September, 2017 - Ina Disguise

What happened to the last decade?

September 3, 2017 No Comments

Over the last decade, I went from being a Senior Banking Consultant, government researcher and corporate researcher to now being a fledgling author and artist. During all of this time I was renovating and maintaining a mansion which will never belong to me and taking care of my parents.

At the beginning of this period, I had around six ex-boyfriends who used to come and visit, thankfully missing each other in the process and helping out if they felt like it. None of them were particularly keen to get me out of my shell, they kind of delivered themselves like pizzas as and when they were not busy.

Overall, the crucial years from the age of 25, a long time ago now, were taken up with my parents and family. I had previously been a successful chef, and was out-earning the rest of the family when I was told that I was to take care of things as nobody else would do it. I could have ignored this, but it turned out to be a statement of fact.

I only really realised that my life was over at around 33 or so, when it proved impossible to get decent employment locally, and I could not leave my mother to take care of my father alone as she was not a natural carer by any means.

So, from being absolutely work-obsessed, driven and very keen on pretty poor quality relationships with equally lazy boys, I have become a loner, who slowly moves towards a life of self-expression, for good or ill.

My friend from Slovenia, who I got to know when building the island in Second Life, is now married and is contemplating, at 40, having a child. I am contemplating the fact I will never have a child as I do not leave the house and have no prospect of forming any new relationships. The old ones were curtailed as a result of my overwhelming feelings for Wolfe. I do not regret this at all. In many ways he was an excuse to move on from a rather stagnant life. Nor do I genuinely envy anybody. I just feel rather despondent at the moment and am struggling a bit with the idea of moving on with no goal in mind.

As it is evident that I will never trust anyone enough to have a child with them now, I am inclined to focus on my appearance as a major project that I can spend a lot of time thinking about. I also need to resolve some of the issues that caused my current problem set in the first place – the fact that I never felt that I looked good enough, the fact that I have insufficient real emotional support to let things go easily, (my reaction to Wolfe was most uncharacteristic) the fact that I have failed to get any of the things I wanted – life in a rural location, career, children etc. A major worry is that I have no real way of building a pension.

I always have at least half a dozen plans, which I usually carry out within five years or so. A former friend recently commented that it was always worth dropping in on me every ten years or so because it is never boring and there is always a masterplan. This is not the problem. The problem is that my heart really isn’t in it at the moment, and I feel as if I have been swimming around the same bowl for the last decade. I can handle being wrong, I have been wrong countless times. I just don’t know quite how to break out of the cycle of being wrong over and over again.

One good thing about the Wolfe era was that it forced me to give up a lot of things that were holding me back, and it forced me into a situation in which I had to express myself publicly since there was no way of doing it privately. For this I am strangely grateful. Every step I take at the moment, however, is tempered with a feeling of impending doom. I am sure that this will pass, but at the moment it is rather sad.

None of the people that I have left behind over the last few years did anything unusually wrong. There was more of a generalised wrongness that meant that I was constantly feeling suppressed or undervalued. Wolfe was very much the last straw in that lengthy period. I was insulted, under-valued and not listened to, not directly by him, but by his associated entourage, and after the experience of my family stabbing me over and over again in the hope of gaining money from my parents, enough was enough.

So, although I am numb, lonelier than ever and again forced into a situation in which I have to come out of my shell or perish, you will not catch me genuinely hating Wolfe or his crappy idea of business practice. I have learned and observed a lot that I would never otherwise have noticed, and I am overall better off as a result. despite my almost total destruction in the course of my latest metamorphosis.

business, health

David Wolfe Haters Updated 2017

September 1, 2017 2 Comments

Just before I go for my walk – I just had a quick look around the newer, calmer, more measured haters of Wolfe on Youtube. Most interesting. Things have moved on by quite a bit since five years ago. Wolfe has developed his crowd gathering strategy by quite a bit, and the offended vegans making videos appear to be a bit calmer than last time I looked at this.

I only found one offended customer, and this was an offended 801010er who had gone on one of his courses, only to get crap customer service and lose 800 dollars. So, then, Wolfe evidently still needs to upgrade his staff. Sigh. Were I to show you my emails, which I have no intention of doing, I could show you some far more extreme material from far angrier people, including some people from the Icke camp.

Right then, to inject some rationality into this:

Pros of Wolfe

Wolfe is the most useful person the entire alternative health industry has, because he is utterly shameless about crowd-gathering, can muster enthusiasm about the most obscure topics, and has an extremely tough shell as a result of doing this for more than a couple of decades.

He is the most successful marketer in the business, and there are many businesses that are nothing to do with him making money off his work. He gives away more work than most people do in the course of a full time week.

Yes, a proportion of his recent work is quite far out, but it keeps the audience awake, entertained and interested in learning more, whether this is from him or on their own. The point is that listeners with more than one brain cell gain confidence from his work, not that listeners who are not so blessed follow blindly. That is not the point of Wolfe at all, although I see that there are several such people milling around Youtube.

From someone who had a lot of knowledge before I had ever heard of him, I can tell you that his work is extremely useful in terms of making you more committed to fighting your corner and dealing with problems conventional medicine cannot manage. I tend to disregard quite a bit of what he says, but other things are quite useful.

Cons of Wolfe

He keeps pissing people off, including me at times. Arrogance is not a virtue.

He is too self-interested, but that is in the nature of successful people, so it is probably a useful affectation.

He doesn’t seem to look after number 1 terribly well because he is too busy having a good time.

He relies too heavily on esoteric role models such as Rudolf Steiner. Yeah, Wolfe, we all have our Steiner moment. Most of us grow out of it at age 17 and stop wearing the stupid hat. Over-use of this stuff makes you appear to be a shill, which is not helpful at all to those concerned about such things WHO ARE AN INCREASING PART OF YOUR MARKET. This is one area in which you can easily be defeated so you need to sort that out.

HE STILL HASN’T SORTED OUT THE STAFFING ISSUE. GET A GRIP WOLFE!

Whoever is now running Longevity Warehouse – yes, I see why the prices keep escalating – because people keep buying – but perhaps a budget or wholesale range might make you look a little more egalitarian? If you want to build a true society, you have to cater for people other than rich people with no knowledge or time to go elsewhere. In the meantime you are losing business from everybody else. What is he working for if not to make yet more money?

Personally, I have gained a lot from Wolfe, without spending a penny on anything, but then I decided fairly early on that it was more useful to me to like him rather than not like him, no matter what he did. Nevertheless I was also very critical, as I do not think being nice is necessarily being a good friend to anyone. (we aren’t, just to be clear – the website represents a lengthy period of stress and upset) He has been a major thorn in my side, and I do not owe him any more favours than he has already had, although I am sure he would say the same or worse about me were he to say anything at all.

You can waste a lot of time on picking holes in people. Wolfe is a royal pain in the ass, but he is driven, successful, very good at coming up with more strategies for increasing his community, who then become irritated and go to someone else. Therefore everybody is depending on his being successful. Be careful who you shit on, because that goose is still laying the golden eggs in the alternative health market.

health

Intellectualism and Science – a dangerous correlation?

September 1, 2017 2 Comments

As a historian, I have to take information from a wide variety of sources. You will find any social scientist doing much the same thing. I studied history both from an arts and a social science perspective, so I do a little of both, although I have to say I err on the side of social sciences. I simply find the arts side of an intellectual pursuit of history a bit flowery and a little bit too much like guesswork.

In the last few years, I have seen more and more posts saying that ‘if it isn’t scientific, it isn’t true.’ I think this is just as dangerous as saying that creativity is insanity. It is a very dangerous precedent. Where, I wonder, do people imagine knowledge comes from, if not from testing a ‘mad’ idea that popped into your head?

The vast majority of new science is funded – someone paid for the pursuit of the knowledge. As such, it seems to me, that it is very much tied up with our corporatist future. If the public are led to believe that only a wo/man in a white coat can tell you the truth, then no alternative knowledge is to be respected, and you are automatically a crank, even when you are right.

Not to denigrate the strides made in the pursuit of scientific research in relation to health, but we are seeing more and more previously discredited knowledge being hijacked in the name of science. Only yesterday, I was reading that a company had ‘discovered’ that inflammation had an impact on health, and were researching it. Anyone who has ever been involved with natural health has this as basic knowledge.

Therefore, the scenario I described in Best Scandal Ever is swiftly coming true. It is a very difficult thing to combat, without making an impact on culture. I see more and more advertising reminiscent of the 1950s, ‘scientific’ replacing ‘natural’ as being highly desirable. Sooner or later, in our march towards our genetically engineered and very unhealthy, both economically and literally, future, we will be told that natural is dirty and not good for us.

Having dealt with a lot of jealous middle-aged men over the last few years, who all kept telling me that my new found health was invisible to them, that my diet was a disorder, and that eating properly was unscientific because it did not fit in with what they had been told by our corrupt board of nutrition, I have direct experience of how dangerous this is, and how narrow minded it makes people. Therefore, when I see articles suggesting that anyone arguing against commonly accepted ‘science’ I feel quite sorry for the person who has mistaken science for intellectualism, and who is no longer capable of free thinking research or objective testing.

The example of my mother is a case in point – if I had not had the experience of the last ten years, with my father having been starved to death by the NHS under the Liverpool care plan, to make life more convenient, a common practice, (deaths from Alzheimers in Scotland leapt up by a whopping 31% in one year, for example)followed by my own spectacular recovery from a condition regarded by the NHS as not worth bothering with not once but twice now, I would not have had the confidence to stand up and fight them off when they began the process of drugging my mother to death. As it is, I did, and she is doing very well and has made a good recovery from her stay in hospital. The point is, that the possession of authority does not translate to correct or morally right. The point is also that low denomination understanding of centuries of knowledge is likely to be pretty damned basic.

The real question is – why are these so-called intellectuals rejecting knowledge that has been acquired over centuries for corporate-sponsored information delivered by a man in a coat? Have they lost their capacity for imagination or open mindedness? The hostility is astonishing. At one point, my aging friend was drinking a product entirely composed of chemicals just because it looked more ‘scientific’ than my highly technical natural diet. He sat and watched me reverse my age by at least ten years, and still fought me every step of the way.

There has to be some way of stopping this rot and encouraging imagination, open-mindedness and selective information gathering before it is too late. All that this current climate of science worship is fostering is a lack of enquiry. This is not good for the future of science, never mind the future of humanity because without imagination, without independent thought, and without alternative knowledge sources, the pool from which to draw will become very narrow indeed.

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