6:41 AM 5/28/2024
I don’t know exactly what happened, but I woke up feeling mysteriously slightly better this morning. I don’t know how MUCH better, and I don’t know how long it will last, and I don’t know what CAUSED me to feel better. The powdered colostrum might have helped, but it might have taken a couple days to help. It might be because I went to the truck stop, took a shower, and ate some fried eggs with runny yolks at the restaurant. Fried eggs with runny yolks are ‘real food’ in my mind. They are a luxury that you cannot get just anywhere or anytime. I have fantasized about ‘my restaurant’ the same way that I’ve fantasized about my woolen mills or wool store. I think maybe I will have an all-purpose general store that sells 100% wool, with foods and a restaurant, with a cat cafe in it, and have all my different stores combined into one thing.
So I don’t know why, but there is a mysterious definite improvement today, all of a sudden. I have to go to work early in the morning.
Some of the improvement is because the weather looks a little bit better this morning.
I did visit the cats, and was absolutely ecstatic to see some of them. I am ecstatic to see the tiny few that remain. When I walked up and saw the first one, camouflaged there on the ground, and I suddenly noticed her as I got close, I was like, ‘PAAAATTTTYYYYYY!!!! !!!PAAATTTTYYY!!! !PAAATTTYYY!’ I was almost jumping for joy just to see this one silly little cat who was waiting for me.
If the colostrum helped at all, I may still benefit from using it a few more times for a few more days.
I desperately need to get some more socks. I have some socks, but they are buried somewhere in my trailer, and it’s hard to get in there, and I couldn’t find them quickly and easily even if I did get in there. The socks that I have are, of course, a polyester cotton blend, not the 100% cotton ones that I could only order online. I have gotten them at random stores, and even THEY are no longer cheap. You can’t even buy shitty polyester garbage for a low price anymore.
I seriously wish that some president, or the entire administration, because everybody has to go along with this and not sabotage it, I seriously wish that they would all undo these globalization
agreements, like – I can’t remember the name of it. It’s a bunch of letters. I remember we had debates about it back when I was in school. The debate was like, ‘Will this trade agreement make things better, or worse?’ We were all being brainwashed to believe that this globalist trade agreement was a good thing. ‘The giant sucking sound of all our jobs going to Mexico,’ that agreement. I keep wanting to say ‘NATO,’ but that’s not it. There were several agreements, not just one, and they all had the result of giving all of our manufacturing to China. I can give that summary even if I can’t remember the name of this thing.
Anyway, we need to undo those agreements that allow – is it NAFTA? North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement? That’s probably one of them. There were more of them than that. That’s one. We need to undo the agreements that have resulted in every single thing being manufactured in China.
I might not have enough mental capacity to make this argument this morning, but I will try. I used to be a libertarian, but I don’t call myself a libertarian anymore. I do not know the name of what I would call myself. I have picked up a few ideas from a few different sources, and some of my ideas are actually inspired by things written by Karl Marx, although I have only read one or two paragraphs that he has ever written.
I only know that I was told in school that, for instance, there used to be a lot of farmers, and these farmers just decided on their own that they felt like giving up their farms and getting jobs at the factories, because working at a factory was obviously a better life than working on a farm, and nobody wanted to work on a farm. From the perspective of Karl Marx, he described it completely differently. He described it as the farmers were being FORCED to give up their land, and lost their farms, and not by choice, and someone else TOOK their land, leaving them homeless and jobless, so they went to work at the factories, because they basically had no jobs at all and no life. That sounds a lot more believable to me now. I clearly remember being brainwashed at school to believe that ‘factories gave people a better life.’ There was no mention of how ‘somebody had DESTROYED their lives FIRST, and working at a factory was the only thing they had left to choose from.’
So I was always being told that people just naturally started switching over to a factory lifestyle, in an inevitable way, with no cause, merely because factories are superior to farms, and factories are a ‘level up,’ and factories are the ‘natural progress’ towards a higher level, kind of the way that people describe ‘forest
succession,’ where they believe that conifer trees, like pines, are some kind of short-term tree that will only be there for a little while, whereas things like oaks will ‘succeed’ over the pine trees and eventually take over, as though this is some kind of ‘progress,’ and as if oak trees are better and superior to pine trees; when, in reality, there are locations where various kinds of pine trees are living there forever, just because they are the type of tree that is most adapted to be living in some kind of situation, and there are some pine trees that have very long lifespans. They are not merely some short-lived, disposable, temporary tree that will eventually be replaced by something better. That’s also how I was taught that farms should be viewed. The farm life is inherently ‘inferior’ and ‘backward,’ and factories are merely the ‘natural progression’ towards a ‘higher level’ in society.
Oh, okay – I said I was going to try to explain a difficult argument that required my brain to be working. It was about ‘protectionism.’ ‘Protectionism’ was portrayed as being ‘ALWAYS BAD.’ We ALWAYS benefit from having NO PROTECTION AT ALL, is what I was told. The libertarians also tended to see things this way. Globalism was ALWAYS GOOD. We should ALWAYS have access to TOTAL FREE TRADE WITH NO RESTRICTIONS AT ALL. The slightest bit of a restriction on trade was ALWAYS bad.
I actually believe now that we should ban most of the trade with China, although I actually don’t want to ban all trade with all foreign countries. Maybe there could be a huge tariff. Oh, I remember, nobody ever liked tariffs. We were told that tariffs were always bad. It’s when you add a very high fee on top of the price of an item that you are importing from another country, but you don’t ban the product entirely. You can buy it, but it will have a very large fee added on, so the price will not be cheap anymore. This would be like, if you wanted to get horrible cheap cotton-polyester socks made in China, then you could still buy them if you were absolutely desperate, but they would have, like, a $20 tariff added on, so that you would be buying Chinese socks for $35 instead of $15. And then, you’d look at some American-made 100% cotton socks being sold by a local artisan, and those might be $25, and that would be cheap compared to the now $35 socks from China. That’s ‘protectionism’ and it’s ‘always bad.’
Our prices are high for several reasons. Land prices are high, so everything produced on the land must have a high price just to pay the bills that you owe, the unavoidable bills that every person must pay merely to exist. The prices of EVERYTHING have to be high enough to pay all of those unavoidable bills first. It has to pay whatever monthly payments you have on the land, along with all the utilities, and whatever debt payments you have.
But people complain because we have environmental restrictions, and labor laws, that are stricter than the laws in China. In China, you can pollute as much as you want, and you can make all your products with unpaid slave labor, so that’s why everything is cheap from China. There are other reasons: they have a much higher population density, and so, it is much easier to manufacture anything at all. In a high density population, you can have a whole bunch of different factories that are producing a whole bunch of different parts that all work together, so you can produce complex objects made from hundreds of different specialized pieces. We have a relatively low population density in the United States, and our population is falling, except the Amish and maybe one or two other groups, whose populations are increasing. Everyone else except the Amish are going extinct. Oh, and illegal immigrants. That’s because sending everyone to the university and then expecting them to pay this college debt for the rest of their life, while also expecting them to pay the debt to buy a house, and not enabling them to get any more debt to start their own business, so they have to ‘look for a job’ instead of starting their own business, and then, expecting them to also start having children while paying off all this debt, while they are struggling to ‘climb the corporate ladder’ at their job, so that they can get a higher paying middle management desk job, and this is the American dream – that’s no way to live life. It’s not possible to have children and be able to afford to pay for anything at all, while also paying off all of those debts and struggling to make more money at your job.
The Amish are RIGHT about the idea that there are only a limited number of appropriate ways to live, and buying land and living on a farm is one of the most appropriate ways to live. They are able to use the unpaid labor of children on the farm, and able to use horses, which don’t bring debt, whereas buying a huge tractor brings huge debt, and nowadays, it can only be repaired by a licensed professional who will give you the software updates.
Anyway, the thing that I have changed my mind about in recent years is, I decided that there is some place where we should draw the line and allow ‘protectionism.’ I have realized that, for instance, if you try to hunt all the local wild deer, and then sell all of their venison to people all over the planet, for money, you will actually quickly destroy the wild deer population LONG before the price ‘rises’ enough to make it so that people will stop buying the deer. ‘Price rises’ do not happen automatically from a machine. Price increases are something that the seller can choose to do or not do. They do not have perfect knowledge or perfect information. A venison seller in the middle of Pennsylvania can’t read minds, and doesn’t know that there is a wealthy billionaire in China who is perfectly willing and able to buy the butchered bodies of every single deer in the entire state of Pennsylvania, all at once, in one giant purchase, for the low, low price of $100,000 or something. Wow! you’re thinking. I’d be SUPER rich if somebody walked up to me and just handed me $100,000! That’s a great deal! I’ll say YES to that sale! From your point of view, it looks like a huge amount of money, because you’re living in a low-density population where people have low wages and nobody is making that kind of money around here. But from China’s point of view, $100,000 is a ridiculously tiny amount of money, a mere drop in the bucket, and they could actually afford to buy up every single piece of venison in the entire country if they wanted to, without blinking an eye, because the amounts of money that they are tossing around every day are on a higher order of magnitude that your mind can’t even imagine.
A venison seller in the middle of Pennsylvania DOESN’T KNOW that the absolute limit that this Chinese billionaire can afford to pay him would be, actually, maybe $10,000,000 for all the deer in
Pennsylvania. That would be the price where they would refuse to pay any more than that. This seller would say ‘yes’ to the sale long before they reached that maximum number. ‘Price increases’ never happen automatically like a machine, and the sellers never have perfect knowledge in advance of how much money the buyer would be willing to pay, or what would be the maximum number that the buyers would be willing to buy.
I know there are things like ‘futures trading,’ where they do try to predict in advance the prices that people would be willing to pay for something in the future. Okay, I have to grudgingly acknowledge that maybe, there is KIND OF an economic mechanism for how people can predict how much the buyers would be willing to pay for something. They’d have to set it up so that some amount of time would go by, like ‘A year from now, when all the venison is grown up, I’ll pay this much for them.’
I don’t have a lot of time, and I have to get ready for work. Work is going to become so unbearable that I am going to have to start actively thinking about how I am going to ‘win the number-counting game’ a little bit better than I am now. I need to earn more money, and increasing my work hours at the job is intolerable. My feet are in less pain now that I completely removed all the insoles from the shoes, but they are not in no pain at all. I’m still in pain by the end of the day.
The biggest problem is that I am bored and don’t have enough to do. We have too many people. I worked at busier stores in the past, because I was working in the middle of State College, and I think of things in terms of ‘How can I multitask 36 different things at once?’ How many seconds will it take for me to run to the cooler to go grab a new container of lettuce, which I just ran out of, and is that long enough that the meat will be coming off the grill at the exact second when I run back into the room, so that I can pull the meat off the grill before it starts burning?
Whenever I’m bored, because there are too many people, my multitasking is more like, ‘What am I going to daydream about, while I stand here waiting three minutes for this thing to finish cooking?’ Or ‘What am I going to daydream about, while I wait for them to use up the food that they have plenty of and don’t need any more of, while my feet are in pain and I want to sit down?’ I used up all of my writing pad and need to buy a new one. I brought in some loose pieces of paper and inserted them into the little notepad. The other day I was writing down some stuff that I was thinking about and wanted to remember, but it wasn’t anything pleasant, it was evil. I was thinking about cat-related crimes that had been committed, and other crimes. It wasn’t like, for instance, at the other job, whenever I had a list of names of tree species that I wanted to memorize. I was memorizing the entire list of all the evergreen conifer trees that grew in Centre County. I successfully memorized the list, although I can’t remember it now and would need to refresh my memory. I have not actually made the conscious effort to go to BONAP and make a list of all the species of some particular group that I wanted to focus on.
I also don’t have an easy to use source of ginseng right at this moment. I do have some ginseng, but this particular batch of roots, ordered online, is just hard enough that it’s hard for me to bite them with my teeth. I need some tools to rip the pieces off, but the tool is in my bedroom in the trailer. I did have something I was using for that, a couple pairs of pliers that worked well enough. I was able to crush or break them with that. So I am not eating ginseng very often at all.
I need to hurry. I am going to have to start thinking about
alternative ways to play the number-counting game. There is something wrong with me that I haven’t fixed. The arthritis in my knees and legs is still lingering. I think I have made an improvement in it by not using the greasy hair conditioner, which I believe was getting absorbed through my skin and going into my joints. I may need to eat foods that will actively replace that bad fat; and also, I may need to wash the clothes and other items that have this greasy conditioner on them, such as the pile of sweaters that I use for a pillow.
I may also have a fungal infection that came from my foot, and I have a theory that it might have come from one particular person’s shower that I used, which wasn’t clean. It wasn’t a shower that I paid for at the truck stop, it was a free shower at a friend’s house, and the bottom of the shower needs to be scrubbed with Comet Cleanser or something like I used to do when I had a house. I suspect that the weird fungus-like infection on a couple of my toes might possibly have come from there, but I don’t know for sure. The skin started peeling off those toes, and they became swollen and stiff. I could
theoretically have more of that fungal infection that might have gone INSIDE my body, and it might have moved around, and it might have moved upwards and infected my joints, and maybe THAT’S the reason why my knees and my hip joints are stiffer than usual and more in pain. I do know that, because of my leg injury, I have had more pain and stiffness, and I compensated by overusing my right leg, which would cause more pain and injury in the right leg, so that was some of the explanation of why BOTH legs were hurting more than they should.
‘I’m getting old’ should never be the default explanation for why you are unhealthy. I keep seeing women with hair that is completely gray, who are in much better health and are moving around better and look happier than I am. They usually have husbands. Having a husband means that you can take better care of yourself and your entire life, in every single way, especially if they are a socionic dual who is able to cover all of those difficult socionic functions that you cannot do by yourself. I don’t have a husband, so I don’t have a helper for all of those socionic functions, so I just sit here stagnating in misery for decades with no help. People’s overall health declines in every way when they lose their spouses, and it’s much, much more of a struggle to maintain it all alone, by yourself. You can’t do all of those things that your spouse used to do for you when they were alive, again especially if they were a socionic dual who was doing things that are completely different from the things that you yourself are doing.
I have to go, I’m not finished writing this, I took a different kind of caffeine pill that makes me much more verbose than the other kind, and yet, I have to go, right now, because I have to get to work, and I should eat something before I go to work.
This is going to be a week of frantic desperation, because I am working more hours with hardly any days off, and I can’t recover and think about what I need to do to escape from the cycle of slavery, where I’m making no money at all, yet I am completely and hopelessly exhausted and have no time left to do anything else, and no energy. I am burning up all of my energy going to work, but making not enough money, and there is no hope for this except to get a second job, and work EVEN MORE hours – I won’t get into the discussion again about how I think that if they are going to make this law that says that everyone working more than 40 hours has to be paid overtime, then the law should either REQUIRE employers to GIVE people this overtime, or else the law should be removed, or SOMETHING. Everybody circumvents the law by just NEVER GIVING ANYBODY OVERTIME, no matter how desperately they need it, even if they would be willing to work at the regular rate, just so that they could get MORE MONEY *AT ALL* rather than nothing, because the finite amount that you can make, at the maximum of forty hours, ISN’T ENOUGH. Everybody gets two jobs, which is stupid. You shouldn’t have to do that because of this law! Either close the loopholes, or remove the law. Make the law stronger, or else remove the law entirely, but don’t put us in this position where forty hours isn’t enough, but forty is all that you can ever get, period, the end, unless you get a second job. It’s stupid that it has to be that way. It should be that if someone WANTS to work more than forty, and requests it, then it should be required by law that their employer HAS TO GIVE IT TO THEM, if it’s possible – for instance, if you have 300 people who are all working only 10 hours each, that means nobody gets overtime. That’s what all the employers always do.
Oh no, then we’d have mass unemployment because then you’d have all these businesses where they had only two employees doing all the work of 300 people, and getting overtime, with no room to hire anyone else. I don’t have time for this argument.
What we need are ROBOTS, because we shouldn’t have to be doing all this work anyway! Then we would have to admit that all that any human really needs is SUBSISTENCE! You need permission to go live on a piece of land for free, with NO BILLS TO PAY AT ALL in the form of money, and also not in the form of ‘give us a percentage of your crops,’ like feudalism. No payments at all in any form, and permission to live on the land and get what you need from the land, but with some rules and restrictions, like ‘You’re not allowed to go hunt all the deer and sell them to China.’