Why so strange ?

Note to readers : while I was seriously considering closing the blog and just going to video for all of my own content I thought that I should at least explain a few things in written form and not leave the blog in as lame a manner as it would have been without a few explanatory, and even ranty, posts. I retrieved one old draft post from the bin and have scheduled that one for release – that’s the angry side of my life and I felt also that I should talk about another aspect that otherwise would never appear here – the end seemed to me to be the right time to talk about some of the strange ideas and even stranger beliefs that I hold.

This post is based on several post ideas that got as far as a paragraph or two and then fizzled out – never quite making the edit and being scheduled for public view. Now that I am reading through a load of old drafts, and deleting most of them, I thought it would make a good exercise, for me at least, to work them into some kind of shape. The actual post that appears is based on several posts and my final structure is that each original draft post forms a separate section of this one – it’s a bit like sweeping up the cutting room floor and splicing everything together into something that is the written equivalent of a weird avant guard film from a particularly strange period in French film making.

Here goes……..

1. What we are talking about when we talk about sailing.

As of this year I have been sailing for 47 years and in all that time I haven’t got very far except I have sailed around the big blue marble a few times, thrown up a lot and had a few good moments – mostly when iv’e been at anchor in a muddy creek somewhere or when I have ghosted out of said creek just as the sun came over the horizon. Given that the basis of my life in sailing was about adventuring and learning I’m not even sure that I learned very much except that I can use a delicate surveying instrument to help me work out where I am on the curved surface of an ocean somewhere ; I never did figure out how the mathematics of spherical trigonometry works but that’s because I get a headache whenever I study a mathematical equation. My joke about that was based on the Vogon poetry appreciation chair from the late Douglas Adams Hitchikers Guide and my similar chair is the one in which feel I should be bound and gagged (and lightly sedated) when the modern world says that two plus two can equal five.

Several times in my life I have tried to view my sailing through the lens of what work colleagues and friends think about it through the questions they ask about it. Many of those questions reflect the strange impressions that they have which is partially fear such as “what do you do in a gale” – the short answer was ‘reef, maybe heave to and stick the kettle on. Another thread of questions was always about hedonism in some form, I was once going to meet up with work friends by sailing my little boat to a nearby beach, anchor there and maybe have a couple of beers and a barbecue. In the right conditions I could have beached the boat and taken aboard several of the young women I spent my nights with (in a hospital that is) – and taken them for a quick sail around the bay. It’s one of those ‘roll eyes’ moments but their question was based on fashion magazine advertising (shot in the Caribbean or Mediterranean aboard a superyacht at anchor of course) and featuring flawlessly turned out models wearing minimal clothing. One work colleague, who is married to a Naval chief petty officer did rather laugh out loud and just suggested a pair of mud wellies and a heavy wool jumper. Sailing, for me, may have had a few hedonistic moments when, for instance, it’s been a hot day and a deserted anchorage and I have gone over the side to cool off by swimming naked in clear Brittany seawater.

I get the distinct impression that most of them saw sailing as an expensive but harmless pursuit that somehow represented white middle class privilege and yet is also a trivial pursuit. Having been asked, many years ago at the beginning of my life in sailing, ‘would I become a sailor or a yachtsman’ (I really didn’t understand the question until I became a nurse) I didn’t think about what the social meaning of sailing….or yachting might be. Now, I think I must be a sailor because in the eyes of at least one yacht club steward I wasn’t of high enough a social standing to be allowed in – despite, I must add, having just sailed right around the big blue marble. Sailing for me has never been a trivial pursuit or notably a hedonistic one, even though it has given me enjoyable moments – equally it has given me many that include being cold, wet and serially throwing up…..or being upside down in a boat in a seaway trying to solve some technical problem – unblocking the heads (sea toilets) perhaps.

Sailing for me has never felt either trivial or hedonistic because, I think, I have always tended towards the more Corinthian end of the sport…..where Maurice Griffiths meets Peter Blake for example as I love both the deep oceans and the muddy creeks at the head of small tidal rivers. Now, far nearer the end of my life in sailing than the beginning I find that iv’e spent too much time thinking if there is a meaning to sailing – and if so whether I have got anywhere near understanding it. Instead of seeking meaning I prefer now to look at the many strange routes it has led me on and the effects it leaves behind. I think now that, for me, sailing isn’t a single discipline and marginal interest in my life but only a smaller piece out of a larger pattern – the larger pattern is that I have always needed to be in the outdoors and greatly preferred somewhat distant, isolated and often environmentally challenging settings. Perhaps, according to my understanding of a renowned psychologist (Dr Peterson) it comes down to personality and specifically the psychological trait of introversion (the opposite of extraversion) which, when I measured it via a reliable online test, I seem to have to a very high degree….I am an extreme introvert and I also have to live and work with high trait factor withdrawl. According to Peterson’s work such a character takes great solace from being in the outdoors…..maybe it’s that simple.

2, The bandwidth problem

I accidentally created myself a neat segue here because having mentioned Jordan Peterson in one piece I find I need to talk about my interaction and understanding of his work from around 2015 when I first dipped into his work and 2018 when I went to his first public lecture in London UK. The end of that period was marked by me with the appallingly badly run interview by British elite/celebrity Tv journalist Kathy Newman and the next day by the far better interview with a Dutch journalist. After that JBP became really ill during an attempt to wean himself off prescribed medicines (Benzodiazipines I think) , the end result being him hospitalized in a Russian ICU and a very long recovery.

Back as far as 2015 I felt that in my life I had what I called a bandwidth problem although,when I think about it band depth might be a better description in that I had several moderate grade competencies and the interests that went alongside them : nursing for example and then sailing,several more outdoors disciplines, several rather nerdy things that I followed on the internet and so on. They are all the kind of things that one might accumulate over a lifetime due to being interested in lots of things over a long time but there was nothing I could point to that had great intellectual depth and/or no skill that I had ever taken to a very high level, in short I was feeling a bit stunted and under developed – especially intellectually.

By chance, at that time, I was engaged in work for my team that involved me spending long hours studying clinical incidents and thus errors that we could access in report form. My boss described it as having a ‘helicopter’ overview of what was happening in the hospital – except it’s failures and dark side. I became interested in clinical safety and why incidents happen and thus started searching the internet for insights : for a while, for example I studied aviation safety as at that time the UK government were holding up aviation as a shining example and us, in the NHS, as the slack and dangerous ones. Luckily I had several colleagues whom were doctors attached to the services and it was one of them that told me that the average hospital is nothing like an airline and more like the deck of an aircraft carrier at night, in a seaway and conducting flying operations. His analogy is that, like a chaotic A&E department much of the work is being done by the youngest and least experienced staff and like the aforementioned aircraft carrier any mistakes or accidents can be lethal.

I even started studying the subject at home – one avenue of inquiry being to study personality psychology to see if certain ‘types’ would tend to be more over-confident and less safe (I had several surgeons in mind). That inquiry didn’t get very far because medicine seems to encourage over confidence, doesn’t measure any psychological value and definitely doesn’t think about clinical safety as part of a task. There were small but significant changes, for instance that some of the smartest doctors acting in high stress procedures away from their normal departments were starting to use a checklist approach to emergency intubation when performed out on the ward. That was my first and only real experience of talking through a critical checklist before ‘takeoff’.

Anyway…..my internet searches took me to Dr Jordan Peterson’s filmed lecture series about psychometrics and personality and most days, when I wasn’t actually working, I would slip (in the virtual world) into the back of his university classroom and sit through as much of a lecture as I could before losing the thread of what he was talking about : Peterson does seem to bounce from thought to thought which contrasted markedly with the lecture style I was used to in relation to clinical subjects. It took me a while to get used to his style and for a while I thought he was referring to a character called Pierre Jay when he was talking about Piaget – i’d never heard of Piaget so I started to study Peterson’s reading list to see what else and who else I had missed (most of it it seems).

No, studying Peterson’s work didn’t make me an overnight brainbox – but that wasn’t the point. At the end of this period in my life I had left my last career job, dropped out and spent two years doing hard yakka here just rescuing and re-modelling the outside space. That ended when I realized that I wanted a boat again and the only way I could afford the project was to go back and work part time. As it happens I went back in the capacity of a HCA doing a day job part time (years of nights had wrecked my sleep and therefore my health) and I soon started the practice of getting to my department early and spending at least half an hour reading something hard, in my case Jung, Nietzsche, Dosteovsky were the ones I found when I cleared out my locker 3 years later.

Peterson’s work wasn’t an end point but, like many, it was an introduction to the wider world that for a while became known as the IDW (intellectual dark web) and a crash course in the problems in academia, perhaps even the collapse of academic inquiry and honesty as we knew it. One of the main outcomes was that I started to write for my own entertainment and that ultimately became this blog. Reading and listening to JBP made me at least make a decent pass at trying to be a better writer,

3.Excess sugar,excess calories, excess vaccines…….and excess deaths.

I’m on a bit of a mission at the moment, a mission to lose some weight and gain some fitness ; in fact I just took a break from writing, went downstairs to the kitchen to flip the Butternut Squash over, which is roasting in the oven……and took my break by going for a quick circuit of first hill, first uphill lane and third, much harder hill. I think I have a new and different (for me) approach to both health and fitness largely formed from previous knowledge and more recently through the work of Dr Peter Attia (the longevity guy).

One of the new concepts I take from Dr Attia’s work is that I have mostly been living in medicine version 2.0 as he puts it where we got good at dealing with ‘fast’ deaths ie trauma and infection (sepsis) but what we have totally failed with is ‘slow’ deaths for which, according to Attia we need medicine version 3.0. A lot of my life as an ICU nurse was taken up with ‘fast’ deaths, or at least with those people in extremis – near to fast death but rescued by modern medicine as we practiced it – for me that was the thousand details that make up the knowledge of an ICU nurse working with some of the best doctors trained by the NHS.

In the last few years of my nursing career I was more aware that most of the people who I verified (verified deceased) had died of a small range of diseases that we might call the diseases of modernity and which Peter Attia refers to as ‘slow’ deaths. These are the diseases that progress over a long time and can be managed, but not cured, by a good GP. Most of those diseases are so common as to go unremarked or just a single line in the medical notes which it was my job to write the last entry in when called by the ward that they thought that their patient had died.

Right at the end of my working life in healthcare I worked, part time, in a slightly peculiar unit called the endoscopy unit and we spent our days looking down gullets and up bums (gastroscopy and colonoscopy). Right at the end of the end I was working on a failing knee joint so at least once a week I was allocated to making the pre assessment telephone calls which are used to garner the basic medical information about the patient. In every call we had to ask about pre existing medical conditions and previous surgery, then take a medicines history as some regular medicines have to be stopped prior to a procedure. Most days I came home very frustrated with the state of most patient’s scant knowledge about the medicines they were taking and what they were taking them for : in many calls I would hear the patient claim that they had no significant medical conditions and only then find, from their medicines history that they were taking medicines for several system failure problems – heart disease, diabetes, renal failure et al.

About five years ago, if my memory serves, I was acting as the medical moderator for a preparedness and survival (prepper) website and I was asked what I thought the greatest medical and health related threats on the then horizon and what we could do about them. At the time I think the most recent problems had been SARS and MERS and then we had at least one outbreak of Ebola virus. I did think that a worldwide pandemic could be a major threat to health because air travel was so common and populations so concentrated (in some cities). This was of course before a pandemic came along through the accidental back door of simple laboratory incompetence or genuine accident. My answer though is that the developed countries already had all of the health problems they needed to slowly advance the levels of ‘everyday’ disease that we accepted as normal and this in the form that comes down to sugar consumption and our own resistance to a hormone that our bodies produce (Insulin resistance).

Insulin resistance almost certainly causes what we call Type 2 diabetes which is often the precursor of heart disease and metabolic disease, and in the brain causes Alzheimers dementia – what we now call Type 3 Diabetes. If there is a single memorable line here that maybe you should remember it is “cancer loves sugar” which is why a large part of my new approach to health is to avoid as much added dietary sugar as I can. Public health is almost on the verge of classifying sugar as a metabolic poison although I just can’t see the same level of legislation happening as we got with cigarette smoking.

Type 2 Diabetes is usually thought of now as manageable/treatable but not normally curable….in fact it pays the pharmaceutical industry for it to be just that as Diabetes medicines bring in millions in terms of income each year, and because the disease is progressive the income per patient increases over time as their medicines regimes become more complex over time. One British GP, near the end of his working career decided that he would at least try to cure a few of his patients who either had Type 2 Diabetes or were pre Diabetic but heading towards needing medical management. That doctor (Dr David Unwin) thought he could cure Type 2 diabetes by proposing and introducing a low carbohydrate diet into his patients lives, last I heard he had a greater than 40% rate of cure and a huge reduction in his practice’s medicines bill.

What I call the science problem or at least the established medical standpoint is that the accepted method is now to always treat the disease in the same way as nearly all diseases are treated – as a medical problem that needs medicines as a cure. Nearly every medical writer who suggests that maybe we should stop poisoning ourselves as Prof Tim Noakes did in South Africa is usually treated as a pariah by the medical ‘community’ and yet the cure to a long term disease that is also at the root of many other modern diseases is very much in our own hands just as it is with smoking related disease.

There is a twist in the mix right at the end and that is the currently unexplained and largely ignored phenomenon of excess deaths post Covid 19 and notably post vaccination. I’m not nearly smart enough or conspiracy obsessed enough to suggest a single cause, in fact I think that there might not be a single cause although the new disease pattern of organized white clots is suggestive of the problems that the vaccines were said to cause. The only time I had seen anything like that was with an unusual condition called chronic thromboembolic hypertension for which there is a very difficult and ‘high end medicine’ surgical removal called pulmonary thrombo-endarterectomy – I have seen one carried out and met with the patient post operatively. My point though should be more that the problem of excess deaths is very real and yet being pointedly ignored by the UK parliament and the British establishment – as though, by effectively ignoring it, the UK government continue to ignore or deny their appallingly incompetent handling of the whole subject,

4.The strange finale – angels and demons.

Warning, this subject is so strange that it is the only one of the half dozen posts , that form the basis of this whole piece, that I totally rewrote to reflect both my own skepticism and to acknowledge the irrationality of my own belief. I would like to use, as an introduction, what I think is a true story from my own childhood and which concerns UFO’s.

I grew up in a small market town in Lincolnshire, living with my parents in a quite eccentric house which was narrow but quite tall ; my tiny bedroom was 3 floors up and kind of jammed up in what was almost the roof space with a ceiling that sloped in both directions. I also had a small window which was on the outside wall and looked out over the town’s Corn Exchange – the main agricultural meeting and commerce center for that area. One evening in late summer I had been sent to bed (I was young enough as to be sent to bed early at that time) and was in bed but restless so I got up and sat quietly at the desk and chair set up I had under that window looking out towards the village square.

Suddenly I became aware of an object which was descending towards my near horizon and appeared to be doing so without making sound. I describe the object as discoid and silvery in colour with a brownisg silver band around it’s circumference which appeared to be slightly flattened. After about 5 to 10 seconds whatever it was disappeared from view, occluded I think by buildings on my horizon.

I don’t remember doing or saying anything about it until years later when I told my (now late) mother about the experience and she passed it off as maybe having seen one of the odd new aircraft from one of the RAF or USAF bases out in Lincolnshire, Nowadays I don’t try to put any explanation on it except for knowing what it wasn’t and maybe that it was some psychological trick played on me by my own imagination. Years later again and with the internet available I tried to follow it up ; one thing that I came across was anecdotal reports about other UFO sightings over that part of Lincolnshire.

I only use the story now to say that I accept that ‘weird stuff happens’ and that maybe the mind of a young kid also does weird things and that I neither believe nor disbelieve in UFO’S that have come from outside the solar system although more than anything I am extremely skeptical because I know the basics of aircraft design and technology although, once again, I know that what I saw didn’t resemble any aircraft or helicopter in service.

In the context of this section of this post I use the story to try and demonstrate that I apply skepticism to most things, especially odd beliefs and even stranger observations.

To jump right into the subject matter I feel it best to refer directly to it’s scriptural origin which I believe is to be found in the book of Ephesians thus “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

Sorry but here goes with another jump and somebody else’s story – this one is on the internet courtesy of it’s YouTube creator (Daisy Cousens) I will do my best to link to the relevant episode at the end of my post.

For those of you not familiar with Daisy Cousens she is a YouTube creator and commentator who mainly creates material and comments about social affairs and politics in Australia, by temperament she seems to be conservative and skeptical. In the relevant YouTube video segment she talks honestly about what she took to be a mental health problem but which she described as as more like an attack from an outside source – to understand it it is worth watching her explanation. The video clip is partially about that and partially a discussion about the work of a Roman Catholic priest cum functioning exorcist, name of Fr Vincent Lampert.

I should say that Fr Lampert is quite well known for giving remarkably ‘straight’ interviews with both Catholic believers and skeptics alike. He says, for example, that he totally believes in the existence of Demons because he has interacted with them and seen their physical manifestation during the practice of exorcism. If you are now thinking that you have just walked into the script of a bad horror movie then at least go listen to the man himself – he is either a bad actor cum supreme charlatan or is talking honestly about an entire world that hopefully most of us have never experienced and will never experience.

My take on this is that I just don’t know what might be happening and coming from the medicine based end of the spectrum I would tend towards mental ill health except for the fact that actual exorcists have the client seen and assessed by a mental health professional before they take any action and, as Fr Lampert says himself, he only has to do his stuff with less than 1 in a hundred of people who ask for his help. That suggests something to me that mental ill health really is on the rise and that lots of people need help with it…..I don’t think it means that the next person you are referred to will be like ‘Hi my name is Dave and I will be your exorcist today’

If you think that that was ‘out the door weird’ then my strange take might be several steps down the same road. Daisy Cousens herself thinks she was under attack rather than possessed or in some other mental ill health condition. Fr Lampert mentions possession, infestation, obsession and vexation and my odd take, belief if you want to call it that, is that what there is in the world right now is a whole load of vexation and obsession and this should maybe be our interpretation of my opening lines as taken from scripture. Perhaps when we see or hear the next piece of fuckwittery from the police, the Islamists, the alphabet soup brigade and the trans activists maybe we should filter it through the lens of being a coordinated attack or ‘vexation’.

That is all for now……..enough for one day I should think.

But there’s more ?

Yes indeed. Just about the time I was writing up this piece, during one of my ‘take a break’ moments, I was surfing YouTube and found a video from Chris Williamson (modern wisdom) featuring Eric Weinstein in playful mode. The duo were batting around the various ideas surrounding UFO’s and the seemingly endless theories and conspiracies surrounding them. At one point it was basically put on the table that maybe the whole thing wasn’t about little green men and shiny flying saucers but a massive and universal cover story to trot out every time something underhand or a bit secret needed doing. At that moment Chris Williamson coined the term ‘extraterrestrial scapegoat’ and because my own brush with the subject one evening back in the 1960’s came into focus again. I also made the sideways jump into my second difficult to believe subject except that I am glad that nobody (at this time) is making the phrase ‘demonologocial scapegoat’ to easily explain all the distinctly human ‘weird shit’ that’s going down right now.

They think it’s a;ll over.

It is now