Moderates United

 I wonder if fresh (not frozen, not canned) vegetable intake correlate with household income.   I suspect it does.  And I suspect it also correlates with overall health outcomes and life expectancy.

This is perhaps a truism, perhaps obvious, but I tend to often find myself trying to reason and think through basic concepts from their very beginning.

It occurred to me as well to comment on the idea of “socioeconomic status”.  In America, do we really need the “socio”?  Are not the rich the successful, and the successful the elite?  There is no monarchy, and we tend not to value anyone who cannot get rich doing what they do.

Perhaps in some places religious leaders have some status, but that is the only real exception I can think of.  Otherwise it is sports, movie and business folks who have made a lot of money and gained a lot of fame for it.

Who has heard of Doris Lessing?  Albert Camus?  Both heroes of mine.  Yes, I think I am better, while recognizing that most people have never been exposed to better alternatives, and that eventually the job of people like me may be to help build a culture worth living in, where a third of us are not thinking about putting bullets in their heads or jumping off a bridge.  You need a healthy ego to have the strength to swim against such a large, sucking whirlpool of vacuity and meaningless consumption and stupidity.  People know Vince Neil, but not the great writers of the 20th century.

Yeah, I started with cucumbers.  I am a bit of grumpy human being.  I hurt all the time, emotionally, and it comes out whenever I stop holding it back.  I continue to try daily and weekly to fix that.  I will get there eventually.  I will be a bit radioactive until then.

 Just putting that out there.  If you can’t figure it out, I’m not writing for you.

 How much time do you spent touching plastic, and how much fresh or pickled vegetables or fruits?  Or for that matter, good fresh clean dirt?

I will add, I don’t know how to put it, but I feel that a big part of our problems stem from the fact that vegetables don’t play the role in our lives that they did for our grandparents, and certainly THEIR grandparents.

There is something in vegetables that is necessary, but not obviously necessary, and I don’t just mean nutritionally.  I’m honestly not sure what I mean.

I think veggies help us stay more alkaline with less effort.  Our body naturally maintains a fixed PH, but if you keep adding acid to it, getting it back to baseline takes more work, and would think if you ate ONLY foods which wound up lowering your PH that at some point it would be impossible.  

But I think veggies have an energetic, calming influence as well.  Plants perhaps feel stress, but slowly, and in a very different way from us animals.

 What all Governors should be providing daily is new COVID cases, the likely margin of error (we still don’t know if regular cold bugs can create false positives), new hospitalizations, hospital utilization rate, new deaths purely attributable to COVID, new deaths where it was one factor including old age and general decrepitude, TOTAL deaths–this is a key one–from all causes, suicides, drug overdoses, business starts and business failures.

Such a dashboard would allow an honest evaluation of the risk and the success or failure of the policy.

Self evidently, that is PRECISELY why no one is providing such a thing.  These policies ARE failures.  It is really beyond dispute, in my view.

 I think I have said this before, but if there is no outside, there is no inside, and if there is no inside, there is no culture, at least no common culture, which is how most of us tend to use the term.

I will speculate that Leftism–and cultism in general–is an effort to turn Gesellschaft into Gemeinschaft through direct emotional, social, political and eventually physical violence.  This was the core argument Rousseau made, and upon the basis of which events as varied as the French Revolution and Pol Pot’s political democide were perpetrated.

But a true culture frees people, at least from anomie.  Confining people into small boxes is the opposite of the intended result, which can only be obtained through sustained freedom protected by the rule of law, and enriched through a shared base moral code.

Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails
Just call me Lucifer
‘Cause I’m in need of some restraint

Mick Jagger (mainly), 1968

I read he was riffing on Baudelaire (Fleurs de mal, presumably) and Bulgakov, whose The Master and Margerita was a critique of the Soviet Union, as I recall the history, although apparently, and perhaps paradoxically, Stalin himself supported him at certain points of his largely truncated and destroyed artistic career.

 If you think the CIA is a criminal organization, and that there IS a “Military-Industrial Complex” (keep in mind Eisenhower was a retired General and a Republican), you HAVE to vote for Trump this time.

What is odd, too, is that if you support the working men and women of this country, the rule of law, the black community, and all minorities here legally, you ALSO have to vote Trump.  

It’s unclear to me why any person here legally, who works for a paycheck, and loves themselves and their children, would vote for anyone but Trump.

There is nothing left for Democrats but hatred, violence, and self destructive anger.

1. Kamala Harris is Richard Nixon, but without his charm, good looks, and instinctive ethical sense.

2. If you like 2020, vote Kamala Harris for President.  If not, vote Trump.

 The answers to questions asked by experience can only be found within the idiom of experience.

Language kills, misleads, and distracts.

 Healthy routines are the earth within which new life is supported and nurtured.