Big excitement in New York City right now as Mayor Eric Adams has just signed a bill barring individuals from being discriminated against for their height and weight when it comes to access to employment, public housing and public accommodation. Essentially, this is designed to make obese people (anyone with a Body Mass Index > 30) a protected class, along with the other 19 protected classes in NYC such as race, age, disability, sexual orientation, immigration status, etc. The legislation takes effect at the turn of the year, at which point the fun will begin.
The legislation did not come as much of a surprise. For a few years now heavy set people have been pushing the idea – using the mantra “body positivity” – that being overweight is entirely natural and not at all unhealthy, while at the same time saying it makes them vulnerable to discrimination. In fact, they even claim that fatness is caused by discrimination. Whenever a group of people in the more lefty parts of the country even whisper the word discrimination, legislation follows as surely as night does day.
The weight discrimination bill reflects a remarkable change in Mayor Adams’s views. Seven years ago he successfully treated a diagnosis of diabetes with rigorous lifestyle changes. He dropped a lot of weight, eschewed fast food and became a vegan. Since then he has lobbied for healthier living as a means to cut down chronic illnesses. Only last year he commented in an editorial: “I have made it my mission to use what I learned and increase New Yorkers’ access to a high-quality, affordable, nutritious diet, so that more people can avoid diseases in the first place.”
Adams is spot on with the health stuff as obesity is one of the foremost health issues in the U.S. The CDC’s current data show that: “Obesity-related conditions include heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and certain types of cancer. These are among the leading causes of preventable, premature death.” The obesity rate among U.S. adults is 41.9%, and the estimated excess medical costs for our population is $173 Billion.
This begs the question: why should the obese be protected as they can diet and exercise just like Adams? However, the currently fashionable view is that obesity has social causes. Two “experts” from Harvard sum up one of these causes in a paper entitled “Is obesity a manifestation of systemic racism?” The paper answers the question with an enthusiastic yes, and states the cure for obesity lies in fighting the “systemic racism” that causes chronic stress which in turn causes obesity.
It would be hard to believe, even as little as 10 years ago, that two medical doctors would write such a paper. Are you sure it’s not down to over-eating guys? But these days it is par for the course. In a country where recent official pronouncements from medical groups such as the American Psychological Association state that gender dysphoria can be cured by poisoning children with chemicals and cutting off their body parts, it goes unnoticed. However, it explains why Adams has gone all Mayor Wokey and turned the obese into a protected class, rather than urging New Yorkers to eat fewer donuts.
Even if racism and other social factors do cause obesity, the evidence for them being discriminated against is a little threadbare. By “discrimination” what the porkers have in mind is hurty words, along with furniture not being designed to accommodate the grossly overweight. The New York Times reports one such example: “A student at New York University said that desks in classrooms were too small for her, preventing her from taking notes.” Nevertheless, being extremely fat has not held back people in their chosen profession. On the contrary, it can now be a boon. There is now a whole class of ‘plus-sizers’ whose careers are based on being heavy set, such as overweight actors and models/influencers, as well as singers like the 300lb Lizzo.
Americans are usually relaxed about how others want to live their lives. If overweight people want to celebrate the way they are or believe society is to blame by their inability to stop eating, the default attitude is that’s their business. However, a disturbing trend has emerged in the last 10 years or so where this live-and-live-and-let-live attitude is not enough for members of protected groups – they want to make us feel bad about oppressing them.
The poster child for all this is Colorado. Colorado’s anti-discrimination legislation made sexual orientation a protected class in 2008. No-one noticed until gay marriage activists went all Rosa Parks on a small bakery, Masterpiece Cakeshop, in 2012. They insisted on a cake being made for their gay wedding (a little strange as Colorado had not yet legalised gay marriage). The baker refused for religious reasons. The activists were supported by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission and the bakery lost in state court. But the Supreme Court overturned the ruling in 2018.
However, as soon as the Supremes announced their verdict, the activists were back, only this time they were down with the transgender struggle and wanted Masterpiece Cakeshop to bake a cake for a gender transition celebration. They won, although the judgment has not been tested in the Supreme Court yet. No cakes will ever be baked in this ongoing saga of course, because this nonsense is not about enjoying a cake, it’s about rubbing your enemies’ face in it.
Once a protected class magically appears, all kinds of mischief follows. The avalanche of lawsuits that will drop in ever-litigious New York City beginning next year will be awesome. As to what form these will take, a clue was provided by the “plus-size Influencer” Jae’lynn Chaney. She put up a well-timed petition on Change.org in April asking for “Body Equity” for Plus-size airline passengers. Her demands include bigger seats or two seats for the price of one, larger toilets on planes and training for airline staff in the needs of plus-size passengers. Ms. Chaney currently has the option of buying two seats together or getting a seat in business class, but she wants the airlines to buy them for her.
This is a growing movement in blue states. So far, six other cities like San Francisco, and one state, Michigan, have passed similar legislation, while New Jersey is looking at doing so. The heady mix of more discrimination, unscientific thinking and the joy of finding another way to tell people how to behave is irresistible to the Lefty authoritarians. Meanwhile, New York City will have to start working on how to pay for all the concessions made to the overweight that will be the inevitable result of the lawsuits.
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As far out as this sounds, it can be seen to be more of a useful metaphor in the light of Mattias Desmet’s book “The Psychology of Totalitarianism” Desmet’s book somewhat bridges the reality of what is happening now to what is described by this article. Desmet describes the use of maths, statistics to bolster an ungodly level of certainty we can call scientism, when really it can be demonstrated the certainty claimed is entirely false (and I would say ego driven). Scientism, in furnishing false certainties, has divorced humanity from nature and what is real.
And BTW “the singularity,” which is not a far-out concept given neuralink and indeed the extent to which we are already glued to our phones, results in a kind of hive mind. Indeed I would argue much of the social politics and the straitjacket of woke ideas we see today are a result of the “interlocking” of human-neurons in this hive mind. Any mind hates to “see” itself as holding inconsistent principles, so expect any elements of that are not one with the dominant ethos to be killed off.
And then there is Tucker Carlson, who believe demons, real non human entities are on earth and amongst us right now.
Somehow I suspect we (me and most of the commenters on here) are not the dominant hive mind ethos. So that’s us f**ked for a start.
I would highly recommend reading Iain McGilchrist. I think his explanation for the collapse of society fits perfectly. In an embarrassing attempt to summarise: the brain has two hemispheres, left and right, with the left hemisphere understanding the world through a purely mechanistic vantage point which only see the parts and not the whole, and the right hemisphere understanding (or attempting to) the whole with far less regards for the parts that combine to make the whole. McGilchrist believes, and I certainly follow his logic, that society has become very left hemisphere dominated, and is likely a result of the enlightenment, and sciences refusal to properly consider anything that science cannot explain.
I attended one of McGilchrist’s lectures a couple of years ago. Fascinating man with a deep insight into our human predicament. I’ve yet to read one of his tomes, hopefully by the time I die I will have!
The predictions themselves are delusional. However, the people who have these delusions are real and, if wealthy, powerful or influential enough, are capable of doing a great deal of harm as they act them out. For example, because they think genetic engineering offer the prospect of eternal life, they are eager to try out mass-scale experiments on the human population, hence the manic promotion of the COVID vaccines.
No one needs worry about this. It’s science fiction. In the 60s we were told that by the 90s we wouldn’t be bothering with food anymore – we’d just take pills. But now there are millions more food outlets, a choice in supermarkets no one could have imagined then, more TV programmes about food than ever before. Also, depictions of people of the future would show them in spacesuits, very plain clothes, clothes made of paper etc, and of course things have gone totally the other way! As for the statement ‘In the 2030s, medical nanorobots will begin to integrate these brain extensions directly into our nervous systems’. Whose? There are always going to be some people daft enough I suppose, but these will be a tiny minority – perhaps those who spend their lives playing VR games? But most people will have a healthy instinct and mistrust and will not be interested, and probably resistant.
FWIW, I think the image depicting Ahriman in the article is actually the leontocephaline Mithras. Ahriman’s true form is doubtless too terrifying for mortals to behold.
Yes, yes, you have nailed it!
Steiner prophesied that “the Earth will be covered, as with a web, a web of terrible spiders, spiders of enormous wisdom…demonic “spiders”, spinning out a literal worldwide web for us poor humans to become inescapably entangled within like so many fattened-up flies.”
Fascinating article from Steven Tucker. These spider-forms have also featured in movies like “The Matrix”, “Dr. Who”, and one of the Guardians of the Galaxy films even showed similar tiny airships linking up to form a massive net, as a barrier against a huge incoming spaceship.
It all circles back to Kali-Allah, the Moon Spider Goddess of Death, “The Mother Goddess of All India”, and her Toyboy Shiva=Satan, whose symbol is the Crescent Moon, worshipped by millions of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Native Americans (Grandmother Spider)… and Illuminati.
And what a fantastic quote this is! “Elon Musk, once said: “With Artificial Intelligence we’re summoning the demon. You know those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram, and the holy water, and he’s like – yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon? Doesn’t work out.”
Parents may well kill their children, or children their parents, by sending signals to them, but they must wait afterwards lest they become zombies!
Explanation (so that it doesn’t mess up the effect of the sentence): The people who created UNIX certainly had a very peculiar way of naming things. A process (running program) can become a parent by forking (executing a fork system call) which creates an identical copy of itself called a child. A signal is a numeric message a process can, subject to permission checks, send to other processes. The default action of most signals is to kill, that is, ask the kernel to forcibly terminate, the process it was sent to. A terminated process has a so-called exit status which is another numeric message the parent is expected to poll for by executing a so-called wait system call (which waits for the killed process to terminate if this didn’t already happen). Until this has been done, the kernel keeps the exit status of the deceased process which appears in a listing of all process on the system with a status of Z, standing for zombie.
That’s also where the daemon programs mentioned in the text comes from. A daemon is a background process not associated with a user session.
It is the void and the phallus. The penis and vagina. It has been said that it makes dumber people dumber and smarter people smarter. Obviously there are holes in this but you can look at it as an offering. Feast your eyes on it. Let it corrupt you or exalt you make of it what you will. There is a karma that comes with untruthfulness and dishonesty about one’e own abilities.
I never thought I wqould hear mention of anthrposophy on this page. This is truly a cause of rejoicing. That knowledge that they talk about and try to pass on – it isn’t imagination or analysis. The path of spiritual science can only come about through clairvoyance and this can only be achieved in our time by reading accounts of it and then that world slowly starts to appear. Perhaps now we are ready for that as a culture. Steiner said that it would be around our time.
The human spirit needs to reel against the eigth sphere. We are moving towards the next level of our evolution but these forces can imprison us in a world that essentially sets up an endless loop of torment and vampiorism. As James Joyce said, the walls of hell are four thousand miles thick and made of solid granite. You want to avoid getting into this situation to begin with. Ahriman could be understood as the tyranny of numbers or perhaps as the reduction of the trinary nature of the divine anthropos to the binary. In the secret teaching the three comes before the two.
Ahriman was at his strongest in 1850 just look at that age and the transformation that occurred. The rise of industialism occuring concurrently with a very cold exmination of nature. All sorts of critters with a pin through them after a visit to the killing jar. We had to go through this phase but we need to know when it has to end. Just look at where it has led in economics. Because even Ahriman is less toxic than human greed and when you put the two together you end up with hollowed out countries just like the one we have.
This is the only thing that really matters in our time. If you stop and contemplate you will see that this the crux of the evil that we have to face now.
If you want a good introduction to the secret teaching of all ages there is a Youtube channel called Rudolf Steiner Press Audio. It has an archive of thousands of lectures and courses. I would recommend it for those who are ready for this path.
There is no lazy way out or cheating your wait out or sitting around and biding your time in the hope that others do it. Because the whole meaning of this time is that it is asking you to come to the table untramelled. Nobody will support you it will never be a mass movement. You either ken it or you don’t. We have all wasted our lives to some extent.
My parents sent me to a Rudolf Steiner school, but I refused to believe the gospel and dismissed it, rather undiplomatically, as some sort of “deluded nonsense about fairies and elves running the world”. My parents had to appear in front of a tribunal, where my teachers recounted my many sins, agreed that my heretical views were unacceptable and at the end announced my expulsion from their cult.
30 years later I work in IT and control (sometimes even create) the daemons that help to provide the internet. Working with computers certainly changes you, but I would argue that a lot of programming and other IT work is actually creative problem solving and certainly less harmful than doom scrolling and binge watching. That said, I also think that it’s good to spend a lot of time away from screens and interact with the real world.