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.

Come Back, Fat Friend!

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Don’t go away mad.

My last post wasn’t really about fat people, of course, but about how socialism invariably and intentionally incentivizes the worst impulses we have, and punishes the best. But just in case anybody read it and got the idea that I dislike fat people, rather than the culture that encourages them to stay that way, or that I think we should go around feeling bad all the time because our bodies are broken and imperfect, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share yet again that I was once fat myself. In fact, I am still not perfectly shaped, and I’m fine with that.

I don’t sugar-coat my language, and that rubs people the wrong way sometimes–so much so that they emotionally spiral into missing my point entirely. I don’t apologize for that. The truth is often painful to hear, but I think we need to speak it. I’m not going to try to come up with nicer-sounding words than “fat people”. Comfortable words are the problem.

The fact that a person’s weight ranges anywhere from slightly pudgy to unable to get out of the door without a rescue crew and a crane, doesn’t make him any less of a person than I am, and I want you to know that I know that.

Often, what is lacking isn’t willpower, or self-respect, or intelligence, but resources and information. Trying to lose weight and failing, or losing weight and regaining it, is the story of almost every fat person’s life. It’s such a helpless feeling to know that you’re doing exactly what your doctor and all the magazines say to do, or at least trying to, but it doesn’t work. No matter how much you try to cut your calories, no matter how much you exercise, you fail. And your doctor blames you, and you blame yourself, and then you stop trying. I know the cycle, believe me.

I don’t want to get into my own boring history too much here. Suffice it to say that I know what it feels like. The problem I have is not with people being fat (which we can fix, and I’d love it if you’d let me tell you how), but with society telling fat people to just give up, embrace your misery, it’s beautiful!

Friend, we both know it’s not. It’s painful, and it’s embarrassing, and it’s limiting, and it’s dangerous. There are people who want you to be happy this way, and the people at Old Navy are apparently among these. They want you to stay fat because they hate you. Literally, hate. They, and all the major corporations have cast their lot with Satan, who wants to destroy humanity–our health, our happiness, our beauty, our loving relationships with one another. Everything that showcases that divine spark that God breathed into the first man, they hate and want to destroy.

So they tell you to stay fat, and they make sure it’s easy for you to do. Corporations put their highly processed, nutrient-free junk in front of you 24/7. They artificially jack up the prices on real food, while taking our tax dollars to subsidize grains and sugar, until it seems we have no choice but to buy junk. They spend millions of dollars studying how to make consuming their products an uncontrollable impulse. This is not just misguided. It’s evil, ok?

And their latest way of keeping you sick, on purpose, is making sure it doesn’t seem to cost extra at the clothiers, and instead socializing the cost of extra fabric.

Don’t fall for it, my tubby friend. You are not better off giving up. You’re not ok the way you are. To be fat is to be sick.

But you can get better. You are beautiful, made in the image of God, and God wants you to be beautiful in a healthy body. He’s not a God of dysfunction of any kind. I believe you just haven’t had the right information, or the right mindset yet. I’d very much like to help with that. Discuss it with me on Gab, MeWe, or Social Galactic.

You’re Not Welcome

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They’ve socialized my pants. 

Get-Along-Husband took me shopping the other night, and I bought a couple of pretty sweaters. I didn’t try them on, because the size, petite small, has always been a good fit in those brands. I brought them home, put them on, and both of them looked like I was wearing a tent. A granny-tent.

Now, I know a smart person tries everything on before bringing it home.  But I’m not a smart person. What I am, is a person who has learned to rely on labeling as a useful time-saver. This is not totally unreasonable, right? But aside from the inconvenience of having to return these and then try and find things that actually fit, this isn’t really a big deal in the long run. This is a first world problem of the type that people rightly denigrate.

But there’s another real problem of the first world that’s closely related to this. I’ve concluded after so many experiences like this over the last few years, that the first world contains very few people who are properly proportioned anymore. My former petite-smalls are now apparently designed to hide quite a bit of unsightly belly fat. They look awful. Jeans that fit me in the waist have no butt, because people are either emaciated or dumpy. It’s terrifying how unhealthy we all are.

The thing that just broke me recently is this outrage, which I photographed at Old Navy:

By “revolution”, they mean the socialist one.

I can assure you that Old Navy is not eating those extra costs. If I only require two yards of cloth to cover my body, I am the one who is expected to cough up the funds required to help cover the body of someone else who requires five yards of cloth.

We’ve gone from fat-shaming to health-shaming. It’s not even just social disapproval, but outright punition. It’s to the point where you can’t even tell people who’ve asked what they can do to maintain a healthy body without becoming a pariah for acting like you’re better than somebody else.

I stick to a diet that keeps me healthy. I’m vigilant about my physical activity. I put myself to bed at a reasonable hour. I get as much sunlight as I can, and take my Vitamin D supplements. I do a whole lot of things that contribute to my good health. It’s not an accident of genetics or socioeconomic status that I’m not a tub of lard. My good health, and my consequently well-proportioned body have not come without a cost to me. I’ve worked for that, and I’ve paid for that.

I take responsibility for my own health, and you should have to do that, too. Many of the things I do to take care of myself cost more up front than just letting things go would. But the amount I’m saving myself and the collective (thanks, socialism!) in health care and lost productivity makes my health a true net gain, financially. But, up front, I pay for this.

Now I’m being asked to subsidize people who refuse to take those steps. Some of them even desire to remain fat. And you’re a very bad person if you think there’s anything wrong with that. Not only do I have to pay extra for my health care, and in taxes for medicaid or medicare and disability; not only do I have to keep my mouth shut about your obvious problem; NOW I HAVE TO LITERALLY PAY TO  COVER YOUR FAT ^$$.

No, I’m not sorry I put it that way, dear Church Lady. I felt like channeling Karl Denninger this morning, caps and italics and ugly words and all.

You should feel bad about your poor health. How else are you going to be motivated to do anything about it? Contrary to the narrative about “healthy at any size” and “beautiful at any size”, the fact is that if you are overweight, you are sick. Probably not beautiful, either, but this is not about your looks. This is not about who you are as a person. This is not about whether I like to look at you or not. This is not about making you feel bad for other people’s entertainment.

Fat “shaming” is a lie from Satan. Your size has everything to do with your health, both physical and mental, and I do think spiritual as well. And you’re dragging the rest of us down with you.

Many people wouldn’t even care how sick other people were if they didn’t have to pay for it. I admit, the fact that I pay out the nose for my own health and then even more for other people’s is incredibly galling. It’s not just health and clothing. I also have a large family to raise, and I’m personally footing both the cost of their education and other families’ education, too. My numerous kids are going to be on the hook, not only for their own parents’ old age, but for the socialized elderly care of people who couldn’t be bothered to raise their own children.

In this now-fully socialized society, even the “capitalists”, are doing things on the socialist model. As Old Navy amply demonstrates, the more good I do, the more I end up paying because other people don’t want to.

So, you ask, did Atlas shrug? Did you boycott the stupid store, as they richly deserve?

Sigh. To tell the truth, it’s hard to find those fleece-lined leggings anywhere else, and it’s cold on that morning run, so this time, Atlas shouldered the burden. This time, as in most other areas of my life, I ate the cost of somebody else’s poor choices. Whether for lack of information, or motivation, or self-respect, or whatever the excuse, I paid more than I should have had to for the amount of goods I received so that others could slack off. As a responsible person in a society of irresponsible people, I do this daily, in a hundred chaffing little ways.

Fat acceptance–nay, fat supremacy–is killing people. And it’s making me just shy of crazy.

OK, I’m done. You can go back to your cheesecake now. Discuss on Gab, MeWe, or Social Galactic. 

Pemmican

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How to make on-the-go carnivore nutrition:

(Pemmican) was invented by the native peoples of North America. It was widely adopted as a high-energy food by Europeans involved in the fur trade and later by Arctic and Antarctic explorers, such as Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen.

The specific ingredients used were usually whatever was available; the meat was often bison, moose, elk, or deer. Fruits such as cranberries and saskatoon berries were sometimes added. Cherries, currants, chokeberries and blueberries were also used, but almost exclusively in ceremonial and wedding pemmican.

—Read more about pemmican on Infogalactic

Recipe first. Scroll on past for images and explanations.

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Pemmican

A nutrition bar with a 1:1 ratio of meat to fat
Prep Time1 hour
Cook Time8 hours
1 hour
Total Time10 hours
Keyword: Emergency, survival, travel
Servings: 8 bars
Author: GAHCindy

Equipment

  • Food dehydrator (or the sun, or a fire)
  • Food processor (or rocks)
  • Meat slicer (or sharp stone knife)
  • Kitchen scales (or two hands and two eyeballs for estimating)

Ingredients

  • 5 lb beef hearts Other lean meat may be used, but hearts are best.
  • 1 lb rendered beef tallow

Instructions

  • Slice beef hearts very thin using either a meat slicer (recommended) or a very sharp knife. Slightly frozen meat slices much more easily.
  • Lay slices out on food dehydrator sheets in a single layer.
  • Dehydrate for 6-8 hours at 167 degrees. Meat is done when it snaps nicely in two.
  • Using a food processor, grind the dried meat to a powder. Don't leave large pieces, as it makes the texture of the bar much less enjoyable. This takes a while, and it's loud, so cover your ears.
  • It's a good idea to get as close to a 50/50 blend of meat and fat as possible for the sake of shelf-life and flavor. Make note of the weight of both the bowl you will mix the meat in, and the saucepan in which you will melt down the beef tallow, so that you can zero out those amounts when you weigh your meat powder and tallow.
  • Add the tallow to the pan and melt it down.
  • Weigh the meat powder to determine how much fat to use. 5 lbs of meat will usually dry out to about 1 lb of powder. Then weigh out the same amount of fat and mix the two together.
  • At this point, you can flavor your pemmican if you like. Suggested additions: 1/4 cup honey, freezedried blueberries, berry powder.
  • Pour into a baking dish. I usually use a 9x13 for this amount, but you can do whatever thickness you like.
  • This will set right on the counter, or you can put it in the fridge for a few minutes to go faster. After it's set, cut it into the desired number of pieces.
  • Store individually wrapped in plastic wrap or baggies, or for longer shelf-life, in vacuum-sealed bags.

One of the toughest things about maintaining a carnivore diet while traveling is finding food that is just meat. No seed oils, no plants? No food! I often find myself fasting when I don’t really want to, just because there’s not much out there. Yes, you can buy some McDonald’s hamburger patties in a pinch, but I hate the drive-thru, and the rest of my family doesn’t need whatever else is on that God-forsaken menu. This Feather-Indian food is a perfect emergency and travel food, and I try to keep some on hand at all times.

It’s a little bit time consuming to make, and you need some special equipment if you don’t want to spend days making it the old-fashioned way. If you do want to make it the old fashioned way, please do take pictures and send them my way. That would be not much fun at all for me, but I’d love to see it done!

I wouldn’t do this without a good meat slicer

 

Sliced meat, ready for drying.

Lay your beef slices in a single layer and cook ’em!

Pemmican can be cooked into a stew or fried with vegetables for the picky, but I’ve never been motivated or hungry enough to try that. We eat it as a bar. It looks a bit like a brownie, but doesn’t resemble dessert in any other way.

This pemmican has freeze dried blueberries sprinkled on top. Not terribly sweet, and still carnivore enough for me.

 

A few tips and warning before you get started:

Trim: Trim all of the fat you can from around the heart. The red, lean meat is all you want for this part. You’ll add back an equal weight of tallow, and you want the fat:protein to be as close to 50/50 as possible.

Grind! I’ve gotten pretty precise in the way I make my pemmican. My first batch wasn’t very good, to be honest. It was unpleasant to chew, and inconsistently textured. I needed to be pickier about my grind size. You need powder, not just tiny chunks. Be patient and keep grinding the dried meat no matter how long it takes, until you have actual powder.

Sweeten: You can add honey or dried fruits to this and increase both calorie count and carbs. These additions also make it much more palatable. This is survival and on-the-go food, so I don’t worry too much about the carbs, but if you’re trying to lose weight or defeat a carb addiction, leave that stuff out and just salt it when you eat it.

Preserve: Interestingly, while honey is an additional preservative, salt will make your pemmican go bad faster. Wait, wut? It’s true! Salt will draw moisture into your pemmican and shorten its shelf-life considerably. If you feel it needs flavor, add it at the point of consumption, not in the making.

Meat: Any lean meat can be used, even ground beef. If you don’t feel like slicing meat, or only have access to ground meat, 93% or leaner ground beef can be used. I’ve done it, and it tastes pretty good, but not exactly the same. If your meat is not lean enough, you will not have a very tasty or shelf-stable result. Follow all the same instructions as for sliced meat, except use a rolling pin to roll your ground meat between two sheets of parchment, thusly:

Then cut it into roughly 3 inch strips and follow the rest of the instructions.

Fat: You want tallow from a ruminant animal like beef or bison, so you have a high saturated fat content and room-temperature solidity. Lard and higher PUFA fats will not do the same thing. They’d taste awful, too, I’m sure. I imagine lamb tallow would also work. Is lamb tallow a thing?

 

Have you ever tried pemmican? Made it? Let me know how you do it, or if you ever even want to, by joining me on Gab, MeWe, or Social Galactic.

The New Baptism

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Did you guys see this?

I want to translate what you just heard:

Reporter: Do you think that calling people heretics, some of whom were baptized, has had an impact at all on baptisms in parts of the Territory?

Gunner: No, and I’ll repeat it. If you are anti-mandate, you are absolutely an heretic. I mean, I don’t care what your personal baptism status is. If you support, champion, give a green light, comfort to, support, anybody who argues against the mandatory baptisms, you are an heretic. Absolutely.

Your personal baptism status is utterly irrelevant. If you campaign against the mandate, if you campaign against the people being baptized in vulnerable settings–teachers in classrooms—I’ll be really clear: At that point in time people are actually supporting the idea of a teacher being unbaptized in a remote community classroom with innocent kids. I reject that, I still reject it, and if you are out there in any way shape or form campaigning against this mandate you are absolutely an heretic. If you say “pro-persuasion”, stuff it, shove it.”

The fact is that the vaccine isn’t about a virus. If it were, nobody would be worried about kids in a classroom, as kids are in far less danger from the virus than from the shot. If it were about a virus, persuasion would be tried, because sweet reason would be useful. If it were about a virus, and the vaccine were effective, there would be no sin in making your own choice in the matter.

This man, and many others, speak with religious fervor about getting vaccinated at a time when the virus has already mutated beyond the original targeted virus. It is about nothing but obedience. If you got the shot, you’re one of the sheep. If you didn’t, you’re one of the goats. There is not a single thought in this man’s head about real physical danger. He just wants you to get in line.

As for making sure the people teaching your children are baptized Christians? If he’d gone off on a rant like that, I could get behind him. Couldn’t you?

We wouldn’t be in this mess if we’d had that same fervor regarding which teachers we allow our school districts to hire, and which curriculum to guide them.

Want to discuss this post? Meet me on social media:

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Hiyo, Silver!

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I’m not ashamed of doing things that aren’t “smart”–things like taking horse paste and inhaling nanoparticles of silver–when all the “smart” people are jumping off a cliff and calling that foolishness “herd immunity”. It’s herd something, anyway. 

This post is for entertainment purposes and is not to be construed as medical advice. Do not attempt this yourself. I’m just telling you what I did. Try whatever you like. But don’t blame or credit me with the results, please. You have been warned.

So, I think I had the Coof–the Rona, the WuFlu, the Illegal Cough–whatever you want to call it. What I did not have, was Covid-19, because that is an ugly, clunky name, and I do not get ugly, clunkily-named illnesses. I didn’t really feel up to leaving the house to get tested once I was sick, so I can’t say for sure what it was. Besides, you’re not supposed to go places when you’re sick. Somebody might catch something. I’ll probably get antibody testing pretty soon and see if I have them.

What I had at first was about 4 days of awful chest congestion, lots of dry coughing, but no drop in pulse-ox. I never lost my sense of smell, that I could tell, but I also wasn’t eating, so maybe I wouldn’t have noticed it. It felt low in the lungs, unlike asthma, though my albuterol inhaler did ease some of the distress. I was so tired I couldn’t move. I had a low fever and then muscle aches after the fever subsided. It might have just been the flu.

After the first few days, I gave in and took the horse paste, which I should have done the first day. I’ve always been reluctant to medicate. I could cut my hand off and spend several minutes bleeding out while considering whether I really wanted to intervene in nature’s handling of the matter. This works well for me 99% of the time. I have a strong immune system because I let it practice a lot. I’ll go out and lick doorknobs if it’s been too long since I’ve had an illness to spar with.

The day after taking Ivermectin I had most of my energy back, but breathing was still labored. To get an idea of how I should treat myself, I researched how it’s prescribed for other ailments, and how several (mostly successful) experiments specifically for the Cough had been run. I could have taken it daily with little danger of side effects, I figured, but again, I wanted to see if my body could do it on its own. Because of the way I spaced it out, taking notes on how I felt every day, I don’t think it was either placebo effect or coincidence that I improved so quickly after getting my hooves, but I guess it could have been.

Me and My Man

I hung out at that mostly-better level for a while, maybe 3 days. I felt like I was never going to improve further on my own, so I took another dose of the stuff and within a few hours was feeling pretty good. But my breathing was still labored. I wasn’t coughing anything up, even though it felt like I surely had stuff way down in there, and I was having to use my long-neglected asthma inhaler every six to eight hours. It worked to help me breathe, but it didn’t heal me.

I had been doing nebulized hydrogen peroxide (you can do a web search to find instructions if you’re interested), to no detriment as far as I could tell, but also to no avail. I’ve spent the last several weeks living basically normally. I’ve even been doing my workouts at about half my usual intensity, just hoping against hope that I’m not overdoing it. I can’t just sit here and wait until I’m perfectly well. I get bored.

So I was feeling good, almost 100%, but still using my inhaler almost daily. I did finally start coughing some stuff up a week ago, instead of just coughing, but it comes painfully.

Now, I am not going to the doctor unless I absolutely have to. I just don’t do that. It’s a fault of mine. I don’t want anybody to know I’m not invincible, for one thing. I take it as a personal failure when I get sick. Besides, I don’t want to take time out of my busy schedule for an appointment. I also don’t want to take antibiotics or steroids. I don’t want to do a covid test. I don’t want to pay for a consult.

“So what else can I try?”, I wondered. My immune system was clearly unable to finish this thing off on its own.

Last night I was thinking about the hydrogen peroxide treatment, and how that works. To oversimplify the explanation, basically it produces ROS in the tissues which then destroy any bacteria or viruses that they encounter. The H2O2/saline solution, applied several times, was not doing what it should, but I couldn’t think why. It really should work. Maybe it just isn’t powerful enough because I stubbornly let the bug settle in and get comfortable for too long instead of treating immediately.

So I started thinking, there is another substance that I know does the same thing. I’ve taken it internally plenty of times, though not by inhalation. What if I try direct application of colloidal silver? I went on a hunt for literature on nebulizing the stuff, because I’ve never heard of such a thing.

Well, what do you know? People do that! Granted, they’re all slightly crazy, but who isn’t these days? So after some research (on a barely explored topic, unfortunately), and a prayer that I’m not doing something completely stupid, I went ahead and diluted some colloidal silver with distilled water and spent ten minutes with my nebulizer this morning. Immediately, I coughed up a bunch of yellow gunk, and the quality of my breathing for the rest of the morning has been perfect, as if I’d never had even a cold. I am still occasionally coughing stuff up, but not painfully. The sputum tastes like silver, which you probably don’t care to know.

I’ll let you know tomorrow, after I do another treatment tonight, if I’ve made it through a full 36 hours without breathing difficulties. If I do, that will be the first time in about six weeks. Yes, that is how long I’ve let this thing go on. I know I’m an idiot for not doing more, sooner, but I really wanted to figure this out for myself.

Besides, I have a lot of faith in my immune system. This was a weird bug, whatever it was, and my body didn’t know what to do with it. If this peaceful, easy breathing lasts, especially through a good workout, I’ll call this a plausible treatment (for MYSELF) for respiratory infections.

I won’t call it a plausible treatment for you, Dear Reader. You should never take medical advice from a hillbilly mommy blogger, OK? You take your life into your own hands when you do that.

Want to discuss? Join me on either MeWe or Social Galactic.

Update: After a couple of days of not wheezing, my wheeze did come back, but it never got as bad as before. I also started to feel really, really good (except for the breathing), able to fully keep up with my family’s needs for the first time in weeks. The rest of the family also came down with the same symptoms, but recovered very quickly. We tested negative for Covid-19. I think it was probably just a run-of-the-mill flu. Anyhow, I finally tapped out and called the PA I go to, whereupon she told me to just tough it out like I’ve been doing, it’s just taking me a while to recover. I do think the silver helped a lot, but it wasn’t quite a magic bullet as I’d hoped. Perhaps there was some infection set up, and the treatment did help, or perhaps it was coincidental that I started to feel so much better so quickly. Either way, I’m keeping this in mind as a possible treatment for future illnesses. It certainly didn’t hurt.

Special Nutrition in the Bible

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Ezekiel bread, the Daniel diet, the Eden diet. How come nobody ever does a John the Baptist diet? I’d totally do that one!

If you squint just right while you’re reading it, the Bible seems to come closer to supporting a vegetarian approach to eating than a carnivorous one. After all, in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were given every green plant and every herb that grows to eat. I’ve already said a few things about that aspect of Bible nutrition in Carnivore Diet and the Christian Worldview. But there are a few other cases people have brought to me as examples of rejection of meat as good dietary practice.

I think it’s funny how often people take miracles and prophecies to be everyday occurrences, but perfectly natural, albeit difficult things like fasting for long periods of time, to be miracles. We’re so good at reading what we want to read, rather than what is there.

What about that Daniel diet, for instance?

8 But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king’s meat, nor with the wine which he drank: therefore he requested of the prince of the eunuchs that he might not defile himself.

9  Now God had brought Daniel into favour and tender love with the prince of the eunuchs.

10 And the prince of the eunuchs said unto Daniel, I fear my lord the king, who hath appointed your meat and your drink: for why should he see your faces worse liking than the children which are of your sort? then shall ye make me endanger my head to the king.

11 Then said Daniel to Melzar, whom the prince of the eunuchs had set over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah,

12 Prove thy servants, I beseech thee, ten days; and let them give us pulse to eat, and water to drink.

13 Then let our countenances be looked upon before thee, and the countenance of the children that eat of the portion of the king’s meat: and as thou seest, deal with thy servants.

14 So he consented to them in this matter, and proved them ten days.

15 And at the end of ten days their countenances appeared fairer and fatter in flesh than all the children which did eat the portion of the king’s meat.

16 Thus Melzar took away the portion of their meat, and the wine that they should drink; and gave them pulse.

On a surface read-through, this looks an awful lot like the Lord is saying: Look, grains and water are the best food for humans! I hope we’re a little better able to discern what was happening than that. Why did the Daniel and the other three Hebrew children refuse meat? Because they had dietary laws, for one thing, and for another, the king’s meat and drink had surely been sacrificed to idols. Daniel was not worried about his physical condition–which he and the eunuch both knew should take a hit from that kind of fasting–but his spiritual one. And, as in the fiery furnace and the lion’s den, God honored the Israelites’ fear of Him, and their willingness to take damage to their physical and social status to remain faithful to him. He brought His children through the ordeal in better shape than that with which they had begun.

Y’all, this was a miracle, not a dietary prescription.

And then, (this is my favorite part) see the last verse. What was the result of this newfound “nutritional information”? The eunuch could only interpret what he saw scientifically, through observation, having only his natural mind. That fool then took away the meat that the king’s strong and intelligent cohort had been eating, thus undoubtedly weakening their minds and bodies by giving them a sub-optimal diet.

That’s a pretty good joke, if you ask me.

Ezekiel the prophet famously lived for 390 days on a recipe God gave him:

9 “Take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and spelt; put them in a storage jar and use them to make bread for yourself. You are to eat it during the 390 days you lie on your side. 10 Weigh out twenty shekels[b] of food to eat each day and eat it at set times. 11 Also measure out a sixth of a hin[c] of water and drink it at set times. 12 Eat the food as you would a loaf of barley bread; bake it in the sight of the people, using human excrement for fuel.” 13 The Lord said, “In this way the people of Israel will eat defiled food among the nations where I will drive them.”

14 Then I said, “Not so, Sovereign Lord! I have never defiled myself. From my youth until now I have never eaten anything found dead or torn by wild animals. No impure meat has ever entered my mouth.”

15 “Very well,” he said, “I will let you bake your bread over cow dung instead of human excrement.”

16 He then said to me: “Son of man, I am about to cut off the food supply in Jerusalem. The people will eat rationed food in anxiety and drink rationed water in despair, 17 for food and water will be scarce. They will be appalled at the sight of each other and will waste away because of[d] their sin.

I’d bet we have tens, if not hundreds, of versions of “Ezekiel bread” recipes to choose from today. Now, I have no doubt that these breads, especially the sprouted versions, are better for you than the fluffy white loaves I used to feed my family in loving ignorance. I don’t object their existence, or even their naming. It’s just a recipe. People like recipes, especially if they taste good.

But the idea that God prescribed these ingredients because they were complete nutrition without which the prophet wouldn’t have survived is, frankly, silly. It was barely more than a year. You can make it for a mere year on practically any kind of calories, and precious few of them. The human body can withstand a lot of this kind of stress, though not without repercussions. Ezekiel was not doing this for his health. Twenty shekels is about eight ounces, so assuming equal amounts of all the ingredients, Ezekiel was only getting about 220 calories a day like this! These were starvation rations, meted out day by day, hour by hour, to symbolize the famine that God was sending on Israel.

Meat is what everybody knew as abundance.

Not only so, but friends, you’re not really eating that bread God’s way unless you’re cooking it over cow’s dung. If you want to be truly healthy, get thee to the nearest field of cattle and start gathering your fuel, and be grateful that He relented and didn’t insist on the use of human excrement.

I’m not going to touch on Orthodox- and Catholic-type fasts that exclude meat for certain lengths of time, though I’ll surely get to that someday. These two ideas, plus Garden of Eden vegetarianism, are the main dietary ideas people have brought to me from a too-literal reading of the Bible, but I’m sure there are more. If you can think of any others, please let me know by email, or by joining me on MeWe or SG. I’d love to have the whole collection!

P.S. You know what’s funny? Somebody on social media reminded me that I didn’t address Christians who try to eat by Jewish dietary rules. I guess that’s so well-covered in the actual Bible that I don’t need to, but maybe I’ll say a little more about it in the future. Suffice it for now to say that I eat pork,  and I think if the animals are fed correctly, it’s good, healthy meat.

 

 

Sorry About That!

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I’m sorry you guys are getting a password-protected post in your feeds. I didn’t realize an email would be sent out to everybody for password-protected posts. I meant that last one that went out to remain private for the time being. Please forgive me and stick around for (hopefully) a public version of the same post.