Whole Foods

In the last few years every time I’ve had a cold it’s knocked me down flat – and the kids bring home a lot of colds. Even working in a job where I can cope easily with a cold, all I was really doing was postponing the recovery period until the weekend. For a variety of reasons revolving around health I recently embarked on a diet composed of whole foods. It’s not easy to be 100% with this, all the time (and I haven’t tried) but most days of the week I do manage to eat only whole foods.

Added to this we have a copy of Nourishing Traditions in the house now and Karen, who is a keen cook (just as well because I’m not) has been dipping into it on a daily basis. We’ve been eating broths and a variety of fermented foods, including a crazy relish thing I like, which seems to have two quite different tastes within it. We’ve also been eating sourdough bread regularly and using unprocessed sea salt and sugar substitute rapadura in place of the usual stuff. Because I was eating only whole foods and Karen liked the look of what I was eating, she decided to try it to. There have been a number of interesting results.

The first thing we noticed (after someone gave me a commericially made cake a week into the diet change) was that my problem with blocked sinuses has mostly gone away. It used to be that when the air was cold or it dropped a couple of degrees as it does in the late afternoon, my nose would block up and I’d sound like I had a cold – which I hated. Sometimes in desperation I would turn on a heater and breath in the warm air just to get rid of it.

The next thing we noticed was that Karen, who normally gets a lot of headaches, had stopped getting them. Again we only realised this one day when she ate some white bread and immediately got a headache. She tested it one more time with some pasta before concluding that headaches were a powerful enough motivating force to put her off refined flour for a long time. Recently I also realised I was getting less headaches than normal. Anyway here’s what Walt Stoll has to say about the issue*.

The National Research Council recommended daily allowance of refined carbohydrates (CHO) is zero.

Until 300 years ago, refined CHO did not exist. The human body has had no time to evolve a way to cope with this substance. For the past five million years, whenever we took CHO into our bodies, all the vitamins, minerals, enzymes, proteins, etc. present in the living food were eaten with the CHO. Now when we eat refnined CHO, our bodies must immediately provide the vitamins, minerals, proteins, enzymes etc. that manufacturing has removed, in order to digest it. This means we must create a definciency in our bodies of the essential substances – the opposite of nutrion: the more we eat the less nutrition we have.

Refined CHO causes more stress to humans than all the other nutritional stressors put together.

More details on the process behind this available here, and I will add that the fermentation process we are putting our wheat through when we make our sourdough bread deals with the problem of phytates. Phytates are a substance present in wheat and when not fermented (pre-digested) bind with minerals in the stomach thereby preventing them from being taken into the body and further enhancing the nutrition starved state of most everyone in our culture.

We have also read a book on Metabolic Typing, I seem to be a ‘mixed’ type and already eating roughly what I need but Karen has shown that she needs to eat more protein, especially in the morning, and as a consequence now has more energy in the first half of the day – especially when compared to how she was when eating fruit for breakfast.

The latest and best improvement we have found though is in my resistance to colds. As I said at the start I have been incredibly vulnerable to them in the last few years but a month back when one of the kids brought a cold home I discovered that I could keep it at bay simply by getting a good nights sleep – this was a turn for the better! Eventually I got a bad nights sleep and caught the cold but even then the symptoms were so minor as to be almost non existant. Then, a week ago another cold arrived in the house and I caught it before I knew it was around. I woke up one morning feeling rough and thought, “oh well, that’s it I’ve got a proper cold this time” but by mid morning I was completely unaware of any symptoms again and had a great day. The next day started the same way and the day after that it was all over. The worst I could say through the whole experience was that I felt slightly tired.

This is such a stunning reversal of my life over the last few years I can hardly believe it. I’m not sure what improvements we were really expecting but there have been a number of pleasant – and substantial – surprises.

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I can’t recommend Nourishing Traditions highly enough. I wasn’t prepared to make a change in my diet unless it could be done with a minimum of fuss.  If I found myself craving any kind of food I knew I would be wasting my time as the use of will-power is never a long term solution. Luckily this book provides healthy substitutes for every food group – including the all important, cakes and delicious slices group.

*This is from a wellness protocol PDF on the askwaltstollmd.com site, the exact URL of which I can’t seem to locate anymore, I have a copy  if anyone is intersted though.

Socialisation

I just wanted to pick up on the comments on Ran’s blog about schooling and socialisation because ever since we started telling people we were unschooling our children (often we just say homeschooling so as not to frighten them) the single most common objection we receive is;

“But what about you’re child’s socialistion?”.

After several irritating years of this it suddenly dawned on me that no one had ever said;

“But what about your child’s education”!!!

From talking amongst friends, and with homeschoolers on-line, it appears that this a pretty universal experience for all of us.

There’s a mad absurdity about this situation but I also think there is something deeper – people happily, and immediately, concede that school is not that great a place to learn because (I suspect) that at a subconscious level they completely understand the main purpose of school based socialisation. They’ve internalised the values of the domination system and move immediately to defend it.

The absurdity has hidden depths too. The meaning of the word socialisation obviously has to do with a child learning social skills but there are no specific classes on socialisation at schools, and even more bonkers children spend their time almost exclusively with people of their own age who couldn’t possibly teach them how to socilaise because they are at a similar level (Not to mention the issue raised on Ran’s forum about socialisation being repressed for most of the day).

It goes deeper though: In New Zealand homeschoolers have to submit to being reviewed by the education ministry in the same way that schools do and we recently heard from an unschooling parent who said that the reviewer asked a few question’s about their child’s socialisation. First of all this is not part of the New Zealand Curriculum or the curriculum document that the parent’s submitted to the MOE when they applied for a homeschooling exemption (so the reviewer had no right to ask about it). But when they told him that that child regularly plays with a large number of neighbourhood children on a daily basis the reviewer said that it didn’t really count!

He was only satisified that the child was getting proper socialisation when they said it went to more formalised events like soccer practice – despite the obvious fact (or maybe because of it) that child to child interaction is completely mediated by a dominant adult.

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Also: Ran ended his piece with this comment;

…it’s almost impossible to come out of the schooling system with both high intellect and high social intelligence

and I would add that it is the ones who come out with low social intelligence who end up having more power and the most say in how our society functions.

Whic of course is the system working exactly as it’s supposed to

Soil & Health

I heard of the connection between soil and health along time ago but as usual it’s taken a while for the full impact to sink in. The lack of minerals and nutrients in our soil is probably one of the most important issues we face and undoubtably the major cause of our health problems – I suspect it also has a lot to do with our dental problems since ‘re-minrealisation’ is an important part of tooth natural maintenance but I haven’t yet found someone who will make the whole connection for me.

Anyway, I reccomend this article for a quick overview:

Another major area where mineral deficiency manifests itself, in addition to poor health and immune system support, is obesity. Similar to the cats and dogs one sees eating grass when they instinctively know they are either deficient in vitamins and minerals or need extra ones to combat an illness or infection, I believe that the human body also sends such instinctive signals at times that it is missing vital nutrients, but we no longer recognize what it is our bodies are telling us and where to find what we need to silence the signals.

Such confused signals often lead to cravings, and so we eat and eat to try to satisfy them, but what we really crave is missing nutrition.

The biggest problem that I can see is that converting farmland to organic may not be enough – we may need to be more proactive to get minerals and nutrients back in the ground.

Anyway, the author promises further installments regarding this issue but Dan has mentioned that the rebuilding of soil can be done through a proces called bioremediation.

At the bottom of that article you’ll find a link to this article by the same author which gets even more specific about the problem

…we often hear that certain foods contain a certain amount of vitamins and minerals. This is especially true in fruits, vegetables, and other produce, but very few people understand the truth about this information, which is that most of the published values about this nutritional content are not correct. This is especially true among minerals, and that’s the point of this story.

Most of the produce you buy in a grocery store does not have anything close to the mineral profile it is supposed to have according to nutritional textbooks. This is because minerals are not manufactured by plants, whereas vitamins and phytonutrients are. When plants create such nutrients, they synthesize them through chemical and energetic processes that can only be called miraculous. But as capable as they are, plants do not create minerals. Minerals have to be absorbed through the soil, and if they are not present in the soil, then the plant’s roots cannot take them up

At the end the author suggests we buy concentrated sea water, dilute it and sprinkle it on the garden to replace minreals, but I’m wondering, can’t we just go to the beach with a bucket and get some for free?

Civilisation v Aaron

What I’d really like is to break out of the hold civilisation has over me. It’s a hold put there in my childhood by the school system. Unfortunately for me my father was a school principal in that system so I got ’schooled’ at home as well.

Dad always gets a raw deal in these pages so in the interests of fairness I should mention the strong likelihood that he is also behind my ability to stray from mainstream thinking. He always used the term ‘different’ as a compliment when describing other people and he also never sat back and let life push him around which made for a good role-model for taking charge of my life.

But back to the topic. Through whatever means available (exactly what they are doesn’t matter – only the result does) I was thoroughly domesticated. Adults always commented what a quiet and good little boy I was. My teachers always liked me and believed me to be mature because I always did what they asked. I lived for those moments of praise, which I became so good at getting and I very rarely got into trouble, so good was I at reading the minds of my teachers.

The irony is that I forgot how to read my own mind (and body).

To do something like this takes a lot of self control and I can see and sense it still in my body where it is now a near permanent feature. My shoulders are always held up high and my whole upper body is kind of rigid. I’m don’t stand out because most guys are like this but try watching one of us dance – almost nothing is happening with the upper body and only the legs are moving.

The intercostal muscles (between my ribs) are permanently stressed. Until a chiropractor friend showed me what was happening I used to get these muscle freak-outs where every time I tried to take a breath one particular intercostal muscle would give me a lot of pain – this would only last a few seconds or maybe minutes but basically I couldn’t take a proper breath until it had passed. Now I know just to rub the muscle and it relaxes.

So I don’t have to worry about that but still have the problem that if I get too tired or stressed I find it hard to get a full breath. If I focus on breathing deeply into my stomach I can sometimes get it back to normal. Unfortunately with a busy family life I often have to wait for the weekend before I can properly relax. I think what happens to me is that when the going gets tough I ignore everything else, hold on tight and just focus on the issue at hand until it is complete – and it’s the holding on tight so that other issues don’t crowd into my mental space that does it.

This is the physical issue that bugs me the most. Although there are a few others, the other problem with this is that having muscles that are permanently held tight steals a lot of my energy. I have, I think, three friends about my age who were never properly broken in as children and they are very high energy people, they have a great deal of charisma and are usually at the centre of any social activity. Perhaps not all of us are meant to be like this but I think quite a lot more are (certainly more than 3 of the people I know) and I suspect I am supposed to be this way too – I have shown the odd sign of it in the past but only when my energy levels are high and also when my confidence is up.

Speaking of confidence, the effect of being a good hunter/gatherer of praise when you’re a child is that you have no inner confidence because your self-belief comes entirely from the outside. You guys know all this of course but it has always meant that social situations are always potentially stressful for me (unless I’m with old friends). Because I’m naturally gregarious I like to be in social situations but once I’m there each interaction becomes crucial to my self-esteem. (This is less of a problem now that I’m a bit older but I suspect it’s come as a result of my rise through the social hierarchy meaning I don’t have to value the opinions of as many people any more).

Because my self esteem was always on the line I would always be second guessing myself in social situations and rarely at ease. I was of course hopeless around girls and frankly it’s a minor miracle that Karen and I ever got together. I’m even surprised she was interested. Maybe because I was 26 and getting good at my job I must have been finally starting to build a degree of internal confidence and wouldn’t have been exuding the usual desperate and dateless thing I had going back then.

The other place where the need for external validation was a problem was at work where I was totally at the mercy of my employers. In fact any situation where I was in awe of someone or they had even the slightest element of control over my life and I would become nervous and defensive. With one boss in particular I remember feeling worried whenever he was in the building (which was incredibly stressful). The scary thing about this is that although that was seven years ago and I’ve started a family and a business since then I’ve found now that I’m in a job again the problem has re-emerged – and this despite the fact that the job is way easy and the boss is a good friend of mine.

And those are just the side effects!

The actual point of me being like this is that I’m supposed to be a good servant of civilisation. Otherwise known as being a good professional. I’m supposed to be good at sacrificing everything that’s important to me as a person so that I can serve the machine better – and I’m supposed to do it without trying to rebel. Here again my father’s influence; even though I was often cautious in social situations I didn’t lack the thoughtfulness to question my role in society or the courage to leave it so I guess I wasn’t properly broken in either – they broke me at the emotional and body level but they didn’t get my mind.

The weird thing, which I just realised today, is that I make these decisions in my mind and then set about implementing them like a good professional, which is to say with total disregard for my own needs. It’s very confusing for the kids I’m sure, I give and give and then all of a sudden when I’ve got no energy left I suddenly flip over into being a grumpy old man.

I imagine some of you think this sounds completely appalling and others are thinking ‘actually that’s just like me and nearly everyone I know’ and it’s quite normal.

I guess it’s both.

Possession

I thought I’d done quite well in abandoning the materialist mindset, I don’t want for flash cars, electronic goods or plush lounge suites, nor do I desire nick nacks and concrete ornaments for the garden. However I still have one weakness in this area and it pretty much cancels out the gains I have made everywhere else.

It’s very relevant at the moment too. We’d like to buy some land but the desire to own a beautiful piece of land or one with an awesome view is kind of overwhelming. I do want to feel excited or inspired by the place we eventually buy but like everyone else I keep wanting what is out of my grasp.

Anyway, Ran has pointed out the Moneyless World blog and whileI was checking out an old post I found this paragraph which really hit the nail on the head for me.

I find that beauty is overwhelming & disheartening if I am in the wrong mind – the mind that wants to possess. Then my new Mind realizes beauty is neither created nor destroyed, but eternally goes from one form to another, and only beauty’s forms vanish, like flowers! This is when I realize that Heaven is ever at hand. But the greed mind, the mind that wants to possess & capture in picture frames, thinks that the forms are it. So the greed mind grieves when the forms pass.

The degree to which this guy has abandoned our culture makes my own attempts feel decidedly amatuerish. It’s true that we have our own path to follow but the perspective he has on our culture really shows through in the philosophy he produces. It reminds me of a quote I posted recently from Bill Mollison

I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you’ll get a philosopher. But I could never teach people to be philosophers – and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.

I’ve never been in danger of paying much attention to a university-taught philospher but this really does ram home how much we can learn from people who feed their mind with real-life experiences.

Work

Over the last three months I’ve been working for a friend of mine at his hardware store in Raglan. The store is a lot smaller than the big boxes found in larger towns and cities so there’s plenty of variety in the work but all the same I’m amazed at how much I’m enjoying it.

I guessed in advance that I would enjoy parts of it because a large part of the job involves chatting to people but I’ve also discovered a few other things that make this type of work far superior to working in an office.

As I said, chatting to customers is part of the job, but (and this seems really obvious in hindsight) if you’re doing physical work you can actually have a conversation while you do the work – who knew?

The work I used to do in an office used the same part of the brain that you need for holding a conversation which meant that any chatting was done on stolen time. That this has been a revelatory experience for me is a sign of how effective the propaganda pointing me to ‘professional work’ was.

Something I was sure would happen (and it has) is that I’d sleep better. When you do physical work, you get tired and rest but when you do mental work you get tired and lie awake all night trying to make your brain slow down. Also when you do physical work, you get fit whereas when you do mental work you just get tired and lie awake all night trying to…

So I’m sleeping better, I’m having more fun, I’m interacting with people which I enjoy, I’m out in the fresh air and I’m getting fit. These are all things the professional classes pay to do outside of work – usually at gyms, nightclubs and shopping centres – hell I can even go shopping at this job too!

This last week I’ve had a cold but I thought I’d go to work and see how I coped – again I was amazed. If I’d gone to work in an office I would have begun to feel worse and worse until my head was ready to implode but in a job where you get plenty of fresh air and your body is moving you hardly notice a mild illness. All I did was have some benign tablets to help keep my nose clear (which never used to make any difference when I was sitting at a desk) and avoided really tiring physical work. I’d always met a lot of builders who kept working when they had colds and I thought they were real hard-men but now I know their secret – it’s easy when you’re on the move and getting fresh air.

To be fair the pay is crap and this creates other pressures that we’re really struggling with, plus the kids don’t like me being out of the house for so long during the day and it takes a lot of work to collect them again when I get home but for the moment it’s nice to have a job that I actually enjoy. I can’t remember the last time that happened.

And I know some of you are thinking ‘well duh! That’s obvious’ but just remember I was subjected to some pretty powerful propaganda for most of my childhood. Mind you even I’m amazed at just how ignorant I was of these simple facts of life.

 

 

Contraction

My life seems to be going through a phase of contraction at the moment. The previous five years or so have been a huge expansion and probably I went too far too soon and now I’m consequently turning more inward. After being involved in various radio activities and the anti-GE movement my focus has now pretty much closed down to work and family. Astute readers will also have noticed that my blog posts have become erratic and often far apart. 

Aside from what is probably a natural tendency to withdraw after pouring out a great deal of my energy I’m also struggling to give my kids what they need at the moment. Having a full time job isn’t helping but essentially it’s the old nuclear family hell thing going on. I still think I’m giving them a better chance to be themselves than most kids get but as a fully domesticated human I find it increasingly difficult to cope with my ‘wild’ children.

I suppose someone reading my old posts might think that I have a good handle on parenting but the truth of the matter is that I find myself in daily combat with my kids. I don’t have the energy to cope with behaviour which is basically their civilisation-coping mechanism and the more stressed I get the more I start to parent like my parents did. Sometime it gets so bad that I pull back a ways but what’s happening is still a long way from my kids really need – although it’s also a lot better than they would have got if I hadn’t found books like The Continuum Concept.

Sara said along time back that the main difference between her and other mothers is that she doesn’t rationalise her behaviour to her kids. Hopefully her (and our) kids will get through childhood without the usual emotional confusion – even it looks tumultuous at the time.

Every parent wants their kids to have what they didn’t have and it’s true for me too – I want them to be able to express themselves and not be as emotionally straight jacketed as I am. 

So for now I will attempt to endure my five year old’s expressions of ‘not-rightness’ without having to fully domesticate her. The one thing I won’t be doing anymore though is criticising mainstream parents because doing things this way is damn hard and I can’t now blame anyone for doing what it takes to survive this stage of their children’s lives. 

Perhaps my grandchildren will be blessed with parents who can cope with their undomesticated nature.

Civilization! – *Some Restrictions Apply

Tired of primitive living? – why not try civilisation!

Just watch this 3-minute promotional video to see what we have to offer.

Blood and Gore

A while ago I posted a question on Cryptogon wondering exactly what Al Gore was up to with his Inconvenient Truth carry-on. A lot of people in the environmental movement have been very encouraged by the fact that an ex-vice president has seen the light on an environmental issue but I wondered aloud what it really meant when a member of the elite swings in behind an issue like global warming – especially when he’s getting plenty of publicity in the mainstream media.

Today Ran posted a link to an article by Richard Moore that goes a long way to answering the question. Essentially the article is saying that Gore’s agenda is to enable those in the developed world* to continue our high-energy lifestyle a little bit longer. This will be done via bio-fuels and increased resource extraction from the third world – along with increased starvation for those third world populations.

This seems eminently plausible to me. He also suggests that it is also a chance for the elite to begin global population reduction (via starvation). This feels like something I don’t want to believe in but logically if you have an elite who view most of us as sheeple and arrogantly believe that they have the right to manage the planet then it makes sense that they will use population reduction to ease the burden on the environment while still maintaining the global economic system as their power base.

The article is well recommended but I also suggest reading Ran’s commentary about the Master Narrative to go with it. Essentially:

…I’ve never bought the Master Narrative, that the secret rulers are omnipotent, that whatever happened in the past or will happen in the future, it’s exactly what ‘they’ planned.

If you look at history, you don’t see a master plan — you see a mess! The plans of the most powerful people in the world repeatedly come to ruin. Enormous plot twists come out of nowhere.

Something I’ve referred to elsewhere is the sense of powerlessness that comes from believing the Master Narrative. Whilst it’s true that the elite have their plans (and that they can manipulate activists for their own end as with global warming) it’s still true that normal people have some power.

Naturally they want to give the impression that we don’t have any power but throughout Europe and Australia and New Zealand the battle against GE has so far been largely successful because of the efforts of a lot of unimportant people. Of course the key phrase there is ‘a lot of people’. From personal experience I know that the GE fight in New Zealand is really between normal people and the likes of Monsanto with the government dancing around in between us trying to pretend it is in charge.

I don’t want to disappear off into some kind of ‘we have the power’ call-to-arms thing because that always leads to disillusionment but I will insist that if we’re smart and persistent we can still make some kind of difference in our own lives.
*The article refers to the developed world as the ‘North’, but since I live in a developed country in the southern hemisphere I’m going to stick with ‘developed world’. It has the twin benefits of being more accurate and messing with my head less.

Exit Conspiracy

This was supposed to be posted about a week ago when it would have been much more timely. On the better late than never theory, here it is, late;

Tim’s got a post about stepping out of the conspiracy theory headspace and it’s got me thinking about how much good judgment is missing in our world. I have friends who like to tell me that people are spontaneously getting stupid or that we have evolution in reverse or some such. Frankly I think this is just another sign of poor judgment, it’s a step up from common poor judgment but we really need to get to the top of the stairs and not just be smug about being on a different step to the rabble.

One of the problems is that our judgment is stripped from us as we grow up. We’re supposed to learn to use our own judgment via our relationships with stable adults and from our ever-growing body of life experience. School very effectively prevents this by separating us from the grounding experience of our connection with our parents and presenting subjects as discrete disconnected areas of information, which can only ever be verified by reference to a higher authority (the teacher). It’s interesting how often the word separation comes up in there, (almost) needless to say it also separates us from genuine life experiences and nature.

The mess this creates is then locked-in as adults by the media, which both distracts us and distorts the flow of information that we need to make sense of the world. By now we’re getting into the 3rd generation of this carry-on and you can see the results in these comments of an old teacher that I keep hearing about ­everywhere. It obviously strikes a chord but I don’t think anyone knows what to do with it.

The teacher is right about technology short circuiting kids brains but he misses the part of his institution in it. Both serve to provide disconnections. The technology is particularly insidious though and is worth dwelling on. Under the guise of connecting us up it actually serves to disconnect us. Teenagers don’t have to learn the dance of saying what they want to say without insulting people (it would help if their own parents hadn’t insulted them throughout their child hood of course) because it’s not necessary to worry about that when you txting. Me, I can’t stand txt, I always want to be as clear as possible because I’ve learnt the need for clear communication from a lifetime’s experience of a million communication failures. Tis is only one example of the real-life experiences that kid are missing out on as they sit in the fake environment of school texting each other under the desk.

I mentioned before that no one knows what to do with this situation but there is perhaps one person who does. Gordon Neufeld, psychiatrist, dissects the issue of ‘peer attachment’ in Hold on to Your Kids and leaves the reader with the distinct impression that teenagers today are basically a case of the blind leading the blind (with occasional help from Britney Spears). Once I read about this issue a lot of things fell into place. It certainly explains what the old teacher is talking about and has stopped me from passing off such comments as merely being the result an ever-widening generation gap.

Back to Tim:

Upon my return to terra firma, it was rather difficult to untangle the effects of looking at the world through this lens. But I somehow did it. Part of it, I think, was simply having to go through unrelated emotional drama in my own life,

Emotional drama (if properly dealt with) must be a very grounding experience. I don’t know what Tim went through but I know that my own experiences have taught me a lot about myself – basically all the things I had to forget in order to be good at school. I was very good at school so I have a lot of things to unlearn.

I mentioned before about the anchoring effect of adults in a child’s life and I think once you get to know yourself better you reclaim the internal anchor that you were supposed to have from the moment you became an adult. Once that is achieved I think we can all start to work outward from our own center to create a properly functioning model of world. The key about this model is that it will not be handed to us, we will base it on our own judgment – which is another thing we can claim back as adults.

Tim refers to Jeff Wells as being someone who has learned to swim in the world of conspiracies. It’s possibly one reason his site is so popular, I always feel strangely calmed after visiting his site despite having just read about all manner of strangeness. I really don’t understand how he does this except to guess that he is the rare, maybe unique, event of a person who really does have a handle on the conspiracy landscape.

Of course he can’t really help his visitors who still bang on about how Noam Chomsky is a CIA asset or those who think that if we could just prove the JFK was assassinated by the powers that be or that 9-11 was organized by people in power we could finally change the world.

I think the main reason Chomsky won’t go into that territory is that he’s well aware that the evidence he presents of corruption in high places should be adequate to prove things are not as they seem. If his iron-clad and easier-to-stomach evidence can’t convince someone then swimming in the much murkier waters of JFK or 9-11 conspiracies is not going to achieve it either

The reason I back Chomksy as a person of substance is less about the evidence that people put forward and more about my understanding of people and emotions. To me it defies good sense to think that Chomsky is a construct of any kind. His analysis of the issues he’s prepared to entertain is far too good to be faked and I just think that he doesn’t want to confront the weirder more confusing stuff at an emotional level. This should hardly be considered a matter of surprise given that every one has their limit and most people’s limits are much less radical than Chomsky’s. Essentially what we’ve got is a guy who is more radical than 95% of the population and people are criticizing him for not going far enough.

To be honest, even if David Icke’s reptiles turned out to be the real deal I’m not sure what I’d gain by learning about it. There’s not much I can do about reptiles, I alredy know that the mainstream is just a matrix of lies and I’ve already decided to leave the beaten track and chart my own course – what more can I do?

I’ve got far more from following the truths I’ve learned in anti-civ writing about how I have been effected and how I might change in order to have the sort of life I want. Maybe the attraction of conspiracy land is that it takes responsibility away from people so that they don’t have to enter into the much more difficult territory of working on themselves – which means that all they have done is swap one matrix for another one. If a lot of mainstream people consciously make the decision to not get into this stuff because they know what it will mean for their lives (and they do) then living in conspiracy-land where you still don’t have to change anything means all you’ve done is move sideays into a much more cunning matrix.

I think once we’ve learned enough factual truths about our reality to see that a lot of mainstream beliefs are based on lies then we need to move on to dealing with the spiritual/mental truths of reality – which is why I get so much from Ran’s writing. I’ve learnt enough about how corrupt power systems are and now I’m learning how to undermine them with a different kind of power.

Kevin has arrived at a similar point, he’s more technical about it than Ran but has proven over and over again that the most powerful act we can undertake is to drop out of their system and to stop feeding the beast.

People on the Rigorous Intuition comments board sometimes refer to people like Chomsky and Amy Goodman as being Gatekeepers who’s job is to prevent people from looking too far least the uncover truer and deeper conspiracies. In my case Chomksy wasn’t a gate-keeper so much as a gate-way who led me into a new world that included Derrick Jensen, Ran Prieur, Jeff Wells…. It’s a long list. I think if people aren’t going through the gate it’s got more to do with what’s happening in their minds than Chomsky’s.

Essentially I used Chomsky as a stepping stone as I moved further and further into the fringes and gradually built up my map of the world. I’m now in a position where I can make all the connections from my personal experience out to those fringes. I think it may well be the people who haven’t used any stepping stones but have gone directly to deep conspiracy that have lost their anchor and tend to see a conspiracy behind every rock. At the very least if I keep my emotional intuition intact I can read Chomsky and evaluate what he has to say based on, well, what he has to say. Usually it seems pretty smart and I’ll take it on board. If I don’t like what he has to say, fine, I can leave those comments behind without having to build a great conspiracy theory to explain my actions.

Really, I think learning on the fringes (regardless of how deep you go) is great but at some point you need to get into some kind of action because that’s a natural human response. From Ran and Kevin I would say that dropping out of the world’s system is a key strategic move but if you really want to cement these changes in place then choosing how you raise you kids is going to make have biggest long term impact. To inform this decision I think that Hold on to Your Kids, for it’s technical insight and The Continuum Concept for it’s inspirational value are important resources but essentially they the can both be summed up with the advice to simply love your children. I have to add though, because many people love their kids but somehow don’t respect them, to remember that loving them includes respecting their opinions and the choices they make, even when they’re very little.