Breaking the Cultural Suicide Pact of the West

Culturally, most Americans have a problem with the indolent - those who choose to live off the money made by others. These people are economically un-productive. I suppose these folks could say that they were born lazy and that they cannot be asked to behave differently, but I think the bulk of people in a vibrant culture rightly reject this. As societies, we expect people to strive to economically support themselves and contribute to the support of those who authentically cannot do so. Naturally, we think poorly of those who can do this but choose not to do so.

We have not been replacing ourselves in most of the "Western" or "developed" world for a few decades now. North America continues to gain population through immigration, both legal and illegal. The tide of immigrants to Europe as refugees is the only way they keep their vaunted social programs viable, though you won't catch many politicians saying so. If it were up to native-born Westerners to keep our present culture at even a stable state into the future, it could not be done due to an inability or more likely a refusal to have and raise a necessary number of children to do so. It is a statistical reality for North America, Europe, and much of the far East that, without heavy infusions of "third world" breeding stock that eschew the so-called "value" of childlessness, presently strong nations will continue a steady population decline toward cultural irrelevance. To put it into a term, we are in the midst of cultural suicide.

Many Americans refuse to do what is required to avoid cultural suicide and such suicidal tendencies have become an accepted and even heralded addition to our culture. For example, people increasingly choose now fashionable "gay" and other deviant lifestyles that provide an easy rationalization against bearing and raising children in a culturally sustainable way. Although there are many lifestyle choices that encourage childlessness and cultural suicide, we are currently in the hypnotic embrace of deviant sexuality and its absolute desire for acceptance. However, this fact remains: if there are too many deviant people, there won't be enough kids.

It is bad enough that people choose lifestyles that preclude propagation, but now our leaders offer political "perks" to such groups and hand over our most vulnerable children to them for adoption and indoctrination into attitudes of sanctioned and vaunted dis-productivity. Every person, no matter what their personal excuse, who chooses to not birth and raise at least three children under sustainable circumstances is perpetrating cultural suicide. How can Western civilization hope to survive on its present course?

It is easy to blame others for the decline and so expect others to effect the needed turn-around. Better yet, we can look at ourselves and evaluate our own contribution to our cultural continuance. Are we marrying in ways that bring children into our culture? Are we teaching our own children the habits and expectations that will help our culture thrive? Are we being decisive in the direction that our culture should take toward sustainability? Does our personal conduct reflect such habits and expectations? Any change from our present course toward cultural suicide begins with each one of us. Like the indolent, we have little space for people who claim some exemption and could be birthing and properly raising the next generation.

In the end, we must either choose to abandon practices and attitudes that lead to cultural suicide or watch our nations and peoples fade into irrelevancy. The areas of western Europe and north America will continue on and be populated, but other, less suicidal cultures and peoples will occupy them.

MediMania: The CPAP Prostitution

I wrote a few posts a few years back regarding the whole concept of hypochondriac profiteering (aka preventative medical care). It is a compelling subject simply because everyone has a story to tell about their own shellacking by the health industry. Allow me to offer up a personal example.

Ever since we got married (nearly twenty fours years ago these days), my endurant wife has lived with the fear of my imminent death. Apparently, when I go to sleep, I stop breathing. I go for upwards of two minutes where my tongue seems to fall back into my air passage, closing it off, and it seems to take something of an act of Congress for mind and body to jar me awake enough to clear the blockage and get some oxygen back in the lungs. Come to find out that this is an incredibly common problem and the official name for it is "sleep apnea". My wife tells me that she got scared of my dying on our wedding night and has remained scared ever since, until she finally convinced me to "see my doctor", as every drug and health advertisement urges one to do.

I was then introduced to the biggest "medical" cash cow I have yet encountered: the CPAP prostitution.
My quasi-doctor (I use a nurse practitioner because I don't care to deal with physicians), upon hearing the situation from my wife, prescribed a curious instrument somewhere between an oxygen mask and a brain scanner. It seemed to get used quite a lot because they had several and I had to wait a few days before one became available and a specially trained nurse could instruct me on its proper use. You have to understand that I live in an underpopulated place and this clinic probably serves a population of 2000 at best, so these little "sleep apnea" detectors were getting quite a workout. In deference to my wife, I strapped this contraption to my head which confirmed what my wife had been saying for years: I didn't breathe very often at night. This highlights Rule #1 of the medical/insurance cabal: Use very expensive tests to establish the incredibly obvious. This would not be the first time that rule would be employed.

After the obvious results finally came in, I was scheduled for the mandatory "sleep test" which was scheduled at a pleasant little building some hundred miles from where I lived. Even with my pathetic insurance that charges me a lot and pays out very little, I would be getting to sleep in a nice enough bed while hooked up to dozens of sensors and an air pump that kept me inflated like a hot air balloon. Of course, my insurance only paid for part of this, as I am sure many scammers do these tests just for fun to watch me lose the better part of a night's sleep, so I ponied up my co-pay and after the might ended, I was basically told exactly what my wife had been saying for years and for free: I didn't breathe much at night.

I guess I need to say something positive about my health insurance, as they must have thrown piles of money at these "sleep centers", which seem to spring up everywhere. The guy who ran me through the process was very talkative and ultimately revealed that he had gotten into the business after his own "sleep test", perhaps seeing a lucrative career as I seem to recall that he was a truck driver previous to becoming a "sleep tech". Although he seemed small potatoes in the field, he did well enough to afford a nice little building with two suites that stay full every night he chooses and he even gets a lot of repeat business, as the insurance companies likely demand a recheck of your lifelong condition to prevent aforementioned scamming, as if anyone just magically starts breathing better at night.

So, my quasi-doctor and my certified ex-truck-driver sleep tech were satisfied, so my insurance company released the monetary floodgates and I was rented a CPAP machine by a chain smoker who had a certificate as a respiratory therapist. It seems like a lot of victims of various breathing ailments decide to jockey their troubles into a career, as it seems the "sleep" industry doesn't require much more than a background in bail-jumping to begin training. I was dutifully read a paper, as my therapist seemed to be new and hadn't properly memorized things yet in order to look "professional". It seems that everyone involved with this procedure were suffering from my "apnea" in one form or another, just like apparently 98% of the population. I was introduced to my new nighttime buddy, a "quiet" CPAP machine, and instructed in its rather simple use.

At first, this was all payed for by my insurance, so I played along. My wife reported that, when I did sleep, which was difficult in a full face mask that rarely made a usable seal onto my head, I indeed didn't stop breathing. Of course, I doubt is was necessary to breathe as I was swollen up like a bloated porpoise with all the air being pumped into my gastro-intestinal tract and every other empty internal cavity!

Well, I was dutiful about using the CPAP but was also planning what to do about my hiking and backpacking activities and how such a machine would fit into this. There were some incredibly expensive battery-operated units that a person could get, but I am cheap guy and a began looking for alternatives. Most of these were either worthless (variations on jaw-jutting mouthpieces) or practically illegal in the USA, but obtainable over the internet. I tried a few cheap "solutions" that didn't work and I was discouraged. I was also doing my typical job of ignoring the fact that all of these "sleep aids" were absolutely not recommended for sleep apnea sufferers and was told that I was taking a horrible risk with my life by trying such things.

Then, the reality hit as I received my first bill for this "therapy" that my insurance was supposed to pay for. I would pay $50 a month for the rental of my CPAP machine from here on out. Needless-to-say, I was "disappointed" and promptly took all the stuff back before I could be charged again. Of course, I was warned constantly that this action was dangerous, as if I were going to die within hours of the discontinuance of CPAP use. I am accustomed to being lied to by TV hucksters but it is interesting to see the same tactics used by "licensed" "health-care" "professionals". In fact, to this day, I get some harassment from providers over ending my "therapy".

I finally settled up on the wonderful AVEO TSD device, which sucks onto your tongue and keeps it pulled a bit out of the mouth while I sleep, opening the air passage and letting me breathe at night. I got mine off of eBay for around $80 that another person used and didn't like. Normally, you must have a doctor's or dentist's prescription to even touch one of these, but you know how much I love feeding the medical/insurance industry!

In all of this, I had one criteria for dealing with this problem: does it let me breathe at night? That actually was the only original problem and in spite of likely thousands of dollars spent to poke at things, I ultimately solved the problem myself for about $80. I could have skipped the whole sorted process described above by doing one simple thing: Stay away from doctors.

Now, I certainly don't recommend avoiding medicine if there is something causing you extended pain - that is what the system is there for. Sadly, we hypochondriacs are encouraged to see the doctor about every little thing and often see them when we have no problems at all, just in case. My advice is to avoid the "if you had just come in earlier" syndrome, promulgated by a media that loves to tell horror stories about people who are dying that may not have if they would have spent their lives running between waiting rooms. It is a trick: if we had perfect and real-time knowledge, we would also likely never have troubles, but you can't live like that. I choose living a life, perhaps even an allegedly shorter one, than giving myself over to the "life managers" of the medical industry.

Putting Husband Before Father

Children Thrive Best Under a Loving, Stable, and Devoted Marriage between their Natural Parents

The lack of natural marriage, childbearing, and family-building is a root cause of a majority of societal ills. Our prisons are bursting with the products of broken homes who never accomplished proper human development. One cause of such problems is the practice of putting the caring for one's children ahead of devotion for one's spouse. This misplaced centrality leads to selfish divorces, un-launched and mal-developed adult children, and divided loyalties that retard everyone's needed progression. Societies cannot survive with so many under-developed and broken people as "respected" members.

The relationship between a husband and wife is the supreme, enduring relationship as sanctioned and dictated by God himself. It is meant to last a lifetime and beyond. The marriage covenant is designed to complete men and women, drawing upon the innate talents and abilities of each to meet the common needs of both and the children they bear - the natural family. The acquisition and nurture of a mutually beneficial and loving natural marriage should be the over-arching goal and primary labor of every adult human life. No other pursuit is more fulfilling; no other relationship is more honorable. Natural marriage provides its ultimate benefit in incubating the next generation of verdant individuals that healthy societies and nations require and that God demands.

Parental obligations to children should focus on their development and their rise to the station of dutiful and devoted wives and husbands with families of their own. Doting on children beyond this is a major predictor of lifelong dysfunction:

• an inability to put another ahead of self;
• a lack of desire and resolve sufficient to marry or sustain a marriage;
• the immature act of having children out-of-wedlock; and
• a lack of sufficient time and resources to meet the swollen demands of intrinsically misshapened "sub-families".

Governments and leaders of every stripe should show greater concern for the health of their societies by strongly encouraging natural, devoted marriage and building of families based upon such marriages. All adults should show greater respect for the efforts and sacrifices of parents, grandparents, and further ancestors in bringing each man and woman into this world and raising them up, typically within natural families. The voluntary formation and acceptance of "sub-families", such as intentional single-parent groupings, same-sex couplings (adoptive or not), co-habitation households, orphanages, "child development centers" and other sub-optimal child-raising situations should be strongly de-emphasized and categorically discouraged, both through societal and statutory means. No society can hope to prosper where a large and growing proportion of children are subjected to systemically inferior developmental environments outside of their natural families. There will always be a small proportion of children who will lose one parent or both to death and require alternatives and added assistance, but such circumstances are somewhat rare. We do children no favors by socially and legislatively "blessing" the aberrant home-lives of miscreant parent-figures when family life under natural married parents was purposefully rejected.

Every child deserves an optimal developmental setting and it is the duty of each father and mother to join together to provide such for their natural children. Putting devotion to a spouse ahead of love for son or daughter best prepares the children to accept adult roles and responsibilities, the highest of which is to create further natural marriages and optimal families.

The Great "Squaring Up" of Heaven and Hell

As I promised in other blog posts about the ultimate Telestial, Terrestrial, or Celestial rewards that are available after Judgement, I am now going to provide my perspective on the time that we will spend between death and the judgement. As always, these are my thoughts and do not necessarily reflect the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, where I spend my Sundays. Mormons call this time the "Spirit World", which is kinda strange since it describes more of a condition than a place. Christians have several names for it: "Heaven", "Hell", "Paradise", "Prison", "Limbo", "Purgatory". There are likely other names as well and scholars of the Judeo-Christian Bible use them all copiously to try to describe what is going to happen after we die.

There is indeed a time between death and Judgement. How long this time lasts is quite dependent on the way you lived your life. I have come to call it the "Squaring Up", where each of us and God fulfill promises and covenants made previously.

It is useful at this point to explain that you existed before you were born on Earth. You not only just existed, you made a very important choice: you decided to take sides with Jehovah, the man you may know better as Jesus Christ. God's reward for your choice was to send you to Earth with a body and to promise that you would get to have that body again in a perfected form after you die. If you recall, Jesus was "resurrected" after he died and God promised that same resurrection to those of us who followed Christ before birth. Essentially, you are alive today because you made the right choice previously and you will be resurrected for the same reason. God will "square up" his pre-Earth-life promise of immortality with you just before you attend Judgement. You will absolutely live again - God is good on his word.

There are other things to square-up as well. As part of accepting and promising to follow Jehovah (Jesus) before you were born, you were expected to keep commandments during your life on Earth. Also, while on Earth, you may have made further "covenants" with God that involve other activities and rewards. All of these must be accounted for before the Judgement.  If you kept the promises you made, there will be very little to "square up" and your time might be short and blissful, a definition of "heaven". If you didn't do a very good job with your promises, you will have more "squaring up" to do, which seems to be unpleasant and is often referred to as "Hell".  Remember those stories about Hell in the Bible? How long you spend "squaring up" is really dependent on how much you strayed from your promises.

If you have a background in business, this "squaring up" sure sounds like business accounting. God feels like an auditor and you want to have your bookkeeping in good order before the audit (Judgement) comes. That's what this "spirit world" time is for:  make sure all the figures add up and everything on the ledger balances. If you have been a good business manager, you should be ready for your audit without much work.  If you "cooked" the books or kept your records poorly, things could get nasty. Making everything honest and balanced is going to be a painful and expensive.  Sound like "Hell" yet?

There are some things to keep in mind when attempting to make the "squaring up" time as short as possible for yourself:

• Repentance - Everyone messes up on their promises (well, except for Christ). The principle of repentance is that you can avoid the pain of "squaring up" as you make up for your mistakes in the way Jesus has prescribed.  Not sure how to make it work? We are here to help you.
• There is no Excuse for Ignorance - As part of the squaring up there will be full disclosure. No one will be left ignorant before Judgement. I suppose you can try to say you really didn't know about Jehovah's commandments (there are ten and many US courthouses put them out on the front lawn. They also feature in that Bible.) I suppose you can plead ignorance if you like, but you really do determine how long this "squaring up" takes.
• You want Mercy, Not "Fairness" - There are two things to expect from God:  justice and mercy. The smart bet is to go for mercy every time. If you start arguing with God (pretty stupid idea) that he isn't being "fair" about the squaring up process, it will just create more things to settle.

God really has set up a wonderful system - it really is up to you if you choose to take advantage of it. For my money, it's absolutely the best deal that will ever come around! So, keep those commandments! Repent when you need to do so! Don't make the "squaring up" any harder. There is a fantastic reward just waiting for you to claim!

Civilization Crumbles to Appease the Harpy's Pleasure

Feminists fought hard to get wider choices. Now that they have such, will their younger sisters make responsible choices for society? They have a rather poor track record so far.

After I read this back, I see that I was really vague about what I mean by feminist harpies. These are the current crop of Social Justice Warriors that wreak havoc on college campuses, manufacture offences, physically attack those with opposing viewpoints, and plead some higher virtue to justify their behavior. I honor the work over the past generations to give women the vote, allow them to act independently, and to work and live as they choose. The new crop have stolen the good work of previous "feminists" in providing new choices and given the term "feminist" a hideous aftertaste of intolerance to traditional values. When I say "modern feminist", I speak of SJWs that use violence and their ignorant rhetoric to fight for far less-worthy causes and encourage deviant behaviors that threaten the very existence of future generations.

The modern feminist is an interesting character. She is a creature that uses all of the built-up privilege of the classical lady to behave atrociously. Society and decent men step aside respectfully as she tromps like a beast over the feminine traditions of decorum and delicacy to become a foul-mouthed, militantly sexualized, culturally dictatorial harpy over which there seems to be no practical regulation. The modern feminist in western civilization has attained the prize of ultimate freedom of behavior and has chosen to use it to become a despicable monster and virus. This is widely considered to be a wonderful thing.

As you can surmise, I don't think much the current crop of feminists. Like most decent people, I try hard to avoid such folk and live my life among those who consider the honest needs of others before their own pleasure. I consort with those who build natural families who will populate the future. I was raised by and honor women who had a different and more worthy ethic. My mothers honored the ancient underpinnings of verdant culture - the modern feminist tears and rends the past to leave gaping holes for hedonism to fill. It is a worse world, the harpies cheer it, but I reject such.

Don't get me wrong, I like freedom. However, alongside freedom is the wide responsibility for the choices one makes and how those choices affect others. Those with fewer freedoms have fewer choices and are less culpable for happenings, which was the state of so many groups in the past, and still arguably in the present. Western society has managed to give women nearly everything they desire, hopefully short of destroying civilization in the process.

It seems that the feminist movement is excited for the chance to destroy civilization without much thought or care about the potential chaos that might follow. Something will surely inhabit the wreckage that the harpies joyously create, but I doubt it will be a better world.

In the way of clarification, the "modern feminist" seems hell-bent on destroying the traditional culture of marriage and family in favor of "anything goes" sexuality and gender confusion. We already have a problem producing enough children to keep nations afloat and it is now fashionable to praise and coddle willful childlessness and the abandonment of natural marriage. A nation cannot stand without a rising generation taught to perpetuate themselves and their culture. Transsexuals and gays refrain from procreation and family-building and set an example that ignoring these social duties is virtuous.

The feminist is all about freedom from social constraints, for herself and others. Sadly, we have seen precious little of the stuff of responsibility, especially to larger society and its health and continuance. The feminist often denies society her ability to bear children, robbing all of her genuine contribution to its future and encouraging other women and other oppressed peoples to be as self-centered and neglectful of the needs of the larger society as they tend to be. They decry women who make socially responsible choices in child-bearing and family-building as some sort of gender turn-coat: either embrace their ultimate cause of freedom to act without consequence or be crushed by their shrieking social rejection of you.

After the great battle for more choices, the modern feminist wants to ultimately dictate your choice. This indicates that they didn't really want you to have choices, they just wanted to alter your course into some new straight-jacket of the decadent feminist design. Throwing civilization under the bus of their resolve isn't even the real goal - it is just a interesting byproduct of the real vision of a universal life without consequences and void of any consideration beyond self-pleasure. It is like the justification of demolishing a shopping mall in the noble pursuit of a certain jacket - individual desires outstrip all other considerations.

One must remember that we will ultimately be judged by how we use our ability to choose. Did we make good choices that put the needs of others before our own?

More Free Stuff

I give things away all the time.  I figure that I have resources sufficient for my family's needs, so I don't really need to force others to buy my writings in order to read them. I can make more "inconvenient" formats of my books available freely. If you want to support my writing, please visit my Amazon area and buy some of my e-books for the Kindle.

I have made my latest e-book "Feeding the Soul of Steve Jobs" available on my home web server for anyone to read for free. There is a lot of other material there that is also free to read  Enjoy!

Distractions

I don't want people to think I have dropped off the face of the earth.  I am still here, but since the last post, I have left my previous work, taken up a challenging new opportunity and much of my free time is taken up with preparation for additional work as an adjunct professor this coming fall.  Busy, busy!

I will get back to posts at some point in the future, but it may be several months until I can get the free time needed to do a decent job. I hope you will not give up on me yet!