How to lose weight

I just threw away c. 5kg of pork products that were in my freezer, as well as two bags of pork scratchings, and 1.5 bags of pork gelatine.

I’m all for meat eating, but I’m now sure pork is bad for us, and shrimps too:

https://drjockers.com/dont-eat-pig-meat/

We ignore God’s advice at our peril.

Hey Jim, thoughts on full cream milk, does it have a place in this diet?

Also, I recently read The Big Fat Suprise after you mentioned it, what do you think of eating the more-fat, less-lean meat like the brain? Worth pursuing nowadays or not enough pay off?

Thanks

How long have you been on the diet?
Official Scienceâ„¢ says diets reliably rebound after a year. For some reason I don’t trust them to have tested meaty diets properly.

A lot of people worldwide are asking themselves right now: what the hell is wrong with America? Well, to all you non-Americans who just don’t grok the utter insanity that the US is in the midst of, read these excerpts.

— — —

Theodore Dreiser (1917):

“As a fourteen or fifteen year old boy, I listened to sermons on hell, where it was, and what was the nature of its torments. As rewards for imaginary good behavior I have been given colored picture cards containing exact reproductions of heaven. Every newspaper that have ever read, or still can find to read, has had an exact code of morals, by the light of which one might detect at once both Mr. Bad Man and Mr. Good Man, and so save one’s self from the machinations of the former! The books which I was advised to read, and for the neglect of which I was frowned upon, were of that naive character known as pure. One should read only good books—which meant, of course, books from which any reference to sex had been eliminated; and what followed as a natural consequence was that all intelligent interpretation of character and human nature was immediately discounted.

…

A picture of a nude or partially nude woman was sinful. A statue equally so. The dance in our home and our town was taboo. The theater was an institution which led to crime. The saloon a center of low, even bestial, vices. The existence of such a thing as an erring or fallen woman, let alone a house of prostitution, was a crime, hardly a fact to be considered. There were forms and social appearances which we were taught to wear, quite as one wears a suit of clothes. One had to go to church on Sunday whether one wanted to or not.

…

We were taught persistently to shun most human experiences as either dangerous or degrading or destructive. The less you knew about life the better. The more you knew about the fictional heaven and hell, the same. People walked in a form of sanctified maze or dream, hypnotized or self hypnotized by an erratic and impossible theory of human conduct, which had grown up heaven knows where or how, and had finally cast it amethystine spell over all America, if not over all the world.

Positively, I stake my solemn word on this, until I was between seventeen and eighteen, I had scarcely begun to suspect that any other human being was so low as to harbor the erratic and sinful thoughts which occasionally flashed through my own mind.

…

My concern is with the mental and critical standards of America as they exist today, and of England, from which they seem to be derived. England—the home of bourgeois art and bourgeois accomplishment. The average American, as I have said before, has such an odd, such a naive conception of what the world is like, what it is that is taking place under his eyes and under the sun.

As a matter of fact, in spite of the American constitution and the American oratorical address of all and sundry occasions, the average American school, college, university, institution, is very much against the development of the individual in the true sense of that word. What it really wants is not an individual, but an automatic copy of some altruistic and impossible ideal, which has been formulated here and in England, under the domination of Christianity. This is literally true. I defy you to read any college or university prospectus or address or plea, which concerns the purposes or the ideals of these institutions, and not agree with me. They are not after individuals, they are after types or schools of individuals, all to be very much alike, all to be like themselves.

…

No country in the world, at least none that I know anything about, has such a peculiar, such a seemingly fierce determination, to make the Ten Commandments work. It would be amusing if it were not pitiful, their faith in these binding religious ideals. I, for one, have never been able to make up my mind whether this springs from the zealotry of the Puritans who landed at Plymouth Rock, or whether it is indigenous to the soil (which I doubt when I think of the Indians who preceded the whites), or whether it is a product of the federal constitution, compounded by such idealists as Paine and Jefferson and Franklin, and the more or less religious and political dreamers of the p re-constitutional days. Certain it is that no profound moral idealism animated the French in Canada, the Dutch in New York, the Swedes in New Jersey, or the mixed French and English in the extreme south and New Orleans.

…

But an odd thing in connection with this financial and social criminality is that it has been consistently and regularly accompanied, outwardly at least, by a religious and a sex puritanism which would be scarcely believable if it were not true. I do not say that the robbers and thieves who did so much to build up our great commercial and social structures were in themselves inwardly or outwardly always religious or puritanically moral from the sex point of view, although in regard to the latter, they most frequently made a show of so being. But I do say this, that the communities and the states and the nation in which they were committing their depredations have been individually and collectively, in so far as the written, printed and acted word are concerned, and in pictures and music, militantly pure and religious during all the time that this has been going forward under their eyes, and, to a certain extent, with their political consent. Why? I have a vague feeling that it is the American of Anglo-Saxon origin only who has been most vivid in his excitement over religion and morals where the written, printed, acted, or painted word was concerned, yet who, at the same time, and perhaps for this very reason, was failing or deliberately refusing to see, the contrast which his ordinary and very human actions presented to all this.

One of the interesting phases of this puritanism or phariseeism is his attitude toward women and their morality and their purity. If ever a people has refined eroticism to a greater degree than the American, I am not aware of it. Owing to a theory or the doctrinaire acceptance of the Mary legend (Mary olotry, no less), the good American, capable of the same gross financial crimes previously indicated, has been able to look upon most women, but more particularly those above him in the social scale, as considerably more than human—angelic, no less, and possessed of qualities the like of which are not to be found in any breathing being, man, woman, child, or animal. It matters not that his cities and towns, like those of any other nation, are rife with sex ; that in each one are specific and often large areas devoted to Eros or Venus, or both. While maintaining them, he is still blind to their existence or import. He or his boys or his friends go —but—.

Only a sex blunted nature or race such as the Anglo-Saxon could have built up any such asinine theory as this. The purity, the sanctity, the self abnegation, the delicacy of women —how these qualities have been exaggerated and dinned into our ears, until at last the average scrubby non reasoning male, quite capable of visiting the gardens of Venus, or taking a girl off the street, is no more able to clearly visualize the creature before him than he is the central wilds of Africa which he has never seen. A princess, a goddess, a divine mother or creative principle, all the virtues, all the perfections, no vices, no weaknesses, no errors—some such hodgepodge as this has come to be the average Anglo-Saxon, or at least American, conception of the average American woman. I do not say that a portion of this illusion is not valuable — I think it is. But as it stands now, she is too good to be true; a paragon, a myth! Actually, she doesn’t exist at all as he has been taught to imagine her. She is nothing more than a two-legged biped like the rest of us, but in consequence of this delusion sex itself, being a violation of this paragon, has become a crime. We enter upon the earth, it is true, in a none too artistic manner (conceived in iniquity and born in sin, is the biblical phrasing of it) , but all this has long since been glossed over ignored—and to obviate its brutality as much as possible, the male has been called upon to purify himself in thought and deed, to avoid all private speculation as to women and his relationship to them, and, much more than that, to avoid all public discussion, either by word of mouth or the printed page.

To think of women or to describe them as anything less than the paragon previously commented upon, has become, by this process, not only a sin—it is a shameful infraction of the moral code, no less. Women are too good, the sex relationship too vile a thing, to be mentioned or even thought of. We must move in a mirage of illusion. We must not know what we really do. We must trample fact under foot and give fancy, in the guise of our so-called better natures, free rein.

…

Yet this is a democracy. Here, as in every other realm of the world, the individual is permitted, compelled, to seek his own material and mental salvation as best he may. The trouble with a democracy as opposed to an autocracy, with a line of titled idlers permitted the gift of leisure and art indulgence, is that there is no central force or group to foster art, to secure letters and art in their inalienable rights, to make of superior thought a noble and a sacred thing. I am not saying that democracy will not yet produce such a central force or group.

…

The most significant and, to me, discouraging manifestation in connection with the United States today, is the tendency to even narrower and more puritanical standards than have obtained in the past. In all conscience, up to this year of our Lord nineteen hundred and seventeen, they have been bad enough. As a matter of fact, America, in its hundred years of life, has not even reached the intellectual maturity that goes in individual cases with a stripling of eighteen.

…

The American, by some hocus pocus of atavism, has seemingly borrowed or retained from lower English middle-class puritans all their fol de rol notions about making human nature perfect by fiat or edict—the written word, as it were, which goes with all religions. So, although by reason of the coarsest and most brutal methods, we, as a nation, have built up one of the most interesting and domineering oligarchies in the world, we are still by no means aware of the fact.

…

Indeed, ever since the Mayflower landed, and the country began to grow westward, we have been convinced that we were destined to make the Ten Commandments, in all their arbitrary perfection, work. One might show readily enough that America attained its amazing position in life by reason of the fact that, along with boundless opportunities, the Ten Commandments did not and do not work, but what would be the use? With one hand the naïve American takes and executes with all the brutal insistence of nature itself; with the other he writes glowing platitudes concerning brotherly love, virtue, purity, truth, etc., etc.

A part of this right or left hand tendency, as the case might be, is seen in the constant desire of the American to reform something. No country in the world, not even England, the mother of fol de rol reforms, is so prolific in these frail ventures as this great country of ours. In turn we have had campaigns for the reform of the atheist, the drunkard, the lecher, the fallen woman, the buccaneer financier, the drug fiend, the dancer, the theater goer, the reader of novels, the wearer of low-neck dresses and surplus jewelry—in fact, every human taste and frivolity, wherever sporadically it has chanced to manifest itself with any interesting human force. Your reformer’s idea is that any human being, to be a successful one, must be a pale spindling sprout, incapable of any vice or crime. And all the while the threshing sea of life is sounding in his ears. The thief, the lecher, the drunkard, the fallen woman, the greedy, the inordinately vain, as in all ages past, pass by his door, and are not the whit less numerous for the unending campaigns which have been launched to save them. In other words, human nature is human nature, but your American cannot be made to believe it.

…

He will not give up the illusion which was piled safely in the hold of the Mayflower when it set sail. He is going to reform man and the world willy nilly, and, while- in his rampant idealism he is neglecting to build up a suitable army and navy wherewith to defend himself, he is busy propagating little cults whereby man is to be made less vigorous, more the useless anemic thing that he has in mind.

Personally, my quarrel is with America’s quarrel with original thought. It is so painful to me to see one after another of our alleged reformers tilting Don Quixote-like at the giant windmills of fact. We are to have no pictures which the puritan and the narrow, animated by an obsolete dogma, cannot approve of. We are to have no theaters, no motion pictures, no books, no public exhibitions of any kind, no speech even, which will in any way contravene his limited view of life. A few years ago it was the humble dealer in liquor whose life was anathematized, and whose property: was descended upon with torches, axes and bombs. Now comes prohibition. A little later, our cities growing and the sections devoted to the worship of Venus becoming more manifest, the Vice Crusader was bred, and we had the spectacle of whole areas of fallen women scattered to the four winds, and allowed to practice separately what they could not do collectively. Then came Mr. Comstock, vindictive, persistent, and with a nose and a taste for the profane and erotic, such as elsewhere has not been equaled since. Pictures, books, the theater, the dance, the studio—all came under his watchful eye. During the twenty or thirty years in which he acted as a United States Postoffice Inspector, he was, because of his dull charging against things which he did not rightly understand, never out of the white light of publicity which he so greatly craved. One month it would be a novel by D’Annunzio; another, a set of works by Balzac or de Maupassant, found in the shade of some gravelly bookseller’s shop; the humble photographer attempting a nude; the painter who allowed his reverence for Raphael to carry him too far; the poet who attempted a recrudescence of Don Juan in modern iambics, was immediately seized upon and hauled before an equally dull magistrate, there to be charged with his offense and to be fined accordingly. All this is being continued with emphasis.

Then came the day of the White Slave Chasers, and now no American city, and no backwoods Four Corners, however humble, is complete without a vice commission of some kind, or at least a local agent or representative, charged with the duty of keeping the art, the literature, the press, and the private lives of all those at hand up to that standard of perfection which only the dull can set for themselves.

Several years ago, when the White Slave question was at its whitest heat, the problem of giving expression to its fundamental aspects was divided between raiding plays which attempted to show the character of the crime in too graphic a manner, and licensing those which appealed to the intelligence of those who were foremost in the crusade. Thus we had the spectacle of an uncensored, but nevertheless approved, ten-reel film showing more details of the crime and better methods of securing white slaves, than any other production of the day, running undisturbed to packed houses all over the country, while two somewhat more dramatic, but far less effective distributors of information in the way of plays were successfully harried from city to city and finally withdrawn.

…

Shakespeare has been ordered from the schools in some of the states. A production of “Antony and Cleopatra” has been raided in Chicago. Japanese prints of a high art value, intended for the seclusion of a private collection, have been seized and the most valuable of them held to be destroyed. By turns, an artistic fountain to Heine in New York, loan exhibits of paintings in Denver, Kansas City, and elsewhere, scores of books by Stevenson, James Lane Allen, Frances H. Burnett, have been attacked, not only, as in the case of the latter, with the invisible weapons of the law, as might be expected, but, in regard to the former, with actual axes. A male dancer of repute and some artistic ability, has been raided publicly by the Vice Crusaders for his shameless exposure of his person! No play, no picture, no book, no public or private jubilation of any kind, is complete any more without its vice attack.

To me this sort of thing is dull, and bespeaks the low state to which our mental activities have fallen.”

— — —

I hope that these passages have helped you, dear reader, understand better the moral panic that the Americans exhibit right now; and, in fact, have always exhibited.