multi faceted

I decided against my own free will not to go to the gym today. I make this sort of decision often and with great frustration. I was really looking forward to going, WHAT THE FUCK. I feel like a kid whose parent tells them they can't go out to play. A deranged and unstable parent whose judgment I don't trust, nor whose authority do I respect.

Watching my peers, I admire the ones who make it to almost every class and open workout. I try to emulate them, but I am not as fundamentally motivated as they are. I am motivated differently, often prioritizing protecting myself, both mentally and physically. I can get myself moving and with increasingly impressive levels of energy, but there are many days where it just doesn't happen. I can't find the energy, I can't find the courage, I just sit and listen as these two sides curse at each other until it's too late to go anywhere.

I often try to focus on the progress I continue making in spite of it. It's frustrating, but overall, I'm moving in the right direction and that gives me hope. Highly debatable though, is the prospect that the protective side is actually right. Occasionally even these young people cavalierly discuss how training destroys their bodies. They regularly come to the gym with aches and pains that I'd call an excuse to stay home. 

Once the endorphins are flowing, you hardly feel it. I've got two decades on many of them, so it makes sense for me to be more careful, but I even wonder if they're overdoing it, too. The longer we're alive, the more natural it becomes to think long term. Having good working knees ten years from now seems more important than winning a competition next week, to me.

Assessing risk is difficult, and we're heavily biased by what we want to do and what we feel like doing. I assess risk obsessively though, and worry that it's me overdoing it, making excuses, being lazy. Rationalizing. Look at the evidence though. I'm not destroying my body at all. It keeps getting stronger. I feel more resilient than ever. It sure seems as though I'm doing something right.

Yet, It doesn't quite add up. I don't have any joint problems right now. Some aches and pains, but nothing I should have to worry about aggravating. Emotionally, a dismal wreck, but going is supposed to help with that, not make it worse. 

This other part of me though, I don't know how much there is to it. Maybe it's more than just a dissenting view, but even has access to information I don't have. Unconscious, nuanced, complicated. The unconscious can juggle information in ways the conscious mind does not. While consciousness tries to focus, the unconscious strives to manage everything all at once.

There's an argument to be made there for trusting our instincts, which is to say, trusting our unconscious impulses, even when they run counter to what we really want to be doing. At the same time though, the future is looking so dark and narrowing lately. I don't know that I have much time left. Feelings of impending doom can be symptomatic of depression, but depression also has numerous ways of causing impending doom. I hope it's just depression, as I overreact to every day wasted, each opportunity missed or fumbled. Progress inches along, as the darkness closes in. 

There are times when risks and poor odds make sense, the more threatened we feel by circumstances continuing fundamentally unchanged. Change happens always. We can try to utilize change for the better, or we can leave it to entropy, atrophy, and decay.

I'm modulating the effort as well as I can, but I feel like a blind person trying to figure out if my handwriting is legible. I can't see a thing. I feel like a failure.

socialist china

"America has 170 million people, we have several times that number, plentiful resources, and a similar climate; catching up is possible. Should we catch up? Of course we should, or else what are you 600 million people doing? … In another 50 or 60 years, we should be ahead of them." -Mao 

In 1950, average life expectancy in China was only 36 years. This blew me away, I didn't realize it was that bad. That's dark ages, even prehistoric. In the US, it was almost 70, even then. By 1975, life expectancy in China shot up to 63, while inching up to 72 in the US. I understand better now why older people think China's such a miserable place, but they're a little behind the times. Most of the world has come a long way in the same time frame, but none so far as China.

Twenty five years later, the US was still looking ok. Life expectancy went up another few years, with China only a few years behind. Now, China continues to advance with no sign of slowing down. In recent years, they've pulled ahead of us, as life expectancy in the US declines. 

The decline here is not the result of anything particularly recent. This is the impact of a political shift that happened back in the 70s, shortly after I was born. A shift that continues unabated to this day, as consequences continue to mount. It's been getting worse my entire life. It would take a massive course change for things to even begin the decades long process of turning around, and no such change is happening.

Who was king of China during that meteoric advancement of life expectancy itself? Oft compared to Hitler, Chairman Mao. Those statistics on life expectancy alone should give you pause. Holy shit, have I been lied to?

Yes. Chinese and Russian government officials alike refer to the US as the Empire of Lies. They lie all the goddamn time. This is the most important lesson I've learned in my longstanding efforts to figure out what the fuck is going on. If you believe any of it, you're falling for bullshit, I'm telling you. From Israel to Ukraine, from inflation to omicron, you've got to put in the time to sort it all out, because if you don't, you're better off not paying attention at all. 

Sometimes I stop paying attention myself, but it can be hard to turn away from watching the worst train wreck ever. Especially when I have nothing better to do, as the world seems to be coming apart. I keep thinking it's just me, but then I hear other people saying the same sorts of things all over the place. Sometimes it feels like we may only have a few years left. The way Biden's been desperately threatening Russia, China, and Iran, all at once, I'm thinking we may not even have that long. 

Or maybe this is just the virulent mindset of living through the death throes of an empire of lies.

supreme rulers

The issue of the moment is a little beyond my wheelhouse, and I don't normally comment on this sort of thing, but I have some thoughts on the overturning of Roe v. Wade. First, I just want to go over the ruling itself, as there seems to be a lot of basic ignorance of what happened exactly. 

We had a Supreme Court ruling half a century ago, giving women the constitutional right to have an abortion. This prohibits legislators from legislating otherwise, at any level, state, local, or federal. Now with it overturned, states can legislate against abortion as they see fit. Every state will be different, covering the whole gamut, depending on how religiously conservative the people in the state tend to be, etc. In most of the country, the law probably won't change.

This ruling was based on our constitutional right to privacy, the idea being that familiar slogan, "my body, my choice" - a pregnant woman should have final say over her own body, free of any government regulation. We've been treating this as settled law for decades, despite the fact that this rationale has to allow for exceptions. Once you allow for exceptions, the federal supremacy of the ruling falls apart. If there are times when our bodies can be regulated by law, every state will decide their own exceptions.

This has already been the case, to a great extent. Every state placing different restrictions, such that it was nearly impossible to get an abortion in some states already. This ruling has been a much more incremental change than people on either side want to admit. This has a whole lot to do with the specific nature of the ruling. It has always rested on precarious reasoning.

Calling abortion a privacy issue never adequately addresses abortion itself, except to create the exception for a fetus being "viable." This is a complex medical issue. We need laws that get very specific, based on modern science. The constitution doesn't say anything about it, and SCOTUS is supposed to be ruling on constitutionality. 

There needs to be a constitutional basis for SCOTUS to take up a case, and while there's risk of over-reach, laws could also be carefully crafted to avoid it. The problem is that there isn't enough support in congress to pass any such federal laws. Democrats need to win more elections, but wait, they already control both houses of congress and the presidency. They vote blue no matter who, but it turns out, it does matter who.

As always, they need to win more before they can do anything. Republicans can always dismantle progress, even while they're the minority party, and Democrats are always helpless to do anything. So they're historically unpopular these days, and unlikely to gain any seats, let alone enough to matter. Thanks to the pandemic, they've briefly taken control of government, under the brilliant leadership of a racist old clown with dementia. They've already squandered the only chance they'll get. They'll be lucky not to lose big in both 2022 and 2024.

What's surprising has been watching the shift in public opinion. More support for the overruling than I'd expected. Public opinion may turn out to be an additional obstacle. Defining fetal viability can be problematic. If an abortion is done carefully enough to protect the fetus, and then measures are immediately taken to keep it alive, viability shoots way up. Instead, it's almost necessary to do the opposite. You can't have aborted fetuses surviving, often with severe birth defects, but occasionally entirely healthy. Holy shit would that complicate the issue. No worries, though. They never survive..?

Lots of countries have settled around limits of 12-16 weeks, because it does become a much more complicated issue shortly thereafter. Many US states put the limit at 22 weeks, but some go to 27 and beyond. Roe v. Wade was never really an adequate basis for abortion law. Striking it down is unfortunate, but a relatively incremental change to an existing controversy in this country. 

Public opinion may not be on Democrats' side anymore. They can't win elections anyhow. Even when they do, they can't legislate anything but corporate tax cuts, bailouts, and ever increasing funds for war. They haven't held a majority in the Supreme Court ever, in my entire life. They certainly won't be turning that around any time soon.

Like everything else in US politics, sorry, but it's not going to be getting better. All evidence seems to suggest it's only getting worse. China's doing pretty well though. Abortions are safe and legal there. Russia, too. While suicide rates in the US have doubled in the last two decades, suicide rates in Russia have fallen by half in the same time frame. The yuan may replace the dollar as standard global currency, soon. I hear the ruble is also doing pretty well. 

All is not hopeless, just the west and the corrupt imbeciles ruling over us here.

fireworks and mass shootings

Multiple mass shootings, the loss of civil rights, while the American people are milked dry to fund war crimes around the world. Happy Independence Day, everyone. America the beautiful, home of a dying empire. I don't care about gun control, or mental health services. I want to live in a country that doesn't drive its people to such insanity in the first place.

Liberals aren't feeling very celebratory this year. I never have been, but feeling less patriotic than ever. This country is never going to get better. Eventually, it's just going to implode, and that can't come soon enough. I didn't even leave my apartment this 4th of July. Was no one having any get togethers, or maybe I just wasn't invited on account of being a Putinist.

I neither know nor care. I wasn't feeling up to going anywhere. I've been training hard, my arms and legs in dire need of the recovery time.