Category: feminism

Terminate, Abort, Kill

The political establishment and media outlets, including those in the so-called ‘alternative community’ are guilty of faulty narrative framing in order to create maximum conflict and division.

My goal with this post is to offer each side of the ‘abortion argument’ ways they might tweak their strategy in order to improve their position against their opponents. I don’t mean only the Right/Left positions, because a growing number of folks around the world have already left that reservation far behind and are entertaining other ‘spaces’—the new buzzword.

I will dare to conclude with a very easy solution that will never be accepted by any political or religious group, because it is the most individually empowering solution possible.

On the ‘Political, Religious Right-Conservative’—how might you improve your position?

Those who you deem to convince that abortion is wrong and should be heavily regulated, if not illegal, are not swayed by your terminology misuse. The science terms for the development of the fetus: from zygote to embryo to fetus to baby, are replaced in your arguments by the word ‘baby’ in all circumstances, and this is done even by those who consider themselves “alternative” and devoted to science, like Mike Adams, ‘The Health Ranger’, who rages on regularly about ‘baby killers.’

The popular ‘Let the states decide’ argument is not really an argument. It is a power-based position, one to choose in order to deflect taking a position personally based on individual circumstances, while allowing others (as in scientific authorities and politicians) to make the decisions for everyone. Local politics is hardly independent of federal influence. The Left’s concern is one of access. The notion that a teenage girl who wishes to terminate her pregnancy should hop on a bus (with her parent’s permission we assume) to travel across an entire state, or several, for this two-hour procedure does not address their primary issue. It’s not just about the money.

Slogans such as “on-demand abortions” and “using abortion as contraception” are misleading and ignoring the science. The ‘morning after’ pill (used to be called Plan B)* is considered here to be exactly equivalent to the surgical procedure in the first trimester, as it is in the last. In fact, these procedures are about as similar as an egg is to a chicken.

“Human life begins at conception.” Yes, but all life begins at conception, including synthetic life. This leads into the ‘murder is a slippery slope’, another faux-argument, because there is no evidence whatsoever that girls who have abortions go on to commit murders later in life.

If it is true that ending a pregnancy prematurely is the same as murder, and that it is making our society more cruel as a result, then war, all war, must also be included in that conversation. It appears that you wish to blame women for societal violence for ending the life of a zygote, while to fight in wars, sometimes to the death, is considered heroic. There is an inconsistency in your position that is seen by your opponents as weak, evasive and hypocritical.

On the ‘political-secular Left-Progressive’ —how might you improve your position? The abortion industry should be your main cause of concern, if you wish to influence your opponents.

Normalizing all forms of abortion and ignoring the crimes of the industry are two weaknesses making you appear callous and insensitive, which is not the image the Left is expected to be crafting.

Science is in your favor, but not as your periodic scapegoat. It is not logical to cling to science when it comes to terminology, but then to deny the religious mantra of “Human life begins at conception.”

What we used to call “Test-tube babies” prove human life begins at conception. As does all of life. In vitro fertilization is incredibly popular and reliable. If you’re going to use science to back up your arguments, then actually use the science.

Where is the science today? Our bodies, and our genetic make-up, are becoming technological tools in service to the ‘higher power’ of AI.

First came Petris, then came Wombs, then came Bubba in a baby carriage!

Demonstrate to “the Right” that their real enemy is not those who would choose to discard the zygote developing in their womb, but those who currently consider the womb, and in fact the entire body, as irrelevant to future life.

The social engineering component of this normalizing process is ‘equality’ for the “LGBTQ community”.

‘Assisted Reproductive Technology’ is the latest terminology for this ever-growing industry. ‘Abortion’ is rolled out for public consumption to obscure and obfuscate this fact. Abortion, as a moral issue, has been all but irrelevant for decades considering where the Science stands.

Unwanted pregnancies and ‘unwanted’ embryos.
Where once we had adoption, now we have surrogacy, and . . .
An emerging market!

“During the selection and transfer phases, many embryos may be discarded in favour of others. This selection may be based on criteria such as genetic disorders or the sex. One of the earliest cases of special gene selection through IVF was the case of the Collins family in the 1990s, who selected the sex of their child.[137] The ethic issues remain unresolved as no consensus exists in science, religion, and philosophy on when a human embryo should be recognised as a person. For those who believe that this is at the moment of conception, IVF becomes a moral question when multiple eggs are fertilised, begin development, and only a few are chosen for implantation.”
In vitro fertilisation – Wikipedia

That was then . …

This is now (actual already 5 years old, because, it’s proprietary). …

What do you think the new market(s) are going to be?
I bet you already know, that is, if you already know there are ‘Bio-bags’ used to grow lamb fetuses.

(Figure from a 2017 Nature Communications paper describing an extra-uterine life support system, or “biobag”, used to grow lamb fetuses.[1])

In 2017, fetal researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia published a study showing they had grown premature lamb fetuses for four weeks in an extra-uterine life support system.[1][6][7]

Gender equality and LGBT[edit]
In the 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex, feminist Shulamith Firestone wrote that differences in biological reproductive roles are a source of gender inequality. Firestone singled out pregnancy and childbirth, making the argument that an artificial womb would free “women from the tyranny of their reproductive biology.”[25][26]
Arathi Prasad argues in her column on The Guardian in her article “How artificial wombs will change our ideas of gender, family and equality” that “It will […] give men an essential tool to have a child entirely without a woman, should they choose. It will ask us to question concepts of gender and parenthood.” She furthermore argues for the benefits for same-sex couples: “It might also mean that the divide between mother and father can be dispensed with: a womb outside a woman’s body would serve women, trans women and male same-sex couples equally without prejudice.”[27]

This is a global industry.

“None of this is surprising of course. Russia loves genetic stuff.
In August 2019, the State Duma commissioned a report on how to upgrade Russia’s outdated laws so that humans could be genetically enhanced in cool new ways. The study examined:
… the possibilities of conflict-free development of a new generation of technologies for using assisted reproductive technologies (genome editing, metabolic management during pregnancy, etc.) to create a new (contractual) type of society based on more advanced legislation.
The first step was obvious: we need to know everyone’s genome.
In July 2021, Health Minister Mikhail Murashko revealed plans to issue “genetic passports” to all Russians, with special attention given to the little ones.”
https://edwardslavsquat.substack.com/p/genetic-russia?utm_medium=email

The most appropriate course of action for a concerned society is the same one that is most appropriate for the individual.

That is: Take Charge of Your Fertility!! — That’s the title of a book that’s been around since the ‘90s that should be taught in every school.

Why do schools teach more about sex education than reproductive education? I can think of many reasons, many of those centering on money, power and and the social engineering required to keep the proper channels well-greased.

I was taught the only choices for a girl are abstinence, or artificial birth control methods like: The Pill, IUD, sponge, condom, etc. Abstinence until marriage sounded as absurd to me then as it does to me now. Expecting a girl to ignore or erase her sexual maturity for a decade plus is simply cruel and is bound to create issues individually and for the society.

Yet each of these offered birth control methods require regular purchases from the drug store or doctor.

Imagine how empowering it would be for a pre-teen girl to understand her menstrual cycle, physically and emotionally. The process of Natural Birth Control is so easy and it trains a girl to listen to her body. Anyone who can remember to take a pill every day can learn how to read their basal body temperature every day.

Unfortunately I knew nothing of this method until I was nearly 40.

Of course, I understand it is not fool-proof, but then there is the ‘Plan-B’*. There are natural abortificants as well, if only the information were made available.

If a girl chooses against pregnancy, and she knows her body thanks to a proper education that tells her immediately when there is a fertilized egg just then attaching to her uterine wall thanks to her basal body temperature (as it is something she will most likely not feel) and long before that mass of cells should be called ‘a baby’, she can disrupt the development of the embryo, and not have to live her life with the label of ‘murderer’ thrown at her every time the socio-political engine decides to roll down those tracks, again.

Taking Charge of Your Fertility: The Definitive Guide to Natural Birth Control, Pregnancy Achievement, and Reproductive Health by Toni Weschler, MPH

*Notice again the inflammatory language in the renaming of this product, “Emergency Contraception”. To take contraception daily is far more profitable than to take one pill a month only when you need it.

It is my sincere hope that biologically-informed, naturally-gendered girls will someday prove that they do not need the government, or the corporations, or the priest-class—scientific or otherwise—to control their fertility.

We are perfectly capable of managing our fertility and reproduction all on our own with the proper information and resources.

Is It Life, Or Is It Politics?


Money sucks the life out of Life.

While folks argue about what is life, Life has become a fucking clown show.

It’s the conquering aristocracy who calculate their conceptions to the sky clock.  

Normal folk had sex. And had sex, maybe even daily, maybe even from puberty to death.  And the women drank tea each month until they decided not to anymore.  Then they had a baby.  Worked for centuries.

Then came in The Nobles.  The Church. The State. The Medics. Not necessarily in that order.  All there in order to provide protection.

That is, each from the other.

When the nobles, the church, the state, the medics, decided the peasants were having too many babies, or too much sex, or too much leisure, they stepped in.  In order to provide protection.

And then when they needed more soldiers to fight in their future battles, or more souls on the lands they just conquered, they dictated to their peasants, “Have more babies for our nation’s-religion’s-tribe’s greatness!”  

And when they decided once again there were too many babies they dictated to their peasants, “Your babies will be cursed with the plague!” That’s the modern equivalent of “Your babies must be sterilized!” Or, “Your germ-factory children are killing Grandma!”

Or, “Global climate change is caused by overpopulation!”

In the meantime they kill off all the witches who know all the safe brews.  Always, in order to provide protection.

They cry about the horrors of unplanned pregnancy!  Or, the horrors of killing God’s creation! In tandem. In concert.

They leave out the facts.  A woman could potentially have approximately 1, 233 children in her lifetime, according to God.  That’s an approximation, of course.  

A man, good heavens, we’d need a mathematician to calculate that! Harems exist for a reason.

Everything we know about human reproduction originates in animal husbandry.  And it’s absolute nonsense when science and culture claim that all women in a tribe will cycle together with the moon.  

What sort of evolutionary sense does that even make?

The ‘Red Tent’ was always about the tea.

The Tyranny Of Niceness

It’s invading even my preferred forums.  “We’re polite here,” says the moderator, who boasts constantly about his ‘free-speech’ platform.  I’m reminded of my grandmother, bless her heart, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

If I can’t say it, can I show it?  Maybe with a photo or a painting or a poem?

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Jan Saudek, Czech painter, photographer, hand-painted photos, pre Photoshop

Really? Are we not adults? Must every passionate reproach come with milk and cookies lest you soil yourself with fear? Must your poetic weakness control even my righteous indignation?  Have you ever wondered why you’re so afraid, as you pretend you’re surrounded by love?

Shame, guilt, coercion, all erode free speech just as much as shadow banning.  As do the ubiquitous ‘community guidelines’ and the silencing, the ostracizing and ‘casting out’ of uncomfortable or critical viewpoints.  Funny thing is, the very ones who complain about this the most, then seem to pile it on at the very same time!

“The iron hand that crushed the tyrant’s head became the tyrant in its stead.” William Blake

Perhaps he’d be inclined today to add something like: “The velvet glove that chokes the angry voice hides a martyr in her garter.”

Like laws, these ‘guidelines’ are selective, what makes one guilty in one situation is not universally applied to another’s whose infraction yielded results beneficial, albeit perhaps even criminal, to the Alpha myth-maker’s agenda.  

It all comes complete with fake feel-good language and unspoken devotion to conformity to tribe norms.  Enforcing conformity through indirect aggression, as demonstrated through  Phyllis Chesler’s controversial book “Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman” or the ultra-feminization of culture, as explored through Michael Tsarion’s work on the malignant feminine we can see exactly how the Globalists and their ilk continue to successfully cast their sticky net today.

https://www.usda.gov/oce/sustainable/

https://www.garydbarnett.com/the-technocratic-state-is-the-mortal-enemy-of-the-individual/

What’s unspoken, and unallowable, are questioning the underlying assumptions. “Sustainable to what/whom, exactly?”

“Efficient and effective by what standards?” 

They are so seduced by the image of virtue they’ve lost touch with what virtue actually is.  It’s not pretending evil does not exist.  It’s not turning a blind eye. It’s not transforming dissociation into a gift.  And it’s certainly not handing over all sovereignty to supposed ‘experts’ and ‘authorities’— the scourge of our modern-day adultism.  

If I pretend it’s love, it is love.  If I pretend it’s justice, it is justice.  If I slap a happy slogan on it, paint a rainbow over it, it’s fixed.

Jon Rappoport, When Virtue is the Greatest Crime

https://blog.nomorefakenews.com/2020/01/02/when-virtue-is-greatest-crime/

“They are the counter-revolution that has been building in this country for over a hundred years. It is being managed from elite platforms, and its goal is the destruction of every shred of the original ideas on which this country was founded. Destruction in fact, in thought, in action, and in memory. Wipe out the memory of…Individual freedom…And what freedom implies. Wipe out self. Replace it with an all-embracing societal machine dedicated to love.”

Set the next generation up for total compliance, blind obedience to authority, and we’ll call that love and care.

Love, as in complete lack of discernment, devoid of honesty or truth, beyond accountability, and we’ll call this perfect love, ultimate love, unconditional love. Before you know it, the abused will apply this to the tyrannical state as they did to the tyrannical family.

Except, that it has lots of undisclosed conditions.  Like, the tyranny of niceness and conformity.  If you make her uncomfortable, the rules change. If you require accountability, the goal post shifts. 

If you point out her highly conditional love, you see swiftly and clearly the real elephant in the room.

“After ten years in the field, I have had many prosecutors tell me that they prefer to not have women on their juries because women will not identify with the woman survivor, as a psychological means of reassuring themselves that nothing so horrendous could ever happen to them.  Women either believe that the raped woman did something wrong that “allowed” the rape to happen—or that what happened was not rape.  Either way, they themselves remain out of the Possible Victim category in their minds.” 

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Take the Cat Fight Challenge

I double-dog dare you!  I challenge y’all to prove me wrong.

Go to any adult woman that you know and start a conversation about one thing you know is wrong with the world, and watch closely.

Sell your female friends crap they don’t need at your Pampered Chef Party and that’s considered fun, share actual evidence and data that the weather is being used as a weapon and that’s faux pas.  Most likely the things that actually matter in life don’t matter to her at all.

But you might get lucky.

You could pick anything—the forever wars, censorship, politics, poverty, education, health care, child rearing, vaccines.

You could even pick a ‘Leftist’ favorite of the social justice warriors, like the faux climate change ‘debate’, feminism, racism, animal rights, gun control, abortion, veganism, anything at all.

Bring up the subject and if one of the following does NOT occur, you win the challenge!

  1.  She immediately deflects, minimizes and/or changes the subject to something pleasant and/or harmless.
  2. She gingerly addresses your concerns for less than one minute in an uncritical way before changing the subject to something pleasant and/or harmless.
  3. She discusses the topic until you disagree with something she says, when she then either changes the subject abruptly or gets hostile.  If the latter, time how long it takes her before she insults you or rolls her eyes (passive-aggressive insult).
  4. IF you manage to debate the topic with or without insults for 5 minutes, ask her in what way she might take PERSONAL responsibility in order to solve said issue.

If you find such a woman who is willing to take personal responsibility, that is, not just complain and wave a placard and yell for someone else to ‘fix it’ but to look at her own life and her own self, and actually ‘be the change’ she wants to see, hold that woman up on a pedestal and congratulate yourself for having the good sense to have befriended such a rare treasure.

gynocentrism

 

 

Feminine Psychology (Part 4)

Diana or Diva? Mary or Medusa?  Sinner or Saint?

Toxic femininity was the subject of the last post, so now I’d like to explore the opposite, what is Divine femininity?

It’s not at all easy to define the divine feminine through the eyes of the female, because much of its interpretation has come to us through the voices of men—whether that feminine is revered, as in Tantric writings, or reviled, as in much of the Roman writings and into the later religious traditions.

I offer this opinion simply to add to the growing conversation as a middle-aged woman coming late in life into a deep relationship with the land and nature.  I am still a novice, but an enthusiastic one.  The one thing I can say with certainty is this subject cannot be approached without including procreation, and therefore sexuality.

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“Before there was the Word, there was the land, and it was made and watched over by women.” If Women Rose Rooted: The Journey to Authenticity and Belonging by Sharon Blackie

I believe the divine feminine can scarcely be found in modern civilization in our time.  At some point in our history the sacred marriage of the masculine-feminine partnership was usurped by the master-slave relationship.

“Like many of their Eastern counterparts, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mystical writings also tend to relegate the physical to an inferior place—so much so that in Christian mysticism the body is often viewed as intrinsically base.  And while the feminine is still sometimes idealized in the abstract (like the Shekinah of Hebrew Kabbalistic mysticism or the Christian Virgin Mary), woman, and particularly woman’s sexuality, is frequently presented as a danger to man.” Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body—New Paths to Power and Love by Riane Eisler

Goddesses and female saints such as Brigit and Arianrod were dismissed, others such as Demetra are turned into males, others become hemaphrodites (in our time now called Intersex Individuals, or Transsexuals, and considered to be the pinnacle of human perfection—the reason why children are being taught a dozen new pronouns and ‘gender fluidity’ is being pushed across the global culture.) https://www.georgepetros.com/writings/gen/newherm.htm

“By minimizing the importance of what happens on Earth and counseling acceptance of suffering (and even its embrace) as a ticket to spiritual development and divine rewards after death, the Church not only distracted people’s minds and energies from seeking less oppressive social alternatives; it actively reinforced the hold of dominator institutions, beginning with the institutionalization of male dominance.  So when women equated love and bliss with submission and suffering, and when they saw martyrdom as their highest vocation, it was in part due to their indoctrination to view abject obedience and acceptance of suffering as the greatest womanly accomplishment.” 153 R.Eisler

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Girls raised to believe they are ‘sugar and spice and everything nice’ become blind to their true gifts and crippled by their lack of power. 

Kindness, generosity, caring, cooperation, of course these are pleasant traits often attributed to good mothering, and positive aspects of femininity, but they are only divine when they are authentic.  They can just as easily be employed from a place of self-serving manipulation as they can in genuine concern for another’s well-being.

Gracious, thoughtful, considerate, charming, ok, but for their own sakes, for the sake of beauty and care and tenderness, not as tools to get ahead in the dominance game.

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All our most divine-sounding characteristics have a dark side.  Take humility as an example.  In its negative aspects we get avoidance, passivity, dismissiveness.

The divine feminine is NOT passive, she is receptive, and that one word makes a vast world of difference.

How can you tell the difference?  In a culture where constructive criticism is considered hate-speech, that’s not easy.

In a nut-shell, if it comes with strings attached, it’s not genuine.  A gift is not a gift if it’s forced upon you, or if your approval and appreciation of said gift is a requirement.

One of the most obvious (invisible) strings is ‘image management’.  Your experience is devalued, minimized, rebuffed, or ignored.  She’s above criticism, she deflects or sobs or eye-rolls your thoughts and feelings away.  Her ego and personal comfort are more important than her loved ones’ well-being.

Looking good trumps being good.

Just turn on the television or open social media and you’ll have an avalanche of toxic examples to choose from.

Or, save yourself the torture and close your eyes and imagine what the only strings of the divine feminine might be.

Feminine Psychology (Part 3)

There are two ways your ruler uses to control: Love or Fear

In the traditional view of masculine/feminine roles love was the mom’s job and fear was the dad’s.

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We hear a lot of talk these days about ‘toxic masculinity’ and very little about ‘toxic femininity’.  Why might this be?

“Boys are made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails; Girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice.” popular British nursery rhyme

In the 1960s the British Invasion was strategic cultural warfare “Her” way.  But this ‘soft kill’ strategy goes way back and I seriously doubt it was the British who invented it.

It’s not out-right battle with bloodshed and causalities, resulting in clear enemies and much visible damage that then must be repaired at considerable expense.

Her–way warfare is done undercover, using mind weapons like manipulation, plausible deniability, gaslighting, strategic defense.  It prefers enticement rather than open hostility, seduction rather than force.  It is the land of triangulation, conspiracy, witchcraft, word salads, cryptic codes and cunning smiles.

This is how most war and conflict works today, this is why it’s relevant and why I care about it.

Feminine vs. masculine tactics can be defined as simply covert vs. overt.  As the famous JFK quote goes:  “For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system that has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.”  

He was speaking about Communism, a perfect example of a feminine worldview.

Nursery rhymes, day cares, music, movies, games, indoctrination camps calling themselves institutes of learning.

“If you want to beat your enemy just raise their children.”  Chinese proverb

https://www.theeventchronicle.com/video/hollywood-magick-and-social-engineering-robert-sepehr/

https://steemit.com/informationwar/@richq11/highway-to-hell-the-effect-of-music-on-popular-culture

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Michael Tsarion “The rise of Feminism is, as said, directly caused by this scenario. The devoured daughter must hide her pain, misery and hatred from herself. The truth about her envious, possessive, schizoid mother must be rationalized. So, to compensate for legitimate feelings of repulsion, a daughter entrains herself to see no evil in anything females think, do or create. It’s all good, and whatever evil there is comes from men. Most feminized women hold onto this fiction for dear life, and will not willingly relinquish it. There’s too much to lose by so doing. Living in the ashes as a half-self is better than facing the icy reproaches of a terrible mother.”

Weaponized protection. Mother’s gone, cannot protect juvenile as intended by nature.  State takes over her job.  It takes over the job to the tune of child/student as $$ and cares so very much about your child’s welfare they eventually install metal detectors and armed guards.  Perfect!

https://tabublog.com/2015/12/26/the-manufactured-invention-of-the-beatles-stones-grateful-dead-and-the-birth-of-rock-n-roll-by-the-tavistock-institute-a-jesuit-corporation/

Break down the family unit, starting at home.

Turn the home into a battleground and call it Liberation, Baby!

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Did it work?  If all this social engineering pushing a new feminine value system was meant for the good of the culture, the health of the family, the flourishing of the individual, then, it seems we would know them by their fruits.

I’m thinking that was/is not their intention at all.

sarah
Celebrated comedian Sarah Silverman clues us in on the state of the culture.

 

 

Feminine Psychology (part 1)

A new series for me, quite inspired actually, and not at all unrelated to our themes here on the wee homestead, even though that may not appear as immediately obvious. 

We’re going to approach it in a completely non-confrontational, voluntary, super simple journey. KISS—keep it simple, stupid! 

How does nature form the divine feminine?

Jolene by Dolly Parton

Are her fears valid?
Does she spend her precious life energy protecting herself and her family from the perceived “Jolene”? 


How does she do this—a boob job at 60? Bleached hair? Botox to make her eyes look brighter?  How much time does she offer to her gods?

Maybe surrounding herself with only admirers, to boost her perceived public value?  Maybe shaming attractive women who dare to compete? Maybe rebuffing conversations that make her uncomfortable?  Maybe by using her charm to get out of yet another traffic ticket?

How does Hollywood exploit your/her vulnerabilities?

How has this level of exploitation been venerated?

How do you give this level of low-brow passion-play manipulation a free pass to your psyche every damn day?  Through your music, your soap operas, your cruise vacations, your TV programming, your social media?

And don’t pretend it started with flocking Instagram, bitches!  Your mothers were raised on Harlequin and Shirley Temple. Get a bloody grip.

Compete with “perfect”.

YAY!

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Addictions & Distractions: Part 4 “Solutions”

Addiction solutions are big business. Make that BIG Business. From Big Pharma to recovery clinics to psychiatry, from religions to self-help to metaphysics. Enormous industries have been built up to solve this always-escalating crisis of addiction.

But undeniably the biggest and most well-known solution to addiction are The 12-Step Programs, used by Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and a long list of other recovery programs. Anyone who has ever looked into addiction recovery has come first across a 12-step ‘solution.’

In fact, they are so ubiquitous it’s hard to find anything else. The 12-step programs have not only dominated the market for coming up on a century, the 12-step program created the recovery market, thanks to Bill Wilson and the Oxford Group.

According to the Oxford Group’s 12-Step website, Bill Wilson, Frank Buchman, and Mary Baker Eddy created the foundations for the 12-Step Program.

As fate and the WWW would have it, I know a thing or two about Mary Baker Eddy. 

Her “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” was selected as one of the “75 Books By Women Whose Words Have Changed The World,” by the Women’s National Book Association and in 1995 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.  She was also the Founder and President of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in the later years of her life.

She is considered a major founding figure in the Human Potential Movement, also called the “New Thought” faiths, the precursors of the New Age Movement, of Unity Church, that is of Oprah and The Secret fame.

Many volumes of her work are praised by religious thinkers worldwide and her Christian Science Monitor has won 7 Pulitzer Prizes and Christian Science Reading Rooms have been established around the world, all attesting to her remarkable influence during her lifetime until today.

My own family, on my mother’s side, are Christian Scientists and I attended their church as a child. What I most remember are the large block letters on the wall behind the pulpit that said “God is Love”.

According to Ralph Waldo Emerson on ‘Religious Science’: “The emphasis is on positive thinking, influence of circumstances through mental processes, recognition of a creative energy source and natural law (referred to as God, First Principle, Universal Intelligence, and other terms) that manifests as the physical universe, and the rejection of a good/evil duality.”

I have a copy of her most famous text where the seal on the cover reads: “Heal the Sick. Raise the Dead. Cast out Demons. Cleanse the Lepers” in fine print around a symbol of a cross and crown.

photo

Eddy was born of an elite New Hampshire family, married 3 times, first to George Washington Glover, a well-known Mason. Christian Science and Freemasonry have maintained a symbiotic relationship to this day.  Her first school of Christian Science “Mind Healing” was started in 1867.

From the Preface: “Since the author’s discovery of the might of Truth in the treatment of disease as well as of sin, her system has been fully tested and shall not been found wanting; but to reach the heights of Christian Science, man must live in obedience to its divine Principle.”

“We think that we are healed when a disease disappears, though it is liable to reappear; but we are never thoroughly healed until the liability to be ill is removed. So-called mortal mind or the mind of mortals being the remote, predisposing, and the exciting cause of all suffering, the cause of disease must be obliterated through Christ in divine Science, or the so-called physical senses will get the victory. Unless an ill is rightly met and fairly overcome by Truth, the ill is never conquered. If God destroys not sin, sickness, and death, they are not destroyed in the minds of mortals, but seem to this so-called mind to be immortal. What God cannot do, man need not attempt. If God heals not the sick, they are no healed, for no lesser power equals the infinite All-power; but God Truth, Life, Love, does heal the sick through the prayer of the righteous.

Unfortunately for Mary Baker Eddy, despite all her efforts at righteous prayer, it was not enough, as she spent the majority of her life ill.

“She was recorded as having been sick for most of her life: anxious, erratic, doubled-over, her frail body wracked by mysterious intermittent pains. Eddy’s temper tantrums and day terrors alienated her siblings and forced her parents into a lifelong tiptoe. She required constant rocking as a child, and when she was an adult her family commissioned an oversized cradle in which she spent many of her days.  Harold Bloom describes Eddy as “a kind of anthology of nineteenth-century nervous ailments.”

https://catapult.co/stories/we-are-all-scientists-on-mary-baker-eddy-and-christian-science

https://www.conspiracyarchive.com/2014/07/20/oprah-winfrey-new-thought-the-secret-and-the-new-alchemy/

“In her later years Eddy apparently became paranoid, believing that 50,000 people were trying to kill her by projecting their evil thoughts. She wrote that if she died it would be due to malicious animal magnetism rather than from natural causes.” (wiki)

One biography claims she had an addiction to morphine. That’s another interesting parallel, considering Bill Wilson, previously mentioned of the social engineering institution known as the Oxford Group and founder of this famed 12-Step Program, used magic mushrooms to find his inner-voice of God, who then cured him of his alcoholism, and dictated his 12-step cure to addiction.

Yes, just like the New Age ‘Bible’ called ‘A Course in Miracles’, the 12-step Program was reportedly ‘channeled.’

He later went on to help manufacture synthetic LSD.

omgoleus_dry-piper-hdr_38523_sm

http://www.dosenation.com/listing.php?smlid=4189

According to the Narcotics Anonymous site, 33% of addicts get clean from their 12-Step Program. According to Dr. Lance Dodes, author of “The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science of 12-Step Programs” that figure is less than 10%.

As I skimmed through the Basic Text of Narcotics Anonymous, the parallels to Eddy’s principles are obvious. The addict has an incurable disease over which they will remain powerless for the rest of their lives unless they adhere forever to the Principles.  The Principles according to the 12-step site are:

Absolute Honesty
Absolute Purity
Absolute Unselfishness
Absolute Love

Not a tall order in the least, right?!

“NA meetings usually close with a circle of the participants, a group hug and a prayer of some sort. Prayers used to close meetings today include the “we” version of the Serenity Prayer (God, Grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”); the Third Step Prayer (“Take my will and my life. Guide me in my recovery. Show me how to live.”) or the “Gratitude Prayer” (“That no addict seeking recovery need ever die . . . My Gratitude speaks when I care and when I share with others the NA way.”) (wiki)

 

 

According to Narcotics Anonymous’ “Basic Text” the problem with the addict is the: “inability to deal with life on life’s terms.”  He has a terminal disease which can only be dealt with by adhering to the Program.

“We tried drugs and combinations of drugs to cope with a seemingly hostile world. We dreamed of finding a magic formula that would solve our ultimate problem—ourselves.”

In other words, addicts cannot adapt to their environment, and the problem is not the environment, the problem is the addict himself.

According the Prayer, you need the wisdom to know what you cannot change, and what you cannot change is your environment. So it would appear to me we have leagues of folks being brainwashed into adjusting to a hostile environment.

“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

If you can’t fit in, it’s your fault, because the society is just fine, and if you can’t see that, that’s your problem. You just don’t get it! Once you are off the drugs, and healed by mind-spirit, you’ll see how great the culture really is.  If not, just buy better rose-colored glasses, perhaps.

The Basic Text is peppered with similar mantras as Eddy’s about ‘unconditional love’ and our never-ending battle against our disease and selfless demands like: “We learn that we keep what we have only by giving it away. . . No matter how much we give, there is always another addict seeking help.” Double-speak. Life-long commitment. Collectivism.

I suggest what’s happening is a transferring of addiction, from drugs to the collective and the designers of the system know this explicitly and implicitly.  It’s done with a goal in mind . . .(to be continued).

Welcome to the Hotel California.

hotelCA

 

 

Spoons & Country Dumb

quote-watch-a-man-at-play-for-an-hour-and-you-can-learn-more-about-him-than-in-talking-to-plato-84-98-39

The card game called Spoons is a family tradition. We played it from my earliest memory at all Shepard get-togethers, no matter the season or occasion, along with other card games, like Go-Fish and Old Maid, but also on occasion ‘board’ games, like Monopoly and Yatzee.

No cyber world back then, no cell phones or Gameboys or X-Boxes, lord only knows how we managed to plow through the boredom, with only things like cards!

Grandma told us that she was forced by Grandpa to leave the Ice Follies at age 17, where she clearly had an illustrious career in the make, in order to become a respectable wife to him, and honorable mother of his progeny. It was all pretty cool to me, because she was even in the papers, and I had my own aspirations of dancing back then.

Respectable women with families are not show-girls.  This was to my grandfather an automatic given.

That’s how I heard the story, when I could first understand it, wearing my favorite t-shirt that summer of about age 11, with a billboard sprawled across my still-flat chest: Anything boys can do girls can do better.

There was this grandfather, highly concerned about the respectability of his wife, and then the one who played Spoons with the family.

These were quite large gatherings, at least compared to what I knew from my mother’s side of the then-divorced families. The game of Spoons is very simple, all the players sit in a circle, 4 cards are dealt to every player, the dealer who passes the contents of the deck to the player to one side attempts to move with a high enough speed as to confuse and disorient the one picking up the discarded cards after him. The goal is 4 of a kind. If achieved, at that moment you silently strategize alone, as there are a line of spoons in the middle of the circle, enough for every player but one.  So, once you have 4 of a kind, you grab one, or, you slyly sneak one, or you wait and watch as an opportunist of sorts, or, well that’s about all the strategy I was ever able to garner from this game, besides Grandfather’s.

The strategy my grandfather played was no doubt, by any set of rules, cheating. He would collect a pile of cards next to him, feigning slowness or incompetence, and turn them over in chunks, hoping to collect pairs more quickly, then the 4s, winning the position to select the first spoon. He would play this routine regularly, but we as children would forget, it was only a time or two a year we got together, after all. But after a hand or two each time we’d remember this trick, and rail on grandpa that he was cheating, which only made him and everyone else laugh, to the end result that everyone on the floor would start using (t)his trick.

It’s a very old and simple trick after all. There’s many names for it, but in these parts they call it country dumb, that is, shrewdly playing innocent. The old tricks are the best tricks.  When we take even a cursory look at the culture we can see it clearly still works.

There’s a long precedent for this sort of player, most notably from the classic Czech work, The Good Soldier Sveik by Jaroslav Hašek, certainly the predecessor to the Hogan’s Hero’s character called Schultz, celebrated for his classic line, “I know NOTHING!”

There is always a healthy level of doubt as to whether Sveik’s actions are feigned well-executed sabotage or authentic (idiotic) enthusiasm, that’s essential in the classic fool/magician archetype.

“Hasek was a comic genius . . . his message was that war is not merely cruel, unjust and obscene, but ludicrous” Sunday Times

The Good Soldier Svejk is the classic novel of the ‘little man’ fighting officialdom and bureaucracy with the only weapons available to him—passive resistance, subterfuge, native wit and dumb insolence.”

If you were a corporate or military strategist watching our family play Spoons, you might recognize this as a somewhat sophisticated case of sabotage, a sort of coup d’etat, no doubt, because when the patriarch begins to openly cheat and play dumb, you’ve just opened up the entire troupe to the same acceptable level of behavior. Cheating, it seems and many have noted, is contagious. And that’s just how it happened with our family game of Spoons as well. Aunts, uncles, cousins and parents become instant co-conspirators with youngsters of all ages plotting against them, or sometimes, on their behalf.

Is this a ‘good’ lesson to teach children, or a ‘bad’ one?

I thought of this question again when I heard this recent interview with Sarah Westall and Nick Jankel. In it they discuss a bit the importance of “trauma” in a child’s upbringing and the ways this is both under-rated and over-utilized. In my opinion they broach the cutting edge question we now face in the so-called ‘Western modernity’–obviously to bubble-wrap our children is not working, but to go back to old ways of discipline is no longer acceptable either—how can we find the most fertile middle ground?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygDhQ7dQcrk

No doubt as youth we need to be taught to not only deal with, but also to survive and then to thrive within the existing culture, but not to the point we have come now, which is blind obedience, acceptance and acquiescence, generally speaking.

It’s very easy later in life to point fingers at Grandpa and condemn or condone the unhealthy moral principles he was manifesting to his progeny at those cheating moments, especially considering he was clearly loving it.

Did we learn a valuable life lesson, by overcoming a certain level of ‘trauma’?  I hope that was his unconscious agenda. Because make no mistake, to learn as a child that your grandfather willingly cheats against you, and the entire family, and then laughs about it, is not an authentic happy moment in a child’s life.

I saw him differently, call it what you want, but ultimately it’s a loss of innocence, if you can bring it to consciousness. Whether conscious or not, Grandpa taught me in that moment about the real world. Whether we are 7 or 17 when that happens, is it better it happens where one has a soft place to fall, or with random strangers in a proverbial strange land?

I don’t know. I want to stress this fact, I really don’t know. This to me is a pivotal social question. Why are we not discussing it at the dinner tables and the board rooms and the political arenas is beyond me.

Is it better to learn your 60 year old grandfather would cheat against your 6 year old nephew, and embrace that as a valuable familial tradition, and then by extension to learn that is how the world actually works?

Or, would you rather learn it when you get blindsided by crooks out to steal your successful business when you finally wake up to reality at age 47?

Could it be that Trump is brilliantly playing this archetype now?

And what about all the shades of critical social gray there might be in-between that our progeny might need to learn?  Are we learning how to create a better world with these life lessons, or are we learning only how to successfully play along?

https://lithub.com/why-every-progressive-should-read-the-good-soldier-svejk/

 

sveik

 

 

The Slippery Slope of Equality

Once upon a time there was a woman who wanted to vote. She wanted to own property, and she wanted a career that was not nursing or teaching or whoring or mothering.

She was a courageous and independent woman who knew other courageous and independent women who agreed with her. They achieved the right to vote, the right to own property, and established themselves in a variety of occupations across every sector of society.

Fast forward a few generations and they became Supermoms. Mothers could do it all–have a family, have a career–just like fathers. Then the women began to complain that the housework needed to be shared, it was only fair. Machines to make the work easier and faster were invented, primarily by men, to try to satisfy these new preferences of women’s time.

Soon, women wanted to share in the glories of war along side men. They wanted to sit beside them in the boardrooms, play next to them on the golf courses, hang out in their clubs.  They modeled their hierarchies, their whims, and their habits. They wanted to smoke, to drink, to travel, to carouse, to order subordinates, to manage affairs, and to control it all, just like the men.

The laws were changed to reflect ‘equality’ between the sexes. The laws were not sufficient. Women continued to get harassed by men in the workplace, groped on the bus, humiliated with lower pay for equal work, and sometimes even physically endangered.

This angered the women tremendously and they revolted. They pointed and screeched at their male bosses and their former and current colleagues and smeared their reputations publicly and had them fired and humiliated and cursed. Just as they deserved. They demanded an end to violent, colonizing, capitalizing, age-old white male patriarchy.

The women called themselves ‘happy‘ and ‘fulfilled‘ but oddly began using anti-depressants by the millions. 

Still, they took their hard-earned and rightful positions at the head of the table in the boardrooms and backrooms and brothels.

But still, the men were not behaving!

Just like children, they started acting out even worse. They started secretly undermining the women in power. They started to rebel in closed groups. They choose in growing numbers not to get into relationships with women.  They began to consider the women dangerous. One false move and they risked losing everything in the courts of law.

Some men turned despondent, others violent, others exceptionally determined. The women decided to drug them, it was the only way.

The drugs had some unpleasant side effects. Men’s health began to decline, but women saw this as a good thing; they were more docile and less combative that way. They began to drug the boys as well. It seemed the younger they started the more predictive became the results.

Some men were incurable it seemed, so more drastic public measures had to be taken. Those who would not stop oogling women were forced to wear special goggles that limited their peripheral vision by 50%. It was considered a great achievement and sold brilliantly in the marketplace.  There were other great women’s inventions as well, like a male chastity belt, and various electric shock devices that could be used as discreetly as a tampon. 

Then one day a woman complained. “Where have all the men gone?”

 

gynocentrism

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