hardened toward their children that they don’t even care enough to bring them into existence. This is a form of self-hatred, as evidenced by those commenters who reveal that they believe the human race (to which they must surely realize that they, themselves, belong) is a scourge and shouldn’t be encouraged to continue.

There is a consequence—a curse–to this hard-heartedness.

The generational pyramid scheme always topples.

The European nations, Russia, and Japan (to name some recent examples history has to offer) have amply demonstrated the fact that when the burden of the economy suddenly shifts to a generation that is much smaller than the one before it, a nation’s resources begin to be used up at a rate that exceeds creation of new wealth. A nation can only be as healthy as its inventors, builders, thinkers, and fighters, after all.

I admit freely that the hole in my individual argument for allowing fertility to proceed naturally is that some people are indeed just fine, thank you, with no kids to take care of things for them. They cruise through to the very end of their lives with both enough money and enough health to set things up to their own liking, and no offspring need ever cramp their style. For many, that happy ending is a pipe dream, but it works out often enough that it still seems plausible to try.

However, even if it turns out well for some individuals, in the aggregate, it never turns out well. No amount of saving and planning will save any but the very lucky once the economy that their savings and investments rely on teeters over the edge of the generational cliff. As nations depopulate—whether voluntarily or not–poverty and discord follow.

Children really are an asset!
In addition to financial devastation, the responsibility for elder care becomes physically and emotionally too much for the few offspring left behind to do all the work. The bulk of their effort—mostly in the form of tax money, because the children are as hardened toward the parents as the parents were toward them–goes toward keeping up the last generation rather than raising the next, and so the next generation is further depleted. Further, the increasing frailty of the aging population makes it ripe for conquest via immigration. There’s simply no getting around the severe social and economic costs of a population implosion.

I can enjoy the results of other peoples’ child-rearing while I live MY best life unhindered by duty. Let the people who like kids (aka suckers) do that job for me:

Among the comments that really got my attention were the ones who are relying on their family and friends to provide un-wrinkled hands to hold in their old age.

I am fortunate to be very close to my nieces and nephews and to experience a form of grandparenting with their children. I have mentored dozens of my friends children through college frustrations and job searches.

I’ll be the cool, hip aunt to my sibling’s kids, or godmother to friends’ kids…

I don’t begrudge my childfree relatives that, because I want my children to care for the elderly. We have a duty to help the lonely and destitute wherever we find them, and no matter how they ended up in that condition.

However, there’s an attitude of entitlement here that shouldn’t go unrebuked: You do the unpleasant work. I’ll just sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

While these commenters confess that they are emotionally freeloading (I don’t know what else to call it when it’s on purpose), I doubt they’ve fully understood that they are financially freeloading as well. Economies aren’t built on dollars and gold. They are built on people.

But freeloading doesn’t bother this crowd much, because they’re happy little grasshoppers, and who cares whether there’s a next generation? After all, they’re not going to be around to see the world in a hundred years anyway!

This seems like a great place to show off my favorite Cryptofashion tee, doesn’t it?

I got a lot of outraged comments (and emails…oh, the emails.) on my post about the need to breed because of the strong wording I used. I make no apology for it. I meant it when I said “I truly hope you find the accommodations to your liking.”

I really do hope that, for those shortsighted individuals who intentionally have no children, things turn out better than they have historically proven to turn out for the childless. When people start to feel justified in their selfishness to such an extent that they’re proud to spend their entire lives without sacrifice to the f-word (family), what happens to the sick and infirm in the resulting culture is a fate not fit for any human being, whether they unwittingly asked for it or not. Naturally, I wasn’t speaking to those people who are for one reason or another unable to have children, though their end may, tragically, be the same. I will personally (whenever possible) be thrilled to hold their hands and listen to their stories about the good old days when they are in their dotage and need a neighborly ear.

When I see someone heading for trouble, and with a smile, that seems like a very bad time to use soothing and choice-affirming words, so comments about my “merciless” attitude fall on deaf ears. “Merciless” is the word I’d use to describe allowing people to continue in wrong beliefs just because we don’t like to ruffle their feathers. Choosing vivid words to wake people up (and yes, tick them off enough to keep them awake) might just be the most merciful thing I can do.

I am, at the very least, showing mercy to my own children. It is they who will suffer the most for the loss of their generation’s strength to the selfishness of the intentionally childless, and so I do have a vested interest in pointing this out. My passion in the matter is justified, because I love my children and want them to have a secure future.

These Daily Beast readers are right, though. They shouldn’t have children. They should repent of their sins, and God will add the blessings afterwards, as a gift, and a reward.

As always, we can discuss this on Gab, MeWe, or Social Galactic.