A short but steep walk.

 A little video I put together today 9^th January 2022, from a walk I took on Sunday the 2^nd of January 2022. I had a bit of a think about some of the things I said on the ascent. I probably hadn’t walked up that particular hill for over a year given the injury I’d had in 2021.

The tree that had a fallen limb is a Beech and was probably once just a part of a hedge on top of a drystone wall, clearly, the hedge was abandoned in some far distant time, and now the row of trees straddles the remains of the wall. It’s a mixture of bark-covered root structures and dry-stone walling, a symbiosis of two manmade artefacts writing their own rules in the absence of man’s attendance.

I said at the end “I came I saw I reacquainted.” And that was the case, walking up that hill was symbolic to me and to me alone. I needed it to underline the fact that after a fairly horrible 2021, that I had come back to Somerset, fitter and stronger than I have been for over a year, and could enjoy the breathtaking view from the Trig-Point beneath Shervage Wood, and share some old lore, and tree knowledge.

Dr Gary Fettke ( Low Carbing, Keto and the Vegan Agenda)

I have been following these subjects for a while. In an age of media saturation, it is difficult to find near-absolute truth (there is no such thing as absolute truth … only the Sith deal in absolutes, and we all know what a bunch of arseholes the Sith are).

I follow Neal Asher a Sci-fi author in the Space Opera realm, and he has been using his body as a laboratory for what seems like a couple of years now. I think the spur for him was the death of his wife way back now in 2014 from colon cancer. Though it is fair to say he had been showing a burgeoning interest in longevity-semi-immortality for some time prior to that pivotal event. You can read Neals Blog here:

The Skinner blogspot

and here: https://www.nealasher.co.uk/ and follow him here https://www.facebook.com/neal.asher and various other places on the interweb … of things in the metaverse of re-inventing the wheel … lookout for random cynical tangents.

Fortunately for those of us that follow Neal, we don’t necessarily have to go through the sometimes-icky business of using our own carcasses for the research (caveat below). We can just learn the lessons from the distillation of Neals experience. This is useful. However, while it is useful, it is also important to remember that Neal is a Science FICTION author not a scientist and so one must actually question his results and do one’s own monitoring and research of self when implementing one’s own plan. What you don’t have to do so much of is: trawl the web finding all the articles and videos. However, self-monitoring and research is important, lest one ends up in hospital `properly fucked’. To make the point. I have been living a fairly awkward life recently (see the earlier post) and I had to maximise my bang for buck in the absence of cooking facilities, storage for food etc. So, it seemed like an ideal time to go balls deep on a low-carbohydrate high-fat, high-protein diet.

I reckon my current fridge is 25 litres maximum (it is borrowed, inefficient and really not much more than a drinks fridge). So, high fat, that means fatty meat, nuts seeds etc and trying to avoid too much processed food, which is difficult when you are living out of packets. However, if you use your eyes and are prudent and read labels, you would be surprised how you can maximise your fat and protein, while eating fresh cooked meats from packets. Fruit, veg, nuts are easy peasy (I recommend Lidl for Nuts and seeds, Tesco do a range as well, but their pricing is Tesco pricing, and being cynical and knowing where nuts are grown and by whom, I rather suspect that you’re paying Tesco for the word Tesco on the bag and not the contents of the bag).

I increased my swimming, I got back to my floor-work (lunges squats etc), vigorous walks after work and started eating high-fat high-protein, lots of fresh fruit and veg, homemade kefir,l low carbohydrate. No booze, and what I thought was good hydration. I had a bought of Keto-flu. If hadn’t known what it was and why it happened (thanks to Neals experience) I would have thought I had real flu or Covid. The day it hit, followed a very vigorous exercise day; the bodies thermostat went crazy, and I hurt all over, predominantly in the muscle groups I’d been working the day before (Legs). The knock-on effect was severe back pain, just like I had been suffering for most of 2021. I was going on a short road trip to my friends in Hillperton and spent the evening at their place wrapped in blankets shivering, until about two hours after dinner; burgers and bacon in a bap with chips and Coke. Within two hours I had stabilised, with a couple of Neurofen to assist recovery, all the back pain dissipated overnight. Lesson learned, you can keto and the weight falls off, and you will still have energy in abundance and generally feel “more”. It’s hard to describe, better is probably a good word. There are issues and there needs to be some fine-tuning (ideally when I have somewhere to live permanently), but on basic principles low carbohydrates, lots of meat and fat appears to be better for the skin, there is less wind, and fatigue. And the fatigue itself may be different … not gone (I don’t sleep well) but the impacts of fatigue on cognition seem to be less intrusive. I also went through an odd but expected process of urinating all the time, demonstrating how much fluid we carry that we don’t necessarily need.

Al the words above are a preamble to introducing a video. For some time, I’ve known the bare bones of the story of Kellogg, and the fact that for nearly a hundred years a religious whack-job created a cult around his product. I didn’t quite realise how deep it ran, but I did know that because Kellogg stole the march on the narrative and was so good at self-publicity in a religious America; that by dint of the passage of time and the absence of historical context for us as a modern population, we grew up inured or oblivious to the reasons why breakfast cereals and cereal culture carb-culture etc became ingrained. 

The video presentation below lifts the lid a lot higher and having had a rummage around the internet on the back of watching this video, you discover for yourself that what the doctors in the video are talking about is solid. It won’t be everything, do your own digging, but be aware the Adventists were there first and their reach is long.

Also appended is an article from JAMA network (Journal of American Medical Associations (again)). You need to read it all, to realise that, the article suggests that the Adventist Health Studies results appear only to be true within the Adventist cohort and that if you measure their results relative to a non-Adventist cohort that the results are `null’ or put another way falsifiable (in laymen terms, the Adventist results may be a load of bollocks, however, a cautious writer, writing in the Journal of American Medical Associations may be careful of saying exactly that, because underlying all this corruption for want of a better word, sits the pharmaceutical industry …. again).

That’s enough from me here’s a link to the YouTube interview, with Dr Brett Scher and Dr Gary Fettke who has been the victim of both the food and the pharmaceutical industries machinations, to maintain the status quo, or put another way … to maintain their profits.

Dr Gary Fettke's, website

Journal of American Medical Associations (full article)

For interests only. This Wikipedia article refers to the Loma Linda University. One of the Universities that conducts the research and is itself a part of the Adventist network. If that isn't bias, then I am a Monkeys Uncle. It also suggests Wikipedia isn't doing its job properly.

Adventist Health Studies Wikipedia entry

The Covid-Omicron show.

Sitting watching the news on the BBC (I have to do it just to have a rough idea of what’s going outside my bubble of one … at most a few more than one). And then comparing to all the other mainstream news outlets I currently have access to. I am compelled to think, I am actually watching  Covid/Omicron show. Endless punditry and opinion. To be entirely fair to the BBC, it’s also Al Jazeera, RT, Sky, and even GB News (though the GB News take on things are more in line with my opinion, based on information gleaned outside the mainstream media … see links below).

What’s actually going on if you look beyond the demands for more money from the government (nuanced reactive money to cover losses caused by staff absence, not mandatory not by lockdown)? That’s a difficult question to answer. Let's say "My business usually makes a £1000 a day … on Tuesday it only made £500. Can the government make up the difference?" That is a slight oversimplification, and deliberately so. It’s deliberately broad brush, because the sensible will immediately find layers of complexity in the notion. It isn’t impossible to create measures, however, it may be prohibitively expensive in terms of administrative overheads, unless the tax system is used as the input-output buffer. Again, not impossible, but whenever you add layers to systems, you lose clarity, and at this stage ripping out a system and trying to replace it with something bespoke … again why? Crisis end. This crisis is coming to an end (there is a massive caveat to that further down).

Back to the question of what’s actually going on in the wider UK as far as Covid-19-Omicron-Variant is concerned. Not much it seems, 100,000 infections plateauing, a lot of staff absence due to positive tests. The result being a train timetable change in Scotland and a critical incident being declared by Lincolnshire Hospital trust due to staff absence. Hospitality is still suffering from staff shortages, and people are self-regulating themselves away from socialising outside of their immediate bubbles.

I’m going to suggest that the pundits who are suggesting there needs to be even more testing are not thinking clearly. The testing-for-Covid-industry is booming, and positive Covid tests that result in staff absence are jerking the economy like an eager dog on a leash. Herd immunity and the spread of Omicron are likely to be the key to ending the current `not really a crisis’ crisis. Yes, I wrote that and published it.

There are so many fronts to argue on, you spend the whole of the rest of your life arguing the toss about your opinion and where you gathered your facts that formed your opinion. My little voice mostly unheard in an unknown corner of the internet is an irrelevance in the grand scheme of things, but I can’t sit idly by and be counted with the sheep and the useful idiots. So, to this end I’ll leave this digital impression here as my personal testament, that I disagree with the sheep and the useful idiots … never mind those in the pharmaceutical industry who have realised that all their dreams have come true … for a while.

The sheep, I think just love the pandemic and being told what to do. It’s easy comfort, you can signal your virtue and look like a law-abiding citizen, shed non-friends and irrelevant social engagement by the expedient use of plague … and you will be applauded for it … win win. Crack on, as your freedoms are curtailed, and random uncertainty is introduced into your life, by other well-meaning but misinformed partisans; or by petty bureaucrats in your workplace, on the bus, the tube, the miserable whining hypochondriac who shares office space with you and needs a drama to spread their own misery to anyone else they can. Crisis perpetuators at all levels of society, a semi-hive mind driven by a nebulous cloud of finger-wagging, fear of being different, fear of being outcast, while simultaneously out-casting-self (it’s tail eating of the first order, and would be hilarious if it wasn’t so frightening).

Useful idiots, those who have found a cause, a lever for financial or political gain. Crisis perpetuators, who are using low-grade Machiavellian machinations for their cause, and driving the fear of uncertainty, to create uncertainty. Above them are the `Vile expedient arseholes’. Let’s throw the broadest figures we can at the pharmaceutical industry, so we know what the Borg Queen at the head of the collective is all about. Currently, $1000 dollars per second are going to pharmaceutical companies, approximately $90million daily for Covid related products. Lobbyist’s outnumber congressmen three to one in America and it is estimated that the pharmaceutical industry has spent $266-million dollars on lobbying since the start of the pandemic, and there is talk about the pandemic rolling on until 2024. It’s 2022, the pandemic has been with us for two years already. Do you want two more years? Do you want the pandemic as the world's president? Four years that’s a presidential term, that is how long the pharmaceutical industry projects this rolling on for. Buy shares in big-pharma … if you have £52 going spare for a Pfizer share.

Let us today be thankful, that our government is tracking the optimistic line rather than kowtowing to demands for more restrictions, and actually looks to be following the data, rather than the forecasts, which are based on models, that have been designed around worst-case scenarios, and to a greater or lesser degree have been consistently wrong (wide of the worst-case scenario) since the outset of the pandemic.

In the beginning when the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) was playing fast and loose with numbers and the truth, while the BBC amongst others was ramping up the fear, and Covid variously moved from killing less than 1% to killing more than 6% in periods measured in 24hours (the number of dead relative to the number of hospitalisations in Wuhan). I was all over it. I joined a group to dispel misinformation and to point people in the direction of the right information. I was shitting bricks, this SARS (severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) could and likely would kill me, so I believed. I still believe given my asthma and the medication I take for it -Montelukast, an immune suppressant for a system that Covid attacks-  though I have found no papers looking at asthma drugs and Covid outside those steroids used for severe asthma- that for me Covid could be deadly. However, I have been double vaccinated and boosted, I look after my health and fitness, I take care of myself (even in trying times). I stay abreast of the actual science around Covid, not the media distillation, or the projections from the models. And what I see now doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the financial and social fallout from Covid.

Tangent: Note the public health messaging about looking after your health, diet and fitness has slipped off the agenda. Many luminaries of the scientific community and alternative media world have been asking this question. Joe Rogan springs to mind. Could it be that unhealthy lifestyles and the medicines that treat them would be an incentive for the pharmaceutical industry to lobby against health messaging for the general public? Or are people genuinely too lazy and too reliant on medicine to fix things after the fact? Rather than mitigate problems with lifestyle choices?

Anyway, rant over, here’s some links to the Journal of the American Medical Association. This is the source.

The front page for the journals Coronavirus recourse centre.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/pages/coronavirus-alert

Now historic articles. January, February, March 2020.

1.  https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2760500

 2. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762997

3.   https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762688

The latest from South Africa (specifically regarding Omicron)

4. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2787776

Compare and contrast the content of article 2. Above with the content of article 4.

Karma and the Gods ... beware of fooling yourself.

This is one of those I finally got around to it blogs, frankly, I’ve been busy. First, there was a new job and its attendant very steep learning curve. The move back to Somerset living in a guest house, then there was eyestrain and mental fatigue and fear and uncertainty and learning new processes and, and, and habituating them and taking notes and fearing failure, and Christmas and returning to swimming and finding my feet and trying to find a flat (I still haven’t), getting back to a GP, trying to follow up the complaint I made to the DWP (they are shite), dealing with the Universal Credit people (they are also shite), doing laundry in a sink, or driving miles to my sons to do laundry … or taking a bag of laundry 200-miles to your brothers to use the washing machine, because you’re going that way for Christmas and you might as well kill two birds with one stone. Eating cold food out of packets, being miserable and alone (caveat, I’m not miserable for the most part, I just sit in the realm of uncertainty, looking for solutions through the opaque meniscus of uncertainty, and sometimes it “fucks you right off”), having another cough cold thing as I entered a new environment -that’s three in three months new people and environments will do that to a person, walking cold damp streets after dark and wishing I could turn back the arrow of time and fix whatever the fuck it is (was) that went wrong (be mindful of that road … monsters live there, however, it’s also worth saying I have never been so free to do whatever I like), trying to write (it’s difficult given all that needed to be learnt). Travelling back and forth to Wiltshire and Essex for various functions, which is both expensive and knackering.

Getting a Covid booster jab was a chore given the trials and tribulations of the last month, and when I finally got it, it was like groundhog day (or two). I had the Pfizer jab. On day one I had to nap twice immediately after having the jab, I didn’t even realise I’d nodded off, and then slept through the night as well. Day two was OMFG!, the analogy would be, being sealed in a barrel and being tossed over a waterfall. Let’s hope that Omicron is the end and that our long-term T-cell immunity holds up and the CCP-Virus (Covid-19), is finally settling to becoming another endemic cold-causing virus … we can only live in hope.

So, where am I as I type? Sitting on a bed in a guesthouse, where I have been rooming for the last month, eking out an existence. Is it a life? Just about, albeit highly restricted and feeling somewhat tenuous.

The trick it seems is to focus on all the things that have gone right, and don’t mistake the positive results of affirmative action for the whims of karma or God.

I may have written elsewhere and earlier that in the aftermath of my separation from Amanda that I felt for a long while that my face was pressed so hard up against the opaque meniscus of reality; the unseen future, the chaos of the present unfolding and passing into the dead past lost before even being grasped that I just wanted to get off the bus (past-tense). It’s uncertainty and, the horror of being cut loose to freefall forward in time flailing around trying to grab a handhold, while blinded by the velocity of times passing and the sheet of the future pulled so tight across the face of your consciousness like layers of suffocating clingfilm, that ending it all actually looked like a way out, if not by my hand then by incautious action leading to what would appear to be death by misadventure… all very dramatic … but I can assure you that’s exactly what it feels like and it’s terrifying. And especially in the rear-view. I read a piece on Quora that suicide is a long-term solution to a short-term problem. Coupled with reading Jordan Petersons Twelve Rules For Life … I’ve not finished it yet; it needs headroom and this season doesn’t allow for it. I had a tiny scrappy mental toolkit to work with. I will write about the book later.

To speak plainly of suicide in retrospect “Fuck that shit!”

There’s a saying: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Caveat, be mindful of becoming arrogant hard and or rigid in the lea of a terrible experience, lest you circle round and start a new loop of the “same shit … different decade”, time and age will be your enemies if you do not make friends with them as you stabilise going forward. The bit’s you lost in the fall are irretrievably gone, and be thankful you have the hindsight to see them recede.

Upsides.

My return to the pool has been nothing short of fantastic. I changed my days, I stopped wasting time and I increased everything. I dropped my pool corner work, there is something fucked up in my lumbar, I think I’ve isolated it to upper right L5/S1, but I do need to get back into the health system, I think a pin is stripped or snapped … won’t that be a joy if I’ve been right about that for the last eleven-and-three-quarter months. I swam a mile for the first time in years on the 29^th of December, I’ve walked miles on the beach. If I’m careful I can reverse dip, incline press-up, squat, lunge, toe press etc, and my fitness in spite of colds and coughs is good.

The real glory of returning to the pool, has more to do with people than place or activity. Seven years of the same faces, friendships, shared experience, the routine, the sense of normality. Being accepted back into the fold of the familiar, the only thing that has changed in real terms is that now I’m solo … and as above with that comes freedom; at first bitter and nervous … the terror of the first day back at school, but in a few hours all the bugaboos, wiverns and gribbly's of the mind have evaporated away like tendrils of mist in the light of the sun.

The practical things that have worked for me, writing (I have, just not here … admin). I’ve kept my Kefir alive through thick and thin, though my diet has been shaky in the absence of proper food preparation facilities. However, I have been sensible in my spending and consumption and tried to low-carb, high protein mixed with plenty of fresh fruit, nuts and seeds (almost zero alcohol). I think I may have fallen foul of Keto-Flu and over-exercise one weekend, but I seem to have found the basic balance for going forward. Once a week I travel to a café and have a full-English breakfast, it is my only cooked fresh meal of the week (writing that makes me feel a little sad and desperate, it’s a reality bump … imagine what it’s like if you don’t even have that to look forward to … but for the grace etc (but also be mindful of invoking Gods and karma as above). Exercise, thinking, breathing exercises, reading, making speculative spreadsheets and notes, doing research on how to navigate life alone in a new home at some point hence. Knowing it’s a matter of time, and having time measured in increments you can comprehend, NOT the blistering blinding second to second panic of falling. These are the things that will see you through the darkness, and in my very unique circumstance (because everyone’s is), being in the chapter, at the paragraph where reality transitions from Order to Chaos. 

If for one second we are going to consider fate and the intersection of my life (anyone’s life) with a moment of pre-ordained serendipity, it is the moment when for the day I had closed my Kindles cover on the Twelve Rules for Life, knowing in the days after the event of September 2021, that when I re-opened that cover, that Jordan Peterson, having described the myriad points where you transition from Order to Chaos, how best you behave for yourself and for all your satellites, to navigate the realm of Chaos back to Order, and the understanding that Order is as mutable as Chaos.

There is a hard road ahead, not a tunnel with light at the end. A road with hazy horizons and objects I can see, not mirages per se, but those objects may be further along than they appear, or they may not be all they appear to be … BUT, and this is the differentiator … it’s not dark anymore.

Algorithm's Again.

Facebook's blunt instrument algorithms would be comical if they weren't so dangerous. I just made a disparaging comment about an EMS "alleged" fitness device (that's a device that promises to make you into Arnold Schwarzenegger from the comfort of your armchair ... it's utter fucking nonsense, for the idle but still vain). However, in the few seconds between poking a hole in the advertising blurb for the hard-of-thinking, somewhere in Meta's server farm one of their crawlers picked up the activity, but not the essence. This is critical, the essence of the comment, not the activity of making the comment is the important part. The result: a slew of new adverts for things that promise the Earth in terms of fitness but will never deliver.

What's so amusing and the thing that demonstrates how myopic and blunt these so-called emergent AI's are, is the fact that my post from earlier clearly states I swam a mile this morning.

And therein lies the problem. I've effectively given Meta all the right information, and yet it comes probing at me with dumb feelers. Besides that, and this is where you move from dumb to dangerous, those same algorithms are now shifting my meta-data towards what it thinks is my goal. And that is how you accidentally profile and stream people -and if you get it wrong and clearly all social media gets it wrong all the time because we haven't evolved with this technology- you end up pushing people up blind alleys, or worse into polarised positions.